RhetoricVille

There is good news for coffee drinkers. According to a recent story by Victoria Brett of the Associated Press, coffee drinking is on the rise among teenagers.

Naturally, this raises concerns about caffeine-addiction.

The story quotes caffeine-expert Roland Griffiths, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University:

[Caffeine] is not associated with life-threatening health risk, but that is not to say that it is entirely benign. Caffeine is likely the world’s most-used mood-altering drug and it does produce mood changes and physical dependence and withdrawal. It needs to be recognized as a drug.

Brett notes that “a 16-ounce Starbucks coffee has about 320 milligrams of caffeine. It would take more than nine 12-ounce Cokes to get that much caffeine from soda.”

Apparently, teens also go in for the heavily sugared coffee speciality drinks. 

I say this is good news for coffee drinkers because it means coffee will stick around and be readily available whenever we need a fix. Admittedly, swilling buckets of hot java isn’t so good for the health of teens, but as Professor Griffiths suggests, there are worse addictions.

Barack Obama has caused a political dust-up with a remark he made last week at a closed-door fundraiser in San Francisco. Speaking of working class Americans, he said: “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

The pundits and Obama’spolitical opponents are citing the remark as evidence of his elitism. I agree that he is elitist, but do not see it as a big deal. FDR was an elitist, but got himself elected to the presidency four times, on a populist platform. Of course, that was in the days when the mass media consisted of newspapers and radio. So voters could not actually see FDR’s pince-nez, but they could hear it in his voice and that didn’t stop him. (Or was it Teddy Roosevelt who wore a pince-nez? Well, they were cousins, weren’t they? Close enough. I’m not going to cut a good line on account of historical fact.)

Anyway, that some people are calling a Harvard grad and law professor “elitist” does not strike me as interesting. It’s the “bitter” part of Obama’s remark that I want to focus on.

Are we bitter? Yes, we. I am including myself in the working class. It’s a little stretch, maybe, but I am the son of a working class family. I have lived most of my life in and around a prime example of an American working class city — Flint, Michigan. True, I am now a sort of academic, but at the same time a half-baked labor leader. I go to hockey games. My wife bowls. In my youth, I owned a gun — a beautiful Remington pump-action shotgun, which I used to blast ducks and geese from the sky, or tried to. In truth, I was not much of a wing-shot, and I have long since passed the gun onto a nephew.

Why did I hunt? Why did I own a gun? Because I had friends who did. Were we bitter? We were frustrated? It could be, but I don’t think our gun ownership was a response to anything other than it is hard to kill water fowl with your bare hands.

As for clinging to religion, I never did much. My people were not religious, except at the high moments like weddings and funerals. I married a Catholic, and I consented to having whatever children came out of the deal raised as Catholics, but I have never converted to Catholicism from the vague form of Christianity that I was born into. The Catholics are sticklers on believing in God. And not just any god, either. You either believe in their god or forget about it.

OK. On reflection, I am not the sort of working class person Mr. Obama was referring to. But I think I know lots of such people, and better than he does. I don’t think their gun ownership or their belief in God is a reaction to bitterness and frustration. However, their supposed “antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment,” to the extent that it exists, probably is an emotional response to the changing circumstances of their lives. I can agree with Obama on that.

The working class see their jobs and livelihoods going overseas, cities like Flint becoming ghost towns, and they wonder who or what is to blame.

If not bitter, we’re at least pissed off.

Links:

Obama: “I didn’t say it as well as I should have” CNN

“Obama tries to temper ‘bitter’ comment” Washington Post

M. Daniels at Princeton has a online playable version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The computer opponent is programmed to play four different strategies. The human player can pick the strategy or let chance do it.  It’s a simple interactive introduction to a basic non zero-sum game.

Apparently I qualify. You need to be 50+ and blog. This according to Ronni Bennett over at the Time Goes By blog. Well, I may as well own up to it. I passed 50 a few years ago. The year I turned 50, I helped organize a labor union. Since then, I’ve helped negotiate two collective bargaining agreements and to lead a strike. It’s no work for an old man. Maybe for an elder, though.

Say it loud, say it proud . . .

On Friday, I went to a small conference at UM-Flint on engaging students in on-line learning. The keynote speaker was Fred Goodman, a professor emeritus of Education from the Ann Arbor campus. He is a game maker, and his ideas for teaching revolve around games and the insights that playing — and especially designing — games can provide. He talked about several, and we played a few. One was a version of 20 Questions. The rules went like this. The moderator thinks of a famous person, and the players get to ask 20 yes-no questions to figure out who the person is. But the moderator gets to lie twice. After 10 questions, the moderator must tell the players whether or not he has lied and how many times. Now, a lie is defined as a deliberate false-hood, but as Goodman pointed out, you could have situations arise where the moderator might seem to lie but was not. For instance, consider if the famous person were Winston Churchill, and the question asked was, “Was the person a European?” Some people may consider Britain part of Europe, and others not.

The game becomes interesting educationally when you have groups asking the questions, and they have to agree on what questions to ask, how to phrase questions, and what the answers might mean. Also, the students could each play the role of moderator, and need to research a famous person’s life.

I could see using a game like this in various of my classes, which all focus on both critical thinking, collaboration, and writing. It would work well in an online class, too. I could set up groups with their own discussion boards, in which each group could discuss what question to ask, etc. Then in the main course discussion board, each group would pose its question, in turns. Perhaps each group (team) would have its own famous person to guess. But the learning would go on in their discussions and negotiations with each other, and then in an examination of my responses, which might be challenged (as in the case of the Churchill example).