From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Students respond more profoundly to cultural imperatives than to market forces. In the United States, students are insulated from the commercial market’s demand for their knowledge and skills. That market lies a long way off — often too far to see. But they are not insulated one bit from the worldview promoted by their teachers, textbooks, and entertainment. From those sources, students pick up attitudes, motivations, and a lively sense of what life is about. School has always been as much about learning the ropes as it is about learning the rotes. We do, however, have some new ropes, and they aren’t very science-friendly. Rather, they lead students who look upon the difficulties of pursuing science to ask, “Why bother?”

Success in the sciences unquestionably takes a lot of hard work, sustained over many years. Students usually have to catch the science bug in grade school and stick with it to develop the competencies in math and the mastery of complex theories they need to progress up the ladder. Those who succeed at the level where they can eventually pursue graduate degrees must have not only abundant intellectual talent but also a powerful interest in sticking to a long course of cumulative study. A century ago, Max Weber wrote of “Science as a Vocation,” and, indeed, students need to feel something like a calling for science to surmount the numerous obstacles on the way to an advanced degree.

I think the first paragraph is particularly insightful. It’s unfortunate that we live with the consequences of decisions that we made before we knew what those decisions would really mean. I say this as someone that took the vocational route and who was raised amongst the children of engineers many of whom went on to become engineers. When we talk about practical and impractical majors, we sometimes forget that at the time these decisions are made, they are entirely practical. You have the option of spending 15 hours a week with a bunch of people that are likely to have the same backgrounds and interests as you and another 30 hours a week studying on subjects that interest you… or you can spend a lot of time with something really difficult surrounded by a lot of people with whom you have quite little in common.

Of course there is the argument that these kids aren’t thinking ahead, to which I say “Yep.” That’s all part of a larger problem where a substantial chunk of college-bound students spend the five years prior to going to college gaining more and more “adult rights” without adult responsibilities. There’s really not that easy a solution to this part.

In the meantime, my solution remains a sliding tuition scale for different majors which provide more here-and-now motivations for students (with academic scholarships thrown in so that the least academically marginal have more flexibility), an idea deeply unpopular with most non-blog people I’ve discussed it with.

Anyway, from the above paragraph forward the article descends into standard anti-PC “kids are ruined by good self-esteem and a sense of entitlement” stuff we’ve all heard a million times before and already agree or disagree with.

As with a lot of adolescents and early post-adolescents, I defined myself in many ways by who I wasn’t. My sister-in-law grew up deciding that she was first and foremost not her father. Most seem to define themselves by not being some authority figure or another. Some, though, define themselves against mainstream society as a whole. They’re not a conformist or a preppie or whatever else.

That’s more the category that I fell into. I had minimal beef with my parents (as far as such things go when you’re that age, of course), but I hated everyone around me. I hated the rich snobs at my high school. More than that, I hated high school culture itself. Though there was always a special emphasis on the connection between money and popularity, though naturally it extended to the conformity required. Deep down, of course, a lot of it had to do with the certainty that I could conform and do everything they asked of me and still be an outcast. Meanwhile, I had a group outside my school that accepted and even celebrated my presence. Who needed those snobs?

Up through my junior year, I never went to a high school dance. That was mostly because I could never ask a girl to one. I declared the grapes on the tree sour and turned my failure to participate in any extracurricular activities into some bizarre badge of honor. The senior prom, though, was different. I was willing to put the badge on the shelf to avoid a certain other mark — the mark of someone that couldn’t get a date.

Back when I was a junior, I had a friend that I didn’t care very much that spent prom night watching movies with his parents. I decided right then and there that one way or another I would go to the prom if only so people wouldn’t think of me the way that we thought of him. That superceded the Badge of Nonparticipation.

I decided, though, that if I was going to do the whole prom thing that I was going to do it on my own terms. I was not going to spend the outrageous amounts of money that the other kids were spending. There would be no limousine. No beach house in Surfenberg. Not even fine dining. I was going to do this thing for under $20 (excluding gas).

My mother was horrified. She told me that Julie was going to dump me if I did this to her. I pointed out that it wasn’t her prom and besides she was on board with the whole idea. She went to a working class high school where things like limousines and the like weren’t done anyway. Besides, just because I was going to be cheap doesn’t mean that I was going to be lazy. Mom told me that she would take care of the corsage because a friend that made them owed her a favor anyway. She begged and pleaded me to allow her to buy our dinner at a nice restaurant, but I refused.

Instead I drove all the way down the interstate looking for some sort of park that had some covering. Then I found the nearest Wendy’s, which was the establishment that she and I had eaten at on our first official date.

I picked up Julie at her house on prom night. That meant going in the wrong direction, but it still seemed like the thing to do on prom night. We stopped by the Wendy’s nearby and ordered two salads, two burgers, shared fries, a shared drink, and a shared desert. A three course picnic in a little canopy in the wind and rain. That she had a good time was one of the things that I really loved about her.

The prom was the prom. Neither Julie and I are dancers, so we only danced on a couple of songs. There had been an election for what the official prom song would have been. Ironically, the song in question was never played until the very end, where it had to be cut short because our time was up. We had our picture taken (those cost money, of course, but I didn’t count that because that wasn’t on prom night), I had my pictures taken with my best friends Clint and Dave. On the whole it was… kinda boring, actually.

Things picked up afterwards when Julie and I somehow hooked up with my classmate (and reluctant friend) Scott Sanders and Marianne Silbet. The four of us went to the beach together and considering that Scott was by far one of the least fun people to be around, we enjoyed ourselves walking on the pier in our bare feet. Talking about the prom, high school, and all that. That replaced the picnic as the high point of the evening.

Unlike a lot of people, there wasn’t any sex on prom night. By the time we drove home I was beyond sleepy. I told Julie that we’d need to pull over so that she could drive. She asked why and I told her that all of the lane changing I’d been doing (and I’d been doing a lot) had not been intentional. She quickly pointed out the first exit afterwards. She took the wheel, we drove to her house, and I slept on the couch in my tux.

That I was able to go to the prom spending so little money was a source of pride for me for a long time afterwards, though in the last couple years my perspective on it has changed. The biggest factor in that, I think, is the realization that my decision to be different on such inconsequential things as that was a bigger barrier to my social life than anything else. And with the exception of the popular people and the select few people that didn’t like me for one reason or another, it wasn’t because they were snotty and hated my individuality or anything like that, but rather it was because it cost me opportunities to get to know people.

Looking back, I wish that I had gone to the prom with Clint and Dave in their limo or whatever it was that they had. Or if their limo was full, I’m sure I could have found someone to go with. I didn’t even like being around Scott Sanders and yet sharing the experience with him was one of my favorite parts of the evening. Even going with him would have been more fun. Though, come to think of it, he may have been hip to the whole $20 prom thing because he was tightwad.

Instead, I let my conception of the way that things should be get in the way of having as good a time as I might have otherwise had.

Unfortunately, I did that sort of thing a lot.

I don’t know what possessed me to, but when I was in the eighth grade I took a shop class. Maybe I thought it was an easy grade or maybe I just had some space to fill. I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t expect what we got. Neither, did it turn out, did Mr Meeker, fresh out of college and ready to educate young minds.

Meeker had his lesson plan ready. We’d learn all about slide rules and then lessons and tutorials on the equipment. If all went well, somewhere around the halfway point we’d actually be working on said equipment. I don’t know what exactly my classmates were expecting, but it wasn’t Mr Meeker’s lesson plan.

If you’d had a sign up on the room asking for the most unruly, disrespectful, and disruptive students, it surely would have said “Shop Class”. I remember the first day looking all around me and being quite shocked at the high concentration of lowlifes, bullies, and ne’er-do-wells. If a single person from that class actually graduated with me five years later, I couldn’t tell you who they were. Sure, sometimes people move away or whatever, but I would be surprised in half the people in that class graduated at all and I suspect of those that did graduate far more than not did so from the alternative high school.

I heard that as far as the shop classes went, we were not even the worst.

Adding flame to the fire was Meeker’s lesson plan, which gave these unruly kids no outlet for all of their energy. One would expect that they were there to use saws and flames and all manner of exciting tools. They were not there to take pop quizzes on measurement conversions.

Most of the first six weeks of that class was a blur. I went to middle school in a lower-middle class school who’d had most of the wealthier kids plucked out and taken to the new school and by that point most of the smart (and thus well-behaved) kids were in honors classes. On top of that, we were all aged 12-14 or so. So I was used to crazy. I was used to the Lord of the Flies and all that.

This was something different. This was kids bringing bug spray to school and then creating a virtual flamethrower with the flametorch. This was kids brazenly hitting other kids with plywood. Kids karate-chopping wood. Slapping the desk with a ruler just to see how loud they could make it. Kids’ lighting other kids’ schoolbags on fire.

At first Meeker tried to control the madness. He would tell the class to quiet down and sit down. He said “Don’t make me say it again” fifteen times one class period (plus two or three times before I actually started my count). After a couple weeks he ditched the lesson plan and decided to show people how exactly to use the grinder that Marc Eldridge was using on Kerry Fenwick’s math book… but when he’d take over the grinder for a demonstration, people just walked away moved on to the flametorch.

After a couple of weeks, Meeker just locked himself in his office and let the madness reign. Somewhere around the fifth week he was absent. Rumor was that he checked himself into a mental health clinic. The sixth week (or so) he came back. Three days later he quit.

After that we were stuck in an unused classroom with a different substitute teacher each day. At first the subs went off a lesson plan, but it was really kind of pointless because most of the textbooks had been burned to char or grounded up to bits. The only reason I still had mine was that I refused to actually bring books to that class anymore after I had to spend a whole period simply trying to protect my bag from the nuclear incinerator or whatever else they wanted to do with it.

The rumors about the shop class spread and the new subs started coming in wearing their full protective gear. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but they stopped trying to teach. Then they stopped actually showing up. After only a few weeks, Vice Principal Davis himself was having to teach the class. After a couple days, he stopped trying to teach it, too. He made a deal with us that we could do whatever we wanted as long as we stayed in our seats. Kids made a point of bringing large objects with which to swat and poke one another. Davis just sad there and worked on his paperwork.

Finally at about the twelve-week point, he’d managed to find us a new teacher, Mr Kohl. The first day of class he said that he was going to appoint a Class Leader from our ranks and that whoever the best and best behaved student was would get the honor. From the second he mentioned, I knew that giant target was going to end up painted on my back.

Once again, though, things didn’t turn out quite as expected. Kohl was a former military man and he had apparently been fully briefed on the class. In just a couple of days he did what Meeker, Davis, and countless substitutes could never do. He got everyone in line. The first person that cracked a joke got shut in one of the walk-in-closet-sized rooms on the side of the lab. One kid made a physically threatening gesture and was literally pushed onto his ass. The kid complained, but Kohl simply said that the students had thrown out all the rules out so they couldn’t hide behind them now.

I don’t know how Kohl got away with it. Maybe most of the trouble-makers came from families that were too broken to care. Maybe the VP Davis and the Principal simply ignored parental complaints since they knew the score. Whatever the case, in the last six weeks or so of that class, we actually had class.

When I was in high school, my brother Mitch invited me to a fraternity party at the University of Delosa. The gist of the party was that the entire frat house was flooded by a couple of inches and everyone dressed like a swamp soldier in camo and whatnot. It was a pretty big deal. Being 16 and invited to one of these things was a pretty big deal, too.

My brother was dating a girl named Suzie at the time and Suzie was a member of the fraternity’s sister sorority. One of Suzie’s sorority sisters was a girl named Maggie. Maggie wasn’t gorgeous, but she was curvacious (sp?) in a really good way and she had a spunky personality that I liked. The coolest, thing, though, was that she talked to me. Not as Mitch’s kid brother, but as a guy.

The water came down and the place was flooded and the party began. Having access to unlimited free booze, I did the expected thing and started drinking a lot right away. Wherever I turned, for a while, there was Maggie. She kept… touching me. Not in a sexual way, but in the offhand way that made me feel warm (so maybe the alcohol was helping in that regard).

I kept trying to work up the guts to kiss her. The idea that a college girl could be interested in a dopey high school kid like me was on its face ludicrous, but there really weren’t many alternative explanations for the way that she was acting. I wasn’t sure of anything, but I was sure that to not even try was even more ludicrous than the idea that she might be receptive.

Then, after about my eighth beer or so, she disappeared. Then I was stuck with this other girl who was very, very interested in me. This one didn’t know that I was in high school. Can’t remember a whole lot about her but her name and that despite the fact I was drunk, she was still extremely ugly.

Maggie reappeared and I ditched the other girl with all the tact of a drunk 16 year old kid on the cusp of getting his first kiss or more by an older, hot woman. Before I could spring into action, I was suddenly being talked to by all sorts of girls. One after another. They were introducing themselves to me and lightly flirting and eventually all getting around to telling me the exact same thing: Whatever you do, stay the hell away from Maggie.

Girls of the sort that would never even give me the time of day were suddenly taking an interest in my welfare. Maggie must be a psycho or something, I thought. I was too drunk and too dumbstruck to turn down their advice. Maggie seemed to change a little bit, too, making me wonder if someone had said something to her.

The next day it became apparent to me that Suzie had sent her sorority sisters to be my protector. I asked in as offhanded a manner I could muster why she had done so. She said “I don’t know, I just don’t think that she’s good for you?”

“Really. Why not?”

“I don’t know, she’s just… weird.”

I didn’t say so, but the thought that went through my mind was “Weird? Weird?! You got in between me and a hot chick because you thought she was weird?! Who the hell do you think I am? I know every baseball statistic from the 1986 baseball season. I plot gritty noir movies starring Darkwing Duck. I write comic books during English class and set up paper football leagues. I talk to myself, I talk in my sleep. Weird? Not so much a problem!

But alas, it was not to be. The upshot was that it provided me with a much-needed self-esteem boost (sure she was probably crazy, but a college chick dug me!!) and the whole thing made me feel closer to Suzie who really was looking out for me (why couldn’t Mitch have married her?). Greater opportunities were lost, of course. Then again, considering how much I had to drink, it’s quite possible that they wouldn’t have been remembered, anyway.

Band members at Mayne High School were expected to wear a Mayne Mustangs Band shirt on gameday or before they were about to leave for a tournament or something like that. It was a pretty simple shirt with the Mustang logo on the left breast and the words Mustang Band written in a circle. For the most part the band members hated it. It singled them out as band people. A quarter of the school would be wearing the same damn shirt. Almost nobody was caught dead in one unless they had to wear it.

I can’t remember how I got a hold of one, but somehow I did. I had it in my regular shirt rotation and wore it quite frequently. People would periodically ask why I wore it or express surprise that I was in band because they’d never seen me before. When I explained that I wasn’t in band but that I liked navy blue and red and breast-logos shirts, I’d usually get a “cool”. The fact that I wasn’t in band made my wearing the shirt okay. Kinda cool, even. In the end I probably got more compliments on that shirt than any other shirt that I wore.

A while back, in response to something that I wrote a while back, Bob said:

You can put the Trumwill in Skidz, but you can’t take the slacks off of the Trumwill. Those things that identify us as losers aren’t the same things that cause us to be losers. Unfortunately, we don’t always appreciate this difference though. Pick-up guides focus on how to *display* high social value. They list attributes and tell you to do those things. Identify those people; watch them; do what they do. Fake it till you make it. (I’m sure there are some exceptions to this, but this seems to be a dominant theme.)

That is of course true. Often true, though is that context matters a great deal. For a mohawk to make a statement, it needs to be rare. My brother has a freckle on his ear where a piercing would be and when he was young he got a lot of looks because it appeared that his ear was pierced. Today, of course, a pierced ear is nothing. Doing the same thing carries a different meaning in a different context. It’s all contextual.

That’s one reason why it’s different when a popular kid wears something dorky than when a dorky kid does the same. For the former, it is adding an element of unpredictability or irony, whereas for the latter it’s simply reinforcing the existing negative perception. A cool kid wearing cool things reinforces positive perceptions about him whereas a dorky kid doing the same is adding an element of desperation and it just totally reeks of effort, which is (or was when I was young) a huge no-no.

This of course boxes the lower high school social classes into their station. Though it’s a risk to liken the man that won the popular vote to become the President of the United States as an outcast, I nonetheless have come to call this The Second Al Gore Dilemma. In 2000, Al Gore was in the position that he could either accept the perception of him being a square with edges made entirely of dull or he could try to change that and then most odiously reeking of effort. According to many in person Gore is a very warm and personable guy but he was effectively prevented from conveying that by popular perceptions.

The second aspect that makes it extremely difficult for lower people to become upper people simply by dressing the part is that there are all sorts of minutiae (if it’s even small, sometimes it’s huge) that someone that is not more intimately familiar with fashion does not know and that will frequently reveal him or her to be someone on the outside desperately looking in, which is about the only thing worse than someone simply slumming it on the outside.

As I was gradually making my way through school baseball caps and football jerseys were going the cycle from Cool to Standard to Banned. What’s to know about wearing a baseball cap? Well, for starters you have to get one of those expensive $20 official MLB caps instead of one of those with the weaved backs. I didn’t realize this and instead wore a Cane Buddies junior cap for the local Colosse Canes if I was wearing an MLB cap at all (and of course I wore it straight rather than cocked to the side). Likewise, my “jersey” wasn’t a jersey so much as it was a simple cotton fake jersey thing (and for the wrong team, to boot) and lo and behold it got me know headway on the popularity front. When I was in college, blue collar gas station shirts with foreign names on them like Habib or Ernesto were all the rage… but it was a no-no to tuck in your shirt as I always did. Being in college I was too old to care and I liked the shirts for a different reason (3 for $1! Relentlessly casual!), but had I been in junior high at the time it was devastating.

As a general principle, if the rules don’t sufficiently favor the haves over the have-nots new rules will be devised to close any loopholes. By the time people like me get caught up on a fashion it’s already on its way out. By the time lower class people can afford to move into a neighborhood the wealthier people are moving out. When a fat girl can look good in something the fashionistas will go out of their way to find something that only the thinnest 1/2 of 1% look good in and it will be the next big thing.

A while back I read about an attempt in San Fransisco to rename a sewage plant after our current president:

The measure, if passed, would rename the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant the George W. Bush Sewage Plant. McConnell said the intent is to remember the Bush administration and what the group sees as the president’s mistakes, including the war in Iraq.

Some people aren’t laughing, including the San Francisco Republican Party, which sees the measure as an embarrassment, even to this famously liberal city. Chairman Howard Epstein has vowed to fight the measure with all means available to him.

A White House spokeswoman, when asked about the measure several weeks ago, refused to comment.

My original thought was that it’s a disservice to a sewage plant to use it in such a derogatory political manner… but that actually gave me an idea.

If the Republicans were actually smart, what they would do is completely embrace the notion. If the local GOP embraced it, it’d fail. Perhaps better yet would be if they continued their objections right up until they passed it then have the President request a tour of the facilities. He could then give a speech on how important waste processing facilities are and how modern plumbing and waste material has perhaps had the greatest effect on our quality of life and longevity than any other individual thing. That would leave the Presidents opponents stammering “It is tooooo an insult! Is too, is too, is too!” and the whole thing will look about as childish as it is.

On the subject of naming things after presidents, the No Child Left Behind law resulted in one of the local high schools where I was living in Estacado being shut down. It’s going to reopen as a new school under a different name this fall. Its temporary name is Northside High School though they’re aiming to name it after somebody. Interestingly enough, they’ve pushed back the naming of the high school to November 7th, which is the first Friday after the presidential election. The high school is in the dominantly black part of town and I can’t help but wonder if they’re angling to be the first Barack Obama High School in the nation.

On a sidenote, I prefer the comment section of this post not become congested with commentary on how terrible/great Bush, Obama, or the NCLB act are. I’ve been considering a post on the lattest (though perhaps that would be more appropriate on Bobvis), but this post is about the naming of buildings and schools and whatnot.

One of the long list of things that made me unpopular in junior high school was that I refused to wear jeans and would instead wear slacks (among other things, see below). It wasn’t a fashion decision or a desire to go formal and look sleek. Had it been that, I would have showered and groomed, two more reasons for my unpopularity. No, the main reason was that I thought jeans were the most uncomfortable thing ever. So from about the fifth grade to about the eighth, I wore no jeans.

It’s funny how little things can have a disproportionate effect on things. The things that you didn’t know that if you had… Looking back, I think that the reason that jeans were so uncomfortable was that they were tight. They were tight because I have large legs in comparison to my waist size. Slacks generally allow for more leg-room, so they were more comfortable to me. They may have made Relaxed Fit jeans back then, I really don’t know because I didn’t shop. Or they may not have because baggy pants weren’t all the rage back then.

Whatever the case, I didn’t have access to them. I want to say “Gosh, if they’d only existed” or “If I’d only known about them” as if it would make all the difference in the world. Looking back, by itself it likely would have made very little difference. I was unpopular for a lot of reasons, my jeans only being a part of it.

The local fashion scene broke a little luck in my favor when I was in the seventh grade with these pants called (I think?) Skidz. Skidz were these thin, baggyish, colorful, stylized non-jean pants that from my recollection were more similar to pajama pants than actual pants. For hot southern summers, they were great. Increasingly, I also pestered my mother for at least a couple shirts that were “in”.

So at least a couple days a week, I was dressing not too far off from some of the most popular kids at school. Yet… somehow… it didn’t help… at all. My tormentor at the time (who later became a friend when I figured out how really to win those people over) accused them of being fakes and so I was one big, fat fake. Also, and this certainly came as a shock to me, Skidz were unbelievably easy to pull down. So even when I was doing things the way I was supposed to, it was still somehow turned around to my disadvantage.

That’s not to say that my aversion to jeans made no difference. The most popular kid could have gotten away with wearing slacks, but not someone like me. It was merely another thing that cemented my level of popularity with other people that couldn’t wear jeans because their mommas wouldn’t let them (like Orson Millard).

Several years later, I was in an English class where we had to write a paper about ourselves. My teacher didn’t like any of my papers and that one was no exception, so I was called in to class early to discuss it. One thing he didn’t understand was my usage of the fact that I wore slacks instead of jeans as indicative of my unconventionality. Out of nowhere, this girl who was serving morning detention interjected and explained exactly what I was trying to say.

When the teacher moved on to someone else, she moved to the desk in front of me and struck up a conversation. She was asking me all sorts of questions about myself in small talk that I would later figure out was the sort of chit-chat you involve yourself in before asking someone out. I think the kids call this “flirting”. I was of course utterly oblivious at the time. She mentioned in the course of the conversation that I reminded her a little bit of this guy that she knew. I jumped onto the familiar name and expressed how completely and awesomely cool the guy was. Turned out that they’d dated and it didn’t end well. Oops. That remains one of the missed opportunities that I’m sorry that I missed. She was a lot more interesting than the girls I actually wanted to date.

In the previous comment section, Gannon asked how come we haven’t converted to the metric system. Before I get to that, I’m going to write about the keys to the Internet.

I’d link to it if I could find it, but a few years ago I ran across an astonishingly dumb column in The Guardian that completely misunderstood the United States of America, the Internet, and most importantly human nature. You may recall a few years ago that there was a big push by other countries to try to get the US to hand over the keys to the Internet from the Department of Commerce to the United Nations. The aforementioned article in The Guardian said with a certain amount of glee that with the world united in insisting that the US give up control over the Internet that we would have (and I’ll never forget this wording) “little choice but to comply”.

That left to beg the question… “or what?” As in, we will have to comply “or what?” The UN will set up the infrastructure for its own Internet? A league of countries will go to the trouble of building an alternate Internet so that it can hand it over to the UN? They’ll invade Washington DC? If there is no “or [insert some consequence that the US could not endure]” then there is a choice. As it turned out, there was indeed a choice and the US chose to hold on to control of the Internet for the time being. Haven’t even heard mutterings about the issue since.

—

A few years ago when I went to a friend’s wedding in Canada, a discussion about the differences between the United States and Canada came up. When these conversations come up with Canadians, it is almost invariably in the form of them asking us “What is wrong with you people?!” about this issue or that. If the subject were to come up today I would probably be quizzed about our warmongering or our president or one of the many problems that they have with the current direction of our country, but given that it was pre-9/11 I was surprised by the two subjects that came up most frequently. I expected that it would be our health care system or gun-loving or something, but instead it was our tort system (a subject I will expound upon at a later time) and… the metric system.

One guy asked why we hadn’t adopted it and a couple more idealistic fellows asked why the conversion process was taking so long and when it was going to happen. My answers were “not sure”, “what conversion process?”, and “it may never happen”.

After I got back to the states, I asked started asking myself why it hadn’t and it didn’t appear that it was going to. I came up with an answer and then forgot the question and moved on to more important things like repercussions of Robin’s flirtations with Spoiler on his relationship with his then-girlfriend Arianna.

When I was in elementary school, I was dutifully informed by my teachers that the metric system was the wave of the future and that the English system they were teaching us would become obsolete. If I needed an excuse not to learn the English system, I had one. The problem is that I had to learn about inches, feet, gallons, and pounds anyway. Reality made me even if the teachers at West Oak Elementary were telling me that it would be useless knowledge.

The teaching of the metric system never entirely went away, though the examples in the math textbooks slowly started moving back to gallons and yards by the time I got to high school. I remember this because I remember thinking that the books must have been out of date, though in retrospect I’m not sure that they were.

In addition to their odd pronunciation of the word “applicable”, their odd-yet-correct pronunciation of the states Nevada and Colorado, their use of the phrase “Oh my heck/hell”, and a million other things, one of the quirks of Deseret (or more likely the corner of it where I worked) the metric system kept coming up along with the question of why we never adopted it.

Remembering the question reminded me of the answer which actually came indirectly from the Canadians which had asked the question to begin with. When they asked, I asked how the conversion in Canada went. They basically said that the government said that they were going to convert everything to the metric system because it was more logical and it was what everyone else was doing and so Canada went metric. They described it about that simplistically, though I kept trying to make it more complicated by asking “why?” like a bored second grader sitting in the back seat on a 600-mile car trip.

The thing is that everyone in the US had decided, once upon a time, that it would happen here, too. It just didn’t. And I think that part of the answer to the “why” is that Americans are extremely reluctant to being told from on high “this is what we’re going to do” even when there might be a logical reason behind it if we don’t feel like we were adequately consulted on the matter. Part of the success of persuasion is to make people think it was their idea or at least that they had a hand in the decision. It’s noteworthy that the many of the most fierce political backlashes come from Supreme Court decisions (Roe v Wade, gay marriage) rather than legislation.

Unfortunately, by its very nature conversion to the metric system is more of a top-down decision.

Beyond that, though, another big reason is the same reason that we held on to the keys to the Internet. No one was in a position to force us to do otherwise. We don’t need to move towards the universal measurement system to do trade with other countries because we don’t have a shortage of countries to trade with (at least not on that particular basis). We’re big enough and powerful enough that we can unilaterally expect other countries to work with us on the matter. In other words, we converted as much as we needed to in order to keep doing global business, but it wasn’t as much as it might have been for other countries. Americans would rather everybody else learn English rather than we learn Esperanto. We don’t know off-hand what’s wrong with them learning pounds and ounces rather than us learning metrics. And so on.

To bring these ideas together, not only do we not like being told by our government how it’s going to be, we particularly hate being told that we need to do it because other countries are doing it. It’s not an uncommon mistake, but generally speaking telling us that everybody else does it differently causes us to dig in our heels (unless, of course, someone can actually apply enough pressure to get us to reconsider).

My favorite example of this is the death penalty. As an opponent of it, I get very, very frustrated with my fellow travelers’ tendency to mention that we are one of only a handful of countries that continues to execute people. That the world does something one way and that we do it another is not, on its face, evidence that we are wrong. If other countries do things a better way, it needs to be explained why that way is better. I think that the metric-advocates placed too much of an emphasis on world community arguments rather than the ease with which one can divide and multiply by ten.

A few days ago I wrote a post about the advantages to being the oldest kid on your little league baseball team. Apparently the same is true of soccer:

In one study published in the June 2005 Journal of Sport Sciences, researchers from Leuven, Belgium, and Liverpool, England, found that a disproportionate number of World Cup soccer players are born in January, February and March, meaning they were old relative to peers on youth soccer teams.

A while back Half Sigma linked to an interesting article in the New York Times about, among other things, the academic advantages of being the oldest kid in your class and how parents are trying to take advantage of this:

However, more recent research by labor economists takes advantage of new, very large data sets and has produced different results. A few labor economists do concur with the education scholarship, but most have found that while absolute age (how many days a child has been alive) is not so important, relative age (how old that child is in comparison to his classmates) shapes performance long after those few months of maturity should have ceased to matter.

The article is interesting as is the topic as a whole. My oldest brother Ollie was held back into my older brother Mitch’s grade and even though Mitch is the smartest of the three of us, Ollie outperformed Mitch in elementary school (getting into the honors program while Mitch didn’t) and did comparably well until they went off to college where Mitch excelled and Ollie didn’t. My sister-in-law was young in her class and struggled for a while as well, though she ended up with a full-ride scholarship and is now a lawyer.

But what this really got me thinking about is the increasing gender gap between young men and young women. Some have suggested that the problem is that schools are increasingly geared more towards natural female behavior with the kids being told to sit down and be quiet and games of tag and dodgeball being banned and all that. I do think that there may be something to that theory. There are also some that believe that female teachers are overly concerned about the female students to the detriment of the male students that just seem to annoy them. That theory is not completely without merit either, though I don’t think that attitude is widespread enough to come close to approaching the problem.

What I thought about as I read the article was if comparative age makes such a difference, what about comparative maturity? It’s somewhat well known that girls are more likely to be ahead of the maturity curve and boys behind it in the early years. What if the issue isn’t so much teacher bias or feminine rule systems but simply a function of teachers teaching at the maturity level of their more mature, predominantly female, students? Then again, is that any different from a curriculum aimed more towards females than males on the whole?

I think that it is. If the study the NYT cites is sound, then that represents a structural problem for boys. One that can’t simply be addressed by making boys less like boys or diagnosing them with behavioral disorders and drugging them. It’s not so much a matter of boys being boys when they need to behave but rather of boys being held to a higher standard of maturity than they are comfortably capable of. Boys may decline to express the maturity and lose out that way or they may try to meet these expectations and expend mental/emotional energy doing so that they might otherwise be dedicating to classwork.

It also means that there may be some solutions to the problems. Half Sigma suggests cutting grades into 6-month groups rather than 1-year, which may help somewhat but wouldn’t address the gender disparity. Single-sex education might be a better example of a remedy. Put the boys all together and there should be less of a maturity gap. Plus you can play around with with more active learning that some believe is more conducive to the ways that boys prefer to learn. Alternately, you could consider different age cut-offs for boys and girls, putting the boys’ cutoff in July and the girls’ in December.

On the other hand, if it is all so comparative, maybe it’s pointless to even try. There’s always going to be a bottom half. A youngest boy as well as an oldest. Would taking these measures simply be shuffling the same deck? Perhaps so, though it would seem to me that the gap between the most mature girl and least mature boy would be less than the gap between the most and least mature boys. You can’t eliminate the problem, but perhaps lessen the effects.

When I was a junior in high school, there was an attractive, I made the acquaintance of Becky Moran. I didn’t have any classes with her, but she had previously dated this other guy that I knew named Steve Celtaine. I knew him through Todd Derracks, who I also didn’t have any classes with but who I knew from junior high. Why I couldn’t make better friends with the people that I actually did have classes with escapes me but is probably symptomatic of the same disease that prevented me from ever dating anyone that went to my high school. Of course, there were other factors in the latter phenomenon, as Becky Moran demonstrates.

Becky was a notably attractive tall redhead. She wasn’t modelesque or anything, but she was somewhere in the mid-to-upper twos. She was tall and leggy with an outstanding figure. Had she cleaned up nicer, she could have been at home on a Hollywood set. But she didn’t clean up particularly nice at all, nor did she seem to want to. She was in the ROTC with Todd and Steve, where femininity wasn’t particularly valued. That’s probably why she hung out with the ROTC crowd anyway, because they didn’t ask her to be someone she wouldn’t have been very good at being anyway.

Becky seemed to hone in on me very quickly at the lunch table where Steve, Todd, a couple other ROTC guys, and I ate lunch for a short while. She seemed to keep drawing me into conversation, but she and I really didn’t have much of anything to talk about. Not long after she started to eat with us, another ROTC girl joined us at the table. This is a story unto itself, but the site of the other ROTC girl, who seemed like a perfectly pleasant individual and wasn’t hideous in any obvious way, made me physically ill. I had to find some other place to eat lunch. After that, Becky started tracking me down in the hallway and periodically where I was hiding at lunch.

The most convenient place for her was after sixth period on our way to the bus. Every day when I left my last class, she was always right there in the hallway waiting. She would tell me about her day and ask about mine. After a week or two, she started putting her arm in mine as we walked down the hall. After a month or so, she made a habit of kissing me on the cheek when we parted ways. She started inviting me to parties that she was attending, but I always declined because I wasn’t the partying sort, I had doubts if I would fit in with her friends (Steve and Todd notwithstanding), and I figured that the girl who made me physically ill would probably be there, too. The she asked for my help studying, which was an offer I couldn’t refuse due to Will Truman’s First Rule of Female Interaction (the subject of another post).

Not long after we started making study plans, she disappeared. I later found out that she had gotten suspended from school. At first I was relieved because it meant the pressure was off. I no longer had this person clinging oddly close to me. Then, after a couple of weeks, the thought occurred to me that she might maybe could have possibly been romantically interested in me. Like, for real.

I won’t say that the thought never crossed my mind before that epiphany, but I always dismissed it pretty quickly. Girls as attractive as that are not interested in guys like me. Girls with temperaments with hers aren’t interested in squares like me*. She had two metric tons of male friends and she’d dated guys like Steve that were more obviously appealing than myself. But as I thought about it after her disappearance, I realized that she had never, ever displayed the affection for any of them that she did for me with the exception of Steve and that was more clearly of the hug-because-we-hug sort of interaction rather than putting her arm in a relative stranger’s as she did with me.

It very well could be that my initial instincts were correct and that she was just being overly friendly to someone that she did not consider as more than a friend, but the more I’ve learned about women over the years the less likely that is. One big thing that I didn’t realize at the time is that I’d become thin. I still viewed myself at the time as the fat kid that girls didn’t really ever want in any romantic capacity. I’d also, without realizing it, become a much more sociable person. I learned how to interact with people. I didn’t realize that some of the biggest barriers that were holding me back romantically had been lowered.

Becky Moran came to my mind due to a thread in Bobvis on the subject of sexual harassment. Even if I had realized what Becky was up to (assuming that she was up to anything), nothing ever would have come out of that relationship (except, as Steve mentioned when he suggested that I ask her out, the loss of my virginity). There are a couple others that I think might have been baiting me to ask them out that things might have worked out with (at least for a while), but not really her. Nonetheless, it stands as an example of all that I didn’t know when I really wish I had known it.

* – Not true, in high school anyway. I discovered later that my squaredom combines with a relatively open and tolerant attitude (by the standards of my surroundings, anyway) can be rather appealing for particular sorts. I had an unusually high number of freak female friends. Even if they weren’t interested in me romantically, I seemed to draw a lot of them. My first technical relationship was with a girl very similar to Becky in that regard.