Long before I moved to Estacado, I used to go to the Tumbleweed Anime Convention (which was partially how I fell in love with the state to begin with). Helpfully, it was held at a hotel at the airport. However, because it was on airport grounds, such petty things as “Freedom of Speech” did not apply. They took great pains during orientation to say that any joke involving bomb threats or physical harm would result in your arrest no matter how clearly it was intended as a joke. We were on Tierra de Federales and had to behave accordingly. As far as I know, nobody was ever actually arrested.

Though there were obvious reasons for it, brave young dumb kids that we were we always thought that the policy was stupid. Of course, that was before 9/11. After 9/11, the young people have opted not just to do away with the invincibility of youth, but with common sense as well. A professor at UC-Davis was arrested and held for four days for a metaphor that went over the heads of some of his students.

A University of California, Davis, police declaration supporting the arrest of James Marchbanks describes the fear three students reportedly felt when he presented an envelope holding end-of-course evaluations by saying, “I have a bomb.”

“There was no expression of a smile or indicating he was joking,” a student told campus police, according to the declaration. “My stomach dropped and I felt my life flash before my eyes.”

But a letter reportedly signed by 13 other students in the class says Marchbanks was clearly using a figure of speech to present the documents that might “bomb” his career.

You think?!

Despite its relatively low profile outside of California, UC-Davis is a really good school filled ostensibly with really smart kids. And yet… goodness gracious. This goes beyond being cowardly and to just being stupid. Is this what colleges have come to? The inability to differentiate between metaphor and reality? Granted, this is theater and dance class and so you’re not expecting the world’s most analytical minds, but this is at a university where 90% of the student population is in the top 10% of the graduating class! But I guess the need for drama can trump common sense.

There’s an interesting sort of ideological chasm that runs through the Corrigan Compound. The Corrigan Clan includes the Himmelreichs (my wife’s family) as well as a bunch of other last names since Clancy’s mother had many sisters and only one brother.

The Corrigans are not that dissimilar from my father’s family. Our parents raised in families on relatively modest means but with a priority on education that caused a significant generational shift in class. Amongst the Corrigan Clan, I am relatively uneducated with my degree limited to a BS in a family where Master Degrees, MDs, and JDs are increasingly the norm.

That’s where the chasm lies. I was raised to look at college as a vocational school. The notion that I would graduate in something unmarketable was relatively unthinkable. I could have done it, but my parents would have pulled the finance rug right out from under me. Clancy was raised in a relatively similar light with the expectation being that they were going to college to prepare for a career or at least for future career opportunities. If their undergrad degrees weren’t worth much, they at least needed post-grad plans that would pick up the slack. Clancy majored in biochemistry and psychology and her sister Ellie in something ecological, but both went on to become a doctor and lawyer respectively.

My father-in-law and Cousin Lester were talking about Zoey, the youngest of the Himmelreich girls. Zoey wanted to go to school and study French. The compromise was that she would study French and International Finance. She had some pretty nice job opportunities straight out of school (and I don’t think it was because she knew French). When she gets back from Africa (where her French is coming in handy, I suppose), she is likely going back to school to major in something.

Uncle Lester made a comment that given her smarts and charisma and beauty, it doesn’t matter what she majors in because she will do just wonderfully. Notably, Lester’s son is pursuing a master’s degree in something with virtually no marketing utility whatsoever. His daughter is still in the BA stage, but appears headed down a similar path though with the vague plans of law school if nothing else jumps at her.

Lester is a lawyer, as is Uncle Hiram. Hiram’s daughter has a degree in English from a small, expensive private school that I’m sure gave her an excellent education but did not provide a brand name that I was familiar with prior to meeting her. The other daughter majored in something equally useless (though given who she went on to marry it turned out to be irrelevant).

So back to the schism. Clancy and I were raised, as were her siblings and a couple of cousins, that college was meant to be vocational. Obviously, Lester and Hiram raised their children with different priorities. My initial inclination was to chalk it up to wealth with the more middle-end of the upper middle classdom that drank and partied at the Corrigan Compound insisting that college degrees mean something marketable and with those at the upper-end of the UMC not being so concerned. There may be something to it, but it’s an imperfect correlation. As was my attempt to align it to political party preferences.

Instead, I think it comes down at least a little to perceptions of the value of money. Or maybe the value of security. The purpose of money to the Trumans, I think, is more about security than anything else. If money is to mean anything, it is to mean aborbing the financial impact of temporary unemployment, a mold infestation, or a broken down car. Without that, they can’t enjoy all the goods that money can buy. Along those lines, the money spent on college is supposed to go towards that security for my brothers and I and if it doesn’t further our security then it is money wasted. While it’s always possible to do well career-wise without a college degree, having that degree (in something useful) provides a degree of flexibility that make the likelihood of finding secure employment greater and the fear of not being able to find it somewhat more distant.

I would guess that Lester and Hiram (or Hiram’s wife, at any rate), view it all a little different. To them, the point of making money is so that their kids don’t have to live their life trying to minimize the fear of unemployment. It’s less about the security that money can buy and more about the freedom. The fact that they have daughters that can marry future breadwinners (as Hiram’s older daughter did) probably helps, though Clancy’s parents wanted to make darn sure that they would not be dependent on any such contingency and Lester’s uselessly-degreed kid is a son… so maybe not.

Now, my inclination is naturally to say that my parents are right and the others are wrong. That security is more important than freedom and so on. That’s certainly that attitude that Clancy will make. Then again, given that those were the priorities I was raised with, that is precisely what I would say, isn’t it? Though there is a point in my life where I might have said differently.

When I was younger, I had visions of maybe moving to New York City and putting my creative talents to work as a comic book writer. I would like nothing more than to be a writer of some sort with comic books being slightly preferable to movies being slightly preferable to novels being slightly preferable to newspapers. And I held out hope that it could happen someday and maybe it might. But it’s unlikely. I hope to get published someday, but it’s extremely unlikely that it would ever be my career.

There was always the thought that it was something I could do but at the least I needed another vocation as a fall back. What I don’t think I fully appreciated was that there really is a tradeoff between one or the other. By going to college and getting a degree in CIS, I was more-or-less charting a path that did not include New York City or Los Angeles and attempts at being a writer. If anything does happen, it’ll have been due to the luck of marrying who I did. But ultimately, the caution that directed me to get a conservative and marketale degree made making any sort of “leap of faith” that moving to NYC or LA would entail virtually impossible.

And what use is money if not to afford your kids the opportunity to follow their dreams?

It’s an attractive thought, but one I can’t buy into. Maybe because buying into would mean that the decisions I’ve made have been wasteful. But I think it has more to do with my rejection of the implicit lesson that I associated with what Lester was saying: You’re smart; you’re talented; the world will figure something out for you. Maybe there is a point on the economic spectrum where you really can expect that sort of thing. Maybe Lester’s kids and Clancy and I were actually raised at or above that point in the spectrum.

But for good or for ill, I was taught the lesson that the world owes you nothing and will take from you whatever you have unless you do what you have to in order to prevent that from happening. Our children will likely be raised in a better financial position than we were. Perhaps a good enough position that the fear of falling will not be enough to keep them from following their dreams with a reckless abandon. I really don’t know what to think about that.

I discussed the hellish experience that was junior high, where I had to bribe people to leave me alone or act friendly. Things had improved by the 8th grade (the last year of middle school in Delosa), but I was too guarded and defensive to see it. Then I got dropped into high school…

Once again, I was graduating from the little school merging with the big school. Mayne Intermediate had been about twice the size of Larkhill Intermediate. The existence of Airfield (a middle school created my 8th grade year that took some students from Mayne and Larkhill middle schools) didn’t factor in that much because most connections remained strong with the school that they came from. But this time it wasn’t so bad. The chaotic and brutal culture of Larkhill was largely non-existent. The bullies that tormented us couldn’t get the same mileage out of being a thug that they used to. Plus, more and more of them were shipped off to the alternative high school.

But perhaps the largest advantage to Mayne High School was its size. It was large enough that I could become invisible. It’s a lot easier to hide amongst a class of a thousand than it is to hide in a class of a couple hundred. And those that were there were less likely to be thugs, less encouraged to be thugs, and older and wiser than they had been. I know I devoted a paragraph to that, but it was worth repeating.

So I crossed the ranks from the Unpopular to the Not Popular. I had a few tormentors, I guess, but there wasn’t anymore physical intimidation and they didn’t have the people egging them on anymore. I would meet the worst of these guys many years later at the Stockpile Saloon. He seemed to remember us as good friends. Weirdest thing. He wasn’t the only one.

The weight also started to come off. Ten pounds one year, ten the next, fifty the year after that. Gradually I started building up a network. A few networks, actually. There were the people I had classes with, people I met on Camelot BBS that went to my high school, and then people that Clint introduced me to.

There were still problems, though. While Clint had integrated himself into the band scene with all sorts of friends and so on, Though Clint was no longer a liability, I still had other friends who were. I remember one girl in particular who stopped sitting with us at breakfast because of Raleigh’s presence. On the other hand, Ralgeigh graduated a year before me and I started becoming less accommodating of people that I didn’t like that were keeping people I did like away from me.

I never found my clique. I was still reasonably insistent on doing my own thing. And just as I started being in a position where I could make a lot of friends from school, I wasn’t really interested in doing so. My social hub was no longer Mayne High School but was instead Camelot. While I was fine with that most of the time, it was frustrating to know a lot of people and yet have nobody to sit with at lunch. I do with I had found my social gumption earlier. I was so scared of being to them what Raleigh was to me.

But still, the situation had at least improved. I never dated anyone that went to Mayne High School, though I did have a couple of opportunities and I’m sure a few more that I was too clueless to pick up on. I had female friends. If I hadn’t had a girlfriend at the time, I would still have had a date to the prom. Somehow, I think that was always the true measure of success: Being Not Raleigh.

I previously discussed my relatively sanguine experiences in elementary school where I was guarded by my parents’ position in the community, some athleticky friends that I played sports with, and so on. Meanwhile, there was an undercurrent of factors that would later come to haunt me. I’d gained weight, become friends with some less popular people, and embraced eccentric parts of my personality that were not conducive to young popularity. I had “graduated” from elementary school with a vague optimism that junior high would be a little better since there would be more people that I would get to know. How very wrong I was.

Junior high is tough in even the best of circumstances. The onset of puberty, for instance. Your own puberty is actually only a fraction of the problem. By far, the bigger problem is all of the aspiring thugs that suddenly have testosterone gushing through their system. The people that left me alone (or were the reason others left me alone) turned on me as they made new friends that they needed to impress.

Unfortunately, ours was one of the smaller schools to feed into our middle school, so we were absorbed into the social structure of Larkhill Elementary. Larkhill was more of a working class sort of place with a lot of kids raised by uneducated boatsmen, mechanics, and things like that. While very far from an inner city school, it was just a more rough-and-tumble place than was West Oak Elementary and Mayne High School would prove to be. Though only about a quarter or a third of Mayne high school was comprised of people fed into by Larkhill, I would say that well over half of the troublemakers were people I knew from junior high.

Aggravating the problems in junior high was that everything that started getting bad in late elementary school was getting worse. My weight was getting worse, Clint was becoming even more of a social liability, and he and I both would continue to go off and do our own things rather than participate in activities that involved other people. Now added to the mix were other friends, though, that were as bad as or often worse than Clint.

But once again, I had my chance. Joining the football team in the seventh grade didn’t help my popularity, but that was partially my own decision. I wasn’t being invited to parties or anything, but the smart kids on the football team were appreciation that I was a lot smarter than a lot of the other kids on the team. And the contingent of bullies-without-girlfriends (the Crabs and Goyles of the world, who are rarely provoked and often feared) seemed ready to adopt me. But in both cases, there was the issue of the kids that I hung out with.

I don’t want any of this to be read as a complaint that Clint (or anybody else) was dragging me down. Clint did come with a cost, but I can seriously say that my friendship with him was worth just about any price. More than anybody but my parents, he helped shape me into who I have become. Though our friendship was rocky at times (mostly my fault because I was agitated at the opportunities it was costing me), it would lay the groundwork for a great friendship and by the time we reach late high school, he was actually my ambassador to Mayne High School – an invaluable asset.

After football ended, I lost whatever chance I might have had. Clint and I were in offseason athletics together and we brought out the social worst in one another. Worse was the presence of Raleigh, a “friend” who was by far a greater liability than Clint ever was. Worse, while Clint was picked on for stupid reasons, Raleigh deserved his unpopularity. But the three of us (and a German exchange student) would hang out off in our corner while the jocks were all playing a game that sort of a mixture between football and rugby. We might as well have painted targets on our back.

You might think that my size would have made me a less likely target. Or at least my height would. But by and large the worst would-be tormentors actually tended to be the smaller kids. Little Napoleons. The good news was that they were the easiest to deal with. If I stood my ground, they did not genuinely have the confidence they depicted that they would be able to take me out. One Napoleon attempted to push me, but I grabbed his hands, pushing them to the side, and spun him to fall onto the ground. Another case he tried to jack my foot (place his foot under mine while jogging and then pull it up to make me tumble) and actually hurt his knees in the process. The bigger kids were less afraid. Never provoking a fight, but giving pants-pulls, wedgies, and body gloves with some regularity.

My luck with the girls was scantly any better. This was actually an area where Clint had notably more success than I did. I was fat and he was scrawny and I was introverted and he was extroverted so he had a few sorta-relationships while I was rejected over and over again by girls I hadn’t the first clue of how to ask out.

Things improved somewhat by the eighth grade. Not only was I one of the oldest kids in the school, but I was also one of the biggest. And no longer in the worst way. I’d sprouted up to about 6′ and though I weighed more than ever, my dimensions mildly improved. Additionally, they had just build Airfield Intermediate School and the student population of Larkhill dropped considerably into something more manageable. It seems that Larkhill had previously been about the worst possible size. Too small to achieve anonymity, too large with too many nemeses to to ever confront them.

Plus, I got smart. Or rather I used my smarts. I discovered this concept called “bribery” and I found it remarkably effective. It actually started out as a profit-motivated endeavor. Compared to a lot of my friends at the time, I had a pretty good work ethic and was relatively smart. I did my homework when they didn’t. For my friends (the ones I liked) I would give them the answers. For people I didn’t like, I would charge them money. I didn’t even need the money. I just wanted it to cost them something so that they wouldn’t ask me to do every little thing for them. Anyway, one of my bullies wanted in on the action. He asked how much I charged. I said “Buy me a coke at lunch and we’re even” (the average rate was $5 for an assignment I’d already done and $10-$20 for one I hadn’t, so he was getting quite the bargain). The money wasn’t as important as the fact that the coke was the ticket to sitting with him at lunch. The guy who was one of my worst same-grade tormentors in the 6th grade actually signed my yearbook in the 8th. He not only became my friend, but he kept other bullies at bay. He introduced me to his friends. I made my first female friend through him.

The other factor was that I joined the basketball team, which was a mixed bag but mostly on the positive. It reconnected me with a whole lot of people that I played YMCA basketball and, though some were the folks that turned on me in the 6th and 7th grade, we worked out way back up to neutral terms.

Unfortunately, by the 8th grade my head was kept so low that I never noticed things were improving. I remember the relief of not being under the constant weight of bullies, but there was no real sense of optimism. I was oblivious to the opportunities that were starting to open up. And I was still clueless how to get along with these entities called “people”. If one of the big advantages of public education over homeschooling is socialization, it’s possibly a mixed lesson.

Different people divide the strata in K-12 society differently. Some people say that there is “the popular” and “the unpopular”. I personally divide people into three categories: the popular, the not popular, and the unpopular. The first group is self-explanatory, the second group consisting of people that simply lack popularity, and the third group consisting of people that are aggressively disregarded. I’ve actually shifted between all three of these groups over the course of my K-12 experience.

When I started out, I was actually in a relatively good social position. I was friends with a neighbor who was a bit of a bully but kept the other bullies at bay for me. My father was known for being a little league coach. My mother was actively involved in PTA and the like and so a lot of people had parents that knew my parents. And I played sports so a lot of kids knew me from that.

It was, alas, not to last. The biggest problem was that I started gaining weight in about the second grade. It was the biggest problem, though oddly it didn’t actually start causing me problems until the others started to surface. The second issue, related to the first, was that I started to sweat a lot. Given that I don’t have a good sense of smell, I didn’t fully appreciate the need to shower and better groom myself.

The third and fourth are also related. I became friends with Clint, who was a social liability. Clint also had an odor problem and was one of the scrawniest kids you ever saw. He also had ADHD (like the serious kind where you jump out of your chair and for no reason start running around the classroom). So there was a little bit of tarnish-by-association involved. But as important as that was that he and I got along so well that we often didn’t need anybody else. So while the other kids were playing kickball or whatever, he and I were off in our own corner doing our own thing. That sort of self-segregation between you and everyone else (except an unpopular cohort) is a pretty poor strategy.

I was really rather oblivious to the whole need to build and maintain relationships. People had always been there and I had my friends and it was never a problem. Until of course it would become one. When I needed people to have my back and realized that there were none there because I hadn’t made the time and effort to try to include myself. This would become a persistent problem, but it was definitely one that started at West Oak Elementary.

I was becoming vaguely aware of it being a problem. By the fifth grade I had noticed some problems occurring and started tut-tutting Clint about getting too animated. “Think of the casual observer,” I’d say. In other words, don’t do anything that someone who happened to be looking in your direction would find inexplicably weird or mock-worthy. Unfortunately, I never took it to the next step which is to get to know people and to maintain those relationships.

In addition to my connections and my parents’ standing in the community, it was also a lot easier where there were fewer students. To know me is, if not to like me, then to at least think that I am an okay guy. In person I am remarkably inoffensive. All of this was enough to carry me through the fifth grade remaining mostly in tact. I wasn’t popular anymore, but I wasn’t unpopular. I wasn’t generally targeted. That would all change when I got to junior high.

When I was living in Deseret, I kept getting mail from Neumont University, a DeVry sort of university specializing in computer science. I have no idea how they found me. Though I already have a college degree, I thought it was an interesting concept. The Los Angeles Times actually did a write-up on Neumont:

“I don’t think anybody has enough fun at Neumont — it’s a bunch of people addicted to sitting in their mom’s basement playing World of Warcraft and drinking Dr Peppers,” said Murray, who himself was drinking a can of Dr Pepper at 8 a.m. on a Friday.

He might have a point. Instead of Mardi Gras, students hold Nerdi Gras, a video game party featuring “nothing that would ever happen at Mardi Gras,” according to organizer Keith McIff. And though the student commons doesn’t have couches or fast food (or for that matter, any hot food at all), it does have a “Star Trek” pinball machine, a pingpong table and a flat-screen TV frequently hooked up to Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

Some of Neumont’s female students, who make up about 5% of the 266 enrolled this year, are on a mission to get their peers to tune in to the world around them. In October, one posted a message on Neumont’s Web forums protesting what she called “offensive odors.”

“The truth is there are people in this school who just don’t smell pleasant at all,” she wrote.

The post generated more than a dozen replies, with students suggesting the creation of a personal-hygiene company, a crackdown on halitosis, and a three-shower-a-day regimen.

“People (who probably just get busy and distracted by their passion for coding) need to remember to take care of themselves as well as they care for their machines,” Stacy Hughes, the school’s communications manager, wrote on the forum.

The university instituted a requirement that laptops be closed during class (there was apparently a problem with graduates typing away at their computers during meetings) and taking communications classes. Both moves met with resistance.

The students are, of course, paying (or borrowing) their way through and having things their way is one of the things that they undoubtedly believe that they are paying for. The problem is if they’re there for the furtherance of their careers, they’re going to need to learn how to integrate into normal society. Things like Nerdi Gras don’t really help much in that regard. Communications classes do.

In the comment section of Half Sigma (where, no great surprise, I found the article), Brandon Berg points out that few of the developers he knows are actually like the kids described in the article. This could be because the article is caricature or it could be because there are strong distinctions between people that go into computer science and people that make a career out of it. I think that there is something to be said for the latter. I have spent a lot of time around developers and I have spent a lot of time around people that had the skills and the brianpower to become a developer and yet weren’t. One of the primary differences between the two groups was people skills. Some will say that this only proves that society undervalues social skills and overvalues people skills. There is definitely some truth to this. However, it is also the case that developing is a collaborative exercise where you’re working with other developers and testers and managers and the ability to communicate effectively is rather important. I don’t just mean communicating their ideas, but also communicating non-offensively in other ways (including the olfactory senses). Coworkers and bosses have a right to give preference to people that they enjoy working with, follow social protocols, and so on.

I have myself thought in the past that if I ever had a software design company, I would focus on bringing in those that lack social skills in favor of technical skill and exploit their undervalue in the job market. Years later, as I have watched how workplaces actually function, I have my doubts that this is a good idea. These people not only have trouble integrating themselves into general society (which I could perhaps but not necessarily avoid with the right workplace), but they very frequently don’t get alone with one another. Their lack of social skills makes it much more difficult to smooth over these differences than it would be between two ill-matched but more socially conventional people.

Outside the world of nerds, one of the great values of college is the socialization that occurs there. This is arguably one of the many things that should be taught in high school but aren’t. But while socialization occurs in high school, it’s often the counterproductive sort that includes values that ill-serves one in later life. That’s somewhat the case in college, but less so. But this only occurs if people that are forced to go outside their comfort zones. My brother Mitch joined a fraternity in part because he didn’t want all of his friends to fall into the categories of engineers and people he knew in high school. The experience changed his life. He went in a nerd and came out an All-American guy who could make friends with everybody and could date quite beautiful women without being at an exceptional disadvantage. That wouldn’t have happened at Neumont. And while I did not have a similar transformation in college, I nonetheless came out of it (largely thanks to the Honors College) with a lot of valuable social lessons I would not have gotten at Neumont or at a community college. Looking back, I only wish that I had striven more.

So while the Neumont students might wish that they were more catered to because of the money they’re putting forward, I think that not getting what they want and being forced outside their comfort zone is one of the best gifts that a university can give its student population.

Katie Allison Granju has a problem with homework. Her kid’s homework, that is:

Children today have so much homework every night, much of it very boring and/or quite demanding, that it certainly will become your problem… a problem you will dread and wrangle with almost every single night of your life for nine months of each year until your child graduates high school. Yes, it really is that bad. And it’s even worse if you have a HRK (homework-resistant kid), as two of mine are. If you wind up with an HRK of your own, you will spend many hours each week – at a time of day when you and your child are tired and ready to wind down and enjoy family time – cajoling, encouraging, threatening, and isolating your HRK in an ongoing battle of wills. It’s exhausting and irritating.

Seems like a part of the problem in the Granju household is the homework-resistedness of her kids. Not knowing her personally, it’s hard to say that the problem is that she is holding their hands through it, but it could be. Even for kids that aren’t HRKs and even if she wasn’t helping them, at what point does it become too much to ask kids to go to school for 7 hours a day and then come home and spend more time on school-related tasks?

Whether there is “too much homework” is a value-judgment. And it seems to differ from individual to individual. I remember I had a friend when I was in high school that never had time to do anything because she was always working on homework. It was ridiculous. She went to a good school but it was no better than mine. I don’t know if she was just assigned that much more of the stuff or if it had to do with time management. That’s another part of the problem. What’s too much for some is not enough for others. Not just because of different levels of intelligence, but different levels of conscientiousness and different levels of discipline.

I managed to avoid copious amounts of homework a few ways. First, my friends and I had to get to school about 90 minutes before the first bell to get a good parking space. Second, we had 30 minutes of “homeroom” that I spent working on homework. Third, I did homework during lunch. Fourth, I ignored the teacher and did homework while she was talking. So with all that, there usually wasn’t much that I had to take home with me.

A lot of the homework was pretty needless and the manner in which they would give it out irritating. For instance, when I was doing homework while the teachers were talking, I wasn’t doing their homework most of the time because they wouldn’t give us the assignment until the end of class. Instead, I’d do math homework during science, science during history, history during something else, and so on.

I’ve never been good at sitting there and being taught. I’m much better by having something briefly explained, showing me some examples, and giving me some problems. It would have been nice if I’d been able to work on math while the teacher was talking so that I could run into my problems and check with her at the end of class. Instead, I would only discover the question when I was in science class. Maybe I could have avoided if it I’d listened to the teacher, but even if I hadn’t been working on my homework my mind would have been wandering and I would have been thinking about comic books or TV or something.

Some people, though, aren’t like me. They need to be taught. I understand that. But the practice of teachers of assuming that we were all like that was really quite aggravating. I’m sure, though, it saved them the aggravation of people doing their homework during class and asking questions that were already covered while the teacher was being ignored. Even so, I think that there ought to be some sort of balance between instruction time and trying-to-figure-it-out-on-your-own time. At my school there was next to none.

I am reminded of a couple of friends that got In School Suspension for one reason or another. The basic premise behind ISS was that you would be isolated from the general student population. Day-long study-hall, basically. My friends loved it. Not only were they not being pestered by bullies and distracted by classroom attention-seekers, but they’d get all of their assignments and homework at the beginning of the day and would be done within two or maybe four hours. Then they could do whatever the heck they wanted. No homework!

It’s pretty sad when it’s more desirable to be isolated from one’s classmates and stripped of teacher instruction than to have homework and listen to the teachers talk. And it just goes to show how much time is being wasted day in and day out in school. That’s the big problem I have with homework. It’s a symptom. President Obama wants to lengthen the school year. I’m not opposed to the idea, but I would feel much better if our schools made better use of the time that they have.

Lauren Barack announces that, to her, non-necessities are necessities:

My mother would raise an eyebrow at my bimonthly $200 hair highlighting, my $28-per-week coffee fix and my new dependency on $10 organic, grapefruit-scented hand wipes. And, yes, they fall outside the category of true essentials — a place to live, food to eat, clothes to keep out the chill.

To her credit, she’s trying to keep her eye on the ball. She has even gone so far as forego a flat-screen TV! In all seriousness, we all have frivolities that we like to spend what money we have. As long as we recognize them as just that and are prepared to give them up as circumstances warrant, there’s nothing wrong with that.

I did get a kick out of this, though:

On a recent run to the drugstore (Band-Aids, paper towels, dental floss) Harper spied a battery-powered Hello Kitty toothbrush and brought it to me with a breathless catch in her voice that I recognized from my own.

“Mama, please!”

I took a close look at this candy-colored cartoon character, a dual-headed number that promised to clean my child’s teeth in a whirling vortex of bliss. It was $7.99. Then I glanced at the much more practical, soft-bristled, sad little substitute, which had the unfortunate luck of being stocked next to its superstar cousin. It was perfectly adequate and $2.99.

This seems like a very odd place to crimp. First, she’s sacrificing on behalf of her daughter. A whopping $5 for an instrument that’s going to last six months and might give her a little pleasure doing one of those unpleasant things that kids don’t want to do. She was doing better with the whole flat-screen TV bit. On the other hand, I think that it is good to look at the little things because they can add up. I got a kick out of it because of the part that came before, though:

I get that. I know I should put away as much money as possible — for my retirement and for my daughter Harper’s college years. By the time she’s a freshman, the cost of a bachelor’s degree at a private university could add up to nearly $300,000, according to the College Board, a nonprofit group of educational institutions. At the rate we’re saving, I am not sure we’ll have put away quite that much. We’re trying.

As my father is inclined to say… I have an idea!

I recognize that a degree from a public university in the northeast does not carry as much weight as one from anywhere else in the US might. Even so, I am willing to bet that for less money than that there is some public university that she could go to. Even out-of-state tuition would very likely be cheaper. If she goes off to the University of Florida, she’ll be well-positioned in the job market of a growing state. Now, if little Harper has a shot at Harvard or one of a couple other select universities, then you take a serious look at biting the bullet. But if her grades are good enough, a lot of universities will waive out-of-state tuition and if she can make National Merit Scholar Finalist a hundred or so universities nation-wide will give her a free ride.

Allowing her go to a good local private school would certainly be nice. But I find it bizarre that in an article about pinching pennies and seeking out unnecessary expenditures, that she would tout an expensive private school as a more responsible use of that money.

Of course, a degree from the University of Florida would make it less likely that her girl will be able to truck it on up to Manhattan and bust her way into the writing world like her mother did. Speaking of living in Manhattan, I have another idea…

-{The following is a speech that I might give my future daughter. It hasn’t been run by my wife, so in the intervening decade or so before giving it, it would be subject to change on that basis (as well as others). I also use some abstract ideas here, which presents a big of a problem as to when exactly I would give this speech. I would like to give it before boys even become a serious consideration, but I may need to simplify it if I’m going to give it to a twelve year girl and then give her the more high-falutin’ version when it becomes more pertinent. Given that any daughter of mine will have my wife and I as her parents, I figure that will be around 26 15 or 16.}-

The funny thing about money is that, in the end, it’s pieces of carefully crafted paper. It used to represent gold that you could withdraw from Fort Knox, but now it doesn’t represent anything except what we believe it represents. That doesn’t make it worthless. It’s value, though, is in the meaning that we attach to it. We mostly give it out only when we need to or when someone is willing to give us something in return for it. We mostly only get it when we contribute something. But the paper itself only represents the values that we attach to it and the difficulty required in obtaining it. If there were more green paper and fewer things, the money would become less valuable. You would need more money to do less. Money and the things that you can buy with them are valuable only insofar as they are not easily obtained.

Sex is sort of like this. Or at least it is for boys. The physical gratification of sex is something that a guy can simulate on his own if that was what he was mostly after. Even setting aside what he can accomplish on his own, the physical stimulation that comes with sex is largely the same whether a boy is having sex with a girl that he finds desirable or someone that he doesn’t even want to look at. And yet many boys will scour the earth to find the most attractive and popular and desirable women to have sex with. And most will refuse to have sex with someone that repulses them despite the physical pleasure they could get. The reason for this is that most of the value in sex – for boys and girls – is in the meaning and value that we attribute to it. Like money.

For a variety of reasons, boys are less discriminating than girls when it comes to sex. How pleasurable sex is varies far less from encounter to encounter for boys than it does for girls. Boys don’t face nearly the social penalties for being sexually indiscriminate that girls do. They don’t get pregnant and they’re less likely to catch an STD. And for whatever reason, boys are less likely to believe that they need to have any romantic attachment to the person that they are having sex with than do girls. And, of course, his hormones are rapidly approaching their peak. Girls, on the other hand, are more discriminating. They face penalties and repercussions that men don’t. Whether due to social custom or evolutionary psychology, they overtly assign more romantic meaning to sex.

So what this creates is a situation where for boys, there is a natural scarcity of girls that are willing to have sex with them. Sex is harder to get, so it’s more valuable. So when a boy is bragging about how much sex he has, he is sort of saying to the other boys that he has easy access to something that they don’t. He is valuable. He is impressive. He is awesome. Guys sort themselves out from first to worst a number of different ways, but one of the big ways they do as they get into adolescence is by whether or not they can get sex, how frequently they can, and how impressive the person they are having sex with is. This isn’t something reserved for horndog jocks. Guys all up and down the popularity spectrum know that they’re being judged this way. Most of the time they’re judging themselves this way. Some ignore it and come up with alternative ways that they think they should be measured, but it’s pretty rare that he is oblivious to how other people are looking at him and it’s not at all rare that he would incorporate these measures into how he sees himself.

You don’t just have to worry about the horndog jock that’s bragging about all the girls he’s sleeping with. He’s the most loud about this because it presents him in the best light. But there’s as good a chance as not that the quiet kid in the back of the class doodling on his notebook is measuring his worth in the same way. Smart boys will get some solace in their intelligence and the doodling kid – if he’s good – will take some solace in that. But they will also know that in a rather important way – important because their peers believe it is important – they are coming up short.

In fact, in some ways you may have less to fear from the popular kids – unless they are overtly pointing to their sexual desirability as their selling point – than you do those for whom sexual desirability is a source of insecurity. It’s like how money is most important to two groups of people: Those that don’t have it and those that have money but little else going for them except what money can buy. Similarly, sex is most important to the guys that have a lot of trouble getting it and those that don’t have much else going for them. Some guys are so insecure about it that they are like vampires, seeking out sex as a natural urge and a way to try to fill the black hole within their self-esteem. That, like the horndog braggart, is an extreme case, though. Even for guys where it’s not an overriding factor, it still clouds their vision and warps their judgment.

I’m not saying that the only reason a boy would want to sleep with you is to feed his ego. His motives may be as pure as the driven snow. Or they may be questionable. You won’t really know which. Even seeing a side of guys that girls don’t usually see, I’ve been surprised sometimes. I am saying, though, that the younger you are and the younger the guy is, the more likely it is that he doesn’t have a clear idea of his place in the world and the more likely he will desperately seek validation any way that he can find it. As you get older, it will become less of an issue. Some men never really work past these warped priorities, but as time passes more and more of them will gain the perspective of experience and will have more worthwhile ways to establish their identity. Unfortunately, before they’ve established themselves and figured out who they are and what’s really important to them, they are much more likely to be emotionally dangerous.

I wish I had better advice on how to spot the guy with good motives and the guy with bad ones. It’s tough. The more of them you choose to share yourself with, the more likely it is that you will get burned. Even if you’re cautious, though, unless your judgment is flawless, you will probably still get burned. I’m sure what advice I do have will spill out when as I say here and there, “Not that guy!” Beware most those that believe that the world owes them something because they believe either that they are just that special or because they’re unhappy. Take note of how they treat people that they don’t need something from. Don’t waste your time on someone that can’t even pretend to be as interested in you as they are interested in themselves. And beware the person whose self-description is too far at odds with the person you see doing to talking.

Over the years, I’ve had a lot of friends tell me about some first sexual experience that they’ve had with someone I know or have met. Often, at the end, they’ll say something to the effect of “She told me not to tell anyone, so keep tight-lipped.” When they do this, it’s important to take note that they had sex, she told him not to tell anybody, and he told someone anyway. This happens even when he values her a great deal. This happens even when he is generally a pretty honest guy. If a guy lies to a girl about nothing else, he will lie to her about that.

Remember that.

Remember that partly because it reinforces what I’m trying to tell you. He will tell because part of the value of sex is to be able to tell someone. He may even tell it because he wants to share something very special that happened with him and a girl that he cares about a great deal. But also remember that he’ll tell because you will have to live with the consequences of his sharing your most intimate moments. He may share it only with his trusted friends or he may share it with anybody that will listen. It will tell you a lot about him that you will hopefully – but not necessarily – have figured out ahead of time. But the friend that he trusts may be more casual with the information than the guy. Word may get out.

You want to ask yourself some questions before you get intimate with a guy. Are you only willing to do it if absolutely nobody finds out? Would you be surprised if he turns around and tells a lot of people? If the answers are yes and no, think twice. If it does get out, though, will you have the strength of your conviction that you did nothing wrong or will you wonder what the hell you were thinking? If word gets back to us, exactly how horrified will you be that we find out that this is the guy you chose to share yourself with? If you think about these questions beforehand, I think you’ll find that you have more judgment and foresight than you think.

One other thing I want you to ask yourself before moving forward is whether or not you will regret what you did even if things don’t work out. I don’t mean that you’ll regret it the same way that you might regret that expensive birthday gift you got him for your 9-month anniversary. I mean will you regret it in a more fundamental way. Will you feel used. Will you feel like you were a point on his scoreboard. I had a friend who was saving herself for marriage once ask my advice about whether or not she should have sex her boyfriend since she really wanted to marry him but couldn’t at that time in her life. I told her to only do it if she would not regret having done so if they don’t get married. She said that it was a moot question because of course they were going to get married. When he dumped her six months later, she was twice-devastated.

The thing about this game that boys play with themselves and one another is that you are not an active participant. You can’t play and win. If a girl tries to use it to her advantage, to give a guy sex so that his ego will be fed and that she is the one that fed it, he will tire and move on. If she withholds it on the basis that it will become more valuable to him, he will aim for some lower-hanging fruit that he can grab. She is not a partner or a player. She is the ball being batted around in the course of the game.

You are not a ball. You are not currency. You are not a notch in someone’s belt or a point on their scorecard. Don’t willingly allow yourself to be reduced to that. You were not put on this planet to feed the egos of men. You were not put here to please them. Your value is not dependent on your willingness and ability to do that. You have your own wants and your own needs. If you demand that they be met, then you will share yourself on your own terms and in ways far less likely to leave you feeling spent and used.

When you meet the right guy, you won’t be “giving” him anything. You’ll be sharing it. Sharing yourself. It will be mutual. He won’t have to beg, guilt, or needle you into doing something that you don’t want to do. The right guy won’t necessarily be exempt from the urges and psychology of the game, but he will consider being with you, being loved by you, and your happiness to be more important than the scorecard. He will be willing to work with you and your needs, not to the exemption of his own, but in accordance.

Waiting for this, and even knowing that it’s out there, won’t make you any less lonely when you’re being ignored while the boys are off playing their games. But remember that not all attention is good attention and mistakes not made can be as valuable as opportunities missed are frustrating. On the other hand, don’t let your fear shut the rest of the world out. You’ll need to make mistakes so that you can learn from them. But whatever you choose to engage in, make sure that it is in at least equal parts for your benefit, your education, and your self-esteem. If that’s not your aim and if you decide you’ll settle for less than that, you will end up with a lot less than you think.

I’m not going to tell you not to have sex. Your mother and I want you to wait until you are absolutely ready. Ideally, we would like you to only move forward with a man that you love and treasure who feels the same about you. But I’m not going to tell you what to do because we’re not going to be with you when you make that decision. Except to the extent that we deny you the opportunity we won’t be there to stop you from making the wrong one. We are not going to be able to force you to see things how we see them. Besides, your mother and I may not even see things the same way between ourselves. Whatever you do, though, we will hope that it was the right thing. Right by us, of course, but also right by you.

Over at Least I Could Do (a webcomic as well as a blog), a post about the abysmal education numbers recently announced from Washington DC:

They’re telling us that only 12% of DC’s 14 year olds can read proficiently.

That’s insane, that’s ludicrous. Hell, it’s bloody criminal.

That statistic keeps rattling around in my head, and I admit I’m having a hard time accepting it. In a day and age when media, the internet and literature are so freely distributed, how can this be the case? This is a statistic I would expect in a developing country, and not in the United States of America, not the nation’s capital for Christ’s sake.

These kids need to put the drugs away, lay down their right to bear arms, leave their gang, stop going to war and pick up a book.

Can someone honestly tell me what we’re teaching our kids in school, if not how to read?

I really want to know.

As the thread goes on, there’s a lot of left-wing “Evil Dubya Bush and the No Child Left Behind program” attacks, but very little substance beyond that. A few teachers have weighed in, to point out inherent problems in the national education system, some of which are connected to NCLB and some of which have other causes.

I’d like to offer up a few points from my perspective – having gone through public schools and private schools, and in my current employment with an entity that tries to train the next generation of teachers.

#1 – Teachers really don’t get the support they need.
#2 – Regional and social factors aren’t helping.
#3 – Insistence on “self-esteem” hurts the system.
#4 – Insistence on keeping all kids together hurts the system.

In my mind, the last is the worst portion of the problem – (public) schools in America have largely done away with the idea of having more-advanced and less-advanced classes, except for the required “remedial ed” courses based on teaching kids with severe mental handicaps or psychiatrically determined learning/behavioral disorders. If you see a grade school with 3 classes per grade (small, I know), you will never see them arranged by previous academic achievement, with the smartest kids all in one class. No, you’ll see them arranged by random lot, with the smartest kids in each class bored stiff while the teacher desperately tries to educate the idiots who don’t even want to be there and whose parents don’t care about their kids’ education. Add in the socially promoted kids (those whose parents threatened to sue the school district for daring to suggest Johnny repeat a grade or three), and pretty soon you have an entire 8th grade class that’s reading on a 3rd grade level – the idiots because they’re idiots, the rest because they’ve never been given anything better as each successive teacher simply taught to the idiots’ level. Just to cap it off, a teacher who actually fails a kid is to be punished, and no thought ever given to culpability on the part of the kid (who goofs off, doesn’t do homework, makes spitwads with his books, etc) or parents (who, blissfully clueless, insist that the teacher “just hates our little Johnny” when his conduct and lack of study are brought up in conferences).

This is a system that completely fails kids on a psychological level, trying to force-feed “knowledge” without experience or learning. For the kids who respond best to being challenged, being stuck in a “pace of the slowest idiot” class is the surest way to teach them that school is worthless – why should they explore and learn and experiment, when they’re spending 8 hours a day being re-taught something they already absorbed years ago? In the current system, the overachiever will soon learn that going above and beyond is going to be punished; the rest of the kids in the class will see them as a “showoff”, teachers will peg them “disruptive” for getting off the lesson plan, and independent thought… well let’s face it, in the edjamacashun factery, that’s just not to be tolerated. The lesson to the overachiever is simple: overachievers are not the good little drones the system wants.

For the kids who are naturally competitive, they completely lack a reason to compete and a proper metric by which to measure it; grades are quickly noticed to be meaningless, and class ranking means nothing either. Since the overachievers are being beaten into submission, they don’t have anyone in a “top tier” to compete with anyways. When half of the school system are “honor students,” and the other half don’t care about it, competition loses its meaning. And of course, in the name of “self-esteem”, direct competition between students is to be avoided.

For the kids who are natural underachievers, the unstratified system provides no notice whatsoever; quite the contrary, there is a complete lack of attention to them. There is no “congratulations, you’re in the dummies class” shock that might wake a few up and make them realize that they should work harder. There is no definitive attention on how they got where they are. There is no drive, however small, to get out of the “dummies class.” The system assumes every kid is just like them, and makes everyone else wait for them to catch up. If that weren’t enough, the system specifically (in the name of “self-esteem” again) denies all but the barest identification of just which kids it is that are holding the class up.

Stratify the system, and you can get some marvelous results. Yes, you have a whole class of kids who are moving at the slow pace… but you also have classes that aren’t. A class full of geniuses, semi-geniuses, and just average-but-competitive-natured kids will do wonders, the geniuses and semi-geniuses with their natural love of learning and exploration, the competitive ones in trying to keep up with their peers. The teacher in the class with the remedial kids will have a more solid reason to urge that a kid be held back (they’re already underperforming), and won’t have to deal with the disruptions caused by bored-out-of-their-skulls kids who already learned today’s lesson three years ago. It’s a win-win situation.

Just to be clear on this point: when most kids were sneaking in comic books to read during class behind their real books, I was sneaking in the works of Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, and Anne McCaffrey. Did any of my schools support this? Far from it. I was actually told at one point by a school counselor that if I deliberately scored poorly on a couple tests, so as not to be on the top of the GPA list, my classmates would probably like me more. It seems the school system had decided to “grade on a curve”, in that they took the top score of the class on each test (and the aggregate homework grades) and “recentered” it so that the top score was the “new 100.” If the top score was an 80? Everyone got a free 20 points to add in. Unfortunately for the school, each class had 1-2 kids who threw the system off; we were scoring consistent 99-100’s while everyone else got 85 or less.