Tag Archives: Academic Competition

A Little Diddy About Madison Jack

08 Friday Apr 2016

Posted by in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, New York City, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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Jack-In-The-Box 3D model, April 5, 2016. (http://turbosquid.com).

Jack-In-The-Box 3D model, April 5, 2016. (http://turbosquid.com).

Jack-o’-Lantern, Jack-in-the-Box, Monterey Jack, Colby Jack, and jackknife all have something in common with the Jack I’m writing about in this post. They’re all the kinds of Jacks that I’m not a fan of or outright dislike. They also tend to surprise me at precisely the wrong place and at precisely the wrong time. My Jack, the Jack who finished a doctorate in the School of Education at UWisconsin-Madison in the late-1990s, was one of the most competitive and obsequious humans I had ever met. What made my knowing him worse was that he never had to be cutthroat in the first place.

I first “met” Madison Jack the summer of ’95, via telephone and email. My favorite benefactor at the Spencer Foundation in Catherine Lacey had provided Jack my information. It made sense at the time. Both Jack’s dissertation and my own discussed the process of Black migration, White flight, and school desegregation, though his work involved Milwaukee and mine was on DC. Jack had gotten a small Spencer grant, and I had a Spencer Dissertation Fellowship.

Most importantly, Madison Jack wanted to put together a panel presentation for the April 1996 American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting in New York. The panel would involve a group of Spencer-funded folk working on various angles of school desegregation, involving community control, racial discrimination, White anti-desegregation protests, and ideas like my own on multiculturalism and diversity. Over a three-week period between mid-July and early August ’95, we put together a panel of five presenters and a moderator. The moderator was none other than Jack’s dissertation advisor Michael Fultz. Two presenters were 1995 Spencer Dissertation Fellows (including me), and two others would become Dissertation Fellows in 1996 (including Madison Jack).

It could’ve been a powerful panel under the right set of conditions. But it was to be underwhelming by default. We had at least two too many people on the panel. Our panel’s presentation date and time in New York was on the last day of the conference, Friday, April 12th, at 8:15 am, both too early and too late at the same time. With my own troubles with my HNIC advisor in Joe Trotter — not to mention a dissertation nearly complete — AERA wasn’t exactly my primary focus. Plus, visiting my home area with my family living in temporary housing in Yonkers post-616 fire didn’t exactly help with my concentration.

A five-inch folding jackknife, perfect for ingratiating back-stabbers, April 5, 2016. (http://www.lifesupportintl.com/).

A five-inch folding jackknife, perfect for ingratiating back-stabbers, April 5, 2016. (http://www.lifesupportintl.com/).

But it was Madison Jack’s obsessive competition that reared its ugly head and left a raw horseradish taste in my mouth. It was that much more disgusting because I knew it would be my last conference presentation as a graduate student. Jack and I had agreed that all five of us would have twelve minutes apiece for our presentations, leaving time for audience questions. On that brisk spring morning after a rough night at the Milford Plaza, I began the panel with my talk timed for exactly twelve minutes. With my Mom having not yet arrived and only six people in the room to start, I muddled through as if I needed a cup of coffee just to know that I needed to wake up. Mom arrived five minutes into the second presentation, one by my fellow 1995 Spencer Dissertation Fellow, where she used the term “a cacophony of voices” in describing the different sides involved in the 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville (Queens) controversy over community control and racial inequality. Two scholars I knew well were in the audience — including one who was a one-time professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz School (now Heinz College). She said to Harvey Kantor, “This presentation’s ‘caca’ all right” and they both laughed, loud enough for my sleep-deprived mind to notice.

Madison Jack was the last to present. My co-organizer broke our agreed-upon rules. He spoke for more than twenty minutes, all to garner more attention for his work over myself and the other three panelists. Jack also used a slide show, another thing that we had agreed we wouldn’t do, mostly because of the time constraints on the panel. It was a classic example of narcissistic behavior at the doctoral level. By the time Jack had finished — combined with his advisor’s ten minutes of droning commentary — there were only six minutes left for questions from an audience of nearly twenty people, most of whom had missed the first four presentations. Jack fielded all but one of the audience’s questions. If I’d been in my right frame of mind, I would’ve jammed a slide down Jack’s obsequious throat.

Fast-forward nearly a decade to the 2004 AERA conference in San Diego. It was my first time attending the conference since grad school. I decided to go to the Spencer-sponsored talk (an annual tradition), to see if any of my fellow Fellows from 1995 would also be there. A couple of them did show up, which was the good part about this gathering. But so did Madison Jack. He made a bee-line toward me. I made a point of not making eye contact until he was nearly in my face with his grizzly beard and outstretched hand. I shook it as hard as I could, feeling my right hand squeeze his knuckles into each other.

A block of Monterey Jack in all its bland whiteness, January 13, 2015. (Mitch Mandel via http://menshealth.com).

A block of Monterey Jack cheese in all its bland whiteness, January 13, 2015. (Mitch Mandel via http://menshealth.com).

After I let him talk for three minutes about his professorship at some small New England liberal arts college, about his first book, and after introducing me to his wife, he wanted to know how I was doing. Or rather, if I had bested him in my career up to that point. I didn’t take the bait. Knowing that a couple of big wigs had just walked into the room, I started with small talk about my wife and newborn son. I knew. Madison Jack being Madison Jack, I knew he would walk away, with me in mid-sentence, seeking to soak wisdom and advancement out of his next unknowing victims.

With colleagues and friends like Madison Jack, who needed enemies? What made his sycophantic displays and overt attempts at dominance so pitiful was that I never cared. I was too ambivalent about my place in academia and too much in turmoil about myself as a writer to ever care. Fighting over a job or a book with a scholarly publisher? To me in 1996 and in 2004, it was a waste of time and energy.

To me in 2016, it’s also a waste of potential friendships and connections beyond the “what’s in it for me?” perspective. I know lots of folks, but few I count as friends, and only a small number of those are in academia. While much of my work is independent of others, it isn’t work I do or think about alone. Madison Jack probably knows tons of folk in high places. But with an approach to career that is me first, me foremost, and me last, I’m pretty sure that he repels more true connections in his world than he attracts. Kind of like smelling week-old Monterey Jack that’s been left out in the sun too long.

Humanities: 26 Years On

18 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Leonardo di Vinci's Human Body sketch, June 18, 2013. (Wikipedia).

Leonardo di Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (human body sketch, 1485-90), June 18, 2013. (Flickr.com).

Today marks anniversary number twenty-six since the Class of ’87 spent two hours sweating in our polyester caps and gowns on a triple-H summer evening at Memorial Field in Mount Vernon, New York. Oh yeah – and graduated from Mount Vernon High School. Not a big year to mark an anniversary, for sure. But still important for me to remember. After all, I’ve just published a book in which I spend a significant amount of time talking about myself and my former classmates whom help comprise this Class of ’87.

Today I want to say a few positive things about this class, particularly the Humanities Program members of this class. Not that this isn’t in Boy @ The Window as well. But it does help me to reiterate both the obvious and the hidden. Without Humanities, I wouldn’t have taken the path that led me to become the writer, historian, thinker or man that I am today, good, bad and occasionally even ugly. Period.

Not that every high-achieving student in A.B. Davis Middle School or Mount Vernon High School was in Humanities. Some of the more creative and musically-talented folks I’d either met or knew of were in what what I call “gen pop” and not in Humanities. But being someone who on his best days can barely hold a baritone tune (in the same way that an experimental fusion reactor produces energy for only a few seconds), Humanities gave me a chance to do some of what I did best on a platform that could occasionally allow me to maximize my academic gifts.

After ten years of undergrad and grad school at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon, and years of teaching at places as different as Pitt, CMU, Duquesne University School of Education and George Washington University GSEHD, my former classmates remain among the highest academic achievers I’ve ever met. As a group, that is. I’ve met many super-talented and highly creative individuals since ’87. Some of whom were literal geniuses as musicians, actors, studio artists or writers. Students whose academic and athletic prowess would’ve made their peers think about how unfair life can be.

But the one boon (and one criticism too) of Humanities for me was the competition it inadvertently sanctioned. That competition made me a better student, one who could actually focus on the long-term implications for any course I took and how it would apply to what I’d need to do in college. Some of my classes I realized were bullshit (see Andy Butler’s eleventh grade “Higher Math” as prima facie evidence), but I found something useful in most of my courses for my years at Carnegie Mellon, if not at Pitt.

Mount Vernon High School graduation ceremony, June 24, 2009. (http//education.lohudblogs.com).

Mount Vernon High School graduation ceremony, June 24, 2009. (Carucha L. Meuse/The Journal News; http//education.lohudblogs.com).

I think that this competition made us all better students, even as it often didn’t make us better human beings. After all, out of my immediate circle of the top twenty students in the Class of ’87, three of us have doctorates (history, psychology and mathematics education), two have medical degrees, and seventeen of us have earned at least a bachelor’s degree. I’m sure that some of us would’ve done well in college, grad school and our careers even without Humanities. But I’m also sure that the poorest among us – yours truly included – would’ve struggled mightily in college (even if we found a way to graduate) without such a focus on the academic in the first place.

I’ve taught high school students whose skills readily approached my own and those of my classmates from a quarter-century ago, particularly in versions of the AP US History course I taught at Princeton in ’08 and ’09. I’ve also served on the curriculum committee at my son’s school here in Montgomery County, Maryland for the past three years. These students – some more talented than anyone I knew in Humanities – have one thing in common. For the most part, they aren’t challenged by their schools, teachers or curriculum to be competitive, to be well-rounded academically, to strive to be both better students and develop creative talent simultaneously.

Many of these students already feel a sense of academic fatigue, partly because of constant yet meaningless testing, and partly because of a concentration on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields. Both have led to the near-total exclusion of extensive work on reading and writing skills (even though picking apart STEM field problems requires good reading and analysis skills). Not to mention the slashing of budgets for physical education and art, music and chorus, theater and so many other things that would push them to be better students, to be competitive – in a healthy way, that is.

There are nearly 120,000 words in Boy @ The Window, about 60,000 of them dedicated to my years between the end of sixth grade and the beginning of my junior year at Pitt. Many of them describe all that I remember about being in Humanities. It’s not a pretty picture overall. Despite this, without the likes of Laurell and Sam, Brandie and Bobby, Alex and Allison, Dahlia and Dara, Phyllis and Wendy and JD, Joe and Danny, Suzanne and Denise and Mandume and Rhonda and Kim and so many others, I’d still be living in Mount Vernon right now. I’d be lucky to have a minimum-wage job and a one-room flat in someone’s dilapidated house on the South Side. It’s just that simple.

School of Dreams (and Nightmares)

10 Monday Sep 2012

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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School of Dreams (2003), by Edward Humes, September 9, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

Yesterday was the thirty-first anniversary of my first day of seventh grade at A.B. Davis Middle School, my first day in a six-year slog in Mount Vernon public schools’ Humanities Program. The academic pressures that came with being part of a gifted-talented track magnet program were such that the lessons I learned during those years remain with me to this day. The unique lessons about who I was and whom I wanted and needed to become, though, are the kinds of lessons reserved for a memoir, like, say, Boy @ The Window.

But there are other lessons, other issues that anyone who has gone through such a program, is in one, or has kids in one, should heed. Perhaps the best book I’ve ever read about the experiences of high ability students in a gifted track middle or high school has been Edward Humes’ School of Dreams: Making the Grade at a Top American High School (2003). Despite some of the flaws in the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and author’s account covering a year in the life of Whitney High School in Cerritos, California, this is a book I’d use in many of my future graduate seminars in US educational history.

A particularly poignant passage was where Humes wrote, the “combination of a school built upon high expectations and a student population whose dominant culture elevates learning to a high priority—and hard work in school to an absolute necessity—makes for a kind of education echo chamber” (p. 340). Humes meant this as a positive comment on the academic culture of a public high school in Southern California.  But it also reflected a constant tension between learning and zero-sum competition.

Starbucks double chocolate chip frappucino, September 10, 2012. (htttp://wwwcoffeespitfire.blogspot.com).

Humes somehow doesn’t fully take stock of this tension beyond the context of the high school in which he embedded himself in 2000-01. There were stories, disheartening stories about seventh graders hitting up Starbucks for coffee before school, during lunch and after school to stay awake. Of parents who shunned their kids’ artistic talent and aspirations in their quest to ensure they earned a degree in a STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) field. Of students taking as many as six AP (Advanced Placement) courses in a single school year, or colluding to cheat on a calculus or physics exam when the pace of study and testing proved to be too much.

Yes, despite this, Whitney has produced thousands of elite college-goers, and 4.0 is the standard, not the exception, that its students shoot for. But now, in an age in which high-stakes testing is the norm, what’s the social and psychological message that we’re communicating to the current crop of K-12 students in the US today?

For me, the best way to answer this question is to look back on my own experience and the experiences of my former Humanities classmates. Based on my own writings and findings, there’s plenty of evidence that intensive academic rigor and competition — like intensive athletic training and competition — will produce excellent students well prepared for college, but not necessarily well prepared for life. Many of my former Humanities classmates (and many of the students Humes tracked and interviewed for School of Dreams) were socially inept, put themselves under constant stress (not to mention experiencing psychological pressures from each other, their parents and teachers) and lacked the deeper critical reasoning skills necessary to make college a worthwhile experience.

The students had a “cram-and-exam” methodology to learning, spending hours learning techniques and concepts and little time in applying them beyond the classroom in the vast majority of their subjects. Often when students discovered a new talent, particularly in writing, the arts or in music, many of their parents pounced into action to admonish teachers for encouraging these developments or to force their kids into their way of thinking about their future. Bottom line: while many of these high-achievers were willing to slit each others’ throats for an A, an AP “5” or an SAT 1600, they hadn’t really made up their minds about who they wanted to be, the talents they wanted to explore, or the world in which they wanted to live.

“Nightmares & Daydreams” episode screen shot, Avatar: The Last Airbender, September 10, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws due to pic’s low resolution.

When I first read Humes’ School of Dreams nine years ago, it forced me to think about these parallels. I realized that if Starbucks was within a mile of either A.B. Davis Middle or Mount Vernon High School in the ’80s, our class alone would’ve spent about $160,000 a year there on coffee and pastries. That most of us were sane enough to only take three or four AP courses my senior year. That our standard for a minimally acceptable SAT score was a 1200. That, instead of kids crying or running away from home for two days over a B, attempted suicides or a turn to crystal meth would’ve been more common. I guess by Whitney’s standards, we would’ve been slackers.

Still, more than a quarter-century since my last Humanities course, with tighter budgets and far more high-stakes testing (see the correlation?), the crush of intense academic competition has made our public schools a poor place for polishing students into well-adjusted young adults. Yes, I know that this is primarily a parent’s responsibility. But then again, public schools are meant to be far more than an octagon ring with No. 2 pencils.