A is for Anything

Before I get started with this I just want to ask an important question. If I'm out of deodorant is it okay to just use Febreze?

I've never quite understood why back-to-school night is called what it is. The only people who actually go back to school are the teachers. The students aren't there and the parents weren't there before so how is it back to school? That being said, I enjoy back to school night. Not really the leaving home and going back to work at 6 o'clock at night and getting home at 10 part, but the opportunity to at least briefly meet parents and give them a sense for the experience the students are having.

I've always gotten along well with the parents at the school. I guess it's because I am, or at least was, them. I'm a middle-aged Jewish guy who sent his kids to private school, so at least on some level I understand the mindset. This is important, because understanding who you're talking to is just as important as understanding what it is you're saying. Sometimes more so. And there are definitely times when I understand the mindset of the person that I'm talking to better than my own. I don't know if that's generally true but that's just the way my brain operates sometimes.

I think the biggest problem I have with parents at our school at this point is their insistence that their child get A's. This is very Lake Wobegonish- where all the children are above average.I can't really speak for how other departments great, but in math at least, everybody wants their kids to get A's. Of course, everyone wants A's. A's are nice. They stand for some level of achievement. Or do they? If everybody gets them, they don't stand for anything. Or maybe "anything" is all they stand for.

I can't completely blame the parents for everything. It's really just a matter of understanding motivation. Let's go through this: pretty much any parent wants their children to be successful. There's a variety of reasons why parents feel this way, ranging from the biological to the pathological. Part of it is just nurturing your children, and part of it is perhaps living through them. And everything in between.

Okay, so if you're an American parent with a kid in high school, what does successful mean? Of course it means to get into the best possible college. And what do we hear from all the colleges? That the high school transcript is the most important thing. Not that standardized tests aren't important, and parents certainly do plenty to get their kids prepared for those, but the transcript is the big deal. And what makes a transcript look really pretty? Lots of A's. It's like Ricky Bobby. If you're not first, you're last.

But there's a big difference between striving for an A and insisting on one. And high schools sometimes encourage this, primarily by tracking kids. Our school doesn't do that in all topics, but it does it in some.The more appropriately you're tracked, the better your shot at an A. On top of that, the parents press the kids the teachers and the school administration to get their kids' grades as high as possible. It's fine that they want that, but that doesn't mean we have to do.

The net effect of this has been called grade inflation. There's a problem with that terminology, although it's accurate on a certain level. When you talk about monetary inflation, it means it costs more money to buy the same things. But with money, there's no top end. Okay so it costs $1.00 for something a cost $.95 two years ago but it's still the same thing. And there is no "correct price" for something. It's just a matter of what does it cost to produce and distribute and sell and make profit on. It doesn't really matter in any abstract sense whether something costs a dollar or 95 cents. But grades don't have that option. There's a top; there is no grade above A. So if you're inflating grades, all you're doing is pushing up the bottom.The net effect of this of course, is that the grades become meaningless.

And as a teacher, you can't be the only one standing against grade inflation. That will get you in trouble very quickly. So my challenge as a teacher, since in math at least, the grades are just a straight average of points achieved over possible points, is to make the assessments such that some people can get A's, but not everyone does. Because the purpose of the assessment is to assess, it doesn't make any sense to design a test where everybody gets an A. That doesn't tell me anything.

So that's a lot of rambling about this. I can't fix it. Unless people are willing to give up the crazy supposition that it really makes a big difference where you go to college, this is never going to end. And the fact that it's never going to end is the only reason I can't say it's not going to end well, because it's not going to end it all. I don't know if we'll get to a point where everybody gets A's. And I mean absolutely everybody. And then what should we do? Have AA's? It's too bad we started with the first letter. If the top grade was H, we could have added a G. But unless we reimagine, as they say, the alphabet, we're stuck.

Sign me up for a loan!

Just as a matter of convenience, I do a fair amount of riding on the Cynwyd Heritage Trail. I'm not sure why a former commuter train route now has heritage, but it's not a matter of any urgency to me. I ride it because it's close to my house, a round trip adds 4 miles to any subsequent ride, and the 2 mile steady 2-3% climb is good training. But it isn't exactly fun or visually arresting.

My favorite sight along the trail is a billboard ad for a bank that is meant not for the trail, but for the Expressway down below. It shows someone in a suit getting fired out of a cannon with a headline that reads There must be a better way to get a business loan. Now it's possible that this kind of thing has changed since I was in the business world, but in my time at Wharton and 20 years in business, I don't remember anything about cannons. Do people really do this?

On one hand, I find myself thinking, how did someone (1) come up with this idea and (2) convince someone else that it was a good enough idea to spend money for producing and displaying a billboard? I can sort of see where it would start. The client would say, we want people to know that they won't have to jump through all kinds of hoops to get a business loan from our bank. And the add guy might think, "Hmm, jump through hoops, like a trained animal at a circus. What else happens at a circus?"

So it's not completely off message, if the idea is to say, you don't have to do something borderline insane to get a loan from us. On the other hand, wouldn't it be more fun if you did? I mean, it would bring in a different kind of clientele. But getting shot out of a cannon sounds like way more fun that analyzing financial statements and determining credit-worthiness.

5...4...3...2...1...Puppy!

This post is different that the others because it's being written with a puppy next to me. We got a new puppy on Tuesday. This was all timed perfectly, of course. We had just spent Saturday, Sunday and Monday moving our kids into their college dorms and I started the school year on Tuesday. So sure, add an infant dog into the mix, that won't get in the way of anything.

Timing aside, I'm happy to have a dog again. We'd had one for 15 years that died in December, and it seemed like the right time to get another one, now in our second year as empty nesters. Meanwhile, of course, our kids are wanting to come home a lot to visit her. Not us really, just the dog.

This kind of topped off a headlong rush into the year. The crammed in craziness of it punctuated by an overscheduled in-service that kept us in meetings for three quarters of the first day and more than half of the second day. That prevented us, or me at least, from preparing for the first day of school to the extent I wanted to, and unfortunately, where once I could get a lot done in the mornings, now mornings are puppy PUPPY PUPPY! I think of all the dislocations, that's the hardest for me to deal with. Even when we had little kids, early morning was a quiet time for me. It was alone time. Not any more. I can get some alone time, but only after a couple of hours of puppy morning energy burst.

And then there's back to school. I wouldn't say that the in-service stuff was worthless, but it wasn't of tremendous value to me personally. The first day, we did a very nice, if 50% too long, exercise in listening. This is admirable, and I'm hopeful that it was useful for some people. Less so for me, for two resons. First, I'm always right, so what's the point?

But more seriously, this is a lesson already well-learned for me. I learned how to do active listening almost 20 years ago, and it's fully integrated into every part of my life, especially teaching. My whole classroom style is predicated on my listening to and understanding what the students are saying. But it's what I do all the time now anyway, regardless of the situation.

The next day was about how to deal with stressed out kids. That's fine, though I think it's far more important for the kids to learn how to deal with their own stress than to have us do it for them. I'm kind of tired of hearing about how the students are all stressed out, especially by their homework. Life is stress and school is a great place to learn how to deal with it.

More on this and the puppy later

Let them eat cheesecake

Okay, I admit it. I ate at the Cheesecake Factory. This required me getting over quite a bit of internal resistance. Aside from the fact that I never had any particular interest in eating at Cheesecake Factory, there was a recent article where to add the top 10 most unhealthy foods served at restaurants seem to be served at that chain. 

So suffice to say it wasn't my choice. However, I felt confident that I could somehow navigate their menu and find something that I would be able to eat without feeling disgusting. We got to our table and we're handed two menus, one with a spiral binder.

The other menu, which was just on folded laminated card stock, was called, and I can't even write it without gritting my teeth and scowling, the "Skinnylicious" menu. The regular menu items seemed completely innocuous. And the others in my party both ordered from there, one had an appetizer and entrée and one had two appetizers.

For myself, I ordered a Skinnylicious turkey burger. And opted to spend the rest of my calories on beer. The first appetizer for the other two seemed normal enough. Regular type portion size for appetizers. Entrée and the second appetizer however both came on plates that, and I'm not exaggerating here, were about 10" x 18" big. I've had chicken lettuce wraps before. They have them at Pod in Philadelphia and they're delicious. And make a nice light appetizer. At Cheesecake Factory, they come on a platter with approximately an entire head of lettuce, two full grilled chicken breasts, and other things to put in the lettuce including other vegetables, sauces, and, inexplicably, noodles. The entrée, the innocent-sounding chicken piccata, also came on what resembled a serving platter. Three sautéed chicken breasts covered with sauce, and an appetizer sized portion of pasta. My turkey burger looked like a three or 4 ounce patty ground turkey on a brioche roll with lettuce tomato and grilled onions and a salad. It was quite tasty and just the right size.

Nobody had any problem with the quality of the food. Everything tasted really good. I tasted things and will be having chicken lettuce wraps for lunch today. But now I know why everybody else in the restaurant looked overweight. If you ate like that even twice a week, there's no way that you could maintain a healthy weight. 

And it's completely needless. There's no reason anyone needs that much food. I suppose if you were one of those people who likes to go out and eat and then bring leftovers home for the next day, that would make sense. But this was in a touristy area and there was no reason to believe that anybody could do anything like that. I took the lettuce wraps because they're cold and can just be pulled together and eaten easily and quickly.

And then of course there's the cheese cake itself. Again, delicious. We did take those to go and have them several hours later. I, of course, did not order any for myself, because I could tell by the sheer weight of the shopping bag I was holding that there would be plenty for me. And in fact it would be plenty for me the next day also and perhaps the day after that, but we didn't keep it.

The point is, well I don't really have a point. I'm not one of those "how can you eat so much when children are starving elsewhere in the world" people. I just don't think the casual throwing about of extra food sends anyone a useful message. And it's genuinely wasteful. I don't understand it. I mean I don't understand the impulse. Who at corporate headquarters decides to bury people in food? In any event, I had my turkey burger, my beer, and two different kinds of cheesecake, so I ate very happily yesterday.