Opinion

Distinctly biased viewpoints on this and that

Pining for Paper

My Dad and I got into an interesting debate while nursing cold beverages on the deck of his place in Canada,  during the annual “cram everyone into one house and see how long we last” multi-family retreat. We always have some good discussions during these gatherings. But my Dad and I aren’t that often on such clearly opposite sides of an issue. It started with some comment of mine about the declining importance of penmanship (shouldn’t that be penpersonship now? Or perhaps pencraft.) My Dad is in his 70’s and can’t imagine a world in which people don’t write notes, lists, invitations, and memos by hand. I’m about to turn 50, and can.

Ultimately, of course, my Dad is right: it will be a long, long time before humans fully forget the skill of making physical characters with a writing tool on some surface. But long before that happens penmanship will have been relegated to a ceremonial role, and then something of purely antiquarian interest. What of the stuff we write on? An article in the NYT (registration may be required) today about the bookselling giant Barnes & Noble putting itself on the block notes the rapid growth of ebooks, and the how the death of paper is poised over the publishing industry like a virtual wrecking ball. My analogy is imperfect because it implies sudden destruction, whereas this wrecking ball has been slowly swinging back and forth for a few years now.

I used to spend maybe $200 to $500 a year on programming books. I don’t buy any programming books these days, and haven’t for close to five years. Everything I need to know is online. I still do buy fiction, because I don’t yet have a reader. My wife, who does have a reader (a Nook), buys ebooks more or less exclusively at this point. I also buy non-fiction, but much less than in the past. In recent research for a historical novel I purchased four or five technical history texts, but I collected at least as much or more information online. I visit the library for paper books too, and wonder what will happen to Ben Franklin’s idea over the next twenty years? Who will lead us through the stacks when there are no stacks?

As a writer who still has hopes of being published when he grows up, I am not at all disinterested in these developments, and whether they are good for writers. In balance I think they will be. What the publishing business represented was distribution. If the average author made a couple of bucks per book they were doing pretty well. People are already finding success publishing their own work, promoting it online, and delivering it electronically. With publishers focused on blockbuster novels and movie-star authors this change may in fact stir up the market, and let forth a lot of great material that would otherwise have mouldered on a hard drive.

However things turn out for writers, these changes will be cataclysmic for companies like Barnes & Noble, with thousands of stores and the massive bottom line associated with brick and mortar retailing. Companies that make paper, print books, bind books, sell books, and play other roles in the aging paper pipeline will be hit hard. Small companies may find new niches and prosper, but utterly disruptive change is nearly impossible for large companies to deal with. Just try to get a meeting room full of senior executives or board members to jettison an existing business model and pour resources into a risky new one. Netflix wins, not Blockbuster.

The Fine Art of Poking Holes

I’m a hole poker, and people don’t much care for hole pokers. I learned this lesson years ago, when I was the boatswain aboard a large sailing vessel. The boatswain is the highest-rated seaman aboard who isn’t an officer; his job is to keep everything on deck and above in working order, and supervise the other seamen. The word boatswain comes from Old English and Norse, but you don’t often hear it spoken. Instead we say bosun, which should properly be punctuated as bo’sun. Sailors don’t like to move their mouths much, which is one reason why I wasn’t a great success as a sailor.

In the capacity of bo’sun I often found myself delivering bad news to the First Mate, who didn’t always appreciate it. The First Mate, by the way, is the highest rated officer aboard who isn’t the captain, so there was a certain symmetry to our relationship. He didn’t really mind it when I pointed out something that was broken and needed to be patched with money, but when the news was more of the anticipatory “if we don’t fix this then its possible that might happen” variety, he would get a little irritated. I was dreaming up work, which I certainly wouldn’t be doing if I had work to do.

I ended up spending nearly a whole summer aboard a laid-up ship with that same First Mate, and I like to think we developed some respect for each other’s approach. I never forgot that lesson, however, and I’ve had it repeated more than once since, in venues as distant from each other as the deck of an oyster dredger is from a boardroom. Which is to say that while I never forgot it, I never learned it either.

As a species our inherent distaste for hole poking is illuminated by our distaste for criticism. We look down on professional critics, thinking that if they had any real talent they would do things, and not simply criticize the things others are doing. But it takes imagination to criticize, and poke holes. You have to be able to imagine something as other than it is, and then imagine the consequences of that. Novelists should make pretty good hole pokers.

The problem with our aversion to the poking of holes is that there is one thing we fear more than having the flaws in our plans highlighted before a large audience: the consequences of not having those flaws highlighted. We are terrified of Bad Things happening. We hate risk so much we’ll shut down half the world’s airspace rather than chance flying through the Invisible Cloud of Death. We hate it so much that we’ll put colored cellophane around it and call it something else, like Collateralized Debt Obligation.

The way to avoid Bad Things happening as a consequence of flawed plans is to poke holes in the plans before they are put into operation. But that would require admitting that we, the authors of those plans and designs, didn’t possess sufficient imaginative powers to envision and close the revealed gaps before the hole poking began. Perhaps the best thing for all of us is to sit tight, pretend we’ve covered the bases, and then when things go south rise in righteous indignation and demand that our politicians pass a law to keep it from happening again.

On second thought there may be some flaws in that plan.

Books for Former Fantasy Lovers

Somewhere along the line, between devouring everything Tolkien wrote nine times, and putting down the eighth volume of The Wheel of Time in disgust, I lost my appetite for fantasy. There was a time when I would have departed for Middle Earth in a heartbeat, if you had shown me the door. I used to prance around my bedroom wearing my Dad’s Korean war-era bayonet as Sting. It was way too small to be any other sword, but as Sting it was ideal, even if I was far from the archetype of a hobbit.

I never recaptured that feeling with any other story, although I have read very many fantasy novels and series since. I have some favorites, such as The Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay, or Tad Williams’ Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. I have my least favorites too, like The Wheel of Time, and The Wheel of Time, not to mention The Wheel of Time. In general, though, I’m just not that into it anymore. Part of this is no-doubt because I grew older. Another part of it is certainly because fantasy grew weirder. Whatever the reasons, I haven’t purchased a new fantasy novel since George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Kings.

That doesn’t mean I have lost my taste for swashbuckling adventure, the struggle of good vs. evil, and the days when men were men and wore armor to bed. Far from it. But I have lost my tolerance for what feel to me like the excesses of modern fantasy. Fortunately, to replace it I have gained a huge appreciation for historical fiction. After all, European history is awash with exactly these sorts of stories. So, for those of you who, like me, are a little worn out on High Fantasy, or no longer high enough to appreciate it, I present some alternatives that will take you to places just as epic, and just as moving.

Bernard Cornwell. Mr. Cornwell is the reigning Master of Dark Ages and Medieval European historical storytelling. Begin with The Last Kingdom, first in his currently five-part Saxon Chronicles. If that whets your appetite, and it will, finish out the rest of the series and then dig into The Archer’s Tale, which begins his three-part Grail Quest story. Speaking of grails and quests, be certain not to miss Cornwell’s Arthurian Cycle, beginning with The Winter King. It is one of the best renderings of that subject matter that I have ever read, second only to Mary Stewart’s, which I will get to below. Bernard Cornwell is a highly accomplished storyteller whose narratives will grip you from the first page. I devour every new one like a bag of potato chips, and even when I want to linger I can’t possibly.

David Gemmell. Mr. Gemmell was to the pre-Roman Classical Age what Bernard Cornwell is to the post-Roman Dark and Middle Ages. You can pretty much throw a dart at a list of his works taped to the wall, and be assured you’re getting something excellent and satisfying. If I were just discovering Gemmell I would start at the end. His Troy stories, the last series he wrote before his death in 2006, begin with Lord of the Silver Bow, and tell the story of the conquest of Troy from the perspective of Helikaon, Achilles, Ulysses, Priam, Andromache, and many other well-known characters from Greek Mythology. The last installment, The Fall of Kings, was finished by his wife Stella after he passed away. Once you’ve dined on those tasty dishes, don’t miss Lion of Macedon, and Dark Prince, or any of the Rigante books, beginning with Sword in the Storm. Like Cornwell, Gemmell was the very essence of a master storyteller.

Lady Mary Stewart. For my part, when it comes to the Arthurian tales, nobody has told them like Mary Stewart. I read the first book in her five-part series, The Crystal Cave, back in the early eighties and quickly finished off the three additional volumes that were then available. Since then she has published a fifth, The Prince and the Pilgrim. My favorite aspect of these stories is her treatment of Merlin’s character, and the way she weaves Arthur and his family seamlessly into actual events taking place in Britain at the close of the Roman era, and the dawning of the Saxon invasions. If you love stories of King Arthur then Lady Stewart’s cycle is not to be missed.

What you will not find in any of these books are flashy magic, elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins, amulets of power, or rings that can save or doom the world. What you will find in abundance are the essential qualities of epic storytelling: compelling characters, irresistible historical forces, honor, loyalty, treachery, betrayal, the clash of mighty armies, and the saving of the occasional female in need. In other words, all the good stuff, and none of the hokum. Enjoy!

The Last Word on Healthcare

My last word, that is. When I set this site up I vowed to myself to focus on the historical, the technical, occasionally the literary, and stay the hell away from the political. But alas it seems strange, here on the eve of perhaps the greatest change in our government since Johnson’s Great Society, to say nothing at all. So here are two coins with very little copper in them, on the subject of healthcare.

First, healthcare is no different than shoes and shingles. If I want a pair of shoes, or I need shingles for my roof, I have to find people who make shoes or shingles, pay them the costs of their labors plus some profit, and carry away my goods. I don’t have a right to shoes and shingles if I don’t have the money to pay for them. Same thing with food and fuel, both of which, by the way, cost me a lot more on a yearly basis than health care. If you think healthcare represents some special category of stuff, more important than food, fuel, shoes, and shingles, then I think the burden is on you to explain that position.

Second, it disturbs me when I hear healthcare described as a right. Healthcare isn’t like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. None of those things are tangible goods. Healthcare is provided by people who invest huge amounts of time and labor into it. Doctors invest eight to ten years of schooling, nurses two to six. Pharma companies invest billions in the creation of new drugs, health management companies billions into the building and maintenance of hospitals. And the problem, the main problem at any rate, is that we don’t want to pay for the results of their labors. We want someone else to pay.

Specifically we want insurance, apparently some sort of magical artifact that allows the wearer to consume, on demand, thousands of dollars worth of expensive, specialized goods and services, while paying little or nothing in return. And because we would feel bad if we were the only ones who possessed the enchanted item, we want everyone to have one just like ours. Then we can all consume as much as we wish. Tragedy of the Commons, anyone?

Third, if you don’t want to pay for something, and you succeed in convincing someone else to pay for it on your behalf, you lose the power of the purse in that relationship. One of the reasons people are so upset with healthcare, apparently, is that employers and insurance companies have too much say in the kind of treatment patients receive. They have a lot of say, because they’re writing the checks. Shocking, I know. Personally I don’t care if you prefer to have your employer pay, or the government, or some insurance company. The only thing that matters to me is that you don’t want it coming out of your pocket.

If you succeed in that, then in the end you’re going to get what you pay for. Costs will continue to rise, but even faster, because demand will have been expanded without addressing supply. Supply will stagnate or decrease, because the incentives to succeed will be bled out of the system. The payers will have even more power, and even more incentive to regulate access and pricing. All of that is already happening, not because we have single-payer government-provided insurance, but simply because we want our employers and insurance companies to pay our bills.

So, fourth and finally, you’re dreaming. Healthcare is a tangible and limited resource. If you think the government can somehow step in, manage the whole mess, and that suddenly you’ll be paying less, getting more, and be more in control over what you spend and get, then all I can say is that I hope you aren’t in a position of any serious responsibility. Of course, lots of people who do believe that are in such positions, so God help us all.

Learning Geography

I suspect that children are losing track of where stuff is. Not things like socks and backpacks, which they have never been able to locate reliably, but counties, states, nations, rivers, mountains, hemispheres. I already knew that my own kids have no sense of where stuff is in our locality. How could they? They never leave the house other than to strap themselves into a vehicle for transport to some other network-enabled structure. But when one of them made a statement the other day alluding to Portugal’s proximity to China I was a little surprised. I could quickly show her where Portugal is using Google, Bing, National Geographic, but she wouldn’t be interested. She’s a teenager, and doesn’t believe I have enough brain cells left to tie my own shoes.

I often wear slippers, so she may have a point. In any case, people don’t think much about where stuff is anymore. They don’t need to. Our town is where we are, Portugal is at Newark Airport, and everything else is on the web. But supposing they did want to know? What would be the best way to find out? The answer, you might presume, has already been given: just pop open Google Earth or Bing Maps. But unfortunately both of those tools flat-out suck for answering geographic questions. With the appropriate label layers turned on they do fine for things at the scale of countries, so yes you could answer the Portugal question, but they fall to pieces when it comes to geographic features. Quick, open Google Earth and find me the river Vistula.

No, not the Vistula in Houston, Texas, nor the one in Elkhart, Indiana either. The river. Here’s a hint: it’s in Northern Europe. Just zoom in on that general area and search for “Vistula” again. Wow, “Vistula and Wolczanka” is a very popular something in Poland… but still no river. How about the Elbe? The Oder? The Don? Dnieper? Dniester? Rhine? Ok, dammit, just show me the Danube. You must have the freaking Danube. Actually, no, they don’t. Google Earth is an amazing tool, and it’s primarily good at the daunting task of stitching together different imagery of the planet, and of overlaying roads and towns on that imagery. Mountains? Rivers? Estuaries? Peninsulas? Not so much. So let’s try Bing Maps. That must be better, right?

Yes, a little. In the U.S. at least the new Bing beta mapper does a halfway-decent job of labeling some regions, and some bodies of water. At certain elevations it gets the major rivers, but then you scroll out a little and they disappear. In general Bing suffers from place name overload. Some views present you with a vast dense carpet of place names, and no way to filter them out that I can find. But even so it is better than Google Maps, which is specifically and solely about roads and cities. They don’t even bother labeling the Black Sea or the Mediterranean. Forget mountains, and even if you scroll all the way in they won’t tell you what river that blue line represents.

Of course Google and Bing remain the best way to answer all these questions, and perhaps the only way that matters. If you Google “Danube” you’re going to find out which river it is, and where it is. The information is always out there, but just not in the mapping and visualization tools. So consider this a call to web mapping developers everywhere to make their already neat tools more geography-friendly. Give me accessible means for filtering place names (a population slider would be great). Allow me to layer in other features that I want to see. Let me highlight a mountain range, or all the tributaries of a major river. Let me click on a feature and search for its name. Let me visualize ocean currents and prevailing winds, or highlight all the desert environments or forests.

In short, make it easy for me to find out where stuff is on the planet from within your app. And then get to work on my daughter’s backpacks. I’ve bought seventy-five of them and they are all missing.

You Know That Thing?

“Have you seen that thing?”

“What thing?”

“That thing that does that thing it does.”

“Oh, that thing. No, sorry.”

~

thing; noun; from Old English thing, assembly; akin to Old High German ding, thing, assembly; Gothic theihs, time.

~

I’m not known for brevity. Whether speaking or writing I tend to use a lot of words. Sometimes I even use more words than necessary. Of course, I don’t think they are unnecessary words, but from time to time I feel my listeners or readers probably do. I’m a bit of a throwback. People used to speak, and write, using far more words than they do now. In our hurried times staccato bursts of vernacular whipped with slang seem the rule, and any spoken or written statement longer than five or six words feels burdensome.

The exceptions, of course, are lawyers and legal documents, and by inclusion legislators and bills. They grow wordier in inverse proportion to our terseness, and it’s possible that’s no coincidence. Lawyers know that language is a minefield of ambiguity. They add words in order to reinforce the meaning of the text and anticipate ways in which future readers will attempt to take from it meanings that are at odds with the original intent of the writers. Pursue this goal long enough and what emerges makes for less-than-entertaining reading.

It is, however, precise. I learned to read contracts and legal language long ago, and it has served me well in a number of cases worth real money. I even like writing them, much to the consternation of barristers I have worked with. There is something satisfying about the weighty, measured cadence of legal language thumping onto a page as you write. The words matter in the most practical and immediate sense. They are at the same time statements of currently agreed fact and potential weapons in future disagreements.

Terse language, on the other hand, is often imprecise language. It doesn’t have to be. “Pick up that hammer” is a pretty precise statement. “Grab that” is not, but when accompanied by a nod or hand gesture it can be enough. One sure-fire way to boil the precision out of any statement is to add the word “thing.” It may well be the most useless word in any language. At the very least it’s one of the most irritating. One definition for the word “thing” is: a separate and distinct quality, fact, idea, or usually entity. “Thing” can mean any damned thing, and as a result actually means nothing.

I guess the idea worked well for all those Carpi, Allamani, Tervingi, and Taifali running around central Europe 1500 years ago. They had probably just figured out that there were things in the world, and it is kind of heart-warming to imagine them pointing to a walnut in the Hyrcinian Forest and stating “Ding!” with a confident and knowing air. Yes, Fritigern, that’s a thing you have there. Once you get past that basic philosophical understanding of corporeal entities and their existential selfness the word “thing” is just a hair more useful than the word “noun.”

So while I hesitate to suggest that people go back to writing and speaking in complete sentences that offer fully-developed thoughts,  I do propose that we banish the word “thing” from all polite usage written and spoken. I trust you will get right on that. Meanwhile I have this ding I have to do.

My Toyota

fj_sand_pond_rd.JPG
Toyota is taking a pounding in the press for some highly visible quality issues that have surfaced over the last few months, requiring one of the largest vehicle recalls in the company’s history. Every company hits rough spots, and I have no doubt Toyota will do the right thing by its customers, and by itself. The FJ Cruiser pictured to the left (on what remains of Sand Pond Rd. in the Pahaquarry region of northwest New Jersey) is the third Toyota I’ve owned in 15 years, and is one of the best vehicles of any kind that I have owned, ever. In fact, all three of our Toyotas, the FJ, a Sienna minivan, and a Camry wagon, have been solid, well-designed, well-executed vehicles that have given us our money’s worth. If I ever manage to wear out the FJ, you can bet I’ll buy another one.

Why I Hate Windows Vista

I hate Windows Vista, and in this post I’m going to tell you why. But before I do I want to say that I am a long-time admirer of Microsoft, most particularly in the way that they have managed to continually update their operating system while retaining backward compatibility with almost everything ever written for it. That’s no small feat. I have been writing software for Windows since the early 90’s, and I also make heavy use of Debian and Ubuntu. I am no operating system bigot, nor a knee-jerk anti-Microsoft geek. I’m not even under 40, or a lefty.

But, I hate Windows Vista. I hate the way it seemingly chooses at random from two or three different kinds of privelege elevation dialog whenever some program decides it needs elevated priveleges. I hate the way Explorer sometimes just hangs for twenty or thirty seconds when rebuilding the directory structure tree. I hate the way Explorer decides (seemingly at random) that a folder full of miscellaneous text files should be displayed with the media columns showing, or in “big icon” view. I hate that when I change it to the standard view it doesn’t stay changed, or remember the column widths. I hate that when I type a full filename into the search box the engine gets all smart and shows me partial matches and matches on internal content when all I wanted was to find one damn file. In fact I hate everything about Explorer, and while I know that you can resolve most of this crap by switching to classic view (I have), that’s hardly the point.

I hate the way that installed programs sometimes don’t show up on the start menu, but when I search the start menu, there they are. I hate having to elevate privs to manipulate system directories even when running as administrator. I hate the way that most games I install mishandle the desktop trying to get into full screen mode. I hate having standard system folders for my music, my pictures, my videos, my downloads, and my documents that the system insists on preferring over any other location. Dear Microsoft: I am not like everyone else, and I don’t keep my stuff in those places. I’m ok with system folders in general, whether they’re called “\Windows”, “\Program Files”, or “/bin”. But having standard folders for all that other stuff just reeks of smart-assed people deciding that everyone should adopt their conventions so we can all receive our “benefits” in a uniform way. If I bought a file cabinet, and it insisted on offering me a preconfigured location everytime I opened it with a medical file in hand, I’d be pissed. That’s not helpful. Yes, again, all this is customizable, but it isn’t necessarily obvious or easy to do. It should be. These things should be suggestions, that can be banished or changed at the click of a button.

I hate that my Creative Audigy 4 Pro is so poorly supported that I have to reset the mixer settings to get my center channel back every time I run a media program. Yes, I know that’s Creative’s fault, more or less, and that many of the other issues that bug me are software OEM problems, but again that’s hardly the point. Part of Microsoft’s appeal was that they managed this stuff, and I didn’t have to. This time around they seem to have the same relationship with their vendors and partners that I have with my teenaged daughters: neither party has a clue what the other is really thinking.

Not that there isn’t anything to applaud in Vista. The underlying system is actually quite an improvement. It runs better than XP, certainly starts faster than XP, and uses memory more efficiently than XP ever did. Once games are running they seem to run as well as they did in XP, and other media applications fare as well. I like readyboost, though I don’t currently use it, and I like address space randomization. As a software developer Vista gives me the impression of a more formidable foundation than XP, and .NET continues to be the best application framework available on any operating system platform in my opinion. There are some engineering teams in Redmond that are doing a hell of a job.

But it all seems to go to pieces at the user interface, in usability and the way the security issues are presented. Not that the UI isn’t pretty. It’s pretty, and frustrating as hell. From the reorganized start menu, to control panel, to important subsystems like networking, sharing and security, device management, everything has received a thick coating of translucent blue easy gel. It’s like buying a PC game and finding out it’s a bad XBOX port, and you have to control everything with buttons and scroll wheels. Computers are complex. Some people have a harder time with them than others. Burying all that complexity under layers of Aero doesn’t make it go away: it just makes it a pain in the ass to get to.

I sure hope that Windows 7 is a big improvement, and I realize it’s a little late to be climbing on the “I hate Vista” bandwagon, but I did give this OS a long, serious try. In fact I don’t have any real choice about using it. But my recent laptop purchase got a clean disk and Ubuntu 9.04 as my welcoming gift. I don’t want to play games on it, nor do I need Office, so that takes care of both my big reasons for using Windows. If 7 doesn’t turn things around for me, I might be contemplating Ubuntu as the main OS for my desktop, too. I can always run Windows in a VM for development purposes.

Deep in our Past, The Notes of a Flute

My kids sometimes wonder what it is about history that fascinates me so much, and I have almost no ability to provide an answer that satisfies. So instead I turn to demonstration. Every now and then I learn something that, once it sinks in, nearly takes my breath away, and my next thought is usually to communicate it to them so that I might prompt some flowering of interest. But it hasn’t worked yet. Today’s New York Times provided me with such a piece of information, which I may email them. It’s always worth another try.

The story concerns one of the earliest musical instruments ever discovered intact: a flute carved from a piece of bone nearly 35,000 years ago. Go ahead and click on the link. There’s a picture. The instrument in question is thin, graceful, gently curved, and bears every resemblance to a modern woodwind in form and function. It was created in a past so distant that all of recorded history could have occured in the interrim seven times over. Everything we know about civilized humanity spans a mere 5000 years or so, and yet seven times that long ago humans were carving instruments and playing music. If the very idea doesn’t awaken in you an appreciation for ancient history then I think we can safely assume nothing will.

Student Accountability in Public Schools

You may have been in a situation like this, or you may have known of a situation like this. A child is performing poorly in school. He or she misses assignments, pays little attention in class, and doesn’t do well on quizzes and tests. Naturally the quarterly grades reflect this. In between report cards the parents are kept informed through scrawled notes on progress reports, emails, and perhaps even the occasional phone call. The messages may be depressingly consistent: “Missed two assignments.” “Not putting forth effort.” “Project turned in late.” In the worst cases of this sort, the child may even be receiving actual failing grades in one or more classes.

The parents, of course, do their best to intervene. When asked about homework assignments the child always has an answer. The assignment was made up. It was turned in but the teacher missed it. Everybody was late on that one, etc. These excuses generate more messages back and forth between parents and teachers. Everyone is involved, which is what we’re all supposed to be these days. Everyone is talking, and yet the student’s performance doesn’t improve. Why? Wasn’t all of our caring supposed to ensure success? How is it that in the face of all this virtuous involvement the child is still screwing off 75% of the time?

One question that is worth asking is: what are the consequences of screwing off? The answer, depressingly, is that there aren’t any. Will a child who fails to pass a grade be held back from the next grade? No. Will a child who fails to turn in an assignment get detention, or have to write 500 times on the blackboard “I will do my homework,” or even clean up the classroom at the end of the day? No, they won’t. What about discipline? Surely a child who misbehaves will get sent down to the principle’s office for a stern talking to? Yes, that might happen, but unlike in my day there sure as hell won’t be any paddling involved, or any other material consequences, and a stern message delivered to any given teenager has about as much effect as you would expect it to have. But there will be another note home to the parents, who are expected to cure all these problems somehow.

What does the child ultimately learn from this, about the nature of obligations to the institutions that govern our lives, and with which we voluntarily affiliate ourselves over our adult careers? What they learn is that institutions are impotent. The school can assign work. The school can make rules. But the school is utterly unable or unwilling to enforce any of its rules, or hold students accountable for discharging their assigned duties. Later in life the little dears will find out that other institutions are very capable of doing these things, and I suppose it will come as quite a shock to them. Parents naturally want to do what they can to respond to teacher concerns, but the parents are a third party to the relationship. If the institution cannot hold its charges accountable, how should the third party do so?

They cannot, and the impotency of this triangular relationship ultimately encourages the students to do whatever they feel like, secure in the knowlege that nothing bad will happen to them at the hands of the people whose rules and requirements they are disregarding. Of course, bad things will happen, but they will happen much later, in adulthood, long after the administrators of the schools have added another number to their count of children not left behind. Unfortunately, by then it is far too late, and there is no safety net of helicopter parents to descend from the skies and fix the problem. All of which prompts the question: how can a child learn discipline and studiousness and the virtues of hard work from an impotent institution that can do no more than make friendly suggestions? The answer is that they can’t, and many don’t.