On the ugliness of this moment in SF's culture

A while back, I was walking out of the 16th St BART station and noticed a large sticker that someone had plastered on a telephone pole reading "Die Techie Scum" (like this one). This was neither the first nor last anti-tech piece of graffiti or protest I've seen in the Mission, but I think it encapsulates well the ugliness that has overtaken the conversations about our community.

This week, two pieces of writing similarly caught my eye, because both desparately seek a villain to blame for SF's problems.

The first, an open letter from a local start-up founder, Justin Keller, to our mayor, bemoaned the fact that the wealthy folks who can afford to live in this city have to step around homeless people as they go about their days. This letter provides an example of all the worst stereotypes about people who work in technology in the Bay Area - they only care about their fancy coffee and luxury experiences, are oblivious to their privilege, and have no respect for any culture that existed in SF before they arrived. The villains in Justin Keller's story are the city's homeless and our politicians that refuse to do anything about them.

The second was a response titled "Open Letter to Justin Keller, from Edna, one of your servants in San Francisco" that got lots of high fives on Facebook and Twitter. Edna's letter is thinly about Justin's argument but much more about how she hates what the tech industry has done to San Francisco rents and culture. It ends, "If you’re not going to bring anything good to this city or be part of the communities that grew here out of desperation for creativity and acceptance, then GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE, GO BACK TO YOUR PERFECT SUBURB AND TAKE ALL OF YOUR FRIENDS WITH YOU." Edna's villains are people who work in technology and people who enjoy wine bars.

Living in SF now feels like standing in the center of a shouting match between these two extremes, with everyone desperate to find a villain to blame for systemic problems. Housing affordability is at the root of both of these. The two loudest voices on this issue are either in NIMBY camps that argue that there is no problem or in camps like Edna's, who insist that the real solution is for the tech industry to pack up and go back where they came from. The NIMBY camp ignores the impact of things like zoning, height limits, and historically racist housing policy that have created the desperate housing situation we have today in SF. The organizations that fight for tenants' rights against evictions are forced into a corner in which they fight for people who arrived in communities at the exact moment at which they could end up in an affordable rent-controlled apartment. Neither camp provides real solutions to house a growing population.

If your solution to a community problem is to find a villain in your community to expel (Justin and Edna's solutions, both!), you're doing community wrong. SF has a huge and growing problem of housing its people, and regardless of our motivations, none of us wants people living on the streets (Rainbow Grocery included). Our population will continue to grow, but the only question is whether our policies and our discourse can grow with it. For now, this conversation is just ugly.

On teaching boys to take sexual assault seriously

A few weeks ago, our school participated in Denim Day, a campaign to spread awareness about the prevalence of sexual assault and to take a stand against it. A few days before, my advisory co-teacher and I shared information about it with our advisory - 28 9th grade boys. Our boys' reaction demonstrated that they really didn't understand what sexual assault is, when or how it happens, or what healthy sexual interactions with women should look like. Our boys tapped their pencils and looked out the window. There was nervous laughter at inappropriate times. One of our boys raised his hand to ask, "Wait, if you're both drunk and you do it, she gets to say it was rape after? That's messed up."

My co-teacher and I knew we wanted to address these behaviors and make the topic real for our boys, but we didn't have much time. Every curriculum is about priorities, and we have a lot of them that need to be addressed in Advisory. So even though health educators plan full units around healthy relationships, we wanted to take a crack at teaching our boys the core importance of consent in one 30-minute class period.

We started by having the boys think of a time that something had been stolen from them.

 

Having them discuss in partners and share out afterward at each step, we then had our boys think of a more personal item that could be stolen. I told them about an item that's really important to me that I would be devastated to lose. Everyone has prized possessions, so this was relatable.

We then asked our boys to think about being deceived, stolen from, and betrayed, all at once. Emotions became real. The debriefs included anger, sadness, and confusion.

And now it was finally time to put our boys in the shoes of someone who was the victim of sexual assault.

You could feel the weight in the room. It was the complete opposite of everything we felt when we talked about sexual assault for Denim Day. Sexual assault is serious and awful business, and our boys finally felt some understanding of that. We closed by offering an important stat, anchoring to the women in our boys' lives, and driving home every person's responsibility for preventing this around us.

This may not be the best way to teach this lesson, but I've shared it here because I really struggled to find good resources for this topic. Every lesson I found was about directly shoving down our students' throats that consent is necessary and important, and none tried to lead them there on their own. I'm sure that there are great health curricula out there that do this, but I didn't find them easily. If anyone has thoughts to improve this for the next time it's necessary to teach it, I'd love to hear them.

On ATP's desired listenership

One of my favorite podcasts, ATP, has spent time recently discussing their desire to increase the number of women listening to the show. It's an interesting question, because achieving this means that you need to either capture a greater proportion of the existing female tech audience or try to convert more women outside of the tech audience to an interest in tech. Trying to tip that interest in tech is one of the many reasons I like teaching science. But the hosts sideswiped another demographic interest of mine and moved right along, and it stung.

ATP is often focused on Apple technologies. The discussion usually isn't hostile toward other platforms (and Casey works in the MS stack), but none of the three hosts has much love for Android. In last week's episode, Marco was talking about the difficulty in pleasing everybody and made a crack about Android users. After a chuckle, he mumbled that that was about choice, unlike gender. Marco doesn't seem to care that the Android users he's talking about are disproportionately working-class. For many of them, a choice of a phone involves major price-sensitivity. So here's my question - is ATP a tech podcast for everyone, or just for people who can afford nice things?

We're lucky enough to have Chromebooks in our classrooms, so my students spend part of every day interacting with Chrome and the web. In our high-need school, Android is definitely the dominant platform for my students' phones. I don't see much Verizon and AT&T; I see a lot of MetroPCS and some T-Mobile. Some of my students have WiFi at home, and others have to get their work done via a hotspot from their parents' phones.

Last week, I noticed a student doing something strange - tweeting photos with the tag "ignore these" to use Twitter as storage so she could free up space on her phone. The ATP guys discussed photo storage at length on the podcast and how Apple should solve it on the devices they use. But they're missing how people outside the world of high-end technology are solving these problems. Many of my students have just an iPad or just phones in their house - technology is a big part of their lives, but it's not the 'MacBook + iPad + iPhone' world that the ATP guys live in. High-end technologies provide plenty to discuss, but if you don't worry about the cheaper technologies that half of the population is using, you're never going to understand the kinds of problems they're trying to solve or the solutions they are finding. While ATP is thinking about increasing the gender diversity of their listenership, they should consider increasing its SES diversity as well. And that might require seeing Android as something more than a punchline.

On using poverty or racism to justify low expectations

My overall reaction to this piece in Oakland Local on the OUSD Quality Schools Development initiative is mixed, but one portion stuck out for me.

4.   Charters, high-stakes tests, merit pay for teachers and closing schools are not the answer; addressing poverty and racism is.

Schools are expected to make up for inequities that are bigger than we are, and shutting a school down because it serves poor kids and kids of color isn’t the answer. I’m a teacher. I can do a lot, and I have high expectations for my students. Homelessness, lack of living wage work, lack of affordable housing, the trauma of deep poverty and being young and preyed upon by adults who abuse their power and position are bigger than my willingness to work harder. I can’t tell a kid, “No excuses!” when the reason she’s been out of school for two weeks is because her boyfriend forced her into doing sex work in another city. Or her family is living out of a car. There are many sad and angering stories like this and the stories are more prevalent in some schools than in others. What makes me livid is the idea that these problems can be fixed by creating a “college-going culture” in schools, or by fining students for disciplinary infractions, as some charters in Chicago have done. The thing is, class and race are still stronger predictors of student success than teachers or schools alone.

These anecdotes are real, and these struggles against poverty really can be roadblocks to our kids' achievement. But what I can't get behind is the attitude that I should allow these roadblocks to dictate my students' future. A student recently came in having missed several days of school because her family needed to suddenly move out of their apartment and into her cousin's house nearby. It's true that this incident puts her behind, and there isn't much that our school could have done to prevent it. And it's true that shouting the words, "No excuses!" in her face will not bring her up to speed. But giving her reading assignments, video resources, and tutoring time will. And establishing a culture that she cannot allow incidents like this to crush her dreams of being an architect or a doctor will as well.

It's true that schools and teachers are not fully (or even mostly) to blame for the achievement gap. But we have the power and potential to meaningfully improve outcomes for our students if we regularly make and test improvements to the way we educate them. We know that there are both district schools and charters that are changing the odds for kids in high-need communities. Some of the practices from those schools can be painful to implement, but failing to implement them is an acceptance that we will allow our schools to plow forward with results that put our students at a drastic disadvantage in life. Not every program works in every circumstance, but a failure due to experimentation is surely better than a failure from maintaining the status quo.

For our students, meeting a high bar is harder when you're pushing against the weight of poverty and institutional racism. But to tell another generation of kids to sit on the sidelines and wait while we sort out the problems of wealth inequality and implicit bias is not acceptable. Creating cultures of high achievement and the expectation that every student can and will attend college is critical to helping our kids take on that challenge. With some of our students, we may fail to motivate those big efforts that are required. But I really hope that I can't use their income or ethnicity to predict which ones.

On career moves

I spent the past three years working on interesting problems at a great company. I worked with smart people, learned a ton about using data to make decisions and uncover knowledge, and built the soft skills necessary to get things done in a range of situations. I also lived very, very comfortably. I bought dinner without worrying about whether I could afford it. I visited my family in New York as often as I wanted, working remotely whenever it was most convenient. I had the space and resources to fix fitness issues that had plagued me my whole life. Life was good.

But my work became unfulfilling. I was optimizing at the margins for people and organizations who are already very successful, trying to find the insights to improve outcomes by a few percentage points at a time. At my company's scale, that was well worth my salary. But diminishing returns now meant that it was no longer worth the opportunity cost for me. Since my first year teaching, I knew that my goal in my career was to find the point of greatest leverage to improve outcomes for my students - broadly, those affected by the achievement gap. Becoming a strong analyst gave me skills to increase that leverage, but I'd grown my skill set enough in three years that it was time to bring it back to the work I really care about.

So I quit my comfortable job and found a teaching job. My departure from my job for the classroom has been greeted with a pretty consistent pattern: first surprise and confusion, and then expressions of admiration at my "noble" career choice. While I like a compliment as much as the next person, I hope that we'll someday live in a world where we don't look at highly skilled teachers as people who gave up bigger careers to teach. In this work, we need all the dedicated and growth-oriented hands we can get. Our students deserve teachers that work in a competitive labor market, funded by the true incremental value that great teachers can provide and staffed by people who become educators because it's both the thing they can do best and a job that they love.

This time, I'm working for a school with the stated and substantially fulfilled mission of setting its urban students on a path to and through college. At my old school, I worked with a handful of amazing educators that shared this goal; at my new school, it's a culture that penetrates everything that every member of our staff does. I will face new challenges and new failures every day, but I'll gain new points of leverage. In the near term, I'll work to make my Biology students stronger scientific thinkers, writers, and doers. In the long term, I hope that my experience in this school will equip me to work in school leadership that brings these outcomes to a larger group of students.

On "experimenting on your users"

OKCupid recently ran an experiment on its users to determine whether its reported match percentage with another user had an effect on messaging behavior, and people are angry.

The premise of that anger is that it means something to be a 90% match or a 30% match with another OKCupid user; if you lie to a user and tell them that this percentage is something different from what the algorithm currently says it is, that's wrong. But what if that number is meaningless? What if the secret sauce is not about the compatibility metrics that OKCupid calculates between any two users?

If the secret sauce to get two people to have a successful relationship is actually to tell them that they're an algorithmic match, the matching system is useless. OKCupid should then consider dropping their algorithms that attempt to create matches. Indeed, OKCupid's data show that the odds among real 90% matches of a single message turning into a conversation are 20%, versus 17% among the 30% matches that thought they were 90% matches. So the real matching adds just 18% to the likelihood you'll have a real conversation. That's not nothing, but it's not huge. If the "X% match" number is close to meaningless, it isn't really lying to alter it. In fact, the greatest lie is to present it as meaningful. Presumably, OKCupid believes that this difference in likelihood is worth it, or it believes that it can improve it.

OKCupid's job is to help its users find other users that they'll be happy with, whatever their romantic goals. OKCupid can measure some of the behaviors that indicate that - in this case, messaging. It's in the interest of users that OKCupid figure out how to give them the best matches. Messaging may not be the best way to measure that (how about surveying them a few weeks later?), but it's real behavioral data. OKCupid may be irresponsible about the way they selected users for this, and maybe they should tell users that by joining the site, they're consenting to X% of their actions being subject to experimental alteration. But the idea that they're just jerks overlooks the fact they're trying to better understand how to give their users better matches. And that's their job.

On Siri & SpringBoard and the future of better mobile OS interfaces

We live in an age of relatively mature phone operating systems. iOS, Android, and Windows Phone are all fulfilling a baseline level of functionality for which the iPhone established the first working vision.  Today, while Android handset makers bolt on bells and whistles that start to go beyond the basics, Apple's proponents are vigorously defending the simplicity of the iPhone (e.g. Gruber, who is more right than wrong on this but still kind of wrong).  It's the perfect expression of what it's made to be, they contend, so what kind of iteration is there, really, to do?

There is oddly little desire for a better future here.  My utmost desire is a Siri that works perfectly in every situation.  To start to explain what I'm looking for, here are four queries that should work today. They don't, and Apple should be ashamed that they don't.

All right, I suppose that's fair.  There may be a security issue with installing without my providing my Apple ID.  Can you just find the app, Siri?

Really? You have an App Store, and presumably you'd like me to buy apps from it, but you can't even search it. Great.

Let's try to take some pictures now.  I have at least a few apps for doing that, so hopefully Siri can help me find a good one.

Very helpful, Siri. Instead, I'll just hunt through my 6 pages of apps and all the folders I have to find a decent photo app. I'm glad my time and every other user's time is so cheap! And it's a good thing Apple made so little profit on the sale of my phone, because otherwise I'd be kind of pissed they weren't working on this.

Ok, I guess I'll just send my friend, Esther, a message to see what she's up to.

I see. OS-level Facebook integration did us a lot of good.

Notice that I didn't give Siri really hard natural language problems here.  I stuck to simple constructs for things the iPhone should be quite good at.  And it really sucked at all of them.  To be fair, I'm cherry-picking, and Siri does do lots of good stuff.  I picked three simple things from my mind that I figured Siri would fail, and it did so.

Here is the future I crave: one interface to access any task that any app can do.  Maybe it isn't voice - maybe it's some kind of on-screen action flow or written natural language processing (a la Fantastical). But someday, I hope I can never again see SpringBoard.  It's not perfect, and it's not the height of simplicity.  It's just a thing that's pretty good and pretty useful that we'll discard once someone invents something better.