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"Life of Pi"

So I was looking around my room to find something (that had a possibility of being) rhetorical and I finally settled on the shelf next to my bed. On it are some of my favorite books, a sort of way to calm me down were I to be feeling stressful throughout the year. One of those books is Life of Pi. If you’ve read the book, hopefully you’ll see where I’m coming from with this post. If you’ve never read it, I suggest you check out my other blog this week.

In summary, the protagonist, Pi Patel, is lost at sea after a huge ship carrying his family and all of their possessions sinks at sea. Pi’s father owned a zoo in their native India, and upon moving to Canada, is forced to bring a majority of the animals with him on board the ship. When it sinks, so do the animals.

What makes the story interesting is that Pi survives for 227 days on board a lifeboat. Accompanying him, also having managed to reach the lifeboat, is a tiger and, at least for some time, an orangutan, a zebra, and a hyena.

After he finally finds land, Pi begins to explain his tale. Not only is it unbelievable that managed to survive the whole time at sea – but he claimed to do so with a fully grown Bengal tiger aboard. After people don’t believe Pi, he revises his story to them – replacing real life people with the animals that he used as characters in his story. He rationalizes it by saying that although the second version is more believable, it is unexciting and people do not want to hear it.

“And so it is with religion,” he says.

The rhetoric in this is pretty plain to me. The author, Yann Martel, makes a distinct point to his audience. As a reader, you spend the entire story believing that the animals on board with Pi are real – and even after an alternative is suggested, you want them to be.  People do the same thing with religion. They may like a story, but discredit it as inconceivable, and therefore not true. Personally, I’m one of the hypocrites that Martel targets, I want the animals to be real, but do not believe in any religion. The irony, then, is that the author makes you realize this paradox about yourself – rooting for Pi and his animals, yet also holding a double standard.

Regardless, Life of Pi is absolutely my favorite book.

Turning Pro

This week’s blog is about the rhetoric of becoming a pro athlete. I know that I’ve already talked about the rhetoric of being pressured as a phenom, but what about the ultimate goal of those “student” athletes.

With stars like LeBron James or Kobe Bryant who leave straight from high school to go to their respective professional leagues, what kind of message does that send to today’s youth? Though those two examples are extreme, the amount of times that it happens really isn’t that small.

Think about the Major League Baseball draft – oddly enough (and against statistical advice) most teams draft high school players. Personally, I know three kids that got drafted before any of us went to college. Those three guys all went on to college (in baseball, you can deny your drafting and go to college anyway), but it isn’t always the case.

The NBA started seeing what they thought was too much of this “lack of higher education” and so they made what people now call the “one and done” rule. Quite simply, the NBA now requires that before declaring eligible for the draft, draftees must play one year of college basketball. Football has a similar rule (you need to be at least an academic junior).

In baseball, though many suspect a similar ruling coming, there is not yet one in place. Just two years ago the Washington Nationals drafted a 17 year old for instance named Bryce Harper, heralded as the next big thing.

The controversy in all of this, like many things, deals with the money involved. Say you’re a kid from a family who needs the money, how can you turn down millions guaranteed in your rookie contract, to go to college for a few years while your family still struggles to get by? This is the argument that many of the kids are faced with.

Unfortunately, because playing careers don’t last forever, and many of the athletes turn out to be busts, they are left with an inadequate education. Because, this last part is unforeseeable, it is why the decision is so hotly debated. More than anything else, the people whose careers end up not working out, often terribly regret their decision to forgo school. And they become the biggest advocates for education over immediate immersion into professional sports.

America's Pastime

Maybe this post is a little bit of a stretch but, Ben, I’m aiming to have this work under the umbrella of “civic life.”

But, I think it does… or at least, I think it should.

I’m talking about baseball. It’s opening day! Why not?

I love baseball. In reality, there are few things that I have a greater passion for, and it easily makes my top ten (and I’m including family on that same list). My senior year research paper was on baseball. Not just the basics, not just the history, not even just well-written passionate ranting – I wrote about why baseball is so much more than a sport to the American people.

Maybe you have your doubts. But I’d love to take anyone up on the argument. There’s a reason it’s called “America’s Pastime,” and believe me, it’s far more than just another a cliché. It’s been a constant in this country at times when nothing else has. In fact, during World War II, FDR told the commissioner of the MLB to keep the league running – because the country needed it. When I found that out, it blew my mind, but I realized the truth in it. After September 11^th, George Bush threw out the first pitch of Game 3 of the Diamondbacks Yankees World Series. It was in New York, not long after the attacks, and it was a perfect strike.

I remember watching. I was eight, and I could feel the meaning behind it.

Of course, baseball is far more than something to keep us together during times of crisis. It is full of life lessons, and can be anything that you need it to be. Say you’re a big math person, you learn with numbers and formulas. Baseball can be there for you – it is a game of statistics, strategies, and odds. But say you’re the person of abstract, numbers mean nothing to you – you need the creativity. Well, baseball can be there for you too. It’s fluid, quirky, full of superstition, passion, and youth.

It’s America’s sport. It’s there for the die hard fan. And it reaches out to the most unlikely of places. That’s the beauty in it.

As we prepare for this first weekend of the 2012 season, I hope you find time somewhere along the next six months to sit back, relax, and soak it in. Because I think we could all use a little more baseball in us.

Technology in the Classroom

Inspired by our oh so wonderful latest group project, I decided this week to write about the rhetoric of technology in the classroom.

To start off, let me just simply say that I’m not remotely a fan of technology. In some ways that makes me a hypocrite; I’m sitting here typing on a laptop with my iPhone right next to me. But that’s not what I mean, not exactly anyway.

I’m a firm believer that technology has proven to be detrimental to the ability for our society to learn. In my generation, I believe that this started with the PowerPoint and has progressed from there.

When I look back at my favorite classes that I have taken in my lifetime, they are the ones that used the least bit of technology as a teaching aid. They are also the ones that I learned the most in (even when they weren’t my favorite, I still learned more in these classes). In this way, I am not alone. I know many teachers, and students, who prefer not to use technology in their classes because it does not yield the results that they wish.

The promoters of technology rarely see the point. They can look at this new wonderful thing (whatever it may happen to be) and not only feel the need to use it right away, but to encourage everyone around them to do so as well.

In my opinion, this is selfish. Technology can be incredibly unreliable – especially compared to simply giving a speech, writing a paper, or reading a book. While, when done correctly, it has the potential to be quicker, it also has the potential to take an exponentially longer amount of time to complete the same amount of work.

http://www.leburke.com/roadtrip2008/images/phillyamish.jpg

I also have a problem with technology because, as I mentioned, I don’t learn as well from it. In a society based on grades, the verbatim definitions on a slide show are often what teachers want to see on a test. This means that student’s quickly copy down the slides before the teacher clicks to the next one, meaning they rarely take in any of what the teacher is saying anyway.

It would be foolish for me to say that I don’t see the point – that is not the case at all. I just think that technology is getting way too immersed into our education system. Something that I find terribly discouraging as an aspiring teacher.

The Amateur Athlete

I don’t know how many of you watched any of the Women’s NCAA Basketball Tournament coverage – it gets far less attention than the men’s – but if you did, you’ll see where I’m coming from in the this post. The thing is, for the past two weeks, just about the only things that the media doing the women’s side covered were stories on Elena DelleDone.

If you don’t watch a lick of women’s basketball, and if you’re not from Delaware, then you probably don’t know who that is. In reality, she’s the best damn female basketball player in a long time. Now playing at Delaware (due to family issues which are a whole other amazing story), Elena was highly recruited to play at the best of the best schools since she was twelve (received scholarships from great programs like Tennessee, UNC, Duke, and UCONN before high school).

She won her AAU tournaments, played for Team USA around the world, absolutely dominated high school basketball (her school was a rival of mine), and went on to take a scholarship at UCONN.

So she’s really good? What’s the big deal? The thing is, DelleDone had already become sick of basketball. Burnt out. There was no passion left – she just relied on her sheer ability to keep her successful. Finally, it was too much. And she left UCONN shortly after arriving.

This short summary is merely an example of the rhetoric that the media embodies to glorify the amateur athlete in America. It is one of the things that I hate most in the world. DelleDone’s story turns out to be a success, after quitting basketball cold turkey, she returned a year later and led Delaware to a 30-1 record this past season.

But she’s the exception.

The pressure that our society places on top class amateur athletes is ridiculous. ESPN glorified former teenage stars like Michelle Wie and Freddy Adu, people meant to be the next big thing and who have now slipped out of the limelight. Sports Illustrated loves to have articles on high school athletes who are supposed to be the next big thing. Often though, the people surrounding these kids love their story and abilities more than the kids love the sport.

I know the feeling firsthand. By the time I was in seventh grade, I had wrestled in over thirty states, won nationals, all-Americaned twice, and had had several articles written about me. I had been recruited by high schools around the state since elementary school, and was heralded as the next four-time state champ.

But I fell off. I hated it. Got burnt out. And the people around me didn’t help. The rhetoric of writing about stories like this go far beyond what I think most people imagine. Society wants to write about the crazy success story and skills, they don’t want to know that it’s all a façade.

Madness

With March Madness in full swing and the first round in action, I wanted to try to make this week’s blog somehow relevant. To millions of sports fans around the country, March (and the beginning of April) represents the time for incredible athletic phenomena. The “Big Dance,” or the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament, traditionally fields 64 teams (68 this year) all vying for the coveted national championship.

The tournament makes and breaks players’ careers. It fosters magical memories, horrible heartbreaks, and the charismatic Cinderella stories that capture the love of the American public.

The NCAA basketball tournament is something easy to go on and on about on various levels. At its foundation though, is a special bracket that the NCAA has developed over the years to seed teams in their quests for the title. And it is herein that the rhetoric lies.

Every year, the Sunday before the tournament starts, otherwise known as “Selection Sunday,” a selection committee (made up of ten representatives from the major athletic conferences and a few individual athletic directors from various universities) chooses the teams that have earned the right to play in the tournament and the seeds that they will be assigned. Roughly half of the teams receive automatic bids for winning their conference titles, but the remaining teams must be admitted as At-Large entries.

This becomes very subjective. Who gets to be an At-Large team? Let’s look at an easy example. Duke and North Carolina are both in the ACC and both ranked in the top ten in the AP polls. Since only one team can win their conference tournament, only one team gets an automatic bid; since both have showed superiority over the rest of the schools all season though, both will be admitted.

This philosophy works with many of the At-Large bids but not all. What happens, for instance, when a team has beaten five ranked teams over the course of the season, but barely manages to finish about .500? Do they deserve an entry over the team that only lost six games all year but did not play a team ranked higher than fifty? These are the questions the committee faces – and with over three hundred schools to choose from – it is a difficult task.

Many teams that get these special bids are from what are called the Power Conferences, these are conferences (like the Big 10, Big 12, Big East, etc.) that have the biggest schools and generally have more money. Many “Mid-Major” Conferences complain that they don’t receive a fair shot at a bid, and are discriminated against because of lack of size.

It is the rhetoric of choosing the right schools, and being as fair as possible, that  is so interesting about the Selection Committee.