Retards

It occurred to me not long ago that behaviors I had previously taken as adult expression of creativity really were nothing more than rehashes of childhood experience, fifty or so years later, modified to be delivered with current technology.  As a kid, for six years I went to sleep away camp in upstate New York.  It was a long deal - eight weeks each summer.  During the last week or so we had "Color War," the Blue Team against the Gold Team.  Every event was a competition.  If you won, that gave points to your team.  The winning team had more cumulative points.  One of the competitions was done after dinner at the Rec Hall.  The counselors in your group and who were on your team would have previously written snippets of mock lyrics with a camp theme, done to well known tunes, mainly from Broadway musicals.  Your group would  rehearse these during "rest hour" or some other downtime.  Then, during the appointed evening, your group would perform these song bites.   I can't recall whether there was piano accompaniment or not.  It doesn't matter.  At this level, all campers were performers.  Allan Sherman produced the same sort of content, though he did full songs that way.  The key was to produce a humorous and perhaps mildly satirical lyric, to the rhythm of the familiar music.  My Son, The Folksinger provides an excellent example of this genre.  I haven't been to the borscht belt in many years and have been in a university setting for a long time, so try to be more cosmopolitan in my current efforts, but the essence of what I do now can be found in these origins.

Though for the most part I did like summer camp, I believe the main reason we went was so my parents could have a vacation from us.  Yet we did do family vacation too, now and then.  Some of that was before we were old enough to go to camp.  One year when I was three or four that was in Cuddebackville.  I know it only from watching home movies.  We spent some time on a lake in a motorboat, with a kid named Phillip steering the boat.  I have no recollection now of how we knew him or his family.  The next year or the year after that we were at Green Acres.  I had an ingrown toenail and got injections for it that made me cry.  We hung out around the pool and I had to be extra careful, because of my toe.  The next time it was Sha-wan-ga.  We were with our parents there for breakfast and dinner, but in the day there was a camp.  I recall playing punchball and kickball.  There was also some wooden structure we hung out in to play indoor games.  This was probably the first time I spent extended time with kids who had Down's Syndrome.  I remember feeling uncomfortable about that, but I'm not sure why now.  Maybe it's because I couldn't understand what they were saying.  I also have this rather odd and disturbing recollection of finding human feces in the corner of that structure.  It's only a memory fragment and after all these years it easily could be a complete delusion, but I suspect it's real and somehow I associate that recollection with the Down's kids.

Fast forward several years to my last year at sleep away camp.  I was thirteen then, my second year in the Seniors group; this time in bunk 19.  We had a kid in our bunk named Gary and he was quite peculiar in many ways.  For one thing, this was a Jewish camp and he wasn't Jewish.  Though the camp did have Arts and Crafts and Nature activities, most of the time was spent playing team sports, mainly softball and basketball.  Gary was a complete incompetent in all things athletic.  It's as if our maker had assembled Gary wrong, with his legs on backwards.  I was not a very speedy runner, at best average for the group, but I was much faster than Gary.  He couldn't run at all.  And when he swung a bat to hit the softball there simply wasn't any oomph.   There's no way he could have enjoyed playing softball.  Why was he there?

Some of my bunk mates teased Gary mercilessly, if I recollect correctly they then occasionally escalated with physical taunts. The teasing and the taunting bothered me and in that sense I was different from most of my bunk mates.  (One other kid in the bunk also was not athletic and he stayed out of the taunting, as did another kid who was diabetic.)  I had been teased a lot as a kid, at camp and elsewhere.  Much of that happened because I was so much larger than the other kids.  For the most part, being very big is not a disability.  By thirteen my motor skills had caught up to my size, but five years earlier they hadn't, so then I couldn't readily retaliate and "had to take it," in a good natured way.  That's a big part of why I was teased.  Some of it, though, was from the counselors, who came up with unflattering nicknames for me. That was just the way things were done then, ignorant though it may seem from a current vantage. 

I had no desire to become Gary's friend.  We didn't really have anything in common.  Nevertheless, I did become his protector of sorts.  I stayed close to him at the end of a ball game on our way back to the bunk.  I don't think Gary asked me to do that.  It's just that I didn't see any point to the teasing and the counselor's weren't always around to stop it.  If I could, I should.   My bunk mates wouldn't bother Gary when I was near him, so they wouldn't have to deal with me.  In that way, the responsibility became mine.

I knew how to pronounce Gary's surname, but I didn't recall how to spell it.  I did a Google search for him, trying one version, then another.  On the second version I found a hit, born in 1955, the same year I was born, and from Scarsdale, which seems possible.  That probably was him.  The entry said he passed away in 1998.  If it's the same guy, I suspect he lived a troubled existence for his entire lifetime.  I hope he's more at peace now.

* * * * * 

There's needs to be a trigger to come to memories of this sort.  I've been cooking on several things for a while, some of which will be revealed in the rest of the post.  The actual trigger was the movie Charly, which I watched in part the other night night.  I've seen it several times before and liked it, though it produced no special reaction.  This time, however, it pushed me over a cliff.

The movie is based upon Flowers for Algernon, first a short story, later because of popular demand a full novel.   It is about a laboratory mouse, Algernon is his name, who is part of psychology experiments.  Algernon receives an operation that raises his intelligence, temporarily.   After observing the positive results with Algernon, the thought is that something similar might be done with humans.  Charly is the human who gets the operation.   At the beginning of the movie  Charlie is a complete imbecile, with very low intelligence, though earnest in his endeavors and with a gentle disposition.  Cliff Robertson, who won the Academy Award in the lead role, portrays this mainly with his mouth, wide open most of the time and apparently out of control.   Charly too is a laboratory animal.  One of the tests he is put through is to have a maze on a piece of paper that exactly mimics a physical maze Algernon is to run.  Charlie must complete the paper maze without lifting his pencil from the paper.  He races against Algernon.  The mouse wins the race.  They race again with a different maze.  Algernon wins this one too.

Charly works at a commercial bakery, as a helper.  His co-workers play gags on him.  Charly is the butt of their practical jokes.  Evidently, they don't see the harm in this.  It entertains them to put one over on him.  Charly is too stupid to know that it's a gag.  He goes along with it, to be one of the boys.  At the end, everyone has a good laugh, Charly included.  The co-workers don't have a clue that these gags do bother Charly.

The lab experiments bother Charly too, but the psychologists apparently aren't aware that his ego is taking a bruising from losing to Algernon.  In that way the psychologists, smart in understanding human behavior, are extraordinarily insular in understanding human feelings.  Nowadays, of course, there are protocols for human subjects research that are there, in part, to guard against this sort of insularity.  The movie was made before those safeguards were put into place.   Nevertheless, I found it quite disturbing that the highly educated psychologists in the film could be so insensitive and that was part of a very believable story line.  How can that be?

* * * * *

We're told nowadays that learning things by rote is unhelpful and such knowledge doesn't stick for long.  But as kids we learned mindlessly an entire lexicon.  Some of that was the repertoire of jokes that made the rounds.   Others were bad things to say that we used either to be playful with our friends, yet in a mocking way, or to be overtly critical.  Calling somebody "a retard" is one of those.  (See definition 4.)  Likewise, a term I used above to describe Charly, imbecile, is in this category.  We learned more than just individual words this way.  We learned sing-song lines too.   This one, particularly insensitive I've been told as an adult but pretty common in use when we were kids, is done while attempting to clap your hands but having them miss:

If you're a spastic and you know it clap your hands.  

A question I've been asking myself recently is whether we learn to treat certain people in certain circumstances this same way, thoughtless behavior that perpetuates, because it never occurs to us there's a harm being done to someone, perhaps because the behavior itself has been learned in a sing-song way.  If that's true, then in the domains where it happens we don't grow up.  We remain children instead.  Why do some people do grow up and others don't?  I wish I knew.

* * * * *

I'd like to think I treat people with common decency, but I must confess that often I fall far short of the ideal suggested by the example with Gary.  I've puzzled about this on occasion and whether that bothers me or not when I do.  Here are some tentative conclusions.

One  explanation might be termed ethical shirking.  In order to do the right thing, some minor fear I have needs to be overcome.  I'm full of phobias, some sensible, others silly.  I've been afraid of dogs much of my life.  The last seven years we've had a dog, a golden doodle named Ginger.  I'm definitely not afraid of Ginger, though unlike my son I won't try to grab stuff out of her mouth when she's got a good hold of it.  Having Ginger has helped lessen the intensity of this particular fear.  But it hasn't gone away fully.  It comes out when I go for a walk and see a dog (on a leash held by the owner) and have to make a mental judgment to continue walking on the path I was headed along or if to cross the street or in some other way divert my path to avoid close contact with the dog.  My resolution of this is quite idiosyncratic.  Sometimes I cave into the fear.  Other times I show some spine.   I want to stress here that this is with a dog on a leash and the owner is somebody I don't know.  If the dog is somehow out in the open without the owner, I almost surely will cave.  If I know the owner and he or she is around, I almost surely will not be fearful in the first place.

I don't know if fear of failure is the same as fear of dogs in the ill feeling it generates within.  But I think the response to the fear is similarly idiosyncratic.  Sometimes I cave in.  Other times I show character.  I should note that cave in happens just because of an ill feeling inside, without any attempt to ascertain the true risk.  Here is a particular example, to serve as illustration and make the ideas less abstract.

For many years when I was a campus-level administrator, I was the head facilitator for the Faculty Summer Institute on Learning Technologies.  One year the steering committee decided to have an outside speaker come to talk about Web design for people with disabilities.  In fulfilling that mandate we ultimately decided to invite Norm Coombs, an emeritus professor from the Rochester Institute of Technology and an expert on these matters.  Norm happens to be blind.

FSI has a lot of moving parts to it, Murphy's Law tends to favor technology events that have some complexity to them, and a good part of my job as head facilitator was to demonstrate to each person involved that their piece of the puzzle had been well considered, in itself and as part of the whole, and that I was available to help in the spur of the moment, if the need arose.  There was quite a bit of planning in getting FSI to work.  The actual week was kind of hectic nonetheless.

Though I've interacted some with blind people on campus, as part of our efforts with accessibility, they were local and knew to navigate on their own or provide for the assistance they needed.  Our interaction was work related only.  In Norm's case he clearly would need a chaperone, to get from the airport to the hotel, to get from the hotel to where he was speaking, and more generally to accommodate his needs.  I was fearful of playing the chaperone role.  I didn't know whether I was up to it.  And I didn't know how time consuming it would be.  The first issue was the fear.  The second issue was a rational time allocation question.  To address both, I got one of my staff who was willing to be chaperone and wasn't otherwise obligated during FSI, Jan, to play the role.  That went quite well, as did Norm's presentation.  However, I was more aloof with Norm than I was with other guest speakers we had, whom I tried hard to befriend and put at ease, because I mistakenly thought that doing so would mean I'd have to perform the chaperone functions for which I was ill prepared.

The next year we had Norm back.  He had done such a good job the year before, it made sense to do that.  But Jan had retired by then and all my other staff were obligated with FSI work.  So the chaperone job fell to me.  I went through a bit of dread about that, complicated by the fact that there was extremely bad weather the afternoon Norm was to have arrived.  His flight ended up being very late.  When I did get him from the airport, it took me only a minute or two to realize that all my worrying was for naught.  I could perform the chaperone function with little fanfare.  All it took was for Norm to have a good hold of my arm, to walk at a modest pace, and to have a more or less steady stream of conversation that included but wasn't restricted to discussing the obstacles he'd have to encounter - escalator, car door, etc.  Afterward, I was rather ashamed of myself for being frightened about this.  On the plus side, Norm gave another very good talk and this time we connected quite well.

Fear is not the only reason for sometimes straying from decency.  Some of this is simply numbness. Time allocation may be part of the issue, but it is not one and the same with it.  The numbness is perhaps explained by the same finding that shows the rich are less empathetic.  The numbness is a learned behavior, in the same way we learned to filter by eyeball much of the email that comes into our Inbox.  Prior experience suggests paying attention is a low expected reward path, so ignoring it is optimal.  Sometimes this happens even when there are some early warning signs to the contrary.   I'll return to this point in my last subsection.

* * * * *

I've been making some but slow progress with Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow.  Part of the reason for the slow pace is that the book paints a picture of human nature that I find unattractive.   Another part is that in reading it and asking whether what it describes is me or not, I find myself more exception than rule, part of which may be my training as a PhD economist, the academic career that occurred afterward, and my role as a campus administrator.  In all of that there are lots of elements of education that cut against the picture Kahneman depicts.  Still another part may be that I don't really want to accept his conclusions for the rest of the population.  I maintain a hopeful conceit, that they can be educated to be like me in these respects, without having to go through the regimen I experienced.  It would be disheartening to abandon this view, because much of what I'm trying for in my teaching would have to be discarded as well.

Here I want to discuss Chapter 7 - A Machine for Jumping to Conclusions.  On the one hand, Kahneman makes a point that we all can agree on quickly, we reach quick conclusions using information that depends on context in a critical way.  The information, entirely unaltered, would have a different meaning if read in a different context.  This part is unremarkable and as I said, we can all agree on it being true.

Then he makes the further point that we tend to ignore possible information that is not readily available, a reiteration of the saying, Out of sight, out of mind.  Here I begin to stray from what Kahneman says is typical.  Often I will ask whether my tentative conclusion is indeed correct or if I still need to gather further information to make a full determination.  I discuss these issues at some length in a chapter of my book called, Guessing and Verification.  Kahneman indicates that most other people don't do that.  Instead he says they treat the information at hand as if its the entire universe of possible information.  Kahneman calls this What You See Is All There Is.   Then Kahneman goes on to say that not only is there WYSIATI, but further that people are typically overly confident in the conclusions they derive from WYSIATI.  This overconfidence is a kind of woeful ignorance.  Reading about it depressed me.

Then I recalled one of my favorite lines from George Orwell:

To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.

This is the first sentence of the closing paragraph in an essay about people's intellectual schizophrenia, particularly in regard to political life.  By this Orwell is talking about maintaining truth in a proposition that we should know is false simply by reviewing other things we already know to be true. This essay is a very good read and serves as a rather frightening warning about all the stupidity the collective mind seemingly can lock onto.  If you juxtapose Orwell with Kahneman, you come to the inescapable conclusion that what you don't see may very well include things that you did see before but are now buried in memory.  It's not just the potentially knowable things that we've not yet experienced that matter.  It's also those things we know but don't immediately come to mind.  (Why don't those things come to mind?)

Kahneman in this chapter seems to be describing Charly's co-workers at the bakery.  This is how they operate.  It isn't a pretty picture.  What would it take to shock them out of their complacency and challenge their assumptions?

* * * * *

In the very small class I'm teaching this semester, now only eight students, three of them have taken some other course from me in the past.  We've had more than the usual amount of conversation in class, because of the small size.  A good bit of what the students have said paints a picture of being an undergrad at Big Public U akin to Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, alienated and dehumanized by the bureaucracy and the stress that comes from the lecture/high stakes exam approach to the classes they've taken.  I pointed out to them that there is a paradox of sort in this observation, because as Daniel Pink points out in this video, knowledge work is quite different from manual labor.  There can (and should be) intrinsic motivation for knowledge work.  There really can't be for the manual labor, particularly when the work is repetitive and mind numbing.  For several of these students, school has gone from being potentially rewarding in its own right to dull and dreary labor in its stead.   I've been puzzling for quite a while about this predicament.

In much of my efforts with teaching, I've conceived the challenge along intellectual lines, framing the subject matter in a way that somebody who is otherwise inclined to be engaged would enjoy it. With that I've mainly stressed generating an interesting narrative and deemphasizing the derivation of math models.  That approach has been a partial success, at best.

But with a couple of students, one in particular who is among the three who had a class from me already, I'm beginning to see that treating them as human being in regard to their own welfare as having positive benefits on motivation, and perhaps on performance. 

A conjecture based on this limited experience is that the students want to be treated as adults.  When they find the institution treating them as children, they react negatively in some way - shirking, rebelling, or becoming disillusioned.  Big public universities are apt to be more bureaucratic in my experience than are smaller private universities.  I asked one Assistant Dean in Student Affairs in the College of Business about this when I worked in the College.  She explained the adherence to bureaucracy as emerging from a need to satisfy the taxpayer that things are on the up and up.  (If I recall, the particular issue at hand was the last date a student could drop a course without permission of the instructor.  When I was an undergrad at Cornell in the 1970s, I believe you could drop a class all the way till when final exams were given.  At Illinois, it's much earlier in the semester.)

A lot of attention by my friends and colleagues in learning technology is now given to pedagogy, thinking it the key to unblock student learning.  Perhaps there are some clues here that maybe it is less important than assumed but that we need some substantial additional efforts in treating the students as adults and doing so with decency.   Much of that interaction happens not within courses per se, but elsewhere, with advisers, placement officers, and other possible counselors, as well as and perhaps more importantly with peers.  My experience this semester is that the students themselves often perform below par initially and this itself can bring about a string of pernicious tit for tat.

We need to get past that rather than let it perpetuate.  The institution, however, doesn't seem to have this as a goal.  In that it's not the students who are retards.  It's us.

Harshness of Political Rhetoric and the Race to the Bottom

The ads have started.  If you've already had a primary in your state, you know the ones I'm talking about. I wouldn't know except for the basketball.  I no longer watch the local news, apart from when school closings are a possibility.  There isn't much else on the local channels to draw me in.  You hear about the ads by watching the NewsHour.  It's different actually witnessing them.

Unlike in the past, I've hardly watched the basketball.  The Illini's performance in the second half of the Big Ten season put me off my game as a fan.  Being a serious fan is an emotional experience.  Beyond loyalty, it requires intensity of commitment.  The pleasure and the commitment are intertwined.  A dislike of rivals emerges naturally from that.  In the first half of the 1980s, when as a young assistant professor I cut my teeth as an Illini Basketball fan, the games between the "I" state teams (going east to west that's Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa) were particularly fierce.  It's important to understand that the dislike was coupled with respect.  The rivals were good.  They played tough defense.  They had talented players.  They were well coached.  As a fan, you wouldn't want it any other way.

Yesterday, when thinking about the post I would write today, I had thought I'd write one entitled, "Why Shaka Smart Doesn't Need Illinois."  We desperately need a new coach, one who can light a candle underneath both the players and the fans.  With VCU going to the Final Four last year, Shaka Smart's name has been bandied about in the local press.  Presumably, the Illinois job is attractive for a young coach on the rise.  (It's how we landed Bill Self a while back when Lon Kruger left for the pros.)  I'm less sure the proposition still holds true.  Bruce Weber's very public comment, about coaching not to lose, seemed a portent of serious issues that have not yet been fully articulated in the press (and perhaps never will be).  Shaka Smart clearly has a very good thing  going where he is.  It would be great to get him as a coach, but wishing doesn't make it so.  I didn't watch the Indiana-VCU game last night, but I did monitor it on the ESPN Web site.  I wasn't sure about which team to root for.  I still don't like Indiana, even though Bobby the B______ is long gone.  But I thought a VCU win would confirm my hypothesis.  On this one, I'd prefer to be wrong.

I tuned into the CBS broadcast in the late afternoon.  It was "At the Half."  I got caught up with the scores but never found out which game was airing then.  At the first commercial, the ad came on.  Rick Santorum voted fur such and such when he was in Congress and then he did so and so.  The tenor of the ad was accusatory, the tone angry.  Various pundits have told us the ads are effective.  I agree.  I turned off the show before the ad was over.  I switched to watching a movie I had previously recorded, Black Sunday, from the novel by Thomas Harris that I had read quite a while ago. 

There is much anger and hostility in the terrorist characters in that movie.  Bruce Dern is particularly effective as the pilot, because in every role I've seen him he seems not very far away from having a personal explosion, and that aura serves him well here. Marthe Keller is a bit less convincing.  She plays the part of a very bright woman, one who treats terrorism as sport.  But that doesn't seem the right emotion to me.  Primary should be to feel aggrieved. As a partial substitute, Keller's German accent does help in conveying a sense of alienation. 

One can watch a movie or read a novel where the characters are extremely angry, evil incarnate, without getting upset at all from the viewing.  The evil characters play a necessary role in the story.   The story itself is engaging for me, in part because I read the book in the 1990s, well before 9/11, a prognostication of sorts for then but now too familiar to be a further threat.  A piece in today's NY Times about the benefits of reading fiction says that fiction is remarkably good at allowing us to simulate social encounters that we otherwise are unlikely to experience.  Indeed!

My reaction to the ad is quite different.  Almost immediately, I start to feel ill.  This is not politics as college sport, trying to beat a respected opponent.  It's incitement for the rabble.   Perhaps there's been so much of this sort of thing that others can mentally tune it out or have the good sense to mute the TV.  With ordinary commercials, that's exactly what I do.  But with political speech, that's not my first inclination.  I've taught myself that even if I strongly disagree, it's good to hear the opinions of the other side, if for no other reason than to test whether you have suitable counterarguments.  Here, however, I have no fondness whatsoever for Rick Santorum.  I simply wish the opposition treat his candidacy with a modicum of decorum.

George Will is the only pundit I know who has openly embraced the ruling in the Citizen's United case.  His argument is that the massive external funding has made the race for the Republican nomination more, not less, competitive. He has a point.  But he does not consider whether the massive external funding inexorably leads us to a scorched earth type of political rhetoric.  It is instructive to observe on this point that the ad I found so nauseating was done on behalf of the only presumably reasonable candidate in the race.

The implicit argument being made by those funding the ad is this.  Let's win first.  We can be reasonable later.  Right now, it's about winning.  It would be a disaster if we don't win.

This, however, sound a lot like the views Tea Party types, who regard politics as holy war and are not apt to compromise.  If there is ever a time to be reasonable, it is now.  We've witnessed a kind of hostage taking of the Republican party by the far right.   There needs to be push back of that, not accommodation.  Well articulated push back would necessarily be reasonable. 

Many who voted for President Obama in 2008 and had high hopes at the time have been disappointed in his performance in office.  He was not able to rise about the partisanship.  Then he appeared to get caught in the gridlock.  I count myself in this group, though I've flip flopped on these views.  When health care was on the table, I really wanted to see a Public option.  And I wanted to see more fiscal stimulus (and remarked on this in the subsequent post).  But the conditions in Congress and with the electorate writ large clearly matter.  So, of late, I've taken a more benevolent view, because the conditions have been hostile to the President accomplishing anything of worth, especially domestically.  (Scroll to the post from February 9.)

Can we agree, regardless of our political persuasion, that the rhetoric of the Presidential campaign has an impact on the governing thereafter?   Can we also agree that we require thoughtfulness to address the pressing issues?  They aren't simple problems.  And the solutions will require many of us to incur additional burdens.  Doesn't it make sense to cool it on the rhetoric?  There's enough anger already to go around.

Written Evaluation of Student Work and the LMS

When I was a freshman in college, 1972-73, MIT didn't give grades.  I believe that was to take the stress off of students, who were prone to obsess about these things.  MIT had a high suicide rate at the time and this was one of the counter measures.  So, instead, students would get a written evaluation from the instructor.  This was done at mid semester and then again at the end of the term.  (Ironically, they gave "hidden grades," which were needed for Med school and perhaps some other professional schools.)  Somewhere in our house, I've still got my evaluations from back then.  If I recall correctly, the mid semester evaluations encouraged a written response by the students. 

All these years later, I think this is a preferred way of assessing student work.  It is more personal and communicates in a way that an abstract letter or numerical grade cannot.  It also offers the chance to suggest paths for improvement, something other grading schemes don't really do.  (Office hours after a test might work for that but many students don't avail themselves of that opportunity.)  And by giving the student the opportunity to respond, it encourages a learning as dialog approach, which I favor.  Students don't get this in their other courses, and I've noticed that much of their behavior arises from conforming to norms that I assume are determined during their first year in college.  They have a tough time undoing those behaviors, even when the situation no longer calls for them.  I say this because I don't know how much actual dialog my approach will generate.  (I posted the first assessments yesterday evening.)   Earlier in the course I did suggest that each student meet with me outside of class to discuss their work.  Only half did so.  This written approach to evaluation offers a different possibility for dialog.

In the rest of this post I want to talk about the technology that supports this activity, what I need to do to make it work, and how that might be improved.

First, this is the part of course where I need an LMS.  For the rest of my course I use a blog, and that works pretty well.  Indeed, I prefer to use the blog for that part of the course because the software is better done, it is easy to use, and because it is open.  But for the evaluation communication, that must be private and it must be secure.  So the LMS is the right tool for that.

Second, I'm using Moodle this semester.  Once I learned that I'd have a small class and I didn't need a dropbox for student assignments, I decided not to use the Campus Supported Blackboard service.  So specific comments are about that particular LMS.  Precisely how this translates to other LMS, I don't know.

Third, the built in grade book is not the right tool for this communication.  I learned a year ago that the grade book does support columns with text entries in a cell, so conceivably that would be a way to get the message out.  But it doesn't enable student response.  I should add here that I have both individual work and group work of students to evaluate.  I'd like to use the same sort of mechanism for both.  On the group work, if one member of the team responds, the other members of the team should see that response.  The conclusion is that there needs to be a separate discussion forum for each team and also a separate discussion forum for each student.

This requires making a lot of groups.  Each student becomes their own group.  Because my class is small the first name of the student is a unique identifier and I use that for the group name.  (I've got one student from China and use her American name for this, though that info is not on the official roster from Campus.)  Were I to do this in a larger class I believe I'd adopt group names of the form: First_Name (NetID).  Then I make a Grouping called Individual Students, or something like that.

I repeat the process for Teams.  I've opted for letting the students themselves come up with a team name, but requiring them to have it start with a specific letter, so I have an A Team, a B Team, etc.  I again make groups, one for each team, and another Grouping, this one called Teams.

Then I make two discussion forums, one for the individual students, another for the teams.  I make these by Grouping, and each group gets a separate forum.  It is critical that one group can't see the forum posts for another group.  I don't trust my own knowledge of the software to achieve this end.  So I need to test this after I've set it up.  Fortunately, the people who support Moodle have made some dummy accounts for me for that purpose.  The built in - view as student - tool is not sufficient for this purpose, as far as I'm concerned.  I typically use a different browser for the dummy student access.  That way I can be logged in twice at the same time, one as me, the other as the dummy student.

This setup takes a bit of time.  I recognize that for the time being my needs are idiosyncratic and since I'm not particularly time constrained I'm willing to put in the effort.  If in the future the approach becomes more standard, it would be good to automate much of this process.

For the numerical part of the evaluation, I give both a number and a written explanation, I need to record that in a separate spreadsheet, which serves as the course grade book.  There is no need for that to be in the LMS.  My preference is that it is not.  Last Tuesday in class, we showed this video with the voice over by Daniel Pink.  Elsewhere, I've written that the economics part of this video is somewhat wrong.  But on the intrinsic motivation part, and that income rewards distract from that, I believe it is correct.  For students, grades serve a similar function as wages serve for employees in the workforce.  They can be a distraction from the real learning.  We don't talk about this enough.  Students fixate about the online grade book.  So I don't want one.  (In a very large class, the grade book is a crucial management tool, but in smaller classes I don't believe it is.) 

I hope from all of this the reader can see some movement away from automation and toward a more human form of evaluating student work.  The principle behind this is that teaching and learning needs to take the form of ongoing dialog.  This seems straightforward enough to me that it doesn't require an argument to support the point.  But it does seem outside much of our current practice.  I wonder whether we can change that to be more in accord with the principle.

Suffering Suffrage

The forgotten middle
Hearing now the fiddle,

The politics of sex
Doth Conservative women vex.

On women's rights they trample,
Made clear from this small sample.

With more results at hand
It will confirm that and

Show women in the poll
Do extol birth control.

Centrist Women Tell of Disenchantment With G.O.P. - NYTimes.com via kwout

The Undoing Stress We Foist On Our Students

When my older son was in first grade he got tested for the "gifted program."  Anxious and naive as parents, my wife and I wanted, of course, to be told our child was gifted.  Don't all parents want to be told that about their children?  The woman who ran the program indicated to us that gifted children like to be tested, so that in itself shouldn't be stressful.   I didn't quite understand her point, since my son couldn't yet read.  Apparently they had ways to work around that (not really) minor impediment.  Lo and behold, he proved to be gifted according to the test.  We were proud of our son.  He then got put into the gifted classroom for second grade.

There were several factors that made this environment stressful on him.  Like me when I was his age, he was both the youngest and the biggest student in the class.  Because we guessed correctly that he would be a large kid, we thought he should be in the next grade up, though his birthday made him borderline for this.  Then it turned out that the gifted classroom combined grades.  The classroom our son was in had both second and third grades.  With some of the third graders there was almost a two-year age differential; in my opinion that's a lot at such a young age.  And the teacher was on the youngish side herself, not necessarily an issue but it proved to be so in this case.

My son was still not reading on his own. The teacher assigned a lot of homework.  He couldn't do the homework.  Indeed, the teacher made no accommodation regarding where my son was as a learner.  We had several emotion filled evenings about doing the homework.  The situation did not seem to be righting itself so my wife and I complained to the person who ran the gifted program.  She blamed the teacher, but no matter whose fault it was that didn't itself offer up a path to better the situation.  So my wife and I decided to move our son to a regular classroom for the remainder of second grade.  We also decided to take our son to a private reading specialist.  They tested him on how he read, concluded he had a learning disability, something on the lines of dyslexia, and offered up "whole reading" sessions to help him make progress.  Those sessions did help.  Eventually the school concluded that he qualified to see a reading specialist there and he had pullout sessions with that person for some time.

My wife and I had triangle meetings with both the reading specialist and the teacher.  It was clear at those sessions that they were in consult with one another about our son.  They noted the progress he made.  He caught up and became a good enough reader that he no longer qualified for the extra help.  I'm pleased to report all these years later, my son is now a sophomore in college at Illinois, that he is doing well and is a serious reader, of the New York Times and of non-school fiction.  Elsewhere I've written about his essential goodness.  I think that mattered in this case, a trial that he saw his way through. This episode had the possibility of creating permanent damage, but it didn't because the source of the stress was resolved.

* * * * *

My operating hypothesis is that when school creates a continual stress that is not resolved there is dysfunction in the relationship between the student and school that manifests in a variety of ways.  Some of it might show up by the student being present in body but not in spirit, low keying the experience so as not to let it have an emotional impact.  Another alternative is student cynicism and alienation, if not outright anger.  Students have a right to expect that school provides nurture.  When it becomes clear it doesn't, the student needs to find an alternative explanation of what school is in reality.  The quick and available answer is that it's a big game of jumping through hoops, one that is entirely unrelated to personal growth.  One needs to play the game because, presumably, a good job awaits at the other end of the tunnel as long as one wins at the game.  Still another possibility is to stop playing the game entirely and do something else, in the spirit of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, stay true to one's passion irrespective of whether that path runs the possibility of ruin.

I should also point out that some students don't experience much stress and find the same environment nurturing.  They enjoy school and view it as a place that affirms their inner selves.  This gets one to wonder whether in assigning blame if it's the student's or the environment's fault for the dysfunction, when it does happen.

Recently there have been quite a few pieces on the role of habit in determining our behavior.  My suspicion is that initially students try a variety of coping strategies to navigate the academic environment, especially if the approach they used in high school no longer seems to be working.  When one approach seems to work it hardens and becomes habit.  Thereafter the environment might very well change and become more nurturing and less stressful, but the already formed habit trumps that, so the behavior hardly changes if at all.

I was driven to write this post because of the absenteeism I've witnessed in my undergraduate Economics of Organizations class and the tardiness with which some of the students complete the work (or don't submit the work at all).   Based on correspondence with some students it is clear that stress incurred in one course has negative impact on performance in other courses.  That stress may arise from group work where other members of the group don't pull their weight.  Or it may happen as a result of having multiple exams within a very short time window.  Or, perhaps, the material in some class is especially challenging, but the course is required so dropping it is not an attractive alternative.  Many students tend to go on a binge with respect to their school work.  One sign of this is pulling an all-nighter.  This, of course, disrupts the sleep cycle for some days thereafter.  The behavior is myopic and immature.  What else would you expect from a twenty year old kid?  The binge behavior in conjunction with the external sources of stress can create a vicious cycle. 

A couple of weeks ago on the course Web site, I posted a link to a humorous page on Murphy's Laws for Education, and told the students to focus on the Laws of Applied Terror.  Then in class the following day I posted a corollary:

Every instructor assumes that you have nothing else to do except study for that instructor's course.

With that I was trying to be humorous, but also sensitive to the students' reality.  In the correspondence I mentioned, one of the students made reference to the Law of Applied Terror.  That's not a joke.

* * * * *

On my trip to Florida last week I started to read Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow.   It is about the relationship between our intuitive and automatic thinking, called System 1, and our deliberate and mindful thinking, called System 2.  The message is that System 1 usually has its way.  Much of the time that's fine and indeed often it is necessary.  Some of the time, however, System 1 makes mistakes.  Then it needs an assist from System 2 to correct the errors.  System 2 can fatigue and then not keep up. This is when the mistakes prevail. 

Reading chapter 3 in the book, The Lazy Controller, I got depressed.  The chapter starts out well enough, discussing the concept Flow, which according to the author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has its origins in earlier conceptions, such as Abraham Maslow's notion of peak experience.  Kahneman brings up flow to talk about when System 2 performs optimally without tiring.  This occurs when there is no outside interference and hence no conclusions generated by System 1 to monitor.  All concentration can be placed on the object of attention.   In my recollection, I first experienced flow doing math.  Later in college it sometimes happened in conversations with housemates.  Then again it occurred in solitary activity, learning economics in grad school.  And when I used to jog, the "runner's high" one would get after doing 5 miles a day for a couple of weeks, which would kick in during the middle of the run, had aspects of flow as well.  I've experienced flow in writing blog posts, though not this one, which has been a bit of a struggle for me to produce.  Flow represents an ideal for how System 2 might be utilized.  Presumably the more flow experiences we have, the happier we are and the more we want to generate future flow experiences.

Then Kahneman introduces the downside, by discussing the bat and ball problem.  (It is described here, part way down the page.)  This is an example of what we used to call a word problem in high school algebra.  But the algebra is hidden.  If one writes down the equations, one will get the right answer.  The algebra is not hard.  But instead one might do it in one's head and guess the answer.  The numbers are chosen to encourage an intuitive answer which, unfortunately, is wrong.  Kahneman then reports about administering the bat and ball problem to students at ritzy Ivy League colleges.  Shockingly, 50% of them get it wrong.  At less prestigious institutions, the number that gets it wrong can exceed 80%.  

Kahneman argues, I think he's correct in this, that people who get this problem wrong don't check their answer, because if they did they'd spot their error.  He calls students who don't check their work intellectually lazy.  This is plausible to me, but I want to entertain some other possibilities as explanation, because if Kahneman is right in this and in his next point as well, then its very hard not to be an elitist with regard to "rationality," what at the end of the chapter Kahneman describes as the appropriate label for System 2's effective monitoring of System 1. 

I know from other examples that sometimes students sandbag on a test, deliberately earning themselves a low score, because that is to their advantage later.  On placement exams that entering freshmen take, some will sandbag so they can repeat essentially the same class they had in high school.  They won't learn much new this way, but it will help the GPA.  It's hard to imagine why a student would sandbag on the bat and ball problem, but it's easy to believe that the student doesn't care about the answer, one way or the other.   If you don't care, why check the answer, which involves effort?  Not checking, by a different use of the word rationality, is then optimal.   To conclude laziness on the part of the student, as Kahneman does, the student would have to care about the answer, but also find checking the answer tiresome.  Perhaps if in the bat and ball experiments the student getting it wrong was made publicly known and that was a source of embarrassment to the student, it would be sufficient to generate the Kahneman conclusion. 

Let me give a different possibility to explain the lack of checking.  This one I base on being a parent watching his kid do math homework using a calculator.   I didn't use a calculator in high school.  The technology wasn't yet available.  Kahneman is 20 years older than I am.  Surely he didn't use a calculator either.  We learned arithmetic by working problems with a pencil and paper.  It became a badge of honor for the better students to go beyond that and do hard multiplication problems, or even division problems, in one's head.  When you do this on a regular basis, you learn to check your work as part of the process.  Calculators don't make arithmetic mistakes.  You might verify that you typed in the right stuff, but if you're sure you did that there is no need to run the numbers again.  So the checking habit really may be less of a necessity now.  (This is the same sort of argument that with spell check and grammar check built in, there is less reason to proofread beyond that.  One reason why I compose these blog posts directly in the Web page, rather than in a Word document first, is to not have the grammar checker.  I still think proof reading is important so I try to incentivize it.)  

Kahneman then goes on to talk about the measuring willpower experiments run by Walter Mischel with four-year old children, done in the 1960s.  The experiments seemed strongly predictive of success in later life.  Those with a lack of willpower at four frequently developed emotional or dependency problems later while those with strong willpower were frequently quite successful in later life.  

The juxtaposition of the analysis from the bat and ball results with the measuring willpower results is what I found so depressing.  Kahneman seemed to be saying - "we've got so many lazy thinkers out there and we're stuck with that."  It doesn't seem to offer up a way to improve matters.  Is there a right sort of education that might help?  At the college level, we seem to have a lot of education that is of the wrong sort.  It is provided by instructors who expect intelligence and willpower from their students and implicitly also expect that the student had an expression of both in their prior studies.  It is a form of instruction appropriate for a proper subset of the students at best.  What about the rest of the students?  

I have some reason to question Kahneman's juxtaposition.  Anyone who has eaten a meal with me knows I'm a fresser.  It's not hard to suppose that were I a participant in one of Mischel's experiments, I'd have taken the cookie right away, showing no willpower whatsoever.  On the other hand, when working an algebra problem I do check the math.  Indeed, when I'm making a more involved argument, as I am in this post, I check it for internal consistency.  This is a long acquired habit.  So my type occupies a cell of the matrix that Kahneman would deem unlikely.  And that suggests to me that perhaps something other than willpower should be the focus, something that can be learned, something more in line with flow, something that combats the laziness.

It would be nice if psychologists could all agree so the rest of us who read about psychological issues could get the story straight.  I say that tongue in cheek.  There are too many jokes about laying economists end to end for me to expect such agreement as a realistic outcome.  Ellen J. Langer is no fan of deferred gratification (what willpower is supposed to produce).  She's very much against the idea of telling students to "pay attention."  Let them follow their own interests.  That's how they will best learn.  In my critique of her book, On the Power of Mindful Learning, I concurred with her on this point.   Yet I also found fault in that she offers up no alternative to take it's place.  So I offered up my own - sitzfleisch, which in my definition means not letting go of an idea easily once it's been taken up.  

I presume Kahneman should have taken up this notion himself, because it offers such a nice way to tie System 1 into System 2.  But as with Langer, I think there is something of a trap for the behavioral psychologists in so relying on the evidence from experiments and not at all on evidence that comes from introspection (or relying on introspection only to corroborate the experimental results).   Let me paint the picture here of how this works, starting with this delightful quote that I know some will find surprising. 

“It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing.”
― Gertrude Stein

When in that lolling around mode System 1 is working to identify the next object of focus for System 2 to work on.  For example, watching a TV show a face of an actor that is familiar to you from another context might appear.  You intuit the familiarity immediately, but you can't place how you know the face and who the actor is.  This is the spark that's needed to launch the inquiry.  The face problem can be a grabber.  Once you're hooked there's no turning back till you figure it all out. Then System 2 takes over as you go through your inquiry.  And as long as that inquiry is proceeding nicely you can do that content in your activity.  This is flow.  Before reaching your conclusion, however, you may get stuck, at which point flow stops.  You seem to have run out of leads and yet you still haven't matched the face.  Do you give up at this point?  If you have sitzfleisch, you don't.  You may start to do other functional activities unrelated to this inquiry, partly because you have obligations that you need to address but also so System 1 can come back in and generate a possibility that hasn't yet occurred to you.  During this time it can be uncomfortable, unlike the initial idling, because you have an expectation that an answer will be found.  That's a bother.  Feeling bothered, more than feeling inspired, is the emotion at root with the sitzfleisch, though of course we all want to feel inspired to generate the flow.  Past success at such quests doesn't so much provide confidence that this one will succeed as it makes one not want to admit that it won't.  That too is part of the sitzfleisch.  It is learned, not something we're born with.  If the original intuition wasn't a hallucination, eventually System 1 does generate a spark that illuminates the path to the answer, at which point there is both joy and a sense of relief.   Perhaps a point of frustration to an outsider, to get to that illuminating spark takes as long as it takes.  Internet search engines might make it seem the entire query can be concluded in short order.  Often that is true, but it is not a guarantee.

I should also point out here that when engaged in such a query it's hard to also be focused on something else that requires attention.  So while the individual is actually quite attentive to the task, this might very well make the individual appear lazy to an outsider who wants to bring in some other object into focus.

* * * * *

This brings me full circle to the subject of this post.  Learning for courses does not encourage sitzfleisch in those who don't yet have it.  There is a fixed time endpoint for when the learning should occur (when the exam is given or the term paper is due).  Students do tend to procrastinate.  We all do, though we do not all express it in the same arena.  Part of the binging is simply that.  Just as these late starting students are getting into it, the game is coming to an end.  Initiating earlier would help.  This is why more frequent lower stakes assignments are better than a small number of high stakes tests.  But if the assignments are for low stakes only, why should the students take them seriously?  Why won't they respond, instead, as many students seem to with the bat and ball problem, producing the quick intuition but then never getting beyond that.

My answer to that question may seem ridiculous.  Initially the students should exert effort because they are idealistic.  It might prove to be a good experience so let's give it a try at first.  Doing the assignments seriously then needs to have a rewarding aspect to it with the reward coming from the doing.  If this were a realistic goal, it would create a virtuous cycle.   Perhaps not all subjects can be taught this way (organic chemistry comes to mind).  As things are now, however, many courses are not taught this way because we haven't thought to try.  It's time that we did.

Un American

As I was getting on my flight from FLL to ORD (Fort Lauderdale to Chicago) a woman a bit ahead of me asked a man to get up so she could get into the row he was sitting in.  He said in response, "That will be $20."  He was making a funny that, sad to say, actually had some (gallows) humor to it.

I haven't flown out of Champaign in some time.  The above gives a sample about American Airlines new approach to pricing. Boarding order, for example, is no longer done by where you sit on the plane.  You get put into the default group, group 4 in this case, and then when you check in you go through a little dialog with the computer screen about whether you want to upgrade your group...., for a fee of course.

Looks like it is the same deal with seat selection.  I have a distinct preference for aisle seating.  But apparently the airline wouldn't give out seat assignments ahead of check in.  When I got there, mine was a window seat.  So I clicked the link to change my seat selection.  You guessed it, that too required a fee. 

On the way down to Florida I got to Chicago several hours before my next flight.  There was actually another flight to Fort Lauderdale before mine.  I went to the counter for it and asked if I could get on that flight.  They told me that it was crowded but not completely full.  But since I had a ticket for the next flight I'd have to pay a $75 change fee to take that one. 

Coming back, I actually witnessed some sensibility at the gate at Fort Lauderdale.  The gate agent said that she'd allow people to check their bags, waiving the normal fee, because the flight was full and the overhead bins would be very crowded (and it would take longer to complete the boarding unless some people checked their bags).  Makes you wonder why they have the fee to check the bags to begin with.

The airfare for this trip was $540.  To me, that's a decent chunk of change. To, in addition, be nickel and dimed when getting to the airport  is infuriating.

If they really are going to stick with the ridiculous policy for much longer, then they should let you know about it when buying the ticket in the first place.  Of course people shop for flights by looking for low fares as well as convenient times to travel.  Flying is such a hassle anyway - why make the passengers feel like they are being mugged in the process, with this stupid approach to a la carte pricing?

Math in Word

It's been a long time since I've used the equation editor in Word.  My prior experiences with it were none too pleasant.  So I had some trepidation this time around.  Most of that was unfounded.  It worked as it should to produce integrals, fractions, exponents, simultaneous subscripts and superscripts, and the spacing of terms.

The one complaint that I have based on this use was for evaluating a definite integral.  I'm used to notation which, after integrating the integrand, places a vertical bar and then the bounds for integration.  I didn't see a way to produce that vertical bar with integration bounds.  The vertical bar needs to be the same size as the integral symbol, which is much larger than the regular font.  The vertical bar you can access on the keyboard isn't big enough.  So I'd like to see Microsoft add that particular symbol to its set of tools.

I should also note that when the document converts to pdf, the math comes through fine.  Here is an example, from what I produced earlier today.

Not yet March and the grudges are already starting

Looks like Bobby Valentine knows how to drum up some negative publicity.   His last year or two as an announcer, I started to think he was okay.  Now I can go back to my earlier view - intense disdain.  It reminds me of this priceless quote from Russell Martin.

Learning about Learning: Introspection versus Research Part 2

I've now finished Ellen J. Langer's The Power of Mindful Learning (it is a short book).  I will comment here about those parts I had yet to read when writing my previous post, but a few points first.  One is that I view myself as a mindful learner.  I should have said that earlier, but didn't.  Langer clearly views herself as a mindful learner too.  This creates a bit of a puzzle.  How did we become that way if the educational system as a whole didn't recognize mindful learning as a goal?  Was it a product of school?  or something else?  or a combination?  Another point is about the blurb for the book on the amazon.com site, which describes the book as radical in its implications.  I challenge that.  It seems to me that mindful learning is simply the natural way to learn (or I've grown so accustomed to it that I can't imagine another way except for learning very concrete things, like what one needs to know to pass a written driver's test at the DMV).  What does seem to me radical is the ethos about learning that underlies NCLB thinking, and putting the emphasis on measurement via testing above all else.  A third point is for the need of every learner to hear reasoned argument and that in many respects we've moved backwards as a society in that debate and disagreement without being disagreeable is now so rare to be found.  It's absence produces true believers, not mindful learners.  We tend to think about failures of the schools in isolation rather than failures of society as a whole as the prime causal factor.  In particular, the failure of school has focused on low income students living in the inner city.  There has been neglect in discussing how school fails even high income students living in the plush suburbs.  Yet the over programmed, school as credential approach fails these students all too often.  They become slaves of the system rather than masters of their own learning.

Let me turn to Langer's chapter on memory and forgetting.  The chapter for me was the closest one to where Langer and I completely agree on the issues.  She makes an important point that rather than immediately recalling everything we once knew, it is actually a good thing that we forget and when in the relevant situation have to rediscover ideas we learned previously.  Though she makes no mention of Donald Schon in her book, mindful learning looks very much like reflective practice, and the rediscovery of ideas coincides with Schon's notions of learning in action and knowing in action.  I believe that Langer would very much appreciate Schon for his emphasis on knowing as highly contextualized and that our ideas must unfold to match the situation.  One example that Langer provides is that she lectures with few if any notes so that each presentation becomes a thinking aloud rediscovery of the ideas, done in a way that fits the needs of the audience.  She does not mention this, but it seems apparent that questions from the audience that occur during the presentation help to make the presentation unique, even when she has lectured on the topic quite a bit previously.  The needs of the audience become apparent through the questioning and then she can better situate her talk to them.

I too used to lecture without notes, though I was motivated to do this for a different reason.  I found that with notes I would go too fast.  The need to rediscover the ideas would slow me down.  I recall doing this mainly in the first semester graduate course in microeconomics, where there were a lot of mathematical derivations of the results.  I believed I developed a reputation for being very thorough with the analysis of the models, including answering the "why are we doing this?" question.  In this I may have benefited from my own experience.  As an undergrad with little economics training, I took the advanced graduate math econ course, at the encouragement of the the instructor from the one undergrad econ course I had taken.  I could do most of the math, for example the Frobenius-Perron theorem, but I had no sense at all why that yielded interesting economic conclusions.  So in my lectures I developed a habit of spending a significant about of time on the usefulness of the results,  along with their derivation.

In this chapter Langer also takes on our attitudes about the elderly.  We have a tendency to put the elderly in a box and view them as diminished people, part of which is the decline in their memory.  She provides evidence to argue that our society's low expectations for the elderly reduces the performance older people are capable of.  When society has more respect for the elderly, they perform better.  She also argues (via a touching story from the Brothers Grimm) that irrespective of their diminished capacity the elderly deserve to be treated with decency, as human beings.  I took this part of the book as a reminder that we have a tendency to people in a box, whether due to aging or for other reasons.  Doing so is pernicious.  We need to guard against this tendency.

That said, on a couple of particulars regarding aging,  I have some small issues with Langer, based on my own experience.  One is on our ability to recall people.  I used to have very quick recall.  Now I find, fairly regularly, that I'm able to come up with the face pretty quickly.  But coming up with the name is harder and takes more time.  In the interim where I know the face but not the name there is a feeling of mild desperation.  I hate having half a thought only.  I'm really not sure what I do during that interim period to come up with the name.  But I do know the mildness comes from the realization that the world won't end even if I fail in the endeavor.  The desperation part, I believe, results from the sitzfleisch I discussed in the previous post.  There is disappointment in oneself when you don't know something you feel you should know.  The disappointment morphs into desperation in this case.  The other issue is in regard to getting a good night's sleep.  I believe younger people normally get decent rest when they do go to bed, although they may have a tendency to burn the candle on both ends.  My sleep now is more interrupted.  Further,  I have good nights and bad nights. After a really bad night, I've noticed my ability to spell is substantially reduced.  Langer doesn't talk about temporary memory loss due to an immediate incapacity, one that is likely to go away in the near future.  If it is right that there is a temporary relationship between quality of sleep and memory, and if people typically do have worse sleep as they get older, one gets a more nuanced explanation of the relationship between memory and aging. 

Langer next takes on the difference between mindful learning and intelligence.  She is very much into the generation of novel hypotheses, highly dependent on the context, and views that as the object of mindful learning.  In contrast, intelligence seems to be about problem solving, with the problem already formed and awaiting solution.   Though she doesn't dwell on this issue, it is also the case that mindful learning, since it is a process, is something each of us can partake in.  All that is needed is to try, perhaps by first receiving some direction on where to place our efforts.  In contrast, intelligence seems to be innate, predetermined by our genetic makeup or by our very early experiences.  In some sense, a focus on intelligence invariably emphasizes differences across people while a focus on mindful learning emphasizes our common attributes as human beings.

I'm confused on these issues as it relates to my own circumstance, with the question of how I came to be a mindful learner paramount.  For this reason, I have a fantasy of reliving my elementary school years, but looking at that time from the perspective of my teachers.  What did they see, in their class as whole, and then again in me in particular?  Much instruction then was more individualized and student driven than it is now.   For example, either in fifth or sixth grade, I can't recall which, I was involved in a programmed learning experiment with one or two other students, while the rest of the class did something else.  We had a book on English grammar that had white boxes of new information and gray boxes that gave the answer to the previously posed question.  There was one white box and one gray box on a line and perhaps four or five lines on a page.  As you read you covered the gray box on the next line, so as not to peak at the answer before generating it yourself.   Whatever was the ultimate consequence of this experience (my knowledge of when to use "that" versus when to use "which" is muddy, for example) it clearly gave an early try with learning in school on my own.  It eventually became a habit, though I'm unsure whether this particular episode was the cause.

Why was I selected for this programmed learning experience?  I'll never know.  I believe the school administered "Iowas," an intelligence exam of some sort.  Was it used to sort students into different "treatments" at school?  I don't know.  I do recall that with respect to SRA reading, I did make progress but was more in the middle of the pack.  I believe that SRA put some emphasis on reading speed, and I seem to recall that then I wasn't particularly quick.  Later, I learned to make insight in certain domains quite rapidly,  particularly in math, but mindful learning is not about speed of processing thoughts.  Perhaps there is some (small) correlation between being able to read quickly for comprehension, on the one hand, and persisting in reading an interesting and diverse set of materials at one's leisure.   I do have the feeling that now school all too often inadvertently kills the joy of reading, with the frequent testing and the teach to the test mentality.   Developing the reading habit is more important than anything else we can do to educate young learners.  Yet it seems so many kids don't read outside of school.  Is that due to low intelligence or failure of the educational system?  I don't know.

Langer concludes with a chapter on the myth of right answers.  I would have preferred a different title to that chapter - Finding something while looking for something else.  Much discovery is inadvertent.  That should be cherished.  Doing so requires us to be open to possibility.  So the chapter is really an admonishment not to be closed minded.  A fixation on right answers reduces the set of what is possible.   On this much of the argument, I agree with her.  But as a consequence of arguing her point, she doesn't discuss closed domains (like arithmetic) where there are right answers.  (I believe her response would be that closed domains themselves only make sense in context.   I agree with that, but then there are right answers.)   So she doesn't have a theory of education that allows for learning right answers in some domains while still being open to possibility.

The other thing the chapter misses is the human instinct to rationalize what are essentially random phenomena, such as in talking about the "hot hand."  This instinct, and that most of us are not good with probabilistic explanations, provides a counterbalance to an approach that would otherwise suggest all learning should be self-directed.  Langer's book does not discuss that mindful learners can nonetheless make serious mistakes, not so much in forming hypotheses, but rather in prematurely concluding they are true.  Langer depicts the mindful learner as someone who believes all knowledge is contingent, with a willingness to drop one's previously held point of view when the evidence suggests the prior view is untenable.  If only that were true.  I believe it takes longer than that for our views to change, as I've articulated in my piece, A Mature View of Uncertainty.    We remain stuck in our prior beliefs until the world around us appears to be crumbling and, maybe, even after that.  We don't always challenge our own held beliefs, because there is fear of what might happen in doing so.

This leads me to my closing point about Langer's book.  A natural sequel would focus on the emotions, and the relationship between them and mindful learning.  Langer does talk about feeling shame as a block to learning.  But she does not explore the full range of emotions and the relationship of them to taking a mindful approach.  I'd like to see a substantive piece on that.

Learning about Learning: Introspection versus Research

Yesterday was an odd day for me.  Pretty early in the day I read a piece in the Times about Governor Cuomo getting the sides to agree about  how teacher evaluations would occur in New York.  I didn't like what they were planning to do - 40% of the evaluation would be based on student test performance, increments over performance the year before would be attributed to the current teachers, and there seems to be some fixation with teachers who under perform in this dimension. The rest of the evaluation was to be based on direct observation of the teaching by the principal.  If that were really happening intensively it would provide an excellent source of professional development for the teachers, via an ongoing conversation regarding teaching method and customizing that to the teacher's personality and the students' needs.  Alas, there was no discussion of such professional development at all in the piece, no sense that teachers can get better in their craft over time, and that the system should be mainly about promoting such improvement.

So I set out to write a post that would offer up my critique.  As is my habit, I used Kwout to make a snippet of the piece.  For reasons I don't understand, the font in this particular snip looks huge compared to the font in the rest of the post, though it looks fine alone at the link provided.  This annoys me a bit, unsure what to do about it, so I leave it hanging while I move on to the next task.  I'm wanting evidence to support my point of view.  The day before on the Tomorrow's Professor listserv there was a post entitled The Power of Mindful Teaching, which seemed fitting for the purpose.  It is an interview with the Harvard Psychologist Ellen J. Langer about her book, The Power of Mindful Learning.  To make reference to the piece I go to the online archive for the listserv.   Disappointingly, the archive is woefully behind.  This is post #1153.  As of the morning in writing this blog post, the archive only goes through post #1144.  I start to wonder if there is a near term way to make reference to that piece.  It would be little trouble to copy the post and put it in a Google doc.  But checking out when the archive had caught up and remembering to take down my link at the time would be more troublesome.  I'm getting more and more forgetful.  Here's another little annoyance that I set aside.

But by then my enthusiasm for writing the post has waned, a bit unusual for me.  Instead, I find myself on the amazon.com site for the book and the "download to your PC" button is beckoning.  I have Kindle software on both my PC and my iPad.  The Kindle version of the book costs $10.  It's so easy to get it then and there.  The book is in the Education Library on Campus, but it is checked out to another patron.  (I only verified that this morning.  I didn't even check the Library yesterday.)  So I click the button and it downloads.  Ironically, in the book there is a section on the myth of deferred gratification.  I spent a good chunk of time reading the book thereafter and am now a bit more than halfway through it.  The rest of this post contains observations and commentary based on that reading and how what Langer says compares to my own thinking on the issues.

I start out very enthused with her book.  My initial question was whether mindful learning is one and the same as inquiry based learning, which several Dewey scholars here, notably Chip Bruce, have promoted for some time.  On that one, I'm not sure.  Part way through the reading the style seemed to change.  Where it began with what mindful learning is, a multidimensional and contingent way of understanding the object being studied, the subject changed to how to teach with a mindful learning approach and whether doing so is effective.  Determining effectiveness of the teaching approach is somewhat at odds with considering cycles of inquiry, with the next cycle determined by the outcome of the prior cycle.  Nevertheless, I was also excited to see somebody writing both from a scientific and a personal perspective.  The last book I can recall reading which took a personal perspective about teaching and learning is Jane Tompkins' A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned. That book was somewhat unsettling because each successive course offering was a more radical experiment than it's predecessor and the process never settled down, right till she stopped teaching.  I understand the feeling that motivated the movement to a radical approach.  I've had similar feelings as a teacher. Tompkins was an English professor.  Unlike Langer, I don't believe that Hopkins viewed her experiments as hypothesis testing.  She certainly couldn't and didn't try to have controls - what was the outcome with the placebo?   I'm more like Hopkins than Langer with regard both to my teaching and my own learning.  But as an economist, I believe I also have some understanding for why one does want to test hypotheses.

Nevertheless, in what I've read so far I came to find Langer's emphasis on controlled experiments quite limiting.  All of them seemed to be of the one and done variety.  There is an intervention with a mindful learning approach to the study of some subject done with some students and a comparison is done studying the same subject via the traditional approach done with other students.  In all the studies I've read about, the mindful learning approach trumped the traditional approach.  After the first few of these, this stopped being informative for me.  The most interesting bit I read, but it wasn't a recurrent theme, is that the students who had been taught with the mindful learning approach were more self-confident, more willing to go against the crowd, because they had developed their own  point of view, reached from their own individualistic experiences with the subject.

I wish that theme cascaded with further implications, but in what I've read so far it didn't.  I didn't see anything at all about intuition and developing that.   To me developing intuition is the heart of the matter.  It's where the spark comes from.  While it was mentioned early on, there was essentially no follow up about the joy of learning for itself.  And there was nothing on whether having been exposed to mindful learning approaches students come to demand a mindful approach in their own learning and if, having developed such a taste, they continue to need the teacher to approach the next inquiry mindfully or if they can become self-sufficient that way.  Let me illustrate this point by reference to my post on PLAs Please, and the relationship between learning outside school and learning in the classroom.  Langer makes a strong distinction between play, which we take up immediately with no hesitation, which we enjoy for itself and do as its own reward, and for which we receive no external evaluation nor do we get branded by some performance standard, and classroom learning, where many students struggle to pay attention, where the object for the student seems to be to get through the experience since the diploma is a passport, and where for homework or other coursework done outside the classroom procrastination is the norm.  Langer wants school to be more like play.  Fine, I agree with that.   But she seems to ignore whether self-directed learning outside school can be reward just as play is, and if so whether the two are one and the same or if they are different.

Here's a little anecdote on this one.  I was picking my son up to come home for the weekend.  He's a sophomore in engineering here.  He said his best friend from high school, who was coming over later in the evening so they could play video games, is studying Psychology here and has to do an awful lot of reading for his courses and write a lot of papers. My son said the friend wasn't liking that very much.  Then my son reported that in his classes, his favorite now seems to be a computer programming class, it's more math than reading.  And the advantage for him is that he can still enjoy pleasure reading, which is not tied to his school work.  My son does have a taste to read the New York Times online and he enjoys fiction too.  The Harry Potter craze followed by the Lord of the Rings films got all these kids started on fantasy/science fiction.  I'm not sure what he reads now. In high school he was on a Michael Crichton kick for a while.  After a lot of urging on my part he eventually did read the Grapes of Wrath one summer, but otherwise as far as I know he's the driver of his own bus with regard to his reading.  The Daily Show and Colbert are not his only source for news, and at least some of the time he feels a need to read a book on his own, a different source of stimulus than the Xbox or the latest computer games.  I'm not sure whether he has gone to films that are more challenging or has participated in other forms of educational entertainment.  But clearly he is open to possibility and trying new things.  So on an intellectual level, irrespective of how he does from here out in school,  I think he's at a good place.

There is a rather large question of how that learning outside of school fits in with what happens in school.  Over the last several years, I've wrestled with that question, the PLA post one expression of that.  Another one, is this piece on The Purpose of General Education.  If, in my jargon, a kid had a PLA, then the kid is doing General Education right along.  Is the kid mindful in doing that the way Langer wants us to be mindful?  I believe the answer to that is yes, but in a not so overt way.  If one makes a personal discovery one likely wants to share it.  If the sharing it is itself enjoyable that serves as spur to make further discoveries and then the sharing serves to make the learning overt.  But it's not always the case that there is a best friend to share those ideas.  When there's not the alternative is having a conversation with oneself.  That can be absorbing,  and I believe that mindful learners do that on a regular basis, but there is no mark that it's happened.  One reason I turned to blogging some years ago was to make such a mark.  I then made a subsequent discovery that if I could get it out of my system I could move onto something else.  Otherwise the same conversation would play over and over again in my head.

School, no matter how well it is done has a coercive aspect to it.  Where self-direction always provides the next departure based on what has come before, school can insert the student into something truly new, done at a level and in a mode where the student may very well be unfamiliar.  Many have recognized the inherent tension between the coercion and promoting intrinsic motivation for the new endeavor, but I've seen very few convincing analyses on how that tension should be managed.  My current belief is best articulated in this piece, which is about work for wages as in part coercion and the role money incentive plays.  There I argue that money incentive is primarily good for initiation of new work.  For a while thereafter it fades into the background and intrinsic motivation takes over to guide the employee's effort.  Money incentive then reappears when either that work has been completed or when the employee becomes aware that the market values him differently as a consequence of that new work.

In the classroom context there is first the question whether intrinsic motivation ever makes its presence known.  With rote it seemingly does not because the subject being memorized is disembodied from all else the student knows.  The mindful approach aims in large part to encourage intrinsic motivation by creating connection to the subject based on other things the student does know, leveraging the student's inherent curiosity.  By analogy then to the employee case, there is the question when the coercion next makes itself known and does it puncture the intrinsic motivation too soon.   If the pattern had been two midterms and a final under the traditional approach, would only one midterm and a final be better?  And then what about the role of other sorts of feedback that comes without grades?  In my own teaching I've come to like having the students make weekly blog posts, responding with comments (and hoping other students would comment too) without any grades tied to the comments.  Then I will go back to them later and evaluate a bunch of posts for a student at one time for grade purposes.  In teaching there is a further large question of pace and content coverage.  With self-directed learning, the students own hunger for understanding dictates the pace.  For courses that are prerequisites for other other classes, topic coverage dictates the pace irrespective of how well students master the material.  Langer does not ask whether a mindful approach would be slower, faster, or the same pace as the traditional approach.   I do think that if we ask, are the students getting it?, and try to provide an empirically based answer to this, we'll often find that they are not getting it.  There has always been a teaching question of whether to target the top of the class or somewhere in the middle.  Targeting the middle encourages a slower pace.

I want to switch gears here and note that Langer has many examples from sports.  She is not just about academic learning.  Indeed she talks about her own athletic training as a kid and contrasts that to the performance of the top players in the world that she has observed.   In sports one prized attribute of a competitor is his toughness.  Witness two different examples from the past week regarding basketball.  The first is all the hoopla about Linsanity and Mike D'Antoni, the coach of the Knicks, talking about Jeremy Lin as a player with a lot of toughness, able to handle adversity and then make the team thrive when the pressure is on. The other is about the Illini Men's Basketball team and the press conference Coach Weber had after the recent loss to Purdue, where he blamed himself for not developing a culture of toughness around the team.  It was a very emotional moment, not least because Weber may be out of a job after the season concludes.  No doubt toughness is prized in sports.  Is there an analog to toughness to be found in the academic sort of learning?  Langer takes to task deferred gratification as the analog.  It is contrary to how people actually behave.  I'm with her on that.  But she makes no attempt to provide something else that fits the bill.

In my purpose of general education piece, I bring up the word "sitzfleisch" as one of the primary goals.  (I do so in a section that tries to get at the goals of general education without using the terms "critical thinking" or "communication skills," because these labels have lost their meaning, in my view.)  I think sitzfleisch is the right term and appropriate analog for toughness, though it is not one and the same.  One aspect of athletic toughness is playing through pain.  Measured in that way, I'm not tough.  I've got arthritis pain on an ongoing basis.  The doctor says exercise is really the best thing for it.  I try to do the treadmill most days.  When the pain is minor, I hope the warmup period will allow it to vanish temporarily.  But when the pain is more acute, I yield to it and don't do the treadmill, hoping the pain will ebb by tomorrow.  Yesterday I didn't do the treadmill.  Today I will, during the first half of the Illini game.  (Screaming at the TV over bad calls by the refs or our by good or bad plays by the team does get my focus onto an external subject).

Intellectually, however, I have sitzfleisch in that I won't let go of an idea easily once it has come to me.  In the post, Getting Closure, about Jane Leavy's book The Last Boy, a probing biography of Mickey Mantle, I took on the questions why are we still fascinated with Mickey all these years later and why does he seem heroic in a way no other player has seemed since?  The premises for these questions seemed obviously true to me, but the answers were far from apparent.   So I stewed for some days before writing the post.  In the post I wrote the following:

I have this habit/arrogance about me that in order to let go of an idea and move onto something else I must comment about it in a way that provides some insight. Once I get my two cents in I can refocus on what is ahead of me. Until then, however, I can't let go. I wanted to say something about why we love Mickey so much, but I wasn't sure what I should say. So I let the thought simmer. Yesterday, I did a Google search on Mickey Mantle versus Bo Jackson, thinking perhaps that would help. I found several links to fascinating content - this piece on tape measure home runs, who actually hit them, and the misreporting of how long the home runs actually were; a different piece from Baseball Digest about Bo's amazing feats on the diamond; and a YouTube video clip of Mickey with a rather young David Letterman, compelling to view.

Bo had less longevity than Mickey but otherwise he is the other athlete I can think of who combined speed and power in a package that amazed even very accomplished professional players. And I got to witness some of those performances on TV, so I have a better memory of what Bo did than of what Mickey did. Yet while I'm aware of this, I don't regard Bo as a hero, an amazing athlete, yes, a hero, no. So I puzzled over this and came up with the following.....

The habit/arrogance is the sitzfleisch.  I believe it emerges from two different though complementary sources.  One is an emotional need to contribute intellectually.  When our dog, Ginger, sees something that commands her attention in the back yard, she gets very excited, starts barking, begins to rise up on her hind legs, and then claws at the sliding door, offering up a strong signal that she wants to be let outside.  I'm kind of the same way when a topic grabs me, though perhaps not quite so demonstrative.  The other source is repeated practice at doing this sort of thing.  I don't know what Langer would say now about the work of Anders Ericsson and his colleagues regarding deliberate practice.  To me, the question at hand is whether sitzfleish of an intellectual sort emerges from deliberate practice with mindful learning.  I saw nothing about that in what I've read in Langer's book.  I believe it is true, but it is likely a hypothesis that will defy measurement for some time to come.  I would like to see Langer speculate about it.  But she seems content to stick with only those hypotheses where she can perform the experiment.

Ericsson and his colleagues write about the difficulties of persisting with the practice regime.  They make several points on that about how to encourage persistence.  One is that the practice needs to be situated to the current performance level.  If it doesn't push the performer, the performer will become bored with it.  If it expects too much of a step up, it will discourage the performer who will implicitly regard the goal as impossible.  This sort of practice seems quite different from the drill we associate with rote learning.  Langer is against drill of that sort and I am too.  Much of what Ericsson and his colleagues focus on regards one-on-one coaching between the coach and the performer.  This is how the practice becomes individualized.  In the classroom, one-on-one coaching is not realistic.  If only one-on-many coaching is possible, can it possibly achieve the requisite goals?  This makes for a challenge.  It is one real reason whey I see the necessity of the PLA in conjunction with the classroom learning.  The individual student needs the self-direction as well as the one-on-many coaching to make progress.  The teacher needs to know that the student has some self-direction as a learner and based on that is bringing something to the table.

Another point Ericsson and colleagues make is that practice can't happen day and night.  It happens for a limited time on a daily basis, perhaps an hour or so only, maybe only a half hour per day.  If you run a marathon as if it is a sprint, you will not finish the race.  Burnout among high performers is fairly common.   For me, there is a tension with not letting go of an idea I've glommed onto and being always on and therefore burning out, a common affliction with my learning technologist friends (and with me when I was one full time).   On this one, however, I think the parallel with concert musicians or world-class athletes regarding practice is inexact.   The best I've been able to achieve for myself in doing the blog posting is periods of rather intense concentration where I seem to be making good progress, other periods where I'm stuck but haven't abandoned the idea and if nothing else is obligating me then returning to the idea, and complete veg-out periods where I'm awake but for all practical purposes it's mindless activities I'm after so am definitely not thinking about a possible blog post.  (I still teach and am in fact teaching a new preparation this semester, so am putting a fair amount of time into that.  Some of that serves as a substitute for the intellectual joy I get from writing my posts here.  In talking about my sine wave regarding intensity of effort on the blog, I'm abstracting from my teaching time as well as from other more mundane tasks I do.)    Unlike writing a novel, where for the next day of writing your 300 words you already know today the general subject matter, I let different things come to me, usually out of something I've read that day.

The diversity regarding topic helps to keep it interesting.  But since there is a lot more that I read than what I write about, there remains the question of what it takes for me to get absorbed by an idea.  Mostly that happens intuitively.  I'm looking for novelty yet also for the ability to offer up critique.  As you can tell, those criteria make for an imperfect search algorithm.  There may be a period where I find a candidate idea but am not so locked into it, such as with the piece from the Times about teacher evaluation.  (If I finish a book there is little issue here, as I've already made a big personal commitment to the ideas.  But if it is only a movie or even more so an article that takes only a short while to read, that effort isn't sufficient in itself to establish the commitment to see the idea through.)   And like most people these days, I'm subject to distractions in electronic form - email and Facebook posts by friends being the primary source of those.  When in intense concentration mode I'm able to ignore those distractions; when in veg-out mode those can become my primary focus.

The imperfections aside, the approach has been fruitful for me.    So I would like to see something like it in my students.  That would mean I'm helping them learn to learn, a meta-skill which is durable.  Their knowledge of the subject matter I'm teaching is likely not to persist in any depth with them, unless they go onto graduate school in economics.  My ultimate question for Langer is whether she has evidence that mindful learning has durable value.  I know this is extremely difficult to measure, because what is durable in our thinking is the amalgam of many prior experiences.  But for that reason we should be talking about regimes with one approach rather than individual courses or even individual topics within a course with that approach.  So I'd like to see Langer speculate, even if the evidence on this is scant, about where the learners would get to if they had such a regime.  And I'd like to hear her further speculate whether such a regime, say if done in college, can undo the mental numbness that many students seem to develop from the traditional approach in the K-12 grades.  Since Langer wrote her book, we seem to have gone backwards in K-12.  I can' see us going forward again unless there are coherent arguments put forward about what to do instead.

Weather Forecast for Tonight

I really detest this sort of weather.  It's very easy to slip and fall on the ice. Car accidents are also much more likely.   I teach tomorrow.  Otherwise, I'd just stay home the entire day and wait till it melts.

Self-Reflection Limerick

Intellectually speaking,
My rhymes need more than tweaking.
Possessing the curse
Of Poli Sci in verse,
Friends and colleagues I'm out freaking.

Nomination Battle in the Red Party

Rick Santorum
Found a quorum
That will keep him in the dance.

The Far Right
Making a fight
Hoping Romney won't advance.

A true stunner
To the front runner
A blow well beyond a glance.

From this divide
No place to hide
Portending more candidate rants.

Another Twist for G.O.P. as Santorum Fares Well - NYTimes.com via kwout

Irony, Public Health Policy, and Contraceptives

In a sarcastic way, I find it amusing to consider the recent debate about providing free contraceptives as part of health insurance, and combine that with the issue back from 2010, whether there should be a public option.  Were there such an option and if each employee or student covered by an institution provided health care plan might select the public option instead, then the current debate would be a non-issue.  Church sanctioned institutions would be allowed to provide insurance that didn't included coverage for contraceptives, because individuals would have a reasonable alternative that did include such coverage.  In the current circumstance there is no alternative.

The NewsHour had what I thought was a balanced segment on the issue last night.   Among the points made is that most Catholic women will use contraception sometime during their lifetimes.   A second point is that for low income Catholic women, the example was a Masters student at Catholic University who did not have a full time job, the out of pocket expense for contraceptives would impose a hardship.

Nobody is taking on the public health issue directly where the evidence seems overwhelming and in support of the regulation.  Children born out of wedlock are less healthy and get worse care.  More ubiquitous contraception would provide a partial remedy to this situation.

While it is easy to understand the Catholic Church's position on this matter, it is clear that the Catholic Church is not concerned with protecting a woman's right to choose.  So they can argue that the matter isn't about that at all, but rather about their right to adhere to the practices they teach.

What is more disturbing is how thoughtful Conservative pundits have reacted to this issue.  David Brooks had a column today that is totally over the top.  Judging by the few comments of readers that I read, they felt the same way.  His argument is essentially that the charitable organizations provide essential services to the poor.  These good works need to continue.  The government regulation will cause them to cease, so they should be exempted from the the regulation.  He also argues that there needs to be a medley of different approaches to this service provision, because the cycle of poverty is a complex beast.

These arguments are nonsense.  If the cost of health insurance went up for reasons entirely unrelated to contraceptives - the population got less healthy or certain treatments became more expensive, that might impose some hardship on the charitable organizations who'd have to pay higher health insurance premiums for employees, but they wouldn't shut down.  Quite the contrary, they'd intensify their efforts at seeking donations.  So on the business case for this argument, there really isn't one.  There is then the ethical tradeoff that must be made - indirectly support contraception through the health care plans for employees or cease doing the good works.  Brooks argues that if faced with that tradeoff many institutions would opt for the latter.  Sounds fishy to me.  It certainly sounds like a weak commitment to the good works, and yet we're told   And on the medley of offerings argument - it sure would be a lot more convincing if there were decent public schools in the community.  As it is now the charitable organizations seem to be something of an excuse for not providing decent public schools.   So I'd argue for less of a medley until that situation gets remedied.

Michael Gerson makes much the same argument as David Brooks, though he couches it in political terms.  All of this is about the election next November, according to Gerson.  Saying that, with one stroke Gerson frees himself from talking about the public health issue or about a woman's right to choose.

This is one issue I'd like to see go to the Supreme Court soon.  At present, six of the Justices are Catholic.  If they all recused themselves on the matter, there wouldn't be a quorum.   How's that for irony?

IP Number Strangeness

If anyone else can explain this, I'd appreciate learning what is going on here.  The above is a screen shot I took a few minutes ago of my sitemeter page for the blog.  All four of these are me accessing various posts and each from the same computer.  Item 2 provides the Domain Name I have come to expect seeing.  That access was via Firefox.  Item 4 was an access from Chrome.  That there was a different IP number surprised me, so I experimented a little bit.  Item 3 was access from Internet Explorer.  I wondered if there had been a temporary reassignment of IP so after I got the usual IP number, I went back to Chrome to try again.  That's what Item 1 is.

It then occurred to me to go to myipaddress.com in Firefox.  It gave the 50.129.... as the address.  

I do look at sitemeter fairly regularly.  Based on that certain IP numbers start seeming familiar.  I associate 98.222.... as from Champaign-Urbana, for example.   But now I'm confused by what these things mean. 

Hero of the day

It was definitely a team effort.  But it's great to get the perspective of an individual not usually in the spotlight as to why the moment was significant.  That was a great catch. It's worth noting also, that earlier in the game there was another play like that, but he was out of bounds and the announcer criticized him for it. He learned from  his mistake. 

Super Bowl — Manningham’s Patience Is Rewarded in Critical Catch - NYTimes.com via kwout

The Foreclosure Debacle

The malfeasance and fraud reported in this piece dates back to the mid 1990s, and then the problem got progressively worse.  If there is profit to be made in illegal foreclosures, there is then profit to be made in shaky mortgage origination.  The lack of oversight is especially damning.

Mortgage Tornado Warning, Unheeded - NYTimes.com via kwout