“I am not in the entertainment business.”

-Jim Lehrer, Host of The News Hour with Jim Lehrer

In the past few years it’s become almost cliché to attack news organizations. Politicians attack news organizations because their coverage isn’t favorable. Non-profits will make charges of bias. Comedians target the theme music TV news will cook up in a matter of hours. News organizations will attack other news organizations because the audience enjoys it when Katie Couric, for example, bashes the rest of the industry.

I’ve been watching the news for a long time. Not as long as some others (there was a time when I was in elementary school), but it’s not hard to draw a few conclusions from coverage today. Here’s what I’ve discovered:

1. Bias is a problem.

On the upside, it’s not as widespread as people might think. Fox News is hopelessly biased and does not practice journalism, but rather thinly veiled editorialization of the news and twisting of facts in order to push their own agenda. Other news organizations suffer from other problems or, at the very least, their bias is driven by something else, such as ratings (see below).

2. TV Networks need good ratings.

This one doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out. News networks are ratings driven and this is where theme music, flashy sets, and reporters who could be models come into play. People watch things by which they are entertained, so if news networks want people to watch the news, they need to make their coverage entertaining. But they will also follow public opinion more carefully than a politician. Few reporters were brave enough to be critical of, or question, the Bush Administration shortly after 9/11 and heading into the Iraq War. Their criticism now only stems from the unpopularity of the Bush Administration.

3. Investigative journalism appears to be a thing of the past.

Once a journalist has a story, it’s rare that they search for the deeper meaning. Maybe it’s just me, but I think investigative journalism is declining. Reporters are becoming well-paid scribes.

4. The ultimate goal of news organizations is not to report the news.

This is a sad but simple truth. News organizations are largely corportations and corporations (at least the for-profit variety) exist to make money. If they can make money by doing the news, then everyone’s happy, but it seems that the big news corpoations (Disney, Viacom, News Corp, etc.) have been turning to entertainment news.

5. These are broad generalizations.

This is not true for every news organization or even every program or service of that organization.

So where do I turn for real news? PBS! I’ve grown up with The News Hour with Jim Lehrer and while I didn’t appreciate it when I was younger I do now. It does not have a bias towards any side ever and it does not try to turn news into entertainment. (See above quote). Because it’s publicly funded, ratings don’t matter. The news is really the news and it’s better than any of the other news networks I’ve ever seen.

I’ve run into several people who say that they just don’t pay attention to the news. It’s everyone’s social responsibility to pay attention to the news! It doesn’t matter if it’s entertaining or not, everyone should be paying attention to the news.

This issue makes me angry. When angry, I don’t always write coherently. I’m happy to clarify.

There are some news stories that I look at and wonder how the people named in the story could possibly be so stupid. But I’m used to those stories being about people who defenestrate themselves or other Darwin Award-worthy activities. It’s very rare (though becoming more common) that I ask myself this question when reading an article about public officials.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled that prisoners (about 270 of them, taken during the Iraq and Afghanistan armed conflicts) held at Guantánamo Bay as “enemy combatants” have the constitutional right of habeas corpus. The “enemy combatant” status and the fact that they are being held in Cuba had prevented them from having hearings. Approximately 250 of the 270 were being held with no charges having been filed. The Bush Administration, in their persistent efforts to circumvent long respected laws for political gain, had chosen Guantánamo specifically because they believe that U.S. laws would not inconvenience them in their destruction of the Constitution.

Habeas corpus itself is generally uncontroversial. In fact, it’s routine in for criminal trials in the United States. It is simply the process by which a prisoner can challenge why they’ve been imprisoned and to require the accuser to provide adequate proof that they had reason to detain the person. It is not, as Justice Scalia and John McCain would have you believe, letting a terrorist go for two reasons:

1. The government cannot prove that many of the detainees are terrorists or are guilty of anything more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
2. Habeas corpus does not mean letting someone go! It means that the government has to produce proof that these people were detained for a good reason.

I am left, then, to wonder what the Bush administration is smoking. Habeas corpus is not a big deal. Why are they worried? It’s because they don’t have proof that most of these people did anything wrong. And the prospect of following the law makes Bush and his cronies shake in their boots.

All this decision really means is that detainees can go through the legal system so they can be brought to justice or found not guilty, instead of held indefinitely. What is the rationale for holding people without recourse? What does it accomplish? Absolutely nothing, but this Administration wants to sacrifice our core values in order to “win.”

Ultimately, in a very, very close 5-4 split in the Supreme Court (all too common in the Roberts court), the Supreme Court did the right thing. They provided a legal means for detainees to move the legal process along by having their cases tried in the United States. What angers me is not the decision, which I’m happy with. It’s the fact that this was an issue for debate at all. What state is the country in if we actually have to debate whether detainees get legal protection? These were not extraordinary circumstances either. They’ve been sitting in prison for years now; the government can’t argue they haven’t had enough time to collect evidence. This is simply based on the Bush Administration’s faulty rationale. Their argument is something like this:

1. These prisoners are terrorists. We lose if we give terrorists legal rights.

This argument is silly because, as I said above, these people are not necessarily terrorists. And by giving people legal rights, it is not at all a sign of weakness. The people who hate America don’t hate us just because of where we’re born, they hate us because of the principles we uphold. They hate us because we live in a country where women can drive cars and people have freedom. This administration has responded to that by cutting down and personal privacy and making this a political issue. But the destruction of our core values is what terrorists are looking for. Destroying what we hold dear is what shows terrorists they’ve won.

2. “[This decision] will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.” -Justice Antonin Scalia, Dissenting

This is just plainly not true. Habeas corpus is meant to determine whether or not someone is threatening enough to remain behind bars, so if there is proof of wrongdoing, the prisoner will be detained. We need to trust the courts to make good decisions about who should be detained.

But going past the reason why Scalia is wrong, I should point out that Scalia should not be making comments like that. It is nowhere near his job description to be predicting how many Americans will be killed and, without further supporting his claim, his comments are irresponsible, but indicative of the unprofessional way Scalia uses his authority.

3. The courts will be overloaded by these detainees.

Not so much. In 2007, district courts alone saw 57,172 criminal filings, so I doubt 270 are going to make much of a difference.

Those reasons just scratch the surface. The Bush Administration even made the argument once that the Geneva Convetions don’t apply to our prisoners in Guantánamo (also struck down by the Supreme Court).

And now we arrive at John McCain. It positively baffles me that a person who was held in Vietnam could be in favor of a practice so clearly wrong. McCain said the decision is “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”

When I hear John McCain, I’m witnessing the slow death of the country. (If McCain wins, by the way, we might as well break into the National Archives and tear the Constitution and Bill of Rights into shreds). Why is this even being debated? Why are we even debating that these people should get fair trials?

Everybody should get fair trials. If they are a serial murderer, a bomber, a terrorist, or any other flavor of criminal, they deserve a fair trial. We need to trust the justice system. If the Administration can’t produce proof, then these people should not be held. By keeping these prisoners in the dark, we’ve delayed almost 300 important trials. The world should know what these prisoners have done. The world should see that America won’t destroy it’s values for a few hundred terrorists. The world should see that, if they are terrorists, the prisoners are punished properly, humanely, and in accordance with our laws. This is should not be a political issue, but once again, this Administration has chosen to circumvent our laws for their messed up ideology.

I’ve never been a fan of over simplifying things. In fact, it has always bothered me how much network news and even some classes are watered down to make them easier to understand. Some things are complicated and cannot be distilled into sound bites or catch phrases. Albert Einstein once said to “[m]ake everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.” But then there are other things that are simple, but people like to complicate because it makes them feel better.

I realized this “complication” phenomenon when Mark and I started to plan our exercise sessions. Mark is a bit of a health crazy (at least compared to me), so we decided to enter into an arrangement. For these summer months, Mark and I are going to meet and he is going to try to make me at least a little athletic. I’m optimistic, especially if I don’t make this more complicated than it needs to be.

If you search for “weight loss” on Amazon, you get 59,111 books alone! The hundreds of methods that purportedly help you get in the “best shape of your life” are really all saying the same thing. They will complicate it with color coded charts and fun recipes. It seems the key to getting into shape is much simpler than these books would have you believe. There are only two ways to get in shape:

1. Eat less
2. Exercise more

Oddly, it was in a sermon a few years ago that I first heard the two simple steps. While guests during the third hour of The Today Show and “experts” have other methods, every method can be distilled down to these two steps. Of course, discovering the essentials doesn’t make executing them any easier.

I hope I can follow my own advice.

TechCrunch is one of the most visited blogs on the Internet. According to Technorati, it is the number two most linked to blog on the Internet (after the Huffington Post) and is the 1,795th most popular site on the Internet according to Alexa. (I’m not sure I trust Alexa on this one because the site overview also says the site’s average load time is 11.1 seconds, which has not been my experience). Founded by Michael Arrington in 2005 and co-edited by Arrington and Erick Schonfeld, the site is dedicated to “obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies” as well as profiling “existing companies that are making an impact (commercial and/or cultural) on the new webspace.” TechCrunch was the first blog of what became the TechCrunch network, which now includes CrunchGear, TechCrunch UK, and several others.

TechCrunch is somewhat of a gold standard for blogs. It has a clear focus, clear leadership, and good content. The prolific nature of TechCrunch ensures that the audience doesn’t get bored and the great press TechCrunch gets ensures respect from the community and a steady stream of new visitors (i.e. me). It’s no surprise, then, that startups clamor for Arrington’s attention and a profile. Arrigton’s opinion can make or break a startup.

I’ve found that TechCrunch plays an invaluable role on the Internet. Over the past month, the updates about startups and information about new startups has enabled me to stay up-to-date with the current state of web technology (can be impressive for cocktail parties) and, if I stay on top of things, I can get into a limited beta of a new service. Not bad!

After my post yesterday, I realized that, in one sense, Arrington is the Drudge of the tech world. TechCrunch reaches millions of people (791,000 through RSS alone) and, love him or hate him, Arrington wields a lot of power. He even has a lot of inside sources and will often get a story before anyone else. (Perhaps a byproduct of having a lot of people in the tech world trying to impress him). But the similarities stop there. I am happy to report that Arrington seems to have more journalistic integrity than Drudge, who publishes inflamatory links and occasional “exclusives” where Arrington publishes well written articles with frequent exclusives. If Drudge is The National Enquirer of the world of weblogs, then TechCrunch is the New York Times.

The only problem to speak of is not with the content, but with the website itself. The banner and sidebar ads seem to scream, “AD-SUPPORTED, AD-SUPPORTED, CLICK PLEASE!!!.” I would prefer the ads (which run at steep prices) to be more subtle, but I understand the need for revenue. I would like ad-supported sites to become a minority on the Internet, but I know that a shift like this would not start with TechCrunch, nor would it be viable for TechCrunch to move away from their current ad-supported model. The second sub-problem with ads is a potential conflict of interest. TechCrunch, for example, published a story about Yahoo! today, despite the fact that Yahoo! has a rotating ad buy on TechCrunch. While this post (and others about Yahoo!) have not been particularly favorable to Yahoo! and, in fact, some are critical of Yahoo!, TechCrunch should come up with some sort of arrangement with advertisers to avoid even the appearance of impropriety.

Since I discovered TechCrunch in January, it has quickly become a staple of my daily blog reading. Its faults are few, its benefits many and it occupies an important niche in the Internet startup community.

In future, perhaps a BlogCrunch would be in order. I’m always looking for new blogs, and the critical eye of somebody in the TechCrunch network might help me out. But that’s just my humble opinion.

Many people are familiar with the “news” website The Drudge Report. According to Alexa, drudgereport.com is the 551st most visited website on the Internet! I’m sure Matt Drudge is very happy (with his $800,000 a year revenue as of 2003), but he’s in a unique position to influence the minds of visitors to his site. Since I started checking The Drudge Report two years ago, I’ve grown uneasy with the way Drudge manipulates the news.

The Background

Matt Drudge was working as a retail manage at a CBS gift shop in early 1994 when he launched an e-mail subscription “news” service. His contact with the news network allowed him to break stories of which more reliable sources were not yet aware, or were unwilling to report because they lacked authenticity. In 1996, The Drudge Report transitioned to the web format people see today. The website itself has a design that looks like something a beginner HTML coder would have created in the 1990s. The vast majority of the site’s content links to news stories from reliable sources, but Drudge occasionally gets an exclusive, which he investigates himself before writing a short “story.” For example, he broke the Monica Lewinsky story, a feat which helped him gain recognition. Surprisingly often, he breaks a story before anyone else, but he has been wrong in the past, including once when he publicized a claim (later discovered to be a hoax) that Bill Clinton had an illegitimate baby.

The Problem

Most of the time, it’s not his “exclusives” that are biased. Drudge appears to suffer from a selective linking and creativing link titling disorder. Over time, it’s easy to see trends. He has repeatedly linked or shown images of Hillary Clinton aging (he used this image once), while showing headlines about Barack Obama’s successes. Drudge is highly critical of global warming and regularly links to articles about global warming conferences or rallies being held in the snow, while I’ve never known him to link to anything in support of global warming.

Then there are the misleading claims. I was inspired to write this post when Drudge posted a link saying “McCain using GOOGLE to vet VP candidates.” The link is blatantly misleading, as people who read the linked article would know. McCain was asked about his search for a vice presidential candidate. McCain joking responded, “You know, basically it’s a Google.” Either Drudge can’t read, or he’s trying to mislead people. Today, he also linked to an article with the link reading “CLINTONS PUT DRUDGE ON ENEMIES LIST.” If you go read the article, a spokesman says, “There is no list.” This would not be a problem if everybody read the articles, but they don’t. Many people read headlines for a quick glance view of a situation and misleading people is just plain wrong.

Drudge completely abandoned any journalistic standards that he had when he broke the story that Prince Harry was in Afghanistan, putting Prince Harry and his entire unit in danger. While Drudge was not bound by a news blackout in place in England, it would have been appropriate to at the very least inform the British government he was going to publish the story. I personally don’t think he should have published the story in the first place, not because of a legal obligation, but because it was published almost maliciously, had no benefit, and was to the general detriment of Prince Harry and his unit.

Bottom Line

It is deplorable that Drudge has no journalistic standards while running a site that appears to be a news aggregation site. A federal judge summed it up very well (Drudge was sued for claiming Sidney Blumenthal beat his wife then covered it up), “Drudge is not a reporter, a journalist, or a newsgatherer. He is, as he himself admits, simply a purveryour of gossip” (Footnote 18).  While Drudge said that he was nothing more than a “purveyor of gossip”, he should make this clearer, given the high-profile nature of his site.

I wish Drudge could be a more reputable source.  I cannot deny that he has tons of sources and he could be much more effective if he was better at being a decent journalist.

Despite the problems with Drudge’s site, I will still check it everyday. In fact, I checked my history and I looked at The Drudge Report fifty-two times in the past twenty-four hours. I’ve learned to ignore the headlines and read the articles. It pains me to add to his statistics, but he often does have the story before anyone else, and to me, it’s worth it to stay informed.

Being an Apple fan is a blessing and a curse. I am blessed because I can appreciate the wonderful products that Apple releases each year, but I’m cursed because when they do make an announcement, Apple becomes my primary focus. I couldn’t not do a post about Apple, so here it is.

The highlight of the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is the keynote, traditionally given by Steve Jobs (a.k.a. El Jobso, the Steve, Ruler of Heaven and Earth, etc.) and Jobs took his time this year to speak about the iPhone. The first hour was admittedly dull, but in the second hour, things began to get much more interesting. I’ve summed up the highlights of the highlight in chronological order.

iPhone SDK

Apple enthusiasts heard about the iPhone SDK at an event on Apple’s campus in March. The SDK, or software developer’s kit, allows a developer to create an application. iPhone users have been able to use online applications for a while and some of them are quite well done. Facebook and Bank of America both did an excellent job with their online iPhone apps, but these only work if you’re connected to the Internet.

Advantages of having an application reside on the phone itself include the ability to tap into some of the information stored on your phone (i.e. Contacts) or some of the equipment on your phone (i.e. Camera). For example, if I want to chat with friends using AIM, I could use an online application, but an application that resides on my phone would give me the ability to assign a screen name to a contact. I could also assign a buddy a new contact photo by using the built-in camera. The SDK allows developers to do this without jailbreaking the phone.

The Applications

The bulk of the first hour of the keynote was taken up by developers sharing their iPhone applications. In an endless parade that should have been a lot shorter, developer after developer told the packed Moscone Center about how easy it was to develop for iPhone, even though they’d never written a line of Objective-C or how they’d written a seemingly complicated program in three days. I didn’t gain anything out of this part of the keynote, except I now know that in the time I was listening to these developers drone on, I could have written an award winning iPhone application.

There are, as you might imagine, a few games coming out for the iPhone, but I’m not particularly interested in those. For a few months, I’ve been very interested in the more practical uses of iPhones, even for education. Apple satisfied my hunger for information on non-frivolous application development with one developer who is working on an application for doctors. (Apparently the medical community is looking for an easy-to-use portable solution for viewing X-rays and such). I won’t talk too much about this now; I’ll save it for a future post.

Enterprise Features

Apple is targeting a relatively small audience with their new enterprise features, but in an apparent attempt to grab some marketshare from RIM (makers of Blackberry), Apple has built in features that are need in a corporate environment like the ability to remotely remove sensitive information from a phone, the ability to activate many phones at once, and improved security.

I don’t yet work in a corporate environment, so these features don’t mean a whole lot to me, but once again I see the opportunity for some educational uses. Indeed, several institutions of higher learning have participated in Apple’s private beta of the latest version of the iPhone software.

Mobile Me

I’ve never used Apple’s .Mac service before because it always seemed like a waste of money. Apple seemed to think so too. Mobile Me replaces .Mac and adds a whole ton of new features. There are som great online applications for photo sharing and other frivolous features, but I’m interested in the more serious features, namel push e-mail, calendar, and contacts. Anyone with an iPhone or iPod Touch is familiar with the dawning realization every week or two that they should probably sync their device with their computer so they can get the latest calendar items and contacts on both phones. Mobile Me will allow this to happen instantly over the cell network or over the wireless network. No we just need Apple to make wireless syncing happen with iTunes songs!

A few people have remarked on what they view to be high pricing ($99). Considering the service in completely advertisement free and has great features, I’m willing to fork over the $99. But I’m actually only going to pay $69, by virtue of an Amazon discount. A little explanation: Current .Mac users will be automatically upgraded to Mobile Me for no charge (.Mac will be defunct as of 11 July). Amazon currently has a deal to get .Mac for only $69, so I’m going to buy .Mac and then get upgraded automatically. Fun!

iPhone 3G

There was a point during the keynote when I got really scared. We were an hour into the keynote and Steve had barely been on stage. I started thinking about all the iPhone rumors. What if they were just that: rumors? What if Apple wasn’t ready to release a second iteration of the iPhone? The Steve came to the rescue.

You can check out the full specifications here, but the iPhone 3G will be released on 11 July, at a heavily subsidized price of $199 for the 8 GB version or $299 for the 16 GB version. There’s a great ad for the iPhone 3G here. From what I can tell, it’s much improved over the first version with a nice, new plastic back that will improve reception, the abilitiy to use the much faster 3G data network, GPS, and it will ship with the next version of the iPhone software.

The Wrapup

Buy these products. All of them. I am. All of them. You can see the full address here, or a quick summary by Mahalo Daily here.

Hello people who use RSS feeds to subscribe to View from a Farley!  View from a Farley is now using FeedBurner for RSS feeds.  This transition was supposed to go smoothly, but it didn’t.  Mostly everything is sorted out except for one thing - people who are currently subscribed.  So, if you are currently subscribed through the View from a Farley RSS feed, delete the current feed and subscribe to the new feed at this link:

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I would describe the mood in the Internet community as puzzled yesterday afternoon when Amazon.com went down for two hours. When I found out that Amazon was down, I was amazed. Amazon is never down just like Google is never down! Then I started chuckling to myself because it’s almost laughable that only two hours of downtime could cause such a stir on the Internet. Pingdom reports that this is Amazon’s longest downtime since 2006, when Pingdom started monitoring Amazon. Other than a one hour, 44 minute outage in 2006 and today, the longest downtime, according to Pingdom, was 26 minutes in September 2006. Internet users expect a lot more than they used to.

There was a time when 56K modems were considered fast. Online shopping didn’t exist yet. AOL was the industry leader. Google was being run out of a garage. Those were the “good old days.” We didn’t expect webpages to load in a split second. Downloading a one gigabyte file (something like a movie) would take about 41 hours.

Today, we expect instant load time, so when a website doesn’t load at all and instead displays an error message, people tend to freak out. So if the 1990s and early 2000s are the “good old days” now, what will we think of 2008 in ten or twenty years? We imagine ourselves to be so advanced, and perhaps we are, but if there is no limit to just how advanced we can become, then we are just barely scratching the surface of technological development. I’m sure that one hundred years ago Americans considered themselves advanced with such modern marvels as the Eiffel tower (the tallest structure in the world at the time). The French, nor anyone else, could conceive of a time when people were building structures over two thousand feet tall. There is technology that we don’t know about yet and we can’t imagine that will be ubiquitous in another one hundred years.

The next “big thing” on the technological front will be robotics. Much as computers were just beginning to be developed in the 1950s and 1960s, robots are just beginning to be developed now. A lot of great robotic technology exists, but it is prohibitively expensive. The breakthrough will come when robots will be able to learn from behavior, not just programming, and make decisions for themselves. Artificial intelligence will develop alongside robotics and one day, a computer will pass the Turing test.

That’s only the beginning. Robotics and artificial intelligence are already “known.” With those two areas, it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. I’m interested in the technology that hasn’t even been dreamed of yet. As pointed out in an episode of the West Wing, we can’t limit scientific discovery based on what we think will be instantly useful. When Michael Faraday started conducting experiments into the nature of electricity, he could not possibly have know that his work would one day run our entire world. If we keep discovering new things, then we could have a world run on something entirely new. It’s crazy to think of the possibilities because the next revolutionary thing hasn’t been invented yet, but sometime soon, a new technology will do for the 21st century what electricity did for the 20th century.

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

-Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill certainly had a way with words.

Graduating from middle school is definitely nowhere near the end, but it gives me the opportunity to reflect on my experiences in school and the experiences switching to my new school has allowed me to have. In this one year, I feel as though I have aged one hundred years. I turned fourteen. I discovered video podcasting, then audio podcasting and blogging. I gained friends and grew distant from others. I had good days and bad days. I wrote good things and pieces of writing that were quite simply too terrible to look at. I extended my social network online, met Cali Lewis and Neal Campbell, and discovered Twitter. If a person’s life is the sum of their experiences, then I think I’m off to a good start. And I’ve only just begun.

In everything I do, there’s always a chance that I will get tired of it. Every once in a while, I reflect on something and decide it’s time for a change. I looked at my career at Mac News Weekly and decided it was time to move on much as I looked at my public school career and decided I need to go somewhere else. There may come a time when I will feel the same way about my current school, but I doubt it. There are always more opportunities in advanced placement and honors courses to keep me challenged and I can always challenge myself outside of school (by writing things like this).

Wednesday marked the end of my first year in my new school. I made the transition from public school to private school and gained a much better education. I lost economic diversity in the student body, but it was overall the best move I possibly could have made. The public school I was attending was one of the best in the country and had a few excellent teachers, but it was a slave to standardized testing. Now I get to go to one of the best private schools in the country and still have excellent teachers, but I am no longer a professional test taker.

I’m indebted to the teachers I’ve had this year as well as my classmates, if for no other reason than they have been willing punchlines when I need them. It didn’t take me long to realize that I was in a good class, but I’ve found that it is not until the end of something that one realizes just how extraordinary something is.

Whether or not a class will be good is hit or miss. There are so many factors. Is the teacher good? Are students eager to learn? Is the topic interesting? If the answer to all three of those questions is yes, then the class is generally excellent. If the answer to any of those three is no, then my experience leads me to believe that the class will be either great or terrible. If the answer to all three is no, then there’s a problem. I’m not well versed in probability, but the chance of having every class fall into the first category must be astronomical. I suppose I’m just lucky.

I will be posting all summer, even while I’m away. To stay sharp, I’ll be reading this, this, and this. Have an excellent summer (even if you don’t get a break) and check back regularly for updates.

I have the unfortunate habit of calling my teachers by their first names when they’re not around. When I’m in class, a teachers is always Mr./Mrs./Ms. XYZ, but when I’m with anybody other than a teacher, I call them Kyle or Sophie. For a while, I thought there was no harm in calling teachers by their first name when they’re not around. Then I started mixing up the times when I can and can’t use first names. While I’ve never been punished for it, I’ve accidentally called mentioned a teachers first name while in the presence of another teacher. Luckily I haven’t called a teacher by their first name to their face yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

I’ve begun to wonder, though, if calling a teacher by their first name should be allowed. There are so many rules that vary from school to school that deal with cell phones and gum chewing, but the one rule that I’ve discovered to be nearly universal is that all teachers are to be called Mr./Mrs./Ms. XYZ. It’s also one of the few rules that isn’t regularly challenged by students (except me). The reasoning seems to be that it’s a sign of respect and using first names is not formal enough for a student-teacher relationship. I say that’s ridiculous.

I firmly believe that students should be allowed to call teachers by their first names. We show our respect through our words and actions. If a teacher’s respect hinges on being addressed as Mr./Mrs./Ms. XYZ, then that teacher should probably not be teaching. There are obviously exceptions, but I think that allowing teachers and students to be on a first name basis creates an important bond between student and teacher and furthers a student’s education by changing the student-teacher relationship.

The one big restriction on usage of a teacher’s first name is this: I think that the right to use a teacher’s first name should only be extended to middle and high schoolers. For the first several years of education, the in-class relationship is much different than it is in middle and high school. In the lower grades, the teacher tends to be a clear leader in the class and the type of teaching is more of the teacher-talks-student-listens variety. As I get older, however, classes are focused much more on group discussions and learning from each other. I’ve noticed that the role of a teacher shifts from Master and Commander to facilitator. I certainly do not mean to minimize the job of a teacher; I don’t think the job gets any easier as the role of a teacher in a classroom changes, but in class discussions, it’s important for everyone to operate on the same level and have the teacher be less of an absolute authority figure.

The change in names may seem only symbolic, but I believe it has the potential to actually change the way people learn. While schools will always have a hierarchical arrangement of power, striving to create a learning community rather than a learning command structure is infinitely more beneficial. I doubt that educational traditionalists are big fans of a world where teachers can learn from students as much as students can learn from teachers, but schools shouldn’t be afraid to embrace a new kind of learning that doesn’t stop with the names students are allowed to use for teachers.