It may be weird to blog about aging when I'm only 23, but I've been thinking about it a little. My perception of time is extremely limited. It's better than it was. When I was in high school, time felt like it lasted forever. Once I got into the routine of a certain semester, it felt like I had been doing that forever. Then it felt the same the next year. I was very focused on the present. It may have looked like I was focused on the future and motivated to look forward since I was trying to get into a good college, but kids don't really understand what that means. I definitely didn't. I was really just a kid who knew how to do well in school and got praised for it. The immediate rewards meant more to me than the future. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life and I didn't particularly care. That was something I'd think about later. My focus was on the things I was told I had to do right then.
Even in college my vision was pretty narrow and focused on the present. I had classes to take and do well in, so I poured my attention into that. My tone seems to be downplaying the importance of that, but it's not exactly unreasonable. I didn't have a lot of experience to compare things. There are so many things that take a long time to repeat and I just hadn't seen enough of them. One example would be presidents. I kind of remember Clinton, but I wasn't old enough to vote when he was being elected, so I didn't pay much attention. There's not a whole lot of point when you don't have a say in it. This has been my first change of presidency really. The difference is rather remarkable.
However big the change is, the presidency is a pretty lame example of what I'm talking about. I'm really thinking of things that take much longer than 4 years. I realized the other day that I have almost no insight into processes that take 20 or 30 years to mature. I was thinking about our board games and how we'll play them with our kids when they are old enough (and exist). Then I realized that a few pieces of cardboard that might not get frequent use in the meantime will be in pretty ragged shape in 20 years. It occurred to me then, all the things around me are going to decay over the course of my lifetime. There are a good many things that I take for granted and they just won't be around forever, or at least won't be in good shape. As a little kid, you go nuts when some of your possessions are lost (especially important ones). You think they're going to be there forever and it's a shock when you realize they are not a permanent part of your landscape. I think I have realized to certain extent that things have a certain impermanence, but I'm not sure I've ever really been aware of the inevitability of it. I'd say I'm still not.
I also haven't really failed enough to be compassionate. This past year, I've failed a lot. I compare myself now to myself a year ago and I cringe at how cocky I was. You haven't tried enough things at my age to realize how difficult some things are. Most things are difficult. Living is difficult. And when you see someone else fail, it's easy to criticize. I've learned to criticize a lot less I feel. One of the first year MACSMEs hasn't really been humbled by the whole experience yet. I worry for her because she's going to have it the hardest. She's been having a few difficulties, but I can tell it hasn't really hit home yet. Even though she's not the one who's been practically crying during supe group each week, I have the most concerns for her development. Oh well. The learning will come in time. It took me a while too. A few years ago, I think I would have had difficulty spending time with this person. Even today, I notice her little faux pas, but they don't really bother me. I know her realizations will come, and she's really not that bad in the meantime. No worse than I was certainly.
My thoughts have rambled away. And so I end.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Economic Crisis
I had an extended discussion with Steven the other day about the current economic crisis. It helped solidify my knowledge of the causes, but I tend to think a lot better when I write as opposed to just talking out loud. Also, I kind of want a record of my perception of this crisis.
So here goes.
It all began when certain home lending institutions began a new practice: selling mortgages. Their whole business model was based around this. They would give someone a loan to buy a house and then sell the loan to some investor. In effect, that random investor was giving someone a loan and paying the lending institution a finder's fee as the middle man. This means that these lending institutions were lending out other people's money. Once they had sold the loan, they didn't care if it was paid back or not. They still got their finder's fee regardless. So of course, it was in their best interests to find lots and lots of people and collect more and more finder's fees. The lending institutions found people who had never been offered loans before (usually for good reason) and gave them the opportunity to buy a house that they really couldn't afford. Of course, these people jumped at the chance. Huge sections of the population who had been kept away from the "American Dream" all of a sudden found it attainable. There were all kinds of creative payment plans cooked up so that people thought they might actually be able to pay their loans back. Most people were pretty willing to be convinced. It didn't matter if they had a plan where their payments increased over time or a plan that prevented them from saving a dime; they figured their salaries might increase or the value of their home would go up and somehow it would all work out. It doesn't matter if the lending companies thought it would work out as long as they could convince people to accept the loans, which generally wasn't very difficult.
It's not hard to imagine how these bad mortgages were created. I might have made the same mistake in their place if I thought I could actually have a house after being denied one for so long. The part that gets tricky is how these loans were sold. I mentioned before that lending companies were using other people's money to sell these loans, but I conveniently glossed over how they convinced people to buy mortgages that were so incredibly likely to be defaulted. The simple answer is that no one knew who the loans were being given out to. They didn't realize that everyone from the minimum wage earners to migrant workers had been offered loans. The total picture is a bit more complicated than that though. Very few investors are willing to buy something they know so little about. However, many also aren't willing to research their stocks in extremely great depth. That's why stock rating systems were devised. The ratings measure how safe or low risk a stock is. So now the lending companies were faced with the task of making their investments appear safe so that they could get more money to loan and then get more finder's fees. How do you make such and incredibly risky investment appear like a conservative, safe way to store your money? One way was to insure the mortgages. If the person who received the loan defaulted, then the insurance company would pay. Of course, insurance companies make you pay very high rates if they think their insuring something risky, so the lending companies were again left with the problem of making their stocks appear safe. Then some horrible genius came up with the idea of tranching. They divided up all the mortgages into groups called tranches. Often there would be about 20 tranches or more. Let's look at an example of a lending company with 20 tranches. The first tranche would be the first 5% of the mortgages to default on their loans. If even 5% defaulted, you would get no money at all. It was definitely a risky investment. The next tranche would pay out full returns unless more than 5% of the total mortgages defaulted. So if 5% of all the mortgages defaulted, you would be fine. If 6% defaulted, you would take some losses. If 10% or more defaulted, you would get nothing. Again, a risky investment considering that foreclosure rates were about 20% historically. But now imagine that you're in the 15th tranche. More than 70% of all the loans this company gave out would have to default before you'd even have to think about it. Even lower tranches than that looked pretty appealing. Imagine how safe and secure the 20th tranche must have looked. Everyone would have to default before you'd have to worry about a thing. Thus, stock rating companies were deceived and most of the crappy loans earned the safest rating, AAA. People gladly paid big bucks to buy something unbelievably secure with high rates of return that was also insured. You could put your life savings into something that secure and then not have to worry about money at all. Little did they know that the people who could afford loans were usually going to banks, not these lending institutions. People who could actually afford loans are a harder sell. People who never had a chance at a house will jump at the opportunity. You can move people through much more quickly and collect more finder's fees if you give loans to people who have never had money before. The 15th tranche wasn't safe. Even the 20th tranche didn't deserve a AAA rating. Almost every one of those crappy loans ended up defaulting. Nearly all the investors lost all of their money. But how could they lose everything? The investments were rated as being so safe, and weren't those loans insured? Unfortunately for the insurance companies, they were. The insurance companies were some of the first to go under (remember AIG?).
This is how the downward spiral began, but the spiral has much, much farther to go. A few investors losing their savings is certainly tragic for them, but it doesn't destroy a whole economy. Even a major insurance company going out of business isn't more than a ripple in the whole US economy. There are several other factors that set the stage for the huge downfall that ensued. Again, it begin with the lending companies that sold mortgages. Here, the focus shouldn't be on who they sold the loans to, but rather on how many people ended up with loans. From out of nowhere, the demand for houses went through the roof. Many people who had previously never had the opportunity to enter the home buying market were now seriously shopping. Here is a classic case of supply and demand influencing cost. Even with companies building houses as fast as they could, there was no way anyone could match the rate at which lending companies were giving out loans. Demand was increasing far faster than it ever had before. You would think people would get suspicious when their home values began to grow exponentially, but most people just saw it as a great windfall. Real estate agents were certainly enjoying the boom and housing developers didn't have time to consider why housing prices were soaring when other housing developers were getting filthy rich with their newly constructed houses that were being sold as fast as they could be built. As a result of the soaring prices, loans for houses needed to get larger and larger for people to be able to afford one. Even people who could normally afford a house were faced with extremely daunting loans that even they would be hard pressed to pay back. People who tried waiting for housing prices to come down again often panicked as the prices kept going up and up. "Priced out" was a common phrase back then. If you didn't stretch your means and buy a house now, the prices would soar and soar until you no longer had the option even to stretch. To avoid being priced out, people rushed to their banks (and also to those lending institutions) clamoring for loans that they could less and less afford. Even without the lending institutions giving loans to people certain to default, the foreclosure rate would have still skyrocketed because of the unreasonably high cost of housing and the large number of people making sacrifices to buy a house while they could. Now even banks that didn't sell away their mortgages (and so actually screened their loans to increase the chances of being paid back) would be faced with more losses than usual.
As you can see, an enormous problem was already looming on the horizon, but another new lending policy made the problem even worse: the home equity loan. Because of the rising prices of housing, there was now a huge section of the population that looked rich on paper but didn't have a dime in cash. They had spent every penny on buying their house and paying back their enormous mortgage, and now they had nothing with which to buy a car or start a business. Even though they had no liquid assets, many families had a house that was worth much more than when they bought it. It was probably frustrating to have that much net worth and be unable to buy some of the necessary things to live and have a family. So in comes another horrible genius. Why not turn their non liquid assets (in almost all cases, their homes) into cash and then make a profit off of the transaction? People were now able to trade in their mortgage that they had stretched to pay for earlier for an even bigger one plus some cash upfront. If someone wanted to start a business, but didn't have the cash to do so, this was an excellent opportunity. With a brand new successful business, they could afford a larger mortgage. What they really needed was the cash upfront, and now their house could give it to them. Banks liked the deal because they made a lot of money in the process. People liked the deal because they could go from living like paupers in an expensive home to living like they were used to and having the opportunities they would have had if houses had been available that they could have afforded.
And it wasn't just banks and individuals who benefited from home equity loans. The whole economy surged because now people who had never had access to money not only had a house, but a lot of cash from the house's equity that they could now spend. For a few years, the economy experienced an almost unprecedented surge. More people were able to spend than ever before. Most companies tried expanding to meet the growing demand for products and experienced record profits. For a short time, the American dream was attainable and everyone was able to be middle class, even on minimum wage salaries.
The the first foreclosures started to happen.
At first, a few of the most obviously bad loans foreclosing was not a problem. Only the first tranches were affected, and pretty much everyone knew the first tranche was not a good deal anyway. Then more and more tranches were left with no returns. People who had felt very secure were left with nothing. The price of all of these "secure" stocks plummeted. No one was willing to invest in the lending companies or their tranched loans anymore. With no more influx of other people's money, the lending institutions were forced to slow down their loans and eventually halt them entirely. Countrywide and many other companies specializing in quick turnover of home loans began to cease operations. The insurance companies began to crash along with them. Housing prices suffered a commensurate crash since all of a sudden, the supply of available houses was much higher than it had been before. Investors also began to suffer. Individual investors lost whatever they had put into purchasing those loans, but individuals weren't the only investors in the lending companies. Some banks, such as Bear Sterns, were also investors. Bear Sterns was one of the first actual banks to suffer devastating losses. The government didn't want to see the 4th largest bank in the US to go under because they feared that the people would lose trust in the economy and cause it to tank. They did what they could the bandage the situation, but there were many other problems on the horizon that they couldn't foresee.
With the price of homes dropping drastically, home equity loans began to look like a very bad idea. They increased the projected earnings of the banks tremendously and caused their stocks to go through the roof, much to the glee of stockholders. However, the banks were suddenly realizing that those projected earnings weren't going to happen. Housing prices began dropping back down to sane levels and banks realized that they had given people money for something that was no longer worth what they had paid. For many people, their mortgage was now actually higher than the value of their house. Normally, when someone defaults on their mortgage, the banks take a loss, but it is usually in expected profits. They will also often sell a house for less than it is worth because they would rather have cash. If someone has a $500,000 house and still owe $200,000 on it when they find they are unable to continue paying their mortgage, the bank sells the house (let's say for $450,000), keeps the $200,000 plus interest that they are owed, and then gives the rest to the poor defaulted family who often quickly use it up paying the bills they've accrued that caused them to go bankrupt in the first place. That was the old model before home equity loans. It's not great for the banks, but they survive. But now imagine a house that was worth $500,000. Pretend this family also had a $200,000 mortgage, but they needed some cash, so they got a home equity loan raising their mortgage to $400,000. Now imagine if housing prices dropped drastically. This family's $500,000 home could be worth as low as $300,000, perhaps lower in some areas. Some people in this situation chose to default on purpose because they didn't like the idea of paying a mortgage worth more than the cost of their home. By declaring bankruptcy, they would have a bad credit rating for a while, but they could start over fresh without an overwhelming debt that they got from buying an overpriced house. That situation did happen, but I believe that most people continued to struggle to make ends meet and pay exorbitant rates for their house which was steadily decreasing in value. However, when a family couldn't pay any more (perhaps there was a death in the family or a source of income dried up), the bank was unable to recoup their losses. They might be able to sell the house, or they might not. With more houses than there were buyers, a lot of banks couldn't turn over their foreclosed houses, even at a loss. Even if they did manage to sell the house, say for $250,000, that only pays for $250,000 of the now $400,000 mortgage. The bank doesn't get back what it lent and the family gets nothing. And if the family gets nothing, none of their bill collectors get anything either. Credit cards, which had been freely given out during the boom, were now creating losses for companies everywhere.
While companies did receive a blow from the families defaulting on their debts, the real blow came when the home equity loans stopped. The cash from those home equity loans had been stimulating the marketplace significantly and many companies had expanded in response to that. When that cash flow suddenly dried up, companies were suddenly left with an excess of employees and a lack of profits. Hard times hit on Wall Street and one of the first responses was layoffs. So many families were struggling to make ends meet to pay for their expensive houses and they couldn't afford to have a major breadwinner unemployed for long. Many families were stretched so thin they were living paycheck to paycheck. When they got laid off, they were forced to default, which made the situation even worse. It made housing prices drop just a little more since there was a larger supply and less demand. Banks took even more losses from failure to sell houses. Creditors had to erase the profits they had made on paper when they lent these families money. And most importantly, people who used to be shopping and consuming no longer had any money with which to do so, which reduced company profits even more. This, of course, meant more layoffs and the cycle continued.
Everything I've described above affected a large number of people, but many members of the general populace hadn't realized yet how dire the situation was. The general public started to really notice how bad things had gotten when banks started to go under. At first, everyone thought the Bear Sterns bailout was bizarre and unusual. Then other banks started to go under as well. Banks were some of the first institutions hit and they lost the most. Some people started to panic. A few made runs on the banks withdrawing all their cash above $100,000 (the maximum amount the government had insured at that time), which made the banks' situations even worse. Banks that didn't own any crappy mortgages and that had made fewer home equity loans started buying up all the floundering banks that had. Fortunately for people who had their money in banks, very few banks went under. Most were simply bought at a fraction of their real value. If they hadn't been, the situation would have been much, much worse than it is today.
Not many normal banks declared bankruptcy (the same cannot be said of investment banks), but they had all been dealt a serious blow. Very few banks were willing to give out loans anymore, even to families that would normally be able to pay them back. Even middle class families that should have been safe investments were defaulting because they had paid too much for their houses. As more and more people began to be laid off, even someone with a good salary was no guarantee. As banks became more and more reluctant with their loans, housing prices continued to fall. Now when layoffs happened, banks hurt even more. And layoffs were becoming more and more common. The unemployment level was rising steadily. As more people got laid off, fewer people were left to buy products, which lead more companies to lay off their employees. Even people who weren't laid off began to curtail their spending. Everyone realized that their jobs were not safe and they would need as much savings as they could if they wanted to keep their houses. At this point, even people who were relatively safe or who had never applied for a home equity loan started tightening their belts and reconsidering expected purchases. Now the crisis began really touching people who weren't even in the housing market. People who had never had anything to do with bad mortgages and had lived within their means found that they could no longer get credit. Credit card rates increased across the board. People were losing jobs right and left, and even families with savings couldn't afford the loss of income for long. With fewer and fewer companies hiring and more and more layoffs, the number of people unable and unwilling to spend just kept increasing. Then even large companies started going bankrupt (Circuit City, Mervyn's, etc.) and more jobs were lost. Anyone who took out their home equity loan to start a business was faced with a hostile market. More foreclosures ensued.
At this point, the cycle has gone on long enough that the entire country developed a recession mindset. Most people don't feel comfortable spending money, and rightly so. Secure jobs are in high demand. As more secure jobs start flooding the marketplace (from the stimulus package, for instance), the economy will improve slightly, but it will take a while for people to feel comfortable spending again, and the economy won't change until that happens.
Whew! That was long! I'm glad I wrote it down though. It's hard to keep track of it all without seeing it. It's easy to forget how complicated this all is. I think I may also have some parts wrong, but not many. This is the gist of it and I am satisfied. I hope I didn't miss anything.
So here goes.
It all began when certain home lending institutions began a new practice: selling mortgages. Their whole business model was based around this. They would give someone a loan to buy a house and then sell the loan to some investor. In effect, that random investor was giving someone a loan and paying the lending institution a finder's fee as the middle man. This means that these lending institutions were lending out other people's money. Once they had sold the loan, they didn't care if it was paid back or not. They still got their finder's fee regardless. So of course, it was in their best interests to find lots and lots of people and collect more and more finder's fees. The lending institutions found people who had never been offered loans before (usually for good reason) and gave them the opportunity to buy a house that they really couldn't afford. Of course, these people jumped at the chance. Huge sections of the population who had been kept away from the "American Dream" all of a sudden found it attainable. There were all kinds of creative payment plans cooked up so that people thought they might actually be able to pay their loans back. Most people were pretty willing to be convinced. It didn't matter if they had a plan where their payments increased over time or a plan that prevented them from saving a dime; they figured their salaries might increase or the value of their home would go up and somehow it would all work out. It doesn't matter if the lending companies thought it would work out as long as they could convince people to accept the loans, which generally wasn't very difficult.
It's not hard to imagine how these bad mortgages were created. I might have made the same mistake in their place if I thought I could actually have a house after being denied one for so long. The part that gets tricky is how these loans were sold. I mentioned before that lending companies were using other people's money to sell these loans, but I conveniently glossed over how they convinced people to buy mortgages that were so incredibly likely to be defaulted. The simple answer is that no one knew who the loans were being given out to. They didn't realize that everyone from the minimum wage earners to migrant workers had been offered loans. The total picture is a bit more complicated than that though. Very few investors are willing to buy something they know so little about. However, many also aren't willing to research their stocks in extremely great depth. That's why stock rating systems were devised. The ratings measure how safe or low risk a stock is. So now the lending companies were faced with the task of making their investments appear safe so that they could get more money to loan and then get more finder's fees. How do you make such and incredibly risky investment appear like a conservative, safe way to store your money? One way was to insure the mortgages. If the person who received the loan defaulted, then the insurance company would pay. Of course, insurance companies make you pay very high rates if they think their insuring something risky, so the lending companies were again left with the problem of making their stocks appear safe. Then some horrible genius came up with the idea of tranching. They divided up all the mortgages into groups called tranches. Often there would be about 20 tranches or more. Let's look at an example of a lending company with 20 tranches. The first tranche would be the first 5% of the mortgages to default on their loans. If even 5% defaulted, you would get no money at all. It was definitely a risky investment. The next tranche would pay out full returns unless more than 5% of the total mortgages defaulted. So if 5% of all the mortgages defaulted, you would be fine. If 6% defaulted, you would take some losses. If 10% or more defaulted, you would get nothing. Again, a risky investment considering that foreclosure rates were about 20% historically. But now imagine that you're in the 15th tranche. More than 70% of all the loans this company gave out would have to default before you'd even have to think about it. Even lower tranches than that looked pretty appealing. Imagine how safe and secure the 20th tranche must have looked. Everyone would have to default before you'd have to worry about a thing. Thus, stock rating companies were deceived and most of the crappy loans earned the safest rating, AAA. People gladly paid big bucks to buy something unbelievably secure with high rates of return that was also insured. You could put your life savings into something that secure and then not have to worry about money at all. Little did they know that the people who could afford loans were usually going to banks, not these lending institutions. People who could actually afford loans are a harder sell. People who never had a chance at a house will jump at the opportunity. You can move people through much more quickly and collect more finder's fees if you give loans to people who have never had money before. The 15th tranche wasn't safe. Even the 20th tranche didn't deserve a AAA rating. Almost every one of those crappy loans ended up defaulting. Nearly all the investors lost all of their money. But how could they lose everything? The investments were rated as being so safe, and weren't those loans insured? Unfortunately for the insurance companies, they were. The insurance companies were some of the first to go under (remember AIG?).
This is how the downward spiral began, but the spiral has much, much farther to go. A few investors losing their savings is certainly tragic for them, but it doesn't destroy a whole economy. Even a major insurance company going out of business isn't more than a ripple in the whole US economy. There are several other factors that set the stage for the huge downfall that ensued. Again, it begin with the lending companies that sold mortgages. Here, the focus shouldn't be on who they sold the loans to, but rather on how many people ended up with loans. From out of nowhere, the demand for houses went through the roof. Many people who had previously never had the opportunity to enter the home buying market were now seriously shopping. Here is a classic case of supply and demand influencing cost. Even with companies building houses as fast as they could, there was no way anyone could match the rate at which lending companies were giving out loans. Demand was increasing far faster than it ever had before. You would think people would get suspicious when their home values began to grow exponentially, but most people just saw it as a great windfall. Real estate agents were certainly enjoying the boom and housing developers didn't have time to consider why housing prices were soaring when other housing developers were getting filthy rich with their newly constructed houses that were being sold as fast as they could be built. As a result of the soaring prices, loans for houses needed to get larger and larger for people to be able to afford one. Even people who could normally afford a house were faced with extremely daunting loans that even they would be hard pressed to pay back. People who tried waiting for housing prices to come down again often panicked as the prices kept going up and up. "Priced out" was a common phrase back then. If you didn't stretch your means and buy a house now, the prices would soar and soar until you no longer had the option even to stretch. To avoid being priced out, people rushed to their banks (and also to those lending institutions) clamoring for loans that they could less and less afford. Even without the lending institutions giving loans to people certain to default, the foreclosure rate would have still skyrocketed because of the unreasonably high cost of housing and the large number of people making sacrifices to buy a house while they could. Now even banks that didn't sell away their mortgages (and so actually screened their loans to increase the chances of being paid back) would be faced with more losses than usual.
As you can see, an enormous problem was already looming on the horizon, but another new lending policy made the problem even worse: the home equity loan. Because of the rising prices of housing, there was now a huge section of the population that looked rich on paper but didn't have a dime in cash. They had spent every penny on buying their house and paying back their enormous mortgage, and now they had nothing with which to buy a car or start a business. Even though they had no liquid assets, many families had a house that was worth much more than when they bought it. It was probably frustrating to have that much net worth and be unable to buy some of the necessary things to live and have a family. So in comes another horrible genius. Why not turn their non liquid assets (in almost all cases, their homes) into cash and then make a profit off of the transaction? People were now able to trade in their mortgage that they had stretched to pay for earlier for an even bigger one plus some cash upfront. If someone wanted to start a business, but didn't have the cash to do so, this was an excellent opportunity. With a brand new successful business, they could afford a larger mortgage. What they really needed was the cash upfront, and now their house could give it to them. Banks liked the deal because they made a lot of money in the process. People liked the deal because they could go from living like paupers in an expensive home to living like they were used to and having the opportunities they would have had if houses had been available that they could have afforded.
And it wasn't just banks and individuals who benefited from home equity loans. The whole economy surged because now people who had never had access to money not only had a house, but a lot of cash from the house's equity that they could now spend. For a few years, the economy experienced an almost unprecedented surge. More people were able to spend than ever before. Most companies tried expanding to meet the growing demand for products and experienced record profits. For a short time, the American dream was attainable and everyone was able to be middle class, even on minimum wage salaries.
The the first foreclosures started to happen.
At first, a few of the most obviously bad loans foreclosing was not a problem. Only the first tranches were affected, and pretty much everyone knew the first tranche was not a good deal anyway. Then more and more tranches were left with no returns. People who had felt very secure were left with nothing. The price of all of these "secure" stocks plummeted. No one was willing to invest in the lending companies or their tranched loans anymore. With no more influx of other people's money, the lending institutions were forced to slow down their loans and eventually halt them entirely. Countrywide and many other companies specializing in quick turnover of home loans began to cease operations. The insurance companies began to crash along with them. Housing prices suffered a commensurate crash since all of a sudden, the supply of available houses was much higher than it had been before. Investors also began to suffer. Individual investors lost whatever they had put into purchasing those loans, but individuals weren't the only investors in the lending companies. Some banks, such as Bear Sterns, were also investors. Bear Sterns was one of the first actual banks to suffer devastating losses. The government didn't want to see the 4th largest bank in the US to go under because they feared that the people would lose trust in the economy and cause it to tank. They did what they could the bandage the situation, but there were many other problems on the horizon that they couldn't foresee.
With the price of homes dropping drastically, home equity loans began to look like a very bad idea. They increased the projected earnings of the banks tremendously and caused their stocks to go through the roof, much to the glee of stockholders. However, the banks were suddenly realizing that those projected earnings weren't going to happen. Housing prices began dropping back down to sane levels and banks realized that they had given people money for something that was no longer worth what they had paid. For many people, their mortgage was now actually higher than the value of their house. Normally, when someone defaults on their mortgage, the banks take a loss, but it is usually in expected profits. They will also often sell a house for less than it is worth because they would rather have cash. If someone has a $500,000 house and still owe $200,000 on it when they find they are unable to continue paying their mortgage, the bank sells the house (let's say for $450,000), keeps the $200,000 plus interest that they are owed, and then gives the rest to the poor defaulted family who often quickly use it up paying the bills they've accrued that caused them to go bankrupt in the first place. That was the old model before home equity loans. It's not great for the banks, but they survive. But now imagine a house that was worth $500,000. Pretend this family also had a $200,000 mortgage, but they needed some cash, so they got a home equity loan raising their mortgage to $400,000. Now imagine if housing prices dropped drastically. This family's $500,000 home could be worth as low as $300,000, perhaps lower in some areas. Some people in this situation chose to default on purpose because they didn't like the idea of paying a mortgage worth more than the cost of their home. By declaring bankruptcy, they would have a bad credit rating for a while, but they could start over fresh without an overwhelming debt that they got from buying an overpriced house. That situation did happen, but I believe that most people continued to struggle to make ends meet and pay exorbitant rates for their house which was steadily decreasing in value. However, when a family couldn't pay any more (perhaps there was a death in the family or a source of income dried up), the bank was unable to recoup their losses. They might be able to sell the house, or they might not. With more houses than there were buyers, a lot of banks couldn't turn over their foreclosed houses, even at a loss. Even if they did manage to sell the house, say for $250,000, that only pays for $250,000 of the now $400,000 mortgage. The bank doesn't get back what it lent and the family gets nothing. And if the family gets nothing, none of their bill collectors get anything either. Credit cards, which had been freely given out during the boom, were now creating losses for companies everywhere.
While companies did receive a blow from the families defaulting on their debts, the real blow came when the home equity loans stopped. The cash from those home equity loans had been stimulating the marketplace significantly and many companies had expanded in response to that. When that cash flow suddenly dried up, companies were suddenly left with an excess of employees and a lack of profits. Hard times hit on Wall Street and one of the first responses was layoffs. So many families were struggling to make ends meet to pay for their expensive houses and they couldn't afford to have a major breadwinner unemployed for long. Many families were stretched so thin they were living paycheck to paycheck. When they got laid off, they were forced to default, which made the situation even worse. It made housing prices drop just a little more since there was a larger supply and less demand. Banks took even more losses from failure to sell houses. Creditors had to erase the profits they had made on paper when they lent these families money. And most importantly, people who used to be shopping and consuming no longer had any money with which to do so, which reduced company profits even more. This, of course, meant more layoffs and the cycle continued.
Everything I've described above affected a large number of people, but many members of the general populace hadn't realized yet how dire the situation was. The general public started to really notice how bad things had gotten when banks started to go under. At first, everyone thought the Bear Sterns bailout was bizarre and unusual. Then other banks started to go under as well. Banks were some of the first institutions hit and they lost the most. Some people started to panic. A few made runs on the banks withdrawing all their cash above $100,000 (the maximum amount the government had insured at that time), which made the banks' situations even worse. Banks that didn't own any crappy mortgages and that had made fewer home equity loans started buying up all the floundering banks that had. Fortunately for people who had their money in banks, very few banks went under. Most were simply bought at a fraction of their real value. If they hadn't been, the situation would have been much, much worse than it is today.
Not many normal banks declared bankruptcy (the same cannot be said of investment banks), but they had all been dealt a serious blow. Very few banks were willing to give out loans anymore, even to families that would normally be able to pay them back. Even middle class families that should have been safe investments were defaulting because they had paid too much for their houses. As more and more people began to be laid off, even someone with a good salary was no guarantee. As banks became more and more reluctant with their loans, housing prices continued to fall. Now when layoffs happened, banks hurt even more. And layoffs were becoming more and more common. The unemployment level was rising steadily. As more people got laid off, fewer people were left to buy products, which lead more companies to lay off their employees. Even people who weren't laid off began to curtail their spending. Everyone realized that their jobs were not safe and they would need as much savings as they could if they wanted to keep their houses. At this point, even people who were relatively safe or who had never applied for a home equity loan started tightening their belts and reconsidering expected purchases. Now the crisis began really touching people who weren't even in the housing market. People who had never had anything to do with bad mortgages and had lived within their means found that they could no longer get credit. Credit card rates increased across the board. People were losing jobs right and left, and even families with savings couldn't afford the loss of income for long. With fewer and fewer companies hiring and more and more layoffs, the number of people unable and unwilling to spend just kept increasing. Then even large companies started going bankrupt (Circuit City, Mervyn's, etc.) and more jobs were lost. Anyone who took out their home equity loan to start a business was faced with a hostile market. More foreclosures ensued.
At this point, the cycle has gone on long enough that the entire country developed a recession mindset. Most people don't feel comfortable spending money, and rightly so. Secure jobs are in high demand. As more secure jobs start flooding the marketplace (from the stimulus package, for instance), the economy will improve slightly, but it will take a while for people to feel comfortable spending again, and the economy won't change until that happens.
Whew! That was long! I'm glad I wrote it down though. It's hard to keep track of it all without seeing it. It's easy to forget how complicated this all is. I think I may also have some parts wrong, but not many. This is the gist of it and I am satisfied. I hope I didn't miss anything.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Emotional turmoil
I feel so crappy right now. Yesterday, I found out that my master teacher Nicole is out sick for the rest of the semester. Now they're looking for a replacement teacher. I am the obvious first choice since I know all the students and taught them already for a while. I think I've already made my decision not to do it. It's an incredibly bad idea for my personal well being. I have to finish PACT, my master's project, the tech portfolio, and plan for a wedding. I don't have that kind of time. But if not helping out is such a good idea for my personal well being, then why do I feel so much like crap? I just feel awful for my algebra 2 students. I saw who their sub is (at least for today)- it's a random foreign language teacher who subbed for Philippe's alg 2 once- he doesn't know any of the math. It's sad to think they're not going to be getting a good education this year, but when I think of individuals, I start feeling really awful. Rosa is probably really scared right now, and that makes her angry and lash out. She knows that she needs to know this stuff and there's no way she can do it. I can only imagine her frustration. And then there's Lannysha- she could have passed second semester and have her first semester grade bumped up to a C retroactively. Nicole would have done it. And Lannysha was working so hard at the end. She could have done it, but I don't think she'll be able to now. And then there's Langston. I have so many regrets about Langston. He worked so hard- he went from doing no homework to doing most of it. I called his mom and told her how great he was doing, but I never really told him. I think he might have known. And then when he cheated on a test, I couldn't bear to call his mom (and he had done well on the parts of the test where I don't think he was cheating), so I gave him a zero on the parts where he had cheated, spoke to him, and then let it slide. And he felt so awful. He apologized, sincerely. I could tell he really meant it. And he promised not to cheat again. And then kept doing all his homework. And then he got a 3 out of 25 on the next quiz. Why didn't I follow up on that? He was doing so well! And he stopped doing homework after that. If i could do it over, I would have handled that so differently. This could be my chance to handle it differently. They're still there and they need a teacher.
It would have been so much easier if this had been a clean break, if the class hadn't lingered on after I left. There are so many regrets that I have and there's this horrible could hanging over my head telling me that I have the chance to right those wrongs and cleanse those regrets, but only if I act now. But I really can't act now. I have to graduate, and that's no small task.
I'm not going to do it. I know I'm not. Next year I'll be an even better teacher. I did the best I could in the given circumstances. I really shouldn't regret anything, and honestly I don't. I think I did pretty well there at the end. And all along, I did the best that I could do at the time. But there are so many things I could do better now and maybe that could make up for some of the things I did wrong before. And I feel really bad for my students not getting the education they deserve. They were an amazing group of kids. I really cared about them (still do). I'd even go so far as to say I loved them, and I do not use that word lightly. I remember I didn't tell my grandparents I loved them for a long time as a kid because I wasn't sure if I did. It's not that I was mad at them or anything. They were very important to me, but it took a while before I felt comfortable with the word "love." In the end, I decided it would make them happy and I might love them, so I should just say it. That's probably how it'll be with Steven's mom, who tells me she loves me, but I haven't reciprocated. I might love her. I do like her a lot. But love? Anyway, I feel like I did love my students. There were some who had just started to open up and there were some who were working so hard and there were some that didn't get what they deserved (none of them now). It tears me up to turn my back on them. Dan says that kids can recover from one year of chaos. Two years and they can't, but one year and they can. They'll be a little behind next year, but they'll make it. It just feels so hard to turn away from helping someone you love. My mom always bends over backwards for her loved ones. I want to do the same. But you can't take care of other people unless you can take care of yourself first. You always have to be your first priority. It's a hard, emotional truth, but it is a truth. I'm really not available to help. I think I just have to face it and come to terms with it. I care about these kids a lot, and it might be in their best interest for me to teach them this semester, but I think I have to pass. If I can get a lot of work done this week (and I mean a LOT), then maybe... but it will mean working around the clock. For them, I might be able to do it...
It would have been so much easier if this had been a clean break, if the class hadn't lingered on after I left. There are so many regrets that I have and there's this horrible could hanging over my head telling me that I have the chance to right those wrongs and cleanse those regrets, but only if I act now. But I really can't act now. I have to graduate, and that's no small task.
I'm not going to do it. I know I'm not. Next year I'll be an even better teacher. I did the best I could in the given circumstances. I really shouldn't regret anything, and honestly I don't. I think I did pretty well there at the end. And all along, I did the best that I could do at the time. But there are so many things I could do better now and maybe that could make up for some of the things I did wrong before. And I feel really bad for my students not getting the education they deserve. They were an amazing group of kids. I really cared about them (still do). I'd even go so far as to say I loved them, and I do not use that word lightly. I remember I didn't tell my grandparents I loved them for a long time as a kid because I wasn't sure if I did. It's not that I was mad at them or anything. They were very important to me, but it took a while before I felt comfortable with the word "love." In the end, I decided it would make them happy and I might love them, so I should just say it. That's probably how it'll be with Steven's mom, who tells me she loves me, but I haven't reciprocated. I might love her. I do like her a lot. But love? Anyway, I feel like I did love my students. There were some who had just started to open up and there were some who were working so hard and there were some that didn't get what they deserved (none of them now). It tears me up to turn my back on them. Dan says that kids can recover from one year of chaos. Two years and they can't, but one year and they can. They'll be a little behind next year, but they'll make it. It just feels so hard to turn away from helping someone you love. My mom always bends over backwards for her loved ones. I want to do the same. But you can't take care of other people unless you can take care of yourself first. You always have to be your first priority. It's a hard, emotional truth, but it is a truth. I'm really not available to help. I think I just have to face it and come to terms with it. I care about these kids a lot, and it might be in their best interest for me to teach them this semester, but I think I have to pass. If I can get a lot of work done this week (and I mean a LOT), then maybe... but it will mean working around the clock. For them, I might be able to do it...
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Dilemma
I'm taking this class right now, Urban Education, that's pretty interesting. Our main assignment in the class is this mapping project where we have to map something in a certain neighborhood. One example she gave was a group who mapped all the pumpkins in a neighborhood around Halloween. It correlated strongly which which areas were higher income. It was pretty interesting. My group has decided to focus a little more around public transportation. We're still a little confused about what we're looking for, but we're making some progress.
The mapping project, however, is not my dilemma. The class as a whole is not a dilemma at all. It's covering some interesting subject matter. The problem is the teacher. I have this class (which happens to be three hours long) right before another class (also 3 hours long, coincidentally), and our teach keeps us late almost every week. The first week, she kept us over by a minute. Ok, fine. It happens. The next week she kept us over by 3, and didn't seem to concerned about it. I came up to her after class and said she really couldn't keep us over like that since half the class (all the MACSMEs) had to go to another class afterwards. She pretty much blew me off in response. "It's only 3 minutes." You know, if I didn't have a class afterwards, I might not be so hard on her, but no, it is not only three minutes when that 10 minute break is all you get.
Even though she blew me off that week, the following week she let us out on time, so I thought maybe she had listened after all. Psych! The week after that she kept us over by 5 minutes! This was the day we started really getting in to racism and white supremacy, so it might be a topic she's really into, but that's no excuse. To make matters even worse, she spends her ill gotten minutes just talking and talking and talking- she never lets up! I raised my hand to ask a question 3 minutes before class ended. She said she noticed my hand and would get to it when she finished her thought. That took 4 minutes. Keep in mind, she had been talking for 15 straight right before that. When she finally finished talking, she said, "You have a question?" I said no. She asked if I was sure and I said "yeah. I'm sure" and I have to admit I said it with every ounce of frustration you can see in this blog. When I said no, it was a little bit of a cross between a "no" and a bitter laugh. She might be so oblivious that she didn't notice, but maybe not. In any event, part of the reason I didn't ask my question was because she was already over by a minute and I was starting to get pissed. So I didn't ask my question, thinking we could finally go, but apparently having no questions meant she should go off on another tirade for another three minutes. I have no idea what she said. I was seeing red by that time. I've stopped bothering to listen while she talks anyway. Most people just surf the internet, except that she told us to put away all laptops today so that "everyone in the room will know you are present. Even if you're taking notes, just take them on a sheet of paper." She also sent out an email asking us to put away cell phones during class or she would call us on it publicly.
My first thoughts, of course, were what a bitch she was, how unhelpful this is to our education, how much she ruining the subject matter by being a total dick, etc. But then I started thinking a little more about the subject matter. This thought is kind of out in left field, but what if she's trying to make us feel like a suppressed minority? We're studying the subtle effects of power and how they impact those without power. She has definitely been exercising her authority in a very coercive manner, ignoring many, many complaints about it. She's trying to quash any forms of passive resistance. She's been filming this movie "The Color of Fear" (the only times she's not talking are when this movie is playing, so I am very grateful), and one of the black people in it wasn't getting through to a white person until he started yelling and screaming. So maybe quiet, subtle complaints aren't working because she doesn't want them to work- what if she's waiting for someone to just yell at her in front of everyone about what a dick she's been...
And here is my dilemma. I have enough common sense to realize how stupid it would be to yell at her if that's not what she was going for. Also, I recognize how improbable it is that she has some sort of grandiose plan to make us feel oppressed and learn to mobilize against an oppressor. But can she really be so dense as to not realize that this is a problem? Can she really ignore so many complaints (I know of at least 4)? She also seems a little full of herself. It would be pretty arrogant to make a stab at being the oppressor in order to teach us all a life lesson.
Ok. I'm not going to accuse her of anything, but I am walking out on her class at 4 exactly next week. I suspect others will follow me, and if they don't they will the week after that. Everyone was so irate after class was over, it was all we could talk about. If I leave 5 minutes earlier than them, and then show up to the next class relaxed and mellow, with no repercussions (I mean, what can she do?), they'll go along the next time for sure.
Sigh. I wish I didn't have to fight so much. I suppose it's only natural that I draw parallels between what we're being taught and the behavior of the teacher teaching it, but in all likelihood, I'd be surprised if she sees the comparison. There are a lot of education professors who don't know the first thing about teaching. She keeps talking about her undergrads, an easily cowed lot, I'm sure. I know I was. But I'm afraid I'm too sassy and full of myself (though perhaps not to the extent that she's full of herself) to let this sort of awful pedagogy slide for long.
The mapping project, however, is not my dilemma. The class as a whole is not a dilemma at all. It's covering some interesting subject matter. The problem is the teacher. I have this class (which happens to be three hours long) right before another class (also 3 hours long, coincidentally), and our teach keeps us late almost every week. The first week, she kept us over by a minute. Ok, fine. It happens. The next week she kept us over by 3, and didn't seem to concerned about it. I came up to her after class and said she really couldn't keep us over like that since half the class (all the MACSMEs) had to go to another class afterwards. She pretty much blew me off in response. "It's only 3 minutes." You know, if I didn't have a class afterwards, I might not be so hard on her, but no, it is not only three minutes when that 10 minute break is all you get.
Even though she blew me off that week, the following week she let us out on time, so I thought maybe she had listened after all. Psych! The week after that she kept us over by 5 minutes! This was the day we started really getting in to racism and white supremacy, so it might be a topic she's really into, but that's no excuse. To make matters even worse, she spends her ill gotten minutes just talking and talking and talking- she never lets up! I raised my hand to ask a question 3 minutes before class ended. She said she noticed my hand and would get to it when she finished her thought. That took 4 minutes. Keep in mind, she had been talking for 15 straight right before that. When she finally finished talking, she said, "You have a question?" I said no. She asked if I was sure and I said "yeah. I'm sure" and I have to admit I said it with every ounce of frustration you can see in this blog. When I said no, it was a little bit of a cross between a "no" and a bitter laugh. She might be so oblivious that she didn't notice, but maybe not. In any event, part of the reason I didn't ask my question was because she was already over by a minute and I was starting to get pissed. So I didn't ask my question, thinking we could finally go, but apparently having no questions meant she should go off on another tirade for another three minutes. I have no idea what she said. I was seeing red by that time. I've stopped bothering to listen while she talks anyway. Most people just surf the internet, except that she told us to put away all laptops today so that "everyone in the room will know you are present. Even if you're taking notes, just take them on a sheet of paper." She also sent out an email asking us to put away cell phones during class or she would call us on it publicly.
My first thoughts, of course, were what a bitch she was, how unhelpful this is to our education, how much she ruining the subject matter by being a total dick, etc. But then I started thinking a little more about the subject matter. This thought is kind of out in left field, but what if she's trying to make us feel like a suppressed minority? We're studying the subtle effects of power and how they impact those without power. She has definitely been exercising her authority in a very coercive manner, ignoring many, many complaints about it. She's trying to quash any forms of passive resistance. She's been filming this movie "The Color of Fear" (the only times she's not talking are when this movie is playing, so I am very grateful), and one of the black people in it wasn't getting through to a white person until he started yelling and screaming. So maybe quiet, subtle complaints aren't working because she doesn't want them to work- what if she's waiting for someone to just yell at her in front of everyone about what a dick she's been...
And here is my dilemma. I have enough common sense to realize how stupid it would be to yell at her if that's not what she was going for. Also, I recognize how improbable it is that she has some sort of grandiose plan to make us feel oppressed and learn to mobilize against an oppressor. But can she really be so dense as to not realize that this is a problem? Can she really ignore so many complaints (I know of at least 4)? She also seems a little full of herself. It would be pretty arrogant to make a stab at being the oppressor in order to teach us all a life lesson.
Ok. I'm not going to accuse her of anything, but I am walking out on her class at 4 exactly next week. I suspect others will follow me, and if they don't they will the week after that. Everyone was so irate after class was over, it was all we could talk about. If I leave 5 minutes earlier than them, and then show up to the next class relaxed and mellow, with no repercussions (I mean, what can she do?), they'll go along the next time for sure.
Sigh. I wish I didn't have to fight so much. I suppose it's only natural that I draw parallels between what we're being taught and the behavior of the teacher teaching it, but in all likelihood, I'd be surprised if she sees the comparison. There are a lot of education professors who don't know the first thing about teaching. She keeps talking about her undergrads, an easily cowed lot, I'm sure. I know I was. But I'm afraid I'm too sassy and full of myself (though perhaps not to the extent that she's full of herself) to let this sort of awful pedagogy slide for long.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
I was an unusual kid
I was just reminiscing about something from high school. I hadn't thought about it in years. I had almost forgotten it. Now that I remembered it, I realize what an unusual thing it was that I did. What's unusual is actually more of my mindset than my actions, but those were strange too.
Here's the setup: I was a mathlete in high school, and proud of it. In fact, that's really the only sort of mathlete you can be. It's such a ridiculous name and so nerdy that unless you wear it like a badge of honor, it pretty much has to be a badge of shame. So I was fortunate to have taken to it so vehemently. I even advertised for the mathletes and went recruiting. I remember hanging up posters around school. Mr. Schwing, the teacher in charge of the mathletes, probably didn't appreciate it much. He was a pretty reserved guy. I guess he's one of those inexplicably shy teachers. He was a bit of a grump too, but in a good natured way. After my recruiting when a hoard (and by hoard I mean about 9. But to give you some perspective, sometimes the mathletes were just Mr. Schwing and me) of mediocre students (by mediocre I mean they might have been getting As and struggling to do so, or they might have had Bs. Either way, Mr. Schwing hadn't recruited them himself, which was what he usually did. If someone was a particularly strong student, he just asked them to join.) stopped by, Mr. Schwing didn't know what to do with the small crowd of students who had never seen these types of problems before and didn't know how to handle them or struggle with them. The mathlete problems were pretty crazy. I think Mr. Schwing was glad when there were fewer of them the next week and fewer the week after that. That was a little surprising since we could barely scrape together enough students to form a legal team for a time. Eventually, by my senior year, we had enough popularity to have enough regulars to not only form a team, but also have a few extras.
In any event, that tells you a little about Mr. Schwing and the status of the Mathletes. So here's the situation I was remembering. During my senior year, Mr. Schwing happened to miss the last Mathlete tournament. I forget what sort of appointment he had (I probably never knew- he wasn't the sort to share), but he couldn't be there. I remember getting quite mock offended, in part because I was actually going to miss him. I remember joking around with some of my fellow Mathletes and a few others that we should leave a threatening note or something for Mr. Schwing because he missed the last meet. I remember mentioning how angry notes are always thrown through windows attached to bricks (I believe even as a high school kid I realized that this is not exactly a common practice, but high school kids in general, and me especially, love a little melodrama). Of course, I didn't want to go around breaking any windows. I wasn't a vandal or anything. But one of my friends did happen to have a spare brick. So I wrote a note (typed) and then painstakingly went through changing the font of each letter so it looked like one of those ransom notes cut out of a magazine (someone later told me there's a font called ransom that does that for you. Oh well. Mine had more soul.). Then I went into the front office with my letter and my brick and asked if someone at the front desk would unlock Mr. Schwing's room so that I could place it on his desk. The secretary thought it was funny and knew me well enough that she didn't mind unlocking it for me, so the letter and brick were successfully placed on his chair.
Mr. Schwing never commented upon the threatening note as I recall. It wasn't the sort of thing he would comment on. He was pretty reserved. We did get a comment out of him one time we surrounded his car with caution tape and made a chalk outline of my body by the car. Someone also left the message in chalk "She's in the trunk." He later commented that he actually looked to make sure. But that's about it. He really was not that interested in our antics. I don't think it bothered him, but I also don't think he cared.
In reliving a few of my past escapades, I kind of got off topic. The point I was originally going for, is that my students don't do things like that. It's not that Mr. Schwing was the kind of guy who made you feel comfortable doing stuff like that. No one had done anything of that ilk before and I would be surprised to hear of anyone behaving that way since. I was just an unusual kid. I don't think I realized how strange I was until recently when I was thinking about my own students. I knew at the time that it was not ordinary, but all my friends would always participate with me, and it's not like they were solely my own ideas. Someone else provided the caution tape. I just was the one who wanted to use it, and who wouldn't have thought twice about using it.
So I guess I was pretty strange, but something else strikes me as I think about it. That sort of spontaneous mischief is also kind of hipster-y. Was I a secret hipster before I even knew what the word was? One or two of my cooler friends from that crowd became kind of hipster-y themselves when they entered college, as opposed to me who became more of a grump. I'm a pretty cheery grump, as grumps go, though.
There's not much of a point to this blog, but I have to say I am surprised by how much I've changed. I just don't do stuff like that anymore, and I certainly don't lead the way. If anything, I'm the one telling people "don't throw rotten pumpkins at CZ" or something like that. Maybe I changed because I like to be one the extremes of any metric, and I just don't think I have it in me to be extremely hipster-y. I do, however, have it in me to be extremely grumpy. Or maybe I was never much of a hipster- my clothing has never been very edgy (a product of growing up in the 90s no doubt). But I have to say I do enjoy hipster music...
Well I think that settles it. I think I kind of like hipster ideals- the sort of things hipsters are going for. But I still don't like hipsters themselves. Grump grump grump.
Here's the setup: I was a mathlete in high school, and proud of it. In fact, that's really the only sort of mathlete you can be. It's such a ridiculous name and so nerdy that unless you wear it like a badge of honor, it pretty much has to be a badge of shame. So I was fortunate to have taken to it so vehemently. I even advertised for the mathletes and went recruiting. I remember hanging up posters around school. Mr. Schwing, the teacher in charge of the mathletes, probably didn't appreciate it much. He was a pretty reserved guy. I guess he's one of those inexplicably shy teachers. He was a bit of a grump too, but in a good natured way. After my recruiting when a hoard (and by hoard I mean about 9. But to give you some perspective, sometimes the mathletes were just Mr. Schwing and me) of mediocre students (by mediocre I mean they might have been getting As and struggling to do so, or they might have had Bs. Either way, Mr. Schwing hadn't recruited them himself, which was what he usually did. If someone was a particularly strong student, he just asked them to join.) stopped by, Mr. Schwing didn't know what to do with the small crowd of students who had never seen these types of problems before and didn't know how to handle them or struggle with them. The mathlete problems were pretty crazy. I think Mr. Schwing was glad when there were fewer of them the next week and fewer the week after that. That was a little surprising since we could barely scrape together enough students to form a legal team for a time. Eventually, by my senior year, we had enough popularity to have enough regulars to not only form a team, but also have a few extras.
In any event, that tells you a little about Mr. Schwing and the status of the Mathletes. So here's the situation I was remembering. During my senior year, Mr. Schwing happened to miss the last Mathlete tournament. I forget what sort of appointment he had (I probably never knew- he wasn't the sort to share), but he couldn't be there. I remember getting quite mock offended, in part because I was actually going to miss him. I remember joking around with some of my fellow Mathletes and a few others that we should leave a threatening note or something for Mr. Schwing because he missed the last meet. I remember mentioning how angry notes are always thrown through windows attached to bricks (I believe even as a high school kid I realized that this is not exactly a common practice, but high school kids in general, and me especially, love a little melodrama). Of course, I didn't want to go around breaking any windows. I wasn't a vandal or anything. But one of my friends did happen to have a spare brick. So I wrote a note (typed) and then painstakingly went through changing the font of each letter so it looked like one of those ransom notes cut out of a magazine (someone later told me there's a font called ransom that does that for you. Oh well. Mine had more soul.). Then I went into the front office with my letter and my brick and asked if someone at the front desk would unlock Mr. Schwing's room so that I could place it on his desk. The secretary thought it was funny and knew me well enough that she didn't mind unlocking it for me, so the letter and brick were successfully placed on his chair.
Mr. Schwing never commented upon the threatening note as I recall. It wasn't the sort of thing he would comment on. He was pretty reserved. We did get a comment out of him one time we surrounded his car with caution tape and made a chalk outline of my body by the car. Someone also left the message in chalk "She's in the trunk." He later commented that he actually looked to make sure. But that's about it. He really was not that interested in our antics. I don't think it bothered him, but I also don't think he cared.
In reliving a few of my past escapades, I kind of got off topic. The point I was originally going for, is that my students don't do things like that. It's not that Mr. Schwing was the kind of guy who made you feel comfortable doing stuff like that. No one had done anything of that ilk before and I would be surprised to hear of anyone behaving that way since. I was just an unusual kid. I don't think I realized how strange I was until recently when I was thinking about my own students. I knew at the time that it was not ordinary, but all my friends would always participate with me, and it's not like they were solely my own ideas. Someone else provided the caution tape. I just was the one who wanted to use it, and who wouldn't have thought twice about using it.
So I guess I was pretty strange, but something else strikes me as I think about it. That sort of spontaneous mischief is also kind of hipster-y. Was I a secret hipster before I even knew what the word was? One or two of my cooler friends from that crowd became kind of hipster-y themselves when they entered college, as opposed to me who became more of a grump. I'm a pretty cheery grump, as grumps go, though.
There's not much of a point to this blog, but I have to say I am surprised by how much I've changed. I just don't do stuff like that anymore, and I certainly don't lead the way. If anything, I'm the one telling people "don't throw rotten pumpkins at CZ" or something like that. Maybe I changed because I like to be one the extremes of any metric, and I just don't think I have it in me to be extremely hipster-y. I do, however, have it in me to be extremely grumpy. Or maybe I was never much of a hipster- my clothing has never been very edgy (a product of growing up in the 90s no doubt). But I have to say I do enjoy hipster music...
Well I think that settles it. I think I kind of like hipster ideals- the sort of things hipsters are going for. But I still don't like hipsters themselves. Grump grump grump.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Finally got that stick out of my butt
It feels much better now.
I don't generally have a stick up my butt. At least I don't think so. But it's a bit of a different story when it comes to teaching. I came into it thinking (and with good cause) that as a teacher you have to act a certain way. It is largely true. I can't really swear or make dirty jokes. I can't give the kids a playful punch (most of the people I playfully punch probably wish I felt that way about them). I can't wear what I want. There are a lot of restrictions on how you can act. You have to have a certain level of propriety.
But there's more to it than that. It's more than just the things you're not allowed to do. There are also the things you have to do, like write and grade tests, discipline students, fail students. Being the person in charge changes you. When the responsibility is on your shoulders and it's your job to make other people do things they don't want to do, it warps you a little bit, even if you're doing it for their own good. It's interesting- bosses or managers at a normal workplace aren't assigning work for their employees' benefits, but neither are they so vested in their employees' performance. Of course a manager cares if their employees do well, but if an employee consistently fails, they just fire that employee and get another one. There's a certain point where the responsibility just isn't yours anymore. That's true of teaching too, but the line isn't drawn in exactly the same place. I carry more responsibility for my students than a manager does for his employees. If a student never takes it upon themselves to study, it's not my fault, but I am supposed to take measures to prevent such a thing. Perhaps a manager is supposed to do that too. I don't know.
Anyway, I've rambled away from my point from earlier. Being in charge changes you and the way you act. Even if I didn't have any restrictions on how I could act, the relation between a teacher and student can never be like an interaction between two people who don't have control over each other's life. I remember reading in my history textbook in high school that slavery warped owners as well as slaves. At the time I thought it interesting, but also sort of wrote it off. No more than a paragraph was devoted to the ill effects slavery had upon slavers (and for very good politically correct reason). I'm not sure I would go so far as to say "warped" myself, but I do know from experience that it changes you, and not for the better. You have a job to do, and you want to get it done. Your job is to control the actions of people. That's a pretty tough job. It takes a special personality and a lot of skill to control people effectively. If you don't know what you're doing, at best, people will chafe under you and perpetrate small acts of vengeance. At worst there will be an open rebellion and you'll get a painful dose of just how ineffective you really are.
I've had everything from chafing to open rebellion this semester. I wasn't exactly managing effectively. I had in my mind all these rules and regulations and artificial systems, as well as all these ideas about how to effectively teach, how to differentiate, how to write a test, how to grade, etc. Rules, like regulating bathroom passes and requiring students to change seats, can be useful and important, but if you don't have the background and understanding needed, you won't know when the rules should bend and when they should be disregarded. Add to that the fact that I've been something of a pompous ass (I don't generally put others down or anything, nor do I get particularly jealous if someone does happen to best me, but I am rather prideful and do have myself on something of a pedestal. Can you blame me? I'm amazing!), and it's no surprise that I haven't been managing effectively.
I think it all comes from the biggest dread of management- to be ignored. I was ignored at first as well. I think a full out riot is worse (and much harder to stop), but being ignored is really frustrating. If someone doesn't stop talking when you tell them to, then why should anybody stop talking? And then why should anyone bother listening to you? If your bark has no bite, then you're the worst kind of manager. But you don't need bite when talking to your friends. I barely even use bite with my enemies - I prefer avoidance to confrontation. So my "warping" began when I discovered the need for bite, and developed it.
It starts off with Threats. Threats are an unpleasant thing to have to do. I never Threaten people usually. I think I'd be pretty intolerable to others if I did, and I'd probably be a little intolerable to myself as well. But heaven forbid I be ignored! Therefore I must Threaten.
But as any manager can tell you, Threats are not enough. You have to back them up every so often. And so there must be Consequences. Fortunately for me, the Consequences in high school are not too severe. They mostly involve standing outside (in effect, punishment by boredom, plus a little suspense) and waiting for a talking to, which can also be unpleasant. Most high school students are not particularly well defended against or adept at one on one confrontation. The most successful ones will just start yelling or possibly cussing you out. Alternatively, they just clam up and remained clammed up for a while (thus achieving your purpose). Other more serious Consequences could be calling home or a referral, but that's about as severe as they get. The severity is important in the altering of personality, but simple willingness to inflict Consequences is the biggest change. Once you have have exercised Consequences, you are now a person of power, someone to be wary of. Everyone's demeanor towards you changes. Immediately, that change is for the better. You are no longer ignored. You can now get your job done effectively, which is quite gratifying. The Consequence wasn't nearly as difficult to dish out as you might have imagined. It was not questioned or fought against as you may have feared. You also see the wariness as a type of respect. All this together makes the next Consequence a lot easier. Give it one or two more instances, and you have become not only a person who Threatens, but also a person with the power and, more importantly, the willingness to inflict Consequences.
But consequences aren't really what gets a student (or any other sort of employee) to work. It keeps them settled and in line and it prevents the dreaded ineffectiveness that results from being ignored, but it isn't really an effective motivator. It is still necessary. If no one will listen to you, how can you motivate? But something else is necessary as well. Several somethings else, in fact. Caring about your students is an oft quoted one. It probably is the most effective way to get people to work for you. If you can convince them that your motives are their own personal welfare, they're far more likely to listen and go along with what you say. This is one place where teachers have a leg up on the average manager. Our charges really are our primary concern.
Even though caring about your students is probably the most important thing a teacher needs to do to get through, there are other necessary actions and stances as well. The most contradictory of these is that you must take what your students say with a grain of salt. You have to care about them and regard them as smart, thinking individuals (they really are), but you also have to recognize just how ignorant they are. And you can't hold it against them! Normally arrogant people earn only my scorn (I like to think my own brand of arrogance is simply confidence. And I do recognize my own limitations fairly realistically for the most part. Yes, I am a little hypocritical, but I am pretty good about respecting those around me and keeping my opinion of myself to myself.), but with arrogant teenagers, you have to accept it and like them anyway. It's who they are. They are only just beginning to gain (regain?) some confidence and most of them don't know how to go about it properly. So you get a lot of posturing and certainty about things they can't possibly know. Don't take them seriously, especially when it comes to your own job. I certainly won't claim to know what I'm doing, but I am also reasonably certain at this point that I know far more than they.
So you must care for and respect, but also not respect, your charges. It is difficult, but it's something you get the hang of. The next important thing to keep in mind is the rules. You have to know them inside and out. And what I mean by that primarily, is that you have to know which ones are really serious, which ones are tertiary, and which ones you would be better off ignoring. Someone in my cohort uses the Go Green system. He turns a card every time a student does something they shouldn't. It's a fine system, especially for beginners as a scaffold, but it is generally pretty meaningless and excessively rigid. Our advisor Dan said that most veteran teachers don't use it. It's difficult to be consistent. If you respond the same way every time, you'll interrupt the flow of a lecture. You also aren't going to catch everything that everyone does, and then he people who were caught will start to complain. It solves a lot of problems (transparency and appropriate response to appropriate crime for example), but it can raise a lot of them also. When you don't know anything, when you don't know how to react to the million of little things that can go on, it's very reassuring to have a rigid system where everything is set up.
I never used Go Green, but I recently had a similar realization about the rigidity of my own posturing. I was a proper teacher who didn't step out of line and who loved all things even remotely mathematical and who would certainly never tease her students. Forcing myself to be something I wasn't was very draining. I went to class every day and left it exhausted and needing to watch Star Trek or something to get me back to myself. The rigidity was useful to me. It helped me know how I should behave in novel situations where I had only a second to decide what my course of action should be. I would ask, "How should a teacher react?" and then I would do what I felt I should. I'm not entirely sure how I broke out of that. Probably just experience. I still fit into the mold more than is optimal in all likelihood, but I have broken free to a much greater extent. I remember the first time I finished class and thought it was fun. It wasn't that long ago. The other day, I felt like I had more energy upon leaving the class instead of less. It takes a lot of energy to put up a false persona. I realized that the first time in high school and began striving to be as honest with myself as possible. I've realized it again only recently, when I got that "proper teacher" stick out of my ass. I'm beginning to realize I will be a most improper teacher. I still won't do anything inappropriate or violate any of my restrictions, but I will tease my students. I will throw a tantrum and toss my whiteboard marker on the floor when people stop paying attention. I will brush off and ignore someone who is hassling me instead of explaining my reasoning and wasting class time (students will often make demands in front of the class that it really isn't wise to respond to). It's quite liberating to be the softhearted grouch I consider myself to be.
I will conclude this entry with a warning to all people of the world who think they can do better than the people in charge: the bosses, the managers, the teachers, etc. You can't. At least not at first. In the beginning, everyone will be wary of you and you will have an initial rush that just maybe you do have a knack for this managing thing. With everyone on their toes, you realize that you are just as good and fair minded as you thought you were. People will listen to you because of how reasonable you are. You won't ever have to force people down like the cads before you. Then someone will ignore you. Then several someones. Then you will go down the same path of Threats and Consequences that every other human being in power has ever done and become just as big an oaf as any superior you ever disliked. The sheer inevitability of it this semester has really struck me. If you really care, you'll get past it. I think I will be a fine manager of students one day. I'm even not that bad today, but it has been a slow and arduous process, one damaging to my own self image more than anything else. I am pleased at the lessons I've learned (care, don't listen to what people say too closely, recognize rules for what they are, be yourself). Some of them may seem obvious even to the point of being trite (I'm looking at you "be yourself"), but they were hard learned and painfully won. I know I have a lot more progress to make. I'm no expert by any means. I'm just happy at this point to have that stick out my rear.
I don't generally have a stick up my butt. At least I don't think so. But it's a bit of a different story when it comes to teaching. I came into it thinking (and with good cause) that as a teacher you have to act a certain way. It is largely true. I can't really swear or make dirty jokes. I can't give the kids a playful punch (most of the people I playfully punch probably wish I felt that way about them). I can't wear what I want. There are a lot of restrictions on how you can act. You have to have a certain level of propriety.
But there's more to it than that. It's more than just the things you're not allowed to do. There are also the things you have to do, like write and grade tests, discipline students, fail students. Being the person in charge changes you. When the responsibility is on your shoulders and it's your job to make other people do things they don't want to do, it warps you a little bit, even if you're doing it for their own good. It's interesting- bosses or managers at a normal workplace aren't assigning work for their employees' benefits, but neither are they so vested in their employees' performance. Of course a manager cares if their employees do well, but if an employee consistently fails, they just fire that employee and get another one. There's a certain point where the responsibility just isn't yours anymore. That's true of teaching too, but the line isn't drawn in exactly the same place. I carry more responsibility for my students than a manager does for his employees. If a student never takes it upon themselves to study, it's not my fault, but I am supposed to take measures to prevent such a thing. Perhaps a manager is supposed to do that too. I don't know.
Anyway, I've rambled away from my point from earlier. Being in charge changes you and the way you act. Even if I didn't have any restrictions on how I could act, the relation between a teacher and student can never be like an interaction between two people who don't have control over each other's life. I remember reading in my history textbook in high school that slavery warped owners as well as slaves. At the time I thought it interesting, but also sort of wrote it off. No more than a paragraph was devoted to the ill effects slavery had upon slavers (and for very good politically correct reason). I'm not sure I would go so far as to say "warped" myself, but I do know from experience that it changes you, and not for the better. You have a job to do, and you want to get it done. Your job is to control the actions of people. That's a pretty tough job. It takes a special personality and a lot of skill to control people effectively. If you don't know what you're doing, at best, people will chafe under you and perpetrate small acts of vengeance. At worst there will be an open rebellion and you'll get a painful dose of just how ineffective you really are.
I've had everything from chafing to open rebellion this semester. I wasn't exactly managing effectively. I had in my mind all these rules and regulations and artificial systems, as well as all these ideas about how to effectively teach, how to differentiate, how to write a test, how to grade, etc. Rules, like regulating bathroom passes and requiring students to change seats, can be useful and important, but if you don't have the background and understanding needed, you won't know when the rules should bend and when they should be disregarded. Add to that the fact that I've been something of a pompous ass (I don't generally put others down or anything, nor do I get particularly jealous if someone does happen to best me, but I am rather prideful and do have myself on something of a pedestal. Can you blame me? I'm amazing!), and it's no surprise that I haven't been managing effectively.
I think it all comes from the biggest dread of management- to be ignored. I was ignored at first as well. I think a full out riot is worse (and much harder to stop), but being ignored is really frustrating. If someone doesn't stop talking when you tell them to, then why should anybody stop talking? And then why should anyone bother listening to you? If your bark has no bite, then you're the worst kind of manager. But you don't need bite when talking to your friends. I barely even use bite with my enemies - I prefer avoidance to confrontation. So my "warping" began when I discovered the need for bite, and developed it.
It starts off with Threats. Threats are an unpleasant thing to have to do. I never Threaten people usually. I think I'd be pretty intolerable to others if I did, and I'd probably be a little intolerable to myself as well. But heaven forbid I be ignored! Therefore I must Threaten.
But as any manager can tell you, Threats are not enough. You have to back them up every so often. And so there must be Consequences. Fortunately for me, the Consequences in high school are not too severe. They mostly involve standing outside (in effect, punishment by boredom, plus a little suspense) and waiting for a talking to, which can also be unpleasant. Most high school students are not particularly well defended against or adept at one on one confrontation. The most successful ones will just start yelling or possibly cussing you out. Alternatively, they just clam up and remained clammed up for a while (thus achieving your purpose). Other more serious Consequences could be calling home or a referral, but that's about as severe as they get. The severity is important in the altering of personality, but simple willingness to inflict Consequences is the biggest change. Once you have have exercised Consequences, you are now a person of power, someone to be wary of. Everyone's demeanor towards you changes. Immediately, that change is for the better. You are no longer ignored. You can now get your job done effectively, which is quite gratifying. The Consequence wasn't nearly as difficult to dish out as you might have imagined. It was not questioned or fought against as you may have feared. You also see the wariness as a type of respect. All this together makes the next Consequence a lot easier. Give it one or two more instances, and you have become not only a person who Threatens, but also a person with the power and, more importantly, the willingness to inflict Consequences.
But consequences aren't really what gets a student (or any other sort of employee) to work. It keeps them settled and in line and it prevents the dreaded ineffectiveness that results from being ignored, but it isn't really an effective motivator. It is still necessary. If no one will listen to you, how can you motivate? But something else is necessary as well. Several somethings else, in fact. Caring about your students is an oft quoted one. It probably is the most effective way to get people to work for you. If you can convince them that your motives are their own personal welfare, they're far more likely to listen and go along with what you say. This is one place where teachers have a leg up on the average manager. Our charges really are our primary concern.
Even though caring about your students is probably the most important thing a teacher needs to do to get through, there are other necessary actions and stances as well. The most contradictory of these is that you must take what your students say with a grain of salt. You have to care about them and regard them as smart, thinking individuals (they really are), but you also have to recognize just how ignorant they are. And you can't hold it against them! Normally arrogant people earn only my scorn (I like to think my own brand of arrogance is simply confidence. And I do recognize my own limitations fairly realistically for the most part. Yes, I am a little hypocritical, but I am pretty good about respecting those around me and keeping my opinion of myself to myself.), but with arrogant teenagers, you have to accept it and like them anyway. It's who they are. They are only just beginning to gain (regain?) some confidence and most of them don't know how to go about it properly. So you get a lot of posturing and certainty about things they can't possibly know. Don't take them seriously, especially when it comes to your own job. I certainly won't claim to know what I'm doing, but I am also reasonably certain at this point that I know far more than they.
So you must care for and respect, but also not respect, your charges. It is difficult, but it's something you get the hang of. The next important thing to keep in mind is the rules. You have to know them inside and out. And what I mean by that primarily, is that you have to know which ones are really serious, which ones are tertiary, and which ones you would be better off ignoring. Someone in my cohort uses the Go Green system. He turns a card every time a student does something they shouldn't. It's a fine system, especially for beginners as a scaffold, but it is generally pretty meaningless and excessively rigid. Our advisor Dan said that most veteran teachers don't use it. It's difficult to be consistent. If you respond the same way every time, you'll interrupt the flow of a lecture. You also aren't going to catch everything that everyone does, and then he people who were caught will start to complain. It solves a lot of problems (transparency and appropriate response to appropriate crime for example), but it can raise a lot of them also. When you don't know anything, when you don't know how to react to the million of little things that can go on, it's very reassuring to have a rigid system where everything is set up.
I never used Go Green, but I recently had a similar realization about the rigidity of my own posturing. I was a proper teacher who didn't step out of line and who loved all things even remotely mathematical and who would certainly never tease her students. Forcing myself to be something I wasn't was very draining. I went to class every day and left it exhausted and needing to watch Star Trek or something to get me back to myself. The rigidity was useful to me. It helped me know how I should behave in novel situations where I had only a second to decide what my course of action should be. I would ask, "How should a teacher react?" and then I would do what I felt I should. I'm not entirely sure how I broke out of that. Probably just experience. I still fit into the mold more than is optimal in all likelihood, but I have broken free to a much greater extent. I remember the first time I finished class and thought it was fun. It wasn't that long ago. The other day, I felt like I had more energy upon leaving the class instead of less. It takes a lot of energy to put up a false persona. I realized that the first time in high school and began striving to be as honest with myself as possible. I've realized it again only recently, when I got that "proper teacher" stick out of my ass. I'm beginning to realize I will be a most improper teacher. I still won't do anything inappropriate or violate any of my restrictions, but I will tease my students. I will throw a tantrum and toss my whiteboard marker on the floor when people stop paying attention. I will brush off and ignore someone who is hassling me instead of explaining my reasoning and wasting class time (students will often make demands in front of the class that it really isn't wise to respond to). It's quite liberating to be the softhearted grouch I consider myself to be.
I will conclude this entry with a warning to all people of the world who think they can do better than the people in charge: the bosses, the managers, the teachers, etc. You can't. At least not at first. In the beginning, everyone will be wary of you and you will have an initial rush that just maybe you do have a knack for this managing thing. With everyone on their toes, you realize that you are just as good and fair minded as you thought you were. People will listen to you because of how reasonable you are. You won't ever have to force people down like the cads before you. Then someone will ignore you. Then several someones. Then you will go down the same path of Threats and Consequences that every other human being in power has ever done and become just as big an oaf as any superior you ever disliked. The sheer inevitability of it this semester has really struck me. If you really care, you'll get past it. I think I will be a fine manager of students one day. I'm even not that bad today, but it has been a slow and arduous process, one damaging to my own self image more than anything else. I am pleased at the lessons I've learned (care, don't listen to what people say too closely, recognize rules for what they are, be yourself). Some of them may seem obvious even to the point of being trite (I'm looking at you "be yourself"), but they were hard learned and painfully won. I know I have a lot more progress to make. I'm no expert by any means. I'm just happy at this point to have that stick out my rear.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Typing whiz!
I am a typing whiz!
I mean I have enough practice. I'm writing lengthy journals, blogs, and emails all the time. I've always enjoyed writing (specifically on the computer I might add).
The interesting thing is my progression. I do remember taking a few elementary typing courses in 7th grade. I struggled with them a lot. I could never move fast enough for them and I often had to keep looking at the keyboard. It was incredibly stressful, and considering how little I used those programs (and how they weren't tested at all), it's not surprising that I never learned to type properly. Our computer class was only once a week and I would be very surprised if it was taught by anyone credentialed. He basically was just someone decently proficient in computer use who gave us a few programs and let us fly. He knew html and gave us a run through of the basic commands. That's about all there was to my early computer class. It culminated in us making a webpage. So many animated gifs. I was so impressed by how fancy they looked. To this day, I have a well hidden impression that the key to good web page design is more animated gifs. The more sensible part of me realizes that that's not really the most pleasant thing to look at, but the little kid in me kind of gets a kick out of it. And if left to my own devices creating a webpage, I would probably sneak what animated gifs I could into it (assuming no one else was going to view my shamefully animated webpage).
But I digress. That was the sum of my early typing experience. I typed so clumsily and with so many errors, that the correct way of typing was not appealing. I still had to type things for class, but I was the worst of the hunt-and-peckers. I remember once getting stuck for a significant length of time on "q." It just hadn't come up before. I remember thinking, "Wait this can't be this hard... it must be here somewhere..." Kids don't often have the sense to search methodically, so I didn't think to start at the top left for a while. Ah, the trials of hunt and peck.
So I never properly learned where all the keys were, and I never properly learned the find the little bumps on the f and the j. I just looked intently. It worked well enough. It certainly wasn't any slower for me than the proper way, and it was quite a bit more accurate.
Over time, I came to spend a lot more time typing. During high school, I wrote lengthy journals which I only trusted that no one would find if I wrote them on my computer. I had them in my email account (one of the most massive saved drafts ever), which I felt was a more secure password than any flimsy key on some cheap diary lock. Honestly, no one was looking, but teenagers can be incredibly secretive, and I was one of the worst.
So began my history of writing lengthy journals by typing them. Over time, I found how much writing helped to organize my thoughts and grew pretty dependent on journals. I spent so much time writing aside from classwork, that a one or two page paper was quite trivial when it was assigned. I did have a lot of trouble refining those papers. My rough drafts were always some of the better ones, but I was very reluctant to edit or incorporate suggested changes. I may have had an advantage writing due to my extra experience with my journals, but I definitely did not have any additional experience editing. The most I do with these sorts of journals is correct grammar and spelling of the previous paragraph. I rarely do a thorough reread. That's not really the purpose the journals serve. They give me a point of reference, a solid record of where I was, before a ramble takes me so far afield I can't remember my original intent. Edits just aren't useful as long as what I wrote gave me the gist of where I was.
Regardless of my lack of experience editing, I gained quite a bit of experience typing. Discovering instant messages in college helped with that also, but my IMing career was quite sort lived in comparison. Over time, my hunt and peck style began to get quite sophisticated. What began as two fingers (a very literal hunt and peck), evolved into five: both middle and index fingers and my left thumb. Occasionally my pinky on my left hand would also come into play for the sake of capitalization. Looking at the keyboard served to stabilize my hands and tell them where to move around so that they wouldn't overshoot their destination keys, but my eyes played less and less of a role. My hands got to the point where the knew where all the keys were. Often, my hands would be blocking my view of the keys, yet I still knew about how far my hands had to move to be correctly positioned. I also got to know familiar letter combinations and the patterns formed by certain words. I never explicitly learned this, but after enough typing, you just get to know this sort of stuff. Now, every so often, I'll notice a few other fingers (ring fingers) jumping into the fray. It seems that my typing evolution is actually coming interestingly close to the correct style. I tested myself a little earlier today to see how well I could type without looking at the keyboard. It wasn't as smooth as when I do look, but it was much smoother than I might have expected. Occasionally I'd be off by a space and type "[;" instead of "pl" before I noticed my error and readjusted my hands, but in general, when I'd guess where the letters should be, I was right. Once my hands were positioned correctly, my fingers knew how to take it from there. It was really pretty fascinating.
So could I learn the correct method? Yes, I would have a reduced accuracy and speed initially, but would it pay off in the end? Right now, my typing speed is about 50 words a minute with very high accuracy. Do I really need to try something new? Is it worth it for me to improve? I seem to be unconsciously optimizing my hunt and peck all the time.
The truth of the matter is that I certainly don't need it. I've clearly gotten by fine without and will continue to get along just fine. I also think it's pretty interesting how my unorthodox style has had such excellent results. That said, I always like to improve. I revel in learning new things. As much as I like my strange style of typing, it might be worthwhile to go about things more efficiently, if only to show that I could. I don't know. I never really thought of myself as an excellent typist (though I've always known I get by). I guess I've just been thinking of this a lot ever since I tried my dad's typing software. I'm feeling a little puffed up at the discovery of a new talent I've been developing for years and yet somehow didn't know I had. I kind of just want to type for a while, just to actually confirm that I'm good at it. It's pretty interesting, like a new game. I've never really had any way to measure my typing before, so this typing software my dad has been using to learn is pretty fun.
Even though I've got typing on the brain, I think I'm going to end this blog entry. I realize it's probably one of my more dull entries. I mean, typing isn't exactly riveting. But I can't help it! I can't think of anything else right at the moment. I'm going to go use the typing software some more!
I mean I have enough practice. I'm writing lengthy journals, blogs, and emails all the time. I've always enjoyed writing (specifically on the computer I might add).
The interesting thing is my progression. I do remember taking a few elementary typing courses in 7th grade. I struggled with them a lot. I could never move fast enough for them and I often had to keep looking at the keyboard. It was incredibly stressful, and considering how little I used those programs (and how they weren't tested at all), it's not surprising that I never learned to type properly. Our computer class was only once a week and I would be very surprised if it was taught by anyone credentialed. He basically was just someone decently proficient in computer use who gave us a few programs and let us fly. He knew html and gave us a run through of the basic commands. That's about all there was to my early computer class. It culminated in us making a webpage. So many animated gifs. I was so impressed by how fancy they looked. To this day, I have a well hidden impression that the key to good web page design is more animated gifs. The more sensible part of me realizes that that's not really the most pleasant thing to look at, but the little kid in me kind of gets a kick out of it. And if left to my own devices creating a webpage, I would probably sneak what animated gifs I could into it (assuming no one else was going to view my shamefully animated webpage).
But I digress. That was the sum of my early typing experience. I typed so clumsily and with so many errors, that the correct way of typing was not appealing. I still had to type things for class, but I was the worst of the hunt-and-peckers. I remember once getting stuck for a significant length of time on "q." It just hadn't come up before. I remember thinking, "Wait this can't be this hard... it must be here somewhere..." Kids don't often have the sense to search methodically, so I didn't think to start at the top left for a while. Ah, the trials of hunt and peck.
So I never properly learned where all the keys were, and I never properly learned the find the little bumps on the f and the j. I just looked intently. It worked well enough. It certainly wasn't any slower for me than the proper way, and it was quite a bit more accurate.
Over time, I came to spend a lot more time typing. During high school, I wrote lengthy journals which I only trusted that no one would find if I wrote them on my computer. I had them in my email account (one of the most massive saved drafts ever), which I felt was a more secure password than any flimsy key on some cheap diary lock. Honestly, no one was looking, but teenagers can be incredibly secretive, and I was one of the worst.
So began my history of writing lengthy journals by typing them. Over time, I found how much writing helped to organize my thoughts and grew pretty dependent on journals. I spent so much time writing aside from classwork, that a one or two page paper was quite trivial when it was assigned. I did have a lot of trouble refining those papers. My rough drafts were always some of the better ones, but I was very reluctant to edit or incorporate suggested changes. I may have had an advantage writing due to my extra experience with my journals, but I definitely did not have any additional experience editing. The most I do with these sorts of journals is correct grammar and spelling of the previous paragraph. I rarely do a thorough reread. That's not really the purpose the journals serve. They give me a point of reference, a solid record of where I was, before a ramble takes me so far afield I can't remember my original intent. Edits just aren't useful as long as what I wrote gave me the gist of where I was.
Regardless of my lack of experience editing, I gained quite a bit of experience typing. Discovering instant messages in college helped with that also, but my IMing career was quite sort lived in comparison. Over time, my hunt and peck style began to get quite sophisticated. What began as two fingers (a very literal hunt and peck), evolved into five: both middle and index fingers and my left thumb. Occasionally my pinky on my left hand would also come into play for the sake of capitalization. Looking at the keyboard served to stabilize my hands and tell them where to move around so that they wouldn't overshoot their destination keys, but my eyes played less and less of a role. My hands got to the point where the knew where all the keys were. Often, my hands would be blocking my view of the keys, yet I still knew about how far my hands had to move to be correctly positioned. I also got to know familiar letter combinations and the patterns formed by certain words. I never explicitly learned this, but after enough typing, you just get to know this sort of stuff. Now, every so often, I'll notice a few other fingers (ring fingers) jumping into the fray. It seems that my typing evolution is actually coming interestingly close to the correct style. I tested myself a little earlier today to see how well I could type without looking at the keyboard. It wasn't as smooth as when I do look, but it was much smoother than I might have expected. Occasionally I'd be off by a space and type "[;" instead of "pl" before I noticed my error and readjusted my hands, but in general, when I'd guess where the letters should be, I was right. Once my hands were positioned correctly, my fingers knew how to take it from there. It was really pretty fascinating.
So could I learn the correct method? Yes, I would have a reduced accuracy and speed initially, but would it pay off in the end? Right now, my typing speed is about 50 words a minute with very high accuracy. Do I really need to try something new? Is it worth it for me to improve? I seem to be unconsciously optimizing my hunt and peck all the time.
The truth of the matter is that I certainly don't need it. I've clearly gotten by fine without and will continue to get along just fine. I also think it's pretty interesting how my unorthodox style has had such excellent results. That said, I always like to improve. I revel in learning new things. As much as I like my strange style of typing, it might be worthwhile to go about things more efficiently, if only to show that I could. I don't know. I never really thought of myself as an excellent typist (though I've always known I get by). I guess I've just been thinking of this a lot ever since I tried my dad's typing software. I'm feeling a little puffed up at the discovery of a new talent I've been developing for years and yet somehow didn't know I had. I kind of just want to type for a while, just to actually confirm that I'm good at it. It's pretty interesting, like a new game. I've never really had any way to measure my typing before, so this typing software my dad has been using to learn is pretty fun.
Even though I've got typing on the brain, I think I'm going to end this blog entry. I realize it's probably one of my more dull entries. I mean, typing isn't exactly riveting. But I can't help it! I can't think of anything else right at the moment. I'm going to go use the typing software some more!
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