Wrong Story, Wisconsin

School's got 99 problems and money ain't one.

I'm not old enough to remember a time when the media referred to groups of teachers acting as “political demonstrators.” As a public school teacher, it's a bit unsettling-- but, I can't help but feel a bit of apathy about it. If you've seen a hundred protests, you've seen them all.

In fact, I suspect the whole “protest movement” looks a bit passe to people under the age of 50. On TV, I've seen marches for everything: civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, black men's rights, white men's rights, Puerto Ricans' rights, gun rights, Glenn Beck's rights, Howard Stern's rights, potheads' rights, and recently, moderates' rights (thanks, Jon Stewart).

I've also seen marches against everything: gun control, abortion, gay marriage, Bush, Obama, the war(s), oil companies, liberal media, Fox News, taxes, the government, and, sadly, dead soldiers (thanks, Fred Phelps). Protest marches don't seem to mean, well, anything. Protest marches often look fun, like a cool party or something, or scary, like a group of wackos, but they don't seem effective.

Protest marches just seem to highlight divisions. And, in this case, they are keeping us from focusing.

The Wrong Problem Problem

As the palpable tensions in public education bubble to the surface in the midwest, the whole country is finding that old arthritis of education woes more difficult to ignore. It's foolish to try and blame anyone, of course, but absolutely unsurprising battle lines are being drawn. The easiest narrative for both politicians and the media (our time's most powerful storytellers) is that the tension grows out of a clear rift in our country-- between those who support smaller government and those who support bigger government.

This story of big government versus small, of left versus right, will only keep distracting us from the cancerous problems of education. I'm not saying that we don't have a money problem. We do. But it is NOT the big problem. And it has to stop driving our discourse about improving education.

Here's what we keep talking about:

1.People want lower taxes

2.American students are getting whooped by students in other countries

3.Teachers' pensions are out of step with other professions

4.There are too many bad teachers

5.Teachers have “short” work days and have summers off, holidays, etc.

The budget constraints are making it more difficult to ignore the big problems. Look, when your mom gets an aggressive form of cancer, you don't say “what's the most cost-effective way we can save her?” Sure, you have to talk about money in that situation, but it's not the ONLY or BIGGEST concern.

Raising taxes, lowering taxes, abolishing unions-- none of these “corrections” address improving education. Sure, we can try and save money. But when do we start talking about better education?

Here's what we SHOULD be talking about:

1.Attracting and keeping great teachers-- and making them the most important element in our schools

2.Evaluating students to test skills and critical thinking, not regurgitation

3.Rebuilding our school infrastructure so that it serves the primacy of learning (not student containment)

4.Resisting the colossal error of making education a “customer service” industry

As long as the battle is between politicians and union members, we're going to have the same, tired arguments with the same, feckless results.

Education is the mother f#$%ing future of the country! When can we get serious about fixing it?

For some of my ideas about fixing education, read my fun-to-read (and smartly handled) four part series “Scapegoats and Saviors.” And I barely swear at all in these articles.

Use the search box at the top of my page. Tell your friends!

The Coolest Party Ever

commentary on the film, the social network

When did you join facebook?

Were you aware of how much your world would change when you did? Are you aware even now?

One of the many brilliant and wonderful things about David Fincher's riveting picture, the social network, doesn't happen in the film at all. It happens inside of you. When you watch this story about the most important website of our time, you can't help but see yourself on the screen.

“That's me up there,” you think without reflection. “I'm on facebook.” You picture your own page. With not a small amount of glee, you say to yourself: “I'm a part of this story.”

And you are. You realize it without realizing it. You ARE a part of this movie. And you love the film because of it.

And this is why this movie is the movie of our time-- at least, right now at this second. It's a movie about itself that is about all of us seeing this movie about itself. It's the title! We see this movie in order to exercise our own role, socially, in the network that 'the social network' the film is all about.

We watch ourselves watching ourselves.

It's a great story, too. It's about a friendship as much as it's about the birth of facebook. You'll care for these fictionalized, real people and wonder what they are doing now.

Mostly, however, you can't help but see how astonishingly significant facebook is.

What facebook has done to all of us is, well, kind of hard to grasp. It hasn't simply enhanced how we interact, made things more convenient, or virtualized real life. It's dramatically changed all the boundaries of the social game.

As Aaron Sorkin's sharply articulate script shows us, facebook has taken a simple truth of humanity (we love to include and exclude people from our lives) and intersected it with a complicated truth of the internet (it's a global connectivity network that one can access alone in intimate moments).

The result? Just like in life B.F. (before-facebook), we get access to people by giving them access to us. But now, W.F. (with-facebook) we can remotely share (and watch) the most private and real moments of human existence. With anyone we choose to share it.

As Mark Zuckerberg, played smartly by Jesse Eisenberg, reveals to us in the film: we love exclusivity. More than anything, we want control over access.  We want to be cool.

We want to have velvet ropes, bouncers, and lines to the party of our own lives. We want to control the guest lists and final approval on the official photos. We are in demand, hanging with other people who are in demand.

Facebook has done the impossible: it has allowed everyone to feel cool.

We all get to feel like celebrities, both elevated and scrutinized as well as reduced and commodified. 

We curate the photos of our lives that tell a narrative that we want people to see-- and others do the same with their photos. And it goes both ways.  Now we get pictures of people that we can look any time we want, of moments we'd only have access to if we were intimate friends. 

More so, you get to do this with acquaintances that you accept as friends- because facebook offers access to all 'friends.' Best friends, casual friends, barely friends-- if you are a friend, you get the whole enchilada. Privacy will never be the same.

Facebook has transformed us. 

After the seeing the movie, my friends and I went out to eat. One of my friends swore she knew the waitress-- from facebook. They had never met, but my friend was sure she could identify this stranger by name.  We, alas, never asked the waitress-- but there we were, watching her across the room, as she brought cocktails to another table.  She was the star of her own movie.  We were her interested audience.

Everyone has had this experience. Facebook has celebritified all of us.

Right now, even while you are reading this, someone is probably looking through pictures of you from your vacation this summer.  There you are on the dock, your feet in the water.  The light is perfect.  You look great from that angle.

Welcome to the new world of interaction.  The world of facebook.

You're cool.