Heartbreak Ridge

The Future's Nothing New - The Alternate Routes (mp3)
A Circus - Army Navy (mp3)

Last week, one of the founding members of our fantasy football league announced his intentions to retire. This announcement -- which in the world of rational and reasonable thought should be about as significant as him saying he got new glasses -- was significant on several levels.

First, this owner claimed it was just time, that he was getting too old for it, that the experience was played out. Why? What’s wrong with him? How dare he desert us in this, our time of desperate need?? Is this some kind of Fantasy Football Owner Lockout, and we didn’t get the memo? Here I thought we were all, like, Al Davis, that the only way you could take our team ownership away was from our cold, dead hands.

The second level was even more disconcerting. Was this merely the first defection? Was the entire league either doomed or irreparably altered?

My thoughts then drifted to this blog. Even as we approach 1,000 posts and soon after that the completion of our fourth year (if it survives to March), death is on my mind. How old is a 4-year-old blog? It’s gotta be like dog years, except more like goldfish years, right? How long do we go until this has become a hobby that merely keeps us from trying other ways of exorcising our creative demons?

Things. Must. Change.
(Psst. this will be a running theme, off and on for the remainder of the year, possibly for eternity. It started with “William 4.0” and even showed up in my Oasis post yesterday.)

Must. It is inevitable. It is fact. The challenge for the wise, it would seem, is not to cling desperately to everything in our lives in some nutty attempt to prevent or dodge change. The challenge is to identify what we most value, what we hold most precious, and to figure out whether honoring and protecting those things requires holding fast to them or finding ways to adapt and evolve them.

I cannot be a good parent if I insist on treating my 11-year-old daughter the same as when she was six. I can’t be a good employee if I’m still sending snow alerts to radio stations as our sole advisory.

Oh crap. Know what I just realized? Maybe schools can’t be very good schools if we’re still doing 95% of everything we did back when my mother was 12. Maybe we’re clinging a little bit too tightly to too much? Ya think?

So maybe fantasy football and blogs -- and office environments and job descriptions and schools -- aren’t in and of themselves what I fear losing. Maybe it’s not about Calvin Johnson and shoddy opinionating. The challenge is figuring out what I need from these outlets, why they mean something to me, why my soul aches a little at the thought of losing them, and what I need to do to hold onto what’s important about them. In all likelihood, with just a little contemplation, I can find other ways to feed those parts of me currently fed by those pursuits.

When the day comes to say goodbye to fantasy football, were I wise, I would already know what my next step would be. I would know what it is I love about the experience, and I would already have plans to funnel that energy into some new endeavor.

Improvise. Adapt. Overcome. These are the words of the new normal and the essential. They are the words of the wise. They are the future, and we will be.

(I just made a reference to Prince/Batman AND a Clint Eastwood movie in the same paragraph! WOOOT!)

William 4.0: In Beta Testing

Different Truck, Same Loser - The Wreckers (mp3)
Different Girl - Daisy McCrackin (mp3)

In a friendly and traditional debate with my hard-right in-laws over Thanksgiving, my in-law proclaimed that this country had lost its way and that she was soon bound for another land, presumably a more conservative land where King Scalia and Queen Bachmann ruled and no one ever wanted for anything, because everyone in this land took care of themselves and shot only non-human animals and home invaders with machine guns, and no one needed public education or insurance.

She concluded that I was an ideologue. That is, someone whose views are unwavering, unchanging, and stubbornly or stupidly so, apparently based on my belief that tomato paste is not a vegetable because tomatoes are a fruit.

A few weeks back, I got into a fairly heated private debate on Facebook with a former elementary school classmate. (Only on Facebook, right?) We debated education, cost, and ways to best affect change. But mostly it was me calling her out, and her offering the implied comeback that I was a provincial “homer” compared to her worldly and evolved self.

Toward the end of her concluding retort back to me, she wrote, “I am a changed woman,” following it with all the ways she was clearly a different entity than the version I knew when we were kids and then teenagers.

Are my views unchanging? Am I unchanging?

Is change actually evitable?

I look different in photos than I did when I was in seventh grade. Different than when I turned 21. I'm pretty sure the differences went deeper than my epidermis. Maturity, spiritual beliefs, opinions on health insurance, whatever.

Is it even possible for people to stay the same? Do we just get older? Doesn’t that in and of itself count as change? Even the Matthew McConaughey character in Dazed and Confused, he of the wise words about “high school girls, man...” even he’s not the same guy he was in high school, no matter how desperately he wishes he were.

Twelve years ago, in my third year working at this school, I was a little bit restless, settling into the job and the place and grappling with the fact that I would soon be a first-time father. "Settling" was the operative word at the time, mostly in ways that induced a mild internal panic.

On the heels of two very popular talks to the student body and full of that youthful desperation to prove that anything was possible, I decided I wanted to pull the Evel Knievel of public speeches, the high school spoken-word equivalent of attempting to jump the Grand Canyon.

As the students took their seats, Chuck Berry’s “My Ding-a-Ling” would play over the speakers. Beginning with an exploration of famous pop songs on the subject, I would eventually delve into a wildly humorous discussion of the male need for masturbation.

I got 24 hours away from delivering this speech and was blocked -- some might say cock-blocked -- by several administrators. Despite their calm and amused explanations, I couldn’t understand. We all do it, right? We're not going to pretend guys don't, are we? The whole computer-and-porn thing made things more complicated than ever, right? So why the hell couldn’t I talk about it??

Thinking back on it cracks me up. How confident and certain I was of my daring, of my talent, of my ability to cross the onanistic river Styx unscathed! What the fuck was I thinking??

So, having pondered on politics and masturbation and time, I return to my elementary school classmate’s proclamation: “I am changed.”

Her words were not a proclamation about herself, but an accusation about me: “I am changed... (and ahem, you are not).” You are still that boy dressed like Samuel Gompers who plays tetherball at recess. You still live in the same town and have resided in the South most of your life. You attend the same church you did when you were six. You are the same.

More troubling, the very need to shout that claim, “I am changed,” is one of needling uncertainty. The chip remains glued on the shoulder and won’t budge. Much like someone who, while walking through the haunted house, keeps saying “I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid.”

Better to avoid such proclamations, such claims of difference or sameness. Instead, I'll go with the less debatable route: I am settled.

For now.

Welcome to the Clown Car

The Dark - Ben Kyle (w/Ryan Adams) (mp3)
You Get What You Give - New Radicals (mp3)

You want new ideas? Be ready to create a new job title. You can’t make new things happen without new employees or big promotions. That’s my takeaway from this summer.

Our entire floor of administrators spent the summer visiting select schools to conversate and collect ways to build on and improve what we do. At the same time, committees of faculty and staff members met and set out action plans for the accreditation process our school must undergo this fall, a process that expects schools to evolve and adapt over time.

I’m a hopey changey kind of guy, and this kind of stuff excites the hell out of me.

All those trips, and all those committees, and all those fresh new ideas, and they all had one uniting common bond: A New Position. And I ain’t talkin’ ‘bout sex.

You want something more done? You want to ramp something up or revamp it? Create a new job description. Or appoint someone with a new title with mo’ money. Otherwise, it will never happen. That’s the universal innuendo of every task force and committee I’ve seen recently.

We’re all busy. Even those of us who aren’t that busy, whose days don’t stretch past 40 hours and whose 40-hour weeks aren’t the stuff of ulcerating stress and misery, whose days are regularly buffered with stops on Facebook or casual emails or a few clips of last night’s “Daily Show,” even those people are firmly convinced they’re busy. They could pass a lie detector test on it, because they truly believe it. Myself included.

When someone has an idea, and that idea points to more responsibility on our plate, our instantaneous reaction is, “Sorry. I’m busy.” We can’t help it. Because we are. Busy. Or we believe we are. At least when it’s our idea, we can sometimes squeeze in time for it... but only when we own the idea. Otherwise, fuhgiddaboutit.

Ironically, as a faculty and staff, we can’t figure out why our salaries aren’t going up. And we can’t figure out how tuition can keep rising, and student numbers can hold steady, yet there’s no income around for us to make mo’ money. (HINT: Maybe it’s because we keep identifying all these things that need to be done and insisting that new people have to be hired to do them. Our raises are going to add people to our ranks!**)

There’s no magic solution here. Few folks want more responsibility without more money or more power. That’s the way we are.

However, for us to implement even half of the ideas we as a school generated this summer, we’d apparently need to hire three to five more full-time people, who would require a budgetary investment of... what, at least $150-200,000, right? After the cost of benefits and other perks, even if the average salary was technically only $35-40,000?

Well, if we have a staff of 150, and we just threw $200k at new employees, not only have we potentially sacrificed $1k+ raises for each of us, but we’ve added three to five more people to the salaried population, which makes the next round of raises spread ever thinner.

Was it always like this?

Did cavemen sit in cavemen conferences and decide someone needed to tackle the velociraptor problem, and the only way to do it was to create a “Velociraptor Czar” job position and post the job on Monster.com?

I don’t think so. I think they took a look at what they were all doing. And if velociraptors deserved more energy, they figured out what deserved less, and they took from that. Cavemen probably had to conclude that some of the jobs they were doing weren’t nearly as important as “Velociraptor Czar.”

We as a society have increasingly lost the ability to give things up.

We’re hoarders. We hold onto things far beyond the point where it’s worth doing or keeping. And this is true with jobs as much as anything. If we as a school were completely honest, there are several positions in our ranks that are outdated concepts from an earlier era. Or jobs that used to take someone 40 hours a week now shouldn’t take more than 20, but that dude or lady ain’t about to admit she’s doing half a job for full-time wage.

And we like the people in those jobs. They probably took that new job description back in 1992 and worked it like gangbusters. And we don’t want to let them go, because we’re a tight-knit family. Kumbaya and shit. I get it.

But we can’t have our cake and eat it too. We can’t demand more salary for ourselves, demand new people to fill new perceived needs, and also demand that the family all stay together and no one breaks up the band. But hell, even the Beatles eventually had to cut Stu Sutcliffe.

New positions. Raises. Keeping the family in tact. Tuition that has already out-priced the market. Not even in America can all of these things remain comfortably crammed in the clown car. Something's gotta give.

* -- Well, it’s also going to support pension plans for retirees who have vastly outlived their expected expiration date, to health care plans that shoot up faster than Courtney Love, and to the ever-increasing costs of campus and building maintenance. But those aren’t as central to my point.

Scooter of Hope, Scooter of Change

I Hope Tomorrow Is Like Today - Guster (mp3)
Election Night - Broadway Calls (mp3)

“How’s all that hopin’ and changin’ workin’ out for ya?”

Transporting a full Grande Misto via scooter is no simple feat. Most scooters, mine included, come sans cup holder, sans trunk. I have two locations for storage on my Yamaha Riva: a very snug and teensy glove box set into the steering column, and my “hard case,” the roundish clamshell-looking contraption behind the seat.

Thanks to Starbucks stoppers -- I once called it a “Green Coffee Buttplug” and received very disappointed looks from the barista -- I have created the fairly reliable practice of scooting back to work with minimal spillage using some 10 napkins and cocooning the cup in the glove box, where it fits quite snugly.

That said, the process takes a few minutes. And it was in the midst of mummifying my coffee and nestling it into the glove that I heard, muffled through my helmet, the quote above. I looked up, and there was this older man, a little bit oily or sweaty, probably in his early 70s, smiling out of his Caddy. Or maybe it was an Oldsmobile. I’ve never been good with cars, but I know it was Amur’can.

Being clueless, I said, “Excuse me?” because the quote seemed without context. I was trying to connect his comments to my attempts to store coffee in a scooter.

And he repeated himself. “How’s all that hopin’ and changin’ workin’ out for ya?”

I still didn’t really get it. So I said, “Um, fine I guess.” And I smiled.

The man was shaking his head before I had even answered, with the same kind of smile I tend to have when I see some moron on the other side of the road driving without headlights after dusk. Then he pushed out a few of those annoyed chuckles before saying, “I’m glad I’ll be dead before I have to see this country go completely up in smoke.”

So, at that point, I finally got it. By then, this old dude has rolled up his window and pulled out of his spot. Off, I guess, to sneer at other young fools and their idiotic notions of hope and change, preferably from the comfort of his enclosed air-conditioned American-made isolation chamber.

My scooter has seven stickers. Three are UNC-related. One is the ubiquitous Apple logo. One is for a band called The Rescues. Another is for the Good People Brewing Company of Alabama. And one is for the Chattanooga Football Club. None of these are of a remote political nature. I’m not much of one for political signs, because I tend to think religion and politics carry too much negative energy in first impressions. And, in those rare moments when either topic creates positive impressions, it’s at the expense of those who don’t belong to your imaginary club.

I don’t think anyone looks at my Good People Brewing Company sticker and thinks, “Ahh, a fellow beer drinker. We’re better than those snotty wine-drinking assholes.” No one sees my Chattanooga FC sticker and thinks, “Fuck the Titans and their oblong monstrosity!”

But put a cross, or a fish, or a “W” or an “O” on your vehicle, and you are painting a double-yellow line in the road that says, “You’re either on my side and going in the (proper) direction, or you’re not.”

Nothing too wrong with talking politics and religion, but not on a first date, and certainly not with people you haven’t even met yet.

This old man made an assumption: youngish coffee-drinking asshole on a nerdy scooter = Obama voter. That he was right makes him more lucky than brilliant. That he looks forward to dying before the US sinks into some Muslim apocalypse makes him exactly the kind of conservative that makes lots of people despise conservatives. (Just a reminder that I’m plenty guilty of this prejudgement habit.)

Why would someone be anti-change? As a species, we talk all the time about how dangerous it is to forget our past, yet so many of us use words like “tradition” and “the good ol’ days” without the slightest bit of irony. Tradition is for Druids. Want tradition? Go to a 3rd world Muslim country, because they’re steeped in tradition so ancient it would knock your great-great-granddaddy’s socks off. But in America? Seriously? Tradition for us is, like, McDonalds french fries. Or something even more shameful like watching an evening news program together as a family while eating TV dinners on TV trays.

As a country, very little of our history is based on anything BUT change.

But I get the whole anti-change thing. We get older. We wish Peter Gabriel and REM still ruled the music landscape. We detest those wacky R&B people with their wacky R&B booties and def cuts. We detest Faith Hill for being twice as hot and half as talented as Loretta Lynn. I get it. It’s kinda goofy, but with every passing year, I find myself fighting that very instinct to wish things were more like they Used Ta Be.

So it sucks to be anti-change, but it’s also an absurd curse of human nature.

But here’s what would really really suck: to be “Anti-Hope.” To be the person who is opposed, politically or otherwise, to hope. I’d like to think that one could be reasonably opposed to Obama and the Democratic Party without being Anti-Hope. Obama didn’t trademark the word. He doesn’t own it. I’m rooting for the guy, but even if you don’t want to, please don’t be against Hope.

Trust me. You don’t want to be that old man in the Oldsmobile. It’s not a happy or contented life.

Itching In Transit

That It Moves - Greg Laswell (mp3)
Patricia's Moving Picture - The Go! Team (mp3)

My wife and I agreed, in principal, that we would eventually move into a house with my mother. The first iteration of this discussion occurred about the same time both her grandmother and my father fell seriously ill. Neither would die for several years, but early on in their sicknesses, we agreed that we wanted to be there to take care of my mother when the time came.

There's this saying I find kind of annoying that goes, "We plan; God laughs."

Yeah, I get the saying, but I don't particularly cotton to it. Should we not plan? Should we not have expectation? If I truly obeyed my WWJD bracelet, I wouldn't have a job or a 401k. I probably wouldn't have a family, although that one can be debated. And I sure as shit wouldn't have needed four days to move our household possessions from one location to another.

Much like other major decisions in our lives -- marriage, job change, kids -- we've been pretty lucky in the draw. We wanted two kids close together, and got 'em. We wanted to live and work near at least one of our families, and got it. We both wanted to work in educational settings, and got it.

This plan to move in with my mother seems like another of those fortuitous moments when things work out almost better than we'd hoped. Our new home sits on two acres in a modest middle-class neighborhood. It's two floors and over 5,000 square feet, but it's hidden down in this gulch, and no one would ever think it was so big just casually driving by us. It even has this cool little (unfinished) cottage adjacent to us that will, for the time being, serve as an escape play room for the kids. It will probably inherit my sister's ping pong table. Eventually it could become, like, the penultimate place to host a poker game or a Super Bowl party. But that's many years and a good $10k away.

Mom has the entire bottom floor to herself. Twelve-foot ceilings. A lower-level deck (or back porch?). Two ginormous bedrooms and a two-car garage and a great room big enough to host an entire small-town Baptist revival. (I'm just going through all this description since many of y'all prolly won't get a chance to visit anytime soon...)

Our top floor ain't shabby, either. 4BR 3BA 2CGarage, and all the modern accouterments a foreclosed-before-completed property can provide.

Eventually, I'm sure I'll be happy with this move, with this house, with our long-awaited decision. But right now, here's the things occupying the most space in my mind:

(1) The amount of shit we packed and moved that, in all likelihood, we'll allow to sit and rot in our garage, never once wondering where _(insert whatever)_ is or where we put it.

(2) The degree of my uselessness in matters of home improvement or upkeep. Even if I thought myself capable of installing closets or affixing blinds, I own none of the tools needed to do these things properly, nor do I own the items needed to patch up all my mistakes. Worse, I wouldn't hardly know where to start. A level, maybe? A drill? (But what kind of drill?) You might as well put me in one of those Hurt Locker bomb suits and ask me to dismantle a big one, 'cuz my odds are just as good. Hell, I changed power cords on our dryer, and I was so thrilled you would've thought I just switched out engines on my El Camino.

(3) The MoneyPitoPhobia certainty that more is wrong with this new, never-lived-in house than we could know. Yesterday I closed the door to the garage, and a light fixture in the kitchen slammed into the sink. Upon waking from our first night here, I went to jump in the jet tub ('cuz the shower wasn't yet finished), and enjoyed the coldest friggin' bath I've had since middle school summer camp when my counselor made me drip dry because I wouldn't take a shower without wearing my swim trunks.

Is it my age, or the nature of my generation, or just me? That in a moment when I should really be excited about what we've done, about yet one more plan that worked out like we planned, I'm instead out dancing naked around a fire trying to make it rain?

I figured there was no point in writing anything shy of an extremely self-important, self-involved, narcissistic post after all that hullabaloo from last week.

Can I Get Me A Yawp?

Gold Into Straw - Brendan Benson (mp3)
Heart of Stone - Erasure (mp3)

"This is bullshit."

I travelled more than 1,000 miles last weekend so I could hear a highly respected man, Jeff Jarvis, stand up on a high school stage and introduce his talk with those very words. Some 200 souls somehow connected to the world of education were fortunate enough to sit in a small auditorium and witness more than a dozen respected thinkers, leaders, and innovators stand up and offer their unique insights into technology and education, and attempt to address the challenges of both, or either.

The event was called TEDxNYED. It's an independent event formatted like and inspired by TED, one of the coolest, geekiest, most intellectually inspiring sites on the entire web, as far as I'm concerned. Several of those videos have even found their way to the BOTG site. Which could only happen were they ingenious. We don't suffer fools lightly here at BOTG. Except for one another.

Jarvis' point, if you didn't go read his talk, is that the entire TED modus operandi is based precisely on the educational philosophy that most modern thinkers have determined sucks shit. Authority figure stands before an audience of 7-300 students whose sole purpose is to stare, listen, and maybe take note. Authority figure spews knowledge and wisdom. Students merely hope to catch enough of it to achieve a particular grade... although it would be cool to learn a little, too.


Here are, in brief and with a second degree of separation, just a sampling of some key ideas passed along during this one glorious Saturday in New York City:

• Volunteerism should not be limited in our minds to just time and money. In 2010 we can now contribute information. Not necessarily information that is ours exclusively, but information that can merely be added to a collective in order to give that collective a little bit more information than existed before. (Andy Garvin's example: OpenStreetMap)
• A teacher should know how well s/he is doing as a teacher based on the questions students ask in that class, says the man responsible for this really popular YouTube video.
• Popular culture can and should be used as an educational tool, and we chronically underestimate its power for good, says professor Henry Jenkins.
• Any true educator should support and endorse open source information. Any great idea or method that educates should be made available to educate as many as it can reach and put into the hands of others if it can make those others better teachers. Or, as David Wiley put it so well, "The successful educator shares the most information with the most students."
• Open = Sharing = Generous = Kind
• The best textbooks would be malleable, and that's best done through the power of Internet technologies like the fascinating and bold CK-12 project.
• Human beings are at their best and most powerful when they share; but the creator of great and powerful concepts and ideas must be given due respect. Lawrence Lessig helped mastermind Creative Commons as an answer.
• Jay Rosen has studied "crowd sourcing" and confidently argues that in the battle between 100 citizens v. 1 journalist, the citizens will win. And, in the 21st Century, it's more like 1,000 or 2,000 citizens v. 1 journalist. The only way the journalist wins is by no longer doing things alone. Educational institutions have the potential to learn from this. (I was surprised no one mentioned the potential for home schooling.)
• "Educators should be curators, not creators." -- Jeff Jarvis
• "Do what you do best and link to the rest." -- Jeff Jarvis
• The best class would ask the students what they must know. The best teachers would let students ask the big questions and attempt to help them find the answers.
• School should be considered an incubator, not a factory.
• Much like the article "Dehumanized" argues, the goal of education should be to create better citizens, not simply better workers.

This is roughly 1/4 of my notes from just the first 2/3 or so of that single day of talks. Most of what I wrote are oversimplified platitudes compared to what got expressed and how.

Even more important, the conference forced us little people, the students, out of the auditorium regularly, our heads full of all these explosive ideas and all this wild intellectual energy, and thrust us into a single large room. How could we not but search out another soul or two with whom we could speak and work through what we'd witnessed, what had been injected into us?

In my 14 years of working in education, which must include at least 9-10 conferences, my attempts at networking have never felt as valuable or vital to my experience as it did last week at TEDxNYED.

Now, the challenge, much like the church camps of my youth, are two-fold:

(1) How do I -- neither a teacher nor an administrator with Decider powers -- return into a den of uninspired agnostics and convince them that they're hungry for change in a system in which my school has proven quite adept? How do you convince an A-/B+ student to radically change her study habits because there's a chance she could do better? How do you convince Phil Mickelson to totally change his golf swing? Is it easier if they know the system is broken and we just happen to be better in a broken system? How did the NBA convince all those short white pros that they should allow Wilt Chamberlain to dunk the ball?

(2) Can I, at the very least, maintain some ties to those equally-inspired people at other schools who could, in theory, keep my enthusiasm charged much longer than I could were I to lose that connection?

This is my challenge. The fate of the entire universe rests in my hands. Kinda sorta.

End In 10?

On and On We Whisper - The Alternate Routes (mp3)
We Came to Dance - The Gaslight Anthem (mp3)

As of this week, according to the New York Times, eight states are now experimenting with the concept of letting certain kids move from 10th grade straight to college.

My first reaction was one of disgusted amusement. Seemed like a pretty stupid concept, really. I'd read the NYT Sunday Magazine article about ending the senior year in high school, and it was clearly written by a guy who no more knew high school than I know about George Clooney and movies about frequent flyers. Much like Christopher Hitchens (read: smarmiest smuggest most annoying sonovabitch to opine this side of Ann Coulter), Walter Kirn's argument made you want to disagree with him -- even if some of his points might be accidentally valid -- simply because he seems so out of touch with the reality of many many students.

But then I sat there and thought about it. Why the hell don't we, at the end of 10th grade, start giving students some choices, especially if they've earned them... and limiting the choices for those whose performance to that point has sucked?

However, instead of focusing on letting the gifted and ambitious kids get out early, why don't we focus on limiting the options of those who actually bog down the system and didn't want to be in school in the first place?

You could make three tracks, which is not unlike systems in many European countries. All three tracks would require that a student be able to pass some kind of low bar exit exam after 10th grade. If they fail, they stay in school somewhere until they can pass it. Kind of like lawyers stuck in limbo until they can pass the bar.

TRACK ONE: GET A JOB
The least motivated and least academically inclined can choose to walk out the door, no questions asked, after 10th grade. If they can't pass the 10th grade test by the time they turn 17 (or 18), then they're released anyway. One of the biggest problems with our educational system is that, for far too many kids who are old enough to drive and be tried as adults, we force them to be where they don't want to be. Many public schools have become literal zoos, full of too many caged and wild animals who only want to be out in their more natural habitat. School never should have become a free babysitting service, but that's what it is. If a 16 or 17-year-old doesn't want to be in school, let them leave.

TRACK TWO: LEARN A TRADE
For those who pass the 10th grade test but have no real ambitions for a comprehensive college education, let them go to a community college. A 2- or 3-year degree to learn a variety of trades that don't really need an expansive liberal arts education or the other broader subject exposure (um, they weren't really paying attention to "Modern European History" anyway) can pursue any number of decently-paid career paths, many more lucrative than my own.

TRACK THREE: PREPARE FOR COLLEGE
The remaining students -- key word: students, as in, they want to learn -- would remain for their final two years of high school, where they would prepare for the rigors of a more traditional (although perhaps, in this brave new world, more challenging) college education. Suddenly high school would be a smaller community filled mostly with teens who wanted to be there, who wanted to learn. Having the choice would empower them to appreciate their situation. Teachers would no longer have to burn out dealing with the behavior cases and instead could burn out dealing with the grade grubbers.

In my new world, the long-standing budgetary problems in public schools would overnight be eradicated, probably for close to a decade. And let's be honest, the kind of money the public system really needs to enact serious reform will never come. The only way to get extra money is to reduce some substantial portion of what high schools are trying to accomplish. It would result in a decrease in the teacher workforce, sure, but community colleges would suddenly be expanding and hiring, which seems a decent trade-off.

Smaller class sizes in the final two grades. A greater interest level and buy-in level with the remaining kids. A legitimate choice for those who are smart enough or motivated enough, but care more about getting into the workforce than they do sleeping two more years of their lives in high school learning "stupid meaningless shit like physics." A more focused body of students naturally makes for a more inspired faculty. I see this every day.*

And finally, for the kids on the bottom of the pile, a wake-up call. While I'm first to acknowledge that many kids at the bottom are dealt a crap hand that isn't their fault, and while I acknowledge that they deserve attention and more than a fighting chance, the harsh reality of the world is that no one can rise up from apathy without a conviction that it must be done. Virtually no one gets out without very much deciding to do so. If that choice was suddenly made more apparent to them, more might work harder to move up and onward. And the ones that don't... well, they can always struggle in the real world for a while and then enter Track Two or Track Three a few years late if their motivation or maturity changes.

Kids today stay immature and irresponsible for the same reason male dogs lick their balls: because they can. Three generations ago, responsibility fell on young shoulders at an earlier age, to work the fields or help gain family income. Those generations seem to have done pretty well, all things considered. Maybe it's time we start expecting teens to grow up before they're 20 rather than before they're 30.

Community colleges would face a new challenge, with people from 16-40 all piled into a campus, which could make for some awkward legal issues, but nothing more awkward than the predatory adults who have already found their way into education or ministry, where they can abuse their position. Scores of other problems would undoubtedly arise, such as the chaos of unemployed 16-year-olds out on the streets. But again, are we talking about improving schools or offering free babysitting? My impression was the former, but perhaps I'm naive.

* -- I often find myself amused by teachers at my school:

1. who complain about the caliber of student they are forced to deal with, as if they're insufferable when they are light years easier to manage than those in more challenging public settings; or
2. who get all worked up about neglecting these apathetic and disconnected and destructive-to-the-classroom students while dedicating their lives to an expensive college prep school. Which is slightly akin to a minister in Beverly Hills agonizing over the plight of the poor in Africa.

Don't Wanna Get Political (Pt. 2): Elections

Hey Mr. President - Will Hoge (mp3)
Uncorrected Proofs - The Weakerthans (mp3)

I don't wanna get political, but... I was a lot more excited about Barack Obama six months ago.

Fret not, you silly liberals, the guy still has my vote, so long as he avoids anything wildly catastrophic, and so long as McCain continues to add to the ways he's courting the Hard Right vote. While Obama reverses earlier claims to look more centrist, McCain reverses earlier claims to look even more conservative. Not only has he reversed course on offshore drilling, but he's pulled a Gore by claiming to have invented The Surge.

But what felt in January like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington now feels more like Tropic Thunder Goes to Washington, and Obama is actually Bill Clinton after he underwent a procedure similar to Robert Downey Jr.'s character in Tropic Thunder.

Don't get me wrong. I'd take 300 Bill Clintons over Dubya. The only part of Dubya's 33-percent approval rating I don't understand is how the hell one-third of our country can continue blindly approving -- or scarier yet, knowledgeably approving -- of the job this guy's done in the last eight years. McCain's not even sure how to deal with this guy at the Republican National Convention, fer Chrissakes. His own fellow politicians are afraid of getting Bush Cooties, yet a third of people out there, stubborn as mules, keep playin' their fiddles even as the water level rises above their noses, insisting that the ship ain't goin' down.

To be fair, I'd also take 250 McCains over Dubya. At the very least, the guy knows what it means to put troops in the line of fire, and he appreciates the risks. That doesn't necessarily make him McArthur or Eisenhower, but it puts him well ahead of every single decision-maker in our current President's neo-con wonk closet.

So Obama will get my vote and, some massive war threat notwithstanding, will probably end up our President. And I'm sure he'll do a fine job, but he'll be dogged by scandals or negative reports, and Democrats will probably lose their majority in Congress in 2010, and all that promise of Change We Can Believe In will amount to... very little, policy-wise.

I'm still voting for him primarily on two grounds: (1) symbolic, and (2) punitive.

(1) Symbolic: Although I doubt he'll do much to transform the nature of D.C. politics, I do believe having a man who wants to move himself and our country beyond two shades of race, who has charisma not unlike Reagan or Kennedy, who exudes optimism in a way not even Clinton did, will create at least a cultural burp. That burp will at minimum get rid of some of the nauseating gas that's been sitting in America's stomach from eating too much Bush Soup for close to a decade.

(2) Punitive: Republicans, with all their talk about how Democrats "tax and spend," and with all their 90s promises of balancing the national budget and limiting terms, and with all their haughty claims of being above corruption and immorality, have merely proven themselves more hypocritical than their opponents. For six long, long years, conservatives controlled both key elective branches of government, executive and legislative. For six long years, they could do practically anything they wanted, pass practically any law (barring a few frowned-upon filibuster attempts by the minority Dems), and what did they do? They cut taxes, blew spending through the roof, and left us in a hole of debt. They also left us mired in a war based on utterly contrived propaganda. And just in case you bought that crap about how announcing an exit date would buoy the terrorists, Bush recently acknowledged that an exit date was in sight. (That is, announcing a pending exit apparently does not buoy the terrorists if done by a Republican President.)

While these two primary reasons live on, my third reason -- He might actually bring integrity to Washington -- is quickly getting weighted down and dirtied with the cowchips both sides have been throwing at one another, and that Hilary and Barack exchanged in the primaries.

At present, at least Obama still has two out of three, which according to Jim Steinman (and Meat Loaf) ain't bad. And it ain't bad. But it ain't world-changing, either. It's only slightly much better than D.C. As Usual, and I'm not even sure he'll be able to stay above that water line once we get closer to Election Day.

But I don't mean to get political.

"Hey, Mr. President" is from Will Hoge's The America EP, and it can't be found at iTunes or Amazon.com. "Uncorrected Proofs" is from The Weakerthans' third album, Reconstruction Site, and is available in both places.