The front page of today\’s Wisconsin State Journal features an article about the UW-Madison\’s \”Parent Program,\” which provides services for parents who just can\’t let their little angels go. The article features mother and daughter team Amy and Alynna Smith, who apparently are a little… close. It appears that Alynna will not be able to live her college life without her mother knowing every move she makes, since that\’s clearly how it works at home now.

While her mother\’s intent in participating in this story was clearly to show how much she loves her daughter, she may actually have just put a target on Alynna\’s back when she shows up on campus. I\’m sure there will be plenty of guys in the dorms who would delight in being the first one to take a crack at Amy\’s little girl. Hooray for unintended consequences!

I don\’t necessarily fault the UW for having such a program, because these clingy parents are probably a royal pain. But instead of having a full fledged program to deal with them, the UW should just set up a hotline, that says the following:

\”If you are calling to pay your child\’s tuition, press \’one.\’ If you are calling because you are having anxiety about your child being in college without you there, then it might be time for you to grow the hell up and leave your kid alone. To return to the main menu, press the star key.\”

Naturally, I draw on my own personal experience with regard to parental involvement in my college life. When my dad packed our van up with all my stuff to drive me to college, I\’m not sure I\’ve ever seen him move so fast. I\’m sure as soon as he got back, the champagne corks were popping in my house. The day after I left for college, my mom converted my bedroom into her own personal art studio. So when I came home to visit, I had to sleep on the floor among pottery and pressed flower pictures.

It\’s not a crime to care about your children and wish them well. But we have reached a point where the kids might actually be more grown-up than the parents.

UPDATE: It appears Newsweek has named UW-Madison their \”Hottest Big State School.\” No doubt, this honor is due to the wide array of parental babysitting options the UW offers.

The Janesville school district is doing what school boards do best – that is, everything other than actually making sure students learn anything. A hockey coach has been suspended for five games for swearing and demeaning players, which naturally has forced the school district to issue another \”policy\” dealing with athletic coaches.

No one would argue that coaches can\’t cross the line in their treatment of players. The hockey coach may very well have gone too far. But enacting this new policy sounds all too much like the school board giving in to whiny parents. Instead of the board having to actually make decisions on a case-by-case basis, they just throw out a blanket policy that tells coaches how to coach and hamstrings their ability to motivate players as they see fit.

Granted, it has been a long time since I\’ve been involved in high school athletics. But at one point, parents trusted their young men and women with their coaches. Coaches occasionally swore, but only to motivate their players. Maybe it\’s gotten out of hand in the last 15 years and we can\’t trust coaches anymore. More likely, parents have grown more controlling about what their little babies hear and see.

There\’s evidence of this in the proposed new policy, which is supposed to provide \”a positive and constructive environment.\” The policy prohibits profanity, \”criticizing to demean or humiliate\” and \”inappropriate contact.\” What any of those mean will likely be sorted out in the courts by the first parent whose kid is criticized.

The idea that a school board, whose members may never have been involved in athletics at any level, can micromanage how coaches teach their players is ridiculous. Of course coaches should be expected to maintain some decorum, and should be punished appropriately if they don\’t. But to equate an athletic field with a classroom shows how utterly clueless the school board is.

Here\’s a video of the story that describes the new policy. More disturbing than the actual policy is where Parker football coach Joe Dye says his players respond better to \”stroking\” than \”poking.\” Now that probably deserves some kind of policy against it.

In related news, some guy decided to \”rock out with his c**k out\” on a Janesville bike path.

Yes, that was me spending $80 for my daughter and me to go see The Wiggles in concert on Thursday. I now have my head in the oven.

Since he was born, I have been singing \”Take Me Out to the Ballgame\” to my son. Now, he\’s finally able to chime in with the occasional word. Here\’s our duet:

Today\’s Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel contains an article about Dr. Christopher Wolfe, a Marquette University political science professor who intends to set out and begin his own university.

From the article:

The university Wolfe envisions would stand in contrast to what he views as a \”flabby relativism\” in modern education, a belief that all ideas must be recognized and given similar weight. \”There is a truth,\” he says. \”It\’s sometimes hard to see what that truth is, but we need to pursue it, and we can discover it to a great extent.\”

As a graduate student in 1998, I took a constitutional law class from Dr. Wolfe, and it was one of the most illuminating academic experiences I\’ve had. In fact, his class inspired me to write my Master\’s thesis on judicial activism – probably a bad choice, given the fact that the topic is Wolfe\’s specialty, and he could easily spot flaws in many of my arguments. But that\’s the type of tough academic instruction that academia needs – and which he\’ll no doubt provide at his new university.

Marquette will miss him, as he represented the best the university had to offer. Best of luck to him, and here\’s hoping his new school\’s basketball team makes the Sweet Sixteen.

I was doing some reading and happened to stumble across some of the writings of Chilean biologist and philosopher Francisco Varela which I thought were interesting. Varela, a Buddhist, coined the term \”autopoiesis\” to describe the regenerative process of human cells and that relation to the body itself.

Put more simply, Varela pointed out that the human body is constantly remaking itself. This is known in some circles as \”structural shift.\” Skin and tissue cells die and are replaced by new ones. Bones completely regenerate themselves after ten years. So you literally are a completely different person every decade.

The interesting part to me is how the person I am today relates to the old me of a decade ago. How is it that I have the same traits, same knowledge, and same characteristics of that guy people knew as me 10, 20, and 30 years ago? At some point, my brain cells die off and new ones are created. How do the old brain cells pass on information to the new ones? Do they \”teach\” the new cells what I have learned in the past? When I grow new taste buds, how is it they have the same tastes as the old ones?

It also made me think about what role an environment might play in one\’s development. While the body continues to regenerate, the objects within someone\’s environment may not. Someone\’s surroundings could play a large part in molding the new person into the same person they were before.

Regardless of which \”me\” happens to be around at any given time, my couch is extremely comfortable. It would be comfortable to Chris at age 10, Chris at age 20, and Chris at age 30. I think all three of them would very much enjoy laying on it – so I do, and quite a lot. I still enjoy much of my favorite music from my teens – is that because there\’s some objective standard of good music, or because my teenage brain has taught my adult brain to like specific albums? And is music and movies the only way I can go back and communicate with the now-extinct me of the past?

In the end, this all may just have the effect of making me feel older than I really should. It\’s a little spooky and a little depressing to know that I fell in love with Mary Beth Hammond in fourth grade a full two sets of eyes ago. When I call my insurance company to tell them the speeding ticket I got in 1998 wasn\’t me, I\’ll really be telling the truth.

On the other hand, this may all just be a lesson that I should stop eating the mushrooms out of the bag that guy on State Street handed me.

Quick question: when you borrow a book that you don\’t intend on reading, for how long should you keep it? A neighbor of mine suggested I borrow this book of his that I have no intention of reading. If I give it right back to him, he\’s going to know I didn\’t read it and probably be offended (it\’s like 600 pages). If I keep it too long, he\’s going to think I\’m either not going to give it back or he\’s going to assume I read the whole thing and start asking questions about it. So I need to give the impression that I read it, but didn\’t enjoy it enough to talk about it. I may just ring his doorbell, drop the book, and run for it.