This morning I want to pose the question whether the various administrative structures we place around formal learning actually impede inquiry. Let me do this only in the context of supervising an undergraduate thesis meant to give honors credit to the student. I am supervising one such student now and had a different student I supervised last year. Each of them had taken my Econ of Organizations class and done well in it and presumably they liked the structure of that class. After conversing with an Econ Department adviser and learning what was required to graduate with honors, they asked me if I would supervise their project. I agreed to do so. So I am posing this question with that experience in mind.
Let me also note that perhaps my situation is unique in that while I still engage in inquiry in some way, much of which is express on this blog where the big question is how can we do better with undergraduate education?, I don't see that investigation as being economics for the most part. So I can't simply make these students research assistants in my ongoing project. If I could, perhaps the answers to this question would be easier to come up with. A big deal issue with students doing a research project is what question should they be trying to answer and who comes up with that?
The first time around I had a project in mind that was a bit off the beaten path. It was about (lack of) preservation of our cultural heritage via the folk music our parents listened to on vinyl. There was an economic policy question here. Most of this music was still under copyright. A good chunk of it hadn't yet been digitized. Should copyright be suspended in this case so people who had these records could make digital versions and place those in the public domain? Music companies, which own the copyright in most of these cases, might balk at this even though they wouldn't lose a dime on sales of these albums because those albums are not sold anymore. The issue for them is whether allowing public copying in this case would somehow impact making copies available of more recently released music. So there was a real question here that the student could nibble on and see what headway might be made.
The next time around in my preliminary conversation with the student he indicated interest in doing something with data. I am not a data guy. I am a theorist. But I didn't try to steer him away from his interest. Rather, I simply posed the question - what data could he get with which to do a project? So I suggested he do something on graduation rates, because I thought that sort of data would be readily available. He agreed, though the specific question he would address was left unspecified and was up to him to determine. He took quite a while doing that - reading what he could about graduation rates and seeing what the education researchers said about the matter. Ultimately he glommed onto a project on transfer students from community colleges, a specific look at what I would term the educational production function.
In both cases (the second one is still ongoing) I've had the feeling of being end gamed on the projects. The students would be graduating at the end of the semester, so the project would finish then, regardless of whether it had really run its course or not. The paper that got produced the first time (this time the paper has not yet been written, even as a first draft) was a rushed job. So it very much feels like the process produces half a loaf only.
At the outset we had to determine how many credit hours this project should count for. Neither of the students needed the credits to graduate. In both cases I suggested 2 credit hours and told them individually that this translated into about 6 hours per week of time commitment on their part. Perhaps that was an error. Maybe it should have been 3 or even 4 credit hours to generate a greater time commitment from the students. I really don't know whether my conclusion from the previous paragraph would have been altered had the projects been for greater credit. On the flip side, if the student spends a lot of time spinning his or her wheels, not uncommon when doing research, and as a consequence the project produces meager results, it seems wrong to award a lot of credit for doing it.
I never published anything out of my dissertation for the doctorate. I did produce working papers from it, submitted those for review, got a revise and resubmit from R.E.Stud on one of them, but ultimately it didn't get accepted. I had to change my research agenda to get stuff published. I did have some non-thesis work published early, stuff I co-wrote with Leon Moses, so it wasn't a fatal blow that the thesis wasn't published, but it was quite distressing. I put a huge amount of time into the thesis work. I mention it here only to point out that the half a loaf outcome seems quite likely to me for undergraduate inquiry, especially if the undergraduate is the principal investigator rather than the research assistant.
A few weeks ago I was contacted by the Director of Undergraduate Studies
in Econ, as were the other instructors supervising undergraduate theses
(there are 12 of these projects and I would guess somewhere between 200
and 300 students graduating with a degree in economics), about whether
the student's project was deserving of a departmental award. So doing such a project is already a plum, but we then seem to want to add another plum on top of that.
Anticipating that the project might not turn out to be a world beater, last year I told the student I'd prefer the grade be credit/no credit only. She agreed, but this proved to be a huge hassle and ultimately I believe I had to assign a letter grade. This time around the student queried the department about this in advance and was told that to receive honors credit, he needed to get a letter grade for the course. So I will enter one at the end of the semester, though I haven't graded any of the intermediate work. It doesn't seem to me appropriate to do that. We're less than three weeks from graduation. Grades really don't matter now. Graduating matters now.
If the student ends up doing other economics research in the future, the half a loaf aspect of the current project might actually provide durable benefit as it will help the student to not make the same mistakes again and provide fodder for asking what needs to be done to get a full loaf the next time around. As the second student is going into a PhD program starting in the fall, I'm hopeful that the project will have this effect. But let's face it, this is not the maintained reason for having students write an undergraduate thesis.
If we want such projects to have more direct benefit to the students, the issues sketched here need to be ironed out. I am not going to try to suggest what improvements should be made, other than to observe that the institution appears rigid to me and there needs to be some flexibility to try alternatives that might have a chance of doing better.
I've written this piece because it may have seemed from my prior two posts on The Boyer Commission Report that I was idealizing the benefits from moving to an inquiry based approach. I'm not nearly so idealistic on the prospect of all students engaging in inquiry that produces new knowledge, even when this is done as a research assistant. As an alternative, I do think there would be substantial learning for most students were they to engage in inquiry on subject matter that was already known, but not yet to the students. This would still contrast sharply with a knowledge dissemination approach and help the students mature as thinkers. Whether it would also work from the instructor's perspective remains an open question, one we should spend some time trying to answer. The question of whether administrative structures impede inquiry goes for that as well.
Thursday, April 30, 2015
Wednesday, April 29, 2015
'Splainin'
I finished reading the Boyer Commission Report this morning. In this post I want to address only the recommendations for student writing. But before I do that, let me observe that I had read the report many years ago. I did a search on my computer to find out when it was that I first read it. The earliest thing I found was a presentation from back in 2002 - my job talk as it turns out. The operative slide is below. (Too much text for my taste now. But in defense of this there was no paper to give out ahead of time, only the talk.)
By the time I was past the halfway point in reading this time around, I had the feeling I had appropriated many of the ideas in the report for my own. Indeed, there is quite a bit of similarity in intent between the recent series of posts I wrote, Everybody Teaches, and the teaching part of the report. However, it is hard for me now to identify the sources of my own thinking on these matters. For example, another influence was knowing Chip Bruce and supporting his work on The Inquiry Page. Another influence was the NY Times site, Writers on Writing. And then there were books on learning by several authors, Donald Schon, Jerome Bruner, and John Dewey himself among others. All of these blended into a whole for me. Yet as I haven't read any of this stuff recently other than the report, I started to attribute more of my thinking to having read the report than to other sources.
The teaching message in the report is straightforward. Abandon knowledge transmission as the primary approach. Some knowledge transmission might still occur en passant but should be nothing more than that. Instead, embrace an inquiry approach from the get go. In so doing, undergraduates can be brought into the core function of the research university, which is inquiry and the production of new knowledge that follows successful investigations.
In my short post on the report from Tuesday I raised the issue of whether students are ready for the type of education the Boyer Commission envisions for them. Here I want to focus on what readiness means for this particular recommendation on writing.
I don't like the expression writing down, as I will indicate in what follows. What it refers to here is somebody with a specialist's knowledge writing for a non-specialist. It sounds too much like dumbing down and that is not really the essence of this sort of writing. The reader should not be treated as stupid, but rather as quite intelligent. Smart people who are non-specialists in a field deserve to have their intelligence respected yet need to be educated on points where they are ignorant.
My main contribution in this piece is the following point. The only way you can write this way with any proficiency whatsoever it to read a lot of this type of writing and come to view it as a way to become broadly educated, an activity that is ongoing and lifelong. Absent this prior reading experience, there is no way to get a good mental picture of the audience. Armed with this experience, the reader develops a sense of taste for what good writing of this sort looks like. Then as a writer style-wise this can be done by imitation of the writing the reader likes with himself or herself as in "generalist mode" as the audience. Indeed, it is my view that all students need to learn to communicate as generalists as well as insider in their given field of study.
When I was in high school I would read at least some of the New York Times, which my dad would bring home from work. I confess that first I turned to Red Smith or Arthur Daley. But I also soon developed a fondness for Russell Baker and then the full Op-Ed page. I also had subscriptions to magazines - first Sports Illustrated, then The New Republic, and Scientific American as well. With the latter two, sometimes the pieces were over my head. But I immediately liked the TRB column and learned to like the film review of Stanley Kauffman. I should add here that this sort of reading was not in lieu of reading books, but in addition to it.
Today I really couldn't say what would make for a good diet of generalist readings. I know what I like, but I don't want to prescriptive that way, other than that there should be multiple genres and a variety of writers to sample their style. My sense is that many kids whom we admit to our research universities don't do this sort of thing. But, as old fashioned as it may sound, I believe it is still the ticket now. This is preparation that is really needed for college, more than the AP courses, more than the zillions of extracurricular activities.
And in the spirit of promoting this idea, I would change General Education to Generalist Education and indicate that we should all be generalists, so we can communicate with one another, and each of us should be a specialist too. This sort of rebranding would help on two fronts. It would give more purpose to Gen Ed and instead of viewing those courses as one from column A and two from column B, make them all part of a whole. It would also help to communicate expectations to would be college students about how they should prepare for college. And, in my heart of hearts, maybe it would help to get students to like school, instead of where we are now where so many kids seem alienated by it in one way or another.
By the time I was past the halfway point in reading this time around, I had the feeling I had appropriated many of the ideas in the report for my own. Indeed, there is quite a bit of similarity in intent between the recent series of posts I wrote, Everybody Teaches, and the teaching part of the report. However, it is hard for me now to identify the sources of my own thinking on these matters. For example, another influence was knowing Chip Bruce and supporting his work on The Inquiry Page. Another influence was the NY Times site, Writers on Writing. And then there were books on learning by several authors, Donald Schon, Jerome Bruner, and John Dewey himself among others. All of these blended into a whole for me. Yet as I haven't read any of this stuff recently other than the report, I started to attribute more of my thinking to having read the report than to other sources.
The teaching message in the report is straightforward. Abandon knowledge transmission as the primary approach. Some knowledge transmission might still occur en passant but should be nothing more than that. Instead, embrace an inquiry approach from the get go. In so doing, undergraduates can be brought into the core function of the research university, which is inquiry and the production of new knowledge that follows successful investigations.
In my short post on the report from Tuesday I raised the issue of whether students are ready for the type of education the Boyer Commission envisions for them. Here I want to focus on what readiness means for this particular recommendation on writing.
3. Writing courses need to emphasize writing "down" to an
audience who needs information, to prepare students directly
for professional work.
I don't like the expression writing down, as I will indicate in what follows. What it refers to here is somebody with a specialist's knowledge writing for a non-specialist. It sounds too much like dumbing down and that is not really the essence of this sort of writing. The reader should not be treated as stupid, but rather as quite intelligent. Smart people who are non-specialists in a field deserve to have their intelligence respected yet need to be educated on points where they are ignorant.
My main contribution in this piece is the following point. The only way you can write this way with any proficiency whatsoever it to read a lot of this type of writing and come to view it as a way to become broadly educated, an activity that is ongoing and lifelong. Absent this prior reading experience, there is no way to get a good mental picture of the audience. Armed with this experience, the reader develops a sense of taste for what good writing of this sort looks like. Then as a writer style-wise this can be done by imitation of the writing the reader likes with himself or herself as in "generalist mode" as the audience. Indeed, it is my view that all students need to learn to communicate as generalists as well as insider in their given field of study.
When I was in high school I would read at least some of the New York Times, which my dad would bring home from work. I confess that first I turned to Red Smith or Arthur Daley. But I also soon developed a fondness for Russell Baker and then the full Op-Ed page. I also had subscriptions to magazines - first Sports Illustrated, then The New Republic, and Scientific American as well. With the latter two, sometimes the pieces were over my head. But I immediately liked the TRB column and learned to like the film review of Stanley Kauffman. I should add here that this sort of reading was not in lieu of reading books, but in addition to it.
Today I really couldn't say what would make for a good diet of generalist readings. I know what I like, but I don't want to prescriptive that way, other than that there should be multiple genres and a variety of writers to sample their style. My sense is that many kids whom we admit to our research universities don't do this sort of thing. But, as old fashioned as it may sound, I believe it is still the ticket now. This is preparation that is really needed for college, more than the AP courses, more than the zillions of extracurricular activities.
And in the spirit of promoting this idea, I would change General Education to Generalist Education and indicate that we should all be generalists, so we can communicate with one another, and each of us should be a specialist too. This sort of rebranding would help on two fronts. It would give more purpose to Gen Ed and instead of viewing those courses as one from column A and two from column B, make them all part of a whole. It would also help to communicate expectations to would be college students about how they should prepare for college. And, in my heart of hearts, maybe it would help to get students to like school, instead of where we are now where so many kids seem alienated by it in one way or another.
Tuesday, April 28, 2015
Re-reading the Boyer Commission Report
The passage below is from page 17 of the pdf, found at the ERIC site.
I suspect that well less than half of the undergraduates at Illinois fit this set of desiderata. My guess is that the population we're talking about is no more than 20% of the student body, quite possibly less. In the preceding paragraph of the report, they write:
If I'm in the ballpark on how many students fit the desiderata and if the New Model mentioned above is predicated on the assumption that near 100% of the students fit the desiderata, then there seems an obvious big issue with the argument before it has really started. So I've momentarily interrupted my reading of the rest of the report to pose the following questions.
Is there an alternative model that would be more functional for the majority of students and yet remains consistent with the research character of the place? Or are we stuck with the characterization of the old model provided in the report, where the education of most undergraduates is given short shrift?
Let me add here some factoids about the business side of undergraduate education, regarding what has changed since the report was published 17 years ago. We, and really here I mean all public R1s, are much more dependent on tuition revenue now. Thus a strategy that said reduce the size of the student body to get much closer to that 100% numbers is likely not feasible. Then there is the much greater reliance on non-tenure-track instructors now, many of whom do no research. And, finally, the small liberal arts college alternative, which might be more suitable for many students on purely learning grounds, has become so pricey tuition-wise that the in-state public R1 has become the first choice of many students for what economists would refer to as liquidity reasons.
My inclination is that the necessary change that might enable some progress here has to be found at the promotion and tenure level, not on a campus by campus basis but systematically across all R1s. These changes must lower the bar on the research side of things and raise the bar on undergraduate teaching, which all tenured and tenure track faculty must do in a significant way. People need to recognize the Prisoner's Dilemma aspect of what is at play here. That will block any possible alternative model in favor of preserving the status quo. The only way to stop the Prisoner's Dilemma is by some systematic change that promotes teaching at the expense of research. I fear that we will not get there and that the current model will break.
Now back to reading the report.
It is obvious that not every student should, or would wish to, attend a research university. Without attempting to characterize students at other kinds of institutions, it might be said that the undergraduate who flourishes at a research university is the individual who enjoys diverse experiences, is not dismayed by complexity or size, has a degree of independence and self-reliance, and seeks stimulation more than security. A research university is in many important ways a city; it offers almost unlimited opportunities and attractions in terms of associations, activities, and enterprises. But as in a city, the requirements of daily living may be taxing, and sorting out the opportunities and finding like- minded individuals may be difficult. The rewards of the ultimate experience, however, can be immeasurable.
I suspect that well less than half of the undergraduates at Illinois fit this set of desiderata. My guess is that the population we're talking about is no more than 20% of the student body, quite possibly less. In the preceding paragraph of the report, they write:
A New Model
WHAT IS NEEDED NOW IS A NEW MODEL OF UNDERGRADUATE education at research universities that makes the baccalaureate experience an inseparable part of an integrated whole. Universities need to take advantage of the immense resources of their graduate and research programs to strengthen the quality of undergraduate education, rather than striving to replicate the special environment of the liberal arts colleges. There needs to be a symbiotic relationship between all the participants in university learning that will provide a new kind of undergraduate experience available only at research institutions. Moreover, productive research faculties might find new stimulation and new creativity in contact with bright, imaginative, and eager baccalaureate students, and graduate students would benefit from integrating their research and teaching experiences. Research universities are distinctly different from small colleges, and they need to offer an experience that is a clear alternative to the college experience.
If I'm in the ballpark on how many students fit the desiderata and if the New Model mentioned above is predicated on the assumption that near 100% of the students fit the desiderata, then there seems an obvious big issue with the argument before it has really started. So I've momentarily interrupted my reading of the rest of the report to pose the following questions.
Is there an alternative model that would be more functional for the majority of students and yet remains consistent with the research character of the place? Or are we stuck with the characterization of the old model provided in the report, where the education of most undergraduates is given short shrift?
Let me add here some factoids about the business side of undergraduate education, regarding what has changed since the report was published 17 years ago. We, and really here I mean all public R1s, are much more dependent on tuition revenue now. Thus a strategy that said reduce the size of the student body to get much closer to that 100% numbers is likely not feasible. Then there is the much greater reliance on non-tenure-track instructors now, many of whom do no research. And, finally, the small liberal arts college alternative, which might be more suitable for many students on purely learning grounds, has become so pricey tuition-wise that the in-state public R1 has become the first choice of many students for what economists would refer to as liquidity reasons.
My inclination is that the necessary change that might enable some progress here has to be found at the promotion and tenure level, not on a campus by campus basis but systematically across all R1s. These changes must lower the bar on the research side of things and raise the bar on undergraduate teaching, which all tenured and tenure track faculty must do in a significant way. People need to recognize the Prisoner's Dilemma aspect of what is at play here. That will block any possible alternative model in favor of preserving the status quo. The only way to stop the Prisoner's Dilemma is by some systematic change that promotes teaching at the expense of research. I fear that we will not get there and that the current model will break.
Now back to reading the report.
Sunday, April 26, 2015
Names for the study of numbers
Here's another plug for my blog, The Daily Rhyme, showing a kwout of a kwout. I wonder if American kids would have scored higher had the length of the wood been 40 inches instead of 40 centimeters, since most don't know the metric system.
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
If I were an undegraduate student now, would I try for a PhD?
Timing is everything. Forty years ago, when I first started to consider going to graduate school, in a field I didn't study much as an undergraduate, I didn't think the decision that odd. I really didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. So trying something that was a gamble, certainly, but seemed a possible good fit was about as much as I could hope for. I was a math guy but didn't think I could hack graduate school in math. I had a social science interest but never considered going to grad school in political science, which was my unofficial minor. Economics seemed a reasonable mixture of those two interests. I didn't think at all about what would happen end of pipe, what sort of job I'd get, whether I'd be happy in that, whether I could support myself let alone a family. All I asked was whether I could get into being a graduate student. And the story I told myself, once I got into Northwestern and accepted their offer, was not to make any decision on that until after the first quarter concluded. Since I got a fellowship, if I dropped out after that to try something else, which many of my classmates ultimately did, I wouldn't have out of pocket expenses to recoup. That was the full extent of the thinking --- then.
How would such decision making go today for me, if I were the same sort of student now. I ask this, in part, to try to make sense of the article linked below. By doing so I also hope to make overt other considerations that should matter in doing studies such as the one at Berkeley. The other part that motivates the question is how the rise in reliance of adjuncts for instruction would impact this decision. It is probably impossible to now be as naive about career prospects as I was back then. Would having more information about career prospects block the PhD path, because it would seem too dismal up front?
I was only 21 when starting graduate school, single and with no dependents. Many of my cohort were older. Some were already married. One already had a kid. Several were international students, studying in the U.S. for the first time. For this part, I'm going to assume age-wise that I'd be in the same situation. Also, I want to note that the world looks quite different as a first-year grad student than it does in the third or fourth year. Here's how this matters.
While I did look for apartments in Evanston where I'd have one or more roommates, I ultimately opted for a one bedroom in Rogers Park that I'd have to myself. While this was a no frills place, it was a step up in the quality of housing that I had in undergrad school. The best part of life at 509 Wykcoff in Ithaca as an undergrad were the people who lived there. I had a great time with many of them. What I had in common with them was where we lived, not what we studied. I lost that when going to grad school, but I was going to lose that no matter what else I did as long as I left Ithaca. In terms of the physical quality of the place, particularly the sharing of bathroom facilities, it really was no great shakes. I didn't have more lofty expectations at the time. I bought crappy furniture. That was okay. After a couple of years I started to wake up with my back hurting. I regretted having such a poor mattress. That got to me after a while. By the time I was writing my dissertation, I was kind of fed up with living like a pauper. A reasonable argument might have been made at the time that I spend an extra year at NU to write a bang up thesis and have an even better job market. But I didn't consider that because of the low income path as a grad student. By then I wanted a real job.
So where in the trajectory are these student surveys being delivered? First year doctoral students are apt to answer quite differently from more advanced doctoral students. Then, as I recast myself into the present, I wonder if my expectations for housing/quality of life outside of school would be different now and if being driven by more materialistic concerns if that would steer me to finding a job rather than go to grad school.
Next, let me talk about the intellectual quality of life, both the schoolwork itself and the social life. Graduate school was much more intense than undergraduate and required a much greater personal commitment, or so was my experience back then. It turns out that I was ready for that; it was something that fit me pretty well. What I missed, however, was having friends who were not studying what I was studying. I didn't really want to narrow in the non-school part of life, which there was little of during the first year, especially the first quarter, but which grew more important over time. Living by myself may have been a mistake in this regard. Who knows? What I wonder now is whether one can get more diversity in social life if outside academia, or if somebody who is on the shy side as I was, would tend to find friends at work, but not elsewhere. In any event, this narrowness can contribute to a depression.
The last bit I want to consider is whether the subject matter itself might seem a betrayal from one's expectations or if it fully captivates the mind. At the time I went to graduate school, and perhaps for the next ten years thereafter, economic theory was in its heyday and as I was trained as a theorist I found it quite captivating. Twenty years after I started graduate school I began to become disillusioned with the theory - it really didn't say much unless you made some arbitrary assumptions up front to get more specific conclusions. That plus the rise of computing has made empirical economics much more valued. But even there, economists are pretty much stuck with the data they can get. The can't perform experiments in situ. There is a branch of economics that does perform experiments, frequently with college students as subjects, but these are classroom as laboratory type of experiments only. If I had more skepticism about the discipline itself in advance of attending grad school, would that have encouraged me to not go for a PhD?
These sort of hypothetical questions don't have right answers. I should add here that I don't see some alternative path that is obviously better. I can envision a public service project in lieu of a stint in the Peace Corps as a possible alternative, the one I have in mind now is to author online interactive content for K-12 to be made freely available to schools and students, and that might engage me and help me mature some so I could better answer the question of what to do next. Maybe watching The Graduate a couple of times would help or just the bit that produced the answer, "plastics." In retrospect, we didn't have such good answers back then. Why is it that we assumed otherwise?
How would such decision making go today for me, if I were the same sort of student now. I ask this, in part, to try to make sense of the article linked below. By doing so I also hope to make overt other considerations that should matter in doing studies such as the one at Berkeley. The other part that motivates the question is how the rise in reliance of adjuncts for instruction would impact this decision. It is probably impossible to now be as naive about career prospects as I was back then. Would having more information about career prospects block the PhD path, because it would seem too dismal up front?
I was only 21 when starting graduate school, single and with no dependents. Many of my cohort were older. Some were already married. One already had a kid. Several were international students, studying in the U.S. for the first time. For this part, I'm going to assume age-wise that I'd be in the same situation. Also, I want to note that the world looks quite different as a first-year grad student than it does in the third or fourth year. Here's how this matters.
While I did look for apartments in Evanston where I'd have one or more roommates, I ultimately opted for a one bedroom in Rogers Park that I'd have to myself. While this was a no frills place, it was a step up in the quality of housing that I had in undergrad school. The best part of life at 509 Wykcoff in Ithaca as an undergrad were the people who lived there. I had a great time with many of them. What I had in common with them was where we lived, not what we studied. I lost that when going to grad school, but I was going to lose that no matter what else I did as long as I left Ithaca. In terms of the physical quality of the place, particularly the sharing of bathroom facilities, it really was no great shakes. I didn't have more lofty expectations at the time. I bought crappy furniture. That was okay. After a couple of years I started to wake up with my back hurting. I regretted having such a poor mattress. That got to me after a while. By the time I was writing my dissertation, I was kind of fed up with living like a pauper. A reasonable argument might have been made at the time that I spend an extra year at NU to write a bang up thesis and have an even better job market. But I didn't consider that because of the low income path as a grad student. By then I wanted a real job.
So where in the trajectory are these student surveys being delivered? First year doctoral students are apt to answer quite differently from more advanced doctoral students. Then, as I recast myself into the present, I wonder if my expectations for housing/quality of life outside of school would be different now and if being driven by more materialistic concerns if that would steer me to finding a job rather than go to grad school.
Next, let me talk about the intellectual quality of life, both the schoolwork itself and the social life. Graduate school was much more intense than undergraduate and required a much greater personal commitment, or so was my experience back then. It turns out that I was ready for that; it was something that fit me pretty well. What I missed, however, was having friends who were not studying what I was studying. I didn't really want to narrow in the non-school part of life, which there was little of during the first year, especially the first quarter, but which grew more important over time. Living by myself may have been a mistake in this regard. Who knows? What I wonder now is whether one can get more diversity in social life if outside academia, or if somebody who is on the shy side as I was, would tend to find friends at work, but not elsewhere. In any event, this narrowness can contribute to a depression.
The last bit I want to consider is whether the subject matter itself might seem a betrayal from one's expectations or if it fully captivates the mind. At the time I went to graduate school, and perhaps for the next ten years thereafter, economic theory was in its heyday and as I was trained as a theorist I found it quite captivating. Twenty years after I started graduate school I began to become disillusioned with the theory - it really didn't say much unless you made some arbitrary assumptions up front to get more specific conclusions. That plus the rise of computing has made empirical economics much more valued. But even there, economists are pretty much stuck with the data they can get. The can't perform experiments in situ. There is a branch of economics that does perform experiments, frequently with college students as subjects, but these are classroom as laboratory type of experiments only. If I had more skepticism about the discipline itself in advance of attending grad school, would that have encouraged me to not go for a PhD?
These sort of hypothetical questions don't have right answers. I should add here that I don't see some alternative path that is obviously better. I can envision a public service project in lieu of a stint in the Peace Corps as a possible alternative, the one I have in mind now is to author online interactive content for K-12 to be made freely available to schools and students, and that might engage me and help me mature some so I could better answer the question of what to do next. Maybe watching The Graduate a couple of times would help or just the bit that produced the answer, "plastics." In retrospect, we didn't have such good answers back then. Why is it that we assumed otherwise?
Monday, April 20, 2015
An American Export - Pablum TV
In the early 1980s I made my first trip to Europe. The main purpose was to attend a conference in Umeå, Sweden. There I learned that many of the locals had perfected their English speaking and listening by watching American TV. Particularly popular at the time was the question, Who shot J.R.? It was interesting to see Swedes infer that American culture was fully reflected in the TV show Dallas. At that time I had not yet been to Texas and, having grown up in New York City, viewed it as much alien to me as Europe was. I hoped that the people at the conference didn't see me as just another character from that that TV show, but really it was hard to know.
Now let's fast forward to the present. In my discussion group where we are trying to find ways for the students to be more creative in their learning we've reached the point in the conversation to consider pathways into creativity. Last week we talked about daydreaming. This week and probably next week too we will talk about humor. It's useful here to know what the students bring to the table before the discussion even starts. From this I've learned that the TV shows, The Big Bang Theory and Friends are quite popular in China. It made me ask, does watching sitcoms helps to develop our own sense of humor?
Who knows what indirect influence watching TV has on our behavior? That said, I don't think my sense of humor has TV as its origin. Rather, it seems to me that some internal need for spontaneity was cultivated when I was growing up, quite possibly by non-humorous activities. Being quick at the draw was its own reward. Then that got channeled into humor, not telling jokes that are in the can, though we did that as kids too, but rather as a kind of mental counter punching, where you develop some intuition both about what little bit that has emerged should be emphasized and how to express that in a way that gets a laugh. It must be a learned behavior, but it feels so intuitive to me now I don't really understand my own process.
What is not intuitive to me at all, indeed what I'm taken aback by, is that the students' first association with humor is American sitcoms. As I've posted earlier, they do like to laugh, very much. Does seeing something that makes you laugh help you to get others to laugh, by your own emoting? If not, do we actively need to repress sitcom humor in order to make progress with the type of humor that emerges between students at school or between co-workers on the job?
I used to think too much TV rots your brain. Now I think it simply gives the wrong impression. In this case the wrong impression is that humor is easy to generate. It isn't, especially at first. Let me close with this quote, which seems apt:
Now let's fast forward to the present. In my discussion group where we are trying to find ways for the students to be more creative in their learning we've reached the point in the conversation to consider pathways into creativity. Last week we talked about daydreaming. This week and probably next week too we will talk about humor. It's useful here to know what the students bring to the table before the discussion even starts. From this I've learned that the TV shows, The Big Bang Theory and Friends are quite popular in China. It made me ask, does watching sitcoms helps to develop our own sense of humor?
Who knows what indirect influence watching TV has on our behavior? That said, I don't think my sense of humor has TV as its origin. Rather, it seems to me that some internal need for spontaneity was cultivated when I was growing up, quite possibly by non-humorous activities. Being quick at the draw was its own reward. Then that got channeled into humor, not telling jokes that are in the can, though we did that as kids too, but rather as a kind of mental counter punching, where you develop some intuition both about what little bit that has emerged should be emphasized and how to express that in a way that gets a laugh. It must be a learned behavior, but it feels so intuitive to me now I don't really understand my own process.
What is not intuitive to me at all, indeed what I'm taken aback by, is that the students' first association with humor is American sitcoms. As I've posted earlier, they do like to laugh, very much. Does seeing something that makes you laugh help you to get others to laugh, by your own emoting? If not, do we actively need to repress sitcom humor in order to make progress with the type of humor that emerges between students at school or between co-workers on the job?
I used to think too much TV rots your brain. Now I think it simply gives the wrong impression. In this case the wrong impression is that humor is easy to generate. It isn't, especially at first. Let me close with this quote, which seems apt:
Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward.
Saturday, April 18, 2015
Alliteration in a Limerick
Here's a little promo for my other blog, The Daily Rhyme. It is going strong after one full week.
Monday, April 13, 2015
Freedom of Speech - When and Where?
The piece excerpted and linked below from today's Inside Higher Ed challenged me because I didn't agree with its premise. In this post I will try to work through my thinking about it. I am not a lawyer and not claiming to be one. Neither is Jonathan Zimmerman, who teaches History and Education at NYU.
Let's begin with what the First Amendment actually says and how that is interpreted by the Supreme Court. After doing a quick Google search on First Amendment, I found this site at Cornell which I found helpful, especially the discussion at the Learn more link.
Where the Amendment itself begins with a restriction on Congress, the discussion says that has been extended to all of the Federal Government and to State Government as well. Fine. So issue one is whether a university such as the University of South Carolina is part of State Government. If it is not, it would seem the First Amendment doesn't apply.
It seems clear that private universities are not part of State Government. So if the incident that Zimmerman leads with had happened at NYU, where he works, then it seems clear there would be no First Amendment issue at all and the school could suspend the student as the University of South Carolina did.
If that is right, an interpretation that treated private universities differently from public universities for application of the First Amendment seems possible, but also would be awkward, at best. Under an interpretation that treated both types of universities uniformly, the conclusion must be that the First Amendment prohibitions are simply not applicable.
The second issue seems to be whether the Carolinian Creed is a law, one that might abridge a student's freedom of speech. As I am more familiar with the University of Illinois than the University of South Carolina, I will focus on the Student Code from my campus. Below is the operative sentence from Part B of the Preamble.
At issue here are the highlighted phrases, which do constitute some limits on speech put into place for the good of the campus community. If the University is part of State Government and the Student Code is law, then there is a First Amendment violation. If the Student Code is not law, the First Amendment prohibitions don't apply. Here, each interpretation seems possible to me. The university cannot fine or imprison a student for violating the Student Code, but it can suspend the student or dismiss the student outright. One thing that matters a lot, in my view, but is not in the language explicitly is on the issue of intent when the rights or dignity of others are violated. Malicious intent requires a different treatment from a clueless trespass. The latter demands education rather than punishment and that is the way it is typically handled on campus. Most law doesn't accommodate the violator that way, which is perhaps one reason to think Student Codes are not law.
The last issue for me is place. In reading the Inside Higher Ed piece I immediately thought of my own classroom. Students do not have Freedom of Speech there. The norm for behavior is that a student can talk up if she first raises her hand and then is called on by me. If the student says something off point, I might very well interrupt. I want to note this rarely happens. Much more common is the issue that no student raises a hand when I would like some student response. Nonetheless, the point is that the instructor is armed with the usual tools to thwart disrespectful speech in the classroom.
A student speaking out on the Quad is an entirely different matter. That is a public place and the First Amendment is probably applicable there. But once you differentiate space where the First Amendment does or does not apply, there is then the issue of which sort of space is a Campus study room. Would the answer depend on whether the room was only accessible to people with campus ID cards? Our Library and our academic buildings have no such access restriction during normal hours, but our gym facilities do.
Much of the rest of Zimmerman's essay is a lament that infringement on the respect for others seems to matter on grounds of race but not on grounds of religion. In other words, the codes are enforced selectively. This is not a First Amendment matter, but it is a serious concern. However, given that the Salaita case is still pending, it would seem that if we think of these codes as applying to the entire Campus community rather than just to students then grounds of religion do in fact matter. If so, the real issue is what constitutes breach and what counts for acceptable criticism within civilized discourse. Drawing that line is undoubtedly difficult, which is why everyone seems to be struggling here. But that is not sufficient reason, in my view, for an argument that no line should exist whatsoever, which is what Zimmerman argues.
Let's begin with what the First Amendment actually says and how that is interpreted by the Supreme Court. After doing a quick Google search on First Amendment, I found this site at Cornell which I found helpful, especially the discussion at the Learn more link.
Where the Amendment itself begins with a restriction on Congress, the discussion says that has been extended to all of the Federal Government and to State Government as well. Fine. So issue one is whether a university such as the University of South Carolina is part of State Government. If it is not, it would seem the First Amendment doesn't apply.
It seems clear that private universities are not part of State Government. So if the incident that Zimmerman leads with had happened at NYU, where he works, then it seems clear there would be no First Amendment issue at all and the school could suspend the student as the University of South Carolina did.
If that is right, an interpretation that treated private universities differently from public universities for application of the First Amendment seems possible, but also would be awkward, at best. Under an interpretation that treated both types of universities uniformly, the conclusion must be that the First Amendment prohibitions are simply not applicable.
The second issue seems to be whether the Carolinian Creed is a law, one that might abridge a student's freedom of speech. As I am more familiar with the University of Illinois than the University of South Carolina, I will focus on the Student Code from my campus. Below is the operative sentence from Part B of the Preamble.
These values include the freedom to learn, free and open expression within limits that do not interfere with the rights of others, free and disinterested inquiry, intellectual honesty, sustained and independent search for truth, the exercise of critical judgment, respect for the dignity of others, and personal and institutional openness to constructive change.
At issue here are the highlighted phrases, which do constitute some limits on speech put into place for the good of the campus community. If the University is part of State Government and the Student Code is law, then there is a First Amendment violation. If the Student Code is not law, the First Amendment prohibitions don't apply. Here, each interpretation seems possible to me. The university cannot fine or imprison a student for violating the Student Code, but it can suspend the student or dismiss the student outright. One thing that matters a lot, in my view, but is not in the language explicitly is on the issue of intent when the rights or dignity of others are violated. Malicious intent requires a different treatment from a clueless trespass. The latter demands education rather than punishment and that is the way it is typically handled on campus. Most law doesn't accommodate the violator that way, which is perhaps one reason to think Student Codes are not law.
The last issue for me is place. In reading the Inside Higher Ed piece I immediately thought of my own classroom. Students do not have Freedom of Speech there. The norm for behavior is that a student can talk up if she first raises her hand and then is called on by me. If the student says something off point, I might very well interrupt. I want to note this rarely happens. Much more common is the issue that no student raises a hand when I would like some student response. Nonetheless, the point is that the instructor is armed with the usual tools to thwart disrespectful speech in the classroom.
A student speaking out on the Quad is an entirely different matter. That is a public place and the First Amendment is probably applicable there. But once you differentiate space where the First Amendment does or does not apply, there is then the issue of which sort of space is a Campus study room. Would the answer depend on whether the room was only accessible to people with campus ID cards? Our Library and our academic buildings have no such access restriction during normal hours, but our gym facilities do.
Much of the rest of Zimmerman's essay is a lament that infringement on the respect for others seems to matter on grounds of race but not on grounds of religion. In other words, the codes are enforced selectively. This is not a First Amendment matter, but it is a serious concern. However, given that the Salaita case is still pending, it would seem that if we think of these codes as applying to the entire Campus community rather than just to students then grounds of religion do in fact matter. If so, the real issue is what constitutes breach and what counts for acceptable criticism within civilized discourse. Drawing that line is undoubtedly difficult, which is why everyone seems to be struggling here. But that is not sufficient reason, in my view, for an argument that no line should exist whatsoever, which is what Zimmerman argues.
Sunday, April 12, 2015
The Teach-to-the-Test Society
Different philosophies of education prevail. They all might be reduced to this one core question. What is the true nature of the learner? One popular view is that first and foremost kids want to play; school often serves as an impediment to that end. Anyone who watched The Little Rascals when they were kids couldn't escape this message. The job of the teacher in this view is to discipline the students enough and not leave them to their own devices. A different view is that the learner will drive real learning, provided the learner is not too stressed by the environment. This alternative can be associated with many names; perhaps Montessori and Maslow are the most prominent. The job of the teacher in this alternative view is to remove as many potential sources of bad stress as possible, model some for the student to help the student shape the direction of inquiry, and then let the student take it from there.
There may be still other views of the learner that can better account for when extrinsic reward (carrots instead of sticks) is most useful in promoting learning. But for my purposes here it suffices to focus only on the above two approaches and treat them as polar opposites. It would be interesting to poll the population of which view of education they subscribe to. Without any data on this, I conjecture that the bulk of the population subscribes to the Little Rascals view of school, as many of them may have struggled in school, found it boring or alienating, or never had that one inspirational teacher who helped them get over the hump. In contrast, the bulk of the the people who became university professors must have liked school, a lot. They are apt then to hold the Montessori and Maslow view. I count myself in this camp.
This spring I've been involved with a discussion group comprised of a few students from my class last fall. We meet on Friday afternoons with a session going somewhere between 90 minutes and 2 hours. It's the first time I've done something like this. Each of the students happens to be Asian, which has encouraged the discussion to take certain directions. I believe the group has been quite successful insofar as we are capable of frank and open conversation. However, it has been pretty much a failure when judged from my original purpose in forming the group. This was to ask how students might become more creative in their own learning. Mainly these students don't see themselves doing that though they are extremely diligent about doing their schoolwork.
One of the three, the only female and a double major in psychology and economics, also the youngest and still a sophomore, has talked about how she expands her horizons by doing research on the Internet, getting at topics that are new to her and somewhat beyond her grasp at first. She enjoys the challenge of mastering these ideas. This is the closest to a description of creativity, but even here the exploration proceeds according to a preconceived plan. There is little or no room for serendipity and discovery that wasn't anticipated ahead of time. There is diligence and competence, but nothing that I would call play.
This is surprising to me as in our conversations I joke a lot and gently tease them fairly often. They are quick to laugh and seem to enjoy the banter. Sometimes they even respond in kind. Yet for whatever reason it doesn't occur to them to bring this sort of play into their learning outside our group discussions, which seems a much more solemn matter. In large part this is because their primary goal is to get an A grade in each class. It has been drilled into them over the years. As I posed it quite a few years ago, Does Pavlov's Dog Evolve? In other words, can students get past all this conditioning and come to drive their own learning? Based on how my discussion group has gone, the answer is either no or that if yes it will be extremely difficult to cause such a change.
Last Friday we had a different sort of discussion, focusing mainly on their high school experiences. This was trying to get at the source of the conditioning. What I learned appalled me. It started this way. Our routine is for one of the students in the group to write a blog post in advance of the discussion. The others, including me, then comment on the post. This is meant to ready us for the discussion. In the post this week a student from China who is graduating after this semester wrote that he used to like reading stuff outside of school and discussing those readings with his friends. But then when he went to high school his teacher in high school said to stop doing that and only read the textbooks they were assigned. This would be the best way to prepare for the national exams. Eventually, he came to agree with his teacher about this. School was hard work. There should be no fun in it.
A Korean student, who though only a junior is a bit older than the others since his college education was interrupted by serving in the army, echoed these sentiments though his story was a little bit different. He said the students spend all day at high school, from early in the morning till late at night. Much of this was like an extended study hall. The students were monitored to keep at it. If they started to goof off they'd be disciplined for it. Corporal punishment was part of it. Not knowing about that from my own experience at school, I thought of this quite vivid scene from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where young Stephen Dedalus away from home at the boarding school Clongowes gets rapped across his knuckles for some indiscretion in class and is writhing in pain thereafter. In spite of this episode, which one surmises had its basis in an actual experience, Joyce remained defiant, one reason why he left Ireland. Most people in these circumstances would capitulate. That seems to be the hidden lesson of the academic high school in China and Korea. Capitulation entails seeing success from the perspective of the school masters. Doing well on the exams becomes the entire focus. Personal self-expression gets drummed out of these kids.
In today's NY Times there is a piece by Frank Bruni about the high suicide rate among teens who live in academic pressure cookers; Palo Alto is one such place, though they exist within certain major cities in gentrified zones and in the suburbs that house the well to do. Wanting their kids to be so smart, the adults are so stupid in how they go about things. A few years ago I wrote a post called Retards, which though it had different bits to it had main focus on the movie Charly. The scientists performing the experiment were so intent on raising the intelligence of their subject that they ignored the ego beating he was taking from having to compete with the mouse, Algernon. That bothered me a great deal at the time.
The issues surrounding accountability in education have been with us upwards of 40 years. The damage done since to the so-called high academic achievers seems enormous to me. Isn't it time to go back to square one and come up with some alternative, one that both engages the students so they don't want to play hooky from school and one that promotes their good mental health? Human beings intrinsically are curious. They want to satisfy that curiosity, which is the prime impetus for learning. Why have we allowed school to so stray from helping the kids learn on their own?
There may be still other views of the learner that can better account for when extrinsic reward (carrots instead of sticks) is most useful in promoting learning. But for my purposes here it suffices to focus only on the above two approaches and treat them as polar opposites. It would be interesting to poll the population of which view of education they subscribe to. Without any data on this, I conjecture that the bulk of the population subscribes to the Little Rascals view of school, as many of them may have struggled in school, found it boring or alienating, or never had that one inspirational teacher who helped them get over the hump. In contrast, the bulk of the the people who became university professors must have liked school, a lot. They are apt then to hold the Montessori and Maslow view. I count myself in this camp.
This spring I've been involved with a discussion group comprised of a few students from my class last fall. We meet on Friday afternoons with a session going somewhere between 90 minutes and 2 hours. It's the first time I've done something like this. Each of the students happens to be Asian, which has encouraged the discussion to take certain directions. I believe the group has been quite successful insofar as we are capable of frank and open conversation. However, it has been pretty much a failure when judged from my original purpose in forming the group. This was to ask how students might become more creative in their own learning. Mainly these students don't see themselves doing that though they are extremely diligent about doing their schoolwork.
One of the three, the only female and a double major in psychology and economics, also the youngest and still a sophomore, has talked about how she expands her horizons by doing research on the Internet, getting at topics that are new to her and somewhat beyond her grasp at first. She enjoys the challenge of mastering these ideas. This is the closest to a description of creativity, but even here the exploration proceeds according to a preconceived plan. There is little or no room for serendipity and discovery that wasn't anticipated ahead of time. There is diligence and competence, but nothing that I would call play.
This is surprising to me as in our conversations I joke a lot and gently tease them fairly often. They are quick to laugh and seem to enjoy the banter. Sometimes they even respond in kind. Yet for whatever reason it doesn't occur to them to bring this sort of play into their learning outside our group discussions, which seems a much more solemn matter. In large part this is because their primary goal is to get an A grade in each class. It has been drilled into them over the years. As I posed it quite a few years ago, Does Pavlov's Dog Evolve? In other words, can students get past all this conditioning and come to drive their own learning? Based on how my discussion group has gone, the answer is either no or that if yes it will be extremely difficult to cause such a change.
Last Friday we had a different sort of discussion, focusing mainly on their high school experiences. This was trying to get at the source of the conditioning. What I learned appalled me. It started this way. Our routine is for one of the students in the group to write a blog post in advance of the discussion. The others, including me, then comment on the post. This is meant to ready us for the discussion. In the post this week a student from China who is graduating after this semester wrote that he used to like reading stuff outside of school and discussing those readings with his friends. But then when he went to high school his teacher in high school said to stop doing that and only read the textbooks they were assigned. This would be the best way to prepare for the national exams. Eventually, he came to agree with his teacher about this. School was hard work. There should be no fun in it.
A Korean student, who though only a junior is a bit older than the others since his college education was interrupted by serving in the army, echoed these sentiments though his story was a little bit different. He said the students spend all day at high school, from early in the morning till late at night. Much of this was like an extended study hall. The students were monitored to keep at it. If they started to goof off they'd be disciplined for it. Corporal punishment was part of it. Not knowing about that from my own experience at school, I thought of this quite vivid scene from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where young Stephen Dedalus away from home at the boarding school Clongowes gets rapped across his knuckles for some indiscretion in class and is writhing in pain thereafter. In spite of this episode, which one surmises had its basis in an actual experience, Joyce remained defiant, one reason why he left Ireland. Most people in these circumstances would capitulate. That seems to be the hidden lesson of the academic high school in China and Korea. Capitulation entails seeing success from the perspective of the school masters. Doing well on the exams becomes the entire focus. Personal self-expression gets drummed out of these kids.
In today's NY Times there is a piece by Frank Bruni about the high suicide rate among teens who live in academic pressure cookers; Palo Alto is one such place, though they exist within certain major cities in gentrified zones and in the suburbs that house the well to do. Wanting their kids to be so smart, the adults are so stupid in how they go about things. A few years ago I wrote a post called Retards, which though it had different bits to it had main focus on the movie Charly. The scientists performing the experiment were so intent on raising the intelligence of their subject that they ignored the ego beating he was taking from having to compete with the mouse, Algernon. That bothered me a great deal at the time.
The issues surrounding accountability in education have been with us upwards of 40 years. The damage done since to the so-called high academic achievers seems enormous to me. Isn't it time to go back to square one and come up with some alternative, one that both engages the students so they don't want to play hooky from school and one that promotes their good mental health? Human beings intrinsically are curious. They want to satisfy that curiosity, which is the prime impetus for learning. Why have we allowed school to so stray from helping the kids learn on their own?
The Daily Rhyme
I've
started a new blog, with link below. This to sustain my latest
indulgence without torturing readers of my main blog who don't want the
nonsense stuff. I will not repost the rhymes in Lanny on Learning or in Facebook. Instead,
there is an email subscription option. Note that if you choose that you
will get a confirmation email message where you must click on the link
to activate the subscription.
There is a semi-serious reason for my doing this. Even before the Internet, papers had abstracts that would often suffice for readers. Now so much information is delivered in digest form. An issue is whether digests can be made more entertaining and thereby make it easier for people to keep up. Rhymes might prove one way of doing this. If so, this effort might help to identify a few kindred souls who also author rhymes of this sort and collectively amass a readership that wants the stuff.
There is a semi-serious reason for my doing this. Even before the Internet, papers had abstracts that would often suffice for readers. Now so much information is delivered in digest form. An issue is whether digests can be made more entertaining and thereby make it easier for people to keep up. Rhymes might prove one way of doing this. If so, this effort might help to identify a few kindred souls who also author rhymes of this sort and collectively amass a readership that wants the stuff.
Tuesday, April 07, 2015
One and done, Spoils the fun.
The Final Four is a very small sample on which to rank the teams who play in it. Just to make that point, below are the Sagarin rankings for the top twenty teams based on the entire season. Sticking with just the top three, the Final Four ranking would be 1. Duke, 2. Wisconsin, and 3. Kentucky.
The Final Four had added interest because two of the teams, Kentucky most famously but Duke as well, featured the new one-and-done model, with the teams featuring freshman stars who are likely to declare for the NBA draft, while the other two teams, both from the Big Ten, employed the more traditional model where seniors and juniors form the bulwark for the clubs. Each game played in the Final Four was new model versus old. The results gave the new model 2 victories and 1 defeat.
Invariably, given this conclusion, the new model is taken to be triumphant and Coach K is looked at as a genius for having embraced it.
There isn't enough data to support these conclusions, though that won't stop the sports pundits from making them. But here I'm more interested in what the coaches actually think rather than what the pundits tell us about them. Are the coaches of one mind on this? Or are there some in both camps?
It seems pretty clear that the new model can work only at a few elite programs at most - there isn't enough talent to go around for it to become the norm for most programs. What is less clear is whether among other programs that go the traditional route if at least a few will emerge that give these elite teams a run for their money. To me, the most interesting game in the tournament was Wichita State beating Kansas. Yet Wichita State seemed outgunned when playing Notre Dame. A few years ago Butler was a compelling story. NCAA basketball needs that type of story to keep up fan interest. Wisconsin provided that type of story this year, even though they play in a so-called bit-time conference.
If those stories begin to dry up, college basketball will start to seem like it is replicating the income inequality in society as a whole. Coaches are under a lot of pressure from their fan base, who want to win now. I wonder whether some coaches at elite programs who actually prefer the traditional model will nonetheless make the switch to the new model because the fans demand it.
One potentially offsetting factor is the Moneyball effect. By this I mean that for players in high school who are better than their competition it is unclear how they will perform once they face a higher caliber competition. So the becoming a McDonald's All American and the various rankings of players at the time they are being recruited out of high school should be thought of as noisy (in a statistical sense). The more the noise, the less good should the new model perform over time. But the talent pool should be thought of as a pyramid. Is there as much noise near the top as there is at the base? Even if there is not, is it still noisy at the top?
Lebron is Lebron and Kobe is Kobe. There wasn't much noise in their case. (Lebron was drafted number 1 so you might say there was no noise in his case. Kobe was drafted 13th. Given that Michael Jordon wasn't drafted number 1, I prefer to think there always is some noise.) But players like that aren't in every draft. Last year Michael Carter-Williams was the NBA Rookie of the Year. He was drafted 11th.
The other factor that could eventually offset the new model is evidence that players' growth in basketball skills and general maturity happens more in college (at least at some programs) than it happens in the NBA. This would give talented players at such programs some incentive to not declare for the NBA draft that is other than that they simply are having a great time in college. I have a sample of one in mind in thinking about this. Deron Williams left Illinois after his junior year and a season where the team made it to the NCAA Championship game. He might have gone out after his sophomore year, but I believe he timed it right doing things as he did. There would need to be many other such examples to convince kids it is good for them to stay. Some of the Kentucky players are sophomores, but it is unclear whether for them that was the reason or if they felt their talent wasn't up to par.
Division 1 men's college basketball serves multiple functions. One, clearly, is as a minor league for the NBA. Another is as entertainment unto itself, with a fan base some of whom care more about the college than the pro game. The old model respects the multiple functions. The new model, not so much. That's the issue.
The Final Four had added interest because two of the teams, Kentucky most famously but Duke as well, featured the new one-and-done model, with the teams featuring freshman stars who are likely to declare for the NBA draft, while the other two teams, both from the Big Ten, employed the more traditional model where seniors and juniors form the bulwark for the clubs. Each game played in the Final Four was new model versus old. The results gave the new model 2 victories and 1 defeat.
Invariably, given this conclusion, the new model is taken to be triumphant and Coach K is looked at as a genius for having embraced it.
Duke won its fifth national championship with four freshmen combining for 60 of the Blue Devils' 68 points and a rookie accounting for every single Duke point in the second half. Tyus Jones finished with 23 points, and Grayson Allen, who had 18 in five combined NCAA tournament games prior, finished with 16.
It is anathema to what Duke had long been, a team built on wily seniors who stuck around and eventually won a championship. The last time the Blue Devils won a title, in 2010, Krzyzewski had mostly avoided one-and-done players. By the end of June he might be saying goodbye to three who remained in Durham, North Carolina, for only one season.
Yet what's maybe even more astounding is that Krzyzewski has not only made the change.
He has loved it.
There isn't enough data to support these conclusions, though that won't stop the sports pundits from making them. But here I'm more interested in what the coaches actually think rather than what the pundits tell us about them. Are the coaches of one mind on this? Or are there some in both camps?
It seems pretty clear that the new model can work only at a few elite programs at most - there isn't enough talent to go around for it to become the norm for most programs. What is less clear is whether among other programs that go the traditional route if at least a few will emerge that give these elite teams a run for their money. To me, the most interesting game in the tournament was Wichita State beating Kansas. Yet Wichita State seemed outgunned when playing Notre Dame. A few years ago Butler was a compelling story. NCAA basketball needs that type of story to keep up fan interest. Wisconsin provided that type of story this year, even though they play in a so-called bit-time conference.
If those stories begin to dry up, college basketball will start to seem like it is replicating the income inequality in society as a whole. Coaches are under a lot of pressure from their fan base, who want to win now. I wonder whether some coaches at elite programs who actually prefer the traditional model will nonetheless make the switch to the new model because the fans demand it.
One potentially offsetting factor is the Moneyball effect. By this I mean that for players in high school who are better than their competition it is unclear how they will perform once they face a higher caliber competition. So the becoming a McDonald's All American and the various rankings of players at the time they are being recruited out of high school should be thought of as noisy (in a statistical sense). The more the noise, the less good should the new model perform over time. But the talent pool should be thought of as a pyramid. Is there as much noise near the top as there is at the base? Even if there is not, is it still noisy at the top?
Lebron is Lebron and Kobe is Kobe. There wasn't much noise in their case. (Lebron was drafted number 1 so you might say there was no noise in his case. Kobe was drafted 13th. Given that Michael Jordon wasn't drafted number 1, I prefer to think there always is some noise.) But players like that aren't in every draft. Last year Michael Carter-Williams was the NBA Rookie of the Year. He was drafted 11th.
The other factor that could eventually offset the new model is evidence that players' growth in basketball skills and general maturity happens more in college (at least at some programs) than it happens in the NBA. This would give talented players at such programs some incentive to not declare for the NBA draft that is other than that they simply are having a great time in college. I have a sample of one in mind in thinking about this. Deron Williams left Illinois after his junior year and a season where the team made it to the NCAA Championship game. He might have gone out after his sophomore year, but I believe he timed it right doing things as he did. There would need to be many other such examples to convince kids it is good for them to stay. Some of the Kentucky players are sophomores, but it is unclear whether for them that was the reason or if they felt their talent wasn't up to par.
Division 1 men's college basketball serves multiple functions. One, clearly, is as a minor league for the NBA. Another is as entertainment unto itself, with a fan base some of whom care more about the college than the pro game. The old model respects the multiple functions. The new model, not so much. That's the issue.
Friday, April 03, 2015
If it says so on the Internet it must be true
At one point in my life I may have understood phonetic spellings of words. But no longer. So I may get this bit wrong, but I hope it is not too far off.
Perhaps my favorite Limerick, it was not written by Edward Lear, has the first line starting as follows:
The last line is:
How many sins have been committed in the name of rhyme? In this case the problem is that the country's name is of French origin and therefore should be pronounced, knee-jair. A little knowledge is a troublesome thing. Undoubtedly, kids learn the wrong pronunciation first, as Limericks precede geography in the education sequence. If only I could figure out why I mispronounce Qatar. I don't recall any rhyme with Qatar in it.
As of late I have not trusted my own glib response to a friend's birthday announcement in Facebook. So I've taken to do a Google search or two in the hope of finding something off the beaten path that I might post. Today one of my classmates from junior high and high school turned sixty. What search would I do? Since I've been on a rhyming kick as of late I did a search on rhymes with sixty. The first hit brings up a page at RhymeZone. From the list there one should conclude that a word which ends in itty rhymes with sixty. Yet I'm saying to myself, no it doesn't.
A few moments latter, I do a different sort of search. Last week I wasn't sleeping well at all and felt exhausted. I'd get up around 2 AM but then have a lot of trouble getting back to sleep, often not succeeding at all. I attributed it to drinking too much, so this week I decided to be a teetotaler. It is harder to first go to sleep that way and there is still some getting up in the night, but I feel the sleep has been more restorative and I'm almost caught up with it. So I searched for drinking alcohol and sleeping. The third hit is to a page at WebMD. It tells you that alcohol interferes with REM sleep and the more you drink the more pronounced the effect.
Some years ago I recall having a discussion with my brother, he is an MD and a PhD, where paraphrasing what he said - in the even numbered years eating eggs for breakfast turns out to be bad for you but in the odd numbered years it is good for you. This was a commentary on clinical trials and that individual trials are not conclusive. Further, in human subject research, identifying causal link while controlling for other factors is no mean feat. So I'm at least a little clued in to be skeptical when reading about medical research.
Nevertheless, I completely trust what is on the WebMD page. It jives entirely with my experience. That is proof enough for me. On the rhyming, however, while I concede that both witty and sixty end in ty, I don't think that is enough to make the two words rhyme, so I don't trust the RhymeZone page. I've been scratching my head about why the one but not the other. This is what I've come up with.
I have some sense of what it means to be an expert. Though I'm not now current in either area, I believe it fair that I can still claim expertise in economics and in learning technology. I write rhymes as a hobby. My proficiency there is not as great and my formal training in doing do is none whatsoever. But even a hobbyist develops some sense of taste about what makes for a good product. When I get information from the Internet that comes into conflict with that sense of taste, I will first rely on the sense of taste and reject the information from the Internet. I will need a lot more convincing to change my mind on that.
In contrast, while I think I'm reasonably well informed about my health as a patient, I recognize that I'm coming at it from a patient's perspective only. I willingly concede that I don't have a doctor's perspective. The lack of expertise there makes me more willing to trust what is on the WebMD site, especially when what it says coincides with my experience as a patient.
There is a perhaps surprising derivative way to consider this, from the perspective of our students. The more of what they do as students that has an authoring function, the more they will develop their own sense of taste and come at information they find online armed with that. The more that they merely take as given what is presented in class, the more they are like a patient who knows he is not a doctor. Acceptance of the information will then be the norm, and the norm will be adhered to unless it contradicts experience in a strong way.
So, if we want our students to be skeptics, let's encourage them to write.
Perhaps my favorite Limerick, it was not written by Edward Lear, has the first line starting as follows:
There was a young lady from Niger.
The last line is:
And a smile on the face of the tiger.
How many sins have been committed in the name of rhyme? In this case the problem is that the country's name is of French origin and therefore should be pronounced, knee-jair. A little knowledge is a troublesome thing. Undoubtedly, kids learn the wrong pronunciation first, as Limericks precede geography in the education sequence. If only I could figure out why I mispronounce Qatar. I don't recall any rhyme with Qatar in it.
As of late I have not trusted my own glib response to a friend's birthday announcement in Facebook. So I've taken to do a Google search or two in the hope of finding something off the beaten path that I might post. Today one of my classmates from junior high and high school turned sixty. What search would I do? Since I've been on a rhyming kick as of late I did a search on rhymes with sixty. The first hit brings up a page at RhymeZone. From the list there one should conclude that a word which ends in itty rhymes with sixty. Yet I'm saying to myself, no it doesn't.
A few moments latter, I do a different sort of search. Last week I wasn't sleeping well at all and felt exhausted. I'd get up around 2 AM but then have a lot of trouble getting back to sleep, often not succeeding at all. I attributed it to drinking too much, so this week I decided to be a teetotaler. It is harder to first go to sleep that way and there is still some getting up in the night, but I feel the sleep has been more restorative and I'm almost caught up with it. So I searched for drinking alcohol and sleeping. The third hit is to a page at WebMD. It tells you that alcohol interferes with REM sleep and the more you drink the more pronounced the effect.
Some years ago I recall having a discussion with my brother, he is an MD and a PhD, where paraphrasing what he said - in the even numbered years eating eggs for breakfast turns out to be bad for you but in the odd numbered years it is good for you. This was a commentary on clinical trials and that individual trials are not conclusive. Further, in human subject research, identifying causal link while controlling for other factors is no mean feat. So I'm at least a little clued in to be skeptical when reading about medical research.
Nevertheless, I completely trust what is on the WebMD page. It jives entirely with my experience. That is proof enough for me. On the rhyming, however, while I concede that both witty and sixty end in ty, I don't think that is enough to make the two words rhyme, so I don't trust the RhymeZone page. I've been scratching my head about why the one but not the other. This is what I've come up with.
I have some sense of what it means to be an expert. Though I'm not now current in either area, I believe it fair that I can still claim expertise in economics and in learning technology. I write rhymes as a hobby. My proficiency there is not as great and my formal training in doing do is none whatsoever. But even a hobbyist develops some sense of taste about what makes for a good product. When I get information from the Internet that comes into conflict with that sense of taste, I will first rely on the sense of taste and reject the information from the Internet. I will need a lot more convincing to change my mind on that.
In contrast, while I think I'm reasonably well informed about my health as a patient, I recognize that I'm coming at it from a patient's perspective only. I willingly concede that I don't have a doctor's perspective. The lack of expertise there makes me more willing to trust what is on the WebMD site, especially when what it says coincides with my experience as a patient.
There is a perhaps surprising derivative way to consider this, from the perspective of our students. The more of what they do as students that has an authoring function, the more they will develop their own sense of taste and come at information they find online armed with that. The more that they merely take as given what is presented in class, the more they are like a patient who knows he is not a doctor. Acceptance of the information will then be the norm, and the norm will be adhered to unless it contradicts experience in a strong way.
So, if we want our students to be skeptics, let's encourage them to write.
Wednesday, April 01, 2015
Capitalists Kill Capitalism
In the search for loot and looking to plunder
Powerful firms rip the economy asunder.
The use of the lobby by these would be harriers
Produce government made entry barriers.
This is the real reason lobbyists do petition
For it has the effect to reduce competition.
Thus while the economy is on the brink
These so-called capitalists cause GDP to shrink.
Powerful firms rip the economy asunder.
The use of the lobby by these would be harriers
Produce government made entry barriers.
This is the real reason lobbyists do petition
For it has the effect to reduce competition.
Thus while the economy is on the brink
These so-called capitalists cause GDP to shrink.
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
The Age of Anger
Several different things that I've read or viewed as of late have caused an ill feeling inside. Here I want to talk about three of them and see if I can bring them together into a coherent narrative. The first is the film version of 1984, which stars John Hurt and Richard Burton. I watched it because I wanted to see another film with Burton after recently having viewed The Night of the Iguana. On the link to Burton from the Night of the Iguana page, 1984 was one the films IMDB featured for further Burton viewing other than The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, which I had seen not that long ago. Plus, the campus Library had a copy of 1984. It turns out, however, that while Burton's role in the film is important, the leading actor clearly is Hurt, and Burton's supporting role deliberately tones down on the passion front, so the film disappointed on that score. But I found it remarkable as social commentary on the present, which is what I want to talk about here. (The film actually was released at the tail end 1984, which I suspect was no coincidence.)
The second is the recent book by Thomas Geoghegan, Only One Thing Can Save Us: Why America Needs a New Kind of Labor Movement. The book is most interesting as an articulation of an aspiration and as a goring of certain myths that Liberals cling to. It is weak on explaining how to get there from here and in several places where an argument is being made there seemed to me to be a jump to the conclusion before all the necessary antecedent steps were presented. It is unclear whether Geoghegan is trying to pull a fast one or if he is unaware that his reasoning is spotty in places. As a consequence, I found this book more of a slug than was really necessary. (Some of the stuff on the Wagner Act and what it does or does not permit employers to do when there is a strike was also a slug, but that part probably was necessary.) Nonetheless, Only One Thing Can Save Us is exactly the sort of thing that we need right now to consider what the Liberal agenda really should be about.
The third is the barrage of emails I have been getting from the Democrats. Most are of the form - here is the latest outrage, sign this petition, or of the form - in order to wage a broad based campaign against the Republicans we need donations from lots of small donors like you, please indicate how much you are willing to contribute. I was getting just these sort of emails before the the midterm elections last year. Look how that election turned out.
What I'm not hearing from the Democrats, but desperately wish I were, is some kind of coherent strategy to generate greater voter turnout. I've recently posted on this need from the point of view of macroeconomic policy. It should be evident that the same need exists from the political perspective, if the Democrats are to become the majority again. This lack of strategy is depressing to me. Indeed, these emails are for me worse than no communication whatsoever. It is like rubbing salt in a wound, where this adding insult to injury is being done by people I should be sympathetic to. I wish they were aware that they are alienating me in the process.
Here's a little aside before I paint my little picture. When I was growing up we had at home the collection by Will and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization. Then it was ten volumes. An eleventh volume was published subsequently. One of those volumes I had remembered as The Age of Reason, though apparently the full title is The Age of Reason Begins. This was the age of Shakespeare, Montaigne, etc. In my way of thinking, Reason is of higher order than Anger. Thus, if we now live in Age of Anger while part of the Renaissance was the Age of Reason, we have gone backwards. That was the purpose of my title.
I did a little Google search on The Age of Anger. From that I found this Letter to the Editor, which I thought was spot on. People begin with anger at themselves, self-loathing. This is then outwardly directed - prodded by talk radio, cable news, various sites on the Internet and/or by the political parties, possibly other organizations. The self-loathing is partly a consequence of not pushing back firmly at social threats, out of principle, not anger. With sufficient principled push back, moderate outcomes can be achieved and a sense of reasonableness can prevail. Without such push back, an us versus them mentality can take over. The entire process can then become a vicious cycle.
The letter was itself a comment on a column by Nicholas Kristof that urged readers to Hold the Vitriol. The date of the piece is interesting to me, November 2003. Maybe hindsight makes the past look more benign than it seemed at the time and maybe because I was working full time and putting in yeoman's hours on the job that I paid less attention to national politics then. Even acknowledging that, however, things seem much worse now. Kristof refers back to the previous decade when Bill Clinton was President and the hostility confronted from the Right. That reference made it seem a starting point for such overt anger expressed in our national politics. While I'm no media historian, for non-print journalism I'd point to two TV shows that began in the early Reagan years - Crossfire and The McLaughlin Group. Both had bombast that I don't recall seeing on news/commentary shows before then. Both shows repeatedly illustrated a lack of tolerance for alternative views. And while they had an air of fairness to them, they had a definite rightward tilt. Until then, it is my impression that the news/commentary shows were rather staid. Following them, some of that sort of programming got more and more extreme, both with the in your face style of the shows and with positions articulated.
* * * * *
In the poignant opening scene, members of Oceania are gathered in a large hall facing what appears to be an enormous TV. Each is wearing the same type of blue overalls. Gender matters not for attire. They are sitting on benches watching the monitor. On it there is the personage of the rival nation-state, Eurasia. They hate this man. They are angry. They start screaming, yelling epithets for everyone else in the hall to hear. As their passion swells they arise from their benches and get louder and louder. This culminates in their giving salute, both arms raised and crossed in front.
The protagonist, Winston Smith, we don't yet know his name from the movie but we're sure it's him nonetheless, follows along with the others. He is feigning his actions, because he knows he is being watched and he doesn't want to bring attention to himself. The essence of the entire film is captured in this first scene. Mind control happens by keeping the members in very public places in front of large TVs, forcing them to listen to the latest outrage and then to take pride in the latest victory in the ongoing war. Anger and patriotism are thereby coupled. It is much easier to capitulate to this manipulation than to resist. Most if not everyone else in the room are unlike Smith and earnest in their actions. They have become slaves of the state, whether they realize this or not.
It is possible to resist, to preserve one's sense of independence, capable of generating one's own thoughts. A heretical book, authored by "Goldstein," offers a plan for insurrection and overthrow of the state. Those sensing a need to resist have a desire to read this book. But the thought police are everywhere. If caught, a person must deliver a painful confession. This is captured on video and delivered to the nation on those TV monitors. Thus, a stark tradeoff is offered. One the one hand is mindlessness which is bundled with anger, pride, and a sense of security. On the other is thought, secrecy, and paranoia. The state leaves no doubt as to which choice it wants the person to make. Yet some do resist, at their own peril.
Before moving on from 1984, let me say that I read the book such a long time ago that I was unsure of what was actually in the novel and what was unique to the movie version. The fear and paranoia I suppose was in the book. I'm less sure that the screaming and overt expressions of anger were in the book as well. If you reflect on just this behavior, it seems clear there is a socio-biological need for such expression. This is why we have big time sporting events played against hated rival teams, so these emotions can find expression in a comparatively benign way. When such games are watched on TV, we distinguish between doing so with home team announcers, who typically are quite biased in favor of their side, from national announcers, who strive for neutrality in their broadcast. What this opening scene shows is politics as sport with true homers for announcers, but where this it not diversion from work; it is life itself. That is the dystopia. As social commentary about our current reality it is not 100% spot on. But it seems to me not too far off, which is why this movie is worth watching, evening now.
How might this dystopia be averted with democracy restored? This is the question that Geoghegan takes on, though he looks at it as much through an economics lens as a political one. Indeed, in considering his book you can readily invoke the old saw - economics is about politics and politics is about economics. Put a different way, politics is about power and those without power, even if they have great numbers, will only get a very little piece of the pie. Democracy in outcomes, then, requires some power to accompany the numbers. For Geoghegan, a new kind of labor movement, one modeled after how things are done in Germany, is the way to restore power to the masses.
To Geoghegan, democracy should happen as much within organizations as it does in how government gets elected. Much of his book concerns getting labor to have real representation on corporate work councils. In other words, he'd like to cast the relationship between labor and management as a partnership with equal say, rather than as vertical arrangement with labor at the bottom and management at the top.
But we are nowhere close to that now. At present Labor is very weak and organized labor, think AFL-CIO, UAW, and other unions, seem wedded to a past that will not repeat. In that past the union hierarchy held power while the rank and file had to toe the line. In other words, the structure itself wasn't really democratic. This is why a different approach is necessary.
How does this brave new world come into being? As I said, this is the part of the book that is hardest to embrace. It brings to mind that old New Yorker cartoon. Geoghegan offers up two different strands of possibility. One amounts to guerrilla tactics for labor - quick hitter strikes that show elements of protest aimed at getting the point across yet with sufficient limit that there is no retaliation for striking by the employers against these employees. The idea is to use existing law in a clever way, understand what the employers are actually fearful of and use that against them, and thereby push the agenda along. If all these employees had law degrees a la Geoghegan, this might work. Absent that, this union labor would need free consulting from lawyers like Geoghegan to orchestrate such a strategy. How long would it take for it to achieve the desired result? Who knows. In the meantime, what lawyers apart from Geoghegan would do such pro bono work?
The other strand comes from looking to the past, The New Deal in particular, and noting that the first labor movement was as much a top down creation of FDR's Presidency as it was a grass roots uprising. We need something top down again from The Kennedy School of Government types who occupy the halls of power in Washington. Even if you buy the argument that there is such a need, how do you get any consensus whatsoever among those folks for the type of legislation and programmatic change that will matter and in a good way? So this part of the book I found not convincing at all
A different part of his argument made much more sense to me. This regards the role of education. Geoghegan views education as essential but as to the role of college he is skeptical, even antagonistic in many cases. Indeed he argues that the call for many more to get college education is a mask for the lack of promotion that what labor really needs is power. Ask yourself whether a college education would be necessary for most workers if labor did have power. Then ask whether a college education will matter if labor continues not to have power.
Geoghegan wants to divide education into two different domains. The first is about literacy and good citizenship. He argues here that we did better on this score in the post WW II era than we are doing at present and does so by comparing the denseness of newspaper articles in the late 1940s, when most people didn't have a college education, to the quality of newspaper writing today, where there is much more fluff and where even on the serious pieces the writing tests the reader's acumen less. This is true though the fraction of the population with college is much higher now.
I concur with Geoghegan on this decline in general literacy. As a long time reader of the New York Times, my sense is that it was more challenging to the reader when I first started with it, in the late 1960s, than it is now. The schools take the brunt of the criticism for the decline in literacy, but I believe there are several other important factors to consider. One of those is the much greater abundance now to alternatives to reading. I am thinking mainly of video games and the movies but also counting things like Facebook which though textual in part don't provide coherent argument, so the young mind is challenged less to produce meaning of what is going on. Tying this back to the theme of the post, it should be evident that literacy encourages reason. It's absence does the opposite, thus makes anger as the norm more likely.
The other part of Geoghegan's education argument concerns the human capital side. If you want to be a university professor, you need a college degree, indeed you need a doctorate, qua human capital. As most college education has such folks as instructors, who if they are like me never held a real job of any responsibility, how can they possibly teach their students in ways that will be relevant for the work these students will do post graduation? In other words, college education is not in the spirit of the master-apprentice model. But human capital accumulation best occurs under that model. Thus the production of human capital should be divested from college and done either by the employer on-the-job or, as Geoghegan argues, be done by the trades themselves and then mediated by the union.
Let me point out further on this score that it has long been understood that students want a more practical education than most college instructors are willing to provide. The gap between desired education and the education that actually is provided is apt to be a source of frustration for the students. Such frustration also contributes to anger.
My final bit on Geoghegan allows me to segue to the Democratic party. Geoghegan argues that the Democratic party has abandoned labor in all but name. One big example of this is where the Democrats stand on the teachers and school reform. Geoghegan is from Chicago and he is very disappointed in Rahm Emanuel as Mayor. The public schools and particularly school closings follow a pattern of elite privilege and minority dislocation that is anathema to little-d democratic values. So Geoghegan argues that much of the disruption that labor can cause should be directed at the Democratic party itself. It is an interesting argument. I doubt it can work, but on this one I would love to be proven wrong.
Let me make my last point and then close. It seems to me that members of the Democratic Party listen to each other, but they don't go outside to hear voices that might generally be sympathetic but are not themselves within the party. For example, in the last election the Federal Minimum Wage was one of the big issues. Nobody with a liberal perspective is against such a proposal, but many feel that wages are still too low for people who are working well above the minimum. The primary agenda, then, should be to raise wages across the board. Does raising the minimum wage do that? If not, what would? That primary agenda was buried, perhaps implicit in some of the infrastructure proposal and elsewhere, but certainly not front and center.
If the Democratic Party had a coherent plan for raising wages across the board, its job then would be to educate the public both about the issues and then about how the plan addresses the issues. Much of what the Democratic Party should be doing should occur on this education front. Now there is very little of that sort of thing. As I said at the outset, instead there is a lot of blather about outrage at the Republicans. This is demagoguery. We see negative campaign ads all the time because demagoguery works. It makes people angry. People then act out of passion. But the reality is the Republicans are better at it than the Democrats. The Democrats should stop responding in kind and instead do something else. That they are not is what makes me angry. How long will it take until they figure this out?
The second is the recent book by Thomas Geoghegan, Only One Thing Can Save Us: Why America Needs a New Kind of Labor Movement. The book is most interesting as an articulation of an aspiration and as a goring of certain myths that Liberals cling to. It is weak on explaining how to get there from here and in several places where an argument is being made there seemed to me to be a jump to the conclusion before all the necessary antecedent steps were presented. It is unclear whether Geoghegan is trying to pull a fast one or if he is unaware that his reasoning is spotty in places. As a consequence, I found this book more of a slug than was really necessary. (Some of the stuff on the Wagner Act and what it does or does not permit employers to do when there is a strike was also a slug, but that part probably was necessary.) Nonetheless, Only One Thing Can Save Us is exactly the sort of thing that we need right now to consider what the Liberal agenda really should be about.
The third is the barrage of emails I have been getting from the Democrats. Most are of the form - here is the latest outrage, sign this petition, or of the form - in order to wage a broad based campaign against the Republicans we need donations from lots of small donors like you, please indicate how much you are willing to contribute. I was getting just these sort of emails before the the midterm elections last year. Look how that election turned out.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein
What I'm not hearing from the Democrats, but desperately wish I were, is some kind of coherent strategy to generate greater voter turnout. I've recently posted on this need from the point of view of macroeconomic policy. It should be evident that the same need exists from the political perspective, if the Democrats are to become the majority again. This lack of strategy is depressing to me. Indeed, these emails are for me worse than no communication whatsoever. It is like rubbing salt in a wound, where this adding insult to injury is being done by people I should be sympathetic to. I wish they were aware that they are alienating me in the process.
Here's a little aside before I paint my little picture. When I was growing up we had at home the collection by Will and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization. Then it was ten volumes. An eleventh volume was published subsequently. One of those volumes I had remembered as The Age of Reason, though apparently the full title is The Age of Reason Begins. This was the age of Shakespeare, Montaigne, etc. In my way of thinking, Reason is of higher order than Anger. Thus, if we now live in Age of Anger while part of the Renaissance was the Age of Reason, we have gone backwards. That was the purpose of my title.
I did a little Google search on The Age of Anger. From that I found this Letter to the Editor, which I thought was spot on. People begin with anger at themselves, self-loathing. This is then outwardly directed - prodded by talk radio, cable news, various sites on the Internet and/or by the political parties, possibly other organizations. The self-loathing is partly a consequence of not pushing back firmly at social threats, out of principle, not anger. With sufficient principled push back, moderate outcomes can be achieved and a sense of reasonableness can prevail. Without such push back, an us versus them mentality can take over. The entire process can then become a vicious cycle.
The letter was itself a comment on a column by Nicholas Kristof that urged readers to Hold the Vitriol. The date of the piece is interesting to me, November 2003. Maybe hindsight makes the past look more benign than it seemed at the time and maybe because I was working full time and putting in yeoman's hours on the job that I paid less attention to national politics then. Even acknowledging that, however, things seem much worse now. Kristof refers back to the previous decade when Bill Clinton was President and the hostility confronted from the Right. That reference made it seem a starting point for such overt anger expressed in our national politics. While I'm no media historian, for non-print journalism I'd point to two TV shows that began in the early Reagan years - Crossfire and The McLaughlin Group. Both had bombast that I don't recall seeing on news/commentary shows before then. Both shows repeatedly illustrated a lack of tolerance for alternative views. And while they had an air of fairness to them, they had a definite rightward tilt. Until then, it is my impression that the news/commentary shows were rather staid. Following them, some of that sort of programming got more and more extreme, both with the in your face style of the shows and with positions articulated.
* * * * *
In the poignant opening scene, members of Oceania are gathered in a large hall facing what appears to be an enormous TV. Each is wearing the same type of blue overalls. Gender matters not for attire. They are sitting on benches watching the monitor. On it there is the personage of the rival nation-state, Eurasia. They hate this man. They are angry. They start screaming, yelling epithets for everyone else in the hall to hear. As their passion swells they arise from their benches and get louder and louder. This culminates in their giving salute, both arms raised and crossed in front.
The protagonist, Winston Smith, we don't yet know his name from the movie but we're sure it's him nonetheless, follows along with the others. He is feigning his actions, because he knows he is being watched and he doesn't want to bring attention to himself. The essence of the entire film is captured in this first scene. Mind control happens by keeping the members in very public places in front of large TVs, forcing them to listen to the latest outrage and then to take pride in the latest victory in the ongoing war. Anger and patriotism are thereby coupled. It is much easier to capitulate to this manipulation than to resist. Most if not everyone else in the room are unlike Smith and earnest in their actions. They have become slaves of the state, whether they realize this or not.
It is possible to resist, to preserve one's sense of independence, capable of generating one's own thoughts. A heretical book, authored by "Goldstein," offers a plan for insurrection and overthrow of the state. Those sensing a need to resist have a desire to read this book. But the thought police are everywhere. If caught, a person must deliver a painful confession. This is captured on video and delivered to the nation on those TV monitors. Thus, a stark tradeoff is offered. One the one hand is mindlessness which is bundled with anger, pride, and a sense of security. On the other is thought, secrecy, and paranoia. The state leaves no doubt as to which choice it wants the person to make. Yet some do resist, at their own peril.
Before moving on from 1984, let me say that I read the book such a long time ago that I was unsure of what was actually in the novel and what was unique to the movie version. The fear and paranoia I suppose was in the book. I'm less sure that the screaming and overt expressions of anger were in the book as well. If you reflect on just this behavior, it seems clear there is a socio-biological need for such expression. This is why we have big time sporting events played against hated rival teams, so these emotions can find expression in a comparatively benign way. When such games are watched on TV, we distinguish between doing so with home team announcers, who typically are quite biased in favor of their side, from national announcers, who strive for neutrality in their broadcast. What this opening scene shows is politics as sport with true homers for announcers, but where this it not diversion from work; it is life itself. That is the dystopia. As social commentary about our current reality it is not 100% spot on. But it seems to me not too far off, which is why this movie is worth watching, evening now.
How might this dystopia be averted with democracy restored? This is the question that Geoghegan takes on, though he looks at it as much through an economics lens as a political one. Indeed, in considering his book you can readily invoke the old saw - economics is about politics and politics is about economics. Put a different way, politics is about power and those without power, even if they have great numbers, will only get a very little piece of the pie. Democracy in outcomes, then, requires some power to accompany the numbers. For Geoghegan, a new kind of labor movement, one modeled after how things are done in Germany, is the way to restore power to the masses.
To Geoghegan, democracy should happen as much within organizations as it does in how government gets elected. Much of his book concerns getting labor to have real representation on corporate work councils. In other words, he'd like to cast the relationship between labor and management as a partnership with equal say, rather than as vertical arrangement with labor at the bottom and management at the top.
But we are nowhere close to that now. At present Labor is very weak and organized labor, think AFL-CIO, UAW, and other unions, seem wedded to a past that will not repeat. In that past the union hierarchy held power while the rank and file had to toe the line. In other words, the structure itself wasn't really democratic. This is why a different approach is necessary.
How does this brave new world come into being? As I said, this is the part of the book that is hardest to embrace. It brings to mind that old New Yorker cartoon. Geoghegan offers up two different strands of possibility. One amounts to guerrilla tactics for labor - quick hitter strikes that show elements of protest aimed at getting the point across yet with sufficient limit that there is no retaliation for striking by the employers against these employees. The idea is to use existing law in a clever way, understand what the employers are actually fearful of and use that against them, and thereby push the agenda along. If all these employees had law degrees a la Geoghegan, this might work. Absent that, this union labor would need free consulting from lawyers like Geoghegan to orchestrate such a strategy. How long would it take for it to achieve the desired result? Who knows. In the meantime, what lawyers apart from Geoghegan would do such pro bono work?
The other strand comes from looking to the past, The New Deal in particular, and noting that the first labor movement was as much a top down creation of FDR's Presidency as it was a grass roots uprising. We need something top down again from The Kennedy School of Government types who occupy the halls of power in Washington. Even if you buy the argument that there is such a need, how do you get any consensus whatsoever among those folks for the type of legislation and programmatic change that will matter and in a good way? So this part of the book I found not convincing at all
A different part of his argument made much more sense to me. This regards the role of education. Geoghegan views education as essential but as to the role of college he is skeptical, even antagonistic in many cases. Indeed he argues that the call for many more to get college education is a mask for the lack of promotion that what labor really needs is power. Ask yourself whether a college education would be necessary for most workers if labor did have power. Then ask whether a college education will matter if labor continues not to have power.
Geoghegan wants to divide education into two different domains. The first is about literacy and good citizenship. He argues here that we did better on this score in the post WW II era than we are doing at present and does so by comparing the denseness of newspaper articles in the late 1940s, when most people didn't have a college education, to the quality of newspaper writing today, where there is much more fluff and where even on the serious pieces the writing tests the reader's acumen less. This is true though the fraction of the population with college is much higher now.
I concur with Geoghegan on this decline in general literacy. As a long time reader of the New York Times, my sense is that it was more challenging to the reader when I first started with it, in the late 1960s, than it is now. The schools take the brunt of the criticism for the decline in literacy, but I believe there are several other important factors to consider. One of those is the much greater abundance now to alternatives to reading. I am thinking mainly of video games and the movies but also counting things like Facebook which though textual in part don't provide coherent argument, so the young mind is challenged less to produce meaning of what is going on. Tying this back to the theme of the post, it should be evident that literacy encourages reason. It's absence does the opposite, thus makes anger as the norm more likely.
The other part of Geoghegan's education argument concerns the human capital side. If you want to be a university professor, you need a college degree, indeed you need a doctorate, qua human capital. As most college education has such folks as instructors, who if they are like me never held a real job of any responsibility, how can they possibly teach their students in ways that will be relevant for the work these students will do post graduation? In other words, college education is not in the spirit of the master-apprentice model. But human capital accumulation best occurs under that model. Thus the production of human capital should be divested from college and done either by the employer on-the-job or, as Geoghegan argues, be done by the trades themselves and then mediated by the union.
Let me point out further on this score that it has long been understood that students want a more practical education than most college instructors are willing to provide. The gap between desired education and the education that actually is provided is apt to be a source of frustration for the students. Such frustration also contributes to anger.
My final bit on Geoghegan allows me to segue to the Democratic party. Geoghegan argues that the Democratic party has abandoned labor in all but name. One big example of this is where the Democrats stand on the teachers and school reform. Geoghegan is from Chicago and he is very disappointed in Rahm Emanuel as Mayor. The public schools and particularly school closings follow a pattern of elite privilege and minority dislocation that is anathema to little-d democratic values. So Geoghegan argues that much of the disruption that labor can cause should be directed at the Democratic party itself. It is an interesting argument. I doubt it can work, but on this one I would love to be proven wrong.
Let me make my last point and then close. It seems to me that members of the Democratic Party listen to each other, but they don't go outside to hear voices that might generally be sympathetic but are not themselves within the party. For example, in the last election the Federal Minimum Wage was one of the big issues. Nobody with a liberal perspective is against such a proposal, but many feel that wages are still too low for people who are working well above the minimum. The primary agenda, then, should be to raise wages across the board. Does raising the minimum wage do that? If not, what would? That primary agenda was buried, perhaps implicit in some of the infrastructure proposal and elsewhere, but certainly not front and center.
If the Democratic Party had a coherent plan for raising wages across the board, its job then would be to educate the public both about the issues and then about how the plan addresses the issues. Much of what the Democratic Party should be doing should occur on this education front. Now there is very little of that sort of thing. As I said at the outset, instead there is a lot of blather about outrage at the Republicans. This is demagoguery. We see negative campaign ads all the time because demagoguery works. It makes people angry. People then act out of passion. But the reality is the Republicans are better at it than the Democrats. The Democrats should stop responding in kind and instead do something else. That they are not is what makes me angry. How long will it take until they figure this out?
Monday, March 23, 2015
The Professor Mind
In a mild act of protest, I have deleted the word "Technology" from my blog title and blog description, though I have kept the word "technical" in the description. My protest is about the mistake I see being made, for example here, of pronouncing the technology as the driver of learning, now and in the future. It isn't and it won't be. At best it is an enabler. Often it doesn't rise to that role and instead serves as a mask for non-learning in the guise of learning.
For you clever folks who realize I haven't changed the url for the blog, that fits in with keeping the protest mild. Some battles are not worth fighting. I did change the url for the blog once, way back when. It was originally hosted on a campus server. Then I moved it to blogspot.com, after it became clear it was creating a management problem to be on a server not intended for that purpose. I lost many readers with that move, most of whom never came back. Once is enough.
* * * * *
My title is about definitions 2, 4, and 5 and their interplay. I wonder how many readers would aver that definitions 2 and 4 apply to their own thinking, which they give voice to often. Definition 5 seems more contractual and less about thinking per se, though in the old days (meaning when I first became a faculty member) it seemed that definition 5 implied definitions 2 and 4. I don't believe that is true any more, though I might be convinced otherwise. (At issue for me is how far beyond what they teach can the instructor go in discussing the subject matter of the course and what differentiates the instructor in such a discussion from the student who has taken the course already.)
Let me begin with the observation that I can claim expertise in Economics, because that is where I have my PhD, but my blog is about learning, where my formal education is nada. It may not be obvious, but one informs the other. The habits of mind that were honed doing formal economic modeling come to bear when thinking about learning issues. The puzzle for me is not my own thinking this way, but rather everyone else and whether they are guilty of an enormous conceit. In other words, they claim definition 4 applies to them, but do so without real justification. (One reading of Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow is that this is human nature, to believe we know much more than we actually do. That belief then underlies what he calls WYSIATI.)
Lest the reader think I'm too arrogant in making my prior claim, I want to come clean on my own conceit. It pertains to belief in "thinking hard" though that descriptor is not accurate, but let me get to the clarification after making the point. Thinking hard, for a sufficiently long duration, opens a portal into whatever the object of investigation is. Once the portal appears, it is just a matter of looking at what one sees and then trying to understand it in some sensible way. Until the portal shows up, however, there is only muddle. The professor mind, in my title, spends much of the time waiting till that next portal happens to appear.
One might very well imagine this conceit is a delusion, that actually there is no portal, or even if there is one it never arrives. I will discuss some of my delusional quests below. But first let me note that part of the art in professing is problem selection, which is trying to find something interesting enough to hold one's attention and yet tractable enough that the portal does appear before interest in the problem wanes entirely.
Let's say for the sake of argument that such a problem has already been identified. Is it hard work to find the portal? What does one do to expedite its arrival? I'm going to begin with an answer to the first question that some might consider a cheat. If you have your full concentration on the problem at hand, then sense of self is entirely lost at that time. In those periods of complete absorption, the notion of hard work doesn't make sense. It might make sense in retrospect, when reconsidering what the thinking was, and it might make sense in prospect as well, since achieving a state of complete absorption is no mean feat. I used to be better at it than I am now, though now I do have other behaviors to compensate for the less intense concentration.
As I've written about many times, this being unaware of self is true as long as I'm not stuck. Getting stuck is an entirely different matter. Then self-awareness returns and with a vengeance. The getting unstuck part is hard work. Quite often when stuck I have a feeling that says, "I should be able to get this." I don't know what the basis of that feeling is, but when I have it I'm bothered by being stuck. The being bothered provides the motivation to find a way to get unstuck. There is much prior experience on which the judgment of the problem being do-able and the emotion of being bothered are formed. But is the prior experience relevant to the current situation? Often I can't establish relevance, which is why I say I don't know the basis for that feeling. Once in a while, I suppose, there are false positives, though at the moment none spring to mind, so I don't have an example as illustration.
When I'm not stuck, I'm telling a story to myself and seeing whether the story holds water. This having an internal conversation is something I enjoy doing. So I don't need to prompt it to happen. It will occur on its own accord. If the story seems to be working I keep going. If it does not I try to identify the issue. Then I will retell that part of the story multiple times, to see if the issue is still there or if perhaps it goes away with a slight modification of the story. An issue that survives several retellings then can trigger a new inquiry, one which either replaces the original problem or is done in conjunction with it. Having a story not hold water is different from being stuck. As long as there appears to be a possible way out of the dilemma, I'm not stuck. When I've run out of possibilities to track down, then I'm stuck. The difference between being stuck and the initial search for a problem to investigate is one that's anathema to an economist, proof that sunk costs really do matter. If I haven't put in much time at all considering an issue, I can drop it with little fanfare once it seems not a good fit for me. If I've worked on a problem for a considerable time it's an entirely different matter. Dropping it then would be like betraying a good friend. You don't do that sort of thing.
How far into the story does the portal appear? This depends to a great extent whether the problem is a reaction to something else read, viewed, or heard, in which case it suffices to come up with a reasonably convincing counter narrative. Then it doesn't take too long. It is different with doing something new on your own, where then you are developing some expertise in that at the same time as you are developing the narrative. You need to find the right sort of practice for producing that expertise. That does take time.
* * * * *
Here I want to switch gears and talk about my delusions. You might think of the first type of these as the embodiment of the Vulcan mind meld or if you prefer a real ESP experience with telepathy. This would be done individually with each of my students. I'd like to enter their minds, unobtrusively so as not to influence their thinking, just to observe what is going on. I will explain why in a bit. Here I do want to note that telepathy is sometimes referred to as mind reading. That is instructive. What I do now is have the students write blog posts. I read those. Certainly that tells me something about the student thinking. But there is much thinking that never shows up in the writing. So I want more than just the writing.
The other delusion is to couple the above capability with time travel. I'd like to visit with earlier versions of me. I'd like to see how far along I was with the professor mind at various stages of my own development. I'd like to get a better sense of causality as to what made it develop more fully.
Let me raise some of the questions I have that motivate these delusions. The first and most obvious one is this. Can the professor mind be taught or, perhaps more likely, be strongly encouraged by some early interventions and good experiences which result from that intervention? For me, math played a foundational role. Solving a math problem that we'd get on the Math Team (which I was first on in eighth grade in junior high school and then again in eleventh and twelfth grades in high school) was very much in the spirit of finding a portal into what the problem was asking. So that was an early antecedent for the professor mind for me, though since those problems were timed it encouraged a quick hitter approach to penetrating the problem. In high school there was also the Problem of the Week, which was not timed, and encouraged a more deliberate sort of investigation.
What I'd like to know about me is really in the last few years of elementary school, where my recollection of school is far hazier. Were there intimations of the professor mind even then? Did one or several of my teachers make some suggestions to me that pushed me in the direction of the professor mind? Then, I'd like to pose the same sort of questions for my students. Might I have a brief dialog with each of them where I make some mild suggestions, nothing more, but ones that the students are willing to try? And then, might those simple suggestions show profound change in the way these students think, not immediately but in the fullness of time?
Another question concerns whether becoming a professor was more or less inevitable for me. I have learned as an adult that my Myers-Briggs type is INTP. Does that fact coupled with the observation that many of my high school classmates who were my friends became either doctors or lawyers but my path was elsewhere mean that the professor path was the likely alternative? Or did I simply luck into it? One obvious bit of serendipity for me was that I took only one undergrad economics course, introduction to macroeconomics. Sometime in the middle of the course the professor announced to the class that if anyone was good in math and was interested in going to graduate school, that person should come see him. This was completely unplanned, yet it offered an extremely good fit for me, marrying the math aptitude to a social science interest. Suppose I hadn't taken that course, or took it as a senior rather than as a junior, or had a different instructor who wouldn't make such an announcement. What would have happened to me then?
A third question concerns whether the professor mind can flourish without associating it with the professor job. For example, can administrators on campus who never were faculty members nonetheless have the professor mind? Might investigative journalists have the professor mind? After all, isn't their job to see things how they actually are rather than simply how they appear to be? Are there other professions where that sort of seeing is fundamental to the job description?
One last question is posed in the negative. Why doesn't the professor mind develop in more people? I hypothesize that extroverts are much less likely to develop the professor mind, as they'd rather spend their time interacting with others than engaging in reflective thought. That takes care of about half the population. Even among introverts, we know that some people are "good with their hands" and express themselves manually rather than through reflection or introspection. Others might have an artistic bent. I will assert here that there are many introverts who are neither professor types, nor good with their hands, nor artistic. Among these, many may not have had good enough educational opportunities to develop intellectually, a manifestation attributable to the income inequality in our society. For the rest, many fit the description given in Excellent Sheep.
Let me return to my delusions and to childhood memories. I would like to trace the role of grades in my own learning. I don't want to say they didn't matter entirely, but they only seemed to matter when the measured performance was less than stellar. For the most part, high grades were expected and when such expectations are confirmed the grades didn't provide motivation or reward. Even when my performance dipped some, the grades served as an indicator, not as a driver. They were by-product only. They were not the main product. I have the feeling that the professor mind would develop in many more kids if grades for them were also by-product only. But it seems to me too late to start with this message only after the kids are in college. And it is probably too late to start even in high school. There is an error that most adults make, parents or educators, that if measured performance is not emphasized that the kids won't care about their own learning. That clearly is not true for infants and toddlers. Does it become true after that?
The entire society should embrace the professor mind and think through that question.
For you clever folks who realize I haven't changed the url for the blog, that fits in with keeping the protest mild. Some battles are not worth fighting. I did change the url for the blog once, way back when. It was originally hosted on a campus server. Then I moved it to blogspot.com, after it became clear it was creating a management problem to be on a server not intended for that purpose. I lost many readers with that move, most of whom never came back. Once is enough.
* * * * *
profess
[pruh-fes]
verb (used with object)
1. to lay claim to, often insincerely; pretend to: He professed extreme regret.
2. to declare openly; announce or affirm; avow or acknowledge: to profess one's satisfaction.
3. to affirm faith in or allegiance to (a religion, God, etc.).
4. to declare oneself skilled or expert in; claim to have knowledge of; make (a thing) one's profession or business.
5. to teach as a professor : She professes comparative literature.
6. to receive or admit into a religious order.
verb (used without object)
7.to make a profession, avowal, or declaration.
8.to take the vows of a religious order.
Source: Dictionary.com
My title is about definitions 2, 4, and 5 and their interplay. I wonder how many readers would aver that definitions 2 and 4 apply to their own thinking, which they give voice to often. Definition 5 seems more contractual and less about thinking per se, though in the old days (meaning when I first became a faculty member) it seemed that definition 5 implied definitions 2 and 4. I don't believe that is true any more, though I might be convinced otherwise. (At issue for me is how far beyond what they teach can the instructor go in discussing the subject matter of the course and what differentiates the instructor in such a discussion from the student who has taken the course already.)
Let me begin with the observation that I can claim expertise in Economics, because that is where I have my PhD, but my blog is about learning, where my formal education is nada. It may not be obvious, but one informs the other. The habits of mind that were honed doing formal economic modeling come to bear when thinking about learning issues. The puzzle for me is not my own thinking this way, but rather everyone else and whether they are guilty of an enormous conceit. In other words, they claim definition 4 applies to them, but do so without real justification. (One reading of Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow is that this is human nature, to believe we know much more than we actually do. That belief then underlies what he calls WYSIATI.)
Lest the reader think I'm too arrogant in making my prior claim, I want to come clean on my own conceit. It pertains to belief in "thinking hard" though that descriptor is not accurate, but let me get to the clarification after making the point. Thinking hard, for a sufficiently long duration, opens a portal into whatever the object of investigation is. Once the portal appears, it is just a matter of looking at what one sees and then trying to understand it in some sensible way. Until the portal shows up, however, there is only muddle. The professor mind, in my title, spends much of the time waiting till that next portal happens to appear.
One might very well imagine this conceit is a delusion, that actually there is no portal, or even if there is one it never arrives. I will discuss some of my delusional quests below. But first let me note that part of the art in professing is problem selection, which is trying to find something interesting enough to hold one's attention and yet tractable enough that the portal does appear before interest in the problem wanes entirely.
Let's say for the sake of argument that such a problem has already been identified. Is it hard work to find the portal? What does one do to expedite its arrival? I'm going to begin with an answer to the first question that some might consider a cheat. If you have your full concentration on the problem at hand, then sense of self is entirely lost at that time. In those periods of complete absorption, the notion of hard work doesn't make sense. It might make sense in retrospect, when reconsidering what the thinking was, and it might make sense in prospect as well, since achieving a state of complete absorption is no mean feat. I used to be better at it than I am now, though now I do have other behaviors to compensate for the less intense concentration.
As I've written about many times, this being unaware of self is true as long as I'm not stuck. Getting stuck is an entirely different matter. Then self-awareness returns and with a vengeance. The getting unstuck part is hard work. Quite often when stuck I have a feeling that says, "I should be able to get this." I don't know what the basis of that feeling is, but when I have it I'm bothered by being stuck. The being bothered provides the motivation to find a way to get unstuck. There is much prior experience on which the judgment of the problem being do-able and the emotion of being bothered are formed. But is the prior experience relevant to the current situation? Often I can't establish relevance, which is why I say I don't know the basis for that feeling. Once in a while, I suppose, there are false positives, though at the moment none spring to mind, so I don't have an example as illustration.
When I'm not stuck, I'm telling a story to myself and seeing whether the story holds water. This having an internal conversation is something I enjoy doing. So I don't need to prompt it to happen. It will occur on its own accord. If the story seems to be working I keep going. If it does not I try to identify the issue. Then I will retell that part of the story multiple times, to see if the issue is still there or if perhaps it goes away with a slight modification of the story. An issue that survives several retellings then can trigger a new inquiry, one which either replaces the original problem or is done in conjunction with it. Having a story not hold water is different from being stuck. As long as there appears to be a possible way out of the dilemma, I'm not stuck. When I've run out of possibilities to track down, then I'm stuck. The difference between being stuck and the initial search for a problem to investigate is one that's anathema to an economist, proof that sunk costs really do matter. If I haven't put in much time at all considering an issue, I can drop it with little fanfare once it seems not a good fit for me. If I've worked on a problem for a considerable time it's an entirely different matter. Dropping it then would be like betraying a good friend. You don't do that sort of thing.
How far into the story does the portal appear? This depends to a great extent whether the problem is a reaction to something else read, viewed, or heard, in which case it suffices to come up with a reasonably convincing counter narrative. Then it doesn't take too long. It is different with doing something new on your own, where then you are developing some expertise in that at the same time as you are developing the narrative. You need to find the right sort of practice for producing that expertise. That does take time.
* * * * *
Here I want to switch gears and talk about my delusions. You might think of the first type of these as the embodiment of the Vulcan mind meld or if you prefer a real ESP experience with telepathy. This would be done individually with each of my students. I'd like to enter their minds, unobtrusively so as not to influence their thinking, just to observe what is going on. I will explain why in a bit. Here I do want to note that telepathy is sometimes referred to as mind reading. That is instructive. What I do now is have the students write blog posts. I read those. Certainly that tells me something about the student thinking. But there is much thinking that never shows up in the writing. So I want more than just the writing.
The other delusion is to couple the above capability with time travel. I'd like to visit with earlier versions of me. I'd like to see how far along I was with the professor mind at various stages of my own development. I'd like to get a better sense of causality as to what made it develop more fully.
Let me raise some of the questions I have that motivate these delusions. The first and most obvious one is this. Can the professor mind be taught or, perhaps more likely, be strongly encouraged by some early interventions and good experiences which result from that intervention? For me, math played a foundational role. Solving a math problem that we'd get on the Math Team (which I was first on in eighth grade in junior high school and then again in eleventh and twelfth grades in high school) was very much in the spirit of finding a portal into what the problem was asking. So that was an early antecedent for the professor mind for me, though since those problems were timed it encouraged a quick hitter approach to penetrating the problem. In high school there was also the Problem of the Week, which was not timed, and encouraged a more deliberate sort of investigation.
What I'd like to know about me is really in the last few years of elementary school, where my recollection of school is far hazier. Were there intimations of the professor mind even then? Did one or several of my teachers make some suggestions to me that pushed me in the direction of the professor mind? Then, I'd like to pose the same sort of questions for my students. Might I have a brief dialog with each of them where I make some mild suggestions, nothing more, but ones that the students are willing to try? And then, might those simple suggestions show profound change in the way these students think, not immediately but in the fullness of time?
Another question concerns whether becoming a professor was more or less inevitable for me. I have learned as an adult that my Myers-Briggs type is INTP. Does that fact coupled with the observation that many of my high school classmates who were my friends became either doctors or lawyers but my path was elsewhere mean that the professor path was the likely alternative? Or did I simply luck into it? One obvious bit of serendipity for me was that I took only one undergrad economics course, introduction to macroeconomics. Sometime in the middle of the course the professor announced to the class that if anyone was good in math and was interested in going to graduate school, that person should come see him. This was completely unplanned, yet it offered an extremely good fit for me, marrying the math aptitude to a social science interest. Suppose I hadn't taken that course, or took it as a senior rather than as a junior, or had a different instructor who wouldn't make such an announcement. What would have happened to me then?
A third question concerns whether the professor mind can flourish without associating it with the professor job. For example, can administrators on campus who never were faculty members nonetheless have the professor mind? Might investigative journalists have the professor mind? After all, isn't their job to see things how they actually are rather than simply how they appear to be? Are there other professions where that sort of seeing is fundamental to the job description?
One last question is posed in the negative. Why doesn't the professor mind develop in more people? I hypothesize that extroverts are much less likely to develop the professor mind, as they'd rather spend their time interacting with others than engaging in reflective thought. That takes care of about half the population. Even among introverts, we know that some people are "good with their hands" and express themselves manually rather than through reflection or introspection. Others might have an artistic bent. I will assert here that there are many introverts who are neither professor types, nor good with their hands, nor artistic. Among these, many may not have had good enough educational opportunities to develop intellectually, a manifestation attributable to the income inequality in our society. For the rest, many fit the description given in Excellent Sheep.
Let me return to my delusions and to childhood memories. I would like to trace the role of grades in my own learning. I don't want to say they didn't matter entirely, but they only seemed to matter when the measured performance was less than stellar. For the most part, high grades were expected and when such expectations are confirmed the grades didn't provide motivation or reward. Even when my performance dipped some, the grades served as an indicator, not as a driver. They were by-product only. They were not the main product. I have the feeling that the professor mind would develop in many more kids if grades for them were also by-product only. But it seems to me too late to start with this message only after the kids are in college. And it is probably too late to start even in high school. There is an error that most adults make, parents or educators, that if measured performance is not emphasized that the kids won't care about their own learning. That clearly is not true for infants and toddlers. Does it become true after that?
The entire society should embrace the professor mind and think through that question.
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