The Greatest Internet Ad Ever 2 Dec 2020 3:08 PM (4 years ago)
…is the one that pulls you in to enjoy every morsel.
Will it sell product? Who knows? Who cares? As long as it isn’t a pain in the neck.
To be honest, that last panel reads more like a bad translation from some post-Soviet Slavic language:
Side note: Producer Hugh Padgham’s greatest contribution to The Police was convincing Sting to change the title of the song from “Perspicacity” to “Synchronicity.”
Original article: The Greatest Internet Ad Ever
©2024 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.
The Facebook control you didn’t know you were missing 18 Feb 2018 4:43 PM (7 years ago)
Facebook needs one simple button.
It seems that every few weeks now, we run across some article or other about the angst within the walls of Facebook, about how it can fix some problem or another.
I mean, when you blanket the globe, there are inevitably going to be kinks in the fabric you have to iron out. Smooth and pleasurable experiences keep people coming back for more, and the business model requires the site to be as sticky as possible. Everything from the tones and textures of the notifications, to the layout, to the names of the options you have — all are tested and re-tested to make the place as open and engaging as possible.
Even the algorithm.
Keep people coming back for more, and score it by the engagement. Every click, every like, every share, every comment — all of that gets dumped into the black box, and spits out the next guidance as to what keeps you around.
It used to be that you could leave a comment, and then be on your way. But that wasn’t enough. Later, we got the ability to have our comments become one-level deep threads of their own, and others can like those comments and send signals.
But it isn’t just liking those comments, there are at least six different “flavors” of reactions from which to choose, allowing you to differentiate what you really like from what amused you, what you loved, what made you angry or sad.
If you think about it, most of the signals Facebook now gets are tied to the comments. And that is why we won’t get the help we need.
Silence can be golden
I have run blogs for a very long time – long enough to remember when the social media glitterati were selling people on blogs, it was the invitation to Join The Conversation! And there was the discovery that the blogs that built traffic were the ones with robust communities around them.
And every so often, you would find that one topic area that was so sensitive, the blog owner would take the very rare step of turning off the comments. Even though they had the power to block and to ban and to moderate, you could occasionally publish something that had no engagement built in. This is what I am saying, and that is the end of it. Talk amongst yourselves, but not in my yard, not in my house.
This is the piece that Facebook desperately needs, yet never will adopt.
Turning off comments for a post takes so many vital signals from the algorithm. But for those of us with opinions to express, it takes away a key tool. It locks us into an always-on mentality that is chilling. There are certain things that I might not write about, for fear that people downstream might get nasty and personal. I can do it on this site, because comments don’t appear until I approve them. Or I can click a button and close the comments for good.
I can’t do that on Facebook. Because while I own my words there, I don’t own prior restraint. Yes, I can go behind you and delete comments and hide comments, and block individuals who are abusive. But if I don’t have the time for that — God forbid I have to spend a half-hour in the car driving somewhere — things can get nasty in a hurry.
The environment on Facebook can become toxic and intense. But when it comes time to decide between what it good for authors and communities versus what is good for the algorithm — that battle was won by the machine. The Deepest Blue.
Original article: The Facebook control you didn’t know you were missing
©2024 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.
The Social Media Outhouse 14 Jan 2018 5:21 PM (7 years ago)
This is not an essay about American foreign policy.
This is not an essay about racism.
This is not an essay about what is proper in social discourse.
I will tend to ignore comments about the above, because this is instead about how the White House has made an Outhouse out of social media — and by extension, mainstream media.
The following is a screen capture of the front page of CNN from the other day. (CNN has a very useful text-only low-bandwidth page.)
What I find interesting is just how much of that limited bandwidth became a referendum on the use of the word Shithole, and the implications of its use.
Look at the markup below — solid red lines are direct references, dotted blue are tangential references.
Down here at the bottom, barely above the scroll, is a link to “quickly catch up on the day’s news.” I didn’t bother to click to see how many more sidebars were buzzing around the front page cesspool.
Agenda-jacking
This particular explosion of outrage came from a leak about what President Trump had said, maybe in closed quarters. Again, that doesn’t matter. The reaction does, because it is entirely a reflex and response that Trump’s team has employed to devastating effect.
Do you believe his early morning tweets are an accident? (Do you even believe that he writes all of them?)
What he accomplishes with those “genius mad tweets” is a hijacking of that day’s news agenda and narrative. If he can swing headlines away from his policy matters, that’s a win. If he can absorb enough attention that the audience actually consuming those stories is smaller, that’s a big win. And if he diverts newsgathering resources to his Tweet du Jour, that’s the biggest victory.
No “Less Than Zero”
As polarizing as Trump is, there is very little room for anyone to change their opinion about him. The number of people convinced that “Shithole” is the last straw is very small indeed. Losing a handful of supporters every day is not a sustainable strategy. But his time in office is finite, so it doesn’t matter. The tiny losses pale in comparison to the advantages of diverting coverage and attention — and of actually being in position to drive the agenda.
War Games
We were never asked the question, “Would you like to play a game?” We were never invited to play Global Thermonuclear War on that old computer. Yet here we are, diving through a vast field of variables and computations, trying to avoid the end of the world. But you know who is winning? The staff in the Oval Office.
While we all get spun and bothered, actual governing is happening. And we really don’t know what all of that entails. (I would say that with the implosion of journalism jobs and the decay of trust, we’ve been in this dilemma for about 30 years — but this only makes it worse.)
Team Trump is #winning on Twitter, because they are among the few who know what is smokescreen and what is smoke-from-fire. How can we join them in “winning?”
By refusing to play.
Silent Victory
The next time you see that outrageous thing he tweeted, don’t get sucked into the game. When you give oxygen to the diversion flame, you just make the smokescreen that much stronger. And his team writing these tweets? They are doing nothing but using the analytics to iterate, and get even better at it.
If you want to defeat the tactic, recognize it for what it is, and stop replying. Stop responding. Stop giving traffic to articles about What Trump Tweeted. (perhaps we can find a way to share them “in the dark,” where the tracking doesn’t follow.)
Ultimately, we are trying to retrain our houses of journalism to reorient themselves to real things, and not to intentional diversions. We all benefit when reporters and editors are in control of their agenda. (If you happen to be a huge fan of Donald Trump and his policies, be aware that there will be a Democrat in office again one day, and you’ll want a strong media to not be swayed by President Winfrey’s Facebook posts.)
Houses of journalism were once built in solid fashion — one might say like brick shithouses. Better than the shitholes they may become, by chasing smoke signals.
Original article: The Social Media Outhouse
©2024 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.
A little less social 19 Nov 2016 11:25 AM (8 years ago)
I deactivated my Facebook account.
Just got too tired of people yelling at each other over misunderstandings, and failure-to-try-to-understand ings. Then I got weary of making them angry, by not siding with them quickly enough against the latest and greatest existential threat since at least 1:15 this afternoon.
I got exhausted, being a voice for reason and perspective in a wind tunnel that accelerates emotion and blows it back in your face.
I need a break.
If you need me for anything (and Lord knows you really don’t,) you know where to find me.
Try not to wallow in fear. It’s how they control you.
Original article: A little less social
©2024 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.
Five Years Talking 27 Apr 2016 2:09 PM (8 years ago)
Obviously, I have been talking for much longer than that.
However, today marks five years being a spokesman for Alabama Power.
That’s an odd sort of thing to remember, as it did not involve a massive employment change, or promotion. If you’d like, you could consider it a “battlefield promotion” of sorts.
I was dubbed a company spokesperson at 11:32 a.m. – squarely between two enormous storm systems that struck Alabama on April 27, 2011.
I remember self-deploying to the office at 5 a.m., when I realized we had seven counties with tornado warnings, and 35,000 customers without service. I even stopped in a parking lot on the way, to avoid a coming gust front of more than 90 miles-an-hour.
The deadly wave hit around 3 that afternoon, and continued for hours. With my “promotion” in hand, I suddenly had more leeway with what I could tweet from the @AlabamaPower account, how I could engage, and how to use it to get intelligence. We assured whole neighborhoods, we got pictures directly from the heart of the carnage – and we also shared images of coming recovery and hope.
Who knows what I will be doing five years from now? Probably looking back at ten years after. Because it was that kind of day.
It is rather odd how the days that define us the most can remain so clear, vivid and detailed in our memory.
I will be doing more talking in the coming weeks.
And after more than eight sporadic years, I will be doing less talking here.
At some point, this site and archive will be coming down. It’s time to mothball these essays, and figure out what they are and what they mean and what value they might still hold.
Of all the acclaim, I was proudest of something my mother said: “I like how what you write there seems timeless.”
Maybe what passes for my wit and wisdom will retain some of that value, and I can salvage it into something else. A different project, different product, different format.
I have several presentations to wrap up this week, and some conference work. So I don’t know how much longer this Razr will stay sharp.
But it has been one hell of a ride, hasn’t it?
Original article: Five Years Talking
©2024 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.
When Personalization Becomes Impersonal 18 Mar 2016 8:01 AM (9 years ago)
In my daily work, I end up on the receiving end of many solicitations. Often I am not the person they really want to reach, and more often than not what they are pitching has little relevance to my business or my industry.
Sometimes, those pitches are the source of very unintentional humor.
In this case, I will do my best to protect the less-than-innocent. If you have gotten the same pitch, you might recognize it. Please don’t out them in the comments, but I am very curious to see if you see what I found…
The Pitch
The email itself starts off in a standard way:
Hi Isaac, Southern Company came across our radar for using [name of non-pitch service redacted], so I thought I’d reach out and see if you’d like to make your audience data more actionable.
I’m from [name of vendor redacted], and our platform uses your readers’ behaviors to automatically create the most relevant experience possible via email, on-site or mobile.
So far, so good. But something was gnawing at me. Something was off.
Here is how it appeared in email (again, with identifying pieces redacted):
I proceeded to get busy, and promptly forgot about it.
Terribly Sorry to Bother You…
Then the second email came in, just three days later:
Hi Isaac, I know how quickly emails can pile up, so just following up on my previous one.
According to VentureBeat’s research, 57% to 98% of your audience is totally anonymous. How valuable would it be to be able to personalize to them, too?
We’re the only personalization company in the market that can personalize to anonymous users on your website — and continue to use that data once they become subscribers.
If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, just let me know. I’m available Tuesday and Wednesday of next week.
A little presumptuous, but it did make me revisit the earlier email. And when I did (on my phone), I saw clearly what had bothered me.
Screen capture from phone, blown up for clarity
In case you are not a font nerd, please notice the change. “Hi Isaac” is in a sans serif Helvetica variant, probably Newhouse DT. The remainder is in Times New Roman. More than likely, that salutation was pasted in from some other document prior to sending. Which is a little funny, when you think about this claim:
We’re the only personalization company in the market that can personalize to anonymous users on your website
Rather impersonal, if you ask me. Details matter.
Update: Jenn Mattern has seen the same phenomenon in bad copy/paste “let me ghost write your blog!” pitches.
10 Reasons Your Guest Post Pitches Get Ignored
(You probably ought to follow her tweets, and sign up for updates from her site. She’s been sharing smart things online for more than a decade.)
Original article: When Personalization Becomes Impersonal
©2024 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.
What Questlove, Nate Silver and Andy Dick taught me about viral headlines 17 Mar 2016 5:07 AM (9 years ago)
Original article: What Questlove, Nate Silver and Andy Dick taught me about viral headlines
©2024 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.
A Field Guide for Spotting Social Fakery 11 Mar 2016 11:06 AM (9 years ago)
I have written before about the art of spotting fake online accounts. Many of the tactics the tricksters use remain the same, but get a fresh coat of paint to maintain the illusion of appearances. For the most part, you really don’t even have to know what the intent of the faux-human might be. Just know that you don’t want any part of them.
Your Instant Twin
One of the rampant operations now is impersonating a user. Find an account:
- that doesn’t post very often
- that has a few pictures you can scrape
- that has a public friends list
From that, you create the Doppelgänger page, and start sending Friend requests to those the real individual is connected with. Most of those people will assume that you are starting a new profile, or may have even forgotten that you were already Friends.
This isn’t a “hack” per se, and does not require a complete change-every-password meltdown. This is the equivalent of someone sending letters with your return address on the envelope. You can’t stop them, but they don’t have access to your bank records.
Sometimes, however, the appearance of human-ish behavior may get us to lower our guard just long enough for a malware link to slip through.
Dumping on Groups
There is a wave of this on Facebook right now, and those behind the scheme are using a nice bit of human psychology and engineering: when you click on the link, it propagates itself by “spamming” the message in a Group you are a member of — not directly on your timeline.
Most any groups tend to have fewer members, which means you probably won’t have someone immediately bringing it to your attention, letting the malware message sit and marinate. Also, since many groups are closed and even secret, there is a more intimate feel of trust. So curiosity temporarily wins and we click…
There is something more reassuring about not being a lone voice, and specific cues that would ordinarily let us sort the real people from the virtual ones. And that’s where the scammers are getting a little more crafty…
Hunting in Packs
Okay, they aren’t really hunting, per se. But they are emulating the actual Social aspects of social media behavior.
Look at this Twitter reply I got the other day:
Hey @ikepigott, you may be interested in #HomeDepotRetool: 9 HBCU can win up to $300K. Please Retweet! https://t.co/BSHbnwQ69s
— Diane Hart (@DianeAmyHart) March 11, 2016
(I will provide a screenshot as well, in preparation for the eventual deletion of the not-very-real Diane Hart.)
Looking at that embed, even, you can see that someone apparently liked that tweet enough to re-tweet it. There were two of them.
However, looking at those accounts, we can see the chinks in the armor. Neither account has a profile picture. Hovering over them gives you some promising stats…
Plenty of tweets and follower numbers, right?
Well, not exactly. Nearly every one of those tweets for Louis and Edmund are retweets, which are done by automated script. No telling how many “Diane Hart”-like accounts they are propping up.
The Danger in the Link
I can’t tell you where that link goes. I don’t want to click it. But I can tell you where my informed opinion is derived.
The link “she” shares is a custom Bitly link. If you type that directly into your browser, then add a + to the end before you click enter, it will take you to an in-between information page, where you can see the eventual destination. In this instance, we can even get some information about the marketer involved!
So, now we can derive a little more info. The URL is simply the mobile landing page for this promotion. Everything after the question mark is Google Analytics tracking code – and the strange piece up front is just the acronym for The Home Depot Retool Your School.
Is this malware? No, it isn’t. But I am still not going to click it!
And this “Eric Yee,” is that even a real person with a real name? No idea. The Bitly account was created just last November.
Am I to be angry at Home Depot for sleazy marketing? I can’t even be mad at them, because marketing firms are capable of some real shady things to juice the engagement numbers that a client pays for.
Shady? Yes, I stand by “Shady.”
- Fake account
- Spams the same message to a big list of Twitter users
- Uses other fake accounts for social proof
Either way – we are talking about false pretenses to get you to click on something in which you had no interest.
Oh, and “Diane?” Where to start with you, Diane?
What a lovely profile picture. You look great for an Idaho resident who is now 130 years old.
The profile itself has existed solely to promote this specific campaign, on its second year now. (Makes you wonder how many of Twitter’s hundreds of millions of profiles come out of hibernation from a marketer’s toolbox once a year.)
Apparently, she used to have a successful modeling career. Thanks to Tineye, we can see that she was once featured in the collections of both Shutterstock and BigStockPhoto:
If you go back to her humble beginnings, you can find this tweet:
#wilberforce #wilberforceRYS2013!Great Comeback! @JLovesu5 nice work! Check this http://t.co/FDPSD0e7y5 out!! pic.twitter.com/yp7QZW6RRz
— Diane Hart (@DianeAmyHart) April 4, 2013
But after that one message in April of 2013, the next did not arrive until February 2015. I am so glad she found her voice…
Your Turn
If you wanted to tell your Aunt how to avoid online trickery, what advice would you add to this post?
Please add it in the comments!
Original article: A Field Guide for Spotting Social Fakery
©2024 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.
Objective Reality, RIP 16 Oct 2015 1:30 PM (9 years ago)
“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” – George Orwell
What do we know anymore? And how do we know it?
We live in scary times. Not because of threats at every turn – we exist in the greatest era of human history, with record degrees of ingenuity and comfort and freedom. What makes them downright frightening is the degree to which – in the blink of a cultural eye – we have lost our ability to divine truth from fiction.
What is “on the record” anymore, beyond the ability to be changed? Orwell’s Oceania from 1984 was a totalitarian nightmare, where any and every fact could be erased or retro-fitted into existing dogma at any moment. You simply had to have the access to edit the record.
Well, we live in a different time. More than 30 years after the fabled 1984, nearly every one of the billions of humans with internet access have the computing power in their hands to change history. Or at the very least alter another’s perception of it. There exist many apps you can use to playfully add words to a photo, and make it appear legit.
This isn’t a trivial thing, mind you. It has to do with the way we process information.
When I am writing words for you, I am engaged in something artificial. I am trying to encode my ideas and feelings into something completely arbitrary, hoping that out of shared experience and context you’ll know what I meant – or at least something similar enough. Want to try this?
Ball.
What did you think of? Now, hover your mouse over the word (or tap it on a mobile device), you ought to see the pop-up box that tells you what I meant. And if you thought it was something spherical, you will understand just how precarious this process really is.
The Bridge of Reason
So I am translating thoughts and feelings into shapes, and you are perceiving those shapes and translating them back into something else. The better job I do, with more editing and more precision, the more likely it is that more of you will grok what I intend.
We have less of this to deal with in person, because so much of our communication is non-verbal. I can tell when you are a little lost or confused, and I will without thinking too hard back up and readjust. Speaking and Listening are both more efficient and effective when done at the same time. It expedites understanding, and that’s the way we evolved.
Text communication goes through encoding and decoding, and as such also goes through your filter of Reason. The act of trying to comprehend – lacking other cues – naturally leads you to be a little bit skeptical, because you are first skeptical of how well you decoded.
This all changes, though, as soon as we get to images. “I’ll believe it when I see it.” Well, we are trained to do just that. When you see a danger, your body reacts. When you experience something directly, it goes right to the heart of you without necessarily hitting that filter of Reason. That’s what makes magicians and illusionists so alluring, they give you cognitive vertigo by pitting your experience and your expectation about reality at odds with one another. Cognitive vertigo is fun, when you know that it is happening.
The joke photo with Lincoln is clearly and obviously a joke. But the reason it is funny is because you know that it is. There is a level of absurdity that grounds it, and you can laugh along with it because the joke is not on you. But what happens when the Absurdity is no longer there to act as a cue?
The End of Truth
One of my digital acquaintances, Mike Brice, tweeted this morning:
I don’t understand journalism outlets on @snapchat How can you be the first draft of history if it disappears in 24 hours?
— Mike Brice (@MikeBrice) October 16, 2015
My reply?
Doesn’t matter. The de facto latest draft is a Wiki that anyone can edit. Welcome to the end of History as Fact. https://t.co/72dRcR48pr — Ike Pigott (@ikepigott) October 16, 2015
At a time when we have more infomation than anyone could comprehend, the most valuable services in the world are the ones that lets you find things that are relevant. Google helps you slice through the noise to find information. Facebook helps feed you with the people and the topics that you’ve programmed it to bring. (For better or worse.)
However, simply having access to information is not the same as having access to good information.
It’s too easy to make minor edits here and there, and the person who looked for the answer at 9:08 will find something different than the person at 9:07. Even if it is the same person. Objective reality isn’t supposed to shift that quickly. Yes, the winners write the history books, but now any loser can alter them.
The Biggest Lies Are Closer to True
Remember Sarah Palin? Remember her most famous quote?
I can see Russia from my house.
Okay, she didn’t say that. In an interview, asking about her lack of foreign policy experience, she remarked that as the governor of Alaska, she was right next to Russia. “You can see Russia from Alaska.” Which is true, there are less than three miles separating them.
Tina Fey made the other quote famous on Saturday Night Live – and since there was already a narrative that Palin was a bit naive, many just accepted that she did. The lie was close enough to the truth that the BS detector never engaged.
I was reminded of that later today, when I saw this propagating on the internet:
This is a rather boneheaded thing to say. And, as it turns out, Trump never said it. Nor did he tweet it. I checked up and down his timeline, and it wasn’t there.
“Don’t be stupid, Ike. He obviously deleted it. That’s why there is a screen capture.”
This idea of the faked screen capture is what prompted Twitter to eventually develop the embed codes that allow the dynamic insertion of a tweet, like I used above. The screen capture is what got Anthony Weiner and so many others who have tried to pull back something they should not have shared. However, I even looked around what would have been 9:02pm in several different time zones, and such a message from him out of the blue, without context, would make no sense. He was fully engaged in covering the Democratic debate, and interacting with his many engaged followers.
Surely, if there had been 2,520 Retweets and 5,622 Favorites of this, someone would have written about it. Snopes.com had nothing on it. So I did a Google search for Trump + “ancestors didn’t make their way”. Here is what I found:
(I did a screen capture, because at some point either this blog post or a real Snopes article will muddy up the waters. It isn’t every day you can catch a meme like this before it locks itself in.)
That is it. All of it. One link, to a video posted last month, and seen 100,000 times.
The text appears in the comments. And just so you know, I clicked on countless “View All Replies” and “Read More” links to open up all 360 comments. What I found was a single comment, posted less than a day ago:
The text is less than a day old, from one person who obviously saw the fake Tweet, and transcribed it. But how many people saw it and never questioned it. After all, you can see that photo of Trump and hear him saying those very words in his own voice!
Stephen Colbert would call it the Truthiness, and if something has enough of it then it really doesn’t matter.
Moving Pictures
Now you need to get seriously paranoid.
We are close to perfecting the technology that not only allows you to realistically manipulate someone else’s face, it does so in a manner that incorporates all of those non-verbal cues and tics and gestures that we have come to interpret as “natural.” Believability off the chart. And this is being done in real time. No need to put on a funky green-screen freak suit leotard. Just someone’s face and torso, for just long enough to scan and grab the reference points. Then we skin them up, digitize them over an actor, and there you are. Instant credibility, just add the liquid remnants of your cold, evil soul.
Welcome to 1984
I still have some thoughts about the surveillance state, and political double speak, and many other Things That Keep Me Up All Night:
- What do we know?
- How do we know it?
- And how easy is it for someone to give a subtle yet intentional nudge through creative editing of documents?
- Will my grandkids even have anything close to an objective reality?
- When my memory starts failing, what goes with it?
But I want to go back to that quote from Orwell.
I suppose I will have to ask you now to trust me about Orwell’s words. After all, you likely don’t have a copy of the book right there in front of you. So I will ask you instead to do a Google search, looking for the quote. Or, you can just click here to open a new tab, with a search for Orwell “Who controls the past”.
What struck me, when I was looking for the exact quote, was that there were two versions:
“Who controls the past controls the future; Who controls the present controls the past.” and “He who controls the past controls the future; He who controls the present controls the past.”
The version without the He is the one that shows up in the book.
The version with the He shows up more prominently when you do an image search.
So if we are trained that Seeing is Believing, which one do you think will eventually be the right answer?
In the future, the most valuable service will not be the search engine, nor will it be the Wiki. It will be the one that can vet what is tangible and supported by reality. Not augmented reality, or virtual reality, but real reality. And it will most certainly not be free.
Original article: Objective Reality, RIP
©2024 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.
Stop failing our kids 3 Sep 2015 5:30 AM (9 years ago)
Apparently, the number one thing you can do in school is Fail. Not “fail,” as in the lowercase meaning of “missing a standard.” No, I mean “Fail,” as in “make a particular grade that comes with a negative connotation.”
I was talking with my friend K., whose child is close in age to mine but goes to a different local school system. We talked about the ridiculous nature of the modern science fair — and about my belief that they have become ridiculous pageants to appease the parental ego. The percentage of school science projects actually done by the children is beginning to fall even below the percentage of Pinewood Derby race cars that aren’t built by Dad. (If soccer started allowing the parents to do all of the work, the games would be more entertaining, if only for the fistfights.)
Type casting
Anyway, K. and her little R. (age 9) have been struggling all week with an assignment to develop a new book cover for a short story. Instead of just asking for a brief book report, a synopsis, the teacher is asking for a selling point. Show us the blurb that would sell others on wanting to read it.
I actually like that twist on the assignment. You have to read the book, and then figure out how to pitch it. Anyway, the kids were given a template page, and told to ‘neatly print’ their synopsis on the cover.
Yesterday, one of the moms turned in the assignment, and the teacher showed it off as an example of what to do.
It was in PowerPoint.
Now K. is freaking out, because R. has been working on improving his penmanship, and practicing writing his words very carefully. Because, as it turns out, the “printing neatly” part is worth 20 percent of the grade.
Failing to measure
This is where I have a problem with the assignment. As you might know, I am a huge fan of incentives/disincentives. If you reward the proper things, you will get the proper things in the future. If you punish good things, you get less of them.
Clippy is hear too help!
In this instance, you would hope the grade would be based upon what R. learns this year. Just three weeks into school, I don’t believe any teacher has the expectation that his handwriting will have improved. So if R. just has ordinary penmanship for a nine-year-old, he will be penalized. Yet, if R. (and his mother) type and print the entire thing, then by all means award the full 20 points for that part of the assignment! Never mind that when it’s typed, you lose all grasp of who actually did the work. Did R. type it? Did K.? Did R. catch the spelling errors, or did Clippy?
This sends a number of clear messages to students:
- It doesn’t matter what you learn.
- It doesn’t matter whether you improve.
- We are going to base today’s grade on things you did or didn’t learn in previous grades.
- It doesn’t matter whether you do your own work.
Lord knows we have enough issues with helicopter parents. Teachers, I am looking at you for this one. Stop rewarding the obvious meddling in a child’s education. If a kid is obviously turning in Mommy’s work (or Dad’s,) then call them out on it. Stop celebrating the “genius” of a child who isn’t learning anything!
Encourage the kids who try. Not with bogus participation ribbons, but how about reserving the A grades for kids who do their own work? Stop failing our kids. Not with the assignment of a silly letter – but by giving up on making them do the work themselves.
If you like this rant, share it. And tell me you liked it, so I might be encouraged to write more of them. Because I believe that incentives matter.
Original article: Stop failing our kids
©2024 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.