Screwing Around Captures The High Ground

People are in search of mirth
Of which there is a dearth
And if what's offered up is pun-ny
They'll like it even if it's not funny.
#FindingJoyWithAWordPlayToy

It's A Puzzlement

The Emperor's new clothes
Display his adipose.
So why do you suppose
It is that which he chose?
#MirrorMirrorOnTheWallWhoWillHaveTheGreatestFall

Thoughts About The Yankees

It is interesting to note that Joe Girardi was the Phillies manager at the start of the season, when they were floundering.  Of course, Girardi had previously been the Yankees manager.  The Yankees did win the World Series back in 2009, but there has been a drought since.  You have to wonder whether managing the Yankees becomes unlike managing other teams, because of the overwhelming media attention, in which case it is inevitable to manage not to lose, rather than to win.  At the time the Yankees let Girardi go, there was talk about him being distant from his players.  I'm belaboring this bit of history, because I wonder if something similar happened to Aaron Boone.  The talk in Twitter is about bringing in Mattingly and Jeter to replace Boone and Cashman (GM).   But I haven't seen anyone talk about the pressurized environment that they operate under.  Can anything be done about that?  I don't know, but I'd like to see some chatter about that. 

I actually think that Cashman did quite a good job this year/last year.  Trading for Harrison Bader late in the season was a great deal.  Likewise, trading for Andrew Benintendi was the right move, though he got hurt and was entirely out of the playoffs.  Together they eliminated the Yankees outfield woes plus Benintendi could bat leadoff, filling the slot that DJ LeMahieu normally fills.  That both of these players ended up not participating in the playoffs was a definite problem, but it can't be blamed on Cashman.  

The one trade I wasn't happy about was getting Josh Donaldson in the preseason.  I would have preferred it had the Yankees kept Gio Urshela.  But it was a package deal and trading Gary Sanchez was a big thing as just a few years earlier he was viewed as the future of the Yankees.  Yankees catching, from a defensive point of view, definitely ticked upward with the acquisition of Jose Trevino.  

Overall - it seems to me that Cashman did a very good job during the past year.  I feel less good about Aaron Boone's performance for the following reasons.

There were mental mistakes made by players who don't normally make them.  This showed up mainly on defense.  Aaron Judge running in front of Harrison Bader right before the baseball landed in Bader's glove, which he then dropped for an error, was perhaps the most egregious example.  Bader surely had been instructed to take all the balls he could reach in left center field, to take the pressure off of Giancarlo Stanton. What were the instructions for Bader and Judge about the balls hit to right center field?  That Judge made an apparent mistake suggests the instructions weren't clear to him, or the matter hadn't been previously addressed.  Preparation of the players is ultimately a managerial responsibility.  The stress of the playoffs is likely to inadvertently reveal where the players are under prepared.  This was one glaring instance.

There was also the revolving door about who plays shortstop.  I didn't understand that, but evidently Boone lost his faith in Kiner-Falefa, the regular shortstop for the entire season.  The substituting at that position during the playoffs looked bush-league to me.  Indirectly, I think it was why there was an error on a double-play ball hit to Gleyber Torres, who made a gentle toss to the bag, but Kiner-Falefa had already scooted past the bag; I suppose to avoid contact with the base runner.  That was a backbreaking play.  Again, I think ultimate responsibility for it goes to the manager.

The Yankees had a Jekyll and Hyde year.  Was it injuries that explained the big drop off in performance around mid season?  And did the Yankees have an unusually high number of injuries?  Or was something else going on?  The team that appeared in the playoffs was some combination of the early excellence and the later dismal performer. So the real question is whether the early excellence can return and, if so, can it last for a full season?  

I want to make on more note, this time about Aaron Judge, and compare him to Alex Bregman.  Judge has a huge swing and there is a definite upper cut in it.  Bregman has a much shorter stroke and his swing is flatter. Judge has clearly developed his swing over several years.  It seems designed to produce the long ball, making contact is a secondary concern.  Judge obviously did make a lot of contact during the season, as evidenced by his high batting average.  But he didn't do it in the playoffs.  Either the home run chase took too much out of him to recover from that, or against good pitching the swing Judge has is less reliable.  It makes you wonder.

The Seeds of Dis Chord

When your treasure drives you insane
So that your pleasure becomes your pain
Maybe it's time to sup
And then lighten up
Measure to measure we need a new refrain.
#VerySoonWeNeedADifferentTune

Aspiring To Be Dorothy Parker

The real difference between boys and girls
Is how they rank order swine and pearls
A pigskin is fine
For crossing the goal line
But for a gem of a phrase, the flag unfurls.
#GettingPastThePhaseWhenTheCleverPhraseCatchesUsInADaze

How Often Should You Blog?

When you have something to say
Then a blog post per day
Is surely the "write" way.

But if you're prone to stew
Then what you must do
Is frequent writing eschew.

To produce the occasional insight
Then one must continue to write
Tho perhaps with lower wattage
For the bulb used in the Aha! light.

The Guardians Versus The Yankees Tonight

A series that goes the full five games
With ups and down and a pitcher who tames
Batters who are hot and swing for the fences
Causing fans to utter expletives in past and future tenses.
#TonightsGameStartsAHalfHourEarlier

A Closer, A Closer, My Kingdom For A Closer

The disappointment in being a fan
When the outcome deviates from plan
It's very much like experiencing grief
Where the Yankees' pitching needs better relief.
#ThereIsAnotherGameTonightAndIWillBeWatching

A Bluff And Related Stuff

When randomizing the traditional action
Is simply to flip a coin
Yet a probability is merely a fraction
Then what with this method gets purloined?
#WhenYouDontWantOthersToSeeTheRandomOutcome

Caring For One's Parents As They Age

First limitations
Then a lack of transcendence
Become frustrations
Passed on to the dependents.
#ThinkingOfMomAndDadAsITurnIntoThem

A Red Letter Day

What if Kurt Gödel
Were to play Wordle
While wearing a girdle
Would that be absurd-el?
#OrWouldItSimplyBeIncomplete

A Knight In Rusty Armor

Finding the right life balance
Requires a variety of different talents
A bad joke if you please
Puts everyone at ease
While a damsel in distress needs gallants.
#AndPrayThereIsntAnEscapadeThatRequiresFallingOnAGrenade

The Humble Beginnings Of Creation

A writer is doing his penance
Idea fragments yet not a full sentence
For he must first pay
For what he will say
Only then will his word house have tenants.
#TheScatteredBrainShouldNotComplain

Life on a Chessboard

Having always been a pawn
I instinctively wanted to move to King-Four
And do so slightly after dawn

While not knowing what I’m doing it for.

#InARhymeYouCanEndASentenceInAPreposition

Marnie

Tippi Hedren

Took an Excedrin

Though her headache continued to linger

While Sean Connery
Played the con on Marnie

After slipping a ring upon her finger.

#AnotherGreatHitchcockMovie

Bullwinkle Is Coming

The squirrels are taking over
From the tall trees to the clover
Spy you they do
Enough to eschew
When near the sidewalk as they crossover.
#AsIGetOlderTheyGetBolder

Saggy

Skin that droops
Posture that stoops
The gray and the wrinkles
And the omnipresent tinkles.
#PerhapsAMetaphorForTheStateOfOurCountry

Male Fail (A Gender Bender)

This post is a reaction to the column by David Brooks from last Friday called The Crisis of Men and Boys.  Brooks, in turn, is commenting on a recent book by Richard Reeves called Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It.  I have not read the book yet and I'm undecided whether I will do that.  Reading about dismal things is not good for my own psyche.  So here I'm just going to make a few observations and then stop.

First, I already was aware of how male children of parents who have at most a high school education are struggling now.  This can readily be attributed to the decline in manufacturing and the concomitant decline in private sector unions, so the evident scarcity of decent well paying jobs that call for manual labor.  I think the country botched this terribly, both on the left and on the right, though for quite different reasons.  I do think it is fixable.  Better late than never.

Second, I was surprised that there were similar gender differences among the elite students, though this might be quite a different phenomenon than the one mentioned in the previous paragraph. Single parent households are less common for this group.  But having a helicopter parent probably happens fairly frequently with this sub-population and having the kids be over programmed is part and parcel of that.  Indeed, the whole Excellent Sheep phenomenon might be explained this way. If you asked whether there are gender differences among children as far as being obedient to parents, irrespective of whether the kids are high academic achievers or not, I'm not sure where I'd come down on that one.  And that sort of thing might depend on the generation when the kids went to school.  It also might depend on the culture/religion/nationality of the parents. But it wouldn't surprise me too much for gender to matter in aggregate.

Third, which is cause and which is effect might be hard to sort here, but there is no doubt that increased income and wealth inequality in the society overall is related to viewing school as a passport to well paying jobs and GPA as an important component of that.  This view existed even when I was in high school, but it clearly has intensified since.  In the current jargon, there is emphasis on extrinsic motivation in school and, in turn, that reduces consideration of intrinsic motivation (curiosity, passion for the subject matter) that might better promote learning.   With the focus on extrinsic motivation, school becomes something of an artificial game.  I'm guessing that it still affords an avenue for self-expression for some kids, as it did for me, but they are comparatively few.  The rest get jaded, because playing an artificial game makes it appear that nothing really matters.  Are there gender differences among those who can function amidst the artifice?  I suppose there are.

Fourth, this one may be less popular to mention these days but I believe school teachers are of lower quality now as compared to when I was in school because, especially for women teachers, there weren't many other paths for having a decent job when I was in school, but now there are.  And teaching is paid comparatively poorly now.  If earnings drive career choice, there is an obvious selection issue as to who becomes a teacher.  Nowadays, teachers may not be well equipped to accommodate students who don't seem engaged in class activities or to get them a specialist to deal with their learning disability.

Fifth, there may be a differential effect that technology plays on children.  I'm thinking particularly of video games and whether the skills learned in that domain are useful for school.  When my younger son was still in elementary school, he became very absorbed with Age of Empires and learned a lot of historical facts that way.  It gave him an interest in history for a while which was satisfied by watching shows on the History Channel. But he also developed a belief that learning should happen in a snap. Slower and more deliberate learning eluded him as a consequence.  Then, of course, there were all these other games that were either a race or a battle against some competition.  The games were absorbing, but might not have much to offer outside the gaming environment.  I don't know how this goes with girl children (both of my kids are boys).  But I can readily imagine gender differences here.

Let me wrap up with a thought experiment.  How would my cohort from elementary school, junior high, and high school fare if they started first grade in the late 1990s or early 2000s rather than in the early 1960s, but they had the same parents.  (How the parents would have adjusted to the times is outside the thought experiment).  In particular, would I have failed in school or done pretty much the same as I did back then?   I did have quite a lot of trouble with "fine motor activities".  For example, threading a needle was a challenge for me.  At school this manifest mainly via poor handwriting.  But I was either extraordinarily fortunate or socially adept in some way to make good friends within the school environment and I was able to learn a lot from my friends this way.  Would that skill have been impeded if I started school 40 years later?  If so, would it be the loneliness that would do me in and perhaps impede my academic performance?  Or would it be more evident that I'm an introvert and could be okay learning on my own?  I don't know, but I think this sort of thought experiment useful for others to consider, before focusing on remedies.  We tend to look for solutions before we understand the problem we're trying to solve. We shouldn't do that here.

Combining Forms

Double Helix
Oscar and Felix
A twisted pair that's odd
On a path well trod.

Antimatter
Auntie Mame
A topic of occasional chatter
And once upon a time considerable fame.

Sylvester the Cat
Sylvester Stallone
A predator comes up flat
While a southpaw finds a bone.

Gerrymander
Jerry Mathers
Voting districts meander
As Eddie Haskell blathers.

Meritocracy - My Take

This post is a response to a recent opinion piece in the New York Times entitled School Is for Merit, by Asra Q. Nomani.  As over the years I've written a lot about education, mostly about higher ed but then sometimes about K-12 as well, here I'm mainly going to excerpt from previous pieces and then provide the links to the full piece as well.  Since readers sometime comment that I'm prolix in writing these blog posts, let me cut to the chase and only after that make my full argument. 

There is much dysfunction in education these days.  I'm certainly not the first to note it.  This dysfunction exists even at schools in upper middle class and wealthy school districts.  The dysfunction is the core issue that needs remedy, which will not be simple to consider nor to implement.  The system may do well by a very small fraction of the students, but it is failing many others, including those with high GPAs. Talking about meritocracy, the way Ms. Nomani does, is applying a surface solution that won't fix the underlying problem.  I am not writing to defend recent changes that she takes up (e.g. dropping the requirement of standardized test scores for college admission).  Those too provide a surface solution.   Let's talk about the underlying issues and see if we can agree on those.   That's my aim below. 

* * * * * 

The following is an excerpt from a post called The double-edged sword we refer to as 'high expectations' and gets at a fundamental issue when grades become prominent.  The post was written at the end of the fall semester in 2015.  I struggled with that class.  In the previous three years teaching. the course had been more rewarding. 

First and foremost is the question whether ordinary students are willing to endure the frequent failure that is necessary for real learning.  Two reasons why they may not are: (1) potential damage to the GPA in so doing and (2) potential damage to the student's ego from feeling embarrassed by being awkward in front of others - classmates and especially the teacher.

As to (1), real learning takes as long as it takes.  On the other hand, exams happen at times scheduled well in advance.  One explanation for why students memorize in advance of exams is that it seems a more reliable approach for readying oneself against the vicissitudes of the exam, while containing the readying activity to a manageable time period. In turn, such students then grow to expect the instructor to teach to the test, so when such expectations are confirmed memorizing the lecture notes ends up indeed being good preparation.  There is also that this becomes a learned behavior (in the sense of habit formation) so even in those circumstances where the instructor offers up questions on the exam that follow only indirectly from the lectures, many students will still prepare as they have in their other courses, for lack of a viable alternative.

The above is an indirect argument that grades are pernicious in encouraging real learning with ordinary students, as too many of them will opt for the self-protection described in the previous paragraph, when the grade consequences are sufficiently severe.  Alternatively, it can be taken as an argument in support of grade inflation.  If students are convinced they will do reasonably well grade-wise as long as they attain a minimal performance standard - e.g., showing up and being counted - then they have less need to self-protect via memorization and might be more willing to go through the steps it takes to produce real learning.  This gets us to (2).

If a student is not self-conscious, then it is possible the student will be oblivious to the risk of failure.  In turn, that lack of self-consciousness can lead to deep learning as the student gets fully absorbed in the subject matter.  It may be the honors students differ from regular students mostly in this lack of self-consciousness and hence in their ability to concentrate. For a student who is self-conscious and who does fear failure as a consequence, a different approach is needed if the student is to engage in real learning.  The student must be convinced that failure is no big deal.  Failure is just an ordinary part of learning, necessary early steps if you will. The way to convince students of this is to create a safe space in which students are encouraged to fail and fail often, all as part of the larger process.

This post followed one I had written a few years earlier entitled, Why does memorization persist as the primary way that students study for exams?

The hypothesis, not particularly novel or really much of a surprise but I've never seen it expressed quite this way, is that The Disengagement Compact, George Kuh's aptly put but discouraging label for the unholy implicit contract between students and instructor, where no party is burdened much at all while all parties get to reside in a virtual Lake Woebegone, is manifest in a very particular way.  If the Disengagement Compact is the Devil making himself known in undergraduate education, then memorization is the Devil's disciple, an artifice for claiming both that learning is happening and that substantial effort in the name of learning is occurring.  Hardly anybody, after all, wants to be labeled a slacker.   Further, students want to resist the damning evidence of low grades.  So students somehow feel that they've been tasked by their instructors to memorize course content.  Many instructors indeed do task their students this way so as to satisfy student expectations and thereby avoid their enmity.  

I should have added here that course evaluations matter, more so for non-tenure-track faculty, whose jobs may depend on them.  If these instructors satisfy their students' grade expectations, they are apt to get tolerably good course evaluations.  This gives one real reason for why instructors participate in the implicit contract. 

Let me turn to a different learning issue, one that is highlighted in the book, Excellent Sheep, by William Deresiewicz, where he was writing about students at Yale who took an English class from him.  In my reframing of the issues considered there, students become excellent at jumping through hoops that elders (parents and teachers) set, but they never learn what pleases themselves other than purely hedonistic pleasure, so they surely don't learn what activities they should engage in that would produce this sense of pleasing themselves. They live in an artificial world created by the adults around them.  Inwardly, many are quite depressed, for life has no real meaning to them. 

In the process of reading Excellent Sheep, I wrote a post about my own experience in high school entitled, I was not a sheep. Were you?  I will not put an excerpt from that piece here, but the various factors I list are worth considering.  Since writing this post I've come to embrace the expression, the student has to drive the bus.   My belief is that if the student does this willingly and with sufficient commitment then deep learning will happen, life will then have meaning, and the dysfunction I mentioned at the outset will largely disappear.  The questions remains, how do we get there from here?

A student will drive the bus when the student is intrinsically motivated.  The dedicated instructor who wants to promote deep learning will then ask, how can I teach my class so as to intrinsically motivate my students?  Pretty soon after posing that question, the instructor will want to know about the relationship between extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation.   I consider this in a post called, Is Daniel Pink Confusing Us About Motivation And Economic Incentives?  This excerpt is from the post.

Main point of Dan Pink's talk: When we are already intrinsically motivated applying extrinsic motivation, in the form of reward for good behavior or punishment for bad behavior, is self-defeating because it detracts from the intrinsic motivation, a much more powerful force.

I completely agree with this point. When intrinsically motivated we lose sense of ourselves. We are totally into the activity, whether reading a great book, watching a fascinating movie, or working through a problem or puzzle that has captured our attention. The object of that attention becomes the entire universe. It is as if we are in a bubble that we are permitted to remain inside so long as we focus only on its contents. Extrinsic motivation of any kind makes us self-conscious. It bursts the bubble. Intellectually, it is like holding up a mirror. Once we look at ourselves, it is very difficult if not impossible to re-enter the bubble.

Later in the post I argue that eventually the bubble will burst of its own accord.  It can't last forever.   At this point extrinsic incentive is needed to contract anew with the student and hope another round of intrinsic motivation can ensue.   To make this concrete, in the course I had been teaching during retirement I had the students do weekly blogging.  I gave feedback on each post they wrote with extensive comments.  But I employed portfolio grading - at mid semester there would be a grade for the posts in the first half of the course and at end of semester there would be a grade for the remaining posts.  There would also be some comment to explain the grade given.  This certainly wasn't perfect.  But it is in the spirit of how we might teach to practice what is being preached here.

I want to change gears now. Let's focus on that unusual student who does learn in a deep way that is evident to others and in so doing learns to please himself or herself.   Does the way this student performs have an impact on the learning of other students?  Quite possibly, the answer is yes.   The following is about my experience in Social Studies, when I regularly raised my hand in response to questions posed by our teacher, and then would give an extensive answer, one that most other students in the class wouldn't have come up with.  It is from a post called, When Boys Had To Wear Ties To School.

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. 

That very good students might intimidate more average students should come as no surprise.  Later, both in high school and then in college, I witnessed this intimidation as deliberate, a kind of trash talking by nerds. When the nerds are themselves friendly with each other it may be no-harm-no-foul.  Otherwise it might be a defense mechanism to hide being socially inept in other ways.  More recently, I've had some friends in Facebook tell me that I was a positive role model for them academically, encouraging them to apply themselves more. Fifty plus years after the fact, I'm willing to admit the possibility though I'm still skeptical about it in this instance.  The overall point is this.  There can be externalities in how the behavior of one student impacts the learning of the other.  A full analysis would aggregate those and then consider the benefits and costs.  It is insufficient to simply consider the benefits for the winners in the meritocratic lottery. 

The same issue can be applied to our national politics, where there seems to be much anger and resentment by Conservatives aimed at Liberal elites, with the Liberals too smug to realize they are causing this reaction and/or blaming it entirely on the media that over hypes what Liberals are trying to achieve.  I wrote about this in a post called Unintentionally Making Others Feel Stupid.  An evident solution to this issue would be to have Liberals communicate a sense of humility on the matter.  But with what now feels like a virtual civil war between Republicans and Democrats, I doubt that such a concession can or will be made in the near future.

The last issue I'll take up here is about the role of meritocracy in school and what graduates earn in the labor market thereafter.   In a post called Pluck or Luck I wrote the following:

The next day I stumbled onto a Web site that articulates The Just World Theory, and makes reference to a book from 1980 called The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion.  That the book is from more than 30 years ago suggests the issue has been with us for quite some time.  The Just World Theory leaves out any role for luck whatsoever.  People get what they deserve.  It is an extreme form of hindsight bias.

Zick Rubin of Harvard University and Letitia Anne Peplau of UCLA have conducted surveys to examine the characteristics of people with strong beliefs in a just world. They found that people who have a strong tendency to believe in a just world also tend to be more religious, more authoritarian, more conservative, more likely to admire political leaders and existing social institutions, and more likely to have negative attitudes toward underprivileged groups. To a lesser but still significant degree, the believers in a just world tend to "feel less of a need to engage in activities to change society or to alleviate plight of social victims."

I want to confront this with some very particular data, which I used the last time I taught, back in fall 2019.  On the second worksheet of this Excel workbook there is salary data from 2018 for Econ department Assistant Professors and Specialized Faculty (teaching faculty not on the tenure track).  There is some discussion of those data in this post to the course Website.   Also included for comparison is my salary from back in 1980, when I first started at Illinois as an Assistant Professor on the tenure track, with an inflation adjustment that is imperfect but workable. The reader should get the message that in 1980 I was earning less in real terms than specialized faculty were earning when teaching in 2018, and assistant professors in 2018 were earning a helluva lot more.  This is one simple snapshot of a much larger phenomenon. The increasing income inequality in the society overall has lifted incomes within the top 10% of the distribution substantially. Is that windfall justice or mere happenstance?  If the latter, shouldn't those benefiting from the windfall be willing to accept substantially less in compensation? That question was meant in a normative sense.  In a positive sense, do we actually expect that?  I surely don't.

Let me wrap up.  I could have written a somewhat different post, one that focuses on core competencies - being able to read with meaning, being comfortable in having an open conversation that isn't mediated by a smart phone, having a good enough people network to be able to go ask for help from someone who is able and willing to provide it, and perhaps some others as well.  If those core competencies were there, then perhaps layering meritocracy in school on top of that wouldn't be so bad.  But if those core competencies aren't there, then what are we doing when talking about meritocracy?  I chose to write the post as I did, because people compensate for their own deficiencies and we should be aware of the typical forms that those compensations take.  Yet the point remains the same.  What's fundamental is the need to address those deficiencies.  Meritocracy then becomes mere window dressing.  Let's focus on the fundamentals.