Chicago: 65. Jacksonville 56.

Eastern Illinois has taken its lumps fielding a youth-oriented team. Yet, Sunday it was those same young players that sparked the Panthers to their first win of the spring.

A week after failing to close out a victory, EIU (1-3) made plays in all three phases en route to a 28-20 triumph over visiting Tennessee Tech (1-3) in Ohio Valley Conference action.

“We talked about that. Sometimes those games that are so heartbreaking . . . They come back and beat you twice. If you hang onto that heartbreak . . . that’s what we said, you’ve got to get rid of that heartbreak,” EIU head coach Adam Cushing said in the postgame.

In fact, EIU ended practice this week by screaming out the heartbreak. Sunday afternoon the Panthers screamed postgame in victory.

“I will enjoy this one tonight,” Cushing said.

Here are three things Prairie State Pigskin learned about the EIU victory.

1. Freshman-to-freshman connection

Making his second start, quarterback Otto Kuhns twice hooked up with fellow freshman Arron Foukles for touchdowns.

Foulkes entered the game with two catches on the season yet made big plays at key times. After hauling in a 17-yard touchdown in the second quarter, Foulkes — a 5-foot-8, 165-pounder from Southfield, Mich. — got behind the TTU secondary and reeled in a 36-yard TD off a play-action pass.

“Arron is one of those guys that the moment is never too big for,” Cushing said.

Foulkes finished with three receptions for 60 yards. He also carried the ball three times for five yards, including a failed jet sweep on a fourth down.

Kuhns was 12-for-19 for 153 yards and the two TDs. He was sacked twice. Kuhns threw his first career interception on the final play of the game when he rolled out and threw the ball high into the end zone to run the clock out on the victory. It’s an interception both he and Cushing will gladly accept.

Kuhns also converted an important 4th-and-1 on a QB sneak to the EIU 35 and allowed the Panthers to get the clock down to the 2:52 mark before punting.

“Otto stood in there with pressure in his face,” Cushing said. “Some bigtime freshmen making some bigtime plays.”

2. Defensive dandies

EIU produced key plays on defense to stem the tide of Tennessee Tech’s offense.

Perhaps none was bigger than true freshman Colin Bohanek’s interception with 1:46 remaining. The Marist product tipped TTU quarterback Bailey Fisher’s pass and then corralled it to end the Golden Eagles’ final threat of the afternoon.

Sophomore linebacker Jason Johnson once again led the Panthers in tackles (15). The Rich Central High School graduate also had two tackles-for-loss and a sack.

Eastern also got strong play out of its secondary despite losing two senior starters. Ray Crittenden was disqualified on a second quarter targeting call and thus did not play in the second half. Cornerback Mark Williams left with an apparent injury on the series after he grabbed his seventh career interception.

Minus those two veterans, JJ Ross and Jestin Morrow were thrust into the lineup before Williams returned in the fourth quarter.

“The good part is that we’d already been rotating guys through so they were ready for the game action,” Cushing said.

Morrow was called for controversial pass interference on a wobbly 4th-and-6 pass. TTU scored on the next play, cutting the lead to 28-20 with 7:11 remaining.

Earlier, linebacker Anthony Shockey thwarted a third quarter TTU drive with his first career interception and a return to the Golden Eagles’ 28. However, EIU turned the ball over on downs.

Eastern entered the game with only one sack and one interception on the season. However, the Panthers pressured Fisher much of the day and sacked the junior three times. EIU also intercepted him three times — all in the second half.

“The plan was to do better in those two areas,” Cushing said. “We said for us to take the next step as a defense we’ve got to get pressure on the quarterback. We’ve got to affect the QB.

“When you see the quarterback getting affected and getting hit, that leads to some interceptions.”

Bohanek and sophomore Tim Varga each had eight tackles.

3. Strong special teams start

The Panthers got off a fast start when DeAirious Smith blocked a TTU punt and Marcus Bornslater recovered it in the end zone for a touchdown. The play stood after being reviewed to see if Bornslater had gone out of the end zone on the recovery.

“When you give maximum effort, all of the sudden there’s those inches that just show up for you,” Cushing said. “What you saw was DeAirious and Marcus in position to make a play with maximum effort.”

However, a familiar EIU bugaboo returned on the final play of the third quarter.

Tennessee Tech used a timeout to keep the clock from running out so it could punt with a strong wind at punter Jacob Anderson’s back. The strategy paid dividends as redshirt freshman Matt Judd muffed the punt and the Golden Eagles recovered at the EIU 27. TTU cashed in with a field goal cutting the lead to 28-13.

What’s next?

EIU travels to OVC leader and nationally ranked Murray State Sunday, March 28.

If you research healthy lifestyle choices, you will find different opinions among healthcare professionals. One person will say it is okay to eat meat and another will say not to eat meat. One person will say not to eat sugar. Another person will say you can eat 25 grams or less of sugar each day. There is a consensus that everyone should exercise. Then the debate starts with what type of exercise. Some believe cardio is the best form of exercise. While others believe strength training is the best. There is debate on what is considered overweight. There is a difference of opinion regarding how much carbs we should eat. What do you do with the conflicting information? You research and find what works for you.

I know vegan or vegetarian will not work for me; however, I was able to give up red meat and eat only poultry and fish. Two trainers at the gym I attended talked to me about intermittent fasting. I said no way. I am not criticizing intermittent fasting. Some people swear it works for them. I knew it was not for me. I was able to adjust my eating by taking 12 hours between my dinner at night and breakfast in the morning without eating anything. I was able to skip late night snacking. After reading the information on sugar, I realized I needed to do something about my sugar intake. I do not want to totally give up sugar; however, I decided to reduce my sugar intake during the week and only indulge on the weekend. I have seen positive results from this one change.

You may have tried something that worked for another person; yet it did not work for you.  That should not discourage you. Our bodies are different. What works for one person might not work for another. The goal is to find what works for you.

“Year-round” misleads. Students do not attend school for twelve months. Instead, this calendar includes a shorter summer break and other breaks throughout the year.

We know that returning to the new normal in a post-pandemic world means change. Especially in education, we cannot return to teaching and learning and systems because “that’s what we used to do.”

The education conversation to this point–amplified by many white bloggers, columnists, and journalists–has focused on the learning loss.

But in a recent media event, Illinois’ State Superintendent Carmen Ayala avoided the use of “learning loss.” Instead, she talked about the “learning impact.”

The learning impact remains clear: low-income, Black and Brown youth have always needed more support than their affluent peers.

Furthermore, our students’ and staff’s mental health should be prioritized so high-quality teaching and learning can happen.

Changing the school calendar to include a shorter summer break and more breaks throughout the school year will address the inequalities revealed by the pandemic.

A year-round calendar isn’t new to Chicago Public Schools. In the 2000s, elementary schools on the city’s Southwest side became so overcrowded due to population shifts that CPS adopted up to five tracks or calendars.

Ten years ago, I experienced Track E while temporarily teaching middle school. With this calendar, students returned mid-August, enjoyed a one week break in October, a three-week winter break, and a two-week spring break.

(And spring break should not be determined by Holy week–but that’s another blog post.)

Aside from decreasing summer break to address the learning impact–which the district is already discussing–a year-round calendar gives students and staff and families well-distributed breaks where we can focus on other aspects of life in a post-pandemic world.

If school buildings need to close because of COVID-19 cases, the scheduled breaks in a year-round school calendar facilitate quarantining and cleaning.

According to a 2014 Congressional Service Report (prepared with and for Congress), year-round schools provide these benefits:

–The use of year-round schools can prevent the loss of learning over the summer, which may be a particular problem for children with special educational needs (e.g., English learners) and addresses the uneven effects of the summer break onstudents based on socioeconomic status.

–Using a modified school calendar creates opportunities to provide remediation and enrichment activities to students during the school year rather than waiting to provide these activities during summer school.

–The use of a balanced calendar could help to prevent staff [and student] burnout by providing more frequent breaks for staff.

A school’s schedule absolutely makes a difference. During the pandemic, Chicago high schools still using the traditional eight-period-a-day schedule realized students could not function well attending seven fifty-minute classes every single school day.

High schools already using a block schedule (four longer periods a day) found remote learning more manageable.

Of course, having school in August means schools need adequate air conditioning. These Chicago Public Schools students produced this podcast episode last year about uncomfortable classrooms during a hot September without A/C.

(The podcast is on SoundCloud, a site blocked by CPS server. Do the internet-log-in thing to listen if needed.)

But it’s March. Chicago Public Schools can begin planning for those hot days now.

And the Chicago Teachers Union needs to make adequate heating and cooling in schools a contract-negotiation issue.

Changing to a year-round calendar will require some getting used to. But after all the changes that resulted from the pandemic, a year-round school calendar will prove beneficial–especially for the students most affect the pandemic’s learning impact.

Take advantage of the “Teaching Editorial Writing” virtual workshop this Wednesday.

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Examples of how the once honorable profession is cutting its own throat

Judging by the atrocious state of journalism today, you’ve got to wonder what students aspiring to become reporters are being taught these days.

After all, if bridges designed by engineering school grads started collapsing, you’d have a right to wonder what they are being taught.

So, here’s a taste of the hogwash that some journalism teachers are feeding their students:

Emily Bell, director of Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Media, said the pursuit of a “truthful news environment” justifies the auditing and vetting of some (read: conservative) media. As reported by The College Fix:

Bell said that the unprecedented events of 2020 and 2021 coincided with “widespread and often politized information” on “conservative cable news channels” and that local reporters need to “learn new cadence.”

She added that the country needs to “rethink what public broadcasting is in the digital age” and “apply some pressure to the platform companies to allow much greater auditing.”

“There has to be a will among the political elite and the media elite and the technology elite to actually do the right thing, as it were,” Bell said, as reported in The Wall Street Journal. [Emphasis added.]

No doubt Bell considers herself to be a part of the elite to lay down the law by defining “misinformation.”

To say this is a deviation from traditional journalism ethics is a brash understatement. Of course, those traditional ethics were a creation of white racists, so they must be tossed.

Because I haven’t been around a journalism classes for decades, I have only the results to judge by the quality of the profession’s current teaching methods. For that we turn to the acclaimed Washington Post and the sort-of-retraction it had to make regarding ex-President Donald Trump’s phone conversation with the George Secretary of State about the election results:

Two months after publication of this story, the Georgia secretary of state released an audio recording of President Donald Trump’s December phone call with the state’s top elections investigator. The recording revealed that The Post misquoted Trump’s comments on the call, based on information provided by a source. Trump did not tell the investigator to “find the fraud” or say she would be “a national hero” if she did so. Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find “dishonesty” there. He also told her that she had “the most important job in the country right now.” A story about the recording can be found here. The headline and text of this story have been corrected to remove quotes misattributed to Trump. [Emphasis added.]

Recall that this erroneous story was reported from an unidentified “source,” and that a handful of media outlets picked up the story with the assertion that they had independently confirmed it.

If they had, it was “confirmed” by the same source that fed the false information to the Washington Post. Or perhaps they didn’t even do that much. Who knows?

Obviously, the Washington Post had not heard the tape that the “source” claimed verified the information. Instead it took the word of someone who had an ax to grind–a practice that has become as common today as the weather report. When, I have asked, will journalists have enough pride to stop letting themselves be used as a propaganda pipeline? What has happened to their self-respect?

Then comes the story about Alexi McCammon who was ousted as editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue magazine days before she was to take the job. She had offended the magazine’s staff about her “racist” tweets about Asians that she had made decades ago as a student. She has since apologized several times, but after pressure from the staff and an advertiser she had to go. (Details here.)

So, now the staff is running the publication? Not the publisher, the editor, the owner? This used to be unthinkable, but has it now become standard operating procedure? Now we get staff members at the New York Times able to get the option page editor to quit for publishing a perfectly legitimate op-ed from a U.S. senator. Because they didn’t like what he said, even though it is a subject of legitimate debate. At the Chicago Tribune, the union executive committee tried to demand that it’s lead columnist, John Kass, bend his knee to their views, enough though theirviews were false and slanderous.

Sadly, these won’t be the last examples of journalism’s self-destruction.

The Death of Journalism I is here.