My favorite magazine, The Atlantic, ran a piece this month connecting the U.S. school sports obsession with our lagging academic performance compared to other countries. While the causality in Amanda Ripley’s “The Case Against High-School Sports” isn’t airtight, her argument raises provocative points about our education priorities. [Read more →]
Dang kids and their confounded digital whatchamacallits! I mean, it’s exgasperating when they’re out there all the time Chirping, Twitching, Facenoting on the old InterWeb. It’s even dangerous, as this kids-go-bump-in-the day story about cellphone-using Penn zombies shows.
For Karen the Small Press Librarian, I recently exchanged interviews and e-mails with Dave Newman, author of Raymond Carver Will Not Raise Our Children. It’s an academic novel about life off the tenure track for a working family with children in Pittsburgh, and I recommend it to anyone interested in the lives of college teachers, parents, and writers. In passing, Dave mentioned that when he was growing up in western Pennsylvania, it was common for boys to fist-fight at carnivals and county fairs, and then he wondered if he wasn’t the only person he knew who used the expression “fist fight.” So that led to my own ruminations on the subject, whether or not to add a hyphen or make it one word, and I also remembered that long before I became a hulking literary menace, able to beat down an entire capitalist higher-educational economy with a work of fiction, I was just another scrawny white boy, geeky and shy, terrified that I’d have to fight in public or fight at all. [Read more →]
So all you hear about is how important it is for children to read books. But should they also love to read? And if they don’t?… [Read more →]
What do the Lone Ranger and a cartoon snail have in common? Well, the answer, other than they might be able to share some foundational Joseph Campbellesque hero archetype role, should be this: “Not much.” But in contemporary cinema, they have a more specific kinship. Both of them, in recent movies (The Lone Ranger and Turbo), when faced with a/the challenge, say the exact same thing: “Let’s do this.” That’s where we are in the world of modern cinema, boring cookie-cutter characters saying stupid, clichéd phrases. Thus, we now have this equation: The Lone Ranger = A cartoon snail. [Read more →]
Having been a lifeguard, I learned many strategies to ward off boredom during those rainy shore weekdays when all the swimmers were at the boardwalk or playing Monopoly at the beach house. Ah, but no experience in life need be wasted: Those anti-ennui lifeguard strategies are transferable to that iconic American family experience: The long automobile trip. [Read more →]
Dads are dumb. I’m a dad, so therefore I’m dumb. If you’re a dad, logic dictates that you too are dumb. Dads are blithering, detached, bumblers. They’re oblivious. Easy to fool. That’s what the world is telling our kids. [Read more →]
I’ve never been into graduations. I am happy for the graduates who themselves are happy, and I like to see proud families, but the event itself never grabbed me. And now graduation fever has taken hold. Kids get a rite of passage ceremony for all kinds of things. We have kindergarten graduations and even pre-school graduations. School systems with multiple tiers have students who “graduate” from middle school or fifth grade.
10. “Nobody told me this BBQ was BYO!”
9. “No dessert today; Twinkies won’t be back on the shelf until the fifteenth.”
7. “Who drank all the lighter fluid?”
6. “That’s not mayonnaise; you’re standing under a tree.”
5. “Why does my hot dog have an engagement ring on it?”
4. “I think Gramps lost his hearing aid in the coleslaw again.”
3. “Hope you like tofu burgers!”
2. “Let me tell you all about Joseph Smith and his amazing revelations.”
1. “I knew it was a bad idea to leave the fireworks in the trunk on a day this hot!”
Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.
No matter how plain-speaking we think we are, we all have our own form of professional jargon. I guess because I’m a word person, I find it interesting when I unwittingly fall into the jargon of my world and realize outsiders have no idea what I’m talking about. For instance, everywhere I go lately in my world of writing and technology, I encounter MOOCs. I say “MOOC” all the time, and I get about 10 stories/news items a week in my In Box about them. Yet, when I utter “MOOC” outside of work, people look at me strangely. [Read more →]
Everywhere you roam nowadays in our great land, you see tattooed folk. I wonder if the runaway U.S. tattooing craze of the past decade or so is connected to the rise in American shortsightedness (e.g., “What do you mean overextended? I’m buying that house!). More importantly, when I see how young some of the inked are, I often can’t help but feel they are traveling the road to regret. [Read more →]
On that great list of things I think I don’t want to be, near the top is “glib.” I don’t want to be all back slappy, all here’s-a-trophy-even-though-you-didn’t-do-much, all smiling and treacly.
Part 6 (of 874) in an occasional series about how standardized tests are destroying education.
One frustration with standardized testing is its seeming inevitability. The bureaucratic, Kafkaesque testing structure. Your disagreements don’t matter. Your arguments and pleas don’t matter. You will be tested. But what if you didn’t have to take a standardized test? A growing number of parents and students are exploring that: Opting out of standardized tests. [Read more →]
10. “No Mother’s Day card this year, but I did send you a tweet!”
9. “I’m taking you out to dinner, but you have to hurry; Taco Bell closes at nine.”
8. “The word ‘love’ seems a little strong. I can ‘tolerate’ you.”
7. “Here’s your gift: a DVD of Oedipus Rex –you sexy mama!”
6. “I wouldn’t call you a great mother, but you’re probably better than Joan Crawford.”
5. “And look what I got for you: a five-day Carnival Cruise!”
4. “Here are all the ingredients for a great Mother’s Day dinner. All you have to do is cook it!”
3. “As I live and breathe! You’re still breathing!”
2. “Of course these flowers aren’t stolen from a funeral home. That banner just means, when you go to sleep tonight, I hope you rest peacefully.”
1. “Mom, I have a surprise for you: I’m adopted!!”
Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.
What does it mean to write well? That the writing is clear? Eloquent? Powerful? Emotion-inducing? Connected? Ah, but there we get into it: Your writing’s value is connected, linked, intertwined with an audience. A reader. Someone who might think about what you’re saying. Someone who might, of all things, care. [Read more →]
We have a peculiar relationship to facts. Dickens’ Prof. Gradgrind and his love of facts. Star Trek characters Spock, Data. “Just the facts ma’am.” We like facts. We’re nervous about facts. We believe in facts. [Read more →]
There was a time when kids played organized sports and enjoyed the experience in whatever form it took. They didn’t have much perspective on a bigger youth sports picture. Now, we turn them into little joiners. We want them connected to the best team possible. We want them to experience heightened competition at the ripe old age of nine. But is it for them and their athletic hopes, or is it just so we can look good at neighborhood gatherings? [Read more →]
So where do you keep your hoes, if you are lucky enough to have any in the first place or you have a living environment that requires (or at least facilitates the use of) them? [Read more →]
Anybody who knows me at all knew this one was coming. The IOC board voted to dump wrestling from the Olympics starting in 2020. [Read more →]
Like many a sports-crazed lad, I grew up thinking about what it would be like to take my kids to a ball game. We’d be sitting in a colorful arena, watching our team, in the midst of a pleasantly churning crowd, cracking nuts, smiling at the ease and joy of it all. But it’s not like that anymore. Big-time sports at all levels are hopelessly corrupt, egocentric, decadent. You have to be willfully ignorant to look past it all and soak in the simple joys of a game. But we are lollipop heads,so we keep fueling it with our interest. [Read more →]
