What makes a bully? Part 2

February 8th, 2010

I reworked my recent blog entry a bit and submitted it to the Boston Herald for consideration as a letter to the editor and/or “As You Were Saying…” (which is what the Herald calls guest op-eds) column.  Here’s the letter they published today:

Good citizenship taught

The school my wife and I chose for our children stands out dramatically because the students, faculty and parents are nice to each other and happy to be there. This does not happen by chance; it is the result of a consciously designed, constantly maintained culture which emphasizes respect and empathy as the community’s most precious values.

That culture could not possibly be achieved through punishment and discipline. Rather, good citizenship is an essential component of the curriculum, in every class and every grade.

And therein lies the solution to bullying. Schools cannot merely teach our children not to be bad; we must teach them to be good.

Jonathan Kamens, Brighton

Here’s what I originally sent them:

Standing up to bullies is not enough

The terrible tragedy of Phoebe Prince’s suicide, following months of relentless bullying by other students, has triggered yet another wave of calls for schools to enforce strict anti-bullying policies. Such policies are important, but if they were enough, then the bullying problem would have been eliminated long ago. Bullying is the symptom, not the disease, and the time for stronger medicine is long overdue.

When bullying is pushed into the spotlight, it is always because of a tragedy. The rarity of these leads us to believe that the bullying which caused them is also rare, a belief to which we cling because it absolves us of communal responsibility. But in fact, bullying and meanness have become the norm: a 2001 study estimated that 30% of students in the U.S. were involved in bullying.

The academic subjects taught in school are intended to give our children the skills and knowledge they need to grow into happy, successful adults. Respectful, polite, and thoughtful behavior, which in our parents’ day was referred to as “good citizenship,” is just as critical as reading, writing or arithmetic, and it, too, needs to be taught continuously.

The school my wife and I chose for our children stands out dramatically from the others because the students, faculty, and even the other parents are nice to each other and happy to be there. This does not happen by chance. Rather, it is the result of a consciously designed, constantly maintained culture which emphasizes respect and empathy as the community’s most precious values.

That culture could not possibly be achieved through punishment and discipline. Rather, good citizenship is an essential component of the curriculum, in every class and every grade.

And therein lies the solution to the bullying problem. Our schools cannot merely teach our children not to be bad; we must teach them to be good.

The terrible tragedy of Phoebe Prince’s suicide, following months of relentless bullying by other students, has triggered yet another wave of calls for schools to enforce strict anti-bullying policies. Such policies are important, but if they were enough, then the bullying problem would have been eliminated long ago. Bullying is the symptom, not the disease, and the time for stronger medicine is long overdue.

When bullying is pushed into the spotlight, it is always because of a tragedy. The rarity of these leads us to believe that the bullying which caused them is also rare, a belief to which we cling because it absolves us of communal responsibility. But in fact, bullying and meanness have become the norm: a 2001 study estimated that 30% of students in the U.S. were involved in bullying.

The academic subjects taught in school are intended to give our children the skills and knowledge they need to grow into happy, successful adults. Respectful, polite, and thoughtful behavior, which in our parents’ day was referred to as “good citizenship,” is just as critical as reading, writing or arithmetic, and it, too, needs to be taught continuously.

The school my wife and I chose for our children stands out dramatically from the others because the students, faculty, and even the other parents are nice to each other and happy to be there. This does not happen by chance. Rather, it is the result of a consciously designed, constantly maintained culture which emphasizes respect and empathy as the community’s most precious values.

That culture could not possibly be achieved through punishment and discipline. Rather, good citizenship is an essential component of the curriculum, in every class and every grade.

And therein lies the solution to the bullying problem. Our schools cannot merely teach our children not to be bad; we must teach them to be good.

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Advent Tamale in Boston is hiring!

February 1st, 2010

The Tamale RMS team at Advent Software (NASDAQ:ADVS) in Boston, where I have been happily ensconced for almost three years, is hiring Operations, Quality Assurance, and Software Engineers, Client Services Specialists, and Product Managers.  Advent Tamale is full of great people doing exciting work for demanding clients.

At Advent, we offer competitive compensation and benefits, treat our people well, and strive to be a good corporate citizen.  Furthermore, we successfully weathered the recent economic storm, with no layoffs, and came out of it stronger than before.  I love coming to work every day at Advent!

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Design defect in American Leather sleeper sofa sold by Jordan’s Furniture

February 1st, 2010

25 Foster Street
Brighton, MA 02135-2616

February 1, 2010

Legal Department
Jordan’s Furniture
450 Revolutionary Drive
East Taunton, MA 02718-1369

To whom it may concern:

I am writing to you about a design defect in a piece of furniture sold to me by Jordan’s Furniture. This defect is sufficiently serious and egregious as to violate both the implied warranty of merchantability and warranty of fitness for a particular purpose. After explaining the problem below, I will explain how I expect you to compensate my wife and me for it.

In November 2007, we purchased an American Leather sleeper sofa at your store in Natick, MA. Several months after the sofa arrived, the end of the zipper holding one of the cushions began to separate from the back of the sofa, so we called and scheduled a technician to come look at it.

He said it could not be repaired and the sofa would have to be replaced. The model was no longer available, and rather than replacing our defective sofa with the closest equivalent, you instead gave us a credit for the original purchase price and told us we could use it toward the purchase of a replacement. The problem was that the new model cost $420 more. In other words, you sold us a defective sofa and then expected us to pay over $400 to replace it within their warranty period.

Needless to say, we were unhappy about this, and we complained. A customer service representative agreed for Jordan’s to absorb half of the incremental cost of the replacement sofa, thus reducing our out-of-pocket cost to $210. We accepted this offer with reservations.

Additional details about the events described above are available on my blog at <http://blog.kamens.brookline.ma.us/~jik/wordpress/jordans_warranty>.

Fast forward to a few months ago, when the same zipper on the same cushion on our replacement sofa began to separate from the sofa in exactly the same way. Not only that, but because of the separation, the zipper comes undone when people lean back on the cushion.

Although I have waited until today to contact you about the issue, primarily because I was so annoyed and angry about its recurrence and about the way you handled it the first time, note that this second failure occurred within a year after we purchased the replacement, i.e., within your one-year warranty. I mention this to buttress my claim, but the substance of my complaint does not depend on it; implied warranties of merchantability and fitness are not bound by the time limits in a merchant’s explicit warranty.

It is clear at this point that the failure of the first sofa was not due to a defect in that particular unit, but rather to defective design. The weakest part of the zipper is situated in the middle of the sofa, where the cushions bear the most weight. It simply cannot handle it. In short, we’ve paid almost $2,700 for a sofa whose faulty design guaranteed that it would fail prematurely, i.e., before the end of the reasonable, expected lifetime of the product.

The other cushion does not have this issue because the insertion pin of that cushion’s zipper is located at the end of the sofa rather than in the middle. Through a trivial design change, i.e., making both zippers zip from the end and meet in the middle rather than making both zip in the same direction, the manufacturer could have significantly mitigated the problem. I say “mitigated” rather than “solved,” because even with this suggested change, it is not clear that the zippers chosen by the manufacturer are sufficiently durable to bear the weight of people leaning on the cushions for the life of the sofa.

I urge you to seriously consider the substance of my claims about the defect in this product. I hope that you will work with the manufacturer to remedy it as soon as possible; if that cannot be done, I hope that you will stop selling the product. I am sure you do not want to be in the business of selling expensive furniture which you know to be defective and likely to fail before the end of its useful life.

As for my wife and me, our demands are simple…. If we had known that our replacement sofa was going to break in exactly the same way as the original, we would never have asked for the replacement. Therefore, we expect you to reimburse us, in the form of an actual refund and not a store credit, for the $210 we were forced to pay for the replacement.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

P.S. This letter has been posted on my blog at <http://blog.kamens.brookline.ma.us/~jik/wordpress/american_leather_sofa_defect>.

CC: Bob Duncan, CEO
American Leather, Inc.
4501 Mountain Creek Parkway
Dallas, TX 75236-4600
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St. Elizabeth’s apparently faster at responding to complaints than treating patients

January 28th, 2010

The letter I posted on my blog earlier today was mailed this morning.

My wife received a call from someone at St. Elizabeth’s at 3:15 today: “… I just wanted to let you know that we received your letter and are looking into it….”

My letter obviously didn’t make it through the mail from my house to St. Elizabeth’s in six hours, which means that they saw it on my blog.  A review of my blog’s access logs shows someone at the hospital visiting the page at 1:49pm, a little over three hours after I posted it.  Either someone who reads my blog knows someone at St. Elizabeth’s and forwarded a link to them, or someone at the hospital is actively monitoring the Web for postings about it.

I suppose this wouldn’t be terribly surprising — any large business that isn’t doing that nowadays is run by fools — but I do think it’s somewhat interesting.

I can’t resist the urge to point out that if St. Elizabeth’s has to choose between having enough people on staff to process test results in a timely fashion, and having someone on staff to monitor the Internet for postings about the hospital, I’d rather they choose the former than the latter.

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What makes a bully?

January 28th, 2010

bullyThe flood of news coverage about the suicide of Phoebe Prince has set me to thinking about what makes kids into bullies.

My children attend JCDS, Boston’s Jewish Community Day School.  Students at all academic levels are admitted to the school.  JCDS is less concerned about intellect than about whether the student, and his or her parents, are compatible with the school’s culture.

In the 6½ years I’ve had children at JCDS, only a few families have chosen to leave.  Some of those departures were due to academic needs the school could not fulfill, but others were because their kids simply didn’t fit in.

I’m sure many of you just cringed.  We all know what “didn’t fit in” means, right?  Kids that are brainy, nerdy, funny-looking, or too fat.  Kids who do their homework and care about getting good grades.  Kids who would rather play D&D than football.  Right?

Nope.  At JCDS, fitting in isn’t about any of those things.  Rather, it’s almost entirely about one thing and one thing only: treating others with respect.  Kids with an “attitude” just don’t fit in at JCDS.  What’s most interesting is that usually, their parents don’t either.

For example, one girl who entered the school in first grade left with her family two years later.  During those years, my wife and I saw and heard of countless incidents in which this girl was mean to other kids.  We weren’t surprised by her behavior, because, frankly, she was just like her mother.  Is it any surprise that a woman who adorned her car with a “mean girl” bumper sticker, who seemed to take pride in being pushy, demanding, and self-centered, would have a daughter who had trouble treating her peers with respect?

Bullies are made, not born.  Not every bully has mean parents, but the odds are that when you look at the adults in a bully’s life, you will find people who at best failed to actively model and teach respect, and at worst did the opposite.

Parents are the biggest influence in their children’s lives, but the second biggest influence is, of course, school.  Our schools share responsibility for teaching and modeling respect.  They are, by and large, falling short.

Having a “zero tolerance” policy about bullying isn’t good enough.  Teaching kids why bullying is bad isn’t good enough.  Even empowering kids to step in when they see someone else being bullied isn’t good enough.  People always fall short of the ideal, so if the ideal you’re teaching is “don’t bully,” then guess what — the bullying isn’t going to stop.

Stop teaching students what not to do, and start teaching them what they should do.  Teach them to be nice to their peers.  Teach them to be respectful to their peers.  Teach them that meanness and disrespect, even when they fall short of what one might consider “bullying,” will simply not be tolerated.  And then don’t tolerate it.

A major part of the JCDS curriculum, in every class in every grade, is middot v’derekh eretz.  There is no good translation for these terms, but a loose translation is “character traits and civil, polite, and thoughtful behavior.”  JCDS doesn’t merely teach its students not to be bad.  It teaches them to be good. The results are obvious: the two things remarked upon most often by visitors to the school are that the students are nice and happy.

I challenge the principal of any school with a bullying problem to visit JCDS and learn from their approach.

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Tefillin on airplanes

January 28th, 2010

tefillinMany of you have probably heard by now about the Kentucky-bound US. Airways Express flight that was diverted last week when the flight crew was alarmed by a Jewish teenager putting on tefillin (New York Times).

It is completely understandable that the kid couldn’t have imagined a problem with doing this.  There are air routes where this occurs regularly , certainly on flights to and from Israel but also on many others into and out of cities with large Jewish populations.   He may have flown on one of those routes in the past; or he may have heard people in his community talking about praying on planes (there is extensive halachic literature on whether and when it is permissible and how to do it properly); or he may even have asked his rabbi before the flight what he should do if he couldn’t say his morning prayers before flying, and his rabbi (who also couldn’t imagine that there would be a problem) told him pray on the plane.  It is not at all surprising that he didn’t see anything wrong with doing so.  The people who are blaming him for what happened are just being idiots, most of whom are probably motivated by anti-Semitism or generalized anti-religious bigotry.

On the other hand, the people who are criticizing the flight crew for overreacting are also being unreasonable.  Is it really so unbelievable that a flight attendants on a plane bound for Kentucky would not be familiar with tefillin?  There are people in this country who have never met a Jew, let alone one who wears tefillin every day.  There are people who actually believe that Jews have little horns. You can mock that all you want, but when somebody stands up in mid-flight and starts strapping things to his head and arm, and when the flight attendant asks what he’s doing, he responds tersely because he’s in the middle of praying and not supposed to talk, exactly what is s/he supposed to think?

The people who have asked why no one else on the flight stepped in and explained to the attendants what was going on, have clearly not thought things through very well.  First of all, there were only 15 passengers on the flight.  Again, on a flight bound for Kentucky, just how many of those fifteen passengers do you think were familiar enough with tefillin to explain them coherently?  Independent of that, when there is an in-flight security situation, the crew does not advertise that fact to the passengers, nor do they even tell the passengers they are diverting the plane until it is absolutely necessary.  If the crew handled the situation properly, no one knew what was going on until long after the decision to divert had already been made.

This was an unfortunate incident in which reasonable actions by everyone involved led to a seemingly unreasonable outcome.  That happens sometimes, and vilifying people over it is just silly.

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St. Elizabeth’s Hospital (Boston) ER: wait 0 minutes to be seen, 9 days to be treated

January 28th, 2010
January 26, 2010

John Holiver, President
St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center
736 Cambridge Street
Brighton, MA 02135

Dear Mr. Holiver,

My wife, Andrea Kamens, was treated in your emergency room (ER) early in the morning on Sunday, January 17.

The doctor who treated her told her to seek follow-up care with her primary care physician (PCP), Dr. Cathleen London. He said he would call Dr. London that day, but my wife should wait until Tuesday to contact her, because by then all the test results would be available in my wife’s electronic record, where Dr. London would be able to access them.

Not only did the ER doctor not call Dr. London on Sunday as promised, he never called her at all.

Not only were my wife’s test results not available by Tuesday as promised, they were not available until January 26, nine days after my wife’s ER visit.

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Honda Village is still at it; let’s see if the threat of a class-action lawsuit will put a stop to it!

January 21st, 2010

January 22, 2010

Ray Ciccolo
Village Automotive Group
75 North Beacon Street
Allston, MA 02134-1912

Dear Mr. Ciccolo,

Once again, I find myself sending you a M.G.L. Chapter 93a letter because of Honda Village’s deceptive trade practices.

In June 2009, Honda Village started sending me promotional materials in envelopes that look like this:

[image elided; see my previous blog posting]

I am not going to waste my time explaining why this is clearly intended to deceive the recipient about the source, importance, and content of these mailings. I know this is so; you know this is so; the methods of deception and intent to deceive are obvious. I’m quite certain that a judge will agree.

I received a number of these mailings before I finally decided to ask you to stop sending them. On October 15, I sent a message through the contact form on your Web site which read as follows:

(Do not add my email address to any bulk email lists as a result of this submission. I am providing you with my email address only so that you can respond to this request. NO OTHER USE OF MY EMAIL ADDRESS IS AUTHORIZED.)

(Do not add my postal mailing address to any direct-marketing lists as a result of this submission. I am providing you with my postal address only so that you can remove me from your direct-marketing list as described below. NO OTHER USE OF MY POSTAL ADDRESS IS AUTHORIZED.)

For months now, you have been sending me junk mail in envelopes that you have intentionally designed to deceive recipients. You’ve made them look like some sort of official certified or registered mail, and you’ve intentionally left your company name and return address off of the envelopes. These envelopes are clearly designed to get people to open them, when they would just throw them in the trash if it was obvious they were from you.

This kind of deceptive direct-mail advertising is exceedingly slimy. It is distressing to me that I purchased a vehicle from a company that employs such slimy tactics. You have proven to me, unfortunately not for the first time, that my initial impression, that you were different from all the other slimy car dealers out there, was wrong.

Whatever mailing list I am on to be sent these slimy mailings — please get me off of it. Right now. And leave me off of it. Permanently.

Honda Village did not have the courtesy to reply. Furthermore, since I sent the message quoted above, I have received at least two more of these offensive mailings, the most recent one today.

If you had stopped sending these when I asked you to stop, I would have left it at that. But since you didn’t, I have decided to teach you a lesson not only about not sending junk mail to people who have asked you to stop, but also about engaging in deceptive trade practices.

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Congressman Robert Wexler ignores spam complaint, continues to gang-rape my inbox

January 20th, 2010

Last November, I posted on my blog a copy of a letter which I faxed to Congressman Robert Wexler, in which I chastised him for giving my email address (which I gave him when I made a donation to his campaign, so that he could send me a receipt) to another politician’s campaign and demanded that he remove my address from all lists and databases under his control.

A friend, Michael Burstein, commented on that blog entry, “Wexler is a good guy, so I can’t I imagine that he and his staff won’t take steps to fix this. Let us know once he has.”

Alas, my friend was incorrect.  I received no response from Wexler or anyone on his staff, and today, I received another piece of spam at the email address I had given to Wexler, from the campaign of yet another politician, Ted Deutch.  Although the spam came from “campaign@tedforcongress.com”, the letter in it was signed by Congressman Wexler, making it all the more clear that he provided the mailing list to Deutch.

Many are saying that one of the reasons why the Democrats lost yesterday’s special election in Massachusetts is because they are acting like elitist snobs.  I’m not fan of the Republicans and I voted for Coakley yesterday, but I can absolutely understand why people feel that way.  I think there’s a lot of truth to it, and I think that this unrepentant spamming from Wexler is a symptom of it.

Congressman Wexler: What you have to say to me is not so important that you get to say it when I’ve told you to leave me alone.  Your fellow Democratic politicians are not so critical to the future of this country that you get to share my email address with them when I’ve never given you permission and indeed asked you not to.  You are not so high and mighty that you get to ignore my letters to you with impunity.  You, sir, have lost my trust, and you will not soon regain it.

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Of soldering guns and audio switches

January 17th, 2010

I want to be able to switch easily between my computer speakers and headset.  Apparently, that’s easier said than done.

Some motherboards shut off audio output in back automatically when you plug something into the front.  Alas, my ASUS motherboard doesn’t do that.  Even if it did, that wouldn’t be “easily” — I don’t want to have to get down on the floor every time I want to use my headset, and what’s more, repeatedly plugging and unplugging the headset will wear out the jack.

One of my coworkers suggested plugging a splitter into the audio output jack, plugging both the speakers and headset into the splitter, and muting the speakers when I want to only use the headset.  There’s just one problem with that — my speakers don’t have a mute or volume control.

A third possibility is to use a USB headset instead of one with a 1/8″ jack.  Then, I could use the volume control applet to switch between output devices.  That would work, but I do this often enough that this would be annoying.

Option four is a switch box.  Like the splitter, I would plug both the speakers and headset into the box and the box into the audio output jack.  The difference is that, as the name implies, the box has a switch to connect either the speakers or the headset, but not both at the same time, to the audio output.

The switch box idea seemed perfect to me, so I set about trying to find one to buy.  Neither my local Radio Shack nor Micro Center were any help.  Plantronics used to sell one, but apparently they discontinued it.  I thought I’d hit pay-dirt when I found this site, but when I tried to order a switch box from them, I was informed that they were on vacation and not accepting orders between December 23 and January 4.  That was the last straw!

For almost two decades, I have been privately ashamed of the fact that I, an MIT EECS graduate, had not once in my life wielded a soldering iron for fun or profit.  I didn’t even own one!  “Self?”  I said to myself.  “Self?  This is your chance to erase that blot from your character.  An audio switch box is not rocket science.  Build it yourself, you EE wimp!”

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