Since most of my woefully small readership are friends and family, I suppose I owe something of a "what's going on" update at some point. Of course you've heard of my impending wedding on the 21st of March, but odds are you know nothing - or close to it - of my coursework here at Stanford this (and last) quarter, except what I have alluded to in my posts.
Stanford's quarter system is different from what I am accustomed to, and the result is the proverbial "fire hose" that many graduates treat with nostalgia. While the environment here is not as immersive as that at St. John's - perhaps because not everyone is reading the same books at the same time - it is more hurried, more demanding. Most courses meet once a week - twice at most - for ten weeks. That's only ten meetings to get a whole curriculum across.
Fall quarter was exceptionally busy for me, this quarter has been even more so. First quarter I was enrolled in a somewhat ambiguous number of classes. By that I mean, I was enrolled in three "proper," 3+ unit classes, but also three 1 unit classes and a 2 unit class. Seven classes in total is a lot, but since four of those did not ask for much work outside of showing up every week, it was a manageable load, and on the whole I logged 16 units (which put me comfortably below the 18-unit maximum). It would have been more manageable had I not been simultaneously applying to the PhD program that links to my Master's program.
This quarter is different. I'm enrolled in fewer classes, but my units add up to 18 even. I'm noticing that 18 units is quite a lot, especially because 17 of those come from classes, and only one from my 10-hour-per-week internship. Ten hours of internship to one unit of credit is not a favorable ratio.
Besides my internship - which is split oddly between a local private, Catholic high school and Stanford's own charter school - I'm taking four proper classes. One of those classes is in the English department, and I am happy to visit twice a week with a collection of students who are, without exception, English or Modern Thought students. The course is called "Biography and Life Writing," a source of amusement for people like me who know some Greek. The Professor - Carol Shloss - is a Pulitzer finalist and National Book Award winner, and so the experience has been tremendous, if different from what I'm used to (the discussion is heavily weighted towards our professor). This class, however, constitutes five units of my 17, because it requires essentially one book's worth of reading each week. That's not so much that it's undoable, but it has certainly been more than enough given my other courses.
My most enjoyable education class - and my 3 unit, and therefore "least work" class, in theory - is called "Understanding Learning Environments." Co-taught by Ray McDermott and Roy Pea, it's a romp through the modern history of learning theory. Of course, in ten weeks we can only go into so much depth, but the actual point of the class has been not so much to digest and debate the history of cognitive sciences, but to understand Ray's peculiar characterization of culture, what learning really is, and why we education students bother at all.
I am also taking a four unit "Introduction to Data Analysis" course focusing on the use of statistics in education and social sciences research. On the whole, the course has been more or less a review of my AP Statistics class from high school, but seeing as it has been a while since then, the course has been worth the time its lengthy assignments require. From a professional standpoint, at the very least, it is valuable to have taken a quantitative research course (I took an introductory qualitative research class first quarter).
Finally, I'm enrolled in a course taught by Denise Pope for the second straight quarter. Denise is the author of Doing School, a phenomenal piece of research that blows up a number of assumptions our culture makes about high achieving students. On top of being an excellent researcher, Denise is an excellent teacher as well. Her course this quarter is "Curriculum Construction," which is, of course, at the heart of the educational process. What makes the course great, however, is the active meta-cognition that Denise and her TAs engage in. Her course is a living example of curriculum construction, and as we strive to build our own curricula - the capstone project for the course - for a real-life site, we are encouraged to reflect upon the curriculum of the course itself, as well as other courses we know of, are taking, have taught, and so on.
Of course, all four of these courses assign a significant amount of reading, and so I'm spending a significant portion of my time pouring over biographies, old psychology articles, and academic debates about curriculum design. On top of that, there's my internship, which, early in the quarter anyway, involved some politics that I think I had better not speak of too loudly. Beyond even that, I've taken on writing two curricula (in addition to the required one for my Curriculum class) on the side for summer workshops I'll be teaching come June. I'm actually quite excited about those curricula, because one is a kind of Johnnie-esque writing curriculum designed for high schoolers who are interested in diving deeper into their own experience with language, and the other is an introductory sabermetrics course designed for, well, nerdy baseball fans. Exciting though those are, they remain an added bit of work on top of an already full plate.
If you've done the math, you'll note that I haven't mentioned one unit of my 18 yet, and that is because I haven't mentioned my LDT Seminar. Seminar is not much work, for the most part (occasional readings, and a lot of housekeeping), but it is also worth mentioning that by the end of this quarter I have to write a draft of a proposal for my Master's project. Drinking from a fire hose indeed.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Monday, February 8, 2010
Links
I've been hesitant to do this, but I there's a great deal of stuff on the Internet that I read that some of you may like, but don't know about. So I'm going to link to some of it. Give it a read, or don't, but I promise it's all interesting.
First off, Pitchers and Poets on Bill "Spaceman" Lee.
If you haven't heard, the Globetrotters are going to play on ice. Joe Posnanski finds that funny enough, but Generals coach Red Klotz - perhaps the losingest coach in history - offers the best quote ever and makes the Poz really laugh.
The Onion takes on the New Orleans Saints and ESPN in one fell swoop.
You may not be surprised to learn that Ralph Nader is taking none-too-kindly to the misrepresentations of Mr. Howard Zinn that are flying around.
While we're at it, here's a Counterpunch from before the election (yeah, over 15 months ago). Matt Gonzalez - who was Nader's running-mate in 2008 - showing why he was almost Mayor of San Francisco (he's quite bright).
Fangraphs is breaking new ground in the Sabermetrics world, again. This first assay is imperfect, but the potential is tremendous.
Finally, let's close with George Siemens and his thoughts on the need for more meaningful innovation in education. To hell with "the System!"
First off, Pitchers and Poets on Bill "Spaceman" Lee.
If you haven't heard, the Globetrotters are going to play on ice. Joe Posnanski finds that funny enough, but Generals coach Red Klotz - perhaps the losingest coach in history - offers the best quote ever and makes the Poz really laugh.
The Onion takes on the New Orleans Saints and ESPN in one fell swoop.
You may not be surprised to learn that Ralph Nader is taking none-too-kindly to the misrepresentations of Mr. Howard Zinn that are flying around.
While we're at it, here's a Counterpunch from before the election (yeah, over 15 months ago). Matt Gonzalez - who was Nader's running-mate in 2008 - showing why he was almost Mayor of San Francisco (he's quite bright).
Fangraphs is breaking new ground in the Sabermetrics world, again. This first assay is imperfect, but the potential is tremendous.
Finally, let's close with George Siemens and his thoughts on the need for more meaningful innovation in education. To hell with "the System!"
Saturday, February 6, 2010
What's the Problem?
Kumu Keahi, a friend and teacher in Honolulu, gives a lesson to his students about his "Problem-Solution Algorithm-Matrix." I'm not sure exactly if I have the hyphens in the correct places, but you get the idea. The goals of this lesson are many, but the most important bit is the end, where he implores students to be leaders because it is leaders who act, rather than simply sitting back and arguing or contemplating forever.
Keahi says there are five steps to problem solving, and ties each to a level of thinking and development. The steps are as follows:
1) Recognize that there is a problem - "This is something even a cockroach can do," Keahi says. "You turn on the light, and the cockroach says, 'whoa, that's a problem,' and scurries into the corner."
2) Identify the problem and its source - This is, as I recall, high school-level thinking. More on that in a second.
3) Enumerate possible solutions - This, Keahi says, is more college-level thinking.
4) Select a solution - You can see where this is going; this is graduate school-level thinking.
5) Act - Here, of course, is where Keahi springs the leader bit on his students. Those previous levels do not mean that you need to go to grad school, because leaders are the most important thing.
I don't think Keahi means to insinuate that we should act without doing a good job identifying problems or selecting solutions, because it is something of a truism that action without reflection or strategy often results in making things worse. It is no accident, too, that educated people often struggle to act, because one of the marks of education is a recognition that simple solutions - solutions that are easy to act upon - often have unintended consequences. A simple example would be the standards movement in education: standards were designed as a way to make sure every student was reaching a certain baseline of knowledge. The real outcome, however, has been a high-stakes, test-based system that reinforces socio-economic boundaries rather than blurs them. That was never the intent, but it has been the outcome.
While I think Keahi's lesson is quite valuable for teenagers, I'm not convinced the problem-solving process is actually so linear (nor am I convinced that Keahi would claim it is). The second step, in particular, is trickier than it seems. Identifying the problem is a matter of much nuance and skill, and in fact failure to so properly is the cause of many failed solutions.
The "d.school" at Stanford believes in user-centered design, and emphasizes identifying the problem, not by simply contemplating, but by asking users. One might cynically suggest that this kind of design thinking leads to "discovering" problems that don't really exist (consider the Snuggy, or any other infomercial product) by mis-emphasizing needs,* but on the whole it's a fairly good system. There's a certain attractive subtlety in asking users what they want, and then comparing their words with their actions and emotions to determine their needs.
* What I mean is, it's easy to watch someone with a blanket and decide that they really don't want to get out from under it when answering the phone. Indeed, the person might even be able - with prompting - to articulate this need. More interesting, however, are the unarticulated needs that are perhaps subtler and larger-scale. I believe the d.school would be interested, not in reinventing the blanket, but in reinventing the phone. But I don't really know. Either way, you can see that defining the problem here is tricky; which is why it is treacherous to let marketing decide the problem for you.
User-centered design, however, does not always work in education. Indeed, formal education would not exist if the "users" (students) could articulate their needs. Educators believe, by necessity, that they not only have material that students need to learn, but that the students will not be able to identify what that material is on their own. That might sound draconian, but think of it this way: what second grader would choose, of his own free will, to learn to read, to write, to do arithmetic, and to share? Perhaps those things would come naturally by contact with a literary, mathematical, and socially complex culture. But perhaps not.
As we get further along - as students are given more choice in the form of "elective" classes - there remains an external push for students to continue taking math, English, foreign language, and - in some blessed schools - art and athletics courses. While much could be said about how those courses fail, it seems fair enough to say that educators as a whole have a better sense of how important those subjects are to future happiness and success. From the other perspective, there are many students who wish they'd paid more attention in Spanish class. There's a certain irony here: students only realize how much teachers have their best interests in mind after they're out of school. Regardless, there seems to be general agreement that teachers can identify the problems of education better than the "users" can.
The contrarian in me, however, wants to point out that this has lead to an under-emphasis on student opinion. A great deal of education research and policy concerns teacher practices, administrator opinions, community biases, impersonal standards, and parent involvement. Where, in all of that, are the kids? User-centered doesn't have to mean students know what they need to learn. It could, alternatively, mean that students have a good sense of why they aren't learning. Indeed, they might have more to say about themselves than tests ever could.
The challenge, here, is that students have a hard time articulating what they dislike about school. What's the problem? School sucks. That's not a good dialogue. Rare is the researcher who, like Dr. Denise Pope at Stanford, decides to follow students around and comes up with a mutually agreeable conclusion.
Pope's Doing School highlights one of the great many problems in education - and this is the bigger issue; there is never only one problem. Where much research focuses on what's wrong, Pope's research question was the opposite: what's going right at good schools, and with good students? She followed around five students over the course of the year, shadowing, doing interviews, and avoiding teachers, parents, and administrators. She wanted the student perspective, and she got it.
What did she get? Well, she went in trying to find out what was right, but she saw instead something deeply wrong. All of these "excellent students" she followed were unhealthy and unhappy. They cheated. They competed mercilessly with their classmates. They never actually remembered the material they were meant to be learning. They were, in short, "doing school."
In a competitive education system, it's easy to look at the people who fail. Competition necessitates failure,* and it is easy to see the racial and economic biases that predict that failure. Many education researchers and reformers, therefore, target the failing schools. What they ignore is the successful schools and successful students where, as Pope discovered, students are miserable, and not learning a thing.
* And don't you forget it. A great deal of hand-wrangling is done over "failing schools." Standardized tests are designed to produce a curve. Schools, in short, are supposed to fail. Either policy-makers who make a big deal of this are very clever, ignorant, or both.
I know, I know. Poor kids! They aren't happy! But they still get to go to Harvard and Yale and make a good living when they're older. Ah, but that's the issue, really. They are not really being prepared to succeed later in life. While there is perhaps some corporate value to employees who know how to "do school," there is also value in students who love to learn. Indeed, beating the love of learning out of students - teaching stress, frustration, and cheating instead - produces future employees who don't know how to work together, who are wary of each other's success instead of doing good work themselves, and who are afraid to be creative and take risks for fear of losing their secure spot. Companies across the country are complaining that there aren't enough good employees graduating from America's schools, despite the fact that school admissions are getting more and more competitive. So how do we define the problem?
I've looked at one particular issue here, but hopefully you can see how this is much broader. In any social structure there are almost always problems, but defining those problems can be very difficult. Indeed, there are often contradictory problems at play, or problems that are contingent upon a certain ideology (for example, the price of health care might seem a problem to one person but not to another, depending on ideology).
At the moment, I am meant to be identifying a "learning problem" to design a solution around for my Master's project. This, I'm finding, is a terribly complicated process. There are so many problems, many of which interrelated, that it makes narrowing difficult. I'm not worried about finding something - indeed I can see a great many small-scale things I could work on - but I am worried that whatever I do settle on will be either too broad or too narrow. I feel I need, more than anything, a broader sense. While I might articulate a small, sub-problem, I still need to define the big problem that most motivates me, and I find myself vacillating on that issue continuously. I might as well ask why I am in education at all. My answer is to multitudinous to define in a sentence.
The burden of complexity is that it is, well, complicated. "What is the problem?" is too simple a question.
Keahi says there are five steps to problem solving, and ties each to a level of thinking and development. The steps are as follows:
1) Recognize that there is a problem - "This is something even a cockroach can do," Keahi says. "You turn on the light, and the cockroach says, 'whoa, that's a problem,' and scurries into the corner."
2) Identify the problem and its source - This is, as I recall, high school-level thinking. More on that in a second.
3) Enumerate possible solutions - This, Keahi says, is more college-level thinking.
4) Select a solution - You can see where this is going; this is graduate school-level thinking.
5) Act - Here, of course, is where Keahi springs the leader bit on his students. Those previous levels do not mean that you need to go to grad school, because leaders are the most important thing.
I don't think Keahi means to insinuate that we should act without doing a good job identifying problems or selecting solutions, because it is something of a truism that action without reflection or strategy often results in making things worse. It is no accident, too, that educated people often struggle to act, because one of the marks of education is a recognition that simple solutions - solutions that are easy to act upon - often have unintended consequences. A simple example would be the standards movement in education: standards were designed as a way to make sure every student was reaching a certain baseline of knowledge. The real outcome, however, has been a high-stakes, test-based system that reinforces socio-economic boundaries rather than blurs them. That was never the intent, but it has been the outcome.
While I think Keahi's lesson is quite valuable for teenagers, I'm not convinced the problem-solving process is actually so linear (nor am I convinced that Keahi would claim it is). The second step, in particular, is trickier than it seems. Identifying the problem is a matter of much nuance and skill, and in fact failure to so properly is the cause of many failed solutions.
The "d.school" at Stanford believes in user-centered design, and emphasizes identifying the problem, not by simply contemplating, but by asking users. One might cynically suggest that this kind of design thinking leads to "discovering" problems that don't really exist (consider the Snuggy, or any other infomercial product) by mis-emphasizing needs,* but on the whole it's a fairly good system. There's a certain attractive subtlety in asking users what they want, and then comparing their words with their actions and emotions to determine their needs.
* What I mean is, it's easy to watch someone with a blanket and decide that they really don't want to get out from under it when answering the phone. Indeed, the person might even be able - with prompting - to articulate this need. More interesting, however, are the unarticulated needs that are perhaps subtler and larger-scale. I believe the d.school would be interested, not in reinventing the blanket, but in reinventing the phone. But I don't really know. Either way, you can see that defining the problem here is tricky; which is why it is treacherous to let marketing decide the problem for you.
User-centered design, however, does not always work in education. Indeed, formal education would not exist if the "users" (students) could articulate their needs. Educators believe, by necessity, that they not only have material that students need to learn, but that the students will not be able to identify what that material is on their own. That might sound draconian, but think of it this way: what second grader would choose, of his own free will, to learn to read, to write, to do arithmetic, and to share? Perhaps those things would come naturally by contact with a literary, mathematical, and socially complex culture. But perhaps not.
As we get further along - as students are given more choice in the form of "elective" classes - there remains an external push for students to continue taking math, English, foreign language, and - in some blessed schools - art and athletics courses. While much could be said about how those courses fail, it seems fair enough to say that educators as a whole have a better sense of how important those subjects are to future happiness and success. From the other perspective, there are many students who wish they'd paid more attention in Spanish class. There's a certain irony here: students only realize how much teachers have their best interests in mind after they're out of school. Regardless, there seems to be general agreement that teachers can identify the problems of education better than the "users" can.
The contrarian in me, however, wants to point out that this has lead to an under-emphasis on student opinion. A great deal of education research and policy concerns teacher practices, administrator opinions, community biases, impersonal standards, and parent involvement. Where, in all of that, are the kids? User-centered doesn't have to mean students know what they need to learn. It could, alternatively, mean that students have a good sense of why they aren't learning. Indeed, they might have more to say about themselves than tests ever could.
The challenge, here, is that students have a hard time articulating what they dislike about school. What's the problem? School sucks. That's not a good dialogue. Rare is the researcher who, like Dr. Denise Pope at Stanford, decides to follow students around and comes up with a mutually agreeable conclusion.
Pope's Doing School highlights one of the great many problems in education - and this is the bigger issue; there is never only one problem. Where much research focuses on what's wrong, Pope's research question was the opposite: what's going right at good schools, and with good students? She followed around five students over the course of the year, shadowing, doing interviews, and avoiding teachers, parents, and administrators. She wanted the student perspective, and she got it.
What did she get? Well, she went in trying to find out what was right, but she saw instead something deeply wrong. All of these "excellent students" she followed were unhealthy and unhappy. They cheated. They competed mercilessly with their classmates. They never actually remembered the material they were meant to be learning. They were, in short, "doing school."
In a competitive education system, it's easy to look at the people who fail. Competition necessitates failure,* and it is easy to see the racial and economic biases that predict that failure. Many education researchers and reformers, therefore, target the failing schools. What they ignore is the successful schools and successful students where, as Pope discovered, students are miserable, and not learning a thing.
* And don't you forget it. A great deal of hand-wrangling is done over "failing schools." Standardized tests are designed to produce a curve. Schools, in short, are supposed to fail. Either policy-makers who make a big deal of this are very clever, ignorant, or both.
I know, I know. Poor kids! They aren't happy! But they still get to go to Harvard and Yale and make a good living when they're older. Ah, but that's the issue, really. They are not really being prepared to succeed later in life. While there is perhaps some corporate value to employees who know how to "do school," there is also value in students who love to learn. Indeed, beating the love of learning out of students - teaching stress, frustration, and cheating instead - produces future employees who don't know how to work together, who are wary of each other's success instead of doing good work themselves, and who are afraid to be creative and take risks for fear of losing their secure spot. Companies across the country are complaining that there aren't enough good employees graduating from America's schools, despite the fact that school admissions are getting more and more competitive. So how do we define the problem?
I've looked at one particular issue here, but hopefully you can see how this is much broader. In any social structure there are almost always problems, but defining those problems can be very difficult. Indeed, there are often contradictory problems at play, or problems that are contingent upon a certain ideology (for example, the price of health care might seem a problem to one person but not to another, depending on ideology).
At the moment, I am meant to be identifying a "learning problem" to design a solution around for my Master's project. This, I'm finding, is a terribly complicated process. There are so many problems, many of which interrelated, that it makes narrowing difficult. I'm not worried about finding something - indeed I can see a great many small-scale things I could work on - but I am worried that whatever I do settle on will be either too broad or too narrow. I feel I need, more than anything, a broader sense. While I might articulate a small, sub-problem, I still need to define the big problem that most motivates me, and I find myself vacillating on that issue continuously. I might as well ask why I am in education at all. My answer is to multitudinous to define in a sentence.
The burden of complexity is that it is, well, complicated. "What is the problem?" is too simple a question.
Friday, February 5, 2010
Basketball and Soccer
Fresh off of watching the Denver Nuggets dismantle the Los Angeles Lakers (in Los Angeles, without Carmelo Anthony), 126-113, I want to talk a little about two sports that I find oddly similar. Neither is my favorite - baseball has no equal, to my mind - but both nonetheless have a certain gracefulness that baseball lacks. Baseball, after all, is a sport organized around some confluence of poetry and mathematics, instinct and strategy, individual competition and team coordination. Those things exist in other sports, too, but in baseball events happen discretely, and are therefore measured with a precision unequaled in any other sport.
Ahem. I'm trying not to get sidetracked.
The object of both soccer and basketball is to score by putting a round ball into a goal. Of course, in soccer there is a goalie protecting a goal that is quite large, and it is not uncommon for neither team to score over the course of a whole 90 minute match. Basketball, on the other hand, is prone to scores like 126-113, especially because each basket is worth 2 or 3 points, instead of just the one.
Nevertheless, the essential similarity is this: both games involve a great deal of dribbling and passing, with nuanced offensive and defensive systems designed to allow players to take a good, high-percentage shot. Both games require tremendous stamina, because they involve running - and often sprinting - back and forth almost continuously.
Ultimately, the biggest difference between the games is scale. Soccer is an epic game, a kind of war of attrition, requiring stamina and focus, and, at the decisive moment, sudden speed and agility. A team might spend the better part of a half-hour wearing down at their opponents, trying a pass from the flank or working through the center of the field (pitch, as they call it in England), only to see each attack thwarted by a well-organized defense. Finally, when someone makes a mistake, they might get a real chance to score, but even then a striker must maintain his composure, or else see the goalie turn away his shot.
Basketball, by contrast, is an explosive (and, in a very real sense, American) game. It is about quickfire scoring, jumping and sprinting, steals and hard fouls. The clock stops in basketball - unlike in soccer - but only just (unless the game is on national TV, in which case it stops for needlessly long commercial breaks). On the whole, it is speed and agility not at select moments, but always, with stamina and focus coming into play as the game wears on. Whereas in soccer you might ask, who will have the speed and agility to break free at the pivotal moment (taking stamina and focus for granted), in basketball you would ask, who will have the stamina and focus to come through in the final quarter, when the game is truly decided.
It is worth noting that, especially at high levels, soccer is also a game decided in the last "quarter." The final 15 minutes of a soccer match see the most intense play, and often the most goals. Some teams, indeed, are organized around this principle: play slow and conservative for 75 minutes, try to keep the score at 0-0, then explode at the end (after making your substitutions) to secure the win. Many basketball teams play in a similar style, though of course such a strategy has an obvious foil. Consider the Cleveland Cavaliers last season, who often rested LeBron James late in the game because of the tremendous leads they managed to gain in the first three quarters.
You could also say that both games share similar drawbacks. Officiating is notoriously difficult in both sports, and is therefore the subject of much grumbling among fans. On a related note, players from both sports have acquired a reputation for complaining and over-exaggerating potential fouls in order to get calls in their favor. The reason, in both sports, that this practice is so widespread is its effectiveness; in sports where officiating is difficult, it pays to be a good actor and "help" the officials get the call right.
Is there anything to make of these similarities? Probably not. More than anything, it helps to explain why basketball has internationalized so well. It is not absurd to say that basketball is the second most popular sport internationally (behind soccer). While there is not the diffusion of talent in basketball that there is in European soccer - or even in baseball, where excellent leagues exist in Japan and South America - countries around the world, and especially in Europe, have embraced basketball.
It is somewhat surprising, then, that soccer has not infiltrated the United States. Of course, to many Americans it is "boring" and "slow." It is not American Football, after all, with 11 minutes of action during a 4 hour game...
Sarcasm aside, soccer is a subtle sport, but, more than anything, it is a difficult sport to advertise during. That, more than anything, has kept it out of the American mainstream. American sports thrive on the commercial break, and any watcher of the Beautiful Game knows that the commercial break is taboo during a soccer match. As a result almost every European team wears sponsorships directly on their jerseys - something American sports fans roundly reject. Really, it's just a cultural difference, but it has helped keep soccer off the airwaves in America. That, and the awkward time difference between here and any of the major leagues (the MLS is not a major league).
Soccer has made inroads, however, just as basketball has made inroads into Europe. The United States national team made the quarterfinals of the 2002 World Cup. Just last year they defeated world #1 Spain in the Confederations Cup. This June, they find themselves in a very winnable group in South Africa, joined by Slovenia, Algeria, and England.
Which is the really exciting thing. Come June 12, the World Cup will kick off for USA soccer with a match against England, their first World Cup head-to-head since the USA pulled off a huge upset in 1950. Needless to say, this is a huge match for USA soccer. Even if you're not a soccer fan, I recommend putting down the date. Think of it as a really long basketball game, without the clock stoppages and commercials, and with a much bigger - but harder to score on - goal.
Ahem. I'm trying not to get sidetracked.
The object of both soccer and basketball is to score by putting a round ball into a goal. Of course, in soccer there is a goalie protecting a goal that is quite large, and it is not uncommon for neither team to score over the course of a whole 90 minute match. Basketball, on the other hand, is prone to scores like 126-113, especially because each basket is worth 2 or 3 points, instead of just the one.
Nevertheless, the essential similarity is this: both games involve a great deal of dribbling and passing, with nuanced offensive and defensive systems designed to allow players to take a good, high-percentage shot. Both games require tremendous stamina, because they involve running - and often sprinting - back and forth almost continuously.
Ultimately, the biggest difference between the games is scale. Soccer is an epic game, a kind of war of attrition, requiring stamina and focus, and, at the decisive moment, sudden speed and agility. A team might spend the better part of a half-hour wearing down at their opponents, trying a pass from the flank or working through the center of the field (pitch, as they call it in England), only to see each attack thwarted by a well-organized defense. Finally, when someone makes a mistake, they might get a real chance to score, but even then a striker must maintain his composure, or else see the goalie turn away his shot.
Basketball, by contrast, is an explosive (and, in a very real sense, American) game. It is about quickfire scoring, jumping and sprinting, steals and hard fouls. The clock stops in basketball - unlike in soccer - but only just (unless the game is on national TV, in which case it stops for needlessly long commercial breaks). On the whole, it is speed and agility not at select moments, but always, with stamina and focus coming into play as the game wears on. Whereas in soccer you might ask, who will have the speed and agility to break free at the pivotal moment (taking stamina and focus for granted), in basketball you would ask, who will have the stamina and focus to come through in the final quarter, when the game is truly decided.
It is worth noting that, especially at high levels, soccer is also a game decided in the last "quarter." The final 15 minutes of a soccer match see the most intense play, and often the most goals. Some teams, indeed, are organized around this principle: play slow and conservative for 75 minutes, try to keep the score at 0-0, then explode at the end (after making your substitutions) to secure the win. Many basketball teams play in a similar style, though of course such a strategy has an obvious foil. Consider the Cleveland Cavaliers last season, who often rested LeBron James late in the game because of the tremendous leads they managed to gain in the first three quarters.
You could also say that both games share similar drawbacks. Officiating is notoriously difficult in both sports, and is therefore the subject of much grumbling among fans. On a related note, players from both sports have acquired a reputation for complaining and over-exaggerating potential fouls in order to get calls in their favor. The reason, in both sports, that this practice is so widespread is its effectiveness; in sports where officiating is difficult, it pays to be a good actor and "help" the officials get the call right.
Is there anything to make of these similarities? Probably not. More than anything, it helps to explain why basketball has internationalized so well. It is not absurd to say that basketball is the second most popular sport internationally (behind soccer). While there is not the diffusion of talent in basketball that there is in European soccer - or even in baseball, where excellent leagues exist in Japan and South America - countries around the world, and especially in Europe, have embraced basketball.
It is somewhat surprising, then, that soccer has not infiltrated the United States. Of course, to many Americans it is "boring" and "slow." It is not American Football, after all, with 11 minutes of action during a 4 hour game...
Sarcasm aside, soccer is a subtle sport, but, more than anything, it is a difficult sport to advertise during. That, more than anything, has kept it out of the American mainstream. American sports thrive on the commercial break, and any watcher of the Beautiful Game knows that the commercial break is taboo during a soccer match. As a result almost every European team wears sponsorships directly on their jerseys - something American sports fans roundly reject. Really, it's just a cultural difference, but it has helped keep soccer off the airwaves in America. That, and the awkward time difference between here and any of the major leagues (the MLS is not a major league).
Soccer has made inroads, however, just as basketball has made inroads into Europe. The United States national team made the quarterfinals of the 2002 World Cup. Just last year they defeated world #1 Spain in the Confederations Cup. This June, they find themselves in a very winnable group in South Africa, joined by Slovenia, Algeria, and England.
Which is the really exciting thing. Come June 12, the World Cup will kick off for USA soccer with a match against England, their first World Cup head-to-head since the USA pulled off a huge upset in 1950. Needless to say, this is a huge match for USA soccer. Even if you're not a soccer fan, I recommend putting down the date. Think of it as a really long basketball game, without the clock stoppages and commercials, and with a much bigger - but harder to score on - goal.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Leechfield, Texas
The following is a short "position paper" from my Biography and Life Writing class (about which I may say more, later). It's about Mary Karr's The Liar's Club, an excellent and disturbing true-story of a childhood in 1960's East Texas. I will warn that the paper may not make much sense if you haven't read the book, but perhaps it will serve as a motivation to that end.
At the top of the page: Texas, 1961; Colorado, 1963; Texas Again, 1980, as if those places and dates were sufficient to mark the events of The Liar's Club. The gruesome humor of a Leechfield afternoon, the irony of a Colorado mountain town standing in for New York... How else could these be described? Perhaps every book is, ultimately, the product of the culture – or the confluence of cultures – by which its author has been shaped, but it is at least somewhat surprising that the horrid Leechfield from which Mary Karr issues could be midwife to any literary impetus. It seems the stuff of stories, not the maker of them. Perhaps it is appropriate, then, that there is no Leechfield, Texas on the map.
Recalling her grandmother's (celebrated, at the time) death, Karr writes, “Something in me had died when Grandma had, and while I didn't miss her one iota, I keenly felt the loss of my own trust in the world's order” (106). The death of a close relative is common enough for a girl of seven to confront, and this quotation is obviously the reflection of an older woman who understands the innate, chaotic frustration of such a death. But this seven year old witnesses, too, her mother's insanity – both as she nearly drives off a bridge during a hurricane, and as she “set fire to the whole world” (245) and threatens her daughters with a butcher knife – and is the victim of an unreported and, to her seven-year-old self, inexpressible, rape. Nevertheless, Grandma's death occupies so much retrospective narrative, whether as a way of explaining the bonfire to follow or on its own merit as another in a string of insupportable experiences.
Karr follows the above passage with this: “Leechfield itself would make you think that way – the landscape, I mean. You needed to watch out for the natural world down there, to defend yourself against it” (106). Of all the descriptions we have of Leechfield – as one of the certifiably ugliest places on Earth, as “one of the blackest squares on the world cancer map” (293), as the home, almost by necessity, of the Liar's Club – it is this Darwinian, animal reality that is most at the core of Karr's childhood. Almost all of what lives in Leechfield is poisonous, as if only the poisonous could survive. Losing trust in the world's order, as Karr puts it, is almost inevitable in a place so naturally disordered. When a gun is an essential part of life solely for protection from the litany of dangerous wildlife running about, it's a wonder there's not more Nervous going around. Add in muggy swamp heat and the odd hurricane, and one sees how out-of-place Karr's Yankee mother – who wants to identify herself above all as a New Yorker – was in such a home.
What is the role of culture in forming a personality, or – perhaps synonymously – a neurosis? For Karr, the East Texas twang, “fixing to” get things done, or lying as a matter of course becomes embedded into her self. The humor of awful she carries around like a stoic, and where anger does float to the surface of her narrative, it feels almost incidental to the mere fact of telling a story. That, it seems, is the essence of the Leechfield culture she is undeniably a member of. Though on the fringes of what is tenable for the nuclear family (even in Leechfield, the Karrs are Not Right), the conditions for insanity are an inescapable part of the Leechfield society, from the climate to the rubber-necking neighbors.
That Karr changes the name of her home is unsurprising, given her father-trained penchant for storytelling. Her words on the vignette she developed to describe her Grandma's death apply equally here, as throughout the book: “It's a clear case of language standing in for reality” (48). Leechfield, the very name, truly does “stand in” for the squalid reality of whatever her hometown actually was called. In some sense, Leechfield stands above whatever that real name is, being too perfect a descriptor to pass up. The stuff of stories.
What backwards fairy-tales, then, issue from Leechfield? If people are the product of their cultures, what culture acquired a young Mary Karr? A liar's culture, we might say, or a survivor's culture (certainly a quality her sister Lecia adopts). Or, perhaps encompassing both of those, a blue-collar, union-man culture. A culture of Nervous and Not Right, we might also say, or a culture of alcohol. Finally, we might very well call it a literary culture, not because it is the cradle of any Nabokovian eloquence – he would be more out-of-place than Mother by a long shot – but because it has an eloquence all its own, bordering on Homeric in emotion. Sing, Goddess, of the ate of Mother.
Yet this is no epic poem, no glorification of Fate and War and Death. There are capital letters here, still, to be sure, but they dot more mundane words. There is a rhythm to the language, too, but it is not the dramatic meter of poetry. One is tempted to call it more human, but that's an empty phrase, because the epic poem is also human. Rather, Karr's Liar's Club is unequivocally modern, and Texan. The catharsis here is not the archetypal vision of the fall of a social better, but rather it is the personal reflection turned into a liberation. One can only imagine writing in such vivid detail of Charlotte's Web turned to a pedophile's blow job.
It is the lies and the humor and the horror of Leechfield (a place the family can't help but carry with them to Colorado) that make it so story-worthy, so able to turn from whatever its dull Texas name really is into something more superlative. And why not? The ugly, swampy reality of such a place might not seem worthy of note, but that such cultures exist reaffirms the need for fiction in all its guises.
At the top of the page: Texas, 1961; Colorado, 1963; Texas Again, 1980, as if those places and dates were sufficient to mark the events of The Liar's Club. The gruesome humor of a Leechfield afternoon, the irony of a Colorado mountain town standing in for New York... How else could these be described? Perhaps every book is, ultimately, the product of the culture – or the confluence of cultures – by which its author has been shaped, but it is at least somewhat surprising that the horrid Leechfield from which Mary Karr issues could be midwife to any literary impetus. It seems the stuff of stories, not the maker of them. Perhaps it is appropriate, then, that there is no Leechfield, Texas on the map.
Recalling her grandmother's (celebrated, at the time) death, Karr writes, “Something in me had died when Grandma had, and while I didn't miss her one iota, I keenly felt the loss of my own trust in the world's order” (106). The death of a close relative is common enough for a girl of seven to confront, and this quotation is obviously the reflection of an older woman who understands the innate, chaotic frustration of such a death. But this seven year old witnesses, too, her mother's insanity – both as she nearly drives off a bridge during a hurricane, and as she “set fire to the whole world” (245) and threatens her daughters with a butcher knife – and is the victim of an unreported and, to her seven-year-old self, inexpressible, rape. Nevertheless, Grandma's death occupies so much retrospective narrative, whether as a way of explaining the bonfire to follow or on its own merit as another in a string of insupportable experiences.
Karr follows the above passage with this: “Leechfield itself would make you think that way – the landscape, I mean. You needed to watch out for the natural world down there, to defend yourself against it” (106). Of all the descriptions we have of Leechfield – as one of the certifiably ugliest places on Earth, as “one of the blackest squares on the world cancer map” (293), as the home, almost by necessity, of the Liar's Club – it is this Darwinian, animal reality that is most at the core of Karr's childhood. Almost all of what lives in Leechfield is poisonous, as if only the poisonous could survive. Losing trust in the world's order, as Karr puts it, is almost inevitable in a place so naturally disordered. When a gun is an essential part of life solely for protection from the litany of dangerous wildlife running about, it's a wonder there's not more Nervous going around. Add in muggy swamp heat and the odd hurricane, and one sees how out-of-place Karr's Yankee mother – who wants to identify herself above all as a New Yorker – was in such a home.
What is the role of culture in forming a personality, or – perhaps synonymously – a neurosis? For Karr, the East Texas twang, “fixing to” get things done, or lying as a matter of course becomes embedded into her self. The humor of awful she carries around like a stoic, and where anger does float to the surface of her narrative, it feels almost incidental to the mere fact of telling a story. That, it seems, is the essence of the Leechfield culture she is undeniably a member of. Though on the fringes of what is tenable for the nuclear family (even in Leechfield, the Karrs are Not Right), the conditions for insanity are an inescapable part of the Leechfield society, from the climate to the rubber-necking neighbors.
That Karr changes the name of her home is unsurprising, given her father-trained penchant for storytelling. Her words on the vignette she developed to describe her Grandma's death apply equally here, as throughout the book: “It's a clear case of language standing in for reality” (48). Leechfield, the very name, truly does “stand in” for the squalid reality of whatever her hometown actually was called. In some sense, Leechfield stands above whatever that real name is, being too perfect a descriptor to pass up. The stuff of stories.
What backwards fairy-tales, then, issue from Leechfield? If people are the product of their cultures, what culture acquired a young Mary Karr? A liar's culture, we might say, or a survivor's culture (certainly a quality her sister Lecia adopts). Or, perhaps encompassing both of those, a blue-collar, union-man culture. A culture of Nervous and Not Right, we might also say, or a culture of alcohol. Finally, we might very well call it a literary culture, not because it is the cradle of any Nabokovian eloquence – he would be more out-of-place than Mother by a long shot – but because it has an eloquence all its own, bordering on Homeric in emotion. Sing, Goddess, of the ate of Mother.
Yet this is no epic poem, no glorification of Fate and War and Death. There are capital letters here, still, to be sure, but they dot more mundane words. There is a rhythm to the language, too, but it is not the dramatic meter of poetry. One is tempted to call it more human, but that's an empty phrase, because the epic poem is also human. Rather, Karr's Liar's Club is unequivocally modern, and Texan. The catharsis here is not the archetypal vision of the fall of a social better, but rather it is the personal reflection turned into a liberation. One can only imagine writing in such vivid detail of Charlotte's Web turned to a pedophile's blow job.
It is the lies and the humor and the horror of Leechfield (a place the family can't help but carry with them to Colorado) that make it so story-worthy, so able to turn from whatever its dull Texas name really is into something more superlative. And why not? The ugly, swampy reality of such a place might not seem worthy of note, but that such cultures exist reaffirms the need for fiction in all its guises.
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