'Marian... Madame Librarian...'

In the latest news from the culture wars, this time from Mason City, Iowa, comes news that the school district used ChatGPT to weed out potentially offensive books from school libraries. Since Mason City is the hometown of the "music man" himself, Meredith Willson, I instantly wondered how Marian the librarian might have responded. 

The assistant superintendent decided to speed up the censorship required by a new Iowa law that has led the district to remove 19 titles - including Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Toni Morrison’s Beloved - from its library shelves. 

Signed into law by Governor Kim Reynolds in May, Iowa’s SF 496, the law is an Angry White People Party attempt to erase any discussion of sex or sexuality from schools. There is a lot of vague language but educators can be charged with a crime should they violate the uncertain rules. There is some language about "age-appropriate," but no guidance from the state department of education.

So, logically, when in doubt, just cut. And no one has time to read every book on the shelves, so why not task AI with simply answering: “Does [insert book here] contain a description or depiction of a sex act?”

Its stipulations are a sweeping attempt at eradicating any discussion of sex or sexuality, and as Mason City School District’s assistant superintendent Bridgette Exman explained in a statement to the Mason City Globe Gazette, “it is simply not feasible to read every book and filter for these new requirements.”

This combination of AI with book censorship was not something I could see coming, but there is some sense to it. The Open Chat folks have fed most published material published prior to 2022 into that giant database, and creating reports is something ChatGPT does quite well.

I shared some advice with my two college writing classes that begin Monday, basically urging the students to (if they wanted) use ChatGPT to simply proofread their drafts, and making spelling and grammar corrections is another thing the AI does very well. I likened using ChatGPT to using Word's spell check and grammar check functions (and what are those, after all, but primitive AI software?). 

Good writing is not anchored in perfect spelling and grammar, but in ideas and a sense of narrative, and a readable personal voice. Why not get a "second set of eyes" on what they write? I wouldn't have a problem with Metro students asking a roommate or spouse to give an essay one last look before uploading an assignment. How is ChatGPT any different?

Marian Paroo defended "vulgar books (BAAAlzac...) and it's disappointing that Iowa, a state that once boasted loudly of its literacy and even prairie progressive history, is now just a crappy version of Florida and its war on woke. 

If there is any comfort to be found in all the school censorship battles, it's that a large number of people actually believe books matter and that ideas can create change. 

And there are certainly a lot of "Harold Hill" flimflam men running for the Republican nomination for president. Marian broke down his cynicism and greed in the musical. 

Who will step up for us today?

Large institutions rushing, and dawdling, to make changes with the times

I did a bit of time traveling this morning while reading a story about how colleges were scrambling to handle the challenges of ChatGPT and rampant "cheating." One of the first suggestions from some professors? Return to the Blue Books.

Of course. Never accuse universities of abandoning the "old ways" and hanging on by tooth and nail to traditions. Unless we are talking college football and the Power 5 schools. 

BTW, this latest round of conference shake-ups may be a good example of why large organizations need to be careful about massive changes without much planning... and almost always responding to money. As many commentators have pointed out, flying from California to Newark for a football game on Friday morning for the Saturday game, returning late Saturday or early Sunday, might be fine for the semi-professionals at USC. But what about the baseball or softball teams? What about basketball teams that normally play at least one mid-week game? 

It all sounds like a scheduling nightmare but, as always, all that time-consuming travel is likely to negatively affect the student athletes (and, honestly, most college athletes really ARE students). 

When football rules all, it's similar to "you hate America" as a motivator in political "debate." Anger and misinformation and rash decisions overwhelm common sense and even civic behavioral norms. 

Eventually, I predict that the top 60 football programs will have to be separated from their traditional (or untraditional) conferences and split into more rational geographic "leagues" of 15. Then the other sports can return to the former conferences and fan bases that have always inspired so much devotion (and pleasure). 

But in the meantime, chaos and misunderstandings and more division within the country awaits. 

Speaking of chaos, we are one week out from opening online courses for Metro and CSU, and no one from either institution has offered any firm guidance as to how to deal with ChatGPT. I received the fall syllabus policies document yesterday from Metro, for instance, and there is no mention of AI. Everyone pledges to "not cheat" but who knows what that means anymore? I checked the Liberal Arts academic integrity videos featured on the university site and they were produced in 2020.

My how time flies. 

I am still fiddling with a ChatGPT "best practices post/unit for my own section, and need to have that ready to go in a week. One thing I know for certain: I will not be returning to Blue Books. 

Would I be comfortable with a classroom culture that assumes cheating and student dishonesty and that exults in "catching" the guilty.

Short answer: no.

But I am certain I can create essay prompts that cannot be simply answered by AI (like, list three common themes in the writing of Charles Dickens). Those simple "regurgitate the facts" exams have got to go. But that was true before ChatGPT.

Rowing against the current... and losing to the waves

As I was wrapping up my (what I thought) was my final student media critique of the summer, I felt that sense of, well, despair, that I often get from reading lots of student writing from across the country (from Florida to New Jersey to Illinois to California). 

One reason is that I find myself typing the same basic advice over and over again... and most of that advice is not recent in my thinking. We should try to anticipate what questions readers will have, for instance, and then find the answers, if possible. We should avoid simply TELLING  readers things in favor of SHOWING them. In other words, advice that they have heard many, many times in their educational lives.

And yet the writing remains consistently flat and lifeless and unsupported. I try to write narrative critiques, when I can, and I adopt first person plural to emphasize that we are all in this together (and to allow me to pretend that I am their media adviser simply going over last year's work as we prepare to start a new academic year). 

I assume that clear narrative writing is not taught enough in schools, particularly once kids get to middle school, but it's hard to imagine that students haven't picked up a few standard techniques storytellers use to engage with readers and viewers. 

One of my go-to pieces of advice is to think "more cinematically," which I explain by asking readers of the critiques to imagine they were writing a TV script. Unless they choose to use a narrator who simply states all the facts, they couldn't choose to TELL instead of SHOW. They would think of dialog. They would imagine a specific setting. They would create characters. They would introduce some sort of conflict, or at least set viewers up for a conflict to come.

Many times TV show or movie will simply drop viewers into an exciting or significant scene. A standard device is to open with something shocking or threatening, and then cut away to a quick screen of "x days or weeks earlier..." We were watching "1883," the first "Yellowstone" prequel a couple weeks ago, and in the very first scene we see a young girl shot in the midsection by an arrow during an attack on a wagon train.  

Spoiler alert: it did not turn out great... but it took 'til the penultimate episode (of 10) to get the context for the attack. That's a long time to wait in dread.

Still, so much better than the several stories I read this week that began with what I can only describe as "creative non-fiction," where the reporter imagines what it might be like to be a hockey player or point guard on the basketball team.

I often ask (somewhat rhetorically, since I have no idea who actually reads my comments) if staff members read many stories or watch TV or movies? Sounds a bit snarky, but when so many students (with the OK from their advisers) are fine publishing material that in no way resembles what they see every day... there is a definite disconnect.

I suppose I could add to the large number of "how to write a narrative" books out there... but who would read it? They aren't reading any of the others, that's certain.

Thinking about ways to "hear" more student voices

As we approach the start of another school year, and as granddaughter Anna prepares to take on more leadership for the Arapahoe HS Herald magazine and social media, I've been thinking about how to help her (and about how much to try to help... after all, she's smart and determined and will likely find her own paths and solutions).

Through two sources, just today, I ran across interesting posts that I plan to share with her if we get a chance to meet and continue our ongoing conversation about journalism. So, I guess that answers my qualms about providing my opinions, solicited or not.

The first is from a blog called Nieman Storyboard, and related a scene from a Wichita, Kansas journalist who works for a nonprofit newspaper. Here's the gist of the story: 

An 11-year-ld boy walks by the room in the library where the "pop up" website was set up, and asked what was going on. A news photographer from The Wichita Eagle, a radio reporter from KMUW, and the editor of The Wichita Beacon, a nonprofit, online news outlet, told him they were doing the news.

He pointed to them one at a time: “Newspapers are dead! Radio is boring and… I don’t even know what you are.” That last was directed at the editor.

She asked him: “What if we wrote about stuff that mattered to you?” The boy seemed slightly curious... didn't just walk away, at least.

Then the reporter said, “Journalists are for when something isn’t fair, and you want someone to find out why. Is there anything in your world that isn’t fair?”

The boy started talking. About how schools don’t give you enough time to eat lunch. About how you don’t get enough time for recess. About how if you stand up to bullies, you get in trouble, too.

He asked if the reporter was going to write down his story... and I guess she did, since it was published.

So, simply asking students what doesn't seem fair in their lives may be a good first step for Anna and her fellow student journalists.

Then I read a post from The Colorado Sun, where a writing tutor was responding in an open letter to the U.S. Supreme Court and its recent decision essentially ending affirmative action. In the opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts pointed out that universities could still take personal stories from students into consideration, thus making their personal essays in the applications even more important. Certainly as important as grades and ethnic background.

But the writer pointed out that "the personal essay is no longer a thing," at least in American high schools. Modern standards have elevated the persuasive essay and the analytical essay, and most English teachers now avoid including many (or any) first person writing assignments in their curricula. 

This year Anna will be taking AP Language and Composition. I taught it for a number of years, so I would claim to know something about that course. It certainly pushes for third person, for strong arguments involving claims and support. Personal anecdotes, the kind that might give special insight into the grit and talent of a potential college student, are considered a bit risky when there is pressure to score well on the AP tests next May. I'm not anti AP Lang.

But the anecdotal evidence I have gathered judging personal opinion columns from across the nation, in various competitions, is that our local writing tutor is correct. Students are uncomfortable with first person writing and often I see AP-style essays masquerading as personal essays. They may be in first person, but readers are just getting a report. 

Schools have been bleeding most of the passion and personality out of student writing for years, of course, since our goals have evolved into meeting broad standards and our assessments have devolved into mammoth grading exercises, with hundreds of volunteer teachers gathering in Kansas City (or somewhere similar) each June, with the job of assessing thousands and thousands of essays. I would never question the judgment of those educators, of course, but such an assembly line strategy seems antithetical to good writing instruction. 

They try to label with essay as a 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5, but the chance of any one essay being mislabeled seems quite good. Of course, College Board would not agree, but their always-present goal is to make money, so...

Perhaps one approach Anna and her fellow journalists can pursue is to invite a broad range of Arapahoe students to share their stories, to write about what seems unfair to them. Or maybe to write about what brings them joy. Or about something that surprised them. 

If the school curriculum can't find time for such writing, maybe student media can provide a platform. Students have the stories to share. They just need some support, some encouragement, and a place to publish. 

Fun with language on TV

Yesterday I heard a TV news reporter covering parental concerns about homeless encampments near an elementary school and parent protests say, "Several parents mentioned worrying about their kids being forced to walk by people using the restroom outside."

Good Lord! I know we wouldn't want to offend anyone's delicate sensibilities and I am certainly aware that Americans are inclined to scream and moan about almost anything that could be remotely offensive, but the outdoors is not a "restroom" for humans.

It is for dogs, of course, which is why I see so many of my neighbors dutifully waiting for Fido to "do his business" before stooping over the steaming shit and scooping it into a specially made plastic bag. Then the bag is deposited in stations that are mere feet away from our community mailboxes. Maybe that's why emptying the junk mail each day is such an ordeal in hot weather. 

I'm not sure when we become quite so fastidious when referring to bodily functions, but we can't count it as true progress to yell at young children who use words like "piss" to indicate urination. We prefer "pee," which seems to pass verbal muster for almost anyone. 

Chaucer was not so timid. I vividly recall reading the Miller's Tale in The Canterbury Tales, with lines like "This Nicholas was risen for to pisse..." and blushing at the naughtiness of it all. Of course, it didn't help that a nun was leading the class (but not reading aloud in Middle English). 

I was also thinking that the TV reporter would have done everyone a favor by specifying #1 or #2... when did we institute a numbering system? At any rate, there seems a qualitative difference between pissing against a tree and defecating. Inquiring TV viewers want to know!

There's an entire industry devoted to pooping and peeing... and heaven forbid that we don't choose discretion when indulging in either activity. Architects must consider proximity and ease of access in placing bathrooms (where we don't bathe) in buildings. We have laws covering all this, based, one assumes on studies of how many toilets or troughs or holes in the ground are needed per hundred people.

We must draw the line somewhere, I suppose, since we continue to see people lined up (often discretely hopping in place) during intermission at a Broadway show. And we have not yet come up with how to equalize access for males and females. 

We certainly don't want the genders mixing in one bathroom, except in our homes, where all bets are off. We even have culture war battles over proper distribution of genitalia in determining which bathroom is legal or allowed in schools, particularly. 

After all, who knows what funny business can result when opposite genders gather in close proximity to defecate? Sex is practically inevitable in such situations, at least according to some of our more wacky fellow citizens. 

Chaucer, I would guess, might have urged that TV reporter to go with "piss and shit" in her report. A Latin scholar such as myself might suggest "urinate and defecate." 

I'm fairly certain the kids would just giggle and point and speed up their walk a bit on their way to being afflicted by uptight adults waiting for them in school or at home. 

It would be nice, however, to encounter an outdoor restroom when I am in desperate need. My bladder warranty is wearing out.

A good day to consider how we spend our money

The breaking news today in the Denver area was that Taylor Swift's private jet landed at about 11:30 a.m. at Centennial Airport, about six miles from our house.

Does that mean I have had a "brush with greatness"? Does it mean that the local media is a bit nutty? Does it mean that there is little actual news to report? Does it mean that Swift's two concerts in the stadium where the Bronco's embarrassed themselves last season are so important as to crowd out reports on climate change, excessive heat, Iowa restricting abortions, and the actors' strike? Perhaps the reason to be riveted is the estimated $1 billion boost to the Denver economy.

All the above? I don't know, but I do know this: I can't come up with a single Taylor Swift song in my head right now... I must have heard some, even as background music, but can't recall a single title. I am officially out of it, that is clear.

Ticket sales for the two concerts is estimated at about $38 million, which is beyond comprehension. Most tickets were sold far above face value, according to numerous reports, due to scalpers snapping up so many tickets using advanced technology to beat your basic 15-year-old who worships the singer.

Ms. Swift will be off to LA Sunday and everyone will recover, but what I will continue to think about is the dramatic split between the rich and the middle class, with the lower class not really even in the economic picture. Not everyone attending the concerts will be what we might call the "rich," and people are entitled to spend their hard-earned bucks as they please. The estimate is that each attendee will spend an average of $1,300 to attend a show.

On the other hand, we had a new induction stovetop installed today, replacing our old standard electric cooktop that was not very efficient at age 15, and that cost over $2,000... Hey, money comes and goes.

And our granddaughter's room, board, and tuition next year at Iowa will top $40,000. It's all relative, I suppose. 

I filled up the Camry today and was shocked to see the pump price at $3.96/gallon. I had enough King Soopers points to save a buck a gallon, but holy cow! I still spent nearly $3/gallon.

In one other piece of economic news today, I read that the Biden administration has a plan to save over 800,000 college borrowers about $39 billion. First reactions from the media, of course, focused on how LITTLE that amount is. 

Hey, it's a big country with lots of people and lots of money.

There is a famous quote from Illinois Republican Senator Everett Dirksen cautioning that federal spending had a way of getting out of control: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money." That quote is from the 1960s.

Were he with us today, he might have to amend that to "a trillion here, a trillion there..."

Good news on my personal economic front: we will enjoy a Papa Murphy's pizza tonight that I bought on Tuesday at the special price of $10. I froze it until today and it will bake perfectly. Mostly, I am proud of saving nearly $7 compared to what I would have paid to buy the pizza freshly made today.

My rough calculation is that the $7 saving comes to 0.0000001 percent of the ticket sales for the two concerts this weekend.

I'm doing what I can.

If I had a lawn, I'd demand you get off it

One of the things we love to do as we age is taking trips down memory lane, recalling (and sometimes augmenting or outright inventing) memorable scenes or characters or events from our past. All that musing about the past is relatively harmless, most of the time.

But problems occur when we have only our pasts to use in comparisons with new trends, facts, and issues. I see that Colorado is considering banning gas-powered lawn equipment due to continuing problems in air quality. This proposal doesn't affect me personally, though I'm sure the company that mows and trims and waters our little corner of paradise is not thrilled. They would have to invest in lots of new equipment (and, really, that seems needed, based on the uneven grass cutting we observe most weeks).

I don't miss mowing the lawn, honestly, but I have many memories of mowing in my youth and middle age, from push mowers to gas mowers. We even owned a snow blower for a time that could handle 27-inch deep drifts. I recall having to pull the cord on our crappy mower as many as two dozen times to get the engine to catch... pulling until I wanted to weep in frustration. Ah, the good old days.

The United States currently has a significant part of the population longing for days past when America was great (we lump them together as the MAGA fans), but when researchers ask those folks to specify exactly when that mythical highpoint occurred, there is no clear answer. Not the Depression, surely. So maybe the 1950s... though that golden age of white people left out a large chunk of humanity. Or maybe during some obscure decade in the 1800s... though not the Civil War. 

What many people long for, ironically, never existed other than to benefit a very few. "Hey, remember when people dressed up to fly on a plane?"

On a more personal level, Kathleen and I recently were forced to confront the "new" world of streaming and the necessity of navigating varied services. We had become quite comfortable with depending upon Xfinity to bundle almost all our TV choices into one simple (if always too large) bill each month.

Imagine our surprise when a series of events led to our needing to change our Xfinity plan and suddenly we could not access HBO... and our DVR was suddenly limited to 10 hours from the previous 100 (though we soon learned we could just click on a button and return to those 100 hours, for a monthly fee added to our bill). 

After several frustrating online chats with Xfinity agents who clearly were copying and pasting prepared comments, we finally drove to a local Xfinity store to talk to a human. He must have been fielding complaints quite regularly about the changes to the previous bundling options because he was all too ready to recommend we check out local library for DVDs to play (for free!) if we were so upset by the service.

We were taken aback, partly because we were not upset... just confused. He lectured us about reading the small print on our monthly bills (which are online) that had been warning Xfinity customers that, basically, the old days were over. Xfinity now has the goal of simply being our gateway to the wonders of the internet. Content? The finances are so messy that the company has simply dropped out. I assume all internet providers are the same. 

We also had to come to terms with the truth that our basic access to the internet, which we value and which is quite fast (so fast that even a slight delay or interruption is met with quiet cursing), would cost as much as what we were paying before, but without the Big Ten Network or HBO or Showtime, or... You get the idea.

In the end, I went online and subscribed to MAX, which supplants HBO, which still exists (I guess) but is part of this larger streaming service. Just this month I subscribed to Paramount+, mostly because I wanted access to all the new Star Trek series that are exclusive to that service. 

Apple+ upped its cost from $49.95 per year by $20... still a bargain. Add in Netflix and we are paying about $48 per month (we will add the Comcast sports package to watch Iowa games late in August at $9.99/month). 

Logically, the over $300 we are now paying per month for TV, internet, and phone is actually quite a value, and I know that. But my gut argues that TV used to be free and that I am somehow being "taken" by the greedy streaming services.

When we talk about this with our children (who are not all that young anymore), they just launch into tales of how they pursue strategies that involve waiting until they have several shows to watch on a particular platform and then binge them in a month or a few weeks, and then cancel and move to the next steamer. Some day, today will be their longed-for past golden era.

We prefer the normal two-months "free" that an annual subscription includes and are not fans of flitting from service to service, thinking we would need a complex spreadsheet just to keep track of the game. Isn't life supposed to be a bit simpler as we age, after all?

It occurs to me that many of the MAGA nut cases imagine sometime early in their lives as that "great America" that they long for. But we had four networks growing up - and one was PBS - when we were young. Kathleen only had three most of her youth, due to the nearest NBC station not being close enough for their antenna to pick up.

That means she never watched the original Star Trek series in the late 1960s, which may account for her suspicion that our Paramount+ subscription is not necessary. But we do have a vague plan to revisit all the Star Trek movies, in order, sometime this winter. After all, we have the DVDs... a technology that our children have mostly abandoned.

Somehow, DVDs are now part of the good old days. And so are we.