Meanderings, 8 June 2024

Last night Kris and I shared a dinner with most of our graduating DMin students. I love this cohort, and I’m proud of them — for their character, for their industriousness, for their collegiality, for their pastoral care for one another, and for the quality of their final thesis project. So today will be a long goodbye for Kris and me.

Photo by Will O on Unsplash

One of our favorite Guardians: Triston McKenzie:

CLEVELAND -- When the Guardians had a game postponed by rain one night last season, Triston McKenzie didn’t use his unexpected Friday evening off to hit the bars or the club or the hay. Instead, McKenzie arranged a last-minute hang with a friend of his.

An eighth grader.

Jarmaine Miller is one of the many kids McKenzie has mentored in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) and one of the many he has befriended. That night, McKenzie and teammate Xzavion Curry took Miller and a classmate out to dinner, then they watched a Cavaliers game and played some “Call of Duty” with them. Most importantly, McKenzie delivered on a promise he had made to Miller.

“We made a bet,” the 16-year-old Miller said. “If I got straight A’s, he’d give me a camera. And I actually won the bet.”

For the past three school years, McKenzie has been participating in CMSD’s True2U, a volunteer mentoring program that helps eighth graders in the district prepare for high school by exploring their interests and building their core values. The volunteers are people in the community who have wisdom to pass along from their successful career paths.

McKenzie, a right-handed starter now in his fifth season with the Guardians, was the first True2U participant who just so happens to suit up for an MLB team. It’s next-level community involvement, which is why we wanted to tell the 26-year-old McKenzie’s story in a new MLB Network feature that premiered on Tuesday.

“[McKenzie is] like a big brother [to the students],” says Erin Moses, who taught Miller’s eighth-grade class at Valley View Boys Leadership Academy. “He does a phenomenal job of really getting to know them as individuals.”

Do you play Uno?

“Place your order.” In the time it took you to read that sentence, another deck of Uno was sold.

The family-favorite card game has been around for 52 years — but it may be more popular than ever. Almost everyone seems to play it, and by one measure it’s the top-selling game in the world.

Almost one set of Uno was sold in the US every second last year, according to Mattel, its publisher. That’s almost 60 Uno decks each minute — up from 17 sets each minute in 2021.

Its popularity is due to the game’s broad appeal, says Michelle Parnett-Dwyer, a curator at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.

“Kids can play against adults without being overmatched, and adults can play it together and still have fun,” she says. “The gameplay is simple and easy to understand, and playing a round moves quickly.”

More than 600 editions of Uno are available, but the game’s core mechanics remain mostly the same with each new version. Players draw a handful of cards and then take turns trying to discard them; the first player to get rid of all their cards wins.

With California in the rearview mirror:

According to a survey by ConsumerAffairs, California ranks as the No. 1 state people are moving from, ahead of New York, New Jersey and Illinois.

The report revealed California saw roughly 17,000 people move out of the state, while only just over 7,000 people moved in, making it the leading state in outbound migration. In comparison, New York, which is second on the list, experienced significantly fewer moves.

The ConsumerAffairs team analyzed data from over 143,000 users from January 2023 to March 2024, indicating North Carolina saw the largest increase in movers.

The states with the most significant inbound migration numbers were primarily located in the Southern U.S., with South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee and Texas seeing notable increases.

“I’d say if you’re optimizing for kombucha consumed per hour a day, go to LA,” Michael Basch, the founder and general partner at Oklahoma-based Atento Capital, told ConsumerAffairs. “I think if you want to start a family, if you want quality of life, if you want a nice community or if you want to make a difference, those are all things I think we win over those markets.”

The study reviewed migration data from the U.S. Census Bureau and noted that the trends do not directly correlate with population growth or decline in the states.

A good review of two recent books about evangelicalism.

We are with Chris Gehrz on this one:

So finally, I’m glad that attending public schools has let our children learn how to navigate and celebrate a neighborhood, city, county, state, country, and world that’s far more diverse than what their parents experienced as children. Our kids have spent nine years learning, playing, eating, chatting, and performing music with the children of immigrants from East Africa, Latin America, and every corner of Asia. They have classmates whose families are both much wealthier and much poorer than ours, and much more progressive and much more conservative than ours. Many of the Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and Hindus they’ve come to know are as committed to their faith as we are to ours… or as the agnostics and atheists in the community are to their uncertainty or skepticism.

Learning how to see the world from all those perspectives, to empathize and understand across some of their society’s many divides, is no small blessing for any American — or any follower of the Christ who calls his followers to the ministry of reconciliation.

Precisely because our kids will have spent their K-12 education in Roseville Area Schools, I’ll encourage them to consider going to college at private religious institutions like the one their mom attended or the one where I work — so that they can explore the amazing variety of American education and work more intentionally on relating their maturing faith to their deepening learning. But like one of the parents interviewed for this 2022 article in Christianity Today, today I’m just grateful “how public school gave [my] kids a broader look at their community and allowed them to get comfortable with diversity, new perspectives, and issues of equity and poverty.”

I’ve heard this, too: from a high school teacher and from a fellow professor who jumped ship because of a lack of serious interest among too many of the professor’s graduate students.

College professors are reporting that their students are no longer capable of reading or writing the kinds of complex texts that used to be routine assignments. Although there are surely multiple reasons, it’s likely this has something to do with the way we’ve been trying to teach reading comprehension, beginning in elementary school.

A couple of recent articles describe the problem in chilling detail. One that appeared in Slate in February, written by a college professor named Adam Kotsko who has been teaching for over 15 years, described his personal experience. While he used to be able to assign around 30 pages of reading per class meeting, he wrote, in the past five years, “students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” He’s had to spend much of class time “simply establishing what happened in a story or the basic steps of an argument—skills I used to be able to take for granted.”

Those outside academia, Kotsko writes, are skeptical. Is this really something new, they ask? Haven’t college professors always complained about the capabilities of their students? But when Kotsko speaks to fellow academics, he says, they get it. “I have literally never met a professor who did not share my experience,” he observes. They’ve had to ratchet down their expectations to meet the abilities of their students. Yes, there have always been students who skip the reading. “But,” Kotsko writes, “we are in new territory when even highly motivated honors students struggle to grasp the basic argument of a 20-page article.” …

Generally, professors say students don’t do work outside of class and struggle to read and analyze lengthier, complex texts that use academic vocabulary. A media studies professor at Wellesley College—a highly selective institution—says he’s had to reduce the amount of reading and writing he assigns. A biology professor at Davidson College observes that students are no longer able to synthesize and summarize information the way they used to, even needing explicit instruction in how to take notes. …

Assuming, then, that this is a problem, and that it’s a new one, there’s unlikely to be a single cause. According to a recent article in the New Yorker, there’s been a general decline in people’s ability to pay attention, which is likely rooted in their ready access to social media. In addition to a global decline in test scores of 15-year-olds—with a third of them citing digital distraction as an issue—there’s been an uptick in the number of people seeking clinical help for attention problems, an acceleration in the pacing of films, and a decline in the average length of a pop song.

Schools can’t entirely insulate students from a culture that seems to be barreling toward decreased attention spans. But there are certainly things they can and should do to mitigate its effects—to introduce students to what it’s like to pay sustained attention to a topic or a written text, and to the rewards of doing so.