Tommy Collison's Blog, page 7

Moved In

Hi all -- quick update today since NYU's Welcome Week started today. My schedule's pretty full between faculty meetings and general events for students. This morning, we had freshman convocation, which is apparently one of two times in my college career that my freshman class of some 1,400 students will ever be in one building together. (The other being graduation.) This afternoon, the Presidential Welcome takes place. 

I moved in yesterday without great fanfare. Everyone on the staff side of things tells me that everyone remembers their first move-in day. It was long and tiring, with far more stairs than I would've like, but I had a great time and I really like my room- and floor-mates. 

One of my favorite parts of NYU so far is how closely the college is connected to Greenwich Village around it. As I walked through the park to my seminar this morning, I shared it with joggers, musicians, and miscellaneous NY denizens. Right now, I'm in a Starbucks on West 4th Street writing this, sharing the café with patrons who, by and large, have no affiliation with NYU.

(That said, the café as an institution has an affiliation with the university, in that I paid for my coffee using my NYU identification/dining card, reducing the need for me to carry cash.)

Part of NYU's attempts to build a freshman community is creating a 'cohort' hosted by an NYU sophomore (second-year student, for any across-the-pond readers). Earlier, he remarked that he felt NYU students grew up and became adults sooner than students who might be on a traditional quad campus in the middle of the country because of its proximity to NYC. With such close ties to the Greenwich and West Villages, it's hard not to agree with him. 'A college of the city' indeed.

Just two photos for you this time, but more to come: 

 

 

Perhaps it's the pop-culture I grew up with, but water towers seem to be such an iconic NYC image. I snapped this on E 10th St. the morning I moved into my dorm.

My parents and I on move-in day.

Dorm

Got to have a look round my dorm today -- here's what it looks like from the outside, and then the view from the window, which overlooks 10th street. Photo of Tommy ensconced in his dorm is incoming.

Rubin Hall, on the corner of 5th Avenue and 10th Street. 

The view from the dorm. 

Forgotten Traditions

Via NYU Local: 

According to legend, if a student walked under the Washington Arch during his four years at NYU, he would not graduate. We’ve only walked under the Arch twice due to blind belief in this nonsensical superstition. Similar superstitions exist at other schools; at Princeton, students who walk through the FitzRandolph gate are believed to be cursed to never graduate. 

Washington Square Park arch.

Given the track record of Collison siblings finishing college, I probably shouldn't tempt fate...

 

Well, I Know Where I'm Gonna Be Next Tuesday...

Spotted this evening near the corner of Mott and Spring St: 

 

I mean, the location manager's name is Tommy; they've got to let me play a bystander.

New York City, Day 1

I'm sitting on my bed here, a little tired after my first day of walking around New York. I can imagine that my walking endurance is going to shoot through the roof now that I'm living in Greenwich Village. Everything is 'just a walk away', but there's so much 'everything' to see/do/experience/visit, so I'm doing a lot more walking than I would've done in Ireland. More walking will strengthen my muscles though, especially when you add in strengthening at the gym and stretching with a physio, I should be in pretty good shape after a couple of weeks. 

We (my parents and I; they're helping me get settled and moved in) arrived in New York yesterday. Getting into lower Manhattan from JFK is a lot longer than coming from Newark, also necessitating the need to change subways during the trip. Having said that, you get off the subway at the Bowery (closest to where we're staying this trip), which is closer to Greenwich Village than Grand Central Station (where the train from Newark lets you off).  

Today comprised of getting all the boring details out of the way. Yesterday, I got a phone and sim set up [1] and this morning opened a bank account, got toiletries [2] and my NYU ID card, which I need to show whenever I go into an NYU-operated building. 

I had a super productive morning since jet-lag woke me at 6.30am), and in the afternoon met with one of NYU's medical staff to discuss whatever help I might need over the next few years on account of my cerebral palsy. I have a meetings with the disability center and one of the health center nurses in the next week or two, so I'm pretty confident whatever CP-related issues arise, they'll be looked after well.

Classes don't start until September 3, the day after Labor Day (still getting used to the American calendar system), so I've got around 10 days to orientate myself with Greenwich Village and college life in general. I'm in one of the NYU dorms in lower Manhattan, so I'm lucky to have fantastic access to services and transport in the area. I move in tomorrow; I'll be sure to let you how it goes.  

* 

 [1] AT&T pay-as-you-go -- called GoPhone. It costs $60 a month but I have unlimited SMSs and calls, and 2 GBs of data. The fact that it's prepay as opposed to contract is a major bonus.

 [2] Managed to move to college with just hand luggage -- handy for expedited airport travel but couldn't bring liquids.

 * 

Some photos:

 

Broadway -- parts of NYU are actually on Broadway, and it's a heady experience to wander around and absorb the culture.

Think Coffee on 3rd and Mercer is by far the best café I've discovered in the NYU area (in the wider vicinity of West Village, Café Minerva gets an honorable mention). It's somewhat famous in NYC start-up/tech circles as where many of the ideas behind Foursquare (including the mayorship concept) were conceived.

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This is the view of Greenwich Village and Midtown, taken from the top (10th) floor of the NYU Kimmel Student Center. That's Washington Square Park in the foreground and the Empire State Building in the background. It's so strange to think of this park and this view as "home" for the next four years, but it's an insanely exciting prospect all the same.

Probably my favorite NYU building: Bobst Library. I can envisage myself spending a lot of time here.

Out West

“For west is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar’s gold in them-thar hills. ... It is just where you go.”

In 1946, Robert Penn Warren wrote those words in All the King's Men.  I've heard such occidental sentiments echoed from John Green to Anthony Rapp, and the quote's been playing on my mind a good bit over the last couple days. 

On Thursday, I'm moving to New York City to study journalism at New York University's college of arts and sciences. I can't wait to share the experience with you here.

"Talented Youth"

I wrote this in June 2011, having attended the CTYI three-week summer course in July 2010. Having edited it for clarity of purpose, I'm reposting it here on 42409 in response to TheJournal.ie's article which reiterated the claim that CTYI attendees are "in the top 5 per cent academically in the country", a claim which I believe does more harm than good.

This is a blogpost that’s been bouncing around my head for months. I don’t know what prompted me to write it now, but here I am. It’s a blogpost regarding the Centre for Talented Youth of Ireland (CTYI), a summer course for “talented youth” in DCU each summer, and also “talented youth” in general. What I’ve got to say about it is not always positive, and it’s possible I may offend some people. I’m prepared to write the post anyway.

To start, I attended the “Centre for Talented Youth” in July last year. To be allowed into CTYI, there is an aptitude test that you have to pass. It’s a three week residential course in DCU, with a choice of doing a number of different courses such as Medicine, Journalism and so on. I did Journalism and found it to be an excellent experience. Most of what I know of Journalism today, I owe to Andrew Payne, the class teacher. There’s a blogpost I wrote last year discussing my CTYI experience here.

What do I dislike about CTYI? The set-up. If I had a cent for every time I’d heard or seen someone say that CTYI is where they’re ‘truly understood’, I’d have several Euro. I’m not saying that being understood is a bad thing (quite the opposite) but it shouldn’t be the case that you’re not ‘understood’ at home. “Being around my own kind” is another one I’ve heard a lot, and this one’s worse.

People are setting up these gifted kids as being hugely different to other people, when they shouldn’t be. I mean, if you give them 3 weeks together and tell them that they’re only here because they’re in the top 5% of those who took the aptitude test (dogma I heard repeated a lot), they’re going to develop an attitude that it’s not in our interest for them to develop. Who’s “our”? I’m talking about Ireland as a whole. We’ve got a lot of smart kids here, but we’re doing them (and us) no favors with our current gifted kids program. There’s a fair amount of arrogance at CTYI. Its sister program (CAT – Centre for Academic Talent) started last year and it wasn’t long before those in the CAT program were being given a hard time. Labels like “not really gifted” and “CAT? Centre for Almost Talented!” started being thrown around.

The main point of this post is for me to express my dislike of those who use the term “gifted kids” or “talented youth”. I got into CTYI, but I don’t for a second consider myself gifted. I’ve found out what I want to do in life and I’m motivated to achieve that by working hard, that’s all.

We’re not doing these kids any favors by instilling (some would even say “encouraging”) these kids to think that they’re different from others.

Being smart isn’t the problem here, it’s what we’re doing to these kids by giving them this label. Most of the people I met at CTYI were fiercely intelligent, but something was amiss. These were people who had been told they were something special and had taken it to their head.

So, teachers, parents, educators: By all means encourage your child to read more challenging books or get extra work from their teacher if they find the pace of the class too slow, but don’t put these kids up on a pedestal. It is doing them absolutely no favors.

I hope that I’ve made people think with this post. Comments are more than welcome below. I welcome a hearty debate, but if it starts getting abusive, I will start deleting your comments.

 Author's Note:  Original comments on this essay can be found at this link.

Summer Updates

Considering we're almost into August, I thought I might post some Tommy's-Life updates.  I tend to do these in bullet-point form to make separate thoughts clearer. 

If you follow me on Twitter, you probably know that I did the Leaving Cert., the Irish second-level graduation/college entry exams, in June. Along with the SATs (the American college entry exams), the Leaving Cert. was required by American colleges when they consider you for admission. Touch wood, I'll be starting at New York University in September, most likely studying "journalism and something else". NYU has a rule that journalism majors must complete a second major, and I haven't yet decided what that second major will be. I'm leaning towards economics, which I loved in secondary school, or politics, which I'd have a huge interest in. Luckily, the American college system is quite general in these respects; I don't have to declare any major until the end of my second year. As always, you can keep up with what I'm reading via my reading log. I really, really enjoyed Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. It's currently $1.52 on the Amazon Kindle store, so I recommend you check it out.I'm moving out of my parent's house in a little over three weeks, which is an exciting and daunting prospect. Both of my parents are fairly technologically literate, so I'm happy that we'll still be in contact when I'm over in New York. It's nice that I'm doing as my older brothers did (going to college in the USA) in that I know what to expect, and have people to go to for advice. On the subject of moving to the USA, I'll be keeping up this blog, Collision Course, alive and updated when I'm over there. I'm envisaging a sort of Irishman's diary-type thing; news and updates and such from the perspective of an Irishman living in 2013 New York City. Expect pictures. 

Trying to be Both

I wrote a tweet on Tuesday night about theJournal.ie, and I thought it deserved some clarification. 

The tweet in question: 

I think Ireland needs & benefits from TheJournal, but it's hampered by being equal parts respected news site & Buzzfeed. Should pick a side.

— Tommy Collison (@tommycollison) July 23, 2013

The Journal started in 2010 with Jennifer O'Connell as editor. I remember being in hospital in the USA when I first read about it. I remember my sense of excitement -- here, at last, was a news organization which would 'get' the internet. I'd followed the likes of Gawker and the Huffington Post for several years, and I'd become disappointed with their seemingly endless soft journalism -- list posts and gossip columns designed to drag eyeballs in and push page-views up. 

I hoped that The Journal wouldn't go down that route -- especially since (and I admired them for this) they seemed to be aggressively presenting themselves as a hard news site that deserved to be taken as seriously as the other established players in the Irish media sphere. 

In short, they seemed to be letting content drive page-views and not the other way around.

Recently, though, I've found fewer hard-hitting journalism pieces and more of what I can only describe as 'fluff pieces' -- taking a look at the their main site, my attention is drawn to "Chocolate bars: A definitive ranking, from worst to best". On the night I sent my tweet, the two articles that prompted me were "11 Most Awkward Social Situations" being right beside (and given equal precedence to) "Irish prison system ‘over-reliant’ on prolonged solitary confinement".

What I take issue with when it comes to The Journal, and this comes back to what I said in my tweet, is that it wants to have its fingers in two pies -- it wants to be able to write the fluff pieces about ice-cream and the royal baby, but it also wants to be taken seriously the hard-hitting journalism site.

Who's to say they can't be both kinds of site simultaneously? No-one, but I believe trying to be both is hindering their attempts to be either.

 

Citing Scripture

An opinion piece in today's Irish Times carries the headline "Science must not be twisted to serve religion" (Opinion and Analysis, Page 14) [1]. In it, David Robert Grimes, described at the end of the article as a "physicist and researcher at Oxford University", decries the misuse and misrepresentation of research in order "to lend credibility to discriminatory views". 

In what's arguably a pro-abortion and pro-same sex marriage piece, he talks about how religion can't be allowed to "obstruct a democratic mandate". All very well and good; that's a tenable position.

However, he goes on to write about how 'The American Psychological Association [APA] states "… the evidence to date suggests that home environments provided by lesbian and gay parents are as likely as those provided by heterosexual parents to support and enable children’s psychosocial growth”.'

I take issue with this line, especially in the context of an article lambasting those who cite scripture (or, in this case, research) for their own purposes. 

As far as I can tell, he doesn't mention a specific study done by the APA. All I can find after some researching of my own is that the APA's policy statement page reiterates studies showing that "results of research suggest that lesbian and gay parents are as likely as heterosexual parents to provide supportive and healthy environments for their children". [2]

Nowhere in the piece does Grimes mention that APA studies regarding same-sex parenting have come under significant criticism. On FamilyScholars.com, David Lapp writes: [3]

"Marks’ contention is that the American Pyschological Association prematurely and inaccurately concluded in its 2005 brief  on lesbian and gay parenting that “Not a single study has found children of lesbian or gay parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents.”

Examining the 59 published studies that the APA relied on to make its conclusion, Marks finds the following.

1. “More than three-fourths (77 percent) of the studies cited by the APA are based on small, non-representative, convenience samples of fewer than 100 participants.” Further, many of these studies were racially homogenous, focusing on white gay couples. Furthermore, only eight of the 59 published studies focused specifically on outcomes of children from gay fathers. Of those eight, four did not include a heterosexual comparison group. Of the four that did include heterosexual comparison groups, one of them relied on a heterosexual comparison group of two single fathers.

…

4. Contrary to the APA’s assertion that “Not a single study has found children of lesbian or gay parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents” — there was at least one notable exception: Sarantakos’s 1996 study. That study had a sample size of 174, the seventh-largest sample size of the 59 published studies listed by the APA. However, the other six with larger sample sizes relied on adult self-report studies, whereas Sarantakos’s study specifically examined children’s developmental outcomes, making it the largest study to specifically study children’s developmental outcomes. What did Sarantakos find? “Overall, the study has shown that children of married couples are more likely to do well at school in academic and social terms, than children of cohabiting and homosexual couples.” Why did the APA not take this study into consideration, particularly if it had the largest sample size that specifically addresses children’s developmental outcomes? They dismissed it because (a) the Sarantakos study was based, in part, on “subjective reports by teachers” (which is inferior to subjective reports by  parents, as is frequently done in the same-sex parenting literature upon which the APA relied?), even though, as Marks points out, some of the assessment was based on “tests” and “normal school asssessments”; (b) the APA concluded that “[Children in Australia, journal where the article was published] cannot be considered a source upon which one should rely for understanding the state of scientific knowledge in this field, particularly when the results contradict those that have been repeatedly replicated in studies published in better known scientific journals.”"

In an article lambasting those who misrepresent research to further their own point of view, I find it somewhat inexcusable for the author not to mention that most of the APA studies his arguments lean on have sample sizes too small to draw meaningful conclusions from, among other shortcomings.

[1] http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/religion-and-beliefs/strong-religious-convictions-are-no-excuse-for-misrepresenting-research-1.1442395

[2] http://www.apa.org/about/policy/parenting.aspx

[3] http://familyscholars.org/2012/06/12/loren-marks-how-the-apa-got-it-wrong/