Open Letter to the Times Free Press Managing Editor

Lesson Learned - Brendan Benson (mp3)

J. Todd Foster
Managing Editor
Chattanooga Times Free Press
Chattanooga, TN

September 16, 2010

Dear Mr. Foster,

Welcome back to Chattanooga. Sorry I have to introduce myself under such negative circumstances.

The purpose of this email is to express my frustration with yesterday's story on National Merit Semifinalists. The story mentions 31 students who rank in the top 1 percent of the country -- the whole country! -- on a highly-respected test. These are the NBA lottery picks of the high school academic world. Yet they don't get their names in the paper. They hardly merit much space at all, really.

Almost every school in this city benefits greatly from an entire section dedicated to sports, and I do not mean to be ungrateful for the recognition you give students for accomplishments in that area. However, were a Martian to land in Chattanooga and read your newspaper (I figure if they have spaceships they can probably figure out English), they would have a very difficult time learning what exactly students do in school other than play sports. You occasionally run stories on community service or, once in a while, something like mock trial, but when it comes to the academic experience, and particularly when it comes to the academic "all-stars" of our city, those stories are the proverbial needles in a very large haystack.

If the city of Chattanooga wonders why so many of its best and brightest leave and don't return, it might be wise to start with the very clear indication that the paper offers: we simply don't, as a community, value them. If they can throw, hit, catch, dribble, or chip, they might earn our recognition and adulation. But if they're just smart? If they study hard and prepare for college exceptionally well? That's just not newsworthy to us.

Every varsity sport in this city ends its season with a series of features dominating the back page of your sports section. Full color. Lots of names and pictures. You even do two. One for the citywide kids and another for the kids in the perimeter counties. Every middle school sports team that wins anything gets a picture on the inside pages.

But if you score in the top 1 percent IN THE NATION on what might be one of the most important tests for anyone with ambitions for college? You don't even merit getting your name in the paper.

Sir, if you don't find something disturbing and misguided in this editorial decision, then I suggest you plug up your ears with some golf balls and put a helmet on backwards and just start running into a wall. Geeks don't have to deal with concussion disorders or repeated rehab stints on knees or dislocated joints. They might risk frying their brains, but I'm pretty sure that particular injury rate is minuscule at best. Apparently that makes them less newsworthy.

Perhaps you say, "We give people what they want to read, and our readers don't want to read about nerds. They want to read about sports." If that's your excuse, I recommend that you announce just that in some editorials. Take a stand. Be proud of your decision. In fact, you could start having reporters talk in schools to encourage kids to play more sports and get their stinkin' noses out of books, because what kind of pathetic nerd would study and learn when there's a hoop to aim for, a net to hit over? Stand up and be counted as Anti-Nerd. Most of the Tea Party would vote for you.

You know what would be nicer, though? If anyone with any real influence would get a grip on what's actually important about school and start finding ways to celebrate it. It might take a little bit of extra work. Actual reporting and such. But I bet you could find some smart kids out there and celebrate them in interesting ways.

What is undeniable about school is this: nothing guarantees a better chance of almost anything we define as "success" than a highly-motivated and hard-working STUDENT. Robert J. Samuelson says so and that dude's never wrong! Parents and teachers are powerful influences, but at the heart of academic success is a motivated kid. This isn't rocket science. Yet your paper does almost nothing to address this problem; it merely exacerbates it.

You are the media equivalent of Coke machines and candy bars in a school hallway. Worse, I think you know it but would hate to risk losing a revenue stream.

If I am unfairly crapping on the athlete, you can take the blame for that as well. Your newspaper assists in promoting that inequality, in promoting the superiority and greater value of an athlete over that of mere booksmarts. And when I say "you," I don't mean you, Mr. Foster. I don't even mean The Times Free Press. I mean 95% of newspapers in this entire pathetic country. You're all doing one disservice after another, and it makes it damn hard to mourn you as your ship sinks into the icy waters of financial ruin, because you could've damn well avoided all these icebergs if only you'd been paying attention.

Mr. Foster, you're new to your position as Managing Editor. You don't have to accept this status quo. You can change things. You can address this problem. You probably won't. But I'll hold out a sliver of hope.

Or, in sports terminology, the geeks will need a Hail Mary. Are you Doug Flutie? Or are you Ryan Leaf?

Hope you like our blog! Best to you and yours! Hugs and Kisses!
Billy

Maybe She's Born With It... Maybe It's Maybelline!

Born Secular - Jenny Lewis + the Watson Twins (mp3)
When Your Mind's Made Up - Glen Hansard + Marketa Irglova (mp3)

At a school I know, the following occurred.

Two administrators stood backstage as the school recognized the top 25% of the graduating GPAs. These nerds were being inducted into a Phi Beta Kappa/Cum Laude kind of organization, a group that does nothing, that exists solely to recognize good GPAs. Sadly, it's the one way some of these kids get recognized for what they do well and what they contribute to the school culture. Kind of like earning a letter just for sitting the bench and keeping stats for varsity baseball.

One administrator, arguably the second most-influential person at this particular school, leaned over to my friend and said, "I don't applaud for something a kid's born with."

Then, as the nerds were walking off the stage with their pieces of paper, acknowledging their good grades, this administrator said the following to them: "Congratulations on your genes, ladies and gentlemen!"

This story was relayed to me because, obviously, I was one of those nerds in high school who made Cum Laude and was never even good enough to sit the bench for an athletic team.

Apparently, how much work and time and effort I put into becoming academically successful was irrelevant, because I was born with my intelligence. Apparently, neither Shaquille O'Neal nor Adrian Peterson were born with athletic gifts or, as they say, "natural talent."

Any nerd would be understandably haunted by this story. The jock administrator just gave our entire geeky way of life a philosophical wedgie (or if you prefer, a swirlie), proclaiming that good grades don't deserve recognition like good tackles or good dunks or good golf shots. And this man, this fan of "genetic" intelligence, is the man who hires teachers and shapes the culture of the school where he works in vast ways.

Then I read the following excerpt from a NYT Book Blog about DRiVE by Daniel H. Pink:

For example, in the chapter titled “Mastery,” Pink presents the research conducted by Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford. One of her theories is that there are (once again) two kinds of people when it comes to intelligence. There are those with an “entity theory” of human intelligence, viewing it as “a finite supply that we cannot increase.” Then there are those who subscribe to an “incremental theory,” believing that intelligence is something you continuously build and shape over time. Pink breaks it down nicely: “In one view, intelligence is something you demonstrate; in the other, it’s something you develop.” It’s a useful frame. Is life a stage on which you constantly must perform, or prove, your intelligence to others? Or is it a library, where you gain knowledge and skills from what surrounds you. How you answer such questions, Pink argues, determines how you will react to setbacks, and how serious you are at mastering a set of skills. It might also influence how you react to books like “Drive.” Do you consider the arguments dispassionately, looking for ideas you can use? Or do you bristle at the suggestion that you need to make some changes? (I've been bristling. Now I feel bad about that bristling, and so am bristling about that.)

Reading this didn't cool my anger, but it's given me a way to diagnose his myopia, to see intelligence the way this administrator sees it. To this guy, intelligence is demonstrated, not developed.

You'll have to forgive the snootery here, but this was clearly a guy who attended a shitty high school, the kind of guy whose workload in high school consisted of work that could be done on a school bus or while Mom was getting dinner ready. I know this because intelligence never felt remotely inherited for me. I worked my ass off for it. I obsessed for it. I fought like hell and competed with gritted or grinding teeth to push my way into the top 20% of my graduating class even though I'd been told in seventh grade that I'd done so poorly on the entrance exam that I was one of the last two boys admitted to the school.

I'm not asking for you to be impressed; I'm only asking that you don't tell me I was innately born with it. My ability to see through brick walls? My prehensile tail? My 14" penis? Yes, I was born with all those. But my intelligence? No, motherf*#ker, I P90X'd the hell out of my feeble brains as a lad, and I just can't think of many things more personally insulting to me than to suggest otherwise.

My oldest daughter is friends with a brilliant Indian girl at her school. Twice now Avery has said to me, "She's so smart. Everything's easy for her," and both times I stopped everything to lovingly correct her. Her Indian friend is smart because her parents expect her to master academics like Southern parents expect their kids to master a sport. She trains. She works. She reads. For every hour that my studious and modestly intellectually curious daughter puts into her school work, her Indian friend puts in two, three, four hours. It doesn't come easy. Nothing comes easy. Allowing Avery to say or believe it does insults the Indian girl and insults my daughter.

If someone believed intelligence cannot be nurtured, cared for, built up, why would that person work in education?

I'm just grateful it didn't happen to me, at my school.

Whew.

NERRRRRRDS!!!

Poor Misguided Fool - Starsailor (mp3)
Man's Gotta Do (Part I) - Dr. Horrible and Captain Hammer (mp3)
Stupid - Toad the Wet Sprocket (mp3)
La-La - Ashlee Simpson (mp3)

Even if I wanted to, I couldn't deny having a fantastical love of the movie Revenge of the Nerds. That film gave awkward adolescents everywhere a ray of optimistic sunshine in what at times could be a life clouded with the feeling that enjoying the academic side of life was shameful or embarrassing. Although I attended a school where keeping one's nose in books was hardly odd, we were still in the South, where more than anywhere else, intellectualism has somehow been equated with nefarious behavior.

In the days of Sherlock Holmes, the hero was the smartest guy in the room. But on the journey "across the pond," booksmarts seem to have made a hefty portion of Americans suspicious.

This notion that our heroes are street smart, like John Wayne, while Lex Luthor was the valedictorian... taps into some primal American fear. It's surely part of our struggle to constantly ignore and downplay the problems in our educational system. Have we created a culture where we simply don't trust anyone smarter than we are because we just assume they're trying to pull a fast one on us? Or have the smart people pulled too many fast ones, thus justifying the suspicion? (See: Wall Street, 2008.)



Think I'm wrong? In my neck of the woods, you know the easiest track to becoming the principal of a school? Coaching. There's not even a close second. Coaches move up faster and more often than your bookworms. To be fair, part of this is about charisma. Coaches are motivational, and coaches manage people -- the players, other coaches -- as part of their jobs. But there are some seriously stupid coaches who have moved up the ranks, leaving the more intelligent, more capable nerds in their jock dust.

Why don't we admire intelligence the way we respect the ability to hit a golf ball or shoot 3-pointers or diagram little plays with X's and O's on napkins?

Put simply, someone significantly smarter than myself should be in the White House. And I don't mean Peyton Manning smart. I don't mean Emeril Legasse smart. I mean Harvard Law Review smart. I mean Top of His F%#king Class smart. Do I mind if he lacks personality? Hell yes I mind. I want charisma, too. It shouldn't be too much to ask that our President be the Uber-Nerd, the guy who not only proved superior in the academic realm but also earned respect from his peers.

Apparently, it's liberal to want your politician to be intelligent. And I'm not being snide or picking a fight. Compared to their competition, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are friggin' demigods of academia. Both were highly successful in school. Meanwhile, George W. Bush and John McCain fought to keep from failing. Bush earned the infamous "Gentleman's C" (as did Gore) at Yale, and McCain finished third from the bottom in his class at Westpoint.

Is it too much for me to ask that Republican intellectualism not begin and end with the likes of Karl Rove, the living embodiment of the scheming nerd puppeteer?

It's not a problem exclusive to conservatives. Too much of black America distrusts the educational system and isolates their academically ambitious. This distrust is just one of many factors in the cycle of poverty. Poor white America holds similar misgivings.

Meanwhile, immigrants from Far Eastern countries like India or Korea come to America, often in extreme poverty, and overcome their economic struggles and often many of their cultural struggles because they embrace the value of succeeding academically. It's a cornerstone of their cultures.

Is our Western Cultural dismissal of intelligence the chicken or the egg? Are the academically successful too smart to become politicians, too intelligent to put themselves through such a sewage system?

I've been in a school long enough to know that grades don't always equate with intelligence. Sometimes the smartest kids are bored to tears and too busy splitting atoms to give a crap about geometry or Gertrude Stein. Sometimes the successful student just cheats his or her ass off. All of my Marion County relatives are reminders that very intelligent people sometimes never get the chance to prove their academic potential. But I'm not talking about smart people who failed in school. That's a different post.

What should concern us is our distrust of smart people who succeed in school. We don't like 'em as principals. We don't like 'em as Presidents. We don't like 'em in a boat or on a goat. We do not like Nerds, Sam I Am.



This ending still gets to me. When Goose -- er, Dr. Green -- asks, "Why? Because we're smart?" I wonder how much has changed, not just in the last 20 years, but in the last century.