On Coaching and Teaching

 

When working with students from disadvantaged communities, it is easy to fall into a negative cycle. These are students who are often even less inclined than most kids to read as they come from cultures that do not even offer the pretense of supporting reading. The parents are likely not going to be able to help them with homework so the temptation is to not give them homework in the first place. These students are often significantly behind their peers so it is tempting to keep the curriculum simple and not demand too much from them. We do not want these kids to become frustrated and drop out. While this sort of thinking may be founded upon good intentions, there is a trap. These students will, one day, go out into the world to compete for college placements and ultimately for jobs against students who have been given a vigorous education both at home and at school.   

Imagine being a basketball coach for a team of middle-class Jewish day school kids. These kids have their Judaic classes plus a variety of secular interests and hobbies besides for basketball. Most of these kids are here because they think it might be nice to hang out with their friends after school. Shooting a basketball and playing pickup ball is fun so why not join the team. You want them to run laps and do drills? How mean of you. Why are you yelling at them? They are doing their "best."  

I used to be one of those kids when I was in 5th grade at Columbus Torah Academy. I particularly remember one practice where the coach made us run ten laps around the gym. After finishing, I went to get a drink of water from a fountain in the gym. The coach yelled at me and then made the entire team run another ten laps. In essence, that practice consisted of us running laps. Why did he "waste" our time like that? We could have run laps at home. Shouldn't our couch have been actually teaching us how to play basketball? 

As an adult, I now recognize that the coach was right. One of the most essential parts of being on a team is to put yourself into the hands of a coach, recognizing that the coach understands the larger picture of what the team needs in order to win better than you do. As a player, if you do not understand this down to your very gut, the coach should cut you immediately even if you have Stephen Curry's 3-point shot. The greatest shot in the world is not going to help your team if you do not know how to get open and can easily become a trap if you lack the humility, when double-teamed, to accept that you might not be touching the ball that game. This might be the game for the number five guy on the team to be fed the ball and take those open shots.

To be clear, we were not a good team and regularly lost heavily to local Catholic schools like Saint Catherine’s and Saint Pius. I was certainly one of the lousier players even though I honestly tried. This was not our coach's fault. He did his job even if it was not a pleasant one. I do not believe that he acted out of any desire to beat down on elementary school boys. The fact was that we were going up against more talented teams and he had to make do with what he had. It would not have been kindness if he had told us we were great only for us to get blown out by reality. 

A more extreme version of the coach is the drill sergeant. Consider the example of the film Full Metal Jacket. It is easy to laugh at the antics of the sergeant but there is something truly tragic about his situation. The Vietnam War is in full blast and the recruits he is training are draftees. We can assume that they are not America's best and the brightest. These are kids who could not make it into college even to avoid military service in an actual war. The sergeant knows that many of these kids are going to die. It is his job to make sure that they do not get their squad mates killed. Then you have someone like Gomer Pyle who most certainly should never have been allowed into the army except that it was the job of some bureaucrat to meet a quota by drafting Pyle even if Pyle is going to get someone killed.

Being a teacher does not involve life and death responsibility like a drill sergeant but the stakes are higher than that of a coach. The worst that can happen if a coach fails at their job is that the kids will be humiliated for an evening by a better-prepared team, possibly leading some of the kids to conclude that they do not have a future in sports and, instead, should become accountants. If a teacher fails at their job, then students will graduate and apply or even start college not even realizing that they are not prepared because, all along, they were fed a fake education.

From this perspective, it seems logical to license teachers to do anything we allow coaches to do. Specifically, teachers should be allowed to accurately describe a student’s shortcomings to their faces and expel them from the classroom for failing to live up to basic standards. Furthermore, obedience should not be something up for negotiation but should be seen as the price of entrance. 

The reason why this does not happen is that the consequences of a teacher not doing their job are entirely long-term. There is no big game next week where the students will be crushed by a better-prepared squad. In practice, even exams usually fail to properly demonstrate that students are not up to task as they are created and administered by the teachers who have every incentive to not hurt their students’ self-esteem. Imagine if my coach had been allowed to schedule a game for us against our school kindergarten. We could have been an A+ team.

As teachers, we work under a further significant disadvantage. Students volunteer to join a team so the coach is free to kick anyone out if they do not get with the program no matter their individual talent. Most students who come to my class have no particular desire to study history. I have to be grateful to the students who do their work as they are told even if they then take a sip of water. If students tell me to "go F myself," the most I can do is report them to the administration, knowing full well that, at best, any punishment will be symbolic and that the student will be back in class the next day. I stand a greater chance of losing my job for "creating" a situation where a student might become "frustrated" enough to curse at me than that student has of being expelled from my class or from the school.       

I have taken to teaching some of my students to play chess. Chess teaches critical thinking and focus. You cannot simply do the first move that occurs to you. Most importantly for my students, chess is unforgiving in its exposure of your ignorance. You think you are smart; why did you just lose? Let us go over the game and see all the better moves that you should have seen if you were actually paying attention. There is no need to insult the students. The game itself can offer more biting criticism than I ever could. With chess, you do not need to wait several weeks for the big game to expose your failings; all chess needs in order to expose you is a few minutes. 

The BZ and Miriam Wedding Skit

Aspergers are often accused of suffering from "mind blindness" and lacking a "theory of mind," a notion that other people think differently. I see this as a more general problem with the human mind. Aspergers, having the misfortune of being born with minds that are more different than most, simply are likely to reach a crisis moment in their mind blindness far sooner than most. It is possible for the neurotypical mind to spend a lifetime with neurotypicals of similar economic and social class and of the same creed and never realize that in fact other people are different. It is easy to intellectually say the words "everyone is different," but to, at a subconscious level, believe it requires work. A simple test to see if you suffer from mind blindness is to ask yourself if you believe that you are capable of forming empathetic links with others. If you do so despite the fact that human beings lack the means of engaging in telepathic communication then you need help not just for mind blindness, but for a general lack of consistent rationalist thinking. If you recognize that your sense of other people's feelings is merely your fantasy of what other people might be feeling, albeit a socially useful fantasy, then you can congratulate yourself for your hard won rationalism in the face of societal superstition. (See Neurotypical Menetal and Emotional Handicaps.)

I believe that everyone, Aspergers and neurotypicals, needs to work on their theory of mind skills. In addition to having logical and scientific reasoning integrated into one's daily life, another helpful method I have found is theater. In this I must admit a debt of gratitude to Dr. Anthony Beukas of the Yeshiva College Dramatics Society, from whom I learned this. There is something to be said about spending weeks and months in someone else's mind. You walk into the theater, from the moment you are first handed a script to the final curtain, you are someone else. Being a good actor does not just mean memorizing lines and blocking. The character needs to be a "real" person to you with a complete history full of thoughts, desires and motives that go beyond the script and inform every line spoken and every glance. To do this properly requires one to recognize and accept that the character being played is fundamentally different from oneself. One needs to take a step back and allow oneself to fade into the background to allow the character to come into existence as a true person.

Despite the fact that Miriam and I both are Aspergers, we are both different people with different interests and ways of reacting to the world. What being Aspergers gives us is a sense of being different from others and a recognition of a common set of developed survival mechanisms. For example Miriam is much more socially outgoing than I am,  much better at starting conversations and making friends. Meeting Miriam forces you to discard the stereotypes of Aspergers as cold and anti-social; she is anything but that. While our outward methods of social interaction are different, we both consciously work from a mental checklist of lines to deliver to people. In a way social interaction for us is just another type of theater in which you play a part. Above all else what we have in common is that we both learned a long time ago that the only way we were going to survive navigating through society is if we verbally explained our thoughts to others, instead of just imagining they would intuitively understand us, and had others verbally explain their thought to us, instead of imagining we could intuitively understand them. Miriam and I have a good relationship and understand each other fairly well not because we are so much alike, but because we are good at talking to each other, particularly about our differences.

Drawing from my theater experience, little game that I invented for us, as a means of thinking about our relationship and explaining how we relate to each other to others, is the BZ and Miriam skit. I play her and she plays me. She tends to play BZ as dour with a penchant for monologuing. I tend to play Miriam as jumpy and ecstatic with a touch more common sense than BZ. When we first gave a public performance of a BZ and Miriam skit at the kiddish her parents sponsored in our honor, BZ ended up lecturing the audience on the differences between ritual murder and blood libel charges with Miriam asking him if this made him happy and if he could please do the dishes while he talked.

Here is the BZ and Miriam skit from our wedding on October 30, 2011. For some reason I failed to notice that the wedding was scheduled at the same time as the Pittsburgh Steelers were playing the New England Patriots. Even more mysterious is the fact that the sizable contingent of Steeler fans in my family came to the wedding and missed what was probably the highlight of the Steeler season. (Congratulation to New York Giant fans on beating the Patriots in the Super Bowl.)

          

2011 in Reading

So for the year 2011, between Kindle, iPod and traditional print, I read or listened to about 100 books. Here are my nominations for the best books. Some of these books are recent, others are not. I would be curious to hear from readers any thoughts on these particular books or favorite books from their past year of reading.

Non-Fiction Related to My Dissertation

1)      The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers by Carl L. Becker - A series of lectures on the Enlightenment, which Becker viewed a product of rather than a simple break with the Middle Ages. If I ever teach a historiography course this book will be assigned along with Sir Herbert Butterfield's The Whig Interpretation of History for the topic of the Whig narrative and why it fails to explain the origins of modernity.

2)      The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement by Pawel Maciejko - The best history hands down on the Frankists, an eighteenth-century heretical movement in eastern Europe, which resulted in a mass conversion of Jews to Catholicism. I would particularly recommend this back as an example of counter "great man" history. Not in the sense that Jacob Frank was a pretty infamous character, though he was, but in the sense that Maciejko places the Frankist movement as the center, as opposed to Frank himself. In fact, Maciejko's central argument is that a strong Polish Sabbatian movement existed apart from Frank and outside his control; Frank reacted to and was the product of "Frankist" movement much more so than the other way around.    

3)      Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History by David Ruderman - There is little original with this book, but Ruderman does a great job bringing the major issues of interest to me regarding early modern Jewish history together, particularly the relationship between conversos, Sabbatians and the early Enlightenment. As I am doing with my own discussion of Sabbatianism, Ruderman places a heavy emphasis on mobile networks of individuals.

Non-Fiction Not Related to My Dissertation

1)      Infidel: My Life by Ayaan Hirsi Ali - A powerful autobiography by a Somali ex-Muslim. What particularly impressed me about Hirsi Ali is that she is remarkably non-bitter and non-polemical in her account of her family and of Islam, particularly if you consider how easy it would have been for her to have made it so. Yes she places Islam as a threat to Western Civilization, but this book is hardly of the "Muslims are evil" or even the "religious people are evil" genre. I particularly relate to this book as someone who has taken a step away from a fundamentalist religion, though not as radical a step as Hirsi Ali, via means of classical liberalism. This is a conscious rejection of the authority of community and tradition in favor of the individual and reason, backed by a nation-state. Because of this experience, Hirsi Ali thinks in terms of either classical liberalism or religious fundamentalism. Her objection to modern multi-cultural liberalism is precisely that it fails to appreciate the attraction of religious fundamentalism. As I see it, how can someone appreciate the attraction of something that never appealed to them in the first place and which they cannot seriously imagine themselves having followed? This unwillingness to take religious fundamentalism seriously at an intellectual level means that modern liberals are not prepared to go up against fundamentalist apologists, who use modern liberalism's own abandonment of the absolute authority of the individual, reason and the placement of any type of national culture as fascism to justify the continued existence of fundamentalist enclaves funded by public tax dollars.    

2)      The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto - As with the previous book, this is a defense of classical liberalism that focuses on the experiences of those outside the West. De Soto makes the libertarian case that government bureaucracy causes poverty in third world countries. More importantly, de Soto, following in the tradition of Frederick Hayek, is an eloquent defender of rule of law. He is not anti-government; on the contrary, he believes in government based on principled rules as opposed to arbitrary whims of politicians and interest groups. As in the case of Hirsi Ali, I think there is something about living in a society where a belief in liberal principles is not a given and where one must consciously defend such positions against intellectually serious non-believers to force one back to the basics of liberal principles. In de Soto's Peru and the other countries he describes there is no two-hundred-year history of a constitional system which commands the loyalty of the entire political system. If one is going to take a stand for constitutional government and the rule of law then that stand must be a principled one or stand in line with those willing to use force of arms and politics to take what they believe to be rightfully theirs.       

3)      Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas - If I ever were placed in charge of Artscroll's hagiography division for the writing of gedolim biographies I would assign this book to everyone working for me as an example as to writing inspirational biographies. There is little need to use over the top rhetoric to make Dietrich Bonhoeffer sound heroic. He was an anti-Nazi German pastor, who returned to Germany right before the start of World War II because he felt he needed to actively oppose Nazism on the ground in Germany. He did not survive the war. With that out of the way, Metaxas is free to spend the book explaining Bonhoeffer's theology and offering some background on early twentieth century Protestantism. This book also makes some useful arguments for viewing Nazism as something other than a conservative movement.  

4)      Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis - Certainly the most interesting book on sports I have ever read. For those who like the Freakonomics/Malcolm Gladwell style counterintuitive arguments, Lewis offers a different way of thinking about sports and possibly about life as well. If you wish to articulate why sports announcers are full of nonsense, who consistently fail to say anything useful about the game this is the book for you. What I particularly took from Moneyball is a lesson on the vulnerabilities of self-replicating elites; they tend to recruit people who look the part rather than genuine capability. Baseball scouts tend to jump for athletes who are tall, well built, fast and can throw over 90 miles an hour as opposed to hitters who can rack up walks. One wonders if the Haredi leadership and the journalists who empower them place too much emphasis on people who come from the right families, make the right public statements and are photographed at the right weddings as opposed to engaging in actual scholarship.   

Fiction (I Will Leave It as an Open Question as to whether Any of This is Related to My Dissertation)

1)      Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill - One of the best-written horror stories I have ever come across. It takes a very simple concept, a suit with a ghost attached to it, and scares the pants out of you with it. It makes little use of graphic violence; who needs gore when you have a deliciously psychotic dead hypnotist to talk people into suicide. The book also features lead characters who are actually likable as opposed to a parade of hunks and blondes just lining up for the slaughter. If the writing sounds a bit like Stephen King's, the author happens to be his son.     

2)      Elantris by Brandon Sanderson - There is something to be said for handing characters over to true destruction, the sudden loss of family, position, and reputation. Death is too easy and for it to actually matter it almost needs to render the character narratively useless. So it is to Sanderson's credit that he can craft a truly unique vision of a Hell on Earth to cast his Christ-like hero. As with Orson Scott Card, Sanderson's stories are first and foremost about characters and relationships. In this case, a hero faced with the task of rallying the denizens of an inescapable Hell into a community. (He does this brilliantly as well in Way of Kings.)

3)      Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson - More Sanderson. This one features a pair of princesses, one of them in a Queen Esther type scenario, a pair of comic henchmen, who go off into libertarian style monologues in defense of their profession and a really cool system of magic involving colors and souls.  Sanderson's fantasy is not about heroes off questing to defeat evil dark lords and save the world. Keeping to the best of the Tolkien tradition, Sanderson is a world builder. If Tolkien built his worlds through language, Sanderson works through systems of magic. Imagine a world governed with a slightly different set of physical laws (Sanderson's magic is always based on clear and consistent rules) and ask yourself what sort of society would spring up under such circumstances. Any system that allows a minority of people to become even slightly more powerful than most is going to be hierarchical, but what sort of hierarchy and how might it become vulnerable?        

4)      Song of Fire and Ice Series by George R. R. Martin - Murder, sexual immorality and idolatry and I am loving the series. I have never read a fantasy author who gets the medieval mindset like Martin does. These books should practically be classified as historical fiction. Is it that big a deal that the books do not actually take place during the War of the Roses and involve some dragons in one of the side plots?

Thoughts for the Super Bowl: Playing According to Rules in Sports and in Life

Only a few more hours until the Super bowl begins and my beloved Pittsburgh Steelers will play the Greenbay Packers. I am not going to any Super Bowl parties, but will be at home in Columbus armed with plenty of food and alcohol. I will have my laptop on so readers should feel free to twitter  me. In the meantime I thought I would take the moment to speak about rules, both in sports and in life.

As an Asperger I struggle in social situations in large part because the only way I know how to deal with people is through clearly defined sets of rules. Other people always seem to be able to get away with general appeals to fairness and decency, which, not surprisingly, always ends with other people being able to do whatever they want and me being left to pay the bill. One of the reasons why I like sports so much, even if I personally was never any good at them, is because sports are a realm of human interaction defined solely by rules with no pretension of there being anything else. In a sport like football there are two teams trying to score more points than the other. After four quarters of fifteen minutes one team will win and the other will lose. (Unless there is a tie at which point the game goes into overtime.)


Whether or not Steeler and Packer fans like each other today, they all agree about the rules of the game. You score points by moving the ball down the field to score a touchdown or a field goal. You have four downs to move the ball ten yards or the ball is turned over. A catch is a catch, a fumble is a fumble and a sack is a sack. This goes for the formal rules on the playing field as well as the more informal rules of sportsmanship. There are no pretensions of vague pleas to socially acceptable behavior and allowing the most deserving to win. I find a comfort in these hard fixed laws, even when they do not go my way.

 

I have very strong memories of the first Steeler AFC championship game I ever saw. I got up that morning in January 1995 convinced that the Steelers were going to crush the San Diego Chargers and head to their first Super Bowl in my lifetime. Things did not go as planned. After jumping out to a 13-3 lead, the Steelers gave up two touchdowns in the second half. In the closing minutes of the game they drove down the field setting up a fourth and goal at the Charger three yard line. Neil O’Donnell’s pass was stuffed on the goal line and that was the end of the game. How could it be that my Steelers had lost and all those months of playing a great season had come to naught? Should not there be one final thing to be done to give the Steelers and fans like myself what we “deserved?”

The next year, the Steelers made it to the Super Bowl to play the Dallas Cowboys. No one gave the Steelers much of a chance, but, down throughout the game, they found themselves, in the final minutes down only 20-17. At which point Neil O'Donnel threw an interception and the Cowboys won 27-17.

When I was in eighth grade at the Lubavitch school in Pittsburgh, I competed in a contest in Jewish law across the Lubavitch school system in North America. I was one of four students from the school selected to go to Toronto to compete in the championship, my own personal Super Bowl I thought. The first part of the championship was a written multiple choice exam held Saturday night. As I am sure has happened to many of my readers, after going through the exam once I went back and changed several of the answers that I was not sure about only to find out later that I was right the first time. The top third of contestants got to go on to a final oral round. I was the one person from the Pittsburgh team who did not make the cut. After the names were read out, our school principal, who traveled to Toronto with us, came over to me to congratulate me for a good effort. As he walked away from me to watch the finals, in my mind I was calling out to him: "is there not something you can do, some way you can pull some strings to let me also stand in the finals?"     

Of course the rules of the game have also given me some moments of victory such as in the Super Bowl two years ago, when, down 23-20 against the Arizona Cardinals, Ben Roethlisberger threw one of the most incredible touchdown passes in Super Bowl history to Santonio Holmes.

Sorry Cardinal fans, Holmes feet were down and in. The Steelers won their sixth Super Bowl, 27-23.




Hopefully this Super Bowl, Roethlisberger will produce another incredible pass, this time perhaps to Hines Ward or Michael Wallace, to win a seventh Super Bowl. But if he comes up short like Neil O’Donnell then so be it; that is how the game is played. I only wish that people could be honest with themselves and recognize that life must also be played by rules through both winning and losing.

Now that is Integrity

A while back I posted on the need to be repulsed by the mere idea of improperly taking government money and my horror at a young man who claimed not to see anything wrong in stealing from the government. At its roots integrity is about the recognition of what you deserve and a loathing to receive anything other than that. The moment someone loses that moral compass of “I should not have it therefore I do not want it” it becomes possible, and even perhaps inevitable, to accept playing outside the rules


One can see baseball’s malady this past decade of star baseball players using steroids as based in this lack of integrity. Millions of dollars are at stake and players desire to extend their careers. If it means violating some rules well then it is not like they are actually hurting anyone and besides “everyone else is doing it.” This is the logic of someone who wants millions of dollars as opposed to someone who wishes to earn millions of dollars and do it in complete honesty.

So what are we to make of Royals pitcher Gil Meche who declined the $12 million of the last year of his contract because he did not feel he was playing well enough to deserve that kind of money? Legally he had every right to this money and no one would have questioned him for taking it. How many people here (me included) have that kind of integrity to not be able to bring oneself to accept millions of dollars that was not completely deserved.

As a libertarian I would add that there is a lesson here in the how and why statist regimes come to power. Contrary to what some of you might think, libertarianism is not about greed. Quite the contrary it is rooted in the moral integrity to only want what one honestly deserves. It is the statist that suffers from greed and that is how the government ensnares them. People look around and see others with more than they have. They are not criminals and would never dream of actually stealing, but still they are consumed with the desire to have that which by law they have no right to. Even worse than simple materialist greed is the jealously of wanting something not for its own sake, but precisely because someone else has it. Keep this up long enough and a person will believe that they “deserve” what the other person has regardless of any law and if the law does not come to this “correct” solution it needs to be made more “practical” to fit the “reality” of day to day life. It is at this point that the statist politician enters the picture and offers to use government to give you what belongs to someone else (this includes anything paid for with someone else’s tax dollars) in the interest of “fairness.”

The vast majority of Americans lack the integrity to not desire what they have not honestly earned and politicians from both parties eagerly cater to this moral weakness. What most people do not realize that there is a hidden price to pay. Allowing the government to take money in the interest of fairness means the government now has the right to take your money in the interest of someone else’s “fairness.” You agree to let the government give you a single penny of someone else’s money you are really signing over to the government everything you own. Every election cycle the American population happily sells itself into slavery and thanks the government for being so kind as to slap on the chains of bondage. So who here can resist the temptation to accept from the government something they have not worked for and earned? Who has the integrity to be a free man?

Why Israel Needs to Earn a Spot at the 2022 World Cup

Israel may not be a major soccer power in the world having only been to the World Cup once in 1970. But now the World Cup in 2022 is going to be held in the Arab country of Qatar. What might happen if Israel were to earn a spot? Would Qatar even allow the Israeli team to enter the country? One way or another having Israel take part should be enough to put egg in the faces of the entire Arab world much as Jesse Owens winning gold at the Berlin Olympic of 1936 was a slap at Hitler. Israelis love soccer so why not make it a national drive to get that spot. Young Israeli soccer fans can now dream of growing up and representing their country in a way that the world will not soon forget.  

The Yiddish Karate Kids

I ran into the following poster in a synagogue this past weekend in Queens NY.



The Yiddish heading reads as follows: "The Yiddish Karate Kids."

I would see this as an interesting example of acculturation going on even actively within the Haredi community. The fact that the poster has Yiddish and features a Haredi looking kid leads one to conclude that the group is designed for and run by Haredim. Whether or not Jacob used martial arts to defeat the angel in Genesis, karate is not part of the Jewish cultural tradition. (We shall see what happens to Krav Maga.) Nor is karate a ubiquitous part of American culture like baseball or football that it would be impossible to ignore it. I would also point out that other forms of loose clothing can be used in karate besides for the distinctively non-Jewish gi garment. If you are going to take a stand against not engaging in gentile practices and wearing their clothing, this would be a logical place.

So we have Haredim reaching out and taking a product not only from a gentile culture, but one that is actually pagan (something that, unlike American culture, actually does raise legitimate halachic issues). Far be it from me to encourage Haredim to ban things, but there are too many obvious issues for someone not to notice. I wish this group best of luck. It would, though, be in their best interest to be honest as to what they are doing so not to give the banners a chance to create a moral high ground for themselves. If you openly support acculturation then no one can use it to discredit you. Up front intellectual honesty is always the best form of self defense.   

Muggle Quidditch and the Revenge of the Potter Nerds

NPR has a piece on the growth of Quidditch, the wizard sport in Harry Potter. It is now being played at several dozen high schools and colleges, and there is even a move to make it an official NCAA sport. Unlike the Quidditch of Harry Potter, Muggle Quidditch does not involve flying, but players do run around with a broomstick between their legs.

I take pride in this much as I take pride in the success of television shows like Big Bang Theory, Lost and Battlestar Galactica; it is a sign of the increased cultural power of us nerds, people who relate to the world primarily through the mind as opposed to the physical or the social. This "nerd" sensibility is most obviously manifested in an attachment to reading or, in the case of television, shows with strong literary qualities. In the case of Quidditch, what we have, in a matter of fashion, is a deconstruction of athletics in which the product of a literary culture is allowed to dominate the culture of athletics, the most obvious manifestation of our physical culture. The nerd is allowed to take on this physical culture on his own terms and come out victorious. For this reason, I would support the continued use of broomsticks in the game; it maintains the sport as a parody. I suspect that Quidditch would cease to be interesting if it became just another sport, unmoored from its connection to the most successful product of literary culture. We nerds would lose our revenge.

Method Thinking or How Not to Play Sports

I was never particularly good at sports. The only thing that I did even somewhat well was playing defense in street hockey. That is a position that does not require much in the way of skill but a willingness to throw your body around, put yourself in the way of people and the ball, take a hit and hit back. I never had much in the way of talent, to this day I have remarkably poor hand and eye coordination, but I always played with a lot of heart and did my best. As such, I took it as a personal offense to see kids who were not trying and who even just sat there staring off into space with their hands in their pockets. In sports, there are no guarantees to win. There is certainly no way to always stop your opponent from scoring. Your opponent will score and will win games. A team that can win two-thirds of their games over a season is an elite team. That being said there are ways to maximize the chances of winning. It does not take any great sports wisdom to understand that to succeed, whether at soccer or at other sports, one needs to play with all of one’s heart, do one’s utmost to get in the way of the opposition and stop them from scoring and on the flip side to go after the ball and try to score for oneself. This may not be enough to win, but it is better than the alternative of staring off into space with one’s hands pocketed. Staring off into space with one’s hands pocketed is not an “alternative” style of playing, it is not playing at all, not even if you come up with clever philosophical arguments to prove that your opponent’s goals are nothing artificial intellectual constructs.

As a historian, I engage in method thinking. I know that I do not have a sure path to being right. In fact, I will be wrong quite often. That being said I know that the historical method allows one to maximize the chances of being right about past historical events and that it is far superior to any of the alternatives to such an extent that the alternatives cannot be seen as playing the game at all. As a historian I know to rely on written documents, particularly internal documents such as private letters and diaries. I know to be suspicious of the memory of individuals and to show no faith in oral traditions. Either you have written texts or you go home. I know how to critically interrogate texts, to look for contradictions, biases and narrative constructions. This allows me not only to spot a falsehood but also to form hypotheses that are remarkably close to the truth. Cherry-picking sources to find things that one wants to hear or employing radical skepticism to throw out all source readings, leaving one to believe whatever one wants, does not. Such a method may sometimes get things right, even some things that the historical method gets wrong. In the long run, though, it cannot compete. Furthermore, even when the historical method makes a “mistake” it still has the internal mechanism to eventually correct itself. The “alternatives” have no such mechanism.

As a follower of the historical method, I am not afraid to be wrong and accept that I will quite often be wrong. I am not omniscient; the study of history often forces me to make guesses based on incomplete evidence to almost no evidence. As a person, I have my biases and will misread sources. While I may be biased and flawed and the sources I work with are certainly that, the historical method has no such weaknesses. I will, therefore, rely wholeheartedly on the historical method, win or lose. I would rather be wrong following the historical method than be right following an “alternative.”

George Will and Ohio State Ticket Scalpers

George Will, one of the great defenders of capitalism, has an article, “Greed’s Saving Graces,” arguing for the self regulatory powers of unregulated markets. He discusses in particular the issue of ticket scalping. Of interest to Ohio State fans, Will uses the case of the Ohio State versus Penn State football game last year. I was one of those people trying to get tickets in the weeks before the game. The game was at Ohio State and was being played on Saturday night, unlike most college football games which are played on Saturday afternoon. As a graduate student I did not have several hundred dollars to pay for a ticket so it was the apartment building lounge for me. For those of you who are not Ohio State or Penn State fans, Terrelle Pryor, Ohio State’s new superstar quarterback blew it in the last few minutes and Ohio State lost 13-6.

I have mixed feelings about ticket scalping. As a believer in free markets I am inclined to oppose any attempt to regulate ticket scalping; ticket scalpers are just the free market at work. The problem, though, is that it is in the interest of both fans and teams to keep the price of tickets depressed below market levels. This helps the pocket book of your average fan as they usually do not have hundreds of dollars to spend on a sporting event. As for the teams, they need to cultivate a fan base and that means creating fans while they are still young. People tend to become fans of teams, particularly of the sort willing to spend hundreds of dollars, because they were taken to games when they were children. If teams do not make it economically feasible for parents to come to games with their children they are committing long term suicide.

Tickets to sporting events are freely entered contracts between parties. As a free economic entity, sports teams have the right to stipulate terms to the contracts they sign with ticket buyers and this can include stipulations against reselling to ticket at above marked prices. Since the enforcement of contracts is a legitimate function of government, the government is perfectly justified in aiding sports teams by going after scalpers.

At the end of the day I recognize that this is not going to be a plausible. It is too difficult to regulate scalpers; the market interests are just too strong. If scalping is ever to be brought down it is going to have to be the society of fans. To bring this back to Ohio State, we Ohio State fans are a community so we should look out for eachother. We know that there are only a 105,000 seats in the Horseshoe; any ticket you buy means some other fan does not get to go. If you pay above marked prices for tickets you are taking a seat away from a fan who does not have that kind of money. Furthermore you are hurting every other fan because you are encouraging scalpers to grab more tickets thus forcing other fans to pay higher prices. Any Ohio State fan that does this is therefore not real fan. Buying scalped tickets is something that Michigan fans stoop to.

Bill Cosby at the Draft

Here is a great video featuring Bill Cosby commenting on the draft and channeling Mel Brooks’ 2000 Year Old Man. Since John Madden has retired (thank goodness) could we draft Cosby to fill his place?

Blue Jackets versus Penguins: A Fan’s Dilemma

Last night the Pittsburgh Penguins came to Columbus to play the Blue Jackets. As I have mentioned previously I have been a lifelong Penguin fan, though, since coming to Columbus I have become an active Jackets fan as well. This year the Penguins have been playing horribly and the Jackets, despite numerous injuries, have been playing very well. Now this statement needs to be placed into the context of the two teams. Both teams are in sixth place in their respective conferences and the Penguins, in fact, have a slightly better record. The Penguins, though, have Sidney Crosby and Evengi Malkin and went to the Stanly Cup last year. The Blue Jackets have Rick Nash and have never even been to the playoffs. I have been to numerous Blue Jackets games, but have never seen the Penguins play live. Considering that I do not live in Pittsburgh and even if I did Penguin tickets, so I hear, for all intents and purposes start at around $100 this was an opportunity I did not want to miss. So right after class I went downtown to stand in line to get the Huntington green seats (nose bleeds) for $10. These go on sale two hours before the game. Unfortunately these tickets sold out just before my turn. This actually turned out to be a good thing since I then got on line for the Student Rush tickets which go on sale an hour before the game. I ended up getting a lower bowl seat for $25. (Just so you should know I was reading Miriam Bodian’s Dying in the Law of Moses while standing on line so I was not completely wasting my time.)I feel particularly fortunate to have gotten such a seat as this game set a franchise attendance record of 19,167. It seems that there were a lot of Penguin fans from Ohio and even Pittsburgh who had the same idea as I did. So who to cheer for? Since I like both teams I wanted the game to go into overtime so both teams would at least get a point. I have been a Penguin fan a lot longer than I have been a Blue Jackets fan and I had come specifically to watch the Penguins. What decided it for me was the sight of all these Penguin fans; they must have made up at least forty percent of the crowd. Even the announcers were acknowledging the strong Penguin presence. For all intents and purposes the Penguins were not playing an away game. Pittsburgh fans are of course well known for their willingness to travel and as a fan of Pittsburgh teams I am really proud of that. That being said it got to me, as a Columbus person, that we were getting overrun in our own city. I never thought this would happen, but I ended up cheering against the Penguins. The game was a classic, worthy of the more than nineteen thousand in attendance and worth every penny that they spent. By the early third period the Jackets had managed to build a 3 – 0 lead thanks to Steve Mason’s superb goaltending (By the end of the game he had faced forty one shots) and all round solid play by the rest of the team. Than in a span of less than four minutes the Penguins put up three goals. The Penguins are that good offensively. The Jackets though held on and managed to put the game into overtime and then into a shootout where Kristian Huselius won the game for them. So I got my wish. The Blue Jackets won, but the Penguins still got a point.

Columbus is the Champion (in Soccer)

Yesterday the city of Columbus won its first major league professional sports championship, as the Columbus Crew defeated the New York Red Bulls 3 - 1. Granted this was in soccer, but I will take it anyway. Not that most people here could care less. The Crew winning the MLS championship is not nearly as important as the Ohio State football team stomping all over Michigan 42-7. Michigan may have been lousy this year, not even eligible for a Bowl game, but be as it may there are certain sports priorities around this town. I actually went to one of the Crew’s games during the summer and bothered to tune in to watch the championship game on television so I guess I can count myself as a fan.

During the broadcast of the championship game, the announcer said something very interesting about New York’s goalie, Danny Cepero. Cepero was actually their backup goalie, who ended up having to play for them at the end of the season after their starting goalie, Jon Conway, was suspended for using illegal substances and ended up carrying the team through the playoffs. Cepero is still a student at the University of Pennsylvania. Apparently Cepero is a history major and spent the day before the game working on a paper for school on post World War II England. All future students of mine should be forewarned; you have no excuse. If Cepero could work on a history paper the day before appearing in an national championship game I think you can make the time despite anything that life may throw you.

The Columbus Blue Jackets’ Civil War Hockey

I was raised by no one less then my rebbetzin grandmother to be a hockey fan. My grandmother, living in McKeesport PA, is a very big Pittsburgh Penguin fan. I grew up in Columbus before we had the Blue Jackets so, like a good boy, I was a Penguin fan. The Penguins still are my team but I follow the Blue Jackets a little as well. My sister in Baltimore, similarly, is now a Caps fan. While I have lived for the past year three miles away from Nationwide Arena, I had never been to a Blue Jackets game before. So last night I decided to take a break from my Christianity studies and took myself out to see a Blue Jackets game. I got a student rush ticket for $25 that put me three rows behind the glass. As you can see there are certain advantages to living in a city in which people do not care about their professional sports team. In Columbus the team that people care about is the Ohio State Buckeye football team and, depending on the year, the basketball team. There is no way that I would get student rush rink side seats to a Penguins game.
Long before I got myself into Late Medieval and Early Modern History, I was a Civil War buff. I was the sort of kid who asked for the Ken Burns Civil War documentary as a bar mitzvah present. Glory is my favorite Civil War Movie. God’s and Generals is the more inspiring and heart wrenching film but despite its genius it is too flawed a film. While I am at it, the best novel ever written about the Civil War without question is Killer Angels.
Despite the fact that the Blue Jackets have a mascot named Stinger, the name Blue Jackets is supposed to refer to the Union army in the Civil War. To those of you who are illiterate in American history, Ohio fought on the Northern Side during the Civil War and produced the North’s two greatest general, Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. The Blue Jackets have recently been emphasizing this. They now have as their motto, “Carry the Flag.” Before the game begins Stinger comes out to plant the Blue Jacket's flag. As they are about to bring out the team a clip from Glory comes on the Jumbotron. It’s the one where Matthew Broderick is about to send the 54th Massachusetts, a colored regiment, to attack Ft. Wagner. He goes over to the carrier of the regimental flag and asks his men: “If this man should fall who will lift the flag and carry on?” You then have members of the Blue Jackets saying I will, I will. The screen then goes to an animation of charging soldiers who then morph into hockey players.
Considering all the Russian and European players on the team, this Civil War ethos is a bit humorous. When the Blue Jackets score they fire off a series of cannons. Maybe in homage to our Russian players we can follow up the cannon fire with the end of Tchaikovsky’s Overture of 1812.
The Blue Jackets were a lousy team last year and look to be, at best, a mediocre team this year. Probably the more appropriate scene for them to have used would have been the one where Matthew Broderick gets killed and Denzel Washington rushes forward and grabs the flag and shouts “Come on” before being shot himself. The men of the 54th then heroically charge forward into battle and are slaughtered.
The Blue Jackets beat the St. Louis Blues 3-0. The Blue Jackets are now 5-3-1. This Civil War hockey fan holds on to hope.

Gator Trap

Last night I went over to Value City Arena in Columbus to watch the BCS championship game on a giant screen. Along with several thousand other Buckeye fans in attendance, I looked on in horror at what can only be viewed as one of the greatest embarrassments in the history of Buckeye sports. To those of you who may not have heard. The undefeated and heavily favored Ohio State Buckeye football team lost to the Florida Gators 41-14. The game was worse then even the score indicates. One of the OSU touchdowns was scored on the opening kickoff return by Ted Ginn Jr. The only sustained drive managed by the OSU offense was that second touchdown; other then that the OSU offense did nothing. Troy Smith spent the game running away from the Florida defenders, who managed to penetrate the pocket on almost every single play. Contrast that with Florida’s Chris Leak, who marched his team up and down the field at will.
I felt embarrassed watching this game and I was sitting in the company of fellow Buckeye fans. I cannot even begin to fathom the embarrassment felt by those Buckeye fans who traveled to Arizona, spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars, and had to watch this game in the company of Gator fans.
It is one thing to lose a game. I would have nothing to say against the OSU football team if they had lost like Oklahoma did to Boise State. But to go and not show up to a game that is beyond disgraceful. The players owe the fans an apology if not a refund.