Everything's a Lesson

Now if I have to describe one of my relatives, it would definitely have to be my Grandpa Rob. In some ways he is the prototypical grandpa but in other ways he is so not. Just looking at him you would never be able to guess his age. He is approaching 80 but still looks like he is in his late 60's because he is physically fit and eats well. Before he broke his shoulder a few years ago he even competed in roller blading marathons in his 70's. He wears glasses, stands about five feet ten inches, and has pretty much no hair. He was in the military for a little while after college, and then he spent his life as a social studies teacher and swimming coach.
Now he is unlike most old people in that he travels the world. A few years ago he and my grandma went to Tunisia in Africa. The next year they toured Europe. The next year they went to Costa Rica. The next year they went to the southernmost tip of South America. My grandpa is always in search of a new adventure but sometimes I think it is all because he wants to tell his family about it when he gets home, and pull a deeper meaning out of it. My grandpa, forever a teacher, always has a story to tell and something to teach you. For any subject you are talking about he will search for something you don't know about it and then tell you about that thing. Trust me, he is really smart so he will find something you don't know. Good thing I like learning new things so I enjoy talking with my grandpa. Even today I had dinner with him and I was talking to him about the math team meet tonight. I said that I got a perfect score and Wayzata won the meet, and that St. Louis Park did poorly among other schools. He told me that St. Louis Park used to always win so I said "oh that's interesting". I then proceeded to learn about Russian immigration patterns and Jewish camps in Europe holding refugees before import quotas were lifted and about how the Russian families moved into St. Louis Park and highland and how the Russian families were in outrage that math and science wasn't taught until age 6 and how they dominated the math and science communities. Interesting right?
My grandpa is a very observant and confident person. He is easily the head of the family, and his decision is final on where we go to eat, who does what, anything, it has to be cleared with my grandpa if he is there. He is also one of those people who when you do something wrong he won't yell at you or punish you he will just acknowledge you, or say your name and be very calm about it but you know he is disappointed. For anybody who hasn't experienced that, it's the worst. But it impacts you much more than getting screamed at.
He also knows everyone's potential and knows how to pull it out of them. One example is how every time he asks me how something went, and I give my go to response, "good", he will say "Jordan, that is not an answer. Give me more." He has always been an intellectual person and he expects it from me, for me to reflect on the things I have done or have experienced rather than just experiencing them. My grandpa somehow understands what is best for everybody and is not afraid to let everyone know that he knows that, which I love about him. I love how he breaks off onto tangents and teaches me new things every time I am with him. I am thankful for my grandpa, the way he looks at life, everything he has taught me, and everything he has yet to teach me.

The Last Turkey Day: 2012, but not actually

Oh Thanksgiving. What a great holiday. Family, Friends, Food, and Football. That's what life is really about isn't it? It's interesting in itself, a purely American tradition, gathering with the people we love to pig out and lounge around all day. There are also many interesting spins on tradition for each family and  ways that Thanksgiving brings us together.
My thanksgivings are always awesome to say the least. My family has a system where every other year we have thanksgiving with our normal extended family (grandpa and grandma, aunts and uncles, cousins) and the other years we have it with the whole family (add second cousins, great aunts, third cousins, you name it, anyone related is there). This year happened to be a normal family year which is a little less exciting but also nice because you know everyone really well. It also happened to be at my stepdad's house this year.
Side note: My parents were divorced when I was young and I always spend thanksgiving with my mom's family, who I will be referring to as my family. My mom also passed away two summers ago which is why I won't be mentioning her in my observations.
So, I woke up around 10:30 or so, got ready and went downstairs. My grandparents arrived at about the same time and went to work on the inner workings of the meal. The turkey was roasting in the crock pot, a new attempt at cooking the turkey which turned out very well I may add, the potatoes, mashed and sweet, were cooking, the green beans were cooking, the pita chips with cream cheese and jelly (delicious) were being laid out on the counter for pre-meal snackery, and the rolls were baking. While this was going on, my task was to entertain my seven year old brother, and yes we did play video games. We were locked in a timeless battle of Super Smash Brothers when the first of the two other families attending arrived.
Of course that meant we had to go upstairs and leave our game, but it would be finished later. My uncle Brent, oldest of my grandparents three kids, my aunt Katie, my cousin Alex, taking a gap year before going to medical school next year, and my cousin Ryan, in his second year at Denver University, all walked in the door. They actually would only stay for a half hour or so because they were hosting Katie's family for dinner, but they wanted to stop by and see everyone anyway. It was then that my cousins, Kaeden (my brother), Tony (my stepdad), and I began to play Apples to Apples, a fantastic game if I have ever played one. I think I probably played that for a total of 3 hours with Kaeden on Thanksgiving but it was still fun. It's interesting how the game plays out because for every group of cards played, the sexual answer always gets the biggest laugh, but it never wins because nobody wants to be "that guy" who picks it.
We continued to play that until the next family arrived. My uncle Chad, youngest of my grandparents' three kids, my aunt Kirsten, my cousin Kaj, 15, my cousin Tait, 13, and my cousin Ava, 7, walked in. Yes I know they have odd names. Then Brent, Katie, Alex, and Ryan said their hellos and goodbyes and left.
Chad brought in the corn, cranberries, rolls, and sparkling apple cider and the spread was complete. Then once the food was done we all gathered around and read an excerpt on being thankful, gathered our plates, and dug in. It was delicious and I ate so much! Then we also had ice cream and pumpkin pie afterward, but I don't like pumpkin pie after a vomiting episode a few years ago so I just ate ice cream. Then the kids retreated to the game room and the adults stayed in the kitchen and talked.

So for my family observations now.
Well my grandpa is clearly the head of the family and he makes all the decisions and runs the show. When someone wants to do something with the food, the furniture, the TV channel, they have to clear it by him first, and he is the one who calls the family together when everything is done. He is also a very smart man though so nobody questions the decisions he makes because they are pretty much always right.
Now my grandma is second in command and she does a lot of the cooking and organizing. She is also the one that spoke to the family and I remember what she said, it went something like this, "This Thanksgiving as we gather here let us not be thankful for the things that we have, but for the things we have lost." As she said this everyone in my family was thinking about my mother who was not with us, and how much we missed her. My grandma is very good with things like that, saying just the right amount to get everyone's minds and hearts in the right place.
My uncle Chad is very relaxed about everything and goes with the flow. Kind of funny considering that he is a swimming instructor, but he is very nice and helps out wherever he is needed.
Kirsten is also very nice, and she usually travels around talking to everyone and seeing how their day is going and seeing where any help is needed.
Tony is probably the nicest man I have ever met, and he always takes care of others before he takes care of himself. He is normally pretty passive but can be assertive when he needs to be and he always knows what to do to make someone else feel good.

I really like my family and everyone gets along well. We don't really have any characters, or clowns who are looking for a laugh or attention. Everyone is very nice and they are exactly the kind of family I want and I am very thankful to have them.

Comics aren't as funny when I analyze them

This comic is very humorous but also very true. It's arguing that these days our society is so obsessed with technology and caught up in being connected all the time that they can be completely oblivious to things going on around them. It's humorous because there should be no way that this could ever happen, but in a way I wouldn't be surprised if it did happen. People are very careless these days and almost every day I see someone on their phone walking and bumping into people or miss something exciting or important because they are too busy checking their messages. The comic is trying to argue that our society is too caught up with being eternally connected and that it is preventing them from actually knowing what is going on around them other than what their friends are posting online or sending them. It is a very similar argument to The Dumbest Generation, but instead of people overusing technology, getting dumb, and not being good citizens; the people are overusing technology, getting dumb, and making it ten times easier for criminals to steal things from them (physically or over the internet nowadays).


Now this comic was also hilarious but had a much lighter argument and tone toward it. In this comic the main character is trying to figure out something a girl said to him, but then just completely blows it off because it was a woman who said it to him and women and men are never on the same page. This takes it a little far but not overly far because it is actually very true. At least the part about how men will never understand women, and vice versa, is true. That is the argument that the author is trying to make, that women and men don't understand each other, but that men don't really care at all. The comic makes it humorous because in this case the woman is correct in judging the tie, but the man just treats it as any situation when a woman tells him something that he doesn't understand or agree with and just ignores it. I think this comic does a great job playing with the relationship between genders in our society, because "women!" pretty much sums up the way that many guys reflect on their interactions with the other sex.

Some People Like Progress...

-         

     Well, I am finally finished with reading "The Dumbest Generation" by Mark Bauerlein who basically spent 236 pages telling me that I am dumb. He does make a pretty interesting argument though that is extremely relevant to my generation and me.

      Bauerlein is arguing that the newest generation in America is drastically underachieving when it comes to their massive potential. He says that the powerful and helpful technology that we have today that has the potential to drive learning and knowledge gaining to a whole new level is simply serving to shorten our attention spans and sour our minds with instant  gratification. With everything available to us at the push of a button the youth today have no incentive to work or gain knowledge because if they really needed to know something it can be found in two seconds, and the social aspects of always being connected control the focus of kids that could be spent on building intelligence and becoming cultured. Bauerlein argues this by utilizing a vast number of statistics and polls to show how kids are reading less, spending more time “connected”, and not fulfilling their role in becoming a cultured citizen to further our society. During this however he also touches on how teachers are somewhat responsible for this trend, embracing the children’s attitude and going along with the decline in true learning. Bauerlein repeatedly argues that America’s youth are on the decline when it comes to intelligence and capabilities, and that with this lack of progress in intelligence to correspond to progress in technology, the future for America and its future leaders looks dim.

     

     One passage that I thought was really interesting was when Bauerlein explained some new data on the reading styles of youth:

   “A similar study of Web reading came out of Nielsen’s ‘Alertbox’ in April 2006 with the title ‘F-Shaped Pattern for Reading Web Content.’ Here the eyetracker picked up a curious movement in user scanning. ‘F for Fast,’ it opened. ‘That’s how users read your precious content. In a few seconds, their eyes move at amazing speeds across your website’s words in a pattern that’s very different from what you learned in school.’ The pattern looks like the capital letter F. At the top of the page, users read all the way across, but as they proceed their descent quickens and horizontal movement shortens, with a slowdown around the middle of the page. Near the bottom of the page, the eyes move almost vertically, forming the lower stem of the F shape.”

-pg 144

This passage was interesting to me because I had never really thought about it that much before, but I realized that it is completely true. Sometimes I find myself reading an article that I soon get bored with and begin scanning less and less across as I go down. I don't do this with school assignments but in the newspaper, definitely. Most of the things Bauerlein highlights in this book about students intellectual habits don't apply to me but this one did.

Another passage that I like from Bauerlein came toward the end as he was wrapping up his argument:

                         

“It isn’t funny anymore. The Dumbest Generation cares little for history books, civic principles, foreign affairs, comparative religions, and serious media and art, and it knows less. Careening through their formative years, they don’t catch the knowledge bug, and tradition might as well be a foreign word. Other things monopolize their attention—the allure of screens, peer absorption, career goals. They are latter-day Rip Van Winkles, sleeping through the movements of culture and events of history, preferring the company of peers to great books and powerful ideas and momentous happenings (. . .) Adolescence is always going to be more or less anti-intellectual (. . .) but the battle has never proven so uphill. Youth culture and youth society, fabulously autonomized by digital technology, swamp the intellectual pockets holding on against waves of pop culture and teen mores, and the Boomer mentors have lowered the bulwarks to surmountable heights (. . .) Books can’t hold their own with screen images,”

-pg 234

I thought this excerpt was very compelling because he stops showering the readers with statistics and gives the message to them straightforward. I also agreed with what he is saying because I see the trends in many of my peers. This passage was one of the most effective in getting me to agree with the author's argument.

There were some passages that I didn't really agree with such as one relating to rates in reading:

“As digital natives dive daily into three visual media and two sound sources as a matter of disposition, of deep mental compatibility, not just taste, ordinary reading, slow and uniform, strikes them as imcompatible, alien. It isn’t just boring and obsolete. It’s irritating. A Raymond Chandler novel takes too long, an Emily Dickinson poem wears them down. A history book requires too much contextual knowledge, and science facts come quicker through the Web than through A Brief History of Time. Bibliophobia is the syndrome. Technophiles cast the young media-savvy sensibility as open and flexible, and it is, as long as the media come through a screen or a speaker. But faced with 100 paper pages, the digital mind turns away. The bearers of e-literacy reject books the way eBay addicts reject bricks-and-mortar stores.”

-pg 95

I don't agree with the argument he is making in this section that my generation is worse off because we don't read as many books as previous generations. I think that the decision to look up something online in ten seconds rather than read a book searching for it is a very rational decision that is time efficient in our ever so valuable time. At least for me, as I am getting older I have been reading less and less not because reading isn't appealing to me, but because there is simply not enough time in the day.

Another passage that I didn't agree with had to do with what we can get out of technological advances:

"They do not pause to consider that screen experience may contain factors that cannot be overcome by better tools and better implementation. This is the possibility that digital enthusiasts must face before they peddle any more books on screen intelligence or commit $15 million to another classroom initiative (. . .) Digital natives are a restless group, and like all teens and young adults they are self-assertive and insecure, living in the moment but worrying over their future (. . .) It is time to examine clear-sightedly how their worse dispositions play out online, or in a game, or on a blog, or with the remote, the cell phone, or the handheld, and to recognize that their engagement with technology actually aggravates a few key and troubling tendencies."

-pg 126

I think that Bauerlein is trying to implicitly say that technological advancement is detrimental to our learning and I do not agree with that. I think that having so many more resources available to us enhances our learning experience if we choose to use them. Even if many people choose not to utilize them, it doesn't make them useless, it is the fault of the users and not the fault of the technology if intelligence gains to match the technological gains are not seen.

-          Overall, I think that Bauerlein makes a valid argument and his method of reasoning and explaining his argument is done relatively well, but his ways of persuading were not very appealing. At many times he just rambled on listing facts and cherrypicking statistics that are very real, but that only support his viewpoint and at some points overshadow the argument that he is actually trying to make. I did like the anecdote about Rip Van Winkle and the comparison to the youth today. He should have included more analogies like that to create a better understanding for the audience of what his argument is rather than just listing of pages and pages of facts that at many points the audience must analyze themselves. His argument is very valid and he uses credible data and logic to support his claims, but I think his method of arguing was not very effective because he relied much too heavily on cherrypicking statistics and outright criticizing the effects of technology on our society rather than truly analyzing the data provided and looking at the various perspectives surrounding it. Bauerlein makes a reasonable argument that may be true for the majority of my generation, but it is not for me so I can't buy into it. I also think he is unfair to the technological progress made in our society because he treats it like a bad thing, when I think it's exactly the opposite, and many people would agree.

     I remembered watching a video a few years ago on technological advancement in our society and the information age that is relevant to this topic so I decided to include it. It includes many statistics, some that could be used to support Bauerlein's argument and some that couldn't be, but the argument that it is making is simply that our society and its technology is advancing at an astounding rate that is only going to increase.

      

    I was also looking around at some websites that completely backup Bauerleins arguments of the stupidity and ignorance our my generation. I found a site with some RIDICULOUS facebook posts and they are hilarious. Check it out:

        Stupid Facebook Posts

Well, even though I am doing one of the things that is exactly what Bauerlein says is the bane of my generation, blogging on the internet, I know that I am one of the exceptions of my generation and I am going to continue to learn, to work hard, and to prove him wrong.