Whenever I think about how to solve the world’s problems (as I do frequently, with limited success), I realize that education is the most important tools to combat a plethora of issues. On a national scale, proper education would have, I believe, prevented the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Part of the blame for the crisis falls to consumers who accepted loans they shouldn’t have and lived beyond their means because they didn’t understand basic economics. Voters’ susceptibility to the various misinformation campaigns in the recent election (particularly those perpetrated against then-Senator Obama) underline how better education might focus voters better on real issues.

Then I thought more specifically about schools. My school does many things right, but like most students, I’m constantly thinking of ways things could be better. I eventually want to be a venture capitalist and, assuming I’m wildly successful (which is admittedly a lot to hope), I figure that I want to donate money to education.

So what would be in my ideal school? It would be an independent school (public education, at least at the moment, is fraught with complications) and the facilities would be state-of-the-art. Schools with amazing facilities, however, are not unique.

The standards for both students and teachers would have to be stringent, but at the same time I believe that teacher salaries should be very high. The culture of standardized testing in public education has reduced teachers there to babysitters instead of trained professionals. The ideal school would pay teachers like pros because they are pros. All contracts would be year-to-year. In the time I was in public school, I saw far too many teachers who worked hard until they got tenure. Job security should be tied to job performance.

Students should also have tough academic requirements. Schools are responsible for creating well-rounded people, but academics should always be the primary focus. In addition to disciplinary measures, the school should expel students for failing to meet academic standards. Students shouldn’t live under the constant threat of being expelled, but there are a few students in my grade who clearly do not live up to basic standards of academics. In the ideal school, they would be given the chance to improve and, if they didn’t, they’d be expelled.

Of course, it should be difficult to get in to the school to begin with. Ideally, an entrance exam would not only cover the subjects that you need to study for, it would include problems that require reasoning. It’s more important that people know how to think than it is that they remember things, particularly in a time when information is so easily obtained. Oxford and Cambridge do this really well. Admissions should also be blind - students shouldn’t be admitted because they’re likely high donors.

As far as the curriculum goes, ethical and moral reasoning should be featured prominently. Independent schools attract wealthy families and produce the next generation of important people. It’s important that ethics is introduced very early on. There’s a class at Harvard called “Justice” that would ideally be the model for the Upper School ethics curriculum. I also believe that writing should be a big part of the curriculum. My school’s most glaring curricular failing is not having a good writing program. We simply do not do enough writing and we don’t do enough long writing. Students should have to write papers of considerable length frequently. The result of the lax writing program has been students viewing writing as traumatic and poor writing quality.

Those are the few building blocks of an ideal school that I was able to brainstorm in a few minutes. My observations and conclusions are based on my time in both public and independent schools. My ideal school is based on my current school which is as close to ideal as possible. That said, there are always improvements to be made.

Happy 2009 everyone,

CF

I went to bed around 1 AM on Election Night (well, the morning after Election Night if you want to be precise).  I probably could have gone to bed after the networks called Ohio and, if I had listened to pollsters, I could have gone to bed long before that.  I’m more excited for President-Elect Obama’s term to start than I have been about any other president’s term starting.  (That’s not saying much, though.  I was born during the Clinton years and the first election I remember was Bush’s first term).  A lot has been written about how historical this election has been and how amazing his term will be, so I doubt I can top the experts, but this is my take on this election, devoid of hyperbole.

Going into election night, I was cautiously optimistic.  During election night, I was overjoyed.  And now I’m back to cautiously optimistic.  A lot hinges on this next term - Supreme court justices, tax policy, the war in Iraq, and economic policy.  The promises made in a campaign are never promises to enact legislation; they’re promises to try.  By the time the promises get on paper, they become subject to political realities.  That’s why it’s not enough for a candidate to win the presidency.  They have to win decisively or they’re dead in the water.

The President-Elect has won decisively but I’m still worried.  Yes, this win is historic.  I still wake up every morning and I’m proud of the progress we’ve made.  But we’ve only made the first step.  The Republicans are in minority, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be a quiet minority.  No, the ones who are left are the most conservative wackos of their party and they will give the President-Elect no end of trouble.

In other words, we have a couple weeks of happiness and marveling in the amazing step the country has taken.  But then, as Jed Bartlett would say, “Break’s over.”

Hello everyone.  Yeah, yeah, I haven’t written lately.  I’m working on that.  Indeed, it will probably be easier to write after the election.

If you want good election coverage, I suggest NBC if you must watch one of the news networks (CNN would be alright if Wolf Blitzer could speak in a complete, fluid sentence).  For great online coverage, check out pollster.com and fivethirtyeight.com, as well as the websites for the major news networks.  Pollster.com is great because they will show the calls of all the major networks and the AP as they happen.

Have a great election night!

The Vice Presidential debate is tonight and the Republicans are already looking for a way to cover in case Palin doesn’t deliver.  The moderator is a woman so they won’t be able to whine about the sexist coverage in the media and the moderator is a fair, unbiased journalist - a characteristic which drives Republicans crazy…with annoyance.

They’ll probably try to whine about the “gotcha” questions.  They have a problem though.  Not every question for which the candidate does not have an adequate answer is a “gotcha” question.  And not having good answers doesn’t endear the candidate to anyone with a middle school education.

So now they’re fixated on the moderator, Gwen Ifill.  I’ve written before about how I’m a big fan of The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, for which Ifill is a correspondent.  PBS is about as fair as they come and I’ve always appreciated their philosophy, characterized by this Jim Lehrer quote:  ”..I am not in the entertainment business.”  But the McCain campaign has fixated on a book that Ifill is writing called The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama.

First of all, no one has actually read the book, so it’s not fair to jump to conclusions based on manufactured information.  All we have is an Amazon.com book summary:

“In The Breakthrough, veteran journalist Gwen Ifill surveys the American political landscape, shedding new light on the impact of Barack Obama’s stunning presidential campaign and introducing the emerging young African American politicians forging a bold new path to political power. 

Ifill argues that the Black political structure formed during the Civil Rights movement is giving way to a generation of men and women who are the direct beneficiaries of the struggles of the 1960s. She offers incisive, detailed profiles of such prominent leaders as Newark Mayor Cory Booker, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, and U.S. Congressman Artur Davis of Alabama, and also covers up-and-coming figures from across the nation. Drawing on interviews with power brokers like Senator Obama, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Vernon Jordan, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and many others, as well as her own razor-sharp observations and analysis of such issues as generational conflict and the “black enough” conundrum, Ifill shows why this is a pivotal moment in American history.” 

So the book is obviously not just about Obama, nor is Obama really the subject of the book.  Ifill is trying to make a broader point about African Americans in politics.  Obama is the clearest example of that, so it makes sense that Ifill would include him.  He has defined this era for African Americans in politics.

But Orin Hatch seems to turn what I’m sure will be a scholarly exploration of African Americans in politics into an Obama bias.  He wrote: 

“Watch out. 

“Sarah Palin is being set up. 

“The moderator of tonight’s debate is in the tank for Obama — this liberal PBS reporter is releasing a pro-Obama book . . . to debut on inauguration day.”

The Republicans are looking for some way to bail themselves out of a potential disaster.  And Orin Hatch is brilliantly demonstrating the abandonment of integrity for party politics.  PBS is not liberal and there is no evidence that the book is pro-Obama.  The only people being set up are the American people and they’re not being set up by Gwen Ifill or even Barack Obama.  They’re being set up by John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Republican party.

Hey, everyone.  Remember me?  Yeah, the person that’s supposed to write.  So, I’m back.  There may or may not have been what could be characterized but will not be formally named as time management issues/constraints (Dana Perino wrote that line), but I am now re-incarnated, ready to take on (i.e. write about) the world, including, but not limited to: economic crises, the election, certain comedy shows, and all the other stuff that I manage to cram in.  (By the way, this is a very short post by any standards.  I’ll make up for the extreme shortness within the next week).

Aaron Sorkin is my favorite writer, as I’ve previously stated, but up until now I’ve never wanted his job.  I’ve always appreciated his amazingly fast-paced dialogue and wit, worshipped shows like The West Wing and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and I’m looking forward to seeing the results of his recent forays into feature films.

I, on the other hand, have never written anything longer than nine or ten pages.  But I’m intrigued about the idea of writing a television show.  I’m just slightly unsure how to proceed.  So here’s my question to the masses:  How do you write a television script?  What do you do?

Obviously, you need a concept, which I already have, but I’d like to know what format or style is required for scripts.  I’m not intending to shop this when I’m done, but I’d like it to be done right.

So here I am, sitting at my desk on Labor Day. Two days before the official start of school. At my feet, I have textbooks, stacked by subject, in mint condition. On my desk, I have piles of pens and pencils. To my right, I have my required summer work. On my laptop, I have IM windows open to ask questions of people and to allow them to ask questions of me. (I’m still trying to solve the mystery of two pieces of paper that no one seems to have, despite the fact that they were referenced in a cover letter for the same mailing in which they supposedly arrived).

I finally decide to do something productive. For the third or fourth time, I open the student-parent handbook and start reading. I figure that, as class Vice President, I should be familiar with the rules and guidelines. I stop on page 29, at a note about how my school is a smoke free campus. The passage, in part, reads, “Smoking is prohibited in the buildings, on the grounds, or in the immediate vicinty of the school, including downtown [redacted].”

And then I had an idea for a blog post. The passage prohibits smoking in school buildings and on the grounds. Fine. In fact, I’m glad for the rule. But I wondered about the school’s prohibition on “[s]moking..in the immediate vicinity of the school, including downtown [redacted].” The smoking issue is just the beginning, however. What about other issues? Should schools have the ability to regulate what students do out of school? Should they have the ability to punish a student for behaving badly in public?

My legal advisers tell me that this issue is still somewhat up in the air. For private schools, of course, the issue is simple. A private school can expel any student, at any time, and for any non-discriminatory and otherwise legal reason. Public schools get a bit more complicated.

Instead of focusing on what schools can do (which is largely up in the air), I’m going to focus on what schools should do. Private schools should always maintain their ability to expel students at will (or within the systems that they’ve set up internally). When students opt into private school, they accept that the rules are different. If students don’t like the rules in a private school, they can opt out. It becomes a simple contractual relationship. At the same time, private schools should internally protect a student’s right to freedom of expression.

In public schools, activities outside school should never be punished at school. It’s simply not their jurisdiction. If it’s something illegal, the Police can take care of it. If it’s something just generally undesireable, it’s a parental issue. The school, of course, would say that if a student is reflecting badly on the school, then they should be able to punish that student. Or perhaps that once the student re-enters their jurisdiction, they can punish the student. That’s absolutely ridiculous because it would be the equivalent of the NYPD claiming jurisdiction over a crime that happened in Los Angeles, simply because the criminal traveled to New York.

When the legalities finally shake out, I anticipate that private schools will be left alone and public school students will, once again, have their first amendment rights curtailed (not that they have many rights left right now).

For now, I’m going to look over all the mailings from school. Again.

In my several years following politics, Sarah Palin is probably the worst candidate I’ve seen ascend to the vice presidential level. I’m going to present a very clear case against Sarah Palin in this post, but even if you don’t agree with any of those reasons, here’s one more: When voters choose a vice president, they realize that his or her Constitutional duties are to be ready to assume the presidency. When nominees choose a vice president, they realize that the most important factor is the vice president’s preparedness to assume the presidency. Sarah Palin is not ready to assume the presidency and she is therefore unfit to assume the vice presidency.

Her experience is limited to salmon fishing and moose hunting. Her foreign policy experience is non-existent. John McCain is 72 years old and he’s had several recurrences of cancer. The actuarial tables aren’t looking so good. McCain’s death is not imminent, but it is more likely with this particular president that he will expire before his term is done. Voters understand that, so they immediately look to the bottom half of the ticket. And who do we see there? Sarah Louise Palin.

So who is she? Palin is in the middle of her first term as governor of Alaska. Before that, she was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska. Population: 5,469 in the 2000 census. How can people who say Obama is inexperienced say that Palin is even comparable? While Palin was mayor of a 5,500 person town, Barack Obama was a state legislator serving 12.5 million people. While Palin was governor of a state with a population of 650,00, Obama was in the United States Senate serving 300 million people.

Going further back, Palin attended the University of Idaho with no further education. Obama started at Occidental College, then transferred to Columbia University. He attended Harvard Law School and became president of the Harvard Law Review (I mention that because it is no minor accomplishment). I’m not against public or even community colleges, but do you think that Palin’s degree in journalism is going to be much help in anything but being nice to the press?

And now to the issues. Palin is pro-life, but also pro-capital punishment. In other words, everyone should have their babies because if they do something wrong, she’ll just advocate killing them later. This is not the woman I want to run the country. She supports drilling in ANWR, even though that will clearly not help anything. As for other issues, she’s such an unknown that nobody really knows where she stands on most important issues.

Given that her state is so important as it is her only experience, it’s worth it to think what some of her colleagues think about Palin’s appointment. Fellow Republican State Senate President Lyda Green from Palin’s own town said,”She’s not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president? Look at what she’s done to this state. What will she do to the nation?” In the article linked above, Green cites an oil tax increase Palin pushed through and a $500 million state subsidy Palin awarded to a Canadian firm to build a natural gas pipeline with an uncertain future.

To top it all off, Palin even said to a question about VP speculation, “I still can’t answer that question until somebody answers for me what is it exactly that the V.P. does every day.”

Normally VP picks don’t matter so much, but in this particular case, McCain’s choice really matters. She is not ready to be vice president by her own statement. She’s not ready to be president. Her views are shrouded in mystery because she’s never had to address many national issues in Alaska. She has zero experience on the national scene, zero experience of the international scene. Sarah Palin is not a good choice. She’s a small time governor being brought out on to a big stage.

Please, please, somebody who has read this explain to me why they would still vote for Palin. In my opinion, even if someone were voting for McCain, the Palin choice would be enough to persuade someone to vote for someone else. If the VP has to assume office, Palin isn’t ready.

It’s back to school for me on 3 September, but at the moment I’m fully engaged in buying books and such. Textbooks are, after all, important. Where else would one find either annoying but colorful blurbs on vaguely related topics surrounded by some content (at the less advanced levels) or remarkably dense, black-and-white books? These pieces of bound paper are worth something, though, because my books for this year cost over $600! The college students among you will probably ask if I left out a zero or two, but this is for 9th grade. $600 for 9th grade textbooks!

On top of that, the books weight about 25 to 30 pounds in total. They take up a bunch of space and are inconvenient to move and carry around. So what is the solution?

E-books! I can completely reduce the clutter, the tonnage, and the inconvenience. I can put all of my books onto one device. As far as e-book readers go, the Amazon Kindle is the clear winner for a number of reasons, including its ability to download books over the air and its independence from a computer. The obstacles to that oh-so-elegant solution, however, are not few.

First, my school does not support e-books at this point. With good reason as well! E-book technology has not developed to the point where it’s suitable for classroom use. You can’t take notes on the ink, for example. It lacks a built-in dictionary. The ability to configure many Kindles at once would be helpful for school as well.

Second, the availability of textbooks is a problem. McGraw-Hill publishes nearly all of their textbooks electronically as well as on paper, as do many publishers, but I’d have much more trouble finding my obscure French textbook on the Kindle.

Third, the design of the Kindle (the only viable option) would be problematic. It has some design quirks (the placement of the “next page” buttons, for example) and the screen is a bit small.

Like most things, all of this will be solved in time. My school (as well as many others) will start support e-books when the technology progresses to where it needs to be. The availability of textbooks is a work in progress. As time passes, more books will be published electronically and as schools and consumers switch to e-books, that will surely fuel more electronic releases. My design prayers will be reportedly answered as early as October with my small screen fears allayed next year.

With those changes made, Amazon will have created an electronic device that mimics most of the features of a regular book and enhances many others (please give us a dictionary that would allow us to tap a word and see the definition or something similar). The only “big” missing feature is the ability to write on the “paper.” That will help the Kindle infiltrate the education market because taking notes in the book is crucial for students. But in the case of a touch screen, write-able Kindle, it is not Amazon that is slowing the process. The underlying electronic paper technology cannot produce those results yet.

So it seems that my dreams of walking out the door to school with nothing but my Kindle and my laptop in hand are a bit far off. I’d probably still have to pay about $600 anyway because the high price of textbooks is due to the content on the pages, not the cost of the pages themselves. I can hope, though, as I’m lugging my books out my front door.

Times are changing for the world and so too they must change for View from a Farley.

I initially conceived View from a Farley as a weblog and podcast. I come from a background of video podcasting, so I felt that I should do what I know. Without the financial backing to do a video podcast properly (I wanted good equipment or no equipment), I went to audio podcasting. I even invested in an excellent theme by Geoff Smith, but the audio part of View from a Farley never took root. For one reason or another, writing has come more easily to me than podcasting. So today, the View from a Farley podcast is officially dead. (However, since I am all-powerful on my own website, I can ressurect it if I ever feel motivated to do so.)

View from a Farley will now exclusively be a weblog. The purpose is not changing, but some other things will.

The number one rule of successful blogging, according to several accounts, is to write every day. Especially at the beginning, it seems, not showing up is the worst thing you can do. Most bloggers manage it well, but I’m not content to throw up a YouTube embed with a couple words. The nature of View from a Farley is that it requires much more time than a typical personal blog. If only this could be my full time job! Unfortunately, my other commitments are pressing and showing up everyday is just not going to happen. You will instead be hearing from me most days and you can always be bothered by me on Twitter!

Several people noticed and commented on the new theme. By no fault of the designer, Matthew Heidenreich, and coder, Adam Kiss, the theme is not what I wanted. Of couse I approved the design every step of the way, but I don’t like it in action. It’s a shame not to use this theme, though, so it will be around for a while. If there are any changes that could be pulled off with relative ease, I would be happy to hear about them.

Regarding plans for the future, I’ve been asked if I plan on monetizing through advertising at any point. To answer, I’ve considered it, but AdSense hates me and it’s difficult to get a traditional sponsorship. If any opportunity ever arises, I would consider advertising, but I’m not planning on living off View from a Farley. I’d hope to cover my operating costs and other things to help the site (new theme, etc.)

I also wanted to communicate how much I appreciate your comments. View from a Farley was intended to be my thoughts and initially I didn’t care if people listened to what I was saying or not. Today, I care very much. I want people to listen, I want more people to read, but what I like best are the comments. I love it when a conversation develops in the comments (so feel free to hit reply in the comments instead of just writing a new comment). Intense Debate provides excellent tools for actually having an intense debate, so I hope people use them.

Thank you to everyone for reading! Expect me to be back with a real post in the next few days.

Teens in Tech's Launch Marred by Technical Issues

Teens in Tech, the new startup purportedly creating a community for teens interested in creating new media, not-launch launched into private alpha yesterday. After a TechCrunch review yesterday, the group has been widely panned.

Critics point to the lack of innovation on the part of the company. It uses a standard Wordpress MU installation and has already shown a surprising lack of foresight. A review on TechCrunch generates huge site traffic and server load, but Teens in Tech (I’ll spell out the name to avoid the acronym - not the best marketing choice) was using DreamHost, a service clearly not designed for reliability. The people at Teens in Tech bit the bullet and switched to a more reliable host, but only after leaving the front page down for most of the all-important launch day.

But still, I don’t think the technicalities are critical. Being crashed by TechCrunch is almost a rite of passage for startups, but Teens in Tech should have at least attempted to plan. My concern lies with the theory behind the company. Even if the launch has been smooth and Teens in Tech used the best custom backend in the world, the service would still fail because it is pursuing a flawed (if existent) business plan. While the teen market is huge on the Internet, the number of teens who are willing to create new media is very small. From a business perspective, targeting such an infinitessimal market segment isn’t at all profitable. Opening up to everyone would defeat the purpose of beging a teen company and place the group the group in direct competition with more established foes, like Mevio.

In fact, one of only a few things Teens in Tech has going for them is the design. Sean Blake did an excellent job at creating a professional design to complement the content. But as professional as the site looks, I’m not sure how professional it actually is.

The company is not incorporated and much of the company’s future plans remain “in discussion.” Oddly, Teens in Tech is generating an inordinate amount of hype for a service launching into private alpha. I question the wisdom of launching so early, given the technical issues, lack of innovation, and lack of clear direction. While Teens in Tech has the profit potential of a lemonade stand on a deserted road, a few conversations with the Teens in Tech team lead me to believe that the company isn’t going after profit. They seem undecided at the moment, but some sort of charity-type, donation-based organization might be in the works.

For the most part, the criticism of Teens in Tech is well-deserved. They launched too early, with no real innovation, haunted by technical difficulties. It was just not thought through. It is, as of now, all hype and no product. But I won’t tolerate the people who say Teens in Tech is only popular in the media because of who Daniel, the founder, knows and because of his location (Daniel is based in Silicon Valley). Perhaps this has some merit in that Daniel has more access to those who matter, but the people who matter wouldn’t care about Daniel if he was just an ordinary person. Daniel obviously has something going for him that’s impressing the likes of Robert Scoble and others.

My primary concern is that Teens in Tech will harm the teen community as a whole on the Internet. As teens, we have a certain disadvantage because we are not viewed as equals. But we can’t expect to be treated specially because we’re young, either. If teens want to be as successful as adults, then they need to be as good as adults. Age is no excuse for a less-than-fantastic product.

I have nothing against Daniel or the Teens in Tech team, but I want them to use their efforts for something else. I want them to do something really great, but I’m not quite sure what. Daniel would do it well, I’m sure, but more importantly, if he and his team pulled it off, it would be a major advancement for teens. So my advice to Daniel is to close up shop on Teens in Tech and move on to something more worthy of his efforts. Teens in Tech is just not going to gain the audience it needs to be a successful business.