It occurred to me today that the high road is probably pretty light on traffic.

On Monday, I posted a piece about hypocrisy and running one’s mouth. Unfortunately though, it doesn’t seem like our society is going to be going away from the ‘a lot of people talking about a lot of different things’ approach anytime soon.

So perhaps, we’ll just go to the highlight reel. A look at some of the hypocrisy that I’ve been privileged to witness over the past few days.

* * *

The other night, while I was watching a football game, there was a point where the announcers were agreeing with a referee’s call on the field, saying how the call was the right call and that it would have been an obvious call to make, all of this happening while the call was ‘under further review’. Then, when the call ended up being reversed, the announcers changed their tune so quickly that it was jarring.

I wasn’t the only person in the room who noticed.

My daughter turned to me and said, “How could they have been in favor of that call two minutes ago and also in favor of it being overturned just now?”

So, I took the opportunity to mention to my daughter what a ‘talking head’ is, and how people are often motivated to say the things that they believe other people want to hear.

But, that got me to start wondering about the number of people in the world who are subject to the ebb and flow of public opinion, leaning this way when it’s popular to do so, and leaning that way when it’s the more popular choice.

* * *

You may not know who Marina Sirtis is. In fact, you may only be slightly more likely to know her if I mentioned her by the name of one of the characters that has contributed most to her fame; Ms. Sirtis played Counselor Deanna Troi on the television show Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Since I happen to follow most of the actors and actresses from that show on Twitter, as a way to keep current on news about the franchise, I’ve been privy to a lot of information coming from the actress who once played a reserved, intelligent, empathic ship’s counselor.

One of her most recent tweets was anything but empathic, specifically in reference to whether or not it was likely to expect that she would gloat about a recent Republican loss any less than those Republicans gloated about Democratic losses in 2016.

Now, don’t get me wrong, because I am not at all upset when people of low moral character get voted out of office. Ms. Sirtis and I probably can agree on a number of issues surrounding the most recent political elections.

But…

While I was thinking about how great an actress you would have to be in order to play someone so compassionate on a television show, while it turns out to be the case that you are so much less so in real life, I was also thinking about how ‘an eye for an eye’ leaves the world blind.

I was also thinking about storming the field.

* * *

I don’t know if you heard or not, but the Notre Dame football team beat the number one team in the country (Clemson) this past weekend. It was easily the most exciting and satisfying game that I’ve watched Notre Dame play in the last decade, at least. At the end of the game, in celebration and excitement, the students –and probably most of the other people who had been allowed in the stadium– stormed the field to celebrate.

The President of the University, Father John Jenkins –a man that I have often had reasons to admire and respect– issued a statement expressing his disappointment about the decision of the fans to do such a thing, in the midst of a pandemic.

I was hoping he wouldn’t say a word, considering his own predicament.

On September 26th, Father Jenkins was present at the ceremony in the Rose Garden of the White House, celebrating the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, an event that Dr. Anthony Fauci later described as a “superspreader event”. In fact, Father Jenkins’s attendance at that event was a direct violation of instructions that he’d given to members of the Notre Dame campus community, asking them to restrict travel in the best interests of the University’s health and safety.

That particular choice of his, most certainly motivated out of a level of excitement about the nominee’s connection to the University, has caused much consternation for the President, from the students and faculty members at the University. Calls for the President’s resignation, and the threat of a vote of no confidence from the faculty, loom large for Father Jenkins.

His excitement lead him to poor decision-making in the same way that those students most certainly stormed the field without safety in the forefront of their minds.

Can someone please take the off-ramp to the high road? Anyone?

* * *

I guess, at the end of the day, what I’m trying to get at is this: hypocrisy is a plague among us. Its rampant destruction results from our inability to master our own tongues; the truth of the matter is that you’re not likely to find many silent hypocrites roaming around.

Talk is cheap, so cheap in fact that it seems to be what people are most likely to do –> in fact, what’s even cheaper than talk is social media ‘talk’, where people are free to say all manner of crazy things, things that they wouldn’t dare say in front of someone else in person, for fear of the repercussions.

BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH.

If your idea of making the world a better place is posting your opinions on social media, subjecting the people around you to your inflated observations –and that’s all you do in the name of social change– then you shouldn’t be surprised/angry/upset when the world around you doesn’t seem to be getting any better.

Especially if you aren’t living out those opinions in your daily life. I hate to break it to you, but some of the people that you are friends with on Facebook actually get to watch you walk around all day, acting contrarily to what you suggested we should all be doing.

I guess that’s my point, having come around to it in a rather round-about kind of way: it has to start with us, with each of us. Am I responsible for Father Jenkins’s travel plans? No, I am not. Am I responsible for calling people to account for the opinions they profess that seem to be in contradiction to the way they live? No, I am not.

But, I can start with me. If we all just started being intentional about working on ourselves, and our own imperfections and inconsistencies, we’d hopefully improve. And, as a by-product, we’d have less time to be judging each other.

It occurred to me today that it has to start somewhere.

I’m a hypocrite, and I’m not sure how to fix it.

Maybe I should edit that last sentence.

I’m a hypocrite, and I have a basic understanding of how to go about fixing it, but I’m not sure that I want to do what’s required.

There. That’s more accurate.

Obviously, there are a couple of different ways to approach one’s hypocrisy. The first, and most obvious way would be to stop talking so much. Since hypocrisy is a combination of saying something to someone about what they ought to do, and then doing something else for yourself, people who keep their mouths shut more often are probably much less likely to be hypocrites, simply because they have less often said things that they might end up later contradicting with their actions.

If only the world was more quiet. If only people made fewer brazen declarations, out of a fear that they might end up being discovered as a hypocrite down the road when they contradict themselves. If only.

I’ve, on many occasions, written about our proper course, about the decisions that we should all be considering, that we don’t end up considering. Probably more times than I’d like to admit, more times than I might even be aware of, I am guilty of violating –in big ways and in small ways– the very positions that I claim that we should all be taking, the very choices that I claim that we should all be making.

Take this, for example:

In the spring, right around the start of the pandemic, I wrote a post on this blog about mask-wearing and about following the guidelines that –at the time– the CDC had just released. But, then, probably only a few hours after publishing that post, I was caught in public by someone that I know, someone who knows me, without a mask on. Truth be told, back then, I was still getting used to mask-wearing and having one with me wherever I go. I’m fairly certain that, back then, this person was not reading the blog that was, back then, just getting off the ground, so at the end of the day, my hypocrisy wasn’t apparent to them, and it probably wouldn’t ever have been recognized by anyone else. Back then.

Of course, the other approach to fixing the problem of one’s own hypocrisy is to modify one’s own behavior so that it comes into accordance with what one has claimed to be appropriate and right. If I decide to run my mouth on a regular basis, this becomes more of a challenge of course, since I end up having to bring my own behavior in line with a whole host of different comments that I’ve made.

Having said all of this, I’m not sure which would be more difficult: to keep my mouth shut more often or to obey the edicts that I hand down from my imagined position of superiority.

That’s a tough one.

I’ve written about division in our nation on this blog, but what have I done to unify the people around me? I’ve written about hatred on this blog, but what have I done to show love? I’ve written about moderation and discovered myself to occasionally be an extremist. The list goes on and on.

A little less conversation, a little more action, please.

* * *

I’ve often thought that there ought to be a talk-tax, or maybe a daily limit to speech. Say, everyone is allowed to speak five thousand total words per day, and then a tax accrues for every two hundred words extra you say after that. So, for example, I’d have to be careful with how much talking I do on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, since I’d want to come home and then write a one-thousand word blog post in the evenings on those days. Or, I’d have to be willing to pay that price.

Perhaps I could get sponsored by some of my readers, people who (might) think that what I have to say (write) would be worth paying the ‘talk overage tax’ for me –in whole or in part. Any takers?!?!

Of course, we’d work social media posts of all forms into this, to keep those people who talk too much on the internet (including me, perhaps) from annoying the rest of us with their drivel. And then, people who talk for a living would have their ‘talk overage tax’ covered by their employers.

Of course, we’d have to play it by ear at the start. Maybe the daily total number isn’t quite right. Maybe the ‘talk overage tax’ concept needs to be tweaked. But, I’m sure we could work something out.

Oh, and here you go. People can buy extra words. You know how? They engage in making the world a better place, for points, and those points are redeemable for extra words. If I want to be able to go home at the end of a full day of talking at work, then I’ll spend time on the weekend volunteering at the local homeless shelter. This will earn me twenty-five points that I can use to purchase twenty-five hundred extra words.

At least then we won’t have as many people talking about a better world and not doing anything about it.

Ooh, and here’s an idea.

Everyone has a bank –> maybe it’s a weekly bank or maybe it’s a monthly bank (it seems to be that a daily bank wouldn’t have the same sting to it) and people would have to learn how to budget their words like we ought to learn to budget our dollars and cents.

Of course, I’m just shooting in the dark here.

Just trying to come up with a way to quiet things down a little bit.

If I had a dollar for every time that I’ve heard someone opine about the world in its current state, and I knew in my heart that the person in question wasn’t going to do a darn thing about the situation, other than whine, I could most certainly afford to pay may ‘talk overage tax’ for weeks and weeks to come.

More on Wednesday.

 

It occurred to me today that there are many things that vary by degrees.

Three students take a test in a class. The first students fails the test with a 58%. The second student gets a D- by scoring at a 62%. The third student gets a 74%, which earns them the mark of a straight C.

Should that student –the one with the straight C– be proud of themselves? I don’t think I would be proud of a C. But, maybe one hundred students have taken this same test, and only thirteen of those one hundred were even able to pass the test; what then? Imagine if the top score of all one hundred of the students to have taken the test is that 74%. Should they be proud then?

What if the proctor is expecting only As? What if every score that isn’t an A (90% or higher) is determined to be a failure?

That’s a pretty high bar.

Or imagine it this way –> three men have problems with looking at women with lust on their minds. The first man looks at just about every woman that he sees with lust on his mind. The second man does it once or twice a day. The third man does it a couple of times a week. Is one of these three doing a better job than the others? On the one hand, you’d be tempted to say that these men are various in their level of depravity; on the other hand, though, they’ve each got a bit of a problem.

What if the expectation is that a man should never look lustfully at a woman –except his own wife, perhaps– ever in his whole life?

Imagine three children come in from playing in the backyard. One of them has dirt all over their hands. The second has dirt all over their hands and face. The third is covered from forehead to feet with clumps of drying mud and caked-on dirt. Would you say that one of them is dirtier? You probably would, and you’d be right. But, that doesn’t make the other two not dirty. All three of these children are dirty, and they vary by degrees, but they ought to EACH be defined as filthy –> because they are.

Or are they? I can hear you thinking it –because I’m thinking it, too– that the kid with just the dirty hands isn’t filthy, per se. And I’d have to agree with you, if we’re going to compare that kid to his two peers. But, what it we are going to compare that kid with the dirty hands to a fourth child, one who is freshly out of the shower, who is as squeaky clean as they are ever likely to be? Then, that kid with the dirty hands starts to feel a little more filthy.

* * *

I’m becoming more and more disgusted with some of the tendencies that I see in American Christianity. Of course, if you know me, you know that I’m a Christian, and you know that I’m an American, so a statement like this doesn’t roll easily off of my tongue. Nevertheless, my conviction is growing that we are getting a lot of what we’re doing completely wrong.

One of the things that I think we are messing up is our attitude of self-righteousness.

Ten is larger than six, and six is larger than four, but is ten big? How about when we compare than ten with one billion?

Am I better than my neighbor because I go to church and they don’t? Are my neighbors better than the axe murderer rotting in a federal prison? Are any of us ‘good’?

Nope. Especially when you think about where the bar is.

Isaiah 64 has a great verse on this concept. In verse 6, it says that all of our righteousness is like filthy rags. Or, if your a New Testament kind of a person, look at Romans 3. Verses 10 through 12 say that there is not even one good person on the planet.

And here’s the problem with filthy rags. The unsaved, unchurched, lost sheep in the world, the lost sheep wandering around in the yard outside of the American Christian church, they are all wearing filthy rags. But, here’s the thing:

So is the American Christian church.

The only difference –besides the forgiveness and mercy and grace of God– is that the lost sheep aren’t feeling better about themselves and their behavior than they ought. American Christians who’ve forgotten that they are in need of a savior repel the lost sheep by pretending that they aren’t still wayward sheep, most of the time –> filthy sheep themselves.

No one is good; there is not even one.

Ten is only four more than six, and it’s only six more than four, but ten is also nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety short of one billion.

That’s what American Christians would do best to keep in mind. We fall short. SO VERY VERY SHORT. The bar is so high that we couldn’t get over it driving the shiniest Cadillac to the prettiest church on every Sunday of every year for our entire lives.

And what we lose by pretending that we are better than we are is that we end up distancing ourselves from the people around us who need the same mercy and grace and forgiveness that we’ve found at the foot of the Cross, not because of how cool we are or how well we know the Bible, but because we heard the message. How can we tell people about the message that we’ve heard when we’ve built walls between them and us, walls built out of our own self-righteous non-sense? There isn’t a person on the planet who wants to approach their friend or neighbor to discuss the things that they are struggling with, when that neighbor or that friend has forgotten that they’re a sinner as well.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am here to tell you that I am filthy. And so are you. And so are your friends –the self-righteous ones and the wallowing heathens, alike. Heaven isn’t going to one day be full of people who mastered appropriate human behavior.

Ten really isn’t that much closer to a billion than six or four is. God forgives the ten for not being a billion, and the six, and the four.

There are two kinds of filthy sheep in the world –> forgiven filthy sheep and lost filthy sheep. There aren’t any clean sheep. And if you’re a filthy sheep that’s looking around and thinking, “Hey, look at how clean I am!”…

Knock it off.

I’ll see if I can do the same.

It occurred to me today that the tower sometimes falls.

If you are unfamiliar with the game Jenga, it starts with a tower that is made out of rectangular blocks that are laid on top of each other, three blocks to a level, in levels that lie perpendicular to those above and below, eighteen levels in all.

Once the tower of fifty-four blocks is built, players take turns removing blocks, judiciously, from the tower, hoping to avoid causing the tower to fall. The player who causes the tower to fall is the loser, obviously.

The game is fun, inasmuch as it is fun to watch the tower fall, especially if someone else is responsible for that oops. Early on in the round, it’s not a terribly difficult thing to do –> to get one of the blocks out of the tower. But, as play progresses, the tower becomes more and more unstable, and it is more and more likely that a person –especially if they have a particularly low level of dexterity– is going to cause it to fall.

This morning, it occurred to me that the game is a metaphor for life, in a few very interesting ways.

* * *

2020 has been a pretty decent year for me; but I feel kind of bad voicing that sentiment out loud. With all of the memes going around that discuss the horrors of 2020 –I literally just spent fifteen minutes looking at 2020 memes; it’s no wonder writing these posts takes me so long, sometimes– and the fact that a lot of people are just clawing and scratching their way to December 31st, hoping for a new start in 2021, there’s a little bit of guilt that goes along with saying to people that I’ve had a great year.

I am in the greatest physical shape of my life, as nearly as I can tell. I ran a half-marathon on October 10th, which I certainly wouldn’t have been able to do at the start of this year. I’ve written more than 650 pages of fiction and non-fiction prose since the start of the year, and I have most definitely never done that before. I’ve made some other, minor, positive changes in my life that have contributed to my overall sense of health and well-being.

All of these changes have reminded me of Jenga, inasmuch as the game really is about removing things from a structure and hoping that the thing is still standing when you’re done.

Getting rid of the excuses and making the necessary changes to move myself forward this year was challenging, and I was a little afraid of how some of those changes were going to affect my lifestyle, but the tower is still standing; dare I say that the tower is better off for me having removed some of what was getting in my way.

Of course, you don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, which is to say that you can’t go overboard when it comes to making a bunch of changes in your life, and I recognize that. But, I’m also starting to recognize, the older that I get, that I’m not looking down the road at as much ‘remaining time’ as I used to see. It’s time to stop kidding around, for me –and maybe also for you.

No change means no progress.

* * *

As I was discussing the concept for this post with my wife, she reminded me that there was a particularly challenging part of the game of Jenga that I was totally forgetting about. If you are a fan of the game, maybe you noticed it, as well, when I described the game in the opening section.

In Jenga, when you remove a piece from the tower, you have to place it back on top of the tower, which is to say that you are building on top of what it is that you are slowly destroying.

Admittedly, it has been some time since I’ve played the game, so I have to apologize for having left out that little detail. And, as my wife was reminding me of this part of the game, I was already thinking about how that affects my metaphor. If you can imagine the game a little better now, where you remove pieces from underneath to place them on the top, you can see that this ends up becoming a balancing act, of sorts. It’s an additional, challenging part of the game to be sure, stacking the pieces on the top of the tower without causing it to fall over.

I don’t know if you’ve ever thought of your life as a balancing act, but I’ll bet a lot of people have. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a plate spinning performer before –perhaps at the circus– but I often feel like my life is a constant exercise in trying to keep several spinning plates up in the air, on top of these thin poles, and it’s not as easy as it might sound. Others think of their lives as a tightwire act, where they are really doing their very best to maintain as much balance as possible, in order to avoid falling off the high-wire.

Jenga is as good a metaphor as any for this difficult balancing act that we call life, come to think of it. Removing blocks from the base of the tower to build onto the top of the tower becomes, without great attention to detail, an exercise in improper foundational mechanics. Of course, at the beginning of the game, the fifty-four blocks that you start your tower with are a very solid foundation –perhaps lacking a little width, but otherwise pretty concrete. But, as you go through the process of weakening your foundation, block by block, you are then hoping that what you’re left with is enough to build upon.

Life is a balancing act, to say the least. It’s not nearly as delicate, or dangerous, when you’ve got a firm foundation. The less firm that foundation is, the closer you probably are to a crash.

It occurred to me today that we have a chance to move toward something better.

On Monday, I wrote about the experiences that a friend of mine in college is having with his classmates and their tendencies toward cheating. While I talked about cheating and why I think it will continue to grow as a problem –the further we get into the information age– I wanted to continue that discussion, while also branching out onto a couple of other, related topics.

As an educator, I’ve always had certain, charged feelings about cheating. There have been periods during my career when I hunted cheaters with an avarice beyond scope. For example, I used to administer a research paper in a Senior English class, and the paper was a graduation requirement; I occasionally had to keep my eyes peeled for cheating on that assignment. There have been other classes, here and there, that I’ve taught over the years where cheating flared up, from time to time. The problem with cheaters is that they don’t tend to work any harder at the cheating that they’ve decided to do than they would have needed to work to complete the assignment at hand. As such, their cheating isn’t usually very ingenious or crafty; it usually screams from the page, “I cheated on this assignment.”

These days, though, I am starting to think that it’s time for education to abandon the kinds of assessments and assignments that students are able to cheat on in the first place.

Last week, as this friend of mine and I were discussing cheating, he was very judgmental of his classmates, who would chose to take such actions as to cheat. But, when I suggested to him that his professors ought to be doing a better job of creating materials that tested students on their knowledge and understanding of the course material, without using pre-packaged assessment questions that exist, with their answers, in a dozen different places on the internet, you could tell that the thought hadn’t occurred to him that his teachers were partly responsible for the cheating problem.

If we are truly teaching students content and material in a way that they are understanding and comprehending, there are probably a couple of dozen different ways that we can assess that understanding. Of those approaches, only a small number –the least ingenious of the approaches– can be cheated on in the first place.

* * *

When the pandemic began –in Michigan, this occurred at the end of the school day on Friday, March 13th, 2020– my fellow teachers and I headed to our homes with very little certainty about what was to follow, in the days and weeks ahead. We learned many things, and many of us became better at things that we’d barely even tried before. I remember thinking to myself, on multiple occasions during those days, that I’d been relegated to the role of ‘content creator’.

I felt this because, at the time, I launched into the process of creating videos that my students would be able to watch, to get the basic information-transmission that they needed from me. These videos were shared with my students back in the spring, and I’ll be darned if they weren’t just as successful on the summative assessments, in the units that they were studying, as they would have been had they been in my presence in the classroom. That got me to thinking a lot about my role in the classroom.

If students can get content from a number of different sources these days, then what makes me think that I’m the best source from whom to receive information? Rather, if my job is not to be the ‘sage on the stage’, then my job is something else. Walking alongside my students, and assisting them in the process of understanding what they are able to get from other sources, is probably a more valuable use of my time and talents than ‘being a content creator’.

* * *

What the information age does to education is that it raises the bar by which we might measure an educational experience as being a successful one. Thirty years ago, if a biology teacher instructed students on DNA and taught the students about the four nitrogenous bases –adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine– and then gave a little formative quiz to test them on their understanding, this would have been a win.

These days, that information is readily available on the internet –> I should know, since I just looked it up to be able to write the previous sentence.

Of course, the availability of all this information, many times, leaves us with a significant need for an understanding of what makes for a good source of information. In ‘the business’, we call this “media literacy”. I’ve been teaching media literacy to my students –in ever-increasing levels of intensity, in keeping with the requirements of our increasingly digital society– for many years.

Unfortunately though, I’m afraid that we have an education gap when it comes to the list of people who are consumers of internet-based media, and the much smaller subset of that group, those individuals who understand that you can’t just assume that whatever you read on the internet is true. This disparity is causing the internet to become a place where misinformation is as readily available –maybe even more so– than good quality information is.

So, let me bring this whole big conversation finally around full circle, if I may.

We are each responsible for the information that we believe. The extent to which some people are convinced by the flimsiest of arguments, while others are skeptical unless they are confronted with a preponderance of evidence, is an illustration –many times– of the understanding that some people have, when it comes to that good, ol’ aphorism, “Consider the source.” If I tend to be the kind of person who will believe all manner of craziness from the internet, then I am not considering the source of my information much at all. When it comes to media literacy, doing the necessary research, to see whether or not we have reasons to be skeptical of what we are reading on the internet, is an appropriate first step in getting our minds right.

As the influence of the internet grows in this age of information, and in light of the fact that behavior is usually subsequent to belief, it is not a coincidence that we are noticing behavior in our society spiraling out of control, usually from people who have been drinking the wrong kind of kool-aid from the internet.

 

It occurred to me today that the times, they are a-changin’.

I have, for a few years now, been developing a relationship with my favorite student of all time. As that student moved on to college, with an interest in the computer sciences, he and I stayed in touch, and I’ve even served as his ‘mentor’ during an opportunity that he had, through his college, to set up an internship with an IT professional (even though I’m not sure that I meet that definition). There was even a semester in there where this young man was just volunteering in my school district, to assist me with my duties and to learn from me whatever I might have to offer him as instructions for being an IT professional (even though I’m not sure that I meet that definition).

Then, last month, I was drowning in the start of the school year, which is an annual thing for me, every September, except that this year, the problems all seemed to be significantly more difficult, because of the six-month summer vacation that preceded this fall’s start of school –> courtesy of the coronavirus. I was more stressed last month than in most Septembers in recent memory, and people in the district were noticing my distress. So, the administrators in the Central Office in our school district asked if someone could be hired to assist me in doing the work that I have to do, as the sole proprietor of a single-person IT department.

And now, I work in a two-person IT department. And I recommended, for my coworker, that former student of mine.

* * *

Since I didn’t get his permission to write about him, I’ll call him George, for the duration of this post, not that it will matter much, since most of the people who read this blog are my coworkers (who would know George’s real name) or my close family and friends (who may also know George’s real name). George and I have been, over the course of the last few years, talking about a lot of different things, as we’ve spent so much time working together.

One of the things that George often likes to talk about are his college experiences. While many of them have been good and enriching experiences, George is often wont to lament the experiences that he has had in college that have been disappointing to him. George often tells me that he learns more from working alongside me than he does in his courses in computer science at his college. Late last week, George and I were talking about cheating.

George would have me believe that he is the only student in his college’s computer science program who doesn’t cheat their way through most of the coursework in the program. Now, whether or not George really is the only person that doesn’t cheat (I’ve never had any reasons to question his honesty in the past, so there’s that), and whether or not George is being hyperbolic when he describes himself thusly, the conversation that we had about cheating and education got me to thinking, as I am often likely to do.

I started out this blog post with the intention of writing on the subject that I am just now getting around to raising, via all of this backstory about George and the associated flotsam. So, without further ado…

* * *

I have been of the opinion, for a number of years now, that education is in a different place than it used to be, and I, fortunately, got a front-row seat to watch the change unfolding right in front of me, over the last couple of decades.

In case you haven’t noticed, we are living in the twenty-first century, and this century –at least, in the industrialized world– puts most people smack dab in the middle of the information age. This information age, inasmuch as it developed inside of the lifetimes of anyone who would call themselves a middle-aged adult, or older, has been something that we’ve grown accustomed to, as the internet has given rise to a wider availability of information to people who would not have been as privileged in days gone by.

What the information age means for educators is that it changes the paradigm that students just need to receive our transmissions of information in class.

Nineteen years ago, I worked alongside a number of seasoned teachers who mentored me in all manner of different aspects of what it means to be an effective teacher. The majority of those teachers, who’ve since gone on to their retirements, would have agreed with the philosophy that education is largely about the teaching of skills and the transmission of critical information from the teacher to the student.

And, while I’ll agree that education still is, and forever shall be, about the teaching of skills, in our current information age, the transmission of any amount of information on any subject can occur through electronic means just as effectively, and probably much more efficiently, than through any antiquated educational endeavor.

Students don’t need teachers to transmit information to them.

I can’t even begin to tell you how many things I’ve learned from watching YouTube videos, as an example.

And, while we’ll never be able to successfully teach children to read, or successfully manage conflict, or manage their own workloads, or learn to think critically, etc., via YouTube videos, we still have –and I’m often guilty of this myself– many teachers who treat classrooms like places to disseminate information.

Today’s students don’t look at things that way. When they want to know something, they go to the internet to find it.

So, what does this mean for George?

Teachers who have problems with students who cheat in their classes, or on their assignments, should take a long look at what they’re assigning as graded work in their classes.

Have you ever seen a student cheat at conflict resolution? No, you haven’t.

When students cheat on an assignment, they are operating under a couple of different understandings that are important to note: 1) the student understands that the work is to be graded, and must therefore be completed, but the student also knows that 2) the work is of little real significance and can therefore be cheated on without any real risk at missing out on anything important.

Additionally, teachers who create assignments that students can cheat on are, more than likely, just creating assignments to check to see whether or not the student received their information-transmission.

While there’s certainly more to be said on this subject, and a couple of related subjects, this might be a good place to take a break. More on this subject on Wednesday, in Part 2.

It occurred to me today that no one wants to pay the bill.

WARNING: THIS IS A LONG ONE, BUT –BOY– IT’S A DOOZY.

I don’t know when it was that we forgot, as a society, that choices have consequences. Granted, I’ve got some theories. Nevertheless, it’s one of my greatest frustrations about American society that we seem to be disconnected from the consequences of our actions, either through systems that protect us from having to fully realize those consequences, or because people enable each other in their poor decision-making. I’m as guilty as the next guy, I’m sure; I complain about things that I had a hand in creating, probably far too often.

But here’s the thing: if you aren’t happy with your obesity, make the changes that are necessary to fix that problem. If you aren’t happy with your occupational situation, make the changes that are necessary to fix that problem. Most of life’s problems aren’t situations that are thrust on us by a cruel universe that wants to watch us squirm; they are beds that we made and then we decided that we didn’t feel like sleeping in them.

Of course, this doesn’t stop people from whining about their lots in life, regardless of whether or not they were self-inflicted wounds. Because whining involves so little of us, it’s the go-to action for countless people who would be better served by shutting their mouths and getting down to the business of cleaning up the milk they spilled.

Somewhere along the way, we’ve become a nation of people who do what they want, with no concern for the price to be paid, and then we complain about the costs.

It’s just foolishness.

* * *

Today, the Superintendents of all of the public school districts in my county issued a joint letter, in coordination with our county’s health department, urging members of the community to continue to follow proper guidelines in public to try to slow the spread of the coronavirus. In the two school districts that I have connections with –the district where I work and the district where my children attend school– the cases that have come through the doors and into the schools are cases that are spreading in the communities in question.

There hasn’t been any spread in the schools.

Because school districts that want to keep their doors open are following the proper guidelines, cases aren’t being transmitted in schools. In the schools, there is a structure that keeps people in line –students and staff members alike– as they are obliged to follow the rules that have been established. In the community, however, where that structure isn’t necessarily present, community spread continues.

Here’s an example. I know that there are people in the community where I teach who are preparing to violate the community’s ban on public gathering during Halloween. I know, not because I am a mole who has infiltrated their secret organizations, or a spy who has been tapping their home telephone lines –> they’ve been posting it on Facebook, for goodness sake.

So, what do events like this cause? An increased risk of the transmission of the coronavirus.

And here’s how that is going to play out:

Several kids will get the virus. Close contacts of those students will end up having to quarantine. Some of those close contacts may happen in the school where I work, several days after Halloween. The outbreak in the district will cause us to have to close our doors to keep the rest of our student population, and the staff, safe.

AND THOSE SAME INDIVIDUALS WHO THOUGHT IT WAS THEIR BRIGHTEST IDEA EVER TO HAVE HALLOWEEN –FOR THE KIDS– WILL BE IN THEIR HOMES, WITH THEIR STUDENTS AT THEIR SIDES, COMPLAINING ABOUT THE SCHOOLS.

Not a single one of them is going to sit down, at the end of one of those hypothetical quarantine evenings, and think to themselves, “Man, it really was a stupid thing for us to have exposed all of those kids with a dumb little Halloween get-together.” Instead, they will get back onto the same Facebook accounts where they got together in the first place to say, “Hey! Screw the man! We are going to have Halloween!”, except a couple of weeks later, they’ll complain, “Hey! Why did the school go into quarantine?!?! They can’t do that! This isn’t fair!”

When it goes down like that, I won’t even feel prophetic. Do you know why? Because I’ve seen this all before.

And it’s starting to get old.

* * *

The thing about choice in America is that it’s linked up with this concept that everyone is so fired up about ’round here: freedom. If you start to take away people’s freedoms –REGARDLESS OF YOUR REASONS FOR DOING SO– then you run the risk of getting bitten by the vicious masses who would rather you not do anything to impinge on their oh-so-sacred freedom and their Constitutional right to choices.

Let me just drop this right here and I’ll point out the fact that COVID-19 cases have been on the rise in the state of Michigan, pretty much constantly, ever since the state’s executive branch was stripped of some of its executive power by other entities within the state government, representatives of the hordes of people who don’t seem to understand that freedom must be curtailed when those who are free won’t restrict themselves from being reckless.

Would there even need to be any executive orders if everyone just agreed to do the right things because they’re the right things?

It’s the height of hypocrisy when people complain about someone taking away their freedoms by forcing rules upon them, only to turn around and be pro-law-enforcement. You literally have no idea how many people I know that would identify with both of these opinions at the same time. Maybe you’re reading this and you’re thinking, “Hey, I’m one of those people.”

You do all understand that the police enforce rules that are put in place because not everyone is going to do what’s best for the society, just as our political leaders are often put in positions where they have to do things to keep free people from exercising their freedom irresponsibly.

IT’S LITERALLY THE SAME THING!!!!

You know what this boils down to; if you’re as smart as I think you all are, you saw me hinting at it in the previous paragraph –> people like the police when they are stopping the bad guys, but no one wants to be stopped when they’re being the bad guys.

And I’ve got news for you, we’re all the bad guys. When you decide that cops are great because they keep the criminals from breaking into parked cars in your neighborhood, but you don’t like governors telling you what to do because spreading a virus around is your Constitutional right, then all that you’ve done is split a hair.

The truth of the matter is that you’re wrong, and I’m wrong, and he’s wrong, and she’s wrong, and when we’re wrong, our bad choices have consequences.

No one wants to be controlled. Not the criminals, and certainly not the criminals, if you catch my drift.

It occurred to me today that no one has a chance at permanently staying on the horse, come to think of it.

I ran a half-marathon on October 10th, and at the time, I couldn’t remember having ever felt any more excruciating pain in my life. October 10th was my target date, and I’d been working my way through a training program that I’d found on the internet. I started training for the half-marathon during the first week of August, and all along, I was laser-focused on that finish line of finish lines.

The pain during the run was coming from my knees and my hips, and I started to stiffen up in those joints during the ninth mile of the run. The stiffer that I got, the more that it hurt to keep going. Of course, nine miles into a thirteen mile run, at least for me, is this point where you just kind of talk yourself into the fact that there really isn’t that much left, that all you have to do is just continue to endure.

But then, to add insult to injury, I ‘hit the wall’ pretty hard in the eleventh mile of the run, so alongside the pain that I was feeling in my joints, I was exhausted and without the energy to be very impressive during that last mile or two. My pace fell through the floor, which isn’t good when you’re trying to finish a run; when your pace gets worse, it just means that it’s going to take you longer to complete the distance because you are running slower. The last thing that you want at the end of an excruciating run is for it to last any longer than it must.

When I made my distance, 13.1 miles, I was probably still a half-mile from being back at my home. But, I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to make it, so I called my wife and asked her to come to where I was, to pick me up. To my recollection, I’ve never done that before; in all of the runs that I’ve left the house to complete, I’ve never had to call in for the evac chopper to come and fly me out of the warzone.

The worst part of this whole story is that I haven’t run since. It’s been eleven days since my last run.

I think I’ve fallen off of the horse.

I was going to run yesterday, and just call the week previous to yesterday a break after making it to my goal. But, I didn’t really want to run yesterday. Maybe I’ll end the break tomorrow. But, I suspect that I won’t want to run tomorrow, either, when it comes.

I’m going to need to figure out a way to get back on that horse.

I think I over-extended myself, reaching for a goal that I’d been pursuing for a couple of months. If I’m being candid, I knew that, leading up to it, I was probably pushing too hard. I should have given myself more time to make it up to the full distance more gradually. But, I saw the goal and I didn’t want to wait for it.

* * *

Starting on April 22nd, I wrote a daily blog post on this blog of mine, without missing a single day along the way, for about five months. But then, in September, I decided to take a step back so that I could focus on other writing projects that I have going on, and the truth of the matter is that I haven’t been prioritizing that like I said I was going to, when I excused myself from the daily writing duties on my blog.

This thing gets in the way, or that thing does, and the truth of the matter is that I was spoiled by having had a period of time there where it wasn’t too terribly difficult to devote a portion of my day to all of that writing –> I had the time to give. But then, life sneaks back in and we get busy again and, before you know it, what was the priority becomes an after-thought when other, new priorities work their way into the top few positions on the to-do list.

If I’m being honest with myself, the other writing projects that I am working on, the ones that I left the constant blog writing so I could focus on them, those projects are proving to be really hard –> a lot harder than it was for me to crank out a blog post per day. Coupling how hard those other projects are, with my decreased availability of time, and I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

I think I’ve fallen off of the horse.

* * *

So, these two different examples going on in my life right now –examples of me having been knocked off of a couple of different horses– have obvious similarities. But, a couple of their differences seem even more striking to me.

When it comes to the novels that I’m trying to write, it’s obviously just me avoiding hard stuff. I need to buckle down and get about the matter of doing the hard writing, instead of just enjoying this kind of writing –the writing that you’re reading in this blog post. It’s easy, and because it’s easy, I’m not growing from just taking it easy.

The polar extreme of ‘just taking it easy’ is ‘pushing yourself so hard that you end up going off the deep end’. I don’t suppose that it was the brightest thing in the world for me to have pushed myself so hard to achieve that half-marathon distance, especially since now I am feeling a little burnt out on the whole running thing.

So the question occurs to me, “How does one stay on the horse?” “Where is the middle ground between too much and too little?” “How does one push oneself without being overzealous?”

I don’t know why this just happened, but Hold On Loosely, by .38 Special, just jumped into my head. I’ve always loved the advice in that song, which can –at the same time– seem counter-intuitive and right-on-the-money at the same time. How does one even ‘hold on loosely’?

Perhaps, I’ll take it easy in the realm of my distance running, at least for a little while, for I seem to have been overdoing it, as of late. But, the opposite is true in my writing endeavors; I need to put a bit more effort into that particular venture. The growth comes in the struggle.

Now, let’s see if I can get back onto the horse.