The Unity Bike

On the tandem it's pretty easy to cooperate. There are two simple reasons for this. One is that without cooperation, neither rider will go far once underway, and the other is that unless the experience is enjoyable for both parties, one or the other will stop going for rides. The old adage is that an unhappy stoker means no more rides, and there's really no finessing this.  When my wife and I started tandeming, we first developed a way to communicate. There's a bunch of stuff online about how to communicate on a tandem and why it's important, but the first person to articulate this to us was the guy in Alpharetta, GA who sold us our first tandem on craigslist, and it was something in passing like, be sure to tell your stoker before you hit a bump.  This is really important on a tandem because the captain can see things on the road the stoker cannot, and the captain controls the bike and does things that can upset the stoker's equilibrium. We came up with the followi...

I don't want to personify authority, but there is a sense of the authority/power (or my own ego) seeking to protect itself. For example, those very times which should make me learn a lesson about how ineffective asserting control is are exactly the times when I think the solution is to assert further control. There is a certain, perhaps unwitting, dishonesty that goes along with having power that makes it seem like attaining and asserting more power and control are always desirable. The natural question is then how does one break out of this feedback loop and, in my case, do something as counterintuitive and contrary to my desires as cede control? If power corrupts and is (at least partially) responsible for a damaged relationship, how can I identify it and how can I disrupt the same old cycle?  For us, two related changes occurred, one negative and one positive,  i.e. one that pushed me away from the authoritarian model and one that drew me toward and alternative. The first, ...

Why does it take so long to see something is wrong? I had known for some time that there was a problem with my parenting. That something was amiss seemed to be clear enough. So why then did I persist in my style of parenting? I have thought about this, and meditated seriously on it, over and over again. I even visited multiple psychologists about it. I've had many different thoughts and received varying advice from friends and professionals, yet none of it seemed to affect the actual results of my parenting. I have come to the following conclusion in two ways described by Hemingway, gradually then suddenly. When my son was born, I was imbued with a lot of power, and power corrupts.  It had never really occurred to me that parenting is a skill to be developed. I had the idea--from somewhere, who knows--that I would be a good dad, naturally. Somehow I would just know what to do and everything would be grand. Why? Because I'm smart, diligent, and wanted very badly to be a good dad...

Earlier today my son and I went out for a short ride on our single bikes. It has been fruitful for me to think about how to distribute our time on the bikes between tandem rides and single rides. He is a young teenager so I think a lot about how to balance promoting his independence and riding together. He's a pretty good rider in his own right, but on our singles we can't go too far and I'm still not really comfortable with his riding on Baltimore streets. On the tandems we can go about 4-5 times as far and really go anywhere we want to. Certainly riding his own bike makes him a better stoker when we do go out on a tandem. Honestly, though, I'm just grateful he likes riding with me in either capacity as much as he does. The bikes are a good place for the two of us to have discussions that could become contentious. A tandem is especially good for this because we always stay the same distance apart so it's easy to have a conversation. On the singles it takes a little...

How can I determine whether or not a given idea is working? To get clarity on this I should probably first determine what I mean by "working." This notion varies depending on context so here are a few examples of what this might look like in practice. The first is probably the most concrete. After I had been teaching at my university for a few years, I made some faculty friends who were advocating for a model of curriculum building called "Backwards Design." Every course had a syllabus which included course goals. For me, these were just part of the boilerplate of the syllabus, akin to office hours and contact information. I already knew what I was going to do day-to-day and with respect to assignments, so the course goals didn't really have much to do with my course design. Surely if I lectured clearly enough, they would learn whatever they were supposed to. My friends suggested I design my course by starting with my objectives. Once I began to articulate new g...

I have many ideas that are not particularly effective if I judge them by the results they yield. What I mean is that I may have some goal or desire, which may or may not be explicit in my mind, and I have a set of actions that I take to achieve it. Often my goals are nebulous, and the associated actions, upon inspection, do not seem to take me toward that goal. The actions sometimes have no effect and sometimes they actually have negative effects. My parenting has been this way. I have suspected for a long time that something is amiss with my particular style of parenting. For many years my son and I have had a contentious relationship. We have a lot of good times, and we definitely love each other, but we have also argued a lot and both get easily frustrated. Here is a typical example: I want to make sure my son takes care each day of the things he needs to do, e.g. his homework, eating good food, brushing his teeth, showering daily, etc. I almost always leave for work before he's...

The Unity Bike is the name my son recently gave to one of our bicycles, a circa 2009 Cannondale Road tandem. My wife and I bought this bike in the beginning of 2012 on Craigslist and were regular tandem riders when we lived in Georgia until 2016. When we moved to Baltimore we just couldn't find time to ride it, but as my son has grown he now fits the bike pretty well so he and I have been using it quite a bit. The COVID-19 pandemic makes writers of us all, I suppose. Even before the pandemic it became apparent that things were not going so well with my parenting, and I'd begun reflecting on why and what I could differently. Recently, I was listening to an interview with Rutger Bergman about his book, Humankind -- I placed a hold for this at the Enoch Pratt library and am eagerly awaiting. He mentioned a couple of things about anarchy that I hadn't really thought about much before, but resonated with me on that day. He stated two basic assumptions: (a) humans a fundamental...