My dad took me to the Thompson High School parking lot.  Then, I drove around.  I am sure, looking back, that it was terrifying.  I am sure that I wobbled left and right, and accelerated unevenly, and braked much too suddenly.

And then, for the next year, I drove a lot, with a parent in the seat beside me.  I got a ticket in Ohio when I pulled off the left side of the interstate at 55 mph to let a State Trooper pass.  One week after receiving my license, I drove straight into a ditch for no good reason whatsoever.

I’m 32 now, and I haven’t wrecked in a decade or gotten a ticket in 5 years. (The fact that I wrote that here means that both will happen tomorrow…unless my buddy Jordan has consumed our circle’s quota of vehicular bad luck for the year.)

This is how I did NOT learn to drive a car:

My dad did not sit me down and make me memorize the definition of all the parts of the car.

My dad did not force me to learn to drive a car against my will; I recognized on my own that learning to drive the car was an essential component of the autonomy I so desperately desired.

My dad did not, when the time came to practice, force me to practice things piecemeal and incrementally.

My dad did not spend one day on “acceleration practice” and one day on “braking practice” and one day on “blinker operation practice,” and then, after 18 weeks, have “final car-driving assessment” in which we finally pieced the whole thing together.

My dad did not set an amount of minutes I had to practice driving each week.

My dad DID offer feedback and tell me when I did something incorrectly (or really, really stupidly)…

…but my dad did NOT periodically sit down with me and assign a numerical value to my proficiency thus far in my car-operating journey.

And I’m a proficient driver.

The same logic applies to sports (learned while they’re played), music (all the theory in the world doesn’t replace just sitting down with the guitar and sucking until you’re decent at it), relationships (we learn to navigate other people by messing it up until we figure it out), walking (babies learn by running into stuff and falling down)–the list of extremely essential skills that we learn in the most haphazard ways is endless.

This is why I’m always amused by the calls for “more tech training in schools.”  Kids eat that stuff alive.  They learn technology by sitting in the room with it.  The average 15-year old can swim intricate technological circles around the average 45-year-old computer teacher (I said “average.”)   More on that topic here.

So why does school work the way it does?  I suppose I am thankful that God gave me a personality (read: jerkiness) strong enough that I was able to ignore much of what was methodically done wrong to me during my time in school–but I feel increasingly guilty about what I’m expected to do to my students by my various accrediting agencies.

Your thoughts?

(And thanks to Alfie Kohn for the impetus)

That’s the background.

So the other day, I’m at home with the kids after school on one of those days when the wife works till 9.

I’m baking away, when Ellie enters and begins hanging off my back pockets.  Covered in flour, generally irritated (thus the psyche-calming bread-baking), I shooed her away.  It took several tries, as I could not use my dough-covered hands.

Off she went, happily yammering and playing in the living room.  (This day, it was the telephone game, in which she picks up the plastic phone, says “Hello?  Uh-huh.  Uh-huh.  Uh-huh.  Daddy, Mommy, Jack Tyler, Macy.  Bye.”  It sounds sweet, unless you think about how she could be, in her baby way, ordering a hit on the other members of her family for various toddler grievances.  She’s very careful to keep her end of the conversation devoid of detail, as if she’s hiding something.)

Fast-forward about 400 minutes.

It’s time for bed, when I swoop her up and put her down to change her diaper before the elaborate PJ-insertion process.

“No NO Daddy!”

“What do you need, baby?”

“No Daddy! Daddy money, Daddy money!”

“Money?  What are you talking about?”  I continue attempting to remove the diaper.

“NO NO NO Daddy!  MONEY, Daddy, Daddy Money!”

Exasperated, I back away from the bed, hands raised in surrender.

“Show me what you’re talking about,” I say.

It is at this point that Ellie reaches down the back of her diaper–just where the butt pocket would be, if Huggies had butt pockets–and comes out…with my debit card.

That is correct.  Evidently, somehow, in the kitchen-shooing episode, she removed my debit card from my wallet WITHOUT TAKING MY WALLET OUT OF MY POCKET or me realizing what she’d done.   Regardless of my annoyance level, I found it frankly impressive.  I’m considering taking her to a densely populated Central American metropolis soon so that she can wander the crowds of tourists and seed her college fund.

Back to the story where, because Ellie knows money goes in your pocket–and she didn’t have pockets–she did the next best thing.  She shoved it down the back of her diaper.

At some point in the intervening three hours, she did what babies do in diapers.

So, I spent an evening this week disinfecting my ATM card.  And, although it’s not due for a replacement till March, I went ahead and ordered one now, since I have a nervous habit of chewing on the corner of it while I’m in line.

Got a disgusting kid story?

That heroic guy.

That heroic guy who gunned down his daughter’s laptop after she disrespected him on Facebook.

THAT GUY now has an official website.  And it is GOLD.

Go read it–all of it–right now.

But make SURE you read his response to Dr. Phil.

Anyone who knows me well is familiar with my longstanding visceral hatred of the philosophy espoused by the  nefarious Dr. Phil.  (As well as the fact that I do an ALARMINGLY SPOT-ON impersonation, often in the middle of lectures in AP Senior English.)

It’s this bad–if Dr. Phil and Justin Bieber were in two separate cages, and you gave me only one grenade, and told me to choose…I would blow myself up, because I couldn’t live in a world where I came so, so close to perfection.

So, when this guy tells Dr. Phil:

What gives you the self-righteous audacity to assume my mother and father made mistakes raising me, or that any mother and father who spanks their kids, or publicly reprimands their kids, are making mistakes?

…well, it makes me happy.  I don’t even need a giant hyperbolic metaphor.  It just makes me happy.

And, beautifully, he attacks Dr. Phil’s reasoning with well-crafted, thoughtful, arguments.  (Which I’m sure threw the Philster for a loop, since he’s accustomed to arguing with people whose lives are so far in the toilet they’ve forfeited the right to be taken seriously.)

http://8minutesoffame.com/response-to-dr-phil/

http://8minutesoffame.com/ (main site)

What do you think?  Is this guy a stellar parent?  Or should DHR come get his kid?

Close one eye.

Now, poke your tongue out the OPPOSITE corner of your mouth.

(As in, left eye, right side of mouth.)

Easy, right?

Now, attempt to simultaneously switch eyes and corners.

Can’t do it, can you?

Someone must explain this phenomenon to me. It is killing me.

That is all today.

reading this week:

• The Intelligent Investor, by Benjamin Graham.  This on the advice of my father-in-law.  Do not attempt if you’re not prepared for some thoroughly researched tedium.
• Cows of Our Planet.  Because Gary Larson remains the Jesus of comic strip authors.
• How Children Fail, by John Holt.  Required for any teacher (especially elementary), and not a bad idea for parents seeking to understand what gets done to your children against their will for twelve straight years.
• If you’ve been following the recent Mars Hill Excommunication Kerfuffle, there’s a great response by Matt Appling at the Church of No People (who is a very nice guy that once gave me an entire elementary art curriculum for free).
• If you’re headed to college (or have a kid that might be), take ten minutes to read the UnCollege Manifesto before you spend the equivalent of a large house on college.  Well-written, solidly conceived, and not all tedious.
• Seth Godin points out that success lies primarily in picking the right hills.

hearing and watching this week:

• Zack Galafianakis, Live at the Purple Onion.  I woke my wife up two times giggle-snorting while watching this.  Only funny if your natural reflex when you’re uncomfortable is to giggle. Language warning, if you’re all offensible and what-not.
• Bon Iver.  I alternately love and loathe this album.  This week I’m hooked.
• Birds by Aaron Strumpel and Wrath by Preson Phillips are both excellent choices if you’re tired of formulaic, 4-chord worship music.

wasting our time this week:

• Slashdot reports, to the delight of the Black Helicopter crowd, that Minority Report could be a reality very soon, since evil scientists will soon be able to listen in on your brain.  Donning aluminum foil cranium covers…check.
• Some guy named Brock Davis is making amazing (sometimes very funny) pictures of food.  Including a cauliflower Nagasaki.  (thanks, kottke.)
• DO NOT MISS THIS ONE!  I bet I’ve watched James Canupp sing “Looking for a City” a thousand times this week on YouTube.  Draw your own conclusions.

I’ve had my own opinion on this season’s Tebow phenomenon; the short take was that, while I thought he was a great athlete and a swell guy, I couldn’t understand why so many Christians needed a famous person to validate their faith.  I always assumed Jesus–not Tim Tebow–was the centerpiece of the Christian faith.

That being said, I was never critical of The Tebow himself, unlike Nyad’s piece, which seems poorly-reasoned at best.  She takes issue with his “proselytizing on the field,” complaining that (while at Florida), it “wasn’t fair for to his teammates, nor anyone else at his school, to be lumped in with [Tebow's] private beliefs.”

This is a stretch of Armstrongian proportions.  Did anyone legitimately think that Tim Tebow’s 3:16 eye black somehow spoke for the “Gator Nation”?  Or that an entire Denver stadium joins him in prayer after scoring a touchdown?

There are two logical problems with Nyad’s piece.  First, her use of the word “proselytize,” which means “to induce or recruit another to join one’s faith.”  I don’t think anyone can legitimately argue Tim Tebow is INDUCING people to believe against their will; no matter how ripped the guy is–and he could clearly thump my head right off my neck–he still carries a choir-boy persona,  displays the earnestness of an animated chipmunk, and seems interested in imposing his will only on unfortunate linebackers.

Which means Nyad takes issue with the “recruitment” aspect of the word.  And (as far as I remember) Tebow hasn’t done that, either, from his platform as a football player.  He’s made no bones about what he believes, but I haven’t heard him invite anyone to church in the post-game interview.  I can only assume from this that Nyad interprets the simple expression of one’s belief system as an implicit attempt at recruitment.

Where does this leave us?  We can’t even TALK ABOUT what we believe?

I once had a Muslim lab partner while in college.  When he talked about his faith, or his mosque, I never assumed that he was attempting to convert me.  I thought he was just talking about what he believed.  He was perfectly aware that I taught at a Christian school, and we both knew that each disagreed with the other–yet somehow we managed to run titrations and perform gas chromatography without feeling proselytized, because we were both adults who weren’t threatened by other adults disagreeing with us.

The second problem emerges from her insistence that Tim Tebow is using a “public” forum to advance a “private” set of beliefs.

For the purposes of this argument, let’s grant Nyad the assumption that the founders intended “separation of church and state” exactly as she has interpreted it (which is by no means a certainty).  Even assuming that, Nyad has a big problem:  The Denver Broncos are a private organization.

This part of the argument is the most concerning to me, because Nyad seems to be implying that employees of private companies are subject to the same strictures as those drawing a paycheck from publicly-funded organizations.

Doesn’t a private employee–even one who’s a public figure–maintain the right to hold, and communicate, a private set of beliefs?  Or is Nyad’s position that the First Amendment protects only those below the minimum threshold of Twitter followers?

Let the Denver Broncos manage the Denver Broncos.  Let Tim Tebow be who he wants.  If Elway wants to tell him to shut up, let them work it out in the back office.  If Tebow doesn’t like that, let him look for a new job, like any other private citizen.

Am I overthinking this?

1.  Originally stumbled across this via boingboing some time ago.  It’s a brief (but fascinating) account of how one becomes a shaman in Iquitos, Peru, along with a rudimentary recipe for hallucinogenic ayahuasca. Throw in the disconcerting revelation that apparently Peruvian shamans look a lot like out-of-work house painters, and it’s golden.

2.  Less tedious fare:  be careful what you tweet, since two British kids found themselves caged, questioned, and deported this week for hinting that they were coming to “destroy America.”  Evidently, “destroy America” also involved facetiously tweeting their plans to dig up Marilyn Monroe.  I assume that order came from the ghost of bin Laden himself.

3.  I’m sure RIM’s new CEO has many plans to revive the floundering, aging giant.  However, I primarily find myself mesmerized by the fact that he appears to be an elongated, Germanized near-clone of NewsRadio star Dave Foley.

4.  Via challies, a short piece in Wired magazine on the concept of interleaving, which involves studying or practicing multiple related items simultaneously over time, rather than the hyperfocused “cramming”  that many students insist on utilizing.

over time, the sum of these small steps is much greater than the sum of the leaps you would have taken if you’d spent the same amount of time mastering each skill in its turn… [When] information is studied so that it can be interpreted in relation to other things in memory, learning is much more powerful…

This is something I’ve been telling my students for years, and it may also explain why a curriculum like Saxon Math works so freaking well–just do the lesson, and don’t panic if you’re not getting it perfectly correct already–and why people who read widely and nonacademically are still so freaking smart.

5.  Speaking of people who read well:  in 1988, the average 5th grader was reading 4.6 minutes per day outside of school.  5th graders in the 90th percentile read 21.1 minutes per day.  This accounts for an additional 1.6 MILLION words per year.  It turns out that 5th grade reading volume is a pretty doggone good predictor of high school GPA and future standardized test scores.  And what’s a good predictor of 5th grade reading volume?  BOOM.  FIRST GRADE READING ABILITY.  No pressure.  It just looks like if you don’t teach your own kid to read before first grade, you’ve doomed them to live under a bridge and drink rainwater from an old boot.  All of that (minus horrible prophecies) is presented very convincingly and clinically right here.

6.  Here, Clay Shirky argues against the apocalyptic case for internet-induced “digital stupidity” and in favor of the proposition that the internet “restores reading and writing as central activities in our culture.”  I’m inclined to agree.  But then, I love Clay Shirky.  Warning:  this piece is fairly long (but well worth it).

7.  Fantastic analysis by David Friedman which suggests that the murder rate in the US can’t be linked to rates of gun ownership:  rather (by comparing it to Prohibition and doing fancy numerical graphy-type things), he claims that we keep killing each other because of the War on Drugs.  Food for thought, indeed.

… if the objective is to reduce violent crime, there is a presumption… that drug prohibition is an inefficient way of achieving that objective–that one can get a greater reduction at the same cost by targetting [sic] violent crime directly.

8.  Hey…remember that time we accidentally dropped two…TWO(!?)…nuclear bombs on Spain in 1966?

That’s all for today.   If you see me this week, ask me about my experiment in pig ownership.  I’m tempted to make an “EPORK FAIL” joke, but I won’t.

1. Via the inestimable Jason Kottke, an explanation of dubstep music in under three minutes.  I am not sure why I find this fascinating.  But I do.
2. Fascinating story regarding professor Sebastian Thrun’s recent decision to step away from a tenured position at Stanford university, after learning that free online classes just work better.
3. I still very much love my new Kindle Fire.  You should buy one.
4. In honor of the recent Occupy Protests, McSweeney’s offers a thoroughly sarcastically scathing satire here.  Measured in units of giggle-snortage, this one is at least as funny as a very good XKCD.
5. Cory Doctorow at boingboing points us to the greatest 404 page of all time.  I quite agree.
6. I’ve just finished reading How Children Fail by John Holt.  Each book I read takes me one step closer to firmly believing we have to scrap the entire educational system or riot in the streets.
7. And, finally, if you haven’t yet purchased my first book, do. (It’s more like a pamphlet.)  It’s 99 cents.  (I have low self-esteem.)  I’ll mail you four quarters if you hate it.  (I’m lying.  Probably.)  So you could actually make a penny.  (Which means you’d be better off putting your money in a 6-month CD.)  At the Kindle store:    If You Make Me Go Back to Disney, the Livestock Better Be More Polite.

The week’s challenge:  converse with a fire hydrant.  Make it believable.  Tweet pics to @the36review.

(In this metaphor, “painstakingly culled” means I tooled around Twitter and my RSS feeds for a while.  And I was sitting in a Starbucks.  It’s a Metaphor.  It didn’t actually hurt at all.  It’s not a good metaphor.)

1.  At this year’s CES, Samsung unveiled a “dual-view, dual-sound” television.  This enables couples who spend their evenings staring mutely at a television screen to progress to staring mutely at TWO COMPLETELY DIFFERENT shows.  This way their poorly-communicated marriages can collapse even further, without either of them doing so much as getting up off the couch.

2.  I’ve been obsessed this fortnight with Ivan Illich’s dissection of institutional education.  The style is formal, clinical, and rational–and it is creating immense tension in the life of yours truly, a ten-year teacher and administrator.  Illich asserts that “school prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught” and proposes that we reorient ourselves “toward personal surprise rather than institutionally engineered values.”  He’s locked on to many of the things I notice in my students–but he noticed them forty years ago, and accurately predicted much of what the intervening years would bring.  Read it online here or buy it at Amazon.

3.  Concise thinking about the benefits of “creative destruction” and the failure of certain GOP candidates (and most whiny people) to understand it can be found by Ross Kaminsky at the American Spectator.  Most of the piece was so well-written I didn’t even cringe at the phrase “the march of progress” until I read it for the second time.  Fun fact:  since Microsoft Office hit the workplace, 33% of the secretaries in the US have found themselves out of a job–but does anybody legitimately believe that Microsoft has caused a net job loss?

4.  Ok, the last two were a little heady.  So, if you’re still reading, be rewarded with this very funny video:  Sh*t Nobody Says has owned YouTube for a couple of days now.  If you happen to know my friends Daniel and Ty, you know they’ve missed their calling.  This is absolutely something they could have come up with.

5.  If you missed my post full of self-proclaimed brilliance regarding Tim Tebow, here’s proof, thanks to Matthew Paul Turner:

There.  That should be enough to burn at least a few hours of your workday.  Of course, if you need to burn more time, you can always buy my first goofy book right here.  If you don’t have a Kindle, comment below and I’ll figure out how to send you a personally crafted hard copy.

1. Boingboing reports that the IRS and Marvel Comics are embroiled in a legal battle over whether or not the X-men are humans or mutants.  I am not making that up.  It is really happening, with profound tax implications that easily stretch into the millions of dollars.  Simple Rule of Thumb:  if your tax code results in court battles over the legal status of Dr. Doom, it’s time to simplify.

2. MIT is doing a super-awesome thing called MITx.  Imagine Khan Academy.  On steroids.  With nuclear weapons.  On a high-protein diet.  Open-source learning, designed for scale, built around the idea of earning merit-based certifications rather than time-based diplomas.  It’s educational theorist heaven.

3.  Four words:  Orangutans skyping via iPads.  The future is happening.  And sometimes, when the future happens, it flings dookie through its cage bars.

4. Tom the Dancing Bug has a infotaining poster regarding recent NDAA legislation that is either a completely necessary and logical step toward ending terrorism, or an apocalyptic abuse of the legislative process that’s a step toward a cryptomilitaristic maniacal corporate dicatorship.

5.  John Scalzi over at Whatever offers the best single sentence on internet etiquette I’ve ever read:

A good rule of thumb is to comment as if the person to whom you are commenting is standing in front of you, is built like a linebacker, and has both a short temper and excellent legal representation.

Personal note;  this approach works excellently well in real life as well.

6.  And, of course, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal once again explains what it’s like to live inside my head.

Enjoy those.  Have a grand week.  Be careful to dodge rogue platypi.