Xark!

Why middle schools should add 'Bike Shop' to their curriculum

Our world operates on an evolved relationship between humans and machines, but the tricky part of that relationship is that many of the machines we rely upon most intimately function so far beyond a layman's capabilities that they might as well be magic.

DIY hackavists have a saying: You don't really "own" a device until you can fix it. But what if we expanded this principle to a global scale? Do we own our lives, our place in the economy, our roles in a rapidly changing culture? Are we confident participants, or anxious consumers? Do we run the things in our lives, or do the things in our lives run us?

There are all sorts of reasons why Americans have traditionally divided "mind work" and "hand work," but when it comes to how we educate our children, I think we're long past the time when this division was helpful. Every modern child should have a positive, engaged relationship with technology, even as we challenge them to think creatively and abstractly. 

And I can't think of a better technology for beginning that real-world relationship between children and machines than the bicycle. 

Most of the business I get though my Uptown Bike Repairs service comes from simple adjustments and maintenance tasks that I could teach just about anyone over the age of 10 to perform. But the crucial lesson isn't teaching students whether to turn the barrel-adjuster on their rear derailleur to the left or right. It's teaching them how springs and cables and rachets work to move your chain up and down a series of cogs to improve your mechanical advantage while riding under different conditions. 

The other name for that is "Newtonian physics."

So yes,adding a hands-on "Bike Shop" class to the middle school curriculum would do double-duty for academics, but here's the bonus: When kids repack the the ball bearings in a demonstration bicycle's steering column, they learn principles that apply to all sorts of machines, AND they develop a new relationship with their own bike back home. No longer is it some mysterious, confusing, occasionally frustrating thing. Now it's a system.

Once you understand a system in principle, you relate to it creatively. You own it mentally. And once you own one machine mentally, the second machine comes more easily.

But why a bike? Because bikes are relevant. Children ride them. Teenagers customize them. Adults use them for work and pleasure and fitness. Most of the tools required for most bike maintenance can be found around most homes. And when you teach a child to fix her bike, you match the rewards of competence with the sense of freedom that a bike represents. 

Maybe students in rural districts don't need this kind of education. I grew up country, and I think that's one reason why I've felt more naturally comfortable around tools than kids who grew up without access to them. But for city kids,many of whom will commute to work on a bike as adults, learning physics, shopcraft and a healthy relationship to technology is an academic trifecta. 

It's not that complex a concept. But then again, neither is a derailleur.

Photos: Our neighbor Qua'vonta Washington, 12, of Charleston has been working on bikes for about two years. He knows his way around basic adjustments, flat fixes, etc. 

Why I shut down comments

Long-time readers of Xark (and yes, my web analytics indicate you're still out there) will have noticed a number of changes over the years, but I'd say none have been more profound than my relatively recent decision to remove the option to comment on posts here. It's an indication of how the world has changed, but also how Xark's position in the blogosphere has diminished, that this decision generated not a single response.

But here's why I did it.

I was an early pro-comment partisan in the news business, and given the 2005-era mood of American newsrooms that put me on a very small island. Since I had a web-related job at the paper, I spent a good amount of time studying the issues and trying to come up with solutions. Along the way I found great examples of smart community moderating policies and technologies, and purchased the CMS that offered the most-evolved comment management tools. I believed then, as I believe now, that the ability to comment and share across horizontal, informal networks is the killer app for the 21st century.

Which sounds nice. 

Unfortunately, newspaper and other traditional-media websites, for all their hand-wringing concerns about libel and civility circa 2005, are typically the worst offenders when it comes to building quality comment cultures. We've taught users bad habits and turned comment sections into troll ghettos.

The thing we're slow to understand is just how rapidly the culture surrounding the Web is adapting to the tools we use for creating and connecting to content. Because in the end, the quality of your comments is really a reflection of your online community, not the snazziness of your comment control dashboard. I think Xark's experiment in creating a community that wasn't focused on one topic was great while it lasted, but the new model of that kind of general engagement is a well-cultivated list of friends and follows on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.

What really changed between 2005 and 2009 was that regular people left blogging for social media platforms that far better suited their purposes. Blogs, once known for short blurbs and links that fit the emerging TLDNR attention span of modern readers, became the place where actual writers went to compose longer thoughts. 

In that context, Xark stopped being a community of readers and writers between 2007 and 2008. Instead of fighting that, I embraced it. One of the things that came out of writing about that openly was that it revealed what I already expected: The last truly engaged members of the original Xark communities were its trolls, and I blocked them. They howled elsewhere, and then were silent.

Once a community stops functioning, its comments turn to spam. And I mean that literally. Most of the open-comments moderation I did here in 2010-11 was deleting spambots. Turning on "moderator approved" comments just meant that I did the same thing, only less frequently. And the human comments often weren't much better. 

Last year I wrote an essay here and did what I normally do in today's media ecosystem: I posted it to Facebook and Twitter, where I can follow much of the conversation about my ideas, though not as fully as I can via on-post comments. And a day or so later, someone left a comment for moderation that I considered nothing more than a hateful turd deposited atop work I wanted to share with others.

In 2005-09, I'd have not only left that comment on the site, but responded to it, because that was the ethos that meant something at the time. But in 2012 I stared at that isolated piece of ignorant hate mail from some anonymous jerk and hit the delete button. There's no conversation going on here. The conversation moved. And I'm not about to let stupid strangers smear shit all over work I value based on nothing more than an outdated principle.

Still, I hung on for a while, unwilling to apply my new understanding of Xark's place in the new world. Call it nostalgia.

But as my kids say, you have to get with the now. And now this is the place where I come to write. You're free to talk about it someplace else.

So if you like that, great. If you don't, so what? It's a big internet.