Diatribes by Joah

Guest Post: As a high school teacher and coach for 15 years...

I have all kinds of friends and all kinds of readers. On occasion, I allow some of them to become writers via my blog. Here are some previous guest posts (here and here too) and now comes one from my long-time friend and teacher, Rob. He's a real role model if I've ever seen one and I thought he'd be able to drop some gems on this here blog...he did. Sure the story is specific, but the larger message is very broad.

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As a high school teacher and coach for the past fifteen years, I see the following scenario often enough that I have come to view it as a problem. Bright, often educated 20-somethings struggling to find their way in life. I’m sure that every 25 year-old living in his or her parent’s house has a unique story, but it seems to me that I see similar patterns over and over.

Six years ago I had a student named Mike. Mike did very well in my AP U.S. History class, making all As and a four (out of five) on the AP exam at the end of the year. He was also an All-State player on our soccer team and a national qualifier on our debate team. He seemed to have all the intangibles that would point to success – quick to smile, engaging personality, highly successful parents with advanced degrees. When it came time for Mike to apply for colleges, he asked me to write his letters of recommendation. Ultimately he was accepted into USC, Notre Dame, Georgetown, Michigan, and Wake Forest and ended up choosing Wake Forest. At the time I would have placed Mike high on my list of the best students I had ever taught.

Mike spent five years at Wake Forest including time off for an academic suspension halfway through. He switched majors two or three times and ultimately left without graduating. He’s living with his parents and selling cell phones at Best Buy. 

This whole situation is embarrassing to Mike’s family. His father is a colleague of mine. Not so long ago, his dad spoke of Mike constantly and was obviously very proud. When he stopped speaking about him so much, I suspected something was wrong but I didn’t ask about it.

Recently I ran into Mike at 7-Eleven pumping gas. He didn’t look very good and didn’t seem that eager to talk to me. He probably doesn’t know that I know about his struggles. We had a quick conversation. I didn’t press him about any specifics. This has been bothering me a lot lately and I’ve been thinking about getting in touch with him so that I can offer him some unsolicited advice. I know that Mike must sense this and the atmosphere around their home must be tense.

I went through the exact same thing over twenty years ago. I was expelled from college one semester shy of graduation because of poor grades. Why this happened is another story completely. This is how I overcame it and this is the advice I would give Mike or any other young adult facing a similar challenge.

1. Realize that this is no joke. Not finishing what you started is almost always a bad thing so you can’t allow it to stand. You have to graduate from college. If you failed academically and were suspended or expelled, you need to go back and finish at that place.
2. Confront any failures directly. I used to pride myself in being able to write a decent paper on a book I hadn’t read. After being expelled from college I went back and read every one of those books and wrote a paper on each one. Five years later, when I re-applied to the same college that had expelled me, I submitted these papers to the appeals committee along with an explanation.
3. Do something everyday that makes you feel good about yourself. I went to my local high school and volunteered to tutor struggling students and got way more work than I expected. Volunteer at a food bank or homeless shelter. Making yourself useful is the best thing you can do.
4. Don’t get away from what you are good at. Mike was a great soccer player. Now he’s fat. Why? He should join an adult soccer league and take it just as seriously as he took it in high school.
5. Instead of avoiding people in your embarrassment, cultivate relationships with people who can help you. You will find that almost no one cares about your current circumstances and that most people are eager to help someone who wants to move forward.
6. Accomplish short-term things that few people can do. On a whim one day I rode my bike across the state of Florida. Took a picture of myself with my bike standing in the Atlantic Ocean early in the day and an identical one in the Gulf of Mexico nine hours later. You do stuff like that often enough and you start to feel pretty good about yourself.
7. If you are living with your parents you need to remember that having an adult child living with them was probably not part of their ideal vision of where they wanted to be in their 60s approaching retirement. You have the responsibility to communicate a plan to them and they have a right to see you moving in the right direction. They will do almost anything for you if they don’t feel like you are simply spinning your wheels.

So that’s what worked for me. I graduated from college when I was twenty-eight and started my professional career that I’m in now when I was thirty. You know what though? I don’t regret a single mistake that I made in my early twenties. I met my wife when I returned to school. If I had been completely disciplined, focused and responsible at an earlier age I wouldn’t have her or my kids or my career that means the world to me.

The only thing I would have regretted would have been resigning myself to my failure and settling for less.

My World Beyond the Blog

Plenty of new blog readers as of late so I wanted to give you a bit more background so you know who you're reading so it's not just some random guy with controversial words and an interesting first name. These links provide some context to what I've done, what I'm up to and what makes me tick?

Real Role Models book

KUT Interview on Real Role Models

New York Times pieces on Real Role Models

Sneak Attack feature in Rare

Sneak Attack in Community Impact

Style X Press

Huffington Post writing

Words on abstinence-only education

Austin  Music People in Tribeza

ArtnHustle feature

ABCs of College feature

Higher Learning on Style X

Young Money Today feature

What is it?

It's a regret, the first of its kind

It's a memory, distant in due time

It's a lie, lived long enough

It's a fact, the going was rough

It's a lesson, learned once before

It's a test, never no more

It's a bluff, called once again

It's a scheme, not trusted by friends

It's a game, played with vigor

It's a shot, in the heart for pleasure

It's a gamble, dealt with a price

It's a chance, seldom given twice

It's a ruse, not to be trusted

It's a risk, to mistake love for what lust is.

Words for your Wednesday: Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

If you’ve read enough of my blog, you’ve probably seen me write about the significance – both good and bad – of self-fulfilling prophecies. Every day, I see how they impact my own thinking and outlook on the world – from how much I like my outfit to how productive I am during the workday.

More so, however, it’s even easier for me to see how they affect my friends and their lives because I find myself being a source of advice, both personally and professional for so many of them. I see, almost daily, how the creation of self-fulfilling prophecies bolsters or hinders their abilities to find jobs they like or excel at the ones they have, get into relationships they value or get out of the ones they don’t, and live life to the fullest.

I don’t have some prescriptive thought on the matter, but I did want to share the majority of the definition. I think knowing the meaning of a self-fulfilling prophecy is half the battle in better understanding their purpose. Knowing their purpose may enable people to turn it from something that can be a negative contributor to one’s life into something that is milked for goodness.

People tend to find what they are looking for. They create what they seek. So, by knowing what the word’s “originator” Robert Merton was describing when he coined the term, I hope my friends and others are able to look for bigger and better things for themselves and create a sea of opportunities rather than obstacles.

[Straight from Wikipedia:] 

A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true, by the very terms of the prophecy itself, due to positive feedback between belief and behavior. Although examples of such prophecies can be found in literature as far back as ancient Greece and ancient India, it is 20th-century sociologist Robert K. Merton who is credited with coining the expression "self-fulfilling prophecy" and formalizing its structure and consequences. In his book Social Theory and Social Structure, Merton defines self-fulfilling prophecy in the following terms: e.g. when Roxanna falsely believes her marriage will fail, her fears of such failure actually cause the marriage to fail.

The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior, which makes the original false conception come 'true'. This specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning. In other words, a prophecy declared as truth when it is actually false may sufficiently influence people, either through fear or logical confusion, so that their reactions ultimately fulfill the once-false prophecy.

Sting: Lose My Faith

Yes, this is one of my five favorite songs of all time.

Who is Ella Baker

Justice advocate. Civil Rights leader. Societal change agent. Women's rights and student's voice giver. Real Role Model.

Ella Baker was instrumental at the NAACP, before helping to drive the the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization MLK led, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (Snick/SNCC to most).

Why Light Rail is Austin's Public Transit Answer

So here’s a follow-up to my previous post about the need for public transit in Austin. Today, I’m going to focus on some more broad aspects of this issue: feasibility and budgeting. Before I can get down into the nitty-gritty of what public transit in Austin should look like, I feel it’s important to lay a good foundation for my overall perspective in this discussion.

In the days and weeks since my last post on transit, I’ve heard from many fellow Austinites, government and pseudo-government officials and public transit supporters and detractors. These are the main three questions I’ve been asked: 1) Why light rail?, 2) Do you think this could work in Austin?, and 3) Who’s budget responsibility is this?

My answers are fairly simple. Not because I’m not informed enough to make more complex conclusions. Not because “I haven’t been in those discussions” with Cap Metro and city government, etc., to know what’s really going on. And certainly not because I’m not being realistic about what is possible.

My answers are simple because I’m certain they are the right ones to get us where we need to be.

For starters, let’s acknowledge that light rail is the only scalable solution, and by scale I mean large and expansive, to Austin’s current and future transit issues. Buses can’t get the job done. Cap Metro’s bus system is lackluster today and not only is there no template for success within their current system, but there is no real reason to support its growth after years upon years of inadequacy to the city’s larger transportation issue. The likelihood of buses being the answer to our future public transit issue is two-fold.

1)   Socially speaking, buses will not go west of Exposition. I’m not going to dive too deeply into this from a racial or socio-economic standpoint, but if you’ve lived in Austin long enough you know that there’s an isolated, but strong, base of wealthy, neighborhood-centric people in West Austin that would not allow Cap Metro’s footprint to be expanded in that part of town via buses.

Light rail, on the other hand, doesn’t have such a social stigma and – in cities like D.C. and Boston – has been able to play up its functionality for young professional commuters, creatives (how do musicians get around in Manhattan?) and students to keep a steady base of rail supporters.

2)   Financially speaking, public transit is not cheap. At least not up-front. The ticket price for a full-scale deployment of trains and tracks is going to be an expensive pill to swallow for Austinites who look more like Dallasites the second any project budget is discussed. But it’s far cheaper than the next-best alternative. I’m being loose with the numbers here, but I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to project light rail being a billion dollar project up-front (with anywhere from 60 to 80 percent of that coming directly from state and federal funding) that becomes self-sustaining – meaning the ridership pays for the upkeep and staffing – within three to five years (if done correctly).

Improvements to I-35 and Mopac, along with other major roads in Austin, will not only cost plenty more over, say, 30 or 40 years, but they’ll also require much more human capital and environmental damage. It takes one bus driver to ride dozens people compared to one train driver for hundreds not to mention the impact of thousands of cars on the road and our environment. It’s also worth noting that it takes hundreds of millions of dollars to create an HOV- or bus-only lane that is still subject to traffic and accidents and we’ve yet to determine the space to do so on I-35 where it’s most needed.

Yes, this can work in Austin. The main factors that convince me of this are as follows:

1)   Our traffic is already terrible. We’re not trying to get light rail implemented to solve a problem that doesn’t exist…we’re trying to solve a problem that exist today and will be even more of a problem in the years to come.

2)   The population of our city is growing tremendously. That means our tax base will increase, which means we’ll have the funds to pay back light rail’s high up-front costs over several years through a small tax (oh, not that word!) and increased ridership over time. Do this math: [120,000 weekly riders x $2.00 per ride (each way) x 52 weeks] + [80,000 daily riders x $2.00 per ride (each way) x 250 days] + [200,000 riders (special events such as SXSW) x $2.00 per ride (each way)] = ???

3)   We have an established college and young professional community. These people are prime targets for a ridership campaign. Lower DUI rates (APD should be involved). Decrease the need for parking on campus (UT and St. Edward’s should be involved). And better position our city for 22-to-29 year olds who are comparing Austin to cities like San Francisco, Chicago, New York, D.C. and other cities with known public transportation infrastructure.

4)   Austin’s heritage is one that involves public transit. Our voting base may have short memory, but I’m certain we can remind them of Austin’s history – from the late 1870s through the ‘40s – that did in fact involve rail.

5)   It’s cheaper! I can’t say this enough. And I’m not just talking about the price tag for trains and tracks vs. highway improvements and buses. I’m also talking about the additional cost on our environment.

It’s everyone’s responsibility. Here’s how it starts.

1)   With City leadership. Our elected officials have a responsibility to the future of this city to support public transit that addresses our future transportation issues.

2)   With State & Federal funding. With local support in tact, Austin should be able to get a very high match from federal funding – not quite to Detroit levels, but close enough. Why? Because Rick Perry should push for as much federal money to Texas as possible (which will require some state contributions as well) and Barack Obama should push for as much federal money to Austin as possible (perhaps somewhere in the next decade the Texas Democratic Party will have a respectable statewide candidate).

3)   With verbal and rider support from Austinites. We all like to convince ourselves that we care about how taxpayer dollars are spent and the harm cars do to our environment, but we’re never hesitant to put some more money towards road and highway improvements and shun those same dollars going toward more sustainable public transit needs.

4)   With private investment. Texas is home to dozens of Fortune companies that could benefit tremendously from public transit in Austin. AT&T could provide wireless exclusivity on the trains. Dell could install kiosk to help tourist get around the city. I could go on and on. While the city is busy rounding up dollars from its residents, the state and federal government, we should also be thinking creatively about a private-public partnership that gets everyone what they want through light rail.

As I stated before, there is going to be a very vocal minority against light rail here in Austin. They will start by saying it’s not feasible and cost-effective. They will point to the need for better highway infrastructure rather than expenditures on public transit, slyly making a pitch to the more affluent Austinites who may not want to “subsidize” other residents. They will point to the planned budget and the likelihood of cost overruns, scaring residents into thinking the actual costs on them will be significantly greater than initially projected.

They will then reach into their bag of tricks and focus their attacks on elected officials who support the initiative by making it a neighborhood battle. I live in the South Congress area, and this is definitely one of the neighborhoods, where a select few business owners and long-time residents will be so vocal that it will seem as if the majority of neighborhood residents agree with them. Travis Heights, Tarrytown, Enfield, Hyde Park and Allandale are all neighborhoods that public transit and light rail detractors will target to scare off City Council leadership from supporting this much-needed citywide project.

What will be important throughout the coming weeks, months and years is to constantly verbalize the significance of light rail to the city’s future by rooting out problems of today. We already have a traffic problem. We already have an environmentally conscious voting base. We have population growth full of students and young professionals who welcome the idea of rail. Let’s let this work to our advantage and support the development of a public transit solution that will solve present-day problems before they become future nightmares.

Damn, I want these!

What an unbelievable collaboration between two Nike icons - Kobe Bryant and Eric Koston. (via Hypebeast)