Reading Novels Requires Discipline

(From the May 9 issue of the Grand Haven Tribune)

Colleges have had their spring graduation ceremonies, and the end of the high school year is less than a month away. It’s time to think about “summer reading.”

I think about it with a mix of anxiety and joy.

“Summer reading” is the notion that people read more in the summer. It also conjures images of reading lighter fare, specifically some popular novels that have a good story line conducive more to quick page turning than deep introspection. Hence my feelings of anxiety and joy.

The joy comes from thoughts of reading for simple pleasure and not for work. I don’t have to grade it, review it, comment on it, or otherwise think too hard. I can set it aside occasionally to nap on my patio, or to cool off in Lake Michigan. An easy reading novel connotes more than just reading for pleasure, it is a state of mind and a season.

But there is also that anxiety. That comes from a sense of guilt. Can I really get away with reading something so simple, just for, dare I say it, fun? Shouldn’t I be reading impressive and thick hard cover tomes on subjects related to the academic field I teach and other related intellectual fare?

I need to get over it. I need to tell myself that reading the latest John Grisham or Jim Harrison or other favorite novelist is perfectly ok. For one, it is good to relax. We can’t be on duty all the time. The brain needs refreshment too. At the same time, reading novels can have tremendous benefit beyond simple relaxation. Many novels are didactic in nature, meaning they teach us something. It could be a moral point gleaned from the subject of the story. It could be education about a place or particular subject, such as in historical novels, or those set in or written by authors in other countries. In other words, novels can be both entertaining and educational.

But I need some discipline to go ahead and read a bunch of novels on my list. Why? Because there is all the other “stuff” in my life. Summer also brings yard work, household projects, and a job that doesn’t just stop. Mostly, the available time for reading novels is eroded by all the other things I feel compelled to read.

First there is email. I get way too much of it. I get about 30-40 emails per day at home. Much of this can be sorted and deleted quickly since it is mostly personal correspondence or marketing emails from vendors sending offers or electronic versions of bills. But a lot of my home email is actually stuff to read—electronic newsletters from various newspapers, blogs and other sources. Then there’s my work email, where I get easily 100 emails per day. (I always laugh when a student comes to my door and says “I’m the one who emailed you.” Would that there were only one!). Besides the student emails, there are emails from faculty colleagues and administrators. Many of these require not just reading, but responding or doing more work. I also sort my work email into folders to try to manage and unclutter the flow. But these folders require lots of reading too—social media updates, alerts to the subjects of newly published academic journals and various trade publications. I feel compelled to read all of this to stay up to date in my field.

I mentioned social media. That is a black hole of reading. Not only do I use social media, I teach it, so I feel I must be engaged on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, Vine, and other social media platforms. But as many have said, this can be a real “time suck” that takes me away from reading other things.

I also get hard copies of journals, trade publications and magazines. They sit next to stacks of nonfiction and academic related books to read. One stack of these books resting in my home office looks very familiar—they were there last summer when I intended to get through them over the summer.

So you can see my consternation. Perhaps you have the same problem. Some of my friends on a social media site called “Goodreads” seem to rub it in when they post about books they’ve recently read. I envy them.

But like I said, I plan to discipline myself. I am going to set aside time this summer to read novels. I will do so without guilt. The lawn can be edged later—or not. I can skim those professional blogs and publications later. I am going to focus on reading novels. I deserve a little relaxing entertainment this summer. And my work will be better for it come fall.

Book of Newspaper Columns Published

(Shameless self-promotion: a news release about my new book)

Community Columnist Publishes Book

SPRING LAKE, MICH.—Tim Penning, a Spring Lake resident and “community columnist” for the Grand Haven Tribune, has published a book of columns.

“Thoughts on Thursdays: Views from the Shores of Lake Michigan,” is a collection of 65 columns Penning has written since he started as a community columnist for the Tribune in 2002. The name reflects the fact that his column has appeared on the second Thursday of the month. The subtitle reflects the fact that some topics in the book are about West Michigan but also that published views on national and global issues should not always come from the big cities on the east and west coasts.

Topics in the book range from humorous and lighthearted observations to more serious commentary about political or social issues. Topics include advocacy of public parks, the foibles of airline travel, the popularity of cooking shows, college education, local tourism, having faith in government, and many more.

“People ask me what I write about and I say anything that’s going on currently or anything that comes to mind,” Penning said. “I often thought about quitting the column because it seems like the monthly deadline comes around fast. But then someone would tell me how much they liked my recent column and that gave me energy to write the next one.”

It was in early 2012 that Penning realized he had been writing the column for a decade. Several friends suggested he publish a collection in a book. He spent the past year reviewing and revising his favorite columns for the book.

Penning self published the book under the name Penning Ink, his freelance business. The book is available from Schuler Books in stores and online as well as from Amazon. He hopes to also have copies of the book available for sale at Grand Haven bookstores and select merchants.

Question of Sports in College is a Tie

(From the April 11, 2013 issue of the Grand Haven Tribune)

This has been an exciting week in college sports, especially for those of us who live in Michigan. We saw one of our own universities go all the way to the championship game in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.

I can’t deny my own excitement. I’ve been a Michigan fan since I was a kid. That was when my dad first was watching sports on TV—it may have been football at the time—and Michigan was a powerhouse in those days. I was hooked. I became a fan of Michigan just because they got lots of attention when I first paid attention to sports.

Other than that, I have no real reason to be a Michigan fan. No one in my family ever attended college there. As for me, I have degrees from Central Michigan, Western Michigan, and Michigan State University. I now teach at Grand Valley State University.

People who know me will know that I have cheered for Michigan, especially in football, over the years. So when they see me sporting a green and white MSU hat or sweatshirt, they look at me funny and ask me questions. Some who don’t know me but are partisan Michigan fans ask me why I would sport the green and white.

That’s when I remind them that college is about education, not sports. My affinity to Michigan State University is due to the years of hard but satisfactory work I put in there to earn my PhD. It doesn’t hurt that they have been doing well on the gridiron and basketball court, or that basketball coach Tom Izzo has a summer place in the area. I saw him once at a local grocery store and was tempted to loft a cantaloupe into my cart from three-point range to impress him. But seriously, college is for education. Sports is called “extra-curricular” for a reason. But our society seems to treat sports as the main thing.

The obsession with college sports is a phenomenon unique in the United States. When I taught on faculty exchange at a college in France, I noticed the school had no athletic facilities or team mascot and logo emblazoned on hats and shirts and sweatpants. A Canadian student in my doctoral program at MSU told the story of driving to Lansing from her home in Ontario to begin her studies. The customs agent at the border asked her “Are you a Spartan or a Wolverine?” She was paralyzed with fear and had no idea what he was asking. In Canada the colleges don’t have teams and mascots either. Sports are played in community leagues.

As a taxpayer and a professor concerned about our state universities, I am always pained to read about athletes for a Michigan university who leave college early for a professional league. In some respect that’s exciting. But it seems to violate the principle of a sports scholarship—to help a young person get a college education. Our universities should not be treated as a minor league sports franchise to aid the professional sports teams in identifying their next stars.

I have been concerned about this for years, even as far back as my undergraduate days. I remember when a candidate running for re-election visited the campus in Mt. Pleasant and when asked what concerned me as a student I told him to think about legislation mandating that scholarship athletes who go pro early return their scholarship funds to an account for non-athletes who demonstrate academic potential. He said he would “look into it.”

We’re already seeing that this week in the coverage of the NCAA final. There has been discussion of the games, of course. But the backstory since the final has been about whether this or that sophomore will go pro or stay in school. Sophomore? I know a lot of sophomores. They haven’t learned enough yet. Yes, the money is tempting, and the years of playing time in pro sports are short so a young person may want to jump on an opportunity to play at the top level. But for that same reason, they may want to think about getting a degree and setting themself up for a life after sports.

In my dozen years of teaching full time, I’ve had lots of athletes in class. Only one of them ever went pro. That may be because we’re Division II, but then again you need to re-watch Spike Lee’s “Hoop Dreams” to remember that the number of pro athletes nationwide is significantly smaller than the number of college athletes.

The one I knew who went pro was actually a good student. A quiet kid who sat in the back row, he wasn’t an A student, but nevertheless turned in good work and paid attention. I was most impressed when, after he was drafted by an NFL team, he contacted a colleague of mine from his new home out west and arranged to complete his final three credits in an independent study so that he could complete his degree in the off-season. There may me more stories like that. It’s too bad the media does not stress the academic achievements of college athletes more, to the satisfaction of citizens like me and as an example to younger athletes in high school.

At the end of the day there will always be sports in college in the U.S. I don’t mind that, and actually do enjoy it. But I would hope our collective perspective would change. One way to do that is to consider that if a college announced it was cancelling all its classes, people would wonder why it still exist at all. But if a college announced the elimination of sports, there might be complaints, but the central mission would not be affected.

With Rising Costs, Is TV Still Worth It?

(From the March 14, 2013 issue of the Grand Haven Tribune)

It may seem odd, but occasionally lately I long for the days of low-tech TV. If you’re old enough, you may remember those days. You had to actually walk up to the TV and physically touch it, turning a dial, to change channels. This wasn’t much of a challenge, since there were only three or four channels. The only difficulty may have been fiddling with the tin foil “rabbit ears” you scrunched on the antenna to improve reception.

Why would I long for those days, you ask? Three reasons. Free content. Better content. Uncomplicated.

First, let’s talk about price. I’ve read several articles in the past few months that state the obvious but nevertheless were shocking to see it spelled out. We pay a lot for TV these days. Too much, in my opinion. As one article pointed out, there has been a 167% increase in what people pay on average for TV, including phone and Internet bundled in, over the past 10 years. The average customer pays $128 per month for this bundle, as compared to $48 per month back in 2001. That average monthly price seems considerably higher in West Michigan, according to my bill. It’s enough to cause me to get my underwear in a bundle, as they say.

I recently noticed an ad for the charter bundle for $90. But it’s for new customers only. I called and said I’ve been a loyal customer, why not a discount to reward my longevity. No, only for new customers. So you basically entice people and then jack up the price. She said something diplomatically vague and unsatisfactory. I said goodbye and then said something precise and unsuitable for family newspapers.

Of course, one of the reasons the cost is so high is because it costs more to create programs. And despite what you think, they don’t make TV programs just for fun—they want to make money. DirecTV, the second-largest pay-TV provider in the U.S., noted in another article I read  recently that it expects programming costs per subscriber to increase 8% in 2013. So they raised prices it charged consumers 4.5% at the start of this year.

I’m not the only one starting to wonder about the value of paying for what we used to get free, magically, over the air in the era of tin foil rabbit ears. Customers are looking at other options that involve cancelling cable subscriptions and watching their favorite programs via Netflix or Hulu online. Apple may introduce a new TV later this year that could disrupt the TV industry the way it radically changed music—people would buy one show or series (think song or album) at a time as opposed to subscribing to an entire package of channels. The Federal Communications Commission has debated forcing companies to offer “a la carte” programming, allowing customers to pay for only the channels they want. But there are economic, legal and public interest factors that make that unlikely.

The whole cost of TV is complicated. Entertainment companies that make the shows want to get paid for them. Telecom companies that enable us to receive and watch the shows also want to get paid. None of us want to watch ads so we use technology to skip them, which means advertisers pay less and cable companies have to charge more to make up the difference. We’ll either have to keep paying more or  see the return of ads that we are not able to skip.

My second reason for questioning the value of what we pay for TV has to do with the quality of the content. There’s a little known song by Bruce Springsteen called “57 Channels (and Nothin’ On).” We have more than 57 channels on most cable packages today, but I come to the same conclusion that Bruce did on many evenings. Aside from the utility of news, weather and sports, the quality of programming doesn’t seem worth the cost. There are too many tired detective and crime dramas, juvenile ‘reality’ programming, and other fare that either seems to bore or disgust me. My wife and I have found some shows we enjoy, but I start to wonder at the cost given the number of actually enjoyable shows.

Finally, I long for the old days when TV was less complicated. Back then you bought a TV, plugged it in, and turned it on. Now the TV comes with a DVR or box and a book thicker than a college physics text to explain how to use it.

My wife and I have three advanced degrees between us, but occasionally we hit the wrong button on our remote and turn off the system as opposed to just the TV. This requires several anxiety-ridden moments of button punching before all systems are normal again. I rarely use any buttons besides power, volume, and channel. I’m not sure what all the other ones are for, but I think one can launch a missile.

I understand Apple, known for its intuitive design and sophisticated simplicity, is coming out with its own TV later this year that may revolutionize the industry. A TV that connects simply to the Internet and has a simple remote and a unit that you just plug in and go would be a huge step forward, and probably another blockbuster consumer product for Apple.

Until that happens, I have little choice but to sit in front of my current TV, confused, broke and bored. 

My Diagnosis of Medicine: Imprecise

(From the February 14, 2013 Grand Haven Tribune)

“Everyone is different.” We joke about it now. But it is the summary of my wife’s and my own frustrations with modern medicine.

We anticipate hearing that line in doctors’ offices now. We can finish a doctor’s sentence when we ask a question to get at some level of certainty about my wife’s current medical status, reaction to treatment, or future prognosis.

They just don’t know. They, in their impressive white coats and framed medical degrees, can’t give a definitive and precise answer.

I don’t really blame them, now that I’m more intimately aware of medical research and treatment related to my wife’s fight with cancer. But previously, without this experience, I had a notion that medicine was a field of scientific precision. I thought that when you ask a question of a medical doctor, after submitting yourself to a series of invasive and high tech tests, that you could get a very clear and specific answer.

You don’t always get that.

You do get a lot of qualified answers, full of soft words like “might” and “maybe” and “could” and “hopefully.” Then, when you ask why you don’t get more of a solid answer, you get....wait for it.... “well, everyone is different.”

That means the human body is not a machine. All our moving parts vary from one person to another. For all the medical research, for all the rigor of scientific process, it is still not possible to say that if you take this pill, have this procedure, adopt this diet or whatever, that you will be cured without question, 100 percent.

I also am a doctor, although not a medical doctor. As a PhD working as a professor in a field known as social science versus medical science, I study human behavior, which is more dependent on variables like attitude, value, social structure and so on. In social science, we would consider it preposterous to predict that 100 percent of a certain class of people will change their mind or act a certain way based on a certain circumstance. Instead, we look at percent response, variation in response, and multiple causes to the studied effect.

But I had thought that in science, what we call hard or physical science, there would be more straightforward relationships. But only in certain areas of study can things be predicted with absolute certainty, in what we call not theories but laws. The law of gravity in physics is an example. But I was naïve to assume that such laws governed medicine.

This reality bears itself out in multiple ways. Not all doctors agree. Articles come out that contradict long-held understandings of medical causes and treatments. Patients have to weigh the risk versus benefit of treatments, and whether the side effects of a treatment are worse than what they are supposed to be curing. This is another case where “everyone is different.”

One thing we have noticed in all of this is the importance of the softer skills in the middle of medicine. The skills and concepts taught in my field of public relations and communications, and its specific application in the field of health communications, for example, is what really sets apart doctors’ offices. Their staffs, from the receptionist to the nurses and physician’s assistants, and sometimes the doctors themselves, are the real difference makers.

We have been in situations where the two extremes of health care communication have been in evidence. In some, my wife has felt like a number, asked to fill out information for the hundredth time that they should already have in their system. Repeating her birth date so the medical professionals know they are talking to the right person. We have had to remind them that something quite important needed to happen in the RIGHT side, not the left. They seem annoyed when we ask questions, expecting us to be like lambs and submit to their care, in spite of the lack of precision and our experience with mistakes. I, meanwhile, have been all but ignored as someone who is not a patient and somehow, even though I am going through all of this too. This is why my wife introduces me as Dr. Tim Penning.

In other medical offices, the staff smiles when we enter and greet both of us by name. They remember that my wife likes to be greeted by her short name or nickname, and not her full given name. My wife has fond nicknames and inside jokes with some of these people. They remember aspects of her life and personality and ask about them. They even remember me and greet me by name. They spend ample time answering questions and putting us at ease.

In this context, even thought the medical science may be imprecise, at least we have a level of comfort and camaraderie to make up for the lack of certainty. I thank God for doctors and medical professionals who work hard and are continually making progress to understand and fight disease. But I have come to be especially grateful for those in medicine who see each patient uniquely, with unique diagnoses, personalities, life situations, concerns and faith perspectives. They see patients as fellow humans, not as medical cases. That’s why such people are making a difference: they are responding appropriately to the fact that “everyone is different.”