Advice on Parenting: Let Your Kids Fail

Tim Elmore with Students Who Have Learned to Dress the Part

Thought I’d come back from a somewhat extended paternity leave (more on that at some point) with a post about good and bad parenting. Over at the Huffington Post’s parenthood portal, Mickey Goodman asks if we are raising a generation of kids who are essentially helpless. As a professor here at Messiah College (and even when teaching in graduate school at Virginia Tech) I have experienced helicopter parents firsthand. My parents almost never stepped in to side with me against a professor or teacher. The only exception I can recall was when they got a teacher in junior high or early high school to bump my negative(!) quiz score up to a zero. I still managed an A for the marking period, so I wasn’t too scarred. Some of my students, however, seem to expect that either they or their parents can make any bad grade disappear. This doesn’t work with me, nor is that attitude likely to go over well on the job once they leave the academic world.

Goodman quotes Tim Elmore, who heads a company that attempts to help students self-motivate and prepare mentally for the “real world”, a world where success rarely comes overnight, they are not rewarded for showing up, and they are not excused for mistakes. Here are some of what Elmore thinks we get wrong, and how he suggests we fix it:

Where did we go wrong?

• We’ve told our kids to dream big – and now any small act seems insignificant. In the great scheme of things, kids can’t instantly change the world. They have to take small, first steps – which seem like no progress at all to them. Nothing short of instant fame is good enough. “It’s time we tell them that doing great things starts with accomplishing small goals,” he says.

• We’ve told our kids that they are special – for no reason, even though they didn’t display excellent character or skill, and now they demand special treatment. The problem is that kids assumed they didn’t have to do anything special in order to be special.

• We gave our kids every comfort – and now they can’t delay gratification. And we heard the message loud and clear. We, too, pace in front of the microwave, become angry when things don’t go our way at work, rage at traffic. “Now it’s time to relay the importance of waiting for the things we want, deferring to the wishes of others and surrendering personal desires in the pursuit of something bigger than ‘me,’” Elmore says.

• We made our kid’s happiness a central goal – and now it’s difficult for them to generate happiness — the by-product of living a meaningful life. “It’s time we tell them that our goal is to enable them to discover their gifts, passions and purposes in life so they can help others. Happiness comes as a result.”

The uncomfortable solutions:

“We need to let our kids fail at 12 – which is far better than at 42,” he says. “We need to tell them the truth (with grace) that the notion of ‘you can do anything you want’ is not necessarily true.”

Kids need to align their dreams with their gifts. Every girl with a lovely voice won’t sing at the Met; every Little League baseball star won’t play for the major leagues.

• Allow them to get into trouble and accept the consequences. It’s okay to make a “C-.” Next time, they’ll try harder to make an “A”.

• Balance autonomy with responsibility. If your son borrows the car, he also has to re-fill the tank.

• Collaborate with the teacher, but don’t do the work for your child. If he fails a test, let him take the consequences.

“We need to become velvet bricks,” Elmore says, “soft on the outside and hard on the inside and allow children to fail while they are young in order to succeed when they are adults.”

You can read the whole post here.

The Mathematics of the Game SET

The Cover Image for the Game SET

SET is an extremely addictive, fast-paced card game found in toy stores nationwide. Although children often beat adults, the game has a rich mathematical structure linking it to the combinatorics of finite affine and projective spaces and the theory of error-correcting codes. Last year an unexpected connection to Fourier analysis was used to settle a basic question directly related to the game of SET, and many related questions remain open.

So begins a recent paper on the elegant mathematics of the card game SET. For those of us who enjoy card games that require logic and quick thinking, rather than simply luch, and the mathematical beauty and surprising interconnectedness of different mathematical fields, this paper is interesting. Warning: you need a certain level of algebraic understanding to follow the paper (having had an algebraic structures course beyond “linear algebra” in college will help). The paper starts out by giving the background of the development of the game, and how it is played. Then the authors turn to problems of algebraic interest regarding the game and show how to answer some of these questions.

Personally, I love the game. I was introduced while visiting my graduate alma mater (Virginia Tech) by a former student here at Messiah College who was in graduate school at Tech. She introduced my wife and I to the game, and I fell in love. For those familiar with the game SET, or would like to try it out, it is available online here.

How to Save Some Energy

If only this blog was about napping, or some other personal energy saving technique. Alas, it is not. This is about a way to save some energy on your computer. A Virginia Tech computer scientist is now marketing a power management software called Granola that is free for personal use, and available for a fee for businesses and servers. I’ve installed it, and haven’t noticed any appreciable difference while it (claims) to be saving me about 20% of my energy usage. The website for the product claims that it can extend battery life on a laptop by up to 10% and desktops can cut energy use by 15-35%.

You can check out the software here, read more about it in a Business Week article here, and watch a video about it below.

Virginia Tech Researchers Study Youth Football

The Auburn Eagles, 6-8 year old boys from Montgomery County, VA

Researchers at my graduate Alma Mater, Virginia Tech, have been studying head traumas in youth football. Here is a bit from the article:

BLACKSBURG, Va., Oct. 18, 2011 – Virginia Tech released today results from the first study ever to instrument child football helmets. Youth football helmets are currently designed to the same standards as adult helmets, even though little is known about how child football players impact their heads. This is the first study to investigate the head impact characteristics in youth football, and will greatly enhance the development of improved helmets specifically designed for children.

The Auburn Eagles, a local, Montgomery County, Va., youth team consisting of 6- to 8-year-old boys, has participated in the study since August. The helmets of the child football players are instrumented with custom 12 accelerometer arrays that measure how a child’s head responds to impact. Each time a player impacts his head, data is recorded and wirelessly downloaded to a computer on the sideline.

The technology is similar to what Virginia Tech has used since 2003 to instrument its collegiate football team. “The research conducted with the Virginia Tech football team has led to a better understanding of head impacts in football and how they relate to concussions,” said Stefan Duma, the Virginia Tech professor of biomedical engineering and department head of the Virginia Tech – Wake Forest University School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences that directs this project.

Furthermore, this research has led to the development of the National Impact Database, which contains the first safety rating system ever available for adult football helmets (STAR Evaluation System). Similar developments for youth football are anticipated from the current study with the Auburn Eagles.

“Based on eight years of studying head impacts experienced by Virginia Tech football players, we were able to quantify exposure for adult football players relative to impact location, severity, and frequency,” Duma said. “Unfortunately, we cannot translate the adult exposure to the youth helmets because the impact conditions of youth football are completely unknown. To solve this problem, we are applying the same approach that we have used with the Virginia Tech football team to a youth football team,” Duma added.

You can read the rest here. I’m interested in seeing where this research leads. Concerns about unnecessary head trauma is part of our reasoning for not encouraging our kids to consider sports like football or hockey for their activities. This is definitely a study/story to watch over the next few months/years.

Thoughts from (Last Week’s) TMQ

A little behind on my reading of Gregg Easterbrook’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback column on ESPN.com, so just getting to the entirety of last week’s TMQ. The football pieces are old news now, but here are my favorite non-NFL pieces (find the whole thing here):

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On New York Times corrections:

New York Times Corrections on Fast-Forward: In recent months, the Multicolored Lady has run these corrections:

• Describing the Volt hybrid car, the Times wrote that if its battery runs down, “an electric motor provides backup charging.” What would drive the electric motor if the problem was the battery ran down? The backup motor on the Volt is, of course, gasoline powered.

• A chart said an event happened in 1997. A correction said it happened in 1976. A correction of the correction said it happened in 1977.

• An article described attempts of British television personality Andrew Marr to keep secret an extramarital affair. Two months later, the paper published a correction. Why the time lag? “The correction was delayed for research,” the Times huffed. What kind of “research” does one conduct into a sexual affair?

• An article “erroneously reported a story about cows falling from planes. No cows … ever fell from a plane into a Japanese fishing rig.” Pointed out by reader Jonathan Duker of Beit Shemesh, Israel.

• An article “misstated the proportion of Americans who believe extraterrestrials live among us.” Who in this context is “us”?

• An article “described incorrectly a scene from ‘The Godfather Part II.’ The senator threatens to squeeze the Mafia boss Michael Corleone, played by Al Pacino; Corleone does not threaten the senator.” Come on Times, let’s be accurate about imaginary events!

• “A report misidentified the material used to create a muppet of Mayor Michael Bloomberg.”

• An article “incorrectly described Claudius’s actions in Hamlet. Claudius married his brother’s wife, not his brother’s sister.” Not only did this rudimentary error occur in a story written by a man identified by the Times as an expert on Shakespeare — “his brother’s sister” would be his own sister.

The correction of the year, pointed out by reader Heather Rebman of Mountain View, Calif., was found on the weddings page: “The Vows column paraphrased incorrectly comments made by the bridegroom about the way the bride’s father … would test his children. When the bridegroom called it a ‘blindfold test,’ he was speaking figuratively, not literally.” Get what happened? The original item made it seem the bridegroom told the New York Times his bride-to-be had, as a child, been blindfolded by his new father-in-law. Must have been a cheery rehearsal dinner!

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On Christmas Creep:

Christmas Creep: Reader Natasha Wunderlich of Sacramento, Calif., reports, “I went to Costco and my 3-year-old son said, ‘Look mommy, Santa!’ There was a big light up Santa. Then I got home and in my mailbox was an advertisement for the health club chain 24 Hour Fitness. It said, ‘Want to lose those holiday pounds? Join 24 Hour Fitness for the New Year.’ “

Reader Brian Endo of Tokyo reports that the Costco in Kawasaki, Japan, already has Christmas trees on sale. Paul Lockhart-Korris of New York City reports that in late August, he received an email from ESPN The Magazine (published on Earth The Planet) urging him to renew gift subscriptions now because, “The holiday season is fast upon us.”

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On the state of Sci-Fi TV:

Sci-Fi Update: The science fiction scene on television remains weak. The “Star Trek” and “Stargate” franchises are no more, “Fringe” has veered into the silly, and TNT’s “Falling Skies” is so lame in plot and dialogue it doesn’t even merit an insult. Will Steven Spielberg put his name on anything?

“Stargate Universe” ended in May, concluding the run of “Stargate” serials. “Universe” was poorly written in its first season, canceled early in its second. Then a surprise: Midway through the second season, the writing improved noticeably. But the first season lost the audience, and by the time quality improved, nobody was watching. The last few episodes were terrific, building to a series finale that numbers among the best in television annals. In the finale, the starship crew decides to attempt something dangerous and noble. The characters make sentimental promises to each other, then the ship disappears into the distance. The last frame is a character admiring the grandeur of the cosmos. Viewers never find out the ship’s fate.

The premise of “Stargate Universe” was that a wormhole accident put a group of present-day soldiers and civilians aboard a million-year-old automated starship built by an extinct civilization. Though the vessel had been exploring the universe on its own for a million years, the moment people arrived, engines and shields began failing — and must be fixed by characters pressing buttons. If pulling out a failed piece of electronics and screwing in a new one as warning alarms sound is critical to starship operation — this happened several times in the series — how did the vessel function autonomously for a million years? Plus why did an automated ship have loud alarms?

When the “Stargate Universe” starship got into battles with other spaceships — which happened surprisingly often, considering galaxies are 99.999999 percent void — laser hits on the outside meant showers of sparks on the bridge, just like on “Star Trek.” I admit I don’t know much about the electrical engineering of faster-than-light starcruisers. But why, in sci-fi space battles, do weapons hits on the hull cause sparks deep inside the vessel? It seems the civilization that built the ship was able to invent warp engines, but not circuit breakers.

Will Fox’s upcoming “Terra Nova,” touted as the most expensive television series ever made, revive sci-fi TV? Spielberg sold his imprimatur to this show too, possibly a bad sign. “Terra Nova” posits a scenario in which humanity acquires the ultra-sophisticated knowledge necessary to send an expedition 85 million years into the past, but everyone forgets there were dinosaurs back then. More on “Terra Nova” next week.

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On fact checking:

Calling Tony Reali: TMQ’s favorite part of “Pardon the Interruption” comes at the end, when Tony Reali corrects factual errors made during the course of the show’s unscripted comments. Not only does the on-air real-time fact checking lend authenticity — it’s entertaining!

So why not have on-air real-time fact checking during presidential debates?

Perhaps the worst aspect of political debates is candidates’ self-flattering phony claims: Viewers have no way of judging whether the claims are true or false. So appoint a fact checker! The obvious candidate is PolitiFact, sponsored by the St. Petersburg Times, which is devoted to verifying or denying the assertions of politicians. In 2009, PolitiFact won a Pulitzer Prize for its work. Here is PolitiFact’s fact-check of last week’s Republican debate.

Suppose that while candidates were speaking, a neutral third party such as PolitiFact checked all factual claims and reported its findings the moment the debate concluded: or even live, in a crawl as candidates were speaking. Candidates would be furious about this, because then they’d have to tell the truth, or at least stop making preposterous claims. There would be obvious public benefit in presidential debate fact checking. What are we waiting for?

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On the cost of an Ivy League education:

The Butler Will Bring the S’Mores: Summer, as usual, has gone too quickly. You probably wish you attended a summer camp that costs $198 a day. Yale, including room and board, has a list price that works out to $235 a day. The average Yale undergrad pays 70 percent of the list price, or $165 per day — less than for a high-end summer camp.

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On concussions in football (sorry for the football related piece, but it has to do with player health, and mentions Virginia Tech, the official graduate school of No Longer Normal, to borrow a TMQ stylistic flair):

Concussion Watch: Are there different types of head trauma risk for different positions in football? This is a question the NFL says it is studying.

Researchers at Brown University already have the answer: Running backs receive the hardest blows to the head, while linemen and linebackers are hit in the head most often.. The study, led by Brown professor of orthopedics Joseph Crisco, looked at several years of helmet accelerometer data from players at Brown, Dartmouth and Virginia Tech, which has become the leader institution for study of helmet safety. Crisco speculates that his findings could lead to rule changes, or position-specific helmets that are designed to withstand the types of contact a player is likely to experience.

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On government waste:

Washington Is Borrowing Money to Give to Hawaii to Give to the NFL — Why Isn’t the Tea Party Upset About This? The state of Hawaii is cutting its education budget, yet paying the NFL $4 million annually to hold the Pro Bowl in Honolulu. Bad enough that Hawaii (or any state) offers public funds for the private profit of the NFL (or any pro sport). What’s shameful is that the NFL accepts the money. Commissioner Roger Goddell, and at least some of the NFL owners, talk big about setting a good example. But it’s all talk. Setting a good example would be this: Give Hawaii the money back, to use for schools.

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On economics and Washington, DC:

In Praise of Lawrence Lindsey: Don’t be lulled to sleep by super-low interest rates — it seems close to inevitable that interest rates will rise. This matters because the ginormous national debt is financed using very cheap T-bills and T-bonds selling for 3 percent or less. When interest rates rise — as they must, unless neoclassical economics is totally wrong — federal debt-service payments will skyrocket, pushing the nation further into the red. This complication has simply been ignored by presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and by Democrats and Republicans in Congress, in the past five years of reckless debt-based federal spending.

Lawrence Lindsey, who was head of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors, warned a few months ago that if the interest the Treasury pays to borrow money simply rises to the 20-year average of 5.7 percent, this will add another $4.9 trillion to the national debt in the next decade — more than wiping out the savings the congressional “supercommittee” is supposed to agree upon.

Lindsey’s is a credible voice. Before the invasion of Iraq, when Lindsey was working in the Bush White House, he said an American occupation of that nation would cost about $200 billion a year. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called Lindsey’s estimate “baloney.” At that time President Bush was asserting an irresponsible fiction that an attack on Iraq would be quick and cheap. Bush wanted to run the war entirely on borrowed money, thus foisting the cost onto future generations — not to raise taxes for war, the honorable course, as was done during World War II and Vietnam. Bush fired Lindsey shortly after he issued his cost estimate, because Lindsey said something the president and defense secretary did not want the public to hear. So far, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the Iraq occupation has cost about $1.3 trillion over eight years, about what Lindsey predicted. Every penny of that cost, under Bush and now Obama, has been billed to the young, so the reckless men and women running Washington can spend without accountability.

In recent years, Bush and Rumsfeld have tried to argue away their blunder in Iraq by saying they had no way of knowing how costly it would be. They claim this even though the White House chief economist warned them! If interest rates rise, and the national debt skyrockets owing to debt-service expenses, look for Obama and Nancy Pelosi to claim they had no way of knowing that could happen.

Lindsey note: Though a top-notch guy, he is another example of the Washington grandee who names a consulting company after himself, then boasts of being in charge. Lindsey is “president and CEO” of The Lindsey Group. Chosen, surely, after an exhaustive search! Despite a tiny staff, this boutique consultancy has a president, a CEO, a vice president and two managing directors.

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Read the football parts, and other miscellany, here.

 

 

 

 

The Morality of NCAA Conference Realignment

The Frontpage Graphic at TheACC.com Today

An interesting read about the conference realignment currently going on in Division I of the NCAA. This weekend, it was announced that the ACC (home of my graduate alma mater: Virginia Tech) had accepted the application of the University of Pittsburgh and Syracuse University for inclusion in the conference. Pitt and Syracuse are leaving the Big East conference. Most of the talk about the move has centered on it simply being a logical continuation of the recent upheaval in the conference alignment landscape. Last year Nebraska left the Big 12 (currently 10 teams) for the Big Ten (now 12 teams). The PAC-10 grabbed Colorado (from the Big 12) and Utah (from the Mountain West). TCU agreed to join the Big East after this year. Now that may be in jeopardy. While some bemoan the altering of the landscape, most have concentrated on traditional rivalries being broken up, and the lack of sense in the geography (Texas Christian is in the east?!), I hadn’t heard many voices talking about the ethical questions. Jayson Stark, a baseball writer for ESPN that I follow on Twitter, tweeted about this article from Dana O’Neil about the ethics. Here is a taste of the ethical part of her piece:

The bulk of the blame, though, goes to the people who are making the decisions. No one likes to talk about integrity more than university presidents, right? Yet no one fails to walk the walk quite as well, either.

In defense of her university’s move, Syracuse chancellor Nancy Cantor explained that leaving the Big East was in the university’s best interest “as conference realignment gives some instability to the landscape.” What she — and everyone else who has taken their bag of toys and run — failed to acknowledge is that by leaving, Syracuse and Pittsburgh are the ones creating the instability.

Pitt chancellor Mark Nordenberg, meanwhile, said, “We did make it clear within the Big East, we were willing to improve the conference in any way we were asked. At the same time, we made it very clear that if other opportunities did arise, we would feel obligated to seriously assess them and look at the long-term future of the University of Pittsburgh.”

Not only is that a 400-level class of doublespeak, it is steeped in irony eight years old. In 2003, Boston College bolted the Big East for the ACC. Pittsburgh and four other schools sued BC with none other than Nordenberg explaining the decision.

“This is a case that involves broken commitments, secret dealings, breaches of fiduciary responsibility, the misappropriations of conference opportunities and predatory attempts to eliminate competition,” he said at the time.

That’s all true.

Unless, of course, breaking commitments, secret dealings, breaches of fiduciary responsibility, misappropriating conference opportunities and predatory attempts to eliminate competition are to your own betterment.

Which is why none of this should be so surprising.

It’s emblematic of the me-first world we live in, of cash valued far more than moral integrity, and of panic rewarded and loyalty trampled.

An interesting reason to pause and question the process. Admittedly, I am torn by this. I’m not sure how you allow schools to choose without requiring them to do some work behind the scenes. This smells bad, but I’m not sure it is unethical. Still, promising one conference that you are committed, and then leaving for another seems like it is not ethical. That false face and lying, often blatantly, makes it worse to me. Perhaps part of my difficulty is that beyond Virginia Tech being in the ACC, they were “poached” from the Big East several years ago (along with the Miama, and a year later Boston College). Additionally, I was openly wondering (including a tweet) whether VT should be looking to move to the SEC before the ACC fell apart. Now that seems unlikely due to the increased exit fee (recently moved to $20 million to leave the ACC) and the strengthening of the conference with the addition of Pitt and Syracuse. There are also rumors that other schools will be joining the ACC as well (rumors revolve around UConn and Rutgers at this point).

Anyone have any other thoughts on the ethics of all of this?

Education and Faith: Enemies?

A recent article in Inside Higher Ed says that they are not really the enemies that some assume:

For years, a commonly held belief has been that more educated Americans are less likely to embrace religion. But an article forthcoming (abstract available here) in The Review of Religious Research suggests that the relationship between education and faith is more nuanced, and that more education has a negative impact only on certain religious questions, not on all of them.

Some religious beliefs and practices — including belief in God and regular prayer — increase with years of education, the research found.

You can check out the rest of his post here, including comments about the methodology used, and a variety of examples of the conclusions.

As for my experience, it certainly wouldn’t be fair to simply look around at Messiah College, since all of my colleagues are committed to their faith and hold advanced degrees, but I can look back at my graduate school experience at Virginia Tech (Technically: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University). I was aware of several faculty that took their faith seriously. I remember discussing with one why I wanted to reschedule a Wednesday evening exam (due to church commitments), and receiving permission readily based on the professor’s own usual church involvement which he was missing for one week to give the exam. Another faculty member and I had discussions about his move from a more mainline denomination into the Mennonite Church while he was in graduate school at Penn State. Several of my classmates and I discussed matters of faith, including one who commented on becoming more serious about his faith while an undergrad at Wake Forrest University in North Carolina. Personally, I moved from the “mainline” United Methodist Church (though my father, who is a pastor, is squarely in the more conservative edge of the denomination) into the Brethren in Christ denomination, traditionally much more conservative. I have never felt that my faith was in any way in conflict with my education or work in the academy, even in secular settings.