Out of service

You know those people where you say, "I can read him or her like a book?" I don't think I'm that person. My family still can't always tell if I'm serious and joking. I have what seems to be a cynical sense of humor. I don't really think so; I think my humor is more absurdist. On the other hand, I don't even really know what that means, so let's move on. What it comes down to is that it takes a while for some people to get that I'm actually pretty positive and optimistic. Students actually get a more upbeat picture of me than most because I enjoy that part of my day so much.

This is a long way of getting to a pretty surprising conclusion. There was a lot of value to the in-service today and I enjoyed quite a bit of it. Remember that I despise doing this kind of thing. I don't like working in groups. I always feel like I know better than everyone else (because I do know better) and there's always someone who's annoying. And all of that was certainly true, but for at least an hour, I got to discuss some pretty interesting topics with some smart insightful, (and yes, perhaps loud and annoying) people.

The task was to look at a year-old survey of parent attitudes towards the school compared to other somewhat similar schools. At the heart of the discussion was an age-old marketing problem. You have a product and a market that seem to be mismatched in some fashion and you ask yourselves a couple of questions. Is it a problem with the product? Or, is there something the market doesn't understand about the product that can be mitigated by a good communications effort?

The kinds of answers depend on the product, of course. My first advertising job was on a product called Coast soap, made by Procter and Gamble, the largest soap manufacturer in the world. They make many kinds of soap- Ivory is the biggest seller- and as a result each brand they sell has to have it's own specific niche in the market. Otherwise you're competing against yourself. Coast's "Positioning," as we advertising dudes call it, was The Refreshment Soap. It was a pretty blue and white color, meant to evoke surf, I think, and had a strong but pleasant, upbeat kind of scent and made lots of lather when you used it in the shower. The tagline was "The Eye-Opener" and we made funny commercials about draggy people suddenly being perky after showering with the soap.

Coast was very successful for a while, but by the time I was working there it had entered a slow decline in sales and everyone was scurrying around trying to turn it around. The reason for the decline seemed obvious enough. People get tired of the smell or it loses its novelty and you don't really smell it any more (the dreaded olfactory wearout), plus it made all that lather because it dissolved quickly and therefore got used up quickly, making it expensive to use over time.

The lathering/dissolving thing was fundamental to the product and there was nothing to be done about it. So clearly, the way to go was to change the scent (or offer a second scent). And here the company put itself in a box. The Chief Marketing Poobah (I think that was his title, maybe it was VP or something boring though) stated from on high that if Coast as it currently existed was The Refreshment Soap, how could something else also be The Refreshment Soap? Logically, that couldn't be true because, as we all know, if you call something "the" it implies that it's the only one.

Everybody looked at the CMP and nodded and agreed and we moved on to advertising slogans and packaging and such. Coast's sales continued to decline, the ad agency where I worked was fired and P&G eventually sold the brand to rival Dial. But how stupid was that? There's only one kind of refreshment? Rather then violate the brand positioning you'll blow up the entire thing?

To make a long story maybe not so long, soap is a simple and people choose their soap for simple reasons. A product change was needed. A school is a very complicated product and it's possible for there to be both product and communications changes needed. So that was what we spent the morning discussing. The funny thing is, the problem for Coast was that the positioning was too inflexible. For the school (and though this is only my opinion, I know I'm right), the problem is that there is no positioning. Maybe there once was but it didn't survive the move and name change. Fixing this requires some deep thought and tough decisions about what exactly our product is and does. That was the part of marketing that I really liked, but nobody asked me (which is too bad because, as I said, I really do know better).

The Fundamental Theorem of Meetings

Wisdom + Wisdom = More Wisdom

Remember the difference between theorems and postulates? Postulates you don't have to prove and theorems you do. But sometimes people who run meetings forget that there's no assurance that bringing a bunch of smart people together is going to garner anything more than chaos. The Wisdom of Crowds can be useful when the goal is to develop standards, but is a path to mediocrity in other cases.

The Fundamental Postulate of Meetings is the same as for any other activity. Without clear objectives and leadership, meetings are a waste of time. 

That's one of the values of sports in education. In sports, the objectives are clear and leaderless teams usually lose. In other activities, the outcomes are less clear unless the leader has set and communicated what the goals are. So it's much easier to fool yourself into thinking that you're getting somewhere when you're actually sitting still.

Speaking of paying attention

Our head of school reads a lot of reports online on the state of education and forwards things to teachers on a daily basis, often more than once. Today we got something titled "Does Technology Distract Students and Harm Learning?" Results of a non-scientific test by some middle school teacher say "yes."

Well, duh. The report should be titled "Do Distractions Distract Students..?" Well of course they do. The problem isn't the technology, it's the context. What kind of learning are you talking about? The kind that's best done free of distraction? Anything that requires single-minded concentration will clearly be adversely affected by interfering stimuli, but is technological distraction any more harmful to learning than having the room too warm or somebody blowing leaves outside the window? Or maybe I could bring some cute puppies into class during a Calculus test and see how well people do.

I'm just poking holes here (and poking them in nothing really, because I didn't actually read the article, just the title and subhead). Before you can answer a huge, broad question like that, you need to ask an even broader one- what's the objective of school? Or if even that's too specific, what's the objective of learning? This is one of those questions that's more important to ask than to answer, but here's a thought or two.

I sometimes wonder what the people who set educational objectives are thinking about. For me, school isn't really about the specific things you're learning. I mean, only a tiny percentage of people who take biology are ever going to be biologists or even biologers (?). The point of the class is understanding the scientific method and how the natural world works. The point of reading Hamlet isn't to be Shakespearean. It's to learn to appreciate the power and richness of the written word and how it can be used to illuminate humanity.

So let's just say that the goal of school is to prepare people to live rich lives when they are no longer in school. If that's the case, I'm here to tell you that single-minded concentration is only one of the skills one needs to live a rich life. In fact, given life's chaotic nature, being able to concentrate when faced with multiple distractions is as important a skill as one could possibly acquire. I'm not a fan of multitasking, but I understand the benefit of being able to balance competing demands for your time and attention. Prioritizing and managing your personal resources, whatever they may be, are key both to making a positive impact on the world and to enjoying yourself.

Miscellaneous

I was going to call this "Random Notes" because that's what people say, but there's absolutely nothing random about it. Not that there's ever really anything random about what people usually call random; the word is almost always misused. Being a non-sequitur in no way makes a statement random.

We have new neighbors across the street. On recycling day today, they left on the curbside 2 open boxes filled with old bills and bank statements. Hello? What year is this? Ever hear of identity theft? This is why I seldom worry about having that kind of thing happen to me. If I act with reasonable precaution and common sense, that's bound to put me in the upper 10% of guardedness because so many people just don't think. And in the meantime, too bad I wasted the mental effort remembering their names because now I can have not only those but their financial wherewithal and purchasing habits as well.

Here's the kind of conversation you can only have if you've been married a really long time:

Me: "I'm still not feeling well. I'm not going to work tomorrow."

Spouse: "Any chance of your getting a haircut soon?"

Apres-mortem

I'm not really big on this kind of thing, but considering the kind of baseball season it's been, I thought I'd toss my impressions into the cap.

My perspective is unusual, I think. I've been to 9 World Series. I may be the only person who was at the Mets improbable win in 1969, the Reggie Jackson game in 1977, the Phillies win in 2008 and Roy's no-no this year.  So I'm at a point where I don't live or die for winning the Series. So here are my impressions of the 2010 Phillies, trying to skip what everyone else is saying (e.g., they underachieved, etc.).

One thing you couldn't possibly get on the full effect of on TV but was amazing at the ballpark was the contrast between 46000 people screaming as Wilson readied to throw the last pitch and the dead silence after strike 3 was called. I've never heard anything like it.

Let's dispense with the Cliff Lee thing. Sure, he's great, I loved him last year and would have loved to keep him. But not having him didn't cost the Phillies anything, given that they got Oswalt instead. In fact, while Oswalt was helping to carry them back into first place, Lee was ineffective and injured. He only got his act together at the very end of the season. Even in the playoffs, it's unlikely he would have helped. Oswalt wasn't good against the Reds, but in the SF series he was their best pitcher.

It's easy to focus our attention on the ultimate failure, but there were many successes along the way.  Just in the last month I've been at the park and seen them win a game on a walkoff homerun after being down 5 through 7 innings, sweep Atlanta to get a stranglehold on the division (which meant going to games 5 straight days, something I'd never done before), Halladay's no-hitter (my only one after attending around 1000 games) and the comeback win the next night versus the Reds, and Oswalt's gem in NLCS game 2. So it's not like it's been bad or anything. Just disappointing because they had good chances to win NLCS games 1, 4 and 6 and didn't take advantage.

Now we get to watch the Jason Werth saga play out. Management doesn't have a perfect track record, but they've earned my trust with their body of work. These have been some of the best years in Phillies history and I feel privileged to have gotten to see so much great baseball in such a terrific ballpark.

What it adds up to for me is how rich baseball is. Nobody would ever say that Texas and San Francisco were the two best teams in baseball but here they are in the World Series. The best team doesn't always win, but the team that plays the best does. And that's okay with me.

On the importance of listening, continued.

"Pay attention" is a schoolhouse mantra, repeated at every level of school in every class (or at least in every class I was ever in, hmmm). But what does that even mean? Literally, I guess it means to be attentive to what is going on in the class, meaning that your mind is focused on the class rather than your bodily functions (tired, hungry, and in the case of high school boys, well, you know). OK, so how do you do that? It seems to entail an ability to block out most of  the flood of information your nervous system is receiving at any given moment. I supposedly learned how to do it in what I would imagine is a fairly common way, I was reprimanded for not paying attention until my behavior fit a pattern that the teacher found acceptable. So I learned very well what paying attention isn't and how to avoid those behaviors. And that was good enough.

It was good enough at that time anyway. It's hard to imagine it now, but the world was much less distracting 40+ years ago than it is presently. Actually, it's probably impossible for today's generation of teenagers and young adults to conceive of what the world was like, unless they read some contemporary fiction from the middle third of the 20th century, before the technological revolution that fuels today's distractions. Take a look at what the people in those books are doing with their time. Notice anybody doing more than one thing at a time? The vast majority of activity was hanging out/talking/playing with family and friends, reading, occasionally listening to the radio or watching TV or talking on the telephone (teenagers were notorious for hogging the family's one telephone), maybe traveling, and solving mysteries.

Paying attention is, I think, focusing all of your thoughts and senses on one thing. Ponder that for a moment and think about how difficult it is. It's hard enough to do, even in a classroom, an environment designed with the goal of helping people pay attention. How about in the street, in your car, in your house? How often do you have total focus on just one thing?

The buzz today is multitasking. The busy folk among us have lives defined by multitasking. Here's the problem, though. Multitasking is bad for you. And we're bad at it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. Kids today are so much better at multitasking. Balderdash, I say. Maybe they're better, but they're still lousy at it. The human brain wasn't designed to do it and it doesn't do it well. If you've tried to pat your head and rub your belly at the same time, you know it's not easy to get your brain to control 2 things at once. So what makes you think you can study for that test while you're watching TV? You can't. I'm sorry, even if you think you can, you can't. Any time you are multitasking you are not really paying attention to anything you are doing.

The seminal invention in the history of multitasking is the portable stereo. The first one, a Walkman cassette player, was introduced in the 70's. When I got one, for years I thought, "Wow, it's like I can give my life a soundtrack." Portable stereos (I guess now you might as well say iPods) allow you to do almost anything while listening to music. While that may seem great, it enriches the experience of neither the music listening or anything else you're doing. Why do you need to need to listen to music while you're running, for example? If running is so unpleasant, then why are you doing it? And if you respond, “Because it's boring,” what do you think I'll respond? I’ll say, only if you aren’t paying attention.

Honestly, I can’t understand how anyone can find running boring. There’s a flood of stimuli when you’re running, both from your body and the surroundings, (and I’m talking about actual running, not running on a treadmill, which is only pretend running and you can do whatever you want when you’re playing pretend). So listening to music while running means partially substituting an imposed set of stimuli for what’s really there, which keeps you from being fully engaged in either the music or the running.

I’ve you’ve been running while listening intensely to music, how would you even answer the question, what were you just doing, running or listening to music? You can’t possibly get the full experience of both, which is the same as not getting the full experience of either. Is that okay? I guess, because running isn’t that important. But it's not just running, it's everything. The problem is that if you train yourself to not be fully engaged in one thing, it can start to leak into parts of your life where it doesn’t belong and can be truly damaging, like dealing with other people.

And since the single most important skill in dealing with other people is listening, and since listening requires paying attention, that brings us back to the original topic, the importance of listening. To be continued.

Baseball biz

As I was saying to a friend the other day, I can just see the TV network executives salivating over the prospect of a Rangers-Giants World Series. I happen to think that would be highly entertaining, but that's just me. Actually, aside from people who live in Texas and San Francisco, it probably is just me.

Something's fishy

I just made some tuna salad for lunch. I happened to glance at the can and it said, "Best if used by May 22, 2013." And I'm thinking, if I find myself eating something in 2013 that I bought last week, I will not be a happy camper.

Enlighten this

If you read self-help books (which I don't, and if you need someone else's book in order to self-help, isn't that kind of cheating?) there's often something about trying to be in the moment, which is another way of stating the old mystical concept of enlightenment. Enlightenment sounds mystical and tough to achieve, and I suppose it can be if you set the bar too high (but if you tend to set the bar too high for yourself, that's probably why you need a self-help book in the first place). Achieving enlightenment is like a lot of things, if you try to take it all on at once, it's daunting. Take on a piece at a time, however, and it can be manageable.

One aspect of being in the moment is what they call mindful awareness. That also sounds kind of spooky, but all it really means is paying attention, to what you see, to what you hear, and what you feel. These are all essential skills for living a full life, and each deserves its own consideration, which consideration I will give them over the next few days or weeks. What I want to start on is listening.

How many times have you talked to someone and feel like they're not listening? Happens way too often, doesn't it? People often confuse hearing with listening, especially since nobody ever adequately explains the difference. There is probably no more important aspect to human relationships than listening. Listening is one person's way of connecting to another in the deepest possible way, by trying to truly understand what somebody is thinking and feeling when they say something.

Listening is simply hearing plus paying attention. But just because it's simple doesn't mean it's easy. Really listening to someone else talking to you is actually quite difficult, because it requires your processing what that person has to say without injecting your own opinions, prejudices, or extraneous thoughts. Think about conversations you've had with people recently. Were you really listening to them? Were you totally focused on what the other peson was saying and therefore understanding both why they were saying what they did and what they meant? Or were you hearing words and getting their basic meaning while you thought about what you wanted to say or do next? One of the first things I had to learn as a teacher was how to momentarily ditch my lesson plan, to forget about what I wanted to say and really listen to students' questions. In personal conversations it's much harder and even more important.

I have more to say on this, but I think I want to backtrack a bit and expand on what it means to pay attention first, so to be continued.

Factoring Drowsiness

I noticed that I've been doing a lot of ranting lately so I'm going to stop, or pause at least. I don't want to give the impression that I'm on the warpath all the time or even at the moment. I'm in a perfectly good mood. I'm just reacting to what pops up in front of me at any given moment.

What's popped up today is a feeling of tiredness that doesn't usually come this early in the week. It may have something to do with getting an unpleasant phone call at 1:30 in the morning. Shout out to Davida here, but she wasn't the one who called me.

So after the phone call (which ended up being nothing awful) I got back in bed but was too wound up to lie there, much less fall asleep. So I went downstairs and turned on the TV. For some reason, it was on a public TV station with a guy named Rick Steves doing a travel show about someplace, maybe Vienna, that looked both stuffy and boring. Perfect!

Of course, like anything else, there's a proper way to lull yourself to the proper state of sleepiness. The skill is in balancing the drowsiness factor. You want to be drowsy enough that you can get right to sleep once you get in bed but not drowsy enough that you fall asleep on the momentarily comfortable but ultimately back-spasming couch. I have to admit I failed, though not entirely. A total fail would have had me still asleep on the couch when my daughter came down to eat breakfast. I woke up at 3, stumbled into bed and fell right to sleep.

It's almost back-to-school morning

Got back from that annual fall festival, back to school night. My 3rd this year, two at my school and one at my kid's school. A least one kid is in college now. Last year I had 5 of them.

I'm never quite sure what to do at these things. Am I supposed to give a detailed description of the curriculum? Do I give the parents math problems to work on, (at my older daughter's school, the choir teachers used to make us sing, so why not)? Do I talk about our math department philosophies?

I probably should do all or most of these things, but of course what I usually do is just ramble on for 10 minutes, just like I do in class. I don't really think this is a total waste of time. As a parent, I want to know (1) what kind of person is teaching my kid? and (2) does this person understand my kid? I think parents leave with a decent idea of what class is like, and I try to sprinkle in enough observations of the students that they are comfortable that I'm at least making an effort to get to know them. In reality, my whole approach is based on getting to know the students as well as I can, as math students anyway. I can be much more effective answering questions if I know what's behind them, and that's where the skill is. Anyone can outline a chapter and write it on the board.

Tonight, the one thing I realize I forgot to say is what an abomination the whole AP thing has turned into. Not the class or the curriculum. That's fine. I just think the original intent of the AP has been perverted. When I was in high school, the only people who took AP were people who had specific reason for wanting to enter college advanced in a particular subject. The vast majority of the advanced students took honors classes. Today, AP classes have become the new honors- they're transcript trophies. Again, the curricula are generally pretty good, but the time pressure caused by having to teach to the test isn't good for anyone's psyche. And I don't think it does anything to foster a love of learning. It is certainly good for the College Board's bottom line, though, so they have no reason to discourage it.

I'm just sympathetic to the kids. The college entrance process in this day and age is brutal and I hate to watch it, especially since I think that college choice is not nearly as important as it's cracked up to be. More on that later.

My baseball post for the day

You have to win the games that are winnable. Just looking at the Reds-Phillies series, for example, there was probably no way the Reds were going to win game 1. Halladay was too good. And sometimes a team is on fire at bat and you get down 12-0. You might occasionally win those games, but not on any kind of regular basis.

The kind of game I'm talking about is game 2 in the Reds-Phils series. That game was there for the taking, 4-3 after 6 innings. At that point either team could win it. Only one team did. My general observation is that when you have 2 fairly evenly matched teams, there will be blowouts in both directions in similar numbers. There will also be a few games that are closely contested and it's the team that wins those that is usually victorious.

The closest analog I can think of is in basketball or hockey or soccer, whichever team comes up with the majority of the loose balls (or 50-50 balls) almost always wins the game. Win the little contests to win the big one.

Thinking pink

I think the Susan G. Komen Foundation has done a magnificent job raising awareness of breast cancer as an important societal challenge, and as much as I enjoy being contrary, that's not really my point here. My main objection to all of the Breast Cancer Awareness stuff is the they've done such a good job that I don't think that awareness is the most pressing issue. Much more important are improving early detection and treatment options, as well as lowering the potentially devastating costs to the families of cancer patients of all kinds. I know that all that kind of stuff is part of the mission too, but I hate to see resources that could actually help people being diverted into making pink cookie packages.

Slightly awkward thought

My car is really dirty and gross looking and could really use a wash, but when I went by the gas station where there was a cheerleader carwash, the station was full of middle aged men standing around watching girls wash their cars and it made me feel skeevy. So my car is still dirty.

On the other hand, when I was in Sacramento and driving up to the mountains for a little mini-reunion, there were a bunch of high school soccer boys at an intersection looking for donations. When we stopped, this kind of cute, skinny 16 year-old boy in a t-shirt and shorts and a big smile sized up our car and walked over to where my (52 year-old) cousin was sitting and started blatantly flirting with her to get a donation. We gave him a buck and managed to restrain our laughter until we'd driven on.

Annual advisories

I just wanted to reiterate my sage advice of years past. During October:

1.  Be on high alert to avoid eating or drinking anything pumpkin flavored.

2. At this time of year, the word is not "spectacular," it's spooktacular.

It's not the umpires, it's us. (Not just about baseball)

Much of the attention in postseason baseball to date has been on the umpires- they blew this call or that, they should have instant replay for more things. To me, this sounds like "Waah, it's not fair!" Something a nine year-old would say. And baseball should know better. Baseball is a game of failure. The best hitters fail nearly 70% of the time. Even when you hit the ball, more often than not you will not get on base and on any given play the probability of your scoring a run, which as far as I know is the object of the game, is tiny.

People don't like to fail, and when they do fail, for many people the first instinct is to blame someone else for your failure. In many aspects of life, you can blame others and get away with it, because often nobody knows the truth except you. One of the nice things about sports is their relative transparency. You can see with your own two eyes who tripped, dropped the ball, struck out, or walked in a run. This is true for baseball in particular, because even though it's a team game it's mostly a game of individual confrontations. Pitcher versus batter, runner versus fielder. Baseball has a very good system of allocating success, failure, and ultimate responsibility; there are very few opportunities to blame others.

There have been missed calls by officials in sports since there have been sports. They are part of sports' fabric. I don't really think anyone is saying that umpiring is worse now than it used to be. What's changed is our ability to evaluate how well the umpires are doing their jobs. Baseball was around for close to 100 years before instant replay was invented in 1963. And part of the sport's (or world's, for that matter) history is about arguments. Given the lessons of we can learn from the history of the world, one might rationally expect that if instant replay arguments were eliminated that we'd find something else to argue about.

Again, the point is here isn't that it's okay to make mistakes. The point is that no matter what you do, people are always going to want to blame others for their own shortcomings and whine about it, even if there somehow invented a perfect officiating system. Although I'm pretty sure "It's not fair!" is the rallying cry more of the baby boomers and their progeny than it was of prior generations, I'm just as sure that blaming others for one's own mistakes is either innate or intrinsic in the core value systems people live by. And the population at this point in history, where most popular communications technologies are in their relative infancy and society as a whole feels like it's in flux, the time is ripe for complaining about other people's mistakes.

So over the winter they'll decide whether to offer instant replay for a few other kinds of calls (and let's see them try to make a machine that can tell you if Chase Utley actually got hit by a pitch tonight). But I'm betting that whatever they decide will not significantly change the amount of arguing or whining. It just comes too naturally to us.

Still at a loss for words

I've been to something near 1000 baseball games, including at least 50 postseason games, maybe more. And I've seen some truly incredible, historic (for baseball anyway) things. But I never saw a no-hitter before, and by a guy who came to Philadelphia specifically because he had never pitched in postseason before and really really wanted to, And he does it in his first postseason start? It really doesn't get better than that.

Hotel Amenities

Just took a shower and used the "Soothing Massage Bar." Was disappointed that the bar did not massage me. I had to massage myself, and though I could use that bar to do that it was really just soap and it wasn't a massage I was just washing. I remember back when I was in advertising working on a kind of soap called Coast, that we were never allowed to say that our soap was "refreshing." Somebody who decides these kinds of things (and I do not know who that is) decided that it is the shower that's refreshing, not the soap. So we always had to say things like "a refreshing Coast shower." What do you expect from an industry where "Better" is better than "Best?"

I guess those rules don't apply to hotel amenities.

The California

California is just different. I'm a born and bred east-coaster, but I've lived out here twice for a total of about 2 years, and have visited another 20 or 30 times and have driven from border to border, west to east, and north to south and back again. There's a reason California holds such an iconic place in our national consciousness. California is unusual in almost any way you can imagine.

You can't talk about California without talking about cars and driving. Have you ever been to a really formal party where you know that if you make the slightest mistake of etiquette you will be scolded? That's what driving in California is like. As a result of having too many huge roads (3 left turn lanes? Really? And how about a 4-way stop with 2-lane roads- that's 8 cars stopped at the same time) and too many cars, California has developed rules of road conduct that are strict and unforgiving. Break the rules and you will be honked, yelled at, and/or ticketed.

The first thing you notice on the freeway is that almost nobody speeds. I just drove round trip to New York and did not spend a moment on the Jersey Turnpike under 80 miles per hour and passed maybe 3 people. Same speed limit here, but everyone, in all 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7 lanes is going between 65 and 68. Even at 10 at night.

Also, if you're in one of those 3 left turn lanes, you'd better stay in lane when you make the turn, so you have to anticipate where being in the middle left turn lane will leave you, unable to turn left or right for a distance.

Driving aside, another thing that's very different about California is how Western the landscape is. For those who have never been West of the Mississippi, you know that in the East, everywhere you go there's something- town, city, park, forest, shopping center, houses, developments, whatever. In the West, there are vast area of nothing. I mean, I'm sure it's habitat for something, but it's mostly just open space with a bunch of scrubby stuff (or not) scattered around. The suburbs here look like regular suburbs, but get even a bit outside the metro area and there's lots and lots of nothing. It takes getting used to. On my first cross country trip, I was driving one morning on an interstate in Wyoming and I didn't see another car, person, tree, or building for a half hour. It terrified me and I had to wake my friend up to keep me company.

Gotta go now. More to fill in later.

The obligatory social networking post

Obviously, anyone reading this is going to be well aware of the incident at Rutgers. If one were a conspiracy theorist, one might imagine that the whole affair was a hoax to generate interest in The Social Network movie. I haven't seen the movie yet, though I'm sure I will, nor have I read more details about the story than is absolutely necessary to carry on a casual conversation about a big news story. I know some students at Rutgers and care about their well-being, but beyond that I didn't have much interest in the day-to-day activities of the student body and I still don't unless they point to something important about the population at large.

The first thing that you need to understand is that this case isn't about social networking. It's about casual cruelty, or bullying, which appears to be to be epidemic in certain groups. Forgetting about all of the details, let's boil this down to its core. Let me preface this by saying I know nothing about these people, the details of the incidents, or any of the relevant research. Everything I say here is a guess and it's up to you to decide if it makes sense. 

This was a case of a guy who didn't like his roommate telling secrets about him to his peer group behind his back. Did he expect or want the guy to commit suicide? I highly doubt it. He may have just wanted a new roommate, for whatever reason. He didn't really know his roommate, but he knew that he had secrets. Everyone has secrets they don't want told. Everyone does stuff they wouldn't want being broadcast to anyone who cared to look. And these represent a person's weak spots. Everyone has weak spots. Bullying is the act of taking advantage of the weakness of others for your own gain, psychically (feel better about yourself), socially (higher status), or materially (stealing an ice cream cone from the scrawny little kid).

Bullying is bullying, and there's absolutely nothing new about it. What's new is that there are new tools available to potential bullies, and the existence of those tools vastly expands the pool of potential bullies, in this case from the bigger and stronger to the more technologically savvy, as well as the potential venues for bullying, from one-on-one to public humiliation. As teachers, we've all been hearing about cyberbullying for a few years now- someone steals someone's password and sends embarrassing e-mails, vandalizes a Facebook page, or whatever. The people who do these kinds of things do them for the same reason the mean big kids beat up little kids. It makes them feel better about themselves somehow. 

Every day in school I see incidents of casual cruelty. People insult other people and then say "JK." But they don't say JK to make the other person feel better. They say JK to avoid being thought of as a jerk. It is impossible to anticipate how another person will react to something you do or say; it's even hard to anticipate how you would react if someone else said the same thing to you. There are too many variables- for example, it makes a big difference what the relative social status of the person doing the insulting is. Though that kind of thing isn't allowed in my classroom, I'm not naive enough to think it doesn't happen all the time. My observation is that people feel more free to insult people than before, and that one of the things that encourages it is the relative (or total) anonymity that the Internet provides.

So you have a larger pool of potential bullies with better tools at their disposal, and a culture that accepts a questionable standard of how it's okay to treat other people. I personally don't think it's ever okay to insult someone. You might call someone out and say they're acting like a jerk, but you shouldn't ever say that person is a jerk. Simple as that. It's been in the rules since the Ten Commandments. Don't treat others the way you wouldn't want to be treated yourself. Simple to understand. Maybe not so easy to do.

This is at its heart no different. A young man (allegedly, of course) used his technology skills to reveal secrets about his roommate. Was this cruel? Of course. Was it clearly dangerous? Not so sure. More dangerous than a big kid beating up a smaller, weaker kid? Not sure. This guy was a bully, pure and simple. The problem isn't in the technology itself. The problem is a culture that permits far more casual cruelty than it ought to at a time when there are more tools to facilitate cruelty, and this is only the most extreme case of things that happen every day.