This afternoon, I had the opportunity to attend an event sponsored by the Penn State Israel Alliance. The event was The David Project. The purpose of this organization is to educated students about how to advocated for Israel. It provides students with the strategies and tools to create effective programs that teach others what Israel can do as well as providing context for many of the facts used in conversation about the Middle East. It was an interesting program, because in part of the Israelis making up most of the audience but more importantly about the message it sent. The take away messages that stuck with me and that I am going to share with you reminded me why the PLA exists and its founding purpose--to educate students. 

The first point is that there are people who will never agree with what you have to say. They have their own opinions and feelings about certain situations and no matter what evidence you throw at them or what argument you use to convince them, they will forever be set in their opinions. But your purpose as an advocator for Israel is not to try and change their mind. The goal is to try and persuade the people listening to you argument with the opinionated person. The hope is that the eavesdropper will hear what you are saying and form their opinions based on educated information, not contextless facts. 

The second point is that we have to get to the root of the problem before we can start addressing the issues. If a person does not believe that a state should exist, you cannot argue about the political policies of that state because their argument will always be that the state should not exist. Before you can get into discussing the complexities of the problems in the Middle East, you have to first be on the same page that Israel as a state has a right to exist. 

Finally, whenever dealing with someone who is spewing facts and history in your face, ask them for context, to explain where that information is coming from and more importantly why that information is valuable. You can show pictures of Israelis searching ambulances or schools. And it looks awful if the soldiers are pulling people out of the ambulances. However, once you give the context that ambulances and schools are used to store weapons, it makes more sense that the Israeli soldiers should search these places. 

This relates directly to the mission of the PLA, whose goal is to develop leaders who can have a discussion about a topic where "multiple dimensions of an issue are explored, diverse viewpoints are welcomed and heard, and fully informed and respectful discourse ensues that leads to sound action." Without having the ability to listen to the other side of an argument, let alone welcome those opinions, a meaningful discussion will never be had. By fully understanding the root of the issue, we can look at the various facets that comprise a problem like the one in Israel. And without having the context behind the facts and figures there is no way to be completely informed about an issue. Taking the skills learned in the PLA can be taken out of the fan behavior policy issue and placed on larger scale problems like the ones in the Middle East. These skills are universal, and how lucky are we that we get to learn them now? 

This past week's class started off with a discussion about prioritizing solutions. How do you choose which problems you want to solve first. Most of the points brought up in Bjorn Lomborg's video on TED Talks were not new to me, just presented from an economist's perspective which was a new point of view for me. It was different because there did not seem to be any bias. An economist was able to normalize the questions and look at it in a pragmatic way, rather than putting forth biased opinions that specialized experts might contribute to the discussion. 
The questions he raised about how we set priorities were brought to my attention a few years ago when I participated on a Model UN committee in high school. My committee was the World Health Organization and one of our debate topics was achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. These goals are a lists of problems that the UN wishes to conquer by the year 2015. Most of these issues are huge, and the question is how do you go about solving them in an effective way? Which ones do you start with? 

My school was representing an African country (I don't remember which one, we had 6 different African countries throughout my years on Model UN) in the conference and I had to participate in the debate advocating for what my country would want to support. That threw a different perspective on the issue--not only did I have to answer which world problems should we solve first, but I had to take on an international persona (which reminded me of a section of Wrong that talked about how you cannot let your personal biases help you make judgments about how another country would respond to a given question)! It was a challenge for me as a high school student and now that I am analyzing the critical thinking decisions that go into making a non-biased judgment I can see just why those decisions were so difficult. 

When working to tackle the problem of adverse fan behavior, we should take into account our biases and find a way to normalize the question--find a way to compare the different solutions that puts each one on an equal level so that they can be compared to find the best solution, or order of solutions to solving this problem. 

I have been teaching at the local JCC for a year now. I have had the same students the entire time (I taught third grade last year and am teaching 4th grade this year). This class is a challenge because the fourth grade is split up for its Hebrew class based on behavior and ability. I love my kids, but it takes them a while to learn what we are doing and sometimes it gets frustrating to be learning the same material each week. The problem is that they do not reinforce what I am teaching in class at home during the week, so each class I start over again re-teaching the same material as before. 
But today was different. We are working on learning Yotzer Or, a prayer that praises G-d for the formation of light and the creation of darkness. It is a prayer said during the morning service and parallels a prayer said during the evening service. We went quickly through the evening service prayer because I could sense that they were getting tired of reading the same lines over and over again. 

I took a different approach with Yotzer Or though. Instead of reading the entire prayer over and over again, I've broken it down into smaller sections, adding one line at a time until they build up their confidence. Rather than waiting for the student to complete the sentence or the word to correct them, I'm trying to give more than just corrective feedback. Meaning that instead of telling them which letter or vowel sound they mispronounced, I am giving the class general "you did this line really well, but started to mumble at this line." I'm working with individual students to make the class successful. 

In our previous class, we had read through 6 lines of this 16 line prayer and I was really happy with that because it sounded as if they knew those 6 lines really well. When we got to class this morning, they started to mumble on the third line. So we worked today from the third line through the 8th line. That's not the amazing part. Here's what is: they asked for homework. The students who complain about coming to Hebrew school every week asked for homework. They want to practice this prayer at home so that they can move forward in class. I was shocked, amazed and in awe when I heard this. I have been battling attendance issues since I started teaching them and now they are asking to practice at home. 

What I think happened was that my students could see the short term goals. I was not expecting them to know this prayer in one day. I was asking them to add two or three lines a class (about a sentence of Hebrew). The goals were explicit, and more importantly, the students felt that the goals were attainable if they had a little bit more practice. Boy did I jump on that opportunity. As soon as I got back from the synagogue, I found a link with the text and an audio track and emailed it to their parents explaining what happened in class today with the hopes that the parents would encourage their children to keep up the good work. 

I was so excited, and I'm looking forward to my next class to see how many of them actually practiced this week!

The cover story in USA Today caught my attention this evening. Jobs, the CEO and co-founder of Apple announced that he will be taking a medical leave of absence. The part of the story that struck me was how iconic Jobs was to Apple and questioning how the company would thrive without its CEO. Part of being a leader is making sure that the people you lead can continue to work in your absence. When stories get published that say "Apple will chug along for years, but it may not burn so bright" it concerns me. Shouldn't the Apple company be the Apple company with or without Jobs? Is there some quality that he has brought to the company or is he micro-managing to the point where he has to be present for this company to continue the way Apple has been progressing? This article seems to imply that without Jobs, the company may not be able to come up with something new. While Tim Cook will be taking over the day-to-day operations, Jobs will still be involved with the major decisions. If Jobs is the only one developing new products, coming up with the innovations and making the decision about whether to make a cellphone or a tablet, how will this company work without Steve Jobs. Yes there have been medical leaves in the past, but Jobs has been there to "reposition Apple from a niche player in the desktop market to a leading purveyor to tech-cool PCs and portable entertainment devices..." What happens when Jobs is no longer around to make those decisions or innovations? Shouldn't a leader take that into consideration and plan for when a new leader must take over? 

As soon as I saw the front page of the Collegian yesterday, I knew exactly what article Melissa wanted us to comment on. We had talked about the negative message on t-shirts and the role that it plays in establishing certain behaviors, specifically fan behavior at games. Well, the t-shirts described in the Collegian article were not about football or sports, but rather about another popular activity here at Penn State: drinking. Shirts were being pre-ordered and sold to celebrate "State Patty's Day," a drinking holiday made up by students to make up for the fact that Saint Patrick's Day occurred during spring break. Times have changed: spring break dates have changed and Saint Patrick's Day occurs when students are on campus and the creator of the event has denounced it! Probably the most disturbing part of the article was that the t-shirts were not even made by a student at Penn State. This "holiday" has gotten so big that we attract the attention of students from numerous other school to come and drink with and even make t-shrits for Penn State students for the day. 

Some arguments in the article were that the t-shirts were a "financial opportunity" and that students are responsible for their own actions. And while both are true, the fact that you are wearing a shirt that says "Kiss me...I'm wasted" leads to the impression that you support excessive drinking, even if you do not drink yourself. The clothes we wear sends a message about what we value. The clothes a school or student sells sends a message about what they value. If we stop selling shirts that promote drinking or this ridiculous holiday, we send the message that this behavior is not okay. The same is true for sports-related t-shirts. The messages we wear on our clothes show what behaviors we value. If we changed the t-shirts that were being created and sold for State Patty's Day and for sports-related events, we may see some "positive behavioral changes" (whatever that means [see last post]). 

So I'll have to admit that fan behavior is probably not my favorite topic, and I feel that my lack of enthusiasm was evident in class Monday night. My problem I think is that this question is huge. "How can we positively affect fan behavior?" First of all, what does it mean to positively affect something? How concrete to the results have to be? Secondly what is fan behavior? I think my not understanding the question fully prevented me from completing the post-it note exercise. I had a challenge generating the words and phrases to put on the notes that were associated with the question because I spent a lot of the time trying to figure out what the question meant. Still grappling with the definition, there was goal in mind--what are we trying to accomplish? I struggled because I could not figure out what I was supposed to be doing.      

The exercise in general seemed to be excess work. Instead of starting simple with basic topics and categories and adding complexity as we started researching, we seemed to start complex with the various post-it note examples. We then collected those examples into organized categories and labeled them. Now we're going to synthesize those categories into simpler groups. Those groups will then be researched and details and complexities will be added so that we can then write policies about what we learned. This may not have made sense, but my point is that the exercise seemed to be an extra step. Why couldn't we have just brian-stormed topics and then added the complexity with the details rather than starting with the details and then going to the topics and researching the specific details. 

On a completely separate topic, the readings. In Heuer's Psychology of Intelligence Analysis,two ideas resonated with me: we cannot get rid of our biases and hindsight is 20/20. The first idea struck me when Heuer was explaining the hindrance of memory. When we see something new, we try to make sense of it by applying what we already know, what we remember. However, this something new may be so completely different that there is nothing like it that we know. When this happens, we try to explain it by finding something as similar to it as possible without really seeing what this new item really is. We see it at a level that makes sense to us, and that may not, and is probably not, the whole of that issue. The second idea is that hindsight is 20/20. When reviewing an analysis and trying to decide if an event could have actually been predicted, it is impossible to make that conclusion because the known events already happened. There is no way to correct for the bias of knowing the result and trying to analyze if that prediction could have been made accurately. Instead of looking at all of the facts and seeing what they lead to, a reviewer will look at the events and see them leading to the event that happened. 

In Wrong, I was struck by the thought that whether employees are rewarded for their work or not, wrongness is more likely to be the case than rightness. When a company does not reward for their work, there is no need to try and get the right answer. Data can be manipulated and results can be altered because there will be no benefit or punishment if the results are false. When a company, on the other hand, rewards an employee for right answers, works is likely to be falsified just so that the conclusion that will get the employee the promotion or benefit is achieved. There doesn't seem to be a push to work integrally. 

Onto the topic of blogging. I like that we are given topics to write about as I am usually at a loss for what to say. I never got into journaling because I could not find an audience. I had nothing to say because no one was going to read it. In the case of PLA, there are classes and topics and people interested in what we right which makes it a lot easier. My complaints are thus: I do not like that we have assigned blogs on which we are supposed to comment and I do no like that both the comment and the blog are due Sunday night. I feel like it would be more natural to comment on blogs that we want to comment on, rather than being forced to comment on someone else's blog whose topic I may be completely uninterested in. With this system, I am only getting to know six members of the PLA, the three who comment on my blogs and the three on whom I comment. My suggestion is to have us comment on three different blogs during our week to comment so that we get to know more members of the PLA and can find blog topics that interest us. On the second complaint, I feel that it is unfair to make the commenters repeatedly check the blog site to see if the people they were supposed to write on have written this weeks post. To me, it makes more sense to have the blogs be written by Thursday night so that the commenters have the entire weekend to write their responses and know that the blogs on which they are writing will be posted by Friday morning. 

I know it's long, but I had a lot to say. Happy start of a new semester!!