So the ning business is finally going to morph into a real business and stop allowing people to use their goodies without paying for them.

Wow, brings up a whole host of stuff when it comes to writing in the online world.

Is the sale of ad space really expected to power the entire forward progress of the whole world wide web? I don’t think so. Then again, if ning doesn’t give it away free first and foremost, do they grow into the company they now are? And if they now start to charge, how many nings fold up and think, “Well, it was good while it lasted”?

Is this what the next stage of the internet looks like? People give away items at no charge until they become apparently worth something, and then they start to charge for their services and people fold up their tents and drift off to the next latest and greatest thing. (You know, the one that people can use free of charge until enough people start using it to make these folks see “gold in dem dar hills” whereby the model changes to a fee based-structure… and everyone then flees again… and on and on and on?)

Jim Burke said… People need to wake up to the idea that they cannot expect companies to be non-profits. We have grown increasingly addicted to the idea that everything should be free, that we should have to pay for nothing. That is not sustainable.

Indeed. But as soon as Twitter starts charging me per tweet, I think I am gone.

And I think they know this… which is why they do not charge me for tweeting. Which is why so many millions of folks do tweet.

But charge even one dollar a month and, “Nah, I am not so sure it’s worth it” creeps into my consciousness. I mean there are so many other free things I can do on the web, with mobile technology and so on, that, on second thought, Nah, I just don’t think so.

The fact is, most human beings pretty much do not like paying for things that were once free. We feel ripped off. (Even if they are actually worth the money.)

If once upon a time you charged me, and you raised the price, then hey, I get that. But if was free and now you want money for it… that doesn’t really compute so well. I mean “I think I only wanted it because it was free anyway,” is what I tell myself. Then I move on.

And on the flip side, people tend to more highly value that which actually costs them more. Look at the diamond industry. DeBeers is absolutely brilliant in the way that they make us believe diamonds are precious stones worth X amount of dollars. And by controlling 85% of all the diamonds on the planet (they have vaults and vaults and vaults of them locked away so that they can manage world wide inventory and empower all these diamond dealers to say, “but they are rare and precious”) they create the illusion of high value – and the reality of high price – in the mind of buyers.

And we buy it.

Engagement rings, earrings, and so on. “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend.”

Hook, line and sinker, we drank the Kool-Aid on that one.

But NY Times news? I think the cat is outta the bag on that one. Sure, some will buy it – older folks who grew up indoctrinated into the “fine journalism” being offered will stay the course. (They also have more disposable income.) But now, news and commentary are free… and if the NY Times wants to start charging for what they originally gave away online, heck, I’ll go to the Wash Post or L.A. Times or BBC and so on.

Heck, the Huffington Post will go out and scavenge the free news for me. And they are not alone.

And if they all decide to charge at the same time, they are gambling with their very existence… cause there is no guarantee to say enough people will pay to keep them afloat.

Are they willing to risk bankruptcy? Do they really want to know if they call our bluff and insist on charging us that we are actually going to pony up cash for their goods versus simply seeking another source for our news and bail out on them?

TIME magazine charges. Newsweek doesn’t. Is there enough of a difference that I buy TIME? Right now, not really.

The Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety, Hollywood’s Trade Magazines, got it right. They charged for content right away (after giving away small teasers.) People were used to paying for print, they immediately got used to paying for online from the get-go and now, they more or less, seamlessly transitioned to the online journalism world.

Right now, newspapers don’t really have the guts to pull the “free” plug because they know if they do, we might not come back to them and prove them obsolete. (It’s any business’s darkest fear – to recognize that the world can get along just fine without them and have the world recognize that.

Of course, all of the newspapers are hoping Apple and the Kindle will help to save their butts… but ESPN.com does sports for me and the AP wire still provides news and Joe down the block blogs about the tree root situation plaguing the local sidewalks on my street and the idea of one-stop news shopping is something that is already dead to many of us anyway. (Like textbooks providing one-size-fits-all curriculum – that ship has SAILED!)

I get my news from 15 sources, not one and until all 15 charge, I can live with only 14.

So, I won’t get to read Friedman. But if enough people stop reading Friedman, he’s going to try and deliver content to his audience another way… or else he stops being Friedman and someone else’s voice will rise up to replace his. Books still make sense. (I want to read the writing of the folks I want to read: Stephanie Meyers, Stephen King, they could publish on toilet paper and people would read it by the roll.) Newspapers don’t. Magazines… they seem to be on an edge. Can’t call it one way or the other yet.

Ultimately, I am completely at a loss for how this will all work out but I do feel that it sure would be hard to get people to start paying for my blog now that I have been giving it away at no charge for a year and a half.

Most of them would probably say, “Hasta la Vista… it was good while it lasted but I am onto other things.”

Real businesses know customers value what they pay for much more than they value what is free.

Like the dot.com bubble, so is the Free bubble.

The book FREE proposed that free was the way of the business future – at least to get a foot in the door. Actually, I think the real way of the business future is to 1) provide something excellent and 2) charge for it right out of the gate.

People will always pay for quality and if you are giving it away at no charge, how much is it really worth anyway?

Nings seem to have blown it if they want to charge. Someone else is gonna fill their void if they do because most people will not pay for the same thing they used to get at no charge. They will pay for something new, better, enhanced and so on.

Nings aren’t proposing that. There is no Ning II that’s a platinum version they will be selling. Ning just wants money now… and I am not sure how many folks are gonna roll with that.

However, I would chip in a buck to keep this ning alive. And if we all did, maybe the ning folks would let us keep rolling, huh?

I see it with my own eyes from the front of my classroom each and every day. Overall, the boys are getting their butts kicked by the girls – particularly when it comes to reading and literacy skills.

Of course, these are generalizations – I have boys that are wicked smart and truly great students… and girls that are just not stepping up whatsoever – but taken on the whole, there are more girls achieving at higher rates with greater regularity and consistency in school these days than there are young men.

And the data supports this assertion. Here’s a link to an article about the most recent report on how Boys Trailing Girls in Reading Across the States.

And so, should we hit the panic button?

Yes and no.

Yes because no matter what your gender, I couldn’t be more staunch in my belief about how kids need to own excellent literacy skills. Those who can read and write well are at a huge advantage over those who cannot in this world and I don’t care what tech invention Apple, Google, Microsoft, Sony, and so on comes up with… the need to be able to read and write well is not a skill that is disappearing anytime soon.

(Goodness, I hope that doesn’t one day make a list of the world’s dumbest predictions one day like, “Who wants to see talking movies?”)

So yes, boys need to elevate their reading performance. And their writing performance. Why? Because it ultimately relates directly to their thinking performance and the fact is, for those who do not own solid literacy skills, a glass ceiling exists.

A glass ceiling being lowered by things like Friedman’s The World is Flat recognition.

But no, we don’t need to panic. And why? Cause panic isn’t going to do anything. Doing something is going to do something.

• Accessible relevant reading material that wins the hearts and minds of boys must be better embraced as a classroom tool.
• Reading for pleasure has to be recognized as something that does not just occur, but rather, is cultivated in young people. (Expecting it to just bloom is silly – we need to garden.)
• Bludgeoning our lowest level boy readers with scripted curriculums, disengaging, watered-down, 5 pound textbooks and drill-n-kill materials has got to be kicked to the curb.
• Sending the message that good bubbling on bubble tests is the penultimate goal to which readers should aspire needs to be exorcised. Reading is not about being tested on reading.

All in all, we need to listen to our literacy light leaders. I mean it’s not like we do not know how to better win over more boy readers. We do know bhow. And there are a ton of people who do, indeed, provide workable answers to this problem. Thing is, we are not listening to them. Our best thinkers in the field of literacy are holding a map, a flashlight, a canteen of water and a supply pack of tools saying, “Follow me!” …and still, these “experts” are not being entrusted to guide us through the rough terrain us we currently face.

Boy readers are reachable.
Young men do like to read once the right material crosses their path.
We can do better.

But let’s not forget one thing, we oughtta be proud of our girls. A few decades ago they couldn’t even vote and now they are taking the boys out to the woodshed and kickin’ their butts.

Remember, in our effort to raise up our boys, let’s make sure we do not slow down our girls. They are to be saluted!

I am kicking around a new book idea about the need for single-tasking in a world where people sing the praises a bit too loudly about the ability to multi-task.

(But since I kick around new book ideas all the time, it’s probably best just to blog about it and see if the itch is still there to scratch at the end of this post.)

Multi-taking, in the modern world, is something we all do. Talking on the phone while googling an address as someone speaks to you from the other side of the room — come on, how many of us haven’t done that?

And yet, for some reason, white collar employees seem to think that there is merit to functioning like this all the time.

Sure, it produces voluminous work but the truth is, I want quality over quantity. And quality oh-so-very-often is sacrificed in this day and age at the altar of expediency.

With my students, this a growing subject of conversation in my class. (It’s also why I am such a HUGE fan of reading. Reading — particularly reading longer works, like, ahem, real books — is a single-tasking job. One simply cannot read a novel like The Alchemist and google, talk and change songs on your iPod at the same time.

Not that my students don’t try… but the quality of their comprehension will be sacrificed in direct correlation to the amount of attention they willingly divert from the task at hand.

And btw, when I am on the consuming end of the scale — when someone prepares a meal for me, when someone checks my cholesterol by taking a blood sample, when someone valet parks my car — I want them to be single-tasking at the time. I don’t want them talking on the phone while trying to find a vein in my arm. I want their focus… their single-minded focus.

Why? Because single-taskers translate to “better” taskers.

In my own class, one of the ways I greatly improve my students’ writing over the course of a year in English is that I make them concentrate on the small things. The details. The apostrophes, the spelling, the periods at the end of sentences and the such. It might not like sound much but when you see the quality of the work they enter with each year versus the quality of writer they have become by the time they leave, it’s night and day.

Because they concentrate. Because they pay attention. Because I force them to focus and they produce high quality sentences line by line by line.

Being slovenly is disastrous to a crisp thinker. And in the age of txt messages, Facebook, Twitter and so on, just slapping something out is all too easy.

Multi-taskers go a mile wide and an inch deep throughout their careers. Single-taskers go a mile deep… and then they go a mile deep again. They eventually get to breadth as a result of depth — and when all is said and done’ I’d venture to say that it all adds up to a lot more substance when the final tallies are tallied.

Multi-taskers are under the false delusion that they are going someplace quick but in my opinion, it’s intellectual laziness that keeps them flitting from one thing to the next all the time like a moth on red bull.

Single-taskers will cure cancer.
Single-taskers will take green energy to a whole new level.
Single-Taskers Will Rule the World!

And reading is the training camp for single-taskers. In my opinion, letting the red herring of “21rst century skills” undercut deep instruction that demands extended concentration will be a grave mistake. We, in our classrooms today, must overtly recognize this quicksand.

So, is there a possible book here? I think so, if I fleshed it out more, did some research, flavored the whole thing up with anecdotes, provided an 8 Step recipe for Single-Tasking Success, and so on. But do I feel the need to spend a huge amount of time writing this book at the expense of a what could easily be a new work of YA fiction for me? Probably not.

This is why I blog. It allows me to multi-task. (wink-wink.)

Sesame Street turned 40 years old this week. To honor the show which game me my start as a lover of literacy, here’s a big ol’ shout out to Big Bird, Oscar, Ernie & Bert, and of course, the character that still represents to me the height of personal achievement and excellence, COOKIE MONSTER!

Here’s a list of 40 cool things about Sesame Street that is worth a moment if you have one.

And after I read #1 on the list (CBS and NBC rejected Sesame Street before it debuted Nov. 10, 1969, on PBS… I know, WOW! But then again, they probably would have smacked it up anyway so, as Pangloss would say, “All is for the best in this the best of all possible worlds.”)

But it got me thinking, passing on Sesame Street is an epic goof. Like historical. So, what are some of the most famous gaffes in history? (Goodness do I love these type of “predictions” — I mean people will shoot off their mouths about almost anything, won’t they?) And where would passing on Seasme Street rank?

Let’s put it this way, missing out on the opportunity to bring this show to kids across the world is a blunder of spectacular proportions. Anyway, in my opinion, it ranks right up there with a few other brilliant prognosticators.

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
– Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

“We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.”
– Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.

Of course, there are more…

“The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a ‘C,’ the idea must be feasible.”
– A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith’s paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)

“Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”
– Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929.

And finally, some of the most famous…

“Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.”
– Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre.

“Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?”
– H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927.

Thanks for everything, Sesame Street. My life, my daughter’s life, our world is a better because of you! I mean yours is a birthday that really warms my heart.

We fired a bunch of teachers due to “budget cuts” at the end of last year. And yet, guess what? We currently have a few long term subs in place in some of our core classes — STILL, right now, in the sixth week of school! — because we have job openings for teachers that have not yet been filled?

Hmmm.

And in this story, D.C. is letting go of hundreds of teachers about 2 months into the new school year. I’m sure that’s not going to cause any chaos/demoralization/bitterness/grumbling/chain reaction types of negative impact by-products though.

Now I don’t want to go down the road of “how in the world are schools supposed to thrive in the midst of all this administrative dysfunction” right now, but really, “how in the world are schools supposed to thrive in the midst of all this administrative dysfunction”?

I know for a fact that there are schools all across the country that still do not even have their basic staffing issues resolved yet. And it’s October!

Are the teachers to blame?
What about when some kids get changed into your class 6 weeks into the school year so that you have a room of mix and match kids where a few students have been there from Day 1 and others are just experiencing Day 1?
Will NCLB take this into account this year when looking at API and AYP scores?
Will my “merit pay” evaluation reflect these “considerations”?

Though I have said this before, while it’s easy to blame teachers, aren’t we really having a crisis of leadership in American education? Principals are overworked, school districts are out of touch and parents are kicked to the curb. I mean we have educators around here with over 240 students on their total roster… but it’s going to be the teacher’s fault if we don’t see marked improvement in these English Language Learners this academic year?

What a farce. I mean can you really blame the cook on the Titanic is his lobster bisque tastes like seawater? After all, he wasn’t piloting the boat — just cooking and doing the best job he could at what he was hired to do. Instead of wearing business suits to work, some of these people ought to be wearing red noses.

I was in my classroom when the second plane hit the World Trade Center in 2001. I heard about the first plane as I drove into work, turned on the tv in my room and then watched the second plane hit.

And that day, all we did in my class was watch the news and talk. I remember telling my kids, “You just saw the world change.” I didn’t know how, I didn’t know in which way, shape or manner, but I did know that right then, our world had changed.

And it did.

And today, I gotta say I am still hoping it will change some more because where we are, well… it could be better. A lot better.

People who work in schools moan and moan all the time about how “the kids don’t read” but you know what… the people who are moaning aren’t really reading either. At least they’re not, in large part, doing the professional reading necessary (IMHO) to stay up to date with what’s going on the world of literacy and language arts.

I’ve got administrators screaming about how we need to make “data-driven decisions in the English Department” but these folks aren’t reading what I consider to be some of the best, most useful, most insightful books about the world of ELA Instruction — works that are replete with not only data, but reflections upon that data so that the reader/teacher/educator can make methodological decisions based on something other than “I am doing this because it came from above — and I must always do what comes from above — where it appears they simply pulled it out of their butt” mentality.

Here’s a list of a few books NOT read by the folks who are barking at my department with orders as to how to improve, of course, our test scores:

Readicide
Holding On To Good Ideas in Times of Bad Ones
The Reading Zone
Disrupting Class
A Whole New Mind
I Read It but I Don’t Get It
Why Students Don’t Like School
Outliers

Now I could go on. And please do not ask me how I know that most of the top-ranking folks have not read these books because I’ve surreptitiously tested them in my own nefarious ways. However, the point is not to embarrass anyone. The point is to question how can anyone taking on the challenge of improving ELA in the 2009/2010 school year really be considered seriously if they haven’t done this type of reading. (And yes, I know there are more titles as well.)

Sure, it’s hard, time-consuming and dense. But not having the time is, to me, just an excuse. I mean me, I teach, I write YA fiction, I blog, I spend good time with my family and I try to exercise… but I also read! Why? Because I find it absolutely necessary to the development, implementation and application of my professional craft. And I am not drawing an administrator’s salary, either. I do this as a regular ol’ classroom teacher.

So when these folks come to me with “strategies for success” that seem to have ben taken right out of some field book from a Master’s Class in the 1990′s to deal with the problems we are facing in the here and now, I just gotta shrug and say, “Yo, before you open your mouth, open a book, huh?”

Before I lay me down to sleep this evening, I am going to say a prayer of gratitude for all the crappy teachers I’ve had and known. That’s right — for the really stinky ones. Why? Because, if you pay attention, you can learn as much from a poor teacher as you can from a strong one… at least in a few very specific ways.

Through being treated like a just another factory widget by some of my cynical, jaded, been at this job way-too-long type of teachers back when I was in middle and high school, I’ve learned how important it is for me to make sure that I make all my students feel welcomed into my class, respected and of individual value. As a current teacher I actively try to view my students as singular, unique people with likes and dislikes, aptitudes and challenges, different histories, different previous experiences and different emotional teenage baggage. By experiencing (hurtfully) the stuff that far too many teachers never offered to me, well… it makes me sensitive to how important this can really be to a child.

Through listening to to teachers in the lunchroom complain, moan, gripe and whine I’ve learned that if I want something positive done, I have got to be the first to pick up a shovel, roll up my shirt sleeves and start to break ground — otherwise, I am just another dissatisfied bitch-er bemoaning all that is wrong without putting in the sweat, initiative and work it takes to be a force for the change I want to see.

By seeing the teachers that ridicule and belittle our students as young people who are never going to be squat in this world, I see why it is so important for me to remain compassionate towards our “lowest achieving” kids. After all, who needs more help than the kids who need the most help? (Why we demonize these kids instead of embrace them is beyond me… yet, face it, we do.)

By seeing how some teachers refuse to budge in terms of their grading policy, I have learned to remain open to the reasons why my students may need more time, assistance and guidance — especially when I make the extra effort to find out what’s going on at home in their lives. When you teach in a community of high poverty, you realize that darker things go on in this world than anything I myself ever had to face when I was a student… and to not recognize the challenges for a kid to do well in school when they have issues like alcoholism, drug abuse, violence, sexual abuse issues and so on happening after they exit campus to deal with… well, remaining a humanist about other human beings strikes me as being more important than being a stickler about assignment deadlines.

By seeing how peers being rude to other peers on campus demoralizes all of us, I make an effort to show common niceness to others. (Even the idiots I can’t friggin’ stand! LOL!)

Of course, there’s more. But the bigger point is, by seeing that which I loathe, I get to see that which I can embody — at the opposite end of the spectrum.

All it takes is me paying attention to what I can learn when the people who are charged with the teaching fall woefully short of what I would hope that they would be.

So thank goodness for the duds… they are a professional development session all unto themselves.

I just witnessed a group of teens and young adults who said, with a straight face and all the seriousness in their heart that they could muster, that if they did not figure out a way to improve over their performance of last year, they’d be toast. They knew they needed to grow, adapt, change, evolve and break new ground… for if they didn’t, they knew someone else, with more hunger in the belly, would come along and take from them their, well… everything. Their future, their ability to earn a prosperous living , and so on.

Work ethic, creativity, self-determination, guts, a willingness to learn and grow and experiment and push the envelope, they showed it all.

I LOVE young people such as this. And I then I realized that if public education, and all the people who were involved in it, had this same attitude, we might literally move mountains.

Yep, I am saying it: if public education were more like the X games, I think we might all be happily surprised.

Look, I am a HUGE fan of the X games. If you ain’t seen some of their highlights, you have no idea what you are missing. Check it out…

See, the thing is, the reason I believe we, in education, have much we can learn from these X gamers is because 1) They care. I mean they really care. Passion drives this sport and nobody shows up to work at the X games without bringing their A game.

Imagine if our students showed up to class with this same hunger to learn. Or if our nation’s teacher’s showed up with this same fire to teach? It’d almost be a different world. I mean how many people who work at our schools actually show up at the start of a new school year and feel, “If I don’t have the best year as a teacher that I have ever had, if I don’t give my best, reinvent parts of myself, give 110% this year, I’ll be toast?

X-gamers do.

2) They bounce back from adversity. There’s not an X-gamer out there who does not know what it means to fall flat on their face. It’s a world where falling and failing is part of the process but woven into the fabric of being a participant is the notion that YOU GET UP.

You get up. Getting knocked down is inevitable. When adversity strikes, you don’t fold your tent, you don’t weep, “Poor me”, you don’t give up.

You plan to keep going.

3) They celebrate one another’s achievements in a way that is characterized by authentic camaraderie. They are rooting for one another’s success. It’s not a back-biting, undercutting, talk trash about your kids and your colleagues in the lunchroom type of world. They are each working to be their best but they are also each a part of a bigger whole and they love to sit back and admire the excellent efforts of the people in the same game.

They know how to tip their hat.

X games: it’s more than just apparently suicidal tricks. It’s an outlook on life.

See, this is why my students need to be readers who can apply text-to-world critical thinking to our classroom and the world at large.

Take for example, the inimitable actor Woody Harrelson, most famous for being Woody on Cheers but also pretty well known for a heck of a lot of other quite solid — and not so solid — movies he’s done.

White Man Can’t Jump… big thumbs up!

Money Train… big thumbs down!

Anyway, Woody admits getting into a physical confrontation with a paparazzi a few days ago. But he had a good reason. And I quote…

“I quite understandably mistook [the photographer] for a zombie.”

Yep, he really said this. And he also said this…

“I wrapped a movie called ‘Zombieland,’ in which I was constantly under assault by zombies, then flew to New York, still very much in character,” Harrelson said in a statement issued Friday by his publicist.

Niiiicce!

Now if my students were actual readers of the news — any news; The NY Times, The AP wire, FOX or MTV (those last 2 are kinda the same) — they could build a text-to-world connection that could easily get them out of their homework for the night.

I mean if I had a kid come into my class and tell me that “…while scouring the Washington Post for the latest political insight into world economic fiduciary policy they ran across this brief but salient human interest story about Woody Harrelson and then — whodda thunk it — alien zombies ate their HW assignement and there was simply no way Mr. Alan that it could ever be replaced.

And so, I should give them full credit yet not require to see the actual work.”

I’d go for it.

Text-to-World connections. If only our kids could see how valuable what we perpetually advise really could be to their lives.