The Continuing Saga of the Anti-Homework Crusade

I've now written several thousand words to administrators and my son's 9th Grade Honors English teacher about the district homework policy-- and despite the fact that I'm a veteran teacher, I'm starting to feel like a crank-- but let me lay out the assignment and the situation so you know what I'm dealing with; my son is reading Catcher in the Rye and he generally has to read a reasonable amount, three chapters a night or so . . . but along with the reading he needs to complete two literary analysis journals per chapter . . . each journal must be at least 150 words and must analyze language, rhetoric, style, metaphors, similes, imagery etcetera-- these aren't free response journals-- and so if he's got three chapters of reading then he also needs to complete 900 words of literary analysis, and there are 26 chapters in the book so this adds up to 52 literary analysis journals . . . or 7800 words of literary analysis . . . 26 pages; in a few weeks, he's doing more analytical writing than we draft in the entire Rutgers Expos course . . . Zman recognized the fact that the assignment is more than ten percent of the length of The Catcher in the Rye . . . and the journals are due at the end of the book and she doesn't give feedback along the way or use them in class, the kids just grind them out (or copy stuff from the internet or steal their older sister's journals or write dream diaries, it doesn't matter because she can't humanly grade them all) and once I really understood the length and insanity of this assignment and how cavalierly disrespectful of time and intellectual energy it is, my only recourse was to find the district homework policy and see if I had a leg to stand on, and it turned out I had three legs to stand on . . . as the assignment is in flagrant violation of three parts of the policy:

4. The number, frequency, and degree of difficulty of homework assignments should be based on the ability and needs of the pupil and take into account other activities that make a legitimate claim on the pupil's time;

5. As a valid educational tool, homework should be clearly assigned and its product carefully evaluated and that evaluation should be reported to the pupil;

7. Homework should always serve a valid learning purpose; it should never be used as a punitive measure;

and so I wrote several emails arguing that this assignment was incredibly time-consuming and onerous in nature-- kids were spending all weekend on it, staying up until 2 AM, etc, etc-- and that the teacher was not "carefully evaluating" the product, nor could she ever carefully evaluate the product . . . she was going to receive well over 1000 journal entries from her students, so she might spot check a few or grade a few at random-- and neither option is acceptable-- and the assignment was obviously punitive because she kept telling kids "if you don't like it, drop Honors and go to College Prep," making this some sort of hazing/initiation/badge-of-honor ritual to whip kids into shape and break them . . . so I met with the principal Friday and it was a positive meeting in regards to the fact that they were hearing my concerns and the superintendent and the principal and the head of humanities met today and agreed to discuss this assignment and expectations in general with the English department, but that could be everyone just humoring me and hoping this will blow over, so I told the principal and superintendent that they need to enforce the district policy and my son brought a petition to school today with the district homework policy on it and got a bunch of signatures-- he is going to meet with his teacher tomorrow and discuss the assignment . . . the teacher keeps asking me if Alex needs help on the assignment and I've told her he doesn't . . . he's actually done a great job and he's caught up-- he's done 32 journals, without feedback, which is shameful-- and I've advised him not to do any more writing until he gets feedback on every journal he's written . . . what a shitshow and what a sad way to read Catcher in the Rye (I wonder if Mark David Chapman Had to complete an assignment like this when he read Catcher and it sent him over the edge) and I'm sure this isn't over and I'm going to end up angrily reciting a lot of numbers at a Board of Ed meeting.

The Internet Has Already Thought of Everything You Think

After a fun night out in New Brunswick (and an ill-advised late night snack stop at Giovanelli's-- Whitney declared that would be the last fat sandwich he ever orders . . . we shall see) Mose, Whitney and I tried to catch an Uber, but we had some trouble finding the car, and as we searched Easton Avenue, we boozily riffed about taking a Druber-- a cheaper alternative that had no surge pricing but featured inebriated drivers-- and we all thought this would be a great comedy sketch, but -- the internet being the internet-- some dude (Steve Barone) already thought of this and made a video of the Druber conceit (with surprisingly decent production values) and while the footage definitely needs to be edited, Barone explains in the comments that he is "too busy partying to mix it and do color," which is pretty damn perfect for a Druber video: nice work, Steve Barone!

What Do Squirrels, Candy, and Acorns Have in Common? They're All Delicious!

Today was the first crisp fall day of the season and the squirrels were just brazen-- the acorns have fallen from the oak trees on our street and the squirrels are snacking on them (and socking them away for winter) and my dog desperately wants to snack on the squirrels-- which exhibit no chariness in the least and will barely deign to move from the sidewalk as we pass . . . and it seems unfair, kind of like the fact that we've repeatedly told my son Ian to stop buying candy at Rite-Aid before he goes to school, even though he passes right by the store on his bike and they're always having crazy deals and sales on candy . . . lawyers call this "an attractive nuisance."

Welcome to the (five day workweek) Jungle

I just completed the first five day week of the school year . . . brutal, just brutal, but listening to the smooth sounds of Jungle's new album "Forever" definitely takes the edge off . . . master commenter zman eloquently describes this album as "Zaratsu polished to impossible smoothness."

Dave Goes on an Anti-Homework Crusade

I'm exhausted from writing various emails about violations of my school district's homework policy, in the hopes of getting an extremely imperious and inflexible honors teacher to stop assigning so much needless busy work to accompany Catcher in the Rye . . . I closed out my rather vitriolic and litigious email to the teacher with this closer:

I'm sure the irony that you're taking a book about an anxious and overwhelmed teenager that is disillusioned with the adult institutions around him, and you are using it to make teenagers anxious, overwhelmed and disillusioned is not lost on you. 

Dave Throws This Sentence into the Volcano

I hereby vow to sacrifice these very words and this very sentence to the irate, pus-filled, and vengeful Goddess of Canker Sore, in the hopes that mine will be gone tomorrow.

To Coddle or Not To Coddle

My take on Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt's new book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure is that it's based on a fairly reasonable premise:

prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child

and I think the authors do a great job extending the ideas from the viral Atlantic essay they wrote a few years ago . . . since then, there have been even more issues of "safety-ism" and the abrogation of free speech on college campuses and the book details these, including the shrieking girl at Yale, the assault at Middlebury, and the riots at Evergreen College; the authors worry that this new generation of students, labeled iGen, have been taught three great untruths:

1. what doesn't kill you makes you weaker

2. always trust your feelings

3. life is a battle between good people and evil people

and this has led to all sorts of logical problems, such as catastrophizing, call out culture, overgeneralizing, emotional reasoning, etc and that the fact that college campuses have become more and more liberal, with less and less representation by conservative professors, has led to a very sheltered and polarized, almost religiously fanatical us-against-them atmosphere on certain progressive campuses (I just read that more people identify themselves as LGBTQ than conservative at Harvard and Yale) and while this may have some very just causes-- the President Trump/Alex Jones nut job fringe right wing contingent-- there is still a serious problem with the lack of perspectives and the inability of many young people to deal with a diversity of thought, and this ability to debate and discuss ideas that might be slightly repulsive is an important part of a democratic nation; the first amendment is an extraordinarily powerful right, to not only believe and speak, but to amplify with the press, assemble other like-minded people and then petition the government . . . and the authors see some of the behavior on college campuses as a strike to dismantle this right . . . especially because administration rarely support the "offending" professors, who often meant well-- but intentions don't matter, only feelings-- and because college is so expensive, it's less a place of intellectual discourse and more of a luxury item, where "the customer is always right," but the book does offer hope and sees a way forward, away from "micro-agressions" and victimhood and blame, and towards CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) and debate and dialogue . . . and this all sounds excellent to me-- I teach logic and rationality in my Philosophy and Comp classes, and regularly try to expose my students to controversial texts and topics (right now I'm presenting my sophomores  with Bundyville, a different take on the American Dream than they are used to) and I teach them to have reasonable and intellectual discourse on ideas that may be foreign to them . . . but apparently not everyone agrees with me about this book-- there's been some blowback-- and some view the book as a betrayal and a turn rightward by "elite liberals" in America . . . this Guardian review says it all, the advice is fine and good if your middle class and the book (horror!) was written by a couple of white guys, so it's easy for them to be reasonable-- and it might even have good advice if you're a minority attending one of these elite institutions, to help you navigate the waters, but if you're really progressive, then it's not enough to prepare the child for the road . . . you need to imagine how the new generation can change the road . . . but that's a little scary to me, to narrow and pave the road means serious revision to our first amendment rights, and in a society that's moving towards total surveillance, that may be all we have left . . . people -- especially kids-- are not that fragile, and the dangers that plagued humanity for most of our existence-- disease, constant warfare, threats of violence and crime, inequality and slavery-- there have been great inroads made in all these areas and so instead of seeking more and more safe havens, isolated from those that are different, we need to find common ground with the people that we don't necessarily share values with and understand that our children are going to come in contact with texts, words, people and ideas that they disagree with (and perhaps even disgust them) and that sunlight is the best antiseptic . . . anyway, read the book, see what you think, and perhaps even put some of the ideas into action, while raising your own kids or thinking your own thoughts.

Am I THAT Parent?

I'm out of words . . . yesterday I wrote a six paragraph email to my son's Honors English teacher about the amount of homework he has been receiving along with the reading assignments for The Catcher in the Rye, and my screed contained references to Alfie Kohn's book The Homework Myth, a link to a newspaper article about how many districts are easing up on the amount of homework given to honors students, my teaching credentials, the fact that I'm the Middle School soccer coach, some ideas on how to mix up the homework assignments and this insane gem of a sentence:

The “default setting” of always assigning homework is a vestige of the Puritanical and industrialized origins of our education system.

which was also Stacey's favorite sentence in the letter . . . I did exactly what you're not supposed to do-- I wrote something and sent it in the same day (although I did get it approved by my wife) and, of course, after I pressed "send," I thought of a few other ideas that I should have added-- such as the fact that I understand that the assessments and rigor of an honors course should be more intense than a regular class, but just because it's an honors class doesn't mean that you need to do a ton of grunt work . . . anyway, the teacher responded promptly and with a clear explanation of how things would work in the future, and her explanation was reasonable enough to mollify me (for now) but it looks like I have the potential to be that parent.

Bedeviled by the Beverage

A weird Sunday . . . my mind felt foggy and possessed all day, perhaps because I was in the thrall of that dirty old Jersey devil . . . or perhaps because last night I over-served myself Cypress Brewery's new Pale Ale, Dirty Jersey Devil; this aptly named concoction got me into several vociferous gender debates-- my wife had to warn me that I was getting obnoxious-- but I blame the beer for my devilish behavior, and then today, both Ian's team and my travel team lost (1-0 and 2-0 respectively . . . and it's always weird and dreamlike when you play an entire game and it's close and you don't score) and then we went to lunch in the oddly named New Jersey Food Court, which has an unassuming entrance in an Old Post Road strip mall, but once you enter, you're in a dreamy and colorful Asian food wonderland, with fifteen food stalls (and more to come) but while I found some delicious ramen and dumpling soup, Ian and my wife struck out with their food-- they had to wait forever, all the stuff they wanted was sold out, and they didn't like the sticky rice shumai-- so they went next door and got pizza and then we watched a special episode of Sherlock called "The Abominable Bride" and Catherine and I fell asleep in turns, which was perfect for this dreamy time-traveling Inception-esque mindfuck of a story, which ricocheted back and forth between the drugged mind of current Sherlock and a possibly fictitious narrative set in the Conan Doyle era . . . it raises the question of which Sherlock is "real," and the answer, of course, is neither.

Hey Jack Kemp . . . The NFL is the European Socialist Sport!

The new episode of Freakonomics (How to Stop Being a Loser) is another reminder that the NFL-- the world's most lucrative sports league and the symbol of everything right and good about America and capitalism-- is more akin to a socialist monopoly . . . an exclusive cartel featuring profit sharing, aid for failing members (draft picks), subsidized stadiums, and-- thanks to our fearless leader-- a lack of competition . . . meanwhile, soccer at the highest level consists of relegation, competition among multiple leagues (Premier League, Bundesliga, La Liga, etc.), the fear of bankruptcy if you are relegated (although the Premier league offers a capitalist style "parachute" payment which acts as severance pay, but the team will still have to sell off all it's great players) and the general feeling that you are playing in an enormous market place, where Ronaldo goes to Italy in search of tax relief . . . and you can push the metaphor to the sports themselves; a football team is run by a central authority, and everyone contributes their bit for the good of the whole--individuality is swallowed up by the organization and it is far from a democracy-- most of the players are disposable and replaceable and only as good as how precisely they obey orders; soccer is played by small committees, who do what they want and vote with passes and touches, the coach has little control once he puts the players on the field, everyone thinks their own thoughts, engages in creative destruction, and makes their own autonomous contribution to the victory . . . and so when Republican Jack Kemp called soccer a "European socialist sport" he was wrong on all accounts and it is in fact far more capitalist than it's American homograph.

To Veal or Not to Veal?

During a recording session, Cunningham, Stacey and I all proudly virtue signaled the fact that we don't eat veal . . . but perhaps this isn't as benevolent as it seems; in fact, we might be all the more monstrous because while we don't eat baby cows, we're not vegetarians-- all three of us eat beef-- before we eat a cow, it lives for a longer period of time-- probably suffering in terrible conditions-- and also, due to the longer life and larger size, this cow has time to release many more clouds of methane-laced flatulence into the atmosphere . . . so maybe if we're going to eat cows, we should eat veal and kill them while they are young, small, and haven't farted all that much.

Dear People Who Still Read Books

Dear Readers,

I'd like to give my highest recommendation for Julie Schumacher's novel Dear Committee Members (and while I know that's not saying much, as I realize that I spit out "must see" and "must read" endorsements like a demented Pez dispenser . . . has anyone watched Detectorists yet?) and I'm not espousing this novel simply because it's written from the point-of-view of an irate Creative Writing and English professor who might have a heart of gold (or maybe silver or brass . . . but a good heart nonetheless) who resides in a building that is decrepit in a department that is undermanned and underfunded (while the sciences and economics departments are showered with praise, money, and facilities) nor am I enamored-- as a Creative Writing teacher might be-- by Schumacher's use of the epistolary form: the novel is written entirely through Professor Jay Fitger's rambling, candid, sincere and sometimes confessional letters of recommendation-- and he is called on to write many many letters, for a variety of students, colleagues, graduates, etc. and he uses them to try to have some control over a future which dismays him more and more . . . anyway, the main reason I am recommending this book is it is very very funny . . . I've been doing a lot of heavy reading and listening lately, and this book was a breath of fresh air, a gem and a prize-- it took me two days to read . . . if you remember Richard Russo's Straight Man fondly, you will love this novel even more, and Schumacher has just published a sequel, which has good reviews, so I'm sure I'll read that as well-- anyway, I'll end this LOR with some random lines from Fitger's letters so you can peruse the tone and decide if you want to take a break from partisan politics, Supreme Court hearings, immigration snafus, and heinous weather events . . .

Bombastically Yours,

Dave



The reading and writing of fiction both requires and instills empathy—the insertion of oneself into the life of another.

Be reassured: the literature student has learned to inquire, to question, to interpret, to critique, to compare, to research, to argue, to sift, to analyze, to shape, to express. His intellect can be put to broad use. The computer major, by contrast, is a technician—a plumber clutching a single, albeit shining, box of tools.

Literature has served me faithfully (no pun intended) as an ersatz religion, and I would wager that the pursuit of the ineffable via aesthetics in various forms has saved

(Ms. Frame faithfully taking minutes) during which a senior colleague, out of his mind over the issue of punctuation in the department’s mission statement, threatened to “take a dump” (there was a pun on the word “colon” which I won’t belabor here)

My own writing interests me less than it used to; and while I know that to teach and to mentor is truly a calling, on a day-to-day basis I often find myself overwhelmed by the needs of my students—who seem to trust in an influence I no longer have, and in a knowledge of which, increasingly, I am uncertain—and by the university’s mindless adherence to bureaucratic demands.

you should choose from the smaller and more disadvantaged units—Indigenous Studies or Hindi/Urdu, or some similarly besieged program, one of whose members, like a teenage virgin leaping into the bubbling mouth of a volcano, will sacrifice him- or herself in exchange for a chance that the larger community be allowed to survive. 

A Poetic Celebration of Yom Kippur (and the fact that most New Jersey public schools have off today)

While the Jewish folks in Jersey atone for a year's worth of sin
the rest of us Gentiles enjoy sleeping in . . .
except for me, I just can't seem to sleep late,
I woke up this morning at 5:08.

Life is Disgusting: Dawn to Dark Edition

We were practicing showing and not telling in Creative Writing this morning, and I like to practice what I preach, so here goes: we've been mired in humidity here in central New Jersey for the past few weeks; giant fungus is sprouting in weird formations (see the above photo I took at 5:45 AM this morning) and my classroom-- which does not have air-conditioning or a cross breeze and only has windows adjacent to a stagnant courtyard-- just might be the most humid place in this swamp-ass state . . . the desks are slick with a weird viscous scum, the carpet is moist, the laptops are slimy, and soon after entry, the teenagers are coated with glistening teen spirit; at 7:30 AM this morning my knees were already stuck to my pants and my boxer briefs were soaked through . . . you can imagine the rest of the day; it's also been raining every afternoon, so soccer practice has been a muddy mess and all my equipment smells of damp and mold; in the evenings, I've been trying to fix two dodgy toilets in the upstairs of my house, and while I finally conquered the commode just off our bedroom, I couldn't fix the American Standard in the hall (despite a stream of constant profanity) and ended up having to order a different part on Amazon-- my hands were inside the tank so long, as I tried to rebuild the flush valve apparatus, that they pruned-- and were also caked with the black rubber sediment from the flapper-- and then this afternoon, the finale, I tried to cure our dog's proclivity for carsickness by taking her on a couple of short car rides, but when I ran into the beer store to get a six pack, she threw up all over the soccer corner flags . . . the smell was particularly vibrant because of the barometric pressure and the already pungent smell of all the wet fabric in my van, so I unloaded everything, tried to get all the chunks out of the car, washed off the corner flags and then loaded the equipment-- aside from the vomit stained corner flags and poles-- back into the car beofre everything got even yuckier from the impending rain.

Soccer Triathlon

I completed my first soccer-triathlon of the fall season yesterday: I played soccer, watched soccer, and coached soccer . . . I played pick-up with the usual suspects for 90 minutes in the morning, then watched my son Ian play for his club team from in the early afternoon, and finally coached the town travel team-- Ian's old team-- in the evening . . . I could have hit for the soccer-cycle if I did color commentary for a game (or filmed a game? or refereed a game?) so that's something to shoot for, and while it was fun and entertaining, my legs were sore this morning.

R.I.P. JJ McClure (and his Masterful Mustache)

Sadly, Burt Reynolds has taken his last wild ambulance ride and finally joined his buddy Dom DeLuise at the Great Cannonball Run in the Sky . . . and while the Smokey and the Bandit and Cannonball Run movie franchises make me nostalgic for my youth and simpler times, I just learned that Reynolds turned down the role of Han Solo in Star Wars . . . I can't imagine how much better that movie would have been if it contained a shirtless Reynolds ambling around the Millenium Falcon, his chest hair rivaling that of his sidekick Chewbacca . . . anyway, in honor of the man, the mustache, and the legend, I'm revisiting OBFT XVI-- the year of our mustache contest and my award winning 'stache-- and posting a photo of me at my most Burt.

Primer for the Clueless

Charlie Sykes tweeted this image with the caption:

Kind of amazed this pr campaign wasn’t enough to save Alex Jones on Twitter

and the podcast Reply All #126: Alex Jones Dramageddon does a fantastic job explaining what it all means . . . to get the joke in all of it's glory you need to know about: Alex and Jones and Marco Rubio nearly got into a fistfight; the irony that alt-right-trollster Laura Loomer got drowned by an auctioneering Republican congressman in a hearing about letting idiots like her have freedom of speech on social media; Colin Kaepernick is the face and voice of a new Nike ad campaign; our government briefly entertained the idea of making a "gay bomb" . . . but only in the sense that the idea came up in a brainstorming session for theoretical speculative weapons; Alex Jones believes that the government is drugging us with chem-trails and hormones in the water and that the proof of this is that there are pesticides that can turn male frogs into female frogs . . . he links all this together in a wild and entraining conspiratorial rant  . . . before this podcast, I had heard of Alex Jones and knew he was some kind of alt-right figure, but had no idea of how he operated; this episode is an excellent primer into that strange and wild world of right-wing-conspiracy nuts.

Maturity is Admitting You're Stupid

This is hot off the press: so fifty-four minutes ago . . . at the end of middle school soccer practice, my son Ian and some of his friends decided to bike up to the Okie Pokii Cafe and get some bubble tea-- they took off while I was packing the soccer equipment into the minivan, but when I drove the 200 yards up the hill from the park to my house and turned onto Valentine Street (our road) I saw Ian biking the wrong direction, back to the park . . . so I rolled down the window and asked him what was going on and he said he thought he left his phone down at the field and was going to find it; then I drove up the road and crossed paths with his friends, and I told them to wait a moment at Ben's house because Ian had to retrieve his phone and I went home and pulled a cold mug out of the freezer-- Friday!-- but before I could fill it with beer, Ian came storming back in the house, looking for his phone-- he had really lost it-- and this totally pissed me off because it was finally Friday and time for a celebratory beer and now I was on this (mock) epic quest with my son, using Find My Android, calling his phone, searching the house and the soccer equipment bag in the van-- all fruitless-- and then he decided his phone was at the park so we drove back down, and he had to suffer through several tirades and some profanity on the ride but instead of his usual routine-- denial and argument-- he finally realized how to soothe the savage dad, and he acknowledged that his behavior was stupid and insane and the work of a lunatic, and then we found his phone, in the grass behind the goal, and he willingly admitted that he was disorganized and wanton and profligate and he needed to take the time to pack a bag and he couldn't rush to practice and he would accept any consequence and it made me think of how I left my car door open for 90 minutes two days previous (with my wallet on the console) and I told him that I was also insane and constantly losing things and an absolute idiot and then I grew very calm and told him we just had to think of a method to prevent this from happening again (especially on a Friday when dad wanted to kick back and have a beer) and I told him he was lucky to have good friends that would wait for him when he did something stupid like this and then he rode off on his bike to go get bubble tea and all-in-all, it was a pretty decent parent/son interaction and I'm proud of both of us for working through it.

Bunnies on the Border

In Jeff Vandermeer's second book in the Southern Reach Trilogy, Authority, it feels as if the British version of The Office has moved from Slough to the edge of a wilderness contaminated by an alien civilization, and while in the first book (Annihilation) there was no escaping the menace of Area X, in the second novel there is no escaping the byzantine bureaucratic labyrinth of the Southern Reach-- until the two settings begin to merge . . . and then there are all those border-bunnies; I'm sure I'll be just as confused when I finish the third book, but then I'll read the internet theories and watch the movie and perhaps that will clarify things.

Brain Melt

School has truly begun and my brain is taxed . . . I'm teaching four different classes this year (or preps, as we teachers like to call them: Creative Writing, Philosophy, College Writing and English 10) and our family is juggling four different soccer schedules (Alex is playing for the high school, Ian is playing for the middle school team-- which I coach-- and a higher level club team, and I am also coaching the town travel team) and this is probably why I left my driver side door open for the duration of soccer practice, despite the fact that it was raining and my wallet was in the glove compartment; though the rain soaked my seat and the door, it deterred any thievery and my wallet was where I left it.