The unintended consequences will be epic

A still from 1980s-era video video purporting to teach police how to spot signs of Satanism.

 A parent group in Nevada's Washoe County (think Reno) wants to outfit teachers with body cameras in order to ensure no one teaches Critical Race Theory.  Let's get to the fun stuff:

• This could do wonders for student nutrition. Parents will finally see that their kid consumes a steady supply of chips, Red Bull, and Skittles when they're out of Mom's sight. Those carefully packed veggies? Trash can. 
• Parents will learn that there's a reason their daughter chooses to wear an unseasonable sweatshirt every day in late spring. Related, they will also learn that halter tops have never gone out of a style for teens. 
• The public will learn that teachers are every bit students' equals when it comes to procrastination. 

Of course, there's the obvious points -- e.g. This would lead to gross violations of student privacy; It's so impractical that it would near-impossible to implement; CRT is a niche theory usually covered late in law school or maybe some public policy grad programs; No one is teaching 12-year-olds about different philosophies on how to deal with structural racism, etc. 

But we all (should) know this isn't about Critical Race Theory as an academic theory. C'mon -- maybe a few thousand people in this country of 330 million could succinctly explain CRT and none of them teach kids. 

This is about CRT as another boogeyman for the culture wars. It'll come to represent anything and everything deemed dangerous by grifters, ideologues, cynics and the credulous idiots who finance them. See: Common Core, Colin Kaepernick kneeling, etc.

This practice itself is older than the country. You can draw a line from Salem Witch Trials to the Satanic Panic to QAnon and you'll see the same cast of opportunists and morons.

Are Reno's schoolteachers going to be wearing body cameras? Uh, no. I don't think this parent group is any more representative of public sentiment than your typical post on Nextdoor. But it's a useful reminder that moral panics will always be with us.

Choosing what you express

You don't always choose the emotions you feel, but you do get to choose which ones you express.

Emotional intelligence depends on the will to recognize harmful emotions and the skill to avoid inflicting them on others.#SundayThoughts

— Adam Grant (@AdamMGrant) February 3, 2019

One of the early mistakes I made when working with students who were upset (often understandably so) about a situation is that I either 1) minimized their emotions or, when that didn't work, 2) indulged a way of dealing with emotions that was unproductive for both the child and myself. 

The way to find the balance between the two lies in communicating the concept Wharton Professor Adam Grant describes above. That is, one always has a choice about what comes out of your mouth. 

This is incredibly hard for children to actually do because their frontal lobe — the part of the brain that, among other processes, regulates impulse control and emotion — isn't fully developed and won't be until their early twenties. (Side note: This is why RAs often have the most interesting stories from college.) 

That said, a big thing about teaching for a living is convincing/instructing/cajoling people into developing worthwhile skills that they otherwise would resist. I can attest that students can make real progress in expressing their emotions in healthy and productive ways. It's hard because there's nothing fun or fast about this kind of teaching. 

Once I knew the words to say to a student, the next challenge was repeating them again and again. The proverb "fall down seven times, stand up eight" became a mantra. I remember directly saying this to one student after he asked me how many times I was going to tell him to count to ten and speak without shouting when confronted with a situation. (He, uh, wasn't great at holding his tongue or controlling his volume.) He came back a day later and made a connection between the phrase and the manga he favored. Didn't entirely fix the issue, but he got a lot better.

I don't understand manga but the kids really dig it.

Happy coincidences involving pop culture references you're too old to understand are one of the myriad ways working with teenagers is a strange and beautiful job. 

The muted satisfaction of kind of reaching a goal

This is and isn't about running.

***

I ran a marathon a little more than a month ago. Actually, scratch that. I completed a marathon. There's quite a difference between the two. 

I'd resisted it for almost two decades. I've run ever since tenth grade when I went out for my high school cross country team. (Given my average athleticism and slight build, I wasn't going to make any other team at my high school.) I was a mediocre runner, staying firmly on the junior varsity squad for the next three years. To give a sense of my place on the team, the coach described me this way during the end-of-year banquet when I was a senior: "Wilson — he brought a lot of people to practice." 

I did not enjoy cross country at the time, and I'm not quite sure why I stuck with it. I did, though, and one of the hidden benefits is that I ended up enjoying recreational distance running. It's kept me in reasonable shape and somewhat sane for more than 20 years. 

But races did a number on me. I'd throw up after every meet. I'm still not sure why, but I think it has to do with the weird way in which I'm competitive. That is, it's pointed almost entirely inward. I don't get upset about things like winning at board games or pickup soccer, but once I set a personal goal, I really, really like to meet it — to a sometimes unhealthy extent.

After my final high school meet in November 1999,  I didn't run in any sort of race for more than a decade — and even then, it was a Thanksgiving turkey trot where a good chunk of the field ran in a costume.

***

This time last year, I was having a rough go of it. Some trends you might recognize. Plans and projects I crafted were going sideways. I felt caught in a cycle of reaction. It was hard to see solutions.

During the holiday break last year, I needed some positive momentum. Something long-term and within my control to reach. Something that would force me out of a rut. 

Running for an hour or so at a time, especially in cold weather, is oddly therapeutic. It forces my attention on the here and now and clears out mental space. It's the next best thing to sleep in terms of making me feel better. Setting the goal of running a marathon provided the motivation necessary to consistently get out of bed early and get a few miles in. (Well, mostly consistent.)

I originally wanted to run a marathon at the end of May 2018 as a way to mark the end of the school year. That didn't work out because I forgot that May is a crazy month for educators and I was super tired. 

Then the brutal Nashville summer set in. If I didn't get up by 5 a.m., it would soon be too hot to run any sort of distance. So I got out of bed...most days. 

Then we had a baby girl in July. 

I ended up delaying the marathon until early November. It was a small one in downtown and East Nashville, appropriately called the Nashville Marathon. (Not to be confused with the massive marathon in Nashville held in late April. Many still call that one the Country Music Marathon, though it's now known as the St. Jude Rock 'n Roll Country Music Marathon. It's the one with band stages along the route and tens of thousands of runners.)

***

The mileage is the intimidating thing about a marathon, but what really separates it from shorter races is "the wall". It's what happens 20 or so miles in when all of the glycogen is gone from your muscles and your body transitions to burning fat. Glycogen burns faster than fat, so it creates an unusual physiological effect. The upshot is that a bunch of unpleasant stuff happens at that point. The most common is sudden exhaustion, though cramps or other muscle pains can occur, too. 

The wall is one reason training for a marathon is weird and hard. In most races, you train at the distance you plan to run. Quite a bit more, actually. But repeatedly running 26.2 miles (or beyond) will take too much of a physical toll, so most training guides max out at a run of 20 to 21 miles a couple weeks ahead of the marathon. 

I wasn't able to block out enough time to run more than 17 miles at a time before the race. Nevertheless, I figured that at worst, I'd just be extra exhausted at the end, but I could gut my way through it. 

Ha ha ha. 

What actually happened to me during the race was a typical story: felt OK for most of the race, then some leg muscles began tightening. I paused and stretched. I felt better for a bit, then the pain started, especially around my left knee. Running through mild tightness or tiredness is the part of distance running; your muscles adjust over time. Discomfort comes with the territory. 

It didn't help that the temperature at the start was a few degrees below freezing and didn't warm up until a few hours later.

So a cascade of problems started in my left leg. It felt like a boa constrictor slowly choking my knee with pain. It increased until I worried I would tear something. I stopped to walk. The pain subsided after a couple hundred yards, so I started jogging again. Thus began a cycle of pain/walk/jog/pain in ever-shorter intervals. My walking breaks were longer and longer. 

At this point in the race, I was geographically as far as the course would take me from the finish line (and my car). I wasn't carrying a cell phone and N was at home with the kids. Short of having a volunteer call an ambulance, the only way I was getting back to my car was on my own two legs. 

So for the last six or so miles, I walked. After about two miles, the weather and lactic acid buildup in my muscles caused a steady diet of pain. Not so much that I couldn't walk, but enough to make each step unpleasant. I kept thinking of the saying: "The only way out is through."

I managed to run the last quarter-mile and cross the finish line. My vanity — what was left of it — demanded it.

***

I write this because I don't think my experience is unique when it comes to goal-setting. That is, we often reach a version of a goal. There's the end and it's not quite what you thought it would be. 

Now my knee has mostly healed and I'm considering running another one. In a lot of ways, I feel like I had to run one in order to understand the scale of the challenge. Like many things — marriage, raising children, careers — it's impossible to understand or appreciate the challenges and rewards until one is neck-deep in it. 

For better and for worse

I've spent the past few weeks off of Twitter. I've done this because the never-ending stream of (usually justified) outrage made me feel kind of terrible. I found myself doing things I normally enjoyed, but would still be holding on to frustration like I'd just been in an argument in real life. 

In addition, the stuff people were most often angry about were also things I couldn't do anything about beyond a retweet or an affirmation. In other words, nothing meaningful.

All that said, Kevin Drum argues that "Social media is making the world a better place; quit griping about it". I actually agree with most of what he says, though I'd add that it's not necessarily better for people like me who were already news junkies. 

First, he makes a couple points on social media's place in the history of communication that are worth considering:

...[T]he internet boasts an immediacy that allows it to pack a bigger punch than any previous medium. But this is hardly something new. Newspapers packed a bigger punch than the gossipmonger who appeared in your village every few weeks. Radio was more powerful than newspapers. TV was more powerful than radio. And social media is more powerful than TV.

The immediacy piece of social media is something that isn't analyzed enough. We humans seem to have a cognitive bias to respond to whatever is in front of us. If that's a Facebook or Twitter feed, then that will give whatever is on the screen a sense of urgency that 99 times out of 100, it doesn't deserve. 

Along with the immediacy of social media, it also gives the same visual weight to viewpoints that otherwise wouldn't deserve it. A random blogger wouldn't otherwise merit the same consideration as, say, Jake Tapper. The upshot is that we see more of everything, including topics that we would've previously never been aware of:

...[B]roadly speaking, the world is not worse than it used to be. We simply see far more of its dark corners than we used to, and we see them in the most visceral possible way: live, in color, and with caustic commentary. Human nature being what it is, it’s hardly surprising that we end up thinking the world is getting worse.

I generally agree with Drum's point here. I don't think the world is more racist or hateful than it used to be — a visit to the Holocaust Museum or the National Civil Rights Museum should disabuse anyone of that notion — but fringe viewpoints now get exposure that didn't happen nearly as much 20 years ago.

What is new and frightening is the role that Fox News (and a couple of related websites) play in echoing, legitimizing, and amplifying conspiracy theories and thinly veiled racism. They have monetized feeding the dark corners of human nature at a scale we haven't seen before. The idea of a major TV news network devoting their prime-time lineup to content that would make the editors of Pravda blush would've been unheard of a few decades ago when Walter Cronkite was the biggest gatekeeper of TV news.

Drum makes an interesting argument that there is some benefit to the "more exposure for everything" era we are in:

Instead, though, consider a different possibility: the world is roughly the same as it’s always been, but we see the bad parts more frequently and more intensely than ever before. What has that produced? 

Well, sure, it helped produce Donald Trump. There’s a downside to everything. But what it’s also produced is far more awareness of all those dark corners of the world. And while that may be depressing as hell, that awareness in turn has produced #MeToo. It’s produced #BlackLivesMatter. It’s produced a rebellion among the young. It’s produced the #Resistance. It’s produced more awareness of extreme weather events. It’s produced an entire genre of journalism, the health care horror story, that in turn has produced a growing acceptance that we need something better.

I could go on, but the point I want to make is simple: if you want to make things better, you first have to convince people that something bad is happening. 

I again mostly agree with his point, though it's awfully depressing to be reminded that we humans pretty much always need a crisis to spur real action. But his point about the world being more or less as great and terrible as it has always been rings true. 

The context we live in has changed a great deal, but I don't think human nature is all that different. For better and for worse.

The (all-time winningest) football coach who didn't yell

One of the greatest coaches in college football history died a few weeks ago. You probably didn’t know about it.

John Gagliardi is the all-time winningest coach in college football history. That’s right — more than Nick Saban, Woody Hayes, Bear Bryant, and Joe Paterno. During his six-decade career, he won 75 percent of his games, 30 division championships, and four national titles, mostly at Division-III St. John’s University in Minnesota. (The coach who preceded him in the job said, “Nobody can win at St. John’s.”)

Gagliardi did this while:

• Never yelling at players
• Never using a whistle during practice
• Never cutting a player
• Never having a playbook and only minimal film study
• Allowing players as many water breaks as they wanted (he started this in 1940s, mind you) 
• Limiting practices to no longer than 90 minutes and banning tackling during practices
• Eliminating hazing rituals (again, this man started coaching football during the Roosevelt Administration)

He was a coach since age 16 when his high school coach was drafted to serve in World War II. His teammates asked him to coach and he proceeding to eliminate all the parts of practice he hated. He coached his high school team for the next six years with the school paying his tuition at Colorado College.

This part of his career is fascinating to me. In the Hollywood version of this type of story, of course it makes sense that the gifted player leads his teammates to victory simply by not doing all of the stuff they don’t like doing. The reality is that usually the stuff teenagers don’t like doing is the exact things they need to practice. Think running wind sprints or, on the academic side, writing and re-writing essays in English class.

Since I’ve spent quite a bit of time attempting to motivate sixteen-year-olds, Gagliardi’s early success is all the more remarkable to me. Usually if you leave teenagers to their own devices, it’s not going to turn out well. Whether it’s a classroom or a team, divisions are likely to emerge and would-be leaders (understandably) don’t yet know how to lead an entire group. Teaching is more a learned skill than an innate one and it takes some years to even achieve proficiency. Gagliardi seems to be the Yo-Yo Ma type of prodigy — gifted at the start, then able to build on early mastery.

The other that strikes me is Gagliardi's instinct for doing obvious things that were 180 degrees from what most of his coaching peers were doing. The thing about never yelling at players really sticks out. A lot of modern research on leadership shows that people are likely to learn more efficiently in a calm environment. (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow is worth checking out on this and related topics.)  

Findings like that aren't surprising, so it's striking how often coaches and teachers still — on purpose, mind you — yell to make a point. Tell me a time you performed better when someone was screaming at you. Nevertheless, the myth of yelling endures — just tune into your local sports talk radio on pretty much any day. You’ll hear caller after caller say that what really needs to happen to fix ________ team is that the coach essentially just needs to "get tough" — i.e. yell more.

***

Another thing about the implications of Gagliardi's lifetime of work is this: Gagliardi plied his craft for decades, won early and often, has a legion of adoring alumni, and seems to have influenced pretty much none of his fellow coaches in any significant way. 

Instead, as his career started around the same time as Bear Bryant's and stretched well into Nick Saban's time, the latter two, with their dour demeanors and aggressive-even-by-football-standards approach ("Gotta be more physical!"), are considered the gold standard of football coaching.

This makes me consider: how many other popular assumptions about coaching and teaching are off the mark? Could Bear Bryant had won even more if he hadn't had such brutal practices? If Nick Saban didn't yell, would he be even more successful? 

To be more personal: what if some techniques I've been doing most of my career are kind of ineffective and the reason no one notices is that most everyone else's techniques are pretty ineffective, too?

I mean, I think I know some stuff that works. My students have done well by many measures. I don't yell at kids or do a lot of old school stuff. But still. Are there breakthroughs to be had in transferring skills and knowledge to young people? 

Is there another John Gagliardi out there?

Talking with kids doesn't involve much talking (from adults)

This is post in an occasional series about lessons I've learned from more than a decade of working in middle and high schools. Other posts here, here, and here.

***

Every so often someone asks me about switching careers to teaching. My first question is always the same: How do you feel about being around kids all day? 

My next question: No, really. Do you enjoy being around them? 

I find most people haven't thought hard about the sheer amount of time teacher spend with kid. Hell, thirteen years ago, I didn't think about it that way. I'm not sure I would've accepted my Teach for America placement in 2005 if I had. 

It wasn't that I thought I'd be bad at it. I thought I was cool enough (ha!), plus I liked being in front of people. There would be a learning curve, sure, but I'd figure it out. I did, eventually, but for none of the reasons above. 

In order to make it beyond the first year or so, I had to learn how to talk with kids — in my case, teenagers. You know, the developmental stage that combines narcissism, insecurity, ignorance, and emotional volatility. The one that many of us as adults try to forget or repress. 

Like teaching, people erroneously assume those who can built rapport with kids possess a gift and some people can do it effortlessly while others are doomed. There's some truth there, as a lucky few seem to have been born with the requisite combination of empathy, charisma, and wisdom that can elicit the best from the most angsty or angry kid. 

The rest of us have to work at it. 

The good news is that one of the rewards of working with teenagers is the opportunity to help them make better decisions and shape their lives and a more positive direction. (Makes up for the long hours and low pay.)

I'm not an expert and, in fact, I made a ton of mistakes. It's safe to assume that each of the following points came from hard-won experience. I hope I can spare you some of the same.

First, I learned to be a better listener. My conversational habits during my early-twenties were crap because I excelled at making every conversation about me. This doesn't go over well with anyone, but most peers were too polite to call me out. Teenagers weren't (and aren't) burdened by such niceties. There are few things teenagers are less interested in than the thoughts of adults.

Thanks to some wiser folks, I memorized the following phrases and applied as needed.

• “Say more.”
• “What is in your control?”
• “How do you think you should fix it?”
• “Who else will be affected?”
• “What is the ideal result for you?”
• “What have you learned from from this?”
• “If you had to do it again, what would you do differently?”
• “What do you want to change going forward?”
• “If you want to become your best self, what do you think you should do?”

Second, I discovered the subtle difference between affirming and agreeing. Teenagers say all sorts of crazy things, mostly because they are inexperienced at life. This is their first time through a breakup, a failed test, or peer rejection. Therefore, a lot of bad ideas are liable to come out (often alongside some, shall we say, poor linguistic choices.)

I initially would want to immediately correct those ideas, but my well-meaning advice would fall on deaf ears. What I realized is that a kid had to believe I heard them before they would listen to me. This took time and no small amount of smiling and saying phrases like, "I understand that you're upset."

Once they blew off steam, they were usually in a better place to reassess ideas like, "I'm going to repeatedly text (him/her) until they respond," or, "I'm going to punch (him/her) the next time I see (him/her)."

Third, I had to internalize the idea that I wasn't going to help kids by solving problems for them. This is hard to do in practice, primarily because this involves kids experiencing pain. If you have the slightest bit of empathy, you want to do everything possible to alleviate what they're going through. By doing that, though, you can create a dysfunctional cycle. Moreover, you deny a person the wisdom gained from addressing challenges and mistakes.

If anything, we want children to make mistakes while they're still in an environment where they have a support system that is stronger than anything they might have as an adult. They will be faced with tougher decisions when they are adults and the way to get practice making those decisions is by trying, failing, and trying again.

But it is hard to witness.

Finally, a cautionary note: be careful about what you promise. If you work with kids long enough, inevitably one will approach you and, before describing a problem, ask you to keep what he or she says a secret. This is where it's critical to both remember who the adult is and also take seriously the promises one makes to children.

This is how to thread the needle: Say something like, “I will listen to you very seriously. There are some things I cannot keep a secret because I also have to take your safety and the safety of others seriously. I don't want to make promises that I cannot keep. What I can promise to do is help you make the best decision."

The goal is to leave you space to ask for help and/or notify other adults who need to be brought in the loop.

A kid then may not want to tell you at the moment and that's OK. What I've found is that either the kid will eventually tell you or one of his or her friends will. If nothing else, you've left yourself room to go to another adult and say, "I'm worried about _________." School counselors are my go-to people for this. (I've even called the counselors for students who went to a different school than the one where I worked because because another student reported an alarming text message or social media post.)

This may upset a kid in the short term, but more than likely, that same kid will thank you later. What matters above all is their safety.

The rewards of working with kids aren't just the kinds featured in inspirational movie montages. Whether you're a teacher, coach, youth pastor, volunteer, or just a concerned adult, sometimes the best way we mentor is by making the difficult, ethical decision ourselves.

The thing about all kids is that they are always watching us — especially when they need help doing the right thing.

The price of things versus their cost

Manafort's mug shot, or, the look of a man who is starting to realize the depths of his losses

When we want to buy something, we usually know its price. The story of Paul Manafort shows we rarely realize the cost.

Manafort was an addict, though not in the traditional sense. Looking at the details of his case -- the clothes, houses, mistresses -- he was consumed by acquiring. Seeing the photo of his ostrich-skin jacket is akin to seeing a garbage can full of bottles outside an alcoholic’s house. 

(Yes, some of his spending was cover for money laundering. However, most of his smaller-ticket items -- the dozens of suits, shoes, and jackets -- reflect his spending preferences because they don’t hold resale value well. Also, the fact he bought stuff so he could buy more stuff speaks to his addiction to buying stuff.)

The infamous ostrich-skin jacket

Like most addictions, Manafort’s came at a far greater cost than the exorbitant sticker price of tacky clothes. For one, he’ll be in prison for, if not the rest of his life, the rest of it worth living. But while sad, jail time isn’t unheard of for high profile white collar criminals. People can bounce back from that sort of thing. 

The detail that struck me is how his daughter dealt with the consequences of her father’s crimes: she changed her last name.

Jessica Manafort, 36, filed to change her surname in Manhattan Supreme Court late Friday to "Jessica Bond," multiple reports showed Saturday. The independent filmmaker said she filed for the name change “to separate myself and my work from a public perception that has nothing to do with the person that I am.”

The last name Manafort will be associated with greed and corruption as long as Jessica Bond lives. In a move that matches her father's reputation for ruthlessness, she cut her losses. 

I could see Paul Manafort taking a calculated risk that his crimes could land him in jail. He may have thought some of his deals could've bankrupted him. Given the sketchy Russian oligarchs who paid him, I’ll bet he even weighed the risk of being killed. But having his child reject their shared name out of shame? I doubt Manafort figured that in as a potential cost of his actions. No one would. 

*** 

Entire industries are premised on taking advantage of the difference between the price people will pay for a good versus the true cost of it. Economist Richard Thaler won a Nobel Prize for describing this, and similar, habits of thinking. The most expensive goods -- houses and cars -- are where this is most true. People spend their time negotiating the price down with the car dealer, but ignore the finance charges. We congratulate ourselves for negotiating down the price of the house, but don’t account for the enitre cost of the 30 year mortgage. 

(When I bought my first house, the mortgage salesman showed me the spreadsheet of all that I would pay over the 30 year life of the mortgage -- interest plus principal payments. In a moment of inadvertent admission, he said to me, “Those numbers are so huge, I just try not to look at them.” This was the person selling the mortgage.) 

But cost encompasses so much more than money. Every purchase takes up time, space, and attention. The real cost comes in to play when one factors in the two things we can't replace -- time and people. 

At its core, the story of Paul Manafort is the story of a life spent life in an endless search for more, then paying for it for with his relationships with his family and the time he can move freely on this earth. It is a parable of understanding what wanting something can really cost. 

That is, we are great knowing the price of something and terrible at knowing its cost.