Refusing to even play the game

We are now in the midst of Week 5 of the fall semester and certain trends show up about now in my 16-week online courses.

For the Metro students, the original enrollment of 22 is now down to 20. That's normal as students discover that the online world just doesn't work for them or personal scheduling issues are interfering. In fact, it's smart for students to recognize that this might not be the right semester for this particular class, and to cut their losses (and maybe get some tuition money back).

More concerning is that there was an assignment due Tuesday night that simply required taking a stance on one of several sample "advice" essays that I shared in our readings. I asked for 400-500 words and that students paste their short essays into a discussion window through Canvas. One of my goals was to allow students to see what their peers were writing, not to mention seeing any responses from me on each argument.

The assignment is worth 40 points, which makes it fairly substantial in a course with about 1,000 total points. In the end, I mostly awarded all 40 points to each submission as they did solid work for early in the semester.

But here's the distressing thing: Of the 20 remaining students, only 12 completed the assignment. I am not sure I have ever had 40 percent of a class opt for a zero on any assignment. I emailed each of the missing individually and heard back from a couple with vague excuses about being "super busy" and "having a mental health issue," as two examples. 

I replied with encouragement and urging everyone to submit their work late, exchanging a few penalty points for the zero. It's Friday now and none of the 8 have completed the missing essay.

So, at this point, it appears that 60 percent of those Metro students are "in" for the course and the remainder are not so sure. 

Last week I read an email from CSU's instructional coaching mentor (it goes to everyone each week) which argued that the pandemic's effects are lingering and that instructors may need to make adjustments in everything from expectations to assigned workload to outside-of-class readings. Many current college freshmen and sophomores (the most likely level to be taking my basic writing class) must have been in 9th or 10th grade four years ago, at the height of the Covid nightmare, so I get the point.

They were damaged by the year or two where most education happened online and where secondary teachers were likely in as much despair as their students. "Standards" were lowered or eliminated. Students must have felt abandoned and without the support from adults they were used to.

Now I am working with students online, where I might as well be an AI program for all the personal interactions we are having. I share some quick videos from time to time, mostly to prove that I am a living being and I insert personalize (and sometimes quirky) responses on discussion posts and essay assignments. I respond to emails with speed. 

But it is clearly not enough for a good portion of these college students who missed a whole lot of preparation for the rigors and expectations of higher education. Even the threat of failure may not be enough to motivate them.

On the other hand, at least a handful of students in the class are doing excellent work, full of personality and insight. They went through the same pandemic. Very different academic lives now.

Two Americas, indeed.

They're eating the dogs... they're eating the cats...

Another week and another dramatic twist in the 2024 election narrative, and I am amazed that all the political pundits have the gall to show their faces/drop yet another commentary into the mix. Did anyone really see Kamala utterly destroying Trump on Tuesday, with the humiliation rivaling what Biden experienced in June? 

Mainstream journalists don't really know what to do with Trump and his endless and outrageous stream of consciousness, and appear to have forgotten how to cover candidates like Harris and Walz who seem "normal," at least in our turbulent century. What they do understand is "keeping score," and they use whatever the latest poll may be to anchor, well, everything.

Of course, they don't really understand public opinion polling, so there is little available that could help a reader in Highlands Ranch make sense of all the competing numbers. I laughed at Trump pontificating about 93-2 and 72-27 with not a shred of context and without a murmur of dissent from reporters simply hoping for a soundbite. But I also admit that any poll results from last week already seem questionable. I know Americans hate each other, but the only evidence I have for that comes from social media and TV.

David Brooks has established himself as the "voice of reason" for the New York Times, staking out positions based on a combination of traveling the country listening to people and his own brand of personal ethics. If I could sum him up, it might be that he prefers to give people the benefit of the doubt, and that is decidedly not what makes for good TV or for more clicks.

His latest column suggests that American culture goes through regular phases and that the culture has become exhausted (bored?) with the drumbeat of "our country is failing... millions are invading... they're eating dogs" rhetoric. He thinks Kamala is riding on a new feeling in the zeitgeist, with Americans wanting something more hopeful and at least cautiously optimistic. Most people prefer joy to agony and unfocused fear. Kamala and her team have chosen to highlight the joy. Trump and his minions are doubling down on the hate. 

What worked in the past is not guaranteed to work in the present or future. What wins one election may have little to do with the next. Biden won because he convinced just enough voters that he would make life seem a bit more normal after years of chaos. History will likely show that he did preside over more normalcy for most Americans, though there is always a lag between perception and reality. I see that gas prices are down nearly 15 percent nationally but all the media shares is that eggs are up 50 cents. Bad news sells, of course, but there must be a point where most people simply look at their bank statements and note that they are doing OK.

I also recognize that some people are so entrenched in their ideological positions that they will vote for whomever has a D or R after their name. The character or leadership or intelligence of the candidate are not important enough to force a different choice. 

Yesterday, Trump blurted in Arizona that Kamala Harris is a "Marxist, Communist, Fascist, Socialist." He literally pulled four terms that he clearly doesn't understand and linked them all together, disregarding any sense of logic or just common sense... and hoping that at least one of those pejoratives will bring cheers from the cult. I assume he got what he wanted. He is doubling down on the hateful rhetoric about Haitians who came to Ohio (Ohio?) to work and avoid endless strife in their own nation.

Now they are getting death threats and bomb threats and AI-generated videos showing them "herding geese" for tonight's dinner. 

There are millions of Americans who are right now discussing the existential threat posed by Haitian immigrants. They are afraid. They have lost the ability to fairly evaluate outlandish claims. They will vote for Trump.

That may be frightening, but let's get back to the latest polls.

It turns out that we are terrible at predictions

One of the relatively few benefits gained by being 74 is that living over seven decades helps smooth out the hills and valleys of history. So many events and tragedies and victories and disappointments and promises that seemed so momentous at the time now seem much less dramatic and overwhelming.

Hindsight really is 20-20, but hindsight also provides real answers to the questions about "what's going to happen?" It is quite natural to imagine the very worst possibilities in the moment -- some would claim that the tendency to prepare for the worst is what has helped the human species survive. On the other hand, dogs don't imagine much about the future and the species seems to be doing OK...

As our memory of history stretches out, we also have a chance to see just how wrong our "in the moment" predictions" turned out to be. 

An example of time "smoothing" history might be the Vietnam War. For me, it eventually led to being drafted and then enlisting in the Air Force and risking being sent to southeast Asia. I was sent to England instead, and that bit of luck led to a marriage now approaching 53 years and our first daughter... and then so much more. Fewer and fewer Americans are now living who remember the events of the 1960s and 1970s very clearly, and that includes those of us who lived through them. Most of my memories of the Air Force are vague or fleeting, despite those years being stressful and formative (I guess). Maybe I just assume those three years were formative since I can't draw any direct lines between what happened then and who I am now. 

I was thinking the other day that my grandchildren couldn't even imagine being separated from family and childhood friends for two years, as Kathleen and I were from 1971-73 while we lived near RAF Lakenheath in the days before easy phone access and the internet. Considered as a fraction of a lifespan, two years really is not all that long. At 74, those two years amount to about 3 percent of my life at this point. And that percentage keeps getting smaller.

An example of a prediction that turned out much worse that I imagined was the advent of the internet, which I went on record as predicting would be the end of censorship. My reasoning was based on the old saying that "freedom of the press belongs to those who own a press." Therefore, when all of us could publish online, without needing to work for a newspaper's ownership, freedom would reign and we would enter a golden era of communication. 

Then came social media and endless online platforms that can publish everything from valuable insights on the human condition to sheer garbage. The U.S. Justice Department this week charged a number of Russians with adding very effective lies and distortions to the news feeds of millions of people who are simply not equipped with the means of separating fact from fiction.

Many people don't even try, of course, and actually welcome the fantasy world of conspiracies and breathless rumors based on slivers of truth. After all, it's fun... not to mention many people clearly are living lives of quiet desperation and find reality more disturbing than any wacko conspiracy.

How else to explain most of the Trump cult?

Related to my inaccurate prediction of an internet golden era would be the affordability and accessibility of smart phones. I recall many educators proclaiming that schools could stop wasting space on computer labs and that we could leverage the reality that all human knowledge could be accessed from a device students carry in their pockets and purses and backpacks. 

Social media basically took off in 2007, which already seems forever ago, and most people are in agreement that young people, in particular, have been seriously harmed by smartphones and their access to platforms that focus on creating addictions. I would argue that all age groups have been affected, but young people are more depressed, more pessimistic, more isolated, more unhappy. Even Gen Xers will proudly remember their youth as not being overwhelmed by devices and social media (though they are certainly addicted now). 

The biggest trend in education right now is taking phones out of the hands of students, at least during school hours. Every educator who has experienced the relief of devices being removed from the classroom and hallways and lunchrooms reports more engaged kids, fewer disruptions, and more laughter and smiles around the school. 

Deep thinkers are asking, "How could we have ever allowed those phones to invade our schools?" Here's how: we made uninformed predictions.

Two freshmen and two math teachers were slaughtered this week at a Georgia high school by a freshman boy given an AR-15 by his father. Both will be going to jail, if there is any justice. The Republican candidate for vice president said that school shooting are just "a fact of life." 

Really? Aren't smart phones just a fact of life? But we are finding ways to put at least a few limits on their use. We aren't taking away the phones. Just regulating them, and just for a few hours each day.

Perhaps we can start to see ways to not just settle for "facts of life."