How to Fight Fake News

A colleague's pet project (forgive the pun), A Dog's Purpose was the victim of fake news, wherein the movie project got almost destroyed by rumors an animal was abused in the course of the making of the film.   The animal wasn't harmed, and if you have the opportunity, go see the film.

Tom Brady got sacked twice in a single drive and I thought for the first half, had the Patriots been victims of fake news with respect to Atlanta?

When it comes to fake news, the question becomes, how do we know?  I've seen some good discussion on this matter, mostly focusing on where you get your source material.  Reuters, BBC, the Wall Street Journal and AP have become my favorite places to get information but the eroding of public trust, both by what is omitted and what is trumpeted, has resulted in a fundamental shift in how everyone views the news.

We all must become editors, who must engage in extreme vetting of all information which might inspire an outraged reaction on our part and all information which might gladden our hearts.  In short, if there's an emotional response generated by an article, one must pause and wonder, is that not merely the point of this piece but the author's intent?

If there is a silver lining in all this, the need for trusted sources may be cause for a great renaissance in journalism as the media must reestablish itself against the White House spin, and internet noise.

We will need the fourth estate in fighting trim to help reestablish genuine affection across the political divide, to reveal how truth is stronger than ideology, and reality is often full of peole who aren't one sided or blind to their own failings or the "other side's" virtues.   We will need to reconnect the whole of the country, united in creating a stronger community, whether or not the government goes along.
The great divide of politics so sharp and hard on Facebook and in the election, serves the parties and the game of politics, but not communities, and not friendships.

Hopefully, we remember this and let such barriers vanish when we see each other face to face.  I firmly believe that when we interact to deal with the real problems we should address every day in our own communities and stop treating each one and everyone we disagree with as an unclean other unworthy of our consideration.

Bring everyone along with what we agree about, because building community is based on mutual respect, one heart at a time.

Oh, and NEVER count the Patriots out.  Unbelievable!  Or it would be, but I watched the whole game so I know what happened.  UNBELIEVABLE!

Mulling over O'Connor, Copying Machines and Minutia

As an assistant in the room, my presence is only an augmentation of the learning enviornment, and some days, the pay is for dealing with difficult students. However, keeping machines on task proved far more daunting. Today, I spent the bulk of my afternoon attempting to amass and assemble copies of O'Connor's most famous short story. The first machine needed a part. The second machine (in the office), could only be used for school business, not classwork. The third copier flashed evil red lights.

With the new semester, we had six more students than versions of "A Good Man is Hard to Find," and while the students could listen to an audio verison and follow along with their phone; for annotation, they needed an incarnational version. Flannery would approve. She also knew, the way we come to understanding of all things, is suffering. I suspect she had a hand in the matter.

After twenty minutes of waiting for the office copier (There was a queue of teachers and assistants ignoring the policy), I attempted to fix the third machine by rebooting it. Much to my astonishment, the screen cooperated and I thought, "I am the master of my domain!" for the five copies of page one it spit up, before flashing the same error as before. Undeterred, I turned off the machine and rebooted again. Five more copies. I now had page two. Each page grew subsequently lighter. At seven pages long, I pressed the buttons and my luck turning the machine on and off for the subsequent five reboots before sneaking out of the copying room with my six versions of the story. I did have to trace the last page with a marker.

Leaving the machine with a red flashing light bruised my conscience, so I rebooted one more time. The next person might not need more than five copies of any one thing, and thus not find out the machine needed a serious repair. That afternoon, four students showed up having lost their versions.

I tried the staff room and planned to simply pull up a pdf of the story and have the computer print it. It did, but swallowed the last line of each story. It also printed them front to back, and flipped every other page, making the new version almost unreadable if you didn't know which way to turn for each page. I spent the rest of the period writing out the missing words of O'Connor's prose at the end of each page and wondering if the whole thing would have been easier and quicker if I'd retreated to a monastery and copied the needed documents by hand.

Having missed period five and six in the classroom, all for papers needed in period five and six, I pondered whether I could plead temporary sanity and remove all the infernal copiers to the outside, and perhaps invite all the faculty to take turns shooting the machines in the woods for being misfits. I thought it would give me great pleasure to imagine the machines being destroyed, or it would if only they could feel pain.

Somehow, the demonic desire for their demise wouldn't find any pleasure unless the copiers experienced agony, my irritation, my annoyance, and the collective pain of the staff and students. I told myself, it wouldn't be a sin, except I knew better. I wanted more than justice. I wanted revenge, and not just revenge, universal revenge for all the printers which ran out of ink, all the copiers which failed, and all the technology that made all of us slaves to their convenience, and masters of nothing.

A fellow teacher came into the staff room ranting about how the machines. He cursed them all and we agreed, Hell is littered with office machines, all unable to print or copy more than a page at a time, and with jams and no ink, and in Heaven, they don't bother with machines because everyone has a copy of the book and they can't lose it. I took satisfaction in the theological rightness of this revelation, that no technology would be saved and even better, I had no obligation to pray otherwise.  I pulled out four old Norton Anthologies which included O'Connor's story from the library for the next day. If the kids needed more copies, I'd be ready and maybe, save my own soul from spending further time in preemptive purgatory.  A good man may be hard to find, a good soul even harder, but a good copier, that's the stuff of legend.  

The Teens and I

Today on my computer, I found this as my screen saver on a pseudo post-it note:

To Do list

*Fix John's watch

*Have A great Day

*Write 

*Read 

*Eat,live and do alllll the other important stuff

You finished reading the naggy list I made for you. I hope you enjoyed it.

-love your naggy son John  *__*<------you after="" p="" reading="" this="">

                  \

                    [How does he nag THIS much]

Just in case I needed help figuring out what to do today.  

Other children have less direct ways of communicating, but they are as effective.

This morning the clothes I'd washed and put in the dryer were back in the washer.  I wondered why. Having opened said dryer, the answer became clear.

One teen wanted dry clothing and thought the easiest way to get it, would involve removing all of the wash from the dryer, and puting only said teen's clothes in the machine.

I'm guessing this child in particular didn't think the rest of us would mind wet clothing.

I did ask, "Wasn't it a lot of effort to take all the clean wet clothes out of the washer; put them in a laundry basket, and dump all the damp clothes from the dryer back in the washer before putting ONLY the teen's clothes in the dryer?"

The teen answered, "Yes."  

I asked if it might be less work to have let the first wash finish drying, and simply switch out the clothes when the cycle ended.

"Perhaps," the teen responded.

Letting the world know this sequence of events and revealing teen reasoning might not be something I ought to disclose.  Humanity can only bear so much truth at any given moment, and nature has deemed it wise to only allow for the onset of adolescent mood swings, eating you out of house and home, driving lessons, dates, text messages and explaining how the books aren't like the movies even if the movies came out recently and star famous people, after we as parents have demonstrated sufficient love and commitment to these gradually maturing human beings.

Writing about teenagers and tweens and children skating the edges of adolescence, I'm spending a lot of time discerning what is their intent, and what does their action/speech really say.  

Is Puzzlement!

These days, getting time to write comes at a premium. The going price for writing a new piece is sleep.  Editing comes at the expense of dishes, and posting, well, that cuts into life when everyone else is up and about.   I'm not complaining.  I'm explaining why you might be complaining about the sporadic nature of this blog.  I'll be over here, trying to convince a teen to do the dishes from the extra supper cooked, and get another one to take a practice S.A.T.   Getting to know teens day by day, I'll just state for the record, and I mean this with a full heart:  Potty training was easier.