Margaret Thatcher walks into a bar...

Margaret Thatcher walks into a bar and runs smack into George Washington.

(Did I mention that this bar is just down the street from the U.S. Treasury's Bureau of Engraving and Printing? It's where all these green-tinged fellows hang out after a long day spent posing for the currency.)

So Margaret Thatcher walks into this bar and stumbles up against George Washington and the first thing he wants to know is "Who's your wig-maker?" Because let's face it, George's curls look limp and lifeless next to Margaret's gravity-defying hair.

"It's not a wig," she says, and when George reaches out to give her curls a hearty tug, she draws away in high dudgeon. The Iron Lady is not amused.

What is she doing here in the haunts of American heroes? That's what Alexander Hamilton wants to know.

"I hardly know myself," says poor Margaret. "I was dragged into this debate by Jeb Bush, who thinks my face should grace the 10-dollar bill."

Poor Alex is torn: make way chivalrously for the weaker sex or stand firm for his right to fill the green oval? Before he can decide, his compatriots step in:

"She's not even an American," says U.S. Grant, "and besides, she doesn't have a beard."

"Well, a beard isn't strictly required," says Maggie.

"Beard or no beard, what have you ever done?" demands Honest Abe. "How many slaves have you freed?"

"And how many did you breed?" asks Jefferson.

"Have you fought any battles with your own tender hands?" asks Andrew Jackson, but before Thatcher can mention the Falklands, he charges on: "We whipped you fair and square in the War of 1812, and we don't want losers on our currency. We want winners! How many elections have you won? Ever been elected President in a landslide?"

Margaret draws herself to her full height, looks Jackson straight in the belly-button, and marshals all her baronessial hauteur, but before she can speak, gentle Ben Franklin grabs her elbow and moves her smoothly toward the bar. "There, there, my dear," he says, "there's no need to fuss. My colleagues have forgotten both their manners and their history. Everyone knows that you don't have to be elected president to appear on the currency."

"Then what does it take?" she asks. "Come, Ben, tell me your secret."

"You must be willing to be passed from hand to hand, collecting dirt and germs and miscellaneous marks. You must endure a million caricatures without complaint. You must maintain a smile that convinces consumers that you're thinking profound thoughts when maybe your teeth hurt. You must, above all, be willing to become common."

"Common?" Lady Thatcher bites off the word as if it were a bit of sour persimmon.

"Yes, there's nothing more common than currency," explains Ben. "And yet despite your commonness, very few who see your face will come to know you deeply, and many won't even know your name."

"You can say that again," says a dour-looking man at the bar. He turns toward Maggie and holds out his hand. "Allow me to introduce myself," he says. "I'm Salmon P. Chase."

"Who?" she says.

"I rest my case," says Ben.

A lesson from a tinkerer

Young John Muir had two great passions: walking in the woods and tinkering with mechanical things. As a teen he constructed a peculiar alarm clock that shook the leg of his bed to wake him up, and later, as a student at the University of Wisconsin in the 1860s, he created a desk-clock that held a book open for half and hour and then closed it, moved it aside, and replaced it with the next book Muir needed to study. (See a photo here.)

Muir won prizes for his mechanical wonders and might have pursued a career in engineering if he hadn't suffered an eye injury that hampered his tinkering and sent him on a trek that would consume the rest of his long life: walking in the woods (and fields and mountains and glaciers) all across the North American continent.

Muir walked from Indiana to Florida, took a boat to California, and walked all over the west to pursue his passion for wilderness--all without the benefit of cell phones or GPS or modern hiking gear. The titles of his books map his journeys: A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, My First Summer in the Sierra, The Mountains of California, Our National Parks, and more. Today he is remembered as the guiding force behind the formation of our national parks and the father of the Sierra Club.

What would happen to Muir if he were a teenager today? A fidgety boy with a foreign name (Muir was an immigrant born in Scotland!) shows up at school carrying an odd contraption he has created and no one can figure out what it is--he'd be arrested, of course, just like Ahmed Mohamed, who took a homemade clock to school in Texas and was hauled off in handcuffs for constructing device that looked threatening (read it here). 

The charges have now been dropped and young Ahmed is coping with his fifteen minutes of fame. Muir, on the other hand, didn't make his name until he'd walked those thousand miles, hopped that boat, and written those books. But his life would have taken an entirely different path if he hadn't had the freedom to pursue his passions. 

Let the kids tinker; let them walk in the woods. You never know where they might end up or what kinds of wonders they'll discover or who, in the end, might be inspired to follow.

Lost among the zombies

One of the great benefits of attending an academic conference is the opportunity to make small talk with interesting people. You're standing in the coffee line, waiting for an elevator, or loafing between sessions and you just start chatting with someone in the same boat, and before you know it you're laughing or learning something or, at the very least, thanking your lucky stars that you're not in that person's predicament.

I fear, however, that these serendipities are coming to an end. I base this on my experience at a recent academic meeting where no one was interested in small talk, preferring to spend down time staring at tiny screens.

Now I'm the first to admit that I'll never win the Most Outgoing prize, but over the years I've developed some pretty reliable techniques for engaging in meaningless chatter with strangers. These skills, however, failed utterly at the meeting I attended over the weekend. In a daylong event, I managed to engage exactly one person in chit-chat; every other opportunity was rebuffed by devotees of tiny screens.

I realize that it's a waste of time to try to chat with people engrossed in their phones or tablets in public, but finding anyone not so occupied is a challenge. It's as if they're so fearful of venturing into public alone that they have to stay tethered to the nanny lest someone approach with poisoned lollipops. 

I know I'm not the first to notice the impending death of small talk with strangers in public places, but this was the first time I felt utterly cut off from everyone around me simply because I was busy watching people instead of screens. People-watching was once a pretty interesting practice, but people attached to screens are boring. It's like being surrounded by zombies, except the brains being consumed are their own.

The cure is simple, of course: join the crowd devoted to avoiding engagement with the crowd. But I'm not quite ready to zombify myself. I hold out hope that somewhere out there in smartphoneland there exist a few other holdouts who still hold dear the art of conversation. If only I could figure out where they're hiding.

(Maybe there's an app for that?)

 

The little darlings identify another valuable life skill

I'm reading Cheating in College: Why Students Do It and What Educators Can Do about It (McCabe, Butterfield, and Trevino  2012) but I'm making slow progress because I keep getting hung up on this point that keeps coming up:

Many students today simply do not consider cut-and-paste plagiarism from the Internet or written sources to be cheating, so when asked in a survey on 'cheating' whether they have engaged in this behavior, many simply say no--even if they have. As noted earlier in the chapter, in their open-ended comments, many explain that they answered this way because, when they engaged in one of these behaviors, it simply wasn't cheating. (58-59)

And what reasons do students offer to explain why their cheating doesn't really qualify as cheating? They rationalize: "they didn't have enough time to do the assignment and had no choice; the assignment had little learning value or was unfair; or using the Internet in this was is effective time management--a skill that will serve them well in the real world when they graduate" (59-60).

So what we have here is a bunch of students who see cheating as a valuable life skill. If that's true, then maybe we ought to start teaching more effective plagiarism skills. Cheating 101--the class that prepares students for a life of rationalization.

How will I ever finish the book when I can't stop banging my head against the wall?

Teaching the Listicle Generation

I was startled recently to find my students in The New Yorker--not by name, of course, but the article opens wide a window into my students' values and thought processes.

In "The Virologist," Andrew Marantz explores the peculiar world of Emerson Spartz, the "King of Clickbait," a 27-year-old creator of online viral content.  "The ability to make things go viral felt like the closest thing we could get to having a human superpower," he says, but is he using that superpower for good? Let's take a look at the principles that seems to rule his sites:

• Interesting is more important than true.
• Popularity is more important than accuracy.
• Short is better than long. 
• Originality? Bah, humbug. Once it's out there, it belongs to everyone.
• Feeling is more important than thinking.
• Superficiality rules. If you can't say it in a bullet point and a photo, it's not worth saying.
• Beauty is even more irrelevant than truth.
• Virality = quality.

Although he calls himself "one of the most avid readers I know," Spartz doesn't read straight news, he says, because "It's conveyed in a very boring way" (or, as my students like to say, it's too dry.) Spartz's idea of quality? Clickbait headlines linked to illustrated lists stuffed with advertising. "The way we view the world," he says, "the ultimate barometer of quality is: if it gets shared, it's quality. If someone wants to toil in obscurity, if that makes them happy, that's fine. Not everyone has to change the world." (Glad to know he approves of my life choices.)

The saddest line in the article, though, is this: "Asked to name the most beautiful prose he had read, he said, 'A beautiful book? I don't even know what that means.'"

And that's when I realized that he was speaking for my students. The way they look at me when I rave on and on about truth and beauty and originality and transcendence--they're a bunch of little Spartzes sitting in the desks, wondering when I'll shut up so they can go back to clicking on listicles full of plagiarized factoids masquerading as news.

And I'm trying to make them read Henry James? What was I thinking?!