How my writing kids (ages 10-12) would vote to change society

      When I went to meet with my Writopia writing workshop kids this evening, I'd just read that voter turnout in my town was a mere 20%, and that really depressed me. I know it's not a Presidential election year, but municipal elections count. We're electing the people who run our towns and cities and perhaps most importantly, our schools. As it turns out, there was a late burst which brought us up to 33%, but still, that's pathetic.

If you don't vote, folks, you shouldn't complain when things aren't the way you want them to be. Yes, there are problems with the system, and yes, it often feels that our voices don't count nearly as much as the deep pockets of corporate interests, but not voting is an illogical option.

We always do a short writing warmup, and this evening, I spoke to my kids about how sad I was about the low voting turnout and so for the 10 minute warmup, I asked them to think about what issues would be important to them if they had the power to vote.

The answers were worth listening to - particularly for politicians.

• more subjects in school, such as social studies, chemistry, and much more.
• more gun safety.
• more air conditioning, because some schools don’t have any air conditioning.
• more activities, so kids can learn more, such as music, karate, art, and more.
• more recycling.
• more medicines for sick people.
• more homes for the homeless.
• no more war.
• no bullying, not just in school, but everywhere.
• good education for kids, and parents get paid a good amount of money.
• healthy food in school cafeterias.
• more food donations for the poor.
• food for less money, for poor people that have at least a little money.

• All guns illegal
• no homeless people, and everyone has a least a small apartment
• Things cost less
• You can drive at age ten, but only in small cars, and you can’t go on main roads or highways
• School lunches gave real food, and not some horrible mixture of stuff that they call salad.  Also, they have a real menu, and fancy waiters and stuff
• Everyone gets a phone, at age seven in case of emergencies, but it only calls parents and 911 until they're older
• no homework, you spend six hours in school why should you spend another hour with mountains of homework
• no war

• I would change gun laws. I would make guns illegal all over the world. They don’t solve anything. Except killing people.
• I would make a law so that people of any race could vote.
• Cafeteria Lunches. They suck and they aren’t healthy. I would make sure every kid in America would get a healthy lunch.
• Every kid could get a good education.
• Every adult could get a good paying job. And they would get paid more than the minimum wage.
• Make sure that schools are safe for the kids. Make sure that no shootings happen or bomb threats… Make sure there are at least 2 police officers on guard every day.
• There wouldn’t be as many homeless people. Make sure they have food, water, and a little shelter.
• People that live in places where a lot of hurricanes, tsunamis… happen. They could have a place where they would be safe. Equipped with food, and water, and most importantly candy… J.K( but candy would be nice)
• Mostly,CHILD ABUSE!!!!! IT’S REALLY NOT O.K AS THE WORLD CHANGER I WOULD MAKE SURE ALL OF THE KIDS IN THE WORLD WOULD BE SAFE.
• NO RACISM!!!! IT KILLS PEOPLE ON THE INSIDE!!!

That 10 minute writing prompt told me so much about kids in city schools.They want more from their education than core curriculum and standardized tests. They want arts and music and the things that other kids have.

Holding class in Stamford on the day after a woman was shot dead in a city park, these kids want gun safety laws.

But most this was the sentence that spoke to me most: "No racism!!! It kills people on the inside!!!"

Out of the mouthes of babes...

Shared Awareness: Information + Technology = "Education Spring"

Matt DiRienzo, Group Editor for 21st Century Media in CT, recommended Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody" for one of my MFA students (thanks Matt!) and I've been reading it, too. It's worth picking up if you want to understand the growing backlash against Corporate Education Reform, the Common Core and my focus here, recent events in Hartford, CT.

As anyone who has following the edreform debate will be aware, the push for the current brand of high stakes, test-based stacked ranking of students, teachers and schools has come from moneyed interests - hedge fund billionaires like Paul Tudor Jones, Steve Mandel & Whitney Tilson, and tech billionaires such as Mark Zuckerberg,


Add in the mega bucks of megaphilanthropies like Broad Education Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, the Donald and Doris Fisher Fund, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and corporate interests like Pearson, and you get a pretty clear idea of how much money and power is behind the corporate education reform movement and the push to privatize our public schools.

It was difficult for the constituency of people who work with children and could see the many, valid problems with corporate edreform strategies to make themselves heard, because to put it bluntly, in this country, for all of our ideals of being a democracy and a meritocracy, money talks. This has only become more pronounced in the wake of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision.

It's not just that the wealthy have greater influence in the corridors of power because of their ability to make campaign donations. It's that the wealthy and powerful have a disproportionate influence on traditional means of communication - newspapers, television, radio. To get out a conflicting narrative means rocking the donor/advertising boat, and when media outlets are already struggling to survive in choppy economic waters, it's become abundantly clear that boat rocking is avoided at all costs.

But what's happened in Hartford - and is catching fire all across the country, much to Arne Duncan's chagrin - is that new technology is giving the rest of us (Shirky's "everybody")the tools for shared awareness and that awareness leads to action, which is resulting in consequences for those who have willfully ignored our voices for far too long.

Let's focus on an example from Hartford. The Hartford Board of Education, consists of 9 members, 5 appointed by Hartford Mayor Pedro Segarra (including himself) and 4 elected members. Parents have complained about lack of transparency about process, lack of interest in the types of programs being pushed on them, and lack of resources before the decision to privatize the schools. But they haven't always had sufficient information and the ability to communicate and disperse that information in a timely way, in order to protest the Board's decisions.

In the last year or so, however, things have changed. First, there is the blogosphere - and blogs like Wait What? and Real Hartford have been providing a function that traditional media sources haven't - investigative reporting - thus giving parents information.

Social media is what has given this information power. By spreading the information far and wide, it's become harder for the traditional media to ignore, and thus for the Hartford politicians and the Board of Education to turn a blind eye to parent's concerns.

What's more, as Shirky observed in HERE COMES EVERYBODY regarding protests in Liepzig, (GDR) in 1989 prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, "each of the citizens...had some threshold at which they might join a protest. Each week the march happened without a crackdown offered additional eidence that the marches provided an outlet for their disaffection; each successful march diminished the fear felt by some additional part of the populace."

We saw this with the Steve Perry/Capital Prep story in Hartford. Jonathan Pelto started covering Perry's inappropriate tweets, his chronic absenteeism for speaking engagements, and his bullying behavior on Wait What?. Former and current teachers started approaching him behind the scenes, but because of Perry's threats to ruin their careers, they were concerned about going on the record. However a few things happened at once which changed the situation. A former Capital Prep teacher, Michael Fryar, 45, filed a complaint with the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities over his alleged treatment at Capital Prep.

According to a report in the Hartford Courant:

"Fryar said he was fired Nov. 8, only weeks after he formally complained to the district and state that he was denied professional development opportunities and given low evaluation scores "with no factual basis."

Fryar criticized Perry's leadership and described an environment of low teacher morale. He also questioned Capital Prep's disciplinary practices, including instances in which students ran up and down the school's stairs as an apparent form of punishment, Fryar said.

City schools spokesman David Medina said the district would not comment on Fryar's allegations because of "pending litigation." Perry, who declined to comment on much of Fryar's remarks, denied that morale is low."

This, coupled with Supt Christina Kishimoto's proposal to give Perry an additional school to run, (under structured as a private management company owned by Perry) which was scheduled for a hasty BOE vote, lit the spark. Having social media tools allowed parents to stay informed, to spread the word, and to make their feelings known publicly. As more parents and teachers started telling their stories, others became more forthright.



From Wait What?



Addendum: New parental complaint

From Buffalospree.com

At this point the issues became harder for both the BOE and the traditional media to ignore, although the establishment paper,(CT's Daily Mail) the Courant, appears to still be doing its best to do so. In its late, and obviously reluctant coverage of the Perry tweet affair (which it posted after the Washington Post had already taken up the story)the Courant headlines with "Teacher's Union Asks for Investigation into Principal's 'threatening' tweet." Let's put "threatening' in quotes because we're going to pretend that a student or a teacher making that tweet like wouldn't have been suspended, right HC? It's just that meddlesome old teacher's union making trouble again! Okay...got it.

Multiply this effect with a network of concerned parents, educators, professors, writers and activists around the country and you can start to understand why the Opt Out Movement is growing, why opposition to the Common Core is growing, why districts are opting out of RTTT funding, and why Arne Duncan (and Democrats who support him) will regret that "white suburban mom" comment for a VERY VERY LONG TIME. Because it's not just white suburban moms. It's everybody. And we're here, armed with information, research and investigative reporting and the ability to spread it, even if the traditional media won't.

What does College Ready really MEAN?

The phrase "college ready" is being bandied about in education circles ad nauseum (another thing for which we can thank Mr and Mrs Bill Gates) and after a conversation with my daughter last night I've been doing a lot of thinking about what this really means for our kids. My daughter started her senior year today, and we were having another discussion last night about what classes she was taking and for various reasons got onto the subject of Calculus vs. Statistics. She told me that the colleges she wants to go to wouldn't look at her if she doesn't take Calculus.

This is my second child, and I've sat through enough of these admissions talks now to know what college admissions officers are saying. And I have to question some of the values that I see being beaten into our kids' heads in these college admissions sessions. For example, if I have to sit in another admissions session saying that they want kids who have held leadership positions, I might well stand up and scream, "HOW THE HELL ARE ALL OF THESE KIDS SUPPOSED TO HOLD LEADERSHIP POSITIONS? THERE AREN'T ENOUGH CLUBS IN ALL THE SCHOOLS FOR EVERY SINGLE KID TO BE A LEADER?" And what message is that giving kids? That NOT being the CEO is failure? Really? There are plenty of CEOS whose tenure could be viewed as a failure (*cough* Steve Ballmer *cough*). One can be a leader in so many different ways, without holding an official title.

But it's this prescribed view of what kids need to take in order to be college ready that makes me the most crazy. I understand the focus on a rigorous curriculum. I understand that they should be challenging themselves. But calculus vs statistics? Really?

I didn't take calculus in HS or college. It's not that I'm not good with numbers. I got an A+ in Accounting in college, and in my work life created and analyzed budgets for a multimillion pound business.

Financial numbers like balance sheets and income statements make sense to me. They're like putting together pieces of a puzzle. I've told both my kids that no matter what they want to do in life, they should take a basic accounting class, because they need to be able to understand how to read financial statements.

When I got to business school, I had to take calculus as a pass/fail prerequisite. It's the only class I've almost failed in my entire life. I don't know if it was the professor or my brain, but I couldn't wrap my head around the concepts. I tried so hard to understand. I tried to do it by understanding the concepts. I tried to do it by rote memorization of formulas. I passed, but barely. It traumatized me so much that for almost a decade after I got my MBA in Finance, I would wake up in a cold sweat, having dreamed that I'd failed calculus, and I'd actually have to go down to the study and look at my framed diploma to make sure it was still there.

It traumatized me so much I was worried about taking statistics, assuming that I was total dunce. But I did fine in statistics. Statistics made total sense to me.

In my working life since taking calculus, I have never once had to use it. Not when I worked in finance, not as the financial director of a business, not in my current fields of endeavor.In my life since taking statistics, I use that knowledge all the time. Having a working knowledge of statistics enables me to understand how they are being used or misused in political discourse. I can't help wondering - why do colleges value that less than calculus for an educated person?

Again, I wonder what does "college ready" really mean? Who is defining it? And what is the end game? What kind of life is this "college readiness" making kids ready FOR?

As parents we need to ask these questions of our schools, our elected representatives, our government - and we must do it loudly. It matters, for our children, and for the future of this country.

The Gates Foundation - spending billions to make my creative writing students' dystopia a reality

This evening during my creative writing workshop we talked about setting and world building. I had the kids do one of my favorite brainstorming exercises for this topic: EXTRAPOLATING INTO THE FUTURE.

I ask the students to make two columns. In column one, they write a current law, issues or technology. In the second column, I ask them to extrapolate what they have written in column one, imagining it in a future society. Is it being taken to an extreme? Is it being used for good or not so good purposes?

The example I gave them is scientists currently using brain imaging for various forms of research (ie/Alzheimers, Autism, MS, etc.) What if in the future they used that technology see how a subject reacted to images of murder or other forms of crime and isolated those who reacted positively to those images because they were likely criminals?

My younger kids (rising 6-7 graders) were more lighthearted, yet I'm amazed by the cynicism and distrust of government I see in all of my students. (Heckuva job, Washington!)

One student had some wonderfully innovative ideas - I told her I want to be her business manager and pitch them to Shark Tank.

One of my guys wrote an interesting, humorous piece about how the government, in an attempt to ensure everyone's safety, created bubbles around everyone's houses for protection. But eventually the citizens started getting upset because they couldn't get out to go do things like go on vacation. The Commander in Chief was President Imafraud. Like I said, cynical!

The same kid, in his brainstorming list, wrote about the iPhone 3D. "They're coming out with the 4D with a few months but it's hard to see the difference." (LOL!)

His piece led to an interesting discussion about the impact the government's protective bubbles would have on community and citizenship. This is an example of why the setting and world building workshop is always one of the most lively and fun.

My older kids (rising 8-9 graders) are all working on dystopian novels, so this exercise was particularly useful.

What was really interesting to me as a political writer was one student's projection that schools would be abolished and kids would be educated via computer - because it sounds very much like vision promoted by the Gates Foundation.

I asked the student how he would feel if that really happened.

"I wouldn't like it," he said. "We're required to have iPads next year. I'm not happy. I like to write things down."

We had another lively discussion about a certain class all my kids had shared last year in school, in which computer instruction was used.

Verbatim comments from my students:

"Our teacher sits us in front of the computer for the entire class. He doesn't actually teach us anything."

"Half the time the keyboard doesn't work and then you can't finish the assignment."

"If you don't get it right you just have to keep on practicing until you do. It's really frustrating."

And then the student who wrote that school would be reduced to a computer said to me, "I like this kind of class, like we're having here."

Here's the thing, Mr. Gates: I am not anti-technology. I love technology. I use it every day. I couldn't even consider writing the two books I have with an October 1st deadline if it weren't for my Macbook Pro (Yeah, gave up PCs years ago) and my Scrivener.

But the difference between you and me is that I see technology as a tool - one among many that can be used to reach students.

You are spending billions of dollars to influence policy to make it THE SOLUTION, thus forcing it on my kids - because I view all of the students I work with as my kids. And that, Mr. Gates, is wrong. Maybe you should get out of your Billionaire Bubble, stop listening to the yes men and the Wall Street folks and hear from some actual young people - the ones who are being affected by your misguided policies.

Dear CT State Dept of Education: "That's just disrespectful."

Yesterday, I was trying to tune out the world and get some serious writing done, when during one of my email/Twitter breaks THIS arrived in my inbox:



At which point I had a parental head explosion. I didn't even begin to talk to my 11th grader, who already has enough on her plate, about it last night. But I had to wonder what idiot with no comprehension of teenagers and their emotional lives had the GENIUS to decide that NOW would be a great time to add MORE TESTING - particularly testing thats stated aim is merely to give additional data to the district and the State Board of Education - to our teenagers lives.

For that particular rocket scientist - and Governor Dannel Malloy, and State Board of Education Commissioner Stefan Pryor, and everyone who is pushing this particular sick brand of corporate "education reform", all the way up to Arne Duncan and President Barack Obama, I'd like to give you a little insight about teenagers. I base my insights on the fact that I was a teenager, I parent two, in the course of my work as a YA author I spend a great deal of time with many others, and I happen to love this age group big time.

!. Teenagers are human beings. They are not data points. Please read this sentence over and over until you understand this concept before moving on to the next paragraph.

2. They are going through massive hormonal changes, which can be difficult to live with as a parent, but just as difficult to cope with as the teenager experiencing them, because you have these FEELINGS and they HAPPEN and you can't always control how and why.

3. Teenagers need more sleep than most age groups and get less of it, which has major implications for mood, stress, concentration, study ability.

4. Coming in between now and June, my particular 11th grader already has to take the SATS, AP exams and finals. When I finally discussed the proposed state testing with her this afternoon, she told me "that's just disrespectful." I agreed with her, 100%. She said, "It's one thing taking CAPT, when our teachers reduce our homework in our other classes. But to schedule those tests NOW?"

I'd like CT Governor Malloy, State Department of Education Commissioner Stefan Pryor, Bill McKersie, Arne Duncan, and President Obama to reread those words: "That's just disrespectful."

We adults expect respect from our teenagers. But to earn their respect, we must show them the respect they, too, deserve. Expecting them take an assessment test for data purposes when they are already facing so much pressure is not only disrespectful, it is unhealthy.

As adults, we should be modeling balance for our kids, not cruelty and insanity. The rate of suicide for the 15-24 age group has nearly tripled since 1960. Is it any wonder when the State Board of Ed treats our already stressed out teens like lab rats instead of human beings?

Last year, when the Education Reform Bill was before the CT State Legislature, I tried to get the Greenwich High School PTA to speak out against it, as PTA's in other towns were doing, because of the implications for increased testing. There was absolutely zero interest in getting involved. But lo and behold,now that the precious darlings in Greenwich are going to be affected, guess what arrived in my inbox today:



Yes, now that it's affecting OUR KIDS the Greenwich parents must have raised holy hell because that was one heck of a quick backdown by both our Greenwich Superintendent and our State BOE. You see, when parents from an extremely wealthy suburb start making a fuss, the State BOE is suddenly all ears.

But I challenge my fellow Greenwich parents - and indeed, the parents in all the other wealthy suburbs across the nation - to wake up and smell the coffee. They need to realize our reprieve was only temporary, not permanent. What the kids in Bridgeport, Windham, Hartford and New London are being forced to do this year while we got a pass, our kids are going to be doing in the years to come - while they are struggling with the same SATS, APs and finals. Oh, and maybe looking forward to going to Prom and all the other social and extra curricular activities that we want them to have as well-balanced, well-rounded kids.

There's a piece in the Atlantic, The Coming Revolution in Public Education that's a must read for every parent, grandparent and person who cares about having a healthy system of public education in this country. I also encourage you to join the Network for Public Education, and if you're in CT, like the PAA-CT Facebook page. Please join the fight now, before this insanity train moves even further down the track.

What I learned from kids about Accelerated Reader

Last night I taught the first of a series of creative writing workshops at the C.H. Booth library in Newtown CT. It's the second year I've taught these workshops and despite the travel to get there and back (it's an hour each way) I really love doing them. I teach two groups - one rising 6-7 graders and the other rising 8-9 graders, each for an hour and a half.

In our session last night, we talked about how writers get ideas and did some brainstorming exercises.

As a writer, I find teaching these workshops incredibly energizing. After all, these are my people, the kids I write for - okay, maybe some are little younger, but I do plan to write a middle grade again some day. I learn so much from them by listening.

Last night, what I heard broke my heart. In my younger group, the 6-7 graders, I asked the kids for some books that they'd really loved. And from one of the most promising writers in the group, I heard this: "I read this really long book and it was a waste because it wasn't in Accelerated Reader."

I died a little inside. Actually a lot. And then I said to her, "It's NEVER a waste to read a book you enjoy."

The girl next to her said that she'd started reading the Harry Potter series and loved it but then she "got stuck in Accelerated Reader."

This generated a whole discussion amongst the kids about AR. One girl complained that she likes to read high school books but because she is at 8th grade level on AR she is only allowed to read those books. Out of ten kids in the class, there was one kid who was happy with AR, and that was because she'd won a pizza party with two friends because she'd got to 500 AR points and it was a big source of pride and accomplishment.

But this is a kid who is involved with Odyssey of the Mind, multiple after school activities - a clearly bright and motivated child. Is anyone telling me that AR got her to read and that she wouldn't have been reading anyway? That she couldn't have been motivated without "points"?

During the break between my class I spoke to the librarian who runs my CW workshop about how heartbroken I was to hear this. She said that the school librarian at the elementary school was a big proponent of AR, because it had shown marked benefits with the reluctant and average readers.

I'm not convinced training kids like puppies with "treats" is the way to turn them into lifelong readers. I had the privilege of hearing our National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, Walter Dean Myers speak in May at the Hudson Children's Book Festival, and he convinced me more than ever that it's adults modeling enthusiasm for books and reading and getting books into the home EARLY through programs like Reading is Fundamental and First Book that really makes a difference. That and investing in early childhood education.

Instead we are cutting library funding and school librarians, cutting funding to literacy programs, and school systems are spending money on programs like AR, because it seems like an easy, one size fits all fix, instead of letting teachers work their magic. And in doing so, we end up with kids thinking that reading a really long book they enjoyed is a "waste." That makes my blood boil. It makes me wonder who the hell is making decisions about education in this country and if they're doing for benefit of kids or for financial benefit.

For more on Accelerated Reader from those in the trenches here's some further reading:

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/book_whisperer/2010/09/reading_rewarded_part_ii.html

http://thereadingzone.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/accelerated-reader-frustrations/

http://thereadingzone.wordpress.com/2012/04/14/what-kids-are-reading-2012-why-it-doesnt-matter/

Innovation, creativity, and humanity - what I learned from reading Isaacson's Steve Jobs

Last night, just as my daughter was coming in to say goodnight to me,  I turned the final page on Walter Isaacson's fascinating biography on the late Steve Jobs. My daughter, who is, like me, a big Apple fan, asked me, "So did it change your opinion of him?"

The answer is complex, as it must be for a very complicated man.

There are  many things I admire about Jobs, both as a creative person, and someone who studied business administration  (I hope this becomes required reading for MBA courses).

The first, and perhaps the most important is that Jobs had a fervent belief of the importance of the liberal arts and humanities - as exemplified by the slide at the end of his product presentations showing the intersection of Liberal Arts Street and Technology Street.

"It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough. We believe that it's technology married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our heart sing...We think we have the right architecture not just in silicon, but in our organization, to build these kinds of products."

Compare this thinking with that of Tea Party politicians like Florida Governor Rick Scott, who wants to drastically cut funding for higher education in the liberal arts in favor of the "STEM" disciplines. Scott should read Isaacson's book, pronto, in hopes that he might gain some understanding why his approach is moving us back to the past rather than preparing us for the future.

Steve Jobs was a great example of the term "Synthesis" - he drew ideas from different, disperate sources, many outside the field of technology and from them was able to originate a new way of looking at an issue.

Isn't that what we need more of in our society, in business, education, and government? There's so much pressure on kids to focus, focus, focus, so they can get into the "best college" (but is it the "best one for them?) and then get out there and make money. But we need more polymaths -people who can see beyond the balance sheet and profit and loss. People who can draw inspiration from other cultures instead of fearing them, because like it or not, we are a global society and there's no way to turn back the clock, no matter how much some people appear to wish to do so.

One of the most fascinating things for me from a business management perspective was Jobs' unique understanding of how the very culture of a business is shaped by the design of its' headquarters. (p.430-431).

"Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings. 'There's a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat,' he said. 'That's crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they're doing, you say 'Wow', and soon you're cooking up all sorts of ideas.'"

The Pixar building, therefore, was designed around one central atrium in order to promote just those kind of serendipitous encounters. The front doors, main stairs, and corridors all led to the atrium, the company cafe and mailboxes were there. It was the hub around which Pixar gravitated. And it worked.

"Steve's theory worked from day one" [John] Lasseter recalled. "I kept running into people I hadn't seen for months. I've never seen a building that promoted collaboration and creativity as well as this one."

But like many geniuses I've read about, Jobs was not an easy man to be around.  He clearly had disordered eating, if not an actual eating disorder. He appeared to exhibit many symptoms of  narcissistic personality disorder. Perhaps the best example of this comes late in the book (p.543). Isaacson is talking about Jobs' "complicated but always loyal" relationship with his wife Laurene Powell, who, early in their marriage, cofounded and launched College Track, an organization that helps disadvantaged kids graduate high school and get into college.

While Jobs paid lipservice to her work: " What she's done with College Track really impresses me," he never actually visited her after school centers.

So here's the woman who has supported him, loved him, looked after him, raised his kids - yet he couldn't even put himself out to visit the centers that are important to her? Sorry, that's husband fail on a grand scale. One of the most poignant parts of the book was an interview Isaacson had with Jobs' middle daughter, Erin, in which she made excuses for her father's inattention to her:

"He does his best to be a father and the CEO of Apple, and he juggles those pretty well...Sometimes I wish I had more of his attention, but I know the work he's doing is very important and I think it's really cool, so I'm fine. I don't really need more attention."

 Erin...for the record - I just want to say that I think YOU are really cool and I think you are very important. I bet you'll do some pretty cool stuff yourself someday.

So in answer to my daughter's question about if reading the book changed my opinion of Jobs - I think it made me respect his ideas and genius more, but him as a person less. Could he have been one without the other?

Isaacson's conclusion is that Jobs could have controlled himself if he wanted to. "When he hurt people, it was not because he was lacking in emotional awareness. Quite the contrary: He could size people up, understand their inner thoughts, and know how to relate to them, cajole them, or hurt them at will."

But on the other hand - even the people who he bullied acknowledge that he pushed them to do things they never thought possible.

My final line to my daughter: " He was a genius and a brilliant businessman, but I wouldn't want him as my husband or my father."