Plain Vanilla

This week, we explore how keeping it simple can be effective, what happens when you don't beat the buzzer, how a 1990s song got a remix before becoming a hit on its own, and some other things.

Apr 03, 2020

Welcome back, friends. As always, I hope you are well. Keep washing your hands. Stay safe, stay home. So let's get to it, shall we?

Back to Basics

In what is shaping up to be the oddest school year of my career, it began with some good news. I was informed in mid-August that I had been selected as the Annette and Jim McConnell Michigan High School History Teacher of the Year. It was a tremendous honor, one that was something I do not think I could have seen happening a decade ago, but one that was very gratifying to receive. As part of the ceremony where I was honored, I was asked to present a sample lesson. It was during that presentation, to a room of well, maybe 20 people, that I presented the extended version of The Vanilla Ice Cream theory. If everyone subscribed to The Barchive reads this, I will have tripled the live reach of this speech. So, in as much as that is the case, please indulge me in the Vanilla Ice Cream Theory.

People tend to think of vanilla ice cream as boring. After all, there's an entry in Wikipedia for "plain vanilla" that states "Plain vanilla is an adjective describing the simplest version of something, without any optional extras, basic or ordinary. In analogy with the common ice cream flavor vanilla, which became widely and cheaply available with the development of artificial vanillin flavor."

It is my belief, however, that vanilla ice cream is actually extraordinary.

What makes vanilla ice cream extraordinary is how good it can be even when it's mediocre. It pairs well with almost everything dessert-y you'd want to eat (especially chocolate) and while no one is necessarily thrilled with an offer of vanilla ice cream, few people are turning up their noses at it.

BUT

When vanilla ice cream is well-executed like the ingredients are high quality, there is care put into the making and churning, it's the right temperature to eat without being too hard or too soft, it can be a transcendent experience. (It is at this point I will acknowledge that I have watched more Food Network than I care to admit. My 9-year-old son loves it.) My friends in the food science industry have told me that in the industry, you’re judged on how well do the basics. It makes sense.

In life, sometimes it's not about being the most innovative or the most creative, it can simply be about doing the thing that needs to be done extraordinarily well.

So if you're not a Triple Fudge Brownie or Maple Bacon creative type, aiming to be the best vanilla possible is not the worst play in the world. People like vanilla.

In my years of teaching, I have discovered that I am not a super creative teacher. I am a great implementer of other people's creativity, tweaking things to make them work better in my classroom but I genuinely struggle to make something "creative." This may be because I am, in my heart, a logistical person. I have a knack for seeing what can or will go wrong and it tends to shut down my creative process.

But they say that necessity is the mother of invention. So, when one has lost several days of school to inclement weather, power failures, and a room flooding that could best be described as “ill-timed” (then again, when would a room flooding be well-timed?), and you have essentially one day to teach 1980-present. I mean, it's not like a lot happened during that time period or anything, even if it is only 5% of the AP exam and even if some of the history of this time period is not yet settled law, so to speak. Needing a solution, I went back to basics and my quarter-century of involvement with quiz bowl.

It has become fashionable in recent years to bash history education that focuses on factual recall. The key to that criticism should be "exclusively" on factual recall. Students need to be critical thinkers, able to examine primary documents, understand multiple narratives and counterpoint, and see the larger vistas of previously underrepresented peoples and their stories and challenges. That is when history education is at its best. But the fuel that makes that engine go is factual knowledge; factual knowledge that makes connections to other facts. Quiz bowl showed me over 25 years that knowing things is great, but it's when you know how facts connect to other facts, you actually have a better understanding of things. This especially becomes true with bonus questions, where your team is answering three questions on a related theme. When you can make connections within that limited scope of information, you have a better shot of scoring points.

It was with this knowledge that I built "The Go List." The Go List was named for the premise I learned in college that United States Marines have, at all times, a bag packed, and can be ready to be anywhere in the world in 24 hours. I have since learned that it's more about being prepared for any emergency situation that one could face in the field, but the premise is the same: you should be ready with the essentials, something that admittedly requires a little planning and foresight on your part. So, I took from a discussion of the "need to know" terms from the College Board's Course Description for AP U.S. History a list of the 45 words that were specifically mentioned. I then took pains to personally write three to four line definitions of each term. This was not because I did not trust my students to handle this portion of it, I know they could do it. It was because I had limited time to achieve my goal and wanted all of us to be working out the same playbook so we could spend more time on the important part, the making connections, than the definitions.

So this is where I share the Go List with you. I wasn't sure what resources I would have available, but I trusted you might have a mobile device, so I put them in a Google Folder.

We got the class together, I divvied them into groups of four and asked them to mark up the front page list (which had the original list of terms) by making connections between terms. Multiple terms could be connected and I suggested using multiple colors to make it easier to see multiple different connections (my students love of Papermate Flair Tip pens made this a very small hurdle.) I also thought they would do well to practice their chronological sequencing and reasoning by marking each term as to which Presidential administration it best fit into, an R for Reagan, a B for Bush 41, a C for Clinton, a W for Bush 43, and an O for Obama (and now a T for Trump as appropriate.)

One of my favorite things about the process of having students make connections is that the list lends itself to obvious connections, especially with the definitions they are working from. Yes, you should probably connect Gorbachev to glasnost and perestroika, as well as to the Fall of Communism/Berlin Wall. You might even be able to make a second level argument for the Strategic Defense Initiative. The key to the who exercise is in making meaningful connections. It's not just that the definitions told you that they were related, good on you for seeing that. Why are they connected? Why does this matter?

It is not inconceivable in my mind that you could easily have a list of over 7,500 words that would qualify in a "first cut" of consideration for being included in a College Board course expectations for United States history. As you winnow that list down to something closer to 750 or so, cutting nine terms for every one you keep, one of the core questions you would need to be able to answer would be "Why?" Why this word and not that one? Why is this important enough that it would need to be a part of a survey-level examination of United States History? One of the criteria that some baseball writers use in Hall of Fame voting is "Can you tell the story of baseball without this player?" In our case, can you tell the story of America without this term? More than likely you can, but it would be incomplete, all stories at the survey level are. But are you telling a fully considered survey version? The “why” helps us make these connections. If you can explain the why of why you chose it, you can see how it connects to other parts of the narrative.

Connections matter. Connections not only help students remember the information. Connections help students build compelling narratives when writing essays. They take the realm of facts and make them meaningful. But connection making takes time, energy, and conversation. It is not something that simply just happens because you want it to happen. But if you take the time to make it happen, you can get some of the best results you could hope for. Thank you.

The Magic that Faltered

Consider college basketball. Consider a single season. KenPom tells me that there were 5,768 Division I men’s games played this (abbreviated year). So let’s say roughly 6,000 Division I men’s games. I wonder how many of those games come down to one possession? Like how many games come down to a team has a shot to win or tie in the final 10 seconds. I asked Ken via Twitter if there was a way to look for this in his data. He politely informed me that he did not, which is fine.

But I was trying to consider all of the buzzer-beaters that missed. The most famous one is probably Butler’s Gordon Hayward’s half-court shot that hit backboard and rim in the 2010 National Title game against Duke. (SB Nation has a nice rewind on it.) So often we don’t remember the shots that missed because they didn’t change the outcome. It’s not the way it works. We remember the buzzer-beaters because they snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, but also because there are a number of times where it doesn’t happen. We don’t necessarily remember the shots that missed as much as we know they are part of the collective tapestry of watching sports that makes buzzer-beaters more interesting.

Solid State Radio (forty-five)

Today's 90s music selection came from a moment of Mandela Effect. I was in Kroger, listening to the InStore Audio Network, and the song that began playing was "Brimful of Asha" by Cornershop, the second track and lead single from the band's 1997 album When I Was Born for the 7th Time. Except it wasn’t the version I remembered. It was in a different key and faster. It was this.

This is not the song I remembered. This is not the song in my iTunes! My MP3 version is the one:

So, wait. What happened here? How did a remix become the preferred version that would make the soundtrack of grocery store shopping? Well, it turns out, I came at this backwards.

See, the original version of “Brimful of Asha”, a tribute to Indian film, only hit #60 on the British singles chart, then Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim, remixed it. That remix became a hit, and then the original version was re-released and went to #1 on the British charts and #16 on the Billboard Alternative Chart.

The original shows up in a Season 4 episode of Friends - “The One With the Fake Party” alongside “Sixth Avenue Heartache” and “The Impression That I Get”.

Three things I learned in my Wikiwalk:

Since their beginnings, Indian films have relied heavily on song-and-dance numbers. The singing is almost always performed by background singers while the actors and actresses lip-sync. (The titular) Asha Bhosle is a playback singer who has sung over 12,000 songs and is referred to as "Sadi rani" (Punjabi for "our queen") at one point in the lyrics.
NME ranked the remix at number 2 in their list of "The 50 Best Remixes Ever", saying it "does what the truly great remixes do – render you unable to enjoy the original" (Politely disagree.)
The remix by speeds up the track and modulates the song into a higher key (halfway between B-flat and B, rather than in A).

So somewhere I missed out on the remix until a random encounter with it at Kroger during a pandemic. The spirit of the 90s never died. It’s just been socially distanced from us.

Barker Randomness

I probably picked a bad time to start a newsletter that was built around me musing on teaching and sports. Thank goodness I didn’t commit to more than one edition a week.

Thank you.