The Self-Esteem Generation

Early last fall, I was surprised to see that included on my list of texts for a basic composition university course I teach was a book called Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled--and More Miserable than Ever Before by Jean Twenge (psychology professor at San Diego State). We use it for multiple purposes: to generate student responses, to engage in critical reading, and as a rhetoric for analysis.

In it, Twenge mentions a study by Harold Stevenson. The study found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that American children rate quite highly at thinking they are good at math but score poorly when their math skills are actually assessed. Why the disparity? Twenge says it's because of a self-esteem movement that we've taken on in homes, churches, and schools.

As a teacher and student, it's clear that no one is as guilty as my own professional field. Teachers give higher grades as a way to avoid conflict with students and parents. (Surely, as a student, I was/am a benefactor of this trend.) Everyone gets a sticker on their spelling test; everyone receives a trophy at the end of t-ball season.

And the consequences? Predictably, we've created a society of people who do not receive criticism well. Twenge quotes Maureen Stout, who said that "What the self-esteem movement really says to students is that their achievement is not important and their minds are not worth developing."

But Twenge also argues that we've also produced another trait in what she calls Generation Me (everyone born from the 1970s on): wide-reaching amounts of narcissism. That is, we were told we were special growing up, we were not asked much to demonstrate our special-ness, and thus we think very highly of ourselves, whether we've accomplished anything or not, whether we are loving those around us or not. One does not have to look very far into social media--my own pages surely included--to discover the merits of Twenge's argument.

Is there an alternative to indoctrinating kids into thinking that they're special? Should we all become like Tiger Moms? I do think there's an alternative, but I don't think rigidness is the only answer. Another option is affirmation. I can't claim to be all that good at it myself, but I suppose I'm learning what it is. The difference between self-esteem curriculum and affirmation is nuanced but significant. We cannot start a program for affirmation. In fact, it should be conceded that self-esteem programs are way easier than providing authentic affirmation for a person. Whereas self-esteem advocacy seems pretty superficial, affirming someone necessarily involves knowing that person--his or her story, pain, triumphs. And once we know them, we can express our sincere gratitude and pride in who that person is, including but not limited to what that person is good at, what in that person makes you become more alive.

The difference in result would be another nuanced but significant one. I think if we affirmed each other well, nurtured each other with intention, we would produce confident people who are assured that they are loved (rather than a bunch of narcissists).

Bob Knight: Forever a Hoosier Icon

"I wish I could give you a little bit of an idea on what our starting lineup is going to be, but I can't. The Bloomington Faculty Council was supposed to have it to me by four o'clock this afternoon, but they got caught up in a debate over whether to put petunias or daffodils in a flower bed behind the old library building."
~Bob Knight on his radio show as the Indiana basketball coach


If Indiana had an icon, who would it be? Larry Bird? Oscar Robertson? Evan Bayh? Richard Lugar? Amelia Earhart? David Letterman? John Mellencamp? Kurt Vonnegut? Of all those deserving candidates, are any of them more closely associated with and representative of the Hoosier state than Bob Knight? I doubt it. Knight was brilliant, fiercely loyal, and never boring. Perhaps most importantly in this state, he won a lot of basketball games (without resorting to cheating, reportedly), which is why many IU fans still revere him.

So almost midway into a semester of grad school and teaching, my mind took a little intellectual tangent away from academic articles and toward The General himself. I often arrive at the discourse a bit late, and this is no exception. The two books I read--John Feinstein's A Season on the Brink: A Year with Bob Knight and the Indiana Hoosiers and Steve Alford's Playing for Knight: My Six Seasons with Coach Knight--were written and published in the 1980s. Somehow it felt like getting in touch with my heritage. Fittingly, one of my favorite movies, Hoosiers, also came out during this time.

Feinstein's book was predictably better written, since he is a journalist, but Alford's work provided an interesting contribution as well. Everyone knows that Knight threw a chair onto the floor during a game later in Alford's career at IU, but one of my favorite anecdotes--"war stories" the IU players called them--was after an early-season loss to Purdue during Alford's freshman season when Knight kicked them out of the locker room for a few days, told the assistant coaches not to show up for practice, and told the players to coach themselves until their next game against Michigan State. "You didn't put enough effort into the Purdue game to deserve coaches and managers," he said, according to Alford. Knight quietly watched the practices that players designed. He also forced them to order their own transportation and a place to stay for the trip, though he relented on those plans after they executed them.

Alford, like so many other IU players that graduated, seems to reconcile the methods with the results. Feinstein is a little more detached, a little more objective. "In a good mood," he wrote, "there is no one in the world more delightful to be around (than Knight) because he is so bright, so well-read. In a a bad mood, there is no one worse." According to Alford, Knight--who gave Feinstein surprising access during the 1985-1986 season--wasn't thrilled with how Feinstein's book was written, although Alford claims it was accurate. The relationship between Knight and Feinstein apparently soured.

Could I have played for Knight? Well for one, I wasn't good enough. But if I had been? I don't know. I probably wouldn't have handled his "mind games" very well, kicking players out of practice and such, riding the older players. Keeping my mouth shut has never been a strength. But then again, maybe I could have become one of those players who channeled my disgust into working harder and getting better. Who knows. Either way, I feel connected to him for what he did for the sport I love in my state.

The Value of Diversity

"I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain." ~James Baldwin


"Diversity" has been a buzzword for all of my lifetime it seems, surely coming out of the various waves of historical movements like feminism, civil rights for racial minorities, and now, gay rights. In many venues, it has been presented in such a way that diversity is good, but some diversity is better than others, i.e. we want the foreigner, but not so much the conservative Republican or even, say, the mentally ill. The extent of the diversity also seemed really limited at times with all the focus on race or nationality and not enough said about religion or socioeconomic status. (Reading Wendell Berry's The Hidden Wound serves as one of the better exceptions to these trends in my own life.) That said, surely that I am a white male affects the way I receive these conversations the way I do.

But if talking about diversity has not always been a positive experience for me, interacting with diversity almost always has, whether it was friendships with African Americans growing up, attending a wealthy boarding school as a low-middle-income high schooler, visiting and working in a Native American town a couple times in college, or teaching in a mostly-black school as a Teach For America corps member.

In a recent conversation with an African-American female friend, she offered one of the most compelling reasons for our needing diversity. She said that it was within her experiences with diversity that she is able to confront (and in the best circumstances, heal) her own biases, prejudices, and maybe even hatreds. For her, interacting with difference looks much different than it does for me because our backgrounds are not the same, but I do resonate with the need to interact with people who who are different than me. In TFA, we operated out of a similar assumption: we all have biases that affect the way we make decisions and interact with people.

It can go the other way, too, of course. That is to say, we can have a negative experience that reinforces our own stereotype. I'll offer two very different examples to illustrate my point. Let's say someone theoretically (or not so theoretically) grows up in the suburbs. As they grow up, they move to a city, and are, at some point, held up and robbed at night by a black male. Such an experience may reinforce a fearful prejudice that's already there.

The same can be true from black-to-white, or name your other combination. Let's say said African American is admitted into and chooses to attend a mostly-white, elitist sort-of university. That person has trouble fitting in socially or struggles academically and maybe even bumps into a few racial incidents. Probably not going to affirm him or her that white people can be lovable or good.

As a more tangible example, think Juan Williams (an African American and former NPR employee who should never have been fired for admitting his own bias), admitting that when he gets on a plane he is consciously or subconsciously more nervous if he sits near a Muslim person. A very natural bias, birthed out of a negative experience, that can probably only be healed by interacting with enough Muslims to learn a different pattern of relational trust.

It is my theory that we develop these biases from either ignorance or negative experiences, and that the resentment builds as an avoidance of coming to grips with our own vulnerability. Most of us possess assumptions that are comparable to Williams', attitudes that can only heal through honest reflection and real interaction with people of another race or religion, or someone who has more or less money, or who plays a different sport or attends a different school. Diversity, in this sense, can make us more healthy and whole.

Valentine's Day 2012: "Do You Love Me?"

As hopefully you know, it's Valentine's Day, which I'm told comes from some Christian martyr in ancient Rome. I'd be lying if I pretended to know the story well. As for today's meaning, we could surely exaggerate it and become depressed by our aloneness or over-pleased by our relational glee or we could even criticize the day as just another commercial stunt, but what came to my mind this morning, for whatever reason, was a passage in the Gospel of John. The context then wasn't romantic or sexual in implication, but I do think it was very central to who we are as humans, and because of that, it has something to say to us even on Valentine's Day in 2012.

In verses 15-17, we find the following conversation between Jesus and Peter:

When they had finished eating, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me?”

“Yes, Lord,” he said, “you know that I love you.”

Jesus said, “Feed my lambs.”

Again Jesus said, “Simon son of John, do you love me?”

He answered, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.”

Jesus said, “Take care of my sheep.”

The third time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?”

Peter was hurt because Jesus asked him the third time, “Do you love me?” He said, “Lord, you know all things; you know that I love you.”

Jesus said, “Feed my sheep.

Most of the analysis I've heard about this passage centers around Jesus's interesting and surely metaphorical response to Peter: "Feed my sheep." But my interest today is in the very question itself: "Do you love me?" I believe our question is the same. That is to say, we all possess a very deeply-rooted desire to be loved, even if we're unaware that the question motivates our subconsciousness.

Some of us act it out in very desperate, sad ways, others of us do it in the detached denial of someone who has been burned by love once (or many times) and is determined to never go there again. Sometimes the question and perceived answer drives us to depression, other times to sheer ecstasy. Sometimes the answer seems very plain and routine, but that we recognize the monotony in the first place indicates that the question is still there.

I believe we see evidence of the question also in our vice. When we do not feel loved or when we are too scared to risk love, we turn to all sorts of varieties of cheap substitutes, some more harmful than others. The degree of our addictions certainly varies, too, but the thread is still the same: Will you love me? Because if you won't, certainly Facebook will or my favorite television show or my achievement at work or the Notre Dame sports team that's in season or at least this food I'm about to consume. Surely "it" will fulfill my needs or at least cover up the absence of something--love--that's more fulfilling. We all do it, don't we?

This question--of our life, I suspect--puts us in a vulnerable place. We tremble at the possibilities of a pending answer. We wonder if someone could love even the unattractive parts of ourselves. May you, however, hear a resounding "yes" from the intimate people in your life today. Happy Valentine's Day!

Education and Purpose

"I wish there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn't, it's just a disgusting waste of time!"
~Franny, in J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zoey

"Why don't all of us—the teachers and the students—try to take these books to heart, not just analyze them and then go on to the next book. We may be smarter, but are we better?"
~A student in Robert Cole's The Call to Stories

"Objectivity has come to be simply the academic uniform of moral cowardice: one who is 'objective' never takes a stand."
~Wendell Berry


Knowledge for knowledge's sake. I used to believe in it, but not so much anymore. Don't get me wrong: I love to inquire, to read, to discuss, to write. But only when there seems to be a connection to the life that I am living. I have little desire to hide in the corner of a library and read boring, detached academic journal articles whose meaning doesn't seem to connect in any way to my life. Sometimes, as a grad student, that gets me in trouble because I am more likely to express my disgust than I am to "play the game" well. There's usually a class per semester that challenges me in this way (and this semester is no exception).

One of the moments I recall that began to plant seeds toward a changed perception was a conversation a few years ago with a mentor who possessed a PhD. He does quite a bit of writing, speaking, and teaching, but has never pursued a tenured professorship. "Why not?" I asked him. I've never forgotten his answer.

He told me it was because too much of university life exists on an island. In books, classrooms, and blocked off from the world by aesthetic gates. People live one life before college, another life in college, and an altogether different one after college. "There have been opportunities," he told me. "But I was always afraid I'd get too detached from real work and real people."

"You don't think you can find those things in the university setting?" I asked him.

"Too many times, no," he said.

As one who teaches and does much of his current work in adjunct cubicles, I know what he means. In academia we say things that would never fly outside our own walls, and that's sad. We try to get students to separate out their own life from the material they are studying: an impossible task and harmful one at that. My response to this kind of pedagogy, more often than not, is boredom.

But this is not to dismiss academia altogether. It plays an important role in life, mostly always has (in some capacity), and probably always will. It will undoubtedly be a part of my own professional pursuits in the future.

So what is the alternative vision? Let me first illustrate with an anecdote. As an undergraduate student at Anderson University, I took a microeconomics course, most of which definitely challenged my own ways of thinking. That is to say, I've always been a lot more interested in what something means than the scientific or the mathematical aspect of whatever that thing was. It's partially a weakness, I'll admit. But this particular professor made a habit out of writing two words on the board after solving various problems. "Who cares?" he would write. In other words: what is the point? why does this matter? what does it mean? And then he would go into his own diatribe of an answer.

What he was doing was connecting the objective to the subjective, the scientific to the humanities, the skill to the knowledge, the order to the wisdom. Rather than isolate, he believed in coherence. If it didn't mean anything than it wasn't worth learning. Not knowledge for knowledge's sake, but rather, to borrow the student's idea from quote in the Coles' book, knowledge to become better. Now that is a vision for education that I can live into for the long haul.

2012 Super Bowl: Maybe Sneaking into the Playoffs is Good Strategy

It happens every year. Teams that rolled all season and have wrapped up divisions and playoff home-field advantage begin resting starters to avoid injuries in weeks 15, 16, and 17. Almost inevitably, what had been the NFL's hottest teams just a few weeks earlier come out flat in the playoffs and go home early. Think this year's Packers. And to be fair, with this year as an exception, we've seen that in Indianapolis as much anyone has. Is there a connection between the "resting starters" and the going home early?

You'd have to be in a coma or hate football to not know that the New York Giants beat the New England Patriots 21-17 last night in the Indianapolis-hosted Super Bowl. Eli Manning bested his older brother's one Super Bowl win by doing what he's done all year: calmly driving his team into position to take the lead with less than one minute to go. Manning was assisted by Mario Manningham's version of "the catch," in what would become the Giants' sixth straight win to end the season. You see, after week 15, the Giants sat at 7-7, on the verge of missing out on the playoffs.

As I watched this Giants' team's impressive run, I thought back to the last time they won the Super Bowl (in 2008), and I checked and confirmed my suspicion: that team had not been good enough in the regular season to earn a first round bye, either. Is that a trend? At least two other teams immediately came to mind: last year's Packers (10-6 regular season, earned a wildcard playoff birth) and the only Colts' team during the Manning era that won the Super Bowl (finished 12-4 in the regular season, not good enough to earn a first-round bye).

So with a question forming (Something like, is it a mistake to rest players late in the season? Or: are teams that earn a first-round bye in the NFL playoffs really at a disadvantage?), I decided to do some quick Wikipedia research. For time's sake and because I'm really only interested for this question in the modern NFL game, I looked at every Super Bowl Champion since 2000. In what I already know is a small sample size, here is what I found.

Overall, it's a pretty mixed bag. Of the thirteen Super Bowl winners I considered, seven of them had earned a first-round bye. One of the more interesting cases was the 2010 Saints, which began their season 13-0, lost their last three, then recovered in time to snag a playoff run and a Super Bowl win. Of the six winners that came from a wildcard round, five have come in the past seven seasons. Only two teams that have won a Super Bowl since 2000 have had the best record during the regular season.

So maybe it's not enough to cast aside the "resting starters" philosophy, although recent Super Bowl winners definitely seem to be ones that don't. At the very least, though, we should be able to acknowledge that maybe a few losses during the regular season aren't really such a bad thing.

Super Bowl Excess?

I should start by saying I love football. My grandfather on my dad's side was a Hall of Fame high school coach in Wisconsin who won several state championships, so I guess you could say it's in my blood. (He's also a Notre Dame graduate, so maybe that explains my obsession with the Fighting Irish.) Anyway, I grew up playing the game, I probably spend too much time watching it in fall and winter, and I still enjoy a good recreational game. So I'm not out to hate on a sport that I love.

Also, there are degrees to which hosting the Super Bowl is terrific for Indianapolis, the city in which I currently live. Surely, there will be a short-term economic boost, and more than that, the city is benefiting from some excellent exposure, and so far is getting tremendous reviews for its hosting abilities. So I'm not out to hate on Indianapolis either.

Disclaimers aside, there is something that troubles me about this whole thing. The other night, I biked downtown with a couple of roommates, and we enjoying the outdoor concerts, checked out the Indy cars (painted as one NFL team each), and even drank an $8 beer. Which is the starting point of my uneasiness. Would it be possible, for example, for a legitimately poor person to participate without being irresponsible with all the hefty prices of food, drinks, and games?

The Super Bowl is basically a week-long party. I like a celebration as much as anybody: good food, good drink, good people, maybe even a dance floor at the end of the night. But what exactly are we celebrating? The city? The end of a football season? My theory is that it's just an excuse to be drink too much, to blow off school and work, and probably most of all, to exploit. Houses are renting for thousands of dollars a night. Some people pay more than $100 to park for a day. That's a lot of wealth changing hands. There are people out there who are making bank off this thing, and I doubt it's the Indianapolis schools, hospitals, and charitable organizations.

It kind of reminds me of an amusement park experience, which has never settled well with me either. Spend a bunch of money in a place you don't know, eat a bunch of bad food, wait in long lines for one-minute rides, then go home. Or what I imagine a cruise to be like, since I've never been on one. But some friends of mine that have come back bragging how much they ate and drink and how much weight they gained. Excess. The ultimate gluttony. I'm not so sure the big Super Bowl party is not essentially the same thing.

There is also reason to believe that the prostitution industry bolsters its presence and activity during this week, which is even more troubling. And even more exploitative. I was glad to see that Indiana's governor Mitch Daniels and his legislature has tried to act in a preventative manner, but it also be great if some of the players or coaches came out and spoke against this.

All this said, there's almost no doubt in my mind that I'll watch the big game on Sunday (and cheer hard against the Patriots!). I may even join the party downtown one more time on Friday night. But I do so with mixed feelings at best. I just think there are better ways to celebrate than this.