But Will It Work?

It usually takes a total of 0.34 seconds, following some sort of tragedy, for people to go from shock to blame. Of course, there's a lot of sentiment in there, some of which is authentic but much of which has a level of transience that, while expected from those who are so far removed from the actual event, can hardly rise to the intensity one truly feels when accurately describing the emotion as "grief." The flood of social media, paradoxically, desensitizes: after all, it's all politics and the sharing of other people's icons with very little digging into one's psyche for an unmediated reaction.

One question, predictably, has come out of the most recent school shooting. That question is: what is the future of guns? There seem to be two viewpoints, neither of which are all that tenable. The first is the pro-gun "if everyone had a gun, this wouldn't happen" viewpoint. I'm just going to dismiss that one outright, since it's so shortsighted it doesn't really warrant a response. The second viewpoint, which I wish to address, is the "if no one had guns, this wouldn't have happened" stance.

I don't like guns. It would freak me out a little to have one in the house. Once, when I was at summer camp, I tried to go to the rifle range. I was too freaked out to do much of anything, so they moved me to the archery range. Archery was better, although I was a lot more interested in the cute counselor instructing us and invariably broke the bow. So, yeah, weapons aren't my thing. I fared slightly better at pony riding. Oh, and D&D. Still, weapons aren't really my thing. So, what I'm about to say I say as someone that does not like guns, does not want a gun and does not want to think about what sort of life circumstances would have to occur for that to change.

Most current gun debates wind up being like most political debates: highly polarized and entrenched in dogma without much by way of intelligent discourse. Most of the time, unless I'm in the mood to play Devil's Advocate, I find myself woefully indifferent to the debate.

Still, the past couple of days got me wondering about this. One question that I keep coming back to is:but would banning guns do anything?* Okay, in theory, if no one had guns, certainly that would alleviate gun violence. However, what I'm curious about is whether this is actually something that can be realized.

The biggest argument against it, I think, is that there has never been a truly successful prohibition in this country. Perhaps this is my recent obsession with Boardwalk Empire talking but...really, has there been? I mean, has there been a prohibition in this country where the government manages to ban something and have the presence of that thing decrease? Most of the time, it seems to push it underground and worsen the problem. The war on drugs is another such example. Prostitution is yet another example. All of these are things where prohibitions have resulted in criminal suppliers with the associated increased crime.

The problem is, in large part, geographic. We're a huge country with huge land-based borders that are near-ideal for smuggling. There are major logistical problems in any attempts at prohibition. I don't see this as some sort of "if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns" slogan. I'm honestly curious how one might go about doing this. It seems a lot like unleashing feral cats into the woods to deal with a rodent problem.

So how would we ensure this wouldn't be another case of simply pushing the problem underground, creating more problems south of the border and in the inner cities, while essentially scrubbing it off the face of suburbia? The first step would be to have some mechanism in place at the borders, but how do we do that without piggybacking some sort of oppressive immigration crackdown?

I recommend Mothra.



*There are moderate positions advocating control, rather than an outright ban. I believe the question I'm raising is relevant to that as well.

Perception and Reality

An interesting side effect of having recently bought a home is that I've found myself taking a bigger interest in my community. Perhaps it's having a school next door, or perhaps it's simply knowing that where I am will be "home" for the next several years, I'm not sure. Still, you don't have to be a home owner to have heard about
the Chicago teachers' strike.

The strike has been unusual as it has addressed a laundry list of issues. One of the issues raised has been pay. Chicago teachers are cited as earning between $49,000 and $92,000 a year and initially pushed for a 30% pay increase, while the city offered 16% over four years. The number offered by the city is in far excess of the budget and increases the education deficit, as reported here.

As negotiations have continued, and financial concessions have been met, the real meat of the issue has become increasingly apparent: job security. Working conditions, such as lack of air conditioning, have been raised but these are no doubt connected to job security, since under the new evaluation system, test scores will play a significant role (roughly 1/4-1/5 of the overall evaluation) in teacher retention. To mitigate this, experienced teachers have been guaranteed that they will not be penalized after the first year's evaluation, thus allowing time to tweak any problems in the new system. An appeals process is in place as well. Bearing these factors in mind, it is hard to understand why teachers would not make a good faith gesture by returning to school, at least until the details of the contracts can be hammered out. It is the refusal to do so, and the perception that this is simply union politics at the expense of children's education, which has led Mayor Rahm Emanuel to file an injunction, trying to force the teachers to return to work. As it has become clear that the desired changes are more systemic than financial, the strike has been deemed illegal, since it is ultimately job security, not pay, that is the hold out. So far, the courts have stalled, no doubt not wanting to be "The Next Wisconsin."

The big problem the courts are faced with, and this is a concern for teachers' as well, is the impact that the strike has on parents and children. Latino Ed Beat points out, for example, the significant toll this is taking on Latino families, many of whom are struggling to find care for their children while the strike continues:

With her two daughters kept out of school because of the Chicago teachers strike, Patricia Rodriguez was left with no other option than to take them with her to her job at a local laundromat this week. The Chicago teachers’ strike affected nearly 180,000 Latino children enrolled in the school district, many from disadvantaged families, Fox News Latino reports.

Additionally, there is the consequence suffered from lack of education, which risks putting already disadvantaged students behind academically. Other parents have resorted to home schooling and CPS has begun offering online AP courses for high school students needing to keep up to and stay competitive in college admissions. Every day that the strike continues is a day that parental patience wanes. The loss of support is significant, and the teachers run the risk of seeming uncompromising at best and self-interested at worst.

All of this creates a distinct problem for the courts, who will be forced to choose between two unappealing scenarios: the risk of being accused of "union busting" on the one hand and the risk of seeming unwilling to protect families' right to education on the other. In a city where the affluent frequently approach urban living as "Fun to do when you're young, but when it's time to raise a family, move to the suburbs"it will be important to demonstrate that we can ensure basic access to education for all children. Not doing so will widen the already enormous education disparity between urban public schools and suburban and private schools. This isn't to say that there aren't some real issues for the conditions of public schools, but unless the teachers are willing to return and teach while these issues are being addressed, they run the serious danger of backlash.

When Union president Karen Lewis states, "No one will ever look upon a teacher and think of him or her as a passive person to be bullied and walked on ever again" there is quite a bit of truth in that. However, this may not be a good thing. In the long term, eroding parental trust in the school systems will have an adverse impact on the reputation of Chicago teachers and will decrease morale within the community and increase the already too pervasive flight to the suburbs. Furthermore, the perception of assertiveness might go overboard. We probably have all met people who had trouble asserting themselves and over-accommodated, only to become aggressive when they mean to be merely assertive. The teachers run the risk of conveying this impression: they've taken a stand and now they won't back down until they get everything they want. I wonder though, if this is really a perception that they want to convey of teachers. With education under attack by conservatives, do you really want to create the image that children are collateral damage in service of "the bigger cause"?

Why I'm Boycotting E-Books and Why You Should too

As you can see from the title, I'm advocating boycotting E-books. It's been a long time since I've told anyone that they should boycott anything. A couple of decades in fact. So why do I think you should boycott e-books? Romantic notions of the physical structure and the history of the book? A desire to preserve something I can touch, flip with my fingers and smell? No. While I admit all of those are why I love non-digital books, I can also appreciate the beauty of a well done digital collection. Besides, I'm not a big fan of imposing my judgments of taste on others. No, this is something much more serious.

In a recent article called Your E-Book is Reading You, Alexandra Alter alerted the public to one particularly insidious aspect of the e-book: that your data is being collected with every e-book you download and read. By this, I don't mean they simply track what you buy, but what you read. They know if you read the introduction or don't, they know what your favorite passage is, they know if you finish the book or if you don't. They track how quickly you read the book. All of this is collected to determine just how popular a book is and has broad ramifications for publishing, civil rights and personal privacy. Alter explains,

Amazon can identify which passages of digital books are popular with readers, and shares some of this data publicly on its website through features such as its "most highlighted passages" list. Readers digitally "highlight" selections using a button on the Kindle; they can also opt to see the lines commonly highlighted by other readers as they read a book. Amazon aggregates these selections to see what gets underlined the most. Topping the list is the line from the "Hunger Games" trilogy. It is followed by the opening sentence of "Pride and Prejudice."

The problem with this is two-fold. First, there is simply the sense of one's privacy being invaded. If you're one of the many people who have become weary of sites like Facebook using basic information about you--who you know, where you met them, where your photos are taken and where you went for your anniversary dinner--to sell so that they might better market to you, this will take it to a whole new level all the while making you pay for the privilege. I know for myself, one of my favorite things to do with a book is underline and make notes in the margins. At the same time, I don't mean this to be for public consumption. I remember one time, I wanted to loan a friend a book on the enneagram. I had made a number of notes and underlined sections that I thought described me. This was more personal information than I wanted to share with my colleague, so I went out and bought another copy of the book to loan to him. It became my loaner copy for anyone else that I happened to meet who wanted to learn more about the subject. However, if I didn't want my colleague, a very accepting and easy going Taoist who had lived an interesting and varied life, to know this about me how much less would I want that information shared with Amazon? If forced to read an e-book, I would likely stop underlining passages altogether and just keep a private, hand written journal in which I could write down quotes and reflections on the material.

There's a bigger problem, though. The problem is that this data is being used not just to market what someone might like but to potentially control what is written as well.

"The bigger trend we're trying to unearth is where are those drop-offs in certain kinds of books, and what can we do with publishers to prevent that?" Mr. Hilt says. "If we can help authors create even better books than they create today, it's a win for everybody."

The problem there, though, is that it then shapes the market. Right now, those types of editorial decisions may be very loosely shaped by trends ("teen horror is really in right now, let's sign on more horror writers!") and general stylistic concerns. Cutting may be as much a subjective choice based on the editor's individual experience and whatever aesthetic sense they may (or may not) bring to the table. However, once you incorporate numbers based thinking, you start tossing all deeper considerations out the window. The numbers become facts and these "facts" dictate reality. If data says that readers really like a certain line in a book, the author then may be pressured to write lines like that in. Yet, the immediacy of data is a problem. Sometimes the most significant works, the ones that have most stood the test of time, had only a modest degree of responsiveness among readers when they were first published. The truly visionary writer may, in fact, yield less promising data than someone who will enjoy brief success but make little long-term impact on literature. I support Galassi on this point when he's quoted as saying,

Others worry that a data-driven approach could hinder the kinds of creative risks that produce great literature. "The thing about a book is that it can be eccentric, it can be the length it needs to be, and that is something the reader shouldn't have anything to do with," says Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. "We're not going to shorten 'War and Peace' because someone didn't finish it."

Additionally, what happens to the book with modest, but not sweeping, success under this model? Many of us have the experience of becoming obsessed with a television show which, while not mainstream, has a huge cult following. We are all too familiar with realizing that, no matter how much we love something, if the numbers don't rank it as highly as the latest reality show, we're SOL. Do we really want the same thing to happen to our books? What if those readers of literary fiction, works which rank a much slower read time than popular novels, suddenly find publishing companies slashing the amount of titles they'll publish in that category because, while there may be modest success in sales, they still don't seem to "grab" people as much as the latest made-into-a-tv-series title?

Finally, the most distressing is the legal ramifications. It's a thin line between information gathered for marketing purposes and information collected by the government to spy on its citizens. However, as Alter points out, the ACLU is on that and some states have already begun to put some restrictions in. Still, one may recall when the Patriot Act first came into existence, librarians were having to stand up against the government en masse in order to protect their patrons' privacy. Laws in place may help, but we've all seen that laws protecting individual rights are seldom set in stone, and all the provisions in the world won't stop that should so-called "exigent circumstances" arise. Do you trust Amazon to stand up for our rights should such a scenario occur? I do not.

My stance as a reader? I will buy print for as long as I'm able to. And as a writer? Well, I may just need to take up playwriting after all.

On Navigating the Entry Level Gap

There's been a lot of publicity lately about the plight of college grads. At the same time, albeit less publicized, have been the gripes of employers complaining about the difficulty finding decent hires for entry level positions. In addition to reading about these gripes online, I've had the privilege of discussing the problem with people who are in a position to hire recent college graduates. This, combined with my own experience in the workforce (I didn't do undergrad until after thirty) and my experience teaching undergraduates, has given me a unique perspective. I wanted, therefore, to give some advice for students who are in college now about how to best navigate the workforce upon graduation.

1. Think of a degree in terms of minimum qualifications

Some people have described, rather cynically, undergraduates as seeing a degree as their "passport to the middle class." I think that, more often, it is seen as a backstage pass. This is not really the students' fault. More often, it's the fault of university administrators that seek to profit off of those dreams and increase student retention by giving a rose colored view of their prospects. However, a degree is just the starting point, it's what you need to make the first cut, so to speak. In that sense, it is very much like a passport. Think about it like this: imagine that you want to take a trip to Italy. You know that you need to get your passport to get in. There's so much more you need to do to have the type of trip that you want to have: picking the right hotel, finding the best places to eat, tours to go on, art museums to visit, bars to hang out in and so forth. In many respects, the quality of your vacation is up to you. If you only got the passport and did none of those other things, then you would have denied yourself the necessary components to get what you want: an enjoyable vacation. College is much the same way. The degree is only a minimum qualification. However, taking courses that improve your writing and critical thinking skills, learning how to solve problems independently, learning how to navigate bureaucracies--these are all part of the picture and can be invaluable assets.

2. Get Experience

Don't wait until you graduate to get experience in your chosen field. Find a professor's lab to work in, get a part time job in tech support, volunteer in a mental health facility, work on the school newspaper, you name it...get experience. Get lots of it. Get it often. If your school doesn't have these resources, look at a site like Volunteer Match. In the summers, get an internship. Employers expect that you've been doing that while in college, and if all you have to show is a degree and a listing of your GPA, then they very well may pass over your resume.

3. Know What Entry Level Positions in Your Field Really Pay

I've heard horror stories of some very respectable schools telling its students that the going rate for entry level in their field is $20-30,000 higher than it actually is. I'd like to think that this is naivete--an indication of academics not keeping up with the times--but I fear that it may be more self-serving than that. The truth is, if there are a bunch of undergraduates taking out $25,000 or more in loans, they may not be happy to learn that the starting salary for supposedly pragmatic professions is only likely to be $40,000 a year. The problem, of course, is if you come in with only minimal experience asking for $70,000 a year, your resume will quickly be put in the trash file. It would be better if universities gave a realistic perspective to students and explain, "Yes, this profession may be lucrative but only after several years experience." That way, grads wouldn't be thwarted by the unrealistic expectations they were given in college. The solution? Find people working in your profession. Look them up on message boards, Twitter, Facebook--but find them and ask what's realistic. Don't count on your college to give you an accurate picture.

4. Write a Compelling Resume, But Keep it Professional

Definitely try to make your resume sound as impressive as you can while still remaining truthful. Think about how your experience might be relevant to the position. Use online resources. At the same time, remember that this is still a resume and not a blog or Facebook profile. I once saw the resume of an out-of-work Library School grad. She showed off her technical know-how by doing her resume online. Unfortunately, she failed in understanding her target audience: her resume was full of flower graphics and, at the top, a heading which read "My FAB Online Resume." Sure, she knew to put her resume online. What she did not know was how that resume would come across to a potential employer. Avoid "cutesy" titles, kitschy icons and the like. Have a nice, classic look with all of the relevant information and, above all, be professional.

5. Interview Well

I've asked hiring managers and one of the things that I hear a lot is, "I don't want to do all the work." In other words, don't be so afraid of making a mistake that you make the interviewer uncomfortable. Don't interrupt them, be engaging and be knowledgable. Have some questions in mind to ask the interviewer, since they'll want that. It sounds paradoxical, but don't try too hard. Think of it as being like a first date: you want to be well-dressed and charming, but you don't want to worry so much about how you're coming across that you blow it. The best way for a date to go well is if you actually have fun. On the other hand, if the date is too forced, then the other party will just want it to be over and you won't get a second call. An interview is much the same way. If it's too forced or awkward, all the interviewer will be thinking is how much they want you out of their office. On the other hand, if you put the end result out of your mind and see it as a pleasant, albeit somewhat formal conversation with a colleague, it will go that much more smoothly.


Of course, I can't guarantee that even mastering all of these will get you the job. Just like in more selective undergraduate universities and most graduate programs, there is a big element of luck. Luck in terms of when you apply, what your competition is, how many others are applying and so forth. Still, the more of an edge you give yourself, the better a shot you have at steering luck in your favor. My hope is that this information will provide that edge to some college students who may not have heard it elsewhere.