katie bouman's algorithm, black holes, and incels

There's a lot of news going on about the "black hole girl" right now, and how she's being given too much credit for her role in the historic first image of a black hole. Because this is too important, I want to set the record straight.

Once Katie Bouman became the "face" of the black hole photo, and articles began to call her "the woman behind the black hole photo", an assortment of people that I'm strongly inclined to call incels but won't decided to figure out just how much of a role she had in it. Why? You'd have to ask them. Something about her attractiveness, youthfulness, and femaleness disturbed them to the point where they had to go digging.

And after digging, they found Andrew Chael, who wrote an algorithm, and put his algorithm online. Andrew Chael worked on the black hole photo as well. And because people kept saying that Katie Bouman wrote "the algorithm", these people decided that "the algorithm" in question must be Chael's.

So they looked at Chael's GitHub repository and checked the history. The history showed that Andrew Chael's commits totaled more than 850,000 lines, while Katie Bouman contributed only 2,400.

"Oh my god!" they all said. "He did almost all of the work on the algorithm and yet she's the one getting all of the credit!"

They dug a little deeper - but not much - and discovered that the algorithm that "ultimately" generated the world-famous photo was created a different man, named Mareki Honma.

"She's taken the credit from two men!" they gasped. "Feminism and the PC media is destroying everything!"

There were, of course, those who tried to be kind. "She's always said that this was a team effort," they said. "We don't blame her, we blame the media. She didn't ask to become the poster girl of a team project she barely contributed to."

Meanwhile, Andrew Chael - a gay man - tweeted in defense of her. He thanked people for congratulating him on the work he'd spent years on but clarified that if they were doing so as a part of a sexist attack on Katie Bouman, they should go away and reconsider their lives. He said that his work couldn't have happened without Katie.

And it turns out that he was the one who took the viral photo of Bouman, specifically because he didn't want her contributions to be lost to history

So I decided to find out for myself what Katie Bouman's actual contributions were. As a programmer, I'm well aware that the number of GitHub commits means nothing without context. And Chael himself clarified that the lines being counted in the commits were from automatic commits of large data files. The actual software was made up of 68,000 lines, and though he didn't count how many he did personally (having said he doesn't actually care how much of it he personally authored), someone else assessed that he wrote about 24,000 of those.

Whether 68,000 or 24,000-- it's more than 2,400 right? Why call it "her" algorithm, then?

Because there's more than one algorithm being referenced here. These people just don't realize it.

I'll work my way backward because it's easier to explain that way.

The photo that everyone is looking at, the world famous black hole photo? It's actually a composite photo. It was generated by an algorithm credited to Mareki Honma. Honma's algorithm, based on MRI technology, is used to "stitch together" photos and fill in the missing pixels by analyzing the surrounding pixels.

But where did the photos come from that are composited into this photo?

The photos making up the composite were generated by 4 separate teams, led by Katie Bouman and Andrew Chael, Kazu Akiyama and Sara Issaoun, Shoko Koyama, Jose L. Gomez, and Michael Johnson. Each team was given a copy of the black hole data and isolated from each other. Between the four of them, they used two techniques - an older, traditional one called CLEAN, and a newer one called RML - to generate an image.

The purpose of this division and isolation of teams was deliberately done to test the accuracy of the black hole data they were all using. If four isolated teams using different algorithms all got similar results, that would indicate that the data itself was accurate.

And lo, that's exactly what happened. The data wasn't just good, it's the most accurate of its kind. 5 petabytes (millions of billions of bytes) worth of accurate black hole data.

But where did the data come from?

Eight radio telescopes around the world trained their attention on the night sky in the direction of this black hole. The black hole is some ungodly distance away, a relative speck amidst billions of celestial bodies. And what the telescopes caught was not only the data of the black hole but the data of everything else as well.

Data that would need to be sorted.

Clearly, it's not the sort of thing you can sort by hand. To separate the wheat (one specific black hole's data) from the chaff (literally everything else around and between here and there) required an algorithm that could identify and single it out, calculations that were crunched across 800 CPUs on a 40Gbit/s network. And given that the resulting black hole-specific data was 5 petabytes (hundreds of pounds worth of hard drives!) you can imagine that the original data set was many times larger.

The algorithm that accomplished this feat was called CHIRP, short for "Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors".

CHIRP was created by Katie Bouman.

At the age of 23, she knew nothing about black holes. Her field is computer science and artificial intelligence, topics she'd been involved in since high school. She had a theory about the shadows of black holes, and her algorithm was designed to find those shadows. Katie Bouman used a variety of what MIT called "clever algebraic solutions" to overcome the obstacles involved in creating the CHIRP algorithm. And though she had a team working to help her, her name comes first on the peer-reviewed documentation.

It's called the CHIRP algorithm because that's what she named it. It's the only reason these images could be created, and it's responsible for creating some of the images that were incorporated into the final image. It's the algorithm that made the effort of collecting all that data worth it. Any data analyst can tell you that you can't analyze or visualize data until it's been prepared first. Cleaned up. Narrowed down to the important information.

That's what Katie Bouman did, and after working as a data analyst for two years with a focus on this exact thing - data transformation - I can tell you it's not easy. It's not easy on the small data sets I worked with, where I could wind up spending a week looking for the patterns in a 68K Excel spreadsheet containing only one month's worth of programming for a single TV station!

Katie Bouman's 2,400 line contribution to Andrew Chael's work is on top of all of her other work. She spent five years developing and refining the CHIRP algorithm before leading four teams in testing the data created. The data collection phase of this took 10 days in April 2017, when the eight telescopes simultaneously trained their gazes towards the black hole.

This photo was ultimately created as a way to test Katie Bouman's algorithm for accuracy. MIT says that it's frequently more accurate than similar predecessors. And it is the algorithm that gave us our first direct image of a black hole.

Around the internet, there are people who have the misperception that Katie Bouman is just the pretty face, a minor contributor to a project where men like Andrew Chael and Mareki Honma deserve the credit. There are people pushing memes and narratives that she's only being given such acclaim because of feminism. And because Katie Bouman refuses to say that this was anything other than a team effort, even the most flattering comments about her still place her contributions to the photo at less-than-equal contribution to others.

But I'm writing to set the story straight:

When it is written that Katie Bouman is the woman "behind the black hole photo", it is objectively true. She wasn't the only woman, but her work was crucial to making all of this happen.

When Andrew Chael says that his software could not have worked without her, he isn't just being a stand-up guy, he's being literal. And there are those who could just as easily say the same about his contribution, or the contributions of many others.

And while it's true that every one of the 200+ people involved played an important role, Katie Bouman deserves every ounce of superstardom she receives.

If there must be a face to this project - and there usually is - then why shouldn't it be her, her fingers twined across her lips, her gleeful eyes luminous and wide with awe and joy?

Edited:

Thinking on it a little further, I felt I should clarify that I'm not actually trying to downplay Andrew Chael. His imaging algorithm is actually the result of years of effort, a labor of love. Each image that could be composited into the final photo brought with it a unique take on the data, without which the final photo wouldn't have been complete.

So let's take a moment to celebrate the fact that two of the most integral contributors to the first direct photo of a black hole

were a woman

and a gay man.

===============================================
2nd Update (LONG!)

I went to bed at 19 shares on a post I wrote to vent to my FB friends, and now it's over 2K. I guess it's gone viral. That means I have some work to do.

I'm going to provide a list of the various articles I read to piece this together. When I wrote this, I wasn't trying to write an essay so I didn't put sources in and I didn't ensure that every detail is 100% accurate. So I'm doing that now.

Any edits I make are mentioned below (apart from spelling/grammar fixes). The resources that led me to write this are listed below. And because I value accuracy, I welcome people to point out mistakes of any kind. I'll make corrections and credit them here.

Edit: I incorrectly wrote that Bouman worked on the algorithm for 6 years and spent 2 years refining it. This was an accidental mush of facts: She's been working on this project for a total of 6 years (ages 23 to 29). She spent 3 years building CHIRP and 2 years refining it. I've corrected that and included that she led the four teams, as two separate articles mention it.

Edit: One of the leads for the 4 team project was a man named Jose L Gomez. I added that to the above, after being sent a twitter thread from Xu S. Han. Thank you! Twitter thread here:
https://twitter.com/saraissaoun/status/1116304522660519936…

Edit: Thanks to Zoë Barraclough and someone who would prefer not to be named, for messaging me with another couple of edits. As confirmed on Kazu Akiyama's twitter, there were more than four leaders for the four imaging teams. As I find out the names of these co-leaders, I'll incorporate them into the post.

http://news.mit.edu/2016/method-image-black-holes-0606
This is a 2016 MIT article announcing CHIRP. It gives a pretty excellent idea about the magnitude of Bouman's contribution.

https://www.extremetech.com/…/229675-mit-researcher-develop…
This goes into detail about Katie Bouman's algorithm. It describes how her algorithm differs from normal/traditional interferometric algorithms. This article explains the difficulty she faced in how trying to capture a black hole is like trying to photograph "a grapefruit on the moon." This also explains how Bouman's algorithm made all of this work-- it combines all of the data from the participating telescopes into, in essence, one massive telescope.

https://youtu.be/BIvezCVcsYs
This is a 2016 TEDx talk from Bouman where she describes her work. Note: though I am intentionally focusing on her contributions specifically to defend the attention she's getting, she makes it clear that this was a team effort. She always gives credit to her teammates who work with her. She is full of humility and wonder.

http://people.csail.mit.edu/…/papers_an…/cvpr2016_bouman.pdf
This is the paper based on Bouman's work, where she's listed as first author. The position of her name is important. While the meaning of being first author can differ in certain fields, I'm basing the 'primary contributor' interpretation on the fact that multiple other articles say she was lead, MIT refers to the algorithm as hers, as well as the fact that she named CHIRP.

https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging
This is Andrew Chael's imaging library available on GitHub. It's where our original "sleuths" discovered that Bouman had contributed very little and assumed that she was stealing the glory from others. NOTE: Andrew Chael didn't make these claims or ask for this sort of attention!

https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.06156
This is a paper describing Chael's work, which is impressive. Bouman is in the position of last author. Again, the relevance of the author order can differ, but the common significance of 'last author' is either the supervisor or the relative least contribution. In Bouman's paper, the position of last author seemed to indicate supervisor(s) based on the organization hierarchy on the EHT website. In this instance, I interpret Bouman's name being last as her being a minor contributor to Chael's specific work.

https://eventhorizontelescope.org/
This is the official EHT telescope website. I can't remember what I looked at here, it's in my history. I think I was trying to find out who Bouman's project lead was.

https://twitter.com/thisgreyspir…/status/1116518544961830918
This is the twitter thread where Chael defends Katie. He explains that he didn't write 850K lines, defends Katie and says that his algorithm couldn't have worked without her, mentions his LGBTQ status, and more. He seems like a great guy.

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/…/10.1063/PT.6.1.2…/full/
This article speaks to some of the other people involved, including the project leader Sheperd Doeleman. This describes the process they went through in creating the black hole image and is where I got the information about how they split the teams into 4, and how the final image is a composite.

https://phys.org/…/2019-04-scientist-superstar-katie-bouman…
This is the article that talks about CHIRP sorting through a "true mountain" of data, and how that data was passed out to four teams to check for accuracy.

https://www.theguardian.com/…/black-hole-picture-captured-f…
This article talks about Bouman coming up with a new algorithm to "stitch data across the EHT network" of telescopes, and how she led an elaborate series of tests (splitting the data up across four teams, etc) to verify that the output wasn't the result of a glitch or fluke.

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201904110037.html
This article explains Honma's significant role. It describes what Honma's algorithm does and how it was used in this project.

https://www.nao.ac.jp/en/news/science/2019/20190410-eht.html
Here is another article that goes into more detail about Honma and team. He does a great job of explaining how all of the algorithms in question were, in fact, capable of producing accurate images of the black hole, and a part of the task of his algorithm was to verify the accuracy of those generated photos.

The final link is the document by all 200+ participants. This document is important because it gives such a clear idea of the work that went into this, the fabric of which Bouman is an integral part. While I'm intentionally highlighting her contributions in defense of her, it should be understood that, like with most scientific breakthroughs, there were many unsung heroes:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0ec7

wear sunscreen, people

My favorite quote is "If I can't be a good example, let me be a horrible warning."  It turns out that once again, I get to be the bearer of good news AND cautionary advice, simultaneously.

The good news: "the result of the biopsy was consistent with a benign mole. No sign of any skin cancer..."

The other news: Wear sunscreen, people.

. . .

Last Friday, I got a new scar. It's where a mole above my lips and to the right of my nose used to be. I say 'used to be' because there really isn't a tidy way to biopsy a beauty mark -- the whole thing was removed a week ago. My dad was in the back of my mind as I sat with the dermatologist. He had numerous small skin cancers excised from his face and ears after spending years in the sun without a thought of wearing a hat or anything with SPF in it.

. . .

It's interesting because I've considered my radical nephrectomy scar my 'beauty mark' for nearly sixteen years now. At 7 inches long, it is silvery white and runs from just above my right hip around my flank to my back, stopping a few inches before by spine. It is dotted with staple marks and is a reminder of when surgeons carved my diseased kidney out of my body to save my life. The scar has faded and is now also joined by more beauty marks: stretch marks from two pregnancies. The surgery that created the scar was a success, removing a few malignant tumors which would have killed me by now. Within my kidney were the slow-growing seeds of death -- the largest tumor was a scant 2.3 cm by 4 cm; the smallest was only 1.1 cm by 2.1 cm.  There was no metastasis and no lymph node involvement,  so my diagnosis was stage-1 clear cell renal cell carcinoma.

The 'typical' kidney cancer patient is male, of African American or Scandinavian American decent, has been a heavy smoker all his life, or worked in an industry with a high exposure to certain chemicals. He also is diagnosed at stage 3 or 4, when there's little to be done for him.  I met none of these criteria. I was (and still am) a medical outlier. Every healthcare professional who takes my medical history puts down her pen or pushes away from the keyboard and asks me how my cancer was found at age 28. They remind me that my diagnosis 'doesn't happen to 28-year-old women' and that I am lucky to be alive.  I nod and remind them that cancer can happen to anyone, that there is a lot science still doesn't understand about epigenetic changes and our environment, and that I was fortunate to have a physician who took me seriously when I said I had an odd, lower right quadrant nagging pain when doing yoga.

. . .

I'm not a terribly vain person (I wear makeup maybe a few times a year, mostly at important work meetings), but I was pretty upset about needing to remove a mole that is connected to my identity in a lot of ways.  My children were both fascinated by it and constantly reached for it as infants and toddlers, grabbing and pinching it until their curiosity was sated / they were old enough to understand what it was.  My daughter has the same mole, in the same spot (but mirror image and --like mine was at her age -- still only a pin point on her face).  She has often asked if her face will look like mine and if her mole will be like mine when she's an adult. I've told her the truth -- I'm not sure.

When I got home from the procedure, Leo and I explained to the kids why I was wearing a bandaid and couldn't smile or open my mouth very wide. We never said the word "cancer" to them.  Seba couldn't take his eyes off my stitches when I had the bandaid off. Lucia asked me hundred questions over the weekend about it, finally admitting that she had been scared that she might have to have her mole removed eventually, too. I promised her that I was doing everything I could to make sure it would not happen to her -- and that it why I insist on putting sunscreen on them before every soccer game and that she and her brother wear hats when feasible.

. . .

Tomorrow, I will return to the doctor's office and the last 3 stitches will come out. I'll ask him if he thinks the 1 cm scar will fade into my smile line or if he thinks I could tattoo a 'replacement' mole in its place. He's already told me to keep the scar well protected from the sun with sunscreen and a hat,  and that makeup will cover most of it. I'm sure about the sunscreen and hat but not sure if I'll start wearing makeup again. To be honest, I spent a lot of time looking in the mirror before I had kids; I often find that I've gone all day without looking in one only to discover eye crud off to the side behind my glasses hours after getting to the office. I've spent many hours looking in the mirror this week, getting used to my new face and trying not to think too much about what my biopsy results would be. I've over-thought the coincidence that my 1 cm scar is slightly smaller than my smallest malignant kidney tumor. But I've also remembered that while having kidney cancer was the Krakatoa of my life, that there's also been more joy, more adventures, and more passion in the last ~16 years than in the entire 28 years before. For now, I'm focusing on the joy -- and shopping for some more hats and sunscreen for everyone in the family.

the clip system: outdated and inefffective

I hate the clip system. 

Teaching is a hard, thankless job, and my children's teachers have infinitely more patience than I can conjure. But the kind of behavior charts used in most classrooms are antiquated and hurtful, and they need to go.

 I have two very well behaved kids (at school) whom teachers and other adults characterize as "almost perfectly behaved" at school. That behavior isn't the result of calm confidence or being comfortable in their own skin at school. One has perfectionism and anxiety so paralyzing that he never dares to step out of line or take risks. His stated (written) goal when asked by teachers for a several years now is "to never, ever ever have my clip moved down at school."

 His sister's anxiety manifests differently -- she is so focused on being a pleaser that she kept quiet for months about being kicked, poked, pinched, having her hair and clothing pulled on, being shouted at and taunted to her face, etc. by a classmate because she did not want to disappoint her teacher or principal. Her teacher paired her with the child because she thought Lucia would be a good example and also able to not be distracted by the child. Lucia liked being praised for "being a good friend to" the child, but finally couldn't take it any more.

Column: Hey teachers, please stop using behavior charts. Here’s whyEducation Sep 13, 2016 3:03 PM EST 

My daughter started fifth grade this month with a wonderful new teacher and, to my delight, the absence of one of the most annoyingly ubiquitous “tools” in modern classrooms today: the behavior chart.

You know what I’m talking about, right? Those color-coded charts, using cards or clothes pins or Popsicle sticks to represent each child in the class. If students are “good,” they get rewarded with a good color. If they’re “bad,” they’re punished with a bad color — which often accompanies some type of actual consequence.

“Pull your card,” is a common refrain in these classrooms. “Change your color” is another. The daughter of a friend has a teacher who tells disrupting students to “clip yourself down.”
The rationale for these charts is as obvious as it is understandable: Teachers have one of the hardest jobs on the planet. Put a group of high-maintenance, chronic “misbehavers” in their classrooms, and what the heck are they supposed to do? They have to do something, right? And behavior charts are certainly kinder than the ruler-to-the-hands or dunce-in-the-corner tactics used in our grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ age.
And yet.
Fellow parent David Martin’s daughter was in kindergarten when she was first exposed to a color chart. For the first few days she stayed on the “good colors,” but still found herself preoccupied with the students who were not. “She saw how reputations of children were being shaped as a result of what colors they typically landed on,” Martin recalled to me. “She felt empathy for them but helpless to do anything for them.
Charts may be better than physical punishment, but that’s far from good enough.
Each day, Martin said, his daughter’s anxiety grew. Within the month, she was “begging us to tape her mouth shut to prevent a possible slip-up that could result in her clip being moved down.” And then it happened: The teacher moved the girl’s color from green down to yellow.
Martin’s daughter came home and told her parents she wanted to kill herself. She was 5.
Yes, charts may be better than physical punishment, but that’s far from good enough. It’s high time behavior charts themselves got moved down to “a bad color” and expelled from schools altogether.

I’m not the first to suggest outlawing these things. According to countless child psychologists and the country’s most respected parenting experts, the function of “rewards” in child-rearing is drastically misguided. Though reward systems may sometimes appear to work in the short-term — and who, among us, hasn’t used a reward or two to coax our kids to try something new? — rewards are as detrimental as punishments when used regularly. The damage they inflict over the long-term has been proven time and again.
Here are seven reasons teachers need to trash the behavior charts. 

1. They’re demeaning.
Rewards are for training pets, not people. You give your dog a command, he obeys, you offer praise. Why? Because dogs have small brains. They can think, of course, but they can’t reason or talk or make rational decisions, which means we humans are left to communicate with them in relatively primitive ways.
Rewards are for training pets, not people.
Elementary school kids, on the other hand, can read, write, reason and think highly complex thoughts. Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, authors of one of the bestselling parenting books of all time, “How to Talk to So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk,” are heavily anti-praise. Treating kids like people who want to do the right thing, rather than animals in need of training, they say, is key to relationship-building, and relationship-building is the only way to bring about lasting change. In short, rewards charts underestimate children’s abilities — and, I would argue, their humanity. 

2. They’re shaming.
Behavior charts are not private matters between teachers and students; they are public reminders that your teacher thinks you are inadequate. Humiliating kids should never be accepted, much less condoned, in any school. 

3. They make teachers a figure of judgment, not empathy.
Treating behavior as “good” or “bad” is part of an antiquated paradigm that doesn’t take into consideration a child’s temperament, developmental stage or emotional needs. When a child disrupts class in some way, there is a reason for that. Maybe the kid is hungry or didn’t get enough sleep. Maybe the kid is being left out on the playground or having a hard time at home. Maybe he is having learning difficulties, or maybe he’s just suffering from a little thing called JUST BEING A KID.
Treating behavior as “good” or “bad” is part of an antiquated paradigm that doesn’t take the child into consideration. 

Similarly, children who play the role of teacher’s pet may be acting that way because they are scared, or insecure, or perpetually subordinated at home. Now, I get it: Teachers don’t have time to sit and empathize with every child’s back story; they have two dozen other kids to look after. But just because a child’s behavior isn’t permitted doesn’t necessarily make the behavior bad, and just because a child is doing what you want doesn’t necessarily make the behavior healthy. So let’s stop being so judgey, yeah? 

4. They encourage extrinsic motivation and corrode self-esteem.
Grading children’s behavior on a daily basis — whether it be through behavior charts or a new and increasingly popular phone app called “Class Dojo” — shows kids that the approval of others is what matters. It becomes all about what the child “gets” from the teacher rather than what the child “gets” from himself. It doesn’t matter if the child is proud of herself for keeping her impulse-control issues in check that day; what matters is what the teacher thinks. 

This is classic self-esteem-killing stuff, people. Rudolf Dreikers, an Austrian psychiatrist and educator, wrote about what he called “the fallacy of punishment and reward” in his 1964 book, “Children: The Challenge.” “The system of rewarding children for good behavior is as detrimental to their outlook as the system of punishment,” he said. “The same lack of respect is shown.” And that’s not all, says Dr. Laura Markham, creator of Aha Parenting. In her book, Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids, Markham writes: “It’s also well established that giving kids rewards robs them of the inherent pleasure of their achievements.” 

5. They’re hypocritical.
If kids are put in the position of being their very best selves every moment of every day, why aren’t teachers and administrators (and parents, for that matter) held to the same standard? What happens when a teacher comes to school in a bad mood? What happens when she snaps at a kid, or blames the wrong person for a misdeed, or forgets to give out an assignment?
Where are the teachers’ behavior charts?
Kids often are concerned about fairness, and, as a society, we encourage kids to stand up for equality and human rights. Yet here is a situation where teachers are constantly being asked to judge children, and no process exists by which the children are able to make their own opinions known. Where are the teachers’ behavior charts? 

6. They waste valuable class time.
I knew a teacher who, whenever a child would begin acting up in class, would walk slowly over to the child and stand behind him while continuing to teach. The child instinctively knew to settle down, and the teacher didn’t miss a beat. Now contrast that with a class where a teacher is regularly interrupting her own teaching so she can tell kids to make a trip to the behavior chart. Not only is the teacher losing valuable instruction time, but all the children in the class are losing valuable learning time. By the same token, why would we ask a child who is doing well in class to make a chart run when a simple smile or a “thank you” would mean so much more? 

7. They don’t work.
Rewards and punishments rarely change behavior. Not only do kids “outgrow” the rewards being offered, meaning the rewards must get increasingly bigger to make an impact, but kids don’t end up wanting to change; they simply end up wanting their rewards. “Redirecting Children’s Behavior” author Kathryn Kvols, founder of the International Network for Children and Families, writes: “If the person giving the reward is not around, the child has no motivation to internally behave as you want her to.”
In other words, as soon as the class gets a substitute teacher who doesn’t use the behavior chart, all bets are off. Alfie Kohn, a scholar, educator and author of “Punished by Rewards,” argues parents and teachers need to keep in mind the long-term goal of helping kids grow into responsible and caring people rather than the short-term goal of obedience. When faced with a “misbehaving” kid, the question he asks is: “What do kids need — and how do we meet those needs?” 

I can hear a lot of educators saying: “What else are teachers supposed to do to keep order in their classrooms?” As though behavior charts are somehow necessary. They’re not. There are plenty of alternatives to behavior charts — far more effective and far less damaging — if only educators (and parents) took the time to explore and use them.
There are plenty of alternatives to behavior charts if only educators (and parents) took the time to explore and use them. 

Martin, the father I talked about earlier, did try to get his daughter’s school to do away with the behavior charts — as did I, incidentally. Both of us were met with inaction. For Martin, though, the stakes were higher. Faced with a seemingly suicidal child, he and his wife decided to homeschool. Three years later, and his daughter is doing great. 

Teaching is a hard, thankless job, and most teachers deserve to be sainted for the patience they show their students. I have nothing but admiration for the vast majority of them. But — like a swat on the hand — the kind of behavior charts used in most classrooms are antiquated and hurtful, and they need to go.

• 
  

By —

Wendy Thomas Russell

Wendy Thomas Russell is an award-winning journalist, parenting columnist and co-author of the forthcoming book "ParentShift: Ten Universal Truths That Will Change the Way You Raise Your Kids." She lives in Long Beach, California, with her husband and daughter.

quotable

Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom.

[…]

Plunging into the ocean of words, roaming in the broad fields of the mind, climbing the mountains of the imagination. Just like the kid in the Carnegie or the student in Widener, that was my freedom, that was my joy. And it still is.

That joy must not be sold. It must not be “privatised,” made into another privilege for the privileged. A public library is a public trust.

And that freedom must not be compromised. It must be available to all who need it, and that’s everyone, when they need it, and that’s always. - Ursula LeGuin

#TeamSanta no more

Re: Santa. (Yes, I know it isn't even Halloween yet, but this is popping up in a few places right now.)

We told Seba (8) and Lucia (6) the truth about 2 weeks ago. The conversation included a bit of a conspiratorial air -- with Leo and I leaning in and telling them that we knew they were finally old enough to learn the truth and both of us nodding in agreement that we thought they were ready and mature enough to handle this information. (They totally leaned in and were riveted at that point.)

Lucia, who has always been skeptical and has asked hard, pointed questions about Santa --even at age 3 -- confessed she knew "there had to be something you guys did to help Santa" and "it wasn't physically possible for him to do all of that all over the world." We shared that Santa was based on a real person who lived long ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Nicholas) who made people feel special by secretly giving them gifts.

We stressed that the magic of Santa is that he makes others feel special and that they can still be a Santa to someone else who needs the magic and who believes. We also reminded them that giving to others has its own magic and makes the giver feel great, too. Both got excited at the prospect of this -- and even talked about wanting to do this for their kids someday. The conversation began and ended with a very clear message from us about not ruining the magic for others, especially their peers and cousins, and to TELL NO ONE AT SCHOOL. (So far, so good.)

Truthfully, I am relieved to be free of the Santa myth. I do not like lying or having to be very evasive to my kids. We went along with it mostly because Leo's family has a tradition of "Santa" coming down the stairs on Christmas eve at the Noche Buena family gathering and giving each child a gift that his/ her parent has discreetly placed in Santa's bag at the beginning of the party. I will say that it is usually an adult cousin who reluctantly gets roped into wearing the costume by Tía Olga. The funniest year was when the smartass 9 year old told Santa (Martin Stezano that year) that his New Balance kicks might be too slippery for the icy North Pole.

But that was also the year that our children received a Thomas the Train game (Seba - 4 at the time) and Dora the Explorer doll (Lucia - 2 at the time) and they were firmly #TeamSanta no matter their personal doubts, because being on Team Santa meant gifts and all sorts of cool things. They are bright kids and weren't interested in upsetting the (un)natural order of things if it meant they might get less gifts.

I was ready to tell them because I think our way of explaining the magic is more meaningful and can help them get really excited about what they do for others. I also wanted them to hear it from us and not be (potentially) crushed by the betrayal the lie means. Lastly, Seba is always the last person to get the memo about what's cool and what's not socially and for once, I wanted him to feel the power and confidence of what it means to be an insider.

Epilogue: They made their Christmas wishlist this weekend. It was so nice to remind them that Santa and his elves aren't the ones who make or buy their presents. I reminded them that now that they know it is mami and papi (and their grandparents/ aunts/ uncles) who are bankrolling all the loot and buying their presents, that the expensive items (I'm looking at you, Bugatti Chiron and Hogwarts Castle LEGO sets) might not be the best choice because there's a very low probability of them being under the tree on Christmas morning.

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"You find the universal through the specific. Details are what draw you in." - Margaret Dilloway

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- We have the capacity to find joy in all things. A negative attitude is worse than a tumor. The best of life can come from the worst of life. - Everyone has a difficult trial. Everyone. Be compassionate. - When your looks get taken away, you better have a solid character or you're screwed. - Priorities are revealed when abilities are stripped. Put them in order before life forces it upon you. - No one learns in the middle of a crisis. Survive. Breathe. Reflect. - Life is too short to take offense. Assume the best and move on. One day our children will struggle. We must endure our own trials so that, when needed, we can look in their eyes with perfect credibility and say, "I've been through the same struggle. I know your pain. You can do this." By Mark A. Smith, 23 years ago today my parents and doctor walked into my ICU room, held my hands, and told me I had only a few months to live. I had a rare disease called Wegener's Granulomatosis and had 18 tumors throughout my lungs, kidneys, and airway. 16 years of chemotherapy, 200,000+ pills, 34 surgeries, and a million prayers later and I'm still around

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"You can’t transform mountebanks into menschen. Character is like concrete: You can make an impression when it’s freshly poured, in its youth, one could say, but when it sets, it’s impervious to alteration. 

Trump has always been vile, dishonorable and dishonest. That hasn’t changed even when draped by the history, majesty and pageantry of the presidency." - Charles M Blow,  Satan in a Sunday Hat, July 31, 2017

"Some things in life cannot be fixed. They can only be carried. If your life has exploded into a million little bits, you don't need platitudes. You don't need cheerleading. You don't need to be told this all happened for a reason. You certainly don't need to be told that you needed your pain in order to learn something about life." - Megan Divine

As seen in Tim Lawrence's beautiful essay:

Everything Doesn't Happen For A Reason

OCTOBER 20, 2015

I emerge from this conversation dumbfounded. I've seen this a million times before, but it still gets me every time. 

I’m listening to a man tell a story. A woman he knows was in a devastating car accident; her life shattered in an instant. She now lives in a state of near-permanent pain; a paraplegic; many of her hopes stolen.

He tells of how she had been a mess before the accident, but that the tragedy had engendered positive changes in her life. That she was, as a result of this devastation, living a wonderful life.

And then he utters the words. The words that are responsible for nothing less than emotional, spiritual and psychological violence:

Everything happens for a reason. That this was something that had to happen in order for her to grow.

That's the kind of bullshit that destroys lives. And it is categorically untrue. 

It is amazing to me that so many of these myths persist—and that is why I share actionable tools and strategies to work with your pain in my free newsletter. These myths are nothing more than platitudes cloaked as sophistication, and they preclude us from doing the one and only thing we must do when our lives are turned upside down: grieve.

You know exactly what I'm talking about. You've heard these countless times. You've probably even uttered them a few times yourself. And every single one of them needs to be annihilated.

Let me be crystal clear: if you've faced a tragedy and someone tells you in any way, shape or form that your tragedy was meant to be, that it happened for a reason, that it will make you a better person, or that taking responsibility for it will fix it, you have every right to remove them from your life.

Grief is brutally painful. Grief does not only occur when someone dies. When relationships fall apart, you grieve. When opportunities are shattered, you grieve. When dreams die, you grieve. When illnesses wreck you, you grieve.

So I’m going to repeat a few words I’ve uttered countless times; words so powerful and honest they tear at the hubris of every jackass who participates in the debasing of the grieving:

Some things in life cannot be fixed. They can only be carried. 

These words come from my dear friend Megan Devine, one of the only writers in the field of loss and trauma I endorse. These words are so poignant because they aim right at the pathetic platitudes our culture has come to embody on an increasingly hopeless level. Losing a child cannot be fixed. Being diagnosed with a debilitating illness cannot be fixed. Facing the betrayal of your closest confidante cannot be fixed. 

They can only be carried.

I hate to break it to you, but although devastation can lead to growth, it often doesn't. The reality is that it often destroys lives. And the real calamity is that this happens precisely because we've replaced grieving with advice. With platitudes. With our absence.  

I now live an extraordinary life. I've been deeply blessed by the opportunities I've had and the radically unconventional life I've built for myself. Yet even with that said, I'm hardly being facetious when I say that loss has not in and of itself made me a better person. In fact, in some ways it's hardened me.

While so much loss has made me acutely aware and empathetic of the pains of others, it has made me more insular and predisposed to hide. I have a more cynical view of human nature, and a greater impatience with those who are unfamiliar with what loss does to people.

Above all, I've been left with a pervasive survivor’s guilt that has haunted me all my life. This guilt is really the genesis of my hiding, self-sabotage and brokenness.

In short, my pain has never been eradicated, I've just learned to channel it into my work with others. I consider it a great privilege to work with others in pain, but to say that my losses somehow had to happen in order for my gifts to grow would be to trample on the memories of all those I lost too young; all those who suffered needlessly, and all those who faced the same trials I did early in life, but who did not make it. 

I'm simply not going to do that. I'm not going to construct some delusional narrative fallacy for myself so that I can feel better about being alive. I'm not going to assume that God ordained me for life instead of all the others so that I could do what I do now. And I'm certainly not going to pretend that I've made it through simply because I was strong enough; that I became "successful" because I "took responsibility."

There’s a lot of “take responsibility” platitudes in the personal development space, and they are largely nonsense. People tell others to take responsibility when they don’t want to understand.

Because understanding is harder than posturing. Telling someone to “take responsibility” for their loss is a form of benevolent masturbation. It’s the inverse of inspirational porn: it’s sanctimonious porn.

Personal responsibility implies that there’s something to take responsibility for. You don’t take responsibility for being raped or losing your child. You take responsibility for how you choose to live in the wake of the horrors that confront you, but you don't choose whether you grieve. We're not that smart or powerful. When hell visits us, we don't get to escape grieving.

This is why all the platitudes and fixes and posturing are so dangerous: in unleashing them upon those we claim to love, we deny them the right to grieve.

In so doing, we deny them the right to be human. We steal a bit of their freedom precisely when they're standing at the intersection of their greatest fragility and despair.

No one—and I mean no one—has that authority. Though we claim it all the time.

The irony is that the only thing that even can be "responsible" amid loss is grieving. 

So if anyone tells you some form of get over it, move on, or rise above, you can let them go.

If anyone avoids you amidst loss, or pretends like it didn’t happen, or disappears from your life, you can let them go.

If anyone tells you that all is not lost, that it happened for a reason, that you’ll become better as a result of your grief, you can let them go.

Let me reiterate: all of those platitudes are bullshit. 

You are not responsible to those who try to shove them down your throat. You can let them go. 

I’m not saying you should. That is up to you, and only up to you. It isn't an easy decision to make and should be made carefully. But I want you to understand that you can.

I've grieved many times in my life. I've been overwhelmed with shame and self-hatred so strong it’s nearly killed me.

The ones who helped—the only ones who helped—were those who were there. And said nothing. 

In that nothingness, they did everything.

I am here—I have lived—because they chose to love me. They loved me in their silence, in their willingness to suffer with me, alongside me, and through me. They loved me in their desire to be as uncomfortable, as destroyed, as I was, if only for a week, an hour, even just a few minutes.

Most people have no idea how utterly powerful this is.

Are there ways to find "healing" amid devastation? Yes. Can one be "transformed" by the hell life thrusts upon them? Absolutely. But it does not happen if one is not permitted to grieve. Because grief itself is not an obstacle.

The obstacles come later. The choices as to how to live; how to carry what we have lost; how to weave a new mosaic for ourselves? Those come in the wake of grief. It cannot be any other way. 

Grief is woven into the fabric of the human experience. If it is not permitted to occur, its absence pillages everything that remains: the fragile, vulnerable shell you might become in the face of catastrophe.

Yet our culture has treated grief as a problem to be solved, an illness to be healed, or both. In the process, we've done everything we can to avoid, ignore, or transform grief. As a result, when you're faced with tragedy you usually find that you're no longer surrounded by people, you're surrounded by platitudes. 

What to Offer Instead

When a person is devastated by grief, the last thing they need is advice. Their world has been shattered. This means that the act of inviting someone—anyone—into their world is an act of great risk. To try and fix or rationalize or wash away their pain only deepens their terror.

Instead, the most powerful thing you can do is acknowledge. Literally say the words: 

I acknowledge your pain. I am here with you.

Note that I said with you, not for you. For implies that you're going to do something. That is not for you to enact. But to stand with your loved one, to suffer with them, to listen to them, to do everything but something is incredibly powerful.

There is no greater act than acknowledgment. And acknowledgment requires no training, no special skills, no expertise. It only requires the willingness to be present with a wounded soul, and to stay present, as long as is necessary.

Be there. Only be there. Do not leave when you feel uncomfortable or when you feel like you're not doing anything. In fact, it is when you feel uncomfortable and like you're not doing anything that you must stay.

Because it is in those places—in the shadows of horror we rarely allow ourselves to enter—where the beginnings of healing are found. This healing is found when we have others who are willing to enter that space alongside us. Every grieving person on earth needs these people.

Thus I beg you, I plead with you, to be one of these people.

You are more needed than you will ever know. 

And when you find yourself in need of those people, find them. I guarantee they are there. 

Everyone else can go. 

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"Some of us are surrounded by destructive people who tell us we’re worthless when we’re endlessly valuable, that we’re stupid when we’re smart, that we’re failing even when we succeed. But the opposite of people who drag you down isn’t people who build you up and butter you up. It’s equals who are generous but keep you accountable, true mirrors who reflect back who you are and what you are doing.

We keep each other honest, we keep each other good with our feedback, our intolerance of meanness and falsehood, our demands that the people we are with listen, respect, respond—if we are allowed to, if we are free and valued ourselves. There is a democracy of social discourse, in which we are reminded that as we are beset with desires and fears and feelings, so are others"- Rebecca Solnit, THE LONELINESS OF DONALD TRUMP: ON THE CORROSIVE PRIVILEGE OF THE MOST MOCKED MAN IN THE WORLD