20 Rules for Life (2023 Edition)

After first posting this list years ago, I have made it a tradition to get it out every year and re-examine it, edit it, and remind myself why I thought such things in the first place (it is also a way to give myself the day off for my birthday). I will keep my original observation-- that this list does not represent any particular signs of wisdom on my part, because I discovered these rules much in the same way that a dim cow discovers an electric fence. Also, I'll note that it gets longer every year; if you think you see a book, feel free to contact me with a publishing offer. In the meantime, I exercise a blogger's privilege to be self-indulgent.

1. Don't be a dick.

There is no excuse for being mean on purpose. Life will provide ample occasions on which you will hurt other people, either through ignorance or just because sometimes life puts us on collision courses with others and people get hurt. Sometimes conflict and struggle appear, and there is no way out but through. There is enough hurt and trouble and disappointment and rejection naturally occurring in the world; there is no reason to deliberately go out of your way to add more. 

This is doubly true these days, when everyone is already feeling the stress even as some folks have decided that being a dick is a worthwhile goal to be pursued, that inflicting hurt on Those People Who Deserve It Because They Are Wrong is some sort of virtue. It isn't. Be kind.





2. Do better.

You are not necessarily going to be great. But you can always be better. You can always do a better job today than you did yesterday. Make better choices. Do better. You can always do better. Important note: having screwed up yesterday does not excuse from doing better today.

3. Tell the truth.

Words matter. Do not use them as tools with which to attack the world or attempt to pry prizes out of your fellow humans (see Rule #1). "Untrue but advantageous for my team" is not an okay substitute for "true to the best of my understanding." Say what you understand to be true. Life is too short to put your name to a lie. This does not mean that every word out of your mouth is some sort of Pronouncement from God. Nor does it mean you must be unkind. But you simply can't speak words that you know to be untrue. I'll extend this to social media as well: if it's not true, don't post it.

4. Seek to understand.

The necessary companion to #3. Do not seek comfort or confirmation. Do not simply look for ways to prove what you already believe. Seek to understand, and always be open to the possibility that what you knew to be true yesterday must be rewritten today in the light of new, better understanding. Ignoring evidence you don't like because you want to protect your cherished beliefs is not helpful. Understand that this is a journey you will never complete, and it's not okay to quit.

5. Listen and pay attention.

Shut up, listen, watch, and pay attention. How else will you seek understanding? Watch carefully. Really see. Really hear. People in particular, even the ones who lie, will tell you who they are if you just pay attention. Your life is happening right now, and the idea of Special Moments just tricks us into ignoring a million other moments that are just as important. Also, love is not a thing you do at people-- to say that you care about someone even as you don't actually hear or see them is a lie.

Also, pay attention to things and people who contradict your cherished beliefs about yourself, because there may be something there that you really need to hear.

6. Be grateful.

You are the recipient of all sorts of bounty that you didn't earn. Call it the grace of God or good fortune, but be grateful for the gifts you have been given. You did not make yourself. Nobody owes you anything, but you owe God/the Universe/fate everything. I have been hugely fortunate/blessed/privileged; I would have to be some sort of huge dope to grab all that life has given me and say, "This is mine. I made this. It's all because I'm so richly deserving." I've been given gifts, and the only rational response I can think of is to be grateful. That's important because gratitude is the parent of generosity.

7. Mind the 5%

95% of life is silly foolishness that humans just made up and then pretended had some Great Significance. Only about 5% really matters, has real value. Don't spend energy, worry, fret, concern, time, stress on the other 95%. I'm pretty sure that part of what happened during the pandemic is a whole bunch of folks looked around at their lives and thought, "Man, 95% of this is bullshit that I don't even care about." The trick is that every person has a different idea of what constitutes the 5%, and sometimes the path to honoring and loving that other person is to indulge their 5%.

8. Mind your own business (and hush).

Somehow we have arrived at a culture in which everyone needs to have and express an opinion about everything. If it's not your monkey, not your circus, and not a topic about which you know a single damn thing, what do you suppose you will add by chiming in? There are people whose whole day is organized around roaming the internet so they can unleash their opinion on people (see Rule #1). This does not make the world a better place, doesn't make them better people, and doesn't help solve the issue. 

9. Take care of the people around you.

"What difference can one person make" is a dumb question. It is impossible for any individual human to avoid making a difference. Every day you make a difference either for good or bad. People cross your path. You either makes their lives a little better or you don't. Choose to make them better. The opportunity to make the world a better place is right in front of your face every day; it just happens to look like other people (including the annoying ones). Nobody is in a better position than you are to take care of the people right in front of your face.

These opportunities may come at inconvenient times in inconvenient forms. That's tough--we don't get to pick our times or circumstances, but we can either rise to meet them or bail. Bailing does not make the world better. Take care of people.



You are never too young for your first tin hat.


10. Commit.

If you're going to do it, do it. Commitment gets up and gets the job done on the days when love and passion are too tired to get off the couch. Also, commitment is like food. You don't eat on Monday and then say, "Well, that takes care of that. I don't need to think about eating for another week or so. " Commitment must be renewed regularly.

11. Shut up and do the work

While I recognize there are successful people who ignore this rule, this is my list, so these are my rules. And my rule is: Stop talking about how hard you're working or what a great job you're doing or what tremendous obstacles you're overcoming. In short, stop delivering variations on, "Hey, look at me do this work! Look at me!" Sometimes we spend too much time talking about the work instead of just doing the work. 

Note, however, there is a difference between "Hey, lookit me do this work" and "Hey, look at this important work that needs to be done." Ask the ego check question-- if you could do the work under the condition that nobody would ever know that you did it, would you still sign up? If the answer isn't "yes," ask yourself why not.

One of the side effects of social media is that not only do we curate and craft our lives, but we want lots of other people to participate in and confirm the narrative that we're creating. "You're canceling me," often means "You are refusing to corroborate my preferred narrative." We don't just want an audience; we want pliable co-stars. Worry less about both.

12. Assume good intent.

Do not assume that everyone who disagrees with you is either evil or stupid. They may well be either, or both-- but make them prove it. People mostly see themselves as following a set of rules that makes sense to them. If you can understand their set of rules, you can understand why they do what they do. Doesn't mean you'll like it any better, but you may have a basis for trying to talk to them about it. And as a bare minimum, you will see yourself operating in a world where people are trying to do the right thing, rather than a hostile universe filled with senseless evil idiots. It's a happier, more hopeful way to see the world.

Also, this: when you paint all your opponents as monsters, you provide excellent cover for the actual monsters out there, and you excuse monstrous behavior in yourself.

13. Don't waste time on people who are not being serious.

Some people forget to be serious. They don't use words seriously. They don't have a serious understanding of other people or their actions or the consequences of those actions. They can be silly or careless or mean, but whatever batch of words they are tossing together, they are not serious about them. They are not guided by principle or empathy or anything substantial. Note: do not mistake grimness for seriousness and do not mistake joy and fun for the absence of seriousness. Beware: One of the great tricks of not-being-serious people is to get you to waste time on them, to spend time and energy thinking, fretting, arguing acting about shiny foolishness, leaving them free for larger abuses that go unchecked.

14. Don't forget the point.

Whatever it is you're doing, don't lose sight of the point. It's basic Drivers Ed 101. If you look a foot in front of the car, you'll wander all over the road. If you stare right at the tree you want to miss, you will drive right into it. Where you look is where you go. Keep your eye on the goal. Remember your purpose. And don't try to shorthand it; don't imagine that you know the path that guarantees the outcome you want. Focus on the point (even if it's a goal that you may never reach) because otherwise you will miss Really Good Stuff because you had too many fixed ideas about what the path to your destination is supposed to look like.

15. People are complicated (mostly)

People grow up. People learn things. People have a day on which their peculiar batch of quirks is just what the day needs; our strengths and weaknesses are often the exact same thing just in different contexts. Awful people can have good moments, and good people can have awful moments-- it's a mistake to assume that someone is all one thing or another. Nobody can be safely written off and ignored completely. Corollary: nobody can be unquestioningly trusted and uncritically accepted all the time. People are a mixed mess of stuff. Trying to sort folks into good guys and bad guys is a fool's game.

16. Don't be misled by your expectations.

Most of our daily misery (not the real big suffering stuff) is the result of measuring our actual situation against expectations we've created for ourselves. So many times we could be saying "Wow! A steak!" but instead we go with, "Dammit, where's my watermelon?"

Doors will appear on your path. Open them even if they are not exactly what you were expecting or looking for. Don't simply fight or flee everything that surprises or challenges you (but don't be a dope about it, either). Most of what I've screwed up in life came from reacting in fear-- not sensible evaluation of potential problems, but just visceral fear. Most of what is good about my life has come from saying "yes." And most of that is not at all what I would have expected or planned for.

17. Make something.

Music, art, refurbished furniture, machinery. Something.

18. Show up.

The first rule of all relationships is that you have to show up. And you have to fully show up. People cannot have a relationship with someone who isn't there, and that includes someone who looks kind of like they're there but who isn't really. In the combination of retirement and parenting again, I'm reminded that this also means nor just being fully present, but remembering to show up at all. You put your head down, go to work, and then a week or two later you're suddenly remembering that it's been a while since you checked in with someone. Rule #2 applies.

Part B of this rule is that when you show up, you may suddenly find out that the place and time requires something of you. Showing up means answering that call.

19. Refine your core.

Know who you are. Strip the definition of yourself of references to situation and circumstance; don't make the definition about your car, your hair, your job, your house. The more compact your definition of self, the less it will be buffeted and beaten by changes in circumstance. Also, the more compact your core, the less often you will be existentially threatened by some small piece of the 95%. Note: this is good work to do long before you, say, retire from a lifelong career that largely defined you.

20. How you treat people is about you, not about them.

It's useful to understand this because it frees you from the need to be a great Agent of Justice in the world, meting out rewards and punishments based on what you think about what people have done or said. It keeps you from wasting time trying to decide what someone deserves, which is not your call anyway. It also gives you power back that you give up when your stance is that you have to wait to see what someone says or does before you react to it. Treat people well because that's how you should treat people, not because you have decided they deserve it. But don't be a dope; if someone shows you that they will always bite you in the hand, it's prudent to stop offering them your hand.

FL: Doubling Down On "Don't Say Gay"

Florida's Don't Say Gay law was carried through the legislative process with plenty of lies. Now Florida's leaders are ready to take the masks off.

Back then, the big counter-argument was "Well, what teacher needs to expose 5-8 year olds to sexual content?" Nobody needs to talk sex stuff with the littles! The other defense of the bill was that people calling it "Don't Say Gay" we're overreacting. The guy who introduced the bill, Rep. Joe Harding, was among the many saying, "Look, you can still talk about this stuff--you just can't have lessons or curriculum about it."

That, of course, all turns out to be baloney. 

Governor Ron DeSantis has signed a stack of anti-LGBTQ bills, including one that extends the reach of Don't Say Gay into high school. Where "classroom instruction by school personnel or third  parties on sexual orientation or gender identity" was previously prohibited from kindergarten through third grade, it is now prohibited in pre-K through grade 8, with some restrictions on 9-12 sex ed. 

The new version of this law also covers charter schools. Which means this law about "parental rights" further restricts a parent's right to choose a school that doesn't keep gender identity and sexual roles a secret.

It's a dumb law for many reasons, not the least of which is that sexual orientation and gender identity come up all the time. But hey, defenders of the law say, this law just prohibits instruction about them. If the subject just happens to come up, that's not illegal.

Except that's a lie, too.

Just ask Jenna Barbee. She's the teacher now under investigation by the state because she showed fifth graders the Disney flick Strange World. The indispensable Mercedes Schneider has an excellent run down of what happened; you can also watch her tell her story here and I've embedded it below--it's worth a watch. The short form is that Barbee had sent out parental permission slips, showed the film, and Moms for Liberty-backed board member and parent Shannon Rodriguez went after her. 

“It is not a teacher’s job to impose their beliefs upon a child,” Ms Rodriguez said during the meeting, adding that the movie opened the door “for conversations that have no place in our classrooms”.

I've seen Strange World; it's an okayish Disney entry that happens to include a gay teen character. We see him crushing on the object of his affection at the beginning of the film. When the central characters leave for the main adventure, the crush is not with them, but the teen has a conversation with a family member about his love interest, and they talk about it from a "how do you handle being really interested in someone" angle--the gay aspect of the relationship is treated as ordinary, and no character ever challenges it. At the end of the film, we get an indication that the main character has acted on his crush, but the film does not have so much as an LGBTQ kiss.

In other words--no sexualized content, no graphic anything. The message that Rodriguez objects to is "Gay person exist and that's no big deal." 

A movie, not instruction. Just talking pictures that show gay persons existing. 

Will that "open the door" to terrible conversations. Have you met a fifth grader lately? As Barbee told CNN:

“These students are talking about things way beyond this (movie),” Barbee said. “This door that she’s talking about, it’s been open. These are common conversations that I have to tell my students, ‘Woah there. We’re getting a little too much here.’”

And as Schneider points out, these continues attacks on teachers and schools, the need for schools and teachers to police their students' speech and conversation, also open the door to conversations that are, at a minimum, Kafkaesque:

Teacher: Stop, Pat. We can't talk about that in here.

Pat: Why can't we talk about that?"

Teacher: Well, we can't talk about why we can't talk about that.

But under Florida's repressive law, any shmoe can initiate action against a teacher or district if said shmoe thinks the vaguely worded law has been broken. So now Barbee is being scrutinized by the Florida Department of Education. And even if they correctly determine that the complaint is a load of baloney, it will still take a toil on Barbee and the district, as well as sending a message to other teachers and districts. And the message is, as it has been, "Don't mention LGBTQ persons at all." 

The notion that this dumb law can be extended to older students would be silly if it weren't going to cause so much damage. Go tell an 8th grader they aren't allowed to talk about something. I dare you. All of their time is focused on figuring out their identity; forbidding them to talk about anything on the State's list of forbidden topics, is going to cause real damage. 

Apparently only the rights of some parents matter, and apparently those rights for those certain fragile parents include the right to evade any slightly difficult conversations with your children (what some might call a parental responsibility). Why should Rodriguez be so alarmed at having to discuss with her child an LGBTQ character in an animated film? Heck, LGBTQ parents and parents of LGBTQ children have to have conversations with their children why persons like them are not allowed to be discussed or depicted around children in Florida. 

If Floridian MAGA M4L folks imagine they can simply drive LGBTQ persons into invisibility by using the full force of the state, they are kidding themselves-- which would be fine if they weren't hurting a lot of other people miserable at the same time. 

But if you are in a state considering one of these laws, just remember--all the talk about how it's just protecting small children from graphic porn turns out to be just lie, a cover for more repression and mistreatment later on.

Meanwhile, Barbee told CNN that she has already submitted her resignation "due to 'politics and the fear of not being able to be who you are' in the public school system." Good luck with those problems filling teaching positions, Florida. 

@becomingabetterbarbee I am the teacher. Here is the truth. #indoctrination #disneymovie #disney #strangeworld #viraltweet ♬ original sound - Jenna Lynn

The Generation Gulf

The culture wars feel an awful lot like a generational war, a collective yawp from a slice of an older generation that has seen its children turn into people that are not what they had planned for, hoped for, expected. 

The target that they've selected is schools and the apparently huge cadre of socialist indoctrinators hiding there, but the real source of their frustration is their own children who refuse to be the person they're supposed to be. They are deeply alarmed about parental rights; they are not nearly so concerned about the rights of their children. "The government does not own my child," they say, and in case you miss the implication, Rand Paul is one guy who finished the statement:

“The state doesn’t own your children,” Paul said in an interview with CNBC’s “Closing Bell.” “Parents own the children, and it is an issue of freedom and public health.”

I often think of one woman who responded to the North Carolina tip line set up to report public school indoctrination. She wrote:

My daughter was raised with sound Biblical values, but just three short years [in]) public school has turned her into a full-blown socialist...even to this day, I cannot have a rational discussion with her regarding anything significant.

Her daughter had graduated fifteen years before this was written. Fifteen years and this sound Biblical mom had not found a way to bridge the gap that was totally created by schools and in no way a result of any parenting choices she made. 

This gulf between parents and children is everywhere in the culture war skirmishes. For instance, the many requirements that school districts must not keep secrets about the children, as if there were any secrets the school could keep from parents if the parents and children were talking freely and openly at home. Yesterday, my sons had a special program at school that I knew nothing about ahead of time, but we talk about the day's events every afternoon when I pick them up, so they told me about it, we talked about it, and life went on. It's that easy.

Except, of course, for some folks it is not. And we have studies to illuminate the issue, sort of. 

What's out there is spotty, inconsistent, and (surprise) sloppily reported by some news outlets (though given the absolutely frustrating and expensive hoops one needs to jump through to read the actual research, it's understandable). 

There's an oft-cited statistic from a 1997 study (that you have to really dig to find) finding 7% of adults are estranged from mothers, 25% from fathers. In 2013 we find mainstream outlets like Today talking about a "silent epidemic" of "cut off kids." Nowadays the study of estrangement is a "young field of research" of a "surprisingly common" phenomenon. 

 

In 2020, Karl Pillemer (Cornell) gave the topic a bump with his book Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them, -- but that book came out in September of 2020, and as you may recall, we were all a bit preoccupied with other issues at the time. Pillemer found that 27% of over-18 people-- 1 in 4--had cut off contact with a family member. That's around 67 million Americans. 

What's going on? Joshua Coleman, author of When Parents Hurt, suggested in a 2022 article that families view their lives through different lenses:

However they arrive at estrangement, parents and adult children seem to be looking at the past and present through very different eyes. Estranged parents often tell me that their adult child is rewriting the history of their childhood, accusing them of things they didn’t do, and/or failing to acknowledge the ways in which the parent demonstrated their love and commitment. Adult children frequently say the parent is gaslighting them by not acknowledging the harm they caused or are still causing, failing to respect their boundaries, and/or being unwilling to accept the adult child’s requirements for a healthy relationship. 

Coleman further notes that "Both sides often fail to recognize how profoundly the rules of family life have changed over the past half century." And he quotes historian Stephanie Coontz:

For most of history, family relationships were based on mutual obligations rather than on mutual understanding. Parents or children might reproach the other for failing to honor/acknowledge their duty, but the idea that a relative could be faulted for failing to honor/acknowledge one’s ‘identity’ would have been incomprehensible.

So where families used to argue about what one was supposed to do or how one was supposed to act, we're now fighting over who we're supposed to be. 

Other writers point to a constellation of the usual suspects, heightened in our current atmosphere. Different values. Different politics. New approaches to mental health--Coleman says that the idea of cutting off a family member as a step in personal growth is "almost certainly new." 

Coleman also argues that our increased valuing of individualism, which puts greater stakes on parents who try to control children's behavior--their friends, their activities, their jobs. Children, once they're old enough to do it, seek to set boundaries, make their own choices, define their own identity.

Much of what I'm reading makes me wonder if the helicopter parents of 20-ish years ago haven't spawned a break-away generation of children.

Being cut off from your own child, having them reject your guidance and values, watching them deliberately break from being the person that you invested so much time and effort and self in can be a tough and painful thing. It doesn't have to be, especially if your parenting goal has been top raise an independent, functioning adult. It doesn't have to be hard if, in fact, you raised them on the premise that they are a separate individual and not a parental possession. You also have to face up to the realities of parenting; is there anything more hilarious than a first time parent telling you exactly what their child will or will not be like? But even if you've managed not to parent based on control and possession, it can be rough to realize that the child that you once rocked in your arms is a stranger to you.

It's unsurprising that folks suffering through this hurt or anger will look for someone to blame. One 2021 study of 1,000 estranged mothers found most of them blaming ex-husband's or their child's partner. 

Add to all this ideas like "Race stuff was fixed in the sixties and anyone who's still talking about it is just making trouble for political gains, or they've been tricked into going along by someone who's looking for political power."  Add to all this misguided biases like the idea that LGBTQ persons aren't born, but have to be "recruited." You get a bunch of older parents saying, "Who stole my child from me" and a bunch of younger parents declaring, "Well, by God, nobody's going to take MY child away!" It's a very human thing to ask "who did this to me" instead of "what did I do cause it?"

These waves of generational angst always end up looking for culprits, and schools always make the list, so it should come as no surprise this time. Schools are targeted, and all that parental fear and frustration is harvested for societal and political clout. 

Alyssa Rosenberg at the Washington Post convincingly argues that the parental rights movement is actually about avoiding parental responsibilities, that the various reading and subject matter restrictions are a way to shield parents from having to talk to their children about anything difficult or uncomfortable, or more to the point, shielding parents from having to explain themselves, their values, their beliefs. Maybe, the reasoning seems to go, if my child never hears anything at all about any of this, they will be the person I want them to be. But that trick doesn't work, has never worked, will never work. 

Should We Spare The Rod?

Classroom chaos is an issue. How bad is it? Why is it bad? What do we do? (Warning: this ended up being quite a ramble).

Daniel Buck raised a bit of an internet stir with a complaint about school discipline issues, "Don't Spare the Rod," that ends with this rather dark paragraph:

Schools fail when they lose sight of human nature. Children are capable of wickedness and cruelty. There is something rotten in the core of man. When schools deny this, when they fail to punish cruelty, the apple is left putrefying on the teacher’s desk.

Who is Daniel Buck?

We have met Buck before over the years. Buck is a teacher in Wisconsin who writes for the Foundation for Economic Education and The Federalist, among other outlets. Of The Closing of the American Mind he said, "The Bible taught me how to live but that book taught me how to think." He's not a union guy. He's a "senior visiting fellow" at Fordham. He got started in the conservative writing in college, and wrote for the now-defunct "The Lone Conservative" website. From reading his tweets, I learned that he would pay to keep the union rep out of the lounge and once shook Scott Walker's hand and thanked Walker "for all he's doing to improve education in Wisconsin." He dresses up for school, appears to take a serious and conscientious approach to the work. Back in 2019, he helped launch the Chalkboard Review, a right-tilted news and commentary ed site (which seems to have quieted down in the last year or so). And he's got a book in which he explains what's wrong with education. 

Buck has been busy, considering he started his teaching career in 2016. For his first four years he was in Green Bay public schools before switching to the Holy Spirit Catholic School, a move he has said was prompted by the lack of student discipline in public schools. He left Holy Spirit at the end of the 22-23 school year, and he now teaches at a private Christian school. I know this because I read the name off a lanyard in one of his pics, and while I usually like to show my work, Buck has chosen not to talk about at what school he teaches, and to publish the name of the school when he hasn't is a level of doxing that I'm not willing to do. But the nature of his current employment is important to our story. I'm just not going to get specific and this time I'll ask you to just take my word for it.

Buck's thesis, developed in multiple articles and social media posts is that education has been infected by a debilitating wokeness, that a combination of things like restorative justice and treating behavior as communication and, of course, that awful social emotional learning are leading to chaos in classrooms. 

Now, Buck's rhetorical stock in trade is the straw man, but anyone who knows a teacher knows that, post-pandemic, we've got trouble in classrooms across the country. There is not a day that I don't see some classroom horror story on my screen. So Buck and folks like him are not, I feel certain, making something out of nothing.

How bad is the problem?

Is it worse than ever? Hard to know--we haven't been quantifying this on any kind of national scale for a long time, but as someone who's been in the classroom for ages, I can't remember a time when it wasn't a concern. Not only a concern, but often characterized as "worse than ever." And that "worse than ever" has always been a localized thing. I remember coming back to my small town after teaching my first year in Lorain, Ohio, where fighting and disorder were common, I'd faced physical threats twice in my own room, and students came from environments where guns and knives were not unusual. When I came back home, I tried not to laugh at colleagues who were really, really upset about how out of control gum chewing had become. 

Buck has stories of his own. "A kid punched another child and then threw a chair at my colleague yesterday. He’s at school today. No consequence. Nothing," he tweeted just a week ago. And he's at a private Christian school, one that says that their "education helps each child learn his or her Identity in Christ and live out a God-given Purpose in life. We regularly discuss and practice the Actions that grow character based on who we are and what we have been called to do in our lives." Plus emphasis on college prep. (Buck doesn't claim that this is a public school, but he doesn't correct responses that assume so, either.) 

Are things worse these days? My gut says yes, and the most obvious cause to point at is the pandemic disruption of education that brought chaos into students' lives even as it gave them ample opportunity to lose the habits of "doing school." A year is a really long time if you're a child. I'm betting that every school building in the country could use one more counselor, at least.

Why is it so bad?

Can we also point at restorative justice and SEL and other such fuzzy-headed touchy-feely stuff. Surely that's part of the problem; even if these are solid programs, I would bet dollars to donuts that across the country, a decent number of schools are implementing them poorly. I will also point at the political climate, the rise of brutal, crude scorched earth, and even physical attacks on "enemies," which becomes even more of a factor when the "enemy" is the school. In some communities, students hear plenty of that language.

Conservatives like Buck also point to mission creep, the degree to which schools have been tasked with so much beyond simply "teaching the basics." Two problems with that (well, at least two). One is that it's really hard to get kids who are hungry or tired struggling with other issues at home to care about prepositions and times tables, or, even if they care, to have the mental bandwidth to engage productively. The other is that mission creep is constant and from all sides; right now even conservatives are saying that we need to spend more time on civics and history education and. Also, let's add more time on math and reading to get those test scores up. More time, more time, more time (but not more resources). 

Nor is mission creep a public school issue alone. Buck last week tweeted, "Overheard a teacher saying 'I’m not here to teach academics so much as life lessons' Ok… but can you also teach the academics?" Buck is teaching at a school that promises, "In Partnership with the Character Formation Project, we offer a Biblically-based journey that equips and trains children to live Christ-centered, fulfilling lives for Greater Purpose." Their mission statement lists as goals "Growth in wisdom, character, faith, relationship, service, leadership and discernment take significant time, experiences and diligence." It's not a bad list, but the Three R's it is not.

Yeah, I'm still waiting for an answer to "why"

The roots of the issue are both deeply philosophical and simply practical.

The philosophical part is hinted at in Buck's paragraph and the responses to it. Are human beings fundamentally good or fundamentally bad. Is there "something rotten in the core of man" that must be harnessed, tamed, restrained? Or are humans destined to grow into something bright and beautiful if we just give them what they need to do that and shelter them from forces that will twist and stunt them? Or are humans some kind of blank-ish slate upon which family and experience write any number of possible answers? Are we all doomed sinners, or do we each carry a piece of divine spirit that can be nurtured? Or do humans carry the potential for good and bad, developed and enhanced by the circumstances and people they encounter through life? 

It's a complex question, complicated by the fact that everyone has an opinion, even if they don't take it out and look at it often. There's a tradition that says folks on the left are in the fundamentally bad camp, hence their desire to put powers in place to rein in human tendencies toward naughtiness, while the right favors a free field that trusts people to do mostly the right thing, but that's a gross oversimplification. Also, if conservatives think we should trust grownups, why do they think we can't trust children? At what point is that magical transition supposed to occur?

It's not an issue that I'll sort out in a blog post, which is fine, because it could all be true or none of it could be true, and the answers for school discipline would be the same. 

So what is the best way forward?

In fact, the answers to school discipline requires us to set aside "either or" and pick up "and."  Many things can be true at once. Behavior is communication, AND behavior needs to have consequences. Social emotional learning is a critical unremovable part of what teachers do (iow, I don't care what you do, you can't NOT teach SEL), AND some formal SEL programs are junk. Schools have to be conscious of biases and prejudices that may adversely affect disciplinary processes AND disciplinary processes need to exist. Students need the class to be a safe space to learn, which includes both being free of disruptions by fellow students AND not worrying that some small step on their part might bring the hammer down on their own head.

We don't have to argue philosophy when we can talk practicalities. Maybe you pine for the days when students were raised to automatically fear and respect the authority of the school and its personnel. Maybe you wish we had classrooms in which all those different groups just pretended to blend in with the presumed mainstream. Too bad. Those days are gone, and you aren't going to bring them back. Maybe you still believe that a key part of school discipline is breaking the spirit of a disobedient child. Morally, I think you're dead wrong, but at the same time, I encourage you to stop trying because it just doesn't get you the results you think it will. Worse, it gets you to a place where your desire to be the boss has become a higher priority than meeting the needs of the child. And speaking of your own needs, if you are letting everything go because you want to never ruffle student feathers or make anyone sad, that is also putting your need for comfort ahead of their needs.

Much of your classroom order comes down to you and how you leverage your particular style and resources. Know your material. Be firm and fair and consistent. Build relationships, but don't break your own rules to do it. Don't take what they do personally. 

None of that is new. What's also not new is the root of most school chaos issues--

The front office.

Long before SEL or culturally responsive teaching or restorative justice, there were administrators who didn't back up their classroom teachers. Every teacher who has worked more than a decade has met them. The principal who has a friendly chat with the kid who you threw out of class and then send the kid back five minutes later, a big smile on their face. The principal who requires you to complete the 147-item checklist before they'll get involved. The principal who always takes the student's word over the teacher's. The principal who folds the minute a parent makes contact. The principal you avoid involving in any situation because you know he'll back the student into a corner and escalate the situation. The principal you avoid involving because you know that certain students can expect poor treatment in the office. The principal who is somehow never around when you need them. The principal who doesn't observe (or maybe understand) district policy. The principal who will do anything to avoid having to answer a phone and hear an angry voice on the other end. The principal who is too overloaded with stuff to do so they don't have enough time to deal with your student's issues (again--at least one more counselor in every building in the country).

I do not want for a second to minimize the importance of the individual teacher taking care of her business in her classroom. It's hard for an administrator to back up a teacher who is making bad choices in her own room. But one fundamental part of classroom management is for the teacher to know that the front office has her back. An ineffective teacher can make a mess out of one room; an ineffective principal can make a mess out of an entire building. 

None of these principals (or their brethren and sistern) needed any particular policies or program to implement their approach, but you can bet they embraced them when they appeared, because it's a big help, if you don't want to do your job, to have a policy or program to point at for the blame. 

And again--this entire issue is not simply public school. Buck's piece focuses on a bullying incident and the administrative non-response at his current school. He also mentions students smoking weed in the restroom, "roaming the hall in gangs of three or four," and a slack policy toward attendance. This is a K-6 private Christian school.

There's another level of irony here. You may think "spare the rod and spoil the child" is Biblical. It isn't, exactly. The Bible gives us 

Whoever spares the rod hates their children, but the one who loves their children is careful to discipline them. (Proverbs 13:24).

If you punish (children) with the rod, they will not die (Proverbs 23:13b).

A rod and a reprimand impart wisdom (Proverbs 29:15a).*

The familiar variant comes from Hudibras, a mock-heroic poem by Samuel Butler (1613–1680) that brings up the notion as part of the satire of outmoded and Puritanical ideas. 

I swear I'm just about at the end of this post

We kind of forget what "spare the rod" means-- it means that if you don't beat a child, they're liable to grow up bad. It's an idea that never goes away (witness the earlier versions of No Excuse charters like KIPP) despite the fact that it has never worked particularly well, and it plays with bonus oddity in Buck's piece, which lands somewhere in the neighborhood of "If we don't bully these children, they will continue to bully each other." 

There's a whole other side trip we could take about bullying itself, but this has already rambled on long enough. My short answer is that if we want students to live respectful lives, it would be helpful to model respect for them, and starting with the assumption that they're rotten inside probably doesn't fit that model well. Nor would I argue that we show respect by sparing them any negative consequences for bad choices. It's a complicated balancing act between two extreme poles, neither of which is the whole answer by itself. Kind of like every other complex issue in education. 

One of my first superintendents used to start the school year with a story about a horse trainer asking rookies what the first step of training was; the punch line was "First, you have to love the horse." The student-to-horse comparison was questionable, but his point was solid enough-- it helps to care about the students you are supposed to teach. Some folks imagine a kind of false dichotomy, that either A) one is a hard-nailed taskmaster who focuses strictly on the three R's or B) one is focused only on warm fuzzy socio-emotional stuff and never does anything that might seem "mean." As it is unkind and ineffective to demand complete depersonalized compliance, it is also unkind and ineffective not to teach the students to read and write and all the rest.

My idea of the purpose of education is pretty simple-- to help students better understand the world, to help become their best selves, and to grasp what it means to be fully human in the world. It can't happen in an atmosphere of chaos and Do As You Please, and it can't happen in an environment in which rod-enforced compliance is valued above all else. And I hope that my children's teachers don't start from any assumption that A) they are perfect angels or B) they are rotten inside. 

*For the record, Proverb 29 also includes verse 7:  The righteous care about justice for the poor, but the wicked have no such concern.

PA: The Culture War School Board Checklist

This is of most interest to folks in my region, but worth noting elsewhere because I'm sure this kind of thing will continue to pop up all over. 

The American Family Association, a longstanding conservative Christian fundamentalist group that mostly works against LGBTQ rights and porn. Founded nationally by Doug Wildmon, now headed by his son Tim. They're big on boycotts, like boycotting convenience store chains for carrying Playboy and Penthouse, companies that advertise in gay magazines, Disney a zillion times for a long list of offenses. 

Their Pennsylvania affiliate, the last time I checked, was the work of two women located in my neck of the woods. Like so many activist groups on both sides, they don't so much have members as subscribers, and they depend heavily on the church network to get their word out. As a local theater director, I've been on the receiving end of one of their public calls for a boycott, and it is better than the best marketing money can buy, so they tend to avoid publicly mounting these campaigns.

They've been busy sending questionaires out to area school board candidates, and the areas of concern will be familiar to anyone who's been following the culture wars:

Do you support emphasis on phonics? Are you anti-trans? Would you like some "don't say gay" rules? Do you want the feds out of ed? Abstinence only sex ed?  All the classics are here, presented without any nuance or complexity, and focusing on parental rights for only the parents who believe the Correct Things. It's a quick guide to the far right agenda for schools.

If you are in my region, here are the results that AGA got for their response. As one might expect, the slate for Penncrest, where they're already all in on anti-LGBTQ, reading suppression, and the rest of the agenda-- that crew says yes to it all. Other districts in the area can check to see which candidates want to prioritize the suppression of students who don't fit the Proper Mold over fully educating them. 

I do wish I'd gotten my hands on this sooner, as the primary election is tomorrow, but it's still worth look. School districts suffer when these folks get in charge. 

ICYMI: Mother's Day 2023 Edition (5/14)

Well, that's it teachers. Teacher Appreciation Week is over and now we can go back to the usual everyday levels of appreciation (or the lack thereof). In the meantime, today we will appreciate moms. And while all that appreciating is flying about, here's some reading from the week.

‘Education reform’ is dying. Now we can actually reform education.

Perry Bacon Jr. at the Washington Post had a must-read column this week, a compact history of modern ed reform paired with a succinct articulation of a positive vision for public education.

Williamson County mom helps launch national campaign pushing back on 'parents rights' groups

Let's start with something encouraging-- a group of moms who are trying to act as a counter-force to some of those other parental rights (for the parents we approve of) groups. By Rachel Wegner in The Tennessean.

Public Education Is Vital for Democracy. But It’s Not the Solution to Poverty or Inequality.

In Jacobin, Jennifer Berkshire takes a look at Jon Shelton's new book, the Education Myth (my copy is on the way), which takes a look at the notion that education will somehow fix poverty and inequality ion this country (spoiler alert: it won't).

A Charter School Board Member Says The Quiet Part Out Loud

Carl Petersen catches a charter board member talking out loud about the practice of creaming students and only accepting the Right Students for the school (spoiler alert: they do it).

False choice: Wisconsin taxpayers support schools that can discriminate

Phoebe Petrovic at Wisconsin Watch covers a voucher school story that asks if a school can really discriminate in ways that would be illegal for a public school, even as they accept taxpayer money. Can they really suspend two successful, accomplished seniors from activities just because they are in a gay dating relationship? (Spoiler alert: Yes, they can).

A Philly charter school manipulated its lottery to keep kids out, a top administrator says

A Philly charter is also caught cooking the books. Story in the Philadelphia Inquirer, so if you want to get the story without navigating the paywall, check out the coverage by the indispensable Mercedes Schneider here. 

A Tennessee teacher planned a Mother’s Day class. Then came the MAGA rage.

Just another one of those stories. As always, chicken administration is a key feature. 

State offices tasked with making Indiana high school curricula more career-centered

Well, here's a new wrinkle. What if taxpayers were to foot the bill for a private business's job training?

The Troubling Focus on Testing Rewards, Testing Pep Rallies, and Test Prep Bootcamps

You already know that most of this stuff is a bad idea, but Nancy Bailey has the research to back it up.

The Black Screen of Agony

Is it a "standardized" test if every student has a different experience, depending on how well their computer works (or doesn't)? Gregory Sampson with some reminders of what this kind of testing looks like at ground level.

Why Is the Ohio Legislature So Devoted to the Third-Grade Reading Guarantee?

Jan Resseger looks at Ohio's misguided devotion to a third grade reading retention policy. 

Where the Boys Aren’t: Why is Teaching Still a Female-Dominated Profession?

Nancy Flanagan asks the question. Do you already follow her blog? Because you should.

Teach Like a Desert Father

From the blog Whatonomy, another meditation on teaching in the age of AI.

The truth is that my immediate thought is that the poem had been written using Open AI’s ChatGPT. This thought was the first arrow. The pain of self-loathing that arose from the entertaining of this suspicion, this doubt was the second arrow. I had recently attended a poetry competition organised by a group of students and I knew that, from this moment on, I would in all likelihood never be able to freely enjoy listening to my students’ recitals of their original work without, from time to time, wondering whether indeed they had written their own work or whether AI had had a grubby, silicon hand in the poem’s creation.

Texas lawmaker lobbies for 3rd graders to be trained to administer aid for gunshot wounds in the event of a school shooting, says report

For your Crazy Stuff That Is Actually Happening file. And you thought that active shooter drills were traumatizing...

Chaplains could be in Texas public schools this fall under new bill

Also in Texas. Because, Texas. 

‘Trump was great at this’: How conservatives transformed a Colorado school district

This story from NBC News is pretty frustratingly rage-inducing, but it's important to understand just how bad things can get when you put terrible people with no real interest in education on a school board. And I call them terrible not because I disagree with their politics, but because of their desire to exercise to slap people down just because they can and because they believe they should be making Certain People hurt. 

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The Pandemic and The Testing Red Herring

The pandemic exacerbated some of US education's major problems, and that's reflected in the effects on children. Unfortunately, it's also reflected in how we respond to those effects; policies that were a bad idea in "normal" times become terrible ideas in a post-pandemic world.

I have no doubt that learning loss is a real thing, and we need to address it. But I'm afraid that instead we're throwing weight behind Learning Loss instead.

Look, we all know there was learning loss, that students did not get the usual amount of learning and growth done during the pandemic, hampered by cobbled-together distance learning set-ups, general stress, and a disconnection from education in general. 

But Learning Loss is something else; it's a slightly panic-stricken doubling down on the Big Standardized Test, the single biggest policy failure in education of the last thirty years. 

The panic is predictable for many reasons, not the least of which is that the pandemic suspended the Big Standardized Test, which threatens the income of lots of folks in the testing industry. 

There are people who really believe in the importance of the BS Test, who have always believed that we can make the pig fatter by weighing it repeatedly. In the economism-dominated world of ed research, we get the regular assertion that testing results are linked to future life outcomes. Well, not exactly. Test results correlate with future life outcomes. This is not a surprise. Test results correlate with the socio-economic back ground of the students. Future life outcomes also correlate with the socio-economic background of students. 

What's missing--what has always been missing-- is any research showing a relationship between changing test scores and changing life outcomes. We know that if Pat has a high BS Test score, Pat is probably going to have swell life outcomes. What we don't know is this--if Sam was going to get a lousy BS Test score, but the school gets Sam to score higher, will Sam's life have more swell outcomes than it would have otherwise? Probably impossible to prove, but given the fact that we can accurately predict a school's test scores with just demographic data, it's the only question that matters.

Other arguments-- like dropping test scores mean a loss of millions of dollars of income--are based on even flimsier reasoning. 

The testocrats have pulled off the neat trick of getting people to debate and clutch pearls about BS Test scores without even knowing they're doing it. They do this by using some mathy prestidigitation to turn test scores into days/weeks/months/years of learning. When test fans Tom Kane and Sean Reardon get space in the New York Times to push the panic button over Learning Loss and print charts showing how many years or months students are "behind," all they're talking about test scores. When they and others talk about "catching up" and "making up lost time," all they're talking about is getting test scores back up.

This is a lousy focus, a misguided response that uses a made-up crisis to take attention away from a real one.

I'm partway through Anya Kamenetz's new book The Stolen Year, which catalogs the many ways in which students were pummeled, hurt, beat up, deprived, cut off and generally batted about by the pandemic and our responses to it. 

On the long list of things that students need to deal with in the aftermath, both educational and non, "get test scores back up" doesn't even make the top ten.

We got children being carted into the ER, battered, bruised, bloody, and a bunch of folks are hollering, "First, we've got to get these kids some clean shirts. And maybe a nice hat." 

I get the whole "it's the only concrete data we have, so what else are we going to use" argument. Pro-test folks have been using this argument forever, just like the guy who's searching for his car keys and night under the street light that is 100 feet from his car because that's where the light is best. Is testing data really better than nothing at all? Probably--but only if we approach it is an only-sort-of-accurate tiny slice of a larger picture. In other words, if we discuss them as scores on a single standardized test given to students who are out of practice in taking standardized tests, and not as some magical measure of the complete state of student learning. 

The current state of learning loss (not Learning Loss) is complicated. Beyond reading and math, there are subjects that took an extra hit, like those that require group work (chorus, band) or hands on work (the CTE stuff). And we're seeing widely that many students simply lost the knack for (or interest in) "doing school." Every community was hit differently, with some fielding far more trauma than others.

It's the people on the ground who know the most about what the students in their school need, and once again we run into one of the problems of the testocratic approach-- an attitude of "we don't need to talk to people who are there because we have all these numbers we can look at instead." Which is exactly backwards to what students and schools need right now. 

I'm doubtful that we'll prioritize the needs of students or the parents and teachers who work directly with them, based on our failure to do so when the pandemic was officially on. But "get those test scores back up" is a red herring, a beside-the-point exercise that will make far too many people feel as if The Problem is being addressed and they can stop worrying about it. Meanwhile, resources will be directed for some big herring hunt.