Writer, Teacher, Writing Teacher

The Long Detention: Frank Dolan's Kindle Scout Campaign

In another lifetime, Frank Dolan and I were co-workers.  

And now we kind of are again, as Frank has written an absolutely first-rate crime novel set in a suburban high school. It's called The Long Detention, and Frank is launching a Kindle Scout campaign to get it off the ground. I sat down with him (on a chat client, but whatever. We were both sitting down. At least I was.) to get the scoop.

Brendan Halpin:  So, first of all, I loved the book.

Frank Dolan: Thank you. That means a lot to me.

BH: You really nailed the staff politics of a big suburban high school, which is an unexpected pleasure in a crime novel.

FD: Ha! Well, I guess I'm better at writing about the politics than navigating them.

BH: Well, you've got at least sixteen years as a high school teacher, so you must be doing okay with the politics. So you're launching a Kindle Scout campaign. What is that?

FD: It's a program Amazon runs where you submit your book through their program and people get to "nominate" the book for publication. You just go on the site and click on the book (or books) you'd like to see published. If they decide to publish the book you picked, you get a free electronic copy.

BH: So it's not like a Kickstarter or something where people have to put money down up front.

FD: Right. All you have to do is have an Amazon account and click on the book. 

BH: What's the advantage of doing it this way? Why not just self-publish?

FD: Well, the big advantage is that they pay you a $1500 advance if they pick your book. And then because they've invested some money in the book, they invest some energy in promoting it. I guess like putting it in their "if you bought this thing, you might like this other thing" emails and stuff.

BH: That's huge. What's the downside?

FD: I mean, they keep a bigger percentage of the cover price than they would if you did it yourself. But, then, if nobody knows your book exists, you don't sell any. 

BH: Tell me about it.

FD: So I guess it's like a chance at 50% of something instead of 70% of nothing.

BH: Cool. Well good luck: so if you get enough votes, you win the 1500 bucks?

FD: As far as I can tell, the votes--or nominations, whatever--are necessary but not sufficient. Ultimately if they don't like the book they won't pull the trigger, but if nobody is interested in the book, they're less likely to like the book. If you know what I mean.

BH: I do. So what's your pitch? Why should we go nominate you?

FD: Well, for one thing, it costs you absolutely nothing. Like, it feels like a pretty small ask to me. But also the book is good. I think it's good, anyway. If you like dark crime fiction--James Ellroy, Charlie Huston, that kind of thing--you'll definitely like this. 

BH: I can attest to that. I'll post the link and the cover image you sent.

FD: Thanks for your help! 

BH: My huge and devoted following is at your disposal.

No on 2: What Makes an Excellent School?

Charter school mythology maintains that charter schools are excellent. The astroturf organizations that venture capitalists fund in order to simulate popular support for charter schools have names like "Families for Excellent Schools" and "Great Schools For All." And, if you're foolish enough to get into an argument with one of these folks on Twitter, it won't be long before they compare themselves to Freedom Riders and you to an evil segregationist who opposes good schools for children of color.

In light of this, it's worth asking if charter schools are, in fact, excellent schools. There is certainly abundant evidence that they do not do as good a job of educating all comers as regular urban schools, but I'd like to take the comparison to another level. Charter backers often suggest that they only want to give people with limited means the same freedom of choice that wealthy people have. After all, if you've got enough money, you can move to any community you want and send your kids to the public schools there. 

By this logic, charter schools should be quite similar to the kind of suburban schools that affluent families choose for their children.  

So let's take a look and see if that's true!

I decided to look at Lexington High School, a public high school in an affluent community, and MATCH Charter High School, one of the so-called "Excellent Schools" that charter advocates want to open more of.

As one might expect, Lexington High School students perform very well on standardized tests. So do MATCH students, though they don't perform as well as LHS students.  

But there's more to a school than test scores.

At least in Lexington there is. 

Lexington High School offers Cheerleading, Field Hockey, Football, Swimming, Golf, Soccer, Volleyball, Basketball, Hockey, Wrestling, Baseball, Softball, Lacrosse, Tennis, and Ultimate Frisbee.

MATCH offers Basketball, Track, and Soccer.

Now admittedly, MATCH has a much smaller student body and couldn't support all those teams. But even the teams they have seem a bit half-hearted. MATCH girls' soccer plays 11 matches; Lexington High School girls' varsity soccer plays 20 matches. 

Lexington High School offers an extensive art program: they have a visual art department and a performing arts department that includes dance, drama, and music.

MATCH has no visual art teacher or music teacher. It employs one drama teacher who is also the athletic director. I am not making this up.

Lexington High School's library employs two librarians and three assistants.

MATCH does not appear to have a librarian or a library.

Lexington High School offers courses in ASL, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish.

MATCH offers courses in Spanish.

Lexington High School's principal has 18 years of experience as a teacher.

MATCH's principal graduated from college in 2008.

Now, comparing a large suburban school to a small urban one may not be fair. But this is the comparison charter advocates invite. This, they say, pointing at schools like MATCH (which I chose for this example only because they do a better job of retaining their students than most Boston charter high schools, though they still lag behind BPS), is the very best we can do for urban students.

This?

This barebones test-prep factory is the best we can do?

No: students in Boston deserve better. Students everywhere in Massachusetts deserve better.

And, in fact, they have better. 

Not only suburban high schools, but also Snowden, a small Boston Public High School where students can play soccer, football, hockey, basketball, wrestling, volleyball and softball. Where students can take courses in performing and visual arts. Where students can study Chinese, French, Japanese, and Spanish. Where there is a librarian.

Charter advocates would have you focus only on test scores, but these are not the only thing that makes a school great. The arts, world languages, athletics, libraries: these are not frills. They are, in fact, what the affluent parents of Lexington demand for their children. They are part of a complete education. And they are an area in which charter schools fall woefully short. 

This is not an accident. Charter schools have chosen to shortchange their students in these areas.  They have had twenty years in Massachusetts to establish themselves, and this is what they've come up with.

Our students deserve better and already have better. Expanding the number of charter schools will only weaken the schools working to educate the whole student rather than simply training students to take tests.

No On 2: The Charter Experiment Has Failed

This November, Massachusetts voters will weigh in on whether to lift the cap on charter school expansion in the Commonwealth. Question 2 would allow for 12 new charters to open per year.

This is an emotionally fraught issue that inspires a lot of overheated rhetoric, certainly including from me, but I'm going to try to stick to the facts and cut back on my usual sarcasm and snark. Without getting too deep into the educational policy weeds here, I'm going to present two reasons why I hope you (assuming you are a Massachusetts voter) will vote no on 2. 

1.You Just Haven't Earned it Yet, Baby. We already have a public school system in Massachusetts. If charter schools are going to continue to expand, I think it's reasonable to ask whether they are doing as good a job as regular public schools.

The answer to this is a resounding no. This may come as a surprise given that what most people in Massachusetts know about charter schools is that they are innovative schools that do a better job than regular public schools. 

What this actually means is that some charter schools perform, as a whole, better on statewide standardized tests than schools in the surrounding districts.

The data that's rarely discussed, however,  is the fact that charter school demographics tend to differ greatly from those of the surrounding districts. In particular, English Language Learners (who tend to score lower on Standardized Tests conducted entirely in English) and students with learning disabilities (who may also not perform well on standardized tests) are vastly underrepresented in charter school enrollments.

(All this data is public, but few people ever put it together. Here's a data-heavy post from last year and another from this year if you want to dig into the numbers. Or you can go here and do your own research.)

We've had charter schools for 21 years, and they have proven either unwilling or unable to serve a student body that mirrors that of the district in which they are located. Why, then, should we open more schools like this?

Here is some more data. You may have heard that Massachusetts charter schools have over 37,000 students on their waiting lists. State Auditor Suzanne Bump analyzed this number and found it to be overstated and unverifiable. So it's important to be aware that people quoting this number are using data they know to be bad in order to bolster their argument.

But apart from the students waiting to get in to charter schools, it's important to look at the students clambering to get out.  Judging by this post, charter schools, at least the ones in Boston, have relatively abysmal graduation rates. Simply put, a lot of students leave. Those numbers are three years old--again, all the data resides here if you want to do your own analysis. Something to consider: in its application to open a new high school in New Bedford, City on a Hill Charter School projects losing 65% of its students. (The data is at the end of the post.) 

Again, I'm trying to keep my opinion out of this and stick to facts. To sum up: Massachusetts charter schools are failing to educate English language learners and students with disabilities at the rate of the regular public schools. They also fail to graduate students at the rate of regular public schools.

Now for my opinion: if we're going to invest more public money in a parallel school system, it should work at least as well as the one we've already got. Charter schools simply do not. So this alone justifies a no vote.   But speaking of pubic money....

2. Charter Schools Are Not Accountable to the People Who Fund Them.

This may also be surprising, but it's true. In your city or town, the people who run your public schools are accountable to you, usually because their bosses are elected officials like school committee members or the mayor. So if you have a problem with your school and you don't get any satisfaction from the school, you can go to your city councilor or school committee member for help. Also, you can look at the school department's line-item budget because it's a public document, so if you really want to investigate how your tax money is being spent, you can.

If you have a charter school in your town, the officials of the school do not report to any elected officials. You can't appeal to your local elected officials for help because they have no power over the charter schools. 

Here's how they work: charter school employees report to the charter school board. The charter school board is made up of people selected by the charter school board itself. There are no elections, and most charter schools do not have any parent or student representation on their boards. (Here's a board and here's another if you'd like to check for the kind of people on these boards. No parents or students on either.)

As you can see if you click on those links, the people on charter school boards all have other jobs. So they don't really report to anyone.   

The Commonwealth evaluates charter schools once every five years. The current Secretary of Education, who oversees the charter renewal process, served as a director of the pro-charter advocacy group Families for Excellent Schools even after he was serving as Secretary of Education. 

So if you have a problem with a charter school and you get no satisfaction from the administration, you can go to the unelected, self-appointed board. If you don't get satisfaction from them, you can wait up to five years and hope to have some input on the renewal process overseen by an advocate for charter schools.

And if you are a taxpayer and want to see how the charter school is spending your money, you can't see a line-item budget. Charters put an overview in their annual reports but are not required to disclose their line-item budgets as regular public schools do. Here's a bill that is proposed in the current session. It recommends a lot of changes that even I, as someone who follows this issue closely, did not know were necessary for charters to be as transparent as regular public schools. The upshot is that charter schools in Massachusetts currently disclose far less information about their operations than regular public schools. 

Public schools are public entities funded by public money and must, therefore operate with complete transparency. Charter schools are public entities funded by public money and do not operate with complete transparency.

I'm not accusing anyone of anything; I just think, as a taxpayer, that it's very bad policy to send a bunch of tax dollars to an organization that won't tell you exactly how they are spending the money.

In Conclusion 

Charter schools have not proven that they can do the job better than regular public schools, and they are not transparent about their use of public funds. Therefore we should not vote to create more of them.

 

 

Diversity in Children's Publishing, Or The Lack Thereof

As anyone who's ever unsuccessfully queried an agent knows, publishing is a subjective business. Which is to say this: whether your book gets published depends not on the quality of the book (assuming a certain baseline professionalism) but on whether someone loves it. This is not a system you can game because love is irrational. You never know what's going to make someone respond to your book. 

Which is what made the Lee & Low diversity survey so interesting. It revealed that the children's publishing industry consists overwhelmingly of straight white women.  (The survey didn't cover agents, but I'm willing to bet that the numbers are similar.) Which simply means that if you're going to get a book for children or teens published in this country, you have to get at least one straight white woman to love it. Actually, one probably won't do since your editor will have to take it to a meeting and get other people to agree. So let's say two.

Now obviously straight white women are capable of loving books by all different kinds of people. But it's a reasonable fear that all those straight white women might be responding better to books that speak to their experience than books that don't. (Thought experiment if you're a straight white woman reading this and preparing to tee off on me in the comments: imagine you can't get published without someone who is transgender and Hispanic loving your book. How confident are you that your book is going to find love? Sure, we're all people, and we all experience the same kinds of emotions, but is the cultural context of your book just going to be too far from the experience of  a transgender Hispanic editor to get it in their guts in a way they have to do in order to love it?)

The other day someone tweeted out a link to the Publisher's Weekly rights report, which tracks which books have been bought by which editors from which agents. It includes a headshot of the author. As I scrolled down, I thought, "Whoa! That's a lot of white women! Only 6 out of the 15 projects sold there don't involve a white woman!"

So I thought, let me look at some more of these and see if this is an anomaly. So I looked at every rights report from January 11, 2016 through April 25, 2016.  I stopped at the end of April because I figured 15 weeks is a relatively decent sample size and, after all, nobody's paying me for this.

I counted the total number of projects and then counted the number of those projects that don't have a white woman creator. (So for picture books with an author and an illustrator, I counted them in the white woman category if either the author or the illustrator is a white woman even if the other member of the creative team isn't).

Major caveat: I don't know how people self-identify. I used a combination of people's names and headshots to determine whether they were white women. So I may have put a handful of people into the wrong category.  And my study necessarily doesn't take into account any diversity in religious beliefs or sexual orientations. All the Rights Report posts are free and available to the public, so feel free to double-check my work.

Here's what I found. 

From January through April of 2016, there were 330 book deals announced. 

Of those 330 book deals, 99 did not involve white women.

In other words: 70% of deals in the first third of this year were for projects written and/or illustrated by a white woman.

Quick demographic check: in the USA, 77 percent of people identify as white. Assuming roughly half of those are women, that's 38.5%.  So, demographically speaking, 38.5% of the population accounts for 70% of the children's publishing creators. 

To put it another way: all men and all people of color, who represent 61.5% of the US population, are competing for just 30% of the spots on publishers' lists. 

Now, let's be clear: it's really hard to get published. Most books that get written will never be published. If you're a white woman, it's still really hard to get published. It's just not as hard as it is for everybody else.

Why I Chose Boston Public Schools

In a few weeks, my youngest child will graduate and I will be able to say I sent three children through the Boston Public Schools.

Since I am a middle-class (holding on by my fingernails!) white person, I hear a LOT of people talk about how they "have" to move out of Boston "for the schools."

(There's a lot to unpack in that statement, but I'm just gonna leave it packed up for now. )

To people who say stuff like this, my decision to stay in the city and send my children to public school here is incomprehensible. So I'd like to explain it. Here, ladies and gentlemen and everything in between, is explanation of why my wife and I chose the Boston Public Schools for our kids: 

In elementary school, you want your kids to learn to read, write, and do basic math. Guess what: they're gonna learn that stuff. Especially if you're reading to them and what not. So what else do kids get out of school in the elementary years?  A whole lot of socialization. 

It's certainly possible to live in a bubble in this country and have no idea that not everyone lives the kind of life you do. I did not want my kids to live in such a bubble. I wanted them to meet, and share space with a whole bunch of different kinds of people in different circumstances in hopes that they would grow up open-minded and empathetic. Of course you can be open-minded and empathetic no matter where you go to school, but you're going to be inherently less open-minded if you've never met anyone who doesn't fundamentally live the same kind of life you do.

When I named my older daughter Rowen, some of my friends who lived in the suburbs asked if I was worried about her being teased for her name. This literally never happened in Boston Public Schools, where a diversity in names is the norm. I was a high school teacher for ten years, and when I taught in urban schools, my height (or, more accurately, my shortness) was never an issue. When I worked in the suburbs, I was teased about being short every day. Now, I'm not sensitive about this: I know I'm short. It never comes as a surprise to me when it's pointed out.  But the relentless reminders that you don't fit the mold do begin to wear on one.  

All of which is to say, there's a lot of acceptance of differences baked into the Boston Public Schools experience. My kids had white kids, Asian kids, Hispanic kids, black kids, and mixtures of all of the above in their classes. They had classmates from at least four different religions and classmates who were born on four different continents.  They had classmates with single moms, moms and dads, two moms, two dads, grandparents...just about every permutation of family situation you can imagine seemed normal to them because they knew someone in that situation.

A lot of people don't want to send their kids to Boston Public Schools because they feel like they'll have to be extra vigilant, work hard, and be involved. As an antisocial and lazy person, I sympathize with this point of view. But here's the thing: there really isn't such a thing as a Crock Pot school system that's just "set it and forget it." No matter where you go, you're going to have to get involved. And if you have a child with special needs, that's especially true. People I've known with special needs kids in suburban school systems have had to fight especially hard with intransigent administrators in order to get their child's needs met.  This happens in Boston too, of course. It happens everywhere. All of which is to say, not wanting to be an active parent is a bad reason to not choose the Boston Public Schools.

A final note: my kids have had a handful of fantastic teachers in the Boston Public Schools. They've had a handful of horrible teachers. And they've had mostly competent teachers. That was pretty much the spread in my education at both Cincinnati Public Schools and the private middle and high school I attended. It's been the case in every school where I worked.  

So, if the amount of excellent, good, and bad teachers are more or less the same everywhere, what exactly do we mean by "good schools?" I have my suspicions about what most people mean by good schools. But for my family, the Boston Public Schools were good schools.

 

Anarchy in the YA

A lot of the conversation about young adult lit these days seems to focus on rules for what you as an artist (sorry--gonna use the a word throughout this post) are allowed to do.

You are not allowed to write characters who do not share your race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, skin tone, and Meyers-Briggs Personality Type.

JK, actually you are allowed to write characters who are not you, but you must immerse yourself in VERY SERIOUS RESEARCH first.

Unless you are writing a character not like you who is not wholly and inarguably good. Then your work is problematic.

JK, your inability to write a complex, multifaceted character who is not like you shows that you should pretty much only write characters who are you.

Oh, and by the way, you must be very careful about what "messages" your art is conveying because THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

The hell with all this. Let me tell you something about art:

There are no rules.

Anybody telling you what you must or must not do in your art is inherently wrong.  Do whatever you want. 

Even if your art is aimed at young people. Maybe especially if your art is aimed at young people.  You do not have a responsibility to be didactic or morally correct in your art for young people. Young people live with ambiguity all the time. They can handle it.  By the time you're a teenager, you've already noticed that bad people frequently prosper, that good people do bad things, that love is complicated, that hate is complicated, and that people are complicated. You know people who have done terrible things. You know people who have had terrible things done to them. 

And, you have a very good bullshit detector. So you don't require art that tells you how the world is supposed to be in order to shape your delicate mind.  Art that tells you how things should be rather than how they are can be comforting, and so go for it. But you also deserve art that reflects the world in all of its messy horror and glory. 

When I was young, there was a big anti-art push from the right. Google Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, Karen Finley, or W.A.S.P. if you don't know what I'm talking about.

Now, the anti-art forces are also coming from the left.

But here's the thing: the urge to dictate terms to art is a totalitarian impulse, and it sucks wherever it comes from. Art requires you to think for yourself. People who want to regulate art through actual lawmaking or through the internet shame patrol are fundamentally against you thinking for yourself.

Regular readers, both of them, know I am an advocate of real criticism; if something sucks, say it. After you've read it. That is your right, and, I would argue, your responsibility as a reader.

But you don't get to tell artists what's permissible. You don't get to make rules for what artists get to do or for which artists get to do what. 

One reason art matters so much to so many of us is that making or consuming art is one of the only times we can really feel free. Don't let anybody take that from you. There are no rules.

Some Thoughts on Rejection

Well, in my second decade as a professional writer, I am becoming very well acquainted with rejection.

The other day I was pondering one of my latest rejections, in which an editor said some of the elements of my book felt "too familiar." My initial reaction was, "the fuck are you talking about? The shelves at bookstores are groaning with familiar!" Seriously--take a stroll through the YA section in any bookstore and check out how publishers go out of their way to ape the titles that have already been successful.

I had a similar moment when my middle grade adventure novel was rejected by an editor for having too much adventure. She wished I had written a book about two girls getting to know each other in middle school rather than a book about two girls getting to know each other in a nonstop rollicking adventure where they save their town from the machinations of an evil ape.

That's a bit like saying, "this coffee is okay, but I really wanted it to be hot chocolate."

So:  the reasons I've been rejected are bullshit.

But, fellow writers, it isn't just me! Your rejections are also bullshit! You can tell because they're contradictory:  "too much like other books on our list" is followed directly by, "we don't see a market for this kind of thing."

"I couldn't connect with the characters," says one editor. "I loved the characters but the plot just never came together for me," says another.

Here is what it all means: I didn't love your book.

That's all.  They can give you reasons why they didn't love it, but the reasons don't matter. Because love is irrational.  And, I mean, fair enough, right? Do you love every book you read? If your job were championing books, would you champion one you didn't love if you didn't have to? Of course not.

I would say this: if you're getting the same feedback from everybody, you might want to look at that element and revise it. But if  you're getting wildly contradictory and/or nonsensical reasons for your rejections, that's good! That doesn't mean your book sucks! It means that the ten, or twelve, or however many people you've sent it to don't love it.  And no book is going to be loved by everyone.

Of course the business of publishing is incredibly frustrating. Because if you like your book, I guarantee someone else will too. Probably a lot of people.  Even if it's only 0.01% of people who will like your book, in a country of 350 million people, that's an ass ton of readers. But it's really hard to find those people and get your book into their hands. This is true even if you do get your book published.

(Example: my  profane, snarky memoir of my sucky experience during my late wife's cancer treatment is definitely not for everybody. But it's probably for more than 6,000 people, which is about how many people have bought it.) (You can pick up the ebook or the audiobook, and if you like swearing and music, you'll probably be glad you did)

Rejection sucks. Take it from somebody who has been rejected a lot in the last five years.  But it doesn't mean your book isn't good or  you aren't a good writer.  It just means the right people don't love your book. Yet. Maybe someone else will. Or maybe they'll love the next one.  

 

Bad 90's Rock March Madness

The Premise

If you were a teenager in the 90's, I am going to tell you something that will shock and disturb you.

If you were not a teenager in the 90's, you already know this, but stay with me.

The 1990's were rock's worst decade. The absolute nadir of the sixty-year history of rock and roll, including the current decade in which rock has joined jazz as a largely dead genre drawing old people to listen to even older performers.  And yet even this sad current state of affairs is preferable to the 90's, when a number of factors came together to produce a decade that is an embarrassment to rock and roll. 

Why is this? Why did this decade cough up bad band after bad band? Why did its awfulness infect bands that had been good in the 80's? 

My theory is that when the mainstream finally conquered punk in this country, it just opened the floodgates for the boring, mediocre, 2nd-raters to take over.  Because with few exceptions, being boring and mediocre is the way to sell a lot of product. You have to inspire people who don't buy a lot of music to buy your music, which means sanding off the hard edges and burying all the interesting parts.

Of course, there had always been boring rock. But 90's boring rock is even worse than earlier boring rock. I believe this is because of the pseudo-punk aesthetic that infected corporate rock. So while earlier boring rock--let's take Foghat's "Slow Ride," for example, but we could just as easily go with Foreigner's "Hot Blooded" or, like, any Loverboy song--was at least celebratory in nature, praising rock's holy trinity of sex, partying, and rock, 90's boring rock, aiming at faux authenticity, did away with fun and swagger and celebration and left us with the dogs beginning to smell her.

And yet because there are such a large number of people who were teens in the 1990's, the myth persists, at least among them, that the 90's were a great musical decade. 

Stuff and nonsense.  That is why I have created this bracket: so that those of us whose adolescence came either before or after the 1990's can at last have our say and crown the worst rock act of the worst decade of rock.

The Methodology

I toyed with a 64-act bracket, but I ultimately decided that this was going to force me to include a lot of bad acts, but ones that weren't bad in a specifically 90's kind of way.  So the jam bands are out because no one who is not currently high will argue that any of them are any good. The annoying singer-songwriters are out, because they are squarely in the tradition of annoying singer-songwriters that dates back to the first generation of Dylan imitators. Also, history has largely forgotten them. (Let us take a moment to pity Tori Amos, once a big star, now not even first on the list of annoying red-haired musicians associated with Neil Gaiman.)

I've chosen acts that achieved some level of popularity in the 90's and that are, for better or worse, associated with the 90's.  So Metallica and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, both of whom were good in the 80's, are included here because they rose to megastardom (and fell to shittiness) in the 90's. I toyed with the idea of including Aerosmith, since Get a Grip is one of the worst rock albums ever, but they did release Pump in the 90's, and that's hilariously horny, so they're out. 

I have not chosen one-hit acts that are easy to shit on because nobody liked them all that much even then. So your Eve 6, your Seven Mary Three, your Three Doors Down, and the rest of the one-hit wonders of the 90's are not included. They've been punished enough.

I have included many sacred cow acts here. This is not simply to troll 90's kids, although that is fun. I genuinely believe these bands are terrible, and I will be happy to explain my choice in the comments if you wish to question me. (Remember though: this is a safe space, which means I brook no dissent from my views. Just kidding. But I will delete you if you're abusive but not funny. Abusive and funny is fine. Encouraged, even.)

 

The Bracket

(Sorry it's a little hard to read. The "fillable PDF" kept saving as a blank, so I had to do a screenshot.  So yes, I am old.)

If you prefer it in non-graphic form:

1. Nirvana vs. Rage Against the Machine
2. Pearl Jam vs. Sublime
3. Bush vs. Third Eye Blind
4. Red Hot Chili Peppers vs. Weezer
5. Hole vs. The Black Crowes
6. Radiohead vs. Foo Fighters
7. Primus vs. Blues Traveler
8. Alice in Chains vs. Metallica
9. The Wallflowers vs. Garbage
10. Dave Matthews Band vs. Barenaked Ladies
11. Liz Phair vs. Smashing Pumpkins
12. Oasis vs. Toad the Wet Sprocket
13. 311 vs. Live
14. Stone Temple Pilots vs. Blink-182
15. Jane's Addiction vs. Tool
16. Green Day vs. The Offspring

How to Vote

You may vote in one of two ways: through the comments here (please just include the number of the matchup and your winner.) I will put up a new post with the first round winners filled in on March 30, 2016, and you can vote on 2nd round winners there.

I will also be posting all the matchups as Twitter polls. You can just head over to https://twitter.com/bhalpin and cast your vote there. Twitter polls stay open for 24 hours, and I'll start posting tonight.

Against Grit

If you spend any time in educational circles at all, you will hear something about "grit." 

If you want a lot of information about what "grit" is, you can google it, especially in conjunction with its foremost proponent, Angela Duckworth. She has a TED talk about it because of course she does.

But maybe you don't want to do the research. In which case, I'll break it down for you:  "grit" means perseverance. It's your ability to stay focused and work hard toward a goal and keep going rather than giving up in spite of obstacles.  

Seems like something nobody could possibly object to. In fact, it's in huge vogue in education right now. You can't make a rubric without somebody wanting to throw grit on it. Especially when you are working with disadvantaged students.

Because "grit," it turns out, is a handy way to blame people in bad circumstances for their fate.  

This plays right into the myth that the United States is a meritocracy, which people cling to stubbornly in spite of the evidence. So if you're poor, it's not because the deck is stacked against you. It's not because of the fact that even the low-achieving, incurious children of the rich clog up the top rungs of the career and educational ladder. Nope--it's your own fault because you're lazy and you give up too easily!

This, of course, is why the big money forces of education reform love grit. 

Indeed, when I worked in a charter school, we subscribed to this idea even though Angela Duckworth hadn't given it a name yet.  We used to start with 70 9th graders and end with 30 12th graders. And when a kid left, we would shake our heads and bemoan the fact that they'd given up, that they just didn't want it bad enough.  (We didn't examine our own pedagogy or disciplinary practices because it was obviously the students' fault for giving up. No excuses!)

Even as I write this, people are wringing their hands, wondering how they can teach grit. Because that will solve poverty. People are giving demerits to students for their failure to show grit. Because showing grit is the only way Those People will ever succeed. 

Grit is all about blaming people for their own circumstances and denying the role of luck, race, and money in people's success. But there are two other problems. One, as Alfie Kohn points out, is that measuring students' grit based on what they are or aren't persevering at in school ignores the question of whether that particular thing is worth persevering at.  It allows educators to not examine their own practice and just blame the kids. 

But there's another problem that I haven't seen a lot of people writing about (though someone probably has): grading someone else's grit is incredibly presumptuous.

I worked for seven years with a post-secondary student population who by and large had not done well in high school. And I did a personal essay assignment with them. And many of them would choose to write about something horrible they had been through. Reading these essays would wreck me every time.  And it's what really turned me against "grit." Because you never know what kinds of horrors people have seen and endured. And how much grit it takes them to just get out of bed in the morning. 

Many, many students wrote of sexual abuse they had endured as children, and the shame they felt and how it had broken their ability to trust anyone, how they could never feel safe. Many students wrote of the trauma of witnessing or experiencing violence. Students had been shot or stabbed or watched a loved one gunned down in the street.

And you're going to presume to judge the grit of someone who's been through that kind of experience? 

How dare you? 

It's arrogance of the highest caliber to think you can put someone's character traits on a rubric and give them a score based on what you know of them.  And we put poor kids through this all the time.  Can you imagine how this must feel? What must it be like to summon the effort to leave the house after you were abducted off the street and tortured for three days and then have someone tell you you're not showing enough grit? Does anyone on earth deserve this kind of humiliation? Does anyone on earth have the right to judge anyone like this?

Grit is not a helpful concept. It's not innovative. It is, in its current application, sickening and shameful.

 

Revealed: The Right Thing To Say

Talking to a dear friend who got life-changing bad news the other day, and she was complaining about all the stupid things people say when they learn that something terrible has happened to you.  Having had some terrible things happen to me, I knew exactly what she was talking about: people don't seem to know what to say, so they say something stupid and offensive.

So as a public service, I am going to reveal what you should say when someone tells you that something incredibly terrible has happened.

"I'm sorry."  You can add "so" in the middle if you like. You could also tell the person that you love them.

That's it, folks!  

Now you may be thinking, "But Brendan! My friend has cancer! (or whatever terrible thing just happened) Those words are completely inadequate!"

Yep. Because that's the thing. Life-changing bad news is too big for words. Words can't help.  You can't be the one to make the person feel better because nobody can make the person feel better. Whether you're acting out of compassion because a person you care about is hurting and you want the hurt to stop, or narcissism because you want to be the one who utters the magic words that help, just stop it.

Because while your words can't possibly make the person feel better, they can actually make them feel worse. 

So that's it: "I'm sorry."  Try it next time someone tells you something terrible. And never  say you don't know what to say again.