Writer-Mom "Experiments" with LSD

Well, this is certainly one of the weirder stories I've heard in a while. Even stanger, it's not just a story. Author Michael's Chabon's wife, Ayelet Waldman, has published a new memoir called A Really Good Day: How Microdosing made a Megadifference in my Mood, Marriage, and Life. Microdosing? That's a word? And a thing?

Ayelet Waldman would like you to know that she’s just a regular mom. Like you, she lives in her yoga pants, Instagrams her indulgent desserts, bickers with her husband and (four!) children: “I’m the woman standing behind you in Starbucks ordering the skinny vanilla latte, the one getting a mammogram in the room next to yours, the one digging through her too-full purse looking for her keys while you wait impatiently for her parking spot,” she writes in “A Really Good Day.”  But Waldman the everywoman is also Waldman the outlaw. She has not only taken LSD but has also written a book about it. “A Really Good Day” is a chronicle of her one-month search for emotional balance by taking small doses of a drug most people associate with Timothy Leary or CIA experiments [or hippies at a Dead concert or millenials dancing at raves of a Phish concert].

I'm not quite sure how to feel about this idea and story other than to say it makes me ... uneasy.

GOP's "State Lines" Claim on Insurance Prices is Flawed

As the country braces for controversial changes to a controversial health care law, many American families are deeply concerned about the GOP making things worse and losing gains that have been made. Obviously, lowering health care costs is the primary and very necessary goal, and the "Affordable Care Act" has for the most part failed to accomplish that goal. And, there is simply no legitimate reason that health care and health insurance has to be so expensive - especially in a time of somewhat ridiculous revenue and profits for the health care industry. That said, the standard GOP call for "market reforms" and "consumer freedom" seem like rather naive and ambiguous plans and policies to alleviate the problems. I'm not going to disagree that "fixing health care requires the repeal of Obamacare," as argued by three Colorado congressmen.

And speaking of replacement plans, the narrative that Republicans have offered no plan to replace Obamacare is false. Republicans have introduced multiple alternative health care plans since 2010, and we encourage you to review them. The most recent replacement plan was offered by the Republican Study Committee, called the American Health Care Reform Act. The Empowering Patients First Act was a plan put forth in the 114th Congress by future Health and Human Services Secretary, Dr. Tom Price. Our Better Way Agenda also includes a blueprint for replacing Obamacare that is centered on more choices, lowers costs, and greater flexibility.

However, many of the claims and counterarguments and proposals by the GOP are simply ideological positions that have no proven benefit, and potentially troublesome effects. The biggest myth of GOP health care reform is the argument that allowing the purchase of policies across state lines will lower health care costs. Insurance prices are market-based, and companies will simply not sell a low-cost market policy to a higher cost market consumer. That's such basic business and economic knowledge that I wonder how GOP politicians and policy writers can continue to claim otherwise with a straight face. They are either ideologically naive, or they are simply lying. The question voters have failed to ask is why. As Bruce Japsen explains for Forbes magazine, "Selling Insurance Across State Lines Won't Lower Costs."

“Currently individual states can decide whether or not to allow insurers to sell plans from another state in their state,” the Center for Health & Economy wrote about Trump’s health plan earlier this year. “However, even where this is allowed, various barriers such as the difficulty of building a network and attracting enough customers to create a large enough risk pool make it unappealing to insurers to pursue this option.”

Is the 401K Retirement a Lie?

I've been thinking about retirement lately as I approach the mid-century mark, and like too many members of Generation X who were hit hard by several downturns and recessions, I don't have a grand plan for reitirement income. As an educator who pays into a state pension, I will never draw from Social Security, and I have to hope that legislators in Colorado and Illinois do not gut the defined benefit plans I have paid into. The story of the "vanishing pension" plans has been the story of a generation that may not have the comfortable golden years that the Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers have enjoyed. A solution to the problem of weak or disappearing pensions and the unstable future of Social Security was the rise of the brilliant 401k plan that promised to allow people to control more of their own money and grow their own nest eggs. Sadly, it may all be based on false promises and naive ideological thinking. That's the warning from Bloomberg's Meghan McCardle who writes this week about "The 401K Problem We Refuse to Solve."

Was the 401(k) a tragic mistake? “The great lie is that the 401(k) was capable of replacing the old system of pensions,” former American Society of Pension Actuaries head Gerald Facciani told the Journal. “It was oversold." This is true. On the other hand, so was Social Security oversold. As was that good ol' defined benefit pension, so beloved of editorial writers, which was available to only a minority of workers when the 401(k) sprang into being. Nor were those pensions necessarily the generous perpetual incomes of popular imagining; autoworkers and public-sector employees got a great deal, but most people were not working for either the government or General Motors. They got smaller pensions -- sometimes much smaller, if their companies failed and dumped the pensions onto the government’s pension insurer.

Yes, We Can.

Maggie Smith's Poem & the Loss of Innocence

It's not so often that poetry and poets make national news or even create a buzz among the non-literary population across the forums of social media. But 2016 was the type of year that could stir many in middle America to read, respond to, and promote a poem that captured a moment and articulated the emotions and confusion that are too often impossible to describe. National tragedies and tragedies of the human spirit are becoming all too common, and events like the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando scream for someone to explain and clarify and offer an avenue for healing. And so it was that poet Maggie Smith "sat in a Starbucks and wrote a poem" that begins with the resigned melancholic observation "Life is short, though I keep this from my children." It became, in the words of Washington Post writer Nora Krug, "A Poem that Captured the Mood of 2016."

The poem is a heartfelt work that grapples with pain and injustice, with unfairness and disillusionment. “The world is at least/ fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative/ estimate,” it says. “For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird./ For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,/ sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world/ is at least half terrible, and for every kind/ stranger, there is one who would break you.”Its subject is whether, when and how to talk to children about these hard realities. “I was troubled by the question of how we teach our kids about the world without lying to them — telling them that it’s all good — and telling them the truth without scaring them.” In the poem, the speaker takes on the role of a real estate agent: “I am trying/ to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,/ walking you through a real s***hole, chirps on/ about good bones: This place could be beautiful,/ right? You could make this place beautiful.”

Poetry is a bit of a conundrum for many, but often it rings true and clarifies, and that's the case with the full poem "Good Bones," which grapples with the delicate question of how we protect our children from the harsh realities of the world without hiding it to their detriment. It's a parenting question I first addressed here, and which many a critic has struggled to clarify. Neil Postman warned us that the increasingly technological and interconnected world we seek and have casually cultivated will ultimately lead to The Disappearance of Childhood, a societal invention that should be more cherished.

Minimalism: a Documentary

Tiny houses and tidying up - these two phenomena of sorts seem to be an apt reflection for a time and place where people are feeling underwhelmed and overwhelmed by the very same lives. In perhaps the most materialist and consumer-oriented time in history, there remains among many middle class dwellers a feeling of emptiness and a desire to get away from it all. "Simplify, simplify, simplify," advised Henry David Thorea way back in the 1830s in rural New England. Can you even imagine what he'd make of 2016.

So, ironically, there are many products and presentations and even apps that are available to help contemporary Americans in their quest to simplify their lives. One addition I recently encountered is a podcast and documentary from a couple of guys who call themselves "The Minimalists." Josh Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus are attempting to help people live more with less. Take a look at their documentary trailer:



So, if you're feeling a like "The World is Too Much with Us," you may want to consider focusing on downsizing your life. And, while you're here, take a look and listen to this beautiful piece by REM that came on while I was posting this blog entry:

The Whimsical Brilliance of the Geography of Genius

It was amusingly in an airport bookstore that I ran across Eric Weiner's engaging book The Geography of Genius. One of the perks of travel - of going new places - is the chance to encounter something unexpected and open up a new pathway to knowledge, insight, even bliss. Weiner's book is about his "search for the world's most creative places, from ancient Athens to Silicon Valley," and he operates from the idea that there are special qualities or factors that led a surge of creative thinking and genius resulting in a "renaissance." It's a good question - why does a renaissance happen with the seemingly fortuitious congregation of great minds and achievements in small locales at specific places in time?

Eric Weiner has the gift of engaging storytelling as his hook, and he has the sharp mind of an astute researcher who can ask the right questions, engage the right people, and spot or synthesize the right trends. Those are the keys to successful educators - which he clearly is - and "ideas gurus" whose writing has become a sub-genre of the non-fiction world. What I enjoyed most about this book are the names and connections that inspire me to seek more information. While we all know a bit about Socrates and the basics of Greek philosophy (or at least about Athens as the epicenter of philosophy and democracy), Weiner's descriptions of the factors and relationships lead a reader to want to know more - to deepen and synthesize our knowledge and understanding of these great men. The chapter on Edinburgh offers a thoughtful introduction to one of the great Age of Reason writers and thinkers that far too many people don't know about - David Hume. It was the Hume story - and all the little connections my mind made to other ideas I knew or wanted to know - which convinced me this book was a keeper. It would be one to go on the shelf as a resource when I was looking for something or someone new to learn about. And it would hopefully inspire my own creativity and my little personal renaissance from time to time.

The insight of this book is best summed up by Weiner in the words of Socrates - "What is honored in a country will be cultivated there." Throughout Weiner's travels - and that's the best part of the book: he visits the places and gets down and dirty with the locals - Weiner identifies various keys to geographical creative flourishes. By visiting the countries/cities/regions of Athens, Hangzhou, Florence, Edinburgh, Calcutta, Vienna, and Silicon Valley, he is able to identify how the chaotic nature of one place or the collaborative quality of another cultivated genius. These places tend to host little hotbeds of discussion or dissent in cafes, botegas, coffeehouses, symposiums, libraries, addas, and more. The places within the places are often the true secret to a renaissance. And in describing who hangs out in these places mulling their ideas, Weiner's book has the added benefit of introducing readers to even more examples of true genuises than they thought they knew - from Thucydides to Hewlett & Packard.

The final insight is a fun one - he places his quest against the one place we know best - our homes - and he encourages all of us to take the lessons of geographical genius and try to cultivate them in our own geography.

Look to Neil Postman and warnings of "Future Schlock"

When I am wondering what I think about something, I generally know I can look to a few contemporary philosophers and social critics to put events in perspective .... even if their conclusions make me a bit dizzy. So, lately I've been looking back over a collection of essays called Conscientious Objections by humanities professor and writer Neil Postman. The subtitle of the work is "Stirring up Trouble about Language, Technology, and Education." Published in 1988, the collection of essays are eerily prescient about the languishing of culture and education at the expense of a convenience-oriented, entertainment-focused, technology-driven society. Two essays in particular - "Amusing Ourselves to Death" and "Future Schlock" - point to the rising tide of anti-intellectualism and distraction which seems so prevalent in a society that is by all accounts living in what should be the "most informed" time in the history of man. Yet, man's "appetite for distraction" is large, and his inclination for over-simplified thinking is equally vast. Postman contextualizes his concerns with references to the seemingly unlikely rise of fascism prior to World War II, and he frames that historical reality with the lessons of two brilliant pieces of pop culture and social satire: The Gods Must be Crazy and Mel Brooks' The Producers.

Me and Bruce - Born to Run in 2016

Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA changed my life and rocked my world as a fourteen-year-old boy growing up in small town southern, Illinois in the early 80s. It would become an anthem for a generation, and while I was undoubtedly a rock-n-roll fan by then, Bruce's songs and stories opened up a whole new world in terms of understanding angst amidst the American Dream. The raw honesty of the story-telling and the rugged power of a rock guitar made sense to me, and the boxed set of the E Street Band I received for my birthday a year later was an early chapter in my American education. Now, as I sit comfortably in middle age, celebrating a slow march nearing the age of fifty, the Boss has once again graced my coming-of-age with a manifesto of "Growing Up."

So, here I am at the beginning of 2017, reflecting on the past and the dawn of "another year" in front of me. And as I glance back at the past two January 2 posts, I am wondering if this is the year that I just "get on with it" and take a few more steps toward living the life I have imagined. I haven't established the more comprehensive "A Teacher's View" website yet, and I haven't made any progress with the more scholarly writing that I have been planning. And, of course I am certainly not David Brooks or Malcom Gladwell in any professional sense. That said, I did manage to finally complete and publish an up-dated version of my critical work of Douglas Coupland, McJob: Life and Culture in Douglas Coupland's Early Novels, and I think it's even sold a few copies at this point. There will hopefully be some more extensive Generation X writing in the near future, and I hope to increase my academic output with a few more pieces of cultural criticism, and maybe even a conference paper or two.

We'll see. Hoping 2017 and the age of 47 is my "best year yet."

2016 - A Year in Review

"When looking back on the 365 days of 2016 most people will think ... WHAT THE HELL?"

The best and most hilarious part of welcoming a New Year is reading the brilliant Dave Barry's review of the last one.

Dave Barry Year in Review 2016: Trump and the Hideous Monstrosity that was 2016

Some New Year's Thoughts from Great Minds

On New Year's Day 2017, I took a long walk through the neighborhood, and that might be the best way to begin any new beginning - by taking a walk. That bit of insight is not mine, but from America's original original, Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau was a proponent of walking:

No one has made a more compelling case for the bodily and spiritual value of walking — that basic, infinitely rewarding, yet presently endangered human activity — than Henry David Thoreau. In his 1861 treatise Walking, penned seven years after Walden, Thoreau reminds us of how that primal act of mobility connects us with our essential wildness, that spring of spiritual vitality methodically dried up by our sedentary civilization. He makes a special point of differentiating the art of sauntering from the mere act of walking:

This Thoreau-ian insight was collected for us by one of the premier "ideas bloggers" out there, Maria Popova, whose Brainpickings site is one of the best collections of literary and philosophical tidbits found anywhere on the web. Popova is a consumate reader and writer who posts regularly about information that is just too wonderful to keep to herself. For New Year's Day, she collected "fifteen such higher-order resolutions for personal refinement."

Teach Literacy Skills & Content Knowledge

RE-PRINT: Mazenglish, 2012

A somewhat cold and undeclared war seems to be boiling in the English community, specifically, and the education world at large regarding the teaching of literacy.  Basically, the divide is happening between subject knowledge and the practice of basic literacy and the teaching of reading strategies.  While people like Cris Tovani have argued passionately for the teaching of reading strategies all the way through high school, core knowledge people like Dan Willingham have expressed concern that teaching strategies has no impact on actual learning.  The war isn't actually as serious as it has been hyped.  For Tovani's camp is certainly teaching the importance of core knowledge - as one of their foundational strategies is that "effective readers use existing knowledge to make sense of new information."  And from the Willingham/Hirsch side, there is no evidence that they are outright dismissing the teaching of literacy strategies.

Ultimately, the solution is found - not surprisingly - in a balanced approach.

Anthony Palumbo, a literacy professor, examines and explains this idea quite well in a recent piece of commentary published in Education Week.  The key concepts of reading strategies - such as basic phonemic awareness - are the foundation of accessing text.  But they do not automatically lead to comprehension.  A student can pronounce the words in his head, even as he fails to understand what he's seeing.  It's called "fake reading."  And, the data reveals that students' comprehension of complex information is declining, even as schools seem focused on ramping up literacy instruction.  Clearly, the gap is evident at the earliest level, but it becomes a foundational issue by grade four when "schools begin to emphasize the measurement of subject-matter knowledge and de-emphasize the measurement of basic literacy skills."  Schools find this most frustrating in the subject areas outside of English class where the science and social studies text simply baffle many average teenagers.  They shut down and fail to engage with the text.

The problem often can be traced to the overall lack of "knowledge-based literacy," meaning kids simply do not know enough to access texts on information they don't know.  And, worse, they lack the self-awareness and meta-cognitive abilities to even understand when and why they do or do not understand a text.

And, that is the nature of our burden.