$ for On Line Newspapers

(News-Herald, January 28) This week, in what must be a journalistic first, the New York Times announced that it is going to follow the lead of the News-Derrick. Specifically, the NYT announced that it will start charging readers to look at its on-line version, a decision that this paper implemented last November.
Neither newspaper met much enthusiasm from its customers. The internet hasn’t been around that long, but it has some strong traditions, and one of them is that stuff is supposed to be free. People will pay to DO stuff on the internet (over 12 million people pay real money each month to play World of Warcraft), but to just look at content, folks expect free.
These are tough times for newspapers and magazines. Many print media (“old media” they’re often called) have folded, prompting hand-wringing reminiscent of the days when malls were extinguishing downtown shopping.
For newspapers to stay in business, they must make money. Journalists like to eat, too. The money has to come from somewhere. But many attitudes stand in the way of paying for an on-line newspaper.
One is quick and easy availability of content on line. Why bother with those fancy “journalists” with all their “research” and smarty-pants “facts” that have been “verified” when there’s so much more colorful coverage from a few thousand ranting bloggers?
If a guy is giving away free hamburgers on the corner, why would you go sit in a restaurant and wait to pay for steak? Certainly there are some people who would pay—they’d rather have steak and they don’t trust the corner guy or his hamburgers—but will there be enough of them to keep the restaurant in business?
Another factor is the old media’s own fault. They used to sell nice, fresh-cooked steak, but after a while they just started dragging freeze-dried processed beef slabs out of the freezer, microwaving them, and calling them steak. Many big city newspapers became fat, happy and lazy, and their steak really isn’t all that better than the corner hamburger.
Still another factor is an old one. We aren’t really used to paying for our own entertainment. Television and radio are free (ish). The old media model is a three-cornered transaction, and the audience rarely foots the bill. The tv draws a crowd, and advertisers pay to have a chance to address the assembly. Newspapers do the same. All these years we’ve been paying a token charge while advertisers buy the paper for us.
The internet upped the ante. We could suddenly catch the show without having to stick around for the pitch. Advertisers figured out they were talking to an empty room; they packed up, stopped buying ads, and now nobody is paying for the show.
Modern Americans hate paying our own bills, and in a sense the problems in media are part of a larger picture. We have someone else to pay our medical bills, someone to hire garbage collectors and policemen for us.
Why does the government insist in running up debts? In part, because we the people keep egging them on. Why do we egg them on? Because with the miracle of deficit spending, the government can take one of our dollars and buy us ten dollars worth of stuff. The pain that we are just starting to feel in Pennsylvania is the pain of government telling us, “Sorry, but we can only use your dollar to buy one dollar’s worth of stuff.”
We’re used to having invisible someones buy stuff for us, the illusion that folks are giving us things for free, from infrastructure to entertainment.
The deck is stacked against newspapers, big or small. What can they do? The biggest thing they can do is provide something unavailable anywhere else. That’s a challenge—many papers use wire service content, but that same content is available everywhere on line, for free.
What newspapers need is content that no one else has, and lots of it. This challenge requires nerve. A paper deals with people who want free promotion for their events, and it makes sense to charge for what is essentially advertising. I respectfully suggest that newspapers should not view these folks as people asking for free advertising, but people offering free local content.
However, the other thing newspapers need is reader/subscribers who can grow up and not expect someone else to buy their paper for them. Don’t ask someone to buy it for you or make it for you for free. If something is worth having, it’s worth paying for.
(Note: I do pay for my own newspaper subscription)

Appreciating PA State Troopers

(News-Herald, January 21) Here in Venangoland, we’ve had ample opportunity recently to think about the business of being a Pennsylvania State Trooper.
I learned several things at the service last Sunday for Pennsylvania State Trooper Paul Richey. I learned that troopers are unparalleled organizers, that they can take seemingly unmanageable logistics and manage them. Among their many talents, it turns out that troopers are the world’s best ushers. (As a choir, however, not so much.)
I have also learned that the Troopers do not wear a badge. This practice reminds the troopers that their authority comes from their conduct, not any badge. In other words, the state police do not demand that citizens respect the badge no matter who wears it. Instead, they demand that their troopers earn our respect by being honorable men and women.
In this area, it’s not hard to find people who have an automatic dislike for any and all manner of police. And there’s no doubt that putting on a uniform does not magically transform an average jerk into a hero.
But I don’t think it’s at all easy for an average jerk to put on the uniform of a Pennsylvania State Trooper.
Not all jobs are created equal. Some jobs are more tough, more demanding, more heroic than others. They require a level of guts and commitment that not many people have, and yet the jobs need to be done. Pennsylvania has always known it asks a great deal of its troopers. For the first few decades of its existence, the PSP didn’t allow its troopers to marry.
It has been noted many times that Paul Richey volunteered to go out to the Smith home, that he didn’t have to be there. That tells us a lot about his character, commitment and courage.
But here’s the thing. The same thing is true of every trooper, every day.
None of them have go out there. None of them have to put on that uniform. None of them have to stay on the job, and none of them had to take the job (a job that they had to work hard to earn) in the first place. Scott Mohnkern could be selling cars by day and spinning tunes weekends. Dave Wargo could live off his wife’s teacher salary while he worked as a blues singer. All the members of Troop E could hang up their uniforms tomorrow and the rest of us would have no excuse to complain, because the rest of us didn’t have the nerve to take on that job in the first place.
State Troopers belong to that select group of people who run toward the things that the rest of us run away from.
It is easy for us to forget the level of danger that troopers face in their routine days. On the 13th, after all, the troopers were only going out to talk to a guy with a bad tendency to smack his wife around. Today other troopers will answer similar routine calls, make routine traffic stops, step into routine situations where someone is needed to bring some peace and order. Today, like any other day, they will never know if they’re about to meet some dangerous nut with a beef and a gun.
The rest of us don’t have to think about the danger in such places because there are people in uniform to think about it for us.
Sometimes civilians are called to face extraordinary danger. I wonder, for instance, how well Nancy Frey-Smith knew that she was putting herself in harm’s way every day. But as civilians, we usually find ourselves in a dangerous place by accident or circumstance. Troopers choose it.
In 2008 there were over 50,000 violent crimes in Pennsylvania. There are fewer than 5000 State Troopers.
There is nothing good about the loss of a man like Paul Richey. But it does serve as a shock and a reminder that even here in one of the world’s quieter places, dark and dangerous events can strike, and that there are people who have chosen to stand between that darkness and the rest of us. They and their wives and children and families sacrifice so much, sometimes all at once, and sometimes day after day, year after year, so that the rest of us can rest easy.
PSP’s stated core purpose is to seek justice, preserve peace, and improve the quality of life for all. Paul Richey’s life and death remind us how seriously they take that, and how large a debt of gratitude we owe them.

A Message from the World's Slobs

(News-Herald, January 14) I’m here with a message from the messy people of the world to those of you who are Very Neat:
We are not the ones with the problem—you are.
Being neat wastes enormous amounts of time. Double amounts, really, because you are taking the time to put things away just so, and before you know it, you just have to get them back out again.
The entire Picking Up process wastes time and effort. The wise messy person consolidates work—in the course of a normal day, while traveling about the house for everyday business (eating, dressing, showering), we just pick up anything that’s not where it’s supposed to be and move it to an appropriate location. No extra trips, no extra effort, no time wasted.
You people with incredibly neat and tidy desks—who the heck has time to do that? If your desk is incredibly neat, I have to wonder what you didn’t get done today so that you could do maintenance on your paper clip collection.
Even more troubled are the secret slobs who keep a public pretense of perfect neatness. These people don’t waste time, exactly. Their desks are neat because there isn’t anything sitting out in plain sight that they actually use. The shiny stapler, perfect collection of clips, pristine pile of paper sitting on their desk—they haven’t touched any of it in three months. All the supplies they actually use are shoved in a big jumble in the desk drawers.
Neat freaks (yes, I called them freaks) like to think they are taking control of their environment when actually the reverse is true. Jumble your kitchen condiment collection into a disarrayed higgledy-piggledy (yes, I said higgledy-piggledy) and the slob will be able to walk right by it, still free to go about his business. But a neat freak will be at the mercy of that mess, unable to take care of anything else until the salt and pepper shakers are in proper harmony.
(To be clear, I am not arguing in favor of dirtiness. An entire collection of paperback novels stacked around the dining room table is messy. An entire collection of dishes, displaying a collection of food samples from the last month and covered with growing things that are quite possibly never seen outside of a science lab—that’s dirty, and we messy people of the world do not support it.)
Messiness preserves value. A neat person might jump to the conclusion that a plastic doohickey is not valuable just because he hasn’t had any use for it in the past seventeen years. Messy people understand that tomorrow could be the day that plastic doohickeys suddenly return to prominence in the world. A messy person is not surrounded by random junk, but by a possibly-valuable collection of potential-worthwhile stuff. We understand that someday you will be thanking us for holding onto that doohickey. Jake DeBence ran a messy museum, and Venangoland is now better for his legacy of valuable antiques at DeBence Music World.
Messiness is also more secure. Neat people believe in a place for everything and everything in its place. For the messmasters of the world, the rule is a pile for everything and everything in its pile. A messy person can find that valuable plastic doohickey just as easily as the neatnik can (if the neatnik hasn’t already thrown it away). The important difference is that in the home of a neat freak, anybody can find it.
A burglar can get in and out of a neat person’s house in less than five minutes, loaded down with valuables. A burglar who breaks into a messy person’s home will be found by police five hours later, trapped between the stack of National Geographics and the collection of boxes filled with cans filled with wrapping paper, still trying to decide if anything important is in there.
Mess protects important things. The urban planners who designed Washington DC laid it out as a deliberate, confusing mess, specifically so that invading armies would have a hard time capturing our leaders. Yes, messiness is part of what has made our country great.
Entropy, chaos, disorder—these are the strong natural forces of the physical world, which means that neat people are battling the very natural order of the universe, while we messy ones are in tune with the cosmos. Neatness is unnatural. Come on. Set down those big storage tub organizers and join us on the dark side.

Gossip

(News-Herald, January 7) Gossip has always been associated with small towns. I don’t think we have a lock on the sweet pastime, but I do think there is a special brand that flourishes only in small communities.
Big city gossip is not a pastime—it’s an industry. Entire magazines and cable channels are devoted to dishing the latest dirt about a variety of celebrities. This is not new. Opponents of Presidential candidate James G. Blain shouted “Ma, Ma, where’s my pa?” in reference to his alleged illegitimate child (the reply from his supporters was “Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha!”) As long as there has been print, a certain amount of it has been devoted to gossip about the famous and successful.
Big city gossip has upped the ante by creating faux celebrities. We call them famous for being famous, but they are famous because they are fun to gossip about. In the big city gossip industry, people are willing to pay for dishes of new dirt.
This business model clearly does not work as well in a small town setting. At least, I don’t think so. Perhaps it is time for the News-Derrick to start a local gossip page. But small town gossip is a little like Christmas—it’s more fun to give than to receive.
Small town gossip used to come in more varieties than big city stuff. Small towns could gossip about general misbehavior, attributing all manner of rule breaking that, in print, would feed a flock of libel lawyers. During Prohibition, Chess Lamberton was picked up for an alcohol violation, but charges were dismissed weeks later when the evidence had mysteriously vanished. That much I know from newspaper accounts, but I’ll bet that a considerably more colorful story was traveling around town at the time.
Nowadays, malfeasance gossip is a lost art, mainly because people no longer feel much shame over being caught Doing Naughty Things (“Why yes, I cleaned out the pension fund. But let me show you our vacation pictures from Bermuda!”)
It’s not that gossip requires shame as fuel. It’s that gossip tends to shrivel up in the face of well-dispersed hard facts. If everybody already knows exactly how Floyd burned down his mother-in-law’s house, there’s no fun to be had conjecturing and nobody to pass the conjecture on to.
That’s why personal gossip will always provide entertainment. It’s not just that personal gossip is impervious to facts, but that solid facts will never be available.
The fastest way to get yourself on the small town gossip grapevine is to get a divorce. Divorce can be a matter of public interest (just how many businesses around here have been sunk because the owners went through a messy split), but mostly they provide drama surrounding a set of unknowable circumstances.
Regardless of a couple’s circumstances, nobody outside of the two people involved can possibly know what is between them. It’s fun to make guesses about why two people come together or fall apart, but guesses are all you can really have. As long as the guesses are entertaining, you can keep playing.
Guesses and gossip go together like peanut butter and jelly. And small town gossip can travel with a speed and vigor that the best big city tabloid can only dream of. Electricity seeks the ground, water seeks its own level, and gossip seeks the path of greatest entertainment. Gossip is only fun to know if you can tell another person. But not just anybody. You seek out the person who will be most entertained, whose face will register shock and surprise (or the jackpot—real emotions like joy or anger or pain or outrage).
In fact, passing on gossip to an entertained audience can be such a rush that many people just go ahead and pass on gossip about themselves.
Big city gossip has to hunt for an audience. Before you can be entertained by scoop about Paris Hilton or Heidi Montag, you have to know (and care) who they are. Even in a big city, that’s a small crowd. Because everyone knows everyone in a small town, potential audience is everywhere. The trick is not to find a possible audience, but to find it first, before someone else ruins your fun.
Is gossip bad? I’m not a big fan of Not Truth, but I suppose gossip, like the truth, can be spoken maliciously or kindly. Just don’t mistake gossip and truth for each other, and when you’re the subject, don’t confuse gossip with genuine concern.

Commitment

(News-Herald, December 31) New Year’s Eve is my least favorite holiday. Regret, disappointment, betrayal, sadness, disaster, stupid choices—too many of the ugliest snapshots of my life are time-stamped December 31.
But I like the idea of resolutions. I like the idea of renewed commitment to something, despite the fact that most of us don’t do commitment well.
We often approach commitment focusing too much on the end point. Now, I don’t mean to suggest that taking a clear-eyed view into the future is bad. The world includes too many people who are surprised that when they stick their metaphorical tongues in metaphorical fans, they suffer metaphorical hurt.
But commitment is not about “if.” Commitment is not about, “ I will look at the various obstacles and if I think I can beat them and if I think this will turn out okay, then I guess I will try to do it.”
There is no “if” in commitment. Commitment is more “of course.” “Of course we’re going to do this. There are some obstacles, so let’s figure out how to get past them.” We don’t say, “I’ll eat food today if I can find the time.” We say, “Of course I’m eating today. I’ll just find the time.” Commitment changes “Will I do this?” to “How will I do this?”
This is what people are complaining about when they talk about the fuzziness of modern marriage. Too many folks say, “Yes, I’ll stick with you if we can figure out how to beat that obstacle” instead of “Of course we’re staying together. Let’s work on how to deal with the obstacles.”
Organizations do the same. “Of course we’ll help you, valued customer. Let me just figure out how to solve this” is not “We’ll try to help with this problem if it falls within the list of issues I’m looking at on my computer screen.”
“If” is the enemy of commitment. So is “what if,” as in “What if the other job would be better” or “what if a different person would make me happier.” Making a commitment to Option A always means kissing Options B through Z goodbye. If you insist on keeping your options open, the only commitment you’ve made is to keeping your options open.
Other impulses get in the way of commitment. Keeping your choices hidden so that nobody can critique them is not commitment. Pretending you didn’t try in order to avoid looking foolish in failure is not commitment. That’s one more reason for marriage ceremonies to be held in front of friends and families—it’s what you do if you really mean it. And if your resolution is to lose ten pounds, but you aren’t telling a soul—well, you’ve already decided you’re going to have that piece of cheesecake. Your real commitment is to your goal of not looking foolish.
It’s not that commitment guarantees success. It doesn’t. In life, speed bumps and brick walls look much the same from a distance. Often you don’t know which is which until you try to get past it. If you make it past, it was just an obstacle; if you didn’t, it’s a dead end.
You have to make the commitment to find out. Standing at a comfortable distance making a judgment about which you’re facing, because if it’s going to be a dead end or even just plain hard, you aren’t going to go any further—well, that’s not a commitment. When you commit to go the distance, you don’t get to now how long the distance actually is.
Non-commitment has ultimatums (I won’t stay with you unless you serve me on silver plates); commitment has limits (I will stay here all week, but if I don’t get any food, I will collapse). Non-commitment says “I will try as long as I feel like it.” Commitment says, “I will keep going as long as I can.”
If commitment guaranteed success, everybody would leap whole-heartedly into the commitment pool. But committing guarantees either real success or undeniable failure— and that’s what many people don’t want to face. (As Yoda said, “There is no try. Only do—or do not.”) So they pick the luke-warm not-so-commitment and hope they get lucky.
Our commitments define us, both the ones we make consciously (I will walk five miles every single day) and the ones we make without thinking (I will stay safe and comfortable). Spending at least one day out of the year thinking about them couldn’t be a bad thing.

Boxing Day

Yes, a few days late. I actually forgot I'd written something about this holiday...
(News-Herald, December 2002) Today, Thursday, December 26, is Boxing Day. Well, at least in some parts of the world it is.
Nobody knows exactly when Boxing Day began, and historians offer a variety of theories about why it developed.
Some say that because servants were required to work on Christmas Day, they would have the following day as their holiday. As they headed out to celebrate the holiday, their employers would give them gift boxes.
Another tradition says that it was the day on which churches opened their poor boxes and distributed the contents to the poor.
Both of these ideas fit reasonably well, as December 26 is also the Feast of St. Stephen. St. Stephen, for those of you who are not up on your saints, was the first Christian martyr, one of the original deacons of the church, ordained by the apostles to care for widows and orphans.
There is, in fact, a Boxing Day carol. Remember—“Good King Wencelsas looked out on the Feast of Stephen.” If you have ever actually sung more than the first verse of the carol, you might recall that the song tells the story of the good king rendering assistance to the poor.
Boxing Day is celebrated in Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Canada. The tradition includes a variety of raucous sporting events and has broadened from helping the poor to giving a gift to any of those who have rendered a service in the past year—tradesmen, doormen, mail carriers, porters and others.
It’s not hard to see why the holiday never really caught on in the states. It is very much a class-driven holiday; the whole purpose is to set aside one day on which the upper crust folks deign to share a little something with the underlings of the world. It’s not at all in keeping with the idea of America as a classless society.
Still, I can see some advantages to an American version of Boxing Day.
First of all, any holiday that can be commemorated with a sporting event deserves our attention. Granted, some of the celebratory events, such as cold-water swimming, have a certain lunatic quality about them. But we already play more football games on New Years Day than we know what to do with. Another easily memorable holiday on which to schedule a pigskin romp or two certainly couldn’t hurt.
More than that, though, I support the idea of a holiday that requires us to personally honor the people who do all the grunt work. Labor Day ought to fill the bill, but most of us just enjoy the three day weekend without pausing to consider what the day off is about.
Besides, Labor Day is abstract. Boxing Day American style could be much more direct. There are many people on whom we depend for the daily maintenance of life. The city water doesn’t magically appear in the sink, the mail isn’t delivered by enchanted gnomes, and garbage doesn’t fly off the curb by itself (well, unless it’s left there a really long time). Our roads aren’t self-clearing, electricity doesn’t feed itself into self-repairing cables, and groceries do not grow on the shelves of stores.
All of these things are taken care of for us by real live human beings. We are able to go about our business, take care of the daily stuff of our lives because other people keep the wheels moving for us.
It wouldn’t hurt us a bit to say thank you, not in a vague, abstract way, but as a real gesture to an actual person. Do it not as a sign that you are so much better than they are, but because you appreciate what they do for you.
Sure it’s their job, but they could always do something else. And if nobody was willing to take on the job of hauling away your garbage, you’d be in a terrible mess.
If you can thank Aunt Grizelda for the matching puce and eggplant colored pot holders, you can certainly thank the guy who spent his day today slogging through the slush so that you could get the late Christmas cards from your cousin Beulah in Lake Tahoe.
So we’ll make this year the year we start the American version of Boxing Day. Start slow. Pick someone to thank today. Write him a nice note, or give her the extra fruitcake that’s sitting in your kitchen. Thank someone whose hard work makes your life a little easier. Happy Boxing Day.

Christmas Shopping Eve

(December 24, News-Herald) I am done shopping. Seriously, I’m done.
I am one of those people who suffers from severs shopping disorders. I have trouble gearing up to shop, but once started, I have real trouble stopping. And I don’t improve with practice. So far this week I have made four trips to the grocery store. And I’m not counting the time I went to the store, realized I didn’t have my wallet, drove home to find it, couldn’t find it, realized it was in the car, and drove back to the store.
Meanwhile, my daughter is home and in baking mode, so I have been on ingredient patrol (since my home is usually only occupied by a single guy, it is ingredient-free). I take lists. I still have to go back. Four trips so far this week. And I am writing this column on Monday night.
It is the Christmas shopping that pushes me over the edge.
I work hard to shop locally. I do not think less of people who cruise to Pittsburgh or Erie to do some big time shopping. But every penny I make as a teacher comes out of some taxpayer’s pocket, so I feel an obligation to put back as many as I can.
This year a new national initiative emerged called the 3/50 project, tooting the horn for local independent businesses. Pick three local independent businesses you would like to see survive. Spend fifty dollars. It’s an excellent thought. Here’s a way to take care of our own without turning to big government for a cure. Lots of folks worry about the local economy, and this is a way they can put their money in the same neighborhood as their mouths.
But local shopping has challenges. In the later stages, I can make fewer trips because I have the stock of many stores memorized. Some stores have clearly tightened their belts by sending salespeople home (but no, I will not use the self-check-out—if you want me to work for you, then hire me).
And memo to local business operators: Nobody wants to support you more than I do, but sometimes you make me feel that I want to give you my business way more than you want to get it.
I shop only for family. My family of origin was once five people large, but continued expansion and recruitment has swollen the ranks. To me, that means an ever-enlarging list of people to get Just The Right Thing. A well-chosen present says, “I like you.” I want to make sure the gifts I give speak up clearly. If I start buying presents for every friend, co-worker, and Person I Just Generally Like, I will enter a prolonged anxiety attack, worrying that I shortchanged someone. Overlooking ALL my friends and co-workers lets me feel I’m at least being evenhanded.
I blame this gift-giving anxiety on my mother. She begins Christmas shopping in June. You would think that would make keeping the secrets difficult (our presents are traditionally unknown until unwrapped), but she rarely spills the beans. What she does do is call the beans names. She has already told me that she is giving me what she gives me every year—a Lousy No-good Present.
I have also stimulated the part of the local economy involved in package delivery. It’s not just the wonders of amazon.com—there are, for instance, lots of good books that are no longer in print, but luckily I’ve found alibris.com, a massive used bookstore on line. And I can present fret any hour of day or night.
I know there are people who find gift-buying heinous, viewing it with the same glaring eyes that our Puritan forefathers used when they banned the holiday entirely. Those folks can go sit with the people who carp about the imaginary War on Christmas.
I think there is something sweet and commendable about indulging the desire to do something nice for the people we love; the fact that such giving involves a sacrifice of ordinary mortal money is a fine echo of the larger immortal sacrifice that Christmas foreshadows.
I like getting people stuff, and Christmas is a fine excuse to do it. But I will be glad to sit back later tonight, take in a Christmas eve service, go to bed while my grown children have their traditional slumber party, sleep until my son harasses me into wakefulness, and enjoy a day tomorrow during which I need do nothing but enjoy the day.

The Race to the Top (Education reform #42187)

(News-Herald, December 17) I’m sorry. I didn’t think we’d be talking about this sort of thing during the pre-Christmas rush. My cynical side suspects that certain people were kind of counting on that.
As part of the federal initiative to stimulate everything that walks, crawls and breathes by throwing money at it, a giant dollar pile has been set up to throw at education. It’s called “Race to the Top,” and apparently the first part of the race is to the top of that mountain of money.
States are being given the chance to compete for educational stimulus money—many are called, but only a few will be paid off. Only a few states can win a slice of pork pie by showing their willingness to scrap their own educational visions and do as Washington wants them to.
The feds have four goals they want to see states pursue:
1) Adopt super-duper standards and assessments.
2) Get big-time data crunching systems in place.
3) Recruiting, retaining and rewarding top teachers.
4) Fixing low-achieving schools.
Noble goals, though DC also has very specific ideas about how to pursue them. Goals 1 and 2 translate into more high stakes testing and centralized control of local curriculum, with lots of sophisticated bean-counting. In Pennsylvania, that will mean the PSSA, Keystone exams and PVAAS boondoggle will be given fresh coats of paint and set in cement.
Goal 3 would require some of the biggest shifts in local focus; there isn’t any school district in Venangoland that makes even a token effort to recruit and retain the tops in the teaching field. Most depend on a hiring technique known as “Hope We Get Lucky.” The troubling part of Goal 3 is that it appears the feds would like to see merit pay (and de-merit pay) based on student test results.
Goals 1-3 require camouflage and paperwork. Goal 4 has real teeth. In the Pennsylvania version, a school that is deemed too under par has three choices—replace the principal and at least half the teachers, convert the school to a charter school, or simply close the school and ship the students out.
This is particularly exciting when you remember that under current No Child Left Behind goals, every school in the state will fail (or cheat) within the next four years.
States will compete for free federal money by racking up points based on various criteria, most measuring how willing the state is to submit federal demands. One of the criteria is how well the state can guarantee that local school districts will go along, and so each school district is being asked to sign a letter agreeing to follow the state’s plan. The local school districts hand the keys to the store over to the state, who in turn hands them over to the feds.
Everybody remotely serious about education knows that accountability is absolutely necessary. We should be able to tell you what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and how successfully it has been done. But everybody remotely serious about education also knows that the way to get there is not with one-size-fits-all cookie-cutter programs poorly measured by a handful of high stakes tests.
So why are so many people who ought to know better lining up to declare that yes, indeed, the emperor’s new clothes are beautiful?
You remember that mountain of money. Some of the promotional material for RTTT notes proudly that half of the federal money will actually makes its way to local districts. The rest presumably will stay in Harrisburg to buy really nice, shiny bean counting machinery.
The program is complicated and still-changing, but it is worth noting that many of its details are not supported by a shred of the sort of data these reformers claim to revere. Even if you think a bureaucrat in DC is the best person to design curriculum for our local school districts, I believe in my heart that some of what’s being pushed here is bad educational policy.
Harrisburg has been asked to sell off our schools and sell out its educational principles. The state could say no. So could local districts.
And while you may think that such a sweeping retooling of American public education might be accompanied by discussion, you’d be wrong. In the tradition of great Harrisburg initiatives (midnight pay raise, property tax “reform,” I-80 tolls) this is being handled like a greased pig in a wind tunnel. Your local district must make its decision and let Harrisburg know by December 18. Tomorrow.

Son of How the Church Lost Me

(News-Herald, December 10) Last week’s column about leaving the church generated more response than any column I’ve ever written, more emails than I can keep up with. So I’m going to break two of my rarely-broken rules—don’t write about the same topic two weeks in a row, and don’t discuss mail.
Many correspondents guessed that I would receive many invitations to various churches in the area, and they were correct. The invitations came with varying degrees of charm and concern, and while I probably won’t accept most of them, I sincerely appreciate each one.
Some folks will be surprised that I received not a single solitary note calling me names, speculating on how much I will enjoy roasting in hell, or recommending that I be thumped soundly for my wandering ways. Even people who mostly disagreed with me were kind and friendly about it.
It reminded me of something I’ve suspected for a long time, which is that people inside and outside of the church don’t generally understand each other very well.
These days, few people know how to discuss differences opinion without slinging mud and calling names.
Some folks object to being evangelized (i.e. “fixed”), and some believers can’t sit idle when they see someone who, they believe, needs their spiritual help. Unchurched folks can be overly defensive, hearing themselves called names and rejected even when it hasn’t happened yet, and might not happen ever. At the same time, some folks in the church sit silent while a wide variety of wingnuts wrap their personal political and social agendas in an ill-fitting suit of faux Christianity. Those wingnuts make it easy for intellectually lazy unchurched folks to dismiss the whole package.
Churched and unchurched folks are way more complicated than they give each other credit for.
I heard from a wide variety of drop-outs (and nearly-drop-outs) who shared that they felt a church had failed to meet their needs and felt that they couldn’t stay in a place where they were spiritually starving. And I heard from a wide variety of church people who wanted to remind me that the church is not a fast food drive-through where you motor up, order what you need, get it, and then drive away.
I agree with both. In broken relationships the blame, if we have to call it that, is usually shared by both parties. But here’s the thing—in this particular broken relationship, the church is the party that’s being left.
Imagine one spouse is walking out. Pat says, “Why are you leaving me?” Chris explains, revealing heart and hurt and motivations. “Oh,” says Pat. “Well, let me explain why you are wrong to feel that way.”
This conversation does not end with Pat saying, “Oh, well, since you’ve explained why I shouldn’t feel the way I do, I’ll just stop feeling that way and stay here.”
Last week was not meant as a personal plea. I am working through my own issues in my own way. But people who abandon the church rarely explain why, leaving the church to fly blind on the increasingly common issue of “Hey! Where did everybody go?” I wanted to add some data to the conversation; folks are free to use the info, or not, as they wish.
But my mail has led me to one more suggestion.
The most universal comment in my mail, from all sides of the pews, was that I was brave to write last week’s column. On the one hand, I get that. Talking about religion in Venango County is like complaining about the Pope in an Irish bar – some kind of argument will certainly break out.
But on the other hand—really??!! Is it really that hard to talk honestly about a subject that is so critical? Religion is one of the few issues that is so pervasive, so important to us as a society, that it shapes the lives of even those who choose not to be involved in it.
The emails, from believers and non-believers, churched and unchurched (need I really explain that those distinctions are not the same?), moved me and reminded me of how much I missed simple, honest discussion of the matter, with people sharing what they really think and not what they think they’re supposed to think. And I’m told that some of these conversations have spilled out into the real world. In this season, when it’s so easy to go through motions without remembering why, that can’t be a bad thing.

How the Church Lost Me

(News-Herald, December 3) In the last few decades, large numbers of Americans have dropped out of organized religion. I may know a bit about why, because I am one of them.
I was raised in the church. Went to Sunday School and youth group regularly. I was a youth delegate to Annual Conference (the United Methodist equivalent of state government, with more praying and less money-grubbing), and when I outgrew that, I joined a group of activists who pushed for young adults to have a place in the church’s ministry. I’ve been an usher, a choir director, and a youth director.
I tell you all of this not to brag, but so you understand that I’m a true drop-out, not a never-was. So how did the church lose me and, presumably, people like me?
First, I have no beef with God. I’ve been blessed with a life far better than I deserve—sometimes way far better-- and not a day goes by that I am not grateful for it. And I am well aware that faith exercised without community is incomplete. But for years, I’ve wrestled with the following:
No attitude of searching. For me, it’s a basic part of life to be looking for answers. I am amazed and alarmed by the number of believers who are looking, not for understanding, but for confirmation that what they already believe is true. What is the point of trying to be open to the voice of God if you have convinced yourself that you already know exactly what He has to say?
It’s Finished Christian Syndrome. They’re finished, done growing, done searching. They don’t need anything except another coat of varnish and a little polish, thanks. I can’t relate. How can anything be alive and not be growing?
No room for the wicked. It is one of the oldest clichés in the churching world, the repeated reminder that we are supposed to minister to people who are dirty, grubby, unsavory or even (gasp) just plain wrong. And yet some church folks apparently did not get that memo.
Never mind the Great Commission (“Go ye into all the world etc ” which we memorized in Bob Shearer’s Sunday School class). Some believers think that a Good Christian should never consort with, talk to, work with, or share air with the Wrong Sort of People.
I knew a minister once who was happy to minister to anyone who was Right With God. But if you weren’t, he expected you to go off by yourself and work it out, and he didn’t really want to talk to you until you had Gotten Right. Never mind the arrogance involved in believing that you can judge who is Right With God; the total disregard for the Bible’s fairly clear instructions on the matter is disheartening. Too many churches have no more active ministry than a country club or a reasonably friendly bar. Too many churches spend too much time celebrating how their faith proves that they’re better than everyone else.
Tiny God. The Eternal Creator of All That Is, Was and Will Be has strong feelings about which political party to support in this year’s elections?!?! Seriously??
Traditions short-circuited. You know how upset Catholics become when the Vatican messes with tradition every hundred years or so? Protestant churches do that all the time. “That tradition that has always been comforting and meaningful to you? Yeah, we decided to chuck that last week.” I could go back to my old church, but beyond the bricks and mortars, it bears no resemblance at all to the church I grew up in.
Diversity? Pursuing diversity for its own sake is dumb. But in Venango County, if you don’t come as part of a complete traditional family unit package, many churches aren’t sure what to do with you.
My Own Fault. To be honest, I have to acknowledge my own role. I’m the one who put distance between myself and the church. It’s true that the last time a minister visited me was in September, 1979. But in all the intervening years, not one church has barred the door or refused to let me sit in a pew. Those of us who chose to walk away could also choose to walk back.
What might prompt us to do that? Hard to say. The shortest answer is for churches to be places that clearly offer something powerful and positive not found elsewhere. That might give churches and strays a reason to bother with each other.

Stuffing

(News-Herald, November 26) My daughter feels that I should write about stuffing, which she believes is the whole point of the turkey.
Personally, I rather like turkey, though the combination of turkey and stuffing is optimal. I do not have any special secret family recipe and so in the years that I have stuffed and cooked a turkey, I have started with a bag of herbified bread, some chicken broth, assorted onions and herbs, and a bunch of garlic, because everything in the world is better with garlic.
I dump it all in a big bowl and add ingredients till I like how it smells. Then I stuff it into the bird.
Well, after I finish defrosting the bird. I know there’s a formula that tells me when to put the frozen bird in the fridge so that it will safely defrost (weight times the cosine of the number of bags of leftover restaurant food taking up refrigerator space minus the size of the ice cube maker equals “put the turkey in the refrigerator shortly after the Fourth of July”). I live on the edge, sitting the brick-like bird on a kitchen counter roughly five minutes after I remember that I need to defrost it. On cooking day this is supplemented with a warm bath in the kitchen sink (the bird, not me).
I am aware that I am turning the turkey into a seething cauldron of dangerous bacteria, so I am telling you clearly here that doctors, dietary experts and lawyers for this newspaper all advise that you should absolutely NOT follow any of the turkey instructions I am offering here.
Nevertheless, I have always felt relatively safe from the consequences of my wanton recklessness because I do not eat, lick or otherwise ingest the turkey before I have cooked it an appropriate number of hours (weight of bird times age of oven equals half a day). Stuffing laced with enough garlic to kill all life-forms within a ten-foot radius also helps.
My son is a big fan of chicken, but not so much its poultry cousin. He is not a major fan of holidays in general, so I think he views holiday meals as gilt-edged potholes on the highway of life. He has no strong feelings about stuffing.
My daughter accuses turkey of being boring. I disagree, though I think much of the standard holiday menu makes a good case for the value of boring. Stuffing is as exotic as I care to get. I can appreciate the artistry that goes into a giant vat of sweet potato sculpted into the form of the grand canyon with little marshmallow goats and donkeys prancing around the whipped orange cliffs, but I don’t want to eat it.
I’m inclined to say that Things Made Out of Jello do not belong on the Thanksgiving table, and I think that vegetables that are good enough for everyday use shouldn’t be forced to dress up for the occasion with bread crumbs or nuts or other unfamiliar substances.
But I have to admit that my own Thanksgiving dinner is not complete without cranberry relish, a substance that nobody really eats on purpose. It’s traditional, and I am a creature of habit. Tradition is a useful part of holidays; it helps make them comfortable and relaxing.
Still, even the most traditional of us can bend. My tradition was to watch the Macy’s parade, and then complain about how present-day parades are invariably ruined by “hosts” talking incessantly throughout. Now that I have cut my cable television ties, I no longer get to watch the parade, or complain about it. That may be a loss for me, but it’s a win for anybody who ever had to listen to me complain.
Time eventually forces traditions to change. My son won’t be home, so I can only hound him about eating by phone—not quite the same. But some traditions are immovable. I will play tomorrow night in the Franklin Silver Cornet Band pops concert because I can’t imagine not doing it.
A holiday is just another day—same number of hours, no different air. And stuffing is just bread. In both cases we simply add something of our own to make it into what we would like it to be. It’s that ability to shape a day that we are referring to when we talk about making every day a holiday. Heck, if we wanted to, we could have stuffing every day.

Heroes 2009

(News-Herald, November 19) Every year at this time, I ask you to honor one of your heroes. Not some big, grand hero that you know about from television news or a magazine, but someone who you know personally. Someone who is an actual part of your life.
We are always oddly reluctant to honor such people. Perhaps we’re just shy. Perhaps we feel awkward. Maybe our heroes also have some less-than-admirable qualities that we don’t want to be seen as approving.
There is something extra sad about people standing around a funeral home saying nice things about the deceased that they never told that departed person in life. The one thing sadder I can think of would be someone who died before he ever told the people he honored how much he admired and valued them.
But as a people we find it all too easy to criticize, complain and carp while never quite getting around to the more positive words. We leave people to stumble forward blind and alone, never knowing how much they mean to many of the people around them.
So let’s do it. Once a year, minimum, let’s tell them that they are our heroes. Even if they are people that we are already close to.
My children have become heroes of mine. They are certainly far braver than I was at their age. They have carted themselves to the other side of the continent to pursue their biggest dreams and aspiration. They have sacrificed much of the comfortable and familiar to pursue the fields that they are passionate about.
But it’s not just that courage that I admire. They have continued to show courage and strength in their personal lives, been smart about who to let in and brave about holding to those people, even when holding on was a challenge of one sort or another.
Because they are my children, I love them. But for all these other things, they are heroes of mine.
So are my parents. They got married when my father was in college—who does that? Surely someone must have tried to talk sense into them. Then ten years later they packed up three children and moved a day’s drive from their home and families to Pennsylvania, which also could not have been easy (my sister was only three at the time).
Not that this is a scary, awful place, or a hard place to settle in and make a home. But they had no way of knowing that when they headed down here.
I’m not talking about extraordinary leaps of unheard-of daring. People do similar things, take similar leaps every day. But people also shrink from doing similar things every day.
People who take the leap will tell you they didn’t have much choice, that once they knew what they wanted, they had to deal with the obstacles. Once you’ve decided to eat the banana, you have to deal with the peel.
But lots of folks find it hard to summon that courage. When they see what they have to do, they draw back and say, “But I don’t wanna.” It’s a story as old as Moses saying, “Go pick somebody else for this.”
So among my heroes are people like my children and my parents who find the nerve to go where there passions direct them, who summon the kind of courage which is ordinary in its application, but rare in appearance. My heroes are the people who do what they have to do, even if it is hard or inconvenient, even if, as is almost always the case, they have to take the leap not knowing for certain where they will land.
It’s a quality I admire because, at critical junctures in my life, I have lacked it. Every big mistake I’ve made in my life I’ve made because I lost my nerve, and so many of my heroes are the people who didn’t.
You may choose your own admired heroic qualities for your own personal reasons. The point is, if you want a world where these qualities flourish, you need to honor them when they appear.
So send a note—something real and physical that your hero can hold and save—and let him or her know. Doesn’t have to be fancy. You can start with “You are a hero of mine because…” and send. Do it now, this week, and enter the season of decorating knowing that you added a little point of light to the world.

The Dumbest Generation

(news-Herald, November 12) I recently finished Mark Bauerlein’s best-seller The Dumbest Generation. It’s one more interesting entry in the genre of cranky “kids these days” screeds, but a couple of his ideas struck me as interesting. These types of books are as regular as dandelions. It seems you are not a certified grown-up until you have complained about Those Darn Young Folks.
In the 1970’s there were regular complaints about the bunch of scary young “hippies” who would gather in Franklin’s parks for all manner of nefarious purposes. In the 1930’s, the Franklin Band threatened to stop giving concerts unless parents got their children under control. [Insert tired old quote by Socrates about disrespectful younger generation here.]
There is one different factor in current complaints—the rise of the digital age. Media changes always add challenges. Find a culture that is adopting the use of writing and you will find a bunch of old-timers complaining. “Kids these days. They don’t learn the old stories and songs. They can’t remember stuff at all. They just sit around squinting at those funny marks on papyrus.”
Digital media is changing us in ways that aren’t entirely clear yet. I like to physically own my music and books; younger folks seem comfortable having these things in intangible and impermanent forms. And the internet allows my children to stay close and in touch in ways I would never have imagined.
This is my digital age story: I stopped at Sheetz and bought gas, then pulled out onto the street. My cell phone rang. It was my daughter calling from across the country to tell me that my gas cap was off. One of her friends had seen me pull out, called her on the cell phone, and then she called me.
Bauerlein’s point is that the digital age is making young Americans stupid. Some of what he says is not new. One generation’s historic essential gold is another generation’s trivial garbage. Boomers remember where they were when JFK was shot; they are lucky if their descendants even remember who JFK was.
But two of Bauerlein’s points struck a chord.
First is a simple observation. We’ve been hearing for a while now the prediction that access to the internet and computers and an infinite library of digitized information would put young brains into overdrive. The internet computer revolution was going to drop our next generation of mental saplings into a deep sea of brain-expanding fertilizer.
Well, the saplings have been soaking for well over a decade now, and there are no signs that the computer-weaned young are any brighter than their forebears, and at least a little evidence that they are actually dumber. It may be that computers don’t make folks smarter any more than the invention of the automobile made people better runners.
Bauerlein’s other interesting point is more subtle. Digital connection has made it possible to stay insulated from other people.
This is true for everybody. Folks who want to believe that Obama was not born in America can stay on the internet fully insulated from anything like facts or sense. Belief that the earth is flat also thrives on line.
But Bauerlein suggests that this effect is more insidious for young folks.
Back in the day, teens would spend just a portion of the day in Teenworld, a world of drama and angst, where cool mattered and smart did not. But at the end of the day they had to go back home, a place often (but not always) ruled by adults and subject to rules different from Teenworld. They needed permission to leave, or even to call out on the single landline in the house.
Experiences in home, church, work and other settings outside of Teenworld prepared young people for life in the adult world, a world where you have to pull up your pants, work for rewards, and listen to people who aren’t like you. When it was time to leave Teenworld, they knew how to acclimate to the Real World.
But digital media have ended that, suggests Bauerlein. With a cell phone and good texting thumbs, teens can stay immersed in Teenworld 24/7, living by nobody’s rules but their own. They stay dumb and immature and therefore often fail to learn how to take a place in the world of Grown Ups.
I don’t think Bauerlein’s book is the last word. In fact, I think he gets some things just plain wrong. But it’s an interesting place for a discussion to start.

Loved and Lost

(News-Herald, November 5) Is it better to have loved and lost?
It’s cliché to call men commitmentphobic. There’s more to it than the picture of men as hungry buffet diners who won’t settle for just one food. Plenty of men, and women, too, fear commitment for the same reason some folks fear heights, water and pointy objects—something in their gut warns This Way Lies Danger and Hurt.
Hence the proverbial alternative to “loved and lost”—never to have loved at all.
Most of us would opt for choice three—to love and not lose. But that’s probably less likely. Not just because couples and love can fail; sometimes timing, circumstances, geography or courage fail. The only method guaranteed, the only way to be sure that you won’t lose, is not to love at all.
The benefits? Relative safety. Lack of danger.
Is that better than loving and losing? After all, loving and losing hurts. It stings. At its worst, losing leaves you reeling and torn open, betrayed by someone who had the keys to your heart (or your house, or bank account). You are left not only bereft of love, but doubting your own worth, your own senses, your own judgment.
But even the best losing leaves a curious emptiness, a place where someone once filled up a corner of your heart. Even if you are a happy, fulfilled person, a good love brings you happiness beyond what you can find for yourself.
Still, safety is way overrated. To begin with, it’s a lot harder to achieve than it seems in theory. And while “never love at all” could mean hiding in the basement, what it usually means is relationships that are safely half measures, a partner chosen precisely because they will never get close to your heart, or someone who is convenient and familiar. And that usually ends up creating a lot of hurt for which there is no justification.
Yes, losing love hurts. But if someone offers you a supremely delicious chocolate muffin, you’d be a fool to pass it up just because the experience of eating it will only last a few bites.
Love always risks loss, not only because things might not work out in the end (whatever “the end” is, exactly), but also because love, like everything else in life, costs.
It’s not just the time and effort that you put into it yourself. You pay costs in your relationships with other people, your availability, focus, attention. Commit to the person of your dreams, and you lose a little control over your own fate.
Love has an opportunity cost as well. Opportunity cost is an economic concept—spend a dollar on chocolate, and you give up the opportunity to spend it on pickles. Choosing to stay with one person means choosing to go without a whole bunch of other people. It takes a grown-up to make that choice, and some people grow up faster than others.
Once you’ve grown way up, you’ve accumulated much stuff in your life, and holding love can require a major rearrangement of the furniture. When you’re young, you don’t have much furniture, but you have a thousand future possibilities that have to be sacrificed to gain that one real, actual love.
So loving means you will lose something, and while the romantic ideal is that you’ll lose something you’ll never miss because you’ve acquired a priceless gem for the cost of a jar of pickles, it’s human to miss some of those things anyway. That’s why it’s wise to choose with your eyes open, fully aware of the cost, so you don’t second-guess yourself later and mess up the Good Stuff.
Love, at its best, makes you stronger and better, helps you grow, helps you become more yourself, teaches you how to help someone else do all that, too. That’s how you know it’s love, and not something smaller or uglier in faux-love mask.
Loving and losing stinks (just so we’re clear on that). But if you did the love part right, you are still stronger and better after it has passed, certainly more so than if you had never loved at all. And while losing is bad, the stupid stuff you do from fear of losing is far worse.
Love is not for the cowardly or the childish. In the end, death eventually does part us all. So there really is no question of whether we win or lose—only if we’re going to get in the game. Unlike some games, this one rewards the courage to risk losing.

For Monarch Park Fans

William Passauer has created the definitive Monarch Park website, and I recommend it to all fans of local history.

As noted elsewhere on this blog, Monarch Park was a trolley destination park in Venango County during the first few decades of the 20th century. Today there are few traces left of this thriving amusement park that once served as Venangoland's playground.

This site features images (virtually every photo I've ever seen of the park is here) plus history, maps, and even modern views of the site. This is the best work of scholarship about the fabled park that I've seen to date. You should click on over and take a look.

Nearly Scary

(News-Herald, October 29) It’s that time again.
I don’t mean election time. This round of elections reeks of dullness. In Franklin most races were settled in primary season, except for the city council contest. We have two candidates running for three seats, which means the field is ripe for some sort of write-in campaign. I’m not sure if the seat is for a particular ward or an at-large, but I’m going to suggest we all write in “Christian Marshall” for councilman, because I think we could at least count on him to make council meetings more entertaining.
But, no. I mean that it’s Halloween time again.
There are lots of things not to like about Halloween, starting with its newfound role as the kick-off holiday for the Christmas season. When Tim Burton put Christmas and Halloween together for The Nightmare before Christmas, the result was one of the best movies ever. When retailers put creepy plastic skeletons next to fake Christmas tree displays, the result is just disturbing.
But for people-watching, Halloween can’t be beaten. Get a big vat of candy, sit on your porch, and the parade comes to you.
Incredibly Cute Children are the bread and butter of Halloween, and there is something pleasantly heartwarming about how they are usually part of a family field trip. I appreciate the ambition of families who spend the night piling in and out of the car after cruising for the next street filled with burning porch lights. And I’m always encouraged by the large number of parents who gently remind their children to practice basic courtesy. Most of the customers actually say, “Thank you.”
Of course, that’s only the customers who can actually speak. There’s something vaguely unethical about using around a trick-or-treater who can’t walk, talk or chew as a Halloween prop. I wait apprehensively for the year that someone comes carrying a stuffed or inflatable child as an excuse to gather sweets.
Halloween has lost a certain amount of its brand identity. Theoretically, it’s the holiday to be scary, but costumes both in the stores and on the streets don’t stick to the theme very closely. There are certainly many traditionalists who trot out the fake blood and creepy faces, but in many cases it takes extra effort to scan for scariness.
Small children generally stick with cuteness. Little boys dress up as super heroes, which is not at all scary, while little girls frequently turn themselves into princesses. The princess thing will eventually be scary to those super-heroes, but not for another couple of decades.
Grown men are encouraged to simply give in to our worst fashion instincts. Plenty of costumes look suspiciously like the clothes that many of us wore on purpose decades ago. I freely agree that lots of that is plenty scary, but somehow I can’t quite associate vampires with disco and tie-dyed vests.
Grown women—well, in the costume section of any store, you can see a certain pattern emerge as you walk down the aisle: sexy nurse, sexy maid, sexy raggedy ann, sexy nun, sexy grandma, sexy cable repairwoman, and sexy sexpot. Any character you can think of in the pop culture world exists in a “sexy” version for women; as God is my witness, a woman can buy a sexy Spongebob Squarepants costume this year if she wishes, and I have to admit—that is a little bit scary.
The tough costume demographic remains the teenaged crowd. Of course, many prefer the traditional ski-mask and dark clothes ensemble. (Question for grocery store managers—are more eggs sold just before Easter, or just before Halloween?) For those who hope to grab a little treat with their egg-flinging trickery, the choice is usually a little face paint plus A) something ugly, B) something torn, or C) the same sports jersey that you usually wear on game day.
Occasionally one finds teens who will commit to looking fully ridiculous, but most are torn by the tricky issue of trying to beg for treats while still maintaining their dignity. It’s a useful skill that many will need later in life; I suppose that’s a bit scary, too.
Perhaps Halloween has become a time to just sort of let loose and act a little silly. I can’t argue with that. It can be scary to get out of your box, but sometimes when you do the really scary things, you get the biggest rewards.
And that’s why I’ll be writing in “Christian Marshall” for city councilman in Franklin.

PSSA, PVAAS and More Nifty Help from the State

(News-Herald, October 22) This week I was schooled by the state about more awesomeness that is Pennsylvania’s System of School Assessment (the PSSA tests). This latest big vat of coolaid was served up, ironically, in the Hemlock Room at IU6. When the state lowers itself to send consultants to instruct the poor hicks who toil in local school districts, there is always lots to learn.
For those of you still following the PSSA’s, we are down to the crunch. Remember, No Child Left Behind mandates that in four years, every single American school child will test above average. Since this is only slightly more likely than pigs flying out of Ed Rendell’s nose, the ever-benevolent state has leapt to the rescue with—more statistical tools!
The number crunching is called the Pennsylvania Value-Added Assessment System. “Value Added” is a useful term from the manufacturing world. Simple explanation: If I take a ten cent piece of sheet metal and turn it into a two dollar widget, I’ve added a buck ninety’s worth of value.
What that principle has to do with testing or educating students is not clear, unless the state means to suggest that students are the same as sheet metal and widgets. I was prepared to argue that point, but it turns out that the state’s meaning is something else; words mean whatever they want them to. And I can call my bicycle a stealth bomber.
PVAAS uses a thousand points of data to project the test results for students. This is a highly complex model that three well-paid consultants could not clearly explain to seven college-educated adults, but there were lots of bars and graphs, so you know it’s really good. I searched for a comparison and first tried “sophisticated guess;” the consultant quickly corrected me—“sophisticated prediction.” I tried again—was it like a weather report, developed by comparing thousands of instances of similar conditions to predict the probability of what will happen next? Yes, I was told. That was exactly right. This makes me feel much better about PVAAS, because weather reports are the height of perfect prediction.
It was hard not to well up with that sort of sarcasm during the indoctrination. We were there to copy numbers from websites onto papers, as if the zillions of tax dollars had suddenly crumped out before the developers could add the capability of printing reports. The consultant veered between trying to bludgeon us with jargon-filled gobbledegook and patronizing us with explanations of words like “excelling” and “improving.” And assurances that if we just taught what the state wants us to, everything will be great.
The fallacy at the heart of the PSSA remains. A bunch of multiple choice questions are a lousy measure of the reading skills of live humans. (The PSSA, we were told, is not a standardized test. Okay. I’ll think about that while I pedal my stealth bomber to the store.) You can run numbers through statistical models all day, but if the numbers are near-meaningless to start with, a massage doesn’t improve them.
The intent of the state has not changed much since they first launched the PSSA’s—Harrisburg wants to write the curriculum for every district in the state. What has changed is their tone. Ten years ago they were still trying to gently con us; now their contempt for local districts is beginning to shine through. They are really tired of talking to all these yokels; they would just as soon simply roll right over us and whip us into shape.
So prepare next for the proposed Keystone Exams. Students currently in 7th grade may face ten exit exams in order to graduate. And because the state wants to wield a big hammer, the exams will count for a full third of students’ final grades.
The process remains a two-handed slap in teachers’ faces. On the one hand, we’re treated as if we are the problem and that schools need to be rescued from us by brave bureaucrats and consultants. On the other hand, we are pushed to do things that we know are professionally unsound. Imagine suits going into hospitals and telling doctors, “You are making all these people sick. Stop using pointy scalpels and start operating with shovels.” High stakes multiple choice tests are bad education.
And the final indignity is that after these sorts of sessions, one on one in the hall, many of these consultants will freely admit that they’re selling poisoned punch, but hey, they’re well paid and they’ve gotten used to the taste.

More Bad Managers

(News-Herald, October 15) Show me a chronically bad employee, and I will show a big neon sign pointing toward a bad manager.
Please note—nothing that I’m about to say removes one iota of responsibility from employees. An employee who is not doing the job should be making improvements, not excuses.
But if I am looking at the big picture and I see an organization with employee performance problems, the blame lies with the managers in the system.
In the widget factory, managers are the guys who do not actually work on widgets. Managers are not in any way directly involved in the primary mission of the company, which is to manufacture widgets.
Instead, managers have one primary function, and that is to get the best very best performance out of the people who work for them. That’s their entire job. And the performance of their employees is the most important measure of whether they are good managers or not.
Most bad managers have forgotten this principle. It’s not that they choose bad methods to get the best work out of their people. It’s that they have forgotten that getting that best work is the manager’s job.
They believe, for instance, that effort is a measure of their own job performance. But if the dikes are collapsing, it’s pointless to claim that you plugged some of the holes and you were going to plug some more but it was difficult to figure out how and actually plugging those holes would have been hard. The fact that you tried as hard as you felt like trying is irrelevant when the waters are up around your armpits.
Management is like most jobs in that the job is not done when you’re tired of working; the job is done when you’ve achieved the results you need to achieve.
Many bad managers have their favorite techniques, Management by bullying. Management by email. Management by think-I’ll-hide-in-my-office-and-hope-it-goes-away. None of these get any useful results, other than to set up the moment when the bad manager tells his boss, “Hey, I managed the heck out of that situation. If it didn’t get any better, it must be a hopeless employee or sunspots or drugs in the water. It certainly isn’t my fault.”
This is a dumb career move for the bad manager. If he’s announcing that he can’t actually manage employees, which is in fact the very job he was hired to do, his boss should be wondering why the organization is still paying him. Well, unless his boss is also a bad manager.
Bad managers will also protest that their techniques of choice Should Have Worked. But “should have” means nothing. When your car stalls, you can kick the tires and kiss your St. Christopher medal, then get back behind the wheel and claim that the car “should be” running—but you will still be going nowhere.
There is no doubt that some employees are a challenge. Most come with some particular quirk that, under the wrong circumstances, can invite disaster and chaos. Getting the best possible work out of them can require skill, talent and diligence. And that’s why the widget plant managers get paid more than the widget builders.
If an employee needs help and direction, it’s the manager’s job to see that it’s provided. If the employee can’t be salvaged, it’s the manager’s job to replace the employee.
Of course, a manager who wants to replace employees because he doesn’t have the wit to manage them will not exactly inspire loyalty or optimism in the employees. That’s why it’s useful to have a variety of techniques with which to salvage problem employees.
An entire cluster of employee problems, hostility and poor performance is a sure sign that bad management is loose in the workplace. Part of insuring that you get the best work from your people is helping them work well together. Bad morale, infighting, and widespread non-performance are sure signs that a manager either can’t do his job or just doesn’t want to.
None of this excuses employee bad behavior. Every employee should be responsible enough to stay on track, behave himself, and do what he needs to do without being reminded. In a perfect world all employees would be self-directed professionals, responsible and selflessly working together to fulfill the organization’s purpose every hour of the day. And in that world the managers would all be out of work because there would be no use for them.

What Do You Want

(News-Herald, October 8) It seems like the easiest thing in the world to know what you want. And yet the world is filled with people who aren’t certain, don’t know, can’t decide. Even when we tell ourselves that we know what we want, our actions can suggest that we don’t really know what we’re talking about.
The grown-up dating world, for instance, is filled with people who “really want to be in a relationship.” Except that if you watch their behavior, their choices, the way they spend their time, it becomes obvious there are a hundred things more important to them than finding a mate.
Or parents who say that they want their children to grow up strong and independent, but who don’t allow their children five minutes of independent thought or action in a week.
Sometimes people grab what they don’t want and hold tight, because if their hands were free, they would have to risk reaching for what they do want. They might fail. They might drop it. Full hands keep their hearts safe.
Successful people say they want something and then behave as if they actually mean it. The Secret of Success isn’t much more complicated than that. Most of the people who are muddled and just getting by have missed some part of that formula.
They may “want” something only because they think they are supposed to. Shortly after college graduation the landscape is littered with couples getting married because they’re pretty sure that’s what they’re supposed to do next. It does not occur to them that they may not WANT to get married. Or rather, it doesn’t occur to them at that point—it often comes up later.
Some people discover that behaving as if they actually want what they want is hard. It may require hard work. It may require giving up things that, supposedly, one wants less than the Big Goal. Goals cost, and if you want them you have to pay. “I want a Lexus and I want to pay $1.50,” is no use. “I want this person as long as I don’t have to give up these others,” doesn’t buy you a functional relationship.
Some people are way too vague about what they want. “I want a better life” doesn’t really give you direction. It could mean a higher paying job or better hair.
Sometimes people want things they can’t have. It’s positively un-American to say, but people have limits and those limits affect what they can accomplish. If your IQ is 50 and you want to become the world’s top rocket scientist, you are destined for disappointment. A shlumpy, middle-aged guy will never become an NBA starter.
Some people want things that can’t go together. Then they have to decide which they want most. This can lead to whiplash-inducing waffling. It’s not just confusion; met needs do not motivate. You can be really driven by hunger, until you eat. You’re at the beach and you want to sunbathe and you want to swim in the water. While you’re in the water, you’ll really want to go lie on the sand. While you’re lying on the sand, you’ll really want to go dash into the waves.
Sometimes what you want comes in an unexpected package; if you’re not clear and alert, you may miss it. You may even reject it because you don’t like the wrapper. That’s why you need to know what you want—so that you can recognize it no matter what shape it comes in. “I want chocolate,” you declare. But if you only recognize chocolate when it’s bar-shaped, you’ll miss a tasty chocolate bunny while gnawing on a chocolate-colored bar of soap.
In Venangoland, we find lots of people who say they want economic resurgence. And yet. Some of them don’t want it badly enough to actually do anything about it. Some of them want it to happen by a rebirth of industries that aren’t going to be reborn here or anywhere else. Some want the region to somehow get “better.” Some want the region to get what it needs as long as they don’t have to sacrifice anything they want.
Too many people are more concerned about the package and not the actual economic improvement. Pushing economic development around here would work better if folks really wanted it—without a long list of Only If’s attached. The rule for regional success is no different than that for personal success. Know what you want, and then act like you really want it.

Applefest '09

(News-Herald, October 1) This week I’d like to talk about a guaranteed path to true love and peace for all the people of the world.
Ha! Just kidding. The only thing I could possibly be writing about this week is the 473rd Applefest in Franklin. Crowds may not top one million, though a large turn-out is anticipated for the launch of a moon rocket containing the bones of Col. Drake, followed by the Beatles reunion concert.
Okay, still just kidding. Generally the only way to say something new about Applefest is to make stuff up. As a pretend journalist I’m certainly not above that, but I am reluctant to do so when 100,000 fact-checkers are expected. (Disclaimer: the above details were exaggerated for effect. The Beatles will not be at Applefest, as far as I know.)
Every Applefest brings small variations on past festivals, mild mutations that have allowed the original small celebration to evolve into a sprawling monstrosity in the same way that single-cell organisms eventually led to more complicated structures capable of sitting on a couch, eating pizza and hollering Jeopardy answers at the tv.
So, yes, there are some new wrinkles. There’s the wedding, some new musical offerings, probably some new tchotchke shops. But let’s be honest. If you wanted new things at Applefest, you’d start your festing by first visiting all the stuff you never got to last year.
Applefest is festival comfort food. There is something pleasant in the consistency. We look forward to the music, the pancake breakfast, the race, the show at the Barrow, the cars, our favorite shops, the carved stumps and the seashells painted with Jesus and Elvis—it’s so much like visiting with old friends that visiting with actual old friends seem perfectly suited to the occasion.
However, if you are a mildly wild soul looking to spice things up just a bit, let me offer some suggestions for new Applefestian adventure.
Franklin Pizza Challenge: Next to churches and bars, we have more pizza sellers than Dunkin’ has donut holes (and why can’t we have one of those again, huh?). So—can you eat pizza from every pizza place in town before the weekend is over? (Disclaimer: note that I asked “can you”—the question of whether you should is one I’m not going to raise. The moral, ethical and dietary issues of the pizza challenge are ones that every person can only answer for him/her-self.)
Create Marketing Ideas: The Chamber needs ways to market Applefest like I need hair ribbons. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some good ideas out there. For instance, Pittsburgh folks might be interested to know that Applefest is going to be way more fun than the G-20 summit. No demonstrators terrorizing local businesses and citizens, no local police terrorizing demonstrators. “Applefest: No Tear Gas Here” may not seem like a natural slogan, but I bet once it’s on a few t-shirts it will grow on people.
Cell Phone Games: Years ago, I suggested cell phone tag. To play that game, you call your pursuer and give hints for finding you. Back then, cell phones were mostly for talking. Now, of course, cell phones can be used for texting, photographing, and performing minor surgery.
So, for modified cell phone tag:
Team I starts by picking a location and taking their picture there. The picture location can be easy (by the fountain) or hard (by the roof slates painted with pictures of fish). Send that picture to Team II, who now have to find the location and take their own picture there and send it. Then Team II picks a new location and sends a picture to Team I. Rinse and repeat until it’s time to eat another funnel cake (approximately 30 minutes). Time stamps on the phone and math skills will tell you who found the locations fastest. Winners pick the place to eat supper; losers buy.
Cell phone teams may also compete to collect the largest set of pictures of incredible Applefest sights, from the above-mentioned Jesus seas shells to a ferret on a leash. Each special sight can only be claimed once—first team to send a picture to other teams gets the point.
(Disclaimer: If you don’t know what I’ve been talking about for the last two paragraphs, you should not attempt to play these games. Instead, just move along the sidewalk at a leisurely pace and when you see someone using a cell phone, shake your head and mutter, “Kids these days!” Then go get some pizza.)