By John McDonnell
Okay, so IBM’s Watson computer can win at “Jeopardy”. Can it understand a Groucho Marx joke?
The news came out in mid-February that Watson, a computer built by IBM, beat two former champions at the game of “Jeopardy”. Beat them soundly, too.
I thought it was amusing when IBM's Deep Blue computer beat chess champion Gary Kasparov in the 1990s, because I thought it was nothing more than a parlor trick. It’s just raw computing power, I told myself. Computers will never be more than glorified adding machines.
However, Watson has me worried. That's because this computer was specially built to do "natural language processing", which meant it had to analyze “Jeopardy” questions by sifting through a vast database of knowledge (encyclopedias, atlases, dictionaries, etc.) in microseconds, make hundreds of decisions in the blink of an eye, and then come up with what it decided was the correct answer.
I can accept that computers can do math a million times better than me. I'm not threatened by that at all. But when they start coming onto my turf, which is words and their meanings, then I get a little nervous. I'm a writer, and I have been one all my life. I've always had a certain skill at putting words together, and it's served me well both in school and in my profession.
I know that over the course of the last 30 years computers have proven to be better at humans in many things, and they have made major changes in industries and professions because of that.
But words? I thought I was safe from computer penetration of my field, simply because computers couldn't understand the nuances of words the way humans can. A human expression like, "It's raining cats and dogs," can completely flummox a computer, because the machines are so literal. Or, how about a Groucho Marx joke like, “I wanted to get a boat with a flat bottom, but the girl at the boathouse didn’t have one.” How can a computer understand the joke in that line?
For the “Jeopardy” challenge, IBM had to find a way to enable Watson to analyze expressions, decide between different meanings of a word, and take all sorts of gray areas into account that you don't have with a mathematics problem. Apparently, they succeeded. IBM announced that it is entering into a partnership with Nuance, a company that makes speech recognition software, to adapt its technology for commercial use in the near future.
What does this mean for my profession? One thing I can see is that it won't be long before writers will have the kind of software that musicians use to correct imperfections in a vocal performance. In other words, your word processing program will have a way to convert a clunky turn of phrase into something more clear, with more style and grace. The software will analyze a pedestrian turn of phrase and offer options for making it better. "Perhaps this metaphor will work better," it might say. "Here is a quote from Shakespeare that will express your point better." Or, "this section should be shorter; these words should be eliminated."
Not long after that I can see a program that will write articles, books, yes even fiction and poetry, and all you have to do is type in a few keywords. As the technology gets more sophisticated, you could have computers producing great literature just as now they make breakthroughs in the fields of mathematics and science.
And then what? Will there be a time when people prefer computer writers over human ones? If a computer can write a best-selling detective novel or romance for a publisher, and the publisher doesn't have to pay royalties or deal with eccentric writers, I think publishers will jump at that arrangement. Why not?
And then guys like me will be among the millions of writers who have been replaced by a computer. They'll be hawking their wares on street corners, trying to get somebody to buy their novels or poems even though people will have programs on their laptops that can produce better writing for free, and in a matter of minutes.
There’s an expression that everyone thinks they have a novel in them. What will happen to them when the Watsons of the world can do it better? Will they become bitter? Will they destroy their computers? Will they form underground cults and seek to overthrow the computer companies and send us back to the Dark Ages when people still wrote literature?
It's not fair, I tell you. Somebody better stop this before it gets serious.
THE END
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Goodbye To A Priest
Father Hanley was a priest who taught me in high school, and I hadn't seen him in a long time. In fact, I hadn't even thought of him in years, although when I got the email invitation to his memorial Mass, a flood of memories came back to me.
High school for me was awhile ago, and I'm reminded of that when I run into my classmates at reunions. They have gray hair and they talk about the 1950s and 60s with a great deal of familiarity. We all have vivid memories of JFK's assassination, the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show, miniskirts, Woodstock, the moon landing, etc.
I share all those memories with my classmates, but I also have something most of them don't have, even the ones on their second marriages -- a 13 year old daughter. I got married late and had children even later, so while some of my classmates have grandchildren, I still have teenagers.
At my last reunion a couple of guys mentioned they were already retired and had moved to South Carolina. I said, "I have a kid who's not even in high school yet. That retirement place on the beach is a long way off for me."
When Father Hanley died I realized that he was probably the last surviving teacher I had in high school. The little Catholic high school where I went has a cemetery in a field out back, and most of the priests who taught me are buried there. About ten years ago, on a visit to the school, I took a walk through the cemetery and read the headstones. When I saw the birth dates I realized that most of them were only in their 30s and 40s when they taught me, and now I’m older than that.
I wanted to go to Father Hanley's Mass, and I marked it on my calendar. I envisioned myself going back to the little chapel where I attended Mass in high school, seeing some of my classmates, perhaps walking through that cemetery again. I would revel in the memories, thinking back to the good and bad of high school.
The tough guy poses we struck, the machismo that was as thin as a haze of cigarette smoke. Talking about girls. Playing basketball in a gym that throbbed with teenage hormones. Thinking about girls. Wondering how my life was going to turn out. The cutting humor that teenage boys have, where everything was unprintable but so funny it made your sides hurt from laughing. Thinking about girls. Talking about life, morals, religion, sports, and a million other things with the priests during and after class, with blazing honesty.
I went to a Catholic grade school and was taught by nuns. Eight years of stern-faced women in black habits made me feel like a prisoner by the time I was 13. When I got to the all-boys high school it was a relief to have male teachers. They didn't mince words, they didn't wheedle or scold you the way the nuns did. Some of them had served in World War II or the Korean War, and they had the grit of life on them. They told it to you straight, and we boys were grateful for that. They didn't take any nonsense, but at the same time they had a kindness you could sense under the gruff exterior. They cared about us, and we knew it.
Father Hanley taught a religion class. I don't remember the specifics of what he taught me, but I do remember a lot of passionate discussions in class. I remember talking about real world situations, challenges we faced every day, and how to handle them. It wasn't a pie-in-the-sky philosophy, or the rote memorization we had in grade school with the nuns, but a nuts and bolts discussion about real life morals.
There was a lot going on in the world. The Civil Rights movement. The Vietnam War. The hippie movement. Old values were being questioned, and people were anxious for change. Father Hanley and his peers didn’t shy away from those tough questions, and they taught us how to look at them honestly and try to find the moral path amid all that turmoil.
I realized the night before Father Hanley's Mass that I couldn't go. My wife was out of town visiting our son in college, and I had two teenagers to look after, with a full schedule of activities the next day. It was impossible to do it all and still drive 25 miles to get to my high school in time for the Mass.
So, I had to say a silent prayer for Father Hanley, and hope that he's in Heaven now. I wish I had gotten to see him at some point in the last 40 years and thanked him for what he did for me. I'm sure he didn't get nearly enough thanks from the thousands of students he taught in a long teaching career. He was one of many priests who taught me, men who gave up the comforts of family life to teach other people’s children, who lived in a community and had no salary, no house or car to call their own.
People like him, who don't have children of their own, have to live on in the lives of the people they taught. I know that he influenced me in profound ways, and he did that with thousands of other men. All those discussions about what's important in life sunk deep into us, and helped to mold our later lives. I would not be the person I am today without the Father Hanleys of the world.
Many thanks, Father. May you rest in peace.
High school for me was awhile ago, and I'm reminded of that when I run into my classmates at reunions. They have gray hair and they talk about the 1950s and 60s with a great deal of familiarity. We all have vivid memories of JFK's assassination, the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show, miniskirts, Woodstock, the moon landing, etc.
I share all those memories with my classmates, but I also have something most of them don't have, even the ones on their second marriages -- a 13 year old daughter. I got married late and had children even later, so while some of my classmates have grandchildren, I still have teenagers.
At my last reunion a couple of guys mentioned they were already retired and had moved to South Carolina. I said, "I have a kid who's not even in high school yet. That retirement place on the beach is a long way off for me."
When Father Hanley died I realized that he was probably the last surviving teacher I had in high school. The little Catholic high school where I went has a cemetery in a field out back, and most of the priests who taught me are buried there. About ten years ago, on a visit to the school, I took a walk through the cemetery and read the headstones. When I saw the birth dates I realized that most of them were only in their 30s and 40s when they taught me, and now I’m older than that.
I wanted to go to Father Hanley's Mass, and I marked it on my calendar. I envisioned myself going back to the little chapel where I attended Mass in high school, seeing some of my classmates, perhaps walking through that cemetery again. I would revel in the memories, thinking back to the good and bad of high school.
The tough guy poses we struck, the machismo that was as thin as a haze of cigarette smoke. Talking about girls. Playing basketball in a gym that throbbed with teenage hormones. Thinking about girls. Wondering how my life was going to turn out. The cutting humor that teenage boys have, where everything was unprintable but so funny it made your sides hurt from laughing. Thinking about girls. Talking about life, morals, religion, sports, and a million other things with the priests during and after class, with blazing honesty.
I went to a Catholic grade school and was taught by nuns. Eight years of stern-faced women in black habits made me feel like a prisoner by the time I was 13. When I got to the all-boys high school it was a relief to have male teachers. They didn't mince words, they didn't wheedle or scold you the way the nuns did. Some of them had served in World War II or the Korean War, and they had the grit of life on them. They told it to you straight, and we boys were grateful for that. They didn't take any nonsense, but at the same time they had a kindness you could sense under the gruff exterior. They cared about us, and we knew it.
Father Hanley taught a religion class. I don't remember the specifics of what he taught me, but I do remember a lot of passionate discussions in class. I remember talking about real world situations, challenges we faced every day, and how to handle them. It wasn't a pie-in-the-sky philosophy, or the rote memorization we had in grade school with the nuns, but a nuts and bolts discussion about real life morals.
There was a lot going on in the world. The Civil Rights movement. The Vietnam War. The hippie movement. Old values were being questioned, and people were anxious for change. Father Hanley and his peers didn’t shy away from those tough questions, and they taught us how to look at them honestly and try to find the moral path amid all that turmoil.
I realized the night before Father Hanley's Mass that I couldn't go. My wife was out of town visiting our son in college, and I had two teenagers to look after, with a full schedule of activities the next day. It was impossible to do it all and still drive 25 miles to get to my high school in time for the Mass.
So, I had to say a silent prayer for Father Hanley, and hope that he's in Heaven now. I wish I had gotten to see him at some point in the last 40 years and thanked him for what he did for me. I'm sure he didn't get nearly enough thanks from the thousands of students he taught in a long teaching career. He was one of many priests who taught me, men who gave up the comforts of family life to teach other people’s children, who lived in a community and had no salary, no house or car to call their own.
People like him, who don't have children of their own, have to live on in the lives of the people they taught. I know that he influenced me in profound ways, and he did that with thousands of other men. All those discussions about what's important in life sunk deep into us, and helped to mold our later lives. I would not be the person I am today without the Father Hanleys of the world.
Many thanks, Father. May you rest in peace.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Does Birth Order Matter?
By John McDonnell
I never believed that birth order plays a role in a person's life, until I became a parent. As much as parents try to deny it, we do treat each child differently. Sometimes that’s because they have different personalities, but it also has something to do with birth order.
Parents change over time, and that’s the main reason birth order is important. You just don’t raise your youngest child the way you did your oldest, especially if there’s a big gap between them. I’m not saying that the oldest children get the best parenting, or that the youngest do. It’s just different, and here’s why.
. The first time is a charm. The first time you experience anything as a parent is always a small miracle. Hearing your baby cry for the first time. Watching them take their first steps, say their first words. It doesn't matter how inane or stupid, the first time your kid does something it’s the most amazing event in the universe. This is not to say that it's less amazing when your other children have the same experiences. A miracle is still a miracle the second time, but it just doesn’t have that same slap-in-the-face freshness to it.
. You take more pictures in the beginning. There is no clearer way to analyze the birth order question than to add up how many pictures and videos parents have of each of their kids. In most families, the number of images is inversely proportional to the birth order. When my mother cleaned out her house before moving into a retirement home, she presented each of her children with envelopes full of childhood photographs. For me, the oldest of six, there were several manila envelopes bulging with photos, some that were glossy studio portraits. My youngest sibling got one letter-size envelope with a handful of Polaroids in it, and no studio shots.
. You start out with more energy. I used to wonder why my Dad only played catch in the backyard with me as a little boy, and didn't do it with any of my brothers. Now I know. When my oldest daughter and son were young I'd often play basketball with them in the driveway. Now, I look at the basketball net wistfully, and remember the days before back pain. If I ever went out in the driveway and challenged my youngest daughter to a game of hoops she'd probably tell me to put the ball down before I gave myself a heart attack.
. You relax your grip over time. Here is where things get better for the baby of the family. With your first child you are involved in every aspect of their life. This makes for some ugly scenes during the teen years. With each additional child you relax your grip a little until with the last one you basically give them the car keys when they're 16 and tell them just to stay out of jail.
. You stop trying to be a puppet master. With their first child parents often mistake themselves for God Almighty. They feel they can mold the child like clay, starting when the child is still a toddler. "Look at the way he throws his peas from that high chair," you say. "He's got a great arm. That's a future baseball star there." You have a template you want them to follow, and you fully expect that they'll become an all-star athlete, a millionaire before they're 30, and President of the United States (making sure to tell the whole world in their inauguration speech that you’re the real reason behind their success).
With time comes disappointment, however, and the scaling back of your grand plans. By the time the youngest child comes along you just want them to stay off welfare and not do anything to embarrass the family. A humble job and the ability to meet their mortgage payments are quite enough.
Children are the greatest timepieces ever invented. They grow up so fast that parents find themselves butting up against the reality of Time’s rapid pace. The other day my youngest child, who is now a teenager, found our wedding album in a closet. "Dad, you were actually handsome," she said. "And you had hair."
I looked at the photos from so long ago and once again asked myself where the time has gone. I realized that the father she has is not the same one that her oldest sibling had, in so many ways. But where there's a lack of hair and energy, I think there's a lot more wisdom, so that even though I don't play basketball in the driveway with her, I also don't make the same stupid mistakes I made with my older kids.
She's growing up with a saner, wiser Dad, one who hopefully will guide her through the next few years with enough grace and dignity to make up for a few less basketball games.
THE END
I never believed that birth order plays a role in a person's life, until I became a parent. As much as parents try to deny it, we do treat each child differently. Sometimes that’s because they have different personalities, but it also has something to do with birth order.
Parents change over time, and that’s the main reason birth order is important. You just don’t raise your youngest child the way you did your oldest, especially if there’s a big gap between them. I’m not saying that the oldest children get the best parenting, or that the youngest do. It’s just different, and here’s why.
. The first time is a charm. The first time you experience anything as a parent is always a small miracle. Hearing your baby cry for the first time. Watching them take their first steps, say their first words. It doesn't matter how inane or stupid, the first time your kid does something it’s the most amazing event in the universe. This is not to say that it's less amazing when your other children have the same experiences. A miracle is still a miracle the second time, but it just doesn’t have that same slap-in-the-face freshness to it.
. You take more pictures in the beginning. There is no clearer way to analyze the birth order question than to add up how many pictures and videos parents have of each of their kids. In most families, the number of images is inversely proportional to the birth order. When my mother cleaned out her house before moving into a retirement home, she presented each of her children with envelopes full of childhood photographs. For me, the oldest of six, there were several manila envelopes bulging with photos, some that were glossy studio portraits. My youngest sibling got one letter-size envelope with a handful of Polaroids in it, and no studio shots.
. You start out with more energy. I used to wonder why my Dad only played catch in the backyard with me as a little boy, and didn't do it with any of my brothers. Now I know. When my oldest daughter and son were young I'd often play basketball with them in the driveway. Now, I look at the basketball net wistfully, and remember the days before back pain. If I ever went out in the driveway and challenged my youngest daughter to a game of hoops she'd probably tell me to put the ball down before I gave myself a heart attack.
. You relax your grip over time. Here is where things get better for the baby of the family. With your first child you are involved in every aspect of their life. This makes for some ugly scenes during the teen years. With each additional child you relax your grip a little until with the last one you basically give them the car keys when they're 16 and tell them just to stay out of jail.
. You stop trying to be a puppet master. With their first child parents often mistake themselves for God Almighty. They feel they can mold the child like clay, starting when the child is still a toddler. "Look at the way he throws his peas from that high chair," you say. "He's got a great arm. That's a future baseball star there." You have a template you want them to follow, and you fully expect that they'll become an all-star athlete, a millionaire before they're 30, and President of the United States (making sure to tell the whole world in their inauguration speech that you’re the real reason behind their success).
With time comes disappointment, however, and the scaling back of your grand plans. By the time the youngest child comes along you just want them to stay off welfare and not do anything to embarrass the family. A humble job and the ability to meet their mortgage payments are quite enough.
Children are the greatest timepieces ever invented. They grow up so fast that parents find themselves butting up against the reality of Time’s rapid pace. The other day my youngest child, who is now a teenager, found our wedding album in a closet. "Dad, you were actually handsome," she said. "And you had hair."
I looked at the photos from so long ago and once again asked myself where the time has gone. I realized that the father she has is not the same one that her oldest sibling had, in so many ways. But where there's a lack of hair and energy, I think there's a lot more wisdom, so that even though I don't play basketball in the driveway with her, I also don't make the same stupid mistakes I made with my older kids.
She's growing up with a saner, wiser Dad, one who hopefully will guide her through the next few years with enough grace and dignity to make up for a few less basketball games.
THE END
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
More On The "Tiger Mother" Controversy
By John McDonnell
My last post got more attention that any other post I've written for this blog. It was about the new book "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" by Amy Chua.
This book has generated a firestorm of controversy, especially after Amy Chua wrote an essay in the Wall St. Journal about it, titled, "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior". Chua is getting a lot of flak from bloggers everywhere, and it seems every parent has a strong opinion about her thesis, which is basically that Western parents are too soft on their kids.
Amy Chua has struck a nerve, because that subject is one that every parent I know struggles with. Get a group of parents together these days and invariably the talk turns to their children, and before long they're telling stories about how soft their kids are. Oh, they don’t use words like “soft” or “spoiled”, but that’s the gist of the stories.
If you have teenagers, it’s easy to go on a rant about the sense of entitlement they have, how they whine about the few chores they're asked to do, how they have more money and toys and gadgets than any other generation in history, and so on.
A lot of Western parents these days are asking questions like: Are we raising our kids right? Have we given them too much? Should we have been more demanding, asked more of them? What kind of people are they turning into? Now along comes this Amy Chua person to reinforce our worst fears.
You were too easy on them, she says. You gave them too much, and didn't ask anything of them in return. You should have taught them how to work harder, how to deal with adversity, how to respect their elders, etc., etc.
It's true that when I compare my childhood to the one my kids have, it's like I came from a different planet. I grew up in a house that was hardly bigger than some of the garages I see in the affluent suburb where I live. Of course I had no cell phone, computer, video games, or cable TV, but in my house we didn't even have our own phone line. We had what was called a party line, where you shared the phone line with another house, because the rate was cheaper. We had a big black phone on the wall in the kitchen, and if I wanted to call a friend I had to stand there and talk amidst the hubbub of a family of six, then be ready to hang up in an instant if someone on our party line started dialing the phone on their end.
But it goes further than just being deprived of material possessions. Parents back then demanded more of their kids, and they weren't shy about it. There was a lot of yelling in our house, especially around report card time. It was a kind of yelling that got very personal, and in today's world it would probably be called abuse.
Apparently Asian parents still do this, because Amy Chua admits that she called her daughter "garbage" once when she was particularly angry at her, and another time yelled herself hoarse when her daughter couldn't play a piano piece right.
I have never yelled at my kids like that, because I decided years ago that I didn't agree with that style of parenting. I thought there was a better way, one that wouldn't tear down my kids' self-esteem. I can't help but shake my head in wonderment, however, on the rare occasions when I do raise my voice just a tad, and my kids tell me to stop yelling at them. "Yelling?" I say. "You call that yelling? That's not yelling. I know yelling, and what I did is definitely not yelling."
Would a little more volume in my voice have toughened my kids up, made them more resilient and better able to handle life's down times?
Maybe. But you can't go back, and as I said in my last post, I'm basically happy with how my children are turning out. They are happy, confident, and outgoing. They have opinions, and they're not shy about expressing them. They haven't gotten straight "A's" but they seem able to handle a lot more than just schoolwork in their lives.
The jury's still out, like I said before. But I'm not going to be one of those parents who lacerates myself with guilt because some writer comes out with a glib formula for child-rearing. My parents did their best, but I feel I improved on their methods.
And besides, what worked 30 years ago is not necessarily going to work in today's world. The world my children live in is light years from the one I lived in at their age. They need to be confident, flexible, and adaptable if they’re going to succeed in the the next 30 years. They do not need to be rigid rule followers, because the rules are changing every day.
These kids need different skill sets to survive in the 21st century.
And learning how to deal with a “Tiger Mother” is not one of them.
My last post got more attention that any other post I've written for this blog. It was about the new book "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" by Amy Chua.
This book has generated a firestorm of controversy, especially after Amy Chua wrote an essay in the Wall St. Journal about it, titled, "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior". Chua is getting a lot of flak from bloggers everywhere, and it seems every parent has a strong opinion about her thesis, which is basically that Western parents are too soft on their kids.
Amy Chua has struck a nerve, because that subject is one that every parent I know struggles with. Get a group of parents together these days and invariably the talk turns to their children, and before long they're telling stories about how soft their kids are. Oh, they don’t use words like “soft” or “spoiled”, but that’s the gist of the stories.
If you have teenagers, it’s easy to go on a rant about the sense of entitlement they have, how they whine about the few chores they're asked to do, how they have more money and toys and gadgets than any other generation in history, and so on.
A lot of Western parents these days are asking questions like: Are we raising our kids right? Have we given them too much? Should we have been more demanding, asked more of them? What kind of people are they turning into? Now along comes this Amy Chua person to reinforce our worst fears.
You were too easy on them, she says. You gave them too much, and didn't ask anything of them in return. You should have taught them how to work harder, how to deal with adversity, how to respect their elders, etc., etc.
It's true that when I compare my childhood to the one my kids have, it's like I came from a different planet. I grew up in a house that was hardly bigger than some of the garages I see in the affluent suburb where I live. Of course I had no cell phone, computer, video games, or cable TV, but in my house we didn't even have our own phone line. We had what was called a party line, where you shared the phone line with another house, because the rate was cheaper. We had a big black phone on the wall in the kitchen, and if I wanted to call a friend I had to stand there and talk amidst the hubbub of a family of six, then be ready to hang up in an instant if someone on our party line started dialing the phone on their end.
But it goes further than just being deprived of material possessions. Parents back then demanded more of their kids, and they weren't shy about it. There was a lot of yelling in our house, especially around report card time. It was a kind of yelling that got very personal, and in today's world it would probably be called abuse.
Apparently Asian parents still do this, because Amy Chua admits that she called her daughter "garbage" once when she was particularly angry at her, and another time yelled herself hoarse when her daughter couldn't play a piano piece right.
I have never yelled at my kids like that, because I decided years ago that I didn't agree with that style of parenting. I thought there was a better way, one that wouldn't tear down my kids' self-esteem. I can't help but shake my head in wonderment, however, on the rare occasions when I do raise my voice just a tad, and my kids tell me to stop yelling at them. "Yelling?" I say. "You call that yelling? That's not yelling. I know yelling, and what I did is definitely not yelling."
Would a little more volume in my voice have toughened my kids up, made them more resilient and better able to handle life's down times?
Maybe. But you can't go back, and as I said in my last post, I'm basically happy with how my children are turning out. They are happy, confident, and outgoing. They have opinions, and they're not shy about expressing them. They haven't gotten straight "A's" but they seem able to handle a lot more than just schoolwork in their lives.
The jury's still out, like I said before. But I'm not going to be one of those parents who lacerates myself with guilt because some writer comes out with a glib formula for child-rearing. My parents did their best, but I feel I improved on their methods.
And besides, what worked 30 years ago is not necessarily going to work in today's world. The world my children live in is light years from the one I lived in at their age. They need to be confident, flexible, and adaptable if they’re going to succeed in the the next 30 years. They do not need to be rigid rule followers, because the rules are changing every day.
These kids need different skill sets to survive in the 21st century.
And learning how to deal with a “Tiger Mother” is not one of them.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Are Chinese Mothers The Best Parents?
By John McDonnell
One thing about parenting, there’s always somebody telling you that you’re doing it wrong. Mothers-in-law are good at that, along with best-selling books like “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”. This new book by Amy Chua will make even the strictest parents feel like they’re too soft on their kids.
“Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” is basically saying that Asian mothers are more successful parents because they push their kids harder. Amy Chua cheerfully recounts the way she pushed her two daughters to succeed in school by hectoring them constantly to study harder, telling them they couldn't bring home anything less than an "A" in every subject, and not allowing them to have sleepovers, play dates, or extra-curricular activities besides music lessons.
This is a mother who sat in on all her daughters’ music lessons, took notes, and then monitored their practices at home to make sure they were doing what the teacher instructed them to do. Her infamous quote in this regard is that American mothers think one hour of practice is enough. “For a Chinese mother, the first hour is the easy part. It’s hours two and three that get tough.”
Predictably, this book has generated a storm of protest from guilt-ridden American parents, some of whom resent the implication that they are unconcerned with their children's welfare, that they're absentee moms, and that their children will never succeed in life because they don't know how to work hard.
My wife and I have discussed the book, and so have our four children. The consensus among our kids is that they think Amy Chua is crazy; no surprise there.
We do wonder sometimes if we were too easy on our children, and Amy's strict parenting style seems a reproach when you have kids who were not first in their class in any subject, and who we could barely get to practice 30 minutes on their musical instruments, much less three hours.
There are no instruction manuals when you bring a baby home from the hospital, and although we tried to read the latest books about parenting, when our kids were young we were mostly too busy and too tired to do much reading. We made it up on the fly, based on our own common sense and what we learned from our parents growing up. We made mistakes, in varying degrees, but we also had some successes.
Compared to Amy Chua we were soft American parents. We let the kids have cell phones, sleepovers, and play sports. We did not call them "garbage" (a quote from Amy's book) if they brought home a "B". We did not monitor every minute of their lives.
The jury is still out, but at this point it looks like we raised four kids who are reasonably smart and successful in school, and who have a good deal of self-confidence. They are reasonably independent, and they have good values. Nobody has played the violin at Carnegie Hall, and we have no Ivy League grads so far, but they also haven't made any bad judgments or gone down all the many treacherous paths they could have taken, and people tell us they are all personable, confident, polite, and fun to be around.
The Chinese style of parenting is not for everyone. It's not even for many Chinese, if you believe the reports in the Wall Street Journal that say even in China some parents are trying to loosen their grip, because the government is trying to encourage more creativity and less conformity and rote learning. It seems that maybe the Tiger style of mothering is too harsh, and creates children who grow up to be too reliant on outside forces to motivate them, instead of being motivated from within.
The one thing I know is that the Tiger style of parenting will be a fad for awhile, but then someone else will come along with another approach, and parents will all think they're doing it wrong if they don't follow that approach. The pendulum swings back and forth all the time. I've learned from parenting four kids that there is no template for raising each child, and that what works for one child may not work for his or her sibling. No matter how many parenting books you read, parenting is still a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants endeavor.
Tiger mothering may work for tigers, but it has to be modified for humans.
One thing about parenting, there’s always somebody telling you that you’re doing it wrong. Mothers-in-law are good at that, along with best-selling books like “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”. This new book by Amy Chua will make even the strictest parents feel like they’re too soft on their kids.
“Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” is basically saying that Asian mothers are more successful parents because they push their kids harder. Amy Chua cheerfully recounts the way she pushed her two daughters to succeed in school by hectoring them constantly to study harder, telling them they couldn't bring home anything less than an "A" in every subject, and not allowing them to have sleepovers, play dates, or extra-curricular activities besides music lessons.
This is a mother who sat in on all her daughters’ music lessons, took notes, and then monitored their practices at home to make sure they were doing what the teacher instructed them to do. Her infamous quote in this regard is that American mothers think one hour of practice is enough. “For a Chinese mother, the first hour is the easy part. It’s hours two and three that get tough.”
Predictably, this book has generated a storm of protest from guilt-ridden American parents, some of whom resent the implication that they are unconcerned with their children's welfare, that they're absentee moms, and that their children will never succeed in life because they don't know how to work hard.
My wife and I have discussed the book, and so have our four children. The consensus among our kids is that they think Amy Chua is crazy; no surprise there.
We do wonder sometimes if we were too easy on our children, and Amy's strict parenting style seems a reproach when you have kids who were not first in their class in any subject, and who we could barely get to practice 30 minutes on their musical instruments, much less three hours.
There are no instruction manuals when you bring a baby home from the hospital, and although we tried to read the latest books about parenting, when our kids were young we were mostly too busy and too tired to do much reading. We made it up on the fly, based on our own common sense and what we learned from our parents growing up. We made mistakes, in varying degrees, but we also had some successes.
Compared to Amy Chua we were soft American parents. We let the kids have cell phones, sleepovers, and play sports. We did not call them "garbage" (a quote from Amy's book) if they brought home a "B". We did not monitor every minute of their lives.
The jury is still out, but at this point it looks like we raised four kids who are reasonably smart and successful in school, and who have a good deal of self-confidence. They are reasonably independent, and they have good values. Nobody has played the violin at Carnegie Hall, and we have no Ivy League grads so far, but they also haven't made any bad judgments or gone down all the many treacherous paths they could have taken, and people tell us they are all personable, confident, polite, and fun to be around.
The Chinese style of parenting is not for everyone. It's not even for many Chinese, if you believe the reports in the Wall Street Journal that say even in China some parents are trying to loosen their grip, because the government is trying to encourage more creativity and less conformity and rote learning. It seems that maybe the Tiger style of mothering is too harsh, and creates children who grow up to be too reliant on outside forces to motivate them, instead of being motivated from within.
The one thing I know is that the Tiger style of parenting will be a fad for awhile, but then someone else will come along with another approach, and parents will all think they're doing it wrong if they don't follow that approach. The pendulum swings back and forth all the time. I've learned from parenting four kids that there is no template for raising each child, and that what works for one child may not work for his or her sibling. No matter how many parenting books you read, parenting is still a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants endeavor.
Tiger mothering may work for tigers, but it has to be modified for humans.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Do We Need A National Day Of Unplugging?
By John McDonnell
So now we have National Day of Unplugging. It was started last year by Reboot, a group of Jewish professional people who decided that we all spend too much time online, and we need a day to unplug ourselves from our technology and re-experience the wonder of the real world.
According to their Sabbath Manifesto, this year the National Day of Unplugging is from sundown Friday March 4 till sundown Saturday March 5. The folks at Reboot are encouraging everyone to “put down your cell phone, sign out of email, stop your Facebook and Twitter updates”.
It’s not a bad idea, to spend that 24 hours doing something humans have been doing for millennia -- hang out and talk, listen, connect with each other in person.
Here’s a thought, though: How many people have you interacted with in the last month only through online means? It’s probably a lot more than you actually spoke to in person, or even on the phone. And how many people do you interact with online that you haven’t met in person in the last year? Or ever? I have friends and relatives I haven’t spoken to or seen in years, but I communicate with them on a regular basis online. I have classmates from high school I have seen only once or twice at reunions in over 30 years, but we share emails at least once a month.
And how about the people we’ve never met? There’s an English fellow I met 15 years ago on an online message board and I have never seen his picture or heard his voice, but I’ve had enough meaningful conversations with him that I consider him a friend. By contrast I have friends and family members who don’t use email, Facebook or Twitter, and consequently I interact with them less than with this guy from England whom I’ve never met in person.
Whenever I hear people say that technology is isolating us I think of my grandfather. He lived and worked his whole life in Philadelphia, mostly within the confines of an area that was about three miles in diameter. He didn’t have a phone in his house till the 1950s, so he couldn’t call his daughter who moved to Michigan when she got married, or his son who went to college in Maryland. If a friend or family member moved out of the neighborhood, he lost touch with them unless they came back for a visit.
Sure, he had more face-to-face contact with his neighbors than most of us do today. He didn’t have a screen separating him from authentic human interaction. But he also lived in a smaller world than I do. He couldn’t text message or email his kids the way I can, couldn’t send pictures instantly to a daughter in Europe the way I have, and had no chance of meeting or interacting with people who lived in other countries, the way I can.
Whose world was bigger?
Who was more isolated?
I think National Day of Unplugging is a good idea if it makes people get away from their screens for a bit and go outside for a walk, or take a friend out to lunch. There’s nothing wrong with that. Sitting in front of a screen for too long can give you eyestrain, and it’s bad for the circulation. And technology will never satisfy the simple human need for touching and eye contact. However, let’s not lose sight of the fact that technology is helping us all to stay connected in ways that our parents and grandparents could not have dreamed of. Our world is so much bigger and more interesting than it was before, and technology is helping us to meet people and stay in touch with them on a much deeper level than at any time in history.
So, unplug for a day, sure.
But then plug back in again!
So now we have National Day of Unplugging. It was started last year by Reboot, a group of Jewish professional people who decided that we all spend too much time online, and we need a day to unplug ourselves from our technology and re-experience the wonder of the real world.
According to their Sabbath Manifesto, this year the National Day of Unplugging is from sundown Friday March 4 till sundown Saturday March 5. The folks at Reboot are encouraging everyone to “put down your cell phone, sign out of email, stop your Facebook and Twitter updates”.
It’s not a bad idea, to spend that 24 hours doing something humans have been doing for millennia -- hang out and talk, listen, connect with each other in person.
Here’s a thought, though: How many people have you interacted with in the last month only through online means? It’s probably a lot more than you actually spoke to in person, or even on the phone. And how many people do you interact with online that you haven’t met in person in the last year? Or ever? I have friends and relatives I haven’t spoken to or seen in years, but I communicate with them on a regular basis online. I have classmates from high school I have seen only once or twice at reunions in over 30 years, but we share emails at least once a month.
And how about the people we’ve never met? There’s an English fellow I met 15 years ago on an online message board and I have never seen his picture or heard his voice, but I’ve had enough meaningful conversations with him that I consider him a friend. By contrast I have friends and family members who don’t use email, Facebook or Twitter, and consequently I interact with them less than with this guy from England whom I’ve never met in person.
Whenever I hear people say that technology is isolating us I think of my grandfather. He lived and worked his whole life in Philadelphia, mostly within the confines of an area that was about three miles in diameter. He didn’t have a phone in his house till the 1950s, so he couldn’t call his daughter who moved to Michigan when she got married, or his son who went to college in Maryland. If a friend or family member moved out of the neighborhood, he lost touch with them unless they came back for a visit.
Sure, he had more face-to-face contact with his neighbors than most of us do today. He didn’t have a screen separating him from authentic human interaction. But he also lived in a smaller world than I do. He couldn’t text message or email his kids the way I can, couldn’t send pictures instantly to a daughter in Europe the way I have, and had no chance of meeting or interacting with people who lived in other countries, the way I can.
Whose world was bigger?
Who was more isolated?
I think National Day of Unplugging is a good idea if it makes people get away from their screens for a bit and go outside for a walk, or take a friend out to lunch. There’s nothing wrong with that. Sitting in front of a screen for too long can give you eyestrain, and it’s bad for the circulation. And technology will never satisfy the simple human need for touching and eye contact. However, let’s not lose sight of the fact that technology is helping us all to stay connected in ways that our parents and grandparents could not have dreamed of. Our world is so much bigger and more interesting than it was before, and technology is helping us to meet people and stay in touch with them on a much deeper level than at any time in history.
So, unplug for a day, sure.
But then plug back in again!
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
The King's Speech And The Art Of Storytelling
By John McDonnell
The other night I saw The King’s Speech, a film about Britain’s King George VI, who had a crippling stammer and overcame it in the 1920s and 30s with the help of an Australian speech therapist named Lionel Logue.
You know how when you see a good movie you can’t stop thinking about it, sometimes for days afterward? The King’s Speech has stayed with me for days now, and I keep replaying its scenes in my mind.
And it’s making me realize that I haven’t had that experience in the last several years of moviegoing. It’s been a long time since a movie has had that kind of impact on me.
Why is that? The King’s Speech is an old-fashioned movie, one that emphasizes character development over everything else. There are long scenes with only two characters, King George and the speech therapist, simply talking.
There are no car crashes, alien invasions, cartoon sequences, explosions, earthquakes, or monsters. There are no superheroes. You don’t have to put on 3-D glasses to watch this film.
It’s just people talking, revealing themselves through their conversation, interacting, showing (or trying to hide) their feelings, and doing what humans do every day.
Not much in the slam-bang department, but it’s still powerful stuff.
The reason is that through the course of the film we get to know these characters intimately. We see what their fears are, what motivates them, how they react to stress, what they love, what they hope for. The King, played by Colin Firth, shows his vulnerability, his fear of public speaking, and with every stammering word out of his mouth we see the pain of a troubled childhood.
Lionel Logue, played masterfully by Geoffrey Bush, is a man struggling with his own insecurities, while also trying to make sense of the fact that the King of England has come to him, a commoner from Australia, to ask for help.
These simple but profound scenes are rare in movies today. With all the explosions and special effects going on in movies, there is very little room for character development. It’s almost as if the moviemakers want to keep our eyes busy with a lot of flashing lights so we won’t realize their characters are cardboard-thin and their stories have no coherence or logic.
Or maybe it’s just that directors are like kids playing with toys. They get so wrapped up in all the new technology they forget to tell a story.
Humans have been telling stories to each other for thousands of years, and it’s not hard to do. You simply need to present some rounded, three dimensional characters and give them a conflict to work out. The characters can’t be cardboard cutouts moving against a background of computer graphics. They need to have rough edges. The good guys have to show their weaknesses. The bad guys have to show a common humanity, not simply be cartoonishly bad all the time. The story has to grow out of character conflicts, and you can’t have a superhero come in and rescue them at the end.
I mean, really, for all the hype about last year’s Avatar, did it stay with you for more than a few hours after you saw it? I loved the alien world that was presented in that movie, but I forgot about it an hour after I left the theater. The characters and their problems just didn’t seem real to me, didn’t grab me. The King’s Speech, however, was made for a tenth of the price of Avatar, and had not a single special effect, yet I’ve been thinking about it all week.
For my money, that’s a real story.
The other night I saw The King’s Speech, a film about Britain’s King George VI, who had a crippling stammer and overcame it in the 1920s and 30s with the help of an Australian speech therapist named Lionel Logue.
You know how when you see a good movie you can’t stop thinking about it, sometimes for days afterward? The King’s Speech has stayed with me for days now, and I keep replaying its scenes in my mind.
And it’s making me realize that I haven’t had that experience in the last several years of moviegoing. It’s been a long time since a movie has had that kind of impact on me.
Why is that? The King’s Speech is an old-fashioned movie, one that emphasizes character development over everything else. There are long scenes with only two characters, King George and the speech therapist, simply talking.
There are no car crashes, alien invasions, cartoon sequences, explosions, earthquakes, or monsters. There are no superheroes. You don’t have to put on 3-D glasses to watch this film.
It’s just people talking, revealing themselves through their conversation, interacting, showing (or trying to hide) their feelings, and doing what humans do every day.
Not much in the slam-bang department, but it’s still powerful stuff.
The reason is that through the course of the film we get to know these characters intimately. We see what their fears are, what motivates them, how they react to stress, what they love, what they hope for. The King, played by Colin Firth, shows his vulnerability, his fear of public speaking, and with every stammering word out of his mouth we see the pain of a troubled childhood.
Lionel Logue, played masterfully by Geoffrey Bush, is a man struggling with his own insecurities, while also trying to make sense of the fact that the King of England has come to him, a commoner from Australia, to ask for help.
These simple but profound scenes are rare in movies today. With all the explosions and special effects going on in movies, there is very little room for character development. It’s almost as if the moviemakers want to keep our eyes busy with a lot of flashing lights so we won’t realize their characters are cardboard-thin and their stories have no coherence or logic.
Or maybe it’s just that directors are like kids playing with toys. They get so wrapped up in all the new technology they forget to tell a story.
Humans have been telling stories to each other for thousands of years, and it’s not hard to do. You simply need to present some rounded, three dimensional characters and give them a conflict to work out. The characters can’t be cardboard cutouts moving against a background of computer graphics. They need to have rough edges. The good guys have to show their weaknesses. The bad guys have to show a common humanity, not simply be cartoonishly bad all the time. The story has to grow out of character conflicts, and you can’t have a superhero come in and rescue them at the end.
I mean, really, for all the hype about last year’s Avatar, did it stay with you for more than a few hours after you saw it? I loved the alien world that was presented in that movie, but I forgot about it an hour after I left the theater. The characters and their problems just didn’t seem real to me, didn’t grab me. The King’s Speech, however, was made for a tenth of the price of Avatar, and had not a single special effect, yet I’ve been thinking about it all week.
For my money, that’s a real story.
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