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What We Are Not Teaching Boys About Being Human

August 25, 2021 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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By Ruth Whippman New York Times August 6th 2021

Ms. Whippman, the author of “America the Anxious,” is writing a book about raising boys.

A while back, at the bookstore with my three sons, I started flicking through a kids’ magazine that had the kind of hyper-pink sparkly cover that screams: “Boys! Even glancing in this direction will threaten your masculinity!”

In between the friendship-bracelet tutorials and the “What Type of Hamster Are You, Really?” quizzes, the magazine featured a story about a ’tween girl who had been invited to two birthday parties scheduled for the same time. Not wanting to disappoint either friend, she came up with an elaborate scheme to shuttle, unnoticed, between the parties, joining in the games at one before racing off to arrive just in time for the same games at the other, then repeating the sprint for cake at each house and so on. This was a tale of high-stakes emotional labor and I related to it strongly — if not the actual scenario itself, then at least the nerve-frazzling, people-pleasing compulsions driving it.

This birthday party stressfest is a pretty standard-issue story for female childhood. The girls in my sons’ classes will likely have read or watched hundreds like it — stories framed around people, their friendships, relationships and emotions, their internal dramas and the competing emotional needs of others. These were my stories as a young girl, too — the movies and TV shows I watched, the books and comics I read, the narratives I internalized about what was important.

But reading the magazine now, as the mother of three boys, this type of people-driven story felt oddly alien. I realized that, despite my liberal vanities about raising my sons in a relatively gender-neutral way, they had most likely never read a story like this, let alone experienced a similar situation in real life. It turns out that there is a bizarre absence of fully realized human beings in my sons’ fictional worlds.

As male toddlers, they were quickly funneled into a vehicle-only narrative reality. Apparently, preschool masculinity norms stipulate that human dilemmas may be explored through the emotional lives of only bulldozers, fire trucks, busy backhoes and the occasional stegosaurus.

As they aged out of the digger demographic, they transitioned seamlessly into one dominated by battles, fighting, heroes, villains and a whole lot of “saving the day.” Now, they are 10, 7 and 3, and virtually every story they read, TV show they watch or video game they play is essentially a story with two men (or male-identifying nonhuman creatures) pitted against each other in some form of combat, which inevitably ends with one crowned a hero and the other brutally defeated. This narrative world contains almost zero emotional complexity — no interiority, no negotiating or nurturing or friendship dilemmas or internal conflict. None of the mess of being a real human in constant relationship with other humans.

An exception to the “no real humans” rule: The small subgenre of realistic fiction aimed at elementary and middle schoolboys is actually wildly popular. Jeff Kinney’s beloved “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series, for example, has sold more than 250 million copies while the middle school graphic novel series “Big Nate” has sold over 20 million. My sons and their friends gobble up these books, hungry for something that reflects their own lives. They gain a lot from them too — a jumping off point to think about their own real-world challenges and relationships, and a way to open up discussions about the emotional dilemmas they face.

But the main characters in this genre tend to be slightly depressing antiheroes, middle school nihilists who are almost defiantly mediocre. Their driving narrative motivation is often a kind of contempt — for school, teachers, annoying siblings and nagging parents. This background sense of grievance can sometimes be casually misogynistic, in the “stupid, dumb girls” vein. Although later examples of these books have dialed this back, if we follow these characters’ trajectory of resentment and self-loathing to its most extreme conclusion, it’s not a huge stretch to imagine one of them in 10 years’ time, trolling feminists online from his parents’ basement.

The lack of positive people-focused stories for boys has consequences both for them and girls. In the narratives they consume, as well as the broader cultural landscape in which they operate, girls get a huge head start on relational skills, in the day-to-day thorniness and complexity of emotional life. Story by story, girls are getting the message that other people’s feelings are their concern and their responsibility. Boys are learning that these things have nothing to do with them.More on boys, men and culture

We have barely even registered this lack of an emotional and relational education as a worrying loss for boys. We tend to dismiss and trivialize teenage girls’ preoccupation with the intricacies of relationships as “girl-drama.” But as Niobe Way, a professor of psychology at New York University and the author of “Deep Secrets, Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection,” says, “When we devalue things associated with femininity — such as emotions and relationships — boys miss out.”

The imbalance doesn’t just put exhausting pressure on girls and women to bear the social and emotional load of life — to remember the birthdays and wipe the tears and understand that Grandma’s increasingly aggressive eyebrow twitch means that she needs to be separated from Aunt Susan — it harms boys and men, too. They are missing out on internalizing concepts and learning skills crucial to a connected, moral, psychologically healthy life.

Probably because of this difference in socialization, boys score lower than girls of the same age on virtually all measures of empathy and social skills, a gap that grows throughout childhood and adolescence. This has implications across the board. Among first graders, social emotional ability, including the skills to form and maintain friendships, is a greater predictor of academic success than either family background or cognitive skills. Boys are now lagging behind girls academically at every grade level through college, so providing them with a more nuanced and people-focused emotional world — in what they read and watch, and in the conversations we have with them — might go some way toward closing that gap.

The impact on boys’ mental health is also likely to be significant. From a young age, girls’ friendships tend to be more intimate, deeper and more emotionally focused, providing a support structure that is often sorely lacking for boys. According to the American Psychological Association, this lack of support, and the masculinity norms that underpin it, can contribute to a range of serious mental health problems. Adolescent boys are also at almost twice the risk for death by suicide as girls — so this is an urgent problem.

We talk about toxic masculinity as an extreme scenario — the #metoo monster, the school shooter — but it is more like a spectrum. We have normalized a kind of workaday sub-toxic masculinity, which is as much about what we don’t expose boys to as what we do.

The stories we tell become our emotional blueprints, what we come to expect of ourselves and others and how we engage with our lives. And in the vast majority of situations we are likely to encounter in the course of a lifetime, there is no hero or villain, no death and no glory, but rather just a bunch of needy humans kvetching over who said what. Understanding how to navigate that with grace and skill is the beating heart of human connection.

So let’s work toward a brave new world, in which a boy can proudly shuttle between two birthday parties, sweating with compulsive people-pleasing. Let’s give boys some girl drama, teach them the dark arts of emotional labor and likability. We might all be healthier for it.

Ruth Whippman, the author of “America the Anxious,” is writing a book about raising boys in the age of #metoo, misogyny and male rage.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 9, 2021, Section A, Page 17 of the New York edition with the headline: Let’s Teach Boys the Art of Emotional Labor. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | SubscribeREAD 1548 COMMENTS

The School Kids Are Not Alright

August 25, 2021 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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By The Editorial Board New York Times August 22nd 2021 page 7

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

One of the most distressing aspects of the Covid pandemic has been seeing governors and state education officials abdicate responsibility for managing the worst disruption of public schooling in modern history and leaving the heavy lifting to the localities. Virtually every school in the nation closed in March 2020, replacing face-to-face schooling with thrown-together online education or programs that used a disruptive scheduling process to combine the two. Only a small portion of the student body returned to fully opened schools the following fall. The resulting learning setbacks range from grave for all groups of students to catastrophic for poor children.

From the start, elected officials seemed more concerned about reopening bars and restaurants than safely reopening schools that hold the futures of more than 50 million children in their hands. Failed leadership continues to be painfully evident as the states enter yet another pandemic school year without enforcing common-sense public health policies that would make a much-needed return to in-person schooling as safe as possible. These policy failures are compounding at a time when the highly infectious Delta variant is surging and the coronavirus seems likely to become a permanent feature of life.

Consider a new state-by-state analysis of reopening policies by the nonprofit Center on Reinventing Public Education. The analysis shows that many states have urged localities to return to in-person schooling while promoting policies that conflict with the goal of educating young people in safety. For example, as of this month, nearly one-fourth of the states had banned Covid-19 vaccination requirements, hamstringing localities that want to prioritize student safety. As of early August, only 29 states had recommended that students wear masks — down from the 44 states that did so last fall — and nine states had banned masking requirements. President Biden took the right approach on Wednesday when he announced that his Education Department would use its broad authority to deter the states from barring universal masking in classrooms.

State leaders would be wise to further protect children by requiring teachers to be vaccinated — without exception. Meanwhile, parents who wish to know what proportion of the teaching staff has been vaccinated are being thwarted by the fact that only a few states are publicly reporting this information.

Governors and other elected officials are trying to whistle past the devastating learning setbacks that schoolchildren incurred during the shutdown. That story is coming to light in studies and reports that lay out the alarming extent to which all groups of students are behind where they should be in a normal academic year and how the most vulnerable students are experiencing the steepest drop-offs in learning.

Credit…Jose A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York Times

An analysis by N.W.E.A., a nonprofit that provides academic assessments, for example, found that Latino third graders scored 17 percentile points lower in math in the spring of 2021, compared to the typical achievements of Latino third graders in the spring of 2019. The decline was 15 percentile points for Black students and 14 percentile points for Native American students, compared with similar students in the past. As Sarah Mervosh of The New York Times describes the situation, the pandemic amplified disadvantages rooted in racial and socioeconomic inequality, transforming an educational gap into a gulf.

A sobering report by the consulting firm McKinsey sounds a similar alarm. Among other things, it notes that the pandemic has widened existing opportunity and achievement gaps and made high schoolers more likely to drop out. As the authors say: “The fallout from the pandemic threatens to depress this generation’s prospects and constrict their opportunities far into adulthood. The ripple effects may undermine their chances of attending college and ultimately finding a fulfilling job that enables them to support a family.” Unless steps are taken to fill the pandemic learning gap, the authors say, these people will earn less over their lifetimes. The impact on the U.S. economy could range from $128 billion to $188 billion every year as the cohort enters the work force.

These findings constitute a scalding rebuke of those who have minimized the impact of the school shutdowns. Perhaps the most grotesque of these minimizing arguments holds that concerns about learning loss are being manufactured by educational testing companies with dollar signs in their eyes.

Children’s advocates at the United Nations got it right last month when they admonished governments around the globe for reacting to the pandemic by ending in-person schooling for long periods instead of using mitigation strategies to contain infection. This communiqué, issued by UNESCO and UNICEF, noted that the shutdown placed children at risk of developmental setbacks from which many of them might never recover, pointed out that primary and secondary schools are not among the main drivers of the pandemic and called for governments to resume in-person instruction as quickly as possible.

In the United States, a growing body of research shows that the suffering of poor children during the pandemic was compounded by the fact that their schools were more likely to remain closed than schools serving higher-income students. This left poor students more dependent on online education. A recent analysis by the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice found that schools in districts with higher percentages of Black and Latino children were more likely to have remote schooling and that, with all other things being equal, districts with more people living in poverty “were more likely to have remote instruction.”

Remote instruction was clearly a factor in driving what researchers call disenrollment. For example, research by Thomas S. Dee, a professor at Stanford University, and his associates finds that schools that went strictly remote experienced a 42 percent increase in disenrollment compared with those that offered full-time in-person learning. Beyond that, as The Times recently reported, more than a million children who had been expected to enroll in local schools did not show up, either in person or online: “The missing students were concentrated in the younger grades, with the steepest drop in kindergarten — more than 340,000 students.”

Under the best of circumstances, this means that some of the country’s most vulnerable children will begin first grade without the benefit of having had a crucial preparatory year. Under a more ominous scenario, some of the children who lost connection to school in the upper grades may not return to class at all unless districts make a concerted effort to bring them back into the fold.

The learning catastrophe that has befallen the country’s most vulnerable children will take longer than one academic year to remedy. For starters, states and localities will need to create intensive plans for helping children catch up while moving them through new academic material and to devise systems for measuring progress toward clearly stated goals. This project will not be easy to accomplish. But pretending that everything is fine — and that no extraordinary measures are needed — is a recipe for disaster.


More on education during the pandemic
The Kindergarten ExodusAug. 7, 2021
The Pandemic Hurt These Students the MostJuly 28, 2021

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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We Weren’t Happy Before the Pandemic, Either

August 23, 2021 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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Aug. 21, 2021

Esau McCaulley

By Esau McCaulley

Dr. McCaulley is a contributing Opinion writer and a professor at Wheaton College in Illinois. He’s written frequently about how the pandemic has shaped our lives.

I do not remember the last conversation I had with my father before he died. The weeks and months before his passing were like the months and years of our life together: full of starts and stops. We tried to create the relationship we knew that fathers and sons should have but that we didn’t, because he left our family when I was young. There were times when I called and he did not answer. In other cases, I missed his attempts to connect.

In August 2017, I received a phone call in the middle of the night. My father had died in a single-vehicle accident in California, far from those who knew and loved him.

As I grieved, my father’s death brought a certain clarity about my calling as a husband and parent. If my relationship with my dad had been marked by brokenness, I wanted my relationship with my wife and children to be marked by healing. It also forced me to re-evaluate my career. Impressing other writers and academics ceased to be my goal. Instead, I would focus on using my words to find beauty and hope. I couldn’t write a different ending for my father’s story, but I could show that a different ending was possible for others.

Over the past year and a half, many people have experienced something similar to what I did when my father died. I am not the only one who has received a terrifying call that wakes us from our slumber and changes us forever. It may have been a notification about a loved one going on a ventilator rather than dying in a car crash, but the trauma is the same. This pandemic has left conversations and lives cut short.

And it seems to be bringing a similar clarity to people about their priorities: The pandemic has led to one of the largest shifts in jobs in recent memory, with millions of Americans making changes. The housing market is exploding as many people reconsider where they want to live. We are in the midst of a societal shift, an awakening to how much we want our lives to be different. But the changes leave an issue unaddressed: Why didn’t we know all of that before?

All these changes that people are embarking on during the pandemic make me think that we weren’t that happy before the pandemic. What about our lives prevented us from seeing things that are so clear to us now? When I talked to friends and neighbors about this, two themes emerged. The pandemic has disabused us of the illusion of time as a limitless resource and of the false promise that the sacrifices we make for our careers are always worth it.

Before the pandemic, we knew we were going to die, but we did not believe it. Maybe we believed it, but considered it a problem to be dealt with later. In the meantime, exercise and a reasonable diet was the tithes we paid to our fears. We believed we had time.

For all that we know about the relatively low mortality rates of Covid-19 among the young, it remains something of a deadly lottery. You could take all the precautions, be basically healthy, and still die, quickly. I have classmates and friends who graduated from high school and college alongside me who have died from this disease.

We have had to consider our collective mortality. And we are now faced with the question of meaning. Like the biblical psalmist says, “We have escaped like a bird from the fowler’s snare; the snare has been broken, and we have escaped.” (Psalm 124:7). Covid-19 threatened to capture us in its snare, but thus far we have eluded it. What shall we do with this opportunity?

This opportunity made plain what may have been hidden. Maybe the sacrifices we make for our careers are not worth it. When we had the illusion of time, the lower pay, long commutes, high cost of living and separation from loved ones seemed a small price to pay for a successful career. But the pandemic reminded us that there are some things more important than vocational progress.

Friends with children came to see that living far from family meant that they did not have a social network that could help them when school and life logistics became difficult. Covid-19 showed us that when systems break, we need people.

This was equally true for single friends who lived in areas where the entire social scene catered to married people with families. Being at home helped many people realize how lonely they were before the pandemic and how few people they could really turn to in need.

The pandemic has reminded us that life is more than what we do. It is about whom we spend our lives with. We cannot hug a career or laugh with a promotion. We are made for friendship, love and community.

I recognize that for some, Covid-19 did not raise the same existential questions. They had to deal with the issues of survival, including the need for food and a warm place to sleep. Nonetheless, I have relatives in service industries raising similar questions. They are no longer willing to deal with harassment from rude customers for a barely livable wage. They are struggling to pay their bills, but they are doing so on their terms with their humanity intact.

If there is a lesson in this for employers, it is to remember that employees are more than workers. We have an identity outside the hours committed to making a living. Jobs that treat their employees honorably, provide flexibility and leave room for life outside of work will thrive.

I did not get to speak to my father a final time, but I did deliver the eulogy at his funeral. The need to make sense of his death revealed what was so often hard to see in the ebb and flow of our life together. He was not simply the villain who caused so much pain to our family; he was a broken person trying to find himself in a world that rarely shows damaged Black men pity. He was like most of us, a mass of contradictions.

In that eulogy I spoke about how an earlier brush with death via a heart attack changed him. He finally began to ask ultimate questions and work his way toward his own answers. He and I began to have hard and necessary conversations. I confronted him about things he had done and the real pain he caused. It was not a healing, but it began something we never got to finish.

When he died, I was in the early stages of writing what became “Reading While Black.” It has the following dedication: “This book is dedicated to the memory of Esau McCaulley Sr., who died before he ever got to see a book bearing our name in print. Whatever else I am, I will always remain your son.”

I did not dedicate the book to him because we were close. We were not. I dedicated it to him because his life and later tragic death forced me to make decisions about who and what I wanted to be. It gave me courage to write even if the world rejected it. I was changed through the calamity of his death, and the changes continue. It seems that Covid-19 has dealt a collective trauma to the American consciousness and that the full fruit of that trauma remains uncertain. One thing is clear: Our previous normal was not as good as we thought it was.

More on finding meaning during the pandemic

Opinion | Emily Esfahani SmithOn Coronavirus Lockdown? Look for Meaning, Not HappinessApril 7, 2020

Opinion | Esau McCaulleyHow to Give Children Joy, Even During a PandemicJuly 23, 2020

Opinion | Margaret RenklI Don’t Want to Spend the Rest of My Days GrievingAug. 9, 2021

Opinion | Esau McCaulleyHow to Give Children Joy, Even During a PandemicJuly 23, 2020

Opinion | Margaret RenklI Don’t Want to Spend the Rest of My Days GrievingAug. 9, 2021

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Montgomery County schools should mandate vaccines for teachers and staff

August 11, 2021 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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Opinion by Adam Zimmerman August 9, 2021 at 11:51 a.m. EDT5

Adam Zimmerman is a communications consultant who lives in Rockville.

A Montgomery County school district recently announced that all teachers and staff must get vaccinated against the coronavirus or be subject to weekly testing and other requirements. “I have an obligation to do everything I can to ensure that our kids are safe and healthy,” said Gary Ledebur, the school board member who developed the policy.

Alas, that Montgomery County school district is in Pennsylvania. But the Montgomery County school district in Maryland should follow suit and mandate coronavirus vaccines for all teachers and staff.

I am a parent of two Montgomery County Public School (MCPS) students who are still too young to get the vaccines, and I know the first day of school will bring even more trepidation and nerves than usual. MCPS has issued several directives, including universal masking, to ensure a safe and successful return to classrooms. Montgomery County recently reinstated a mask mandate for all individuals in indoor public spaces and implemented new vaccination protocols for county employees. These steps will help, but they’re not enough to give families peace of mind. The failure to require coronavirus vaccines for teachers and staff is a glaring omission by MCPS, one that threatens the entire community and increases the odds of significant coronavirus outbreaks in our schools.

To be sure, getting kids back into their classrooms is critically important. Long-term school closures nationwide have affected children’s academic achievement, social-emotional development and mental health. The Black and Brown Coalition for Educational Equity and Excellence, a group of 25 education and civil rights organizations, has documented the harm of school closures in Montgomery County, particularly for children of color. Educational disparities have been further exacerbated during the pandemic. The return to in-person learning is essential to close these gaps.

In response to my email to the Montgomery County Board of Education urging a vaccine mandate for teachers and staff, a staffer replied that “MCPS continues to work with our state and local health department to determine appropriate mandates.” It does not take a degree in epidemiology to realize that a school year that has not even begun is already threatened by the delta variant surge. On July 1, the 14-day average new coronavirus case rate in Montgomery County per 100,000 residents stood at 0.7. It is now 8.0 — a greater than elevenfold increase in only six weeks that has vaulted Montgomery County back into the “moderate” category for risk of transmission — and it is rapidly approaching “high” transmission risk.

This surge is happening despite Montgomery County having one of the highest coronavirus vaccination rates in the nation. This does not mean that the vaccines are ineffective; research continues to show that vaccines remain exceptionally effective at preventing severe cases, hospitalizations and deaths. Rather, the surge illustrates how devastatingly contagious the delta strain is. We do not yet fully understand the short- or long-term impact of the delta variant on our children, but we do know that caseloads and hospitalizations among young children are rising. This situation demands caution and even greater fidelity to science and public health.

Despite our high vaccination rate, more than 35 percent of Montgomery County residents are unvaccinated, including the vast majority of MCPS’ nearly 70,000 elementary school students. We have already seen some schools shut their doors almost immediately after opening them — leading the head of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, to announce that she supports vaccine mandates for teachers. Young children are best protected when the adults around them do the right thing; a coronavirus vaccine mandate for MCPS teachers and staff would demonstrate that principle in action.

Since coronavirus vaccines were authorized last December, MCPS has consistently encouraged teachers and staff to get vaccinated, partnered with Johns Hopkins to ensure an adequate vaccine supply and sponsored clinics at schools and other neighborhood sites. But as of June, several thousand MCPS personnel were still not vaccinated. Persuasion and encouragement have only brought us so far; all it takes is one case to light a match that engulfs an entire school in flames. We must do more and we should not wait.

Mandating coronavirus vaccines will help ensure a healthy and safe school year for everybody. Developing the particulars of such a plan, including exemptions for those with medical conditions that preclude vaccination, is necessary. But on whether such a mandate is needed, there is no question, and there should be no delay.

Our teachers are heroes; our school staff are essential workers; our children are everything. Let’s do this for them.5 Comments

The Changemakers

August 5, 2021 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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Jack Kerouac quote: the only people for me are the mad ones, the...

“….Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them; disagree with them; glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.“

—  Jack Kerouac

PEACE CORPS AT 60:INSIDE THE VOLUNTEER EXPERIENCE

August 5, 2021 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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Birnholz.jpeg

On January 20, 1961, President John F. Kennedy issued a challenge to all Americans: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”


Two months later American University hosted a National Conference on Youth Service Abroad, organized by students from AU, the University of Michigan, and the National Student Association. Nearly 500 participants, representing 300 schools in 45 states, gathered in Washington, DC, to discuss the goals, mission, and methods of a new Peace Corps.  

Two months later American University hosted a National Conference on Youth Service Abroad, organized by students from AU, the University of Michigan, and the National Student Association. Nearly 500 participants, representing 300 schools in 45 states, gathered in Washington, DC, to discuss the goals, mission, and methods of a new Peace Corps.   The original 1961 legislation that created the Peace Corps laid out three goals:  

1. Help the people of interested countries meet their need for trained men and women. 
2. Help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the people served. 
3. Help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.  
The 30 individuals whose objects and stories we showcase here represent a sampling of the nearly 240,000 volunteers who have answered Kennedy’s call to serve since 1961. This exhibition illuminates how the Peace Corps has offered alternative ways to advance peace and promote international friendship. 
Today we confront unprecedented global challenges, including the coronavirus pandemic, climate change, and an immigration crisis. In March 2020 the Peace Corps evacuated 7,300 volunteers from 61 countries. Now the agency has an opportunity to return volunteers to the field with a new sense of purpose. How will the Peace Corps, at 60, create positive change in our complex world? How should it address concerns around racial, economic, and asymmetrical power dynamics? The Peace Corps must find a way to remain relevant in an ever changing environment.  
Peace Corps at 60: Inside the Volunteer Experience explores these challenges through the lens of the third Peace Corps goal. The objects these volunteers chose to keep embody memories of their Peace Corps experiences. The stories behind those objects reveal the reciprocal relationships between volunteers and their country hosts. These relationships have always been central to the Peace Corps experience and essential to the agency’s role and service. Micro-memoirs accompanying each object tell these stories, providing a window into the agency’s past and lessons for its future. 

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Serve America. Together. Our Vision for the Future

August 5, 2021 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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The Serve America Together Presidential Challenge - Serve America. Together.

Serve America Together is a campaign to make national service part of growing up in America.

For too long, national service has not been an option for most young Americans. The college affordability crisis has left too many students with debt that they’re struggling to repay. Millions of young people are out of work, their talents untapped. Communities across the country face significant unmet challenges including education inequity, disaster relief, aging populations, and substance abuse issues. Americans are more profoundly polarized than any moment in recent history. We are beginning to truly confront the systemic racism of our institutions and society. And our country is grappling with public health, economic, social, and educational crises as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Imagine a future in which young people earn college tuition by addressing our communities’ greatest challenges — where they are empowered to shape their own destinies and those of their communities, regardless of zip code. Imagine a future in which empathy trumps apathy and participation and problem-solving outmatch indifference. Imagine a shared experience far stronger than anything that may seek to divide us.

This future is entirely achievable if a year of service is part of growing up in America. The White House, Congress, state and local leaders, business, community and philanthropic leaders, and every American should be working to make this future a reality. America has been at crossroads like this before. If we are going to achieve this bold vision, we must be audacious in our call to action and make national service a national priority. National service can transform lives, strengthen communities, and fuel civic renewal. Our country can do big things together. And Service Year Alliance is organizing the stakeholders, the strategy, and the movement we need to bring this vision to life.

We believe civilian national service should:

1. Exist at scale, engaging at least one million young Americans in civilian national service annually

2. Address America’s unmet needs

3. Bridge divides and fuel civic renewal

4. Be an opportunity for all

5. Build pathways to long-term success for individuals who serve through benefits and connectivity to future education and careers.

Our campaign platform is detailed below. Read More

Impact Of Service Years

August 5, 2021 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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Service years transform lives, strengthen communities, and fuel civic renewal.

Service Year Alliance - Service Year

Service Years Transform Lives ( from Service Year)

Service years create pathways to opportunity for young people and allow them to develop real-world experience as well as valued professional and leadership skills. 

Service years helps young people of all backgrounds advance on career and college pathways. For example:

  • National service is backed by over 600 “Employers of National Service” who highly value the skills individuals gain during their service.
  • 200 higher education institutions match the AmeriCorps education award because they value the national service experience.
  • 79% say that their service year was a defining professional experience.
  • 74% of YouthBuild graduates earn a GED or high school diploma through the program and more than half go on to further education or employment.
  • AmeriCorps alumni are more likely to attain a bachelor’s or graduate degree than the average American adult.

Learn more:

Service Years as a Workforce Development Strategy

Service Years + Higher Education

Service Years Strengthen Communities

Service years provide cost-effective human capital that can be utilized by local communities to tackle our biggest challenges, like educational equity, disaster response, health, conservation, and more.

Service years help communities tackle local problems. For example:

  • In 2017, 2,000 AmeriCorps members from all 50 states were deployed to Texas, Florida, Georgia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands in response to hurricanes.
  • Students tutored by Reading Corps AmeriCorps members increase their reading levels, saving millions in special education and academic remediation costs.
  • AmeriCorps Urban Safety corps members reduced crime in midtown Detroit by more than 50%.
  • Youth corps conduct energy audits and weatherize homes, reducing energy usage by millions of kWh per year and saving low-income residents hundreds of dollars annually.

Learn more: 

Service years as a strategy to respond to COVID-19

The Case for National Service as a Solution to Critical Contact Tracing Needs

Service Years Improve Education Outcomes

Service Years Fuel Civic Renewal

Service years bring people together across lines of difference around a shared experience that builds cultural competency and enhances civic engagement. 

Service years develop better citizens. For example:

  • 9 out of 10 AmeriCorps alums report that their service year experience improved their ability to solve problems, and 8 out of 10 report that if they were confronted with a community issue, they could develop a plan to address it and get others to care.
  • YouthBuild increases social trust and community orientation among the low-income youth who serve in the program.
  • AmeriCorps, YouthBuild, and Peace Corps alumni vote and volunteer throughout their lives at higher rates than their peers.

After months in lockdown, we need some new memories. But can you ‘make’ them?

August 2, 2021 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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By Roxanne RobertsJuly 25, 2021 at 6:00 a.m. EDT14

If 2020 was unforgettable for all the wrong reasons, then the pressure is on to make 2021 unforgettable for the right ones. We want to get out, have fun, and, of course,“make memories,” in the words of advertisers and inspirational wooden signs in gift shops everywhere: the milestone birthday party, the postponed wedding, that special family vacation.

These memories will become, we hope, stories we will tell and retell, cherished flashbacks that will become part of our personal history. Maybe we’ll splurge a little (life is too short to drink cheap wine, isn’t it?) or finally book that round-the-world cruise. After the year we’ve all had, the bucket list just got longer, and companies are eager to stoke that yearning with promises of “making” magical moments and life-changing experiences.

But memory is a tricky thing. What we expect to remember and what we actually remember don’t always match. Two people in the same place at the same time can have very different feelings and very different recollections. Or you plan, say, the perfect wedding and what everyone remembers is that the best man broke his leg on the dance floor. The best laid plans of moms and men often go awry.

Can you make memories? The answer is … maybe.

It all starts in the brain, which decides what to keep and what to discard using a process called “encoding,” where chemical reactions link different networks. Important facts are referred to as “semantic” memory; the vivid stories — the who, what, and when — are called “episodic memory.”

“If you’re having a good time, there are regions of the brain that will be more active, like the prefrontal cortex, during both the encoding of that memory and also trying to retrieve all that memory later,” says Scott Slotnick, a professor at Boston College and author of “Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory.”

There’s a specific kind of episodic memory called an autobiographical memory — a formative moment that becomescentral to our sense of self. The brain gives priority to emotions, good and bad. Sensory triggers (sights, smells, sounds) can cause what is known as “involuntary memory” — for example, the madeleines in Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past.”

But there are other ways to boost the chances that the carefully planned event will make the memory book: focus and repetition.

“If you’re paying attention to a sunset or a great experience at Disneyland, then the brain is going to be more active,” says Slotnick. “So then you’re going to be more likely to sort of encode those as a good memory. If somebody is not paying attention to the experience — they’re on their smartphone or distracted — they’re not going to form those memories.”

And here’s another trick: a good night’s rest.

“Sleep is also really important for laying down solid memory of the events that occurred the day before,” says Slotnick. It’s not the lighter state when we dream, but the deeper sleep where long-term memories are pruned or strengthened.

There’s a growing scientific consensus that we change a memory in every retelling, omitting and adding details until the original experience is significantly transformed. That doesn’t stop people from repeating them, and memories become family history.

“One of the things that’s important is that memory is kind of social exchange,” says Nora Newcombe, a psychologist at Temple University. Traditionally, “part of a female role is creating social cohesion, family cohesion — it’s pretty well-known that families with sisters, when the parents die, end up more cohesive than families with just brothers. The emotional work of women is very often actually creating and sharing these sort of memories.”

But all the parents who are convinced that their children will have lifelong memories of that very special trip or birthday party? Not so fast.

Infants and toddlers are not going to have distinct, individual memories, she says. Children have a harder time remembering what they don’t understand and don’t really begin to create episodic memories until about 8 years old. What kids do remember is anything unexpected — say, no cake at a birthday party or running into a teacher outside the classroom.

Which means, she says, that parents should cut themselves some slack. “Kids are as likely to remember a store-bought birthday cake as one lovingly homemade,” she says, adding: “As with most things, I think ‘relax’ is the message.”

When asked what they would grab if their house was on fire, people list people, pets, phones and then old family photographs, the most tangible manifestation of memories. Photos trigger our brains to remember not just the moment captured on film, but the stories behind the image. Because personal photos are almost always taken at social gatherings, the memories tend to skew positive.

Scrapbooking — memories on steroids — enjoyed a decade of glory before everyone had a cellphone and therefore a personal, portable collection of photos. And now the irony: Having so many photos on our phones makes it harder to distinguish the memorable from the mundane.

How to organize your travel photos

But the promise of creating special moments is a constant in advertising. You can — for $32 — score a sign explaining your errant housekeeping: “Please Excuse The Mess, Our Children Are Making Memories.”

The trick is convincing consumers that a car, food or vacation will become part of their personal narrative. Subaru scored big with its 2015 “Making Memories” commercial: A dad cleans out his old car while replaying highlights of his daughter’s childhood, then tosses her the keys. The tagline? “You can pass down a Subaru Forrester, but you get to keep the memories.” Lexus wants you to believe in “a December to remember,” with the car front and center in special family moments. And McCormick built an ad in its “Making Memories” series around the idea that a properly spiced lasagna will become a cherished family tradition.

But nowhere is the lure of memory-making as pervasive as it is in the travel industry. Carnival Cruise Lines used family photos for its “Moments That Matter” campaign; the Belle of Louisville, the oldest continuously operating river steamboat, introduced its “Making Memories Since 1914” campaign this spring.

And, of course, the mouse that roared: Is there any company better than Disney at tugging our heartstrings while picking our pockets? In 2011, it launched “Let the Memories Begin,” a three-year promotion using customer photos and videos in television and print ads. The memories start when the kids find out they’re going to Disney World and last, according to the ads, “a lifetime.” Maybe for the parents, who pay thousands of dollars for the trip; what kids remember might be the $17.99 mouse ears.

The hope is that these moments might evenbecome touchstones of nostalgia, what Don Draper in “Mad Men” called “a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.” In an iconic scene of theSeason 1 finale, the legendary advertising executive pitches his campaign for a Kodak Carousel slide projector. “This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine,” he explains. “It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. To a place where we know we are loved.”

And so we come full circle. Google’s 2020 Super Bowl ad was a sentimental tear-jerker about the longing to hold on to the good times. The commercial features a voice-over by an older man using his Google Assistant to store specific memories of his beloved late wife. The Assistant replies, “Okay, I’ll remember that.”

Remembrance of Things Past, 2.0.

Read more:

Aromas can evoke beloved journeys — or voyages not yet taken

Go ahead and post your old travel photos. Experts say it can improve your mood.

Twelve Mental Resets I Learned from the Book “Skip the Line”

August 2, 2021 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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Life is a series of queues you can skip.
Tim Denning Medium June 28th 2021

Thinking can become stale.

I discovered that gem not long ago. My thoughts had become, well, useless and the good insights were lost. These are times I need a mental reset. In the 1990s, desktop computers had a shutdown and reset button. Whenever my computer was making me rage, I simply hit the reset button. Somehow, like magic, after a slow reboot, the computer would work again.

I’ve taken the idea of a reset button and applied it to my thinking. It involves reading a random book. Books give me ideas. Ideas can lead to mental resets.

The book I read during this odd period in my life is called “Skip The Line” by James Altucher. Many of the takeaways from the book pushed the reset button in different areas of my life. Here are the best mental resets.

Become comfortable with the land of not knowing

The key to skipping the line is to consistently live in a world of “not knowing.” To constantly be curious but not threatened by what’s next. To live in the world where everyone else is scared but you are so comfortable with the land of not knowing that you can still navigate the rough waters.

I’m a certainty addict. Practicing discomfort has helped me mentally reset. It’s why I do public speaking in front of a room full of strangers. The slight vomit feeling I get before jumping on stage reminds me I don’t have it all figured out, and have a long way to go.

It’s easy to write on the internet and think you have life all figured out.

Comfort is a threat that creates many stops and starts. Curiosity is a compass towards gentle upwards progress.

Skipping the line in life is backwards

I always thought self-improvement was the way to skip the line in life. So do many people. James provided a mental reset by teaching me that helping people who are lost is not the end of the line but the beginning.

An obsession with ourselves causes us to go off course. We start becoming so obsessed with what we’re doing in life that we trample on the hopes and dreams of others. But you get what you want by helping other people get what they want.

The individualism cult has got it wrong.

Individualism that turns into collectivism allows you to skip many spots in the line to achieve life goals. ‘Help others’ is a timeless, cliche way to get out of your own head.

Tap into the mind’s time-traveling ability

Right now may be a disaster. James taught me to use the mind’s memory to go back in time to a period when life worked.

Once I’m back in a moment of significant achievement, it feels as if it’s happening to me all over again. The brain can’t tell the difference between the past and present. I use the dysfunctional body clock to create a mental reset. What if it’s 2016 all over again? I say.

What feels impossible becomes possible when you unlock the power of your memory. You can sort through the memories and find the ones that act as a reset and even inspire you to rethink the stage of life you’re at.

Opportunities to exit the comfort zone are limited

‘Asks’ that scare the pants off you don’t come around often. When I get one I try to grab it by the curly ones. You can do the same. There is nothing to lose by accepting an uncomfortable opportunity. The worst case is it doesn’t work out and you get to try again in the future.

Humans have tiny goldfish memories, according to research. Our need to survive is so great that we can’t remember all of your failures.

The hard drive in our head is running on 58 megabytes of disk space from thousands of years ago. Your small failure is a 4K Youtube video that takes up gigabytes of mental disk space. Sorry, pal. Disk full. This is a great mental reset to remind yourself of.

You’ve got nothing to lose from fear that makes your pants fall down.

Purpose = Obsession

The word purpose is thrown around a lot. “What is my purpose in life?” is a question we’ve all asked through our lives. If the question is avoided for too long you find yourself lost, needing a mental reset. What about instead of what do you love, the question became what are you obsessed with?

I’m obsessed with writing. I quit my job for my obsession. I think about it before bed, while sleeping, while in the bathroom, on my birthday, and even during job interviews.

Every spare minute I have is spent writing something, somewhere on the internet — Twitter, Substack, LinkedIn, News Break, Quora. The worst thing I did is ignore this purpose and try to place 9–5 job band-aids over it. James helped me focus on my obsessions and less on hard to explain love or passion.

Obsessions steal time in your calendar.

When one interest suffers a cardiac arrest, switch to another interest

Amongst online writers right now, I hear the word burnout a lot.

I’ve certainly burned out from writing obsessively too. James gave me a simple mental reset: switch interests when one has become stale. For example, I’m going to switch to doing slightly more teaching than writing to let my writing freshen up. Too much of a good thing is bad.

Give an interest a rest to unlock the next level.

Writing down ideas fires up your brain

James describes dying to wake up and get to the local cafe in 2002 after losing everything. Ideas took his mind into all sorts of alternate realities.

Ideas help you skip the line in life. But what ideas really do is unlock your potential muscle, which gets you excited and pumped to wake up. Even if the ideas are trash the feeling outweighs the few seconds it takes to write each one down.

Writing ideas down is starting up your imagination. Once the imagination engine is running, it interrupts your mind’s sad story playing on repeat, causing you to become solution-focused. The question that follows is “What can I do about this?” Your idea habit answers the question for you.

One bizarre thing leads to another

The book Skip The Line tells the story of well-known podcaster Lewis Howes. Many of us think podcasting was how Lewis became who he is. James shared the real story.

Lewis learned how to send direct messages on LinkedIn and network. He used messages to get people to his in-person events. It became such a successful habit that he started running online courses. The scope of the course was narrow. All he taught was how to network in messages like he did. This led Lewis to make millions from his course and eventually start a podcast.

Sending a message on LinkedIn looks like an insignificant task. Most of us would disregard this small act. Lewis trusted where this might lead him. The result isn’t something anybody could have mapped out, not even a prestigious university.

Joining the dots makes sense looking back. Trust that one bizarre thing will lead you to the sequence of events you’ll look back on and be proud of.

A paycheck is an addiction

I, Tim Denning, am a paycheck-aholic. Paychecks make you feel safe. Most jobs pay you to never fail. This resistance to failure hurts long term. You expect for things to work out. Then if you try a side hustle and there are setbacks, you erupt like a volcano on Twitter.

What if a job is holding you back? What if taking risks and failing at work took your life in a different direction.

Here’s the mental reset I learned: you can always get another job again. So you’ve got nothing to lose.

Vulnerability is a new beginning

James’ writing career is fascinating. He started writing about finance and got nowhere. At one point he switched into writing with vulnerability. That’s the moment everybody started to know who James is.

Real success happens when you dare to be vulnerable. The same happened to me. When I stopped hiding behind writing startup press releases and dared to talk about taboo subjects like mental illness, everything changed.

Vulnerability is relatability. Without it, our words become cobwebs.

Become an energy minimalist

Many of us think energy comes from food and exercise. That’s true. But energy also comes from people, writing, books, places, finance. I’m writing a whole book on energy right now.

The mental reset I borrowed from James is this: Where are the energy leaks?

Plug the leaks and be a minimalist with your energy. Blowing up at a driver who cut you off costs precious energy. Spend energy like you spend money and then you won’t waste it on crap.

Use this superhero trait more often

Being secretly good to people = superhero

My parent’s generation was taught to chase fame. James resets your ego by boldly stating fame is for losers.

Being good to people looks pointless. What I learned is that you can’t see what being good does for you behind closed doors. Every day people are reference checking you without you knowing. Those reference checks are glowing 5-star reviews if you’ve been caught offloading goodness on everybody.

Your life has an Uber rating. Make it 5 out of 5 by treating people ridiculously well for the hell of it.

Skipping the line in life involves embracing mental resets. Our operating system gets selfishness viruses that infect every area of life. Even a good night’s sleep or a prescription for a cold shower can’t erase the virus. The best thing to do is use James’ ideas to create mental resets that act like a vaccine. Question your self-talk. Push the reset button if lies become visibly noticeable.

The most powerful way to skip the line is to remember it’s all backwards. Individualism puts you at the back of the queue. You get to the front of the queue by quietly helping others who give you 5-star references that unlock doors others believe are invisible.