Tuesday, May 31, 2005

The Demanding/Expectation Paradox

This may be straying a bit from the AEM debate, but both G-Money and The Wolf Man have made points which bring up an interesting paradox at the center of current American education, and one which, conveniently, allows me to both heartily agree and respectfully disagree with them both. First the disagreement: the problem is not that the system isn't pushing students hard enough. On the contrary, we are pushing students -- especially those in grades 7-12 -- as hard as ever we can, expecting from them ever more impressive feats of accomplishment and ever less harmless vice. Students have never been pushed as hard as they are being pushed now, and that has been true for every "now" since the early Eighties when we realized that other nations' youths we out-performing us. The pushing of students has become structural, and, as a curious result, has become an integral part of the teenage experience in suburban America.

Now, you might say that if we are pushing the students as hard as that, where is the achievement? Why are we still so stupid? How can it be that only a third of Harvard graduates can find Florida on a map (or any other outrageous, too-Strange-to-be-made-up statistic)? The answer is in my agreement with my esteemed colleagues: we push students harder and harder to succeed, but for some reason, we expect less and less of them. We expect less responsibility, less intellectual rigor. To put it more clearly: the emphasis is placed strongly on getting the best possible grade, not attaining the highest possible degree of knowledge. This is the tragedy of modern American public education, and, as time goes by, it has less and less to do with the teachers in the system.

We don't need to descend into a debate on the benefits/shortcomings of NCLB, but I will say that the kind of thinking which has cornered education by saddling up the Horse of Knowledge with testing is indicative of the problem I've just outlined. Never mind your ability to reason or to think critically; you must instead pass this test. If you pass this test, you're good to go. What's important is that you know that The Great War ended in 1918 and The Deuce started in 1939. What's not important is your ability to create a thoughtful, well-reasoned argument for or against the idea that they are actually one single war with a twenty-one-year lull between them.

American public education does not produce thinkers, leaders, or even educated people. America's top-level prep schools and universities do that (although even the public university system has slipped, in my opinion). The reason I'm going into education is to try and fix this problem from the inside out. I can say without any exaggeration that I learned absolutely nothing during the three years I spent at Roseville Area High School; I am educated and articulate despite my public education, not because of it.

So what does all this have to do with AEM and our generation's problems? Well, think about this: G-Money's intelligent remarks about college graduates engaging in extended adolescence are part and parcel of Mme. Flamingo's intelligent remarks about having been expected to be responsible from a young age and then rejecting those responsibilities as soon as possible. The more pressure we put on true adolescents to be adults, to pass tests, to be academically competitive, the less able they will be to act like adolescents. When you are forced into a box at the age of fourteen only to emerge with a BA and a high alcohol tolerance at twenty-two, you must naturally want to take some time and do whatever it is you felt you missed out on when you were sixteen. How many of you spend time thinking about that girl/guy you really should have dated in high school? Be honest.

I'm not saying that grades are bad or testing is wrong or any of that other hippie, educational trend foolishness. Of course grading and testing are necessary, as is the ability to demonstrate what you've learned. I'm also not saying that the root or our generation's problems are entirely to be found in public education. What I am saying is that if high school (and perhaps even middle school) education was more like college education, we could all be much happier. Sure, you might not make it through Honors Calculus VII, but at least you'd be able to speak or write intelligently about the advances made in biology since the time of Darwin. I can't imagine that colleges would frown on students coming to their campuses better-prepared to learn than they are now.

Nobody wants to address this particular educational issue, because they believe that high expectations and being highly demanding are the same. They are not. You don't need to be a teacher to understand the difference; you just have to try and remember what it was like to be a student.

Friday, May 27, 2005

Stage One: Complete

To take a break, if I may, from our conversation about the struggles of our generation, I'd just like to say that Stage One of the exodus from this place to the Mojave Desert is Complete. I have just signed -- in triplicate -- my letter of resignation and sent it off to our HR director, while presenting the other two copies to my principal and the Media Specialist. I will now be officially unemployed as of 3:50 on 10 June... time to go and see the doctor before my insurance runs out.

The Consequence of Malaise

There is nothing more rewarding than responding to well-reasoned criticism (especially since I take no offense at being disagreed with by some one as dashing as G-Money). I know I sounded defeatist with the remark about waiting around and leaving for lunch and so on... that was not a sentiment particularly directed at the generation as a whole. Rather, I was trying to tie the whole business back in to the original point about age culture. I literally meant that those of us who are working just need to hang on until there are more of us out there to work with, not that we should just wait for something to happen in a sort of unclear, undefined way.

Once again, I strongly agree with what G-Money is saying about the defining voice of this American generation either coming too late to have any meaningful effect (if this voice emerges when we're all in our fifties, then we won't need it anymore and the whole point will be lost), or, even more likely, coming from abroad. And precisely because of the path this nation has chosen to take, we will never hear that voice. I mean, I do my part: I read Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje... but of course, none of these writers are from this generation. I'm sure the State is allowing at least some brilliant writing to flourish in China, but, as G-Money rightly points out, that will never reach us.

So, yes indeed we must be more proactive. I refer obliquely to my novel (or perhaps not so obliquely, since this blog is named after its protagonist), which, since I can't afford to give back to the college which minted me or to give meaningfully to any other charitable cause, is my main channel of proactive bildung. Besides that -- and we cannot all be novelists, after all -- what can be done to combat this scattered-ness?

I could restate G-Money's concise understanding of the situation, but why bother when his words do it so well:

"...this ambitionless entitlement malaise is a psychological disease that we must work hard to fight off. And it is precisely that work that our generation is loath to do."


If we can do this, then we will indeed be looking at a new world. I wonder, though, if we can actually make this collectively happen. Many of us can, will, and perhaps already have done this individually; the two of us carrying on this dialogue, for example, are both doing their best to transcend the malaise. But collectively, I wonder if that can be accomplished.

My case in point: I have an associate to whom I will not even assign an oblique codename who, given all the advantages our system can pump out, is nonetheless consciously moving backward through the class structures of this society. His parents are medical professionals, he has earned a difficult degree from a prestigious four-year liberal arts college, and he is intelligent almost to a fault. He had planned to attend graduate school and become a professor. However, two years on, he is in low-income sales, and has made several choices which are currently actively working to move both him and his new family backwards from upper-middle-class through middle-class, and eventually down to lower-middle-class.

American class struggle is fascinating to me, since we do our best as a society to ignore it. But it can't be completely swept under the rug, because class is a reality of the human condition. Before anybody accuses me of being a Marxist (which I most certainly am not), let me just make my point: my associate's children will most likely not attend college. My associate himself will probably never attend graduate school. While his moderately ambitious friends move forward through careers, his will stagnate, and his lack of will to distinguish himself at a younger age will have set him on a very different path than the one he had intended for himself. And all of this is due to G-Money's Ambitionless Entitlement Malaise. People like my associate are far more common in our generation than people like G-Money and myself.

Perhaps all these ideas are also defeatist; that may be so. I think our generational stagnation -- this extended adolescence -- is a function of nobody wanting to make conscious decisions about the paths our lives will take. I'm not calling for some sort of neo-Sixities, consciousness-raising flowerfest (although perhaps I have been listening to too much Polyphonic Spree), but we do need to realize that this choice to wander is not a consequence-free one.

Thursday, May 26, 2005

Wandering Through Extended Adolescence

G-Money's thoughtful and well-reasoned response to my response brings up a number of interesting points about a number of interesting things. While I don't consider myself qualified to comment on ambition -- I don't currently and never will work in a field where ambition is really a factor -- I would like to address his points on Education and, perhaps more importantly, Extended Adolescence.

I knew when I started down the path to a liberal-arts degree that it wouldn't lead to a job, but I did it anyway. Music History was unemployable and I knew it, but it interested me and so I studied it. I had a plan for a career that would include Music History when I started, but now those plans have changed; I consider myself lucky that I am qualified to go back to school to study something that will lead to a career. That said, I very much agree with G-Money's assessment of "non-traditional" fields of study, and I would further observe that this trend began in the late Seventies with the addition of Communications departments to college and university faculties. Colleges and universities don't do anything to help their students -- who are indeed accustomed to entitlements (I'll get to that in a minute) -- realize that there will be no job on the other end if they major in liberal-arts fields. The interesting thing about Minnesota is that, even if you major in a field that should get you a job upon graduation, things are so tight here that you might be stuck anyway. Witness not only Mme. Flamingo's experience, but also the two-year sax-teaching limbo patiently waited-out by G-Money. Something needs to change on college campuses, but change is slow and difficult to adopt.

As for extended adolescence, I am in full agreement. Witness the vast numbers of college graduates across the country who actually plan to live at home after spending four years or more living on their own. For every one of us who has moved out and moved on, there are at least four who have not. These people are, as G-Money rightly stated, traveling to Europe and focusing on personal enjoyment. And we are part of the largest entitlement culture since the adults who grew up in the Gilded Age. Those twenty-somethings became the Lost Generation when they all left town to find themselves in Paris and London, but if that's what we're doing, then where are our Hemingways and Fitzgeralds? They're probably living in their parents' basements, ordering pizza, and playing Grand Theft Auto San Andreas.

What can I say? I'm a lazy person too. I expect things to come naturally to me as much as any of my Boom Echo compatriots. What we lack -- in addition to people who can be our friends in the workplace -- is a "voice of the generation" figure. Now, I may or may not be working toward something which could accomplish that; on my good days, I think I might be. On every other day, I realize that, even though I'm working towards an MA which has a career attached to it, I too am drifting aimlessly through my twenties. I don't know if G-Money feels this himself or not, but to label us The Wandering Generation is spot-on.

There's no solution except for those of us who are working to wait for the rest of our buddies to catch up to us. It'll happen eventually. Until then we're stuck -- as The Kat put it -- in the conference room eating our bag lunches over forced conversation with people to whom we have no chance of meaningfully relating. I leave every day for lunch too, and for the same reason. It is indeed a sad state of affairs.

Blowing the Pop Stand

I'd like to draw everyone's attention to two things. First off, Mme. Flamingo now has a blog of her own, which you might find interesting to check out. She calls it The Flock Report, and, if you're confused about text linking, you can hit the link over to the right. Good stuff.

Secondly, I am in complete agreement with the sentiment expressed by G-Money yesterday evening, only in a less localized, more global sense. He's getting at this issue of feeling uncomfortable in your working environment because there's nobody around to relate to. Us Young Guns are, for some reason, scattered all over the place; even though we are statistically the largest demographic to hit the work force since the Boomers rolled up in the late Seventies, there don't seem to be any of us around. Where are we? The more people I talk to about this issue, the more people I find are experiencing this issue, and I don't mind saying that this is a prime motivating factor -- all economic concerns aside, for once -- for our relocation to the Mojave Desert. It's not like any of us suffer from having small social networks... it's just that those networks exist solely outside work. G-Money's remark about not wanting to engage these people on an out-of-work basis really rings true, and I think most of us twenty-somethings would agree.

So what's the problem? Is it that we went from being in school for seventeen years, all the while being in a large group of same-aged, like-minded, easily-relateable people to the workforce? Is it that we have unreasonable expectations for the relationships we should form at work? Or is it something deeper, somehow a function of some kind of generational gap? I don't know.

I do know that for me, it goes beyond not being able to really meaningfully converse with my co-workers because they have kids and I don't, or they're cheating on their wives and I'm not, or they're painting their house and I live in an apartment. There's an unwillingness to accept those of us Fine Young Turks who do our work well as equals. To find validation, then, some of us turn to outside pursuits while others of us do what we have always done in situations like these: operate outside the rules governing the environment. In these ways, we are able to make these environments our own, and while it may result in us being branded "aloof" or "loners," it is our way of coming to terms with something we find deeply unsatisfactory.

The end result of all this -- for myself, for Mme. Flamingo, for G-Money, and even for far more stable people like El Zinga the Mexican Outlaw -- is for us to move. To the Mojave. To New Zealand. To Chicago. Systems that remain stagnant like those in this metro area are doomed to lose their best young people to places where those people can be more comfortable. It's a frustrating state of affairs, but it's one that every young person I know can relate to.

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

A Fast One is Pulled

Woah! Hang on a second here. I thought the Gitmo interrogators specifically did not stick the Koran in the toilet. I thought that this didn't actually happen. Isn't that what Scott McClellan meant when he told us that he and others in the administration had "encouraged" Newsweek to kill the story on exactly this topic? So I guess it looks like our friends in the White House either didn't know this stuff was true, or lied to cover it up. Either way, it's Spin Time. Let the fun begin.

Runaway Boondoggle

We just can't let this thing die, can we? I understand: she actually made false statements, and reported a crime that didn't happen, but the real question here is why did she do these things? Could it be that she reported being kidnapped by Mexican thugs and transported across the country because... I don't know... she was under intense pressure from the media to have been kidnapped? I mean, if she hadn't been kidnapped, that would mean that the entire media establishment had gone apeshit for no reason, right?

I'm not excusing what she did -- especially since she decided to blame it on a minority group, which is pathetic -- but I'd really like to be done with the Runaway Bride thing now. The story here is this: some woman about to marry an insane Christian guru bugged out and fled. Everything else it bogus and unnecessary, and now that she actually has committed a crime, we can all be happy about prosecuting her to the fullest extent of the law.

This story is where Terry Schiavo and Bill O'Reilly come together: large organizations -- whether they are governments, television networks, or Microsoft -- have no business dealing in the private lives of citizens. There you have it. My Libertarian pronouncement of the day.

Whitey Rears His Ugly Head

Let me paint you a picture. Imagine a middle school cafeteria in an exurban/rural school district. Imagine that it is filled with all sort of people -- some obviously coming in from their farms, others from the dusty highway atop their Harleys (complete with chaps), still others strapped with cell phones and arriving from their city offices -- and that many of them are clapping along to a song being sung by a choir of middle school students. Now imagine that the song being sung is a heinous choral jazz rendition of "C Jam Blues" by Duke Ellington which features such lyrical gems as "he fills your cup with dreams" and "trumpets get their kicks in Duke's place." Add that the clapping is happening mostly in the rhythmic limbo between beats 1 and 2 and then again between 3 and 4, as though some people knew when to clap, others did not, and most of them had no idea where the beat was anyway. And to top it all off, imagine a fourteen year old girl in an all-orange jumper (and braided pigtails... we can't forget the braided pigtails) scatting over all of this.

Whitey was out in force at Farmington Middle School West last night.

Luckily for me, as usual, I was able to stay black and proud while stuck in a sea of haystack crackers. But it was crazy. It would have angered/tickled pink G-Money, had he been there to experience it. I was forced to imagine how, some day, a jazz band of my very own will play "Battle Without Honor or Humanity" by Tomayasu Hotei and kick its ass all over the stage while Whitey exults in the audience and offers me sizeables cash bonuses for my stunning service to the community. Where could something like that happen? Where else?

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

A Single Tear or a Jubilant Whoop

Here's a nugget of wisdom gleaned from my two years of work in this privileged enclave: if your secretary does it for you, it's no longer a meaningful gesture. You might think that this is something so obvious that it doesn't need to be pointed out, but you would be wrong about that. Imagine this: your child is "graduating" from fifth grade; there is to be a ceremony. You have volunteered to put together a photo slide show of the kids in your child's class, showing them first as babies and then as fifth-graders. This is sure to be a moving, sentimental journey through the tear-soaked halls of Growing Up. Right?

Well, not really. Because you suddenly realize less than twelve hours before it's to be shown that you haven't done it yet. Worse, you recognize equally as suddenly that you actually don't have any skillz for preparing said slide show using PowerPoint, Photoshop, or any other digital imaging software. So what do you do? Admit defeat? Certainly not. You outsource that shit to your secretary, who puts together a slide show for you. Maybe I'm being overly harsh here, but I'm pretty sure that once you assign somebody who has never even met your children to make a beautiful statement about the passage of their respective youths, the touching-ness of it completely vanishes.

I feel confident that globalization did not come into play here. I think that the secretary in question actually works for a firm here in town, and was not, say, in Bangalore. However, if the secretary was in Bangalore, the story changes dramatically. That would be such a towering feat of parental negligence that it goes from being sort of a sad commentary on our times to being an outstanding story of spectacular bullshittery. If the secretary is in Minneapolis, my hat remains firmly planted on my head. If the secretary is in Bangalore, my hat sweeps off, my nose brushes the ground ever so daintily, and I can be heard whispering over and over to myself, "damn, that's good."

Media on Media

Eugene Robinson's column in the Post today makes what is at first an interesting (and much needed) point about how often the media cannibalizes itself... and then goes on to cannibalize the media. Bummer. Still, he makes a good and almost entirely overlooked argument about how successfully the White House was able to spin the Koran business last week and completely divert attention from the main thrust of the Newsweek story. Instead of being upset about prisoner abuse, we were all upset about (if you are a Rightie) irresponsible and national-security-threatening reportage or (if you are a Leftie) the administration putting pressure on the free press to not be so free. Either way, the whole nation looked the other way. Remarkably well done, boys.

My Bum is on the Swedish

It looks like the voice of my favorite Big Cat breakfast logo is dead. Thurl Ravenscroft is no more. I know, I know. With a name like Thurl Ravenscroft, hiding behind the face of a bandana-wearing, spoon-wielding beast should not have been his first career choice. And who knows? Perhaps it was not. Perhaps he realized at the tender age of twenty-six that there just isn't much going on around the Spanish Main anymore... or at least that the prevailing south-weaterly winds in the Caribbean make it difficult for square-rigged ships to outrun 700-horsepower Miami Vice boats. It's gotta be one or the other.

And speaking of Miami Vice, when was the last time you put on a lavender blazer and rolled the sleeves up? When was the last time you busted Enrique for having eighty-four metric tons of cocaine in a semi, pontificated on the evils of drug use, and then brought several kilos back to your oceanside bungalow to sample in the presence of the Swedish Bikini Team? (Side note: ever since I saw the Swedish Bikini Team in a beer commercial when I was in elementary school, I've wondered in what sense these people are a team. Are there competitions? Since they get to be the Swedish Bikini Team, is there state sponsorship involved? Burning questions that must be answered.) If you have not done these things recently -- particularly the sampling of confiscated cocaine -- then you must do so soon. You'll thank me in the end.

Monday, May 23, 2005

The Great Pyramid of Lauderdale

While I was off kicking out the jams last night at the studio, Muffin called up the Ultra Lounge with a Business Proposition. It seems he met a Business Man when he was selling Toyotas at the Auto Show (instead of eating good food and smoking with us on my birthday) who let him in on a little concern. It seems that this man-about-town could help Muffin to make money without really doing any work. This was as far as Liz let him go before telling him we weren't interested, even though it was easy money and he was willing to tell us all about it.

So let's see what we have here. Some dude rolls up to Muffin and wants him to do business with him. Muffin accepts. Muffin calls people he knows to let them decide if they too would like to be involved in this business opprtunity. They agree (presumably) and then (presumably) tell people they know who tell people they know.... Hm. I think there's a term for this sort of thing out there... hang on... let me just check my... aha! Yes, here it is: Pyramid Scheme. This is a pyramid scheme and Muffin has bought into it hard core.

Who knows what's really going on? My point is that it's probably a con and that, in this state, it is definitely illegal. Not country-club illegal. No. It's toss-my-salad-or-I'll-cut-you-bitch illegal. Julio wants a word in the shower and he's not prepared to wait any longer. That kind of illegal. I'm not wishing the poor little baked-good ill; far from it. But if you're twenty-four years old and you can't tell when somebody is offering to involve you in shady dealings, then whatever happens happens.

The Great Buckwalter Hunt 2.0

Well, here I am, having moved The Great Buckwalter Hunt 1.0 to the new, more streamlined, far more sexy The Great Buckwalter Hunt 2.0 here at blogger.com. A big hat tip to your friend and mine The Kat both for screwing her courage to the sticking place this weekend at the studio and for hinting that perhaps I would be better-served by moving over to blog with the Big Kids. And so far, I like what I see... my own links list, totally open commenting, and a hella flexible template editing system. Now, I don't pretend to understand HTML code at the moment, but I'm trying to learn and there's no time like the present.