Here in New Jersey, education is a front-and-center topic. Public schools are under pressure. I live in Riverton, a small town with its own K8 grammar school that sends its students to a high school in the town next to us, Palmyra. Palmyra and Riverton are in many ways a unified community of 3.5 total square miles, sharing activities and services, like our youth sports teams.

Palmyra High School is full of great students who go on to do all kinds of amazing things, but because it’s a small school that could use more cash, it has some challenges. Mainly, though, it suffers from an image problem. As a result, many children in both communities are sent to private high schools. Five years ago, three other Riverton parents and I started RivertonK12, a group whose aim was to explore local high school choices and share that information with parents. We were objective, but we thought that with accurate information about PHS, many parents would stay. We chose the name “RivertonK12″ to represent the unifying educational/community experience we were seeking for our children.

We did some good. We conducted a survey, held two informational forums, set up committees. Ultimately, though, many people continue to choose private.

Discouraged, I wondered what we could have done differently. For my part, I realized I had the argument wrong from the start. I assumed people conceptualized our two-town community in ways that, well, they just don’t, and that their educational choices were framed under this mistaken conceptualization. To me what is clear and alarming is that when children leave a school their family’s energy and interest go too, a slow draining away from the community. This is not the way most people see things.

See, people choose private schools for various reasons. Some I didn’t worry about from RivertonK12’s beginning, but, to be fair, few of these people live around us. These are the people who like the sweatshirt that comes with certain schools. They like dropping their kids off and seeing expensive cars. They like their kids going to school with kids who look like their kid. These people are not interested in arguments about the connections between educational outcomes and family incomes (i.e., wealthier children may succeed academically largely because they are rich). They don’t care about economic segregation. They don’t care that children who do well in elite private schools are self-selected and would have likely succeeded anywhere. They parent by check, replacing parenting time, effort, and interest with money. These folks were untouchable from the beginning. My co-founders and I knew that.

(Interestingly, our limited RivertonK12 research analyzing college attendance depending on which high school students attended largely supported these self-selection educational arguments.)

Others were untouchable for different reasons. They want a specific religious or moral structure. They want their kids to attend the school they attended. It wasn’t necessarily about academics, but these people think it over and can’t find what they mainly want in public school.

But another group, probably the largest, was the toughest to lose. They love their children, of course. They love our community. They care. They thought their decision over. Finally, they still choose private. You only get one shot to educate your children, and they made the choice they felt was best.

But the big problem is that the moment their children sign on to a school outside the community, their interest and energy begins to drain away too. It has to.

They’re great people, so they still buy Girl Scout cookies and coach a team or two, but their interest seeps away. The school loses their energy, passion, and talent, draining the community’s talent and resource pool. These people tend to have a little more money, so their kids do well in school. The school loses these academic achievers. And the school loses that money too.

Riverton has a superbly run, extremely high-quality public elementary school. Like many small, high-functioning schools in New Jersey, we are the target of vicious budget cuts. It’s tough to survive. When I roughly calculated the dollars that leave our community to educate elementary children at private schools, I was stunned. And this isn’t even for high school.

I can’t imagine the magnitude of the problem elsewhere, where wealth disparities are greater and what’s left behind much shallower. People aren’t going to turn their private school tuitions over to the public school — they still pay taxes — but what if all that money was put together? We could revolutionize things even in our high-functioning little school.What must it be like elsewhere?

Luckily, in my two-town community, there are more than enough caring, smart, affluent people to make the schools and community strong. But what about these other places. After a while, after so much has drained away, what is left behind?

We’re all running scared in the U.S., listening to fear mongers telling us how the world is outpacing us educationally (often measured by standardized tests, of course. Is our goal really beat China in standardized tests?). In response, while we’re chasing this elite schooling phantasm, there are real consequences for our whole society. Because communities are being drained, and real kids are being left behind.

In helping launch RivertonK12, I was too pollyannaish to understand why some of the best people would leave. I’m still idealistic, believing that if our collective will changed, we could abruptly change education. But maybe the problem is not dire enough for me. As I said, our towns, our kids are going to do just fine. But in so many other places, the steady draining leaves behind all these slowly drying-up little souls, who, through no fault of their own, don’t stand much of a chance.

I have been declared Emperor of the World. Let us not waste time explaining why or how; let’s all simply accept the fact that we are better off, as a result.  Hence, my decree:

Emperor’s Decree No. 3487: Henceforth, parents and coaches are no longer allowed — either enthusiastically or casually — to say “Good eye!” when a child leaps out of the batter’s box in order to escape the spiteful hiss of a four-seam fastball rocketing toward the bridge of his nose. One might as well compliment a person for giggling upon being tickled on the foot with a feather: “Good laugh! Well done!” [clap…clap…]. The Emperor has serious problems with anything that contributes to the creation of vapid mediocrities among his youngest subjects. He wishes, some day, to be able to stop writing these decrees and that will never happen if parents and coaches continue to produce knuckle-dragging foot-lickers who crave praise for instinctually diving to the ground in order to avoid having their frontal lobe impaled by a Rawlings-propelled septum.

The Punishment: Violators will be doused in a delicious garlic and herb sauce and dropped onto an island inhabited by cannibals (where they will quickly learn that the phrase “Good eye!” has quite a different, and rather intensely literal, meaning).

Now: Go forth and obey.

The Emperor will grace the world with a new decree each Tuesday.

The art of writing. The mysterious skill of writing. Writer Jack Dann once said, “For me, writing is exploration; and most of the time, I’m surprised where the journey takes me.” Alas, for many of our children, writing will never be about exploration, discovery, art, or the challenge of learning complex technical skill. Instead, writing will be standardized, boxed-in, formulaic. It will be an obstacle they need to figure out strategies to get around. Lucky for me, a pre-teen who may or may not live in my home, bless her heart, always has it all figured out. More about that in a moment.

You know that writing components have been added to many standardized testing systems, including the SAT. It’s just a part of the broader movement to narrow the band of education.

Now, using valuable time they might have spent gaming the multiple choice sections of tests like the SAT, students have to figure out how to game the writing sections. They learn to throw in big words. They learn to write long sentences. They learn to make arguments fit five-paragraph essays: Thesis, point one, point two, point three, conclusion. They learn the value of writing a lot, no matter how much they really have to say. They learn the preeminence of neat handwriting.

But what they don’t learn is how to write. They don’t get better at writing by thinking about these writing tests, by practicing for them, or by being evaluated for them.

Evaluated? They just get a number, and there is increasing interest in having that number generated by a machine. In a recent New York Times article about these “robo-readers,” writing researcher Les Perelman discusses his analysis of some of these automated graders, based on his own experiences writing for them. One slight problem, Perelman says, is that truth is unimportant. Robo-graders don’t care if you don’t know your facts. They can’t tell. Also, they like long sentences (sorry Hemingway). They prefer longer essays. They don’t notice if you throw in a random line or two about an unrelated topic. If you take your sentences that start with “and” and “or” and switch them to “however” and “moreover,” Perelman says, these machines see you as having more “complex thinking.”

And so on.

These students learn strategies revolving around using big words and writing long. They learn writing formulas that help them write exactly one kind of writing: The standardized test. Forget the damning generational accusation I often hear: “These kids can’t write.” For every 18-year-old you show me who has writing issues, I’ll show you two forty-somethings with similar issues, even if clear writing is crucial to their field. The students I know are extremely smart, and what they are lacking — when they are lacking— in their writing is not the skill, broadly conceived, but instead the creativity to think outside the five-paragraph format of the standardized test. Gun control: Good. Pollution: Bad.

These students, bred in the era of the five-paragraph standardized testing essay, can produce that five-paragraph argument about almost anything. But I find that when I ask them to say, toss in that sixth paragraph, they’re confused, cagey. “But where would it go?” they wonder. “In an appendix?”

The world, of course, is not broken up into five-paragraph problems. Yet make no mistake about it: The form in which you are trained to write becomes a form that governs the way you think. So they try to see the world in terms of the five-paragraph essay: Contained, neat, easy.

I’m not blaming them. I don’t blame their teachers, either. The stakes in this mad game of educational assessment are too high for their individual classes. It’s hard to blame administrators. In the absence of thoughtful ways of evaluating the overall success of their schools, these tests carry incredible weight; the results are connected to real dollars.

I want to blame the government, but this is the US, and we are the government. Anyway, in his January State of the Union Address, President Obama said, “Stop teaching to the test.” In a February interview with Jon Stewart, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said the same thing. Yet teacher-blogger Anthony Cody asked a reasonable question: “How is it that with both our President and Secretary of Education so firmly against teaching to the test that we have states dramatically increasing the stakes for these tests?”

I suppose, like with most things, we only have ourselves to blame for the growth of this testing farce. So our kids are just going to have to continue to figure out ways to please/beat the system.

Which brings me back to that pre-teen who may or may not live with me. She was getting ready for the written component of her recent battery of standardized tests. “Are you ready for your writing test?” I asked. “Oh yes, I’m ready,” she said, eyes gleaming with confidence, lips pursed, head nodding wisely. “I’m going to use the word ‘plethora’.”

We were in an ice cream parlor the other day, and my son was looking at some old-time paintings on the wall. One was a decades-old picture of a sundae with a price tag: 10 cents. Despite my efforts, he couldn’t comprehend it — which may not be difficult to imagine since my grasp of macroeconomic issues is wanting . I had similar success explaining to him that gas, the stuff that makes our car go, was once a quarter.

Of course, we’ve all been complaining about high gasoline prices for years, and there’s been all kinds of lamenting, whining, some saber rattling (and even some saber wielding). But as I’ve watched my children’s lives overlap with constant war in oil-rich parts of the world, I wonder how much we care about conserving this energy resource. I mean, how much, on a day-to-day basis, do we really care about the people who are fighting overseas for our lifestyle?

Some years ago, I conducted a little driving study that I have since reproduced several times with similar results. The original study was prompted during a trip from Washington to South Jersey on I-95 and I-295 when I became disenchanted with the radio and tired of deciphering peeling bumper stickers.

When I left the D.C. area, I made sure to maintain a speed between 65 and 70 mph. Then (and, admittedly, this is the part my wife says makes me certifiable), at eight different one-minute intervals, I counted the vehicles I passed and the vehicles that passed me.

The results: Vehicles that passed me: 37. Vehicles I passed: 2.

If you calculate this out for the 150 minutes I was on the road, about 700 total vehicles passed me. But although I passed two vehicles in my “official” count during the time intervals, I don’t need to calculate that number out for the whole trip, because I was able to count easily  the total number of vehicles I passed because there were so few of them. In that entire 150-minute trip, I only passed nine vehicles. Of that nine, four of them were part of a caravan of campers, two were pick-up trucks that had just limped onto the highway from the shoulder, and one was a woman cruising proudly in a new SUV.

Everyone else blew by me: lumbering rigs, wimpy minivans, cute couple-driven SUVs, motorcycles, new cars, old cars. And while, for research integrity, I tried to stay around 70 mph, I admit I occasionally succumbed to an inferiority complex and nudged it up to 75 mph, but to no avail; everyone still left me in the dust.

While cars vary in efficiency, 55 is still a good number for most, and no cars are fuel efficient at 80 MPH – not to mention the reduced fuel efficiency of the many folks who came screaming up behind me, slammed on their brakes, tailgated for a while, and then accelerated past.

One good reason I heard for higher speeds on interstates is that higher speeds (and speed limits) allow drivers to reduce the time of long trips, thus reducing driver fatigue and accidents. But, good researcher I am, I noted that almost every license plate I saw during my trip was local to the three small states I traveled in: Maryland, New Jersey, and Delaware. It’s tough to fall victim to fatigue in a drive across Delaware on a beautiful Saturday afternoon.

The irrefutable conclusion: We can’t be hurting too badly, because we individually don’t care one bit about conserving gas.

So the question may be this: Should our government take measures to address high fuel prices? Keep in mind that even though lots of people lately say they don’t want government in their lives, these are the same people who any time a cyclone hits their house or they have to fill up the tank of their riding lawnmower clamor for government aid.

If our government maintains the representative spirit the Founding Fathers intended, in which elected officials serve as wise leaders to guide us not-so-bright masses, then our government should jack up the price of gas through a tax to help curb our wasteful, careless ways. Because as my study proves (and I encourage you to reproduce it), we do almost little individually to conserve fuel.

But if government should act based on the opinions of the people, then as far as the gas issue goes, the people have spoken. We need to get places in a hurry, and we don’t mind burning extra gas to do it, so government officials, you better help us get our hands on this resource, and you better make it as painless as possible.

That’s one of the great things about being American: Even when you don’t do one thing to help yourself, often somebody comes along and helps you out anyway.

Children today are barraged with messages about going green, about sustainability, about saving the environment. But if you are a parent, you still probably spend a lot of time walking around the house switching off lights.

Because if your kids are like my kids, there are certain lights they never turn off. Ever. And that’s just a dim glimpse into what goes on in their minds. Despite the little coloring exercises they get at school, the guilt-inducing slogans, the catchy TV ads, they are children, and they still don’t think much about it all when the (environmentally unsustainable) rubber hits the road.

But that doesn’t mean my wife and I would give up, no matter how calloused my light switch-flipping finger is. So we try to teach them. Forget those lights that we fight about nearly every day (I have mentioned they don’t turn off the lights, yes?). We try to be role models of sustainability, despite the uphill, and thus energy wasting, nature of this battle.

“We recycle paper!” I have trumpeted. You know those little tabs of paper you rip off a check that comes in the mail? I even put them in the paper recycling bin. Yet my kids draw something that may be a hobbit or a machine gun or a zebra on only one side of a piece of paper, then they chuck it in the trash can.

To the annoyance of our garbage collectors, I have often placed shards of plastic in the yellow glass and plastic bin, following the same dedication as my treatment of the tabs of check paper. I try to show the kids that every little bit counts. But they’ll suck down a Gatorade and toss it in the trash.

I’m just getting started.

We trek outside in the cold to put a peanut shell in the compost pile. But the kids will throw a whole watermelon rind in the trash can, you guessed it, next to the Gatorade bottles and one-side-only pictures of hobbit-gun-zebras.

We walk the kids to school. Rain or shine. Snow or hurricane. After all, it’s only two blocks. But is their character hardened, forged? No. Anytime they can, they all pile into a neighbor’s car to make that two-block ride. In air conditioning. Then they whine about walking to school for weeks.

Speaking of air conditioning, we almost never run the air in the summer, no matter how hot it is. In the winter, the thermostat hovers at 60 at night, and sometimes I sneak in an extra degree, dropping it to 59. They complain it’s too hot, it’s too cold, but do they burst forth from the house on a snowy day and leave the door open? They do.

They’ll eat half a taco and wander away, leaving the other half, ignorant of our pleas that they consider the kids who were happy to have a quarter of a taco for dinner. “But they probably don’t have cheese on theirs,” is the response.

I even tell them how by staying relaxed and calm you can sometimes sneak in two wears of your work shirts between washings. But my daughter I believe once had on and then hampered, a new definition I just created, 11 outfits. Before noon.

In the face of our failed role modelship, we thought all was lost.

But then we stumbled upon their sustainability niche. We mentioned to them how much water they could save by not running the faucet while brushing their teeth and taking shorter showers. Blankness. But then I mentioned the magic word: toilet.

I said if I use the bathroom and then one of them uses the bathroom and then we flush, we could save water. We pointed out that they could do even better by having one flush in the morning when the three of them make a similarly goal-based quick bathroom journey. We used precise measurements, in both standard and metric volumes.

This resonated with them, especially for our boys. Non-flushing became their immediate contribution to sustainability. Indeed, they have saved thousands of gallons of water. Maybe millions.

Because let me tell you, they do not flush.

I’m proud, although there is a cost associated with this green living. But does it matter that when you walk by one of our smartly appointed bathrooms you are brought to your knees by a nostril-curdling stench more powerful than the kiddie shoe bin in a fast food restaurant play area? Does it matter that when you enter that bathroom, the olfactory assault is reminiscent of an old Vet Stadium bathroom in the fourth quarter of an Eagles game? Does it matter that should you battle through the effluvium that you, in horror, see a film of what can only be a form of advanced, perhaps malevolently intelligent, algae?

Even my pride has its limits, so I’ve ask them, gagging, choking, why they don’t flush? “We don’t want to waste water,” they say, providing statistics, using my data against me. They recite the mellow-yellow-brown-down toilet etiquette mnemonic device (which, I might add, is not always followed). They are downright angelic in their intentions.

So, there it is. This is their environmentalism. Ah, it brings a tear to my eye. But whether it’s the tear of genuine emotion or one induced by a miasma of vaporized ketones and ammonia — my god, especially after asparagus night — you, reader, will have to be the judge.

On her birthday, the daughter of a friend of mine came to him in a tizzy. You see, she explained, so-and-so was disrespecting her on Facebook. My friend geared up for the worst as he went with her to view the offending post. And there he saw it. Someone had posted this on her homepage: “happy birthday.”

He peered at the screen, looking I guess for maybe an animated devil or something to leap out at him. But all he saw was this: “happy birthday.” He checked the calendar. Yes, it was her birthday. So what was the problem?

His daughter, reaching exasperation at an emotional speed only achieved by teenage girls interacting with their parents, pointed out that the post “happy birthday” from someone — I forget the complex relationship web of who knew who here, but it was something like a friend’s ex-boyfriend’s sister — in lower case without the exclamation point was not a genuine wishing of goodwill. It was a snub, a dismissive gesture.

Dad, being a good dad, tried to digest this, and then tried to calm her perhaps overreaction (treading lightly in this area, though) by raising what he thought was an excellent point. He pointed out that he, dad, could easily have done the same thing, hastily typing “happy birthday” to her — and meaning every little drop of joy in the word “happy.”

Of course, dad, she said, moving now at warp speed beyond exasperation to disdain, it’s excusable by you, because you’re a, pff, grown up. You don’t know the rules. In other words, you’re just blundering around Facebook anyway, so writing that is the equivalent of broccoli in your teeth or toilet paper on your shoe can be forgiven.

Okay, he got it. So dad left this little encounter, maybe a little wiser, and later told me the story. What struck me about it is not that it’s another marker of the big generational gap with technology or even how extremely sensitive teenage girls are. I’m interested in this because his daughter was probably right: A post like that probably is intentional, designed to achieve the effect it did and doing so with a sly, subtle bit of language play.

With her rightness as the premise, this little incident made me think again about all those people who are so worried that texting and Facebook are destroying kids’ ability to write. Lots of older folks who mash a few words themselves have become vocal linguistic reactionaries, describing the seemingly inevitable decline of language caused by technology. And it’s bad enough that teachers, bakers, and insurance executives are decrying the language skills of children, but in this article, “Hammering grammar in the age of texting,” even some of the kids pile on themselves. As one high school freshman said, “Texting affects us a lot. I get so used to texting that I mess up a lot of easy words.”

Maybe this kid is correct about his own writing behaviors, but my friend’s tale shows how our young Web scribes are often way more clever language-wise than we give them credit for. But I already knew this. I teach writing online, at Drexel, and I have read tens of millions of words written by my students. I see very few glitches, errors, and shortcuts that are clearly connected to their texting habits. Very, very few. Why? The reasons are many, but I can tell you this: I ask them not to, and these sharp Drexel students are quite capable of switching out of that technology coding when they need to.

Of course, students do make some writing errors. They always have, and they always will. That’s why they take writing courses. But when I heard the tale of my friend’s daughter, I’m struck by how far we are from the kind of complete language degradation predicted by alarmists. We might not always like what they’re doing with language, but their errors are not always the result of ignorance, and instead of lazily pecking away, they are making some very savvy rhetorical choices.

Indeed, these kids can be so sophisticated in their writing that “Happy Birthday!” and “happy birthday” mean extraordinarily different things. At the juncture of language and technology, they are creating meaning using differences as small as case and punctuation.

These kids are, basically, writing so much and practicing becoming skilled rhetoricians. I guess the grammar guardians are fearful that they will put “u” instead of “you” in their college entrance essay and thus spoil their chances of getting into an elite college like EZU — we know those EZUites aren’t going to tolerate this kind of thing — but, as I said, I see them as being quite able, when asked, to shift from texting and Facebook-ese into formal written discourse rapidly, effectively, and fluidly based on their analysis of audience, purpose, and context.

When I think of my friend’s justifiable annoyed daughter, I believe these kids’ immersion in text-based dialogue helps them become skilled users, and perhaps lovers, of language. And even if they don’t always use their powers for good (I’ll pick up that topic later), they are probably better at communicating in writing and certainly way more conscious of written language than the folks of my generation ever were. They can make a comma or exclamation point do an almost poetic amount of work.

But maybe you are sitting back, scoffing. Maybe you don’t agree with me. Well?

then have a nice day

Today, Yahoo had a link on their main page to an alarming Time story about an alarming trend — actually, it’s more like an epidemic! — of children (who are our future and our most precious resource) asphyxiating themselves in an effort to achieve a “high,” to just feel something in this callously dull world. This deadly dangerous activity goes by many names, but the most alarming by far is “The Choking Game,” and only the most naive among you don’t believe it’s already infected your community.

Researchers at The Crime Victims’ Institute at Sam Houston State University surveyed 837 students at a Texas university and found that the behavior, which works by cutting off blood flow to the brain in order to induce a high, was frighteningly commonplace:

•16% of students said they’d played the game, and three-quarters more than once
•On average, students first played the game at age 14
•Males were more likely to have played than females
•90% of students who had played the game learned about it from friends, and most students said they first played in a group

16% of a group of 837 students at one Texas University might have choked or hyperventilated themselves at some point in the past. And three-quarters of those might have done it twice!

That is “frighteningly commonplace” (by the way, emphasis added, because, see below)! That’s practically everybody!

It turns out that The Choking Game is a crisis that media outlets have been trying to manufacture for some time. With limited success, because today was the first I’d ever heard of it — now, of course, I’m panicked. Anyway, back in 2010, Time also sounded an alarm:

Known by various names around the world — including funky chicken, space monkey, sleeper hold and the blackout, choking or fainting game — the activity involves applying pressure to the neck to stop the blood flow to the brain and then releasing the pressure to create a temporary sense of euphoria. It isn’t new: French medical books mention the scarf game as early as the 18th century, and deaths in Britain, Canada and the U.S. have occasionally made the headlines over the years. What is new — and frightening — is that teenagers are now uploading instructional videos to the Internet that glamorize the potentially deadly practice.

Are you “frightened” by this “frighteningly commonplace” activity? People have been doing it since the 18th century for crying out loud! But, thanks to the murderous internet, that is literally killing people in Asian countries, these misguided children have a new and frightening way of promoting their frightening activity.

But let’s get down to it. How many people are dying thanks to this frighteningly commonplace activity? As it turns out, “many.” Back to Time’s 2010 expose:

Many teenagers already are dying. Figures on choking-game deaths remain sketchy — a lack of awareness among police means that cases often end up being classified as suicides. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta estimates that at least 82 people died from the activity between 1995 and 2007. But according to the Wisconsin-based campaign group Games Adolescents Shouldn’t Play (GASP), as many as 1,000 young people die in the U.S. each year playing some variation of the game. In France, officials identified 17 deaths in 2009, but they suspect that many more go unreported.

Hold on a second — you mean that police have a “lack of awareness” of this frighteningly commonplace epidemic??? How could they be unaware of something that has killed 82 people between 1995 and 2007?

Oh, but wait, a special interest group formed to fight this frightening commonplace scourge claims that “as many as 1,000 young people die in the U.S. each year playing some variation on the game.” Are you frightened of that astonishingly equivocal statement?

Okay, let’s head over to the GASP website. They’re the experts on this epidemic I’d never heard of before, despite all the frightening stories out there. What kind of statistics do they have? I bet they’re frightening.

Or, maybe not. Here are a couple of screenshots.

According to their spreadsheet, thus far in 2012 there’s been one incident. Worldwide. In 2011, that number was a frighteningly commonplace 45. In 2010? 50. Remember, these numbers are from all over the world, and the GASP website doesn’t seem to have any information about how they come by them. Oh, they have a “contact us” hyperlink, where users can send an email to report something, but we have no way of knowing where the numbers actually came from.

Even when they don’t tell us where they get their numbers, the group dedicated to fighting this frighteningly commonplace problem can’t muster more than 151 worldwide incidents in a given year (2006).

But, these are the people who claim that “as many as 1,000 young people die in the U.S. each year playing some variation on the game.” Their own statistics — the statistics available on their own alarmist website — are nowhere near that number. So where did they get it?

I don’t know and they won’t say. But here’s something interesting from a 2008 attempt by the New York Times to jump on the frighteningly commonplace bandwagon:

The deaths identified by the C.D.C. are based on media reports of the game over the past decade, but more than 60 of the deaths have occurred since 2005. The agency says the number of deaths is probably understated, and other experts agree, noting that choking game deaths, which involve accidental strangulation with a rope or belt, often look like suicides.

The Web site GASP, which stands for Games Adolescents Shouldn’t Play, reports that 65 children died in 2007 alone. Mark Lepore, an assistant professor of counseling psychology at Chatham College in Pittsburgh, told The Houston Press last year that he believed 1,800 people in the United States had died playing the game in the past 10 years; most were children and teenagers.

These frighteningly commonplace Choking Game deaths sometimes look like suicides — which actually are much more common — so we can just make up numbers that we think represent the actual frightening statistics that we don’t have because the media hasn’t done enough to draw attention to this frighteningly commonplace problem they’ve been trying to turn into crisis for several years.

But look at what the New York Times says about GASP’s 2007 numbers — “65 children died in 2007 alone.” Now look at the screen shot that I took of GASP’s 2007 numbers. For the USA, they list 77 “Choking Game” incidents, and 12 “Recovered.” I don’t know what that means, and there’s nothing on GASP’s site to explain, but the New York Times reporter apparently believes that it represents people who “recovered” from their choking game injuries and survived, because 77 minus 12 is 65. But, if you look at the 2007 total, and add all the numbers together (I used a calculator!), you find that the total includes all of the “Choking Game” incidents and “Recovered” added together.

The “recovered” people are being counted twice? And they still only made it to 147.

As for Mark Lepore, and his “1,800 people” (notice the article says “people,” not “young people”) dying every year from playing the Choking Game, here is that Houston Press article, and here is the paragraph with Mr. Lepore’s quote:

But Mark Lepore, assistant professor of counseling psychology at Pittsburgh’s Chatham College, believes 1,800 people in the United States have died playing the game in the past ten years. The majority were children and teens. However, Lepore acknowledges that “it’s really hard to make an accurate determination” as to exactly how many deaths can be attributed to the choking game. (Deaths attributed to the choking game are not to be confused with those attributed to autoerotic asphyxiation, in which masturbation and asphyxia are combined in the quest for a more powerful orgasm, and which typically involves older practitioners.)

And, that’s it. Mr. Lepore believes it’s 1,800 people in ten years, but he’s got absolutely no evidence whatsoever to back up his claim. (But the majority of his wholly made up number were children and teens.) Frightened yet? 1,800 in ten years, up to 1,000 a year, 85 people from 1995 to 2007… who really cares? The important thing is that this is a frighteningly commonplace epidemic that is literally choking our future.

So, what is a panicking parent to do? Back to today’s Time article:

The good news is that learning that a number of teens and college students have suffocated to death from playing the Choking Game helped deter students from playing. Parents, talk to your kids. And schools can play a role too: related research found that 90% of parents think that including information about the dangers of the game in school health and drug prevention classes is a smart idea.

Talk to your kids.

Except. From the Today show, 2009:

Their son Kevin was a good kid — a bright and generous 15-year-old who seemed to have everything going for him. But the boy played what is most commonly called the “choking game” — a fad among teenagers that experts say could more accurately be called “suffocation roulette” — and he lost. Kevin was discovered unconscious in his room by his 11-year-old sister.
…
Kevin Tork died on March 30. What made it even more painful for his parents was that Ken Tork had seen a televised report on a young person who died playing the game and talked with his son about it. He told Kevin to promise he would never engage in anything so dangerous, and Kevin promised.

This father saw an alarmist television report about the “frighteningly commonplace” choking game, and decided to talk to his son about it. And then his son died from the very activity that the alarmist report alarmed him about.

What if Mr. Tork hadn’t seen that televised report about a manufactured crisis that is literally killing maybe a couple of dozen people a year, if that, we really have no way of knowing because even though it’s frighteningly commonplace the actual numbers that we have are awfully small, too small to be accurate because we just know there’s got to be more dying from this than we think because, well, the internet, and, well, kids these days, you know?

Even one death from this dumb “game” is one too many, and I feel terrible for anyone who has to bury their child, for any reason. But for crying out loud this isn’t a “frighteningly commonplace” “fad,” this is exploiting fear to sell advertising. Maybe the real crisis is lazy “journalists” manufacturing crises? Maybe parents need to sit down and talk to their kids about the importance of being skeptical about the news. That is, if they can calm down enough from their own panic.

As an alumnus of Rutgers Camden (BA, ’91; MA, ’95), I have received a lot of information through alumni channels and talked with many former classmates about Governor Chris Christie’s proposed “merger” of Rutgers University Camden with Rowan University. After digesting this information as best I could, I realize I am against this forced joining, for many reasons. But being faced with this issue has rekindled an embarrassing aspect of my thinking: My utter ignorance about educational branding. No, that’s being too generous: When it comes to educational branding, I’m stupid, naïve, and pathetically out of step with my fellow humans.

In case you don’t know, Governor Christie proposed linking these two southern New Jersey institutions as part of a larger plan for NJ higher education that includes incorporating many components of the University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey into Rutgers University. Rutgers Camden is fighting back vigorously, and many prominent people in South Jersey have voiced disapproval, saying the move would hurt the City of Camden, disrupt the education of current Rutgers Camden students, and fuse two institutions with different pedagogical and research agendas. This site provides more information from the Rutgers Camden side.

Another prominent anti-merger reason that keeps surfacing is about the “brand” of Rutgers. And this is the part that just leaves poor me, in all my ignorance, adrift. But by writing this, I am confessing my wrongness, because I dimly know how important people think your educational brand is, and Rutgers has a great one. I also know people will think less of you at parties and job interviewers will throw your resume in the trash and grad schools will snicker at you because of your institutional brand. And I know this branding can now start in preschool.

But I still don’t get it.

People of a certain stripe are scrambling like never before to send their kids to places like Elite Zenith University (EZU). Do they really know in a concrete way not only that EZU is a great place to learn but that it’s a great place to learn for their children? Usually no. They do know there is a mythical aura – constructed and supported mainly, of course, by people just like them – around EZU. They may not know anything concrete about EZU educationally, but they know that with EZU you get a cool bumper sticker, a secret society-like alumni association, and the opportunity for their kid to hang out with rich folks. They can tell people “My children go to EZU” and get the buzz of seeing others feel all gushy and amazed.

But due to some cerebral shortcoming on my part, the EZU educational brand doesn’t register. (This shortcoming may contribute to my having driven some crappy cars and being a bad dresser.) Certainly, I’m a linguistic animal, so words do affect me, but for me, when I hear “I go to EZU,” my associations, as a result no doubt of my cerebral miswiring, go kind of like this:

• Your parents might be rich.
• Your uncle might have paid for a building at EZU, maybe a library or gym.
• You might be smart.
• You might be talented.
• You might be really good at doing what teachers and other authorities tell you to do and at taking standardized tests.
• You might have been able to pay someone who was good at taking standardized tests.
• You might be an out-of-the-box thinker.
• You might be lying.

Alas, in my life, in my experience with EZUites (the school name is actually the Apogees, which illustrates the beyond-the-mortal-coil perception in which this group should be held), some of them have been super smart and successful. Some have been losers. Unfortunately, they fall into these categories in about the same ratios as my non-EZU acquaintances.

This is not to say that certain programs at certain schools would be better for certain people. If your kid is a great cello player, you might want her around the best cello players. Pick that school. If your kid is researching toxoplasmosis prevention (and if you read this article, you will most definitely encourage your kid to pursue this line of research), then the best toxoplasmosis lab in the world would be good. Pick that school. If your kid has 4.3 speed and when he tackles people the earth shakes, you might want him around great football players. Pick that school.

But, starting when they’re little, kids are being shepherded to elite places because of perceived eliteness. Period. What the schools actually do for these kids is a hard question, once you sort out self-selection bias and money.

Because of my naiveté, regardless of your EZU sweatshirt or Apogee forehead tattoo, I will take some time to get to know you, whether I meet you in a diner or you’re interviewing for a job with me, before I really know what you’re all about.

Despite my perceptual problem and my embarrassment about it, I still think the idea that the very air of EZU is going to make your kid, just by virtue of strolling around the ground, better, is bad. While there’s something harmlessly pathetic about thinking a brand of sneakers or a type of car makes you a better person, it seems insidious when we apply the same idea to education, considering how complex the outcome of educational “success” is when applied to a particular child.

But, of course, I think that because I’m missing something about how the world works.

I am proud I went to Rutgers Camden. I had a great experience and learned a ton. I don’t want Rutgers Camden and Rowan to merge. But it makes me a little sad that Rutgers people are so worried about the brand on their degree and that they would be judged by the name of the institution on their resume or sweatshirt. But, I’m even sadder because despite my ignorance about this topic, I do realize they are absolutely right.

Has there ever been a time when there was such a hard-charging fury to be a great parent? Well, maybe it’s always been like this (see what Tolstoy thinks below), but many observers do see the rise of a stifling kid-centric worldview. Could it be that true greatness in raising kids is measured by a smaller yardstick than we realize?

Last year I read “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy” by Lori Gottlieb in The Atlantic. Gottlieb a therapist and parent herself, talked to many psychiatrists and experts about children to weave together a fascinating narrative about the over-protective, over-involved modern parent. For instance, child psychologist Dan Kindlon told her that if kids don’t experience painful feelings, they won’t develop “psychological immunity”; Kindlon describes how our civilization is about confronting and dealing with the imperfect, yet “parents have this instantaneous reaction to unpleasantness, which is ‘I can fix this.’” Psychiatrist Paul Bohn tells Gottlieb how parents go to great extremes to avoid having their kids encounter unpleasantries like anxiety or disappointment. Jeff Blume, a family psychologist, explains that a kid “needs to feel normal anxiety to be resilient” and that if we want our kids to be independent, “we should prepare our kids to leave us every day.”

Most sensible people would read the previous paragraph and get it. But it ain’t easy to let your kids consciously experience pain or suffering, even if it’s the old character-building kind. Geez, I have this memory of my now 10-year-old gleefully pushing around a toy dumptruck when he was about two. It slid out from under him, and he cracked his face on the ground. I knew he wasn’t going to die or anything, but my response was sub-cognitive, because as I write this I can still feel my anguish at seeing his bright, optimistic face laced with actual pain.

Yes, we get it, yet colleges are having trouble wresting parents away from their about-to-be freshmen (not the other way around), and when I worked as the director of a first-year writing program, I can tell you I dealt with parents who were explaining why students didn’t do anything in class for ten weeks or defending plagiarists or advocating for children who were disrespectful — really disrespectful — to their instructors.

I understand the reaction of “I don’t want my kid to experience distress.” However, if we take time to process, to turn a reaction into reflection, maybe we should ratchet it back — and stop feeling so bad for ourselves for doing so. Because this absorption with not just our kids’ success but our own sense of success as parents has so many troubling aspects.

Back to the dumptruck pusher. He was born at a time of tough time in my life; people aren’t lying: experiencing birth, death, job change, and moving all within four months of each other will apparently lead to a lot of stress. I had been so happy with my nearly two-year-old daughter, but the stress, as stress will do, switched out the excitement about child #2 with a dread and anxiety that I didn’t have it in me to be a great dad again. It was a grueling, self-flagellating time.

I paralyzed myself with excessive caring. Maybe we’re not unique, maybe some sectors of society will always be obsessed with their kids. For instance, Tolstoy wrote this not in 21st century America but in the 19th-century Russia of Anna Karenina: “… when we were brought up people went to one extreme: we were kept in the attic while our parents lived on the first floor. Now it’s the other way round: the parent in the lumber room and the children on the first floor. The parents, you see, have no right to live now. Everything is for the children.”

But maybe we can bring a little more perspective to the whole endeavor. Let’s amp it down. As a solution, I’m suggesting a little strategic apathy.

Say a child complains a teacher or coach is playing favorites? So what? It’s probably not true, but if it were, maybe the kids would learn the best lesson of their lives that year, navigating through some adult who wasn’t isn’t fawning over their every move. So what if little Chris scored a goal today? So what if they didn’t get a trophy this year? So what if they cleaned their rooms? — they’re supposed to! Can the real demonstration of love be in restraining this gushing desire to communicate praise — even though, dammit, you do think that crummy clay “statue” is the best thing you’ve ever seen. This is where we can really help them. Gottlieb points out “paradoxically, all of this worry about creating low self-esteem may actually perpetuate it.” Once kids hit the real world, they are indeed going to find out quickly that no one, no one, thinks their clay “statues” are as great as mommy and daddy do.

So we should screw up, blow our tops once in a while, go to dinner instead of one of their recitals, call them “knuckleheads” when they’re acting like knuckleheads. (You need restraint in your restraint, though: “shiftless knuckleheads” is crossing the line.)

Being mediocre and sometimes flawed may paradoxically be the ingredients of great child raising. It is admittedly tough to frame a slogan, let alone a philosophy, around mediocrity (observe the slim market for big foam fingers that say “We’re #2″). It’s an idea that’s going to take some getting used to, but the very greatness of a parent may lie in a touch of apathy, an understanding that the term “great” in this context means something quite different and perhaps a little less than what we thought.

Proposition 8 was a heartbreaker for those who loved Candidate Obama the second best. His greatest admirers were those like Samuel Jackson who saw in him an ethnic reflection of themselves. His “message” didn’t mean shit to them. But a close second in devotion is that other bulwark of Democratic politics, the gay community. Though they tended towards Hillary (a known fan of sensible shoes), like many other key groups they saw in Obama a champion of their cause. They were as disappointed as the young hemp enthusiasts but much sooner. They knew on Election Day that Prop 8 had passed adding an Amendment to the California Constitution defining marriage as a union of one man and one woman.

The dissappointment was to some extent their own fault. Candidate Obama had never publicly supported literal gay marriage any more than President Bush had. Rather, like those who took cannibis for medical reasons and hoped to be able to take it legally in any setting, the gay marriage advocates assumed that a President Obama would indeed be actively on their side though his stock response to questions always was, “My position is the same as the President’s (Bush), civil unions.) No one believed it. I don’t believe it. What are the odds that Obama TRULY does not favor absolute equality of gay marriage? As an issue it is uniformly supported by his demographic; elite university graduates/government bigwigs. But an alliance of gays and their  more numerous allies is far from a majority; not even in a Democratic primary. It might be different if the balance of the electorate were, like me, flagrantly apathetic to marriage, gay or sullen. That is not the case. Mr. Hillary knew it although he clearly was hostile to all marriage. He made his accommodations with his own base on gay issues, recognizing two powerful blocks were and are opposed to “gay rights” as we know them. That would be the Catholics and the blacks.

We’ll throw the Latino vote in with the Catholics, no objections there, right? It is a statistical, electoral fact (as far as such can be determined): it was the appearance of Barack Hussein Obama on the national ballot that made Proposition 8 a near certainty. How? Why? The Golden State, birthplace of referenda, had been a battle-ground on this issue for years. Before Prop 8 there had been an ordinary statute of identical construction. It was struck down by the State courts. So the defenders of traditional marriage, as they style themselves, set about immediately to put an Amendment in place. The marriage enthusiasts were also energetic. They married and married and married boosting the sales of wedding kit and fattening the wallets of many a photographer. In part this is pent-up demand, yes? Those who could not swing the airfares to Hawaii or Mitt’s Massachusetts could now enjoy a court ordered matrimonial regime like those happy jurisdictions. But this was also a move in the great chess tournament; a castling maneuver that would protect their newly uncovered rights with the weight of the Grandfather Clause. If all this was going on without your knowledge, you are in good company. As can happen even with a political obsessive, this controversy came to the attention of much of the electorate only at the polls on election day. Collectively the opposing forces spent about $80 million in advertising and for once the divide was almost even. It is the gunslingers’ permanent frustration that lavish spending STILL does not reach many ears and long-term polling STILL does not capture many voices so the gay marriage lobby had a brutal shock to go along with their relief at seeing the tailpipes of John McCain. Prop 8 won handily, even in a solidly Blue state, even with a pumped up Dem turnout. And the culprit was Barack Obama.

Chalk this up to the eternal perversions of politics. Obama’s presence on the ballot naturally SPIKED black turnout and this is after a spike in black registration fanned by his candidacy. Hillary would certainly have won California and probably with as great a margin. The pro-8 hispanic vote would have been largely the same. The anti-8 gay vote would have been largely the same. And Democrats collectively would oppose Prop 8 but the newly engorged black vote most certainly did not. Whether religious or secular, even the Californian black community is not up for this particular struggle. It adamantly prefers its gay constituents on the Down Low. Those calculating electoral chits certainly knew that on both sides. The PR men however, and this includes the candidates, had good reason to disbelieve and keep to themselves the private cautions of the gunslingers: as the Obama vote increases so does the support for Prop 8. You know the reasons. To even admit to such a breech in your coalition is to encourage the breech to widen. The fissure between the Democrats and the devout is one of the most active known to Crackology while even the gay vote is far from a monolith. Elections sweep away the stucco and show the state of the brick underneath.

The courts have always been more availing than The People so off to the courts we go. The 9th Cir Ct of Appeals strikes down the Amendment as the State courts struck down the law. And on even more expansive grounds. Whatever your views you may find that you are not familiar with the arguments even of your own side. No need to break a sweat catching up. I relieve all the combatants of their duties with the simple observation that the decision of the 9th, should it be upheld, has rendered ALL marriage Unconstitutional.

Deviation from a position shared by Barack Obama and George Bush is difficult to categorize as Left or Right so let us assert that it is ABOVE the prejudices of both these gentlemen. My position, which has now been ratified at the Federal level is not Marriage for All, but Marriage for None. Both Obama and Bush favor civil unions or domestic partnerships for gays that exclude “marriage” only rhetorically. Some of the State civil unions laws actually state the intent to deliver ALL the rights and privileges of marriage, except the name. The 9th correctly decides that this can only be explained by an animus for a particular group of citizens. Unlike the gay lobby, I will not define either religious scruple or Common Law objections as mere bigotry but our tattered Constitution clearly states Equal Protection under the Law as sacrosanct. Yes, the Constitution was ratified while truly horrific punishments were prescribed for homosexuality in some precincts. That is of no consequence. Precedent, legislation and simple social requirements have rendered those moot, even in hellish Texas! All citizens are to be held in common before the law. That means not civil unions for gays but, as far as the government is concerned, civil unions for ALL!

So what will this mean, if marriage is struck down, as the gay lobby puts it, like segregated schools? The Grandfather Clause, wrinkled gift of the Common Law, is again in play. Your marriage, as well as a sacred bann, is already a civil union; a contract recorded at your county clerk’s office. Yes, your divorce, annulment, adoption, military separation, deeds, trusts, wills and diverse other social agreements are there as well and like your marriage contract are unaffected by mere changes in their names. In Louisiana they pollute our legal system with FRENCH, yet their records are as sound as any other (in just theory). No, this does not admit polygamy necessarily. Keeping the partnerships to one-on-one is a perfectly sound restriction that can be applied to all evenly. And let us quickly put aside the bilious absurdity that we now admit inter-species marriage. No, however comely your goat, Abdul, you cannot make an honest doe of her (or billy of him). This contract is a contract. If you can’t buy a used car from livestock neither can you marry it. This also means that no one otherwise incompetent to contract can enter into marriage. The legal age for marriage has just become 18 or whatever the Age of Majority is by statute. Perhaps this is something for the traditionalists but there is something else larger and far more important. Believers, if you don’t believe me, believe your eyes your ears and the Constitution; government and religion just don’t mix. The religion sinks right to the bottom. If you, as you should, want the government out of your medicine and your charity you must be willing to get your religion out of government. So what does this mean? It means that marriage will still exist but will only be recognized as a civil contract equal to others in the public, legal realm. That is only part of our existence for the moment and the de-recognition of marriage is part of the defense of the perilously shrinking private sphere. You may still be married by a priest and it will still be a sacrament with your congregation, like Confession or a bar mitzvah. Does the county record your First Communion? Okay, maybe in Louisiana, but what is it’s legal weight? None or nearly none. Does that diminish its relevance to you or to Eternity? If so I think you have missed a day or two of Catechism.

In any event, keeping marriage “holy” doesn’t seem to have increased its staying power. Even those precincts that don’t recognize divorce have a divorce rate at least equal to the nation at large. What does that tell you? Is all marriage sacred? What of marriage concluded by fraud? Wracked with adultery or violence? Or plagued with reciprocal apathy? If that is Holy Matrimony, give me Unholy Divorce! Most marriages are initiated by the man; most divorces by the woman and never have I encountered an unjust divorce. Marriages that profane the name through their condition are endemic. So save the snark at the irony of the First Gay Spouses of California making use of the surviving law of Gay Divorce. If marriage is not in the heart and of free will, something only the participants can decide, then it is better we do not enforce it with the alacrity of the Fugitive Slave Act. Once the separation of the sacred from the earthly was a large part of religious faith and practice. Now we have an opportunity to Render unto Ceasar what is Ceasar’s and reserve to ourselves the sacred and eternal while admitting our own fallibility and embracing our neighbors without malignity. This we can do while renewing our vows to the most basic tenet of our beloved and beleaguered Constitution. Shall we do that? Yes.

Happy Valentine’s Day.