Stop feeding the flames of viral trends

Over the past couple weeks everyone has learned of the latest teenage craze, the Tik-Tok viral challenge by "delicious licks." Students across the nation have been blithely and openly (I mean, it's on the internet!) sharing quick videos showing them vandalizing school property. 

Sinks broken. Handles and doorknobs missing. TP hijacked. You can picture it, I'm sure. 

The "people in charge" are outraged, of course, and no one really blames them. Lots of school districts are sending stern emails and letters to parents, warning about potential suspensions and other punishments, not to mention reminding them that those videos are destroying property funded by tax dollars.

Completely logical. And probably not very effective.

The most effective response is likely to increase security in the building, close down all but a very few restrooms and monitor who goes in and out, etc. Oh, and to basically try to ignore the entire trend.

That's right. If we know anything about teen trends, they tend to die out as quickly as they appeared, and denying the "oxygen" needed to keep them going is a simple strategy.

If everyone would just stop talking about it (but charging the culprits for damages and issuing other penalties privately), the entire craze would quickly fade. Then the NEXT craze could begin.

I have been amused by some memes online shared by teachers, such as a Tik-Tok challenge to bring their English teacher coffee one day a week, or meeting deadlines for a class this week.

Oh, if only students were so easy to manipulate.

In the meantime, the outrage from the wise adults -- you know, the ones who suspect that microchips are being inserted in vaccinated folks to, um, control their thoughts? -- will likely end up as overkill and the wise adults won't even realize that the kids have moved on to the next thing.

But at least we had something besides politics to moan about... for a few minutes.

The world rarely offers 'simple rules'

From a recent Seth Godin blog post about respecting people's time: "The simple rule is: If this can be done on multiple tracks, at our own pace, it should be. If it creates a benefit when we all do it together, then let’s."

That sounds so reasonable and I'm sure that, on some level, the future of education may be contained in that simple pair of sentences. 

But my nearly four decades of in-person teaching created habits and opinions that are tough to shed. I have seen posts that claim showing a movie in class, for instance, is a horrible waste of time. After all, the movie could be watched on the students' own schedules and the 2-3 class periods required for a movie would be better invested in answering questions, discussions, projects, and assorted creative activities.

I know I should adopt the "improv credo" of "... yes, and..." but I can't help thinking of some reasons to say, "No, because..." 

My main objection is simple observation: If I provide a link to a two-hour movie (and that is rarely possible), what assurance do I have that any particular student will find that time within a busy schedule? And prior to our class period where all that cool creative thought is scheduled to occur? My experience has taught me that there will ALWAYS be a percentage of students who can't find the time.

When I taught a high school course on Shakespeare, I made it a point to show a filmed version of most plays. My reasoning was that we should read the play, of course, but that Shakespeare never intended that his plays be read privately. He expected them to be performed.

Later in my high school teaching career I would even show TWO versions of "Romeo and Juliet" -- still one of my favorites to teach -- starting with Zeffirelli's 1968 version followed by Baz Luhrmann's 1996 version "Romeo + Juliet."

Here is the trailer for the 1968 film. Here is the trailer for the 1996 film. Even a brief sampling makes clear the stylistic differences, not to mention changes in setting. I thought seeing both of those, even if they spanned five days of class, was worth the deep dive. 

I wanted students to develop comparison skills while forcing them to also get to know the narrative and the poetry and themes a bit better. At least a few years I added watching "West Side Story" to not only enhance understanding of the themes but to get students thinking of how many movies and books and TV shows rely on the basic "two households" in conflict plot device.

In a perfect education world, I suppose the school day could be shortened, allowing for more flexible time for students to watch videos, etc. In a perfect education world, we could access the videos we need on demand, rather than having teachers buy the DVDs for classroom use (and I still have those). In a perfect education world, students would adhere to deadlines to do that "out of school" viewing and notetaking and come ready to talk about what they saw in class on a designated day.

I just never taught in that perfect world. 

A lot of angst over education tends to focus on efficient time use, with a classic culprit being a harried teacher showing "Goonies" in class while sitting in the back of the classroom grading papers that have piled up. 

Very rarely there would be a local stage production of a Shakespeare play with a matinee offering designed for students to attend. 

We would go as a class on that field trip and all sit in the theater and experience the play live.

How was that different from watching a professional film version right in school, without the need for buses and permission slips and excuses from other classes for the day?

So Mr. Godin's "simple rule" reminds me that in education there are few simple rules.

The gender gap comes to American universities

I'm not sure what to make of the latest estimates comparing men and women and college attendance.

Women now make up nearly 60 percent of all college students, which may mostly serve to remind us that the ratio was reversed not all that long ago. It may have something to do with economics. It may have something to do with women not having many viable options WITHOUT a college degree. It may signify an anti-intellectualism among males.

Who knows?

Not everyone wants to go to college, nor does everyone NEED to attend. But considering just how much of a boost college grads get economically, this preponderance of female students should alert us to a future that may look dramatically different (better? worse?). 

Women still earn much less than men in comparable jobs, so the baked in sexism and "biology penalty" (my term for women often needing to step away from school to have babies) remains.

As a long-time high school teacher, I consistently found young women to be much stronger students as a group than young men, though there were always lots of exceptions. "Sit at your desk and pay attention" sorts of classrooms tend to reward young women, who have always coped with such restrictions better than guys. I never thought the intelligence levels of the genders were any different but something about K-12 school was always a challenge for males

The Wall Street Journal did a major story on this last week and sounded the alarm, as news media tend to do. Oh dear! Change is coming! 

If there ARE changes coming, they won't arrive quickly nor evenly distributed among social and economic classes.

But I, for one, am optimistic about this change. I mean, it's tough to imagine women fouling things up worse than men have for centuries.

One great sentence usually leads to more great sentences

Long ago and far away, when the web was mysterious and Facebook, Twitter, etc., did not even exist (that is, in 2002), people experimented online in all sorts of ways with the goal of bringing people together and creating something new.

One of those experiments was something called "One Sentence Stories," which was a spin-off from the six-word story craze that grew from a probably apocryphal Hemingway quote about the shortest story he ever wrote: "For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn." Expanding from a strict limit of six words to a limit of one sentence appealed to many.

Here are a few examples of one sentence stories I gathered:

The last piece of advice that my mother ever gave me was, "Don't dip your fries in the ice cream."

I think the worst thing about being in nursing school and working full-time is coming home at night to find that my roommates made tacos without me.

My grandmother asked me my favorite part of 'Titanic' when we saw it at the movies when I was six, and I replied, "When everyone fell asleep in their floaties."

Here is an archive of a few more of the thousands of sentences www.onesentence.org gathered from 2002-2014.

Of course, to describe these one-sentence exercises as true stories is a stretch. The best stories include the four vital pieces: setting, characters, conflict, and resolution. In those single sentences, we get hints about all four of those factors but there is just not enough space to do the narrative justice.

On the other hand, I came to appreciate these focused, concise sentences as great starting points for true narratives. Each of them seems like a "tease" about what is still to come.

I am early in the semester with my Composing Arguments course that I teach each semester for Metro State, and our first larger writing assignment is a short memoir (maybe 800 words). All I ask is that the writers focus on just one or two key moments or scenes and that they, as writers, feel a significance in those scenes. 

I was thinking that each of the three examples I included above would be great first sentences for a short memoir. 

One top goal for the course is for students to understand the importance of a strong first sentence and how that can provide energy for the entire essay to come.

Taking some extra time to get that opening sentence "just right" always pays off.

When you can't win them all...

Here are the first three grafs of a story in today's Washington Post about the firing of a football coach:

The long, unusual tenure of Clay Helton, the 49-year-old head coach at Southern California, ended Monday afternoon when the school fired him two games into the season. It came more than 11½ years after his arrival as an assistant and almost six after his ascension to the helm. It left an opening at one of the country’s storied football programs.

Donte Williams, an associate head coach who coached USC’s cornerbacks, will serve as interim head coach, his first such turn in a career that has taken him through Nevada, Washington, San Jose State, Arizona, Nebraska and Oregon before his arrival at USC in 2020. He is regarded as an excellent recruiter.

Helton’s head-coaching tenure, long viewed as pretty good but not good enough, ended at 46-24. His 70th game became a flashing-lights loss to Stanford sound-tracked by booing in Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on Saturday night. Two late USC touchdowns window-dressed the score from 42-13 to a final 42-28, and the Trojans exhibited some of the same issues of football discipline that have plagued them in recent seasons.

I'm sure Coach Helton's tenure has not been perfect and I'm also certain that one loss, however embarrassing, was not the key factor in his being terminated so early in the new season. I also am well aware that USC has a long and storied tradition as a college football power and that expectations for any coach of that program are quite lofty. But the guy's teams managed to win two-thirds of their games, and many universities would be more than satisfied with that.

I often think about the near-impossible task coaches face. Win or lose, most eventually get fired. Win or lose, all coaches are being constantly second-guessed and criticized. Athletes, parents, and boosters all see the sport through unique lenses and no coach can possibly meet every need and make everyone happy.

This seems related to my thoughts on politics and government. Much like coaching, politicians and government officials will always be criticized and will always be second-guessed. Once politicians can accept that they will never receive universal approval, they can get on with making the best decisions possible, based on their philosophies and experiences. 

Coaching requires judgments and discipline and technical skill and interpersonal "genius," at least at the highest levels. There is also the reality that in most contests, one coach will be leading the losing team.

Even the best athletic coaches tend to get fired. Same with politicians. 

I honestly wonder why ANYONE would want to get into either career at this point in American life. 

Country goes from crazy uncle to patient dad

We needed a dad, or at least someone who could cut through the whining and bickering and stubbornness... all the behaviors that were encouraged for several years under a president who, beyond all his other failures and idiocy, was like a silly kid.

We got Joe Biden, and in only nine months he has done many of the things that we all (deep down) know are needed for the country. We are mandating vaccines. We are out of an unwinnable war. We are having discussions with other countries and not constantly pounding our chests. We are lifting innocent children out of poverty with modest stipends.

Is the country still a bit chaotic, a bit unorganized, and a bit just plain nuts? Duh. That helps explain the recent drop in President Biden's approval ratings, according to some polls, anyway. When dad makes the call and cuts the crap, the children are rarely big fans.

Of course, dad is not always right, and I'm certain we all have quibbles and questions about exactly how the Biden administration is proceeding. 

Some people would argue that we should have been mandating Covid vaccines as soon as we could have, for instance. After all, it doesn't seem to matter to the more rabid Republican politicians that the vaccines are fully approved (well, one is and the others are not far behind) and that there are virtually zero long-lasting or life-threatening effects from getting vaccinated.

Our "dad" did what he could to urge his children to do the right thing. We all appreciate a bit of patience in our parents, as they allow us to figure it out on our own... up to a point. 

But there comes a time when an exasperated dad goes with, "Because I said so." 

And that's the end of the discussion.

Kids aren't happy about that answer, at least at first. But most of us eventually acknowledge that some of those seemingly arbitrary rules and admonitions issued by dad or mom or grandma turned out to be wise. And when it is our turn to be parents... well, THEN we really see the wisdom of our elders.

The wacky mix of politics and health science means that anything resembling a mandate will get politicians (and some of their followers) to overreact, to protest, to proudly proclaim that they are guarding the nation against socialism or baby-eaters or whatever.

When you know you will be criticized by the tiny percentage of pundits who dominate our national discourse, no matter what you do, a solid choice is to choose to do what your discussions and your research and your common sense and your experiences lead you to.

No politician can "win" approval from all in the short term. Attempting to placate all parties and all views is a fool's errand.

It's becoming a theme for me: do the right thing to the best of your ability. All other choices go nowhere.

The past is always with us

We love nice round anniversary numbers, and tomorrow is an irresistible anniversary: 9-11.

The events are no more or less horrible this year, as opposed to last year or next year, but most of us appreciate an agreed upon time to memorialize major events. We do it with wedding anniversaries -- two weeks from tomorrow my wife and I will celebrate 50 years of marriage -- and with high school and college graduations -- ten-year and twenty-year gatherings, for instance. 

Logically, agreeing on a time to check in on what happened then, what has happened since, what is different or the same, etc., makes sense. Twenty years is a large enough period of time to provide some separation. Twenty years is long enough past to be only an entry in a history textbook for Americans who have not reached 21 years of age, including our four grandchildren. Twenty years is enough to create an entire new generation of societal reference points and allusions.

I drove to Safford, Arizona, the evening of Sept. 10, 2001, spending the night at a Comfort Inn prior to meeting with a yearbook staff at the high school. I had just begun a short, forgettable job as a yearbook publisher representative, and meeting with the adviser and staff at Safford HS was one of my first tasks.

My sales territory was vast, and there are only so many towns and schools in southeast Arizona. Our home was in Tucson, and the most efficient strategy to stop in and see teachers and students was to spend a couple days "on the road," cramming as many visits in as practical.

Anyway, I was eating the hotel breakfast when the two TVs high on the wall began showing the attack. There were a number of folks in the breakfast area, but no one spoke. And no one left. We just watched.

By mid-morning the towers were down, confusion was everywhere, and I had joined the rest of the country with a sick feeling in my gut. I tried to call Kathleen, who was still in Iowa City, selling our home there and prepping for the move to AZ, but the phone system was overwhelmed. I did not even own a cellphone at the time, but the cell towers couldn't handle the volume of calls in any case. Imagine that.

Kathleen, of course, tried multiple times to call our elder daughter, Lesley, but that didn't work either. Why repeated calls to Lesley, you ask?

She was the associate features editor for the Rocky Mountain News and one of her "beats" was fashion. As part of her work, she went to New York for Fashion Week each fall, and it turns out that she was the only RMN staff member physically in New York City that morning. 

She was able to use the paper's resources to contact her editors back in Denver and suddenly her assignment switched from covering fashion trends to gathering stories for the paper back home. It took at least three days for a senior columnist/reporter to get a flight to New York and to relieve her so she could return home.

When something overwhelming happens we can be forgiven for panicking a bit. I knew in my head that her hotel was in Midtown and that the towers were in lower Manhattan, miles away. Still, my wife and I worried as only parents can. After all, Lesley was just 28, married for just one year. 

She was OK, though to this day she still does not talk about what she saw and smelled and heard as she did her best to find angles to cover that would be unique for Colorado readers. She walked south from her hotel for miles until authorities would let her go no closer. She did file a half-dozen stories over several days, somehow keeping it together, embracing the chaos, and finding those local angles. I have copies of all her stories, and they are terrific.

Many hours later Kathleen got through to her, if only for a few minutes. We were separated from one another by distance but as one in our worry. We were safe, far away from the attack, but adding the possible dangers for our daughter to the overwhelming images and tragic human stories made it all so personal

And twenty years on, those emotions and fragments of memory remain raw and vivid.

Lesley was among a legion of unsung "heroes," people who did their best to do their jobs in the face of enormous confusion and tragedy.

She'll always be a hero to me.