Tiding the STEM

This post will give a brief analysis and then delve into a proposed solution.  A much more thorough analysis of the general issues was given in a post I wrote back in 2013 called, The business and ethical dilemmas of undergraduate education at public R1s.  This is the most salient paragraph from that piece for what I want to argue here:

Yet I've also become distraught with the regular classes - too many students don't have enough on the ball.  Then there are a few students who do, but some are so alienated by what I gather has been their prior experience, anti-nurture if you will, that they've tuned out.  My little corner of the world may be just that and the rest of the world may be quite different.  But if not, somebody in the know should be screaming about this.  That's what I'm trying to do with this post.

In that post I talked about two possible models of undergraduate education.  The old model employed the grab-the-brass ring approach, in which elite students commanded a lot of attention and got a very good education, while the remaining students did not.  The new model I called the nurturing approach, where even average students have access to a good education and the instructors they interact with treat them as serious students.  The reason for moving from the old model to the new model was a consequence of how undergraduate tuition counts in the overall picture of university revenues.  Undergraduate tuition now is a big deal where when I started it wasn't.  While it is true that in-state tuition is much less than at a ritzy private university now, it is actually more, even after inflation adjustment, than what tuition at such a private university was when I started.  So it takes a big bite out of a middle-class family's income.   If the university is going to rely on undergraduate tuition for revenue it must deliver a decent education in return, for the typical student, not just for the top performers.

Now I'd like to mention several facts that have come to my attention since writing that post in 2013.  Many students I'm currently teaching seem quite stressed out.  This is partly due to their being on the job market and going through the process of interviewing with recruiters and/or their making preparation for graduate/professional school.  (And it may partly be due to their sensing in themselves a certain lack of competence for the new world they will be entering after they graduate.)  I wrote about this, along with one possible solution for alleviating some of this stress, in my prior post called Should We Offer On-Campus Students Online Self-Paced Courses As A Scheduling Option?  What I didn't mention in that post, though it should be evident, is that any mitigation taken to lessen student stress, whether this one or something else, will come with a price tag.  So one wants to know how those resources might be obtained.

Next, regarding the leadership on campus, it seems more heavily STEM concentrated now than I can remember previously.  Of course, STEM will always be quite important on campus.  But there used to be more balance among the leadership than there is now.  When I started with SCALE about 25 years ago, the Provost at the time was Larry Faulkner (Chemistry).  And a soon to be Associate Provost who would have ed tech in his portfolio was Dave Liu (Computer Science).   But the Associate Provost for undergraduate education was Susan Gonzo (English as an International Language) and that gave the overall approach some balance.  Susan was also on the SCALE advisory committee and Dave Liu had a few folks who had accomplished quite a lot with ed tech tour some universities in Taiwan with him to showcase what we were doing.  I was one of those who went on the trip.  So I became reasonably closely connected to this leadership.  Now the Provost is from Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education is a physicist, and I heard only last week that a new person has been hired for what might be considered the sequel to the Dave Liu position.  She is a mathematician.  In addition, the Director of CITL (the campus learning center) is a biologist.   I don't know these people so don't want to comment on their individual talents, but I sense less connection with folks on campus outside of STEM.

Third, regarding the flow of funds, I am aware that there is a new budgeting model on campus for how tuition dollars track the students that pay this tuition.   The payment per IU (what we at Illinois call a credit hour; it stands for instructional unit) is much greater under the new model than it was under the old.   The new budgeting model applies to payments from the Provost's Office to the Dean's Office in the various colleges.  In any such scheme, one should expect some funds to be retained by the level that is higher in the organization chart.  So I've been told that the Provost's Office keeps the differential in tuition that international students pay.  But for the in-state tuition, my understanding is that more of it now flows to the colleges than before, though I don't know the precise formula.  We should also know, however, how the flow works from the Dean's Office to the Department Head's Office.  Has the new model changed that flow as well?  I heard last week that in LAS it has not, or to be more precise for LAS Social Science departments it has not.  (In addition to Economics, Statistics should be lumped into Social Science for this purpose.)

Fourth, regarding enrollments, for the campus as a whole undergraduate IUs have grown about 10% over the last 10 years while undergraduate students have grown about 8% in that same period.   But specifically within the Economics Department, when I wrote that piece on the business and ethical dilemmas back in 2013 the number of majors was somewhere in the range of 800-850.   I learned last week that there are now 1100 majors.  And that's in only a 6 year period.   So the rate of growth in Economics majors is close to three times the rate of growth of students overall.

Last, the New York Times produced tables of family income distribution for students and how these students fared after college income-wise.  This is the page for Illinois.  (There is some weird programming at the top of the page, which makes it a little harder to access the rest of the content that is there.)  The upshot is that Illinois, like many major public research universities, seems an engine for income redistribution - upward.  In colloquial terms, it is welfare for families that live in the northwest suburbs of Chicago.  In an idealistic conception of public universities, they provide opportunities for all and thus serve as great levelers of the income distribution.  The data shows otherwise.  One then wonders whether this perpetuates down onto the Campus and whether one should look at the STEM versus Social Science divide as a mirror of the divide in income distribution.

* * * * *

I was tempted to write a bunch of recommendations about how the Campus should change, based on the above, but it occurred to me that not enough is known, on a drill-down level, to have an interesting and intelligent conversation about these matters.  So the suggestions below are all about transparency - provide information that is publicly available with this drill down look.  What follows are a bunch of suggestions in this regard. 

Replicate the kind of information one can find in the Campus Profile, but do it on a department by department basis.

On Majors in the Department

• Report the 25th percentile and 75th percentile on standardized test scores.
• Redo the the New York Times table on family income distribution for each major.
• Report how many IUs are taught by tenure track faculty, specialized (teaching) faculty, and graduate students.
• Do this disaggregated for 100-level class, 200-level, classes, 300-level classes, and 400-level classes.
• Report how the IUs are distributed among these various levels for a student who graduates with that major. 
• To get a handle on required classes that get closed out, report on day 10 enrollment numbers (the 10th day is the last day students can add a course without permission from the instructor) versus room size.  If there is wait list information, report that as well.  There needs to be a time series of this.  Temporary (lasting for one semester) close outs are to be expected when demand for a particular major increases.  Ongoing close outs are a different matter and deserve closer attention. 
• Report on section size, for classes with only one section.  Report on pooled section size for cross listed courses.  For large lectures with discussion sections, report on both lecture size and discussion section size.  Again do this disaggregated by course number.

On Faculty in the Department

• We need a time series on the faculty/majors ratio.  
• We need a separate time series of this ratio for tenure track faculty and specialized faculty.
• Likewise we need a time series on the size of the doctoral student program and the tenure-track -faculty/doctoral students ratio.
• If there is a Professional Masters program in the department, we need similar information for it.

Part of the issue here is whether the undergraduate tuition is subsidizing doctoral education, which would be the case if tuition revenue outside of what is generated from the Professional Masters program ends up paying some of the tenure track faculty salaries, yet those faculty teach PhD students and perhaps Masters students, but not undergraduates.

On Instructional Personnel Spending Per IU

This is the heart of the matter, but it will take some work in getting the necessary information and then putting it together correctly.  One needs: instructor salaries, teaching loads, and percentage of appointment devoted to instruction.  From this one can determine spending per course.  One then divides that by credit hours times number of students enrolled.  We would expect this number to rise by course number, with 100-level courses having the lowest spending per IU and 400-level courses having the highest spending per IU.   Holding course level fixed, how does the number vary by major? Is it relatively flat or is there a significant gradient?  My worst fear is that for 300-level and 400-level courses it is lower for Social Science majors than it is for STEM majors.  But I don't know that; it's only a hunch.  That's why it would be good to do such a study.


* * * * *

We live in a world where data driven decision making is the new mantra.   The university provides a lot of institutional data already, but it is too aggregated for the purposes of this piece.  Further, while faculty salary information can be obtained, as far as I know it is never put together with faculty teaching information.  If we wanted to tell students and their families how their tuition dollars are spent, we'd need to do this.  So a case can be made for performing the above exercise as a way to educate the public on these matters.

I want to give a different argument here as well.  Above I quoted my post from 2013 to say - too many of my students don't have enough on the ball.  If that's not just my class but is actually happening broadly, what should be done about it?

In Engineering they have an attrition strategy (a weed out process).  A good fraction of students who start as Engineering majors transfer out of the College of Engineering.  Recently, I've become aware that Economics is one of those majors they transfer into.  What should happen to these students then?  Overall the campus doesn't want to follow an attrition strategy, especially if that means the student dropping out of the university entirely.   Thus, there seem to me to be two possibilities on how to proceed.  One would be letting the students slide through in spite of not having enough on the ball.  The other would be to follow a nurturing approach and try very hard to get these students up to speed.

The Economics major is particularly odd in that most of the students really want to be in the College of Business, but lack the credentials to get in there.  So Economics might be called the Business Lite degree.  If it comes with reasonably well paying jobs at the other end of the tunnel, everyone can take a heads down approach and continue as we've been doing.   But when fundamentals don't match up to the market price, there is a possibility of a bubble in the making.   Bubbles tend to burst and at the most inconvenient times.   This is why I think these matters are worthy of a closer look and why the campus, already in possession of much of the necessary data, should make substantial further effort to get the disaggregated view of how tuition pays for instruction at the undergraduate level.

This would be a project where lots of people would like to see the results.

Should We Offer On Campus Students Online Self-Paced Courses As A Scheduling Option?

This post falls in the category - you can't fight city hall.

I am overwhelmed in teaching the one undergraduate class I have.  Part of that is me, where in the last year or two I've become a complete alte kaker, so am kvetchy much of the time.  Yet before the course started, I still had some idealism in me. I thought I could open the eyes of some of the students to change the ways they go about things and encourage them to think more deeply about what they are being taught, making introspection part and parcel of their regular process.  For the most part, that now appears to be a pipe-dream.  There are several factors I'm encountering with the students that are blocking this outcome.  The blocking is what I mean when I say you can't fight city hall.  If you take those factors as givens, and largely unchangeable, then you might ask a different question.  What can you do to make the lives students lead easier as they go about their coursework?  It's not as noble a goal as getting them to learn more deeply.  But it may be more realistic under the circumstances.  Let me give some background.

The class I teach is an upper level undergraduate course intended primarily for economics majors.  It's called The Economics of Organizations.  I do not require attendance in class.  And I allow students to submit their homework past the deadline and still get credit for it.  As one former student has said, I try to treat the students as adults.  It's their responsibility to perform that way. Many are seniors who are interviewing for jobs.  They expect/hope to get a position where they are treated as a working professional.  Yet the performance of many in my class is anything but professional.

The class has 38 students on the roster.  I would guess that no more than 10 of the students regularly come to class and get their work done on time.  With one notable exception, these students tend not to speak up in class.  Last week I polled those present on whether they'd register for this class if it were offered totally online.  In response, one of the quiet students who sits near the front responded that he would not take it.  For him, coming to class was important.  In behavioral economics terms, it is a nudge.  Coming to class gets him to take the schoolwork seriously.  Several of the other quiet students agreed with that.

There are 10 to 15 students who mostly come, but not always.  They try to keep up with the homework but sometimes get behind on it.  And then most of the rest of the students do not attend much at all.  Truthfully, I can't tell whether they are slower to do the homework.   Then there are two or three students who are still on the roster, but otherwise don't seem to be part of the class at all.

If the student learning was evident, the lack of attendance and being tardy with the homework wouldn't be that big a deal.  The thing is, however, students don't seem to be getting what I'm intending them to learn.  There's a variety of evidence to support this proposition.  The most recent one happened yesterday in class when we did a bargaining experiment to test what our textbook calls The Efficiency Principle - parties to a bargain will achieve an efficient outcome.  For about half the class, the experimental results supported what the textbook claimed.  But the other half either were irrational or didn't understand what they should have been doing in the experiment. My thesis is that there is a significant group of students where not understanding what is being taught is ongoing for them.  They go about their homework to get through it, but do not wrestle with the ideas at all in a way to internalize the ideas.

This is not a new thing for me.  Looking for the Excel workbooks I used to produce the experiment, I stumbled upon this video, which I made for the class back in 2016.  The first half of the video talks about the issue described in the previous paragraph, though the evidence it uses on which to base the conclusion is somewhat different.

If I set the bar in the class so that only students who did get it would pass, there would be a lot of flunks or a very high dropout rate.  That would be inconsistent with the other economics courses these students are taking. Given that, my idealistic aspiration is to encourage students on their own to try to clear the bar, but then not punish them grade-wise if they do not.  However, my course is but one of many that these students take.  Their patterns in doing homework and attending class are shaped by the overall environment they encounter.  So my encouragement has a very limited impact.

There is one more factor that bothers me.  I surveyed the students on this.  Among those who responded, the bulk said that if they miss class they use the class Website as a way to catch up (as distinct from asking a classmate about what happened in class).  But the intent in the course design now is for the class Website to supplement the in-class activity, not to replicate it.  So those who don't attend miss things.  As long as they can get through the homework, missing these things doesn't seem to bother them.  Just yesterday, a student who missed class unabashedly emailed me about the homework that is due tonight.  He was stuck on a particular problem.  Earlier in class, I gave students a tip so they wouldn't be stuck on that problem. Should I have to repeat that tip online?

Actually, each week I have a post about the homework and students are supposed to ask their questions about the homework there.  Indeed, there is quite a thread about doing this.  The thread demonstrates that many students don't have competence to work through the algebra and/or they don't understand the tutorial I had them do earlier in the semester about how to enter answers into the Excel so it will say they have the right answer if their formula is correct.   It is hard to teach economics on this level when students seem so uncomfortable with doing the math.   Getting back to that thread, students have to know it is there and they have to read through my responses, not just the panicky queries by the other students.  For students who aren't coming to class frequently, they probably missed these instructions about how to get help on the homework.

So, the title of this post is asking whether we should accommodate those students who aren't attending regularly nor getting their work in before the deadlines by making the class entirely online and self-paced for them.

My background with self-paced classes is limited.  Back in fall 1972, as a college freshman, I took multivariable calculus in self-paced mode.  The textbook was Thomas' Calculus and Analytic Geometry.  You could attend lectures given by George Brinton Thomas himself.  (I still remember his humorous explanation - it takes two hands to multiply matrices.)  Then you could go to a testing center at any time to take competency tests on the subject matter, six in all.  This space was staffed by upperclassmen, who would grade the test on the spot.  One of those I had to take a second time around.  Nevertheless, I recall finishing the last test about a month before the end of the semester, which allowed me to concentrate on other courses then.

The only other experience I have is in supporting Jerry Uhl, one of the founders of the Calculus and Mathematica approach on campus.  At the time they had already started to teach an online version of C&M , which was called NetMath.  Jerry's idea was to do a Netmath version of differential equations,  offer it only to students who had already dropped the on ground version, do this in the spring semester only, and if necessary give the students an incomplete grade, letting them finish up the course in the summer.  Jerry did this as one of the projects among The SCALE Efficiency Projects.  It seemed quite effective except for one serious caveat.  Most of the students taking differential equations were in Engineering.  When some of the administration in Engineering heard about this offering, they got upset.  They thought it was an unfair advantage for students to be able to get an incomplete.

That was 20 years ago.  I have no idea where current thinking on campus is on this matter of granting undergraduate students incompletes.  But I can report it now somewhat common for students to tell me they have to miss my class because they have a midterm in another class that day.  This makes sense because....?  If we acknowledged that students are over programmed, in general, and then episodically the stress levels amp up even more, as high stakes tests in courses take their toll, we need to find some way to release the pressure.  In that way of looking at things, granting incompletes makes sense.

There is still a different issue to confront.  I like to use Socratic Dialog in class, partly as a way to get students involved in the session, and partly because it models how people (should) think and I want to give students a method they should aspire to in their own thinking.  But economics students are mainly getting straight lecture in their other courses.  So that is what they are used to.   Micro-lectures can readily be delivered online.  I am reasonably proficient in producing them.  I already have micro-lecture content for some parts of the course.   Would students who aren't coming to class now watch online micro-lectures?

My guess is that if they could do the homework without watching, most would go that route.  That would parallel the current behavior that I'm seeing with those who skip class.  On the other hand, online viewing when and where the students wants to do that is clearly more convenient than going to class at a pre-scheduled time.  So on the fundamentals of this admittedly theoretical analysis, it could go either way.  Further, if we really considered the current reality on the ground, then we shouldn't be such purists in considering the student behavior we'd find acceptable.

In other words, online self-paced offerings for on ground students as an option should definitely be thought of as a second best solution. A first best solution would address the idealistic concerns I sketched at the beginning of this piece.  I do have some other posts with suggestions in the more idealistic vein, which of necessity would have to be implemented much earlier in the students' trajectory through their school years.  In the spring I wrote, A Summer Camp for Teaching College-Level Reading and Learning to Learn.   A few years earlier I wrote, The Holistic First-Year College Course - A Non-Solution.  Each of these offers a fairly drastic solution for addressing the underlying issues. Yet these solutions seem so speculative and unrealistic that one should ask what can we do now that is do-able?  That's how my the idea in this post should be considered.

Do I Look Younger than Bill Gates?

Nerds of a feather....

Yesterday I watched the first episode of Inside Bill's Brain, which Netflix is heavily promoting. Bill Gates and I are contemporaries.  Indeed, back in 2013 I made a "Slidecast," a streaming PowerPoint presentation with an audio track as accompaniment, called Simple Quiz, which featured a list of famous contemporaries and then me after first posing the question: what do these people have in common?  Alas, Slideshare stopped supporting Slidecasts a few years ago, but you can see the video version and the original slides are also still available. The background music in the video is a Midi version of the song It Was A Very Good Year.

Years earlier, I had become fascinated with the idea of students making presentations that were largely images, with a small amount of text as narration, and then background music to make it all come together.  I tried it out in a CHP class in 2009 (Campus Honors Program students seem receptive to instructor experimentation) as a novel form of writing, since some students took the class to satisfy the Advanced Composition requirement.  I've since used it occasionally in my course on The Economics of Organization, where the students have written a review paper first of some article in an economics journal that is relevant to the course.  I've referred to the presentation as a "virtual elevator speech."  What's interesting in this context is whether the students trust that their image choices are good enough to represent the ideas in their review paper.  For those that did it well (meaning they put in real effort in the image selection) the result was satisfying.  Others, however, had way too much text on the screen, defeating the purpose of exercise.  Also, some students weren't very attentive to production values, though this was probably a failure of my coaching.  Their presentations would end abruptly, before the song reached its end.  The slide timings need to be adjusted so the presentation and the song conclude simultaneously.

Getting back to my Simple Quiz, the music held the clue to answer the question.  The presentation itself was my type of shaggy dog story, including me with the others, all of whom are/were quite famous. Each of us was born in 1955 - it was a very good year.   I'm a bit older than most of the other people listed in Simple Quiz, since my birthday is in January.  Bill Gates was born in October. I had always thought of him as having a boyish appearance.  Watching that episode in Netflix was the first time I can recall his appearance showing his age, noticeably gray and with lots of wrinkles in his face.

I found that I compared myself with Bill Gates in other ways as well.  There is a superficial similarity between us.  I too was a math nerd and in junior high and high school had a reputation as a very smart guy.  And I also had lots of issues with my mother during adolescence.    Then, much later in life, I've also found an interest in doing volunteer work in Africa, albeit via totally online interactions.

Now I want to be a bit critical of the video, which is probably not too shrewd on my part as the organization that I work with likely will be making an application to the Gates Foundation for support sometime in the not too distant future.  On the other hand, I try to be skeptical when I hear stuff and I think other viewers of this Netflix series should be skeptical as well.  Here are the main issues in what I saw.

1.  The Gates Foundation has spent a large sum on what appears to be Bill Gates' pet project, figuring out an environmentally friendly way to dispose of human waste in LDCs, so the spread of disease is thwarted and clean drinking water can be provided.  In the first episode, the focus was on technological solutions to this problem.

My critique here is based on my experience supporting ed tech projects on campus in the mid 1990s and early 2000s.  I came to conclude that you had to end-to-end the solution, and identify all possible points of failure.  Murphy's Law favors these sorts of hopeful projects which show possibility but ignore the pitfalls. They will fail in this case, as the pitfalls will invariably be confronted.  Further, the success of innovators and early adopters can fool us into believing that the success will be generally available to majority adopters, though that may not be true.   Apart from bringing down the cost of the technological solutions, which was mentioned in the video (Bill Gates made a simple math error in discussing this; he said that costs must be reduced by a factor of 10 when they actually must be reduced by a factor of 100) what else is needed for successful diffusion?  Is he expecting foundations like his to underwrite the adoption of the technology or foreign aid budgets to do that?  Foreign aid wasn't mentioned at all in what I saw.  My sense of things is that it has been reduced greatly since the Reagan Revolution began (when Bill Gates got his big break by winning the contract to write the operating system for IBM PCs).   Also,  if there are revenues flowing to an LDC in support of a worthy cause, what is to prevent those funds from being diverted to local warlords and the other powers that be?  This is the unglamorous but necessary part to consider.  It wasn't discussed at all.  In my opinion, making light of the political economy issues and treating this as mainly a technology problem is a mistake.

2.  While the Gates Foundation has a huge budget, how much wealth are Bill and Melinda retaining for themselves and their family?  I don't know the answer to that but I suspect the number is also huge and likely dwarfs the Gates Foundation endowment.  Netflix touts this video as a documentary, but it readily could be interpreted as a Bill Gates promotion, getting unwitting viewers to regard Gates as a philanthropist rather than as a robber baron, with Microsoft in the mid to late 1990s the evil empire.  Since I haven't yet watched the other episodes, I don't know how much of that history will be reviewed in the video.  But even if the history is shown, will the case be made that while Bill Gates may have changed his tune its possible that he's the same guy but now is cagier at marketing his image?  At the least, it seems to me that possibility should be explored.

3.  I can't help but think that a good deal of Gates' wealth is a consequence of tax cuts put in place during Reagan's time and thereafter.  Marginal tax rates on very high incomes came down dramatically.  Whether you now favor Medicare for all or instead expanding the benefits of Obamacare to those in the population who are not currently covered, it will cost a lot of money to do either of these.  I honestly don't know how to consider the trade-off between improved healthcare for low income Americans and making investments to improve the health of those who live in LDCs.  I think there are some thorny ethical questions here in coming up with a good answer.  If it were government doing this, it would be a struggle to work through.  But with a private individual doing this, those thorny issues are avoided. It's almost as if the Gates Foundation has become its own sort of State Department.

Let me conclude on a lighter note.  The TV show The Big Bang Theory made the nerd personality entertaining to others.  Casting Bill Gates in the same light may be good entertainment as well and its certainly closer to the real life story.  Over the rest of this week I'll watch the other episodes and see for myself.  I expect that many of my friends will do likewise.

The Challenges in Teaching the Student Rather than the Subject

I have been struggling with my teaching this semester and have started to lose my patience, which I fear is the death knell for any instructor who is trying a non-standard approach to instruction.  With impatience there is a temptation to scold the students.  The scolding may work for me to expunge the demons from my own system, but I know that it won't work for the students.  Nobody likes to be scolded.  I certainly don't.  There is a tendency to shut down when you're being scolded. What I need is for the students to open their eyes and see things as I'm seeing them.

There seem to be two factors that are distinct but work in conjunction to produce the source of my struggles.  One is student competence (or lack thereof) on prior knowledge, which to me includes the ability to fill in gaps in their knowledge on demand as the need arises.  Part of this is to understand the meaning of terms in a way they can be applied correctly.  I'm actually seeing a lot of mistaken interpretations that might have been reached in haste but then weren't checked to see if they were correct.  Doing it slower to get to the right meaning of the terms is a habit of mind.  That habit seems to be absent in a lot of students.

The other is student responsibility, which includes feeling an obligation to come to class even when attendance is not required, doing a thorough job on the homework rather than rushing through only a partially completed assignment, this includes a thorough checking of one's own work before submitting it, and then getting the work done in a timely manner.  In my class last Tuesday, which was the start of the fourth week of the semester, attendance was around 50%.  This is in an upper level course in the major, one where students should have intrinsic interest in the subject matter.   The question I will pose in class today is who bears the responsibility to catch up the students who missed that session? Does that rest on me, them, or the entire class?  In the process of asking this question I will inquire among those who attend regularly whether they've been asked by any of their classmates to catch them up.  I'm expecting unanimity, or near unanimity, that they haven't received any such requests.   

Yesterday, I wrote a post on the class site that I hope didn't scold, at least not too much, about what the issues are from my point of view.  We will discuss that post in class today. I will repeatedly say that I want students to be making connections between the various ideas they are being exposed to and with that also make connections to their own experiences that illustrate those ideas. I believe many students aren't used to do doing that.  They don't understand this is time consuming.  They also won't see the gain to themselves from going through this sort of effort.  Maybe I can convince the students to try out my way for a while, to see if they can get the hang of things.  That's for the blogging I require.

But then there is the math modeling part of the class.  Some of the students seem to be extremely uncomfortable with high school algebra and basic analytic geometry.  They have no intuition at all here and lack the skills to do some basic manipulations.  How can I teach economics at this level, where we do some math modeling, when the students don't have high school algebra in their set of tools?

On an ethical level, I feel compelled to help those students who struggle through these limitations, but I don't feel responsible for other students, who themselves don't display a sense of responsibility.  I don't believe I can teach them that.  I can make them aware of behavior I perceive to be unprofessional.  But from there on out, the choice in how to react to the information is theirs to make.

This is not the first time teaching the class where these issues have manifest.  But this time my class has more students.  I have tried to preserve an approach that I first used in fall 2012, then to good effect.  But the last few times these issues have been there.  Maybe it's time for me to hang up the spikes and go onto something else.

But if I do that, who else is going to get these students to turn around?

Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech - My Take

Last week the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a couple of pieces that caught my attention.   The first was This Professor Compared a Columnist to a Bedbug. Then the Columnist Contacted the Provost.  The article included an interview with the professor, David Karpf.  He had written a Tweet about the NY Times columnist Bret Stephens that eventually went viral, but only after Stephens responded to it in a way that raised attention. The other piece appeared the next day.  It is by Steven Salaita and is entitled My Life As a Cautionary Tale: Probing the limits of academic freedom.  I will comment a bit on both of these articles below.  Mainly for my own edification before writing this piece, I did a Google search on academic freedom versus freedom of speech.  From that search I found this page at Columbia Law School, which I found helpful.  While I'm no legal scholar, I had two points to take away from this piece.  First, many people confound the two.  Second, academic freedom is about community rights, groups of scholars within a certain field have the right to set the norms for the field and establish those truths that the field embraces.  Freedom of speech is an individual right.  The two may be related but they are different.  Then I want to bring in this piece from the Sunday Review, Can We Guarantee That Colleges Are Intellectually Diverse?  This will round out the picture for me.

I want to begin with some history, which will start when I was in grad school (1976-80).  In this world that I was introduced to, scholarly communication happened first via working paper, where the authors produced a document that might have had earlier drafts and might have been previewed by some small circle of colleagues, but then was revised for broader distribution, yet the work had yet to go through the peer review process.  Most of the audience for a paper would read it in working paper form.  During this time period, line space in published journals was scarce, so even a paper that was accepted for publication might be trimmed substantially to fit with the space allotted to it.  The working paper then would survive as the longer form, even after the paper had been published.  This gives some sense of the community for which the working paper was intended.

Sometimes reprints of popular articles would be made and distributed in undergraduate classes, to expose those students to well known research.  However, undergraduates generally didn't have access to the published research in bound periodicals.  When I was an undergraduate at Cornell, I only could get into the stacks by having the faculty member I was doing some research for sign a note that my access was on his behalf.  At Illinois, undergraduates don't have access to the stacks in the Main Library.  I can't remember what the situation was at Northwestern this way.   But my general sense is that published research was restricted in its release to faculty and graduate students.  It was not meant for a general audience.

Regarding publication in general interest magazines or op-ed pieces in a newspaper, some luminaries in the field did that, certainly.  So there was an "educating the public about the field" function achieved this way.  But those who authored in this way counted for only a small fraction of the field.  Most scholars didn't do this at the time.

In the late 1970s - the mid 1980s academic freedom was contained to this sort of communication.  At the individual scholar level, the research agenda was determined by that scholar; co-authors, and academic friends who would make friendly suggestions about the work might have some influence, but the ultimate decision was with the individual scholar.  Similarly, while course assignments were made by the academic department, given the course assignment the scholar would control the syllabus and the set of readings chosen.  There were some obligations that were mandatory - the instructor had to specify office hours and a final exam had to be given, except in seminar courses. The instructor did have to operate within these constraints, but had flexibility on other matters as long as the constraints were satisfied.

What about publication of work entirely outside the field, scholarly or otherwise?  Could that impact academic freedom?  My first year of grad school at Northwestern, Arthur Butz, a tenured faculty member in Electrical Engineering, published The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, which denied the Holocaust ever happened.  It created quite a maelstrom yet Butz kept his tenure, to the chagrin of many on campus.  If we contrast what happened with Butz to the Salaita case, I believe there are two factors that are important to note here.  The first is that Northwestern is a private university while Illinois is a public university.  Second, Butz had already been at Northwestern for a couple of years before the book came out.  So his tenure had been granted ahead of that event.  In contrast, in the fine print of the offer letter that Salaita received from Illinois it said pending the approval of the Board of Trustees.  Such approval was never granted.  That much I know.  What I don't know is when Salaita resigned from Virginia Tech.  If it was when he initially received the offer letter from Illinois, then in retrospect that was a mistake, since he did have tenure at Virginia Tech.  I can only guess about this.  My conjecture is that any controversial publication of work outside of normally scholarly outlets will severely limit the scholar's market, regardless of the quality of the scholarly publications.  If the scholar has tenure at one institution that is some job security, but it doesn't transfer to other institutions.

Now let's move forward to how the Internet has impacted scholarly communication.  A different form emerged - communities of practice - where members of the community would post or respond to other posts in some discussion forum.  This began with Usenet Newsgroups in the mid 1980s.  I initially did something like this in the bulletin board applications FirstClass (for folks on my campus who were affiliated with SCALE) and in Allaire Forums for those who were part of the Sloan-C community.  Listserv made email an effective way for groups to form and communicate, since members then didn't need other software to participate.   Communities of practice were not restricted to academic fields and could be used for any endeavor where members shared some common interest.  For example, many classes embraced a community of practice approach where members of the class could discuss course topics.  An important distinction to keep in mind is open groups versus closed groups. With an open group, a potential member can self-enroll into the group.  With a closed group, only vetted individuals become members and the criteria for membership would be predetermined.  Class groups, for example were typically restricted to the instructor and the students who were registered in the class.

My experience is that while mostly such groups had discussion where members respected each other and where disagreements might then be negotiated in a friendly fashion, once in a while there would be a jerk in a group, whose flip and off the cuff remarks would bother other members.  This could then cascade into something toxic. I've experienced this both in professional groups and in class groups. Something similar might then happen with individual emails.  We soon learned that while people understood norms of behavior when in face to face discussion, when writing on a computer screen with the message to be sent after the writing was completed, many people would "take the gloves off" and say harsh things, only to regret that they had sent the message after it had been delivered and they had calmed down from the earlier provocation.  It is from this observation that netiquette was born.  Further, many people learned to move away from the  computer when they were agitated.  Alas, these lessons may not have stayed learned and/or the next generation of users never mastered them.

As the technology changed some of the issues also morphed.  I started this blog back in spring 2005.  Within about six months or so I was part of the edu blogging community.  Other people would read my blog regularly and I would read other blogs in the community on a regular basis as well.  Sometimes we would comment on their blogs.  Other times we would respond in our subsequent posts.  I later learned that I was a slow blogger (possibly the slowest).  Indeed Barbara Ganley, who is pictured writing outside at the beginning of the linked piece, was one of the people who became part of the circle I was in.  I enjoyed that community very much.  But it didn't last.  The sort of writing that I'm doing in this post is meant to be read on a computer screen.  As smartphones began to take over, the readership for these longer pieces declined, simply because of the screen size to render the text.  Plus the multiprocessing, moving between many different messages in a short period of time, doesn't favor the lengthy piece that has been composed slowly. The quick hitter wins out here.  And winning has a metric, or a set of metrics, that are undeniable - hits, likes, referrals, etc.  I should also note here that life events also impacted my participation in the edu blogging community.  After I retired (in summer 2010) I didn't feel the need.  I still wrote posts once in a while.  But I no longer felt it necessary to read other edu blogs, let alone comment on them.

The point here, bringing this back to the title of my post, is that a truly academic discussion of a subject, with nuance and counterpoints, is facilitated by a slow blogging approach.  A scholar can make a strong argument this way where others can disagree but see the scholar has attended to the underlying issues and treated others respectfully.  While that is still possible, the market largely made slow blogging dry up.

So, for example, in the Chronicle piece featuring the interview with David Karpf, he argues that Bret Stephens simply didn't get it that Karpf's initial tweet was a joke.  Let us, for a moment, imagine that Stephens read the Chronicle piece before he ever saw the tweet.  Would Stephens have reacted the same way if only then did he see the tweet or would he have shrugged it off as not worthy of a response?  There is an issue for which I can see an argument made both ways as to whether an author bears any responsibility for errors resulting in misinterpretation that someone in the audience might make, especially if the author is someone like David Karpf who is savvy about how social media works.  Karpf talked in the interview about how he felt secure because he has tenure.  So he would not be harmed by Stephens' response (contacting the Provost of George Washington University in the process).  But Karpf did not address whether his institution might be harmed even if he personally remains unscathed.  I can't say in this case, but I'm quite clear that in the Salaita matter the U of I was hurt in this episode, along a variety of fronts.   If the individual faculty member remains unharmed but the institution might be damaged as a result, what is the responsible thing for the faculty member to do?  I will return to this question in a bit.

I have had a couple of incidents in teaching where my students misinterpreted my intentions, in such a way as to render what I planned, which made sense to me for good pedagogic reasons both ex ante and ex post, but which the students thought I was pursuing some far left agenda and indoctrinating them in the process (I wasn't). So the idea that especially conservative students will misinterpret instructor motives seems a very real issue to me.  I don't know how most faculty deal with it, but as for me I opted not to teach behavioral economics, the class where the issue arose, and changed the approach in the next course I did teach, the economics of organizations, so the issue wouldn't arise there.  I wrote about this in a post called On the role or economic rationality in teaching undergraduate economics.  The post makes reference to the book Nudge, by Sunstein and Thaler.

Seeing that a behavioral approach can have real economic consequence in areas where the assumption of rational decision making would predict no consequence whatsoever, there is a temptation to want to teach about behavioral economics.  Indeed I offered a course on that in spring 2011.  Unfortunately I stumbled into a couple of issues, one anticipated, the other not.  The anticipated one concerned senioritis.  Attendance dropped below 50% fairly early into the semester.  Many of the students didn't seem very earnest about what they were supposedly learning.  The unanticipated issue resulted from using the Nudge book as the core reading in the second half of the course.  The underlying philosophy to guide the nudges is called Libertarian Paternalism.  It is libertarian in the sense that choice by the individual is retained.  It is paternalistic in that the nudges are defined to achieve some social good defined by other than the individual.  In preparation for the students in encountering this philosophy, I had the students read this piece by Amy Gutmann on paternalism unmodified, with regard to the State's interest in the education of children, and then I had them read the Supreme Court case Wisconsin versus Yoder.  Among those students who were earnestly participating in the class, several reacted quite negatively to these pieces on the merits.  They wanted as little government interference in the ordinary activities of individuals as possible.  From there, they reacted negatively to much that is in Nudge.

So I opted not to teach that course again.  I didn't want to have to do battle with the students on their politics as we were learning the economics.  Instead, last spring I taught a course on the Economics of Organizations.  This semester I'm teaching on the same topic though in a different format.   The environment that organization members operate under is full of uncertainty.  Different members have different information and they may very well also have different agendas for what the organization should be trying to accomplish.   So it is in this setting where I pose the question - what should the role of economic rationality play in teaching such a course?

That example is a sample of one course offering. In this case, the conservative students ended beating up on the liberal professor. And the liberal professor wanted out.  In this case out means teaching economics in a way where liberal or conservative shouldn't matter much at all.  I know it is dangerous to generalize from a sample of one. But that single experience has me believing that the hype and the reality are two different things on this issue.  While conservatives lament liberal professors indoctrinating students, perhaps true in the humanities on occasion, how much does it happen in social science and business disciplines, where the conservative students mock liberal professors who then must conform to the prior expectations that students have?  And if this reverse form of indoctrination is actually happening, who is reporting about it?  If it happens more frequently than others care to admit, why isn't that commanding any attention?

I've set the stage for the real issue that I want to talk about, but which I'm afraid doesn't get any attention at all. But before I get to this, here is my university's code of conduct.   The code is fundamentally about preserving the trust between the university and the larger community. At this level of generality, it seems an imperative we must all respect.  But when one drills down a little, it then creates many issues about what preserving the trust means.  These issues are exacerbated by how the university raises funds, with state tax dollars playing less of a role, while tuition and gifts are of increasing importance.

Undergraduate education at the university should be a concern for all faculty, all undergraduate students, and those graduate students who participate as TAs, graders, or in other capacities in undergraduate instruction.  Yet we are a campus where STEM rules and Social Science drools.  (I won't even mention the arts and humanities.)  We market the successes that sometimes occurs in STEM. (For example, see this page about undergraduate research at the university.)  We don't discuss the mediocrity and outright failures that are more obvious when looking in social science.  

I wrote about this in a post called More Thoughts on Campus Strategic Planning - Five Years Later.  Imagine that we will do a SWOT analysis on undergraduate education.  The underlying issue is whether weakness and threats can get a full airing or if they are glossed over because the fundraising arm of the university reports that an open discussion of the issues will damage contributions.  Those who are writing the checks want to feel good about the university, even if that feeling is generated in a glossed over, uncritical way. Further, there is a long run/short run aspect to this consideration.  If eventually all the warts will come out, does the current claim that everything is honky-dory amount to the powers that be saying that if the bad news will eventually come out, let it happen on the next person's watch?

The particular issue that I'd like to see get a broader hearing are student transfers within campus, particularly those from the College of Engineering to some major in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Economics in particular. The previous time I taught my course, fall 2017, I had quite a few such students who transferred in this way and many of them, perhaps all of them, were bitter about their experiences while in Engineering.  One of them, based on what she wrote in her blog for my class, went through a rather severe depression as a result of that experience. Yet the strong academic reputation of the university is based largely on the reputation of the College of Engineering.  My sense of things is that new students coming in don't understand the reality on the ground and/or the brutal competition that engineering engenders needs to be softened so the students don't get beaten up by it.  But this is a tough issue to discuss openly.  So one wants to know, will we ever get to such a discussion or not?

I don't know whether this would make sense to either David Karpf or Steven Salaita, but it is my view that episodes like the ones they were engaged in weaken the university in a way which makes it much harder to have the type of discussion I've described in the previous paragraph.  Put a different way, since no news is good news, when the university makes the news that usually ends up tarnishing the university's reputation.  Senior leadership of the university then proceeds by damage control.  Stopping the bleeding becomes job one.  Nothing else can be accomplished until the university's reputation has been restored.

It is my view that Twitter is a terrible forum for discussing university issues, while simultaneously being the best forum if the goal is to attract eyeballs. It invites a blunt and inflamed rhetoric by the author and thereby encourages venting rather than calm and persuasive discourse.  We live in a world where now anyone can self-publish online.  It seems to me that academic freedom, as distinct from freedom of speech, comes with a responsibility to educate, especially when the audience for the communication is largely outside the university. If we know ahead of time that some people will have a visceral and strongly negative reaction to a blunt message, then academics have a responsibility to mitigate against that outcome by changing the nature of how they communicate.  The visceral and negative reaction might still happen.  Yet any thoughtful reader would then have to acknowledge that the author tried to make an even handed argument.  We should work toward that as our social norm.

Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks.....

.....What Would It Take to get the Start of the Semester Add-Drop Period Down from 10 Days to 5 Days?

In my next class session we'll spend some time on Paul David's famous paper on QWERTY.  The paper initially goes through the history of the typewriter.  In the nineteenth century the mechanism was slow and clunky.  Having one key depressed before the previous key returned to its original position would cause the keys to jam.  The inventor of the qwerty keyboard designed it as a way to slow the typist down, to reduce the number of key jams.  At the time of the invention, it was an efficiency enhancing development, which is why it took hold. But then the typewriter mechanism improved. This was followed by electric typewriters, some of which no longer had keys at all. Then there were word processors and personal computers.  Eventually there was no reason whatsoever to slow people down with typing.  Yet the qwerty keyboard has persisted, in spite of some efforts to unseat it by keyboards that are more sensible for encouraging rapid and accurate typing.

I think my own situation is typical and explains why we're locked into qwerty.  I learned touch typing in the summer after 10th grade (1970), attending a secretarial school in Flushing for that very purpose.  At the time I learned on a manual typewriter.  But those skills have survived to the present and are evident to me as I compose this blog post. I surely have a preference now for a qwerty keyboard.  I would hate any other system.  That would require me to practice hunt and peck and slow down the flow of the writing substantially.  This is why I don't like to text on my phone, even with a qwerty keyboard.  It's painful to input that way, at least for me.

The qwerty example is the best known example of lock-in to a practice that is no longer efficient, but it is certainly not the only example, not by a long shot.  The university offers several other examples. In class we will consider the lecture and ask whether it remains an efficient form of instruction or if it no longer is yet persists because of lock-in.  My views on this are somewhat eclectic.  I believe that lecture still makes sense as a mean of discourse when researchers are communicating with other researchers in the same field about their recent work.  I also believe lecture makes sense, in other settings that are closer to a general interest presentation when the audience is reasonably large, though then you might say the person is giving a talk. The first case, especially, means that much doctoral education will be in the form of lecture, so the students can prepare both to give talks about their own research, and to understand the obligation of members of the audience.  Reading a professional working paper requires diligence and keeping up with the literature.  It is effortful.  Having gone through this rigor as a doctoral student, is it any wonder that new assistant professors lecture?  It is what they were trained to do.

But for teaching undergraduates, especially when not in a large class setting, is lecture the best way for them to learn?  There are several different angles on this.  One is that making online micro-lectures is now a viable option and further, the videos can be made broadly available, so students elsewhere can view them if they so desire.  As an example, my profarvan channel on YouTube has recently gone over 250,000 views, the vast majority of which is from other than my own students.  Second, the online micro lectures can be coupled with online assessments that encourage the students to pay attention while watching the video.  Third, the research on learning shows "active learning methods" superior to lecture for most students.  Then there is my personal preference, Socratic dialog.  I like it because the sequence of question and response is the closest thing I know to thinking, and what I'm trying for in the classroom is to model thinking for the students. More than a dozen years ago, Barbara Ganley and I debated these issues on our respective blogs.  (Barbara's post that I was responding to can be found here, but it takes a while to load.)  At the time I had yet to experience the-post retirement teaching that I've now been doing for many years, where around then when I did teach it was students in the Campus Honors Program.  My sense of the student has changed as a result of this more recent teaching.  And I'm more in Barbara's camp now then I was then.

Another example of lock-in at the university that is usually given is the academic calendar, which treats the summer in an asymmetric fashion.  Once upon a time students needed to go home to tend to the harvest.   That need is no longer present, but the academic calendar persists as if it still were there. The first 10 days of the semester is the add-drop period.  While I don't know this for a fact, I do remember back to when students had to line up at the Armory to register and the process was all done on paper.  Instructors would eventually get a paper based copy of their course roster.  Adds and drops after that were printed on manila cards.  I'm guessing that the 10 days were needed then. But now course registration is done online, yet we still have these first 10 days.   Is that too an example of lock-in.  Or does it survive now simply out of institutional inertia?

Before trying to answer that, I want to note the example of Google, which has taken the approach to kill applications it had been supporting, even if the applications are popular with current users.  Google does this when the application no longer fits into their overall business plan.  Examples include Google Reader, iGoogle, and most recently Google+.  Even though I was a pretty avid user of the first two of these services, I didn't jump off the Google bandwagon after those services were cancelled.  So the lockin, if it existed in this case, might not be to a particular service or way of doing business.  Alternatively, the company might take some near term hits when it does cancel such a service, users who relied on the service are indeed upset by the cancellation, but the company can endure that and those users eventually do adjust to the new circumstance, perhaps more quickly than they had anticipated.

Now I want to consider the first 10 days of the semester and the add-drop period, where students can add or drop a class without getting permission from an instructor or an advisor.  In theory, students are not  supposed to game the system by registering for more classes than they plan to take.  I informally polled my students on that issue in my class on Tuesday, where I asked, to be cute and so my students didn't feel they needed to lie about themselves, do they know of other students who hoard classes like this, where they plan to drop at least one of them during the semester?  I only eyeballed the results, but it seems that a vast majority present raised their hands, indicating they were aware of such gaming of the system.   Then I explained that the Econ Department also apparently gamed the system.  On August 15, 11 days before the start of the semester, I did a tally of all the 400-level classes in Economics based on the listings in the online Class Schedule. At that time there were no openings whatsoever for undergraduates, while there were 11 cross-listed graduate sections that had some openings.  (I think there was 27 offerings overall.)   A week or so later, there were many openings for undergraduates in 400-level classes.  Apparently the department had held back seats for late arriving students who had yet to register, perhaps sensible under the circumstances.   Then the free-for-all began.

Because I use a class Website that is not on a campus supported application, I email the students ahead of time with the url for the site and some other information specific to each student.  (Thank you, mail merge.)  As my class is Tues and Thurs, I always make this mailing on Sunday.  I downloaded the roster for my class the day before.  At the time I had 37 students registered for my class.  Since then, I've had 14 students drop and 18 students add the class, and in one case a student dropped but then added it again later. This amount of churn is unbelievable. Is it really necessary?

From my perspective, instructors are definitely not locked into the current 10-day arrangement.  I don't speak for other instructors but I imagine that most of them would echo the sentiments in this rhyme, written back in 2011. You don't want students adding your class who have missed the opening session(s).  Catch up is hard and it places an added burden on the instructor.

This point makes it necessary to distinguish switching discussion sections for the same large lecture class, either because the new section is at a preferred time or because the student wants a different TA, from what I was describing with the 400-level classes.  In the case of switching discussion sections in a large lecture class there isn't the catching up I mentioned in the previous paragraph and the section switching probably should be accommodated, even after the 10 days are over.  Indeed, at the U of I students can add a class after the 10 days with the permission of the instructor.  So there maybe be enough flex in the system as is to handle this case.

Missing the first two weeks of class in an entirely new course is a different matter. Such adds do happen and I'm fearful now that I will experience some of them this time around.  It is a downer to consider the possibility.

A real study of late student add-drop behavior would entail interviewing many of the students who make such course changes to understand their situation and their motives.  Did they find some other course they were registered for too difficult or the instructor too rigid?  Do they have a friend taking the course they add late who gives them the skinny on the new course, something they couldn't get from the available information to all students (course syllabi)?  Did they make some bad mistake in their previous class and would prefer not to be accountable for that so want to switch classes to start with a new slate?  Or was it just sloth and they couldn't figure out the right courses to register for the previous semester under the normal scheme where students register for classes?  Who knows?  Some data gathering might shed some light on this.

Maybe an efficiency argument can be made for enabling adds through day 10.  (The last day students can drop a class is much later than that.) But I doubt it.  Further,  there clearly are a lot of bad things that result from the churn.  Number one of these is that instructors have to adjust their teaching during the first two weeks of the semester so that late adding students can catch up.  Students who are in the class on day one are done a disservice by this practice.

Once the appropriate study has been done, the issue of shortening the duration of the add-drop period becomes a matter of campus politics.  I wouldn't want to speculate on whether it's possible to do something in this dimension or not.  But I suspect that if another peer institution were to do this, that would make it much easier for us to do it here.  The arguments I've been making are not specific to my campus.  Somebody should have a crack at this, please.

The Lack of Usability in Campus/University Supported Applications That Undergird Instruction

I'm on a Maslow kick as of late.  In this post I'm going to talk mainly about applications that learning technologists on campus tend to ignore, because they are outside the scope of their direct responsibility.  But instructors get waylaid by these applications, for pretty obvious reasons.  If you believe in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, this means that instructors get stuck on lower rungs of the hierarchy and as a result don't self-actualize, which in this context means they don't use the instructional technology in a creative way that might enhance learning.  They are too busy coping with other accommodations with the technology to do that.

Here I will take on the Student Information System, University email for students, and if I've got any energy left over then I'll consider the hosting of files so they are publicly available as well.  My complaints are not new.  And that's a big part of the point.  Why hasn't there been innovation so what was perceived as a problem 10 years ago isn't a problem now?

Let's get at it.  My university uses Banner as their SIS.  It has the unfortunate feature of treating the section as the unit of measurement rather than the course as unit of measurement.  If you teach a class where there is only one section, this is no biggie.  But if you teach a class that has multiple sections which are cross listed, as I do, then there are several problems.  The biggest one right now for me is the way quotas are set.  The room I teach in has 50 seats for students.  That is an obvious quota.  The software should not have more than 50 students registered for the class.  But I have one undergrad section and one grad section cross listed, as do several other upper level undergraduate classes offered in Economics.  Though the classes are primarily intended for undergraduates, Masters students are welcome to take the classes as a way to round out their degrees.  Banner forces one quota for the undergrad section and another quota for the grad section.  The two add up to 50.  If the undergrad fills while the grad section has openings, then more undergraduate students can't register for the class, unless the quota is manually reset. In fact, this is happening for many of the upper level courses being offered.  I did a tally of this last Thursday for 400-level courses in Economics using data from the Course Explorer. At the time there were no empty seats for undergrads, while there were 11 grad sections with openings across the various offerings.

This situation created an ethical conundrum for me.  I'd rather teach a smaller class and, in fact, my course has never had more than about 30 students in the past.  But there are more students now taking such classes and possibly fewer offerings overall (of that I'm less sure).  Do I have some responsibility to those undergraduate students who want to add a 400-level class in Economics by increasing the quota on my undergraduate section?  If there were a quota on the room only, not on the individual sections which are cross listed, that decision would be taken out of my hands.  As it is now, it looks like the Economics Department is giving preferential treatment to the grad students, as empty seats are being held for them while the undergrads don't have any options.   Even if in fact there is some preference for the grad students, is this the sort of message that the department wants to broadcast?  The software forces this.   It would be much better if the software allowed students to add as long as the room wasn't full, regardless of which section the students joined.  It's amazing that this simple function is not supported.

Coupled with this, alas, I can't view both sections pooled in one view, nor can I readily download data from Banner for import into Excel.  These are obvious deficiencies of the software.  The campus provides work arounds for these limitations.   The LMS can be viewed as an alternative roster service.  And DMI also offers such a service.  But the services are imperfect substitutes.  For example, while DMI does list a second major for the students, it doesn't list a minor.  Also, the home address isn't provided.  This is particularly useful to identify international students and out-of-state domestic students.  So, while it would be nice to go to just once source for the roster information, I end up using all three sources.  Before the semester starts I rely mainly on Banner, as the information is most current there.  DMI does color code recent adds and drops, which is useful for the first 10 days of the semester.  After that I use the LMS for it's electronic grade book function. I've been doing this for so long that I'm used to it.  But that doesn't make it right.  A newbie instructor is likely to be frustrated by this environment.

Let me turn to email/student identity.  While I've not done a careful sampling, my general impression is that about 50% of my students use non-university email as their primary form of communication.  There are two obvious reasons why.  One is continuity from before being a students on campus and after they graduate.  If they've already been using their email for external to the university functions (and I will note that a quick check of my current roster has students with other external sites - LinkedIn mainly, some other sites too) then it makes sense from their perspective to continue with that.  The other use is so they can change their screen name to a preferred name that is different from what is on their university record. This is particularly important for international students who want to use an Americanized name will studying in the U.S.  Our business practice at the university, however, doesn't accommodate either of these uses.  Instead it is up to each instructor to adjust or not.

I will note that ATLAS has a photo roster service that is potentially quite nice.  I gather that it is pulling data from Banner and the I-Card (student ID) databases.  So in addition to name and photo it also offers the student's UIN (University ID Number).  If students were allowed to enter a preferred name into one of of these databases, then that information could be pulled as well.  In my class UIN has no function.  Addressing students by their preferred names would have real value.

Now let me briefly talk about my use of Box.com for my course files, rather than use the LMS.  This allows the files to be made publicly available, so my course site becomes a mini OER.  When these files are associated with a YouTube video, they do get external access.  I would like to better identify external access from access by students in my class, but at present I can only tell that by when access occurs.  I do wish the Campus would consider the OER function more seriously, rather than only be concerned about Coursera, but I suppose I'm a voice in the wilderness on this.  C'est la vie.

Wearing Out

Dualism in all things is the rule, not the exception.  Why I need a frequent reminder of that, I don't know.  But it seems surprising every time I tell myself that.  In this case my recent fascination with early childhood development as a template for how the college student goes about school, including much reminiscing about my own time in nursery school and elementary school, a foreshadowing of The Professor Mind, has its own dual in my current self-perceived decline, of which I will detail a few separate incidents.  Then I will wave my hands and make some not so sweeping conclusions about whether the cause is mainly fear of the inevitable or if it is the inevitable itself.

First let me tell a personal joke that I first used on my then optometrist (he too has retired now) but subsequently have used on several other doctors I visit.  It's clear that some parts of me are slowly wearing out.  For my eyes, in particular, I'm managing that by taking eye vitamins twice daily and by putting drops in during the evening. What I told the optometrist is that my goal would be for all my parts to wear down, more or less, at the same time.  He chuckled at that one.  Be careful what you wish for.

Then, yesterday, I had a little episode with the dishwasher.  I thought I had started it, but four hours later it was still not done, so I opened it up.  The control panel was flashing.  Apparently, I had never pushed the start button.  This very simple thing bothered me because not all that long ago I was a campus administrator with learning technology my domain.  Such a person is supposed to like technology and be comfortable with it.  But more recently I'm vexed by such things, especially our hand control for the big TV in the family room.  There are many different pieces of hardware connected to it and a variety of packages play on it.  So manipulating the hand control is a challenge.  But the real biggie is when a message comes on the screen that says the firmware needs updating and wants to know whether that should happen now or not.  I push the button but there is no response.  Evidently I'm not on the right screen.  I haven't a clue what the right screen is or how to navigate to it.  There's some irony here, given my prior job.

Perhaps my bigger issue with technology is a perception that I'm making more typos than I used to.  Some of these flip letters in a word.  Others put in wrong letters altogether.  I teach in my class on the economics of organizations that there is an issue of alignment between management and the staff.  Apparently my mind and my fingers are having a similar issue.  Proofreading, of course, would negate this problem, or so one would think.  (Homophones survive even a serious proofreading, but the reader may be more tolerant of that sort of error.)  The reality is that the energy to proofread is less than what it used to be, because the generating prose is itself getting harder.  To paraphrase a well-known maxim, all dissipative play and no engaging work makes Lanny a dull boy.  Also, in the type of online chat I do, using Facebook Messenger a fair amount and texting some, the environment itself is not that conducive for proofreading.  (Composing a post in Blogger is better.  The editing window is ample and the normal sentence-paragraph structure is evident.)

I'm also finding that my ability to deal with even minor stress has declined a great deal.  It used to be that minor sources of annoyance would just bounce off and become part of the background noise.  If necessary, they would be dealt with as they came up.  But now I seem to fixate on them and am unable to let go, which I almost certainly should do.  Here's a case in point.  Earlier in the week, I got an email from the Econ Department's HR person about the course I'm supposed to teach this fall.  Apparently, since I didn't teach last year, they have to file an I-9 form for me.  (Though I only had been teaching in the fall and not in the spring, so I don't understand why they have to do that now but didn't each time they did rehired me in the past.)  The email said this had to be done no later than the date my appointment starts, August 16, which is a week from tomorrow.  I will be out of town the first part of next week, so wanted to get this done before I left and responded with that information. Then nada from the person who sent the email.  I also noted, though just to myself, that the offer letter was contingent on doing a background check (which was a non-issue in my case) but didn't mention an I-9 form.  I submitted a signed offer letter, so in my mind, though I'm not a lawyer, that should be a binding contract as the background check was completed in under an hour. Yet it now seems possible that the I-9 will not get done in time.  What then?

My bigger stress with regard to this class is what the ultimate enrollment will be.  When the Department Head asked me to teach the class, where the year before he did not, he told me the class would "border on 60 students" because the department didn't have enough upper level offerings for majors.  So I started to plan for that.  I asked for a classroom in Wohlers Hall, rather than in DKH where the Econ Department is located, because Wohlers has amphitheater classrooms, which are better when the class size is 60.  And I looked to hire a former student as a TA, because I have students do weekly blogging, where I do try to write interesting comments in response on each student post, but 60 is just too many for that. So I was hoping to divide up the commenting work with the TA.  This former student graduated right after my class in 2017, lives elsewhere, and has a full time job. I envisioned the commenting as taking 5-10 hours a week for her and getting her some additional spending money for the effort.  But the department didn't go for it.  They promised me a grad student hourly instead.

So far, I haven't been assigned anyone, and it is unclear to me whether they will follow through on that.  The actual classroom I am in has a capacity of 50 students, which is in Wohlers Hall, and is flat.  (The class is from 9:30 to 10:50 a fairly popular time on campus and I'm guessing the amphitheater classrooms had been previously scheduled at that time.)   Further, the class is cross listed - one section for undergrads, a different section for grads in Econ.  (The department has a big bucks professional masters program and uses the upper level undergraduate offerings to amplify the variety of courses available to those masters students).  In Banner they set the capacities of the undergrad section at 30 and the grad section at 20.  Yesterday, the undergrad section reached capacity.  The grad section has no students registered.  Managing this is the department's issue, not mine, but for planning how to conduct the class I would like to know how many students I will ultimately have.  I would really prefer not to have more than 35 students and in my mind an upper level class should be taught like a seminar, so no more than the mid 20s in enrollment.  But I also try to be a good citizen and accommodate the Department's wishes.  If they need the classroom to be full, I'll figure out some way to conduct the class.  Yet while knowing that, I'm still stressing out about it.  I need to chill out, till the students are back on campus.  I wish I could do that, but it seems outside my control.

Then there is the matter that my mental quickness seems to be on the downs.  This is a simple test of that proposition.  I do the Daily Jumble, which appears in the local paper.  I used to be able to unscramble the words in a snap and then most of the time I could get the theme pretty quickly as well.  I don't know where that skill comes from, it's just one of those things that came easily to me.  But this past week it's been a struggle.  I sit there and ask myself, why am I not getting this?  Eventually I do, but it takes an inordinate amount of time.  Is this a foreboding of all sorts of thinking that requires some insight?    Last week I had a terrible senior moment (that went on for about a half hour) seeing somebody while grocery shopping whose voice was familiar, but I couldn't place him.  It was very disturbing.  (It turned out to be my old optometrist.)  And for quite a while I have been having the issue that I know the famous person, but can't come up with the name.   My memory was once truly great (witness those report cards from nursery school).  It now is beginning to betray me.

I could go on and talk about aches and pains as well as various ailments.  But I think that's enough.  The real issue here is whether this is normal aging combined with perhaps too much time where I'm at home at the computer rather than interacting in some social context or if this is marking an acceleration in my personal decline. The jury is still out on this.   I'm sure I'm not the only person who has been in this situation.  I wonder how others manage it.

Let me close with this point.  The past few years I've noticed an ageism that discriminates against retired people, where if I were still working full time I wouldn't experience this nearly as much.  My ideas are ignored now much more readily than they otherwise would be.  (The low number of hits on this blog is one indicator of that.)  Yet if I am experiencing an acceleration in my own decline, my desire to accomplish something of substance while I still can is all the greater.  The question is how to do that.  My dad read us an abbreviated form of Don Quixote when we were young kids.  Maybe it's time now to read the real thing.

Maslow and the Creative Attitude

Last week I started to read The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, a book of Maslow's essays which I believe were written later in his career.  Some years ago I read Toward a Psychology of Being.  Actually, I read it twice.  The first time was in the 1990s as I was trying to catch up on theory about learning, while doing my campus job as an ed tech administrator, where I thought that background was necessary.  Educational technology was about learning as much as it was about the technology, maybe even more so.  The next time I read it was perhaps a dozen years later, when I was near retirement, where it was more pleasure reading and to gain some further self-understanding. In both instances I found that much of what I read in Maslow spoke to me directly, as if he was explaining my behavior, especially when I was writing or concentrating while making some Excel learning object.

I am somewhat reluctant to call myself a self-actualizer, because Maslow thought that those who are in this category represent only a small fraction of the population, and I am loathe to self-diagnose in a way that makes me part of an elite group.  Doing so seems egotistical.  But some realizations as of late make me more willing.  For one, periods of complete absorption into some task happen less frequently for me now.  Indeed, I'm finding that much more often I can't read straight through to the end an Op-Ed in the New York Times.   In the last few years, where I've spent quite a lot of time sitting in front of my computer, I've acquired a kind of ADHD.  I will speculate on why that is and what I should be doing to reduce its incidence, though much of this will come as no surprise, for it seems that everyone who is in front of a screen may be experiencing something similar. The other part is that Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs should be reconsidered to allow being on several different rungs of the hierarchy, more or less simultaneously.  Most people these days are exposed to stress, from a variety of different sources.  Coping with those, sometimes by caving in, other times by an inelegant approach so definitely not self-actualization in that domain, does not preclude that periods of intense concentration may accompany a writing activity or some other project I happen to be engaged in at the time.  In Maslow's terms, health and sickness co-exist in me.  It is not all of one and none of the other.

I suspect this is true of most people, but in varying proportions.  And what I want to know, which is why I'm writing this piece, is for college students, such as the ones who will take my class this fall, having made their deal with the devil where they've opted for a non-creative path through school, is it worthwhile to encourage them to reconsider that choice, as a way to make them more effective at lifelong learning, or will there be a pernicious effect as a consequence from having pointed out their inadequacies without giving them sufficient training on how to remedy those?  At present I'm opting for making the point rather forcefully, but then not belaboring it.  I do believe the choice is ultimately for the students to make.  My job then is only to make them aware of the decision, not to foist it upon them.  But I will criticize that the "good students" in the crowd over program themselves and are constantly juggling the various activities that they've committed to.  This juggling is inconsistent with deep concentration on one activity only.  It may be that they've become addicted to keeping all those balls in the air and consider it something of an accomplishment just to be able to do that.  Yet they are shortchanging themselves on depth of experience that way.

Let's turn to child development and what in it might encourage the creative attitude as the kid matures.  It occurred to me to go back to my "report cards" from nursery school, which gave written evaluations only, no letter grades.  There are two of these, one from January 1960, reporting on my progress from the previous fall, when I was 4, the other from June 1960, reporting on my progress that spring, when I was 5.  The first area of the report is on physical development, where I struggled because my fine motor skills were lagging behind the other kids and because being a larger kid I may have been grouped with kids who were a bit older, even then, so this limitation may have felt even more extreme to me.   The other two areas are on intellectual development and social development.  There it seems my performance was much better - eager to try new things, a strong sense of completed work, a good memory, a high level of concentration, and a pleasing sense of humor. Without seeing the reports on other children, so to learn how much of this was fluff and how much was an accurate representation of the kid, this does seem quite a good foreshadowing of my adult self - at least on my good days.

Taking that as a starting point, I want to consider further developments that in retrospect seemed to matter for the creative attitude.  When I grew up kids didn't get pacifiers and, as a result, thumb sucking was pretty common.  I'm quite sure I did it a lot, till about age 7.  I also had my favorite security blanket, so held that in my left hand while I was sucking the thumb on my right hand.  That's the way I went to sleep.  To give up such an ingrained habit it probably helps a good deal if whatever else comes along next satisfies the same needs in the kid.  Somewhere around that time I read my first real book, Charlotte's Web, and did so sitting in an overstuffed chair in the basement with nobody else around, which provided quite a comforting environment for me.  So I was able to associate this sense of security with the joy of reading.  This joy was accompanied by some sense of control as to what would be read, as my school had a program of Individualized Reading, and my dad made sure I had ample reading materials, either from books we had at home or by taking me to the local library.  I wrote about this in a post called Read The Book and Find Out, the invariable closing line to the book reports students did in class then.

I want to be clear here.  I certainly got recommendations of what to read from adults, teachers and librarians.  From that I developed a pattern.  If I liked the suggestion, as I usually did, I would then read several other books by the same author and of the same genre.  Eventually I'd want to move on.  When I was early in this pattern, at that time I would elicit another recommendation for a different author and perhaps on a different topic.  Eventually I made those choices for myself as well.  Random House had a series of books for kids, biographies of famous Americans and sometimes histories of famous events.   I believe these had various authors, but were written according to a style the publisher specified.  I stuck with that series for quite a while and became excellent in social studies as a consequence.

While most of this reading was done outside of school I also want to note that especially in sixth grade, but perhaps in fifth grade as well, I spent a significant chunk of time doing school stuff on my own.  One thing, and lets remember that in the 1960s there was no such thing as a personal computer, I had a book to teach grammar that was designed to be interactive like a learning system, such as the Plato system developed at Illinois.  A little lesson was in a text box that took up part of a page.   Below that was a question to test the understanding of the lesson.  The answer, with an explanation, was below that.  Of the two or three kids who got this sort of instruction, we were told to cover up the answer and then see if our selection was correct.  If so, we could proceed.  If not, we were to go back to the lesson and see if we could figure out what we didn't understand the first time.   Only a few kids in the class got this programmed instruction and now, as an adult, I would love to know why I was selected to participate in it.  What I want to note here is simply that at this early age, I was 10 or 11 then, the teacher encouraged me to teach myself, given the programmed learning book.  I believe it reinforced the reading I was doing as another source of self-teaching.

The next step up on the path to creativity happened in 8th grade, when my math teacher asked me to join the Math Team, something that wouldn't have occurred to me on my own then.  I am extremely grateful to her now for making that suggestion. As I've written about this some time ago in a post called Math as a gateway to creativity, let me only note that as a prelude to addressing open ended issues which have no known solution, working on a hard math problem while knowing in advance that there is a solution, though it's not obvious what that solution is, offers an excellent way for the mind to explore possibilities and not give up too early.  I found I had some aptitude for this, a definite plus.  And I found it engaged me, in the same way that many people become engaged by a puzzle that doesn't admit an immediate solution.  Somewhere along the way I also developed a sense of either - I should be able to get this or this is beyond my capability.  That intuition matters a good deal.  It can't be perfect ahead of time.  As an adult working on something much more complex than a math team problem, I still had this same intuition about whether I should be able to get a pleasing answer.  Even now, I become bothered when I have that feeling, but have yet to produce something that cuts the mustard.  In my class, where I do want to bring Maslow's essay to the attention of students, I will make some mention of Grit and associate it with this notion of being bothered.  I persist because I can't let go when in that state of mind.  Then I'm operating under a certain tension.  I want release of that, but release can only come if the issue is resolved.  I'm incapable of saying, let's move on and perhaps return to it later.  This type of persistence as response is learned, in the sense of a habit that has formed, one which I choose not to break.  While it is happening it is vexing.  After the fact, the stick-to-itiveness proves remarkably productive.

Now I want to take on what is something of a puzzle, why I didn't write more in those years, particularly in high school, beyond what was required in the classes I took.   I did write some, contributing an article here and there to a school publication.  But I didn't feel a need to produce piece after piece, as I seem to feel now.  Here are some of the reasons why.  Probably most importantly, I had friends with whom I could talk about my formative ideas and learn about theirs.  Having such conversations, the urge for writing was less for me.  Then there was the mechanical aspect.  My handwriting was atrocious.   I had to slow down a lot to write out something that eventually would be typed up for publication. That made the writing activity itself more of a chore.  I did learn to touch type  in the summer after 10th grade, but the electric typewriter we had was in the den, the same room where my mother did her foreign language tutoring and where my parents played bridge when they had friends over to the house.  So it was only available to me at certain times.  Then, I pigeon-holed myself some.  My older sister had friends who could quote Shakespeare, in the context of the current discussion.  I definitely could not do that.  Plus, in English class I often couldn't make headway with the symbolism in the poetry we read.  So I didn't consider myself artsy.  For that reason, I never followed through on the encouragement I got from my ninth grade English teacher to try writing for the school's literary magazine.  For me, that was the road not taken.

I want to fast forward some and talk about productive habits I developed when doing research as an assistant professor, which morphed into something far less so after I retired.  It would take two or three months of serious thinking to work through a model, fully digest its implications, and then write that up in a paper.  I learned that between papers there needed to be a time interval for the mind to be fallow, a period of rejuvenation.  Some of that would happen during the work day while I was doing my research.  Doing the Times crossword, usually in the morning, and playing bridge at lunchtime provided such relief.  And then I would jog or play golf, to get some exercise and have a different sort of diversion.  Beyond that, however, between projects I would veg out even more - junk TV a source of downtime then. The pressure put on by publish or perish then, and later when I was an administrator to the more or less constant demands on my time, would serve as a discipline device so that the fallow time was limited.  Unfortunately, many of the activities in it had their addictive aspects, so when the discipline device was eliminated, I began to indulge more than was really healthy for me.  This is the underlying reality for me on which the new addictions from Facebook, Twitter, etc. have worked their evil magic.

The obvious answer is that when I'm not writing or researching a new topic to write about, I should step away from the computer.   I would like to think I have the resolve when reading online to stick with that piece of reading.  But the reality is that too often I bounce from one thing to another when at the computer.  I may go back to reading books on paper for this reason.  

Yet even in retirement there is work to do - for the class I will teach in the fall, for the volunteer organization I help to support, and once in a while trying to touch base with the ed tech universe that was my stomping grounds a decade ago.  And some of this work entails its own creative activity.  So I continue to delude myself that the periods intense concentration will return on their own.

Maslow is right to glorify those episodes.  They are precious indeed.  One may not realize that when partaking in them.  After the fact, it's a different story.  Absence makes the heart grow fonder.