Competition Improves Math Skills

I'm not a fan of spelling bees. And, that's a bit surprising considering my background in English and my own son's prowess in that area. But I'm more of the Brian Regen school of spelling bees, which means I think they're a collossal waste of time and nothing but trivial challenges with no correlation to valuable skills or learning. That said, I am not opposed to the value of competition as a motivator for academic success. And, that's not surprising considering my son's prowess in the world of Math Counts. In fact, his success and passion for math was initially fueled by a teacher promoting competitions like Math Counts, Math Madness, Math Challenge, etc. And, "video games" for him are often simply competing on "For the Win." Truly, competitions like Math Counts, the National Science Fair, and others have significant ability to engage students - especially boys - in academics. In fact, if Bill Gates really wanted to improve math skills and academics in school, he would start funding big prizes for competitors in contests like Math Madness or Math Counts.

And, as EducationNext reports today, there is sound validity to the role of competition in increasing academic achievement. The Game Plan for Learning is about the history and reseach on the value of competition in learning.

So Coleman challenged educators to rethink how they viewed competition.

Writing two years later in his 1961 book The Adolescent Society, he noted that educators had long been suspicious of academic competition, but that they unwittingly used it every day when handing out letter grades. The problem, he said, was that the competition in most classrooms was interpersonal. Shift the emphasis—make it interscholastic, that is, school versus school—and the suspicion gives way to celebration. “When a boy or girl is competing, not merely for himself, but as a representative of others who surround him, then they support his efforts, acclaim his successes, console his failures,” Coleman wrote. “His psychological environment is supportive rather than antagonistic, is at one with his efforts rather than opposed to them. It matters little that there are others, members of other social communities, who oppose him and would discourage his efforts, for those who are important to him give support to his efforts.”

Coleman proposed that schools should replace the competition for grades with interscholastic academic games, “systematically organized competitions, tournaments and meets in all activities,” from math and English to home economics and industrial arts. These competitions, he predicted, would get both students and the general public more focused on academics and ensure all students a better education. It wouldn’t be easy, he predicted: schools would need “considerable inventiveness” to come up with the right vehicles for competition. But they already had a few good models, including math and debate competitions, as well as drama and music contests. He noted that the RAND Corporation and MIT had already established “political gaming” contests with great success.

In the early 1960s, Coleman developed six games and tested them in Baltimore schools. Teachers, he would later write, “came to share our enthusiasm for this reconstruction of the learning environment.” But he admitted that his vision was “not realized,” even though a handful of fellow researchers at Hopkins and elsewhere piloted academic games with great success.

"Big Beer" is Moving in on Craft Beer Scene

I can't blame them really - those craft brewers who hit the lottery. Think about it: you start a small brewpub in a little mountain town, and after a decade or so, you have a few locations and a thriving bottle business. And then someone offers you $50 million or so for the whole operation. That's tough to walk away from. That's tough to say, "No, I want to keep going to work each day and earning a nice, but not extravagant living." And, that's the way it was last month when the soul of craft brewing was rattled to its core by news of In-Bev's purchase of local favorite, Breckenridge Brewery. But it wasn't just about Breck Brew - the international beer behemoth bought up five other craft breweries. And the wrinkles in the spirit of the industry continue, as Jeremy Meyer of the Denver Post notes in his examination of In-Bev moving into the up-and-coming River North  neighborhood of Denver:

Big Beer has discovered the market and desperately wants in. Whether corporate beer will be accepted and whether its incursion will spoil the good thing we have going are good questions.
Anheuser-Busch InBev recently acquired Breckenridge Brewing, which even Gov. John Hickenlooper said left him with a feeling of loss. In another development, 10 Barrel Brewing, an Oregon-based brewery that was bought by AB InBev, just announced it was opening a pub in the River North district. Upon this news, many craft beer lovers took to social media to say they would stay far away from 10 Barrel out of allegiance to independent brewers.

"I'm neither interested in drinking InBev beer or giving them my money on a regular basis ... or at all," said Annie Sugar, a beer lover and research associate at the University of Colorado. "InBev's business ethics and practices will not allow me to support their products." Beer lover Luc Sauer had the same response. "I will be unlikely to visit the pub, especially given its ownership," he said. "The craft beer business movement has historically been one of remarkable cooperation. ... AB InBev seems to be afraid because they are losing share in their fizzy yellow beer sales and so are trying to drive out any competition to anything that isn't theirs."

I don't know if the news of these aquisitions is catastophic to the craft industry. But it sure feels a lot like the Wal-mart-ization of the craft beer industry. And losing that artisan spirit is a loss for us all.

Is Trump Kidding? Could This Be Satire

Until a student mentioned it a few months ago, I hadn't thought that Donald Trump may be satirizing the entire GOP primary ... but now I'm not so sure. A couple weeks ago, when many columnists were making predictions for 2016, I was struck by the possibility of mockery and satire again when Denver writer and radio host Ross Kaminsky made this prediction:

“Donald Trump drops out of the presidential race and says that his whole campaign was a bet with fellow Manhattan billionaire liberal Michael Bloomberg about whether Trump could really fool gullible Republicans into thinking he had suddenly become a conservative and that a man who traffics in exaggerations and insults, and learns about national security issues from "the shows," could be a good standard-bearer for the GOP. Former Trump supporters show remarkably little embarrassment.”

And, now I'm giving the idea just a tad more credibility. For, it reaches a point when sane, clear thinking, rational people have to consider the idea that there is no way that Trump could be this much of an ass. So, I've given it some thought, and I've done a bit of research, and I'm not the only one who is speculating - and definitely hoping - that Trump is just playing the GOP primary voters like a fiddle. The best I've seen yet comes from HuffPost blogger Andy Ostroy who posed the idea, "What if Trumps campaign is really about this ..."

I'm leaving the race. I don't want to be president. I never wanted to be president. I just wanted to hold a mirror up to the ignorance and bigotry that lurks dangerously beneath the surface. And you shocked me. The more vile and racist I became, the more you loved me! No matter what I did, I'd go up in the polls! I'd say to Melania, what do I have to do turn these people against me, kill someone?! I pulled off the greatest social experiment in American history. In the end, it wasn't Donald Trump whose behavior was shameful, it was yours. I was merely pretending, but you weren't. You've got a lot to work on, America. And you can thank Trump for exposing it."

New SAT Essay Is Obscure & Sets Kids up for Failure

As ACT and SAT battle for control of state testing, a disconcerting issue has arisen among English teachers regarding the new essay portion of the tests. Specifically, ACT's new writing assessment, while more challenging in the expectations, is still relevant and accessible for all high schools students. However, SAT's essay is a rather obscure and less relevant form of writing that is going to improperly portray writing deficiences and set many kids up for failure in their bid to attend colleges and universities. As you can imagine, I’ve been pretty critical of Colorado’s decision to switch to SAT in the future. I don’t know if you have looked at the new SAT yet, but I am bothered by the new format and its lack of relevance and accessibility for many students.

Argumentative writing, as in taking a position, has been the foundation of both ACT/SAT for years. ACT recently expanded the prompt, and it’s certainly a bit more challenging in its wording. But it’s still an argument. That type of position-based writing has widespread application across content areas, and it is relevant and helpful for all kids, regardless of future college major. SAT’s new essay prompt is an argumentative deconstruction – basically, a style analysis of an argument. Style analysis is not a widely relevant and applicable skill, and it will present considerable difficulties for teachers and kids – all to little benefit. And, as English teachers we need to seriously consider how much we alter what we regularly do in the classroom in response to our kids being asked to take this new – and unpiloted – test.

Here is ACT's prompt style:

"Read and carefully consider the three perspectives related to the passage. Each suggests a particular way of thinking about the issue  (ie., this is a defend, challenge, qualify position approach) Write a unified essay in which you evaluate multiple perspectives. In your essay, be sure to:

• analyze and evaluate multiple perspectives
• state and develop your own perspective
• explain the relationship between the various views

And, here is SAT's standard prompt:

As you read the passage below, consider how [the author] uses

• evidence, such as facts or examples, to support claims.
• reasoning to develop ideas and to connect claims and evidence.
• stylistic or persuasive elements, such as word choice or appeals to emotion, to add power to the ideas expressed.

Write an essay in which you explain how [the author] builds an argument to persuade [his/her] audience that [author’s claim]. In your essay, analyze how [the author] uses one or more of the features listed above (or features of your own choice) to strengthen the logic and persuasiveness of [his/her] argument. Be sure that your analysis focuses on the most relevant features of the passage. Your essay should not explain whether you agree with [the author’s] claims, but rather explain how the author builds an argument to persuade [his/her] audience.

Basically, College Board is setting up more kids for failure based on the simple fact that College Board President David Coleman has no experience teaching high school, knows very little about how to teach English, and has some pretty misguided ideas about how to effectively assess writing proficiency.

Top Gun turns 30 this year

Was it really thirty years ago that Maverick and Goose flew "into the danger zone"?



That's right. I may be jumping the gun a bit because the official release date for the Tony Scott/Jerry Bruckheimer military classic Top Gun is actually in May. But I've been thinking about the movies of my youth, and I've been slowly introducing my teenage son to the movies that mattered when I was his age. Nothing made a splash like this one in 1986.



So, as Generation X looks back at 25 five years, I've been thinking a lot about the media that entertained us and formed our views. A lot of engaging movies with strong political or sociological undertones came out in the years 1986 and 1991, which would be roughly twenty-five and thirty-years for those of us in the heart of Gen X. I plan to write a lot more about these in the coming months. But here are a few from the list:

1986:  Alien, Platoon, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Stand by Me, The Mission, The Fly, Highlander, Crocodile Dundee, About Last Night, Big Trouble in Little China, Hoosiers. and The Name of the Rose.

1991:  Terminator 2, JFK, Point Break, Boyz in the Hood, Bugsy, The Fisher King, The Doors, My Own Private Idaho, Jungle Fever, and, New Jack City.

Complicating the School Lunch Issue - We aren't France

School lunches are definitely a problem in terms of their overall impact on student health. And, the federal guidelines that made them less appealing to many - but in some ways healthier - haven't done much turn them into the brilliant culinary masterpieces that other countries' students seem to enjoy. However, the problem with school lunches in American cafeterias is much more an issue with our country's entire food industry, as opposed to simply the failure of schools to put appetizing meals on the ... tray.



And, that's the issue that Bettinas Elias Siegel seeks to expose and expand our understanding of in her insightful and informative piece in today's New York Times titled "The Real Problem with School Lunch."

Let’s start with money. The federal government provides a little over $3 per student per lunch, and school districts receive a smaller contribution from their state. But districts generally require their food departments to pay their own overhead, including electricity, accounting and trash collection. Most are left with a dollar and change for food — and no matter what Mr. Moore says, no one is buying scallops and lamb on that meager budget. Contrast this with France, where meal prices are tied to family income and wealthy parents can pay around $7 per meal. Give that sum to an American school food services director and you may want to have tissues handy as he’s likely to break down in incredulous tears.

And what about the students on the other side of the serving line? Nothing in our nation’s food environment primes them to embrace fresh, healthful school meals. The top four sources of calories in the average American child’s diet are grain-based desserts, pizza, soda and sports drinks, and bread. One-third eat fast food every single day. More than 90 percent don’t eat enough vegetables. And each year, our children are bombarded by around $2 billion in child-directed food and beverage advertising, much of which promotes the least healthy products.

Having spent a considerable amount of time in the past two years developing a plan to re-organize our cafeterias, I can attest to Siegel's claims. We have problems getting healthy food consumed by our young people. But that's a problem with our culture and food production system, and that's not readily going to change. As natural food icon Alice Waters says,

"I don't want to force kids to eat healthier foods. I want to win them over to making healthy choices."

Two Months from today Coupland's "Generation X" Turns 25

In just two months, Douglas Coupland's zeitgeist novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture will turn twenty-five. That's right, a quarter century ago on March 15, 1991, Generation X was named as the book was published. This year is the year for a generation, which had been deemed the Slackers, to look back on 25 years. In that time, slacking is really the last thing we've been doing. But what we have been doing is worthy of reflection - growing up, getting jobs, raising kids, creating the internet, hacking society, creating artisan crafts, seeking authenticity in a world severely lacking. These ideas are the focus of the retrospective book I've been working on and hope to put out soon. In the meantime, here's the foreward to the book version of my Master's thesis on Coupland's early works. It's title -  McJob: Consumer Culture in Douglas Coupland's Early Works.

In the middle of summer in 1991, as I was about to enter my final year of college, a good friend who had just graduated but was still on campus waiting tables casually mentioned to me “this new book about people our age …” The focus, he said, was on twenty-somethings who had graduated into a lethargic economy with a sense of career ennui and were working hourly service industry jobs rather than pursuing careers. The key, or intriguing element, was that they were “choosing lifestyle over career.” Sure, they were working “McJobs” that had nothing to do with their college majors, and they were earning far under their potential or promise … but they were choosing to do that while they focused on finding some meaning in their lives. They had unintentionally, and rather subconsciously, embraced the mantra laid out for them years before by the Everyman teen hero Lloyd Dobbler who in Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything calmly and rationally explained to Diane Court’s father how “I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that.”  For my friend and other recent graduates in our spehere, Lloyd's idea resonated with validation of our unexpected post-graduate experience. The book was, of course, Douglas Coupland’s Generation X: Tales of an Accelerated Culture (1991), and it would be the work of fiction that captured a moment in time and incidentally named a generation.  

7-Day Punk Rock Challenge

Punk is ...

As I have noted before, punk and punk rock is the spirit of America and every bit as representative of the American identity as early icons of individuality and self-reliance like Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. In fact, for years I've told my students that Henry David Thoreau is America's original punk. And, as I intro Civil Disobedience and Walden, I also share with them the foundational tenets of punk, as wonderfully articulated by Bad Religion frontman Greg Graffin.

Henry David Thoreau & the Punk Rock American Ethos

PUNK*

PUNK IS: the personal expression of uniqueness that comes from the experiences of growing up in touch with our human ability to reason and ask questions.

PUNK IS: a movement that serves to refute social attitudes that have been perpetuated through willful ignorance of human nature.

PUNK IS: a process of questioning and commitment to understanding that results in self-progress, and by extrapolation, could lead to social progress.

PUNK IS: a belief that this world is what we make of it, truth comes from our understanding of the way things are, not from the blind adherence to prescriptions about the way things should be.

PUNK IS: the constant struggle against fear of social repercussions.

                                           

*Credit to Greg Graffin

If you're on Facebook, and you've been on in the past few days, and you are of Generation X, then you have probably seen, or maybe even been nominated to participate in the 7-Day Punk Rock Challenge in which, once a day, for seven days you post a video of an (allegedly) punk rock song, and then nominate a friend to do the same. I've been having great fun with this, both searching for songs to share and waiting for someone to surprise me with something cool I hadn't heard, or hadn't heard in a while. Here's a taste of a few songs I've been enjoying.

Ziggy Stardust is in Heaven Now - RIP David Bowie

"Ziggy played guitar, jammin' good with Weird and Gilly ..."

A man of impeccable style and presence. He was always the coolest man in the room ... in any room.

David Foster Wallace, voice of Generation X, or something else entirely

As we prepare to wade into the monstrous genius of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest as part of the Infinite Winter, I am wading around the fringes of the book, and nibbling at little pieces of criticism and commentary on Wallace and IJ.  Because this year - 2016 - is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the coining of "Generation X," via Coupland's seminal novel, I am also connecting my writing and work back to that concept. Wallace and Coupland are, interestingly, on the very fringe of the generation, being born in 1961, and that makes them some of the earliest icons. And, icon, as much as they might bristle, is the correct word because of the impact they had. And, in doing my nibbling, I've run across a few fun pieces of commentary regarding DFW and Generation X.

There is, of course, this:

And, then there was a really nice bit of criticism from Adam Kirsch in Rocket and Lightship: Essays on Literature and Ideas, excerpted on Salon.com, which explores the connections deeply. I love the perimeter exploration of irony and the examination of language. It reflects the spirit that Dave Eggers recalls in his most excellent introducation to my edition of IJ. And the idea of lineage and allusion and literary bloodlines is great fun to extrapolate. As far as Generation X and Wallace go, here's some fun to batter around:

When Wallace wrote about how difficult it was to be an American, he specifically meant an American of his own generation—the post-sixties cohort known as “Generation X.” “Like most North Americans of his generation,” Wallace writes about the teenage hero of “Infinite Jest,” “Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he’s devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves.” Likewise, in “Westward,” he writes, “Like many Americans of his generation in this awkwardest of post-Imperial decades . . . Sternberg is deeply ambivalent about being embodied.” It is no wonder that readers born between 1965 and 1980 responded to this kind of solicitude, with its implication that they were unique, and uniquely burdened.

What is actually most American and most Generation X about these laments, of course, is their provincialism. For Wallace to find it plausible that “being embodied” or “objective insignificance” were new American problems is as sharp an indictment of American ignorance, in its way, as those polls which are always showing that half of us can’t find the U.S. on a map. Except that if any young novelist knew the ancient history of such problems, it should have been Wallace. He was very widely read, and he studied philosophy in college and graduate school; his first novel plays knowingly with Wittgenstein and Derrida. In the introduction to “Fate, Time, and Language,” the posthumous edition of Wallace’s senior thesis, his father James remembers reading the “Phaedo” with the fourteen-year-old David: “This was the first time I realized what a phenomenal mind David had.”

Build a Better Colorado can fix CO's TABOR problem

Colorado is a uniquely "purple state," with a blend of liberal/conservative/independent Democrats & Republicans. In a perfect world that would mean a degree of moderation that leads to very effective government. And, the Rocky Mountain state does pretty well managing services and expenses with limited revenue and legislation. But the libertarian spirit that runs through all groups - and which was behind voters approval of the Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR) in 1992 - created one heck of a "Gordian knot" in terms of voters rights and responsible governance. Nowhere is that more true than with TABOR, which has required several voter-approved "time outs" because of the necessity of maintaining a strong infrastructure and productive society. And, in 2016 the state is in need of a serious, practical, and permanent fix to TABOR.

Having moved to Colorado in 2003 from fiscally-messy Illinois, I can appreciate and support the desires of Colorado voters to have the final authority for approving all tax increases. And, I can firmly assert that the tax-approval right was the primary - and really only - reason voters passed TABOR. Everything else in the amendment is a hinderance to effective government and needs to change. The "everything else" refers to the revenue cap based on an obscure, arbitrary, and ultimately indefensible formula that mandates Colorado's government budget can only grow by inflation + population growth. Any revenue collected beyond that must be refunded to voters. Applying formulas to societies is simply ... irresponsible. We live in complex emergent systems which are far too malleable and intricate to reduce to a formula. Thus, I firmly believe that a majority of Coloradans would and should support an amending of the TABOR amendment to simply maintain voter-approval of taxes ... and that's it.

While the ideologues in the Republican party and unaffiliated libertarians will cry foul and rant conspiratorially about reckless and uncontrolled government, the rational people may have a chance for productive change by supporting the work of a bi-partisan, or non-partisan, lobbying group known as Building a Better Colorado. As the group prepares to float as many as three or four ballot initiatives this election year, the fix of TABOR is the most important one. Here's hoping the group - backed by many prominent Coloradan leaders can actually overhaul TABOR and truly Build a Better Colorado.

The one idea the group did not entertain from the start is the complete repeal of TABOR, in particular the constitutional requirement that voters approve all tax hikes. However, the project's leader said he was surprised at the level of support for removing the revenue caps, which restrict state budget spending and provide taxpayer refunds in boom years. "There's an increasing percentage of the electorate (for which) TABOR is not as sacrosanct as it was to some," Brown said. Brown said the idea has more support among likely voters when coupled with "a prescription on how it would be spent." The state's current budget situation, in which it is issuing taxpayer refunds but facing spending cuts, is a motivating factor, he said. Chris Watney, the president at the nonprofit Colorado Children's Campaign, applauded the move. "Having more ability to invest and more flexibility in how we do so, I do think would have a positive impact on things like education and health care," she said.

The Infinite Winter is Coming

Yep, it's here. My copy of David Foster Wallace's magnum opus, Infinte Jest arrived today. I will be reading the 3 pound, 1079-page, extensively-footnoted novel as part of an online Book Club called The Infinite Winter, which is being organized in honor of the twentieth anniversary of Infinite Jest's publication in 1996. The online book club community reading of the IJ will begin on January 31, and it will run through May with a weekly reading schedule of roughly 75 pages.

For those of you who know little to nothing about Wallace or IJ, let's just say this is one of the more challenging works of post-modern fiction you're going to run across. And, though I have an MA in English - and twenty-three years of teaching experience - I am fairly certain I would not be able to fully understand and appreciate this literary masterpiece without the  help of a reading community.

Like many, I've had IJ on my to-do-list for a while now, and the Infinte Winter is the perfect opportunity to jump in.  Infinite Jest evokes the same excited, but daunting, feeling I had before reading Pynchon's V. in graduate school.  While I knew I would appreciate the novel regardless of how I read it, I greatly benefited from the community of readers sharing thoughts, ideas, questions, and, of course, explanations of allusions that I might have missed. So far, I think I've encouraged a few others to at least buy the book and consider the challenge.

Can't wait to get started.