The Gift of Failure

Ah, spring!  Flowers, green grass, trees in bud, undergraduates in an uproar over their grades --probably because they now realize that they will have to reconcile accounts with whomever has been paying for their college experience and have to put that picture of them doing beer-bongs they posted on Facebook into proper context with the D's and F's that litter their transcript like shattered beer bottles on the frat-house floor.  Ah yes, spring!

Let me share with you the contents of my e-mail's in-box:

Student:  hey, why the f?  i no i did not do will in class, but i went so why an f?

Me: I think you have answered your own question.  You got got an F because you "did not do will [sic] in class."

Your grade is calculated by adding test, quiz and research paper scores together.  Your grade is not dependant on how nice you are, nor how hard you work.  I question your sincerity, because if you knew you were failing, why did I not once see you for extra help during office hours?  This is your education: a fully interactive, actual reality environment, wholly dependent on your performance.  There are no participation awards in college.

In the future, I advise you to take some initiative and fully understand the material before you are tested on it.  You will probably realize better grades if you do this.

I have given you a valuable gift: the gift of failure.  What you do with this gift will define your future character.  You might choose anger and resentment, forever after alienating yourself from the academic process; you might choose despair and depression, turning  harmful thoughts and feelings in on yourself, damaging your character; or, you might choose thoughtful reflection, identifying the reasons for your failure, and making an action plan to prevent future such failures.  I advise you choose the third alternative.

Well yeah, Adjunct Proff-o-rama, but why the F?

In my opinion, the F is not given nearly as much as it needs to be.  In my middle school years back in the late Pleistocene period (we called it "Junior High" back then), I got an F in Algebra.  I couldn't have been more delighted, because that now meant that I could stop taking these uber-difficult math classes that my parents had been pushing me to take, and instead take the ordinary ones, along with Jerome Gallagher who still brought his lunch to school in a Scooby Doo lunchbox, and Chris Neville who had a prominent, protruding brow line, only one eyebrow, and regularly beat the snot out of Jerome Gallagher (to be fair to Chris, he also regularly beat the snot out of anyone else he suspected of being a homo-sapiens).  In high school, I was able to load up on social studies, music and history, which I eventually went into as a career (the history part only.  My music career was limited to playing trombone in a union swing-band that gigged at a  local ballroom for the benefit of the post-punk jitterbuggers that frequented it, and one paid gig as lead vocalist for a Commodores/Earth, Wind and Fire all-caucasian tribute band that disbanded after we learned the real meaning behind the lyrics of [She's a] Brick House).

The song wasn't about a girl with
big tits and a big booty.

Administrators cringe whenever I bring this subject up.  I once worked under a high school principal whom I'll call "George," who once suggested to me that I give my students extra points on their term grade if they "brought a pen or a pencil to class."  "George" took issue with my gradebook because "it had too many F's in it and not enough A's."  Believing that "George" was more of a hands-on guy than he ultimately turned out to be, I started shipping him the collected homework and uncorrected tests from that class so that he could grade them more to his liking.  I also discovered that "George" was a bit deficient in the humor department  when he threatened to bring me up on charges of being a total smart-ass in front of the Superintendent.  So, we just agreed to disagree.  George kept on "socially promoting" students who had in reality flunked, and I kept on flunking them.

But wait, you who are parents of struggling students now cry, flunking students will damage their self-esteem.  Besides, grades are essentially meaningless.  Einstein once flunked a math course; Teddy Kennedy flunked Spanish at Harvard; George W. Bush's grades were, well, self-esteem damagingly low, and look at how successful they all turned out to be.  Ok then, let's get rid of grades.  How about we just establish a minimum number of classroom hours as a basis for awarding undergraduate degrees?  That way, the student can take any number of classes on every subject in the university course catalog, just as long as they spend enough time at it.  Under this system, faculty can dispense with the time-consuming exercise of writing quizzes, tests and exams, and instead concentrate on their own research projects and creating content-rich, stimulating materials for class.  Valedictorian status can be determined by the student who has logged the most class time in 4 years.

"Accountability?  Rigor?  Up your nose with a rubber hose!"

I'm sure that some small college tried to do just that sometime in the 1960's; I am also sure that school no longer exists and that its real estate is currently tasteful, sub-divided homes or condos placed around a central golf course.  You see, that model of education --as good as it sounds --lacks two key elements: accountability and rigor.  And as counterintuitive as it sounds, grades help to ensure both rigor and accountability.  They also provide some students with motivation and positive reinforcement (or negative reinforcement in the case of a poor grade).  So love them or hate them, grades and tests are pretty much here to stay.

One spring after classes were over, the college sponsored several classes for the teaching staff covering a bunch of interesting topics.  I picked one on educational technology, being the gadget-geek that I am.  It turned out to be a class on how to use this software that your students can access with their smartphones or laptops during class in order to complete small quizzes, ask questions, get more information about a topic covered in class and get their homework assignments.  I was mildly impressed, until I realized something: why don't the students just raise their hands?  So I raised my hand and asked the presenter that same question.

His answer said a lot about what is wrong with kids these days (ok ok, I know how that sounds and I don't care.  I turn 50 tomorrow, which officially makes me that that guy with the potbelly gut, standing in the doorway in a wife-beater t-shirt screaming, "Hey!  You kids!  Get outta my yard!")  He said (the presenter, not the guy in the 'beater') "Kids today are more comfortable interfacing with the world through their electronica.  This gives them the chance to interact virtually without exposing them to actual reality."

The really sad thing is that they are texting each other.

 I was stunned, but then it all made sense: that blank look on a former girlfriend's children's faces when I suggested that they go outside and play; the anxiety and panic on the face of the student who was told by his parents in a disciplinary meeting that he was forbidden the use of his cell phone and computer for a week; the proliferation of on-line courses, colleges and degrees.

Look, when I was a kid, I played outside with tons of other kids in all kinds of weather.  We rode bikes all over town (sans helmets), played a politically incorrect game called Russian Muck that consisted of kicking a football in the air and then piling onto the kid who caught it.  We ate penny candy, drank sodas, stole apples and cherries from the orchard trees, pelted each other with snowballs, and yes, we got into fist-fights.  And we were human because we did these things.  When we were cruel to each other, we saw them cry, felt shitty about what we did, apologised and tried not to do it again, because it was much better to have a lot of friends than to be thought of as a meanie.  When we were bullied, we didn't have counselling sessions or adult intervention.  We either stood up to the bully or continued to get pounded by them or both.  And our only "electronica" consisted of cartoons and Three Stooges re-runs on the TV, and the occasional crank-call on the telephone that was bolted to the wall.

When we went to school, we were instructed by an adult, but we often taught each other.  I remember a "reading-round" group in 6th grade where we read passages of the text out loud to our group, who were encouraged to correct word order mistakes, pronunciation goofs and help us to sound-out unfamiliar words. In high school study hall, we would always sit next to kids in our classes so that we could study for tests together and help each other with our homework.  And yes, we raised our hands in class.

Dad, this is totally awkward.  I know where babies
come from.  Hell, I AM a baby!

We didn't have as much information back then as kids have today for the simple reason that our information had to be excavated from the dictionary and the encyclopedia.  And we didn't have as much porn in our lives (we were pretty much limited to mold-encrusted Playboy magazines stashed in our treehouses).  And our parents didn't feed us microwaved food or take-out.  And if we did crummy in school, we dropped out to get a job or went to vocational training schools and became rich plumbers and contractors.  But whatever we did, we actually did it --not virtually.

So please forgive me for sending this tirade out via blog and not by first class U.S. Postal Service.  And don't  pass up your next opportunity to actually do something with a person who is actually standing in your vicinity.  And don't whine to me about your grade --I'll just stick your whiny little complaint in my next end-of-term blog.

The Post in which I Sell My Soul

A couple of weeks have come and gone since my city of Boston was attacked by a couple of slacker shitheads, aided and abetted after the fact by their friends who "didn't want them to get in trouble," so they tried to destroy material evidence of the crime by throwing it out in a public dumpster.  Firstly, let me say that I am thankful to the American education system and American pop culture (Beavis and Buthead, especially) for creating the climate of complete idiocy that all of these shitheads were raised and nurtured in.  If their generation was raised amid the sociological and historical conditions that produced The Greatest Generation (survived the Great Depression, won World War II, repopulated the country with Baby Boomers, made so much friggin' money that they defeated Communism because it couldn't economically compete with us so they threw in the towel and began opening up McDonalds and Baby Gaps all over Siberia) --IF they were made of the same stuff my father and his pals were, then there would have been a chance that Deceased-Shithead-Suspect-#1 and Shot-Up-Shithead-Suspect-#2 might --just might --have carried out their attack and gotten away.

"Woah!  Uhhhh, we like thwarted an attack, you butt-monkey!"
"Yeah, heh heh, yeah, that's kinda cool, heh heh!"

I am also grateful to the ordinary race spectators who helped stabilize people who had gotten their arms and legs blown off, and the First Responders who rushed into the scene while not knowing if another bomb was going to go off, in order to get these victims to the best effing hospitals in the whole effing world.  I am grateful for the police, FBI, ATF, McGruff the Crime Dog and I don't know who friggin' else, who hunted these shitheads down, risked life and limb and even got killed, in order kill and capture them.  I am grateful to that Chinese guy in the SUV for not having a full tank of gas (Shitheads 1 & 2 were going to drive down to Times Square and let off their remaining bombs, but the SUV they jacked was running on fumes), and for escaping so he could call the cops on them.  I am grateful to that guy in Watertown whose nic-fit drove him outside for a smoke, so that he could see that Shithead #2 was hiding in and bleeding-out in his boat.  Finally, I am grateful to the politicians for doing their jobs (protecting us all) and not using a tragedy to make political capital; the media for keeping us informed and involved, making this the first social media crowd-sourced manhunt in history; the people of the United States of America for all the kind shows of support (hey, I'm the first to admit that we can be wicked-pissahs sometimes!); and NEIL freakin' DIAMOND for flying out to Boston on his own dime so he could lead the Fenway Faithful in "Sweet Caroline," a Boston Red Sox tradition.  It made us feel so good!

"So Good! So Good! So Good!"

All that said, here is where I sell my soul to the Devil.  They say that a Democrat is a person with a social conscience who loves America, believes in the American Dream, and wants to include as many people in that American dream as possible.  The same people say that a Republican is a Democrat who has just been mugged.  Perhaps that explains what is about to come out of my tortured mind right now --this quote from Barry Goldwater, of all people:

I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!

It's time we in America got extreme in our defense of liberty.  Violate somebody's rights if it will save a life or stop a criminal.  The detainees at Guantanamo Bay are on a hunger strike?  Great --maybe they'll die from it and then we can finally close the prison-part (but keep the naval base part open, just to piss-off the Cuban Commies, hee hee!)  Pakistan doesn't like the Predator Drones cruising around and blowing away the terrorists that they harbor?  Ok, we've still got a bunch of B-52's around; let's roll them out and carpet-bomb their crummy Tribal Areas, killing everyone including the 40 or 50 terrorists there.  Not nice, is it? Kind of un-American, right?  Get used to it, people --and by that I mean people of the World and people of America --because this is what we need to do.

"Bang, bang, bang on the door, baby: BOOM!  BOOM!"

Let's take a step back and look to history for a moment.  The Assyrians were the first bad-ass empire to grace this planet.  They did all the usual stuff: big army, besieged cities, took prisoners and slaves and all that.  It's the degree of what they did that was the new wrinkle.  The Assyrians would make piles of skulls out of the enemy dead and place them alongside of their flayed skins in order to make a point to those whom they allowed to survive: don't piss us off.  The survivors would find themselves deported en masse throughout the Assyrian empire, where they lost their cultural identity after a generation and totally forgot that they used to belong to one of the Twelve Lost Tribes of Israel.  True, the Assyrians aren't around any more, but they did have a good run of it.

Speaking of good runs at empire making, let us consider the Romans, a bunch of Latins who started out as a picked-on collection of villages along the Tiber and ended up ruling the entire classical world.  They didn't get that far by being nice.  Take what they did to their longtime enemies, the Carthaginians.  After the Third Punic War against the Carthaginians, the Romans had clearly had enough: they depopulated the city of Carthage, pulled it down, set it on fire and then congratulated themselves on a job well done.  Oh, and then Julius Caesar built another city on top of the ruins about 100 years later.  

What's that you say?  There WASN'T a 4th Punic War?
Gosh, I wonder why...

Yeah, the Romans were kind of bad-ass that way --just ask the Jews what a couple of legions did to Masada, or ask Cleopatra why she all of a sudden felt the need to get cozy with a deadly poisonous asp, or ask the Gauls, Picts, Germans, Scythians, Numidians, Parthians --ask ANY of the entire ethnic groups that the Romans terrorized (some just for shits and grins) WHY it was that the Romans were not the kind of an empire to be messed with, and they'll probably say that it's because the Romans had them scared shitless.

Not a big fan of the Romans?  Let's take a look at some seriously ultra-violent empires, starting with Spain, 1492-1700.  After spending the previous 700 years re-taking their country from the Moors (who were extremely cool, smart, civilized --just about everything the Spanish were not), Los Reyes Catolico found their most excellent country squeezed-out of the big money trade by the Ottoman Turks and that crazy bunch of fellow-Iberians, the Portuguese.  Their solution?  Send some nutty old Italian with three ships west as far as they could go until they either reached China or, I dunno, DISCOVERED  AMERICA.

Hold on, I know what you are probably shouting at your totally cool MacBook Air monitor: How could Columbus "discover" a place that already had been discovered by Chinese Admiral Cheng-Ho, a.k.a. the Three Jeweled Eunuch (don't ask!), the Vikings, Ireland's St. Brendan, Phoenician sailors drafted by the Egyptian pharaohs, and about 50-100 million Native Americans?  Yeah, well... he discovered it as far as Spain was concerned, and that's good enough for me.

Soooo, once the Tainos and Caribs were killed off, enslaved, exploited for their meager supplies of gold and otherwise abused, the Spanish really went medieval on them: they converted the 20-30 survivors to Roman Catholicism and instituted the Inquisition among them to prevent any backsliders from worshipping the peaceful, creative forces of nature that they used to worship before the Admiral of the Ocean Sea brought them the mumps, measles, smallpox, chicken pox, the plague, and compulsory daily mass.  This conquer-exploit-convert business plan worked so well that the Spanish exported it to Mexico and Peru, which is why you can get really good paella in Mexico City today, but you can't see any human sacrifices at the Pyramid of the Sun because it isn't there anymore, and Mexicans don't do human sacrifices anymore, unless you count the hombre loco who taste-tests habanero chiles for domestic consumption.

Montezuma's other revenge

After Spain's day came and went, their empire's bones were fought over by the English, French, Dutch, Americans, and even a guy named William Walker who tried to steal Nicaragua and run it as a refuge for --and I am SO not making this up --antebellum Southern gentlemen, their families and their slaves.  None of these subsequent countries (or looney-tooney slave owners) ever came close to establishing the same iron grip over so many people and climate zones as the Spanish did.  It must have been all those missions they set up --remember the Alamo?

But for sheer power, huge vastness and terrifying ideology, one need only look toward that 20th century super-empire, the Soviet Union, for a modern lesson in how to hold sway over most of planet Earth and make everybody look good in drab, ill-fitting clothes.  The Soviets built their empire on the ruins of the old Tsarist Russian Empire, so they had a bit of a head start.  Under Josef Stalin, though, the Soviets really outdid themselves: they sailed through the Great Depression without losing one single job (work was mandatory) or closing one single bank (all bankers had been liquidated during the Russian Civil War --not a bad idea...)  They then helped to beat their former friends in Nazi Germany, took over everything "from Settin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic" and stuck it behind an Iron Curtain, stole the atomic bomb plans from those upstart Americans and threatened them with it, exported communism to such beauty spots as Iraq, North Korea, Cuba and Vietnam, sent spacecrafts to the moon and Venus, sent about 15 million of its own citizens to work-or-freeze prison camps in that winter wonderland of Siberia, and if all that wasn't enough, held kick-ass parades in Red Square every May 1st.

"One-two-three-KICK, smiles-two-three-KICK, pretty fingers, smile, three-KICK"

So, here we are in the 21st century, the one and only remaining empire on planet Earth.  Don't give me that look, we ARE  TOO an empire!  Ours is a partly commercial (all praise the almighty dollar!), partly cultural (cable TV, blockbuster movies and celebrity worship for all!), partly spiritual (oh THANK yeh JE-sus!), partly political (how come Hawaii is a state, but Puerto Rico and American Samoa aren't?), completely multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-linguistic and with Delaware making it 11 states that allow same-sex marriage, multi-sexual empire.  Which means that we're the only target for every serious whack-job, religious fanatic, rogue state, failed state, and band of militant breast-feeding-in-public mothers.  What to do?  How do we preserve the pax Americana and keep ourselves in business for the next three or four hundred years?

I'll tell you how: first, by making it such a super-terrific place that the whole freakin' world would want to live here, even if they had to become illegal aliens to do it --that way, everyone has a stake in maintaining a strong, nice, hygenic America and only dickheads want to harm it; second, by so totally fucking-over anybody who attacks us, be it from inside or outside, so completely and so painfully, that NObody would even THINK of attacking us ever again.  In the world of empire maintenance, they're either allied with you, subject to you, defeated by you, or dead.  So let's put some of this kick-ass technology to work huntin' terrorists whom we will waterboard if they're lucky; let's spy on every friggin' keystroke made by wannabe terrorists who are using the public library's ISP to Google "pressure-cooker bomb;" and when we catch them, how about some real reality TV --public execution by the most humiliating method science can concoct.

What's the worst that can happen?

Thanks for your soul, Adjunct Proff!