On Gimmicks and Context in Pop Culture

The best movie-watching experience I have had over the past couple of years or so – or at least the most important – came a couple of weeks ago, when I watched Boyhood. I’m going to be a little melodramatic here for a second. Boyhood felt more like a form of therapy than entertainment; it felt like I was watching my own life unfold in front of me (if the minute particulars of my life, like where I had been born and who my parents were, had happened to be different); every scene (with a few exceptions) seemed to at once depict and transcend the patterns of real life. It was three hours long and I usually have a pretty short attention span, but I was transfixed the entire time. I really can’t recommend it highly enough.

Now I am not alone in being a fan of the movie. It was the 2014 Best Picture Oscar winner, after all, and plenty of critics have adored it. But there has also been a backlash – a number of people who found it boring or pretentious or pointless. And as much as I enjoyed the movie, I find it pretty unsurprising that so many people disliked it. It is not even that hard to imagine an alternate version of reality where I am among them.

The thing about Boyhood is that I think your reaction to it will largely be dictated by the context in which you watch it. Well, that’s true of all media, all art - but something about Boyhood really makes me particularly cognizant of it. Because there is one fact about its creation that it is never going to get away from – the one thing that everybody knows about the movie, if they know anything about it at all - which is that it took twelve years to make. They started filming Boyhood when the lead actor was six years old, and then they filmed a segment of it each year until he was eighteen.

That certainly sounds like a gimmick. And I think a lot of the negative reaction to the movie has been based on the perception that it is all based around a gimmick. People get sick of hearing “It took twelve years to make!” over and over. Hell, that line has basically become a cliché by this point, the sort of thing that is only ever uttered ironically, mocking the frequency with which it was once said sincerely.

Fun fact: Boyhood was originally going to be called 12 Years, but has

to change because of this movie. And that would make this whole

thing very different, because you can't say "12 Years took twelve

years to make."

I am reminded of a friend who once said that she initially thought the only reason people listened to Joanna Newsom was because she had an unusual-sounding voice – another gimmick, another unavoidable piece of context – but then realized her music was actually good as well.

I also think of another indie musician, Bon Iver (who I have been lucky enough to see live twice in 2017, once in the pouring rain and the other time in a place that rhymes with that [see footnote for the answer]). No one ever seems to be able to talk about him (I find it very strange to refer to Bon Iver as a “them,” even though Justin Vernon plays with a full band a lot of the time these days) without mentioning the “story” of his first album, For Emma, Forever Ago. Bad breakup, illness, cabin in the woods, winter, solitude – debut album. I’ve long wondered how much of the appeal and popularity of Bon Iver could be explained by people latching onto this story.

And even now, he can’t quite get away from it. Every article written about Bon Iver has to mention it at some point. Even if it does so self-consciously – even if it’s making a comment about how frequently people bring up the story – that still counts. It’s like this: Daniel Radcliffe is never going to escape the shadow of Harry Potter, not as long as everything he does is described as an attempt to escape the shadow of Harry Potter. We’ll only know he has when no one is even asking the question anymore. (Though if nobody’s asking the question, that includes us. Which may mean we can never actually know.)

That bit of context, that little myth or legend, is always going to be there in one form or another. And that is always true. It’s an inevitability of engaging with art. There is really no such thing as interacting with “the work itself,’ devoid of context. The thing that really makes the difference – that determines whether we disparage a piece of context as a gimmick or embrace it – is just whether we respond to the work or not. I happen to like Bon Iver and Joanna Newsom and Boyhood, so the bits of context that are attached to them, barnacle-like, do not bother me.

Remember when this was a thing?

And then finally, this whole discussion makes me think about Kanye West, whose great genius in my opinion is his ability to create a context around his work. When he released Life of Pablo the way he did – one version, then another, then another – he made it virtually impossible to listen to the album without imagining him as its creator, perpetually dissatisfied, tweaking one little thing after another – a paragon of creativity. And how is it possible to listen to “Famous” these days without thinking about the whole Taylor Swift feud – not just what happened before the song, but also what happened afterward: her reaction, Kim posting the video of her approving the line on social media. What would that song be without that context? What would Kanye West’s music be without his persona? They are one and the same, inextricable. And I feel like, in his case, that is deliberate.

And it might have been deliberate with Boyhood too. Maybe Richard Linklater, the director, wanted people to repeat that line about how it took twelve years to make; maybe he even anticipated that it would lead to backlash and disappointment from those who saw the movie after all the hype. But I liked it. And at the end of the day, that may be all that matters.

1 Portland, Maine

The Emoji Movie: An Existentialist Fairy Tale

It’s definitely cool to hate on The Emoji Movie. And, like, I get why. When I first heard that that it was being made, my reaction was pretty much equal parts: a) I can’t believe that’s an actual thing b) of course that’s an actual thing c) what a shameless attempt to pander to “kids these days” that is probably going to make someone a ton of money and d) couldn’t they at least pretend to come up with an actual name for it?

And my past-self was not alone. The Emoji Movie currently has a 9% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and there was a while when it seemed certain like it was going to land at the somehow-slightly-more-dignified 0%. There have been copious articles and blogs and Tweets panning it, calling it a sign of the death of culture or “soul-crushing” or the end of the world or the worst thing since unsliced bread or whatever other histrionic cliché you want to insert in there.

Yes, Patrick Stewart does the voice of the poop emoji.

But the movie itself, it turns out, actually isn’t bad. (I watched it in a couple of installments over the past couple of days - because I had to rent it for the fifth-grade class at my school, who earned a hot-chocolate-and-snacks-and-a-movie party for bringing in the most donations for a food drive that I was in charge of - and doing so was kind of a long and tedious and complicated process, which involved signing up for a membership at my local movie-rental store, because yes, there are places where those do still exist and play a non-negligible role in the local community, and so I figured I might as well get my three-dollars-and-fifty-cents worth - and besides I kind of wanted to see what it was all about, anyway.)

Plot-wise, it’s basically just Inside Out’s poor, underdeveloped cousin, with the inner workings of the human psyche replaced with the inner workings of a cell phone. (And arguably those two things are rapidly becoming indistinguishable, anyway.) And there are some clever jokes and examples of wordplay interspersed with the more gimmicky aspects of it. My favorite bit was probably the elderly emoticon who gets knocked down by one of the younger emojis and then exclaims, “My colon!” (The fifth-graders, on the other hand, seemed to prefer the poop emojis chanting, “We’re number two! We’re number two!”)

But besides all that, The Emoji Movie is an excellent vehicle for exploring the existentialist philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir.

Simone de Beauvoir is probably most famous for her feminist writing these days – or, sadly and ironically, mentioned only as a footnote to her partner Jean-Paul Sartre – but she is also the writer of what I would currently maintain is the best work of philosophy ever written, The Ethics of Ambiguity. I can’t do it justice here, of course, but Beauvoir basically makes the claim that to be human is to be in a perpetual state of ambiguity. We are not essentially anything – a profession, a member of a religion or a political movement, a moral or immoral person, or even a man or a woman. Rather, these are all merely identities that we adopt through the choices that we make. Though there are certainly people who try to escape the ambiguity of their condition by trying to define themselves by one (or more) of these identities – and Beauvoir has a lot of negative things to say about such people – their fundamental nature remains ambiguous. Our essence is to have no essence.

Everything about her is so FRENCH

Enter Gene, the protagonist of The Emoji Movie. (I have yet to figure out if there is anything significant about his name. It’s not a pun, as far as I can determine, and the connection to genetics does not seem particularly fruitful to explore.) Gene is supposed to be a “meh” emoji like his parents – an emoji that only experiences and expresses disinterest and boredom – but he actually experiences the full spectrum of emotions. Because of this, he is labelled a “malfunction” and cast out of emoji society. And you can probably fill in the gaps from there – wacky sidekick, love interest, impending doom, adventure, learning to accept himself in the end.

Nothing about this is particularly groundbreaking, of course. It’s a kids’ movie about learning to be true to yourself. Which is pretty much just redundant. (I think it was Jeopardy champ and Twitter all-star Ken Jennings who once Tweeted, “Are there any kids’ movies out there about being true to yourself?” – a joke that was lost on a lot of his followers, who gave him earnest responses. Sadly, it was a couple of years ago and I don’t feel like getting lost in the labyrinth of Twitter to find it.)

But what makes the “believe-in-yourself” message of The Emoji Movie different (and more existentialist) than those of all the other movies, is that Gene does not really want to be something else. It’s not that the forces of society want him to be a “meh” and he would rather be a “smile” or an “angry face” or even a “high-five.” Gene wants to be what he fundamentally is – what we all are, according to Beauvoir – nothing, essentially. He wants to retain the freedom of ambiguity. He wants to be able to be express and project different identities based upon - well, based upon nothing at all. That's the whole point.

And – spoiler alert (though I’d be fascinated to meet the person who both wants to avoid spoilers for The Emoji Movie and has bothered to read this far) – it is Gene’s ability to manifest many emotions at once that ultimately saves the day. Because Alex, the kid-whose-phone-all-these-characters-are-living-inside is also fundamentally ambiguous: when he is around the girl he likes, he feels so many different feelings at once that they could never be expressed in a single emoji. So he decides to utilize Gene, and in that same moment decides not to erase everything on his phone. (Yeah, that part of the movie is a little bit contrived. I’ll grant the naysayers that.)

Beauvoir would also have something to say about Jailbreak, the

princess-turned-hacker, but there's only so much time in a day.

So Gene is an existentialist hero right up there with Mersault from The Stranger and Roquentin from Nausea. His willingness to embrace the ambiguity - or, if you prefer Camus to Beauvoir, the absurdity - of his existence rather than flee from it makes him worthy of our admiration. But things get a little bit more murky when you consider the larger world of The Emoji Movie. It’s not quite clear if every emoji is like Gene or if he actually is different. Towards the end of the movie, it is revealed that Gene’s father, Mel Meh, experiences other emotions but has been hiding them. He, too, is fundamentally ambiguous, but has tried to forsake his nature. He has tried to define himself by his identity as a “meh,” for which Simone de Beauvoir would scorn him.

But as for the other emojis – like Gene’s mother, Mary (and here I find the Biblical connotations of the name to be just as useless as the scientific ones mentioned earlier) – the issue is never really addressed. And that makes a pretty big difference. Because if every other emoji is truly nothing but his or her nature, then this is not an existentialist movie at all. Indeed, that would make for a movie with some truly worrying implications. If only the protagonist and his father can experience more than one emotional state, are the others really characters at all? Or are they merely automatons, prisoners of their genetic makeup? Is there no such thing as freedom in this world? (Except for two characters, which is actually weirder than if there was no freedom at all.)

I think we have to believe that all of the emojis are like Gene – or, rather, like his father Mel, fundamentally ambiguous but able and willing to hide it. And the movie does give us some hint that this is the correct interpretation, through the movie’s main villain, Smiler. Smiler is a female, smiley-face emoji who, yes, is always smiling – but she definitely experiences anger and frustration and even a sort of sadistic pleasure as well as happiness. Her identity seems to be a performance - based upon her external appearance rather than her inner states, as is suggested by her name.

(This makes me come back to Inside Out – the character Joy, voiced by the fantastic Amy Poehler, definitely experiences more than just joy. But in Inside Out, it is much more clear that Joy is called that because she has a tendency to be happy, which is not incompatible with existentialist principles. Nor is Inside Out really about the personified-emotions-as-characters so much as it is about the way they impact their human, Riley. Which is perhaps part of the reason why Inside Out seems like the better movie.)

But if Smiler is any indication, then maybe all the emojis are fundamentally ambiguous in their nature, and the only difference is the degree to which they are willing to accept that. Moreover, there is a moral dimension to this: Gene is better than Smiler because he embraces his ambiguity. And that is precisely where Simone de Beauvoir takes the discussion as well. As she writes in The Ethics of Ambiguity: “Man must not attempt to dispel the ambiguity of his being but, on the contrary, accept the task of realizing it.”

Just replace “man” with “emoji” and it all falls into place.

The Chicken Joke: A Close Reading

What is the most famous joke in our culture? The one that would be most people’s automatic, instinctive response if they were asked to give an example of a joke. The one that was quite possibly the first joke we heard as children (or at least the first one we remember hearing). The one that is so deeply ingrained in our collective psyche that it is almost synonymous with the very concept of joke.

It’s got to be this: “Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.”

And yet - that really isn’t a joke at all. It’s an anti-joke. Which I find absolutely fascinating for a number of reasons.

The whole point of the chicken-crossing-the-road joke is that it takes the typical structure of a joke and violates it. Instead of a humorous answer to the question, we get a literal answer. Yes, the most common and obvious reason why one would cross a road is, indeed, to get to the other side. And if that is funny at all (it certainly isn’t laugh-out-loud funny, at least not to me), it’s ostensibly because it subverts our expectations. The set-up makes us anticipate one thing; the punchline gives us something different. That’s kind of the whole point of comedy.

But with the Chicken Joke – again, our number one go-to example of a “joke” – that’s not really what’s going on, is it? Think about a young child hearing this joke for the first time. He or she probably doesn’t have much of the context needed to fully appreciate it. In fact, since the joke is so ubiquitous – not to mention associated in our minds with childhood – he or she may not have heard any jokes of this kind before hearing the Chicken Joke. That means there are no expectations present within the child for the anti-joke to subvert or violate.

Aww, look at him go!

And yet, it’s not like kids hear the Chicken Joke and think that it is a straightforward question-and-answer. They do understand it as a joke. I mean, sometimes they even laugh at it. So that means that they are literally learning the structure of this type of joke from something that presupposes their familiarity with it. Which is a pretty complex cognitive process if you think about it. And I think that it has implications for the way we understand learning.

Maybe you really don’t have to understand the basics of a subject before you can appreciate something that relies upon those basics. Or maybe being exposed to something that presupposes an understanding of the basics is itself a way to apprehend them. That is: maybe you don’t have to walk before you can run; maybe running is a way of learning how to walk.

I remember once, when I was maybe nine years old or so, I was watching an episode of Boy Meets World with my dad. It was the episode where Cory and his class watch some outdated movie about puberty. And Cory is making a point about how outdated the movie was, so he says something like, “The delivery guy was played by George Burns!” Cue the laugh track. And cue nine-year-old me, lying on my couch, laughing as well.

My dad looked at me. “Do you even know who George Burns is?”

I didn’t. (Though I’m sure I lied to my dad and pretended that I did.) And sure, you could take this little anecdote as illustrative of the power of laugh tracks, or the stupidity of human beings and our Pavlovian response to anything that is supposed to be funny. But I think it’s more than that. It’s also true that the experience of hearing that joke taught me who George Burns was in some sense. At least, it taught me that he was an old actor, someone whose name you would invoke to make the point that something was really old. And that is all the context you need to appreciate Cory’s joke.

So a truer answer to my dad’s question might have been, “I do now!”

*

This is George Burns. Or maybe

it's not. You're not gonna look it up.

Another thing I find interesting about the phenomenon of the Chicken Joke is how we have responded to it. We have constructed traditional jokes based on it, like this: “Why did the chicken cross the playground? To get to the other slide.” This relies on our being familiar with the original Chicken Joke - or else we would not appreciate the rhyme of side and slide. And in this case, for whatever reason, I don’t think we could grasp that necessary contextual information from hearing the joke that presupposes it.

Or there’s this one: “Why did the turkey cross the road? It was the chicken’s day off.” To someone who had never heard the Chicken Joke (as hard as that is to even imagine), this would probably just sound absurd. Or would it? Maybe the experience of hearing this joke would allow someone to deduce that there must be something about a chicken and a road that they were expected to know. I guess this whole thing is rather nuanced.

Then there are those who have reinterpreted the Chicken Joke entirely. I remember this one post that was making the rounds on social media at one point, wherein the poster “realized” that the true meaning of “to get to the other side” was “to get to the afterlife.” This kind of reminds me of those edgy posts about children’s shows where every Winnie the Pooh character is reimagined as a manifestation of mental illness, or Angelica is actually hallucinating the rest of the Rugrats or whatever else. Except those are (usually) deliberate reinterpretations, whereas the one about the Chicken Joke makes it sound like this was always the meaning of the joke. Which makes me suspect that the poster – and all those who enthusiastically shared the post – never fully grasped that the Chicken Joke was an anti-joke. So I wonder: what the hell did they think it was all this time?

*

"All black everything"

I also think it’s significant that, when we think joke, we actually think of something that was originally a subversion of the concept of a joke. There is something similar about the way we think about art. Or at least Art with a capital A. When I read that word, the image that comes into my head is just as likely to be some sort of Dada or Abstract Expressionist or Minimalist painting as it is to be something more traditional like da Vinci or even Picasso. And yet those movements were originally conceptualized as anti-Art. But they have become Art, at least to most non-artists. When people say they don’t understand Art or dislike its pretentions, that is invariably what they are referring to.

This happens in every medium, of course. The revolutionary, over time, becomes the new establishment – thereby necessitating a new revolution. It’s like what David Foster Wallace said about postmodern irony and cynicism: “Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the US has now been done and redone . . . Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving.” And so he advocated for a return to sincerity in literature. (Now, I’ve never actually read any of his books so I can’t say whether he was successful in this. But I do like the idea. And Infinite Jest is one superlong entry on the superlong list of books I’ve been meaning to read.)

But with humor, it almost seems like we have reached a point where no further revolution is possible. The anti-joke has become synonymous with the joke. It’s kind of like the end of Animal Farm – looking from pig to man, man to pig (or chicken, as the case may be) and it becomes impossible to tell the difference.

Now, I don’t know if that’s a bad thing, necessarily. But it certainly is interesting.

An Argument Against Choice

We usually take it for granted that choice is a good thing. Having no choice is rotten; having lots of choices is wonderful. It’s a principle that is pretty central to both democracy and capitalism, the two systems whose intersection (somewhat paradoxically) forms the reality of modern American life. And before we get too far here, let me just say that I am not really disputing it. Overall, I do think that having a lot of options to choose from is preferable to having only a few or having no choice at all.

But inherent to the very concept of choice is the idea of opportunity cost. When you choose something, that always means that you are going to miss out on something else. Or, realistically, many somethings else. (How often are we ever really just choosing between two things?) My point here is really that choice itself also has an opportunity cost associated with it. When we emphasize choice, when we construct a world in which people have a lot of choices we lose something in the process. And I think that is worth recognizing and maybe even lamenting.

I also think that, over the past twenty years or so, our culture has become more and more dominated by the principle of choice. This is especially true of the younger generation. Listening to the radio has largely been supplanted by listening to music from one’s own device. Watching TV has been replaced by Hulu, Netflix, Youtube, and podcasts. And I hardly know anyone younger than thirty who gets their news from a traditional source like a newspaper. Personally, I find out what is going on in the world from reading Twitter and Reddit.

Of course, choice has always been part of the equation. This is not an all or nothing thing. (As Jean-Paul Sartre would say, “choice and consciousness are one and the same.”) People living in the nineties were still making choices about which radio station to listen to, which TV channel to put on, which newspaper to purchase. But I think it’s indisputable that there were more constraints back then, more limits on what could be chosen. You could choose what you wanted to watch on TV, but you were only choosing from seventy or so options. Now, any time I decide that I want to sit down and watch something, I am always choosing from a practically infinite amount of possibilities. (Obviously, the library of Netflix contains a finite number of titles, but it certainly feels infinite when you’re scrolling through it.)

*

One of the problems that comes with having so many choices is the one that Aziz Ansari has done a brilliant job exploring in both his TV show Master of None and his book Modern Romance. (Here, read this. It’s far shorter and more straightforward than anything I would ever write.) Having a lot of choices can actually lead to anxiety and dissatisfaction rather than greater happiness. And as that article mentions, there is actually research out there to back this up. With choice comes responsibility, a sense of ownership, and a heightened awareness of “the road not taken.”

"What the fork is a Chidi?"

And there is another character from another staple of the millenial canon who illustrates the same idea, taken to an extreme: Chidi Anagonye from The Good Place. While Aziz Ansari’s Dev is punished for his indecision by arriving at a closed taco truck, Chidi is literally (spoiler alert) sentenced to eternal damnation because he is so indecisive that it hurts those around him. And yet he always operates with the purest of intentions: he simply wants to be sure he is doing the right thing before he acts.

So that is one of the things that led to my wanting to write this. Lately I have found myself feeling quite a bit like Dev or Chidi. On the days where I don’t have to work or have any other obligations, thinking about the number of options that I have can be overwhelming. Do I want to go somewhere? Do I want to listen to music? A podcast? Read a book? Play a video game? Make something to eat? And then each one of those questions, once answered, begets a million others; it’s like cutting off the head of a Hydra. I find myself longing for the days when there was a comfortable default, when you could just turn on the TV and watch whatever’s on. But now everything is on, all the time.

*

If you know me at all, you know that I used to work at Subway. It’s something I jam into a lot of conversations, whether it is relevant or not. But here I think it is actually very relevant. Because the entire business model of Subway is choice. (And it must be working, since despite having a literal child molester as their spokesman for almost twenty years, it is still the largest fast-food chain in the world.) Burger King may have claimed the slogan “Have It Your Way” first, but Subway takes the notion of choice to almost absurd levels.

The best work I ever did at Subway.

Here is how Subway works, if you somehow don’t know. You choose what kind of bread you want; you choose which meat you want; you choose which cheese you want; you choose if you want it toasted or not; you choose which veggies you want; you choose which sauce you want. That means there are over 3 billion distinct possible sandwiches you can get when you walk into a Subway. I actually did the math once. And some customers want to get even more particular than that - requesting that ingredients be placed in a certain order, for instance, or even picking out the particular tomato slices they want. And as an employee, you are encouraged to grant all of these requests, no matter how silly they seem. Subway is about giving the customer exactly what he or she chooses. No more, no less.

But sometimes someone will come into Subway and say they just want a sandwich with “whatever comes on it.” The problem is that there is no “whatever comes on a turkey sandwich” at Subway - any more than there’s a “whatever’s on” on Netflix. And so that always drove me crazy when I worked there. It was just a fundamental misunderstanding of the system. And sometimes it seemed deliberate, like people just wanted to prove a point or start an argument or something.

(Like, there’s this part in one of Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently books where one of the characters, who is an American living in London, deliberately calls up a pizza place and asks them to deliver her a pizza, knowing they won’t do so because that just wasn’t a thing in London when the book is set. She does it for the sake of being able to argue with them and insist that the American way of doing pizza is the right way. I often felt like customers were doing the same passive-aggressive sort of thing at Subway whenever they said they wanted “whatever comes on it.” I mean, it's easy to picture Larry David - or Jerry Seinfeld, for that matter - doing that.)

But I do understand the desire. Sometimes you just don’t want to have to make a bunch of choices. Sometimes you just want someone to bring you a sandwich because you’re hungry and you don’t want to worry about whether it would be better with Provolone or Mozzarella cheese on it. You don’t want to have any personal stake in the sandwich, any sense of obligation to enjoy it. Whatever they bring you will be good enough.

But a world designed around choice doesn’t allow for “good enough.” It forces us to think in terms of “the best.” Because when you choose something, what are you doing but marking it as the best? (Philosophers Kant and Sartre have claimed this as well, arguing that we ought to treat each choice we make as though we were making it for all of humanity.) And there is a lot of pressure that goes along with that. And that is exactly what Aziz Ansari is saying - to the extent that he sometimes he starts to seem nostalgic for the days of arranged marriages, like the one his parents have. Wouldn’t life be so much easier if someone would just choose for us?

Watch the local news sometime. It's enlightening in its own way.

*

Now, I realize all this is starting to sound like what everyone’s curmudgeon of a grandfather would say is the problem with young people. Back in his day, they just did what they had to do and when it was time to make a decision, they just made one and that was that. None of this whining about how hard it all was. And he’s right - to an extent. Being able to worry about this stuff at all is a sign of tremendous privilege and fortune. And perhaps the reason it has only become an issue in my life recently is because only recently has my life really “come together.” I have a good, stable job that I enjoy, plenty of money, a reliable vehicle, a schedule that leaves me with a fair amount of free time - compared to a couple of years ago, when I was in grad school and working so much that I never really left “survival mode.”

But to this fictional grandfather I would reply two things: first of all, it’s not really us who are different so much as the world we navigate is objectively different. (Or, if we are different than our grandparents were at our age, that is because we have grown up in this different world.) And second, this isn’t just about my feelings. I think that living in a choice-centric culture has a real impact on the way society functions; the side-effects aren’t just personal, but social and political as well.

Let's take the idea of “the news” as an example. What does it mean to get one’s news from social media rather than a traditional news outlet? Well, it means that I am hearing only those voices that I have chosen to hear. And this affects not just the opinions and perspectives I encounter, the “takes” I read on the major events of the day (significant in itself) - but also what counts as a major event. For instance, I follow quite a few prominent educators on Twitter. So I have been going through the past couple of days of my life with a vague, omnipresent awareness that the annual conference of the National Council of Teachers of English has been going on. That is a big deal within that particular community. It is news. But if I had not chosen to follow those people, I would not be hearing anything about it. I mean, MSNBC certainly isn’t reporting on it.

And this also means that I have the power to eliminate any individual voice that I am not pleased with for any reason. I have line-item veto power over the news. That was never possible with newspapers or television. Sure, you could decide that you weren’t going to read a particular journalist’s columns anymore, but they would still be there. You would still see their columns, be reminded of their existence from time to time. And we can't discount the impact that mere exposure has. Now, unfollowing a person on Twitter or unsubscribing from a subreddit makes it like that person or topic has ceased to exist for you.

Right now, there is a particular person who I follow on Twitter but have been thinking about unfollowing. Why am I thinking of unfollowing her? A couple of separate strikes. First, she has tweeted a couple of things that have made me think that she is too “extreme” of a feminist for my liking, that she is too much a member of the social justice orthodoxy, too much of a “purist” as opposed to someone with more nuanced views. Second, she has twice now tweeted criticism of someone I admire greatly and I found the criticism to be shallow and unnecessarily personal. So I have the power to remove her voice from the onslaught of voices that I am exposed to on a daily basis. Which means that I will no longer encounter her criticism of that person I admire or her feminist perspective - even though some of it in the future could be more substantial, even though some of it could be good or important for me to see. But I have that power as the result of getting my news from a medium that is built around choice.

And I think it is easy to see how this leads to the formation of social and political “bubbles” or “echo chambers,” where each person hears only the things he or she wants to hear. This has been brought up a lot since the 2016 election, especially as it pertains to liberals who were shocked by the fact that so many people voted for and supported Donald Trump. But I think it is a mistake to think that it is only young liberals who live in a bubble. Our society is becoming one where everyone can bubble themselves, because that is what we tend to do when we have so much choice over what we hear. Maybe it is our responsibility to force ourselves outside of our respective bubbles, to deliberately expose ourselves to the sort of things that we wouldn't normally choose. But maybe we were better off in some ways when that happened naturally, inevitably, just as a part of life.

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I have always felt that homeschooled kids are sort of weird and socially awkward. Just

The "bubbles" are not just political, but cultural as well.

something about them, you know? Perhaps I’m not alone in feeling this way. Once upon a time, I espoused the hypothesis that it was because they didn’t socialize very much with other kids, which seemed like a reasonable guess to make. But I was corrected by a person who actually had been homeschooled. No, they told me. They actually spent a lot of time socializing with the friends they had made through the activities they participated in. Probably even more than I did, they concluded. (I don’t remember who exactly this person was, but I feel as though he or she was rather smug about the whole thing.)

So I revised my hypothesis, like any good scientist would. It wasn’t that homeschooled kids didn’t socialize enough; it was that they only socialized with people they chose to see (or who their parents chose for them, of course.) They met their friends through voluntary activities. And when you like the same things as someone else, I think there’s a better-than-average chance that the two of you will get along. (Though, of course, that’s not always the case, and one of the great bummers of life is finding out that someone you dislike loves something you love. Like, imagine

finding out that Mitch McConnell was super into Modest Mouse or something.) But even when that’s not true, an activity like horseback riding or painting class tends to be only a couple hours a week. Homeschooled kids are deprived of the important experience of having to spend all day, every day surrounded by people that you dislike - which is pretty much all public school really is.

(Speaking of which, I do think this issue has ramifications for the whole debate about "school choice" as well. But it would take a whole separate post to get into that and I have been rambling on for long enough here.)

"You wasted life. Why wouldn't you waste the afterlife?"

So I think that we are all kind of becoming like homeschooled kids in this sense. We have so much choice when it comes to the content that we consume - and there is so much of it out there - that we never really have to deal with things we dislike or don't understand. Or we do have to deal with them sometimes, but we don’t do it on a regular basis so we are really bad at it when we do. We’re out of practice. I mean, imagine all the articles out there right now written by and for young progressives who have to prepare to talk to their conservative family members on Thanksgiving. Encountering someone we disagree with is an event now, instead of a normal part of daily life.

And another thing we have lost is the sense of there being something that is common to everyone in the culture. We have lost our lingua franca. There is nothing to talk about around the water cooler at work anymore because last night I was watching Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt or something last night and my co-worker Susan was watching NCIS and my other co-worker Dave was watching Game of Thrones. Nor can we bond over being annoyed by that “overplayed” song on the radio, because we each have our own playlists on our phones that we listen to. And we can’t even discuss the news (unless it involves Trump, who paradoxically may be the only unifying force in American culture right now despite being the epitome of divisiveness) because we all read different news that morning, too.

Maybe the point here is this: I kind of miss feeling like I lived in an actual culture. And that is one of the things we lose when everything becomes about choice.

*

And we also lose this:

"Sometimes you happen across a brilliant run of radio songs, where each time one station goes to commercial, you scan to another that has just started to play a song you love but had almost forgotten about, a song you never would've picked but that turns out to be perfect for shouting along to." - John Green, Turtles All the Way Down, p. 49-50

Why "High Expectations" Isn't As Simple As It Sounds

In 1964, Robert Rosenthal performed an experiment that has become quite famous. You’ve probably heard the gist of it even if you’ve never heard the name Robert Rosenthal in your life (which I hadn’t either until, like, five minutes ago.) Basically, he took a random sample of students and told those students’ teachers that these particular students had been identified as especially gifted. Over the course of the experiment, he found that those students, despite having been chosen at random, did come to perform better in school than a control group. Somehow (though it is a bit unclear exactly how this process unfolded) their teachers’ higher expectations of them led them to greater success.

When you hear this experiment mentioned these days, it is usually in the context of some inspirational speech: Have high expectations for all your students! Call them scholars! Insist upon excellence! Raise the bar and they will rise to meet it!

But I think what is at play here, really, is an equivocation on the word “expectations.” It is being used in two different senses.

Sometimes, we use the word “expectations” to mean the implicit, unconscious beliefs we hold about what is going to happen in the future. I expect that the sun is going to rise tomorrow morning; I expect that watching the latest episode of The Good Place is going to make me happy; I expect that my coworker Glen is going to walk over and make small talk about what day of the week it is. (“Almost Friday!” or “Monday again!” or “Looking forward to the weekend.") These types of expectations are usually based on past experiences. And often, we’re not even consciously aware of them - that is, until they are violated. Have you ever taken a sip of a drink that you thought was one thing but turned out to be another? You didn’t even know you were expecting water until you tasted coffee. And it can be a really nasty shock. Same thing when you are expecting there to be another stair and there is not and you end up slamming your foot down way too hard and feeling like an idiot.

Someday I'll write about the convoluted philosophy of this show, because
that's my idea of fun, apparently. 

Other times, we use “expectations” to mean something like “demands.” Think of a mother saying to her child, “I expect your room to be clean when I get home.” What she really means is that she demands that the child’s room be cleaned, implying that there will be some sort of punishment for the child if the room is not clean when she gets home. But it’s definitely possible that she actually expects the room to remain messy, that she anticipates having to give out that punishment. The moment the kid is out of earshot, she might say, “There’s no way he is cleaning that room.” So, clearly, there’s a difference between this way of using the word “expect” and the primary definition of the word.

(It kind of reminds me of when President Trump told FBI Director James Comey, “I hope you can let this go” about the Michael Flynn investigation and then some Republicans tried to say this wasn’t actually an order because Trump was just expressing his hope. Which everyone with any understanding of nuance and context and connotation - of language, that is - knew instantly was bullshit. Even Trump’s defenders were clearly being disingenuous.)

But when it comes to “expectations,” the distinction is never made quite so explicit. Rosenthal’s study was about “expectations” in the primary sense; its application is always about the other sort of “expectations,” the ones that we can actually control. Because as this article points out, no teacher - or other human being for that matter - is really completely in charge of his or her unconscious beliefs. If I expect that a particular student is going to be disruptive, that expectation is going to color the way I interact with that student. And as much as I remind myself to treat that student just like any other, to give him or her the benefit of the doubt, to be critical of my own assumptions and prejudices - that is only going to get me so far. At the end of the day, I am still going to be something of a slave to my own biases.

The NPR article (“NPR-ticle?”) acknowledges this - kind of. But then it weirdly comes to the conclusion that the best way to change one’s beliefs is by changing one’s behavior. This is ostensibly based on a study, but I feel like the study isn’t discussed in enough detail for me to really understand it. And the article doesn’t say much about how you could or should change your behavior. I am left feeling skeptical, left feeling as though our beliefs and expectations are largely out of our hands. The idealist in me wants to say that discussion and critical reflection are our best hope, but I also know that that’s a lame, cop-out answer, kind of like implying that “conversation” can heal our nation’s political divide.

It's amazing to me how many "inspirational"
quotes like this there are. 

But this has important implications, especially when it comes to the idea of social justice. It has been shown that white teachers, even those who support anti-racist causes, tend to have lower expectations of their non-white students. These are ingrained in us by our culture. And I wouldn’t be surprised if something similar is true along gender lines, although that might be less of an issue because education is not male-dominated the same way it is white-dominated (although STEM programs often are.)

Every article that I have found that discusses this subject always seems to fall back on that same idea that “being aware” of these biases is - while not sufficient - a good “first step” in the project of eradicating them. But I’m not so sure if I buy that. It sounds nice, but is there any real reason to believe it’s true? What if we can’t control our expectations at all? What then?

I have no goddamn clue. It’s a very unsatisfying and bleak premise, which is why I have been trying and failing to write a conclusion here for a solid fifteen minutes - some part of me can’t bear to end on such a hopeless thought. Some part of me has to believe that we can do something. Even if we must acknowledge that any project of this sort is going to contain an element of failure, I have to think or hope or believe that it could bring some success, too. To get a bit meta here for a second - I can’t help but to expect it to, and so that, in itself, kind of proves my point.

But either way, we should try to be clear about what we’re saying and, at the very least, recognize that “expectations” can mean two different things.

Testing Isn't Everything; It's The Only Thing

My students’ test scores went up last year. Quite a bit, actually. And as much as I am skeptical of the validity of standardized test scores (in the abstract, at least), it is definitely cool to see some evidence that my class has made some sort of a difference. The 2016-2017 school year was the first year that the students in grades 6-8 had a class devoted to writing and - since that was the only major change from the previous year and it was only students in grades 6-8 whose scores rose significantly and it was only their ELA scores (not Math) - it seems reasonable to infer that this class caused that rise in test scores. (Unless you’re David Hume or something and you don’t believe in the notion of causation at all, in which case - yeah, I get it, but also, like, come on.)

Let me brag here for just a second. When my most challenging cohort of kids, last year’s seventh graders, took the ELA test at the end of the 2015-2016 school year, 33% of them were judged to be "proficient." On the 2016-2017 test, that number rose to 71%. That's compared to a statewide average of 63% proficiency. So, in other words, that class went from being way below the state average to slightly above it. And they were the lowest of the three grades I teach. 88% of the sixth graders and 86% of the eighth graders were judged proficient on the ELA test, numbers which put our moderately-high-poverty school in league with schools in affluent towns like Bedford and Amherst. (It’s something of an open secret, I guess, that high income levels are generally associated with high test scores.)

And yeah, I’m definitely that guy who would say “you know, test scores aren’t actually a good measure of learning” if my students’ scores had gone down or stayed the same - but who is perfectly willing to automatically, unthinkingly accept them as valid when they make me look good. (Maybe it counts for something that I’m aware of that? Or maybe it actually makes it worse because I’m not doing anything to fight it?) But that’s not really my main point here.

Proof that rich people are just objectively better, I guess.

My point has to do with the fact that, at the end of this year, I will not be able to see if my students’ progress on these tests was just a fluke or an actual pattern. Because they will be taking a completely different test than they did last year. The format of it will be very similar, but it is designed by a different company - AIR instead of SBAC - and will separate out reading and writing instead of grouping them both together under "English Language Arts." And that means there is no way to make comparisons between the 2016-2017 school year and the 2017-2018 one. We will have to wait until 2019 to have any sense of whether our students' scores are improving, declining, or remaining static.

(Two caveats: that doesn’t mean we won’t have any clue if they’re improving at the skills that we teach. Of course we will. And it also doesn’t mean that people won’t try to say that the results of the new test mean something in relation to the old test. Let's say, for instance, only 60% of students are judged proficient this year - I'm sure someone out there will take this to mean their scores have gone down. I discussed that latter issue in more depth the last time I wrote about testing.)

There is nothing inherently wrong with scrapping an old test and finding a new one, of course. If the old test was bad or invalid, then that’s the wisest thing to do. But it sure does seem to be happening an awful lot. New Hampshire has only been using the SBAC test for three years, a short enough time that I, a twenty-six year old “baby teacher," remember when it was first introduced. I was working in a school at the time. Before that, they had the NECAP, which was around for a bit longer - I remember taking that one in middle school. But when I was an elementary student, there were different tests - one in fourth grade which I want to say was called the CAT (but I refuse to look it up) and a different one in third grade. And those are only the state-mandated tests. It says nothing of the local or school-level tests, which in some places may be changed even more frequently. Or the NAEP test that some schools (including mine, last year) are selected to participate in. It’s hard for kids to keep it all straight, keep track of what they are expected to do on each test. (Not to mention all the acronyms. Sometimes I think our culture has AOD - Acronym Obsessive Disorder. [That sounds like a joke Alfie Kohn would make. Apologies to Mr. Kohn if it is.])

When the test du jour was the NECAP, students were often told to “fill the box” with writing. It was a paper and pencil test and many educators knew that longer responses tended to get higher scores - hopefully because those students were more likely to have elaborated on their answers, but also possibly because some primitive part of the human brain actually believes that more equals better. But when it was replaced by SBAC, “filling the box” became objectively impossible; SBAC was a computerized test, where the box would expand to the length of the Bee Movie script if you typed that in there. (If I remember correctly, you couldn’t copy-and-paste into the box, in an attempt to prevent plagiarism. But I am sure there are some dedicated slackers out there who would be willing to type the whole thing out just “for the lulz.” In fact, the name of a particular seventh-grader just popped into my head. He'd definitely do it if he were in the right mood.) So we had to change what we advised the students to do.

And I think, somewhere in my three years of administering this test, I had gotten pretty good at preparing my students for the writing portion of it. I knew what they would be expected to do and what sort of practice they needed to be able to do it well. And honestly, I thought the writing component of SBAC was pretty darn good. I didn’t love the time limit, but other than that there wasn’t all that much in there that I could take issue with. I felt pretty confident that my regular approach to teaching writing was going to help them succeed on the test as well as grow as writers in the long-term.

"Ya like jazz?"

So maybe I’m partially just annoyed that a standardized test I am familiar with and kind of actually liked (or at least didn’t mind having to deal with) is being replaced. And I definitely am distrustful of the fact that the writing component of our new test is going to be scored by a computer. (I’ve written about that before, too, and so have a bunch of smarter people than me.) And if my students’ scores suck this time around, I’ll almost definitely blame that.

But it also seems like the people involved in education are constantly trying to reinvent the wheel, like the perennial impulse is to dump out the whole bag of apples and start over from scratch. Veteran teachers have been telling me for years that education is cyclical - things that fall out of favor always come back again. And already I feel like I am starting to see that. But it’s also true that there are certain assumptions and features that are never (seriously) questioned - things like annual standardized testing, or the underfunding and subsequent understaffing of many schools. People talk about these things a lot, of course, but no one ever actually does much to address them.

And then there are the things that are really never questioned, which are the things that I can’t even mention here because I am not capable of seeing them, because they are part of the water that I am dissolved in. And my hunch is that if there is any sort of answer to all of the problems that we face, that would probably be the most promising place to start looking.