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Mike Pesca (9:14)

Hello and welcome to Kat and Mike's Museum of Bad Ideas. I'm Mike.

Kat Rosenfield (9:19)

I'm Kat.

Mike Pesca (9:20)

See, we didn't even plan that that was a bad idea, not to talk about it beforehand. And what we do on this show is each take a bad idea, present it to the other, present it to you, and really decide how bad an idea was it. So Kat, are you. I'm a little. I'm a little conflicted. And I know that you are too, in that we could be, by highlighting bad ideas, introducing more badness into the world. But I also think that I, as a journalist, part time critic, you as a critic, part time journalist, are you like me, are you more motivated to talk about and quash the bad ideas than to lift the good ones?

Kat Rosenfield (9:56)

Well, as we all know, bad reviews are much more fun to write and I think that's because bad ideas are much more fun to talk about. Although I too am conflicted about the exercise that we're embarking on here today. I worry that maybe I'm not being the change that I want to see in the world, that I am putting out negativity or being reactive to negative things when I should be promoting positive ideas. But what I'm telling myself, and hopefully anybody listening, is that in knocking down these bad ideas, I will at the same time on the flip side conversely, be promoting a better one, if only by implication.

Mike Pesca (10:40)

Well, I think also by explication on this show and what we're doing is we're knocking down the slums of bad ideas. We're not allowing gentrification of the good ideas to get through. So I think we're doing either the Lord's work or some greedy developers. So our first bad idea. Rather than talk about this in the abstract, I will give you my bad idea this week. Here is a New York Times headline. One solution for too many A's. Harvard considers giving A plus grades. Now that just struck me as very stupid and illogical. But then I started doing some working overtime. All right, maybe this is an idea. Like sometimes you will hear libertarian type people argue that helmet laws actually cause more deaths of motorcyclists or bicyclists because once people wear the helmet they stop thinking about risk. It's something called risk compensation. You also hear it about the autobahn, that actually because there's no speed limit, it works better than having a speed limit. So maybe there's something about giving a pluses that will combat grade inflation. And I read this whole article and there was just, just wasn't acknowledged what a bad idea this was. And then I went to the source and I read a few studies which I'm going to bring to you. But before I do that, the idea of high grades and grade inflation in academia, I'm sure you've read articles about it or maybe skipped them. Do you care, do you care at all about of this among society's ills?

Kat Rosenfield (12:07)

I mean, I'm very grateful to no longer be in a stage of my life where I have to care about grades whatsoever. Except that I did just come from the dentist where they gave me some kind of saliva test that I was certain I was going to pass with flying colors. And then I failed the saliva test. I don't even know what that means, but I'm devastated. So I guess it turns out that I do care about grades even when I have no idea what they are actually reflecting upon.

Mike Pesca (12:31)

Well, was it quantity or quality of saliva? Do you have any idea? Was it PH balance? What were they doing with the saliva?

Kat Rosenfield (12:38)

Okay, it was not quantity, all right? There's nothing wrong with the quantity of saliva I produced. I produced the exact Goldilocks right amount. All right, you're not too drooly. Well, you can edit that out in post production, Right. The colors are.

Mike Pesca (12:53)

No, I want your drooliness noted for the record.

Kat Rosenfield (12:56)

Okay. All right. No, it was about quality. It was about saliva quality. They were looking for some kind of biomarker for inflammation and stress in my saliva. And it turns out I'm very stressed out and have bad saliva. I don't know. I didn't ask too many questions. I just left crying and drooling.

Mike Pesca (13:12)

Yeah. When you just said, I'm past the point of caring about grades, I was. And then with the kids, I'm not. And now I have a child in college, and. And I'm like, bring the grade inflation on. Whatever can help this kid get a decent grade point average. But I guess the faculty, the students, especially at Harvard, it's tearing people apart. So some facts first. The class of 2015 at Harvard had a median grade point average of 3.64. Wow, they're smart. But look how much smarter they got in 10 years. The graduating class of 2025 had a median grade at Harvard of 3.83. And that does seem pretty high. How about Yale? Well, here's a 2023 New York Times headline about Yale. Nearly everyone gets A's at Yale. A report found that close to 80% of grades were in the A range last year. What about Princeton? Because we're talking about just all the. The only schools that I know. Princeton addressed grade inflation in 2004, and they had a limit on grades. And then the. Sorry, that. A limit on A's, which Fonzie would not like. You know, he says. He says A. And then the students revolted. And by 2014, they did away with their limits. And now I guess everyone is upset that everyone's getting A's. And I also will blow the whistle on myself here by saying I have quoted three elite institutions and one elite institution in the New York Times, and I'm sure if I looked in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, I could find that they're worried about grade inflation at Case Western Reserve. But I did not do that because it's more fun to talk about Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and the students there being upset. All right, so so far, do you want to predict or tell me what you think is upsetting the students about getting high grades and what's upsetting the school and the faculty about it?

Kat Rosenfield (15:03)

Okay. Are the students, by any chance, and this is not at all playing into any stereotypes that might currently exist about the type of person who attends Yale, Harvard, or Princeton? Are they perhaps suffering from a certain sense of entitlement?

Mike Pesca (15:19)

Yes. Yes, they are. And I will give this hint as a guide to this whole episode. Playing into stereotypes will be your friend, because everything about this is the stereotype affirmation of these students. But I should say that it's not just the elite schools. According to the national center for Education Statistics, the average college GPA everywhere in all colleges was 2.81 in 1990. And that's exactly when. That's when I graduated high school. And that seems like what the GPA should be. That's, you know, not even a B. Right. So if a B is good, most people don't do good, but they're trying to do good. You got the people who failed. So 2.81 in 1990. By 2020, it was 3.15. And this was across the board. The percent change in GPA improve. Public four year colleges went up 17% in private four year colleges went up 16% went up less in junior colleges. So we get to Harvard, where Amanda Claybaugh, the dean of undergraduate education, puts together a report called Re Centering Academics at Harvard College Update on grading and workload. Now, first of all, the word re centering triggered me. Doesn't that mean something in the current Argo? To center or to recenter? I can't quite remember.

Kat Rosenfield (16:42)

It's ringing a certain bell. I think it's that you're not supposed to center yourself. Conversations about I'm not sure what.

Mike Pesca (16:51)

Yeah, there are things you're not supposed to center, but I don't know if grades are all that. So this is an October report and here are some of the big takeaways. Grades are no longer doing their job. A's are now. A's now exceeded Harvard, 60% of all grades, which we said, making them useless for motivation, feedback or distinction. The faculty, they interviewed a lot of faculty, a lot of students. The faculty say grades no longer reflect quality of work and external readers cannot tell students apart. The faculty. Another recommendation, Faculty should recalibrate grading towards mastery, not effort, which. Which dovetails with another finding. Grading standards must be explicit and consistent. So this stood out. This was interesting to me. Students currently interpret grade grades as rewards for hard work rather than measures of learning. Here's a quote. Grades feel fair to them, they said, when they work hard and get an A. While grades feel unfair when they work hard and don't get an A, or when another student doesn't work hard and does get an A. Only one student spoke of grades in terms of demonstrating skill or mastering material. So that's, that's one of those things where I think it is a stereotype of Harvard students, but maybe it's just a stereotype of the youth.

Kat Rosenfield (18:16)

Yeah, this strikes me actually as basically grade communism. They think they, they deserve, you know, they're there and they want the grades to be distributed according to need, from each according to his ability. The teachers are given the grades and the kids need the A's to feel good and so they should get them right.

Mike Pesca (18:35)

And speaking of communism, the next big recommendation was individual reform will fail without collective action. So the call to collectivism, but I'm making fun of that, but that's true. If some professors just say I'm going to be a hard ass, no one will take their classes. They'll do really poorly on the student evaluations. And that's really important at these colleges. You know, the faculty themselves, especially the non tenured ones, are very upset with what people say. It makes me feel a little bad for these neurotic, self destructive tryhards like this quote. When the median grade is an A, earning an A is no longer enough. Students sense that their grades are insufficient to distinguish themselves from one another. So they seek to distinguish themselves in other ways instead. Some are driven to pursue additional academic credentials such as double concentration secondary fields, language citations or concurrent master's degrees. Others focus on pre program professional clubs to the exclusion of activities that might find more meaningful. They might find more meaningful or enjoyable. I don't know. Do you come across a lot of students or a lot of Harvard students? Does that fit in with your conception of that generation or those, that particular cohort?

Kat Rosenfield (19:49)

I mean, I can't say that I have a lot of direct contact with people who are younger than me, which is how I like it, but. Oh God. Well, I mean a couple things about this. One is I do kind of sympathize with these kids who seem to feel like it's, you know, the thing that you're supposed to try hard to do is get into Harvard. And then once you're there, like you're supposed to be set, that's supposed to set you up for life. Everybody knows that once you leave Harvard you're going to go on to do great things. You know, you'll have the network, you'll have the alumni association, you have the Harvard name, you have the sweatshirt that says Harvard on it. People are gonna think well of you and they're gonna give you that.

Mike Pesca (20:27)

You have the imperative to never admit it. Say school in the Boston area, you have that going.

Kat Rosenfield (20:31)

Right, right, exactly. But everyone knows exactly what you mean. And does anybody even care what your GPA is when you have a diploma or a sweatshirt that says Harvard on it? Is one of my questions. Because my impression as somebody who went to a not brand name school is that Harvard is like your golden ticket and it doesn't really matter whether you were a good student or not there, as long as you graduated and maybe not even then. So that's one thing that I'm sort of curious about. But the other, and this is, this is I think maybe a big difference between what things were like when I was in college as versus now is what happened to the idea of excellence and what happened to the idea of the meritocracy.

Mike Pesca (21:13)

Right, right.

Kat Rosenfield (21:14)

What became of that?

Mike Pesca (21:14)

And so this is, this does informal some of what's going on. And I think you're right. No one has done a report saying what would happen. Or let's find the Harvard kid that only graduated with what do we say, 38 is the median. So let's do a study of the 36 graduates versus the 40 graduates. I don't know how that.

Kat Rosenfield (21:32)

Oh, they're all dead. They all committed suicide. They couldn't. Sorry, that's a dark joke.

Mike Pesca (21:36)

They all. No, it's fine. They all drove into a gorge because, you know, they had a 35 from Harvard.

Kat Rosenfield (21:42)

That's great.

Mike Pesca (21:43)

This may be why all those Cornell students commit suicide. Right. They only got into Cornell. They're looking at their classmates who went to Harvard. But one thing that's going on is that there is still the summa cum laude, the magna cum laude and the cum laude distinctions. And so they have to. This is only a percentage of the school. So they have to find a way to determine who's the top whatever it is. I think it's 5% for Summa. And so they have to go to the grade point average, you know, six decimal points over. And that's a pretty foolish way to do it. And the one A minus wrecks your chances of being summa cum laude. So they do want. If you get into Harvard, you're a high achiever and you have a lot of ambition and your whole life you've shown excellence. So it's very hard for them to give that up. But 95% of them are not going to be summa cum laude. And whatever it is, 90% are not going to be magna cum laude. And it does seem that's very hard for them to take. But so what you do is you give Them, you know, an automatic gentleman, a gentlewoman, a gentle non binary person, a along the way. But you're not doing anyone any favors in terms of that word. You just use the meritocracy.

Kat Rosenfield (22:51)

Right. It's meaningless because everyone's getting one. But what if they decided to expand the scale to include A pluses? How long before the concept creeps surrounding grades just kind of scoots up to A pluses?

Mike Pesca (23:05)

Okay, so you raised the point about the bad idea. The bad idea was A pluses. But before we get to the A pluses, we have the faculty report. So this was the administration report. And then the students reacted to it, and some were upset and some weren't, but the faculty hadn't weighed in yet. And this is what has just come out in recent days. So the faculty had some solid recommendations. But I'll ask you this before we get to if there are three constituencies at Harvard. The children, the administration, the faculty, who would you predict would have the best solutions for this problem? Because I will tell you, I see flaws with each of them. The faculty are tenured, so they might not care or be realistic. The students are are suffused with an ignorant fervor that characterizes charitably them in the best times, or annoyingly, some of what we've seen recently. And administrators are of course filled with mealy mouthed caution. So which of these groups would you guess would propose the best way forward?

Kat Rosenfield (24:07)

Zero of them? None of them. I mean, am I allowed to say none of them? This is clear.

Mike Pesca (24:12)

Yeah, you're allowed to.

Kat Rosenfield (24:12)

You know, I don't want to jump the gun on reaching a conclusion here, but what strikes me is that all of this is really a function of a broken system in which students, students at colleges have come to see themselves as customers and they are entitled to satisfaction in the form of good grades that are commensurate with whatever amount of effort they put in and also whatever amount of money they're paying. But that's not how this machine is supposed to work. And so as long as you have students who feel entitled, who think of themselves as customers, professors who think of themselves as service providers, who are living in terror of being given a bad rating, a bad grade by the students on ratemyprofessor.com and the faculty, or not the faculty, the administrators, whose primary goal is to just make more of themselves like rabbits, until you have 90% administrators and 10% everybody else, basically none of these groups are going to be able to come up with something that has the best interests of the College at heart, as long as the system persists. And so what we need is a consultant, like an outside come in and fire everyone and break everything consultant to just remake the entire system from scratch. Can we do that?

Mike Pesca (25:24)

Yeah. Well, at a Harvard endowment of hundreds of billions of dollars, it's not going to happen. But maybe I'll do it for the

Kat Rosenfield (25:31)

low, low price of $1 million per week.

Mike Pesca (25:35)

Could you put your finger in the corner of your mouth, Dr. Evil style to propose that? No, you're right. And that's in all these reports that I've been reading. The customer idea. Not explicitly, but so much of the problem is that the students demand it. So what should it matter if the students demand it? It's that the students have all this power, including reviews, which are unbelievably important and something called Q ratings. And yes, it is not inmates key to the asylum, but people acting in their acute self interest. What they think is their self interest, but they're not acting in the interest of the institutions or even themselves collectively. And that's where the adults, which in this case are the adults, are supposed to come in. But they come in, in my opinion, with decent suggestions. They address the worst ideas going on in rat ways. And I have a theory in question. Maybe it has to do with tenure. But I'll ask you that after I tell you what they said. First, they said we should cap A grades at 20% of enrollment plus 4 per course. They say we should replace the GPA with the average percentile rank for internal distinctions like honors prizes, rankings, the summa cum laude, magna cum laude would be based on how students perform relative to peers in each course, not the gpa. Now, the GPA is supposed to essentially do that. But what the faculty is saying will just rank everyone. It will be internal, I guess. They'll get. The first person in the course gets a one, the second one gets two. I don't know why faculty would want to take this on. Maybe the horror of so many A's has gotten to them that they want to do a ranking of everyone in the course. And when it comes time to give an award, we'll consult these rankings. No one on the outside will know, but that is how in a much easier, cleaner way, we'll figure out who's magna cum laude. And also they want to do things like allow instructors to submit raw scores or rankings to sharpen internal comparisons. That kind of makes sense. Like if everyone gets an A no matter what their grades on individual tests or assignment are, just note the individual Tests and assignment. So all of this seems logical to me. I don't know if it'll be taken up, but I think the faculty has much better ideas than anyone I heard before. And I guess my theory is that maybe you can't trust the faculty to talk about things they don't know about. I think a lot of times when we hear what college faculty are doing or saying, it's a sense of the faculty senate to opine on some world affairs that just a small percentage of them might know about. Or it's always to oppose whatever the administration wants to do in terms of making the school more economically successful. But when it comes to probably their actual knowledge, which are two things, which is their field, and also how running a college classroom works, maybe they are rather smart. I don't know. What do you think?

Kat Rosenfield (28:35)

Okay, I'm going to amend my previous answer to say, yes, I would trust the faculty more. It seems like they have the best, best sense of things. But how tied are their hands by the practical aspect of this?

Mike Pesca (28:48)

It seems like there's momentum. I mean, just if you look at this as any political issue, you have three different constituencies. They're not entirely at odds. It's not like anyone is pulling for, no, we need higher grades. In fact, everyone is saying, this system needs reform, so we'll see how they agree on reform. But, and this is the question you asked beforehand, what was the bad idea? To remind you in the audience, the

Kat Rosenfield (29:12)

bad idea was to expand the spectrum of grades to include A pluses.

Mike Pesca (29:17)

Exactly, Exactly. And so let me read what the faculty says about this. And this really won me over, especially the analogy they draw. Shifting the entire grading scale up to accommodate a new top distinction could create continued cycles of upward pressure and reduce the legitimacy of our current grading rubric, much as Spinal Tap tries to increase the volume by adding an 11 to the volume button. Moreover, it's a knob, not a button, but I get it. Moreover, proposals to create a capped A plus grade were even more restrictive, often discussing caps of less than 5%, which would only foster competition over an even smaller number of top grades. Yes. If you think the kids are killing each other now, they'll kill each over an A plus. And I got to say that now.

Kat Rosenfield (30:04)

Yeah, no, it's very similar to the whole kind of crabs in a bucket thing. If you have a bunch of crabs in a bucket, the problem is the crabs in a bucket mentality. It's not that you need a larger bucket.

Mike Pesca (30:14)

This is. Wow, that's great. I thought Spinal Tap was the go to analogy. Thank you for that one.

Kat Rosenfield (30:19)

I love to introduce crabs. You know, it's just they make everything more colorful and more exciting.

Mike Pesca (30:25)

And we'll be back in a moment with more of Kat and Mike's Museum of Bad Ideas.

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Mike Pesca (32:52)

we're back. We're joining. This is Kat Mike's Museum of Bad Ideas. This is another thing that pops out from everything I've been reading. Stress Stress Stress Stress Stress. The reports had so many references to stress that a fear of an A minus drives course shopping and stress That's a exact quote from one of these reports. And that faculty report, grading leniency is driven by fear. Fear driven by fear of evaluations, driven by fear of enrollments and student distress. And a legitimate fear. Right. The faculty wasn't poo pooing that or wasn't saying we're babying them. And if the stress does show up, I'm sure in measurable ways, it's a legitimate enough thing to take into account. I have to say, though, that as an outsider, on the one hand, I don't want to say, oh my God, just like you said, you're graduating from Harvard, you have almost nothing to be stressed about. You know, the personality types that would work really hard to get into Harvard or, you know, be the descendants of people who got into Harvard. Maybe that's stressful, I don't know, living in those big houses. But I wonder if I am doing too much to poo poo the legitimate role of stress if you want to take it away from Harvard, Yale and Princeton, just college students. Do you think I am square that with the ideal of the meritocracy?

Kat Rosenfield (34:13)

Well, I think that the problem here is it's not just what's happening at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or at colleges in general. It's something that's starting much earlier. It starts at home, Mike. And the problem is that the kids are arriving at college having had instilled in them basically from birth the idea that failure is not acceptable. They cannot fail, and they've not really been permitted to fail. Their parents buy into this just as much as they do that, you know, if they fail, it's like the end of the world. You will never recover from the setback of having failed. And so if you're never allowed to fail, if you're never allowed to experience what it feels like to fail and then have to come back from having failed and try to either do better at the thing you failed at or do something else that you're good at, because you're actually just a failure at this other thing. So you lack the skill or whatever it is. If you've never had that experience, you are going to eventually grow up to be a person who is so fragile and so terrified of ever not measuring up that when you get into an environment where necessarily there is going to be some sorting going on, it's going to turn out that some people are better than others at certain things. And it's going to be obvious to everybody who those people are and who the people are who are not good at the things, if you haven't learned to cope with that, that you're going to be sent into like a mental health death spiral. And I don't blame the kids for feeling this way, but I think that the fact that they do is indicative of something pretty broken happening in their upbringing that needs to change.

Mike Pesca (35:54)

You know, I agree with you up to a point. And that point is you're eventually going to be in a place where you do fail. And I wonder if for the elite, if that is really true. True. Just like we used to say, the reason that we used to maybe console ourselves, ourselves with the fact that there was all these excesses on college campus and all the, a lot of incentivization for taking offense or umbrage things that maybe should have been written off, you know, the microaggression theories. And one of the things we said is, yeah, but eventually in the real world, in the workplace, this isn't going to fly. And it turns out that was untrue. What we thought of the real world. College takes its version of the world and for a number of socioeconomic reasons that kind of became the real world. And then they imposed the microaggression idea or at least the umbrage taking idea in the workplace. And I wonder, maybe this is more an elite school thing. Yeah, it definitely is. But like, is there much failure in the life of these elite in the offing for these elite institution graduates or maybe just failure as they would define it, which is, you know, a $1 million salary with the second best white shoe law firm as opposed to one and a half with the best.

Kat Rosenfield (37:10)

This is not a world I'm familiar with whatsoever. So I am only speculating, but I feel like even if you were raised from privilege your entire life, you know, silver spoon in your mouth and, and you know, any number of other orifices and you just can coast on your connections, your money, your sense of entitlement even these people must eventually come up against something that they can't do, like I don't know, a pull up or simple physical labor. Yeah, this is why I wrote definitely

Mike Pesca (37:45)

fixing anything around the house. Like I'm good at that.

Kat Rosenfield (37:47)

But yeah, bring back the fitness tests in elementary school. If only you.

Mike Pesca (37:53)

This is one of your MAGA endorsements. I'm on board with coins and straws. But you're a presidential fitness test person.

Kat Rosenfield (37:59)

Okay, that's right, that's right, I'm a presidential fitness test. Not even apologist enthusiast.

Mike Pesca (38:04)

Were you good at it? Did you do the flexed arm hang?

Kat Rosenfield (38:08)

You know, I learned in my adulthood because I was so humiliated by being unable to do a single pull up as a kid. I learned in adulthood to do pull ups. I can't do them anymore because if you don't train them, you lose them. But there was a time in my Life, Life about 10 years ago where I was able to do sets of 10 pull ups, which is for a woman, pretty good.

Mike Pesca (38:32)

Yeah. Well, I think people should know you're a yogi of some repute.

Kat Rosenfield (38:39)

Infamous. The most infamous yogi.

Mike Pesca (38:41)

Well, I should also say that not being able to do a pull up in youth has been shown to correlate to poor saliva scores later in life.

Kat Rosenfield (38:51)

Life.

Mike Pesca (38:51)

I don't know if you knew that.

Kat Rosenfield (38:53)

I've heard that. Yeah.

Mike Pesca (38:54)

Yeah. Your saliva scores might plummet. So David Brooks writes a lot about these ideas. Right. He wrote that famous essay in the Atlantic 25 years ago now, the organizational kid getting at your idea of these students who are so hyper focused and hyper trained and losing is not an option. And then years later he wrote how the Ivy League Broke America, which encapsulates a lot of the ideas we're talking about. About. I think that's true. I think that's worth. That all those ideas are worth paying attention to. I'm going to take it in a slightly different direction, which is if your premise, which I don't disagree with, is that helicopter parents and the inability to fail has been inculcated in these youth for so long and it's eventually going to come to pass. True. I see a slightly different phenomenon on which is that we have been so emotionally sensitive. It's not even different. It's related. We've been so sensitive to the emotional pushback that kids could get so concerned about their feelings. And to some extent this has been good. My kids did an anti. Went to an elementary school where anti bullying was really emphasized and it worked. There was so much less bullying. Different schools do this in different ways. The way they were sensitive to it and correctly defined it and interceded. I mean, it was a better situation than the school I went to. Than the school you went to, the school I went to, of course, allowing me to bully the weaklings. But there is, I think maybe a deep mental health problem that the new sensitivity brought about, which is that I think it is a fundamental misunderstanding of how we help our young and how to best enable human flourishing to be so sensitive that you don't give them assessments that could hurt. And so I think that's some of what's going on. It's not just you can't fail and the kids institute internalize this. It's the worst thing we could do is ever hurt the feeling, self esteem, etc. Of the kids. And this isn't even tough love. They're finding it right there in the very institution, the college with the grading that is trying not to hurt the kids. And sometimes if you differentiate and demarcate, you actually do help them for all the reasons that they don't have to deal with all the emotional sturm and drunk and mishigas that apparently undergraduates the world over America over explored experiencing.

Kat Rosenfield (41:33)

Well, okay, so I'm gonna kind of yes and you. But also disagree with you. I think that the thing about the kids not being able to fail, not being permitted to fail, that is all about protecting their feelings. The ultimate message is not it's impermissible for you to fail. It's if you fail, you will not be able to handle it. We can't allow you to do that because you can't emotionally cope with the bad feelings that are gonna come from having failed. And this is something that I've seen when I was a teen Advice columnist about 10 years back, I saw this a lot.

Mike Pesca (42:09)

Was this for Vogue? Was this for us?

Kat Rosenfield (42:10)

No, it was for a site called Sparklife, which was. It's no longer in existence, but it was a lot of fun at the time.

Mike Pesca (42:17)

The death knell of Sparklife was you snuffed out the spark of Sparklife.

Kat Rosenfield (42:21)

That's correct. Wasn't your fault, I'm sure with all of my saliva I spit on it and it went out. But to return to my original topic, I used to get these letters from kids who were desperate to do things that were inherently emotionally risky, like have relationships, fall in love, you know, try things. But they were certain that if things went badly, they were not going to be able to handle it. It was like, if I have, if I'm disappointed by whatever this is, if I fail at whatever this is, if somebody's, you know, if the person I'd like doesn't like me back, whatever that will break me. And I used to be like, no, it won't. Like it'll hurt you. It'll hurt your feelings, but your feelings are okay. Like, you know, they'll, they'll be hurt and then they'll heal. And then you'll have the resilience in the sense of, of self and you know, that kind of emotional callous that comes from having been hurt and picked yourself back up up and knowing that you could do that again if you had to. That's the real value of failure. It's not like we want to hurt kids feelings so that they can be hurt. It's we want to hurt their feelings so that they understand that having your feelings hurt is not the end of the world. It's something that's survivable and it's something that you can get better at weathering because it is actually a part of life. The loss of resilience is something that really worries me about. Not even like the Gen Z's, but even younger millennials. There has been this expectation increasingly that the world is going to make itself soft for you. And that really is not how it works. It's not possible to bubble wrap the world. You have to make yourself hard for the world. Please don't take that to a sexual place.

Mike Pesca (44:13)

No, I won't. I was thinking of pull ups but one of the reasons, to be fair, one of the reasons we want to hurt them is not just because of them experience that they gained, but some of them are sniveling assholes. Let me ask you this, do you think that it's just part of the human. No, I will, I will stipulate this. It seems part of the human condition for teenagers since we invented that category to worry about these things. But do you think that there's an increase in the worry or do you think that Dear Abby writing 30 years before you would have encountered the same amount of people saying what if I tried and fail?

Kat Rosenfield (44:48)

Oh no, there's definitely an increase in the worry. And something else that I'm thinking about is, you know, you were saying that your kids school, you know, saw bullying that may, that I, I wonder whether they actually solved it or whether it just went into a place where you guys couldn't see it.

Mike Pesca (45:07)

Well, I'll tell you, I had two different kids go to two different schools and they all had an anti bullying curriculum. And the ones that I thought the elementary, public elementary school that did it pretty well, I thought it was sincere and you know, maybe you graduate when you're in fifth grade. So that's before the real hard bullying can happen. The other school, it either didn't work or went into a, went into the place that was a bit obscure to the parents. But I saw a difference in the curricula which is the sincerity of it, not even the pervasiveness of it but, but explaining to the kids what it meant and giving them positive ways not to bully rather than just we don't bully here. Bullying's bad. But here's what we do to help others and uplift. And when someone's being a good friend, they get rewards. And when someone includes someone who is excluded, look, it comes with a lot of eye rolling, but I do think that that is has been a real innovation. So if you had to predict is there going to be a gigantic sea change at Harvard?

Kat Rosenfield (46:13)

I don't know. I am putting the odds of that happening at the impetus of Harvard itself, slightly lower than an earthquake just opening up a chasm in Massachusetts into which the institution just falls wholesale and disappears.

Mike Pesca (46:33)

Today, the earth swallowed up a pretty

Kat Rosenfield (46:35)

good school in the Boston area shall remain nameless.

Mike Pesca (46:39)

So that was you may have noticed a lot of Mike in that episode of Cat Mike's Museum of Bad Ideas, but the full episode had a lot of Cat too. And Peska plus subscribers. I'd love your thoughts. I'd love your thoughts. Most of all, I'd also love your subscription, your support. Go to subscribe.mike pesca.com and hear the full episode and give us your full thoughts at the gist@mike pesca.com. And that's it for today's show. Cory Wara produces the gist, Kathleen Sykes does the Gist list, Ben Astaire is the booking producer, Jeff Craig does our videos, and Michelle Pesca is the best idea associated with Peach Fish Productions in Peru. De Peru Do Peru. Thanks for listening.

Kat Rosenfield (47:29)

We're lost. I'm gonna pull over and ask that man for directions. Hi there. We're looking to get to the campground.

Mike Pesca (47:36)

Well, you're gonna take a left at the old oak tree end of this here road.

Odoo / T Mobile Advertiser (47:40)

No, I'm just kidding.

Mike Pesca (47:41)

Let me get my phone out.

Kat Rosenfield (47:42)

How are you getting a signal out here?

Mike Pesca (47:43)

T Mobile and US Cellular decided to merge.

Odoo / T Mobile Advertiser (47:46)

So the network out here is huge.

Mike Pesca (47:47)

We're getting the same great signal as the city and saving a boatload with all the benefits.

Odoo / T Mobile Advertiser (47:51)

Oh, and a five year price guarantee.

Kat Rosenfield (47:53)

Okay, here's those directions. Actually, can you point us in the direction of a T Mobile store?

Odoo / T Mobile Advertiser (47:58)

America's best network just got bigger. Switch to T Mobile today and get built in benefits the other guys leave out. Plus our five year price guarantee. And now T Mobile is available in US Cellular stores. Best Mobile Network based on analysis by Ookle of speed test intelligence data 2H

Mike Pesca (48:18)

2025 bigger network the combination of T

Odoo / T Mobile Advertiser (48:19)

Mobile's and US cellular network footprints will enhance the T Mobile network's coverage price guarantee on talk text and data exclusions

Mike Pesca (48:25)

like taxes and fees apply.

Odoo / T Mobile Advertiser (48:27)

See t mobile.com for details.

Libsyn Ads Advertiser (48:29)

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