Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 16

Walking speed

Walking speed on the streets of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia has increased 15% since 1979.

This makes me very happy.

I believe in stopping to smell the roses. Admiring the world around us. Noticing the big and little things.

But I also believe in making the most of my time. Accelerating the pace to increase health benefits. Moving past the boring places to get to the good place.

I see people move through the aisles in the grocery store like it’s the place to be.

I see people walking down a street in New York, acting like the exteriors of Starbucks, Chase Bank, and Le Pain Quotidien are worthy of their time and attention.

If the space you’re moving through is worth the time, then spend the time.

But if you’re moving slowly through mundanity and homogeneity, you’re making a mistake.

Get to the good stuff by moving quickly through the not-so-good stuff.

Religious switcheroo

A new global survey from the Pew Research Center aimed to determine the percentage of respondents in a given country who said they had switched religions and that their current religious affiliation differed from the one in which they were raised.

In the United States, that figure is 28 percent, meaning more than a quarter of Americans change religions at some point in their lives.

But this is a tricky question.

I started life as a Catholic, then I became a Protestant when I quit CCD and my parents switched churches (and thus religions) before I  eventually abandoned religion altogether.

But I never believed in any of it, even as a little boy. I wanted to believe, and I still do, but I didn’t and still can’t.

So did I switch religions, or was I simply being dragged into ornate buildings to listen to content I did not accept as truth?

My religious affiliation may have changed because my geography on Sunday changed, but when it comes to my actual spiritual beliefs, nothing ever changed.

So asking people if they have switched religions is tricky.

Did they change their belief?
Or did they modify their geography?

Does a Protestant who converts to Catholicism suddenly believe that the Pope is His Holiness, that priests should be celibate, and that the Holy Ghost suddenly exists?

Or does the geography change but the heart and mind essentially remain the same?

Does a Catholic who converts to Judaism suddenly switch Jesus from the Son of God to a really smart guy with some solid teaching? Or did the Catholic-turned-Jew doubt the whole Son of God thing from the beginning?

Switching religions — at least in some cases — can simply represent a change in where you sit on Sunday.

Or Saturday.

It does not necessarily determine what someone believes in their heart and mind.

Either way, it makes sense that more than a quarter of Americans have changed their religion in their lifetime. It’s incredibly presumptuous and fairly ridiculous to think of religion as something that parents can and should pass down to their children, absent any independent thought on the part of the child. Why would any human being be expected to share the same spiritual belief as their parents simply because the parents said so?

Indoctrination, of course.

Parents attempt to indoctrinate their children into their belief system, but it makes sense that it doesn’t always work.

Why would it? Charlie loves the Yankees, Celtics, and Patriots because I do, but if he moves to San Francisco and becomes a Giants fan later in life, I wouldn’t begrudge him for his shifting loyalty. I might be a little disappointed, but humans get to choose their own path, even if their authoritarian, dictatorial, self-serving parents think otherwise.

People get to choose what they believe.
Who they love.
What they admire.
How they feel.

As parents, we can make suggestions and hope our children might agree, but expecting or demanding it is hubris and authoritarianism.

If a pollster asked me, “Have you switched religions?” should my answer be yes or no?

Is religion a label and location, or is it a belief in your heart and mind?

I think the latter, but I suspect many, including those pollsters, believe the former.

Just a failure

Many things boggle my mind when it comes to Americans who voted for and support Donald Trump, but I’m sure many Americans (though far fewer, according to the latest polling data) think the same about my opposition to him and his administration.

But one of the most incomprehensible things is how often Trump has repeatedly and relentlessly failed to fulfill his promises, especially when they are completely within his power and he declares them with such certainty.

For example

He promised to build a wall and that Mexico would pay for it.

The wall was never completed, even though Republicans controlled both Houses of Congress for two whole years during this first administration, and Mexico never paid a dime.

More importantly, he never even attempted to extract payment from Mexico.

He also promised during his first campaign — many, many  times —  to never play golf while in office, criticizing President Obama for doing so.

Yet he has played more golf than any President ever — more than 300 days of golf during his presidency, costing taxpayers hundreds of millions in travel and security.

He has repeatedly promised — more than a dozen times — that his bigger, better replacement for the Affordable Care Act is just weeks away, but he has never produced that plan. He promises that it’s “almost ready” but has never produced a single thing.

He promised during his first campaign to release his tax returns, but he never did, breaking decades of precedent in the process. His returns were only released later via legal and congressional action.

He promised to eliminate the national debt in eight years. Instead, the national debt increased by nearly $7.8 trillion during his presidency — one of the largest increases under any President, thanks in large part to his 2017 tax cuts.

In the most recent campaign:

He promised to end the Russia-Ukraine War in a day, and later, a week. We are now months into the Presidency, and the war rages on.

Just last week, he said that his promise to end the war in a week was “an exaggeration.”

Also known as a lie.

He promised to lower prices on day one — literally thousands of times. In reality, inflation has increased since he took office, and with the tariffs, it will almost certainly rise further.

Even if you love what Trump has promised the American people, you must admit he doesn’t actually keep many of those promises.

He doesn’t even keep the simple, very doable ones, like not playing golf or releasing his taxes, and the ludicrous ones, like Mexico paying for the wall he never built.

No matter how you slice it, Trump is either lying to his voters or utterly incompetent in terms of achieving many of his goals.

First man in space. Sort of.

What I learned this week:

The first human object launched into space wasn’t Sputnik 1.

Sputnik 1 was the first human-made object intentionally launched into space.

But the first actual object?

A manhole cover was accidentally blown off a test shaft during a nuclear test in Nevada 38 days earlier. It reached speeds equal to six times Earth’s escape velocity and was never found. Scientists debate whether it reached space or vaporized in the atmosphere, but most agree that it almost certainly left the Earth’s atmosphere.

A manhole cover…

Somehow seems appropriate.

Puppets punched me in the face

While visiting the Museum of Moving Inages in Queens, New York last week, we spent time in an exhibit on Jim Henson, which included lots of Sesame Street and The Muppet show artifacts.

I grew up watching both shows, and they had a significant and positive impact on my life. They endlessly entertained me, but at the same time, they taught me so much.

I’m sad to think my kids will never know The Muppet Show like I did. Even if they watch the show on Disney Plus, where it’s currently available, so many of the jokes will fail to land, and many, if not most of the guest hosts, will mean nothing to them.

The show will still be funny in many ways and brilliant in structure and story, but guest stars like Gilda Radner, Linda Lavin, and Jonathan Winters won’t have the same cultural relevance for my kids as they did for me.

Happily, the museum had my two favorite Muppet Show characters, Stattler and Waldorf, and my favorite Sesame Street character, Cookie Mosnter.

Seeing those puppets brought so much nostalgia and joy to my heart. They made my childhood feel like it was just one inch away from the moment I was standing beside them.

A student in one of my Mastermind courses, who has been absorbing all things Matthew Dicks over the past two weeks, heard me talk about The Muppet Show lunch box I owned as a kid, and in the middle of one of our workshops, held up the exact lunchbox into the camera.

He had the same lunchbox while growing up and still owns it!

Then he opened it to reveal a yellow thermos emblazoned with Kermit, which I also owned and had forgotten about until that moment.

Nostalgia punched me in the face joyously and delightfully. I drank from that Thermos hundreds of times as a kid, and just like that, those moments were returned to me in force.

It’s always a wonderful feeling when the gap between adulthood and childhood is closed, even for the briefest moment, by standing beside puppets that meant everything to you as a kid or seeing a childhood artifact brought back to life, even on a laptop camera.

I highly recommend The Museum of Moving Images. It’s a great museum filled with television and movie nostalgia, fascinating behind-the-scenes information, and precious artifacts.

And somehow, because Elysha and I are teachers, our entrance fee for the four of us was just $20, making it the least expensive museum we’ve ever visited.

ChatGPT knows me

While speaking to entrepreneurs in Toronto last week, I met someone who told me that to explore his strengths and weaknesses for the goal of self-improvement, he asked ChatGPT to outline them.

I suspect that you need to be a somewhat public figure for this to work, but when I arrived home, I did the same, and ChatGPT didn’t disappoint.

Here was its response:

“Matthew Dicks’s greatest strength is probably his ability to find and craft extraordinary stories from ordinary life. Whether it’s losing his keys, screwing up at the post office, or having a weird encounter at CVS, he turns small, forgettable moments into funny, moving, unforgettable narratives. That ability—fueled by his “Homework for Life” practice—is not only a storytelling superpower, but also a tool he uses to teach thousands of others how to do the same. He is an ordinary guy and an award-winning teacher who entertains audiences wherever he goes and is in high demand by some of the world’s largest companies.”

Perhaps I’ll share that paragraph with my boss for inclusion in my year-end performance review.

But it was the description of my weaknesses that I found more interesting:

“As for his greatest weakness? It’s probably his inability to let things go—especially petty annoyances or injustices. He tends to pick fights (or at least want to), hold grudges against rude people, and spend too much time plotting imaginary revenge scenarios. It’s part of what makes his stories funny and relatable—but maybe not always the easiest trait to live with day to day. He is also a below-average golfer and seems to care little for the thoughts or opinions of others, especially authority figures.”

I didn’t think the “below-average golfer” was necessary — and perhaps a little cruel — but the rest was pretty spot-on.

Elysha took a different approach, asking ChatGPT to assess her strengths and weaknesses based on their history of interactions.

The results were equally extraordinary, so I did the same.

I won’t bore you with all the details, but like Elysha, it assessed me well based on the interaction we have had, listing my strengths and weaknesses into categories and explaining each one:

STRENGTHS

1. Clear Communicator
2. Iterative Thinker
3. Strategic & Business-Minded
4. Creative Yet Grounded
5. Audience Awareness

WEAKNESSES

1. Perfectionist Tendencies
2. Low Tolerance for Fluff
3. Relentless Curiosity (Borderline Obsessive)

But the last one says it best:

4. Blunt Ask Risk
Your directness is refreshing—but some might find it abrupt or intimidating, especially if they’re accustomed to softer social cues. You can be sharp, forceful, and perhaps too honest at times. (You probably don’t care, but still.)

“You probably don’t care, but still.”

Brilliant.

Yet, for all the information ChatGPT offered, it didn’t say anything I didn’t already know. It did a remarkable job of demonstrating its understanding of me, but it didn’t offer anything new or especially insightful.

As with most AI, it does an excellent job of using what already exists to answer your prompt in a synthesized and efficient way, but it cannot create something from whole cloth.

Only human beings can do this.

One thing is certain about the next Pope

The Pope, as you probably know, passed away on Monday.

I was born into the Catholic religion but left the church after my first CCD class — ironically, after learning about the existence of the Pope.

Even at a young age, I had a problem with authority.

Now the Catholic Church must choose a new leader for the 1.39 billion Catholics around the world, and it still astounds me that the only candidates eligible for this position are men.

Also, only men are allowed to participate in choosing the next Pope.

A bunch of men will choose a man to lead the church.

A church serving nearly 18% of the Earth’s population is still being operated by a sexist, patriarchal regime that forbids women from serving in leadership roles.

It’s crazy. Right?

Ancient and backward and wrong.

I’m no longer a Catholic — I probably never was a Catholic by the truest sense of the word — but as a human, this system of patriarchal leadership strikes me as deeply flawed, incredibly unjust, and undeniably immoral. It inherently implies that men are significantly better than women and that women are incapable of leading large institutions.

Many branches of Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism have eliminated their patriarchal leadership structures, so perhaps the Catholic Church will do the same someday, but when and if that day happens, it will be far too late in coming and will have denied unknowable numbers of women a rightful and perhaps necessary place leading the church.

It’s 2025. It’s crazy to think that women are still blocked from leadership positions in the largest church on the planet.

Right?

Awful and evil but also liars and cowards

The rights of transgender people, and in some cases, their physical safety, have eroded over the past few years, and today, legislators across America are beginning to enact Draconian laws designed to make the lives of transgender people more difficult.

It’s a damn tragedy.

This isn’t to say we can’t have disagreements over issues like transgender women in sports or the comfort level of people regarding transgender use of spaces like locker rooms. These are areas where differences of opinion are at least understandable, and work must be done to educate the public and reach compromise and consensus on these and other issues.

But the laws being imposed by some states are cruel, degrading, and evil.

Also stupid.

Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville said this on Sunday on Fox News:

“We have entire men’s teams across this country now that are turning trans. Women’s teams, they’re turning trans.”

This is, of course, a lie. Nothing of the kind is happening, but Tuberville knows that Fox News viewers have drunk the Kool-Aid and will believe anything they hear.

The show’s host replied, “That’s right,” because she is not a journalist but a propagandist.

Tuberville continued:

“That’s going to be a situation where it’s going to pick up speed because these woke globalists are pushing these kids to say if you can’t compete in men’s sports, let’s just transition and say you’re a woman and participate in women’s sports.”

None of this is happening or will happen, but politicians like Tuberville speak with impunity because they avoid networks and journalists who will question their lies.

Most of the commentary around transgender issues is uninformed and deliberately deceptive.

When Trump, for example, issues an Executive Order declaring that the United States only recognizes two genders, he fails to acknowledge (or perhaps even realize) that not every human being possesses an XX or XY chromosome.

Some humans have XYY, XXX, or XYY chromosomes or a single X chromosome. Each of these chromosomal differences produces different physical characteristics in a person.

There is also:

Mosaicism, wherein a person can possess characteristics of more than one sex.Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, wherein a person appears female externally but also has internal testes.Alpha-Reductase Deficiency, wherein a person is born with female-appearing genitals but may develop more male traits during puberty.

Others, too.

Biologically speaking, the idea that everyone is a man or woman is simply, objectively, and scientifically wrong, and this doesn’t even address the differences in how a person’s brain perceives their own gender and whether that perception matches the reality of their body.

Many people don’t like to hear about this kind of fact-based science because it pushes against their simple, convenient black-and-white world. As a result, legislation is being passed to strip legal protections from transgender people, and they live under constant threats to their physical safety.

It’s all hideous and disastrous.

But I think it’s always important to remember this:

The people who threaten the safety of transgender people or denigrate them based solely on their gender are afraid.

They are small, frightened, frail people.

They see difference as a threat and change as an impediment to their understanding and management of the world. Their capacity to see beyond black and white is limited, so they become unsettled and afraid when the world seems confusing to them.

This doesn’t make them right or just. They are still soulless monsters.

But it also makes them cowards.

Or in the case of Tommy Tuberville and his Fox News propagandists, liars and cowards.

Kids rule the cereal roost

A new study examined all breakfast cereals purchased by 77,000 U.S. households over a nine-year period and tracked them against Nielsen ratings data for all ads seen in the same households during the same time period.

It found that advertising to adults yielded no positive returns in terms of ad dollars, but advertising to kids was strongly correlated to how much sugary cereal a household with children bought.

Fruity Pebbles commercials during the latest late-night crime drama?

Useless.

Those same commercials during the latest episode of Paw Patrol or SpongeBob SquarePants?

Bingo.

The problem?

Kids are apparently making the majority of purchasing decisions when it comes to cereal, and their choices often suck.

Just nine advertised cereals — all of which had between 9 and 12 grams of sugar per serving — account for 41 percent of total household cereal consumption.

So parents are buying a lot of sugar pretending to be a breakfast food because the kids see commercials for that cereal on TV and demand it.

The lesson here:

Don’t let your children tell you what cereal to purchase.Don’t purchase sugar masquerading as cereal.If you’re going to purchase a sugary cereal, make it a treat. Not a staple.Don’t be afraid to say no to your children.

That last lesson is more than a cereal lesson. It’s a life lesson. Perhaps one of the most important things you can ever do for your child.

But as a teacher, when it comes to cereal, I’m begging you:

Send your child to school with a healthy breakfast in their belly.

Not a belly full of colored sugar.

Fidget spinners hurt learning

This will come as a shock:

Fidget spinners and their fidgety brethren don’t work.

Actually, it’s worse than that. Research indicates that they are detrimental to learning.

In a recent study, subjects watched educational videos while either using a fidget spinner or not. Using a fidget spinner was associated with increased attentional lapses and impaired performance on a memory test covering the material from the video.

Students with a fidget spinner didn’t learn as well and were distracted while learning.

The adverse effect on learning was observed even when the sample was limited to participants who came into the study with neutral or positive views on using fidget spinners.

Even people who think fidget spinners are helping them are being hurt by them.

While the same may not be true with students with ADHD, the research on these students isn’t exactly robust and is mixed at best, with some studies indicating that students with ADHD experience even more significant adverse effects from using them.

Gosh!

Who would have thought that allowing children to play with small toys while they attempt to learn might have an adverse impact on learning?

Many teachers, I think.

Maybe even most teachers.

This one for sure.

Thankfully, the fidget spinner fad seems to be fading. I banned their use in my classroom a long time ago, but it hasn’t been an issue in recent years. I see them infrequently, and when I do, they are put into lockers and backpacks with few protestations.

Perhaps this isn’t the case in all places, but hopefully so, since the damn things seemed to harm student learning and annoyed the hell out of most teachers.