My distrust for organized, established power began early. I’m not sure how many other kindergarten students had a nemesis, but I had mine. His name was Nick Davis and he was a dickhead. The specifics of his assorted torments have been lost in the mists of my early childhood memory, but rest assured they were heinous enough to sow a burning dislike for this kid deep in my 5-year-old soul. Between Nick and the idiots who ran my after-school daycare center, I already had a handful of people I’d come to dislike at an early age.
Ms. Cordova began our first week of school by assuring my later embrace of capitalism. She took all of our school supplies, dutifully purchased by our parents with varying levels of commitment to quality workmanship, and seized them for the collective good of the class. The means of kindergarten arts and crafts production were thus pooled for the duration of the year. Knowing my mother as I do, I can only imagine how she’d seethed at this news. Despite what was invariably a limited budget, she’d been excited to provide me with quality stuff for my very first year of school. Her dismay at the thought of my rich and lustrous Crayolas being commingled with shitass waxy RoseArt crayons was a feeling that transmuted easily to anger at the well-meaning Ms. Cordova, who quickly redeemed herself as an otherwise excellent teacher.
I wasn’t thrilled to say goodbye to my first set of school goodies. I tempered my disappointment by seeking out the most exotic of markers and tools each time an art project brought us to select from the collective supply depot. In no time at all, the incident was forgotten amid all the crap that kindergarten students spend their days doing. Before I knew it, the sweet, perfect feeling of the last day of school was upon us.
Ms. Cordova said many sweet things to us and encouraged us all to do well in our lives. We then began the business of settling our kindergarten affairs: collecting our art and classwork into handmade, oversized folders. At the end, what remained of the art supply depot was redistributed to the class. We each got some say in our spoils and my top priority was to secure a year-long favorite: a long, slender Crayola marker of deep and lovely crimson – my favorite color at that age. I secured my prize and a few other selections and closed the book on kindergarten.
Or so I thought.
There remained the always interminable afternoon of mindless daycare time. This bothered me less than it otherwise might have as I contemplated the future and reflected on my collection of classroom junk. The afternoon passed unremarkably and I busied myself with my newly-claimed marker. Which, I now noticed, had a name inscribed in tiny, fine-point permanent marker and cursive script: “Nick Davis.” This, I knew, was written by his mother, doubtless similarly unaware of the seizure of property that would follow. Smugness washed over me as I relished finally getting one over on my bully. The marker’s dark red ink seemed richer than ever.
Then Nick, also a daycare inmate, strolled along to say whatever it is that very young people find so dismaying. Today, thousands of hands of Poker have taught me never to overplay my hand. Back then, I was infinitely more impulsive.
“Oh yeah? Well now I get to keep your marker,” I said, waves of invincibility and vindication blasting from every pore.
Uncharacteristically, Nick shut up. Even more unusual, he turned and left me alone. I frowned, but held onto the feeling.
Minutes later, Nick returned. Accompanying him was one of those people whose list of accomplishments ended with “completed high school” and who were thus popular at my particular daycare.
“Did you take Nick’s marker?” The daycare employee gazed at me as she spoke, words plopping out of her mouth like bits of mayonnaise.
“Uh, no,” I stammered. I then explained the restitution Ms. Cordova had made earlier that day for collectivizing our stuff.
“Yeah, but it has my name on it,” Nick squealed, pointing as emphatically as any child his age could at the meek white instrument in my hand.
The employee looked at the name scribbled on the shaft of the marker and confirmed Nick’s assessment.
She looked pained as she told me, “I’m sorry, it has his name on it, I have to give it back to him.”
I didn’t put up a fight. I hadn’t quite learned how to stand up for myself yet and, unaccountably, these employees were authorities like my teacher at school, like the police, like my mom. I relinquished the marker to a jubilant Nick.
I spent the rest of the afternoon stewing. I also hadn’t learned how to curse, but I’m sure if you translated my brainwave patterns to a modern equivalent, they would have read “What a bunch of fucking idiots.” I was never the kid who painted his nails black and listened to depressing music, but nor could I ever again blindly accept existing authority or “the way things are done.”
Today, I would change none of it. Iconoclasm is power to ignore established limitations, throw out the rulebook and go further than everyone tells you is possible. It opens your eyes to new ways of thinking and new means of solving problems. I suppose the social order requires that this way of thinking be kept to a bare minimum, but if you’re among the lucky few who delights in a bit of herecy now and then, shed your shame for it and trust the alternatives it helps you to discover.
In my adult life, few things have ever been more satisfying than going beyond what people have told me I was capable of doing.
At the same time, I find myself wondering how much this particular leaning of mine handicaps me. In the long term, I resent the hell out of being led or managed. I also dislike leading others. I am an organizational anomaly, suitable only for short-to-medium-term freelance work.
I think I’m okay with that.
Since Tallymander was made a Staff Favorite last month, I’ve noticed that there are more solutions to the tally problem in the App Store than when I began.
There are, of course, many ways to skin a cat. For me, Tallymander does the job best because I built it to my exact desires. Still, while many elements of design are subjective, there are good and bad ways to do things. Let’s look at some of the other approaches to the tally challenge.
Tally Max
A few things jump right out:
Inefficient use of space: The entire width of the iPhone’s screen is available to each tally cell, but the tally title is confined to a much more limited area. The title is the only element that the user can customize beyond the rails of your design — give it some room. Continue Reading…
See the 2010 updated edition of this post.
Reader Benjamin wrote to me tonight and asked:
I have researched some into iPhone programming as I am obsessed with every application that is available for my own iPhone. The problem is that the amount of books and articles out there about programming for an iPhone is enormous. Do you have any recommendations for a few killer books to read in order to learn the process/language?
What a great question. It’s one I’ve been getting a lot from people I know since my apps went on sale.
Thanks to the popularity of the iPhone and the lure of the App Store’s profit potential, there’s plenty of crap floating around promising to teach you how to program for this new platform. Much of it sucks. Thankfully, there’s some gold to be found for iPhone SDK autodidacts. Let’s check it out. Continue Reading…
The casual observer could be forgiven for believing that public education’s goals more closely represent a circus than an earnest pursuit of growth and learning. Each player on the education stage has an elaborately choreographed role that calls for performance for performance’s sake.
The students, of course, carry the bulk of this responsibility, memorizing a routine of answers to be performed on cue for statewide aptitude testing. Teachers play the role of lion tamer in this burlesque, establishing rigid, unimaginative curriculum designed to maximize the school’s ability to deliver positive test scores. Finally, administrators like school principals are tasked with the role of ring master in these proceedings, made responsible for herding dozens of teachers and thousands of students toward some vague higher standard.
Putting aside the farce that is education tailor-made for test taking rather than genuine learning, there’s a story here in the impossible situation created for principals.
Monday morning, NPR ran a piece about the role of a principal as a school CEO. Districts look toward principals as standard bearers responsible for reducing school violence, for inspiring teachers and for innovating policy — and, correspondingly, for improving standardized test scores.
But this is a dreadful position to be in as a principal. The chief responsibility of a leader is people. Having the right people doing the right thing in the right place. More than ever, this is an exceedingly difficult proposition in public education. A principal isn’t empowered to “clean out the dead wood,” since teacher’s unions and district policies have mistaken public education for a government-subsidized jobs program. Inept teachers can’t be removed — merely shuffled around. In addition to being unable remove non-performers, a principal conversely cannot do all that much to reward high achievers. Benefits packages and compensation are inflexible realities established at higher echelons than where these putative “school CEOs” sit. Finally, even the most inspirational of generals would be hard-pressed to motivate troops as besieged as a legion of public educators. These are smart, educated individuals who know how to do math. They can see that their classrooms are over-filled, that their resources are limited and frequently out-of-date, that their students are less and less inclined to play the education game.
You want violence in schools to be reduced? It’s going to take more than clever leader at the helm. Students need a proper reason for attending school. Weekly rehearsal for the choreographed performance piece of standardized testing will not pass muster. You want the best and brightest contributing to the education of our young minds? You’ll need to do better than an empty suit pretending to be an executive even as a 10-year-old paint job peels around him. Educators need a mission they can believe in. They need resources to discharge that mission while also being able to pay their bills and live to standards befitting their hard work and contributions to the betterment of our world.
It sounds like a tall order because it’s the biggest public policy challenge in the history of our nation. So far it goes unanswered. But these reforms are essential to the survival of the next generation of Americans in an unforgiving, knowledge-driven global economy.
It’s true. I don’t want the government involved in providing education. It does not deserve the opportunity. When made, this declaration often rankles my conversational partners.
Yet, in comparing the hundred year progress of the major industries of our lives to progress in education, what greater indictment can be made?
I’m not quite done with incentive. Let’s leave education for a little while as we examine incentive just a little more in another area.
The Department of Motor Vehicles.
I’m going to give you a moment to let the chill run back out of your bones.
The DMV is a perfect example of an essential government service that fails to serve its users. In most regions of the United States, the opportunity to own or at least operate an automobile is a crucial part of being a productive individual. In order to enjoy these opportunity, a citizen must first pass through the gateway of the DMV.
You don’t need an inventory of the ways the DMV sucks at is mission. But just for the record: the lines are long. The service is often very slow. The facilities are rarely comfortable and are often in impressive states of disrepair. The staff are frequently unpleasant if not altogether assholes. Your chances of accomplishing a task at the DMV in less than two hours? Almost non-existent.
The cause, and our recurring theme, is incentive.
Everyone wants or needs to drive, so encouraging users to spend time at the DMV with pleasant facilities and efficient service is unnecessary. Paychecks are drawn through taxation and other compulsory fees, so being unpleasant to customers has no bearing on a clerk’s chances at having a job next year. You can draw dozens of cause/effect relationships, but the result is always the same: incentive is divorced from decision making. The DMV sucks because it has no reason not to.
When I lived in the state of New Mexico, that state began a fascinating project that draws my point into perfect focus.
New Mexico privatized their customer-facing DMV operations. What happened when incentive reconnected to the world of the DMV?
Customers were guaranteed in-and-out service within 15 minutes. The private offices were comfortable and clean. Clerks were friendly and genuinely interested in helping. Perhaps most telling, enormous signs plastered the walls sharing customer service phone numbers and encouraging anyone who felt even the slightest bit disappointed with the service to call and seek redress. In exchange for all this, customers paid a nominal “convenience fee.”
This was a shocking difference and well worth the money when compared to the government-managed alternatives.
So now I’m going to ask you. You really want the same guys who brought you the DMV to go to work on the brains of our children?