Targeting as Emotional Warfare

The Culture Wars Part XIII

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

The culture wars have been going on for decades, but they clearly ramped up somewhat recently. There are a lot of aspects of what exactly happened, and I'm certainly not clear on all of those yet. But I've put together this much:

The culture warriors are largely targeting innocent people.

"You're racist!"

"You're sexist!"

"You're transphobic!"

"You're xenophobic!"

I also fully understand that many of these accusations are the result of tremendous trauma. Almost all of us share at least some of that trauma. The problem is that those who dish out the trauma are often also the best at steering the direction of its aftermath. The result is a torrent of confusion and pain, thrust into politics.

Early in 2017, I came under fire in a way that shocked me. My life was coming to rest after more than thirteen years of 80 hour/week work building schools that served thousands of students. I was proud of the work. Though I never targeted such a result, I managed to build a specialized mathematics program that served around 600 students which, at its height, had 48% female enrollment. The program was meant to keep any and every student challenged, including the many who moved on to schools like MIT or Harvard (who often wrote me emails or letters telling me how easy their college math and computer science classes seemed in comparison). The research (Andreescu et al, 2008) suggests that programs like mine don't exist. All the [few] girls who qualify for math olympiads around the U.S. come from a handful of highly educated and wealthy communities such as San Jose, California or Alexandria, Virginia. I somehow tipped the scales of the sex ratio running an advanced mathematics program in Central Alabama.

I'll write about this topic more another day, but I want to at least point out that the school achieved success with all the students (with a 97% per quarter re-enrollment rate as an entirely voluntary program) regardless of demographics or profile simply because it didn't matter to me. What I mean by that is that I met and "interviewed" each student prior to a first course enrollment with one single goal: to spend an hour with them that would make them thirst for the classes to come. I would quickly find the limits of what they'd already learned, and pick some cool topic that went deeper---maybe exponential counting and permutations with young students, or Fibonacci recursion problems with the more advanced ones. Once in a while I'd reach for Pell equations or a nifty induction problem.

That's it. That's all.

To me, everyone was an individual, and I wanted to meet each individual who showed up to the classroom.

(To note: when I get the chance to set it up, the interview I designed is the "lesson" I plan to record with one or two students.)