When I started writing in this space, my kids were small. I knew nothing about parenting. While I still don’t know much, when people with younger kids seek advice, I offer this: It’s a long road, so be patient.

I know this from hard-won experience. Let’s use a really important example. Every Fall I’d make the effort. I’d keep trying. I’d keep encouraging. I’d go through cycles of hope and disappointment. I stayed at it, and now here we are.

The “here”?: We’re talking important matters. We’re talking about the NFL. We’re talking Eagles. As I admit to all, the NFL is my guilty pleasure. But for years, I soldiered on alone in a house full of football apathy and soccer nuts. For years, my three kids (I gave up on my wife ages ago) would rebuff my invitations to watch a mere quarter of Eagles football on a Sunday. I tried it all. I was even not above overt, although fruitless, emotional manipulation, saying things like, “[Sigh] You know, at some point dear old Dad will be gone, and you’ll regret not watching the game with him.”

That worked exactly not at all.

But over the past couple years, as they’ve cruised into their 20s, my kids and their seven cousins, because they’re geographically dispersed, have decided to assemble a fantasy football league. Year one the spark was igniting.

Then came Thursday night, September 5, 2024. The boys and I had been talking football all summer. I know stuff. Remember, I was one of those kids who grew up in the 70s obsessed with the sport. I spent extensive time playing electric football. I collected these amazing Super Bowl magazines from McDonald’s and can still relate most facts from the first 15 (ahem, XV) Super Bowls.

We played football almost every day in the yards or on the streets of Berlin. I played high school ball, and then I got in with a bunch of dudes and (stupidly) played tackle pick-up for over fifteen years: I played my last game as a doddering 40-year-old on an icy late-Fall field in Echelon, NJ.

The author and Zachary battling it out last Christmas on the metal gridiron of electric football.

Well, that Thursday, both sons, Nate and Zachary, happened to be home, and they came bounding down the stairs. They were hopping around. They were chanting “football, football.” Finally the younger brother, Zachary, exclaimed, “I’m more excited than Christmas Eve!”

A sense of pride and happiness welled up inside me. I had to turn to the side to clear some dust out of my eye. As we settled in to watch the Ravens-Chiefs that night, I reveled in their growing knowledge of the game and got to add in, explaining gridiron arcana like dime packages and shovel passes. My daughter would patch in from Texas–it was a family affair!

Salman Rushdie, the great man himself, once wrote in Quichotte, “But there’s a thing you don’t know about parenthood. It’s mostly about showing up.” I kept showing up: Right on that couch, present, eager, all “did you see that amazing play?!” For years, they scurried by, ignoring my pleas, avoiding my gaze. For years, every Fall, I was rebuffed. But I showed up again the next year. And now we’re all on the same page, talking trash, talking football, talking…

Coda: After Nate and I sat up and watched the miserable end of the Eagles-Falcons game on Monday night, I must admit that I thought, What have I done?

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First off, the easy answer is me. My wife and I watched a ton of the Olympics this year, and I tried, with great success, to stay in a news cocoon each day so I could watch the prime time coverage all fresh-faced.

I was interested in so many aspects of the Games. In fact, as I continue through withdrawal a couple weeks later–although of course we can all still get some buzz from the underpromoted Paralympics–I figured I’ll write something about a question I’ve seen posed in various places: What nation really won?

It may seem crass to talk about winning in such stark terms for an event like the Olympics, but, wait a second, they do give out medals. People do care about winning. (I sure do-ask my friends, and, alas, my children!).

I was especially invested in the U.S. coming out on top in both overall medal count and the gold medal haul this year. The U.S. eked it out over China, tying for golds but then cleaning up in overall medals. I was clannishly, atavistically, jingoistically ecstatic. It was a little embarrassing.

But as this provocative SB Nation article suggests, “What if instead of weighting golds, or evaluating total medals, we determined standings based on how many medals a country wins per-capita?”

The winner in that scenario?… New Zealand, with a medal for every 256,200 people! The U.S.–sorry, folks!–plummets to 12th place: It takes us over 2.6 million people for each medal. China drops all the way to 21st. Australia remains strong, moving from 4th overall to 2nd place per capita.

There are other ways. You could measure by the amount of money a nation spends per athlete, or even ratio of medals to size of Olympic contingent. Or you could generate a metric against one particular performer who rakes in many medals or a nation that is strong at a sport with many medals (like gymnastics or track).

The point is there are other ways of assessing success and effectiveness–and maybe winning.

As we cruise into a new school year, I admit this ties into my ongoing interest in measuring and counting everything, especially how flawed overall school rating systems are: Let’s look at what goes in or what comprises the count before measuring output

Anyway, I was on board–opening ceremonies pun intended–feeling crazy good about the U.S., and I still am, but there might be other ways to feel proud about accomplishments. A gold medal is still a gold medal for someone, but, overall, maybe what went into that medal is not always equal.

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As you may have heard, the Olympics are getting into full swing. Great news for us, as my wife and I love watching the Games and end up, Winter or Summer, taking in all kinds of events, even if we don’t think a bit about them in the intervening years.

Turns out, with all this viewing, we may be doing ourselves a solid over the next couple weeks: Yep, some Frontiers in Public Health research shows that watching sports can help you experience greater wellbeing!–and while that study focuses on in-person attendance, another study shows that even couch-jockey fans can see a benefit: “[…] people who watch sports on TV or on the internet were also less depressed than those who did not, and depressive symptoms were even less likely for those who watched sports with increasing frequency.”

So even those not lucky enough to be in France now but watching from afar can get that “USA, USA!” buzz and greater overall happiness–why wouldn’t you be in?!

Also, if you find yourself sometimes not enjoying the Olympics because all these chiseled athletes make you feel a bit, uh, out of shape, stop being so hard on yourself! A CNN Mindfulness article emphasizes you should not shame yourself with fruitless comparisons to Olympians. Dr. Amadeus Mason, medical director for USA Track and Field says, “Most of the competitors spend their entire lives training for this one moment, and it is unrealistic to expect to look like an Olympian.”

Settle in, get some snacks, let the Games entertain and inspire, and don’t get wrapped up in upward comparisons.

Finally, if all this guilt-free viewing isn’t fantastic enough, how about that Flavor Flav himself is involved, having signed a deal to be the “official hype man” for USA Water Polo Women’s and Men’s National Teams?! As a decades-long lover of Public Enemy, I’m way biased, but I can’t think of anyone greater to be your hype man than Flav–who can raise the roof better than him?!

(I’ve often imagined myself blundering through the end of a 5k or trying to move around some weights in the gym when Flav shows up, cheering me on–and the next thing you know I’m hitting personal bests.)

C’mon, man, this is all straight up amazing: we’ll be soaking up a ton of the Olympics (let’s go USA Wrestling!), getting revved up Flavor Flav, while my joy and happiness are climbing, climbing.

I’m resisting with all my might a “yeah boy!” (oops), but it’s gonna be a fun two+ weeks.

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Drexel was one of the more recent universities to experience a protest, as toward the end of Drexel’s fast-paced spring term and overall academic year, protesters camped in the center of campus for nearly a week.

The university went on lockdown when the encampment started on a Saturday night, gradually resuming normal operations during a five-day period. For two days, many classes were online, including mine.

In my class, studenting-wise, the kids did alright.

I know this pandemic “generation” has been through a lot, but collective worries that they have fallen to pieces and will not be able to cope or function in the “real world” (whatever that is) were certainly challenged by my students’ quick and in most ways expert transition to a Zoom-based classroom.

The university was functioning hour-by-hour, so the entire Drexel community would only receive information about the next day’s operations in the evening. We all had to be ready to shift gears.

I don’t know if they were happy about it, but every student showed up for our online class on Tuesday, and they were on time and ready to go. All but one had cameras on, and they worked well both in the whole group class and the breakout rooms, interacting with me and their classmates.

We shared a few winky in-jokes about online learning, but in terms of the outcomes for that day’s lessons, we stayed on track–I did my best, but it was largely thanks to their attention and efforts.

Few would likely choose to resume learning in a solely digital modality, but if need be, they showed they could pull it off.

These students are not withering little snowflakes, fluttering about, buffeted helplessly by forces they cannot/will not resist, melting when the temperature of their environment clicks up a notch. I think, as I did during much of the pandemic, that they’re warriors. I keep finding that they adjust and adapt when called upon, and they showed that again last month.

Drexel acted with relative speed in opening its campus and beginning onsite instruction again. We finished the quarter. Graduations for both colleges and the university as a whole came and went.

I watched the students walk in front of me across the stage at the College of Arts and Sciences graduation, and, you know, I felt that I’m not only proud I had a chance to work with many of them, but that I’m confident that they’ll be the ones in charge some day.

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A few weeks back, my daughter Elizabeth and I made the drive to Austin, Texas, where she was moving after spending her whole life in the Northeast, including the past several years in Philadelphia. She’s starting a new phase.

I wrote about her in this space for the first time on September 24, 2010. She had recently turned 11. Now she is finishing an MS in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from Nova Southeastern, and she’ll complete internship requirements in Austin before launching a professional career.

Two months ago, we flew down to for an initial scouting trip. We followed a whirlwind itinerary of a dozen apartment visits in three days and secured a place.

The Thursday of the big move, I taught my class at Drexel until 11:00, and she wheeled up soon after in her gray Honda Civic. Her little(r) brother met us on the corner with a couple jugs of water and, bid her, geez, an emotional good-bye. “It’s just so sad,” he said, good man that he is.

The car was packed, and I squeezed in my two bags. The plan: Make the two-day drive, arriving at her apartment late Friday night. Wake up Saturday and unload the U-Haul box that would meet us there. Get situated on Sunday. I would fly out early Monday.

As long as we didn’t hit tornadoes, we’d be in good shape.

I should mention that accompanying us would be Griz and Woozy, her two cats. They were to travel in a large dog crate equipped with food, water, and a custom-made cardboard litter box. Two test drives had revealed Woozy hated it all, and nothing changed as we turned south on 95 that morning. He whined. He howled. He clawed. He clambered on poor, calm Griz until Elizabeth thought he might smother his brother.

We hit a massive traffic jam before we even got started–of course!–sitting about an hour near the Philly airport. We would not be able to withstand Woozy’s woes, so we pulled over and decided he would sit in her lap. Bless his little feline heart, but that’s what he did, squirming (almost) not at all for the next 15 hours. A little CBD oil didn’t hurt.

Oh, there was this other thing. Although I’ve had cats most of my life including right now–Mr. Grey and Calvin–I can be allergic to other people’s cats. Maybe especially hers.

Man, I was dying. But I had to dad-up. So I not only fought for life-sustaining air, but I hid it from her so as to not additional strain to the situation.

But, really, the ride wasn’t bad. We played the alphabet game (splitting 1-1). We listened to and discussed podcasts. We listened to “Scott’s Top 100” playlist, which now contains 239 songs. What can I say?: The kid has good music tastes. It would be all fast food. First: A MacDonald’s stop.

We battled our way through Northeast corridor traffic in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland, and then we hit smooth sailing in Virginia and Tennessee. We arrived at 2:00 a.m. in a sweet, teeny cat-friendly Airbnb outside Nashville. (I should point out she organized all trip logistics. I was just the muscle.)

We awoke at 9:00 on Friday and hit the road again. Chik-fil-A. Then Subway.

Never be glib about tornadoes. Friday, April 26, 2024 was a bad weather day in the Midwest, and while we were south of the real trouble, as we left Arkansas and entered Texas we hit astonishing rain: A local meteorologist we had tuned into said the area received three times as much rain in three hours as the area normally gets in the whole month of April.

Luckily it was daytime and the roads sloughed off the water, but I still had to pull over twice. After more than an hour of intense rain–when would it end, Griz?–the skies cleared. We hit Dallas.

We arrived at her apartment just before midnight after driving 28.5 hours over two days, 24.5 by me while she ably co-piloted. We arrived, and we moved our bags into the apartment. I opened the door at one point…

Griz ran out.

Exhausted, I made a rookie mistake: I chased the dope. She quickly got ahead of me and grabbed the naughty fellow and tossed him back into his new home. He’s been fine ever since.

Then she inflated an air mattress and we zombied out.

Saturday she went to buy things for the new place, and I waited for the U-Haul Box. My friend Andrew–a friendly face in Austin!–brought us Torchy’s Tacos.

It was windy, and we were the last delivery of the day, but I have nothing but good to say about U-Haul. Our box arrived with contents fully intact. It was packed, and then 90 minutes later, it was empty. We were undaunted by her second floor apartment. We hauled. We lifted. We groaned. She and I lugged a sleeper sofa up. We powered up a king mattress.

She can work, and so can I, but, still, I’m getting old! That evening after more fast food–why not?! In-N-Out Burger–I sat diagonally on the sofa in a chiropractically horrific position, hand on one of the hyperallergenic felines, and dissolved into sleep. At some point she pulled out the sleeper sofa for me, and we both slept about 12 hours.

Sunday she got further situated, and I meticulously folded up all of the boxes so some local could re-use them via Buy Nothing. (Our amazing trip to a Waffle House is for another blog.)

She drove me to the airport very early Monday morning, and we parted ways. People asked me if it was emotional. No. We worked hard to get her set up down there, and she’s ready for this change of life. Because of that, so am I.

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Jason Kelce’s retirement speech from the Eagles and NFL is already famous. It was as remarkable a speech as it was a piece of writing and rhetoric.

The delivery was not just quintessential Kelce, but it was very much of his generation: He sat in a sleeveless workout shirt and sandals and read the speech from his phone; perhaps he even composed it using the phone.

Watching, I had thoughts and feelings from many perspectives: as a (former!) athlete, spouse, Eagles fan. I also viewed it as a teacher, and from that vantage, I had a distinct thought: “No way AI wrote that speech.” Why? Because I was struck by how authentic Kelce’s speech was. It was all him in content, style, and voice.

I thought how proud and excited I am when I receive authentic writing work–sometimes with accompanying speeches– from my students. And it made me think again of the big challenge for teachers to create meaningful writing assignments, and how that challenge has been renewed because of generative artificial intelligence. We are being pushed to develop assignments that are not so much plagiarism proof as plagiarism discouraging because they bring out authentic, meaningful student writing.

I know it’s challenging for teachers to create such assignments. After all, we can’t just drop students into a context like Kelce’s, where they bid goodbye to an activity of passion after nearly a decade and a half, especially an activity meshing the violent and the cerebral like football (especially when you play center).

But I believe GAI will productively pressure teachers to create more meaningful writing environments for our students. Assignments with authentic roots will have a greater likelihood of inspiring such responses.

My nephew/housemate recently submitted his college application essay. Despite living with a college writing professor (!), he went it solo. I respect him for doing this task on his own–he’s an independent guy–and he had no compunction sharing the essay with me afterward. After reading it, I said, “No one will think AI wrote this.” The essay had its quirks and inconsistencies, but my comment was not a knock on it. I was saying it had a genuine voice that I felt reflected him well.

There’s a lot of rightful concern in education circles about GAI, especially for writing instruction. Will these GAI engines grow in sophistication to the point that we won’t need people for that very human task, writing? Maybe, but as I watched Kelce, I thought, “I don’t think so”–or at least, “We’ve got a ways to go before that happens.”

I won’t get prideful. If I start boasting that I can create assignments that will prevent students from using GAI, I’m inviting disaster: they’ll prove me wrong. But listening to Jason Kelce’s farewell from football, I realized that if I keep striving to create assignments that mean something to them, they will return something meaningful for me and, more importantly, for themselves.

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The new year, 2024–we’re way into it. It’s been too late for a while to say happy new year to someone. You no longer accidentally write “2023.” We’ve plunged in, and that dive for many includes r-r-r-resolutions. Dry January. I’m gonna start hitting the gym. Book clubs.

Let’s do something maybe a little easier. How about this year commit to making a friend younger or older than you?

This Charley Locke article in Vox “You should have more friends of all ages” suggested just that, saying, “Making friends with those outside of your age range — people 10 or 20 years older or younger than you — can be challenging. But those relationships can widen your world, providing perspective and community beyond your current experiences.”

(As a pleasant surprise, I had bookmarked this article when I decided to write about this topic, and when I opened it discovered a former Drexel student I know well was featured! Go Devin!)

A person I much admired, my former neighbor (sigh) Bob Heck, was to me a model of this. He had friends of all ages, and it seemed to make him a considerably more well-rounded person. As he aged, of course, those intergenerational friendships tended to be with younger people, those he mentored but also simply seemed to enjoy sharing his numerous hobbies and pastimes with.

People can of course diversify friendships and relationships in many ways, but leaping age barriers can provide a unique lens for taking in life, for all the expected reasons: Our younger friendships can help us look at things in new, fresh ways, and with an older friend we could share their vantage of experience.

This doesn’t mean older people have to walk around with a bunch of 20-year-olds saying “fire” and “cap,” or if you’re in the “fire” and “cap” crowd to go see 80-year-olds perform in classic rock bands, but making friends outside of your age bracket can help our perspectives be more flexible and nimbler.

I often think life does tend to push us toward rigidity of belief, starting even when we’re young, and making achronological friends seems a way to slow this. A great divide in human experience seems to be viewing others without valuing the viewpoint their age brings, and we don’t do enough to experience the first-hand experiences of those outside our age range.

As my daughter is finishing up grad school and preparing for a major geographic move, she started babysitting, and she is having the incredible opportunity to be around a baby, whose developmental milestones amaze her. While of course you don’t have a friendship with a baby, her marveling at these daily developmental milestones made me think about how we don’t maintain that sense of wonder. We instead see chronological others through lenses like “Those kids today!” or “Old people are so lame”?

Okay, baby milestones are easy–and fun!–to see, but there are such markers we could find in all of our relationships. As Locke wrote in the Vox article, “Different life stages offer and require different abilities: In your 20s, you may be looking for career advice and are able to help parents connect with a distant teenager; a new parent may be looking for a support system that can become part of their extended family; a recent retiree may have plenty of time but seek more day-to-day connection.”

Developing a friendship with someone much older or younger provides you with opportunities, and I think as does any relationship built around appreciation of others, these opportunities in the end enable us to slow down.

No matter our age, we could all use more of that.

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Many of us spent 2023 wallowing in doubt and self-pity about the inevitable rise of AI. Unbridled academic cheating. Deep fakes. The death of creativity. We feared humanity was done for!

But as I sit perched atop my family fantasy football league–the champ!–I declare that humanity has a few more gasps left.

Last summer, my nephew organized an overpopulated 14-team family league: me, my three kids, their seven cousins, my brother-in-law and sister-in-law, and my one niece’s boyfriend (another niece had a GM/consultant family friend–the more the merrier!).

We’re geographically dispersed, so it was a great way to stay in touch (and talk trash).

In our chaotic draft, many “owners” had a low football acumen and auto-drafted, letting an enigmatic AI pick their players. After the draft, the AI spit this out about my team: “Scott was positioned nicely with a favorable draft pick, but assembled a team that will need to overachieve according to the pundits.” My prospects appeared dim, the AI starkly reported:

• Draft grade: C
• Projected record: 3-11
• Projected finish: T12

12th place!

Ah, but what the AI didn’t know. The AI didn’t see it coming, but suspended Saints running back Alvin Kamara and injured Colts RB Jonathan Taylor returned to play at just the right time. I mixed them in with surprise stud RB from the Browns, Jerome Ford–go, Browns, go!

Sure, my man Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts had his struggles on the gridiron, but in fantasy world, he’s money (#2 ranked QB). Eagles kicker Jake Elliot did his job all season, as did the Kansas City defense and 49ers tight end George Kittle.

I picked up Packers rookie wide receiver Jayden Reed: Who knew he’d be so good? AI didn’t figure on my not only grabbing Steelers WR George Pickens but that he would blow it up in the final two games, including our championship, just when my normal starter Dolphins WR Jaylen Waddle was injured.

In that lopsided Super Bowl win against my brother-in-law–two old guys vindicated–I played six of nine players I drafted. I stuck to my guns. I looked like a genius!

Well, I’m not, but the AI certainly wasn’t either.

If AI can’t predict a silly thing like fantasy football, maybe natural language generators using predictive modeling for word choice aren’t quite there in capturing creativity the way a human does in choosing a sussever (my made-up word for “unique sequence of two words”).

I’m no Shakespeare, the great coiner of words, so “sussever” dies here, but humans will keep cementing words into the dictionary like we did again in 2023 and coming up with new ideas, and AI apps will comb their databases to catch up.

Maybe some day, AI. For now, I lord my championship over all. They were supposed to be better than me. Will I repeat next year? You have as good a chance as anyone or anything of figuring that one out.

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A few weeks ago we buried my dad’s ashes. He had a fitting send-off for an old vet: A small, somber ceremony at Washington Crossing National Cemetery, including a three-volley salute and taps.

It has to be said. My dad was a misanthropic, isolated, enigmatic person. As far as I can tell, he had tenuous relationships with everyone he ever encountered.

Later in the day after the funeral, I was working on a few tasks in my office. My middle child, Nate, typically reserved, mild, walked into the office, cat draped over his shoulder, a move I think was meant to drain the moment of too much gravity. He paused, seemingly uncertain, and said in his quiet way that the day was meaningful.

Yes, this was his grandfather, but he had barely seen my dad through the years. Those tenuous relationships included family. My kids didn’t know him that well.

My son measured me as he said the day was meaningful, and I realized he was not thinking about himself at all: He was gauging how I was doing with this complexity.

So I told him what I thought I was feeling. I told him a little about the peculiar, crossed-up feelings that accompanied a strange day like this. How my dad had been difficult and we all knew it. How the military ritual was appropriate for U.S. Marine Russell J. Warnock. How it was a shame there was no big send-off funeral, but I was fine.

I suppose I was trying to be profound, as we are wont to do when we talk to our children about cosmic matters. We want to rise to the occasion.

My sons and I do not have Iron John-type relationships, but, still, I was struck when he nodded at my pseudo wisdom, said he hoped I was okay, made his way around my way-too-big desk and embraced me.

Then he said, in direct response to my desultory, discursive comments: “But he’s still your dad.”

That was it. You get one dad. And to hear that from my son at that moment meant that he was trying to understand me through his perception of how this man sitting before him saw his own dad. I think he had at a deep level glimpsed the powerful contract between fathers and sons, and while he had always seen me as Dad, he was now also seeing me as Son.

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I live in Burlington County and commute to West Philly. I support public transit, which is a tough sell in South Jersey, the land of the car, but it’s especially tough lately, because our transit systems appear to have given up.

Believe it or not, there’s an easy three-train commute from Western Burlington County to University City. I know because I did it for more than a decade. During rush hour, the RiverLine, PATCO, and the SEPTA El got it done: An easy RiverLine-PATCO connection at Walter Rand in Camden followed by an easy PATCO-SEPTA El (Blue Line) connection at 8th Street.

I loved surprising people by telling them you could board the RiverLine at 7:55 a.m. in Riverton and walk up the El stairs in West Philly before 8:30.

Those days are mostly gone. The commute started collapsing pre-pandemic. Now it’s often intolerable.

You may have seen news stories and press releases from SEPTA and the RiverLine. Jabber about faulty equipment, lack of operators, train unavailability–it’s a mess.

I’ll lay off PATCO, which is mostly fine. PATCO’s problem is the closure of the Walter Rand Transportation Center head house several years ago. Now, the transition between PATCO and the RiverLine involves walking across Broadway, and there’s little protection from the elements while you await the weakest link in this commute, the RiverLine.

Ah, the RiverLine. What could be… In a September 20 Philadelphia Inquirer article “NJ Transit apologizes for ‘less than satisfactory’ performance of River Line light rail” NJ Transit tries to explain away a rash of cancellations, delays, and packed trains.

But the story goes back a ways. Talk to RiverLine riders. Even my local public transit diehards are exasperated with the RiverLine. Many drive to PATCO’s Ferry Ave. Station. Some drive into Philly.

RiverLine passengers must punch a ticket or use an app, but there are only consequences for freeriding if you’re caught, and I couldn’t tell you the last time I saw a ticket checker.

There’s also a meanness to the RiverLine. On numerous–really, numerous–occasions other riders and I would dash to the RiverLine from PATCO and were actually touching the train as it departed. We’d look at each other in disbelief as the operator, avoiding eye contact with us, would pull away. Three seconds and we’re on that train. With schedules stretched to every 30 minutes recently, you’re stranded at Walter Rand, rain or shine–and hope the next scheduled train arrives.

SEPTA has deteriorated too. Stand on the 30th Street platform and save money on your smoke of choice: Just suck in secondhand clouds. As a voice drones over the loudspeaker “Smoking is banned on all SEPTA properties,” people puff away.

SEPTA’s app lists schedules, but that information is a fiction. The EL should run every few minutes, but you can wait many minutes as the crowd builds and you get your smoke on–where’s the train?

I’m a frustrated commuter, but what about people who need public transit?: People without a car, the elderly, people with small kids? And note I’m not even touching safety issues here.

Where is an economic review of the lost revenue because people are fed up? The Inquirer ran a story about frustrations with SEPTA on October 8, but these systems are simply bad services. It’s a company/business death spiral: A terrible service means nobody uses it so you have no cash flow to improve it.

The RiverLine and SEPTA must put people in charge who can revitalize these systems. Do the minimum so riders return!

But then glimmers of hope… as I prepared to click “publish,” the RiverLine announced it is resuming normal service. And when the Phillies, the Flyers, and a Mexico-Germany soccer game took place on the same night last week, SEPTA offered free service from the sports complex.

I didn’t give up on public transit anyway. I do drive now, but only 3.8 miles to the Pennsauken Transit Center, where I take the NJ Transit AC Line one stop, about 20 minutes, to 30th Street Station. That train is on time and orderly, and conductors take your ticket.

Rarely, a conductor will race through, missing some riders. If they miss me, I still activate my e-ticket: Whether someone checks or not, it’s a ride worth paying for.

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I was sending emails about this year’s Palmyra High School Foundation for Educational Excellence (PHSFEE) Casino Night–there’s a reason for this opening, I promise I’m not softening you up in an effort to sell tickets for our fundraiser–and as usual a few messages bounced.

One puzzled me. Initially it appeared as a cryptic series of letters before the @–and then I remembered it was the address of my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Roseann DiMeglio. We had connected online years ago and stayed in touch. Of course she would be on my education foundation mailing list.

When the message bounced, I got a bad feeling. Alas, I was right. A quick web search revealed that on June 22, 2021–more than two years ago!–my teacher Roseann DiMeglio died. I read her obituary.

Recently, I was asked a simple question by a student: When did you know you wanted to be a teacher? I’m sure I’ve been asked that, but I was struck with how dumbfounded I was in my response. I realized I didn’t have a thing, an incident, a concrete moment that I could point to.

I had some good teachers along the way. I enjoyed coaching after college. I wanted a teaching assistant position as I started my MA program. But… why?

When I received that bounced email, I reflected on my second-grade experiences with Mrs. DiMeglio. I loved her. Some of my friends recalled her as strict, but to me she wasn’t that way at all. She was kind to me and, more importantly, motivated in me an eagerness for learning and specifically writing and reading.

Running atop the chalkboard in her class was a banner that looked like a long strip of wide-ruled loose-leaf paper. On that banner each letter was represented in cursive, both upper and lower case. I remember staring at those cursive characters on the lined “paper,” and I recall being impatient as we proceeded through the alphabet. I remember I wrote a note to my mom one night, and I was frustrated because my note was flawed because I was using several letters before we had reviewed the correct way to form them in class. (I chuckled thinking that Mrs. DiMeglio might be the “cause” of my to-this-day wretched penmanship, because I never did learn to make some of these letters the right way.)

Early literacy memories–five decades ago.

I then considered my involvement with a public school education foundation and with my local school board(s). What spurred this education-focused civic engagement?

So I went back to the question the student asked me about my motivation to be a teacher.

Looking at that bounceback email (it strikes me what a melancholy genre the bounceback email is) I realized that our best teachers’ impact stretches into our lives for years, maybe decades. Sometimes only much later will we realize what they were doing for us: “Yes, I see it now.”

I had returned to Berlin Community School several times when I was in grad school, and I had caught up with Mrs. DiMeglio. So I did tell her how important she was to me. I don’t know if I had the perspective, though, at that time in my life, to really say that she was a model of good teaching for me perhaps when I was a learner, only seven and eight years old, just a little guy who wanted to make his cursive letters.

Of course this is bittersweet because I’m writing this now, two years after she has passed. But that’s the thing about writing in particular, that its force can carry on long beyond its source.

I still want it to be known that Mrs. DiMeglio supplied me with early inspiration to help me want to teach–and write. I may know it now more than I ever have.

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I’m critical, including in this space, of the rash of gambling sites and apps, especially how they are fronted by big-name former athletes luring in young bettors. But I’m a hypocrite in dissin’ all these teenage traders and gamblers, because a primary way we got through the pandemic in my house was by establishing a Friday night poker pod consisting of my two sons with a friend each. (My wife played early but smartly evacuated after a few hands.)

Poker inspires nicknames, and it wasn’t long before we were playing with the likes of Riverboat Willie and Crazy 8s. Sure, it was fun, but money, even wee bits of money, was on the table. In karmic response to my corrupting influence I experienced a few horrific moments. I’ll share.

For one, and this should have been obvious to me, penny ante poker is useless. With penny stakes, the betting doesn’t matter, so dum–er, less experienced players, stay in hands no matter what they have. There’s no logic about bluffing, no human sense of reason.

Also, when you’re playing with these types of foo–er, neophytes, you have to get out of the habit of feeling sorry for them and forcing them to go with what they call as their best hand and not their best hand. I didn’t do this, continually reminding them what they really had: How many seven-card stud hands would I have won except the idio– er nice youngster next to me actually had a flush and not the two pair he called?

But the worst part has been the really big, rare wins that weren’t.

We play a game called 7-27. In 7-27, you get two cards to start, one up, one down. Cards are worth their value (e.g., six equals six points). Face cards are worth half a point. Aces can be one or eleven. The goal is to get as close as possible to seven or 27. Each round, the dealer asks each player if they want a card dealt face up, followed by betting. The game ends when no one takes a card, and then one person declares high and another declares low and those closest split the pot.

But do the math: If you get ace, ace, five, you have both seven and 27: You take the whole pot!

Well, of course one spring evening playing with these schlu– kind gents I get ace and ace to start, and I took an early hit: I got a five! But my excitement was short-lived, because what did they all do? They dropped. I won about 12 cents.

The game of 7-27 might be a little complicated for all audiences. But here’s something I think most of you will get.

One night, after eating tacos and while drinking root beer floats, we played a hand of five-card draw. My cards came in: 10 spades, Jack spaces, King spaces, Ace spaces–my god, could it be?!–Queen spades.

I had been dealt, in five cards, a royal flush.

The probability of being dealt a royal flush is the number of royal flushes divided by the total number of poker hands, a probability of 0.00015%. Much like very large numbers, a probability that small is difficult to wrap your head around. A way to put this in perspective is to ask how long it would take to go through 649,740 poker hands. If you were dealt 20 hands of poker every night, then this would only amount to 7,300 hands per year. in 89 years you should get your royal flush.

89 years.

In our game, suppressing my quivers of excitement, I kept the bet low: Two cents. We went around the table. In this group of moro… uh, fellows who stay in when they have NOTHING, three of them dropped. One put in another two cents.

When I took zero cards that last guy dropped. I collected a total pot of 9 cents, 3 of which was mine.

That’s right: 9 cents. Everyone dropped. If we had been playing for nickels, I’d at least have won 45 cents.

I try to show some restraint among my kids and their friends–you know, be a good role model and all–but I slammed the cards to the table and bellowed, “Do you know what this f*%#+ hand is worth in the casinos?”

By the way, you would think things would improve as the players get older, but older=drinking, and drinking=misdeals. In a recent sitting, I had to suffer through three misdeals in four hands. My head nearly exploded, and I blathered about oh just how shot they would all be if we were playing in an old-time Western saloon. Pow! I think my ramblings spooked them, but they had no idea what I was talking about.

As I sat watching them giggling and scraping the cards off the floor, I realized it’d be better for my long-term health if they just tapped around on FanDuel.

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Way back when, as an assistant coach for my middle child Nate’s soccer team, we set up an early spring scrimmage one weekend against another squad. We needed someone to referee.

I volunteered. Before the game, I gathered the kids and then the parents and told them this: I’m no soccer expert, and I’m not going to be a good official. I’m happy to wield a whistle to help keep order, but it’s only a scrimmage. I will focus on preventing dangerous plays, but I will miss many calls (offsides?… forget it!).

Despite this pregame orientation, early on, things got chippy–these were two good teams with many competitive kids–and some parents from the other team started getting on me, complaining about the officiating.

No chance. After a few comments, I walked right up to one guy, and I dangled the whistle in front of him. “You wanna do it?” I asked.

In my long years involved with youth sports, I’ve had the experience many others have had: parents are the weak link. But the growing, well documented abuse of officials has gone too far, and the repercussions are tangible: For example, New Jersey is having trouble finding soccer officials at all levels.

Deptford Little League has come up with a plan: You wanna berate the umps? Then you’re gonna ump yourself. As reported in the May 21, 2023 Philadelphia Inquirer, “Fed up with parents cursing umpires, two of whom quit in April, Deptford Little League president Don Bozzuffi made international news last month by instituting a novel punishment: Unruly parents will be banned from attending games unless they umpire three contests themselves.”

I love it.

Take these jerks out of the bleachers and hand them the umpire jersey.

Watching pro sports, you can see how critiquing the officials has become part of the flow of the game. Announcers, dopes like Jeff Van Gundy and Cris Collingsworth, make such criticism a natural part of a broadcast. (Well, at least Van Gundy’s gone now, but I always wonder how these lousy announcers keep their jobs. How do you rate them? People are going to watch the great products of the NBA finals or the NFL playoffs no matter who blabs about it–sorry… spiteful digression…).

Disdain for officials is cross cultural, but consider how ingrained it is in American sports culture. In the song “Six Months Out of Every Year” from the old baseball musical Damn Yankees, givin’ it to the ump is just part of the game, part of the fandom chorus:

Strike three, ball four, walk a run’ll tie the score,
Yer blind Ump,
Yer blind Ump,
Ya mus’ be out-a yer mind, Ump!

Officiating human beings in motion is incredibly difficult, no matter the level. In my long experience, officials get the vast majority of it right, and when there is a weak official, they are just that: A weak official, and they are missing calls all over. It’s not some crooked person who’s calling everything against your team. (In my many years as coach and fan, I did have one moment I’m truly embarrassed about. I still want to find that ref and apologize.)

I know a missed call is frustrating, especially in the age of replay. Remember, I’m an Eagles fan, and I had to agonize over a Super Bowl frittered away after a tough call.

At its base, though, the abusive, frothy behavior of fans, which often begins as soon as a competition starts, demonstrates a fundamental lack of respect for another person. Deptford’s Little League approach makes the bad fan become that person. As Bozzuffi said, “I tried to think about the one thing in the world parents wouldn’t want to do. This was it.”

My hope is not that such fans will get a taste of their own medicine, because after all that means other fans are yelling at them, but that through this experience thet will understand that the person umpiring the game is earnestly trying to do a good, fair job.

They will, in other words, learn something bigger: They will learn empathy.

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My daughter, Elizabeth, is enrolled in a Nova Southeastern M.S. in Counseling program with a concentration in Clinical Mental Health Counseling. It is a low-residency program, meaning that most coursework involves rigorous online study while several times her cohort will assemble at Nova Fort Lauderdale for onsite, in-person practice and reflection.

Last week, near the end of term two, was her initial in-person experience. Preceding this visit, she had meticulously planned a two-week trip to a music festival and to visit friends in three states, building an itinerary that allowed to her to spend time working hard on school in friends’ homes, cafes, and other wi-fi sites. She would “grind out work,” she told me.

A few months ago, she asked if I wanted to join her in Fort Lauderdale. What an opportunity! Sure, she’d be immersed in school most of the time, but I was coming off another busy academic year and thought some downtime sounded pretty nice.

She set it all up, reserving cheap flights and a rental car via whiz-bang apps (these kids today!), and we even got a Marriott Courtyard for a great price. While she was in class, I finished a novel and cleaned up an issue of The Atlantic. Then we spent a day at the beach and another on a swamp tour. (We both held a scorpion.)

The campus was only a few miles from our hotel. I toted her around in this black Nissan SUV that made it look like she had a secret service escort.

That first morning of class, we drove over to campus. We strolled the beautiful campus–it really is sweet–and checked out the Nova bookstore. We soon found her building, and…

… we sent Elizabeth to kindergarten a few weeks after her fifth birthday. She was young for her class, but she was ready for school, we thought.

She certainly was a spirited child, a characterization that would last about, well, forever.

I remember that first day of kindergarten. She was all of 35 pounds and had this oversized backpack. We walked the few blocks to school, and my wife and I didn’t know what to expect. The Riverton School schoolyard was a chaotic mix of kids laughing and eager for school and others hanging on their parents’ legs, moaning and weeping.

At one point, while my wife and I were talking to someone on the playground, we turned around and realized Elizabeth was coolly walking into the school. We followed her and found she had hung up her backpack.

Okay, so much for needing us …

… and here we were, years later, in “17th grade.” As she and I parted ways in her Nova building, she smiled and said, “I’ll see you this afternoon. Love you!” and walked toward her classroom.

I felt an ache of parental love as this self-assured, proud young woman, still with a backpack, although one more appropriately sized, strode away from me, and before I turned a trick of the atrium light almost had me believing I saw a blurred image of her as that tiny five-year-old confidently entering school on day one of kindergarten: Moving to that next big challenge, a decade-plus later.

My daughter–my daughter!

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Eight months as empty nesters. How was it? We’ve barely had time to branch out.

Because, and this is a little hawkward, but recently I received the starling information that our goose was cooked. With Junco-ming right around the corner, my nephew is moving from Indiana to good old NJay.

He’s alighting into that empty nest. When I first heard this news, I was like, “Is this fake, oriole?” I should’ve dove for cover, but I couldn’t duck: He was robin me of this time of my life! (And I kinda wondered if my sister-in-law was pulling the old mama bird cuckoo trick on us…) I suppose I could rail to Acanthis, grouse about it all I want …

… but w-hen I thought it over, I was like, you know, who’myna to complain? After all, he’s no turkey. He’s a good kid, and I feel we’re gonna be lucky to have him. My own kids might be a little bittern, a little thrush with jealousy, but he could become number one.

So we’ve warmed up to the idea of this guy flying into our roost. He’s a smart, talon-ted kid. He often grackles me up. He likes to talk, so he’ll keep me sharp with some nice chats, and I’m sure his “fascinating” stories will keep me rapt. Believe it or not, it will be nice to have a tanager in the house again. (We will have to get used to aerie-ting out the smell of those soccer cleats again (those things can get pretty fowl!).)

I would vulture to guess that he’ll probably help my diet too beak-ause he eats like a you know what with his salads and cucumbers–it’s owl down the nuthatch. He’ll provide another regular attendee at family-friend game nights, helping passerine the Balderdash box around the table.

Well, let osprey it goes well, but, still, is it a cardinal sin to look at this a little wistfully? It seems my time of rattling around the old house warbling away will be delayed, although the wait may make the time when I do become a loony old coot all the sweeter.

I’ll echo what Joe says to Pip in Great Eggpectations: “What larks!” are ahead of us! Even if he doesn’t pay any wren, overall, I’m sure the eggperience will be, you know, eggcellent.

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Recently my daughter told me she was in the midst of an email feud over an injustice she had suffered at the hands of some organization.

I couldn’t be prouder.

There’s a chip off the old block. See, I have been known to write a bit in the genre of “customer/citizen discontent response”… alright, I’ll be honest: I’ve written about 1,000 letters of complaint to all kinds of organizations. It’s a special kind of madness. Organizations beware: You cross me, you’re gonna hear it. At one time, for better or worse, my most prolific published writing was op-eds and letters railing against the Philadelphia Parking Authority (PPA).

My friends, without a trace of humor, point out that there are certainly thick files on me out there in drawers labeled something like “Loonies.”

Organizations occasionally respond, usually wearily, and often with some kind of autoresponse.

Now there are AI chatbots like ChatGPT. I’m sticking to my guns that these AI language generators aren’t going to ruin the world, but they are out there for all to use.

As a teacher, I’m aware of AI’s potential. While I’m not up at night worrying about student authenticity, suddenly I have this new fascination that the organizations that receive my, uh, constructively critical e-missives should be mindful of these new technologies. In short, in replying, they can do better! A few examples will be instructive.

I recently complained to NJTransit about the inconsistency of the RiverLine (sigh, again). Equipment malfunctions, signal problems, equipment unavailability (?)–it’s always something. While I was at it, I tossed in a comment about how there are hardly ever any ticket checkers on the train. This is a light rail that requires riders to punch a ticket before riding: You don’t pass through a gate or agent to board. I ride the RiverLine several times a week, and I can’t remember the last time I saw a checker.

I let ’em know.

NJTransit punked me with an autoresponse, and they didn’t even try. Again, I complained about 1) inconsistent trains and 2) a lack of ticket checkers. It “wrote” this back:

NJ TRANSIT has an obligation to ensure that revenue is collected on all services to support operating and maintenance expenses, and to minimize our reliance on public support. Therefore, enforcement of our fare policies is a necessary responsibility of this agency.

I guarantee ChatGPT would hit the mark more accurately. You better believe NJT is getting another message.

Here’s another situation I have somehow found myself in: my American Airlines frequent flyer miles expired. Like many people during the pandemic, I didn’t fly. AA was generous in extending the deadline, but in March 2022, my miles were finally expiring. So I did what AA said I should: I used miles to buy something at their online store, thus extending my miles for 18 months. I bought some sporty (if I don’t mind saying) shorts to keep my 70,000+ miles.

But when I checked my miles balance, it was zero! I hastily wrote them to correct the situation. This was part of the reply:

I understand that you are concerned that your account is expiring. I have added 5 miles to your shopping account at this time. Please allow up to 3-5 business days for this to post to your account.

As for the missing rewards associated with your order # _ the order can’t be rewarded for missing miles as the order is over a year old.

They–yeah sure, there’s an “I” behind this–did nothing to address my problem and gave me a measly five miles!

Be confident I’m not done with them either.

A couple of my students have used AI chatbots. We talked it over. First, I’m mad at myself for the assignments, which I think left the door open for such plagiarism. Second, because in both cases it happened early in the writing process, I was able to push them to do better. In one case, the student took to the coaching and composed a great project.

At least they’re exploring this new technology, while companies and organizations are using the same old autoresponses to flick their customers’ communications off their shoulders like so much dialogic dandruff.

Oh great American entities, I’m hellbent on making sure you are aware that I’m onto to you, that at least until you try harder I know you’re not there.

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Last weekend I spent a day in a filled Phillipsburg High School gym for the N.J. State Girls’ Wrestling Championships with our freshman wrestler Samantha Domask. Sammy came out of nowhere this year, shocking the world in this year’s early season Queen of the East Tournament when she emerged from the 15th seed to reach the finals. She ended up placing 8th in the state last weekend.

She has a bright future ahead.

So does the sport of girls’/women’s wrestling: Numbers are up in both high school and college programs, and more and more states are sanctioning state championships.

I’m not much of a prognosticator (or I’d be a lot richer), but I remember all the way back around my college wrestling days in the late 80s/early 90s when Title IX rules were influencing universities to shutter men’s wrestling teams. I thought, “Why don’t colleges just start women’s programs?” For those coaches opposed to mixing genders in competition or even practices, completely separate activities could be run at the same time in the same facility.

The N.J. Girls’ States reflected the growing pains of the sport. In N.J. States, wrestlers compete for places one through eight. The girls in Phillipsburg wrestled for every medal except first and second. The final match was moved to Atlantic City a week later so the girls could wrestle before the boys’ finalists in front of the big AC crowd. The concept was good, but it split the championship girls’ matches from the other place winners, breaking up the tournament’s continuity.

Watching these hard-nosed competitors in Phillipsburg, I got amped about the girls’ path in this great sport. I also realized a little part of that is because of my growing frustration with boys’ wrestling in New Jersey. And I’m not the only one. As this nj.com article describes, team wrestling for boys “is in trouble.” Driven heavily by private schools that have no boundaries in populating their rosters, talent has polarized to fewer and fewer teams. The nj.com piece analyzes considerable chunks of match data to show the lopsided competitive direction the sport has been moving in.

(Help may be on the way, as during the course of drafting this post a proposed solution appeared in nj.com: the state will create private school districts that will funnel into one private school region before states. This is a long overdue move–but that’s a discussion for another time.)

Recruiting does not equal coaching. Right now, girls’ wrestling seems still at the stage at which coaches work hard with athletes in their own schools, in many cases building practices and competitive schedules for a few bold girls who sign up for wrestling in their schools.

Another thing I was heartened by in Phillipsburg was the number of boys who showed up, some traveling far, to support their teammates. This was after many of them had battled it out in the regions themselves all weekend, emphasizing the team nature of the sport.

N.J. Girls’ States was a great day of tough athletes gutting it out for medals. And, yeah, as a coach I had a difficult time the next week watching the 235-lb. state championship final streamed from AC, as I realized what could have been for Sammy. Her only losses to girls this year were to 2nd, 3rd, and 7th in N.J.

She’ll re-focus this spring and summer, hit the weight room, and wrestle those off-season tournaments. She’ll further commit.

It’s what wrestling has always been all about.

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ChatGPT has been out there since November. It’s an artificial intelligence language model that according to its developer OpenAI’s website, does this:

We’ve trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests. ChatGPT is a sibling model to InstructGPT, which is trained to follow an instruction in a prompt and provide a detailed response.

A visitor to the site can type “input”–give it a try!–and the language-trained bot responds, right in front of you, sometimes quite “realistically.” The rumblings are out there. Is this the end of writing as we know it? Writing instruction? Thinking?!

Two very different friends contacted me about ChatGPT recently. I wrote back to the first, and then I based my email to the second on that initial message:

Happy 2023, and it’s always great to hear from you!

Yep, lots of dialogue—especially on the writing studies/composition forums I’m involved with—and plenty of hand-wringing from others.

The Office of the Provost [at Drexel] has assembled a Task Force about ChatGPT. I’m on it, and we meet in two weeks. I still have to get my head around all the conversations, but I’m not feeling like the sky is falling. Here’s a good piece: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2023/01/12/academic-experts-offer-advice-chatgpt?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=c8d2e06e36-DNU_2021_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-c8d2e06e36-236304341&mc_cid=c8d2e06e36&mc_eid=fccc03c8b1

Also, here’s a snip of an email I just wrote to another buddy of mine. He sent me a text about if ChatGPT means the “end of writing”:

“ChatpGPT—the airwaves are blowing up! Is it the end of writing? I think that’s premature. In fact, if you don’t mind, I’d like to use your message to me in a blog post (anonymously of course). I’m not ripping on you at all. Here’s exactly what your text said: ‘Chatgpt? The.end of writing’ It is going to be VERY challenging for this AI to capture this writing style. All lowercase app name. The period between ‘The’ and ‘end.’…”

It won’t end writing–I mean, in a way, text to speech could already do that–but it’s going to push writing instruction. A lot of teachers are wringing their hands on professional forums I’m part of, but I’m like, well, be more creative with your assignments. If you ask for essays on topics like ‘What do you think of Hamlet’s indecision?’ or ‘Argue for/against gun control in five paragraphs” you might be making the bar too low for students to plagiarize or cheat!

I’m digging into this more each day and can keep you posted.

Take care,
Scott

The communicative “nesting” here is significant. I wrote to one friend incorporating a previous email response to another. This is a deep rhetorical complexity that will be very challenging to reproduce by a machine. Not to mention, as I point out, the kind of quirks that appear for all of us in the fast-paced writing we compose via email, text, and chat.

In terms of teaching, as I say above and wrote on my other blog Online Writing Teacher (chugging away since 2004!), to paraphrase: It’s the assignment, stupid. In teaching, when we wanted to take the easy route with assignment instructions, there have always been consequences. Geez, I knew people in the 80s college scene who drove to a literal warehouse and bought papers on canned topics.

Ian Bogost provocatively said in The Atlantic, “… you may find comfort in knowing that the bot’s output, while fluent and persuasive as text, is consistently uninteresting as prose.”

ChatGPT doesn’t seem to be the end of writing or writing instruction (or humanity), but it will–and should–make teachers more aware of what we do. Stay tuned.

Tags: education, family & parenting by Scott Warnock
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This year’s holiday quest
Ranked neither naughtier nor nicer—
I simply wished to buy my wife
A humble bagel slicer.

“What could be easier,” thought I,
With a confident Christmas laugh,
“Than to find that mundane item
That cuts your bread in half?”

In the spirit of the season,
Out I ventured to the stores.
The holidays don’t grate on me–
I like strolling the mall’s floors.

But something unmagical occurred
As I went from shop to shop.
No bagel slicer could I find,
Despite my many stops.

Oh, I found tools for grating, chopping,
Liquidating, dicing, icing.
But nowhere could I seem to find
A device for bagel slicing.

Sure, I could zest some lemons,
Squeeze juice from silly limes–
Mist oil? Check. Cut grapes? Indeed.
But no bagel slicer could I find!?

Decapitate some broccoli!
Carefully measure out some tea.
Cleave tomatoes, mash potatoes—
What was happening to me!

I began to think I was the butt
Of some cruel anti-Santa joke:
Victim of the bagel slicer buy-out
By a Grinchy miser of a bloke.

I went to five stores, ten, then fifteen,
Enlisted shoppers much more able,
But I began to concede my wife
Would must hand slice her Christmas bagels.

Then rambling through South Jersey I saw—
A restaurant supply store!
“You don’t need to be a member!”
Cried the cheery fellow at the door.

I asked the manager in small voice,
“A bagel slicer—please, good sir?”
With a merry laugh he pointed,
And my goodness, there they were!

Bagel slicers stacked up all neatly
Both in metal and in plastic.
The amused cashier had never seen
A patron who found them so fantastic!

I’ve relayed my tale to many folks—
They sputter, “Yo dummy: Amazon!”
But they don’t seem to understand
That would have ruined all the fun.

Because on Christmas morning,
Hearing my wife’s bagel-slicing Splat!
I bragged to all those near me,
“Oh, the work I did for her to find that!”

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Pardon my bad Tom Petty “pun,” as I was going to be more direct with this title: “School ratings: F—ed data (as if you didn’t know).”

Stories have been piling up recently that yet again illuminate the hopelessness of school rankings.

One of the most compelling is a Colombia University professor’s finding that the data that plopped his own institution at the top of the U.S. News rankings pile were dubious. In short, a math professor, Michael Thaddeus, showed that Colombia “had provided fraudulent data to the magazine,” and the magazine unranked it. Then, as Akil Bello, director of the advocacy group FairTest, wrote in October in The Chronicle of Higher Education, after Colombia provided only some updated data, the editors “assigned competitive set values.” Bellow says of what the editors did: “In other words, the magazine made up data to keep a popular university in its rankings.”

In another snowballing story, numerous highly ranked law schools are withdrawing from their participation in the rankings.

The problem is fundamental: Once you think you’re going to make any sense of rating schools, you’re in the world of mirrors.

There are things I suppose you might measure with schools–or are there? I was going to start my list with an easy “number of teachers” metric and then paused, realizing even a seemingly straightforward stat like that might need exploration: Full-time or part-time? Tenure-track or not? How is teaching valued at the institution and how in fact is that measured? And then to think that data will turn into a useful value to a particular human being… geez, when you put it like that…

Sports are fun, and it’s no wonder we’re so obsessed with them in our fractured society. There is an objective, agreed upon (for the vast majority of cases) outcome. Elections are like that too. Someone wins. Someone loses. The outcome is clear and accepted.

But almost anything with even a shade more depth doesn’t lend itself to the “clear and accepted.” Look at the effort online dating systems have made to create match algorithms (to be clear: Not that I would know).

What’s the best place to live? The best ice cream? Greatest rock band? (alright, so that’s Led Zeppelin. Sorry). These are fun listicles that provide hours (and hours) of harmless argument. How about your best friend? Your perfect soulmate? Things are circumstantial. Schools are multi-layered, complex entities like that.

In “The Rankings Farce,” Reed College president Colin Diver powerfully decries this “rankocracy,” saying “the entire structure rests on mostly unaudited, self-reported information of dubious reliability.” Diver lists not just U.S. News but other publications’ efforts to rank colleges and says, “Taken individually, most of the factors are plausibly relevant to an evaluation of colleges. But one can readily see that any process purporting to produce a single comprehensive ranking of best colleges rests on a very shaky foundation.”

Diver outlines six problems with such systems, ranging from the selection of variables to the weighting of variables (as an example, U.S. News, he said, “decreed” that six-year graduation rates were worth “precisely” 17.6%) to the overall issue of having the “chutzpah” to claim that an arbitrary, ever-changing formula “can produce a single, all-purpose measure of institutional quality.”

But here we are, almost 2023, and this is still the way many people talk about not just colleges but schools all the way down the line. “How do you unring the bell of the socially accepted rankings?” Bello said in another Chronicle of Higher Education article, “Do the ‘U.S. News’ Rankings Rely on Dubious Data?” “That’s the biggest challenge right now — is that the ‘These colleges are good’ and ‘These colleges are bad’ has entered the ether of the higher-ed admissions landscape.”

You’re not picking a taco. You’re not buying a potato peeler. You’re not even buying a car. When it comes to selecting a school, you’re making a complicated decision. Don’t let anyone fool you otherwise.

Tags: education, virtual children by Scott Warnock by Scott Warnock
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