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. 

When should a partisan vote against party?

At what point do you vote against your preferred party?

I've been thinking a lot about this question, mostly because I hope several million Republicans will do so come November 6. 

So, in the spirit of intellectual honesty, I've thought about the times I haven't voted for the Democratic candidate. I've lived and voted in five states, so I've got a decent sample size. Here's what I've got:

- The Democrat is corrupt. In a House of Representatives election for a safe D seat, I voted against an incumbent that was under federal investigation for corruption.

- Voting even though there's not a plausible Democrat running for office. I will still vote in an election even when Democrats don't field a serious candidate. (I figure if someone cared enough to put her/his name on the ballot, I owe the courtesy of taking each office seriously.) One of my deal-breaker criteria is that whoever I cast my vote for should, at minimum, be able to handle the rigors of the office. The Basil Marceauxs of the world, sadly, don't quite make the cut. (He's a Republican, but plenty of nutters run on the D line, too. I just like this video.)

- The Democrat is an idiot. In one gubernatorial election, I had met both the Democratic and Republican candidates. I thought the Democratic candidate, while nominally a serious candidate, would've been a disaster if elected. In this case, the GOP candidate was a moderate and, more importantly, wasn't an idiot. Being governor matters more than most other offices in terms of being able to execute on basic, non-ideological governing functions. Therefore, I put a high priority on a candidate who is diligent, fair-minded, and competent. Ability to do the job matters more than ideology. 

Essentially, I'll vote for a Republican when there's clear corruption or incompetence. 

For Republicans who loathe Trump or just think he needs a more aggressive check on his power, what's your criteria for stepping away from the party line?

Bernie Madoff and a lack of imagination

'Cause this is a man that done stole more money than anybody else, we're talking about anybody else, one old man done took everybody. He done beat the record on everybody. He done went to the top of the list in criminality. Everybody is in there for money. The majority of the cases is about money, do you know what I mean? And here you got a man that done did it, done took it all. He's more important than Jesse James, you know what I mean? Bonnie and Clyde.   

The quote above comes from a man who was in prison with Bernie Madoff, the man behind a $60 billion Ponzi scheme -- the largest fraud in U.S. history. 

It's from Reveal's podcast "How Bernie Made Off: Are We Safe From the Next Ponzi Scheme?"  (Short answer: no). 

It's worth revisiting the Madoff scandal because it's not hard to see how it could be repeated -- and not just in the financial sector.

A couple facts stuck out to me about Madoff and his crimes:

- He was already wealthy before he started the Ponzi scheme. Not as wealthy as he would become, but he was worth plenty. He was also a former chair of NASDAQ. So why did he start the fraud? According to Madoff:

'Cause it feeds your ego. You say to yourself, "All right, all of a sudden, these banks which wouldn't give you the time of day, some of them all of a sudden, are willing to give you a billion dollars." I had all these major banks coming down, and entertaining me. It is a head trip.

- The scheme was simple. He employed a few people with high school educations, paid them enough money to put them in mansions, and they would spend their days scanning the stock quotes in the Wall Street Journal (dead tree version) and reverse engineer plausible trades. No actual trading happened -- he just paid older investors with new investors' money. Then he employed two programmers to write software that printed statements. That's it. 

- He was almost caught by both the feds and Wall Street firms. He fooled them, though, and it's worth examining why. 

First, the feds missed problems with Madoff's firm in part because he had a brand. He projected an image of being an old-school, trustworthy investor. Therefore, the Securities and Exchange Commission went soft on him. They sent newbie staff to investigate his firm. They missed basic stuff, like not knowing to check the amount of his cash holdings in the federal clearinghouse where money sits while both sides verify a trade. If they had a made a simple call, they would've realized his balance there was far, far below what it should've been for a firm worth tens of billions of dollars. 

The Wall Street banks ignored red flags with Madoff's operation because they took a cut on the money they steered to Madoff's firm. Therefore, they didn't want to check under the hood, so to speak. One major investor, a Spanish bank,  asked an employee, Rajiv Jaitly, to conduct due diligence. He wanted to do something simple: go to Madoff's firm and watch them execute a trade from beginning to end. Yet Madoff refused to let him do that. Was that a red flag for the Jaitly's bank? Far from it. Madoff called his bosses, who called Jaitly and told him to back off. 

When I then rang up to sort of see how it was going, he says, "Oh, no. No. We haven't done that." He said, "Look, Rajiv. We all know you're a difficult guy. We had to calm you down at that particular point, so we agreed to it. There's really no need to do it. We're all over this. We understand the investment strategy. It doesn't need this."

Jaitly resigned in protest. The fraud continued for several more years and the Spanish bank lost an undisclosed sum to Madoff's con.

In the end, what exposed Madoff was not the work of investigators, but the Great Recession and its massive losses. Madoff couldn't make the fake numbers work anymore, so he confessed to his sons, who then turned him in. 

***

Bernie Madoff ran his scam for two decades in part because of a failure of imagination from those whose job it was to catch him. No one could picture someone with his stature committing fraud at this scale. Because they couldn't imagine it, they missed or intentionally overlooked obvious signs. 

What else are we lacking sufficient imagination to fully consider?

You can't just order people around (Well, you can, but it's surprisingly ineffective)

The Milgram experiments

A few days ago, I listened to Radiolab's podcast "The Bad Show." It explored bad behavior in a couple of different ways. The segment that stuck with me was their take on the famous Milgram experiments on the lengths people will go to follow directions. 

First, the context. An fake experiment on using electric shocks as a motivator for learning is staged. A regular citizen is brought and instructed by an administrator to give increasingly high shocks to a "learner" (actually a voice actor on a recording) if that person incorrectly answers parts of a memorization exercise. The "learner" purposefully starts making mistakes, forcing the regular citizen to decide to administer the shocks.  

The real experiment is to see when the person administering the shocks stops the experiments. That person is forced to hear the "learner" scream in pain and beg to stop. Labels on the "machine" show that the person is administering deadly shocks to the learner. 

The experiments were spurred by examining the idea: "How could so many German citizens be cogs in the Final Solution?" Nowadays, the experiments have been applied to subsequent genocides and also cover territory like: "How could so many Enron employees participate in a massive fraud?" 

The headline of the experiment is that a disturbingly high percentage of people will basically do what they're told by a person in authority -- or even one who looks like she or he is in authority. 

Milgram conducted dozens of variations of the experiment. Did it make a different in what the "administrator" was wearing? What about the age of the person giving instructions? What happens if the administrator gives rationale? What about if the administrator issues an order? What "The Bad Show" discusses are two important, oft-overlooked subtleties in the findings: 

1) What got the highest rates of compliance was when the administrator justified the experiment in terms of contributing the greater good. If the citizens thought they were doing their part to advance the science of learning, around two-thirds of them were willing to shock the learner enough to kill them. 

2) Giving direct orders was the least successful way of gaining compliance in killing people. About two-thirds of all citizens rebelled when giving a direct order to keep sending deadly shocks. 

***

The implications of these results are exciting and horrifying. One could take them in a dozen different directions. For example, I couldn't help but see echoes of them in the Maryland football scandal where a coach inadvertantly ordered a player to exercise himself to death.

For today though, I want to focus on way the experiments' implications could be used in a positive way -- managing people, specifically students. (Writing this blog has a way of quickly exposing the limits of my lived experience.) In a way, me learning how to lead a classroom more or less confirmed Milgram's results.

When I was a rookie teacher, one of the benchmarks that I set for myself was being able to give an behavior instruction with no rationale and get compliance from the students. An order, basically. 

I'm not sure how or why I got in my head that being able to order kids around was a mark of a teacher with a well-managed classroom. Then again, a lot of my ideas back then of what made for a good teaching were 100 percent wrong. I was always able to get a few to comply, but enough would rebel that in short order the lesson would go off the rails.

I never got to the point of being able to consistently, successfully order kids around. This is because as I got better at my job, I realized I didn't need to do it. 

It's sort of similar to the famous photo of cyclists smoking cigarettes while riding in the first few Tour de Frances. Turns out smoking cigarettes is counter-productive if one is riding 100 miles a day! Also counter-productive: barking orders at adolescents. 

Not a successful racing strategy

What I learned from much better teachers is that well-managed classrooms have a rationale -- implicit or explicit -- for everything that happens in executing a lesson. The teacher has set things up so the class doesn't need to rely solely on the authority of an adult for it to function. This creates a virtuous cycle where the teacher can achieve maximum compliance with a light touch. The students trust the teacher's direction, therefore the teacher can do all sorts of other things -- give suggestions, solicit peer feedback, restating rationale, clarifying or simplifying directions  -- instead of issuing a series of orders (with explicit or implicit negative consequences) to achieve the day's goal. 

Great leaders get the behavior they want by investing people in a clear vision, giving simple directions, depending more on persuasion than authority, and setting up strong systems to create a culture where people want to be best their best selves. If you observe one of these classes (or team or working groups), then you'll notice something interesting when there's off-task behavior. The person or people doing the non-compliant behaviors quickly give up because it's exhausting -- like swimming against the tide. 

Thanks to Milgram, we better understand the power -- for good and for ill -- of investing people in a grand vision. The experiments showed that we are hard-wired to follow directions more often than not when we believe we a part of something big and great. It also illustrates the power and perils of being the person in charge. These are morally neutral observations. 

What is up to us is our awareness of what we're asked to do and conversely, what we're asking of others when we lead.

The difference between knowing we humans have a tendency versus treating behavior as fait accompli is what makes a moral choice so hard in the first place.

Reading Twitter: In the end, the justifications won't matter

I have every confidence this will be remembered as the era Republicans cut marginal tax rates for corporations. https://t.co/AhtKigE1HC

— stuart stevens (@stuartpstevens) August 22, 2018

I'm a realist when it comes to self-interested human behavior. On some level, I understand the mechanisms that keep the overwhelming majority of congressional Republicans from exercising the barest levels of oversight. However, the piece I keep coming back to is this: history is going to take a harsh view of those who ignored the criminal behavior of this president. No matter the motive -- fear of losing one's job, the desire to stock the federal judiciary with right-wing jurists -- I believe the epitaph for these politicians will be  " __________ turned a blind eye to criminality." In the end, the justifications won't matter.

I just want to state for the record that the response to this from the president's supporters is actually going to get worse from here, not better. https://t.co/CA6ra557Cm

— Adam Serwer 🍝 (@AdamSerwer) August 22, 2018

Pretty much. 

Mollie Tibbetts was murdered b/c she told a man to leave her alone while she was jogging. Her murderer happens to be undocumented. This isn’t about border security. This is about toxic masculinity. Mollie Tibbetts lost her life b/c a man couldn’t take her saying no. Full stop.

— Symone D. Sanders (@SymoneDSanders) August 22, 2018

Pretty much.

I wonder if we're going to start seeing more and more special concurrences like this one.  https://t.co/5hvnSdmhkt  h/t @steve_vladeck pic.twitter.com/oc9RSRFAjI

— Raffi Melkonian (@RMFifthCircuit) August 22, 2018

A popular myth is that once Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed (a nomination I oppose), the Supreme Court will choose the "death by a thousand cuts" method of defanging Roe, but technically keeping it as precedent. 

I don't see it happening that way. My hunch is that Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and a justice to be named later pull Roberts along in overturning the precedent. 

I also would also bet good money that regulating abortion won't return to the state level. GOP congressmen don't seem to give much credence to federalism when it gets in the way of getting what they want. 

Buckeyes to play 13 games without pay. https://t.co/oJWhnz2nlN

— Stefan Fatsis (@stefanfatsis) August 23, 2018

The ongoing theft of 18-22-year-olds' high-risk labor in order to support a multi-billion dollar sports entertainment industry is not our greatest national scandal, but it's not nothing, either. 

$600 million is enough to pay an entire 120-man roster $50,000 a year for 100 years https://t.co/o1RmNaWbMk

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) August 18, 2018

A school's wraparound services are wonderful, necessary, and shouldn't be confused with teaching

A few assorted thoughts before I get to the point of this post:

- Wealthy people spending money to help at-risk kids get a better education is a Good Thing. 

- Wealthy people focusing education philanthropy on young kids instead of, say, funding a fancy collegiate athletic facility is also a Good Thing.

- It is astonishing that LeBron James has such a sterling reputation despite being in the spotlight since middle school, contending with God knows how many people attempting to profit off of his talent, plus handling the various pressures a world-class professional athlete faces, AND raising a family. The only minor public misstep he's made was a tone-deaf television special when he was 26. I made all sorts of dumb decisions when I was 26. Thankfully, none were broadcast on ESPN.

***
I wanted to expand on comments I made in response to some questions about the Akron public school LeBron James funded (and is providing some ongoing operations cash).

The school, called iPromise, is a regular public school in Akron. It's charter-ish in a couple of ways. It's a selective school, though not in the way "selective" is commonly known. Kids who are a year or two behind are eligible to attend. Also, the Akron school board has given permission for the school to have a longer school day, some additional staff, and some summer sessions. Classes are limited to 20 students, which is smaller than most public schools (traditional and charter), though slightly larger than most private schools. There's also some social-emotional support programs that, at first glance, seem similar to best practices piloted by Nashville-based charter Valor Collegiate Academies. (Full disclosure: I used to teach there before I was hired as an administrator at another school.)

To ensure long-term opportunities, James has partnered with the University of Akron to underwrite the students' tuition if they complete the middle school program and choose to attend U of A. 

***

In addition to what's above, the iPromise' school's "wraparound services" have garnered a lot of press. I follow school news pretty closely so I've heard the term in a variety of contexts. Sometimes it's by charter advocates when a new school is being proposed. On the opposite end, I've heard from folks who are trying to turn around a persistently struggling school-board controlled school (usually before the state or district begins action to shut the school down). The most frequent use is a sort of hand-waving from people who argue that additional wraparound services are what's needed to improve a given school's mediocre academics. 

Because the term is vague and sounds nice, it gets tossed around by people advocating for a bunch of different ed policies. So, let's break down what should and shouldn't be expected of wraparound services.

First, a better definition and some stipulations: 
1) In most cases, wraparound services focused on students are: school counseling, school-based social workers, after-school childcare, and some basic health care. 
2) All of these services are great and necessary. 
3) Every school needs more of them.
4) The outcomes of these services are notoriously hard to measure.
5) The best result of most services is when they help mitigate reasons why a student wouldn't be able to fully participate in a class. 
6) Providers of wraparound services can a do a terrific job with a kid and that student will still likely exhibit some significant challenges -- low grades, behavior issues, inconsistent attendance, etc. 

What I want to shout any time I read articles that describe a school's wraparound services but say little about a school's instruction: Wraparound services should not be confused with the main purpose of any school: teaching kids.

At different junctures in my career, I oversaw some wraparound services at a few different schools. I can say that nearly every counselor and social worker with whom I've worked has gone above and beyond to provide care beyond their job description. (Even then, some students have needs that exceed a school's capacity to meet. This could be where, for example, specialized schools or inpatient treatment programs come in.)

But even at their best, counselors shouldn't have to shoulder a teacher's responsibility. Sometimes it's a victory for a student to be present at school and doing just enough to pass a class.

Once a kid is in class, the overwhelming factor in determining how a student does is the teacher. From there, the major factors in ensuring a teacher does her/his job well are the leadership, instructional coaching, and culture of the school. (I'm simplifying a lot here. Scores of books have been written on what it takes to do each of those factors well and, even then, I've never seen or worked in a school that has it completely figured out.)

So, a school could have the greatest wraparound services in the world, but if the school's focus isn't on instruction, then the school isn't fulfilling its mission. 

The cool thing about education is that when another school succeeds, it's good for everyone. School achievement is the opposite of a zero-sum game. I'm rooting for the iPromise school because it could improve the lives of thousands of Akron kids over the years. Kudos to James for providing startup funding and ongoing support**. 

Just keep in mind that the main -- though not only -- determinant of success will be the factor that's gotten the least media attention: the teachers and administrators doing the work of teaching the kids. 

**I've read some criticisms of James because he isn't funding the whole thing. Ohio law sets limits on how much a private citizen can fund a public school.