The masks we wear to hide from ourselves

Just to get this out of the way up front, the masks I'm referring to are a kind of behavior and perhaps a mental attitude that goes with it.  For example, a sycophant employee will agree with everything the boss says.  That same employee may not be nearly so agreeable when at home and away from work.   That sort of thing is the subject of this post, though the focus will be on other motives for wearing masks.  This post is not about the face masks we need to wear in public to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

Sometimes we wear such a mask when we read fiction, imagining ourselves as one of the characters in the story.  In this week's New Yorker there are four very short stories by Kafka, previously unpublished.  They seem especially appropriate for now, living under the pandemic. I especially liked the third one, which seems to capture my current thinking quite well, even if the particulars are different. The enigmas are of the same nature.  What to want now and how to negotiate for what we want remains a puzzle.

I have several different aspects to my personality.  One of those is to worry excessively, often about things entirely outside my control.  When I was an administrator I did this with some frequency and the stress of it ate me up on the inside.  I didn't know how to cope and put on a lot of weight in those years.  (It didn't help that I had to give up jogging several years earlier because my knees couldn't take it anymore.  I should have embraced walking then, but didn't till much later.)  Earlier in life, this same part of my personality led to two separate bouts of depression as a teenager.  I later learned some coping strategies about avoiding depression.  I'll return to that idea in a bit.

Before that I want to note that everyone has dark aspects to their personalities.  They won't all manifest in the same way, but we are not just our better angels, even if on occasion we behave as if we were.  So, it is my belief that all of us embrace ways for which those dark aspects won't manifest.  This is done by the wearing of masks, as in the title of my post.

Early in May I wrote a post, Fending Off Depression - My Take.  The intended audience for that post was current college students and also recent grads, each of whom is facing a very tough job market.  Implicit in the post, I assumed that we'd get the pandemic under control  eventually, but the economic consequences would persist well after that happened.  So I was writing about dealing with the economic consequences, especially for kids (in my world you're a kid till you're 35) who are living with mom and dad rather than venturing out on their own.  I didn't anticipate that the pandemic itself would be a possible source of depression, at least for the type of kids I saw in the class I taught last fall.

Later in May I stumbled into a wonderful and charming way for me to wear a mask.  I orchestrated a mini high school reunion via a Zoom call with friends in Facebook who went to Benjamin Cardozo HS and who graduated in 1972.  A few of them invited other friends, also in our graduating class.   After that call I did a few one-on-one calls with some of the participants.  But with one, I had been on a date with her in 12th grade, we instead had a very lengthy email exchange.  It was on a variety of topics, but part of it was about a "what if?" talking it through with a romantic touch, when we both were going through those awkward teenage blues that Bob Seeger sung about.  I found it captivating.  Now, with both of us 65, that our teen years are still such an object of fascination, and that we could discuss it openly was wonderful.

This conversation led me to a life question for which I still don't have a good answer.  As an adult I've had conversations with many women, though outside of close friends and family almost all of them had work at the university as how I got to know these women, and work often was at least part of the conversation.  In junior high and high school I had hardly any of these conversations.  In high school, particularly senior year, there was a lot of hanging out as a group, and I knew girls in that context.  But a one-on-one conversation with a girl was quite rare for me.  Why was that?  And had such conversations happened, would they be just like the one-on-one conversations I did have with close friends, all of whom were boys?  Or would they be different because the boy-girl thing would intrude in some way? 

As that email conversation was winding down I started another conversation with a 7th grade classmate whom I understood was having some life struggles.  I didn't know her well in 7th grade but I naively thought I could be of some comfort to her simply by schmoozing online.  This time we used Facebook Messenger instead of email.  My first attempt at contact failed to produce an ongoing conversation, but she did respond that what I sent was sweet in some way.  I had and still have a hunger for communication where the tone is sweet and the messages give the recipient a warm feeling.

A couple of weeks later I tried again and this time we connected.  I took delight in the back and forth we had and would spend considerable time thinking about how the conversation now tied into the common experiences we had in 7th grade.  Eventually, this brought me to a new self-understanding that I wrote about in a recent post, When Boys Had To Wear Ties To School.  And it occurred to me that sending silly but sweet messages, in particular sharing bad jokes, had some of the same elements.  It's a combination of performance/non-performance, where the aim is to evoke the right sort of reaction.  This was the mask I had wanted to wear.

When my kids were little I had similar warm feelings when playing with them, reading a book to them at night, or watching a movie with them in our living room.  Family life was full of warmth.  But the kids grow up and want to hang out with their own friends.  Eventually they move out of the house and our family communication is much more adult now.  My wife, who is still working for the university, occasionally expresses some of those child-like warm feelings, but more so on the weekends, and then they are fleeting, as she needs her downtime to restore herself.  I, however, am retired and have a craving for this sort of interaction.  Where might I find such interactions?  It seems with women I knew in public school, who want something similar.

I came to believe I could fill my day with sweet communications and the thoughts those messages engendered in me.  It was living in a dream world, no doubt.  Then, a few days ago the bubble burst.  The bad news, about the coronavirus in the U.S., as demonstrated in this table from the CDC, which I compulsively view at least once a day, coupled with the bad economic news, and the apparent stupidity of so many to cause these outcomes, got to me. The dark side of me appeared with a vengeance.  I didn't want to share these dark thoughts with anyone, though I'd like to know how others are maintaining their equilibrium in the present circumstances, and maybe understanding that also requires us to express our doubts and fears.  (My rhyme from yesterday is a very mild form of such expression.)

The news is likely to remain grim for a while.  Can I return to where my better angels take over and the sweet messages become a large part of my day?  I don't know.  It's been my experience that by writing about what's bothering me, I can get it out of my system and move onto something else.  But now we're on a pace for more than a million new cases per month.  The election seems far away.  The inauguration even further.  I need a coping strategy for the interim.  Wearing a mask might be part of it, but I don't think it can be the whole solution.  I wonder if others are thinking along the same lines and, if so, what they have come up with.

Maybe I need to stop reading Paul Krugman's column in the NY Times.   Economics is the dismal science.  Instead, we need upbeat science fiction.

Did a Change Ever Come? Will a Change Be Coming Soon?

If you click through to see this song at YouTube, it says it is from 1963.  Wikipedia, in contrast, says the song came out in 1964.  While this distinction is of no consequence for what I want to say here, it does offer a fair warning to not believe everything that 's online, including what I say in this post.  I will try to avoid deliberately distorting matters, but inadvertent distortions might very very well creep into my argument.

Let's begin with a few other dates that help to identify the time.  Brown v. Board of Education happened in 1954.  It overturned the concept of separate but equal, as articulated in Plessy v. Ferguson.  The decision was rendered soon after Earl Warren became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.  Warren had received a recess appointment made by President Eisenhower in fall 1953, but was subsequently confirmed by acclimation of the full Senate early in 1954, which itself stands in quite a contrast to the present moment.  Indeed, Warren wrote the Brown opinion and orchestrated a unanimous agreement with that opinion among the other justices.  The Brown decision is the most clear articulation of a moral principle that I am aware of with regard to public policy in the schools. Yet articulating the principle and implementing it are two quite different things.

On November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated.  Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson became President. I was 8 years old then and in 4th grade at P.S. 203 in Bayside Queens, NYC.  To the best of my recollection, busing to achieve integration hadn't yet started in the NYC schools at that time. President Johnson signed The Civil Rights Act of 1964 on July 2, prior to the election LBJ had against Barry Goldwater that would occur that November. There was an extensive filibuster against the act that was ultimately defeated.

“It is an important gain, but I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come,” Johnson, a Democrat, purportedly told an aide later that day in a prediction that would largely come true.

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution happened a month later.  I don't know anyone of my generation who believes that decision was other than a colossal blunder.  It provided the basis for a dramatic escalation of America's presence in Vietnam.  I believe the political calculus, of which LBJ was said to be a master, was that if the Democrats were going to be so liberal regarding Johnson's Great Society, then they needed to show a tough side too, and this was it, to serve as a counter to Goldwater, who was an incredible hawk.

The pace of the news cycle was much slower then.  But it still may be that the electorate can't well process more than one big issue at a time.  The Vietnam War competed with Civil Rights as that number one big issue.

There are many other important events and pieces of legislation that one might add to this timeline.  In the interest of keeping this piece of reasonable length, I won't do that.  I will simply note that in fall 1966 I started at Junior High School 74, only a ten minute walk from where I lived.  There was busing of Black kids to the school.  Likewise, there was busing of Black kids to Benjamin Cardozo High school, which I attended beginning in 1968, as 74 switched from a Junior High to a Middle School.  (I still have no idea why this happened.  But Middle School eventually became the new normal.)  At 74, I don't have any recollection of racially motivated incidents.  In contrast, at Cardozo I experienced that repeatedly when outside the building waiting to get in.  Being panhandled was a recurrent activity.  Also, there where White toughs who seemed to be looking for a fight to get into with the Black students.  I have no explanation for this difference other than that the high school was much bigger than the junior high regarding the number of students.  Indeed, in 10th grade I was on late session, and that may have been when I most experienced panhandling.   Students on late session couldn't be let into the school until some of the students already there were dismissed.   I do want to point out that the integration was far from complete, inside the school.  Academic classes were tracked and the tracking created a school within a school effect.  The tracking predated busing, so wasn't immediately dismantled when busing started.

Sam Cooke's song presumes a change that is profound and persistent. The first question in my title is about whether any of that happened in the 1960s and early 1970s.  In spite of the high minded intentions of the Great Society and busing to achieve integration, I'm not sure that it did.  Indeed, one of the things I'd like to argue here is that in considering the present we do a deep look at the 1960s, so we can ask the following.  If a change didn't come then, why didn't it happen?  Might those same issues exist today?  If so, can we do something to not repeat that history?

* * * * *

One of the things about current politics that disturbs me, this is not a left versus right thing as everybody does it, is that solutions are proffered before the issue is fully described and analyzed.  Then as a voter your loyalty is tested by whether you subscribe to the proposed solution or not.  I wish so much that we could be far more deliberate and consider the various related issues in their totality, produce a good narrative that explains why those issues manifest, and only then begin on what a good solution might look like.  But nobody seems to have the patience for that.  They want to race ahead to get to the answer.  The wanting to be quick about it trumps whether what they have in mind is indeed an answer, or if instead it is merely window dressing.  A particular example triggered this post.

I have a PayPal account for a non-profit where I am the treasurer.  The non-profit raises funds for an organization in Uganda.  So, I end up checking PayPal at least once a day to see if there have been new donations.  This message has been on PayPal's login page for a while.

I was bothered by this and ultimately it was my irritation that encouraged me to write this post.  It seemed far more marketing than substance, to me.  I will give a bit of analysis of that in a subsequent section.  Here let me simply observe the following.  The George Floyd execution made available to many people the excessive use of violence that Black people face on an all too regular basis.  There was ample evidence of such excessive violence before this, much of it highly publicized.  Why people didn't put two and two together until now, I don't understand.  But they didn't.  That NFL owners have rethought players taking a knee during the National Anthem is not because they too saw the light about the plight of Black people.  It's because they came to understand that the fans, majority White, had seen the light and they needed to show they were aligned with what the fans are now thinking.  Likewise, companies like PayPal, this piece mentions YouTube and Walmart among others, are reacting now because of the same reaction among their customer/user base.

If these companies had been prescient about these matters, they would have reacted in much the same way as they are doing now when Colin Kaepernick first took a knee during the National Anthem, in the last preseason game of the 2016 season, or perhaps even earlier.  (Trayvon Martin was killed in February 2012.)  But they weren't prescient then, which makes one wonder if they are still not prescient now. And, if not, why should one buy into these gestures as anything other than marketing devices?  If that's what they are, we shouldn't be swayed by them.  We should want something more, something earnest and durable, something that we can reasonably expect will improve the situation.

* * * * *

When I was a kid the acronym WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) was in fairly common usage.  This was used as the designation for people who were in control of society.  JFK's election marked a breakthrough for Catholics.  Where I grew up in Bayside there was a Catholic church just two blocks away from where my family lived,  St. Roberts.  It had a parochial school for grades K-8 that was an alternative to the public school.  Why middle income families would want to send their kids to parochial school, I still don't get to this day.  Wasn't it possible to get sufficient religious training for the kid outside of school?  But that it happened, in large numbers, I have no doubt.  And, to be fair, some Jewish kids, like my orthodox cousins, went to Yeshiva.   The Catholic kids were mainly of Irish or Italian decent.  The theory we were taught in social studies at the time was that NYC was a melting pot.  Eventually, we'd all simply be Americans.  The public schools had a chance to perform such melting, if every student attended them.  As things were, it mainly didn't happen that way.  Instead, the public schools I attended inadvertently reinforced the idea that the Jews were the Chosen People, as a significant majority of the high academic achievers at these schools were Jewish.

There were other differentiators that mattered as well.  During the Vietnam War, a significant divider was about whether you were for the war or against it.  Emblematically, this was cast as the hard hats versus the hippies, a division that the show All in the Family captured quite well. Then, there was also a very strong north-south distinction among Whites, which focused on the race issue, specifically including Blacks as equals or not.  Before too long, the Republican Party has captured most Southern Whites, as the LBJ quote above suggested would happen.  The Democratic Party had more of the Northern Whites.  Thus, rather than have a mixture of conservatives and liberals within a political party, there became separation of these types across the parties.  National politics became increasingly fierce thereafter; this is one explanation for that.

Let us note that even if an integrated solution is imposed by government, it may not be a real change if significant numbers of people opt out of the solution.  We've already noted the possibility of going to parochial school instead of public school.  There is also the possibility of attending private schools that have no religious affiliation.  In the 1970s, the opt out happened mainly by families moving to the suburbs, emblematic of the phrase, "white flight."  In case this is not obvious, the families that did opt out tended to be wealthier.   Years later, when there was a reverse trend toward urban gentrification, but with busing no longer in vogue, the quality of the neighborhood schools reflected the wealth in the surrounding communities.   Did this represent overall progress?  Or was it a return to the way things were in the early 1960s?

* * * * * 

While I understand the need for some level of aggregation when in discourse about racial issues, I do not like being referred to as White.  I also do not like the phrases White Privilege and White Guilt, at least as far as they are applied to me.  I will explain why and then offer an alternative that I prefer.  I've lived in Champaign Illinois for 40 years.  It is a college town.  Life revolves around the university here.  On campus, while I was a faculty member and an administrator as well and later when I was retired but would teach one course a year under contract, I had a strong ethos of collegiality, which I applied to all my interactions.  That ethos is race blind.  I would much prefer to live in a world where collegiality is the norm in the way people behave and race fades into the background as an issue.  I have been largely successful in achieving this ethos within my own limited universe.  It is not that everyone I've interacted with is also collegial.  There definitely have been jerks now and then.  But race was largely a non-factor in determining who was collegial and who was a jerk.  This is not to argue that racism is absent on campus.  That is definitely not true.  But if most people behave according to the proverb, when in Rome do as the Romans do, then setting the tone in a collegial manner can encourage others to do likewise.  Further, there is an educational aspect to this, about how one should behave.  People can learn to be collegial by repeatedly behaving that way. This is the ideal I'd like to see extended to society as a whole.

In getting from where we are now to better approximating this ideal, it is evident to me that the opting out behavior, which in the rest of this piece I mean to stand for many additional behaviors that are anathema to desegregation and fair treatment, stands as a significant obstacle, one that is likely to take some time to address sufficiently.  As with the PayPal example, I find us wanting a quick hitter type of solution, which might work in a single instance but then very likely will lead to reversion to form.  I'd put the expression White Privilege in that category.  Realistically, many people are heads down about their politics now - get Trump out of office, that is job one. Build the solidarity that is necessary for that.  Only after job one has been accomplished should we consider what to do next.  I understand that thinking.  But it doesn't do anything to combat systemic racism.

Opting out is myopically rational and selfish behavior, an extension of the notion - vote your pocketbook. We were taught that as the thing to do when we were growing up. It is a learned behavior that has hardened into habit over time.  But it clearly does damage to the system and it makes the game appear rigged when most of the well off opt out.  We've been hearing that the economy was a rigged game for a long time, well before #BlackLivesMatter was established.  Opting out must be unlearned and replaced with something else - socially responsible behavior.  Social responsibility requires opting in.  That much should be evident now.  Our rhetoric could say as much, so it should say as much.

* * * * *

What would the social contract look like if it were to end systemic racism and had the vast majority of people opting in to do the socially responsible thing?  I wish I knew the answer to that question.  If we could figure that out we might then be able to reverse engineer it to see what must be done now to make it happen.

Absent that, one might envision a more pragmatic approach starting with the question, what can be done so that Black Americans don't face excessive violence from the police?  The immediate response might be to give better education to the police and better screening of those who want to become members of the police as well as to provide ongoing evaluation of those currently doing this work. Would that be sufficient?  I'm guessing the answer to that is no.  Segregated schools and segregated housing will produce excessive police violence.  In other words the environment matters, perhaps as much as the skill and the character of the police.  If the environment appears hostile, it will evoke a hostile response, even to people who otherwise seem good and decent.

Then you'd roll that back. What can be done to desegregate housing and the schools?  Almost surely, this would lead to consideration of income inequality in the overall society, the faults in the criminal justice system apart from the police, the disintegration of the two-parent family among working class people, and possibly a host of other issues.

The starting pragmatic and rolling it back approach might eventually lead to much the same place as the more abstract and conceptual structuring of the social contract.  But if only one step in this rolling back were taken per election cycle, it might take quite a while for people to see where this is eventually heading.  Would those who have switched from opting out to opting in keep their commitment through the entire process?  Or would they eventually get discouraged that this is taking too long without showing sufficient results?

* * * * *

The pandemic is today's Vietnam War.  It has focused the public's attention and rightly so, everyone is scared about their own health and the health of their loved ones.  Can we manage the response to the pandemic in a sensible fashion and still make progress on ending systemic racism at the same time?

Let us note that when President Obama first took office, the Great Recession was the big deal issue and many people were in underwater mortgages.  TARP, a program established near the end of the Bush administration, had $50 Billion allocated to bail out people in such mortgages.  As I recall, much of that money went unspent.  Eventually the housing market came back in many communities.  But it remained depressed in majority Black communities.  This was racism of a different sort, documented here.

Social networking enables people to become woke on certain issues, especially if they can be framed in a visually captivating way.  Yet many important issues remain largely invisible.  If through more earnest inquiry we become aware of these issues can we find support for addressing them as well?  Wouldn't that be a necessary piece of ending systemic racism.

* * * * *

I want to turn to the PayPal program that rubbed me the wrong way - I referred to it as marketing.  Maybe there are bits of it that do make sense.  I'm not in a position to determine that.  But I can pose the following questions which I think need real answers before we should embrace the program. 

• What determined the size of the program?  Is it a lot or only a drop in the bucket?  Consider that relative to what PayPal can afford.  Also consider that in terms of the underlying need.

• Given that other large companies are each doing their own programs, does that make sense?  Or would it make better sense if the programs were coordinated into one overall program?  Would such coordination require government to do be doing this?  So might it be better that these companies pay increased taxes on their profits so that the government could implement a coordinated program?

• These programs are targeted at Black-run businesses.  Will employees of these business see benefits as well?  Or is this another case of the same old trickle down that lined the pockets of the CEOs, but left the employees with very little for their part?

• These programs seem designed so that those who are running the programs get to pick the winners and losers.  What criteria will there be to do this?  How can impartiality be assured in the process?  Conversely, how can the process not become too clunky as to block applications for grants?

• Might it actually be socially better, for Black businesses and everyone else as well, if PayPal simply lowered their fees, so customers/users got more bang for their bucks, rather than have any such programs at all?

This list of questions probably can be made longer.  But this should be sufficient as an expression of skepticism that what PayPal is doing isn't going well beyond mere marketing. 

 * * * * *

Let me wrap up.   There's an argument being made that White folks need to speak up or write about racism, for there to be any real progress.  I've done that on occasion, for instance here.  But I know my posts are a slug and people who do work through them want to have a good take away.  It is this.  The idea that there is a quick solution to systemic racism is a pipe dream.  We need to look at the long haul and find an approach which decent people of all colors and creeds can embrace.  Let's do the necessary homework to produce such a solution.  In my view, it still has yet to be articulated.

When Boys Had To Wear Ties To School

To the best of my recollection, there was no dress code for kids when I was in elementary school.  There was in junior high school, which I will describe below.  Sometime during ninth grade, which for me was in high school, as the junior high had converted to being a middle school by then, the dress code was dropped, as a result of the ethos of the time.  The Vietnam War had created a huge reaction and spawned social change.  How we dressed was part of that.  My interest here is before that.  Things like dress codes exist for a reason.  What was the reason then? I'm going to speculate about that here.  I'm also going to talk about this as trying to understand my own development during that time.

Why bother?  For me, better understanding myself as a kid helps in figuring out how I am now. Each of us is the product of our own past. Some revelation of that past can then be brought to the present by increased self-awareness and perhaps change in behavior in the here and now as a consequence.

Here's a little bit of an aside that might help.  It's about our notions of intelligence and how it is determined.  Current thinking, as exemplified by the work of Carol Dweck, is quite different from how we thought of intelligence when I was a kid.  According to Dweck, intelligence is an attitudinal thing.  If you have the growth mindset, you then are willing to put in the time and effort for the practice needed to learn something new and with that learning you do grow.  The learning thus confirms the growth attitude.  In contrast, if you have the fixed mindset, I'm not good at that, then you don't practice much at all and don't get any learning as a result.  That too confirms the prior attitude.  When I was a kid we thought about intelligence as largely genetically determined and a fixed attribute, so your IQ was the same throughout your life.  But unlike hair color, which clearly is genetically determined and does differentiate us some, intelligence apparently differentiated us vertically.  Having a higher IQ was equivalent to being smarter than the other person.  While in some cultural environments intelligence is not prized, so a smart kid might dumb himself down to be more acceptable to others, among the Jewish kids I knew when I was growing up intelligence was prized.  Parents wanted their kids to be smart as benefit to the kids, but also as confirmation about themselves. 

Now let me get to the punchline and then circle back to personalize all of this.  While kids differ in the age at which they enter puberty, if school is to make adjustments in how they go about things, they have to do it based on grade level, or on even coarser considerations, elementary school versus junior high school, for example.  So think of elementary school as for prepubescent kids while junior high school was for kids who have entered puberty.  Considered in this light, the dress code is an increase in the rules that kids must abide by.  Making the rules overt, which the dress code surely did, is a way to enforce authority and to quash student expression via appearance.  This direct effect might have also had an indirect effect on students, who were just becoming aware of their own sexuality.  At least with regard to time in school, the school was signaling that more prudish behavior was preferred.

For the boys, there was some "cheating" with the requirement.  Some kids wore clip-on ties.  One or two wore bow ties, which were also clip on.  And there were these tie-like things, I'm not sure what they were called, that did go around the neck and then you snapped it together to form an inverse V.  Wearing a tie necessitated wearing a button down shirt.  Further, jeans and sneakers were not allowed.  The norm was to have pants too short by what's considered appropriate today*, with white sweat socks, the tops of which were clearly visible, and penny loafers to complete the look.  For the girls, they had to wear skirts and blouses.  Pants weren't allowed, which especially in wintertime seemed quite unfair.  The "solution" was pantyhose.  Had it been the girls who wore pants and the boys who wore skirts, at least that part of the dress code would have been knocked down years earlier.

There were several other factors where elementary school differed from junior high school. Here are a few to consider.  In elementary school, it was not uncommon for some kids in the classroom to be doing one activity while other kids were doing something else.  The easiest of these to remember was painting at an easel.  Our classrooms had a limited number of stations for painting, maybe two or three, that were located in a back corner of the room.  We also had time in class for reading, which was either a book of our own choice from the school library (individualized reading) or SRA reading, which was color coded by how proficient the kid was then.  Students in different color codes got reading passages of different difficulty levels.  Of course, we did have ensemble activities as well.  Spelling was one of the those, with the pre-test on Monday and the re-test on Friday, where all of us had to master the same list of words.  Junior high featured much less (and possibly none) of the small group activity where kids did different things across the groups and much more of the ensemble activity.  So kids in  junior high may have become more aware of the performance of other kids in their class as a result.

Further, junior high featured explicit tracking when I was a student.  If there was tracking in elementary school (and there might not have been) it was invisible to the students. In junior high there was something called SP (special progress) which separated students out by academic performance.  There were two flavors.  I was in the 3-year SP, which emphasized enrichment in the teaching.  There was also 2-year SP, which compressed 3 years of schooling into 2 years, so the emphasis was on acceleration.**  The consequence of SP was to create a school-within-a-school effect, where SP kids were the elite students.  I started junior high in 1966.  Busing to achieve desegregation in the NYC schools started perhaps a year earlier.  SP predates that, which I know because my sister, who is 5 years my senior, was also in SP.  So SP was not designed with the aim of thwarting desegregation, but it may have inadvertently done that.  There were very few Black students in SP when I was in junior high. 

Junior high also had numerical grades, from which a GPA could be computed.  In elementary school, we did get report cards, which included categories for which grades were assigned (Excellent, Good, Fair, or Unsatisfactory) and for which the teacher might write a brief comment, but there was no converting of those grades into numerical equivalents.  There is no doubt that numerical grades make students more grade conscious. We should ask whether that is a feature or a bug.  Overall, I can't say.  But it did have a profound effect on me, as I will illustrate.

Until yesterday, I was under the impression that puberty and academic performance were two entirely separate things.  Then, while having an extended thread with a classmate from 7th grade, it occurred to me (Why? I don't know.) that maybe they are connected in an important way.  So I did some Google searches to see if this has been investigated.  I looked at several documents, which somewhat differ in their conclusions, suggesting that maybe it matters when in the school career of the kid one takes a look.  Among these papers this one was the most interesting to me, The relationship between pubertal hormones and brain plasticity: Implications for cognitive training in adolescence. I won't claim that I read it carefully.  But I garnered from it that it is possible for puberty to be the cause of an "intellectual growth spurt," depending on other factors as well.   I started puberty quite early.  I wrote about that in this post.  This is the relevant paragraph.

Those questions begin, I believe, with the onset of puberty, especially as how the time of that compares with the times for others in the kid's cohort.  For me, it started quite early, when I was nine.  I was kicked out of choir in fourth grade because my voice broke then, much like the kid in Almost Angels.   There was one other kid, Jay S, who was in the same boat.  We were separated from the rest of the class, when it was in choir practice.  I understood this separation wasn't punitive.  But it reinforced a feeling of being different from others.  (Being one of the biggest was what generated that sense of being different.  So I already had some of this feeling since nursery school.)  The first meaning of life question, then, was how to regard this difference and not feel shame about it, which I surely did feel at the time.  I have since confronted this feeling of being different in several other areas.  I probably wasn't ready in fourth grade to consider it a theme that might focus reading and writing.  But by high school I was.  However, I had nobody like Mr. Conrad to intrude on my thinking and direct it in this area.

I believe I had an intellectual growth spurt soon thereafter.  An issue for me that I don't have completely resolved in my head is whether my teachers took note of my early puberty and directed my school activity accordingly.***  I am quite sure that in 6th grade, where my teacher was also the school librarian,  I spent an inordinate time outside of the classroom and in the library.  At least some of that time was to place the plastic coverings on the book jackets of newly received books.  But much of it must have been to do independent reading on my own.  I will never know why Mr. Sachar selected me for this, but I'm now very grateful that he did.  I was able to develop at my own pace. At the time, I had no clue how that compared with the pace of other students, so social concerns didn't impede me in any way then.  And I developed a very strong sense of directing my own learning, which is something I believe each kid needs to develop, though nowadays it is comparatively rare.

I'm also of the mind now that I probably repressed any explicit form of sexual expression in fifth and sixth grades, which was my way to deal with my puberty when my classmates weren't there yet.  It may have been a sensible thing to do at the time, but it probably began a battle between my conscious self and my subconscious being, which persisted for many years thereafter, well into adulthood.

With this as setup, I now want to consider a novel thought for me, that my performance in junior high school was a kind of sexual expression, one that my subconscious directed.  I want to note two things about that performance.  After the first marking period in 7th grade, we had assembly in the auditorium where the school principal called me up to the front of the room because I had the highest GPA among all the 7th graders.  From then I was branded as a very smart kid.  Also, in class, particularly in social studies, I raised my hand a lot in response to questions from the teacher.  I don't recall specifically if this was just to give the "right answer" or instead to embellish on the topic more broadly.  I'm guessing now, without remembering exactly, that I did some of both.  It's more the hand raising and my responses to the teacher that I'm thinking of as a kind of sexual expression.

Yet consciously, it was just me being me.  At that level I'm quite sure I was not trying to impress my classmates.  Was that naiveté or something else?  I did learn near the end of 7th grade that it can cut the other way.  We had autograph books which we got others in our class to sign, after saying something they felt about the person.  One girl wrote that I made her feel uncomfortable in class.  Had I gotten many such comments, I might have changed my in-class behavior.  With just this one comment, while it bothered me, I didn't make any adjustment at all.

Some years later, definitely before college, I read On Aggression by Konrad Lorenz, which was a study of the animal kingdom, of which we humans are members.  It features a concept called territoriality, which helps to explain within-species aggression.  I'm the king of my own zone.  If you stay outside my zone you and I are fine.  But if you cross into my zone I will fight you.  Here I'm using the first person singular to generalize to any animal who will defend his turf.  The book goes beyond this particular concept and discusses particular examples of animal life, for example, mating rituals.  One that illustrates matters quite nicely is the behavior of peacocks, who strut in order to entice peahens to be their mates. Later in life I've referred to the analogous behavior in human beings as "plumage." My classroom behavior in 7th grade seems an almost perfect example, in retrospect, although I really wasn't aware of it at the time.  But it may very well have been the subconscious driver behind the urge to raise my hand to respond to the teacher's question.

Alas, even if I did make a strong (and good) impression on some of the girls in the class then, I didn't know how to close the deal, and felt myself unattractive, both for being very big and because I was a klutz physically. I wrote about this in my previous post, but there I focused on the time from college onward.  Some of the same issues were there, even in 7th grade, which is what gave the impetus for this post.

We don't get to relive our lives over again, where in the encore we've learned from our mistakes made the first time through.  But we can share some memories with our friends who were there with us.  Recently, I've been doing that with some friends from junior high school.  It gives me a warm feeling now to do that.  I hope it's the same for them.

Adolescence is such a struggle. It is said that struggle makes you stronger.  If eventually a spouse is found, this particular struggle makes you more compassionate, at least it did for me. Nowadays, I believe it's good to think of strength as compassion.

-----

*Since the kids were growing in those years, the pants might have been more than long enough when purchased originally, with an inner or outer cuff for the extra material, to be let out after the kid grew a few inches.

** There were three 2-year SP classes and four 3-year SP classes at JHS 74 when I was there.  Some years ago I scanned our yearbook, Insights 68.  The class photos start on page 58, with the 2-year SP 9th graders.  It seems that those classes were somewhat larger (35 or 36 students) than the 3-year SP classes (about 27 students).  If you do look at those photos note that each page is within its own folder and you want the image that has larger file size, the second one in the folder.  Also, after you've opened the file to view the image, near the bottom there is a control that is evident if you mouse over it.  You can expand or shrink the size of the image with that control.

*** I believe placement into SP was generated by performance on a standardized test, the score on which was not made known to the student.  Conceivably, I had a very high score and that, rather than the evident puberty, was something the teachers were aware of.

The Time Machines In Our Minds

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

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

I'm Getting Sentimental Over You Performed by Frank Sinatra

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

Is all I'm thinking of.

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

College Instruction as Therapy for the Students/Rethinking Teaching Loads

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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