The Time Machines In Our Minds

Taking A Chance on Love Performed by Ella Fitzgerald
I thought that cards were a frame-up 
I never would try 
But Now I'm taking the game up 
And the ace of hearts is high.

I first confronted this song while taking piano lessons at our house in Bayside. These lessons were taught by Mr. Anson and after a while those lessons developed a familiar pattern.  The two pieces I had been given the previous week would be performed first, to show some mastery.  Then the two pieces for this week would be introduced and tried.  Of the two pieces one was classical.  (Clementi Sonatinas convey the right sense of these.)  I seem to recall that we had a few books of classical music at the house and Mr. Anson would choose selections from these sources.  The other piece was sheet music that Mr. Anson had rexographed and punched holes in.  We (my brother and sister also took lessons from Mr. Anson) would put the new piece into a loose leaf binder that had the shape to contain this type of music.  The music itself had notes for the melody, but for the accompaniment there were cords written in.  This meant that when you played the accompaniment you could either play block chords, perhaps varying the note sequence within the chord, or as an arpeggio. This, along with the volume and perhaps the pace at which the piece was played, gave the rendering a sense of improvisation.

I'm Getting Sentimental Over You Performed by Frank Sinatra

I thought I was happy,
I could live without love
Now I must admit love 

Is all I'm thinking of.

I took piano lessons for 5 years.  For the first 4 years, I would practice about a half hour per day.  During the last year, in which I had started taking clarinet lessons as well, I did not practice piano on many days.  It was an indicator that I was ready to stop taking lessons.  Until then, however, I developed a skill that has survived into adulthood.  I could take a piece of sheet music where I already knew the tune and give a tolerably good rendering on first playing, as if I were playing by ear.  (The issue for me now with this is the font size of the music that we have.  I often can't tell if the note is between the lines or on a line.  That has made the playing less fun.)  

While I don't remember this explicitly, I must have sung the lyrics while playing the songs, as I now know the lyrics of many of these songs by heart.  (In contrast, I have no such ability to play the classical music now and for the most part don't try to play those pieces at all.). Indeed, this playing and singing was a kind of emoting, my first recollection of doing this sort of thing.  This sense of emoting must have been helped by the nature of the music, much of which was love songs with a common theme in the lyric.  (I've selected the bits of lyric to illustrate that theme.) It is conceivable that such emoting could have happened with the painting we did in elementary school.  Perhaps with other children more skilled than I was that is where they developed their sense of self-expression.   But it didn't work that way for me.  I had the piano playing and once in a while in a social situation some ability to express warmth with a verbal observation.  If that too was learned, it happened very early, perhaps in nursery school. My inclination now is to treat such expressions of warmth as part of my disposition. 

Try to Remember Performed by Jerry Orbach
Try to remember the kind of September
When you were a tender and callow fellow.

I was never good enough to play the piano in a public recital.  But my skill level was sufficient to have family and sometimes friends gather around the piano to sing along.  My dad especially liked to do this, as a form of entertainment.  Try to Remember has to be the best possible song for this purpose.  The melodic line is very simple and the lyrics are so sentimental, a real tearjerker.  I recall being at the piano like this with other kids in my dorm my second year at MIT (where they were lubricated with beer and/or gin and tonic).  A girl who lived the floor below me at Senior House sat on the piano bench with me and turned the pages.  Others were standing around, close enough so they could read the lyrics on the page.  It was evidence that some people want group singing as part of their social life, especially if the songs are familiar and sweet.  Indeed, after I was married we'd often do this with extended family members.

Here is a different set of experiences that might be more unusual.  When we were still in Vancouver BC, living together, engaged but not yet married, my not yet wife and I would sing while driving to wherever we were going.  (We ate out a lot then and occasionally went to the movies.)  The favorite song was definitely Ol' Man River, another song that Mr. Anson had me play.  I would not characterize it as a love song, but there is some romance in it.  And the melody ranges across a few octaves.  Singing the base line in each verse is its own reward.

After my kids were born I learned to put the baby to sleep by holding the baby with his head on my shoulder, touching my ear, and then singing in a gravelly voice.   My favorite then was Haul Away Joe, a song my dad favored.  But once in a while I'd do a little Cole Porter for variety or other show tunes, often from Fiddler on the Roof.  The warm feeling created then was much like the feeling we'd get a year or two later when we would read a book before the kid went to sleep.  Goodnight Moon was one of the favorites then.  We'd never got tired of reading that.

* * * * *

While some of me still remains a tender and callow fellow, I think it helpful to look at two distinct segments of my life, to sort my behavior.  In reverse chronological order,  the first started when I became an ed tech administrator and lasted till now, even though I've been retired for almost 10 years.  At the start, I had already been married six years and had two young kids.  Over time I developed friendships and collegial relationships with many different people on campus, within the CIC (which then was the academic arm of the Big Ten) and nationally.  I had very warm feelings for these people that I wrote about in a post called Affection. And for the most part, the gender of the colleague didn't matter at all in our one-on-one interactions.  I won't say that gender didn't matter at all in the group dynamics, but it was of secondary importance there as well.  (At a national conference the guys from the CIC Learning Technology Group would go out to dinner and the women would do likewise.  The night before an LTG meeting, we'd all go out to dinner together.)

These sort of warm feelings in work are perhaps a byproduct, as the work itself comes first.  But they end up being the reason the work itself becomes enjoyable.  (I don't want to over romanticize this.  There were plenty of headaches too, but I'll abstract from those here.)  I actually try to teach about this in my course on The Economics of Organizations, where we do Akerlof's model on Labor Markets as Partial Gift Exchange.  This is as close as economics comes (and it is part sociology) to a workplace that would generate the type of affection I described above.  The emphasis in the economics is not on the warm feelings generated.  It is on the improvement in productivity that occurs in such a work environment.  The two go hand in hand.

The earlier period is my years in school, from junior high through graduate school, and then including my time working at Illinois till I met my wife, about 8 and a half years into being a faculty member.  While the relationships with male friends were pretty much the same as when I was an ed tech administrator, there was more nuance then regarding affection with female friends, because there was a gray zone of uncertainty where the relationship might take a romantic turn.  I was pretty bad at managing that gray zone.  Out of shyness I often wouldn't ask - would you like to take a walk?  would you like to go to dinner?  would you like to have a drink?  or other questions of that sort.  I don't think the shyness was ever overcome.  Instead, the frustration from what in retrospect seemed a missed opportunity became a spur for being more forthcoming the next time around.

It is also worth noting that while I continue to hold rather romantic ideas about these things, there is no denying that we were exposed to sex in a much more raw way during adolescence and thereafter.  If you watched TV or went to the movies, you couldn't avoid it.  I will mention just two things here as illustration.  The first is this Noxzema TV Commercial, where Joe Namath gets creamed by Farrah Fawcett.  The second is  The Avengers TV series.  Many of my male friends had a thing for Diana Rigg, moi aussi.  We were taught that sex sells, which it evidently did.  I don't think we needed to be told that, but that we were, repeatedly, and that added to the sense of failure in the missed opportunities.

* * * * *

Before I ever learned as an administrator the need for doing a post mortem at work when a project would go awry, to identify the causes and see if we could learn from our mistakes so we wouldn't repeat them, I would review these episodes from the earlier period, imagine that I played my cards differently in the review and then it followed a path that had a happy ending.  This is one type of time machine that I'm referring to in the title of this piece. I've "learned" from reading some popular psychology pieces about this sort of imagining that many people do this.  (Note, I'm not referencing such pieces here, an indication that I'm not sure whether it is science or bs, though it is comforting that at least some others do seem to do this.)

I have not included the interim period, where I was much more satisfied with how things went.  In fact, the year we were engaged I can recall exactly two fights.  One was in Vancouver and was about how to cook broccoli - boil it or steam it.  (I was on the wrong side of that one - boil it - and afterwards I bought flowers to patch things up.) The other was on the drive back from Vancouver to Champaign.  After a very romantic night in Yakima Washington, we had a dreadful time in Butte Montana.  The hotel we stayed in was very shabby.  But we rebounded after that and had a good time on the rest of the trip. We did make a whopper of mistake later on.  While planning our wedding we also purchased the house we would live in soon after we married.  Doing either of those things individually would have been very stressful.  Doing them together was overwhelming.  But that's spilt milk and I'm not crying about it now.

As I can write about certain aspects of that time and do view it as such a happy part of my life, I don't have need for the time machine to fix what might have happened but didn't. And I will observe the transformation from academic economist to ed tech administrator happened in stages and was facilitated by the novelty that was entering our lives in the early days of the Internet, a factor so large that my mental time machine couldn't do anything about it, even if it had wanted to. Before that interim period it's a different story.

And there are episodes from different junctures of that - when I was a counselor at a sleep-away camp, as an undergraduate at MIT, and again after I transferred to Cornell, as a graduate student at Northwestern, and then when I started working at Illinois.

The funny thing is, I don't travel back in time to each of these places with equal frequency.  The focus is on graduate school, especially the first two years.  There are two main reasons for this.  Between Cornell and Northwestern I lost about 50 pounds.  Being overweight was definitely a liability on the romantic front. At Northwestern, my appearance was normal and I was making a fresh start.  As I told a friend recently, my mind didn't make the adjustment nearly as readily as my body did.  This made that first year a challenge, even as opportunities did present themselves. (Actually, the first quarter at Northwestern was so intensive that there really weren't opportunities then.  I'm talking about after that.)

The second year was a bit different.  At Northwestern in Economics at least then, 1977-78, being a TA was a degree requirement for the PhD.  And the Department, which was having some funding issues then, upped the requirement from 4 sections (2 per quarter for 2 quarters) to 6 sections (2 per quarter for all 3 quarters).  During this time I was the rep from my class to the Grad Studies Committee.  This change clearly wasn't made for the educational benefit for the graduate students.  (As an aside, I was on fellowship.  So I didn't get paid anything in addition for being a TA.  Further, because it wasn't income, I didn't have to report the TA activity when filing my income tax.  Indeed, that was the real reason behind some of these shenanigans.  Eventually the IRS caught up with this and disallowed the practice.)

The prospect of being a TA brought a different wrinkle into these gray area interactions.  The song by the Police, Don't Stand So Close To Me, conveys some of the idea.  As a TA, I was very well regarded by the students.  I was quite knowledgeable and passionate about the economics.  During that year, several male students told me I was their favorite TA.  This was based purely on the teaching of the economics.  I, of course, can't know this, but I intuited that some female students developed a crush on me.  This was manifest not so much in live class sessions, though it did happen sometimes there as well.  It was mainly evident during office hours, which I conducted in the Library lounge, a public space.

Writing the previous paragraph was a challenge, as if I was threading a needle, because nowadays sexual harassment on campus is such a big deal issue.  So I want to emphasize that in actuality nothing untoward happened, in the classroom nor in office hours.  I performed my TA function as it should have been performed.  All the action was in my head and possibly in the head of the female student. The most dynamic of these episodes happened in real time as I was performing my TA function, rather than as reflection afterwards.  That contributed to the intensity of the experience.  Another factor that might have mattered is how Northwestern differed from Cornell regarding student culture.  At Cornell, at least among the students I knew, there was an ethos that prevailed about not displaying wealth even if you had plenty of it.  As a result, most students dressed down when going to class.  I continued to do that as a graduate student, a flannel shirt and jeans my usual attire. But many of the students I taught at Northwestern dressed up when coming to class.  Either the Midwest was a different animal than the East Coast, or the times they were a changing.  I had sensed the former ahead of time and was fearful about the culture difference. When I seemingly cut through that, there was exhilaration.

I didn't teach my third and fourth years in graduate school.  I resumed teaching when I came to Illinois and I did experience some of what I had previously experienced as a TA, but the situation was more muted this time around.  One reason for that is distance in authority.  A TA is in between the professor and the student.  At Illinois when I taught I didn't have a TA, but I was now the professor.  It's interesting how young faculty establish their authority.  One of my colleagues wore Brooks Brothers suits while teaching - authority demonstrated in appearance.  In contrast, I had a tendency to make my course more difficult than it should have been.  My approach made some of the students negatively disposed to my class and that blocked the romantic sentiments of those students.  There is also that I was a little older and a little more mature.  I was only 22 when I started as a TA.  I did eventually modify my course difficulty level and I think it generally true that students feel more comfortable with a younger instructor.  But its also true that then my office hours were actually in my office, and the students typically came in groups - strength in numbers.  So there was a different dynamic at play.

I now want to turn to a different time machine, the one the brings our past episodes and incorporates them into who we are at present and how we regard others.  Let me describe the underlying issue first. In the simplest economic model of productivity, the person either puts in effort or the person shirks.  Effort should be rewarded.  Shirking should be punished.  But now, let's complicate things by adding the mental state of the person.  The person can be mentally healthy, in which case things are just as they were before, but if the person has mental health issues, perhaps the person is suffering from anxiety and depression, then productivity-wise the person can look like the healthy person who is shirking.  But the right response is not punishment.  It is to be caring and helping.  There are two issues to confront when the person we are talking about is a student and I am the student's instructor.

The first of these issues is how to identify the student with mental health issues and distinguish the situation from the case of the mentally healthy student who is shirking.  The second issue is how to develop an attitude to want to be helping the student in this instance.  Helping the student, for example by accommodating work that has been turned in very late, well past the deadline, might be thought of as something of a bother.  There is no contractual obligation to do this.  What then might encourage it nonetheless?

What I've found, whether this is true only for me or if it might work for others as well, is that I need to feel affection for the student, more like how I felt affection for my ed tech colleagues, but it would be okay even if some of the feeling was like it was when I was a TA.  The likelihood of a romantic relationship with a student now essentially nil for me, while the student's need for help is real and evident, anything that can create this sense of affection is for the better.  What triggers the affection is evidence of the student struggling, e.g., not coming to class for a while and then reappearing and with a doleful look on the student's face.  Sometimes it is even more obvious.  In an email the student describes the struggles.  As I've written elsewhere in this blog, the number of students who are having like experiences has been rising dramatically, even before the pandemic.

Beforehand, I would not have seen this connection between ethical behavior and having a sense of affection for those who will receive my help.  Now I believe these two things are inseparable and is a very important lesson learned from all the frustration I had with romance when I was younger.

* * * * *

About 10 days ago, a bunch of friends from high school, Benjamin Cardozo in Bayside Queens NY, had virtual happy hour in Zoom.  There were 21 people on the call.  The number of students in our graduating class was well over 1100, so I would hesitate to call it a reunion because of how many others were not on the call.  But it had the feel of a reunion. And it precipitated many subsequent one-on-one interactions by participants in the call as well as all-group exchanges by email.  This post represents me trying to make sense of the call and the follow up as it ties into my life.

There is no doubt that for me the follow up was more fun and interesting than the call itself.  On the technology side of things, Zoom calls where everyone participates equally (as distinct from Webinars where the audience is in a more passive role while the presenters are more active) need to have fewer participants and/or require a moderator who keeps those who do speak to a strict time limit so as not to monopolize the conversation.  If we had met face to face, there is no doubt we'd have broken into smaller groups, and then some would mingle with other groups after that.   There is also that I organized the call based on my friends in Facebook from Cardozo, then there were a few friends of friends who were added to the call.  But the fact is that if two people are friends of mine, they need not be friends of each other.  So many in the call felt affinity for a subgroup on the call, but not for everyone who participated. 

I'm still uncertain how things should play out from here.  I'm going to content myself with a few observations based on the follow up activity where I was directly involved.

The whole thing was encouraged by the stay-at-home behavior we are all living through now due to the pandemic.  A reunion call offered some novelty in interaction.  We graduated 48 years ago and while we have occasional exchanges in Facebook we don't have real conversation.  So there was some hunger for this beforehand as filling a need.  I'm curious to know how the participants perceive that need now.  I did calls with several friends, sometimes in Zoom, others by phone.  And I had email exchanges or Facebook Messenger exchanges with a few others.

Some of the calls were with friends I had been pretty close with in high school.  Others were with friends where I can't recall previously having an extended one-on-one conversation.  I made a point earlier in this post of noting the my professional interactions after I became an ed tech administrator made gender a subsidiary issue, at most.  That was not true in high school, at least for me.  Then I had several deep relationships where we had meaningful one-on-one discussions that engaged me and from which I benefited greatly.  All of those were with other boys.  I can't recall any deep conversations with girls with whom I had Platonic relationships.  Might that have been possible then, but I simply didn't discover it?  I don't know.  In any event, it is certainly possible now.  Indeed the conversations I had with women were in tone much like the conversations I would have with my ed tech colleagues, though the subject matter was different, of course.

Most of these conversations focused on the present and had little or no nostalgic elements.  Some of the conversations did have discussion, not so much about what we did in high school, but rather about things in the past that happened since high school.  In one case where I had an extensive email thread, there was quite a bit of nostalgia, coupled with a time-machine-like look at what might have been.  I found it delightful and fascinating, as I've never previously externalized any of my time machine sojourns.  Yet unlike those sojourns, where I on multiple occasions return to the same episode for still another look, this externalized sojourn was one and done.  And it begs the question, do we have a lot of other territory from high school still to examine or will we soon grow tired of the nostalgia and then, perhaps, grow tired of each other?

I have a more academic reason for maintaining this connection.  I have a sense now that school is broken.  I mean high school and college taken together.  The mental health issues are the canary in the coalmine.  There is no balance between learning for the joy of learning and going to school to get a good job.  It's all the latter and none of the former.  But I believe that when I was in high school there was a true balance between the two.  Indeed, for me it was mainly the former, with the latter a byproduct only.  I still want to learn from my high school classmates how it was that way for them.  Learning about that would help keep me from getting tired of them.  Yet this is my question, not theirs.  Might there be something else that gets them to keep wanting to come back for more?

Many of us have tsoris of one sort of another, mainly health or money issues, sometimes both.  I've got my share of the health variety, which I've written about elsewhere but haven't brought up in this context much at all.  As remedy, I have found that later in life kvetching can be a joy, one that consistently delivers and requires no great creativity to produce.  A group kvetch might be a stretch, but I'd go for it if the others would as well.

If I were scheduled to teach next fall I would insist that it be totally online.

This piece is meant to be a retort to the Mitch Daniels piece in the Washington Post, Why failing to reopen Purdue University this fall would be an unacceptable breach of duty.  But before getting to the health risk issue, some background first.

Before the pandemic, my wife had planned to retire from the U of I this spring (now it has been shifted to this summer, but we'll see).  I've dreaded the winters the last few years and wanted us to become snow-birds after Thanksgiving.  The Econ Department asked me to teach my Economics of Organizations class again.  I told them about this desire to move to a warmer climate in the winter and asked whether I could teach online to accommodate that.  I was told that we don't teach undergraduate classes online.  So, in this pre-pandemic setting, not teaching this fall was the equilibrium outcome.  I was okay with that as I didn't much enjoy teaching last fall.

The reason for that is ironic under the present circumstances.  Though I had not intended this as the outcome, the bulk of my students turned what was supposed to be a face-to-face class into a totally online course.  I explain what happened in this post, Should We Offer On Campus Students Online Self-Paced Courses As A Scheduling Option?  In a nutshell, I didn't require attendance nor give any grade incentive for that.  Plus, I viewed the in-class discussion as the culmination of an investigation into the subject.  The homework was preliminary to that.  But the grade was based on the homework. There was no class-participation credit for the in-class discussion.  As most of the students are quite instrumental about their grades, not attending class should have been the predicted outcome.  Yet if the students themselves perceived that face-to-face instruction was much better than the online alternative, they should have wanted to come to class.  That they didn't offers a revealed preference argument that the students themselves don't perceive face-to-face instruction as that valuable.  But the idealist in me found this very disappointing.

There is, nonetheless, a perception that face-to-face instruction is far better that online or, if we take a more expanded view, that the full residential experience on campus is far richer than the experience of a commuting student who takes on-campus courses but otherwise doesn't interact much with fellow students outside of the time when on campus.  I would argue that this is potentially true and when I was an undergrad (1972-76) I felt that potential realized for me. So I surely don't want to deny it is possible.  But, I fear that potential is rarely realized.  Indeed, in the Daniels piece he cites a variety of current bits of data about Covid-19, but he doesn't make any reference to the learning benefits of students being on campus versus students residing with their parents and taking online classes.  He does cite information that the students and their families are chomping on the bit for the students to return to campus but, frankly, the explanation for that can be quite other than that the students will learn more that way.  The families are going stir crazy with the college kids living at home.  I'm hearing that from some of the students I'm still in touch with from last fall.  So I don't doubt it is generally true.  Yet that in itself is not an argument to have face-to-face instruction in the fall.

Now, let me get to the health issues.  I, for one, am in the at-risk group.  I recently turned 65.  Last year I had pneumonia and a CT-scan showed some unresolved issue with my lungs.  (I was to have a follow up scan this April, but it didn't happen for obvious reasons.)  And, in addition, I'm overweight.  So I can personalize this.  But there are other scenarios to envision, particularly where the instructor is not in the at-risk category but the instructor lives at home with somebody else who is.  What about  that?  This part of Daniels's essay raised the hairs on the back of my neck.

On arrival in August, each Boilermaker will receive a kit including face masks and a thermometer for daily temperature-taking as well as the Protect Purdue Pledge asking for a commitment to at least a semester of inconvenience, not primarily for the student’s own protection but for the safety of those who teach and otherwise serve them. I will urge students to demonstrate their altruism by complying, but also challenge them to refute the cynics who say that today’s young people are too selfish or self-indulgent to help us make this work.

Who bears the risk if the students don't fully demonstrate this altruism?  If it is reasonable to think that students at home now are going stir crazy, why isn't it just as reasonable to assume that for the first week or two the students will comply by the safety guidelines, but then they'll start to slip in taking the safety precautions.  Once that slippage has occurred broadly, the health risk will rise substantially.  If that can be forecast with some likelihood, isn't it then reasonable for an instructor to self-insure against that outcome?

How would Purdue feel if the students all came to the live class session, but the instructor came in by video and was projected on the screen at the front of the room?   Would that be a viable option for the instructor?

This is the unmentioned part in Daniels' piece.  There is an external perception that face to face is better.  That external perception is what will allow Purdue to keep tuition as planned for this fall.   With enrollments strong, this in turn will keep Purdue from making various budget cuts - furloughs, layoffs,  etc.   Let us note that faculty and staff are important stakeholders in the university.  The budget cut scenario is one that any university leader would prefer to avoid and thus might be willing to trade off some safety to avoid the budget cuts.

But now let's drill down.  Suppose I'm a faculty member with tenure, who in an effort to self-insure against the virus says the class will be taught totally online.  (I will briefly describe how that would be done below.)  Now suppose the department pushes back at the faculty member and says this is in breach of contract and grounds for dismissal.  The faculty member is stubborn and says the course will be just as good taught totally online.  The back and forth between the faculty member and the department eventually finds its way into the Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed.  There are then copycat incidents of this.  How does it resolve?

Suppose it resolves in the favor of the faculty member.  Now consider the same situation, but the faculty member is an adjunct (here at Illinois we refer to such instructors as specialized faculty).  As an individual the instructor has far less bargaining power than a professor with tenure.  But there is a union for specialized faculty and it is reasonable to suppose the union will take up this cause.  The basic argument is that the rhetoric of safety is not the same as actually ensuring safety.  Counting on 18-22 year olds to act in a mature and disciplined manner across the board is overly optimistic.

I have several friends who have told me they hate to teach online. One might imagine that instructors like this would return to face-to-face instruction when the institution enabled it, especially if they weren't in the at-risk category.  Would a system where instructors opt in regarding mode of instruction be sustainable, at least until an effective vaccine has been developed and broadly administered?  For this fall an opt in approach is problematic, as returning students already registered for their courses earlier in the spring.  But these students have already been thrown some curve balls with the move to totally online instruction after spring break.  Would they readily adjust to a scenario where some classes were totally online and others offered face-to-face?  Indeed in what I've been reading, most of the latter will be offered in a mixed mode where about 1/3 of the students will attend the live session, the rest will get it online, and the students who attend face to face will rotate through the semester.   This seems to be the model that is emerging to ensure safe social distancing.

It seems to me odd that this is the answer now being advocated, regardless of what the mode of instruction was prior to the pandemic.  In other words, it is to hold whether the course was taught as straight lecture or if, instead, it involved a flipped classroom with active learning techniques employed in the live class session.  But those active learning methods typically require small group work.  Safe social distancing might render that difficult if not impossible to administer.  And if the prior mode was straight lecture, do we really believe that straight lecture is more effective face-to-face than it is when done online?  In my class from last fall, the answer depended on student preference.  There are some students who want face-to-face lectures.  Those are the students who attended class in spite of the lack of grade incentive.  Will such students be satisfied with this new model?

My course is intended for juniors and seniors who are economics majors.  There is the occasional student who is majoring, instead, in psych, or poli sci, or soc.  And sometimes there are masters students in economics.  Enrollments have typically been in the high 20s or low 30s.  Here is the class site for last fall.  A feature of the class is that students write weekly blog posts (under an alias that I assign) and I make extensive comments on their posts.  The eventual goal is for the students to think of their learning as a conversation on the subject matter, one that connects the theory to their personal experiences.  The students also do homework in Excel, which is auto-graded and which they can't submit for credit till they get all questions correct, so they get exposure to the math models we cover in the class.

Were the class taught in totally online mode, I would divide the students into 4 groups.  Each live session in Zoom would be with one of the groups and we'd operate in discussion mode throughout.  In this case I'd make attendance in the group discussion mandatory and give credit for the student showing up.  Students in the remaining three groups would be able to watch these sessions after they've been recorded, but doing so will be optional for them.  I might have a participation grade for those involved in the discussion, which would be to award good questions and thoughtful comments.  Other students might then watch the discussions so they get a sense of what good participation looks like (as well as to get a feel for the content covered in the discussion).  About a month into the semester I would divide each group into A and B subgroups.  Each subgroup would be involved in leading a session later in the semester, presenting the content to the other subgroup, who serves as the live audience.  This too would receive a quality grade.  It would be expected that the subgroups meet on their own to figure out how to do their presentation as best as possible.  They would also have to deliver their presentation content for evaluation.

Earlier in this piece I talked about the benefits of students who interact with their peers substantially in an out-of-class setting.  When I did this it was with students who lived in the same place I was living.  So geographic proximity mattered, a lot, to achieve that benefit.  It is conceivable that if students work in groups as sketched above and if some of those groups are effective, that bonds among the group members will form.  This might then encourage perhaps virtual interaction after the course concludes or possibly face to face interaction if the safety issues are resolved by then.  Lecture mode of instruction is likely unable to produce these effects.  But a single course as I've sketched might not produce them either, because the interaction is insufficiently intensive.  The logic here, however, is not a return to face-to-face instruction.  Instead, it is tracking students in a way were they are more likely to bond from their repeated interaction. 

I don't want this piece to go on and on (it could) so I will make one more point and close.  The mode of instruction is tied to the perception of the value of the degree to the graduates.  The fear is that online degrees will not earn the grads the same jobs that they'd get if they attended face-to-face.  And if, a year hence, the safety issues are no longer a concern that thinking may solidify.  In that case we're solving a short run problem only.  But let's face it, that labor market for new grads will be soft regardless of the mode of instruction because of the macroeconomic consequences of the pandemic and that softness is likely to persist for some time.  As I've written in a recent post, current students have taken a big capital loss on the human capital they've acquired and on the various credentials they've amassed.  In this case they may just want to get through to the degree, no matter how this is achieved.  Yes, the students want to be on campus rather than live at home.  But, no, that's not because they clamor for face-to-face instruction.

If we can get real on this we can get through the current crisis.  At least, I hope so.

College Instruction as Therapy for the Students/Rethinking Teaching Loads

I have been having email threads with a handful of students who took my Economics of Organizations class last fall.  Most interesting about this is how forthcoming they seem to be and welcoming of my emails.  During the course some of these same students were more guarded in their exchanges with me.

From the seniors, they seem to be improvising with regard to what they will do after graduation.  One student had been planning to go to law school.  She was accepted at several places where she applied.  But she has not opted to attend any of them this fall.  Instead she's looking for a job now.  While she didn't elaborate on why she's had this change of heart, one might expect that it has something to do with paying law school tuition now in this very soft labor market.  I really don't know how one finds a job this summer without having interned for the company the previous summer, but maybe she can persevere enough to land something.  Another student, who had gone the internship route and got a job offer from the bank where she interned last summer, had second thoughts (many of them) about whether this sort of work really was a good fit for her.  Indeed, she struggled last fall and this spring as well, because school seemed artificial to her.  That was before the pandemic.  Now she is reconsidering taking the bank job, given that jobs are so scarce having an offer is nothing to sneeze at. 

From the juniors I gather the following.  Internships still exist but will be done online and many have been shortened, from the full summer to one month, some even to one week only.  As there is learning by doing, it's hard to imagine the benefit of a one-week internship, but if companies have a policy of making their new hires from their pool of recent interns, maybe there is a logic to it, anticipating some likelihood of hiring in spring/summer 2021.  But, on the flip side of this, the companies will know much less about the interns this way and the interns will have less of a sense about whether they will eventually be offered a job by the company or not.  So, the uncertainty multiplies.

The word therapy in my title comes from recently reading Viktor Frankl's book Man's Search for Meaning, where he talks about logotherapy based on such a search for meaning.  In the process of having an email thread with one of the juniors, I stumbled onto this video and shared it with him.  He was impressed by the video and was able to connect the message in it to the instruction he has been receiving.  Much of that instruction is heavily rules based, essentially assuming the worst in student behavior, and perhaps inadvertently encouraging that bad behavior to occur.  To be fair to the instructors, in large classes rules may be necessary to keep the teaching manageable.  Too much idiosyncrasy from the students can be overwhelming.

But it should be noted that students who do everything by rules that are externally provided don't learn how to make their own life decisions.  Evidently, in the present environment making life decisions is crucial for all of us, graduates and college students alike.  So, one wonders if instruction can be made less rules-based.   Judging whether this is possible based on my experience the last few years, where most students won't attend my class unless a grade incentive is provided for doing so, an individual instructor moving away from a rules-based approach will fail.  What's needed is a more systematic approach, that changes student mindset and acculturation, with the aim of getting student behavior to be driven mainly by a sense of responsibility.  (Frankl talks a lot about responsibility in the part of his book devoted to logotherapy.) Incentive might still be needed for some things, e.g., 8 AM classes might still need a grade incentive for attendance, but otherwise the incentive approach would largely be pushed into the background.

From my little bit of recent interaction with former students, I'm thinking that students during college, and perhaps recent grads as well, need some mentoring to help them think through these life decisions.  Previously, mentoring in college might have been thought of as helping students get through till graduation.  Now I think it should be broader, helping students to get through life and how to make the important choices in a way that seems somewhat principled and not so seat-of-the-pants.

Alas, one-on-one mentoring doesn't scale well.  So the formal mentoring I'm aware of on campus is offered mainly to low income students, through a program called Illinois Promise, and the mentors themselves volunteer for the work.  I have done such mentoring, but I've found it easier to interact with former students (perhaps by email rather than face to face) because having taken my class there is already some bond between us.   One wonders if mentoring can become part of the on-load work of instructors, possibly by first having them teach a seminar class version of the course they are already teaching, and then also to rely on upper level students, juniors and seniors, to mentor freshmen and sophomores, with some eye on getting the mentoring to scale better.

My sense of things further is that formal programs that are required might not work very well at all (it's getting back to the rules-based approach) but voluntary programs where the mentor can give a prior demonstration of empathy for the student do have a chance to be useful as therapy.  When the mentor is an instructor, how does one reconcile a volunteer activity with it being on-load work?  This too is a matter of acculturation, something we should be thinking through now.  When I was a full-time faculty member in economics, being involved with the recruiting of new faculty members was an on-load yet volunteer activity.  Most of the faculty members in the department felt recruiting to be very important.  Yet participating in it wasn't something listed in your CV.  I'm thinking that mentoring students needs to be elevated to that level.

* * * * *

If capacity utilization of a resource is 100%, then to allocate a bit of the resource to yet another use, it is necessary to for some other current use to be disabled.  With that sort of thinking understood, I'm guessing that the initial response to making mentoring an on-load activity is for the faculty to push back and request that the number of courses they teach be reduced.  But giving course reductions in this case would break the bank.  What can be done about that?

In Economics, when I was hired back in 1980, the standard course load among tenure-track faculty was four courses, two in the fall and two in the spring.  Now the course load is three courses a year, as that became the norm in the discipline at other research universities in the country.  We might envision a reversion to the earlier norm, but with the time spent on that fourth course to be allocated to mentoring instead.  In this way of thinking the time for mentoring would come out of either the faculty member's research time or from the service work they do.  The move from a four course load to a three course load reflected a resource abundance within Economics as a discipline. That resource abundance is no longer there, but the institution has become used to tenure-track faculty teaching 3 courses.  Having them mentor students would be a reasonable way to adjust to current circumstances.

Much undergraduate teaching is done by specialized faculty, who are not on the tenure track.  Many of them do no research at all.  Teaching is their full time work.  How can we get them to embrace mentoring under the circumstances?  I wrote about something similar some years ago, the second out of six posts labeled Everybody Teaches.  In this case, the focus was on these specialized faculty (there I referred to them as adjuncts) who typically teach the same course from one year to the next, often in a large lecture class setting.  Over time the courses tend to get stale and become very mechanical (done by the rules).  The post was about ways for the instructor to experiment in the teaching with the aim of keeping the instruction fresh.  A critical piece of that is getting the student reaction to the changes made in the course.  In the post, the instructor would learn this by teaching one discussion section, more intensive than typical discussion sections taught by graduate student TAs.  The student mentoring, which would happen the following semester, can then be seen as of value to the instructor in getting a sense of the student beyond the class the instructor teaches.  It thus can be viewed as a complement to instruction, in which case the specialized faculty might do it willingly on load.

Of course, this needs to be worked through.  As such faculty are now unionized, the union would need to go for it.  That consideration is beyond me here.  I simply want to note that if the mentoring becomes a feature of what undergraduate education is about, then it can be thought of as a necessity to attract enrollments.  The university and the union's preferences should be aligned regarding wanting to have more students on campus who are paying tuition.  Beyond that observation, I wouldn't want to guess as to the outcome of bargaining on this matter.

I want to turn to a different issue with teaching loads and then close.  There is a peculiarity with using course loads to measure teaching obligation as the measure doesn't include course enrollments.  A different way to measure teaching obligation is by FTE (course enrollments times credit hours per student).  Consider a course that gives 3 credit hours and has fifty students.  This generates 150 FTE.  Now consider two sections of the same course, with each section having 25 students.  The FTE are the same in both cases but the teaching load is twice as high in the second case as the first.

I'm bringing this up here because of how campuses seem to be responding to bringing students back to campus in the fall.  For the sake of safe social distancing, the model that seems to be emerging is for about 1/3 of the students to attend per class session, with the other students getting the instruction online, and then rotating the students through who comes and who gets the instruction online.  An alternative approach would be to break the class into three sections, each taught in blended format.  Then all the students get the same content taught face to face and the same content given online.  Further the total time in class for all three sections would match the total in class time for the course before the pandemic.

This alternative makes more sense to me except that it would mean the teaching load had tripled.  So it could only work if instructors agreed to that.  If the class had originally been slotted for three hours on one day per week, then the instructor could implement this alternative informally, by dividing the students up into three groups, each of whom came for one hour only.  It gets harder for the instructor to coordinate if the three face to face sections are separated over several days, because then the students are somewhat out of sync with regard to the online content.  So there is that issue as well.  In the old days, the three hours in a row was done only as a special request for instructors who wanted to contain their teaching to one day a week.  Now it might be viewed as a benefit for implementing this blended model without having to deal with the course-load issue.   Three sections that met for one hour on the same day each week, but were not offered back to back, might be the most preferred way of doing things.  Yet it could only happen if the instructor assented to this in spite of the increased course load.

* * * * *

Let me conclude.  The point I'm trying to make above is that the pandemic should get us to rethink what the approach to instruction should be, rather than to best approximate a return to how things were done before.  The combination of the pandemic and the soft labor market make it necessary to ask - what would instruction be like if that were the new normal?  Your answers to that question may be different from mine, and I'm okay with that, but I'm not okay with proceeding without having the question posed at all.  We need to do that.

Drive Through Polling Places Or Other Solutions

The Republicans seemingly have no end of dirty tricks to tilt the elections in their favor, while then treating the rest of the process as legitimate, so Democrats seemingly need to accept the results.  I, for one, am still wincing over the Senate not taking up the nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.  That, as much as and perhaps more than the Russians interfering in the election, may have tipped the results to Trump.

The latest seems to be not sending bailout money to the USPS, even as there has been a huge amount of such money for the Airlines.  Why the one but not the other?  The argument is that if the USPS goes belly up, now slated for September, then voting by mail can't happen.  But voting by mail, in this pandemic, would greatly expand the number of potential voters who do participate.  That favors the Democrats.  By restricting participation, the Republicans up their chances at re-election.  This is unseemly.  Yet that is no deterrent at all.

What might be done to counter this?

My first answer comes from a message I got from my health provider a week or so ago.  They are beginning to return to non-Covid healthcare, while trying to respect the guidelines for safe social distancing.  One of the things they are offering are ordinary blood tests done by drive through.  I'm curious as to how that works in actuality.  Assuming it does work, might there be drive through voting done similarly?  The voter in the car is given a ballot and an envelope, as well as a clipboard and a pen or pencil.  The voter completes the ballot, inserts it in the envelope, and then returns it along with the clipboard and writing implement.  Sounds clunky to me, but it is do-able, isn't it?

I want to note that for many years I've voted early, often the very first day that's available.  It is typically not crowded at the polling place.  While the usual arrangement where the various people at the tables who sign you in and give you a ballot doesn't respect safe social distancing, I don't think it would be too hard to do an alternative that would work and would be safe.   The number of people voting then is meager (and it's all retired people).  So it shouldn't be hard for them to keep safe social distancing while completing their ballots.   The question is whether more people could take advantage of early voting, perhaps by (a) having scheduled times for them during which their employer gives them paid time off or (b) having scheduled times on the weekend where the polls are open.  The purpose of the scheduled times would be to not overrun the polling place.  That could make the process break down.

I get email from various Democrat politicians.  Some have been making noises about the USPS.  And there have been articles about this in the New Yorker and the New York Times, though the articles are about the postal service itself, not about the election.

If this latest dirty trick is allowed to happen and if it does sway the election, it does seem to me we'll be at the point of complete fracture in our politics.  Indeed, it's remarkable to me that hasn't happened already.  One would like to believe that the process has built-in stabilizers that restore normalcy when it seems things are tipping over the deep end.  I hope that's still true, but I fear it isn't.

Fending Off Depression - My Take

In the just-because-you're-paranoid department...I whispered to myself, "joke about the stoic and the cynic" and then did a Google search for it as I didn't remember the joke itself.  The first item offered up in the search was what I had whispered.  I tried it again whispering, "joke about the rooster and the shyster" but this time the items offered up weren't close to matching what I said.  Nevertheless, I turned my microphone volume down to zero.  I'll have to remember to adjust it again when I do the next call or recording.  It then occurred to me that I'd be still safer if I weren't connected to the Internet.  So I've disconnected Wi-Fi and will write this post offline.  When I'm ready to post it I will connect again.  I had done a full virus scan of my computer just yesterday.  It found nothing.  But is that software to be trusted?  (I use Norton now after the campus cancelled its contract with McAfee.) If I operated in offline mode the bulk of the time, connected only once in a while to download things to read and to post things that have been written or recorded, it would change my behavior substantially.  Might that be for the better?  I left my browser open as I went offline.  There was a tab for my Facebook feed and another for my Twitter feed still open and I noticed that the time of my posts did update even while offline.  One wonders what other processes continue in that way.  I have it set so Firefox deletes the cookies when I close the browser.  Maybe I need to be doing that more frequently as well.

I'll get back to the above near the end of this piece.  Now I want to explain the purpose of this post.  As a lot of college students are confronting depression, many even before the pandemic, and a whole lot more since, I think it useful for them to hear about how others deal with the issue.  My belief is that college instructors and administrators have coping strategies for themselves, for the general stress that work life brings, and more specifically all the additional burdens that the pandemic has imposed.  One way that we learn is by imitating those who seem to have their act together.  (This is called the master-apprentice model.)  Regarding how to keep depression from getting the better of us, I think this way of learning is better than the alternative (the discovery model) where we figure things out for ourselves, for fear that premature conclusions lead to drastic actions that will be regretted later. If your own health is okay and you are able to get enough to eat and you reside in a place that isn’t physically threatening to you, there is no immediate danger.  Going stir crazy from the stay-at-home order doesn’t count as an immediate threat. Yet your worries may be substantial and, of course, worries can be a source of depression.  Hearing how others deal with this can be useful.  Some of what you hear might make sense to you, enough so that you embrace it for yourself.  That can be helpful.

I surely don’t want to claim any monopoly on coping strategies, nor am I a mental health professional.  But I have been through two episodes of depression in my adolescence.  And I had a bout with prostate cancer in 2018, where during treatment they queried me once a week about whether I was experiencing depression.  (I joked with the nurse then and said, of course I’m depressed.  Everyone in the nation is depressed.  But that’s about politics.  I’m not depressed about my health.  The week after the Yankees lost to the Red Sox in the playoffs I said I was really depressed, and that got a good laugh, because of course I wasn’t.)  This is to make a point about language.  We all experience disappointments and sometimes we say we’re depressed when we’ve experienced a major disappointment. But disappointment and depression are not the same thing.  We rebound from disappointment and return back to our normal selves.  Depression is an absorbing state.  There is no rebound.  There is only sinking further into the hole, unless there is treatment or some radical change in environment.  At most, disappointment can serve as a trigger for our inner demons to launch themselves and move us on the path toward depression.

In good company, we normally don’t talk about depression.  For college students, however, there was a crisis with student depression that got a lot of play last fall.  So students now may be talking about it, if not with their parents or teachers than with some of their friends, or possibly with counselors.  Yet part of the crisis is an apparent shortage of mental health professionals to provide counseling so the students can work through their issues.  In the absence of a sustained conversation with a mental health professional, students might benefit from hearing a teacher they like and respect talk about coping with stress. Possibly an employer, where the student did an internship and where the student thought the supervisor sensible on work matters, might also talk about coping.  After Robin Williams committed suicide I wrote a blog post, Depression in Performing Artists as a Reflection on Ourselves, in part for me to make sense of his actions for myself, but also because my think-alouds in these posts sometimes benefit the readers in their own thinking.  Indeed, in this case several Facebook friends thanked me for that post.  Yet that suicide was a singular event.   The pandemic now is directly impacting all of us.  So I’d encourage other college professors, high school teachers, and employers to discuss their own coping strategies.  There will be a natural audience for these type of pieces and that audience will appreciate what is written, especially if it is grounded and consistent with what the readers know about the personality of the author.

What follows are a bunch of coping strategies offered up as advice.  They are based on my personality as I understand myself.  Some of these may be universal.  Others may be specific to me.

Express Your Current Thinking

During and after my first experience with depression in 10th grade I developed a habit of mumbling, which my parents found quite annoying.  I did it a lot at the dinner table.  I don’t think I did it much at all when I was hanging around with friends.  The obvious logic in mumbling is to say what’s on your mind without it being heard by those who are around you.  The saying what’s on your mind is a felt need.  The not being heard is a safety play, for if you were heard it might very well produce an angry response, with that escalating further in some tit-for-tat.  If you are looking for a fight then you should be heard.  Otherwise, not being heard keeps the fight from happening, even if the mumbling itself is annoying to others.

I don’t want to encourage mumbling as the answer.  Instead, I would suggest either writing out what you are thinking or making a voice recording of your thinking.  You probably want to do this in a way where what you produce is hidden from others.  If it is writing, you’d call it a diary or a journal entry.  I suppose you can have an audio or video diary as well.  If you have a friend whom you trust implicitly, then having a conversation with the friend might be an alternative.  Such friends are rare, however, and in the current circumstances the friend too may be having coping issues.  So the diary or journal would be the way to go.

Now let me explain the benefit from doing this. Absent the self-expression, the same thoughts play over and over again in my head.  I stew about things and prolonged stewing about things without doing anything to change the situation can be a source of depression.  What I’ve found is that if I externalize this thinking somehow, I can then move onto something else.  It’s good to do that.

Identify Your Fears

The idea here is that if you know enough about what really frightens you now, you can make some peace with yourself on an approach where those fears are managed.  Sometimes management means avoidance of situations that would trigger the fear. Other times it means working through an internal argument in your head about how you can deal with the fear in an ongoing way.  I will illustrate with my own situation at present.

I have a great deal of fear regarding intense physical pain that remains persistent.  Momentary pain is a different matter.  With the prostate cancer, there wasn’t much pain associated with it.  There was some discomfort during the radiation treatment itself, but it was only 10 or 15 minutes per session.  The real fear, which remains to this day though I am in remission, is that the cancer would spread elsewhere.  I was absorbed with that concern.  I’ve made some adjustments to diet on the recommendation of my doctor to lessen that risk.  It’s the type of thing that actually combats depression, as it seems like reasonable problem solving rather than lack of agency.

I have a second fear about the potential for dementia, as my mother’s side of the family seemed to experience quite a bit of it, and I don’t have a good way to distinguish between ordinary senior moments, whose frequency seem to be on the increase, from a gradual move toward dementia.  I had a rather frightening experience about a week ago, where I drove to the nearby Walgreens to pick up a prescription.  I went through the parking lot to get to the drive-thru window.  There were an unusual number of cars backing out of the lot when I arrived, so I was checking my rear-view mirrors a lot and did so also after I had gotten my prescription.  For some reason, I found myself driving south on Duncan Road yet still looking at the driver’s side mirror.  I don’t know how long I was doing that, maybe only a second or two. While it was happening I felt fascinated by what I was seeing.  After I realized what I had been doing, I felt horrified.  It occurred to me that this is how I will die, in an accident because I wasn’t paying attention to what I should have been doing.  As as kid, I often didn’t seem to be paying attention to what I was doing, and would frequently drop the dishes that I was supposed to be putting away after they had been washed. This was my nature then and it is still my nature now.  It has proved very productive when I was working, to be so absorbed in some line of thought.  But maybe now it is the road to dementia and losing track of the ordinary world.

A third fear, on financial matters, I mainly deal with by avoidance.  Senator McConnell argues that states should declare bankruptcy to manage their current huge deficits.  In this case the states could renege on their pension obligations to current employees.  The source of my income now is my pension through SURS.  My wife will retire soon and that will be the source of her income too, once she is retired.  If the State of Illinois does renege on their pension obligations, we’ll go from being very comfortable financially to having a very small source of income and inadequate savings for the long term.  Partial measures, like making the pension subject to Illinois Income Tax, are not a concern for me.  Likewise, getting rid of the COLA wouldn’t bother me.  Losing the entire source of income, in contrast, would be devastating.  But there is nothing for me to do about it now.  I don’t obsess about money.  I have recently come to track the Nikkei and the DJIA on a daily basis, more or less like how students track the MyGrades area of the LMS.  But this is more to understand the economy as a whole than to consider the situation of me and my family.  It is an object of fascination for me that the stock markets can remain relatively stable, after an earlier down slide, while the real economy is going to hell in a hand basket.

A last fear, related to the previous one, perhaps the opposite side of the coin, comes from recalling a scene in Schindler’s List near the end of the movie, where Schindler breaks down because, in spite of saving the lives of many Jews, he could have saved many more.  I do charitable giving, some of it targeted to the organization I also support with volunteer work, Universal Love Alliance.  Should I be giving that much more now?  Is my fear about losing our income simply an excuse to limit my current charitable contributions?  I’m a trained economist and yet I don’t know how to think this through.  But making some bow to the issue is nonetheless useful.

Confronting your fears doesn’t make the fears go away.  What it does do is to keep you from being delusional about them.  They remain contained.  You can live with that.

Be Aware of Environmental Sources of Depression

The second time I had depression, in fall 1973, I was a sophomore at MIT and the people I hung out with in my dorm all seemed to me very nihilistic about school and life in general.  The nihilism was a coping strategy for them.  But it didn’t work for me and I could feel myself sliding into the depression I experienced in high school.  On a trip to Cornell I developed the sense that things would be different there and I knew quite a few people at Cornell already, including my brother.  So it occurred to me to transfer there, where previously that thought about transferring had only gotten as far as asking - could I have moved into another dorm at MIT?  I rejected that idea.  I didn’t think I could explain it well and I was afraid of moving to a place where I didn’t know people.

If the environment seems overwhelming you need to either change the environment yourself or move to a totally different environment.  Either of those can be acts of self-preservation.

I’m aware now that students living at home with their parents might find that difficult and yet there is no alternative for the time being.  Given that, the question is whether the student can change some of the circumstances of living at home.  The option of moving out might not be realistic for quite a while.  So making changes at home that all can accept might be the best that can be done for now.

Limit Your Anger

There may be others who thrive on being angry, essentially all the time. For such people anger is empowering.  Anger enables the fight instinct and with fight the person has a sense of agency.  Anger also seems a way to combat fear.  I want to acknowledge this because it doesn’t work this way for me.

Sustained anger is the path to depression for me.  I’m a person who relies on my own sensitivity and on reasoning things out.  Anger blocks the good that is in me.  When I don’t stay in touch with the good that is in me, I lose my sense of agency.

I’m guessing that most people are like me in this respect. Nevertheless, they are susceptible to being stoked.  Further, the subsequent feelings of anger can be addicting, so they end up craving repeated stoking.  The media manipulators, on both the right and the left, fully understand that.  There is money and power in attracting more eyeballs.  Taking a stoking-the-audience approach may very well be a winning strategy for them.  But if members of the audience are addicted to the feelings they get when being stoked, this can lead to depression and/or reinforce depression that is already present.
The first step in making an improvement to the situation is to recognize there is a problem.  In this case, I think it then sensible to monitor one’s own anger.  How frequent are those feelings?  Then one might experiment with the environment.  If there is some TV show or Website that is monitored repeatedly, stop doing that for a day or two.  Is there any impact on the anger?  Going cold turkey on an addiction is very hard to do.  But understanding there is an addiction can make it more manageable.

Learn About Yourself Enough To Know How You Behave When on Your A-Game

I know that with friends and family as well as in a good work environment, I like to joke around, make wisecracks or puns, and share rhymes I write. This is what I do when I’m not stressed out and am enjoying myself.  I also know that when I’m on my own, I try to be reflective and think things through.  Writing blog posts like this is a way to encourage that.

Before the arthritis came big time I used to enjoy golf and jogging. Earlier it was tennis or squash.  Now I do the treadmill.  It’s not the same, but it is something.

The thought is for the person to on a regular basis try for A-Game behavior.  Make the trying routine, even if what happens when doing the A-Game is creative and unique to the situation.  If you do your A-Game with some frequency and there is some internal (feel good) reward from doing so, it will make you more resilient to handle the inevitable disappointments that come along.  Conversely, it you try for A-Game behavior and you get no satisfaction from it at all and this happens over a sustained period of time, it is evidence that you are depressed.

Give Yourself A Break Now and Then

I’ve found this one to be big for me.  I have high standards for my own performance.  I can get on myself pretty hard when I don’t live up to those standards. Then I’m my own worst enemy.  My way of managing this is to lighten up, take delight in ordinary yet whimsical things, and actually elevate them in importance.  It’s a way of maintaining inner balance.

Embrace the Creative Attitude

I wrote about this in a recent post.  To illustrate, I want to return to my opening paragraph, which may have seemed weird to the point that I might be going off the deep end.  What I wrote about really did happen.  But writing about it was a judgment call.  I wanted to illustrate getting fully engaged in a situation that presents itself, without expecting it ahead of time. In this case, the first question that popped into my mind was this.  Has the AI in Google’s search engine gotten so good that it can simulate mind reading?  My second thought was whether I’m communicating in a way I’m not aware of but the computer can pick it up.  Thoughts of The Tell, which is described in the movie Rounders, occurred to me.  When I’m typing into the text box for Blogger, which is what I normally use as my editor, does Google process that in real time so when I then do a search that search is conditioned on what I’ve just typed.  Or might it be my inadvertent audio input, which is what I wrote about in that paragraph?  For me, having an experience that seems puzzling is a trigger to explore why it happened.  I can get completely wrapped up in that without having any prior intent to get so involved.

I don’t want to tell anyone else what they should get wrapped up in.  I only want to reiterate what I said in that earlier post on the creative attitude.  Being completely absorbed in an activity is a mentally healthy thing to do. Having regular experiences of such absorption is a way to ward off depression.

* * * * *

Let’s wrap up this post.  I’ve given a variety of suggestions, each of which makes sense to me.  I’ve also tried to provide enough about my own experience to show why these matter.  What I’ve said may appeal to a certain personality type only (my Myers-Briggs type is INTP).  It may very well be that other types need different coping strategies.  On just this one point it would be good to hear from other teachers and authority figures about how they go about things.

There is also the matter of the credibility of the sender of the message.  For students, they may be more trusting of their own teachers.  This is another reason why it would be good to hear from others about these issues.

Many people are uncomfortable in talking about depression.  It’s time to come to terms with that discomfort.  The mental health crisis among college students is real.  We all should be talking about it and sharing ideas about how we keep depression at bay for ourselves.  It’s a necessary conversation to have.

Reconsidering Elitism in Public Education

The core argument in this piece is that we should expand elite offerings at public schools and public universities as a way to enhance social welfare and address the issues that ail us in education.

What does this mean in plain English?

I'll try to illustrate with a few examples.  The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is the flagship university of the U of I system and is generally regarded at the best public university in the state of Illinois.  Illinois State, in Bloomington-Normal, is a good university but is less prestigious.  What I'm arguing is that some students who ended up at ISU should instead be attending the U of I.

Similarly, within the Urbana-Champaign campus some colleges are considered elite and are more restrictive regarding admission, while other colleges are more accepting.  Since I teach economics, which is in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and many of the students I teach would have preferred to be in the Gies College of Business, what I'm arguing is that some of these econ students should actually be admitted to Gies, by an amount that is more than a mere drop in the bucket.  The increased numbers should be on the order of 50% to 100% of current enrollments. And I mean this to be a sustained plan over at least a decade, maybe longer, enough time to evaluate the impact of such a change.  In this piece I want to argue for why this is apt to be a change for the better.

Then, let's face it, there is elitism in public high schools and middles schools, elementary schools too.  This goes under the name tracking, or honors programs, or gifted programs, or some other labeling that makes the students in such programs seem to be the elite.

I am arguing to make the elite student more abundant, as a policy matter, thereby lessening the value in the distinction of being designated an elite student.  I hope to explain why this would be helpful in addressing key issues in education and why public institutions, in particular, should feel obligated to proceed along these lines.  From a social-welfare point of view, the same argument applies to non-profit but private educational organizations.  However, I believe it will take substantial coercion of such institutions to achieve this end.  So I will focus in this piece on public institutions, because the argument is easier to make in this case. If that argument succeeds in convincing readers, the private educational organizations can be taken on then.

On the other hand, I'm not arguing to treat all students as perfectly equal, which some might consider the ideal.  I believe that treating students as completely equal, irrespective of student intellectual and emotive capacity at any fixed time, is impossible.  To ignore student differentials when they are evident, purely in the name of equality, would be self-defeating.  So, while the temptation to be a purist on this is definitely there, that's not where we're headed.  Later in this essay, I will argue for why some apparent elitism is necessary.  What I would like to see, whether this is possible or not is to be argued thoroughly, is for all students to count in the social welfare function that determines how public education goes about things.  It seems to me now that non-elite students are ignored.  That's what needs to change - dramatically.

* * * * *

With this, I'm trying for two different things in this piece.  One is an explanation for why the mental health issues among current college students are so acute.  This requires an explanation of causality.  In this part, the current post is a sequel to my previous one, about students embracing the creative attitude on their own.  Here we're considering what in the academic environment might be changed to make for substantial improvement in student mental health.

The other is why the system doesn't have auto-corrects that are built in which would remedy the immediate issue, at least eventually.  It doesn't seem there is an immediate remedy.  Why is that?

So, I'm hoping that this piece will get others to pose these questions as well.   But I also want to note, those who are managing the elite units in public education have an incentive to leave well enough alone.  I don't want to get into combat with such folks.  My objective is more modest here.  I merely want to get such folks to ask - is there something that can be done to better the situation overall.

Then, further, I surely don't mean this piece as the last word on the matter.  Rather, I mean it as a beginning of an investigation as to what institutions might do, together, to ameliorate the issue.

* * * * *

I'd like to begin this section with a little jargon from economics, which I think will be helpful in framing the issues.  An economic rent is a payment to a factor of production in excess of what is needed to elicit its supply.  The concept was first developed by David Ricardo, who was concerned that the landed gentry would earn rents from tenant farmers and thereby suck out valuable resources from the economy that otherwise might be invested in productive activities. Rent seeking is competition done where the prize at the end of the tunnel is an economic rent.  The rent seeking, if itself otherwise not productive, dissipates the surplus from the economic rent.

Now let's consider a different notion from economics, product differentiation.  To keep things simple economists talk about vertical product differentiation, in which case the products differ in quality where everyone can agree which product is of higher quality and which of lower quality, and then they talk about horizontal quality, where the products are different but people will disagree as to which they prefer.  Vertical product differentiation is often associated with what is called second degree price discrimination (menu pricing) where the seller offers the buyer a variety of choices.  The most expensive is associated with the highest quality.  Seating on airplanes conforms with this approach - first class is better than coach and it is more expensive to fly first class.  Conversely if you are buying a particular model car of a certain year, car color acts to differentiate one car from another, but there is no price differential based on color.  Vehicle color is an example of horizontal differentiation.

Still a different economics notion is efficient risk absorption.  The standard example is buying insurance against some potential significant downside risk.  The insurance company, through diversification from offering many similar policies with independent risks, is better able to absorb the risk than the insured.  Indeed, that is necessary for the insurance market to work.  Yet there are limits to efficient risk absorption when the insured can impact the likelihood of the loss or the magnitude of the loss, should loss occur, and where lessening the risk is costly for the insured.  So it is well understood that the insured must still bear some of the risk, via deductibles, co-payments, and the like.  And sometimes there is absolutely no market for insuring certain risks because this moral hazard is simply too great to enable a market to function.  In particular, when a student enters college, the student can't purchase earned income insurance to cover income risk in the labor market that the student will experience after graduation. So the student and/or the student's family bears that particular risk entirely. Students whose families are reasonably well off can partially diversify this risk with holding other financial assets.  Other students, whose families are of more modest means, bear the full brunt of this risk.

Now a bit of an aside.  When I started working as an assistant professor, in fall 1980, there was debate going on about whether a college education was a public good, in which case the tuition should be paid for by the state and funded from tax revenues or if, instead, college education was a private good, so tuition should be paid for by the student and/or the student's family.  One can agree there is a mixture of the two but then disagree about the relative importance of each component.  Milton Friedman famously took the position that college education was primarily a private good.  Indeed, at public universities the share of the cost of education borne by the state has declined over this time period, which suggests that the private good view of college education has increasing credence with the electorate.  Nevertheless, there remains a popular view that college education should provide a path for upward mobility,  thereby justifying need-based scholarships.  But at what volume are these offered and how much upward mobility is actually generated?  Bernie Sanders popularized the notion of free college as a way to get at this matter.  Yet community colleges have always been a lower tuition alternative, at least for the first two years of college.  Elite public education needs to be factored into this discussion.  Does free college merely end up being the lower quality version of some second degree price-discrimination approach to tuition? Further, if there is a threshold family income above which the student isn't qualified for free college, let us note that the family will bear the income risk.  On middle income families, that can be quite a burden.

Thus an argument can be made that some other party should bear that income risk.   Some years ago I wrote a speculative post on employer pay for college, reasoning that the future employer could better bear the risk, and then would extract what was paid in tuition by lower wages to the new graduate over some pre-specified period of time. A similar argument could be made that the Federal government pay for college and then have the graduate face higher taxes over a period of time.  If the student could commit to living within the state after graduation, it could be state government that does this.  The difference between this approach and the current approach with student loans is that the amount actually paid back would vary with future income, not just with the amount of tuition paid.  This strikes me as the right way to manage the issue, but might never happen because there is no champion to advocate for it and it could end up a political football.

Let me turn to the next economics issue, which is related.  Capitalism features income inequality.  To illustrate, there is a well known story about when a reporter asked Babe Ruth how come he was paid more than the President of the United States.  The Babe responded, "I had a better year."  The story illustrates that we associate higher earnings with higher performance and, as I mentioned, that's a feature of the system, not a bug.  However, there is now a growing consensus that income inequality has been growing over the past 40 years and the consequences have been extremely pernicious.  You hear that in the expression "the hollowing out of the middle class."  The causes for this increase in income inequality are many and varied.  I will list a few of them: income tax rates have become less progressive, manufacturing went into decline, labor unions lost their power, greater lobbying and increased campaign contributions occurred so the rich could lock in rents that had been previously generated, less enforcement of antitrust law, etc.  There is a growing consensus that we should start having the pendulum swing in the other direction.  I believe, and this may be controversial, that public education should be part of this effort in reducing income inequality.  To do this, assuming that on average, the future earnings of elite students are higher than the future earnings of ordinary students, this means there should be earnings compression.  How would that happen?  One possible way is for public education, across the board, to embrace a more progressive tax system.  This may not be the best way to achieve the result.  I would welcome others who can think through a better alternative.  But, I want to note here, that elite public education may now be encouraging increases in income inequality.  Elite public education therefore needs to take a look at itself to see if the charge sticks.

Let's move on to the last economics idea to be considered here.  This is the notion of sector-specific hyperinflation, sustained price increases in a sector at a rate that is higher than the general inflation rate.  This has happened in healthcare.  It's also happened with elite higher education, and here I'm including private non-profits as well as public colleges.  Full tuition at these places has experienced hyperinflation over the past 40 years. One measure of how elite these colleges are is their selectivity in admissions.  Highly selective colleges have excess demand for the slots they are to fill.  (There is a substantial measurement issue with how much excess demand there actually is as many elite students apply to multiple colleges for admission and, to my knowledge, these students don't provide their rankings among those colleges as to which is the most preferred, the next most preferred, etc. But that there is excess demand seems unmistakable.)  The excess demand persists because the supply of slots at these elite colleges doesn't grow.  That supply is fixed to generate a predetermined quality of education, which, ironically, is determined to a large extent by the quality of the new admits.  (Though I'm no great fan of standardized testing, the scores can be used as a way to measure the quality of the new admits.)  Hyperinflation is the result under chronic excess demand.  If this much of the fundamentals we can agree upon, and if leadership in higher education overall has some responsibility on keeping costs under control, then expanding the slots at elite colleges and within elite programs is a rational management strategy.  The additional students who fill these slots will have to come from somewhere; a good number of them will likely be students who otherwise would attend a non-elite college.

* * * * *

Here will be a brief bit on teaching to the student rather than simply teaching the subject.  The best example I have of this, which I believe worked pretty well at the time, was the SRA reading program we had in elementary school.  Students differed by the speed at which they read and the comprehension they showed in what they read.  The students were put into different categories, color coded, that were sorted in vertical fashion, so they could receive instruction according to their current reading level.  They would demonstrate mastery at that level and then advance to the next level.  This is in accord with current views of developing expertise by deliberate practice.  In my school, when the class did SRA, students changed where they sat so that all the students working on the same color level were in the same row of seats.  And the sorting of students progressed from one level to the next.  So kids could see who the better readers were and who the worse readers were.  I don't know if that was necessary as part of SRA or if it simply was easier for the teacher to manage the students that way.  In any event, teaching that does target where the student is currently along a trajectory of growth invariably invites students to make comparisons between themselves and other students.   Of course, the teacher does this too when assigning grades

Not all instruction can be done via self-study as with SRA.  Sometimes the teacher must teach the class as a whole.  Which student does the teacher target with this instruction?  Will it be the elite students who always raise their hands while the more ordinary students who keep quiet?  How does the instructor get greater participation from the ordinary students?  This is the argument for tracking, that makes learning better for all the students as there is less variation of student quality within each class.

But there can be lock-in with tracking so once on the fast track the student stays there, regardless of seeming performance, and likewise, once in the slow track the student stays there, possibly by not trying very hard with the learning.  In this the elite students can start to believe it is an entitlement, rather than a temporary solution.

There is then the reality that schools are now measured by standardized test performance and elite students then become valued commodities, since they enhance (some) school performance measures.  Further, if transferring to another school is an option, the school then has some reason to accommodate the elite student, to preclude that outcome.  Parental pressure on the school surely matters here.  So, some tracking seems inevitable that is beyond the amount that benefits all students.  The issue is whether that can be limited whereas now it appears to be off the charts.

* * * * *

Now I want to start to put the pieces together.  The idea that getting an education is at least partly rent seeking has been with us for a very long time.  I found this commercial of Abe Lincoln going to an employment agency looking for a job - you ain't going nowhere without that sheepskin, fella - which was on TV when I still was in high school.  And I can certainly remember students who were referred to as grade grubbers, both when I was in high school and when I was in college.  (Pre-med students had a bad reputation that way.)  So it wasn't just the degree, it was the GPA too, or so it seemed. 

The thing is, students can go about their schooling in different ways.  My preferred way is for students to embrace the creative attitude, as I discussed in the previous post, do that intensively, and then get the good GPA as a byproduct from that.  In this way the student will learn to direct the learning and that will tend to produce good mental health.  (I want to be clear that this is not foolproof.  Bob Seeger's phrase - the awkward teenage blues - are still possible even with students who have embraced the creative attitude - so mental health issues can emerge from that.)  But, let's agree that many students go about things differently - even good and conscientious students.  I wrote about this in a post called, Why does memorization persist as the primary way college students study to prepare for exams? The quick and dirty answer to that question is that many students are not confident in their own ability to learn deeply, so they try for a different method that still is apt to produce reasonably good results as far as achieving a good score on the exam.  They are doing this to get the approval of others, mainly parents and teachers.  They do not learn to direct their own learning this way and the approach is far less nurturing regarding their own mental health.  If they have other activities, hanging out with friends or pursuing some hobby deeply, they can self-nurture that way.  This requires free time outside of school, however.

Now, let's do a longitudinal comparison between when I graduated from high school, 1972, and high school graduates now.  The incentive to treat school as rent seeking is far greater, given the increased income inequality and the greater income return to elite education.  Purely on those grounds, the Amy Chua tiger mom approach to parenting makes sense, perhaps starting when the kid is in grade school, because of the big investment that elite college education now is.  But this pushing comes not just with concern for the kid's GPA.  It also includes orchestrating the kid's extracurricular activities.  So the kid is fully (I would say over) programmed and the kid is not a driver of any of this, except perhaps by choosing not to rebel against the parent exercising control.  Early on, pleasing the parent might make the kid happy too.  Eventually, however, the kid will find no identity of one's own and no way to learn even what the kid wants for himself or herself.  This is quite bad for the kid's mental health.  For example, see Hanna Rosin's piece The Silicon Valley Suicides.

Many of these kids obsess about their GPAs, but actually fail to learn important life lessons as a consequence.  See Adam Grant's opinion piece, What Straight-A Students Get Wrong.  Then the argument is to save these students from themselves, reduce the incentive for rent seeking.  Depreciating the value of the credential, both the degree and the GPA, would be helpful here.  Further, if colleges did this then the same notion can be pushed down to the high schools, and so forth.

However, if only one college did this while the rest continued with business as usual, or one academic program did this but elsewhere it didn't happen, then the likely outcome would be an out migration of elite students to go elsewhere and a decline in the revenues that the innovating unit can garner.  With regard to elite public universities, in particular, one might not see the out migration of in-state students, because of the large tuition differential with comparable alternatives, but one is apt to see a decline in out-of-state students or international students, who pay much higher tuition rates.  Therefore, to embrace the recommended solution at scale would require the bulk of elite public institutions to do likewise.

* * * * *

Keeping the previous paragraph in mind, I want to again look at these sort of decisions from the perspective of a single elite college within a larger public university.  I base what I have to say here on the four years where I was an Associate Dean in the College of Business (2006-2010) where there was a weekly meeting of other A-Deans and Department Heads.   Part of this period overlaps with the start of the Great Recession, which may have made everyone even more mercenary than they otherwise would be.  During this time period, the college got campus approval for students to pay a college-specific surcharge, in addition to the base tuition that all students pay. This may have further impacted my impression as I observe the following.

The way a high selective academic unit operates in determining the number of students to admit is very much like the standard textbook model of the monopolist that sets a uniform price when facing a downward sloping demand curve.  The standard result is that such pricing maximizes the producer surplus for the monopolist, but there is a loss in social surplus as compared to the alternative where the good is supplied in a competitive market.  This loss of social surplus is not a concern to the monopolist, but it is a concern to a planner who wants to maximize the social welfare.  (Note that if the monopolist can practice first degree (perfect) price discrimination, there is no loss of social surplus, but that textbook ideal is typically not feasible.)  So the argument is that the next larger containing unit, in this case that's the Urbana-Champaign campus, should be like the social planner and encourage more students to be admitted to the College of Business.  That would be welfare improving.

But under the approach to these decisions I was aware of when I was an Associate Dean (I'm guessing this is still true now, though I don't know that for a fact) each college gets to determine the desired number of new admits.  (Managing the yield on acceptances is a tricky matter, which I don't want to get into here. We will focus on the admit decision only, implicitly assuming that we can invert the yield function so to determine the number of new students.)   It would thus require a major change in campus culture to move the admit decisions for each college to the Provost's Office.

Likewise, the admit decision for the campus as a whole is determined by the campus, but by a similar argument that admit decision should instead revert to the U of I System or perhaps even to the Board of Higher Education in Illinois.   One might hope that individual units would be good citizens and thus could retain decision making power over admission after receiving edicts from above about what the ultimate goal is.  Keeping the decisions local can be argued because actual supply of instruction will be much better understood at the local level.  Yet, if my experience is still relevant on this, when money is especially tight, the incentive to behave as a monopolist is especially strong.  Counting on the good citizenship of each local unit may then be wishful thinking.

* * * * *

I want to conclude here.  With that, I will briefly talk about my motivation for writing this piece.  While I have tried to take an arm's length and analytical approach in giving my argument, I'm really quite emotional about the issue of student mental health, as I've had several students last fall who were at varying levels of going over the deep end.  One, whom I gave an Absent from Final grade to and who in middle January seemed to be making up the coursework she missed in the fall, suddenly stopped doing the remainder of the work and I haven't heard from her since.  I sent her an email about a week ago to find out what's up but got no response.  Under the circumstances, that's really all I can do.

Kids like this, and there are quite a few of them, still matter.  I was able to help some others get through the course.  Higher Ed is responding to the crisis by talking about the shortage of mental healthcare professionals on campus.  That's an issue, but it is not the issue.  The issue is us and making how we go about things more humane, and more educative at the same time.  When will we wake up to see the need to do that?