tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-73310754516645447932024-02-20T06:45:52.160-06:00Guessing GamesA draft of a book, a work in progress, which argues that we should teach students to guess. That should become the centerpiece of how we teach our children. Each chapter is aimed as a stand alone essay, making part of the argument and interspersing autobiographical elements throughout.Lanny Arvanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05597426421997599777noreply@blogger.comBlogger15125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331075451664544793.post-83867830788723459652010-04-15T07:00:00.000-05:002010-04-15T07:13:28.773-05:00WelcomeThis is a little experiment for me in writing a book draft and doing it online. I'm using a blog to host the thing (obviously) but the navigation will be a little different. Each chapter and subsection will have it's own tag so you can navigate easily through the book that way. There will be only one post, even on the main page. So apart from the comments and the links, this won't look that much like a blog, but I hope the idea is clear enough.<br /><br />My goal is to get enough content up and in good enough shape, that I can get a serious editor to work with me on improving the text for publication. At this point I'm somewhat agnostic on whether ultimately there will be traditional paper publishing along with this electronic format. Someone other than me needs to make a business judgment about whether there would be any readers for a print version of this stuff. Those of you who are familiar with my blog <a href="http://lanny-on-learn-tech.blogspot.com/">Lanny On Learning Technology</a> likely will find the writing style similar. (This old dog is being cautious about which new tricks he tries to learn.) It's just that here I'm going to stick to a theme and try to make an extended argument that cuts across the posts in this book.<br /><br />Also, don't be floored by the date of this post continuing to change. I first tried to set it into the future, but Blogger leaves it unpublished till then. Since I want this post to stay on top as my welcoming message, I'm going to update the date each time I post something else, to keep this the most current.<br /><br />When I've got a version of the draft that is reasonably stable, I'll post it as a pdf so you can download. That may be more readable than this blog version. Now it is pretty easy to copy the essay only and paste into Word or some other editor. That's a partial solution.<br /><br />Enjoy. I'd love to learn your reaction either via comments here or by <a href="http://illinois.edu/ows/PH?domainUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fillinois.edu%2Fcgi-bin%2Fphcgi%2Fns.uiuc.edu&Query=lanny+arvan">email</a>. Thanks.Lanny Arvanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05597426421997599777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331075451664544793.post-38159715054224314342010-04-14T11:50:00.005-05:002019-12-29T18:22:03.167-06:00A Mature View of Uncertainty<span xmlns=""></span><br />
<blockquote>
<span xmlns="">"For the moment, this is anarchy," said Adolphe Reynald, a top aide to the mayor of Port-au-Prince, as he supervised a makeshift first aid center that was registering long lines of wounded people but had no medicine to treat them. "There's nothing we can do. We're out here to show that we care, that we're suffering along with them."</span><br />
<span xmlns="">From <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/16/world/americas/16haiti.html?scp=8&sq=haiti&st=cse">Patience Wears Thin as Desperation Grows</a> by Marc Lacey, The New York Times </span></blockquote>
<span xmlns="">Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake appears a microcosm, of what ails society as a whole, of the troubles we're seeing locally, for example on the university campus where I work, and on a personal level too. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Yet there was no prevention for Haiti. Expressions of concern happen after the fact, when the tragedy is the reality. What happens before the fact? David Brooks, in <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/opinion/15brooks.html">a rather disturbing column</a>, suggests the fundamental issue is poverty. The San Francisco earthquake of 20 years ago had the same ferocity as the Haiti earthquake of last week. Both measured 7.0 on the Richter scale. But the Haiti earthquake produced three orders of magnitude greater deaths and human devastation. Rich economies take precaution. Poor ones don't. We don't know how to raise other countries out of poverty. So we are consigned to help reduce the suffering once devastation has occurred.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">It is now several weeks later. I had stopped writing after the paragraph above, not because Haiti is unimportant, the contrary is true, but rather that the situation was and still seems so desperate. I don't want to deny reality but I do want to provide more uplift. Uncertainty need not be so grim. How can we talk about a "mature view" when things appear so irreparable? I needed a different example to shake me out the doldrums.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">From a decision making point of view, I found what I was looking for in the Super Bowl, particularly <a href="http://espn.go.com/blog/nfcsouth/post/_/id/8174/paytons-gambles-all-well-calculated">the aggressive choices made by New Orleans Head Coach, Sean Payton</a>, with the coup de grace the onside kick to start out the second half, a gamble that paid off. New Orleans recovered the ball and went into score a touchdown thereafter.</span><br />
<blockquote>
<span xmlns="">Yeah, the Colts came right back down the field and scored a touchdown to take a 17-13 lead, but the damage had been done and the tone for the rest of the game had been set by the onside kick. Payton followed that gamble by taking another, letting Hartley kick a 47-yard field goal to cut the deficit to a single point.</span></blockquote>
<span xmlns="">The Colts players were not expecting the onside kick. So with that play especially, the Saints became the leaders. The Colts had to react to them, not vice versa. Pulling off a successful gamble, especially one that appears a matter of discretion, not foisted upon the decision maker by circumstance, conveys a sense of bold leadership. When the success of the gamble comes at the expense of a rival, the leader of the rival appears out of position, perhaps indecisive, so the impact can well endure beyond the immediate consequence. All the other participants become infected this way. The Saints transformed themselves from underdog to favorite via this play. Ironically, right before the game there was a brief interview with the Colts Head Coach, Jim Caldwell, and successor to Tony Dungy. Both appear impassive as a matter of style, perhaps a desirable trait for leading tightly wound athletes, who might head south when the going gets tough once they sniff it in the air. If you don't display your inner churn under adversity you can't do so when things are going your way either or the poker face will be a dead giveaway. In the interview Caldwell was asked why he seemed so relaxed. (This came right after the announcers commented that the players, especially those for whom this was their first Super Bowl, had to have butterflies in their stomachs.) Caldwell responded that the team was able to stay at the same hotel and follow essentially the same schedule as when they won the Lombardi Trophy four years earlier. He also said that when you are well prepared you can afford to relax. Those words came back to haunt him.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">Economists teach that a risk averse individual will nonetheless take on additional risk when the odds are favorable enough. Yet <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/30/sports/caution-is-costly-scholars-say.html?scp=1&sq=Caution%20Is%20Costly,%20Scholars%20Say&st=cse">the evidence seems to suggest</a> that even fairly astute decision makers, in this case head coaches in professional football and basketball and managers in major league baseball, consistently make a conservative choice when what may seem the apparently riskier choice offers a better chance of winning the game. In this <a href="http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/501171">paper by David Romer</a> targeted at an audience of professional economists, where he examines the relatively narrow decision to punt or go for it on fourth down, the evidence clearly says that with sufficiently good field position and not too many yards to make for the first down, going for it is the better strategy. Yet most coaches opt to punt. This is a puzzle to ponder. Romer cites much other research to show that the bias towards conservative decision making is the rule; the focus on professional sports in the analysis is only because we are all fans and the micro decision making that happens during games is available for scrutiny by the fans.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">There is a further puzzle in the sports case that doesn't extend elsewhere. Because the information is publicly available, insiders could do the sort of statistical analysis that Romer did (or they could hire experts to do it for them) and in that way learn from experience. Yet such <a href="http://videolectures.net/mlss05us_ghahramani_bl/">Bayesian Learning</a> doesn't seem to have happened or, alternatively, since the book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Moneyball-Art-Winning-Unfair-Game/dp/0393057658">Moneyball</a> popularized the notion of using such statistical information to improve team performance in baseball, it may be that there is such learning but it is happening at a much slower rate than might be anticipated. This is anecdotal information only, but it is interesting to observe that Caldwell came up through the ranks, which might very well be a process that instills a conservative outlook as part of the regimen, while Payton, 8 years Caldwell's junior, went to New Orleans to become head coach in part to bypass the going up through the ranks process. Payton took on Drew Brees to be his quarterback as one of his first steps in the new job, although Brees had experienced what might have been a career threatening injury. So the risk taking has been with Payton, certainly for a while. It is not a new development concocted just for the Super Bowl.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">I want to argue in this chapter that the economics way of looking at this sort of decision making is not as helpful as some other alternatives, which I will develop, but first I want to trace my own trajectory in thinking about the issues. A few weeks ago I finished reading <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Payton">How Markets Fail</a>, John Cassidy's tour through the history of classical and neoclassical economic thought, the difficulties that can emerge with market solutions, and the tragic recent history of our economy that resulted in the financial crisis leading to the "Great Recession." One thing Cassidy makes abundantly clear is that there isn't only one "economics way" of looking at things. Cassidy distinguishes between two different schools of thought. One is the Chicago School of Milton Friedman, George Stigler, etc. The other is the Keynesian school. But here I don't want to use those descriptors to consider whether markets effectively self-regulate or if governments need to step in. The question to hone in on is whether the statistical approach that does seem to make sense in the decision making of head football coaches makes any sense at all in real world decision making that you and I engage in, or if instead either because the decision is a one-off or because there has been a regime change in various aspects of the economic environment that causes departure from historical pattern, assigning meaningful probabilities is a nonsense task, in which case other criteria need to be used to come to a choice.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">The regime change explanation is the focus of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Impact-Highly-Improbable/dp/1400063515">The Black Swan</a>, a book I read last summer. I had planned on writing this chapter well before reading the book. During and immediately after the reading I wondered if Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author, had stolen my thunder. I came to conclude that because he was so caught up in the uncertainty of financial markets and the possibility of enormous one day movements in stock prices, that no, he hadn't already said much if anything I wanted to say. (Cassidy does echo many of Taleb's themes, though Cassidy's style is not nearly as in-your-face as Taleb's.) I wanted to focus on choices that emerge from our ordinary life, inside and outside the classroom. Choice and learning are tied at the hip and what I want to advance in this chapter is that guessing and verification is the approach we all use to make choices. This doesn't mean that if we do it well we'll make the "right" choice. It does mean, however, that if we teach students guessing and verification in school then they will have developed a critical life skill that will endure and that they will come to rely upon, though they will continue to refine it and modify their approach as they mature.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">Let me return then to my own development as it will track a variety of questions and issues that should be considered in this chapter. In the early to mid 1980s I began to change my research area from Keynesian general equilibrium models (I couldn't get that stuff published) to Oligopoly Theory (where I had better success). There is a rich tradition in oligopoly theory dating back to the nineteenth century. Perhaps the most famous of the approaches is the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cournot_competition">Cournot Model</a>, where the outcome is somewhere in between the monopoly solution (high price, low output) and the the competitive solution (low price, high output). Further, under Cournot firms with identical cost are treated symmetrically; they have the same market share. So Cournot "explains" differences in market share across firms via differences in cost function. An alternative model, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stackelberg_competition">Stackelberg Leadership Model</a>, produces an asymmetric market structure even when firms have identical costs. The leader claims the lion's share of the market. The follower reacts to the leader's aggression by contracting output. The question emerged: what might determine whether the game actually played is Cournot or Stackelberg?</span><br />
<span xmlns="">One might very well imagine that in a new industry firms arrive at different times, simply because they become aware of the opportunity differentially. So we talk about a first-in firm and a subsequent entrant. The Cournot outcome results if the first-in firm must accommodate the later entrant, while the Stackelberg model results if there is a first-mover advantage where the first-in firm can make a "credible commitment" to play Stackelberg. At around that time game theory was taking over the teaching of oligopoly theory and the word credible had a very specific game theoretic meaning – once the commitment had been made the play constituted equilibrium behavior thereafter. A <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/2231658">paper by Dixit</a> showed that real capacity investment that couldn't readily be reversed would serve as just such a credible commitment, by lowering the firm's marginal cost. So we had an interesting story. A first-mover advantage coupled with the ability to make a credible pre-commitment got you to Stackleberg, or something closely resembling it.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">There was just one problem. The first mover advantage itself wasn't explained and a leader-follower outcome seems to emerge in many situations where there is no obvious first mover. Prior to the Super Bowl, Sean Payton announced that his play calling would have to be aggressive for his team to win. Jim Caldwell almost certainly did press interviews every day for the week leading up to the Super Bowl, but his remarks must have been bland enough not to warrant mention on the ESPN Web site. One might ask whether Payton's announcement was a credible commitment or simply "cheap talk," which would have no outcome of the game. This thought brings memories of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_III">Super Bowl III</a>, perhaps the most important football game ever played. Joe Namath predicted a victory over the Colts, who were heavily favored. It is impossible to know for sure whether or how the prediction impacted the game. One might envision it having no effect initially but then helping to demoralize the Colts once they fell behind. Similarly, one can imagine that Payton's pre-game comments about aggressive play calling helped to magnify the impact of the successful onside kick.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">I wrote <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/2555513">a paper about the symmetric case</a>, where there was no first mover advantage but where the outcome could be Stackelberg-like (or no equilibrium at all). It's what Sean Payton understood and every kid at the schoolyard understands as well – if there is a leadership advantage to exploit somebody or some group will emerge to play that role. While the point might be obvious to the non-economist, the paper did clarify that a first mover advantage is not necessary for a Stackelberg outcome and further, that even if the situation is symmetric at the start, it need not end up that way. So it was a contribution to the literature and in working through the implications of the model it got me hooked on thinking about strategic commitment, how it is attained and when it makes sense to use.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">At the time of the writing, these results were purely academic to me; I didn't try at all to translate them into implications for real world human interactions. As a consequence, I associated the notion of commitment with rigidity, as in the Dixit paper capacity precommitment created an inelastic output reaction function for the first mover firm over the relevant range. A few years later, while on sabbatical in Vancouver at the University of British Columbia, I became more acutely aware of the inconsistency between the economic theory world constructed in my head and and my real world of human interaction.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">On the economic theory front, there was an emerging literature on flexibility versus commitment where the tradeoff seemed to be to react to random events after the fact or make commitment before the fact, but not both. Since the department I was visiting in the Business School at UBC had the international trade theorists James Brander and Barbara Spencer, I started to apply my old oligopoly theory ideas to the international trade setting. Combining that with this new found interest in modeling flexibility in light of uncertainty, I wrote <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V6D-45JK5R0-4N/2/e6595486711ad78e8278ed4ff7a25fd2">this paper on strategic trade policy</a>, not an entirely satisfactory treatment of the issues but a way to get my fingers dirty on the topic.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">On a personal note I met my wife on this sabbatical about two weeks after my arrival in Vancouver in mid April. We had a wonderful time that spring and summer, full of laughter and romance. After only a couple of weeks of dating I proposed and we had agreed to tie the knot. A few weeks later we travelled to Bellingham, Washington, to buy "the rock," a big commitment to be sure but not one leaving me feel inflexible. She was an assistant professor in the Human Resources group, a bunch who were not particularly fond of economists. Yet they liked me. I was the living oxymoron, a nice economist, going with the flow with no desire to set the agenda. On a personal level, flexibility and commitment went hand in hand. Was there some way to reconcile the economic and personal perspectives? I wouldn't be able to answer that question for another fifteen years or so.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">In the meantime the lessons from economics were stark. Uncertainty was a "bad," something to insure against if you could. The overwhelming evidence on the point came in the form of identifying good jobs – they had salaries rather than performance pay. It's the employers who bore the productivity risks from general economic fluctuations, not the workers. As I write this my university, suffering an anticipated shortfall of state funding in the future, has initiated a <a href="http://www.shr.illinois.edu/VSIP.htm">voluntary separation program</a>, to allow employees to self-select on the choice to sever from the university, with a cash payout and anticipated future grimness in remaining in the current job the main incentives. This is better for employees than forced separation, what economists call involuntary layoffs, something employees can't insure against nor adequately provide self-protection.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">Of course we taught that risk preference varied by individual and, consistent with portfolio theory a la <a href="http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1990/markowitz-autobio.html">Harry Markowitz</a>, that with greater risk comes greater reward. With that we appropriated language from elsewhere to signify this relationship, particularly the world of sport, <a href="http://durhamregion.typepad.com/neil_crone/2009/05/it-takes-leather-balls-to-play-rugby.html">it takes leather balls to play rugby</a>, all we needed to have the rudiments of a theory of value creation. Entrepreneurial types created value by coming up with new business ventures, perhaps taking ideas from basic research developed at universities, and parlaying that into emerging growth sectors of the economy. The book that best encapsulated that line of thinking for me was Michael Lewis' <a href="http://www.amazon.com/New-Thing-Silicon-Valley-Story/dp/0393048136/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0">The New New Thing</a>, a biography of sorts of Jim Clark, former CEO of Netscape and prime mover behind Healtheon, now WebMD. In the late 1990s it seemed that folks of that ilk, the ones possessed with both smarts and animal spirits, had totally transformed our economy.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">This view of uncertainty is inadequate, though I didn't understand that at the time. It doesn't account for the role of learning and its interaction with uncertainty. It doesn't have a place for our emotions and personality apart from the risk preference. And it is essentially anti-democratic in that those of us with little or no endowment of animal spirits are essentially non-players. It is these factors that I wish to explore in the remainder of the chapter, while not entirely ignoring those aspects of uncertainty captured in the phrase, economic rationality, not entirely irrelevant but less important than I had previously thought.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">* * * * *</span><br />
<span xmlns="">I begin this section with what I take to be the heart of the matter, the Ignorance Principle.</span><br />
<span xmlns=""><b>Ignorance Principle</b>: We are all very smart, yet we know less than we think we should.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">Intelligence, or so it seems to most of us, should convey a sense of knowledge. Yet knowledge stems not from intelligence per se but rather from having intelligence interact with experience, as any student of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Experience-Education-John-Dewey/dp/0684838281">Dewey</a> would surely know. What then to do when the requisite experience is lacking? That key question can be broken down into three cases, first, where we don't have the appropriate experience but we are quite sure that others have, second, where we are not sure whether others have, and third, where we are quite sure that nobody has. To this we might add the metaphysical question – can we really distinguish between these cases? But I don't want to talk about metaphysics. I want to talk about some low to the ground questions. How do we deal with our own ignorance? Is ignorance a spur or inhibitor for learning? When is it the one and when the other?</span><br />
<span xmlns="">Ignorance can be a neutral term, a simple not knowing, no harm no foul; or it can be a pejorative, deliberate behavior to avoid considering facts, particularly those that contradict prior held belief, an affirmation of prejudice of an extreme kind, backwardness when there is a more modern view. We tend to take the word one way or the other. Let's try to keep both meanings in mind as we proceed.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">Sometimes we prefer myths. There is delight and fascination in the stories so they are deliberately propagated – Elijah the Prophet, Santa Claus, Guardian Angels, the Easter Bunny. Myths are wrapped up in ritual and these ceremonies become one way for the older generation to pass down its bequest. Let's distinguish the myths of the child who doesn't really have a choice on whether to believe them and those of the adult who does. It's the latter where we want to focus.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">We have "major college sports" on my campus, both football and men's basketball. Many of the faculty attend the games and among them are prominent research scientists. As fans, do they maintain the view of science or does their being a fan change their perspective? We know the cheering (or booing) in the stadium can materially affect the play on the field. What about the cheering at home, when watching the game on TV? I maintain a fan mentality when I watch and then I believe in <a href="http://blogs.suntimes.com/whitesox/2009/07/buehrle_and_the_jinx.html">The Jinx</a>. Certainly, that's not something I invented. It's part of the sports culture. The analysts talk about it all the time. We fans pick up on it.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">Do we adults keep myth cordoned off in the benign regions of our existence, such as during sporting events or religious holidays? Or are myths present in our work as well, perhaps masquerading as something else, best practice maybe, or generational labels, or simply ways to hide our own inexperience for fear that if we don't conceal what we don't know unwelcome change will be forced upon us? I recall watching a West Wing Episode where President Bartlett could have gotten his Foreign Aid Bill passed through the Republican Congress, if only he'd approve a modestly funded study to scientifically test the effects of "remote prayer" on the wellness of patients. In trying to track down <a href="http://www.westwingepguide.com/S4/Episodes/79_GNB.html">that episode</a>, I came across this <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/health/31pray.html?ex=1301461200&en=4acf338be4900000&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss">New York Times article about a scientific study on the efficacy of remote prayer</a>. One of my favorite words is "<a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/orthogonal">orthogonal</a>." The study provides strong evidence that remote prayer and the health of patients are orthogonal, when the patients are unaware, with a mildly pernicious effect when the patients do know, the resulting anxiety on the part of the patients the presumed cause.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">That West Wing episode, however, makes the adhering to myth sort of behavior seem to be the province of religious fanatics. Let's push past that and consider other examples. In Part III of Cassidy's book, there is a ringing indictment of Alan Greenspan, principally for his conviction that financial markets self-regulate. Look at part 04 of <a href="http://fora.tv/2009/01/27/Nassim_Taleb_and_Daniel_Kahneman_Reflection_on_a_Crisis">this video</a>, entitled Greenspan's confession. There, the Nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman gives a compelling recounting of Greenspan as Chairman of the Fed, viewing him as a tragic figure, because he clung to a myth that was patently false – his mental model included that firms are essentially like people and managers of firms have the firms' interest at heart as their primary motivation. Given this belief, Greenspan couldn't fathom that the big financial houses would engage in the destructive, indeed suicidal behavior that they in fact did by holding large amounts of derivative securities based on mortgages that would ultimately end in default. The strong belief in the myth had him discounting evidence contrary to his belief, right up till the financial crisis occurred. The problem, then, is not that we hold myths as truths. Rather it is that we continue to do so in the presence of strong evidence to the contrary. In the presence of myth we cease being empirical. Myth of this sort blocks learning.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">There is the question whether we know we're doing that or if it is an unconscious behavior or comme si comme ça. My sense, based on my own experience, is that we know initially but then if we continue to do it we forget and by denying reality pernicious behaviors become entrenched and become extremely hard to undo thereafter. I base much of this conclusion on my experience as an administrator.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">I was a complete novice in 1996 when I started, with essentially no experience as a faculty member to parallel the demands needed as a manager. I knew one model of professional human interaction, the co-author model, the mode of interaction between faculty members when they write a paper they intend to submit for peer review. I had a variety of co-authors and learned from those experiences. I had a good sense of the collegiality that was required to make such arrangements work and I understood implicitly the obligations and responsibilities that each person needed to bring to the endeavor. Critical among these was not to pull any punches. If there were an objection about a modeling approach or in regard to a conclusion, that needed to be brought up immediately and dealt with forthwith. Further, there needed to be a true sharing of the labor in the work. Otherwise, the partnership would fizzle.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">In the first incarnation of the administrative job my reliance on the co-authorship model actually worked reasonably well. Lynn and I were brought into SCALE about the same time, she for her technical expertise to be the the primary support person, I because of my own teaching experience and willingness to interact with faculty as colleagues. At the outset I viewed Lynn as a peer, where our skills complemented one another. About four months later I was running the show and Lynn became my main direct report, with the other staff and students working for SCALE reporting to Lynn. But things didn't change very much regarding my interaction with her, both because we were a small unit in total and because she and I had a reasonably effective working relationship.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">When Lynn left to work for UofI Online (she liked the SCALE work a lot but it was a soft money job so getting something more permanent was prudent) she helped a lot in finding her own replacement. There were a couple of very talented candidates. Eventually I hired Jolee who, though different in temperament from Lynn, was also quite talented with the technology. Further, she was a Ph.D. in Anthropology, a fact which helped to support the co-author approach I favored. We did hire another staff person who was low-key and had an academic bent, John, to support Mallard. So our setup encouraged collegial interaction. On quite a few afternoons we'd spend an hour or so at a coffee place that was then across the street from Everett Lab (where SCALE was located) talking about work and various ideas about how our approach might spread more broadly across the campus. That mode of interaction was exactly the same as when I co-authored papers. So I was on familiar territory and things seemed to be going reasonably well.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">However, the arrangement was unstable because it was unknown at the time whether we'd secure a renewal grant. We eventually did, though too late to forestall Jolee and John both finding jobs elsewhere, good for both of them career-wise but putting me somewhat in a bind regarding keeping SCALE going. I did hire replacements (and outsourced our server administrator function) but the arrangement was no longer the same. I had been doing this for a couple of years by then so wasn't quite so green in the job as when I started with Lynn. And I was clearly the boss. There was no shared history of prior collegial interaction with these new people and by then I had a reputation around Campus for doing ed tech administration. So there started to be some fissures with the co-author model, but because we were small and because the job still had substantial division of labor, those cracks didn't yet become a full fracture. That happened soon thereafter.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">Not quite a year later, after a lot of cajoling from a variety of faculty members on our Ed Tech Board including me, the Campus formed a hard money <a href="http://www.cites.illinois.edu/about/history.html">Center for Educational Technologies</a> by merging SCALE with a different unit, ETAG, and with some cash from the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_%28computer_system%29">Plato</a> royalties fund, used to hire additional staff. In a real sense, this was my "reward" from having done a reasonably good job leading SCALE. Yet now I had a diverse group of staff who had different backgrounds and a varying sense of what the mission and their function should be. I was then three years in as an administrator, but I was still clueless as a manager and still reliant on the co-author model in thinking about my own interaction with staff.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">To implement that co-author model I needed an assistant director, so I could spend most of my interactions with that one person and otherwise play the ambassador/policy functions for which I had some aptitude. We went to that structure two years later. But we didn't have it right away for several reasons. I had to take an assessment of how things might work and needed a few months to do that. Further, my attention was in other places as well because my dad passed away that summer and because I was teaching an online course. So CET didn't really have my full attention till the summer concluded. Then too, cash was short and there hadn't been any prior articulation of a need for an assistant director.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">So I did what I usually do in such situations. I came up with an ad hoc solution that would preserve my concept without going through the formality that really was necessary to search for an assistant director, but that seemed out of bounds. I would name one of the staff to be office manager and that person would be the assistant director de facto if not de jure. I ended up making a choice based on my narrowly defined conception of of what was needed, which emphasized collegiality over all other considerations. There was only real candidate for this role, Leslie. The staff had settled into two cliques roughly paralleling the two units in which the majority of the staff had been previously employed. Leslie was the only one who seemed to interact readily with everyone else who worked for CET. Plus she was bright and energetic. On these criteria, she seemed the only one who could do this.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">There were fundamental problems with this arrangement, however. I did nothing to prepare the other staff for it. Indeed, short of actually doing a formal search for the assistant director position, I'm not sure there was a way to prepare the staff for it. I believe some of the staff were resentful of having their relationship with me filtered through Leslie. They didn't recognize the source of her authority. And she was either the most junior or the next most junior of the staff, so some of the other staff felt more qualified by their own self-determined criteria. (There may also have been some gender bias but on that I had less direct evidence.) I don't recall this well but I believe we had a staff meeting where I introduced Leslie as the office manager and gave my reasons for her selection. That started the fissures turning into larger cracks.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">So this setup was far from ideal and I as I mentioned, we had some fracture thereafter that I won't elaborate on here. What I do want to discuss is why the myth that I could manage with the co-author model persisted in spite of some rather substantial evidence that it wasn't working well and to draw some broader conclusions from that. There were two potential alternatives that might have worked. First, my then boss was acting CIO (Chief Information Officer) for the Campus, himself a faculty member and a former department head. He was juggling a lot of balls himself and his relationship with me was extremely collegial. I could have gone to him and said, hey, I need an assistant director very badly. Let's do an internal search but I will need some incremental funds to boost that person's salary. Almost certainly with what I know now, that is what I should have done and I should have done it quickly.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">But I didn't. As I said, cash was short and actually some of my other staff were still on soft money. So this would have looked strange to do before getting them permanent funding. Then too, I'd have shown to my boss that I was a ditz. I was deeply involved in the planning for CET. I hadn't brought up the need for an assistant director then. I had a rather naïve belief that what we had been doing in SCALE could have kept on going pretty much as is but with more staff. So I hadn't anticipated the need. I should have. Indicating that then to my boss, I'd have gotten egg on my face.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">The other alternative was for me to reallocate my time and spend more of it directly on managing staff. I had the authority and there was a definite need. But this I didn't want to do. I didn't get into this work to be a manager and really had no aspirations in that area. Further, some of the ETAG folks needed a lot of staff development and hand holding to get them to do the work in the way I envisioned it. Here again, with the benefit of hindsight, that's exactly what should have been done. But at the time I was simply resentful that I didn't have their salary lines so I could hire whom I'd like. (Also, these people weren't well paid, which created some other incentive issues and meant they couldn't be readily replaced.) So all of this looked like unpleasantness and while I wanted to commit myself to the work fully, I wanted to enjoy doing it.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">I'm quite sure at the time I didn't reason it through fully this way because as I do this now, it seems almost like negligence on my part to have opted for the path I did. But this is why we retain our myths, because there are tough decisions to be made that we really don't want to face. I placed Leslie in something of a no-win situation, certainly not the plan for success approach that I'd try for now. She and I did have a largely collegial relationship along the lines I anticipated and she matured in her role as she gained experience, but I micromanaged episodically as fracture issues bubbled up and though managing CET was substantially more difficult than managing SCALE, I reacted in my assessment of the situation more to outcomes than to the challenges at hand. Partly for that reason and partly simply because of the age difference, the relationship with Leslie was more vertical than it had been with Lynn or Jolee and I suppose I got caught up in that somewhat. Even when not everything is working to perfection, there is ego stroking in being the boss and being treated that way. The ego stroking acts as a myth preserving force and as a way to avoid an empirical approach. In that sense it is the basis for <a href="http://www.monitor.com/MENA/Portals/0/MonitorContent/imported/MonitorUnitedStates/Articles/PDFs/Monitor_Organizational_Dynamics.pdf">Argyris' Model 1</a>.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">The following academic year I had a new boss, the first Campus CIO. He was very gracious in our interactions. He allowed me to work through the fracture issues as best I could. Along with his Budget Officer, he and I negotiated to place CET into a more stable funding regime. He encouraged us to do it the right way and perform a national search for an Assistant Director. Several excellent candidates emerged from the search, after which Leslie was selected. Indeed, while he seemed quite pleased with me, he was not happy with the local search that ended up placing me in my job. He wanted a national search for that position as well. We agreed to put that off until these other matters were resolved. In the interim he helped address a rather sensitive issue – as a faculty member the Economics Department Head would determine my salary increases, but the Econ Department didn't see my CET work as contributing to their mission. The CIO helped to remedy this imbalance. All of this was for the good. Yet history cannot fully be undone. Things would have been better still had I more squarely addressed the issues at the outset. Putting those issues on hold till the Campus had a real CIO might seem sensible as an ex post rationalization. But it is not the true explanation for my decisions during CET's first year. Most of those choices were driven by the core belief that I could make the co-author model work in our setup.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">There is much irony in what I've written above. Looking back on that time I know that Leslie and I and other staff who worked for CET then feel nostalgic for "the good old days." I've emphasized the issues we had during those early days of CET without talking about the successes. Part of that, of course, is simply that in this subsection I wanted to focus on myth as a blocking force. That is more likely the result of friction at work than because it is all going swimmingly.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">Yet there are other reasons too. Some of that is my own sense of quality and a mental comparison I make between the SCALE period and the CET period that followed. (They did overlap for a year.) I do have very high standards and SCALE was more innovative than CET. Some of that had to do with mission. SCALE dealt mostly with early adopter faculty who were self-starters and apart from finances and the occasional spark of an idea required very little from us, so SCALE could afford to be more experimental. CET had a more broad diffusion goal. Many of the faculty it supported needed more help and even with that they'd innovate less. Yet it is important to note that CET achieved quite a bit of good. Though there was occasional internal conflict, there was also a feeling of accomplishment among the staff and that our name brand, CET, had real consequence about learning around Campus and conveyed core values, collegiality and quality of service.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">In 2002 CET merged with the main academic computing group to become a division in the new organization, CITES. The goodness that CET achieved was more evident in retrospect; that's regrettable certainly, but a fact.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">Now let's move beyond consideration of myth as a blocking force of our own empiricism to look at cases where we do make tough choices based on all we can know at the time.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">* * * * *</span><br />
<span xmlns="">Sometimes circumstances appear dire and stark choice becomes necessary as a consequence. In the third episode of the TV miniseries Centennial, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_%28miniseries%29">The Wagon and The Elephant</a>, Levi Zendt (played by Gregory Harrison) is a young man from a prosperous Amish family. He is proud of his existence and deeply shares in the values of his family and the community. The good life appears his for the asking, though perhaps he is not yet mature enough to do so. He has all the urges of a young adult and those urges demand to be fulfilled. Soon he must take a wife, but he is not yet ready. He needs to explore his emotions, learn about his personal wants, and how to satisfy them. Attractive as well as prosperous and well to do, many of the girls of his age have their eyes on him. He need not search far for his experiments in romance; the opportunities for exploration present themselves. Driving a wagon for the purpose of delivering goods to orphan children, he starts to kiss a young woman who accompanies him on the delivery. This is as it should be, but then things go awry. They get seen by others.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">Caught between their wants and the values of the community where modesty is stressed, the girl is trapped and so makes up a horrible fiction to resolve her dilemma. Levi sexually assaulted her. Why else would she succumb? Levi denies the charge but the girl is believed while he is not. There is stern punishment for this offense. Levi is shunned. He has two alternatives having been so punished. One is to take his punishment, work to rectify his good name, and hope that he can regain normalcy in his existence thereafter. The other is to leave and make a new life for himself. The Oregon Territory had opened up and though the road west would be fraught with hardship, it offered opportunity and a complete severance with his past, thus a new beginning.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">He opts for the second choice, but it is not the consequence of that choice that I want to focus on. It is the reason, one the viewer can only infer. What would life be like as one shunned? Could he possibly further explore his romantic interests? Could he hold his head up in town? He had has eye on one of the girls at the orphanage. Would she come with him on his trek westward to share a life with him? In the answers to these questions there are stories. It is the stories that compete with each other in Levi's mind, though perhaps not explicitly; they are there nonetheless. The choice ends up being for possibility and against a blocked path.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">The hardship on the Oregon Trail and its contrast with the wealth of his family and the well being of his community in Pennsylvania end up as filler, part of the background and nothing more, clearly not as primary determinants of the choice. Might others have chosen differently? Certainly. Could these secondary factors for Levi have been primary and thus driven their choice? Sure. What distinguishes the one from the other? I believe that it's the goodness of the story that matters and that we are our own arbiters in determining what makes for a good story.</span><br />
<span xmlns="">* * * * *</span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="color: black;"></span></span><br />
<blockquote>
<span xmlns=""><span style="color: black;">Josh: "I can't pick up and leave the White House to go run a campaign for some dark horse I pulled out of a corn field." <a href="http://homepage.eircom.net/%257Eodyssey/Quotes/Popular/TV/Westwing6.html"></a></span><a href="http://homepage.eircom.net/%257Eodyssey/Quotes/Popular/TV/Westwing6.html">Impact Winter</a></span></blockquote>
<span xmlns=""><a href="http://homepage.eircom.net/%257Eodyssey/Quotes/Popular/TV/Westwing6.html"></a><a href="http://homepage.eircom.net/%257Eodyssey/Quotes/Popular/TV/Westwing6.html">In season six of </a><a href="http://www.westwingepguide.com/S4/Episodes/79_GNB.html">The West Wing</a> Josh is in the doldrums because the Republicans have an improbable candidate, Arnie Vinnick, pro-choice and not beholden to the Religious Right. He is a tough and seasoned politician and looks very hard to beat. The Democrats, in contrast, appear to be between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand there is the current Vice President, Bob Russell, nicknamed Bingo Bob, a not so affectionate way of saying the man lacks gravitas. Russell was handpicked by the Republican Congressional leadership. After the prior Vice President, John Hoynes, resigned in disgrace amid a sex scandal, the White House needed a ready replacement owing to the President's Multiple Sclerosis. Hence they couldn't afford to have a floor fight for a candidate with real teeth and real brains but who might have ruffled a few feathers in his day, especially since the Democratic Leadership didn't embrace the President's first choice, the Secretary of State. On the other hand there was Hoynes, scarred by his scandal and without a moral bone in his body, he did have several assets including his prior experience, his intelligence, and his vast political network. He was running not just to clear his good name, but to win.<br />
Josh was distraught about both alternatives. He had an inkling about another possibility, Congressman Matthew Vincente Santos, an extraordinarily able legislator who had worked his way up, the first in his family to go to college, but still a very young man and not on anyone else's radar as of Presidential timbre, the veritable dark horse. Josh was impressed with Santos for his smarts, his guts, and his ability to deliver the goods. But the idea to get Santos to run for President was too wild. He couldn't play that card, could he?<br />
How would any of us decide for Josh if we were in his shoes? If we were fortunate, we'd have a mentor with whom to air the issues, someone venerable and experienced, wise in these matters and sensitive to our own needs, a person we've trusted before who has honored that trust so we're prepared to trust him now. In Leo, Josh has the mentor par excellence. Leo, the former Chief of Staff, who handpicked Josh to work on the Bartlett campaign just as he handpicked Jed Bartlett to run for President, was the ideal personage qua mentor.<br />
Josh felt in his gut that he wanted to leave his Deputy Chief of Staff post to run an upstart Santos campaign, but he also knew in his head that you don't pick Presidential candidates out of cornfields, yet you do dance with the one that brought you. Bartlett was the sitting President so Josh had an obligation to see it through till the end of the second term, or so he thought. Mentors can't make decisions for us. But they can really help with our second thoughts, when to heed them and when to toss them in the trash. Those second thoughts can turn into myths that block our thinking. Or they can be necessary moments of doubt; once overcome they help us to commit totally to our choice.<br />
Leo countered Josh on both points. Bartlett himself was a candidate from the cornfields when Leo asked him to get into the race. It's been done before so it could be done again. There is no endgame in politics. Candidates come and go but issues stay with us and somebody else must govern when the sitting President, either by volition or due to the strictures of the 22<sup>nd</sup> Amendment, leaves office. For Josh's two points Leo had two reasonable if not altogether convincing counterpoints. The decision making is not always or even mainly an exercise in logic. Ultimately, the choice comes down to following your dreams, wild as they may be, or doing what you're told to do, by others or by the "do your duty" voice in your own head, sober and sensible but perhaps not uplifting. Leo, who didn't have eyes in the back of his head nor did he know what it could possibly be that was giving Josh the urge to push Santos as a candidate, understood what made Josh's motor run. He gave Josh the answers Josh needed to hear.<br />
* * * * *<br />
Moving from fiction to reality, I have friends who at their jobs have been in analogous circumstances to Levi Zendt and others who developed the same sort of bug that afflicted Josh Lyman. My guess is that many of you too have examples of friends or colleagues caught in these situations.<br />
Steve, when I met him eleven years ago he had a parallel job to mine at a like research university, has since retired and moved into consulting work. After seeing him at meetings on a quarterly basis for a couple of years, we really got t know each other in Indianapolis at the Educause <a href="http://net.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE2001/1341">National Conference in 2001</a>. One evening we traipsed around the downtown talking about what we were hearing then and our reactions to that. Each of our campuses had been supporting something called a Course Management System (mine supported three and still other online systems), which provided Web pages and ancillary functionality to assist with the online pieces of instruction. Usage had gone through a takeoff phase, something akin to how the World Wide Web itself had taken off. It seemed clear that we needed to bring some order to this Wild Wild West, but it was far less clear how to do that or if in the process of trying to do that whether we'd significantly retard the spirit that generated the growth in the first place. Nobody had good solutions for these issues. Everyone had lots of questions.<br />
Several years later Steve became entrapped in his position by his supervisor, who had a different vision for his job than he had, where initially when she came into the position there was friendship and a sense of possibility, ultimately that transformed into enmity and distrust. The inflection point occurred soon after Steve's ultimate successor was hired, herself a very good person caught in the middle of it all. Steve, who is quite sharp at reading the tea leaves, understood it would be tough sledding were he to stay. Further, his own interest had drawn him into some projects that went outside his campus, collaborations with a state-level entity and several other campuses. That interest led him to some projects entailing electronic textbooks, where the dual goals were to help improve the quality of what was delivered to students while simultaneously bringing the cost to them down. These projects ultimately led to his consulting work. Steve maintained his geniality throughout and was able to make a graceful exit. By seeing what would come next he didn't have to burn more bridges than were absolutely necessary. As a result, he has kept his humanity and has not been overtly altered by the process.<br />
I engage with Steve now and then, sometimes at a conference or a committee we might be serving on together, other times online just to stay in touch, with electronic and traditional publishing a frequent topic in our conversation. Invariably Steve comes up with some novel counterpoint that helps me with my own narrative, just what a really good friend should do. Recently Steve sent me a link to <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23683">Publishing: The Revolutionary Future</a>, an essay in the New York Review of Books by Jason Epstein.<br />
People are likening the changes that are happening with publishing now to what happened in the aftermath of Gutenberg's invention of the printing press – a dramatic alteration of the entire culture. Epstein has had a long and distinguished career as a publisher, with several innovations in the field to his own credit, including as the founder of the New York Review. Though I've cast Steve as a real life Levi Zendt, he and many others too, myself included, look for that mature mentorship that Josh Lyman sought as he was seriously considering leaving the White House to run an upstart campaign. In this day and age we need to cherish when we find that mentorship in flesh and blood, it is rare indeed, so we also have to look for it elsewhere, in what we listen to or read in order to find that wisdom. Following the link from the essay to his mini biography, it occurred to me that Epstein was Leo.<br />
As I work through the piece I glom onto three ideas. First, the best fiction, and probably much of the best non-fiction, is still a solitary effort. The individual author partakes in an extended exploration making a world of his own imagination as he travels, even if it is only a journey of the mind. It is the distinctive creation of the individual author that we readers end up seeing on the printed page. Given all that is being written nowadays of benefits from group work and collaboration, I appreciate this bow to individual creativity and the recognition that it is a province which must be preserved. With this recognition comes the added facts that the creative activity is both extremely time consuming and intensely effortful. Further, the reception for the output so produced remains in doubt right until and in the immediate aftermath of when the work is published. Even proven authors, a Mailer or a Talese for example, can lay an egg. The rewards for a success must of necessity be disproportionate, just for that reason. Copyright, questioned by many who wonder if it is a relic from a previous era, the one begat by Gutenberg, needs to persist in spite of the fact that all of us can now be publishers, electronically distributing our works at essentially zero incremental cost.<br />
Second, sometimes we are the victims of our own biases. As a critic of the Reagan Revolution, I can find much causality in our current travails by looking at the policies his administration enacted in the early 1980s and the mindset that engendered. Yet I recognize that this search can become tedious and further, that it can mask other important factors that were entirely apolitical or attributable to earlier political outcomes. Epstein laments the decline of the backlist that became evident in publishing while Reagan held the White House. The backlist is the extant inventory of books in print. Until its decline the backlist constituted a diverse and deep array of contributions, our culture captured in writing so to speak. The backlist was supported by large, independent, urban bookstores. Those bookstores went into decline coincidentally with Reagan occupying the Oval Office but not because of that; as the book buying populace moved to the suburbs so did the bookstores, with the independent urban bookstores ultimately to be replaced by the Borders and the Barnes and Nobles of the world, soon to be fixtures of suburban strip malls.<br />
In the new world of retail book selling, the business model was little different from any other sort of retail. Items needed to move quickly, off the shelves at the stores and into the homes of the patrons. This was the prime driver for the blockbuster mentality in publishing that predominates today, which has had a substantive effect on the titles that appear. The consequence is to produce a triumph of the ephemeral (to use Epstein's term) at the expense of the thoughtful, the offbeat, and the intellectually challenging. Epstein's insight regarding how demography impacted book publishing is helpful in thinking about how both Cable TV and The Movies evolved as well. We can see parallel consequences there.<br />
Third, in spite of Epstein's obvious insight into the forces shaping publishing and his seeming prescience regarding the future of publishing, Epstein goes out of his way to assert that nobody can predict these outcomes except in very broad strokes – the current forces toward digitization and away from paper-based publishing are apparent but where it all will lead is anything but. So Epstein spares us from his prognostications. He offers up instead a glimpse into his own history as a shaper of the future via the <a href="http://www.ondemandbooks.com/home.htm">Espresso Book Machine</a> and the <a href="http://www.readerscatalog.com/">Readers' Catalog</a>; the latter proved to be the forerunner to Amazon.com's publishing model. The clear message, when there is substantial uncertainty that leaves the the future very much in doubt about something you care for deeply, it is time to get into the game.<br />
Epstein's essay feeds my own prior inquiry in a couple of ways. I had been <a href="http://lanny-on-learn-tech.blogspot.com/2007/05/kopy-wrong.html">thinking about copyright for quite a while</a> and in the whole believe we as a society have allowed the moneyed interests to dictate terms regarding copyright in a way that has made for pernicious consequence for society as a whole. Epstein, with his focus on the individual creator and his acknowledgement that much of what is produced in publishing today has little to commend for itself, provides support of my own views. These turn out to be much in line with conservative thinker Richard Posner, who argues that <a href="http://www.jstor.org/pss/1830401">the welfare costs of monopoly</a> are typically much bigger than normally considered in an economics class, as producers compete away the gains in their effort to secure the monopoly for themselves, the competition itself entirely destructive and without social merit. (Once in a while something novel comes along that generates monopoly profit that is not competed away, for example, the recent movie Avatar's use of 3D. It's in the attempt to produce a successful sequel where the competition completely erodes the monopoly gain.)<br />
Posner can be read as an argument against regulation that encourages monopoly or, at the very least, to hold such regulations severely in check. (If in contrast to Posner's assumption the competition is itself productive, as <a href="http://www.jstor.org/pss/1832184">Franklin Fisher argues it is likely to be in this comment on Posner</a>, then the argument to sustain the regulation is enhanced.) What we are actually seeing with publishing according to Epstein supports Posner's conclusions, and the consequences are noteworthy. Profligate waste is part and parcel of the business, with much junk produced. The business justification for the outcome is that each such title plays the role of a lottery ticket to cash in on the next blockbuster, with the winning ticket "justifying" all the social waste. As if this is not enough, Epstein's view helps me to confirm that the reckless risk taking he has identified in publishing is one and the same with the irresponsible investment behavior Cassidy and others have written about in the financial markets, the unity apparent in the search for the big score and the disregard for the adverse consequence the behavior creates.<br />
Steve has carved himself a niche for himself in this world. His particular concern is with the college textbook market, a market that suffers some of the same moral hazard as in the prescription drug market, since it is the professor who requires the textbook but it is the student who purchases the book (or chooses not to). Students typically don't have the option to purchase books on the same subject written by other authors. This lack of choice at least partially explains the hyperinflation in textbook prices we've witness in recent years, with another part resulting from the mainstreaming of the used textbook market, thereby cutting into the market share of new sales. Steve believes that eTexts might be part of the answer, not eTexts sold in the open marketplace, but rather eText bundles with prices determined via negotiation between state-wide consortia and the publishers, so that the publishers face buyer-side counterparts who have some bargaining power, enabling fair pricing to be set in a manner that gauges uptake in usage and industry trends. Like Epstein, Steve will acknowledge there is substantial uncertainty surrounding these efforts, yet he has a need to be a shaper of what is to come next, to produce an outcome that matches his sense of what is fitting and appropriate. He too has gotten into the game.<br />
* * * * *<br />
Barbara's was a different circumstance. I met Barbara online. She had a deserved reputation as somebody who used blogs very well in her teaching. Since I didn't know others in that category and a friend of mine, Burks, was talking up her blog (I was aware of many bloggers who wrote about education, myself included, but I didn't know instructors in this category) I went to her site to find out what was the big deal. We had kind of a funny start after that. I wrote a comment on her then most recent post, a comment that challenged her and more than a little bit (an interesting way to begin a friendship among academics). She deleted the comment, but as it turned out not because of the criticism. The server was getting spam and her blog was receiving its share. She needed to clean that out. Unfortunately she did that while jet lagged, having just returned from a conference in the UK. All of a sudden all the comments to that post were gone, not just mine. I got an an email from her soon afterward where she apologized for the faux pas and then told me it was rare for anyone to take her on so she really wanted to engage with me on what I said. I don't recall if we continued with that particular thread, but we had several others over the next year or so on her blog and on mine, each pushing the other or applauding the other's efforts. (I probably did more of the pushing and she did more of the applauding, which surely is much more a consequence of our personal styles than anything about the quality of the work we were producing.)<br />
Barbara was teaching writing at an elite small liberal arts college when I met her. She was well respected by her colleagues and beloved by her students. Yet she was not satisfied. She tried, very hard actually, to be experimental with her teaching, to give her students insight into themselves as they learned to write together, to encourage each student to have the backs of their classmates as they gave written comments and oral feedback on the work of their peers. I'm sure this mattered to the students, but it may have mattered more to them as contrast to what they were getting in their other classes than by instilling intellectual patterns that would stick with them for life. Other courses, more traditional in their approach, were and continued to be the norm for them. Students develop certain behaviors and attitudes in response to that norm and as a consequence of their prior schooling which seemed to be in accord with that norm. As a consequence, Barbara felt as if she were moving a mountain. It may have given ground, but on our scale it didn't budge very much. She wanted to be a teacher where her efforts would have consequence in a way more overt to her and, independent of that desire, she felt there were learning needs in the community near where she lived not being attended to by anyone while her students at the college were privileged and would fare well in life irrespective of her efforts. So she left the college of her own accord to pursue digital story telling for residents of the rural locales in the state where she lives.<br />
Barbara's was more of a Josh choice. She certainly could have stayed at the college. Nobody was telling her to go. Yet she saw possibility in leaving and not much personal growth for herself in staying. Josh and Levi may have been in different circumstances, but in some key respects the choice to be made was essentially the same. Until you get the bug, the choice may be very hard. Once infected, it's as if no other alternative exists. Then there is no looking back.<br />
Yet old bonds do not break, nor even alter in a fundamental way. Family relationships and real friendships endure remarkable changes in circumstance. In his middle age Levi returns to Pennsylvania. All has been forgiven as the truth became known and Levi's innocence established. He was again part of the family, though independent of it. Josh has a falling out with Toby, who has estranged himself from the White House by leaking classified information about a military space shuttle to provide impetus for the rescue of astronauts on the civilian shuttle that had experienced equipment failure. The damage done between Josh and Toby seems irreparable, but it turns out otherwise because CJ, who had replaced Toby as Chief of Staff, really wants to know how Toby is doing and because of her position she can't make a direct inquiry. So Josh takes the hint and makes an impromptu call on Toby. It goes badly. They are both too headstrong. But Josh is a smart cookie; he persists and tries again. They connect the second time. Eventually Toby becomes a de facto counselor to Josh for the Santos campaign, one who only gets Josh on his cell, but one who has Josh's ear because Toby has been through the wars before.<br />
Barbara believes in democracy in learning, more than anyone else I know. She wants each student to be an active participant. Teacher centrism is monarchy. Bowing down to the ruler in the classroom is a holdover from a bygone era. Barbara wants equal participation from all. In her current work she has opened doors for many senior citizen members of her community, allowing them to tell their own stories, helping them create a picture of their place and the history behind it by digital means.<br />
Yet while she no longer works in a classroom, the paradox with asymmetric roles remains for her. She is the expert with digital storytelling. She has a vision for the the possible, what her friends in the community might produce online as a way to get their own story out. Possessors of great experience and a wealth of rich history, these seniors are nonetheless novices in the online arena. Quite possibly they are intimidated by it. Novices can bring a fresh look to a situation on occasion. But more often they are so focused on getting something done functionally that they fail to see much possibility, which remains beyond their grasp till they become better acclimated. A guide can help them. Barbara plays the role of guide, finding paths that otherwise would not be traversed. A guide is not royalty. But a guide is a leader.<br />
Not too long ago I got an email invitation forwarded to me by Barbara to join a group that would be reading Joyce's Dubliners and discussing the reading online (and doing other activities in support of the reading). I've always enjoyed my interactions with Barbara, so I opt in. I felt a little inadequate for the task and as it turns out so did others in the group. We weren't ready, at least in our minds. Barbara thought otherwise. The water is wonderful. Jump in. Many in the group have roots in learning technology, with capacities and affectations stemming from that. That's sufficient background for us to have an extended online conversation as "reciprocal apprentices," to use Barbara's terminology. We react to the reading and we react to the posting of the others, then their responses to our reactions, and encore une fois.<br />
This lends legitimacy to my babble about what I'm getting from Dubliners. My skepticism requires me to ask if that is a good thing. I suppose what I'm experiencing explains why faculty are often such bad students, particularly in areas where they are not expert, such as learning technology. They can't stand the unknowing and worse, they really can't stand being seen as unknowing. I definitely feel that way, but not to the point where it causes me to drop out of the group. I am conscious, moreover, that knowing others in the group are reading my posts about Dubliners is making me do more work to say something of consequence. So I also try to do what I quite regularly do in other blog writing – bring in disparate ideas and build connections. Whether my take on individual stories in Dubliners itself has merit, I can't say; I have no tools to test that. We are having some interesting back and forth and enjoying it for itself; certainly there is something to be said for that.<br />
Barbara seems much less concerned about whether our group produces an insightful analysis of Joyce; each of our observations matter to her for themselves, windows into our own thinking. Barbara instinctively wants to nurture that thinking and champion it. I would call it cheerleading but for the fact that Barbara is a player too. To be active and effective in both roles is a rarity. Barbara has that dual capacity. It's what makes her such a good colleague.<br />
* * * * *<br />
Should I stay or should I go? It's a fascinating question, one that more than maintains our interest, perhaps keeping us awake at night as well. Yet answering the question invariably hinges on making a different sort of judgment, an evaluation of people, really of a particular person.<br />
<b>The Fundamental Questions</b>: We all become enraptured from time to time with someone new to us. Can we trust that person? Can we rely on our own passion for the person and for the endeavor that brings us together?<br />
The act of becoming aware of this other almost always is accompanied with some other extraordinary experience that is shared; this common experience can then serve as the basis of a bond, one from which trust might be built. Other subsequent experience can then amplify on this foundation or, when those experiences entail unexpected stress, to break it.<br />
Levi Zendt asked Elly Bahm, a girl who lived at the orphanage, to come with him to Oregon. Elly had outgrown the orphanage and was ready to leave simply for that reason. Elly had also witnessed the kissing incident and was the only person other than Levi himself who understood the injustice that had been placed upon him. That was for starters. It escalated from there. Elly soon married Levi. They fell very much in love and remained that way till Elly's unfortunate and untimely death.<br />
Josh Lyman hardly knew Matt Santos when Josh, uninvited, visited the Santos home in Houston during the winter recess to present his nine point plan on how Santos could become the Democratic candidate and then win the election in November. Sure Josh had knocked down a beer in Santos' office after Santos had given teeth to a Republican led bill for a Patient's Bill of Rights that passed after Santos' own plan had died in committee, with Josh playing the unwitting foil on that one, inadvertently illustrating that Santos was his own man and not beholden to the White House for staking his own position. While that episode showed that Santos was skilled at playing the legislative cards, none of that experience spoke to how Santos would do on the campaign trail, something essentially unknowable without giving it a try. The campaign for the White House is like no other.<br />
Indeed much of the remainder of the sixth season is the story playing out of how each of these two characters learns about the other's wants and values within the heat of the campaign and the extreme circumstances the campaign forced upon the candidate and his campaign manager. Of course, Josh and the Congressmen are the heroes of the show, so it all works out for the best. The candidate, in particular, transcends the expectations of the moment, multiple times in fact. The writers of the show well understood what the viewers wanted. So the relationship between Josh and the Congressman becomes extremely close in a hurry, were real life to follow such a TV script.<br />
That it does not means that we need to stay on our toes and be aware of the possibility that the outcome might remain in doubt for some time. Nonetheless, there is an important take away from watching that West Wing season. Operating in ignorance, much of our learning is about determining trust in people whom we want to befriend and rely on. It is a two-way street. As we learn, so does our potential partner in crime. The currency we use to make these transactions go is stories. Choices are made on the basis of good stories. Experience matters. Actions do speak louder than words. A narrative is built based on both. We participate in the construction of that narrative. So does the other.<br />
The bold ones among us challenge themselves constantly by situating themselves in fundamentally new circumstances. There they meet new people to befriend, people who may become part of their inner circle. I suspect most of us do this at best episodically, more likely not at all. When confronting a will I stay or will I go decision we learn as much about our own capacities and wants as we learn about the other. Within this self-discovery one can find the source of both excitement and much stress, good reasons for the bond to be strong when it forms but an equally good reason for the bond to fracture.<br />
* * * * *<br />
<blockquote>
"Where the hell is my wallet? Have you seen my wallet? It's a complete disaster if I can't find it."</blockquote>
This was right before dinner on Wednesday evening. We got home from a band concert at the school. Both kids play in the band. The family had agreed to go out to eat at the new place in the neighborhood. It opened up in part of the space the hardware store had occupied before it closed. I know what you're thinking but really it is a pretty good place, with an eclectic menu. I've gotten quite fond of the Szechuan mahi mahi with cocoanut rice. I didn't want to hold us up any more. The place was going to close soon. So we leave for dinner, but without my wallet.<br />
During the meal I try as best as I can to ignore my panic and engage in banter with the kids. The meal goes pretty well, but I want it to end so I can look for my wallet. Maybe I left it at the school auditorium where we were sitting during the concert. It could have fallen out of my coat pocket. After dinner I drive to the school, but too late. It's locked. I start to make mental plans to get there first thing in the morning before classes start, before a janitor or someone else finds it. But then I tell myself that I don't remember having it before going to the concert. Perhaps I left it in the office. So I drive there, but no luck. I'm really in a dither at this point but my options for looking this evening are apparently exhausted so I decide to head home. There wasn't really anything else I could do.<br />
About halfway home I get a call on my cell. As it turns out I had gotten a text message too but I only have visual alerts for that so I wasn't aware of it until the phone rings. It was my wife calling. She found my wallet. It was on an end table adjacent to the small couch in our bedroom, under a report I had brought home. I had changed clothes after coming back from the concert and removed my wallet at that time. I didn't pay attention to what I was doing. Everything that ensued was a result me being a space cadet.<br />
Under the best of circumstances, I'm an absent minded professor. I misplace stuff all the time – keys, sunglasses, laptop, and wallet too. The mild idiosyncrasy that is usually dealt with in a very low key manner – "Have you checked in the drawer in your end table?" – becomes the source of alarm when it is other issues that really are at root the cause for concern: a trip with the family when we're not sure the kids know enough to take care of themselves, a major presentation to be given where it's not clear who will be in the audience so fretting needlessly in an attempt to come up with something that might be pleasing regardless of who they are, <i>a job interview</i> for a position I'm not sure whether I want or not but one I need to go through if only to do my own due diligence.<br />
You see, I'm going through my own should I stay or should I go decision as I write this chapter. I've been procrastinating talking about it. I really don't want to write directly about that choice. What I want to write about here is a subject I raised at the beginning of this chapter. How does the emotional side of our persona impact the decision making and conversely, how does the act of making such a decision affect our emotions? It's not an easy subject to write about and I've got an added liability to bring to this task. My personality type is <a href="http://www.intp.org/intprofile.html">INTP</a>. According to the essay by Paul James, individuals with that personality find "Extroverted Feeling," what I'm calling the emotional side of the persona, the part of their personality that is least developed. If I'm to write about the emotional aspect with any awareness whatsoever, I had better base what I say on some very rich recent experience, not one far in the past where romanticized recollections of the experience dull and alter what was actually felt. Rather, I need something where the sharpness of the events persists as a clear memory.<br />
My plan here is to recount as much of the emotional bit as I can while abstracting from the other details of the search so as to avoid commentary on that. The reader will have to judge whether I've pulled it off to good effect. Let me begin with why I'm looking for a job and the sort of job that would be interesting to me. In so doing I hope also to illustrate how a story gets made, one fragment at a time.<br />
I got this story second hand from someone in the Economics department. Nonetheless, it helped to shape my thinking. A former colleague of mine, now working at a university in California, was contemplating the job offer from that place some time ago. He was unhappy with the department head and was seeking a more collegial environment. A few other colleagues, who used to go to lunch with each other, were discussing this move at lunch. One junior member asked something to the effect, "I can't understand how he can take this (other) position. The salary is basically the same and the cost of living is so much higher in California." To which one of the senior members of the group responded, "He can't afford not to. He's been around long enough and he's now old enough that he'll get his pension from SURS (the State University Retirement System) if he leaves." Long timers who have good external job opportunities can <i>double dip</i>, the phrase that has stuck with me. As it turns out, several of my other senior colleagues, irked by something about the place, did likewise. It is an interesting lesson, perhaps not a full story in itself, but you can see the makings of such a story in the following facts. This is my thirtieth year here and I turned fifty five in January, the minimal age at which an employee is retirement eligible. (<a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-pension-reforms-0325-20100324,0,1353278,full.story">The state appears to have just passed legislation</a> that will increase the minimum retirement age for new employees, but that legislation will not affect folks already in the system.)<br />
Now let me move onto a different fragment, one that doesn't so stress my mercenary side. Several years ago I wrote a long blog post, <a href="http://lanny-on-learn-tech.blogspot.com/2006/04/second-careers-and-k-12.html">Second Careers and K-12</a>, which was about how double dippers might go into teaching in the schools after having retired from their previous jobs. The intriguing part of this for me was that the idea leveraged two distinct thoughts, both of which have merit in their own right. One is that that our system encourages talented seniors who are otherwise productive to retire, a real misallocation and waste of human capacity. The other is the extreme shortage of good teachers and, in fact, those college students who intend to become teachers are on average among the lower performing students in college. Senior citizens, especially those whose own offspring have already left the nest, really are in a better position to be altruistic this way and can devote their productive efforts to the development of the younger generation. I discussed these ideas in the earlier chapter, <a href="http://ggames-larvan.blogspot.com/search/label/07%20Personality%20and%20Guessing">Personality and Guessing</a>, Evidently, the thoughts have stayed with me, though the ideas modify as I learn other things. Having read some Peter Drucker and thinking about the issues a bit more broadly I've concluded that the philanthropic work either can be done as pure volunteering or as part of a paid job where it is an essential component. There likely will be a teaching/mentoring aspect to such work, but it need not only happen in K-12.<br />
Drucker puts forward many interesting points on the relationship between learning and work. Knowledge workers must keep learning in their work related activities. Learning and productivity are intimately tied. We may not always be cognizant of the learning we go through on the job. We may be more aware when that learning has ceased. A few years ago going to national conferences about learning technology, it dawned on me that I was getting little to nothing out of the sessions, which seemed like bad remakes of movies I'd already viewed, but I'd still get value talking with people one-on-one between sessions. That remains true but now sometimes even the one-on-ones are less fulfilling. I've become aware that I've been plateauing in my own work. And if you go back to the essay on the INTP, Paul James argues that this personality type gets bored fairly easily, to paraphrase, "once it has figured out what is going on." James asserts that implementing a known solution is not so engaging for the INTP. I concur. So I believe I need some new challenges in order to be fresh with those and put my full energy into addressing them.<br />
These are three different fragments that together partially complete the picture. They do explain why this year and not last year but they don't explain why this year and not the next one or the year after that or even further into the future. What's the hurry?<br />
* * * * *<br />
The east-west Interstate that Champaign-Urbana abuts is I-74. Follow it eastward into Indiana and further on to Indianapolis or westward to Bloomington, then Peoria, and ultimately the Quad Cities. The north-south Interstate borders the development where I live. To the north it heads to Chicago, southward you can take it all the way to Memphis. If you think of the triangle formed by Indianapolis, Chicago, and St. Louis then Champaign-Urbana is not quite in the middle. It is closest to the Indianapolis vertex though because the other two vertices are outside of Illinois most folks not from around here would guess Chicago would be closest. The terrain is flat in all directions. Once you get out of town and until you approach a major urban area, there is not much traffic and the drive is not very challenging. It leaves lots of time for thought or to listen to music or both. I get about halfway to my job interview and stop for gas and to take a break. I do a mental check of my own composure. I'm doing ok, not too much anxiety, not overly nervous. I ask myself if this is because I'm maturing emotionally as I age or if instead it's because I'm not sure this job is a fit so don't get too worked up about it for that reason.<br />
My schedule has two and a half hours of interviews. The first one is brief, only 15 minutes, and goes well enough. I begin to learn about the mission of the place as told by the insiders and get some insight about things that I can't get from their Web site. In return I give some autobiography and have to provide enough of a story to explain how that autobiography sets me up to be interested in this position. The place is a for-profit university whose students are all adult learners, most who were not well served by the schools when they were growing up. This is a different sector of the education space than I've experienced and one of the obvious questions on the minds of both them and me is whether what I have to bring to the table is appropriate to fit their needs. Following that short session I have about an hour chat with the person to whom this position will directly report. He has an interesting style, preferring to answer my questions than to pose his own. So we end up talking much more about the place than we do about me. The conversation is fine but it feels incomplete. However it needs to conclude because I'm scheduled to meet the search committee next.<br />
Normally with something new I'm edgiest right at the start and then calm down as I get used to the thing. The afternoon of the job interview, the pattern reverses. I'm more charged up with the search committee than I was before and I find the intensity rising during the search committee conversation. There are two different reasons for this, I believe. When the secretary sent me the agenda, for the one-on-one sessions she gave me the names and their titles but for this session she listed the titles only. Then it turned out that only a subset of the members actually were in the seminar room where the interview took place, though every seat was taken. Indeed the room felt snug and was on the warm side. We started right in without doing introductions. A couple of them introduced themselves in the flow of the conversation. For the others, I never quite figured out who they were. This was disorienting to me and contributed to my stress.<br />
One of the things I've learned about teaching over the years is the imperative to be aware of the audience and its reactions, to be sensitive to signals from the audience and make adjustments to what we're doing based on that feedback. Last fall I led a group presentation in an online conference and the planning for it was quite enjoyable. Though the workgroup was mainly people I didn't know beforehand, we got to know each other and shared ideas by preparing for the live session. With the audience for the live session, however, I never could learn about their interests and what motivated them nor were they aggressive about giving feedback via text chat during the session. It was like talking to a wall but knowing other people are listening. I didn't like that feeling at all. I've been sensitized to caring about the outcomes and here there was no way to know whether what we presented was effective or not. Actually, with the search committee, we had time near the end for me to inquire about their reactions. But that was only at the end. During most of the session I was in the hot seat and at best got only indirect clues as to what members of the committee were thinking.<br />
The other reason for my stress is that I had the feeling of being on stage with the search committee while I did not in the one-on-one sessions. I get pretty keyed up when on stage. The feeling seems to arise when I'm with a group and I feel I have responsibility for everyone else. When attending a committee meeting as a member the feeling doesn't emerge; then I can pick my spots. When I'm hosting the committee meeting I feel on stage. I have to step in at certain times to keep up the flow. That is my obligation. Sometimes when that feeling is strong I find it very difficult to follow the flow of discussions and yet discharge my responsibility. For me, at least, deep listening conflicts with being on stage. Aware of this personal limitation, I tried very hard with the search committee to do both. That must have been obvious to the others in the room because near the end of the session one of the people at the table commented that he could see my eyes darting from speaker to speaker in an effort to get a sense of what they were saying as well as to garner what they were taking away from me.<br />
What I referred to as intensity others might call stage fright. I think of the latter term happening before the performance begins while the former happens while the performance is underway. I used to absolutely hate feeling fear ahead of time so when I was younger I must have emotionally discounted the value of the intensity during the show. But in this instance I'm aware that the intensity was enjoyable, a feeling of being alive. Then on subsequent reflection it occurs to me that this sense of intensity is where I derive my own personal commitment. I return to activities that generate the feeling, although what is clear is that the feeling may very well depend on the time and place, not just on the activity. I've kept up writing my blog for five years now mainly because the authoring of the posts gives me a charge, but I stopped doing it daily quite a while ago and now I post only when I'm moved to do so.<br />
After the interview concludes I drive to the airport on a quick trip to see my mom, taking advantage that the airfares will be a lot lower than if I were to fly out of Champaign. I don't really know how long it will take to get to the airport and get checked in so I don't stick around but head directly there. Driving downtown I need to find the Interstate that gets you to the airport but once that's done I can turn my attention to how the interview went and what I'd make of the opportunity. I do that much of the rest of the evening including on the flight down and hardly spend any time reading my Kindle.<br />
What I went through in this reflection immediately following the performance I'd refer to as bouncing. I hold almost diametrically opposite points of view within a matter of moments. One big issue is whether I feel I can do the job. The position has a lot of discretion in it. In other circumstances (like my current work) I have a bunch of experience that is relevant in a tacit way and so I'm quite comfortable trusting my instincts when making a judgment call. I can almost always back it up by by reasoned argument and when I can't I can refine my position accordingly. I'm not sure my instincts will be worth a tinker's damn in the new job. Alternatively, I become cognizant that I will need coaching to get my instincts up to speed. Who would provide that coaching? This organization structure appears hierarchical and the position I interviewed for is not at the top but is close to it in the hierarchy. The person to whom this position will directly report appeared extraordinarily busy. Would he have time for this?<br />
I get the impression during the session with the search committee that those folks want to move quickly and are looking for somebody who is functional and can crank out new faculty development programs quickly. I'm almost certainly too reflective and wanting to figure things out from first principles to be comfortable with what we'd produce. There's a tension there. There is a further tension in the seeming desire to change the internal culture and make that more like traditional academic environments and less like a for profit place. There is a definite gap between what the head honcho describes and how the search committee sees things. I get the sense that this position has more than a little "bad cop" in it, saying no because the expeditious way is not the right way, then identifying the right way as do-able if harder. Do I want to be in authority but a bad cop? I don't know. I cycle back on the developing a sense of taste issue.<br />
One of the big cultural differences is that at Illinois faculty call the shots. They have authority derived from their research record, their tenure, and the tradition of the place. In this new setting faculty are more like teachers in K-12, employees who in large part do what they are told. They get direction from above. I have ideas about how to build community with folks for a common purpose, much of which stems from my recent teaching. Do those ideas carry over to this new setting? I have no way of knowing. I tell myself this job is most interesting to me if I can play it balls out and try things that intrigue me. But can that be functional here? This is another source of the bouncing.<br />
The commuting issue had been a big deal for me before I made the trip. Could I manage that? My wife will still work at Illinois regardless of my choice and we built a house not that long ago that we're very comfortable in now. So this out of town work will come with some sort of a commute and ahead of time I asked about some mix of telecommuting to cut down on the being away from home. But I don't even bring this to mind in the reflections. It's a secondary or tertiary consideration and I'm focusing on the bread and butter.<br />
There is still more to keep me churning. The other big deal, why this job search is now rather than a couple of years into the future, is the budget hell that Illinois is going through and its need to downsize, with it likely I'd have to lay off staff were I to stay. I talked about this with the folks interviewing me. I don't know how credible my explanation of the situation sounds to others. It is reality but I suspect some of my candor backfired.<br />
I call my wife from the airport. She asks me how it went. We don't have a very long conversation. I tell her it was interesting but is a long shot. We talk about it only a bit more when I return home after seeing my mom.<br />
A week or so later I become aware of another job opening in the vicinity for which I appear qualified, maybe over qualified. I apply for it. In this case the job is at a public university and the application process is more formal. I put many of my story fragments in the application letter and try to be as forthcoming about my situation as I can be. Let them determine their interest or not with as much information as I can give them. That's what I would want.<br />
The full story is still being written, the conclusion not yet determined.<br />
* * * * *<br />
One of Cassidy's topics in his recent book is following the crowd, in the context of financial markets this is an old Keynesian idea – such herd behavior can be deeply destabilizing and is a prominent source of market failure. For typical investors and for those working in the financial services industry far from the top of the food chain, Cassidy is content to take the the behavior as a given. For CEOs he adds to the stew the perverse incentives based on near term gain only, so that a CEO who thought it prudent to stay out of holding high-risk mortgage-backed securities for reasonable fear of future default would be punished by getting fired since his firm would almost certainly underperform the market in the very near term.<br />
While the decision making of CEOs is fascinating I'd like to focus on the rest of us mortals. Why is so much of what we do driven by following the crowd? Surely most of us in considering the question will hearken back to our own adolescence, our insecurity then and how we coped with that. And we'll think of the clothes we wore and the music we listened to. When I was in Junior High School where we were required to wear ties, I recall the shoes of choice were penny loafers and with that you wore white sweat socks to make for a sharp contrast with where the pants leg ended. The music played at parties was The Monkees more than the Beatles. During my first year in High School the dress code relaxed substantially. Jeans were allowed and we could wear sneakers. The sweat socks were the only part of the attire to survive the transition. The new fad shoes were leather sneakers made by Adidas.<br />
There is seeming safety in going with the crowd. That adolescents do it should come as no surprise, especially where the goal is to avoid bringing attention to themselves, even if ironically much of the discussion at the time of my adolescence in the late 1960s and early 1970s centered around non-conformity. I would term this idea that choice is driven primarily by a desire for safety an immature view. There is certainly nothing wrong with being immature, especially when you are young. The question is whether that sort of decision making persists as we get older. The further question is when "thinking it through" is also an option why people nonetheless opt to go with the crowd when they are aware that thinking it through would lead to a different choice.<br />
Kahneman and Tversky would argue that much choice before the fact is driven by a desire to minimize regret <i>ex post</i>, in the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1987/08/16/magazine/on-language-glossary-of-a-scandal.html?pagewanted=1">inimitable words of John Poindexter</a>, they'd put in a C.Y.A. effort. Following the crowd can be seen as C.Y.A. It lacks originality to be sure, but that is the point. It puts responsibility elsewhere or so it seems at the time. What if part of the maturation process is a willingness to accept responsibility? What then?<br />
In answering those questions I can contribute the following. Regret for me persists not because of bad outcomes but rather because the choice was driven by adhering to notions that I myself don't value after the fact. When I worked for the big campus IT organization I made a variety of choices which (1) were partially driven by my own desire for empire building where after the fact it became clear to me that I didn't really care to have an empire at all and I only pursued that because that is how other administrators measured their own rewards and (2) I ceded authority to technical side of the house often at the expense of the teaching and learning side where I had more direct knowledge. So it is not that there is no regret – as the saying goes if I had to do it all over again, I'd do it the same way. I wouldn't.<br />
What I would do instead is to examine carefully what it is I really care about and then to be in the game and try to shape things as best as I can that are in accord with those beliefs. In that I'd be like Steve and like Barbara.<br />
The economics view of uncertainty has the story remarkably well worked out already. We know almost everything. All that's left is a roll of the dice and whether the dice themselves are fair or loaded. Maybe that's the right way to think about whether to punt or go for it on fourth down in an NFL game. There are a lot of other choices we make where our ignorance is far greater.<br />
We learn what we can and much of the learning is in determining whether we are asking the right questions. We seek wisdom from mentors and opinion from peers who have been through something similar. Then we struggle because there is still a choice that is up to us, one where even when we've done our homework we can't know the outcome in advance.<br />
Let's grow up. Let's make these choices aware of what we're doing. Let's not run away from them.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></span>Lanny Arvanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05597426421997599777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331075451664544793.post-65020646076090475012009-08-12T06:12:00.004-05:002010-06-06T11:59:08.846-05:00Homage to Jerry Uhl<span style=";font-family:lucida grande;font-size:100%;" ><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20030519151332/http://www.vpaa.uillinois.edu/reports_retreats/tid/resources/uhl.html"> </a></span><div class="Section1" style="font-family:georgia;"><blockquote><span style="font-size:100%;">I was always taught to respect my elders and I've now reached the age when I don't have anybody to respect.<a href="http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/George_Burns/"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><b><u><br />George Burns</u></b></span></a><br /><i>US actor & comedian (1896 - 1996)</i></span></blockquote><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">All of us appre</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ciate precision in expression, idea</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s so well articulated that they </span><span style="font-size:100%;">cause reconsideration of</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> our own held position </span><span style="font-size:100%;">or</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> when we’ve not yet thought it through</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> bringing our vague intuitions into sharp focus. Whether spoken or in writing matters not. Giving a well crafted voice to ideas provides illumination. It i</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s helping others to see with crispness </span><span style="font-size:100%;">that counts. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Searching for clarity in what we</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> ourselves</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> see when operating without the guidance of others might </span><span style="font-size:100%;">form </span><span style="font-size:100%;">a matching imperative. E</span><span style="font-size:100%;">xp</span><span style="font-size:100%;">erience, however, shows it does</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> not. </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Sometimes that is because the object clouds the view. Maureen Dowd, in a recent <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/opinion/14dowd.html"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>tongue in cheek column about the deficiencies of High Definition Television</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;">, argues that this </span><span style="font-size:100%;">particular </span><span style="font-size:100%;">technology is gender biased. Men crave it, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">particularly</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> for viewing sports. Women, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">especiall</span><span style="font-size:100%;">y </span><span style="font-size:100%;">those who might appear in front of the camera, detest it – every pimple and blemish, hidden by makeup and not visible</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> even</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> when face to face, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">appears to get</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> revealed on the flat screen. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Beauty resides in the mind’s eye of the beholder</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and in our culture</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, prurient as it may seem at times,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> we’re taught not to lift the veil unless we </span><span style="font-size:100%;">first </span><span style="font-size:100%;">turn out the lights. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">It may not be vanity that</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> causes the object to conceal</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Seeking to retain control when the situation starts to get out of hand provides a powerful motivation to keep truth from view. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">This appears to be <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/world/middleeast/25iran.html?scp=1&sq=khamenei&st=cse"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>what </u></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>has been</u></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u> happening </u></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>in Iran recently</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;">, the totalitarian and brutal </span><span style="font-size:100%;">suppression of the right to assembly in non-violent protest</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> accompanied by a</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> blockade </span><span style="font-size:100%;">of independent journalists, with state sanctioned pronouncements in lieu of investigative reporting. Some commentators, such as <a href="http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10409"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>David Ignatius of the Washington Post</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;">, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">argue that the inner workings of the Iran regime are fractured beyond repair and that the voices of the Iranian people that have been heard </span><span style="font-size:100%;">across the glo</span><span style="font-size:100%;">be the past few</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> week</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and prior to that </span><span style="font-size:100%;">i</span><span style="font-size:100%;">n the run up to their presidential election are sufficient causes to create fundamental regime change. It is hard to tell. Whatever the public utterances of Ayatollah Khamenei, one would think that he is not entirely self-deluded and that he and other hard liners in </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Iran</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> truly believe the current</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> crackdown can work. I fear that</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> he is right. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Mostly, however, it is not the object that blocks the view. Rather </span><span style="font-size:100%;">it is </span><span style="font-size:100%;">the watcher </span><span style="font-size:100%;">who </span><span style="font-size:100%;">sees things unreliably, due to deteriorating function of the senses – straight lines appear wavy when the macula degenerates, current views tie into memories that have been altered and thus distorted with the passage of time, caught up in thought and unable to multi-process we miss what is happening right in front of us – or worse, the cause is an ego that needs to be stroked, so supporting evidence is prized while conflicting information </span><span style="font-size:100%;">gets entirely disregarded without a moment’s pause. We are all subject to this particular form of delusion from time to time. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The problem becomes particularly acute when we are both subject and object, trying to understand ourselves,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> what makes us tick, i</span><span style="font-size:100%;">dentifying strengths and weaknesses. For me, where self-reflection has become the primary way to gain insight about learning, the problem is absolutely diabolical. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Has a new truth been uncovered or only some fanciful deception been rendered, an unintended prank on self to give ambition its comeuppance and restore the requisite sense of humility? Patience and careful verification can help, but there is no sure way because at core there is no </span><span style="font-size:100%;">certain </span><span style="font-size:100%;">answer to the </span><span style="font-size:100%;">kid-in-the-back-seat-of-the-car </span><span style="font-size:100%;">question, “Are we there yet?” My method to address the issue is to look outward as well as inward, try to force comparison with other cases where I can be more objective, a kind of benchmarking if you will. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">It too is not foolproof, but I am more confident in the results when taking that approach.</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">* * * * * </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">This is a true story. When I came to </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Champaign</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> for my recruiting visit</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> in spring 1980, I took the train down from </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Chicago</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. I was met at the Train Station by two Assistant Professors in the Economics Department, John and Larry. I had already eaten dinner on the train, so they took me out for dessert – cheesecake was my favorite then. We went to a place on </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Sixth Street</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> just south of Green called The Manhattan. (It has changed ownership several times since and is now called The Clybourne.) We had a nice dessert and good conversation. When it came time to pay the bill, one of John and Larry, I can’t remember who, pulled out a credit card. The waiter said they didn’t take credit cards. Neither of</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> them had any cash. As a rule I always try to be with at least some cash, s</span><span style="font-size:100%;">o I end</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ed</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> up paying. The next day as I was about to meet with the Executive Committee of the Department John comes into the conference room, though he wasn’t on the Committee. He gave me a twenty dollar bill, right in front of the others, no explanation offered. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">It was reimbursement from the night before, a bit embarrassing but I suppose the timing couldn’t be avoided. Larry </span><span style="font-size:100%;">and </span><span style="font-size:100%;">another assistant professor </span><span style="font-size:100%;">did take me out for Chinese before the train ride back to </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Chicago</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">but John missed that meal. The faux pas </span><span style="font-size:100%;">was part of the</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> attraction to me. These were down to earth people I could relate to. It was the main reason I took the job. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The Assistant Professors were a pretty tight knit group. We did a lot of socializing together. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Almost immediately, Larry and I became best friends. I’m not sure what, in particular, started that but a strong bond quickly formed. I was</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> only twenty five when I began</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> that fall and though I was nerdy and possibly intellectually intimidating</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> about economic theory</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, there was another part of me that really enjoyed “boys will be boys” kind of fun. Larry must have figured that out right off. He’s only a few years older so by rights he too was indulging adolescent tastes as an adult and getting a big kick out of it. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">He was married and I was single. We hung around with another Assistant Professor, Francoise, who lived a couple of doors down from Larry. Most of our dinners we ate together and since they were in East Urbana and my apartment was in West Champaign, and they really knew how to cook, only rarely did I host. Larry</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> liked <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Wave_music"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>New Wave</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> music. I was malleable in that department. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">So we listened to the Vapors, Devo, the Talking Heads, Blo</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ndie, the Pretenders, and other groups</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> of that era. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Larry got me to play golf, something I hadn’t done much before</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> but the rest of them didn’t play tennis</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> which had been my main sport. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I wouldn’t have guessed that ahead of time,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> but I really started to like golf</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. In the winter months </span><span style="font-size:100%;">we played handball, a god-awful activity that can really brutalize your hands, even though you wear gloves to take some of the shock from contact with the ball, but a very good workout because </span><span style="font-size:100%;">you use one hand or the other depending on whether the ball is to your left or your right</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and there is a lot of whole body movement to get into position to hit the ball and to get ready for the return.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Learning to hit the ball with your left (we were all right handed) was an interesting mix of will and practice</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> to overcome the unnatural</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Remembering back to that time and comparing that </span><span style="font-size:100%;">experience </span><span style="font-size:100%;">to how I interact with and view Larry today I have the sense that how we were brought up mattered not too much then. What mattered </span><span style="font-size:100%;">was</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> that we all recently had gone to Econ graduate school, we all were fairly close in age, we didn’t have much if any pretense in our manner (as compared with some other junior faculty we knew </span><span style="font-size:100%;">in other departments </span><span style="font-size:100%;">who were much stiffer and more forma</span><span style="font-size:100%;">l in their social interactions), and we had a</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> common</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> share in departmental politics because by the governance structure at the time the Assistant Professors had a representative on the Executive Committee, who had a right to vote on tenure, promotion, and salary increases of faculty at higher rank!</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">This coming academic year will be my thirtieth at </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Illinois</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. C</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ommonality of recent experience is less </span><span style="font-size:100%;">now </span><span style="font-size:100%;">with Larry and </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I </span><span style="font-size:100%;">because each of us has gone on to do somewhat different type of</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> administrative work and with families with</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> teenage kids, we socialize at most one night a week, on the weekends</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. In our behavior as more mature adults, how</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> we were raised matters more and in that we couldn’t be more different. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Larry grew up on a farm in North Central Illinois, in a very small town, Manlius, not too far from </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Rockford</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. I grew up in </span><span style="font-size:100%;">New York City</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, Bayside</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> in </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Queens</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> to be more precise. Because Larry’s dad was a farmer, work and family were part of a larger whole. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Larry learned farming (he told me he wasn’t very good at it but he did do it)</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. S</span><span style="font-size:100%;">o he had both a regular father-son relationship and a master-apprentice relationship with his dad</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. Further</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">he is much closer in age to his dad than I was with mine</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, who was forty one when I was born</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">My dad was a lawyer and worked in </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Manhattan</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. He took a bus to the subway and then rode that to work. His work was literally outside family existence</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">totally invisible to the goings on a</span><span style="font-size:100%;">t </span><span style="font-size:100%;">56-04 212</span><span style="vertical-align: super;font-size:100%;" >th</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Street</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. We didn’t see him all day till he came home</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and had his dinner</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and then didn’</span><span style="font-size:100%;">t interact that much afterward</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> – he would read his newsp</span><span style="font-size:100%;">aper much of the time. We did spend</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> a lot </span><span style="font-size:100%;">of time together on weekends </span><span style="font-size:100%;">doing yard work, </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> playing association football where </span><span style="font-size:100%;">he played with us kids while</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> the dads of my friends who were in the game did not, occasionally do</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ing</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> some arts and crafts activit</span><span style="font-size:100%;">y indoors, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">playing family tennis, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">or doing some other stuff. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">S</span><span style="font-size:100%;">o I certainly don’t begrudge him in participating in family activities. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">He actually did a lot of that</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> given the circumstances</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> But I never had the master-apprentice type of relationship with my dad that Larry had with his and except for two rather fleeting years after I arrived at Illinois, I also didn’t have </span><span style="font-size:100%;">much </span><span style="font-size:100%;">experience </span><span style="font-size:100%;">with both of us </span><span style="font-size:100%;">as working adults</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, where we could talk from an equal perspective</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">My dad</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> retired in 1982 and because of my mom’s disability they soon became snowbirds in </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Boca Raton</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Florida</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> living in a relatively large condo</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> development</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Century </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Village</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, where life revolved around that. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">So</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> having</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> adult conversation with my dad </span><span style="font-size:100%;">was like two ships passing in the night. The event that marked the change happened in 1979, while I was still in grad school at Northwestern. My mom was havi</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ng her first hip replacement. Previously, s</span><span style="font-size:100%;">he had been radiated for what she thoug</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ht was cancer but what I’m fairly certain</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> was arthritis. (She did have breast cancer in the early 1960s). The radiation caused her bones to be brittle. Since she played a lot of tennis, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">which puts </span><span style="font-size:100%;">severe </span><span style="font-size:100%;">stress on joints from time to time, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">that</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> fun activity</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> amounted to playing Russian r</span><span style="font-size:100%;">oulette with </span><span style="font-size:100%;">her skeletal system</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">My mom’s oncologist was at </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Montefiore </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Hospital</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> in the </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Bronx</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, so that is where the hip replacement was to be done. My dad, who was a brittle diabetic, couldn’t possibly drive back and forth to the hospital and deal with the emotional strain from this </span><span style="font-size:100%;">surgical </span><span style="font-size:100%;">procedure </span><span style="font-size:100%;">for my mom </span><span style="font-size:100%;">by himself. So I took it upon myself to help</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> him and be his chauffeur. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I quickly transition</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ed</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> from being the kid wh</span><span style="font-size:100%;">o wanted to run away from home (</span><span style="font-size:100%;">it is quite a long car ride from </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Bayside to </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Chicago</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, a trip my parents never made) to the devoted son of senior citizen parents</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> who needed care and attention.</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">As with my family life, in my work in economics I never had the master-apprentice relationship with me in the role of apprentice, learning at the hands of the expert</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> by working with him</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. I did have an advisor at Northwestern whom I liked and had talks with on occasion. But the style then was to let the doctoral students work on their own </span><span style="font-size:100%;">and only come out of their cubicle when they wanted to give a talk about their work. I had a better chance for this as a young faculty member at </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Illinois</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. There was a senior theorist, Lenny, who took an interest in me. We co-taught the general equilibrium course that is part of core for first-year grad students. And we ended up playing tennis together and some basketball too. But we never wrote papers together. Twenty five years later, I’m scratching my head wondering why. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I’m incredibly slow at initiating interactions with people I know that would step up the relationship in a meaningful way. I create imaginary blockades for myself. I want the goal, but I don’t know how to get around the blockade. In this case wit</span><span style="font-size:100%;">h Lenny the blockage was a doozie</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. I can best explain it by reference to the movie <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104257/"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>A Few Good Men</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">The question at hand in that film was whether soldiers should exercise their own discretion and directly disobey an order when they </span><span style="font-size:100%;">believe </span><span style="font-size:100%;">the order </span><span style="font-size:100%;">to be </span><span style="font-size:100%;">wrong and unjust and that carrying it out could possibly cause great harm. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The question as I posed it seems to have one unambiguous answer, disobey the order. But now overlay</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> on the</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> situation</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> as depicted in the movie</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> that the soldiers had chose</span><span style="font-size:100%;">n to be marines and did so </span><span style="font-size:100%;">because they wanted to live by </span><span style="font-size:100%;">a</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> code. Under the code, a soldier does not disobey orders</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, ever</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. Of course the Jack Nicholson character also violated the code by issuing an unjust order that ended up going sour. Most of the blame was on him, but not all. The soldiers had responsibility too. Obeying a senseless order was not a perfect defense. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Think of the underlying issues in the movie, but cast them in a non-military context, making the identification “showing respect” </span><span style="font-size:100%;">with</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> “living by the code.” In both there is a surrender of self to a large</span><span style="font-size:100%;">r</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> whole. How can one surrender oneself and yet retain discretion on important matters? I’</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ve never figured </span><span style="font-size:100%;">that one out. The apprentice does surrender himself to </span><span style="font-size:100%;">the </span><span style="font-size:100%;">master, doesn’t he? The arrangement is not permanent. While it lasts the two are most certainly not equal.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Surrender happens in this vertical phase.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Equality is not attained till later, after the then apprentice has ventured out on his own. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I did not know how to be an apprentice to Lenny. So I never approached him about writing a paper together. Ironically, Lenny did teach me something that cut the other way, a lesson I saw much later when reading the book about John Nash, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Mind-Mathematical-Genius-Laureate/dp/0743224574"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>A Beautiful Mind</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span> <span style="font-size:100%;">Lenny thought you should work on economic models that were driven entirely by trying to answer your own posed </span><span style="font-size:100%;">questions</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, rather than spending too much time with the literature and basing your model on what came before. Doing that would cramp your space and not give you freedom to explore. It is an interesting lesson. I didn’t really take advantage of it with the economics, but I have embraced it with learning technology. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">While I never have understood the role of the apprentice, I’ve had no trouble whatsoever in the role of colleague. </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> As a colleague I could critique the papers that Lenny wrote with his students. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Surrender is not required </span><span style="font-size:100%;">for a colleague</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. We can be ourselves, voice our opinions, enjoy the back and forth</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> including the occasional disagreement. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Collegiality is a value I embrace, something very important in the university setting. But I know colleagues aren’t born that way and I struggle in thinking how fledgling scholars should go from here to there. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The only place where I was consistently willing to surrender myself </span><span style="font-size:100%;">to a larger cause not of my own making </span><span style="font-size:100%;">was in visi</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ts to my parents in </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Florida</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> If you were going to be with them, that was the only way fo</span><span style="font-size:100%;">r it to turn out harmoniously. So I accepted being with them on their terms. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">It is not that</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> I</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> don’t </span><span style="font-size:100%;">understand devotion altogether. Rather, it is that devotion as </span><span style="font-size:100%;">prime </span><span style="font-size:100%;">imperative exists for me only in a limited domain. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I believe</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Larry envision</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s that domain as much larger than I do. He is a well liked and respected leader because others can</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> readily</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> see h</span><span style="font-size:100%;">e is fully dedicated to the betterment of the College and the Campus</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. In contrast, I view work to be mostly about self-expression and discovery; novel ideas are the goal and only indirectly will the work support the larger cause, if </span><span style="font-size:100%;">and when </span><span style="font-size:100%;">any of those ideas take root and prove effective. <a name="_Hlk233956993"></a></span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">* * * * * </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I was very fortunate to have turned to online learning at the right time. The Campus had a wealth of prior work in the area, marked by excellence and diversity in approach</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, with many champions of great accomplishment. Then, too, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I was ready. My second son had been </span><span style="font-size:100%;">born earlier that year, with only a twenty month difference in age between the two boys. After being more subdued about work at school so I could amplify my time with the family</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and it clear that we didn’t intend to have a third kid</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, I was ready to resume a more regular commitment to work. I was about to turn forty and had been aroun</span><span style="font-size:100%;">d the block once or twice. T</span><span style="font-size:100%;">hough I didn’t realize it at the time, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">having</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> spent the vast majority of my academic life with other economists</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> had a hunger to interact with </span><span style="font-size:100%;">faculty </span><span style="font-size:100%;">from</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> different backgrounds. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Larry was my conduit into this new world. He was an award winning teacher and served on a campus committee for undergraduate learning where h</span><span style="font-size:100%;">e met other players who were deeply committed to excellence and improvement in the way we teach. He had the pulse on </span><span style="font-size:100%;">new initiatives in this area. W</span><span style="font-size:100%;">hen the time was ripe</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> he got me involved. At the outset, this was just an experiment, something to try, nothing more. As with my going to grad school in economics, I didn’t make an irreversible commitment to it until I was well immersed in the activity.</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Two events mark the initiation into this new career. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">One was a session held in Lincoln Hall, as I recall in December 1994, targeted at those on campus who would get grants in the Sloan Project led by Burks Oakley. Larry and I</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, participating</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> in a joint project</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> were one of the grantees. There were presentations and technology demos done by Burks</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> (along with Roy Roper who interacted with Burks from another site)</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Joe Hardin</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">who is now at the University of Michigan but then was at <a href="http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>NCSA</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;">, and Robert Alun Jones</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> who was spearheading an evaluation of the Sloan Project that eventually aborted for political reason</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s. Bob headed up a technologies-in-the-</span><span style="font-size:100%;">humanities program called the Advanced Information Technologies Group. I will talk more about what I learned from Bob below. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I recall very little of the specifics of that session. What sticks is tone. There was a sparkle and an intelligence which emanated not just from the presenters but from those in the audience</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> as well. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">The technology</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> offered promise; the sense that it</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> could enhance learning was palpable. Anyone who had been at that session would w</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ant to be part of the effort. It </span><span style="font-size:100%;">went beyond the technology itself. T</span><span style="font-size:100%;">he others in the room had a vision of what the technology could accomplish and how they would </span><span style="font-size:100%;">harness it in their own projects</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. This intelligence, intoxicating in its aura</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, attracted me</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The other event </span><span style="font-size:100%;">occurred</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> when my </span><span style="font-size:100%;">then </span><span style="font-size:100%;">department head (</span><span style="font-size:100%;">she </span><span style="font-size:100%;">soon </span><span style="font-size:100%;">stepped down from that role </span><span style="font-size:100%;">after which </span><span style="font-size:100%;">she too became involved with online learning), Larry, and I took an afternoon to visit the computer lab for Chemistry run by Stan</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ley G.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Smith and the computer lab for Calculus with <a href="http://www.wolfram.com/products/mathematica/index.html"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>Mathematica</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> run by Jerry Uhl.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Stan had been involved with <a href="http://www.platopeople.com/index.html"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>Plato</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and had designed extensive and innovative coursework in that system. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">He labored over the next several years to convert</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> his creations</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> to Web delivery, the Internet obviously m</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ore ubiquitous, a big plus </span><span style="font-size:100%;">but</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> to the uninitiated</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and therefore </span><span style="font-size:100%;">less obviously</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">the Web was </span><span style="font-size:100%;">insufficiently interactive to match the pedagogic requirements that Stan demanded be satisfied</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, a significant minus</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. (<a href="http://webdesign.about.com/od/ajax/a/aa101705.htm"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>Ajax technology</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> now delivers much of what Stan wanted</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> via the Web</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, but of course </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Ajax</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> was not available in the mid 1990s.) </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Jerry’s stuff was designed in Mathematica notebooks, not the Web, which </span><span style="font-size:100%;">his group</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> used merely to transfer the content and to enable Q&A between student and tutor. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">As with the first meeting, I recall little of the subject matter in these conversations. Mostly I remember </span><span style="font-size:100%;">it </span><span style="font-size:100%;">as getting to meet these two and their colleagues. Yet it must have made a strong impression on us. Soon afterwards Larry and I planned to use Mathematica as the basis for our project. We’d develop content in it. Ultimately we didn’t follow through with that idea. I recall chatting with Larry on the way to lunch</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> one day</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, asking him how we were going to deliver on what we promised in the proposal, given that we didn’t have the technical wherewithal of some of the other grantees. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Mastering the technology, such as Mathematica, seemed a non-trivial undertaking and then getting some vision of how to use it for the economics appeared equally daunting. Larry’s response was that we could be entrepreneurs rather than designers. Our role was to assemble a team who would put together the content under our direction. Indeed, that is how Larry operated for much of what he did initially. I embraced the approach too, in part, because I was insufficiently far along to invent another alternative. But</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> for my own need to have some control in course design, I wanted to design the online content as well. Ultimately, I did this with Excel, inventing the idea called <a href="http://guava.cites.uiuc.edu/l-arvan/ExceletsWeb/ExceletsHome.htm"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>Excelets</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;">, and developing interactive exercise</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> with Excel. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Eighteen months after this beginning, I took over running</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> the Sloan project from Burks and </span><span style="font-size:100%;">subsequently </span><span style="font-size:100%;">had a different sort of interaction with Bob, Stan, and Jerry. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I learned lots of things from them including some fundamental ideas</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> about online learning, really fundamental ideas of learning pure and simple without </span><span style="font-size:100%;">need for </span><span style="font-size:100%;">any additional modifier.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">All these years later,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> with a somewhat more mature view of the technology and how it might positively impact education,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> I don’t think that one can explain online learning </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> simply through </span><span style="font-size:100%;">appeal to a core set of principles in the same way that one can do that for a subject like microeconomics.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Online learning is</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> not that reducible.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Teaching with technology is an applied art, where continual recalibration is necessary to adjust to the students, the tenor of the times when the course is offered, and the changing demands posed by the subject matter. In making these adjustments, the instructor exercises substantial discretion. Nonetheless, there are basic notions that can inform the choices the instructor makes. Rather than call them principles, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I use a different term </span><span style="font-size:100%;">to refer to</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> these fundamental ideas. I call them knowledge nuggets. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Knowledge nuggets</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> should be prized highly</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> by the ins</span><span style="font-size:100%;">t</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ructor</span><span style="font-size:100%;">.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> As a teacher, one ignor</span><span style="font-size:100%;">es them</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> at one’s own peril.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> I picked up a knowledge nugget from Bob and a different one from Stan. Jerry gets the nod in my title because I got two from him. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">* * * * * </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">One of my current personal themes is to look for non-proximate causes, factors that probably matter a lot but that are readily ignored at first analysis owing to the temporal separation. Though Larry and most of the faculty in the College had PCs, when </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I got started I bought a Mac. T</span><span style="font-size:100%;">he PC users</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> in the department</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> at the time wer</span><span style="font-size:100%;">e mostly using it for statistical</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> applications, or so I thought. I was a theory guy.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> I worked through models. I didn’t do data, so there was no need to have a computer for computation purposes.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> I bought my <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_SE/30"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>SE/30</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> as a lark on the recommendation of </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Bruce Hannon, an Engineer by background who was doing ecological “energy theory of value” models. These were in essence the same as Leontief models I studied in my first year of graduate school, so because I understood the economics (really the math) of that, Bruce and I connected. His recompense was to turn me onto the Mac. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I saw Bruce only now and then. He did give me occasional computer advice (I recall him telling me to get off <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BITNET"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>Bitnet</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and </span><span style="font-size:100%;">for email </span><span style="font-size:100%;">to use <a href="http://www.eudora.com/"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>Eudora</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;">, which had been invented on my campus). Mostly I was on my own to learn how to use it. One of </span><span style="font-size:100%;">the attractions of the Mac then</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> was the much of the use was self-teachable. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">A couple of years later I learned about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>Gopher</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;">. I used Gopher to get a software package called OzTeX. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>TeX</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> is a high falutin software package to enable publisher quality typesetting of mathematical content. OzTeX was a Mac compatible version of </span><span style="font-size:100%;">TeX.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> (Most of the folks who used </span><span style="font-size:100%;">TeX</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> did so on Unix based work stations. Those with PCs used Word or WordPerfect</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> or yet some other alternative</span><span style="font-size:100%;">.) I had a very practical reason to learn this.</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I wrote papers with lots of equations in them with symbols that weren’t part of the regular keyboard. I would hand write drafts of those papers on yellow ruled paper and then send to the College’s Word Processing Center. The lags to get something back were interminable, often two weeks or more. And when it did come back the document would be full of errors because the typists had no clue what they were typing so proof reading was too much of a challenge. If I could do this myself I’d lower the lag substantially and do a better job of reducing the typos. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">TeX</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> seemed like the way to go since my work had all this math in it. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">(Ultimately I learned to compose papers directly in </span><span style="font-size:100%;">TeX</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, including the equations.) </span><span style="font-size:100%;">TeX</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> offered a further advantage, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">it helped with co-authoring </span><span style="font-size:100%;">in that the document files themselves were quite small </span><span style="font-size:100%;">so</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> one could share those as email attachments</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, even though the bandwidth requirements were stark at that time</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">TeX</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> is quite complex. I certainly didn’t learn all of it. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I learned enough of it so I could do the functions that were necessary to me. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Knowledge acquired through self-teaching, particularly when the goal is to master an instrument to support a different activity, seems ordinary and unexceptional, not something to remark upon or make note of. It is only when we watch others who struggle because they are not in possession of that knowledge and who lack self-confidence as a consequence, because they are aware they don’t know while equally aware they have need of the instrument, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">that we come to realize we are fortunately situated for having mastered the tool but, more importantly, that we have earned a sense of confidence that other tools can be mastered as well. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">When I got involved with onl</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ine learning, I had six or seven </span><span style="font-size:100%;">years of prior experience self-teaching on my Mac (by then I had a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_LC"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>Mac LC</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and the Sloan Program gave out <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>Power PCs</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> to those grantees who wanted them.) </span><span style="font-size:100%;">When it came time for Burks, Larry, and I to explore <a href="http://www.firstclass.com/Divisions/Solutions/Education/?Plugin=FC"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>FirstClass</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;">, which Larry and I both used in our courses in the Summer 1 session, 1995, I was ready. Burks chose FirstClass because it could be used on both Macs and PCs and because it supported the then relatively new communication standard, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">TCP</span><span style="font-size:100%;">/IP. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">We were the first users of it on Campus. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Via learning by doing, I became an expert in that system, the conduit to the next step in my career. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Sometime in fall 1996, after I had taken over <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20001205041300/http:/w3.scale.uiuc.edu/"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>SCALE</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> (</span><span style="font-size:100%;">Sloan </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Center</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> for Asynchronous Learning Enivronments)</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, I initiated a conversation with Bob. Curiosity helped to overcome my initial shyness. I wanted to know Bob’s take on the history that surrounded SCALE and the cause of the infamous breakup. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I also wanted to know whether Bob’s prior experience with Burks would extend to me by association. (It didn’t.) We met over coffee and as I recall had a long and quite wonderful conversation, sharing stories about faculty development and experiences with technology. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Bob directed the Hypermedia Lab on Campus and </span><span style="font-size:100%;">was an avid user of a system developed at </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Brown </span><span style="font-size:100%;">University</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> called <a href="http://elab.eserver.org/hfl0032.html"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>Intermedia</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">He gushed about</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> the wonders of hyperlinking</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and maintained it offered lots of potential that had yet to be fully exploited. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I can’t recall whether it was at this initial discussion or at a later session, but at some point Bob talked at length about <a href="http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=168512"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>his work with Rand Spiro</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and encouraged me to read</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> some of</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> that, which I duly did. Bob was an expert in the French Sociologist, Emile Durkheim, and taught courses where st</span><span style="font-size:100%;">udents read ancient texts. He argued that</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> students read those text</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> differently than he did. He carried a rich set of associations to other works that, as an expert, were instantaneously available </span><span style="font-size:100%;">to him</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Reading one work would immediately and effortlessly trigger associations to many other works. The context</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> seemingly</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> suggest</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ed</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> itself</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Students did not have this sort of </span><span style="font-size:100%;">intellectual environment within themselves while reading. The work being read was an island unto itself</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, disconnected from any other</span><span style="font-size:100%;">.</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The Jones and Spiro piece argued that </span><span style="font-size:100%;">the author </span><span style="font-size:100%;">of a </span><span style="font-size:100%;">text could create context for the student</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> through hyperlinks, b</span><span style="font-size:100%;">y </span><span style="font-size:100%;">providing links</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> to the appropriate references at the </span><span style="font-size:100%;">proper</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> juncture</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> in the reading. The diligent student could track down these links and gather the set of requisite associations in the process. </span> <span style="font-size:100%;">It is an intriguing hypothesis. The</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> approach reveals an</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> enormous optimism </span><span style="font-size:100%;">in its creators, expressing faith in the students to produce the context for themselves once the path for them has been duly lit</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> by the expert author</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. Contrast this view with what I take to be more typical view of the academic, that students’ lack of prior knowledge acts as a harsh constraint on what can be taught to them, for example as expressed in this recent paper on <a href="http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/summer07/Crit_Thinking.pdf"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>the difficulty of teaching critical thinking</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;">. The author of this piece, Daniel Willingham, argues that critical thinking must be done in the context of some discipline of study. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I concur. Then he goes on to argue that the instructor is often forced to move away from a focus on critical thinking, simply to get the students sufficient familiarity with the subject matter. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Often by the time that is achieved, t</span><span style="font-size:100%;">he course is over. There ends up being little or no time to fit critical thinking in. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Jones and Spiro would respond, I believe, by arguing that context can be built up whi</span><span style="font-size:100%;">le</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> engaging in critical thinking simultaneously. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I had my own reason to be skeptical about what Bob was saying. In the Intermediate Microeconomics course I was teaching, I would do a segment called Economics in the News. I’d ask students to read a particular piece from the New York Times and then discuss it, either online in FirstClass or during the live class session. The experience created disillusionment for me. I became convinced that many students were incapable of reading these articles. They would distill from their efforts the opposite meaning to which the author intended. Soon thereafter</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> as part of my work in SCALE</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I befriended a natural resource economist who</span><span style="font-size:100%;">m I knew previously</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> from </span><span style="font-size:100%;">our</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> serving on some dissertation committees together for students in Ag Econ. He</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> said the same thing about</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> his students</span><span style="font-size:100%;">’</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> inability to comprehend pieces in the New York Times. At least, I wasn’t </span><span style="font-size:100%;">simply </span><span style="font-size:100%;">making this up. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">We know skepticism can be healthy. Nonetheless, one must challenge one’s own skepticism and not let it harden into dogma. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Later</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> when I began to teach smaller classes</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> I started </span><span style="font-size:100%;">to create context for my own students, not by hyperlinking, which I used perhaps unimaginatively to let students</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> follow ancillary and optional references that might intrigue them, but rather by coming to the </span><span style="font-size:100%;">economic </span><span style="font-size:100%;">theory from <a href="http://lanny-on-learn-tech.blogspot.com/2006/01/teaching-practical-stuff.html"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>stories of very real world experience</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and by <a href="http://lanny-on-learn-tech.blogspot.com/2007/03/whats-next.html"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>designing experiential learning</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> for them so they could see for themselves the effects of incentives. This might seem a complete no brainer to other Econ instructors, though I suspect</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> that</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> to many like myself</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> who came to economics for the elegance in the theoretical abstraction, the idea of needing to provide real world context would </span><span style="font-size:100%;">appear</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> entirely alien. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">In the</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> small classes</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> I taught once I became a full time administrator, I could </span><span style="font-size:100%;">better see the consequences of teaching innovation on the students. My students reacted very po</span><span style="font-size:100%;">sitively to these efforts</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> to provide context for the ideas they were being exposed to</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Based on that, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I believe </span><span style="font-size:100%;">all</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> instructor</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> should</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> strive to give students appropriate context for </span><span style="font-size:100%;">whatever </span><span style="font-size:100%;">the subject matter under consideration</span><span style="font-size:100%;">.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Doing so is one of the more important things </span><span style="font-size:100%;">a</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> teacher can accomplish. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Yet I’ve not come around completely to Bob’s way of thinking. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I’ve come to understand from reading <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Collision-Course-Conflict-Negotiation-Composition/dp/0814107427"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>Russel Durst</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;">, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Declining-Degrees-Higher-Education-Risk/dp/1403973164/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1247349482&sr=1-1#reader"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>Arthur Levine</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;">, and others that most kids come at their studies with an extremely practical orientation</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> looking either for the most obvious way to get a good grade in the</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> course, or to identify the take-</span><span style="font-size:100%;">aways they expect to ge</span><span style="font-size:100%;">t from enrolling in</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> the course</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and </span><span style="font-size:100%;">then to </span><span style="font-size:100%;">focus on one or both of these. The benefit of context is non-tangible, especially to the uninitiated.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Consequently students might not see the benefit.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Bob’s approach requires diligence from the student. If the student doesn’t see the benefit from diligence, there is no rea</span><span style="font-size:100%;">son to expect diligent</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> behavior. So I’ve come to believe the instructor needs to be a little sneaky</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. Trick the student by exploiting his instrumentalism. Get him to do things for which the purpose he understands not. Let the purpose reveal itself after the</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> fact, once </span><span style="font-size:100%;">the</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> context has been created, the A</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ha! moment generated. Randy Pausch in <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>his last lecture</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> calls the approach misdirection, borrowing the term from football. </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> I believe some misdirection is essential because the student isn’t yet ready otherwise. </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Perhaps it is less necessary once the student has been through it once or twice before. The need for context may by then be apparent</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> to the student. Consequently, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Bob’s more overt approach might prove effective at that point. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I suspect, however, it is harder than that. My friend Barbara Ganley, she of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/fashion/23slowblog.html"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>slow blogging fame</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;">, has commented to me that most of the people who visit her blog don’t follow the hyperlinks. Of course some of the visitors are there just because they did a Google search and that’s where they ended up. But those repeat visitors </span><span style="font-size:100%;">who </span><span style="font-size:100%;">arrive at the blog</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, including some of Barbara’s former students, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">do so </span><span style="font-size:100%;">for their</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> own enjoyment and edification</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">What explains not following the links with them? Mostly, I believe, it is a matter of habit. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">When online t</span><span style="font-size:100%;">here is so much reinforcement for darting, flitting back and forth between many different conversations, all of which are ongoing. Persisting within a single narrative framework seems terribly old fashioned, even while </span><span style="font-size:100%;">we may understan</span><span style="font-size:100%;">d that persistence is the path to depth of understanding. The persistence habit doesn’t form because most of the time depth </span><span style="font-size:100%;">of understanding is not needed. All that is necessary</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> for the transactional, which seemingly occupies so much of our time,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> is to be</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> mildly </span><span style="font-size:100%;">acquainted with </span><span style="font-size:100%;">the subject</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">For myself, I find I’m betwixt and between in my online reading, occasionally reading rather lengthy papers in pdf online</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> without printing them out,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> paying close att</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ention and focusing only on what I’m currently reading</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, but often jumping to look at email as it arrives or checking my Bloglines account for newly arrived postings from the blogs I track or having two or three pdfs </span><span style="font-size:100%;">on</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> unrelated </span><span style="font-size:100%;">topics </span><span style="font-size:100%;">open at the same time and bouncing between them. I believe there is some merit to the Nicholas Carr argument that <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>Google is making us stupid</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">It is a great relief for me when with a book or my Kindle away from the computer, with less temptation to follow the immediate, though tempted I remain. My Blackberry is both blessing and curse. Sometimes </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I forget to bring it with me. Then m</span><span style="font-size:100%;">y wife criticizes me because I’m out of touch. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Perhaps, subliminally, that is what I want. Depth of understanding demands solitude. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">To be fair to Bob, the always-on-always-</span><span style="font-size:100%;">connected nature of online communication nowadays wasn’t the reality when I got to know him. He could very well have been right then. He might still be right now. Certainly</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> he is correct in the insight that the teacher should provide cont</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ext for what is being studied, a very important lesson.</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">* * * * * </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><a name="StanSmith"></a>The subsequent academic year I became a member of the</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> now defunct</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Ed Tech Board, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">then </span><span style="font-size:100%;">a campus level committee</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> primarily </span><span style="font-size:100%;">with</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> faculty</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> membership</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, aimed at discussing and advising on all matters related to educational technology, and administering a small grant program for the purpose of spurring faculty innovation with learning technology. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Dave Liu, then an Associate Provost, chaired the committee. I had</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> substantive business</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> interactions with him the year before</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, which I believe is how I got onto the committee</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. In a private meeting </span><span style="font-size:100%;">set up at his urging, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">he and I agreed that the SCALE project would contribute one </span><span style="font-size:100%;">FTE </span><span style="font-size:100%;">(full time equivalent) of staff support for the software <a href="https://mallard.cites.uiuc.edu/"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>Mallard</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;">, as there was increasing demand from instructors on cam</span><span style="font-size:100%;">pus to use that application. For</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> his part Dave committed two </span><span style="font-size:100%;">FTE</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> of staff from the campus computing organization, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">which was</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> called CCSO</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> at the time</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. One </span><span style="font-size:100%;">FTE</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> was to be split between support of the applications <a href="http://www.howhy.com/home/"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>CyberProf</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and the <a href="http://w3.aces.uiuc.edu/AIM/VCI2.0/"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>Virtual Classroom Interface</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> while the other </span><span style="font-size:100%;">FTE</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> would be for general server administration necessary for all three of the applications. Dave was also committing substantial cash for a </span><span style="font-size:100%;">large <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>U</u></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>nix</u></span></a> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">server to host all of these applications. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Each of the</span><span style="font-size:100%;">se</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> applications had been developed on campus, two as faculty originated projects. The place was a hotbed for creativity of this sort</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, contributing to the sense of excitement </span><span style="font-size:100%;">in those times</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. But there was no good</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> way</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> of </span><span style="font-size:100%;">going from this</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> creative initiation phase of software development to sustainable broad support </span><span style="font-size:100%;">for the software</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> (the issue was further compounded since Illinois was home of the first graphical Web browser, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_%28web_browser%29"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>Mosaic</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;">, and certain folks in the administration saw </span><span style="font-size:100%;">other Web</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> applications as potential money spigots, which ended up inhibiting the</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ir</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> tech transfer) </span><span style="font-size:100%;">nor was it clear</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, even if we could get there, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">where the responsibility for that broad support </span><span style="font-size:100%;">should reside</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. At a now infamous more public meeting on the matter</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> held a couple of weeks after Dave and I had met</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, the then CCSO representative, with apparently no chagrin about upstaging and embarrassing Dave, informed the rest of us that in fact CCSO would commit only one </span><span style="font-size:100%;">FTE</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> of staff time to the effort. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">This stinginess created faculty enmity toward CCSO and had a marked impact on how learning technology </span><span style="font-size:100%;">subsequently </span><span style="font-size:100%;">unfolded on campus, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">with us </span><span style="font-size:100%;">ultimately losing our place of leadership nationally and becoming quite ordinary </span><span style="font-size:100%;">in our subsequent efforts. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Partly based on that experience, and partly because I had a general sense </span><span style="font-size:100%;">that Campus bureaucracy served</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> as an inhibitor of </span><span style="font-size:100%;">individual </span><span style="font-size:100%;">creativity, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">with</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> a load of other experiences mostly unrelated to online learning</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> supporting that point of view</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, I had much trepidation when I joined the Ed Tech Board. I thought it might crimp the style we had become accustomed to in SCALE. Those fears proved groundless. Indeed several of the members were faculty who had received SCALE grants. Collectively, the committee members formed a</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> good cross section of the most innovative faculty with learning technology </span><span style="font-size:100%;">on Campus. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">As a consequence</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> t</span><span style="font-size:100%;">he discussion at the ETB was interesting and lively.</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Stan Smith was the senior member. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">He was hugely knowledgeable about the technology itself, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">with a wealth of prior </span><span style="font-size:100%;">experience. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Stan </span><span style="font-size:100%;">took</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> the opposite ta</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ct that Larry had advocated for;</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Stan did it all himself. </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> I learned later that Stan had been a professional photographer. Though he tau</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ght organic chemistry, he had a highly developed</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> eye for visual communication. But I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself here, so let me return to that point. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">It was still two years in the offing before the Campus would have a Center for Educational Technologies, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">a recurrent commitment to what the SCALE project was </span><span style="font-size:100%;">already </span><span style="font-size:100%;">doing on soft money, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">but </span><span style="font-size:100%;">even by fall 1997 I had some</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> intuition that I’d be part of whatever</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> the Campus would be doing with online learning, so I </span><span style="font-size:100%;">sensed I </span><span style="font-size:100%;">needed </span><span style="font-size:100%;">to </span><span style="font-size:100%;">have good relationships with all the players. Also, I knew I was still green in a lot of areas. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I needed to remedy that. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Even</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> in other places where I had substantial experience, I nonetheless needed to have my views corroborated or refined</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> with others who had the expertise to do so</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Stan </span><span style="font-size:100%;">appeared to be the right guy on both counts</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. (Sometime later, I remember talking with Bob about his interactions with Stan and Bob saying he always got something out of their exchanges, which was interesting</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> yet puzzling</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> to me because discipline-wise they seemed to be on opposite ends of the galaxy. It turns out that discussion of how technology can help with learning end</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> up being pretty universal.) So I </span><span style="font-size:100%;">arranged a meeting with Stan</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> at</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> the</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> desk in his lab. Thereafter we mostly met over coffee but it was good to have this first meeting on his turf. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Once you get to know him, Stan is a sweetheart and a very good and supportive colleague. Before the relationship develops, he </span><span style="font-size:100%;">might seem</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> a little intimidating. He could be sharply critical of pract</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ice he didn’t approve of. While</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> I had seen a fair amount of that sort of thing among the Econ faculty, it was much rarer to observe with folks across Campus, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">particularly among those leading up innovative learning technology projects. </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> (Later I learned the two worlds were not as different as I had originally assumed, but still</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> there was more idealism expressed about teaching and learning with technology than I had ever seen within the Economics Department.) SCALE had been funding an instructor who taught in the General Chemistry sequence.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Stan taught Organic Chemistry, a more advanced course</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, so he was not directly involved in the SCALE-funded activity</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">However, Stan was the force behind </span><span style="font-size:100%;">the Chemistry Learning Center, a </span><span style="font-size:100%;">computer </span><span style="font-size:100%;">lab where students could do th</span><span style="font-size:100%;">eir work and receive consultation to address a misunderstanding</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> The space was used by students in a wide variety of Chemistry courses. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">General Chemistry had their students use the space to do the online homework</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> for the course</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. So Stan had a vested interest in General Chemistry. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I heard through the grapevine </span><span style="font-size:100%;">that Stan had some issues with the SCALE-funded project, so I was a bit more apprehensive tha</span><span style="font-size:100%;">n usual before our meeting. As with joining the Ed Tech Board itself, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">my trepidation was based on some unfounded assumptions. In fact, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">we got along very well. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Stan</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> could tell right off that I wanted to listen to his views. We ended up having a</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> very open exchange on issues that pertained specifically to</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Chemistry and </span><span style="font-size:100%;">other issues that mattered </span><span style="font-size:100%;">across Campus. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">It turns out Stan and I had some very important things in common. I understood </span><span style="font-size:100%;">deeply </span><span style="font-size:100%;">from an online forum that SCALE supported</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and in which I participated </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">quite vigorously </span><span style="font-size:100%;">just how valuable it is for faculty to exchange ideas about their teaching with technology. That forum went full bore for about six months and </span><span style="font-size:100%;">then continued on for</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> another six months </span><span style="font-size:100%;">or so </span><span style="font-size:100%;">before it died out. Nothing else appeared </span><span style="font-size:100%;">in its stead </span><span style="font-size:100%;">to replace it. Stan had similarly been involved in rather intensive and intimate exchanges with peers </span><span style="font-size:100%;">at the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory, but that had closed down some years before</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, again</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> with nothing to replace it. So we understood the need for collegiality</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> to advance diffusion and serious uptake of learning technology on Campus</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and that was something lacking that needed to be provided</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span> <span style="font-size:100%;">We also had a strong</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> sense of t</span><span style="font-size:100%;">he impediments that prevented the diffusion and uptake</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> from arising naturally on its own. This was a time when many faculty were just getting their toes wet i</span><span style="font-size:100%;">n teaching with technology. A felt</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> need for collegiality emerges naturally from one’s own explorations of this sort. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Having a novel experience, one wants to share it. In reflecting on that experience, one benefits from the reflection of others. But some information technology providers want control of the IT environment which, unfortunately, ends up blocking the faculty exploration. Stan was very big on tone</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, especially in support of faculty who were just getting started</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. It’s well nigh impossible </span><span style="font-size:100%;">for a support provider </span><span style="font-size:100%;">to exercise control and exude warmth at the same time. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">For a community based in sharing ideas about teaching with technology to emerge, it’s the latter that is necessary. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">We were witnessing way too much of the former. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Stan and I also had </span><span style="font-size:100%;">a similar dilemma</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> as teacher regarding the motivation of the students we taught. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">He taught n</span><span style="font-size:100%;">on-majors. Organic Chemistry is</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> the make-it-or-break-it course for pre-meds, students known to be mercenary, if diligent, about their studies. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Intermediate microeconomics is part of the core Business curriculum here. Many of </span><span style="font-size:100%;">the</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> students </span><span style="font-size:100%;">in my class </span><span style="font-size:100%;">were in Business and </span><span style="font-size:100%;">they tended to be </span><span style="font-size:100%;">extraordinarily skeptical that there was anyt</span><span style="font-size:100%;">hing of use to learn. They saw the course</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> as a hurdle, not an intellectual foundation for everything else they’d take, which was the intended purpose for the requirement. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Unlike Stan, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I did have Econ majors in my class. </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> We didn’t have separate sections for majors and non-majors. The bulk of the Econ majors</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, however, had no real interest in economics. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">At the time </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Econ was the proxy major for students in Liberal Arts and Sciences who wanted to transfer into Business, but didn’t have high enough standard</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ized test scores to get into Business when they were applying for admission, nor did they have a high enough </span><span style="font-size:100%;">GPA as students here to have already effectuated the transfer. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">There were very few real </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Econ </span><span style="font-size:100%;">majors </span><span style="font-size:100%;">who were serious about the subject. Consequently, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">some of the Engineering student</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> who took the course</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> to satisfy the social science distribution requirement</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> had better preparation and purer motivation than the majors. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Stan taught me that, student motivation notwithstanding, there were some advantages in teaching non-majors. Colleagues in the department had less of a proprietary interest in what non-majors w</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ere taught. So there could be</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> more freedom to experiment on topic coverage and mode of presentation. Further, one could be empirical in the approach, learning from the students whether it was working for them, making adjustments when it wasn’t. When the topic coverage is prescribed and the instructor adopts the attitude, “I’m teaching it this way because it’s good for you, like taking medicine when you’re sick</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,” there really is no room to be empirical about the instruction and the instructor can </span><span style="font-size:100%;">end up</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> blithely indifferent to the consequence</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> of the approach for the students. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">A big issue I had at the time, I’ve come to terms with it now, is how difficult the material should be that the instructor requires. When I first heard Burks talk about using a discussion forum where students post queries about how to do circuit problems </span><span style="font-size:100%;">(Burks course was an electrical engineering class on circuit design) </span><span style="font-size:100%;">and either Burks or other students would post responses, I confess I didn’t understand how this would work for the lurkers who might not have even tried the problem and yet would</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> readily</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> be able to see hints of how to proceed toward its solution. Don’t they have to struggle through the problem on their own to really understand it? That was my thinking then. </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> It took quite a while to alter my view. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I’ve subsequently learned </span><span style="font-size:100%;">that student persistence is by no means guaranteed and indeed that early success encourages later persistence. Also, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">it became evident that </span><span style="font-size:100%;">given some variation across students both in latent ability and in prior preparation, Burks’ approach appears far more democratic than mine. </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> If you think of the issue from the perspective of the underlying social contract, how can we instructors be elitist in our approach, especially in core undergraduate courses? Doing so would appear contrary to the Campus mission. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Burks’ practice was not sufficient to fully address my issue. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">The</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> part of what Burks did </span><span style="font-size:100%;">that I eventually imitated in my class </span><span style="font-size:100%;">was only about giving students help</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> online</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. What about the content that we were asking the students to learn? How hard should that be and should it be presented in an opaque or transparent way? </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Is student learning deeper</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> if they struggle </span><span style="font-size:100%;">that much more? </span><span style="font-size:100%;">There is much tradition in teaching economic theory based on the notion that students learn the economics by working problems. If they still don’t understand have them work more problems. This was really more myth than reasoned argument. We never explained how when a student doesn’t understand how to do problem 1 what insight the students will garner from also having to do problem 2. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Stan was very big on the idea of making tough concepts as transparent as possible. Organic Chemistry is a course that most students find difficult. That’s a given. What possible advantage could there be in making it seem even more difficult? </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Making things even harder is apt to cause discouragement among the students, nothing more. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Students want to gauge their own learning. When the material is transparent and students feel they understand the assessment they are asked to complete and can see for t</span><span style="font-size:100%;">hemselves they are getting the assessment questions</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> correct, that is a source of confidence that they are indeed mastering the material. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Instructor efforts to present intrinsically tough content in as simple and transparent a way as possible</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, efforts that are noticeable to the students because such efforts are witnessed rarely in their other classes,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> show</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> the students that the instructor is on their side. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">So there is the direct effect that the particular content is more penetrable and an indirect, potentially much more powerful effect from energizing the students because they care about what they are learning. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Over the years I made numerous presentations with Stan at various events for new faculty, Stan was to show them what was possible with the technology and I was there to talk about how the Campus might assist them</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> with their early efforts. In the course of doing these joint presentations,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> I got to watch Stan demo his video </span><span style="font-size:100%;">clips of actual experiments, showcase pictures of the apparatus for performing these experiments, and see how he s</span><span style="font-size:100%;">et up the assessments his students did</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. There was elegance to his approach. He was quite sparing with the multimedia, just enough for what he need</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ed</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> to demonstrate</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">nothing</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> more. There was not too much text on any one screen, with large font that could be easily read. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">His visual approach encouraged intellectual access to the content. Students liked what they got. Stan would show survey results where the students reported overwhelmingly that they like</span><span style="font-size:100%;">d</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> doing the quizzes. In many other classes that use computer facili</span><span style="font-size:100%;">tated assessment, the students we</span><span style="font-size:100%;">re not so favorably </span><span style="font-size:100%;">disposed toward </span><span style="font-size:100%;">the approach. But, of course, in these other</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> cases the authors of the online content </span><span style="font-size:100%;">were</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> no Stan. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I will never have the eye for the visual that Stan has, but I’ve embraced much of his message in places where I can have an impact, such </span><span style="font-size:100%;">as </span><span style="font-size:100%;">in things I write for students to read or in the way I present an idea i</span><span style="font-size:100%;">n the classroom. I call the</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> approach</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> I’ve come up with</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> “bring it down before bringing it up.” Student access to ideas is primary, making transparency an instructor imperative. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Once that access is already in place, the instructor </span><span style="font-size:100%;">can become more subtle on the issues and go into greater depth. Doing so before the intellectual access has been created, however, makes all the ideas opaque. The students see none of them, including the basics. It’s important to put first things first. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Thank you</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Stan.</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">* * * * * </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Some obligations you search for. Part of the benefit from choosing an academic career is to have the ability to set the agenda for those activities that become the focus of your work. Yet even in academia, sometimes it’s the other way around, the obligations find you. Others have set the agenda. You find yourself tied at the hip to these folks. You’re a team player. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">So you throw yourself into the fray. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The Interinstitutional Faculty Summer Institute on Learning Technologies, <a href="http://edtech.cites.uiuc.edu/FSI_OLD/1997/"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>FSI</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> for short, found me. I became the Head Facilitator for the first one, held on Campus right after Comme</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ncement in 1997 and I continued</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> playing the Head Facilitator role</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> for ten years, well after the initial purpose of the grant had been fulfilled. For the first several y</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ears FSI was grant funded by </span><span style="font-size:100%;">the</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Illinois Board of Higher Education with matching funds from the four-year public universities around the s</span><span style="font-size:100%;">tate, each sending attendees to </span><span style="font-size:100%;">FSI.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> (The grant paid for the conference – meals, facilities, honoraria for speakers, and tech support while the matching funds were to give each attendee, 10 per campus, a stipend for getting started with learning technology after the conference </span><span style="font-size:100%;">had concluded</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> using</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> what they had learned at FSI</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> as a basis</span><span style="font-size:100%;">.) I was not part of writing the grant, but I gather</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ed the thrust through participatio</span><span style="font-size:100%;">n on the Steering Committee. The Illinois</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Campus was </span><span style="font-size:100%;">a known </span><span style="font-size:100%;">hotbed for </span><span style="font-size:100%;">online learning</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, as I’ve indicated, and the goal was to diffuse that knowledge to the other campuses in the state, develop</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ing</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> a critical mass of enterprising faculty</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> on each campus so they could </span><span style="font-size:100%;">spearhead furth</span><span style="font-size:100%;">er efforts locally</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">In that first FSI, the decision was made to select faculty </span><span style="font-size:100%;">who taught in a handful</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> of specific disciplinary areas, with a </span><span style="font-size:100%;">further </span><span style="font-size:100%;">focus on the General Education courses from within those discipline</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. A big part of my job for FSI was to identify and then coordinate with the various facilitators of the disciplinary groups. Jerry Uhl and his sidekick Debra Woods became the facilitators for the group in Math. That’s how my conversation with Jerry began. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">That gateway into talking with Jerry helped a lot with what came next. Frank Mayadas, the Sloan Foundation Grant Officer behind all their work in online learning and the benefactor of SCALE,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> was pushing us to deliver on the promise we made in the</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> original SCALE</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> grant proposal, that </span><span style="font-size:100%;">ALN</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> (what </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Frank called online learning) w</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ould lower the cost of instruction. In response</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> to this pressure</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, I came up with the SCALE Efficiency Projects, the outcomes of which are described in <a href="http://www.aln.org/publications/jaln/v2n2/v2n2_arvan.asp"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>this piece in the Journal of ALN</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> while the</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> details behind the</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> impetus </span><span style="font-size:100%;">for the project are described in the <a href="http://lanny-on-learn-tech.blogspot.com/2007/03/whats-next.html"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>first section of this post</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;">. Jerry </span><span style="font-size:100%;">became one of the grantees for an efficiency project. He </span><span style="font-size:100%;">and I scratched each other’s back, me</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> by giving him SCALE funding, him</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> by doing a project in Differential Equations that would deliver on several of the outcomes Sloan wanted to see. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Jerry had been involved with <a href="http://netmath.uiuc.edu/"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>NetMath</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> for quite a while before this </span><span style="font-size:100%;">SCALE </span><span style="font-size:100%;">project started. NetMath was essentially self-paced learning using the same Mathematica notebooks that had been developed for the on campus Calculus & Mathematica courses. The </span><span style="font-size:100%;">NetMath </span><span style="font-size:100%;">students, some in rural high schools that didn’t have AP Math courses, others who were adult learners, would be assigned a tutor</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, a</span><span style="font-size:100%;">n on-campus </span><span style="font-size:100%;">student here who had taken the course already and done well in it, with whom they could interact by email. If the </span><span style="font-size:100%;">NetMath </span><span style="font-size:100%;">student got stuck or </span><span style="font-size:100%;">got</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> a low grade</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> on a completed assignment</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> showing he didn’t understand how to do the work, he’d contact the tutor. Otherwise he’d just proceed on his own. Jerry wanted to tr</span><span style="font-size:100%;">y the NetMath approach with on-c</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ampus students.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> The self-paced approach wasn’t simply an affordance to accommodate online learners. It made sense pedagogically in its own right. </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Indeed, it was the lecture that was questionable for the math. Perhaps some demonstrations done by the professor would aid the students. But math is a subject where the students have to figure it out on their own. There is essentially no learning of math in the absence of the required head scratching that students must do. Illuminate the path for the students, sure. That’s what the Mathematica notebooks did. The professor, however, couldn’t traverse the path on behalf of the students. Attending lectures (and taking notes during lecture) is not the way to traverse the path and it may not be a good way to ready the student for the trip because as a thing in itself it obscures the need. Self-pacing, in contrast, makes the need obvious. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">What Jerry came up with was a bit irregular because it worked far better in the spring semester than in the fall. Nevertheless, it was a fascinating idea. Engineering students have to take Differential Equations as part of their degree requirements. Many of them don’t like it and quite a few drop the class, only to have to take it again sometime later. Jerry’s idea was to recruit </span><span style="font-size:100%;">from among those who had dropped the course already, very soon after they had dropped, and offer them the alternative of taking the NetMath-style version of the course instead. The hook here, I don’t know if Jerry marketed this to the students or not but I do know that it came into play quite a bit</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> with those he successfully recruited</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, was that the students could get an incomplete in the class and finish it after the semester had concluded because they didn’t need to be on campus to do that. In this way Jerry got a high percentage of these students to complete the course, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">with them </span><span style="font-size:100%;">giving decent performance in the process. The approach worked better in the spring because the summer break is much longer than the winter break, so students were under much less time pressure then</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> could complete the course at their own convenience</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Ultimately Jerry ran afoul of some folks in the College of Engineering administration, who said this approach </span><span style="font-size:100%;">with the incompletes was unfair to the other students who took Differential Equations the usual way and had to complete the course on time. The counter argument, which made sense to me, was that in the absence of Jerry’s offering the students who dropped would have to defer taking Engineering courses that required diff</span><span style="font-size:100%;">-</span><span style="font-size:100%;">eq as a prerequisite, thereby potentially screwing up these students down the road and extending their time to degree. </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I don’t believe he went after other students who hadn’t yet dr</span><span style="font-size:100%;">opped the regular course. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Fortunately for me, I didn’t have to make that argument to the Engineering administration people. All I did was </span><span style="font-size:100%;">to </span><span style="font-size:100%;">provide moral support for Jerry. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">On Friday afternoons</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> after work</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, Jerry liked to go out with his student workers for some beers</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> at <a href="http://joesbrewery.blogspot.com/"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>Joe’s</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;">. He’d invite me to those and on occasion I’d join him. As an Assistant Professor, my cohort would go to Coslows for beer and popcorn or nachos after work on Friday. That stopped either because Coslows closed down or we got </span><span style="font-size:100%;">older and then too</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> wrapped up in family stuff for </span><span style="font-size:100%;">the happy hour thing to remain a priority</span><span style="font-size:100%;">;</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> I can’t remember which came first. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Either way,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> going out with Jerry’s fol</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ks was a throwback </span><span style="font-size:100%;">to my earlier years</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. Mainly, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">those Friday afternoon sessions were </span><span style="font-size:100%;">where he and I would talk, the classroom of the future</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> so to speak. Once</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> in a while I</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> would</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> see him in Altgeld Hall, home of the Math Department. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Jerry </span><span style="font-size:100%;">had taught math the traditional way before getting involved with Calculus & Mathematica. He understood both</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> sides of the abyss. And he had his own </span><span style="font-size:100%;">distinct </span><span style="font-size:100%;">style in expression. He’d say things that were unusual, at least for me. I enjoyed those exchanges</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, partly just for the collegial interaction</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. I got something of substance from them</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> as well</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Jerry was the first person I had heard who talked about learning and failure as two sides of the same coin. I must have nodded my head in agreement when he first told me that, but I was probably bluffing. I doubt the point sunk in immediately. My metaphors at the time were different</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Egocentric as ever, I considered learning mostly from the perspective of myself as student. So my metaphors emphasized that</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> bright kids should be able to figure things out on their own and do so quickly – the kid in science class who masters concepts easily, the avid reader who learns like a sponge sucking it all in, the kid who always raises her hand in class to the point that the instructor strains to get other</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> to chime in. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">All that seemed like learning to me. Where was the failure in it</span><span style="font-size:100%;">?</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> If Jerry was right, I had to</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> find a way to</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> reconcile these two</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> distinct</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> views. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Inexperience is one significant cause of failure. If we try something that is truly novel, we’ll flail at it till we figure it out</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> or we give up</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. Think of a toddler learning to walk. The kid falls down, often. If he lands on his rump, no worse for wear, he’ll get back up in a moment and try again. If he fall</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s forward and bumps his head,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> surely </span><span style="font-size:100%;">he </span><span style="font-size:100%;">will cry. But the pain soon goes away and the memory</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> of the fall causing the pain</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> doesn’t harden. Soon he’s back on his feet, giving it an</span><span style="font-size:100%;">other go. There is improvement, more steps between falls. Perhaps some kids are in better position to learn, so the</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ir</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> improvement is rapid. This doesn’t mean that falls don’t happen for these kids,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> only that they fall less. The story of a kid learning to walk</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> offers one possible reconciliation</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, a reconciliation based on degree of readiness</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. We who watch the learning make comparisons across kids or between one particular kid and a perceived norm for kid behavior. The focus is on the success</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> only</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, especially if the failures are few and far between, all the more so if we have a vested interest in the kid’</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s learning </span><span style="font-size:100%;">as a parent </span><span style="font-size:100%;">and </span><span style="font-size:100%;">maybe even as a teacher.</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">This</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> story</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, however,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> is far from complete. Experience offers no guarantee against failing. The wrong sort of experience can offer very little learning. Ignorance can self-sustain. </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Fundamental knowledge doesn’t get established. Stasis </span><span style="font-size:100%;">rather than progress </span><span style="font-size:100%;">becomes the norm. I’m this way with learning foreign languages. I fought with my mother growing up and she taught foreign languages as her profession. I shunned her teaching </span><span style="font-size:100%;">at home and in school treated the French courses I took as something I had to take, nothing more. I</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> never got the basic skill</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> to pick up rudimentary vocabulary and grammar</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> in anything but English</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. I once spent a month in Portugal as a visiting scholar at the New University</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> in Lisbon</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">That entire month </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I learned two words only, “cerveja” and “obrigado.” My hosts spoke English so I didn’t need to learn it for my Economics interactions. When I was out and about on my own, I was like a mute, alone, pointing to items on a restaurant menu</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> because I couldn’t pronounce them</span><span style="font-size:100%;">.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> I found books in English to buy and went to </span><span style="font-size:100%;">see American </span><span style="font-size:100%;">movies where fortunately they used subtitles (in Portuguese) that I could ignore.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Maybe this is</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> an example of</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> the male gene at work. I often won’t ask for directions when driving in a place where I’m not familiar</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> with the locale</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and </span><span style="font-size:100%;">without</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> a </span><span style="font-size:100%;">GPS</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, though </span><span style="font-size:100%;">as I’ve gotten older</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> I’ve worked to overcome that tendency. </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">The point is</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> that experience </span><span style="font-size:100%;">in itself </span><span style="font-size:100%;">yet absent an open effort to improve will come to naught.</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The reverse is also true. One can le</span><span style="font-size:100%;">arn fundamentals very deeply. Then, s</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ituations that apparently are new end up a familiar refrain. Grasping concepts quickly happens when the concepts reaffirm an already held world view. Most of the pieces of the puzzle</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> have already been assembled; so t</span><span style="font-size:100%;">he last </span><span style="font-size:100%;">few snap</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> right in. I’m thankful for the type of economics training I received in graduate school, because they prized learning fundamenta</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ls deeply. </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> I embraced that value. Sometimes I see connecti</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ons quickly, before others do, because I was taught to look for them</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> in a certain w</span><span style="font-size:100%;">a</span><span style="font-size:100%;">y</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. In some domains we can be very rapid learners while in others we are slowpokes</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, where our fundamentals are poor</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">This is a second possible way to reconcile the two views. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Strong prior learning can make molehills where others see mountains and vice versa. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">We talk about the fear of failing, but that is something of a misnomer. It is </span><span style="font-size:100%;">the</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> scorn and </span><span style="font-size:100%;">derision of others that we fear – </span><span style="font-size:100%;">the insults, glares, and mockery stemming from our inept performance</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and the cruelty or impatience of the audience</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">No longer a toddler, the memory of the event causes pain and embarrassment.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Worse still, we can’t get it out of our mind. </span> <span style="font-size:100%;">We may then try </span><span style="font-size:100%;">only when</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> by ourselves and </span><span style="font-size:100%;">out of view from</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> those who can hold us in contempt or we </span><span style="font-size:100%;">may try</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> with friends </span><span style="font-size:100%;">or family </span><span style="font-size:100%;">we know we can trust. Oftentimes, however, we find ourselves in situations where we are </span><span style="font-size:100%;">in no man’s land</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, with people who are less familiar to us. Jerry’s admonition about repeated failure </span><span style="font-size:100%;">can be taken as a call to befriend the strangers. Do so by showing you are willing to try. Failure can be endearing. A know</span><span style="font-size:100%;">-</span><span style="font-size:100%;">it</span><span style="font-size:100%;">-</span><span style="font-size:100%;">all appears standoffish. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Being open to failure requires courage. Repeated acts of courage become habit. Then it is less painful to try. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Doing so becomes part of your personality.</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Sometimes we project this fear into circumstances where it is not warranted. Performance anxiety ensues. Students who are comfortable talking with the professor when there are other students around </span><span style="font-size:100%;">can </span><span style="font-size:100%;">get painfully nervous when in a one-on-one with their instructor. Likewise faculty may be comfortable talking with a distinguished scholar in the</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> context of a seminar but may be</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> much less so in private conversation with the great thinker. Authority intimidates, irrespective of whether the respected person is gentle or a tyrant. The intimidation emerges </span><span style="font-size:100%;">solely </span><span style="font-size:100%;">from the proje</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ctions of the less accomplished. People who are otherwise quite similar in background can nonetheless be quite different in how these projections manifest. In the identical circumstance one may be perfectly relaxed, the other extraordinarily nervous, with varying performance for those reasons</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> rather than </span><span style="font-size:100%;">from </span><span style="font-size:100%;">any difference in ability. Do note that on occasion it is the nervous one who achieves</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> the</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> high performance. A relaxed individual may not produce the requisite intensity. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Mostly, however, we envision it cutting the other way. Cooler heads prevail.</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">On occasion we can be taken with our ow</span><span style="font-size:100%;">n performance, especially when it </span><span style="font-size:100%;">appears to outshine the performance of our peers. Things may seem effortless for us, a struggle for them. Soon, however, those </span><span style="font-size:100%;">ego </span><span style="font-size:100%;">rewards wear thin. What we find effortless happens only where we are no longer learning. Then we can become bored with encore after encore. Ambition takes hold</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> or our attention turns elsewhere out of curiosity</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. We strive to g</span><span style="font-size:100%;">o beyond our known capacities, to do something fundamentally new. We may have forgotten what failure feels like, expecting to satisfy our ambition too quickly, not trusting ourselves to learn for real. Some people are broken by their past success </span><span style="font-size:100%;">and</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> the</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> inability to live up to </span><span style="font-size:100%;">them</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> by learning anew </span><span style="font-size:100%;">(Gay Talese and Truman Capote come to mind). </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Most of us have not and likely never will produce a magnum opus. We can’t afford to rest on our laurels and in our hearts we really don’t want to. Jerry reminds us that periodically we need to work hard to get beyond ourselves. That is where</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> our own</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> real learning lies</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, especially as we mature and have an established bag of tricks that we can resort to when amusing others</span><span style="font-size:100%;">.</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">W</span><span style="font-size:100%;">hat role should the teacher play regarding the student’s failure in lear</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ning?</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> As I wrote in Chapter 1, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">my</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> approach to </span><span style="font-size:100%;">emphasize</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> guessing</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and in that way developing student intuition</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> is motivated in good part to make failure an integral part of the process. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Yet that is too easy an answer, one that works at 30,000 feet. It doesn’t tell us what to do down on the ground. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The last time I taught a course in the Campus Honors Program, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I had one student in particular who seemed to glom onto the extra-curricular stuff I was pushing – seminars to attend, articles to read; she was an engineering student so the economics we were doing was a brave new world for her. But she was also</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> very concerned about her grade</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> for her within course work</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. She treated </span><span style="font-size:100%;">t</span><span style="font-size:100%;">his other stuff outside the trappings of the </span><span style="font-size:100%;">formal </span><span style="font-size:100%;">class like intellectual entertainment, on a par with a good movie if you will</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. I wanted her to get beyond that, to make some leaps in her thinking, to take a stab at making her own synthesis of what she was being exposed to, although </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I knew </span><span style="font-size:100%;">her initial efforts would be awkward because of her inexperience. It didn’t get that far. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">It was her choice to move beyond the intellectual entertainment stage, not mine. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">During the summer after the course had conclude</span><span style="font-size:100%;">d</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> she first read and then had others in her family read a book I had recommended, a way for them to bond over something she had been exposed to at school. But when the following fall semester arrived, she returned fully to her engineering studies and that was that.</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">What then of students who are not so precocious, perhaps offering up no overt displays of enthusiasm for the subject matter whatsoever? Should we teachers be ambitious for them too, encouraging them to go beyond themselves though we feel it likely they will respond by sitting this one out? </span><span style="font-size:100%;">And what type of critic should we be for the work each of the students produces for the class, regardless of whether they are precocious or otherwise? Do we need to be a cheerleader to boost their enthusiasm or a scathing reviewer so they don’t delude themselves that an early failure really is a success? </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> I wish I had good answers to these questions. I don’t.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> My intuition is that the instructor has to be a bit of a pied piper to draw the students in. That much probably is true regardless of the course. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">But the Pied Piper role is just one piece. It doesn’t offer a full roadmap of what the instructor should do. I</span><span style="font-size:100%;">n that class I was non-communicative about how their efforts translated into course grades, because I thought such communication would contaminate </span><span style="font-size:100%;">rather than inspire. (I gave numerical scores for each piece of work they completed and informed them about the maximum possible score, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">they had a few big projects, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">but didn’t give a formula for how those scores translated into a final course grade.) For these kids, getting an A was the normal expectation. If they were to go beyond themselves, something else would have to motivate that. But I could only get away with this because it was an Honors class with about fifteen students. The approach doesn’t generalize at all. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Jerry had it made on this score in his SCALE project class. The performance standard was fairly objective and readily communicable to the students. He completed his Pied Piper bit once they had enrolled.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> With self-pacing, the instructor is mostly out of the picture. I do think Jerry really nailed it from the student’s view. We could use some of his insight for those cases where the instructor plays a larger role in the conversation. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Although Jerry limited access to the diff-eq course in his clever like a fox way, I believe he thought the Calculus & Mathematica approach superior and wanted all students to take their math courses in that manner. He had me read <a href="http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=AVfqZKCsdGIC&oi=fnd&pg=PA155&ots=-RmHKk4xex&sig=WKXb2cN72e7GZNsXDFOTfiPsT-E"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>a study done by Kyungmee Park and Kenneth Travers</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> (only some of the pages of this article are available at the link) that supported Jerry’s contention. Jerry did report that the Engineering folks wanted the students to be able to do calculations and feared that while C&M was good conceptually it was weak on training students to do calculations. Jerry claimed, to the contrary, that C&M was as good as the regular approach for the calculations. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">My take away from this was not so much about the superiority of one approach or another but </span><span style="font-size:100%;">rather </span><span style="font-size:100%;">that even among the math faculty themselves, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">once</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> you included folks from the different ways Calculus was taught</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">you</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> couldn’t </span><span style="font-size:100%;">get </span><span style="font-size:100%;">agree</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ment</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> on the right way to assess whether one approach was superior to another. They’d write different sort of tests</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, demonstrating</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> that what they valued in student learning varied by approach. My prior going in was that Calculus is</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> pretty cut and dried and consequently there should </span><span style="font-size:100%;">be </span><span style="font-size:100%;">less interpretation </span><span style="font-size:100%;">about what students </span><span style="font-size:100%;">are supposed to </span><span style="font-size:100%;">know than in </span><span style="font-size:100%;">most</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> other </span><span style="font-size:100%;">courses we offer</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. If the experts in Calculus</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> couldn’</span><span style="font-size:100%;">t agree on what to assess</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, God help us to come up with a standard method of evaluation of knowledge in other subjects. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Jerry wrote his own essay, quite a thought provoking piece, on <a href="https://cm.math.uiuc.edu/?q=node/29"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>Why I gave up long lectures</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;">. This part captivated me.</span></p><p style="margin-right: 72pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><blockquote>Another piece of wisdom from Ralph Boas: "Suppose you want to teach the 'cat' concept to a very young child. Do you explain that a cat is a relatively small, primarily carnivorous mammal with retractable claws, a distinctive sonic output, etc.: I'll bet not. You probably show the kid a lot of different cats saying 'kitty' each time until it gets the idea. To put it more generally, generalizations are best made by abstraction from experience."</blockquote></span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I have treated this idea as truth ever since. It has dramatically changed the way I teach. And I’ve become far more critical of how the Economics discipline </span><span style="font-size:100%;">presents itself as a consequence, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">particularly </span><span style="font-size:100%;">about</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> the</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> presentations in the leading textbooks, because they invariably introduce the theory first and then follow with the examples to illustrate. They’ve got it backwards. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Indeed, this idea of leading with examples and letting the theory flow from that ties very nicely into the Russel Durst notion that the students are extremely practical in their orientation. We teachers should appeal to that orientation, not circumvent it. The idea also connects nice</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ly</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> to Stan’s theme about </span><span style="font-size:100%;">making the entry point to the subject transparent and even Bob’s point about applying context. I’ve got my own spin on this with the Economics because of the following dilemma. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">On the one hand, when teaching Principles or even Intermediate Microeconomics, you as instructor really want to hammer on the basics; a student who understand</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> only supply and demand and opportunity cost but who does understand those fundamental concept</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> in a deep way has a big take away from the course. On the other hand, students want to understand the incentives at play in real world economic institutions. Some of those incentives are fairly subtle and to tackle them with formal economic models really requires graduate level training. So I do something else. I <a href="http://lanny-on-learn-tech.blogspot.com/2006/01/teaching-practical-stuff.html"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>discuss these real economic institutions</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and try to bring out the subtleties in the incentives that way, but I don’t model them, because that would be too hard. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I let the discussion of the real world economic institutions happen in parallel with the exposition of the more basic theory. They are two separate strands. Students have intrinsic motivation for the the real world stuff. The approach gives them motivation for the theory they do learn, where the real world discussion extends the theory rather than competes with it. So this is not exactly Ralph Boas point, but it is very close. In my own head, one leads with examples that are of interest to the students, because that is where the motivation lies. Good teaching appeals to and leverages student motivation. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I’ve recently learned another way to think of this from the book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Made-Stick-Ideas-Survive-Others/dp/1400064287"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u>Made to Stick</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;">. This is about the teacher (really any presenter) demonstrating respect for the student (or for any listener). The student is not a blank slate. There is much less work to be done by the student if what is presented ties readily to what the student already knows. The child knows the concept kitty if not the word “cat.” The explanation introduces the new vocabulary, but does not alter </span><span style="font-size:100%;">the already developed concept the child has. If with the examples we introduce the students already have prior conceptual knowledge it will be easier for us as teachers to make progress because it will make the students more comfortable. They’ll have the feeling , “I know most of this already.” In contrast, presenting abstractions up front is alienating, because it is hard for students to tie what they know to the abstractions. Doing that requires skills that many of the students may not possess. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">As much as Jerry’s idea of leading with examples supports Bob’s and Stan’s themes, I’m afraid that Jerry’s other knowledge nugget about tying</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> learning to failure does not. False starts, unsure steps, drawing the wrong conclusion from the information, or stopping prematurely along a path that actually leads to a favorable conclusion, all are part of real learning. Most of what we instructors are trying to do is remove impediments for the students out of fear that the blockage will remain permanent and no further learning will happen thereafter. Sometimes that is right. Other times, however, the student needs to find her own way to recover from the failure. That is where creativity can be found. The good instructor wants the students to create for themselves. It is art to find the right balance, when to remove the blockage and when to leave it in place. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">* * * * * </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I have benefitted a great deal from knowing Bob, Stan, and Jerry, each helping me to mature in my thinking about how students learn and about what practices we teachers can embrace that best assist the students. I now find myself in the position of elder in the field of Learning Technology, feeling a need to pass along some of this acquired wisdom to the next generation. If I can be only half as effective for this next generation as my predecessors were for me, I will have accomplished a lot. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span></p></div>Lanny Arvanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05597426421997599777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331075451664544793.post-58850963454876229642009-05-30T10:44:00.008-05:002009-06-06T11:53:01.337-05:00Assessment<div class="Section1" style=""><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;"></span></p><blockquote><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">A man had trouble with his English, so his friend taught him how to say, “Apple pie and coffee,” so when on the job, he could order some food at the local restaurant during his lunch hour. This was fine with our man, and he was grateful to his friend, but after several months he wanted a little more variety in his fare. His friend was glad to oblige and taught him how to say, “Ham and cheese sandwich.”</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The man proudly walked into the restaurant the next day and said to the waitress, “Ham and cheese sandwich.”</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">To which the waitress responded, “White, whole wheat, or rye?”</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">With shoulders sagging and the smile gone from his face, he answered back, “Apple pie and coffee.”</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Found </span><a href="http://jokesfunny.wordpress.com/2009/05/07/funny-apple-pie-and-coffee-joke/"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">here</span></u></span></a></p></blockquote><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><a href="http://jokesfunny.wordpress.com/2009/05/07/funny-apple-pie-and-coffee-joke/"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;"></span></u></span></a></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">My dad told us that one when we were kids. He put on what I recall was supposed to be an Italian accent when saying the telltale words, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">his version of the new immigrant</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. Perhaps he put in some other embellishments too. I don’t think he me</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ant it as a morality lesson.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Periodically my dad would tell us jokes at dinner, those he heard at work that could be recycled to us kids.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Here’s </span><a href="http://www.jokefile.co.uk/numerical_order/1148.html"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">another one</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;"> from that vintage, c</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ertainly no lesson about morals there. The joke above, however,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> can be taken that way. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">We’re unable to venture beyond what we already know, however dearly we’d like to, because we don’t have the capacity to learn something new. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Literally, we are in a rut. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">This seems all the more so for my discipline, economics. The question is why. Could it be that the native language is so strong that we become deaf to any other? Is it hubris or simply mental incapacity that explains the lack of adaptation, the mistaking </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Shangri-La for Purgatory</span><span style="font-size:100%;">?</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> The Chicago School, in particular, is having its comeuppance. We have witnessed some amazing confessions of late, none more remarkable than </span><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22655"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">that of Richard Posner</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;">, the judge and University of Chicago Law School professor, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">an icon in the field of Law and Economics and a longtime advocate that markets provide the best solutions for society’s travails. The review by Robert Solow makes clear just how astonishing Posner’s book is, not for its thesis, which is rather ordinary to liberal economists such as Solow, but for who articulates it. It’s as if a lifelong Fundamentalist Christian suddenly turns to Atheism, left with no other conclusion after confronting the evidence from science. Those changes don’t ever seem to happen. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Posner however, whose intellectual integrity emerges intact from this book, is forced into this reckoning because it became clear from the recent financial meltdown that such markets are not self-regulating. Indeed, the pursuit of the quick buck via ever increasing financial leverage was a primary source of instability, creating a house of cards that toppled onto itself. One can only wonder whether five or ten years hence</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> after the economy has re</span><span style="font-size:100%;">bounded</span> <span style="font-size:100%;">somewhat </span><span style="font-size:100%;">and moved to its new equilibrium path</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> if the Chicago School thinking will return to its prior orthodoxy or instead forge some new</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> as of now unknown</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> synthesis. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The rest of the profession may not let them stay where they are, in which case surely the battle ground will be macroeconomics. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Current formal macroeconomic models, the type that get published in the leading economic journals, feature neither unemployment nor default on loans. Ge</span><span style="font-size:100%;">orge Akerlof and Robert Shiller</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> in </span><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22702"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">their new book</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;"> call this a fatal flaw. How can such models accurately predict</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> the functioning of our economy when</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> starting a priori with such lack of realism? And why is it that we’ve reached this state of affairs with scholarly thinking about macroeconomics?</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">It wasn’t always this way. When I started graduate school in fall of 1976, Northwestern prided itself on teaching a</span><span style="font-size:100%;">n up to date</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> curriculum. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Sure we </span><span style="font-size:100%;">began our first quarter of macro</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> with </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/28/business/robert-eisner-steadfast-keynesian-economist-dies-at-76.html"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">Robert Eisner, an unabashed Keynesian</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;">. There we read </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/General-Theory-Employment-Interest-Money/dp/1573921394"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">The General Theory</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;">, though I must say we probably didn’t understand it very well</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and Professor</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Eisner </span><span style="font-size:100%;">knew</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> full well that we wouldn’t</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. So we also read the Hicks paper, </span><a href="http://www.eco.utexas.edu/%7Ehmcleave/368hicksonkeynes.html"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">Mr. Keynes and the Classics</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;">. T</span><span style="font-size:100%;">hat </span><span style="font-size:100%;">paper </span><span style="font-size:100%;">introduced the IS-LM (Investment</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Demand</span><span style="font-size:100%;">-Savings, Liquidity</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Demand</span><span style="font-size:100%;">-Money</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Supply</span><span style="font-size:100%;">)</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> framework, which</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> typified </span><span style="font-size:100%;">intermediate macroeconomics textbooks at the time </span><a href="http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/05/is-lm-model.html"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">and continues to do so till this day</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">The IS-LM model produced something akin to the the familiar supply and demand curves from microeconomics, which largely explains its popularity. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The next quarter course, taught by </span><a href="http://faculty-web.at.northwestern.edu/economics/gordon/indexmsie.html"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">Robert J. Gordon</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;">, offered a bridge between the Keynesian mainstream and the then new “rational expectations” approach. In the former category we read Patinkin’s </span><a href="http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=6448"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">Money, Interest, and Prices</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;"> and learned about </span><a href="http://econ161.berkeley.edu/multimedia/PCurve1.html"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">The Phillips Curve</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;">, which posits an inverse relationship between the rate of unemployment and the rate of inflation. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">(Gordon taught us from his then not yet complete undergraduate textbook about something he called the ee curve, which produced a direct relationship between unemployment and inflation. In conjunction with the Philips curve we</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> could then</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> get the familiar scissors that “determines” the equilibrium unemployment and inflation rates.) </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> This</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> theory seemed more ad hoc than IS-LM. It would have survived, however, if it did a good job empirically.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> But </span><span style="font-size:100%;">on that score the</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> approach </span><span style="font-size:100%;">was</span> <span style="font-size:100%;">treading on thin ice. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The </span><a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitextlo/ess_nixongold.html"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">Wage and Price Controls of the Nixon Administration</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;"> had been lifted and the first OPEC Price shock had been weathered. The result, which ultimately doomed the Carter Presidency, was stagflation, a mystery incompatible with Phillips curve thinking. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">For an econ grad student</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> desperately in search of terra firma</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> so entirely unprepared that what we were taught in one quarter would be repudiated in the next</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, there were even </span><span style="font-size:100%;">worse things in store. The notion that</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> an activist Fiscal </span><span style="font-size:100%;">policy could </span><span style="font-size:100%;">counter the economic malaise was under intellectual attack. As if to signify the ascendancy of the Chicago School, Milton Friedman </span><span style="font-size:100%;">had recently won </span><a href="http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1976/index.html"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">the Nobel Prize in Economics</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">We read a paper by Robert Barro, no Chicago School economist himself, </span><a href="http://homepage.newschool.edu/het/essays/keynes/realbalances.htm"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">Are Government Bonds Net Wealth?</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;">, which implied government spending could not boost aggregate demand, because of the implied future tax burden needed to finance the spending. And we read Sargent and Wallace’s paper about </span><a href="http://www.jstor.org/pss/1830921"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">optimal monetary policy in light of rational expectations</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;"> by the public. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">The paper argued that only surprises can matter. Anticipated policy changes were neutral.</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Expectations about the future, particularly about inflation, are crucial for macroeconomic models since such expectations drive key variables like the interest rate. The rational expectations idea, dating back to </span><a href="http://hope.dukejournals.org/cgi/pdf_extract/34/2/291"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">John Muth’s 1961 paper</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;">, is that the agents in the economy shouldn’t be dumber than the model used to generate their behavior. Instead they should use the model itself and all available current information to formulate the</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ir</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> expectations. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prior to the rational expectations idea, expectation</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> had been modeled </span><span style="font-size:100%;">as</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> “adaptive,” meaning that the future values were predicted by some weighted average of past values, with the weights declining as as we go further into the past. Adaptive approaches can produce inconsistencies between the expectations so generated and the prediction of the underlying model. Rational expectations are coveted because no such inconsistencies are generated. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">This was the state of macroeconomic thinking during my first year of graduate school</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, with a tension between the Keynesians and the new Chicago School</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. It couldn’t stay there. Partly, this was because of politics. The Reagan Revolution was still in the offing.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> There was a need for the economic theory that supported the revolution to come into line.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> But mostly it was because of the culture of the economics discipline itself. Macro econom</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ists carry a stigma with them, lampooned nicely in Axel Leijonhufvud’s </span><a href="http://unicast.org/enclosures/life-econ-crop.pdf"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">Life Among The Econ</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;">. The stigma emerges from the assumption that they can write aggregate </span><span style="font-size:100%;">structural</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> equations without deriving those equations rigorously from individual behavior, which is then so aggregated. In other words, macro lacks a good micro foundation. It is micro that is</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> exalted in the temple of Econ, because the behavior is derived directly from rational choice. I will provide my own critique of that in a bit, but first I want to describe the intellectual pull of micro. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Parallel to the macro training we were receiving we also had a year of micro, on</span><span style="font-size:100%;">e</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> quarter of “Price Theory” from Mort Kamien followed by two quarters of General Equilibrium from John Ledyard, my advisor. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Ledyard was aware of micro’s pull. I recall</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> that somewhere in the middle of the second quarter he asked</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> our class whether we felt</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> we were being</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> indoctrinated into the field (he used some other words that I can’t recall) liking our education to the exposure neo Marxists get (Marx was still a pretty hot topic when I started graduate school, though not in the Econ department). </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Ledyard was onto something with this question. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">When in graduate school, e</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ach </span><span style="font-size:100%;">new</span> <span style="font-size:100%;">micro theory </span><span style="font-size:100%;">idea seems sensible in the context in which it is first presented. Consequently, t</span><span style="font-size:100%;">he economics doesn’</span><span style="font-size:100%;">t</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> much </span><span style="font-size:100%;">grab you</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span> <span style="font-size:100%;">Yet</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> the totality </span><span style="font-size:100%;">produced by all the</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> message</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> mesmerizes you</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and creates a sense of seeing </span><span style="font-size:100%;">reality a certain way </span><span style="font-size:100%;">that is very hard to undo. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">One of the books Ledyard had us read was Koopmans’ </span><a href="http://homepage.newschool.edu/het/profiles/koopmans.htm"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">Three Essays</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;">. It was my first exposure to the real beauty in the mathematical formulation. An example is the alarming simple result that identifies aggregate profit maximization with individual firm profit maximization when all firms are “price takers” and there are no externalities in production. This is an argument for decentralization. Let each firm go on its own merry way, maximizing to its heart’s content. Ayn Rand’s selfishness seems to find its virtue he</span><span style="font-size:100%;">re. Koopmans also showed us the reasons for the core economic assumption</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and the powerful implications that emerged </span><span style="font-size:100%;">from them </span><span style="font-size:100%;">as a consequence. Foremost was convexity. If the production set was convex, then there would be a </span><a href="http://www.economics.harvard.edu/pub/hier/1999/HIER1881.pdf"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">supporting hyperplane</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;"> for any boundary point, the outward </span><span style="font-size:100%;">facing normal to which yielding</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> the desired price system. (In English, for every possible efficient production plan a price system could be found under which that plan is the profit maximum, so long as the set of possible production plans was convex.) </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Conversely, under assumptions about boundedness that amounted to the maxim, “there is no free lunch,” and about closedness that posited existence of efficient production plans, there would be a profit maximizing plan for any given price system. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">From Koopmans we graduated to full general equilibrium, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">allowing for</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> consumers as well as producers, and </span><span style="font-size:100%;">with that </span><span style="font-size:100%;">learned about the Arrow-Debreu model, economics’ pièce de résistance. The model combines the optimizing decisions of consumers (those rational actors whom we’d like to model to give suitable micro foundations) along with the profit maximization of firms, all price takers, the assumption that perfect competition requires. We learned about what was required for a competitive equilibrium to exist. And we learned the two </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorems_of_welfare_economics"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">Fundamental Welfare Theorems</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;">, the analogs of Koopman</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s’ results for an economy with consumers as well as producers. The general equilibrium approach unites the rational decision making of individual actors with behavior in the aggregate, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">providing a theoretical justification for market solutions and </span><span style="font-size:100%;">offering</span> <span style="font-size:100%;">elegance in the modeling </span><span style="font-size:100%;">approach </span><span style="font-size:100%;">that is surely captivating</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> to those who have mastered the model</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Perhaps the best well known articulation of the theory is in Debreu’s book, </span><a href="http://cowles.econ.yale.edu/P/cm/m17/index.htm"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">Theory of Value</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;">, which shows the approach can readily be extended to economies with commodities that are differentiated by location, or </span><span style="font-size:100%;">through </span><span style="font-size:100%;">time of availability, or</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> allocated based</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> on a contingent state of nature. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Indeed, the model is held up as the gold standard to which actual markets are compared in that real world markets are not so complete. Ask a theoretically trained economist as to why real world markets don’t perform as well as their theoretical counterparts and very likely the response</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> (at least</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> until quite recently</span><span style="font-size:100%;">)</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> would be about market incompleteness. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">(Credit default swaps are securities that completed some financial markets. But I know of nobody in the public sphere who has defended them for doing so.)</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">As elegant as the theory is, however, it has an air of unreality to it because</span> <span style="font-size:100%;">contrary to the way it is advertised, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">it is fundamentally about planning, not about behavior. Consider this simple yet revealing example. When I was in graduate school I played a lot of pinball, partly out of fascination with the game and partly as a diversion from the economics. You can think of pinball from the perspective of the ball and its path of motion</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> in which case physics is the right tool for analysis</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, or you can think of it from the perspective of the player, which is getting closer to the mark, or you can think about it</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> still another way,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> as the interplay between the two with feedback loops going both ways, from player to ball and from ball to player. If planning sufficed in the analysis, all the interesting consideration would go on inside the player’s head, </span><i><span style="font-size:100%;">before the plunger is pulled</span></i><span style="font-size:100%;">. In the process pinball, that almost devilish pursuit, perhaps a mild form of gambling, would get utterly transformed into </span><span style="font-size:100%;">the most cerebral of endeavors. For each position and velocity of the ball there would be an associate</span><span style="font-size:100%;">d</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> action, perhaps a gentle shaking of the machine, or a click of the flippers, or doing nothing other than monitoring where the ball the is headed. And this map from position and velocity into action would be entirely anticipated in advance, determined to get the the best possible score at the games</span><span style="font-size:100%;">’</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> end. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">The play itself would be reduced to carrying out this elaborate plan. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">But this is theoretical nonsense. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Nobody </span><span style="font-size:100%;">envisions</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> playing pinball this way.</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Pinball when played by an experienced an</span><span style="font-size:100%;">d</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> able player is a work of art. I had the good fortune as a sophomore at Cornell to witness unbelievable pr</span><span style="font-size:100%;">owess in pursuit of this art. A</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> guy whom I knew only as Tex set a record that couldn’t possibly have been beaten. New York State had at the time (perhaps it still does) weird “Blue Laws” that allowed the pinball games to give free balls based on achieving a certain</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> incremental</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> score either from the start of the game or from the acquisition of the previous free ball, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">but not to give free games. Tex played the same game for about two hours straight,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> completely obliterating the previous high score. Then</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> with eight balls left (you start with five at the beginning of the game and could accumulate up to a maximum of ten balls) </span><span style="font-size:100%;">and having enough of it by</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> that </span><span style="font-size:100%;">moment</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span> <span style="font-size:100%;">Tex tilted out the game. I have never seen anything like it, before or since. He had complete mastery of the game. Tex did not shake the machine, ever. Instead, he slapped at it on occasion as a way of imparting some additional momentum to the ball. I learned that slapping technique from watching him. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Pinball play is an example of decision making and execution in the moment. You get better at it with experience. You learn the particular game and the particular machine, how the flippers react, how long to let the ball roll down the flipper before </span><span style="font-size:100%;">trying to shoot</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> the moon. All of this is done by feel, not by calculation. When you have the</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> right</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> feel you and the machine become part</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> of a whole. Things seem in synch. When you don’t have the feel, the balls seem to g</span><span style="font-size:100%;">o</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> through the flippers or down the</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> side slot</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s</span> <span style="font-size:100%;">with rapidity </span><span style="font-size:100%;">and the game ends very quickly. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I’d argue that </span><span style="font-size:100%;">real </span><span style="font-size:100%;">economic behavior</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> as distinct from </span><span style="font-size:100%;">theoretical </span><span style="font-size:100%;">economic planning</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> is a lot like the actual play of pinball. Indeed there are micro models that do strive to capture some aspect of this more realistic notion of behavior. In fact there are models that admit unemployment in equilibrium and other models that include default on loans in credit markets as equilibrium behavior</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, just as Akerlof and Schiller would want</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. But here’s the thing. We don’t know how to aggregate up these micro models into a macroeconomic theory. Aggregation is a non-trivial undertaking</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, once you give up rational o</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ptimizing as</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> the principal that guides behavior</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. The choice left to the theorist is either to model behavior in a somewhat realistic way and then attempt to understand what happens in the aggregate via simulation, a very difficult enterprise where one can’t be sure about the generality of the results</span> <span style="font-size:100%;">n</span><span style="font-size:100%;">or</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> about</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> the lessons learned</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">go back to the structural equations for the macro economy that</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> were part of the standard toolkit when I was in in graduate school </span><span style="font-size:100%;">even </span><span style="font-size:100%;">though those structural equations</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> are not derived from individual behavior, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">or </span><span style="font-size:100%;">jettison</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> individual behavior in favor of</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> individual</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> planning </span><span style="font-size:100%;">à</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> la Debreu and buy into most if not all the results from the general equilibrium model</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, so that aggregation can be achieved and mathematical elegance in the modeling retained</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. Many macro economists </span><span style="font-size:100%;">have </span><span style="font-size:100%;">opted for this</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> third</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> alternative. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">R</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ather than a reluctant choice</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, however, embracing the approach became</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> a badge of honor. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I conjecture that</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> after a while those who did</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> stopped seeing the limitations in their approach. Their models became their reality. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">They didn’t need another</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and didn’t want to contemplate that another was possible</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">This is not the first time in my adult memory where the economics profession has been assaulted because the unreality in its </span><span style="font-size:100%;">formulat</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ions came</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> into conflict with real world behavior. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">In the late 1990s with the </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1996/10/23/business/netscape-revenue-quadruples-in-quarter.html"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">growth of Netscape</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;">, the </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">dot.com boom</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;">, and ultimately the </span><a href="http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/msdoj/"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">Microsoft Case</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;">, some thought the fundamental economic paradigm had changed. This new economy, characterized by large increasing returns to scale (in essence</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> copies of information were free to produce</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, with the Internet essentially a huge virtual photocopier</span><span style="font-size:100%;">) and </span><span style="font-size:100%;">with </span><span style="font-size:100%;">strong network effects (MS Word is more valuable to me if I know you have it too and vice versa) was </span><span style="font-size:100%;">fundamentally</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> non-convex. </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> It would be dominated by a few very large players who were anything but price takers. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Koopmans hadn’t taught us about this sort of environment. </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0415107628"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">Schumpeter</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;"> provided the more apt lessons. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Sure, we had </span><span style="font-size:100%;">been living all along </span><span style="font-size:100%;">with increasing returns in certain well know</span><span style="font-size:100%;">n</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> segments of the economy –</span> <span style="font-size:100%;">railroads, telecommunications, electric power transmission</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, for example</span> <span style="font-size:100%;">–</span> <span style="font-size:100%;">but </span><span style="font-size:100%;">all that </span><span style="font-size:100%;">seemed limited and manageable. After Netscape, things changed. It </span><span style="font-size:100%;">felt as if</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> the entire economy was being transformed, to be overtaken by the new information economics. Potentially, it was a time to reexamine the core macroeconomic models. Had that happened, perhaps </span><a href="http://money.cnn.com/news/specials/enron/"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">Enron</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;"> would have been (correct</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ly) interpreted as a portent of</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> things to come. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">But no such rethinking of macro took place</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> then</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I can only guess why not. The economy was booming. </span><a href="http://data.bls.gov/PDQ/servlet/SurveyOutputServlet?series_id=LNS14000000"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">Unemployment rates</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;"> were unbelievably low, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">for a while less than 4%, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">yet inflation was modest. This wasn’t your grandmother’s </span><span style="font-size:100%;">idea</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> of</span> <span style="font-size:100%;">monopolized economies</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> with </span><a href="http://www.econ.hku.hk/%7Ewsuen/immortal/harberger_triangles.htm"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">Harberger Deadweight Loss Triangles</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;"> there for the asking. McDonalds was paying more than twice the minimum wage and still couldn’t get employees</span><span style="font-size:100%;">; the labor market for unskilled workers was that</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> tight. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Innovation was coming fast and furious and kids with computer programming knowledge were dropping out of school to become instant millionaires. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">It was an exhilarating time, even if ultimately it was fueled by a bubble mentality. I don’t believe economists </span><span style="font-size:100%;">think hard</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> about their fundamental assumptions in a boom. It takes a bust to get us to go back to the drawing board. Then, too, there was a lot of micro theory developed about network economics. Traditionally, monopoly had been the domain of micro, not macro. Perhaps there was less impetus </span><span style="font-size:100%;">toward</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> reexamination for that reason. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Personally, in spite of having taught general equilibrium theory to graduate students at Illinois, I’ve never been comfortable thinking about macroeconomics</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> via general equilibrium or any other way</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, because my </span><span style="font-size:100%;">intellectual </span><span style="font-size:100%;">center of gravity focuses on the decision maker first and foremost, or the pair of decision makers in some contractual relationship, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">such as the interaction between a sponsor and a contractor. When I was writing economic theory papers, I could get interesting behavior out of such a focus</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> (this</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> piece on </span><a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V8P-45F8Y6M-15/2/a3fbb4cd2b097f1ba339b9e3cc0aec2e"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">Cost Overruns</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;"> done with my doctoral student Antonio </span><span style="font-size:100%;">is an</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> example)</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, but I couldn’t roll that up in a nice way into an aggregate. At best, aggregation could happen within the one market where the particular relationship was happening, so I favored the partial equilibrium we studied that first quarter of grad school, duly modified to include the insights from the type of interactions that were of interest to me. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Partial equilibrium is full of ad hoc assumptions. (One is allowed to envision the market under consideration to be out of equilibrium but all other markets must be necessarily in equilibrium because income and the prices in these other markets are fixed.) </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Yet it does offer its own particular insight on aggregation. The question is if some prices go up and other prices go down what can be said about the overall? Has the </span><i><span style="font-size:100%;">price level</span></i><span style="font-size:100%;"> gone up or gone down? This is an example of the </span><a href="http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=5639"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">index number problem</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;">. Economics is at its best when it shows there are no perfect answers to the issue at hand. Alas, that is the case with index numbers. Can’t live with them, well, you know the rest. The Dow, the S&P 500, the CPI, they are all part of the vernacular now. Social Security payments have a Cost of Living Adjustment (</span><a href="http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/COLA/colasummary.html"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">COLA</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;">) in them. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">The COLA aims to compensate beneficiaries whose purchasing power would otherwise erode due to inflation. Does the COLA provide the Goldilocks ideal, offering up the right temperature of porridge? Perhaps for some beneficiaries it does. For others it over compensates and for still others it under compensates. It is one size, which naturally doesn’t fit all. This is the lesson about aggregation from partial equilibrium. You can come up with a number, sure. But you can’t hang your hat on it. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">*</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> * * * * </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I have been fortunate in my teaching to have had some unplanned</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> yet highly revealing</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> experiences that have profoundly shaped my views and have allowed me to reconsider what I was trying to achieve and how I should go about doing that. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Some of these come from my own class; others are entirely outside the domain of instruction; still others fall somewhere in between. Here are examples, one of each. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">In the late 1990s I was teaching intermediate microeconomics to a large class</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> of</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> (about 180) students, using undergraduate TAs who’d previously taken the course to interact with the students online during scheduled office hours. This worked pretty well and was a popular thing with the students. They could get help right when they needed it, while they were working on their homework. But I got one complaint repeatedly – there should be face to face office hours with the TAs too. I didn’t think those would be heavily utilized so I resisted the suggestion initially. Ultimately I capitulated because it seemed that continuing to deny the request was having a negative impact on how the students viewed the online offering. Sometimes you do things just for the symbolism, not for the real consequences. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">My office at the time was in a little cul-de-sac with other offices like mine that had a window and several “interior offices” (no window). Via the grant we had gotten to support the online learning we had arranged for one of those interior offices to be used by the TAs for their office hours. At the time, most people did dialup from where they lived and I wanted the TAs to have a good network connection when they were online. So we provided that and the computer to work on. We used the same space </span><span style="font-size:100%;">for the face to face office hours. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I scheduled the TAs to make sure we had coverage during all the evening slots, 7 – 11 PM. But since the face to face office hours were going to be in the afternoon and we </span><span style="font-size:100%;">scheduled them</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> only as an afterthought, I was more at the</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> mercy of the TA</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> schedules, they had their own courses to take, so the timing for the face to face office hours was more haphazard. As it turns out, some of those overlapped my own office hours, not an efficient alternative to be sure, but the best we could come up with under the circumstances. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">It was my habit at the time when in my office to leave the door open, to be closed only if somebody wanted</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> to talk with me</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> in confidence or if it got really noisy in the corridor. Keeping the door open was the friendly thing to do. Sitting at my desk, I could see all the floor traffic that entered my end of the cul-de-sac, which included everyone wh</span><span style="font-size:100%;">o entered the office that my TAs used. Imagine my surprise when I watched students in my class walk right past my own office so they could meet with the TA. This is the sort of “natural experiment” that most faculty don’t get a chance to witness. But I did. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">If you buy </span><span style="font-size:100%;">into </span><span style="font-size:100%;">the information that U.S. News and other periodical</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> put out about rating colleges, then the quality</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> of the faculty and the student-</span><span style="font-size:100%;">faculty ratio are two important metrics that determine the ratings. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">From that students </span><span style="font-size:100%;">would seem to value having interactions with faculty, particularly one-on-one interactions, so by that logic any student who would schlep up to the faculty member’s office to ask some questions would surely want to pose those to the faculty member, especially if the faculty member was not already engaged with another student. This line of thought makes what the students actually did a real puzzler. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Of course, the behavior is no mystery at all. Students who don’t understand something that they believe they should know are shy about it. The last person on earth they’d like to </span><span style="font-size:100%;">let in on </span><span style="font-size:100%;">their lack of understanding is their professor. It’s much easier for them to talk with undergraduate TAs, who have no responsibility whatsoever for determining their </span><span style="font-size:100%;">final course grades. That much seems clear enough, b</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ut I’ll push this one step further, because as an economist I will argue strongly that how people actually behave indicates what they value. Here were students doing just that. They valued interacting with the undergraduate TAs because they felt comfortable opening up with them. It didn’t matter that I was much more expert about the economics. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">What mattered was that the TAs were closer in age and experience to the students and that t</span><span style="font-size:100%;">he TAs had almost no authority. That meant the students</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> attending the office hours</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> had less to risk by opening up about what they didn’t know. </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> If real learning happens as someone goes from being stuck to getting unstuck and if one of the better ways to get unstuck is to ask for help</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, the willingness to open up about being stuck trumps the ability to access expertise. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">That fact appeared, right under my nose.</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I am not saying that expertise doesn’t matter at all. From time to time the TA would come to my office to ask for help, unsure of how to answer the student’s question. And once in a while the TA and student would both come into my office</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, the curiosity getting the better of them</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. Once the student understood that I wasn’t going to bite his head off, then expertise surely was desired. The point is that getting comfortable come</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> first, before getting the expertise. If comfort isn’t achieved, the questions are never posed, and the learning doesn’t happen at all or gets put off till later when the student’s nerve might return. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">This is a Maslow Hierarchy of Needs argument. Self-esteem is a more basic need. That need must be addressed at first.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Teachers likely know this about their own learning. Nonetheless, they may be wooden to the idea when it is their own students who are in need. It is far too easy to abstract about the</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> student</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> fear from not knowing. Mostly it remains hidden</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> from the instructor</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, so out of mind. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The next experience is really a set of experiences and come</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> from work. For a time I directed a campus Center for Educational Technologies with about ten people working under me. (The staff grew gradually in</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> response to growth in use.) A few of these good folks were techies; they ran our servers and administered the software we supported. The rest of the staff directly assisted faculty members or did other work (like supervise our student employees) that was related to the first task. I had two scheduled weekly meetings with staff. One was with the Assistant Director, who acted as the office manager and made sure things were getting done. My job was to set general directions for the Center and identify big projects we would support, but otherwise leave the work to the staff. Through the one-on-one with the Assistant Director we could have a conversation where each of us could take the pulse </span><span style="font-size:100%;">on the other, learn about the current issues, and make sure things were progressing nicely. If they weren’t we’d have to do something about it. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The other scheduled meeting was an all-staff meeting. I felt it important for the staff to know what was going on in the office and for me to alert them together</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> about</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> campus matters that were relevant to our work. Though some </span><span style="font-size:100%;">in </span><span style="font-size:100%;">the group were naturally expansive and others more reticent, we did make an effort for everyone to get a turn. There is a natural tension in educational technology between the techies and those who directly assist faculty, because each wants to do things a certain way, with those ways being quite different. The techies are as a rule quite risk averse and want to offer services that are very controlled. Those who directly support faculty want services that are flexible so they can accommodate idiosyncratic needs when they arise. I thought it was beneficial for that tension to get a repeated public airing. Sometimes it was me on one side and the rest of the office on another. I can be pig headed about things and need the pushback from the group to change my thinking. That too was good to get aired in public. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I did have other meetings with staff, either on an as needed basis because an issue would arise or more as a mentoring type of conversation that would happen from time to time. I do like to have one-on-one conversations as a rule and would have done it more frequently with the staff, but time wouldn’t allow it. So this was the next best thing. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I had numerous meetings outside the office, on committees or individually with other folks on campus. And I was still teaching the large class, where I would design experiments of new technology use to try, and occasionally writing pieces for review. So time was indeed scarce. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I wouldn’t argue that this way of running the office was the best possible approach. Ultimately, when the assistant director got more control of the offi</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ce and the staff had grown</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> larger</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> still</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, she abandoned the full staff meeting in favor of meeti</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ngs of staff with like roles</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. Those </span><span style="font-size:100%;">meetings </span><span style="font-size:100%;">were more functional and more participatory. So certainly it would have </span><span style="font-size:100%;">been </span><span style="font-size:100%;">possible to do things differently, even early on. But I would say that this experience was not paralleled by other experi</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ences I had as a faculty member</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. Running the Center was unlike service on committees. Perhaps faculty who run a research lab with a bunch of post docs and graduate stu</span><span style="font-size:100%;">dents have </span><span style="font-size:100%;">similar experience</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, because so much of the discussion is about work flow. I never ran</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> a research lab. But I did do this.</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Ultimately my appointment got switched to full time administrator. Once that happen</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ed</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, I no longer had to teach as part of my job. When I did teach, it was because I volunteered for the activity. And understanding that I was a freebie for the Economics Department, I asked to teach small classes so I could have more interaction with students and learn from them. (Teaching was in some sense an applied research for my work directing the center. It was a chance for me to test out some of my ideas.) In these small classes we all could be seated and still be both seen and heard. There was no need for me to stand in front of the room. I found myself more comfortable conducting the live class session much as I had conducted the staff meetings, focusing on work flow much of the </span><span style="font-size:100%;">time, and designing the assignments</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> for the course so that there would be project work that indeed could be discussed. My mechanism wasn’t exactly the same but it was similar and it was clearly informed by the prior experience. My taste had changed regarding what I wanted to achieve in the clas</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Generating conversation was the most important thing; </span><span style="font-size:100%;">lecturing to work</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> through models in detail still happened from time to time, but wasn’t the steady fare.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> The students really liked this approach</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. My course evaluations were unambiguous on that score and it </span><span style="font-size:100%;">also </span><span style="font-size:100%;">showed in the impromptu conversations we had during the break. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I’d ask the students about how the class compared to the rest of what they were taking. It was completely different. They liked the contrast. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">My sense is that more faculty would experiment with their teac</span><span style="font-size:100%;">hing if they had other models of how to conduct</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> class that made sense to them. On this, faculty are creatures of habit. They do things a certain way because that’s the way they’ve done them in the past. Or they do it that way because when they were graduate students that’s the way it was done. If other models for class transactions don’t present themselves, there will be no change. In my position I’ve advocated for faculty experimentation, but when given the opportunity myself, the best I could do was imitate something I had already done before, only not in the classroom. I believe there is a big lesson in this observation. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">If we want faculty to change their teaching, we must give them alternatives in which they have already participated. Then they are imitating more than inventing. We will flatter them if we can come up with this set of experiences for them to copy. Then they will flatter us. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The last set of experiences I want to discuss inform me in what I value as a learner.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> My last two years as an undergraduate at Cornell I found what I was looking for. Only I stumbled into </span><span style="font-size:100%;">it </span><span style="font-size:100%;">and didn’t know it’s what I wanted to find till I was well involved. My intellectual world was idyllic. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Actually, it was two worlds. One revolved around classes. That world was private. I did my work on my own for the most part, took courses based on my own idiosyncratic interests. I had the occasional discussion with classmate or TA or Professor, but the topics and the entry into the discussion were determined by the class itself</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, not by outside influences</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The other</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> world</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> revolved around a rooming house where I lived, where I had social interactions with my housemates. We shared a kitchen and eating place and that was where we gathered. We had discussions there and played there and formed a bond there so that when we went out, to eat or to listen to music or to see a movie, we went as a tight knit group. These friends were diverse in their interests, in their areas of study, and in how far along they were in school. Somehow that</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> diversity</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> helped. It blocked certain areas of discussion (what we were studying) but enabled many other topics that might have been blocked if one of us had been expert. We were all novices so we were open among ourselves. We valued that openness a great deal. When outsiders came in they had layers of self-protection, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">they put on an act</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> if you will</span><span style="font-size:100%;">; most everyone did</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. We nurtured them to peel off this false skin and let them be themselves. </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Then they became part of the group. </span> <span style="font-size:100%;">It was a wonderful feeling to be with these people. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I did not know how to recreate that feeling and I lost it once I went to grad school. My social life and my class life there overlapped much more and the diversity of interest was lost. It was lonelier and less intellectual, though much more intensive about the subject matter of the classes itself. </span> <span style="font-size:100%;">I began to think of my Cornell experiences not as an aspiration for other experience I would try to create on my own, but simply part of a wonderful journey that had ended. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I found the same feeling not quite twenty years later, in an online discussion group we had on campus that focused on how to teach with technology. That was summer and then fall of 1995, pretty earl</span><span style="font-size:100%;">y</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> on with online learning. Friday evenings especially were involved in reading the posts of colleagues in the discussion </span><span style="font-size:100%;">forum </span><span style="font-size:100%;">and making my own points. We too were a diverse community from all over campus, representing lots of different areas of study. But we had a common question to answer and some belief that the answers we came up with would cut across our fields. I can’t speak for the others </span><span style="font-size:100%;">who participated and what the draw was for them, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">but I was pretty much a home body those evenings because we had very young kids and we spent much family time together in our living room. Going online was a diversion from that, though sometimes I had a kid with his head on my shoulder as I was looking at my computer screen. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I was back to being a novice in the conversation, though I had been a faculty member for 15 years. I did have teaching experience, but in no way did I have a pat hand about my class, where I knew that for the middling students especially it wasn’t working well at all. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I think it really helped</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> in</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> build</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ing</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> this sense of community that nobody was expert. Some had done prior things with technology that were interesting and useful for their students. But nobody had it all figured out. There was a need for a collective distillation of what we were learning based on the individual explorations we were all going through. That need served to form a tight bond with the group. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">As we began to satisfy the need the discussion turned more technical and less interesting to me. By late spring of 1996 it had essentially ended. It was</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> a shooting star,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> wondrous while it lasted</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, unfortunately of too short duration</span><span style="font-size:100%;">.</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">*</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> * * * * </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Let’s return to “Apple pie and coffee.” The question I want to ask is whether others aside from economists act like new immigrants, unable to speak the new language and without a program for acquiring it. My guess is that it happens all over. The Bush Administration</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> readily</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> comes to mind. Read these pieces from 2006 in the New Yorker by George Packer, </span><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/04/10/060410fa_fact2?currentPage=all"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">Letter from Iraq: The Lesson of Tal Afar</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;"> and </span><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/12/18/061218fa_fact2"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">A Reporter at Large: Knowing the Enemy</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;">.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> (These were recommended by David Brooks in his </span><a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9407EED61231F934A25751C1A9609C8B63"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">Sidney Awards</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;"> from that year.) </span><span style="font-size:100%;">They are remarkably interesting</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> to read</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, even now, well after the nation has turned its attention away from Iraq. The first piece makes it seem as if we could have actually wo</span><span style="font-size:100%;">n the war </span><span style="font-size:100%;">and turned “the peace” over to the Iraqis, if only we had called it a counterinsurgency early on and managed it as such thereafter. Instead, the Pentagon was in denial. It “knew the answer” before the problem was solved, so no need to learn what was actually going on. Further</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, Rumsfeld and his minions</span> <span style="font-size:100%;">maintained</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> the untenable position that the original strategy was the right one from the get go, so </span><span style="font-size:100%;">they </span><span style="font-size:100%;">had a need to deny evidence that would tend to refute that position. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I recall in the press </span><span style="font-size:100%;">many</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> discussions about the number of troops on the ground being inadequate. But I don’t remember much being said at the time that critiqued what is was the troops should be doing. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Packer’s Tal Afar piece makes clear that there were essentially two different approaches pursued early on, the first – kill or disable all the Iraqi bad guys, the second – befriend and empower all the Iraqi good guys. The first alienates the entire population. The Americans are a foreign power and they are wrecking destruction. The second has a chance to grow the population who want to be good guys, both Shia and Sunni. It clearly is a more collaborative approach. It is also slower and requires greater patience. That is the nature of counterinsurgency. And it is waged mostly by cultural and economic means. The military part is only a small fraction. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">If the second approach had been the plan across the board, it might very well have worked. But it didn’t play out that way. Commanders in the field were free to try the approach they thought best. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">So in some areas in Iraq there was intense fighting</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> as a result of the first approach, while in other areas there were efforts to give Iraq back to the Iraqis that proved successful</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> as a consequence of the second approach. Packer also reports about the sheer waste some years later, where many of the troops were housed on huge bases, essentially walled cities, and there was very little interaction between this occupying force and the native population. The opportunity for repair was there but it was being wasted, a consequence </span><span style="font-size:100%;">from </span><span style="font-size:100%;">the second approach</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> not being</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> more fully embraced early on. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">We non-combatants tend to think that war is won on the battlefield. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">War</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> is also waged by propaganda and the better propaganda machine tends to win.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Growing up in the 1960s and from reading later, George Orwell especially but also </span><span style="font-size:100%;">various reading </span><span style="font-size:100%;">about the Russian Revolution, I have implicit knowledge of that fact. </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Packer’</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s Know the Enemy piece makes that</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> essential point, coupling it with</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> modern day</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> marketing on the Internet. Al Qaeda has learned the lessons of </span><a href="http://www.gladwell.com/tippingpoint/"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">Malcolm Gladwell</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;">. They are winning the hearts and minds of many of the poor in the Muslim world</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> through their approach</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The U.S. Military Machine, for all its might and its capabilities to shock and awe, is still in the Dark Ages on the propaganda/military front. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Packer talks about what it would take to bring our approach up to the present, so it has a chance to compete. The key requirement is to embrace an anthropological approach, understand “the street” from a cultural point of view. Only then is appropriate communication p</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ossible. Apparently we last tried</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> this in Vietnam. We are loathe to return to that past. By igno</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ring history, we turn out to be</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> repeating </span><span style="font-size:100%;">it</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">*</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> * * * * </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">This is my Mr. Miyagi moment. Recall in </span><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087538/"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">The Karate Kid</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;"> that after Daniel-San had waxed the cars, painted the fence, sanded the floors, and painted the house he was very angry. He confronts Mr. Miyagi, arguing that he’s supposed t</span><span style="font-size:100%;">o be learning K</span><span style="font-size:100%;">arate, but he hasn’t learned anything. He’</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> just </span><span style="font-size:100%;">put in a lot of time doing</span> <span style="font-size:100%;">a remarkable amount of</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> uncompensated labor. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Miyagi responds, in turn, that Daniel has indeed</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> learned quite a bit. Miyagi</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> goes further. He </span><span style="font-size:100%;">illustrate</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s the point</span><span style="font-size:100%;">,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> asking Daniel to demonstrate what he has learned by first showing the proper motions from the particular activity, then by having Daniel defend himself from Miyagi’s attack</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> where the</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> learned motion provides the </span><span style="font-size:100%;">key to the defense</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. Miyagi is still teaching in the process, “Watch eye! Always watch eye.” It is the best scene in the movie. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Mr. Miyagi practices what Randy Pausch in his </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fdownload.srv.cs.cmu.edu%2F%7Epausch%2F&feature=player_embedded"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">last lecture</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;"> calls misdirection. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">The teacher gets </span><span style="font-size:100%;">the student</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> to focus on one thing while </span><span style="font-size:100%;">the teacher is really after the student</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> learning something different. The teacher holds back on that something different, letting the student engage in the first activity for itself, because the student can do that on his own. Eventually the time is ripe. The student has readied himself for the real point. Only he’s unaware he’s been </span><span style="font-size:100%;">readying himself</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> all along. The instructor has his attention now and the instructor springs into action. This is the best way to teach important lessons. The process of misdirection signifies the importance of what is learned and the ready</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ing activity allows the student</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> to take it all in, one big gestalt. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">This chapter is about assessment.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> We’ve been doing readying activities for the topic right along.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I lead o</span><span style="font-size:100%;">f</span><span style="font-size:100%;">f with the Economics because </span><span style="font-size:100%;">in talking about assessment </span><span style="font-size:100%;">many are ma</span><span style="font-size:100%;">king the same sort of mistake that</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> the Chicago School macro economists have made. They have forgotten how difficult aggregation is to achieve. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">They make it seem easy by ignoring much of reality. Learning and the products that accompany it - the homework sheets, the projects, the essays, and </span><span style="font-size:100%;">all </span><span style="font-size:100%;">the </span><span style="font-size:100%;">rest are extremely difficult</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> to aggregate </span><span style="font-size:100%;">and still be able to make</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> meaning</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> of the result</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. It’s </span><span style="font-size:100%;">even </span><span style="font-size:100%;">harder </span><span style="font-size:100%;">with learning and its </span><span style="font-size:100%;">byproducts</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> than it is</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> with</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> economics. The lure of standardized tests is that t</span><span style="font-size:100%;">hey seemingly can be aggregated, but i</span><span style="font-size:100%;">t is fools</span><span style="font-size:100%;">’</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> gold.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> (The tests themselves do suffer from an index </span><span style="font-size:100%;">number </span><span style="font-size:100%;">problem that nobody talks about. Some students get a set of questions</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> (A) right</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and a </span><span style="font-size:100%;">different set of </span><span style="font-size:100%;">question</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s</span> <span style="font-size:100%;">(</span><span style="font-size:100%;">B</span><span style="font-size:100%;">)</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> wrong. With ot</span><span style="font-size:100%;">her students</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> the results are flip flopped. Then by the magic of the scoring, those students are ranked</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> with one group outperforming the other</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, as if</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> we know that one sort of mistake is less important than the other</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">It is becoming incr</span><span style="font-size:100%;">easingly popular to argue for a</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> portfolio </span><span style="font-size:100%;">rather than a test approach. E</span><span style="font-size:100%;">valuating the portfolio by a rubric </span><span style="font-size:100%;">may change the nature of the evidence to evaluate but </span><span style="font-size:100%;">le</span><span style="font-size:100%;">aves the index problem intact.)</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Let’s grant that t</span><span style="font-size:100%;">he t</span><span style="font-size:100%;">est may have some value because it </span><span style="font-size:100%;">can be</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> aggregated</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">From there</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> through hubris, or intellectual laziness, or simply not understanding how much information is being ignored with this focus on </span><span style="font-size:100%;">the </span><span style="font-size:100%;">standardized </span><span style="font-size:100%;">test</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">the </span><span style="font-size:100%;">advocates have</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> accepted the untruth that the tests are the total measure of learning</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. So they hang</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> their hats on the numbers</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, though there is little or no justification in doing so</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. T</span><span style="font-size:100%;">he tests are used for purposes analogous to how COLAs are used to adjust Social Securi</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ty, to rate students, teachers, and schools.</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">It is clear that the macroeconomics has failed, miserably. </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Its focus has been too narrow. </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> It simply couldn’t explain the recent meltdown of the economy. Let’</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s take a lesson from that. There is much more about learning than can be seen by</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> performance on standard tests. Let’s talk about learning in its totality and assess it according</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ly. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Much assessment should occur during the process of students </span><span style="font-size:100%;">going about</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> their class work.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> (In </span><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=5"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">this piece by Malcolm Gladwell from December</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;">, the “superstar” high school math teacher (described in the middle of the page) gives individual feedback to most of the students in the class while they are working a problem.) When that class work is open ended, students need more that simple feedback. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Process </span><span style="font-size:100%;">assessment, like my staff meetings,</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> happens via conversation. Instructors must have ongoing conversations with students, ensemble, in small groups, and perhaps individually too. This is the simple take away from my message. It is an inescapable conclusion. Part of the conversation can be by correspondence. Part of the conversation can be by phone or by video conference. The medium matters less. It is the fact that these conversations happen that is most</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> important and that they are ongoing, not once in a blue moon.</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">One reason for talking about Tal Afar is to show that this lesson about learning – the troops having tea with the Iraqis in this instance – is more basic than classroom instruction and therefore one will find the need for conversation wherever</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> open ended</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> learning takes place. Atul Gawande, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">in a quite recent piece in the New Yorker that </span><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">attempts to explain the high cost of health care at a micro level</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;">, argues that conversation between doctor and patient and between the various doctors who devise the patient’s</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> treatment </span><span style="font-size:100%;">is the essence of good health care. It happens all too rarely but does occur at exemplars of good practice, such as the Mayo Clinic. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I will not detail how those conversations should occur. I’ve written a good deal on this in my piece, </span><a href="http://lanny-on-learn-tech.blogspot.com/2007/01/rethinking-office-hours.html"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><span style="font-size:100%;">Rethinking Office Hours</span></u></span></a><span style="font-size:100%;"> and in an earlier piece, Killing the Puppy, linked from there</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. I do want to make the following point, however. Some conversations exist in name only. The participants are</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> too guarded to have real exchange</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. The discussion ends up being perfunctory and unrewarding. It is necessary for everyone to open up first. That might not happen on its own accord. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">So the issue needs to be addressed squarely. Any mechanism for getting the class to function well will incorporate activities and structures to encourage openness of the participants. </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Students benefit not just from learning about the subject matter but also from developing the self-confidence that they can hold up their end of the conversation.</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Conversation as assessment means the assessment is embedded in the activities </span><span style="font-size:100%;">of the</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> class. This notion of embedding </span><span style="font-size:100%;">assessment </span><span style="font-size:100%;">is important and it stands in contrast with a view that says learning happens over here and assessment happens over there. With the latter</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> view</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">conceptually </span><span style="font-size:100%;">the places </span><span style="font-size:100%;">must </span><span style="font-size:100%;">also </span><span style="font-size:100%;">vary temporally. Assessment happens after learning. This idea is ingrained. My campus has a Final Exams week at the conclusion of the semester. Many campuses have that sort of thing. The presence of assessment after the fact may block thinking about embedded assessment. If that is </span><span style="font-size:100%;">true</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, it is a shame. It is the embedded assessment that is fundamental. The conversations need to happen</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> during learning</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Given that, o</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ne might ask if the final exam is necessary (or some other high stakes assessment). This is an answer qua analysis rather than a simple yes or no. One has to look </span><span style="font-size:100%;">at the total environment and fro</span><span style="font-size:100%;">m that see what the final exam contributes. What do the students learn preparing for it? How do the students make their preparations? What does the instructor learn from the student perform</span><span style="font-size:100%;">ance? What would happen in the </span><span style="font-size:100%;">absence</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> of the exam</span><span style="font-size:100%;">? </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Those questions require answers that will depend on the instructor, the students, and the subject matter. If the instructor actually does an analysis of the environment to pr</span><span style="font-size:100%;">oduce such answers</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, it would be a very good thing </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> for the instructor </span><span style="font-size:100%;">to write </span><span style="font-size:100%;">it</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> up and make </span><span style="font-size:100%;">it</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> explicit, for example by posting </span><span style="font-size:100%;">it </span><span style="font-size:100%;">online. I do believe that irrespective of the course students need to be responsible for some deliverable due at or near the end of term that is of substantial consequence regarding grade. The extrinsic incentive matters and </span><span style="font-size:100%;">in </span><span style="font-size:100%;">itself communicates what the instructor values in the work of the students. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The other reason for bringing up the essays by George Packer is that assessment must not restrict itself to whether the particular student is learning. It must also be about whether the mechanism itself is working. The two go hand in hand and happen simultaneously. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">The troops led by Colonel H.R. McMaster assessed the Iraqis in Tal Afar, who in turn assessed the Americans and their commitment to bringing order and well being</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> to the community</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. Together they assessed whether their </span><span style="font-size:100%;">joint </span><span style="font-size:100%;">actions were making things safer and establishing trust between Shia and Sunni, enabling the Iraqis to take over on their own. So it is with learning in the classroom. The students assess the teacher as the teacher assesses the students. Collectively they assess whether the course “is working.” When it’s not, modifications need to be made in the approach. Those changes need to be suitably negotiated among the class members. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I fear that this norm I’ve sketched lies </span><span style="font-size:100%;">beyond</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> current practice in far too many cases. One reason for this is that the instructor is isolated in his teaching and after a time goes about it as an automaton, adhering to a syllabus that was constructed long ago, </span><span style="font-size:100%;">basing the instruction on prior offerings of the course rather than on the current class population and recent events, in the field of study and in the world at large. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">The norm itself needs to be a part of campus culture and the culture within individual departments. At present the culture may not support the norm. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">It is the</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> culture</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> that</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> must change.</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I know that </span><span style="font-size:100%;">soon after</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> I started college at MIT in 1972 I felt college was different than high school because in high school the school was responsible for the students learning but in college it was the student who was responsible. This was reflected in the difficulty of the material, the frequency with which we had classe</span><span style="font-size:100%;">s and had to do homework, and the amount of interaction between teacher and student. I can’t say whether I would have had that feeling had I attended a different university. But let’s say it was true across the board. Then a good reason why supporting the norm is not part of the culture now is that it wasn’t part of the culture then and our individual values aren’t yet geared to change the culture. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 0pt;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Times, however, have changed. We are witnessing major institutions failing. We cannot let higher education fail. We need to recognize collectively the necessity of a shared responsibility for student learning. We must build a new culture with that as the basis.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Gawande sketches what shared responsibility looks like in medicine. It is not hard to envision what the parallel would look like in higher education.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> There is a lot of work to do. We should get started. </span></p></div>Lanny Arvanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05597426421997599777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331075451664544793.post-74066698461609313622009-05-10T05:33:00.003-05:002009-05-14T12:43:11.919-05:00Personality and Guessing<p class="western"></p><blockquote>If we wish to help humans to become more fully human, we must realize not only that they try to realize themselves, but that they are also reluctant or afraid or unable to do so. Only by fully appreciating this dialectic between sickness and health can we help to tip the balance in favor of health.<br />Abraham Maslow, <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Toward-Psychology-Being-Abraham-Maslow/dp/0471293091/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240872914&sr=1-3">Toward a Psychology of Being</a></u></span></blockquote><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Toward-Psychology-Being-Abraham-Maslow/dp/0471293091/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240872914&sr=1-3"></a></u></span><p></p> <p class="western">Sometimes rebellion is quiet, almost inaudible. What else could it be in the early to mid ‘70s, after the flower children and acid rock, still stuck in Watergate with the Viet Nam War just brought to a conclusion, the only good thing that could be said of it. All of those were loud and claimed attention. The ‘60s rebellion was still in the air. That one wasn’t ours. We didn’t want more loudness. And yet we could tell there were insidious aspects to the culture; “<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061722/">Plastics</a></u></span>” wasn’t the first come on, nor was it the last. We couldn’t just sit there and soak it in, could we? </p> <p class="western">The culture was embodied in the magazines we read in the dorms. The mainstays were Mad Magazine, National Lampoon, and Playboy. The potential destruction of the psyche was evident most in Playboy and no, it wasn’t the pictures. The pictures did what they were supposed to do. We read the rest of the magazine too, with too much time on our hands, not selective at all about what we read, and just to show it was more than the pictures. There was column after column that rated things – the arts, what to eat, performers, lots of ratings of performers. I remember one in particular on trumpeters. Al Hirt was number one, Louis Armstrong was two or three, Herb Alpert and Doc Severinsen were also up there. What was one to make of this? Listen to Al Hirt but not Louis Armstrong? Listen to both but get a different degree of satisfaction from one than from the other? Of course, it was total nonsense.</p> <p class="western">Playboy didn’t invent the genre. <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070903/">The Way We Were</a></u></span> came out at the time, a picture postcard in the guise of a movie. With the incessant chatter between Hubbell Gardner (Robert Redford) and J.J. (Bradford Dillman) we see the genre for what it was twenty years before, a way to show the young adult male was hip, each vying to one up the other with the next trite rating, which by its nature insisted on a conformity that had no purpose whatsoever because the rating was a thing unto itself, not to be used at all as a determinant of actual behavior. With conformity itself so much in question at the time, we reject these ratings but only on the sly. We need something else to replace them, but we’re not yet ready to articulate what that something else is or should be.</p> <p class="western">Ever so slowly we begin to pick and choose from the less bright objects the culture itself produces, looking for the thoughtful and off beat, giving our personal stamp of approval by seeking out other objects that appear similar in the way they were created. My personal favorites from that time (and here some of the viewing occurred in grad school, showing that the consequences of the rebellion persisted) are <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070643/">Scarecrow</a></u></span>, with Al Pacino and Gene Hackman who were each in much bigger productions right before this movie and soon after too, but who may have done their best work here, <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071360/">The Conversation</a></u></span>, a frighteningly realistic view into how media can be used to invade privacy, also with Hackman and demonstrating Francis Ford Coppola’s mastery in a small film setting, <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074906/">The Missouri Breaks</a></u></span>, a low keyed film between films with Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando and a surprisingly good performance from Kathleen Lloyd, and <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057495/">Shock Corridor</a></u></span>, an earlier vintage B-Movie classic from Samuel Fuller starring Peter Breck of The Big Valley fame. </p> <p class="western">Then the sense of taste morphs, not because preferences change by themselves, but because other circumstances change and the sense of taste must accommodate the environment in which we live. For me this was getting a job at the University of Illinois, moving to Champaign-Urbana, finding a social existence with my peer assistant professors where film was much less important as a form of recreation and learning outside of school, so ending up watching much fewer movies overall with the ones I did see more of the mainstream variety. With that, I started to like particular films for the characters they developed and to be attracted by movies that developed characters in a strong and appealing way.</p> <p class="western">The type of character I like has a strong intellectual bent. In the movies, however, you can’t have long scenes with the hero staring off into space, thinking deep thoughts. What’s the audience supposed to be doing then? At best the film can have momentary glances into this sort of behavior. Mostly there has to be action. The characters I like take bold action, motivated strongly by a goal. Pursuit of the goal is a quest, not a Quixote tilting, but rather moving to something extraordinary that the inner being somehow knows can be attained. The idealism and unyielding commitment along with the intelligence make for a powerful foundation that justifies the confidence and the singularity of the pursuit. The character makes a fantastic discovery, showing the audience learning of the highest order. But the character has an Achilles heel. Other people are not nearly so noble in their aims. The hero displays a good deal of naiveté, preferring to maintain the idealism that has served so well, invariably getting caught up in the pedestrian but potentially destructive behavior of others who take without giving anything else back. </p> <p class="western">These characters are inevitably either boys, Homer Hickam (Jake Gyllenhaal) in <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0132477/">October Sky</a></u></span>, or are women, Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) in <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118884/">Contact</a></u></span>, George Sand (Judy Davis) in <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102103/">Impromptu</a></u></span>, and Dian Fossey (Sigourney Weaver) in <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095243/">Gorillas in the Mist</a></u></span>. The adult male has learned to numb himself to reality, to adopt a cynical tone, to self-protect against the emotional pains from being exposed while vulnerable. Or the adult male remains pure but is not intellectual, Jimmy Morris (Dennis Quaid) in <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0265662/">The Rookie</a></u></span>, both Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) in <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0265662/">The Matrix</a></u></span>. The adult male doesn’t fit the description. Those who do are attractive, for me personally all the more so when they instill a separate parallel pursuit or are encountered while I’m off doing that. </p> <p class="western">After seeing Contact, I read the Sagan book, which is delicious in its ironies while trying to stay true to known science. Then I read a couple of books in the genre – string theory for laymen. The motivation came from wanting to understand wormholes, but apart from appreciating it as a singularity in an otherwise hard to understand mathematical system, my take away was quite different. The fundamental forces of Physics seem asymmetric. Symmetry, a sort of intellectual beauty, is a desirable to the theorist. It turns out that symmetry can be restored if the theory is cast in a higher number of dimensions than the usual four (three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension). Looking for elegance in the mathematical theory, it seems the theory has gotten way ahead of empirical science, creating an unreality to the theory. At about this time I was beginning a career change from Economics to Learning Technology. As an economist I had been doing mathematical theory and the issue of whether it tied to reality was a strong underlying concern for me (increasingly it seemed it didn’t). So I treated this aftermath of Contact as a shot across the bow.</p> <p class="western">The timing was different with Impromptu. I already had <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://lanny-on-learn-tech.blogspot.com/2007/08/c-minor.html">an infatuation with Chopin piano music</a></u></span> after watching <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0253474/">The Pianist</a></u></span> for a second time. I had downloaded quite a few mp3s of Nocturnes, Mazurkas, Ballades, and Polonaise and listened to them on my computer and my iPod, over and over again, each time as if in a trance. I stumbled over Impromptu while channel surfing, so naturally it caught my attention. Anything that fed the beast was going to grab me. Then, too, I have this rather odd prejudice, contradicted enough by the factual evidence that it should be abandoned; I cling to it nevertheless. I assume that people who are my age are fundamentally like me, so I should be able to do what they can do. I’m not talking about singing and dancing, or about athletics, or sky diving. There are talents I don’t have. I do realize that. Where it comes down mostly to talking and figuring stuff out, however, that’s where I believe I should be able to keep up with them. As it turns out, Judy Davis is only a few months younger than me, so the old chauvinism rears its ugly head, yet she is so much more open and unselfconscious in this character than I could ever be. This contrast draws me into her story. I found this movie fascinating. </p> <p class="western">I would term each of these film characters a <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/maslow.html">self-actualizer</a></u></span>, exemplars of Abraham Maslow’s archetype. Invariably they express themselves in pursuit of some big idea. Chasing the idea provides their raison d’être, giving them focus and a natural center of gravity. Peter Senge in <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Discipline-Practice-Learning-Organization/dp/0385260954">The Fifth Discipline</a></u></span> terms this behavior personal mastery, which is about seeking the truth and understanding reality as it is. Instinctively, we admire this behavior when we see it. </p> <p class="western">We also seem to be drawn in when we see pathologies of the behavior, which sometimes happens when the idea the person is chasing is another individual, with the feelings not reciprocated but the pursuer clings to the alternative view anyway. The quest is no longer about discovering reality but instead becomes a matter of force of will. Can the mental image be turned into reality by insistence, flirtation, and badgering? This is the slippery slope. The fall can be ugly, even brutal. Readers might think of Glenn Close in <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093010/">Fatal Attraction</a></u></span>. My own favorite is Jessica Walter in <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067588/">Play Misty for Me</a></u></span>. As a viewer I got to know Walter from her appearances in a variety of TV dramas. Her style makes you feel relaxed, things are ordinary, commonplace, nothing to be worried about. She’s bright and attractive but not threatening. In Play Misty for Me the style is still there, but she is obviously seething underneath. This schism between outer and inner personas makes the film grab you and frighten you. The movie is wonderfully done. For Clint Eastwood, this marked the second film he directed. He was and remains a self-actualizer in his art.</p> <p class="western">Outside the movies one wonders whether an individual can recognize the the threat of pathology from the outset and ward off such behavior, letting self-actualization triumph. Maslow, I believe, would argue that the issue isn’t fundamentally about prescience but is rather about whether basic needs are fulfilled. When there is a need deficiency, that trumps. It matters not whether the need is about physical security, feeling loved, or being respected by peers. Senge argues that the many of us who don’t look at the need from the perspective of a systems approach are inclined to treat the need symptomatically, rather than focus on root cause and addressing that. The symptomatic treatments can be self-defeating, creating a downward spiral, the pathology that we don’t want to see in real life but that makes for great viewing in the movies. </p> <p class="western">* * * * * </p> <p class="western">The driving question in this chapter is whether a regime of guessing and verification makes sense for all of us, self-actualizer or not. Can it be effective for someone with a need deficiency or must the person first climb Maslow’s hierarchy? In what follows, I will argue for both sides of that coin. But before I do, I want to frame the issue differently and see if I can address it from both perspectives. </p> <p class="western">After several years of writing essays as blog posts, I have come to an approach that I really rely on to investigate a new topic, learn what I want from it, and establish my conclusions. First, following the advice of many educators, I search for ties in my own experience with the topic under consideration. This happens in a series of steps, finding one connection, then another, and on and on till a pattern emerges. Then, given that pattern and the original topic, I confront it with other ideas I’m reading about or learning from TV or Film. This may seem an odd step. What reason is there to expect a connection here? I am not deterred by that worry. It seems much of the time something interesting turns up. I start to ask, do I have a story to tell? Can I see the full picture? If the answer is yes, I start to write. If not, I go through another cycle of the same sequence. As I described in the chapter <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://ggames-larvan.blogspot.com/search/label/02%20Writing%20As%20Guessing">Writing as Guessing,</a></u></span> sometimes the sequence happens again after writing has begun, because some other piece of relevant information has come to my attention. It has proven to be a remarkably fertile approach. My impetus to push for Guessing and Verification is that this method has worked so well for me. </p> <p class="western">Alas, when all seems right in the universe, a little red flag goes off in your head indicating things are far from perfect. I want my method to work for everyone, but I know that my Myers-Briggs type is <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.geocities.com/lifexplore/intp.htm">INTP</a></u></span>, less than 1% of the population according to the essay by David Keirsey, with a tendency to connect seemingly unrelated thoughts according to the essay by Hirsch and Kummerow. Might the approach be right for this type only, not for everyone else? That is a depressing thought. I don’t want to be an elitist and, further, the approach seems so right. I puzzle over this for a while. It leads me to the following quandary. </p> <p class="western"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.capt.org/mbti-assessment/mbti-overview.htm">The Myers-Briggs theory</a></u></span> is essentially a horizontal description of personality and how judgments are made. The various types prefer different sorts of judgment under the same environmental conditions, but the types are not to be ranked. No one type is better than another type. I learned about this theory at the Frye Leadership Institute in a session aimed at getting us attendees to appreciate the differences we see in the people we work with. Understanding the MBTI gives some insight into the drivers behind that diversity. In contrast, Maslow’s theory is essentially vertical. After all, it is referred to as the hierarchy of needs. Self-actualization is at the apex of the pyramid. It can be achieved only when all other needs are met. There are various rungs at lower levels. No particular rung can be achieved unless all the needs below it are met. Self-actualization is meant to be a universal, something all of us are capable of achieving but most of us don’t because there are other needs that block it. The quandary results because I associate the INTP type with self-actualization. The type chases an idea till it is fully understood. Isn’t that what the film characters that I idolize were doing? If self-actualization really is a property of that type then it is not a universal. It may be inaccessible to other types even if the rest of their needs a la Maslow are met. </p> <p class="western">This tension requires resolution. I start to admit that maybe it’s not just INTPs who are self-actualizers. Perhaps INTJs and ENTPs also can fit the bill. Maybe it’s only the middle two indices (S-N) and (T-F) that matter, in which case the requisite pattern, NT, is not quite so rare in the overall population. This is a partial offset for feeling stuck but it is not a completely satisfactory response. Then I start to recall that people can behave opposite to their type and if they do that frequently enough, they very well may measure as the opposite. As a practical matter, I understand this quite well. The last time I was tested my (I-E) index measured as borderline. If circumstance places you in situations where you must behave against type, you will. We adapt to our environments. As a theoretical matter, however, I’m confused by this. If type is mutable, does it mutate back when the stimulus is withdrawn? I don’t know. If not, it doesn’t seem very useful in this context at all. Instead, we should be talking about environments that encourage INTP behavior. If type does revert, then maybe Maslow needs to be modified. Everyone can be a self-actualizer but some are more prone to it than others, quite apart from consideration of needs deprivation. Taking this argument as far as it seems to go leads to this uncomfortable zone. I’d like a more democratic outcome but don’t see how to get there from here, at least not this way.</p> <p class="western">That is why I like Maslow’s quote at the beginning of this chapter. His approach is actually about duality. We are both healthy and unhealthy with a struggle between the two. Certainly I see that in myself. I have fears I readily acknowledge, inwardly if not in writing. One is to be placed in a room with people I don’t know. I’m uncomfortable and shy in this setting. If I strike up a conversation, I tend to cling to that person. A social butterfly I am not. Somehow my core belief is that these situations are meant as proving grounds and I am not worthy. As familiarity with the new people develops the core belief melts away. The pressure lessens. I can listen and not be so self-concerned. My healthier being can emerge. </p> <p class="western">As a junior faculty member at Illinois I recall a talk being given by one of the faculty at Northwestern whom I really admired as a graduate student there. This person always seemed so insightful and totally at ease. But when he he started presenting his paper here, do note that the Illinois Economics department isn’t in the same league as Northwestern’s, he was noticeably uncomfortable and visibly nervous. The challenge couldn’t have been intellectual. It must have been because he didn’t know many people in the audience. </p> <p class="western">In movies and TV we rarely get to see this sort of fear depicted. If a character is fearful, it’s because there is a real threat. Fear out of shyness seems unusual. (My belief now is that it is quite ordinary but I’m less sure how to establish that empirically. Hence, I see how those with initial shyness can persist in believing it unusual with no apparent contradiction to the belief.) So I conjecture further that many of us feel ashamed about it and try to cover it up. It’s the cover up rather than the initial discomfort that causes Senge’s downward spiral. Covering up becomes a <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.noogenesis.com/malama/discouragement/helplessness.html">learned behavior in the sense of Seligman</a></u></span>. We may avoid contexts where we might confront people we don’t know. This blocks learning. </p> <p class="western">At least partially for this reason I was afraid of teaching when I first started. The fear was about teaching undergraduates. I was comfortable with my graduate class because I knew, or at least I thought I knew, where their minds should be, so I could teach accordingly. I had no idea of the undergraduate mind at Illinois although I was a Teaching Assistant at Northwestern and was comfortable and well liked by the students in that setting. None of that transferred. My reaction, instead, was like that of the faculty member I so admired. But unlike him I couldn’t get back on the train to return to more comfortable environs in Evanston after my first class. I had to endure it for the full semester. Eventually I grew out of this particular fear, but only through the numbness that comes with much experience, not by some epiphany that might help manage the fear in other circumstances. </p> <p class="western">The fear is not omnipresent. It shows up in certain contexts. Elsewhere it can’t be found. When it is there I fixate on it. When it is gone, I’m free to do other things. Some of that time is for providing self-comfort. When doing so is as a means of compensation, Senge would call it a symptomatic treatment of stress, it should be minimized and we should be aware that’s what we’re doing. Other times it may be a reward in itself. It’s hard to tell the one from the other. There is still time left over to self-actualize, to feel in full health and engage in activities that realize our selves. Keeping this trifold partition of context and time is helpful. It points to how we might manage ourselves and to how the teacher might coach the student.</p> <p class="western">* * * * *</p> <p class="western">Sometimes only proximity matters. Being near makes for being familiar; one step further lies friendship, beyond that affection. Language helps conjure up the right feelings and signifies to the other that the feelings are genuine. We make nicknames; some of them stick; a few endure a long friendship, well after the context from which the nickname emerged has vanished. Parents choose the names for their children. Yet there is an urge to give the kids nicknames when they are infants, as if the actual name isn’t enough, or they’re not yet old enough to use it. The nickname is more immediate, more cuddly. Later on the nickname becomes shorthand for all that was felt when the children were infants. </p> <p class="western">I’ve got two teenage sons. Sometimes I want to call them by their childhood nicknames. The older one tolerates it, grudgingly. The younger one resists, overtly. He wants to be treated as an adult. I don’t blame him. He should want that. Yet it might be that this yen for growing up blocks other needs that will reemerge later. I wonder if in ten or fifteen years he’ll have changed his perspective and then want the nickname, though I confess maybe that is just wishful thinking on my part. Perhaps by happenstance or for some other reason a gap between the generations has developed, where mine wanted nicknames and his doesn’t. </p> <p class="western">I had many nicknames as a kid. Some pained me, an unwelcome reminder of my size (bigger than everyone else my age) and the awkwardness and klutziness that resulted. I can’t really recall but I believe some of these came from counselors at camp. Did they understand the impact from what they were doing beyond the immediate? Was it cruelty that motivated them or just callousness?</p> <p class="western">I had a friend at school, David, whom I only knew there, not outside of school where I had other friends. I sat directly behind David in class for two years in a row at <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://schools.nyc.gov/schoolportals/26/q203/default.htm">P.S. 203</a></u></span>, on Springfield Boulevard. I started second grade there when that school first opened, September 1961. It’s funny what tricks memory plays. I can’t remember whether it was fourth and fifth grade with David or fifth and sixth grade. But I do seem to recall that the first year seats in the classroom faced north, so the room was almost certainly on the west side of the corridor, while the following year it was reversed with the seats facing south and the room on the east side of the corridor (and perhaps on a different floor). David came up with his own nickname for me and even wrote a book about it – Lannisimo Dimpleski: The Facial Features of Lanny Arvan. It took him a day or two or three to do that, several illustrations done in ink and then labeled, made in a way where the pages turned just like a real book. I have no idea where the thought to do that came from. David followed his own interests. The next year he put in significant time trying to convince me that the cap of a <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.stargazette.com/blogs/genx/apbond/img/bic.jpg">Bic pen</a></u></span> was attracted to the pen itself in the same way that iron is attracted to a magnet. He gave me innumerable demonstrations of the seeming effect. Some girl whose name I can’t recall bore witness to many of those. A little saliva on the fingertips and a pinch of the cap in the right spot were the necessary ingredients, though he probably had me going for a while, otherwise he wouldn’t have persisted. David went to a different Junior High School and a different High School too, so I lost track of him after P.S. 203, though I recall bumping into him once later on, perhaps when we took Driver’s Ed; I can’t remember for sure.</p> <p class="western">School embraces a particular view of the importance of proximity and the duration for which close contact should be maintained. Elementary School enables the idiosyncratic form of friendship I had with David. With Middle School there are the beginnings of search for others based on closeness in affinities rather than on nearness in physical space. Students are still taking their classes together but they may no longer be seated next to each other from class to class. One could imagine an alternative approach where it is the teachers who changed classrooms from period to period and the students stayed put, except perhaps for Gym or Music where a special room is needed for instruction. Yet I’m not aware of this alternative actually being implemented anywhere. It must be that there are insufficient supporters for the view that kids that age need the sense of assurance that comes from extended close contact. The way things work now, the kids are in the halls between classes, perhaps visiting their lockers to get the book they need for the next class, perhaps with a quick trip to the head for a bio break, maybe doing a little socialization between classes. The interchange creates a sense of being founded in transiency rather than permanence. And it encourages boisterousness, which perhaps the kids need as a release, but my guess is that they are prone to go overboard in this dimension.</p> <p class="western">The structure changes even more dramatically in High School, where lock step classes are abandoned in favor of an individualized curriculum. Then taking many of the same classes with other kids is a demonstration of affinity, or at least provides support for the notion that the kids are “on the same track academically.” Friendships do develop this way, to be sure. My guess, however, is that affection is a less likely outcome with friendships that only begin to develop in high school and that nicknames to support such relationships are less common. In other words, the sphere of contact certainly enlarges, but the intensity of the relationships may very well lessen. This in itself may be a source of sickness, to use Maslow’s term, if it is only the deep friendships that sustain health. There is, of course, the added factor that with a larger sphere the sense of competition grows stronger regarding popularity, academic performance, sports, and outside of school activities. There are more potential sources for stress. Students who feel assaulted in one or several of these arenas may develop coping strategies that inhibit rather than promote their own growth. They may stop talking up in class or cease to try out new things in their own learning. The fear of being seen to fail can outweigh the impetus that natural curiosity should drive. Of course, this can happen at any age during the school career. My point here is that force of the negative influences strengthens as proximity lessens.</p> <p class="western">These negative motivators may very well encourage a desire in the student to specialize to show competence at too early and age, before such specialization is really a good thing. Hobbies may take on added importance, both as comfort and as a mode of self-expression, while in other broad areas there is a slow tuning out, an example of Senge’s self-reinforcing spiral at play. My sense is that the personality types we measure in adults are formed by the coping strategies these young people come up with during these more formative years. Those strategies harden and become very difficult to reverse. Hence those personality tests, typically administered only after the person has become a mature adult, measure as much about what the person has found he can tolerate and what gives him comfort when in or immediately after situations he can’t tolerate than they are about something that is intrinsic to his nature at birth. </p> <p class="western">I have been thinking of my own sense of desired proximity in work, in teaching, and with my family. I’m driven more by what feels right than by identifying principles and adhering to them in a consistent manner. At work we use first names. The staff who report to me use my first name and I reciprocate. It was likewise this way when I reported to the Campus CIO and more generally in the Campus information technology organization. The emphasis is on informality, getting things done, and in that regards we’re co-equals even if the org chart indicates some degree of hierarchy. This symmetry is peculiar to work. In teaching undergraduates, in particular, I want them to call me Professor Arvan. Use of the title Professor indicates respect and creates a sense of space between us. Here I do not reciprocate. I still use first names when addressing a student. This pretty much matches how I feel about names within the family. I want my boys to call me Dad. They prefer that I use their first name, though shorter versions are okay, maybe better. The exception seems to be that sometimes as adults we use first names to talk about our own parents. That is either because we’re doing that with our spouses or because with their failing health we feel a need to objectify their condition, in which case use of the first name actually creates distance. </p> <p class="western">Beyond the names I have an idiosyncratic sense of when to reduce distance and when to increase it. One driver is about what subject matter would be discussed if distance closed. Much of our lives seem to be caught up in minutiae. As fodder for the small talk with which we buffer our more serious conversations, that’s fine. It provides richer context and shows we’re human. As the main object of the conversation, however, this would drive me nuts. I deliberately increase distance to avoid those sort of conversations, both in the family and at work. On the other hand, if I sense the conversation can have richness and depth, I will make effort to reduce distance. I changed jobs a few years ago, partly with this in mind. I have a very small work group now. Before I had two units reporting to me each with a dozen or so staff and in turn that was part of a much larger organization. It was very hard to reduce distance in that setting. I prefer the current arrangement and feel I’m very close to the people I work with. </p> <p class="western">It is different with students in that I seem to prefer to keep some distance, even with very bright students in a small class setting. An argument can be made that this feeling persists as a virtual vestigial organ. I started to teach when I was 25 and my undergraduate students were only a few years younger. Insecure in that role, I felt a need to establish my authority with them and keeping a distance was part of that. Then, too, I became aware over time that some students will take advantage, that proctoring was a necessary function, that rules in the syllabus needed to be enforced. This can be done by maintaining distance. Proximity encourages discretion at the expense of rules. These “lessons” happened while teaching intermediate microeconomics, a course where many students are there because it’s required, not because they want to learn the subject matter. Much of the student behavior I’m referring to can be seen as gaming a system that places many unwelcome requirements in the path of students. There is a tit for tat between students and instructor that provides a different example of Senge’s downward spiral. Yet I no longer teach that course. The students I’ve taught recently have been highly able and well motivated. But the desired sense of distance remains. </p> <p class="western">I’m aware of the contradiction and have been searching for an alternate explanation. I don’t have a full one but here are some slivers. The academic culture encourages this sort of distance, certainly with undergraduates, even with graduate students too. Academia is neither apartheid nor a purely egalitarian system. It offers a range of terrain in between and most of us just look to find a comfortable spot where by our presence we don’t make waves. It’s not an attractive view to be defined by the culture, but surely that’s a part of it. Next, courses are unlike work in the sense that I’m consumed by work but a course being just a fraction of the work commands my attention only some of the time. Likewise for the students; they take many courses and the one with me is only a piece of the tapestry. With the more limited scope of interaction, the nearness may not be warranted. The third bit is generational. There are so many parts of their lives of which I am ignorant because I grew up at a different time. Closeness would demand remedying that. Rationally, that makes sense if the reward justifies the effort, but not otherwise. </p> <p class="western">Let me summarize and bring the discussion back to my core questions. I’ve belabored these ideas about closeness to get ready for the point I want to make about encouraging guessing and verification. It is suitable for people with a need deficiency. Almost all of us have need deficiencies in one form or another. Guessing and verification would be a very elitist approach indeed if it were left only to those without such deficiencies. People who embark on an approach of guessing and verification, particularly if this happens when they are a little older and have already established other patterns to “learn” will need a lot of help and encouragement at the outset. Guessing makes one vulnerable, particularly if there is no track record of prior success. That vulnerability must be protected. Perhaps the very best teachers can do that. I, as a teacher, probably can’t. And if I can it will happen during office hours like sessions, not in the classroom. The protection requires the coach to get very close to the learner. Successes and failures must be endured under this close configuration. Eventually confidence will be established and guessing and verification can replace the previous pattern. At that time the coach can withdraw to a greater distance. Doing so prematurely, however, will cause damage, perhaps irreparably so. </p> <p class="western">The closeness creates a safe haven where the fear is absent. In such a safe haven, anyone can self-actualize. The coach has two jobs. One is to make the safe haven. The other is to encourage self-actualization in the learner once the safe haven has been created. It is art. There is no template for doing this sort of work, though there are perhaps general ideas to follow to make it more likely. Making a safe haven is like meeting a new friend. Encouraging self-actualization is probably best by example; going through an explicit sequence of guessing and verification. We need adult versions of my childhood friend David to make it happen.</p> <p class="western">* * * * * </p> <p class="western">Leverage has become a dirty word as of late, especially the financial variety. It’s come to mean taking undo risks with somebody else’s money. Given the limited liability created by the bankruptcy laws, when the investment doesn’t pan out still others have to absorb the remaining risk and clean up the mess. With the hindsight from watching events unfold since the burst of the housing market bubble, it certainly seems that high financial leverage smacks of irresponsibility. </p> <p class="western">All of us in our beliefs tend to engage in a psychological variant of Newton’s Third Law. Suffering the consequences from excessive risk taking in the financial markets, we’re apt to become exceedingly cautious. Indeed, caution in financial matters may be prudent nowadays. This piece from <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200905/goldberg-economy">The Atlantic</a></u></span> by Jeffrey Goldberg typifies the thinking. </p> <p class="western">However, taking caution in making “real investments” where financing is not required is likely a mistake. Consider trying to institute change in your own place of work. Or consider making change in society as a whole. What type of change should we look for? Senge argues that we should look for leverage – possibly small and not hard to implement changes that if they occurred would have substantial impact. It’s the big impact from the small change he says we should be after. My own spin on Senge’s approach is to try to kill two birds with one stone; look for changes that address more than one issue at a time. I’m going to propose such a change here. </p> <p class="western">I come to ideas over time, a bit here, another bit there. Soon after turning fifty, I started to contemplate my retirement. I don’t mean not working. I mean severing my relationship with the University of Illinois and doing something else. I read something about the Japanese retirement system and how it compares to the American system. At age 60 in Japan a person is forced out of their previous (lifetime) job but they don’t stop working. They do something else, a type of work that acknowledges where they are in the life cycle, with wisdom but lacking the energy of youth. They continue to work in this other job till age 70 or so. In America, there is no mandatory retirement. But typically retirement happens at 60 and most people don’t reenter the labor force afterwards. In America we don’t make sufficient productive use of our senior citizens. That is a shame. </p> <p class="western">At about the same time, I was reading about how hard it is to recruit high caliber people to teach in the schools. I put two and two together and wrote this piece on <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://lanny-on-learn-tech.blogspot.com/2006/04/second-careers-and-k-12.html">Second Careers and K-12</a></u></span>. Considering my own views about retirement and guessing the talent pool among seniors looking for a second career might be richer than what the schools can attract now, I thought it was an interesting idea. But I knew there was a problem with it. I’ve got a hard enough time working with my son one-on-one doing his math homework. Could I handle a whole class of kids like my son? If I couldn’t, would it be reasonable to expect that senior citizens could or would want to? Because of that criticism, the idea got put on the back burner.</p> <p class="western">More recently I’ve written a piece about <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://lanny-on-learn-tech.blogspot.com/2008/12/plas-please.html">Personal Learning Agendas</a></u></span>, which I discussed in Chapter 1. I wrote that because I thought my profession, learning technology, was putting the cart before the horse with its recent focus on personal learning environments, a kind of technology or set of technologies, rather than focus on the behavior that the technology is supposed to engender. The question for me then is what creates a hunger for that sort of behavior? What habits should be created? What role should school play and what should be driven by the kid himself outside of school? The answer I gave was that learning needs to be a significant piece of the kid’s recreation time with reading, going to the movies and to live performance, participating in culture in any way shape or form that leads to personal growth, and developing a desire to follow one’s own interests in the process rather than always depending on someone else to prescribe these activities as the essence. Adults can lead kids in this direction, but at some point there needs to be a baton pass where the kid takes control. </p> <p class="western">There are the two birds. The first is that seniors in their second careers should be involved in teaching young adults. The second is that students should develop a Personal Learning Agenda. Now let’s throw in a third bird from the previous section of this chapter; students need a safe haven to self-actualize. With that, the suggested change should be transparent. Get seniors to coach young adults one-on-one with the aim to develop their Personal Learning Agendas. Call it mentoring, or cross generational learning partnership, or whatever else you want, but make sure when implemented it is done widely and deeply. </p> <p class="western">If this idea does materialize, it will probably happen in stages. Companies that want to do something for the communities in which they are situated might start a volunteer program of this sort, focusing on current employees rather than on retirees. It could be offered as an after school program or a weekend activity done through the local public library. Workshops could be given to ready the employees for this volunteer activity. The students would themselves volunteer for the activity. Some resources would be given, perhaps jointly by the companies and the local governments to evaluate these volunteer programs, both to fine tune them and to assess their effectiveness. Should the results prove promising the efforts might then scale up with the thought that mentoring might be a second career activity, not just a voluntary contribution. </p> <p class="western">Resources would need to be found to support this to make it work. Some might reasonably argue that as it is now many school districts don’t have the resources to pay the teachers well. How could such communities possibly add another layer of personnel? Mentoring by seniors might be a good thing for those who are rich enough, but what if we can’t afford it? It is an important question. </p> <p class="western">I believe one of the lessons from the current financial crisis is that we need pension insurance. Pensions should return to the defined benefit variety, but the benefits must be regulated in such a way that it is credible to pay them, reasonable but not excessive benefits. The hostile takeovers from 10 or 20 years ago, at root driven so the corporate raider could pillage the pension fund (actions that presaged the current crisis) can’t be allowed to happen again. If that type of pension system existed, then one could link benefit payment to the mentoring activity (or possibly to other service or second career work). One might not then call it pension, because there would be service rendered in exchange for receiving payment. But the payment would be funded as pensions are currently funded today. In other words, the entire social contract would need to be redone. Mentoring as second career would be a significant part. Surely, this is a very large change. It can start, however, with something small.</p> <p class="western">This is another reason for why I really like the Maslow quote that leads off this chapter, where he refers to mental well being as a matter of health. It is now fashionable (and I believe is no doubt correct) to argue that preventative health care is much more effective and much less expensive than remedial care that is necessary once a serious condition has developed. Nowadays, a student gets one-on-one help from a psychologist, a social worker, an occupational therapist, etc. only when a chronic condition has manifest. A student in good mental health does not have access to one-on-one interaction with an informed and sympathetic adult. Why not? Shouldn’t we be putting more of our resources into promoting the mental well being of our children? The mentoring program I am proposing does just that. </p> <p class="western">This topic might very well deserve a full chapter of its own, maybe even a book, and the reader may feel I’m giving it short shrift here. Indeed, I am. I went through this exercise, however, not to elucidate this idea but rather to show a democratic approach to guessing and verification is possible. </p> <p class="western">* * * * *</p> <p class="western">The focus of this book is on learning in school and on learning out of school while at the age where the kids attend school. One might also consider the issues of guessing and verification for those more mature, who have a full time job. Can work be a source for self-actualization? What role should peers play, and what of supervisors? After all, we live in the knowledge society. Work and individual learning are intertwined for that reason. </p> <p class="western">These are rather large questions. I want to make just one point about them and then close. The last several weeks I’ve done more than my usual norm of silliness and humorous activities, mostly because it felt like the right thing to do, partly as a diversion from other things at work. I’ve shared those with a variety of other people and was somewhat surprised by the consistency of the reaction, something to the effect of, “Thanks for that. I really needed it. It’s been a tough day.” These are coming from learning technology folks in Higher Ed, some on my campus, others elsewhere around the country. </p> <p class="western">The sense from this is that in their regular work these people feel under assault. Budget cuts are probably a good part of that. These folks are likely doing not only their own job but the jobs of colleagues who are no longer there as work partners or of student assistants that their unit can no longer afford to hire. It may also be because with the threat of additional future cuts there is a challenge to mission and a nagging, “what’s this all for?” question undergirding everything they do. Senge might call this treating symptoms rather than addressing root causes, but it seems clear enough that these people need to relax and enjoy themselves a bit and that they are unable to do this sufficiently on their own. The jokes and silliness may be temporary and play the role of bromides only. Yet I think they have potential for more, to set the tone of work. In one of my favorites of all time, Russell Baker in his Observer column wrote of <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://evolvethought.blogspot.com/2006/02/seriously.html">the distinction between being serious and being solemn</a></u></span>. Let us strive to be serious and then, have fun with it </p>Lanny Arvanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05597426421997599777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331075451664544793.post-4614548317540205252009-04-17T08:15:00.003-05:002009-05-14T10:12:22.481-05:00Guessing and Verification<p class="western"></p><blockquote><p class="western">We have already noted in passing the intuitive confidence required of the poet and the literary critic in practicing their crafts: the need to proceed in the absence of agreed-upon criteria for the choice of an image or the formulation of the critique. It is difficult for a teacher, a textbook, a demonstration film, to make explicit provision for the cultivation of courage in taste. As likely as not, courageous taste rests upon confidence in one’s intuitions about what is moving, what is beautiful, what is tawdry. In a culture such as ours, where there is so much toward uniformity in taste in our mass media of communication, so much fear of idiosyncratic style, indeed a certain suspicion of the idea of style altogether, it becomes the more important to nurture confident intuition in the realm of literature and the arts. Yet one finds a virtual vacuum of research on this topic in the educational literature.</p> <p class="western"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Process-Education-Jerome-Bruner/dp/0674710010/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1237566970&sr=8-1">The Process of Education</a></u></span>, by Jerome Bruner, p. 67</p></blockquote><p class="western"></p> <p class="western">For my eighth birthday in January 1963 my parents gave me and my friends a real treat. They took us to see <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056085/">How the West Was Won</a></u></span>, one of the early movies to use the then new technology, Cinerama, three projectors synchronized to produce a single image, widescreen before there was widescreen. We couldn’t see the movie at the local theater; the screen wasn’t big enough and didn’t curve at all; we had to go <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?daddr=212th+St+%26+56th+Ave,+Queens,+NY+11364&geocode=&dirflg=&saddr=Syosset,+NY&f=d&sll=40.751825,-73.76667&sspn=0.008063,0.013475&ie=UTF8&z=11">way out to Syosset</a></u></span> to see the movie. That made it even more special. I really didn’t remember the movie at all but a few years back it started to show up on the TCM channel, so I watched much of it again. I’ve done likewise with <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052948/">Journey to the Center of the Earth</a></u></span> and a few other adventure classics from childhood. The sense of awe is no longer there, the wonder created by the technology completely lost, but the storyline is still interesting and some of the characters and style of narration make it fun to view.</p> <p class="western">The Jimmy Stewart character, Linus Rawlings, is emblematic of the “rugged individualist,” <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://braddelong.posterous.com/beard-the-myth-of-rugged-ameri">the myth of whom</a></u></span> survives till this day. Rawlings is essentially nomadic, with the canoe the preferred mode of transportation, the clothes on his back and the packs he totes in the canoe the totality of his belongings, earning a living as a trapper. He’s a boy’s model of a hero, able to fend for himself, amiable in the company of good people, ready for a snort of whiskey when the opportunity avails, and good with his fists in a fight. I would not have focused on this character but for recently watching the old (1978) TV miniseries, <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076993/">Centennial</a></u></span>. I purchased the boxed set on DVD so I could watch while riding the stationary bike. I’m now a little more than halfway through it. Like How the West Was Won, it chronicles multiple generations, taking an essentially historical approach to the town in Colorado that bears the name of the series title. </p> <p class="western">The film begins with the French Canadian trader Pasquinel, played by Robert Conrad, paddling his canoe into Indian Territory in the latter part of the 18<sup>th</sup> century. While in his tent seemingly asleep, an Arapaho Indian quietly enters, to see what is going on. Pasquinel opens his eyes and they are eyeball to eyeball. Pasquinel shows no fear, thus they do not fight but instead emerge from the situation as friends. Lame Beaver, the Indian, learns to trust Pasquinel. Their friendship goes beyond the honest trading they do. Ultimately Pasuqinel weds Lame Beaver’s daughter because Lame Beaver promises to her that Pasquinel, rather than some other Arapaho, will take good care of her. </p> <p class="western">It occurred to me almost immediately in the watching that Pasquinel is essentially the same character as Linus Rawlings, courageous and strong, seemingly without fear and encouraging the trust of others, beyond that willing to keep his own counsel and see the situation as it is, and willing to endure hardship if necessary. In fighting with other Indians, Pasquinel took an arrow in the back. Painful as it was, he continued on with the arrowhead remaining in a hard to remove place in his lower back for many years, until his friend McKeag had to cut it out because the injury was emitting poisons and if not removal Pasquinel would die. </p> <p class="western">This is the image of the hero that my generation grew up with. The image changed as we matured. Our personal experience and the times in which we lived demanded a somewhat different idea. What we read and saw in the movies encouraged us to reconsider. I can’t remember what class it was where we read <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Giants-Earth-Prairie-Perennial-Classics/dp/0060931930">Giants in the Earth</a></u></span>, but it must have been English not Social Studies; circa 1970-71 the High Schools were not yet progressive enough to have us learn history from a novel rather than a textbook. Per Hansa, Rolvaag’s protagonist, is a protector in a way that Pasquinel definitely is not. Per Hansa, his family, and his neighbors are not adventure seekers. They endure hardship, the first winter on the Great Plains is especially brutal, but they only seek the good life, not glory and redemption. </p> <p class="western">Then, too, we learned that some of the most important life decisions are not about survival per se but about which cause to serve. With that, courage could coexist with fear and self-loathing. Hemingway’s notion, grace under pressure, reflected behavior during the moment of truth. Feelings before or after could be far from noble. Monsieur Rick, Humphrey Bogart in his starring role in <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034583/">Casablanca</a></u></span>, makes a conscious choice at the pivotal time in the story. He is a hero. He could survive either way, but only one path led to self-respect, and honor. That path entails sacrifice. He does not get the girl. He sees that he cannot, but he is blind to this at first. He must go through a drunken rage where he feels entitled and bitter. What he feels should be his has been taken away through what seems a betrayal. This is followed by a confrontation with Ilsa, the Ingrid Bergman character, the betrayer who nonetheless embodies beauty and grace, who it turns out was not disloyal at all, just caught up in impossible circumstances that couldn’t be explained at the time. The ugliness and misunderstanding Rick goes through only then to see what actually happened produces a new resolve and a strong sense of what is right. </p> <p class="western">Other stories suggested either that the original image no longer made sense in the twentieth century or that it could be overdone resulting in the most pernicious of consequences. John Hersey’s <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/War-Lover-John-Hersey/dp/0394450981">The War Lover</a></u></span> is a morality play in the guise of a story about American aviators based in Britain during World War II. It’s a variant of the tortoise and the hare, with the Per Hansa character as the tortoise and the Linus Rawlings or Pasquinel character as the hare. The co-pilot, Bo Boman, plays the role of Per Hansa but he doesn’t realize he is doing so till well into the story. The pilot, Buzz Marrow, is a larger than life character like Rawlings and Pasquinel. It is he to whom the book title refers. War is not meant to be loved. War horrifies. At best it can be survived. In such an endurance contest, slow and steady does indeed win. Marrow goes over the deep end, rejected by Daphne who favors Boman. Marrow literally cracks up after their plane has been hit. The hero from centuries past is the villain in this story. It is Boman who flies the plane to safety, rescuing the crew. </p> <p class="western">We’ve seen the Marrow character or variants thereof in real life. Think of <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://mediamatters.org/items/200411230004">G. Gordon Liddy</a></u></span> or of <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.gwu.edu/%7Ensarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB113/">Oliver North</a></u></span>. There was bravado in their style. They openly exhibited numbness to the pernicious consequences of their actions. In their testimony and public appearances they were matter of fact in their descriptions of what happened where the rest of us would be unsettled because of the evil in the behavior. They aligned themselves with causes initially hidden from public view, the dirty work for a government that couldn’t achieve its ends out in the open because doing so violated the law and public trust. In the War Lover Daphne says near the end of the book that war itself is a consequence of the attitudes of such men, that they like the fight. Perhaps that is true with Liddy and North as well, the covert nature of what they did something they sought irrespective of mission goals. What else would a Rawlings or Pasquinel do when following a path to fame and fortune no longer placed their personal safety in jeopardy? </p> <p class="western">I suppose for this reason that as I was maturing from adolescence to adulthood most of the memorable characters from film or fiction – Yossarian from <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Catch-22-Joseph-Heller/dp/0684833395">Catch 22</a></u></span>, Hawkeye Pierce from <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066026/">Mash</a></u></span>, J.J. Gittes from <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071315/">Chinatown</a></u></span> – were of the antihero variety and all the stories had a double edged quality to them. That matched the tenor of the times and seemed to give the stories more depth. I’m less observant of the mass culture nowadays, but I’ve got the feeling that only recently have we been able to publicly champion the hero in an unbridled way – NYC’s finest in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the pilot and crew of flight 1549 after the emergency landing in the Hudson river – and that seems first and foremost because survival was at issue in those cases and the actions of these true life heroes saved lives. </p> <p class="western">* * * * *</p> <p class="western">As an educator, I love the Jerome Bruner passage that leads off this chapter. Courageous taste is a wonderful notion, grounded after a long cultivation, producing an intuitive sense of what is pleasing and what is not, and with that a willingness to be completely open about it. A critic with courageous taste can articulate a strong point of view about some other work, where other opinion of the work is not yet present to serve as a basis for that point of view. An artist with courageous taste can produce a fundamentally new work, referencing prior art to be sure but producing something that is far from a replica of a previous creation. </p> <p class="western">Yet I think it not a simple matter to tie Bruner’s idea to the more common images of courage and heroism that I sketched in the previous section. We might be able to identify the grace in the work produced by an exercise of courageous taste. There is the potential for that, although it seems possible, even likely, that if as viewers we don’t understand the issues with which the critic or artist is grappling then we’ll miss the elegance and insight of the contribution. Implicit in Hemingway’s terse definition of courage is that the primitives are readily recognizable. What happens when they aren’t? It’s even harder with pressure. Voicing an opinion, writing poetry, creating a piece of artwork may be important activities, but none are matters of life and death. If raw survival is not at stake, where is the pressure? Bruner ultimately wants to ask whether we can teach courageous taste to children. In that context, of course, there is peer pressure. Understanding how much children are vexed by the perceptions of peers, for a child who is establishing her identity through expression of courageous taste, perhaps we can see the Hemingway ideal apply. Bruner, however, defines his concept by talking about experienced professionals who have been practicing their craft for some time. Is it fear of the Monday Morning Quarterbacks that keeps these professionals up at night? If not, is there heroism in their work nonetheless? This seems to me to be a hard question to address directly. So I want to postpone doing that and first go to something simpler. </p> <p class="western">It is time to turn to the subject of this chapter, verification. To let the cat out of the bag, I want to argue that verification is largely a courageous act, perhaps more in the sense of Per Hansa than in the sense of Linus Rawlings or Pasquinel, but courageous without any doubt. Ideas have life to them. Verification is principally about preservation of ideas, especially when they are in jeopardy and under assault. </p> <p class="western">The threat may not yet be apparent so let’s make it more overt by focusing on self-teaching. We live in the knowledge society where we do specialized work and are remarkably dependent on the work of others. In spite of the interconnectedness there is a sense where the notion of rugged individualism survives to this day. It is manifest in self-teaching, wherein I mean learning that doesn’t come with explicit coaching from others, though it can depend on books, movies, etc. that others have already produced as long as that production was not done specifically to enhance the learning of this individual in this instant. Such specific production would be coaching, which is what I want to rule out. The ability to self-teach creates a certain sense of independence, the same sort of independence the child feels when she can feed herself, no longer needing to be spoon fed. The child still relies on the parent, but now also on herself and the relationship to the parent changes as a consequence. So too it is with self-teaching. </p> <p class="western">For anyone who does self-teach, and to a certain extent we all do this, the natural questions emerge: Do we know what we’ve been trying to teach ourselves? If so, how do we know that we know? These questions demand good answers. </p> <p class="western">When I was a young kid there was a TV game show hosted by Merv Griffin called <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.oldtvtickets.com/archives1/2006/01/play_your_hunch.html">Play Your Hunch</a></u></span>. Other than the name, I really don’t recall the show at all. I mention it here because I definitely do not want to take pot shots at that show, nor at the correct observation that real time decision making often requires making a choice with far less information than what one might want. I do want to challenge, however, the relying on a “gut feeling” when there is information available to refute the assertion and time enough to gather that information. In this case relying on the gut feeling is irresponsible, which is how much of the American Public feels now about the Bush Administration’s original justification for prosecuting the war in Iraq. This in itself doesn’t mean that acts of verification are courageous. In normal parlance we distinguish between acting responsibly and acting courageously, the former not necessarily implying the latter. In the opposite direction, courage of the Per Hansa kind does necessitate a strong sense of responsibility, so let’s be perfectly clear. In my agenda to advocate for guessing, which I certainly want to do in this, I want to advocate equally for doing so responsibly, which means verification needs to go hand in hand with guessing wherever possible. </p> <p class="western">There is a tendency to fall into a trap when thinking about verification, believing it little more than busy work, a necessary bit near the end of the process before calling it quits. Even Bruner falls into this trap. In the Process of Education Bruner has a delightful chapter on Intuitive and Analytic thinking. It is the former that holds the exalted perch, perhaps because it is hard to teach, or because it is comparatively rare to observe. Bruner’s chapter focuses on mathematics. Professional mathematicians so value intuition. On occasion a brilliant mathematician discovers a theorem through intuition, but then is <i>reduced to prove the theorem through analytic means</i>. In other words, discovery is elevated while validation is ordinary. </p> <p class="western">This is just plain wrong on the validation part, as consideration of that most famous of conjectures, <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/proof/">Fermat’s Last Theorem</a></u></span>, clearly indicates. It took over 300 years from when the conjecture was posed to establish its proof, a triumph of both will and ingenuity. Clearly, verification was not a pedestrian matter in this instance. Why do we assume otherwise as the norm? </p> <p class="western">Verification is fundamentally about providing validity for a proposition. This is done by following a path different from the original path that led to the idea in the first instance. If evidence of the truth of the proposition is found when reaching the conclusion of the alternate path, confidence in the proposition increases. (If the inference from reaching the conclusion is inductive, it may be necessary to follow many alternative paths to get the requisite confidence. With deductive reasoning, one alternative path should suffice.) When the gateway to the alternate path is evident, the path is well illuminated, and it is easy to traverse, then there is no heroism to verification. Most schools teach verification as error checking, implicitly assuming each of these conditions has been met. Then error checking is necessary but it is mostly drudgery, spelling and grammar mistakes, arithmetic errors, or the like. Because it is perceived as such, many students don’t develop the habit to do these sorts of checks. Consider the following alternative question. Is this an interesting path to follow given the proposition under consideration? That type of checking happens far less frequently. It’s the type of question that would motivate the student to take verification more seriously.</p> <p class="western">While one might associate verification with mathematical proof or the scientific method, it is important in many other fields of endeavor. Take <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.journalism.org/resources/principles">journalism</a></u></span>, for example. Having multiple sources and disclosing as much about those sources as possible is fundamental to the method. In a fascinating <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=20696">review by Russell Baker</a></u></span> of a book by Robert Novak chronicling his life as reporter, columnist, and pundit there is some good drill down that discusses the motives of the source and the reporter alike and how they see the investigative journalism as a kind of bargain. Because a source has his own agenda and that is understood as a matter of course, there has to be corroboration. The movie version of <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074119/">All The President’s Men</a></u></span>, makes clear the yin and yang of whether the “Woodstein” team had the story or not. The game is not just between the reporters and their sources, but also between the reporters and their editor, and then between that editor and the editorial board. Verification is not absolute. It is weighed for the business sense of scooping rival newspapers, for the potential liability in case the story proves false and the person(s) who are the object of the story sue the paper, and for what standards of professional journalism demand. </p> <p class="western">Let me give a simple example to illustrate that verification comes up in all sorts of contexts, many where we are not conscious that’s what we’re doing. On occasion in my job I’ve had the opportunity to hire new staff through a formal job search. Invariably in the job description we use the phrase, “salary commensurate with qualifications,” meaning we don’t have a number pegged in ahead of time, though I will have had a prior conversation with my Dean and the Business Manager about a ballpark figure. The question then is how does that get set? Since I work at a public university, staff salary is a matter of public record. So my task is to identify current staff around campus whom I think are comparable to what we’re looking for in the position and then find what each of them are paid. There is an odd combination of experience, specialized knowledge, formal education, and personal disposition that affect just how comparable these other people actually are. Coming up with a ballpark without this information is well nigh impossible. At the absolute trough of the housing market after the bubble burst, bankers were in that position vis-à-vis real estate values since there were essentially no transactions to monitor of homes being bought and sold.</p> <p class="western">This sort of verification provides information, in this case the salary range of comparable staff elsewhere at the University, but otherwise has no effect on the learner’s world view. In that sense it is well within the comfort zone of the learner. The more interesting case to consider is where the learner stretches himself beyond current capabilities, creating a potential for deeper learning, but also taking a risk of failure. Indeed, a post mortem on a serious try that ended in failure would be most illuminating about the issues with verification when the alternate path is not well illuminated or is hard to traverse. Typically, however, one does not keep good records of past failures. Like the crumpled up balls of paper a struggling writer produces when trying to draft a document, most of our aborted creations that ultimately result in failure end up in the (virtual) trash bin. I did stumble upon one of those as an email attachment in the process of writing this chapter. From that I will attempt to reconstruct what happened and the issues that emerged during that experience. </p> <p class="western">At around the time I read that Russell Baker review of Robert Novak’s book, I saw <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036244/">The Ox-bow Incident</a></u></span> on the TCM channel. It is a movie from more than 60 years ago, but it is still a powerful indictment against the rule of the mob, and from reading some of history about the film it apparently was quite controversial when it appeared because of the implication that Fascism could readily have emerged in the U.S. I also read the John le Carré novel <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Constant-Gardener-John-Carre/dp/0743215052">The Constant Gardner</a></u></span> and then saw <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387131/">the movie</a></u></span> with Ralph Fiennes in the title role. All these works seemed strangely interconnected to me. Their story lines were quite different, but each featured a soft spoken, intense, and intelligent individual overwhelmed by another force that was considerably louder, brusque, and oblivious to the harm it caused. I started to write a blog post entitled, Bluster and Understatement. My usual pattern is to author those in MS Word first, producing about a five page document, and then copy and paste into the blog for posting. In this case I produced about three quarters of a page and stopped. I don’t frequently get writer’s block, but here I was stuck. </p> <p class="western">Most of my postings tie some personal experience, say from watching a TV program or reading some magazine article, to some issue with teaching and learning with technology, my professional field. On occasion, for the latter I make specific reference to things going on at my campus, the writing is more particularized that way and hence I believe more compelling to read. The vast majority of these pieces would ruffle no feathers whatsoever. Infrequently, I take on a more controversial subject. I have fairly strong internal filters, some which developed while I was a campus level administrator for almost ten years and occasionally in the public view, so unlike others I would not simply stake out an extreme position to see what reaction that would create from my readers. Instead, I would aim to make a fairly tight analytic argument and make sure to consider the issue from multiple perspectives. Readers might still not like it, but my goal was definitely to produce something balanced and if I felt what I wrote met that goal then I’d be okay with publishing it to the blog. </p> <p class="western">In this case I did want to tie to some things going on around campus at the time, but I couldn’t see how to do that without seeming accusatory in the writing and doing that was a no-no. My sense is that had I been able to resolve this tension the resulting posting would have made for compelling reading. Other times where I’ve stretched myself to take on tougher issues in the writing, I’ve gotten feedback from readers indicating they really appreciated the perspective. Rather than persist, however, and continue to search for that resolution this time around, I stopped. Not seeing how to get unstuck, I quit. </p> <p class="western">The courage of Per Hansa was in persisting and seeing it through. The courageous taste Jerome Bruner talks about implies the confidence to get unstuck in circumstances like these. About a year after going through this experience I found this piece, <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1269900.1268831&coll=ACM&dl=ACM">Successful Students’ Strategies for Getting Unstuck</a></u></span>, from the ACM Portal. (Your Campus may need to subscribe for you to have access.) Below is an excerpt from one of the students. I really liked how he expressed it.</p> <p class="western"><span style="font-family:SFTI0900,Times New Roman,serif;"><i><blockquote>I would say, deviate from the assignments on your own time and write programs that you think are completely useless and stupid. You think of these programs, no one’s going to use them. ... Just do it anyway because you’ll understand. You’ll run into problems and you’ll find the solutions to that problem. [...] And then, when the school project does come, you’ll have had the experience from what you’ve done on your own. But I think it’s important that you don’t just do the schools. You’ve got to do it on your own.</blockquote></i></span></p> <p class="western">Certainly much of being stuck is not having sufficient familiarity with the environment to let ingenuity take over and try out interesting possibilities. The noodling around done beforehand enables the sense of confidence, in large part because it creates a good deal of familiarity as well as repeated prior success. Yet I believe it easier to envision the benefit from writing dippy little computer programs that nobody else sees than to imagine writing short essays on controversial topics held in confidence because with the former the author can still see whether the programs runs and do what they are supposed to do while with the latter there is not an obvious test for the essays to pass. Nonetheless, the point on noodling and gaining familiarity still holds. </p> <p class="western">Persistence is not the only issue. Patience is also important. Most of us are aware of the problems generated by getting ahead of ourselves since athletes constantly bring it up when discussing their own performance. A case in point, with the Masters golf tournament just concluded, <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/golf/mastersaugusta/5146770/Masters-2009-Angel-Cabrera-wins-as-Kenny-Perry-stumbles-and-Phil-Mickelson-stalls.html">Kenny Perry had the tournament won</a></u></span>, up by two strokes with two holes to play only to bogey those last two holes and then to find the victory not to be, a bitter pill to swallow. The article asks how long it will take for Perry to recover from the setback, entirely ignoring his performance over the first 70 holes of the tournament, which was magnificent. </p> <p class="western">Personally I find the problem not severe at all in my writing. Over time and owing to my economics training in grad school, I’ve disciplined myself to look hard for the holes in the argument and see where it might fall apart. I test the writing both during the pre-write stage and when proof reading. (I’m much less patient about typos and many of those do get through.) Most of the time I’m confident there are no land mines to be found with the writing, though even with that confidence there is still worry that one might be there. A more realistic appraisal, however, indicates the problem is present when in conversation, where often those checks are set aside and we get caught up in the enthusiasm of the moment. There is a strong desire to want the answer immediately and not work through the intermediate steps. Doing that could put a damper on the enthusiasm. It’s usually not avoidance of responsibility that is the cause, however. It’s more a kind of infatuation with the idea. Feeling it has to be right, the urge is to let’s just do it. Play-your-hunch is temptation. Courage is required to fight this devil. </p> <p class="western">My personal solution is to develop the habit of writing up something afterwards, even when there is agreement to go forwards verbally ahead of time. This builds in some opportunity for reconsideration if the mine does become visible. But I’m not always conscious of the need at the time, so on more than one occasion I have had to backtrack on commitments made. Sometimes it feels as if there can be enthusiasm or patience but not both. The answer is not grim determination, certainly not as the long term solution. Better to aim for moderate amounts of patience and enthusiasm each of which sustains. I’m no hero. I typically can’t do that. But it is something I strive for.</p> <p class="western">* * * * *</p> <p class="western">Memory plays tricks on us. Mine seemingly is doing it more frequently now. I thought I had written the blog post titled Bluster and Understatement. But when I searched for it, I couldn’t find it. That puzzled me. I’m vexed by such puzzles. So I looked some more. </p> <p class="western">I note the date of the Russell Baker review, October 2007. I look in the My Documents folder on my computer for something around that time. I still can’t find anything. I tell myself to forget about it. Go back to writing this chapter. Yet I dawdle on the writing and can’t stop fixating on the blog post. I get annoyed with myself because I’m wasting time. I’m not finding the blog post and I’m not producing text for this chapter. It doesn’t matter. The fixation is getting stronger. I need to find the blog post. It’s an incredible urge. </p> <p class="western">Eventually it occurs to me to look at my email archive from around that time and search for messages I may have sent myself which have a file attachment (for me to continue working on later). I do that with some frequency when I write at home and the office. That’s the way I port the file from one place to the other. Lo and behold, I find something this way. I’ve got the file attachment but it’s only the beginning of the document, not the completed thing. So I need to check at home on the computer there for whether there’s a fuller version at that location. I do that. Alas, it’s the same short document but now it is in the My Documents folder at home. I’m forced to conclude I never wrote the entire thing. </p> <p class="western">This little episode is itself an example of verification. It is verification impelled by being vexed about not finding the blog post. Developing these sorts of fixations is an ingrained habit. Chatting with my friend Steve Acker about this, I mentioned how I get locked in on something and when that happens I can’t think of anything else. I must address that thing, solve it some way, shape, or form. Only then can I move on. In telling Steve about this I called it a vice. Sometimes I get fixated on things that are really trivial and of no consequence to anyone in any other context, myself included. Steve, however, argued it was a virtue, an important learning habit. Resolve a situation when you feel vexed. Do whatever it takes to come to a reasonable conclusion. I suppose it can cut both ways. Perhaps to become Per Hansa we need fixation.</p> <p class="western">There are numerous information flows I receive that I ignore entirely. I completely filter them out. They don’t interest me. When something does get through the filter, however, if it then offers up a puzzle, I get hooked. Usually I don’t look for the puzzle directly. How can I? I’m not aware it is there. The puzzle emerges only after a chain of prior connections has been made first. In this case I was looking for examples of verification that were not from science or math. I’ve already written a chapter about guessing in math and I wanted some variety in my examples. It didn’t take long to come up with Journalism. Verification there provides an interesting alternative. I do some searching on that and find a few interesting references. Then I ask myself what else do I know about Journalism and I think of All The President’s Men and the Russell Baker piece. When I drill down on the latter I recall, incorrectly, my blog post. I’m ready to go further down the chain of connections but then I get stuck, which is what starts the whole thing. Here I don’t give up, however, because the memory of writing the blog post seemed strong. </p> <p class="western">I can’t fully explain this interplay between guessing, verification, and personality but there clearly is some looping between the three. Some of the looping is of the urgent type I just described. But there is another form as well, one that is more subtle, that helps determine what type of questions should be of interest in guessing an answer. It’s this other more subtle form of looping that I believe we refer to as developing a sense of taste. The point I want to make about it here is that developing taste happens hand in hand with verifying matters of importance. Taste is acquired this way and it is therefore idiosyncratic, depending on that personal experience of verification. </p> <p class="western">* * * * *</p> <p class="western">Let’s wrap up this chapter by comparing self-teaching to the creativity that Bruner describes in the opening quote. In my view, they are largely the same with one substantive difference. Self-teaching can end up with new understanding but without any tangible product worth speaking about, neither document, work of art, nor other media creation. There may be many intermediate products produced through self-teaching, the results of the noodling we talked about earlier. But those are only stepping stones to the new understanding, not one and the same with it. Creativity, in contrast, requires both new understanding and a tangible product or set of products. So it differs from self-teaching in that respect. But otherwise they are remarkably similar, if not identical. </p> <p class="western">The reason why both self-teaching and creativity require confidence and courage is that we as individuals are in battle with ourselves. Many of us succumb in that battle. The courageous succeed. Courage is not just a matter of will. Habit matters too. Perhaps habit is the more important factor. </p> <p class="western">In Chapter 1, Why Guessing?, I argued that the approach should be started very early in the school career, say at the start of Middle School. Verification needs to be part of this right at the outset. That may seem daunting. It needn’t be. Following the same path for a second, or even a third time can be verification, if there is some lag between the times when the path is traversed. Proof reading is a kind of verification of writing. Placing the mind in a different frame when reading one’s own writing is sufficient to determine whether the work rings true. Watching a movie or a TV show for a second time where detail was missed the first time can be verification too. Does the same sense of the story survive or does the added detail change the meaning? Having the learner find other gateways for herself perhaps is something that can be postponed till she is more mature. </p> <p class="western">The rest of what happens in verification should be encountered early, including running into roadblocks. If we want to develop courage in our children, they need to learn to get up after they fall, to work through the difficulties they encounter. It’s the most important early lesson.<br /></p>Lanny Arvanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05597426421997599777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331075451664544793.post-6077671363913852142009-02-21T11:01:00.003-06:002014-11-03T18:06:10.522-06:00Just The Facts and Guessing<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;">
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You are meant to play the ball as it lies, a fact that may help to touch on your own objective approach to life.<br />
<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/g/grantlandr388810.html">Grantland Rice</a></u></span></blockquote>
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We ran out of <span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.rupparena.com/">Rupp Arena</a></u></span> as fast as we could to get to the car and back on the road. We wanted to avoid the crush of traffic if we could. The Illini had lost to Kentucky in the last few seconds of the Elite Eight, the regional final game in the 1984 NCAA Tournament. Really, we were robbed. With a little less than 20 seconds left in the game and us down by a basket Hank Nichols, he of the <span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://assets.espn.go.com/dickvitale/070809%20Hank%20Nichols.html">stellar reputation</a></u></span>, made a bad call. Bruce Douglas, our point guard and a great defensive player, had trapped Dickie Beals, who had picked up his dribble. <span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AG-KN_fILYo">Beals definitely dragged his foot</a></u></span>, so the right call was traveling. Nichols, however, called a foul on Douglas and that was the ballgame. The following year the NCAA changed the rules to no longer allow any of the schools participating in the Tournament to play on their home court. This game was the reason why. </div>
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It was a bittersweet ending to a glorious few days. This was the first NCAA Tournament I attended. We played the second game on Thursday night. Our opponent was Maryland. Their star was Len Bias. In the first game, Kentucky played Louisville. Rupp Arena is an interesting place. There is an indoor mall immediately adjacent. You could enter the Arena from the mall without going back outside. Larry and I got to the La Quinta where we were staying probably around 2 PM and after dumping our stuff we headed over to the mall. Everyone was in a jovial mood in anticipation of the evening games. Somehow we connected with some diehard Kentucky fans and had a really good time with them. They speculated that Maryland would take us. Uh-uh. </div>
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We watched both games. Our seats were really high up, but it was a thrill just to be in the arena. After the first game, many of the fans cleared out. That was ok. This way the Illini fans could be heard. We were leading Maryland by eight or ten points in the second half when Efrem Winters came down wrong and sprained his ankle. The Illini held on to win that game. Afterward Larry and I went out for a Prime Rib dinner, relishing in the victory. Then some drinks back at the hotel room. We had an off day Friday so why not? One of us woke up kind of early, around 5 AM, and discovered that the game was being replayed on ESPN. So we got to watch it again, this time with a much better view. What a delight.</div>
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There was a lot of anticipation going into the game with Kentucky. We had played them in Champaign the prior December in a game that was odd because it was so cold and blustery outside that most of the fans stayed away and the regular refs couldn’t make it. So they got some High Schools refs to do the game. They were there to watch from the stands. They did a great job. We lost in the last minute or so. Kentucky had a lot more depth and eventually wore down Illinois. But we led most of the game. The best play happened in the first half when Efrem stuffed Mel Turpin, all six foot eleven inches of him, just as he was trying to dunk. Totally awesome. </div>
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In this rematch on their court Efrem was not at full speed and couldn’t cut well. So it is amazing that we stayed right with Kentucky through the entire game. But we did. Bruce Douglas was fantastic. With Turpin and seven foot one inch Sam Bowie, they were much taller than us. But our floor play was better. It should have been Illinois playing Georgetown in the Final Four. Not fair.</div>
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That year was the acme for NCAA College Basketball. Five years earlier, the Tournament featured Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, which brought it into prime time. The talent pool was a lot deeper in 1984 – Michael Jordan, Pat Ewing, Hakeem Olajuwon, Charles Barkley, and many others. And with that, the Illini were right there in the Tournament. Wow.</div>
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Mostly I’ve taught economic theory, so adopting a dispassionate tone goes with the territory. Economic theory is apt to put students to sleep, not get their juices flowing. So I really didn’t think much about the issue till a friend who teaches English and Film, Ramona, had me meet with her and a colleague to talk about some learning technology project. This was long ago and I can’t remember the nature of the project. But I do recall Ramona saying something like, “She really gets into it with the students, doesn’t she? When I teach I try to take a neutral stance rather than take sides.” The thought has been with me ever since. Students are apt to be intrinsically interested in edgy subjects. If as an instructor you deliberately bring those topics into the classroom to draw the students in, how should you play it, above the fray or one of the participants? Does the answer matter if specifically you are trying to teach the students how to guess? </div>
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Those who’ve been trained in the scientific method have this terrible fear about losing objectivity. (Though there is a sub discipline called experimental economics, in the main economics is not about the design of experiments but rather about looking at those data that present themselves from ordinary economic transactions, yet in all other respects it follows the scientific method.) The thought is that if a priori you are for one side of an argument, you will discount or totally ignore evidence that seemingly supports the other side of argument. That bias will have a consequence on the conclusions that are obtained, conclusions apt to be obviously wrong either on inspection or after further evidence has been accumulated. Scientists don’t want to be shown to have been obviously wrong especially when the record indicates they should have known better at the time. Some mistakes will be made in any event. Let’s try not to make those mistakes that could have been avoided. </div>
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Many of us will want to have it both ways. If we’re aware of the problems that stem from bias, can’t we adequately counter for it and still maintain our strongly held views? The question is ethical at its core. In mild circumstances it is reasonable to expect that we can offset the bias and look at all the evidence in an even fashion. When the situation is more extreme passion may win out over sound judgment. <span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.webmm.ahrq.gov/case.aspx?caseID=71">A physician who treats himself has a fool for a patient</a></u></span>. (See especially the commentary, which suggests that the problem is fairly common.) How does one know when events will conspire to turn what at first appears under control into an extreme circumstance? This is, in effect, the argument for objectivity. </div>
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There are many who are not well versed in the scientific method, who nonetheless invoke the mantra that is the title of this chapter – just the facts. They too are aiming for objectivity though sometimes I fear they have an additional agenda, to close off further argument. Anecdotes are evidence. They may not be the best sort of evidence, especially when more systematic evidence is available, in which case relying on anecdotes exclusively is silly. But throwing them out is bias. When the systematic evidence points one way and the anecdote another, there is learning in carefully reconciling the two. Likewise, the expressed opinion of a friend, colleague, or opponent is evidence too. The vast majority of people are rational and thoughtful. When they express an opinion that appears contrary, they are apt to have access to information that you don’t have or to have related experiences that are unknown to you. Ignoring the opinion then is inconsistent with weighing all the evidence. Of course, we are awash in polemical argument in the political arena, where often the goal is to seek political advantage rather than to illuminate the truth. So there is a tendency to discount if not entirely ignore opinions of the other side. To the extent that politics is like sports and we voters are like fans, perhaps that’s ok. Outside of sports and politics, however, it’s a problem. </div>
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The best articulation of the principle I’ve seen is by Steven Sample in his book <span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Contrarians-Guide-Leadership-Steven-Sample/dp/0787955876">The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership</a></u></span>. The first chapter is on <i>Thinking Gray</i>, which means several things all at once. First, don’t make a decision before you have to and don’t tip your hand as to how the decision will eventually come out to encourage others to provide you with evidence that you will weigh fairly. Second, actively encourage argument and debate about the decision so different points of view can be well articulated. Third, while the first two are really external behaviors this one is truly internal to yourself. It’s not that you have a quickly formed opinion that you are not sharing because of the first two reasons. It’s that you maintain neutrality on the issues until when judgment is needed. You do this so you can make the best and therefore unbiased judgment when it’s time for that. As Sample says, this is contrary to the way most of us behave because we’ve been taught to make snap judgments. </div>
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F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed something similar to thinking gray when he observed that the test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two opposing thoughts at the same time while still retaining the ability to function. </blockquote>
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Thinking gray is contrary to what I was taught in formal economic theory/statistics, <span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://ite.gmu.edu/%7Eklaskey/SYST664/SYST664.html">Bayesian Decision Theory</a></u></span>. This theory admits an element of subjectivity captured in the decision maker’s beliefs represented by the <i>prior</i> distribution over the unknown parameter. The theory then explains how beliefs get updated based on experience, generating a <i>posterior</i> distribution. That part is pure statistics. The economics comes in when experience is driven by choice, call it a consumption choice, and when different consumption choices have varying degrees of informativeness. For example, in consuming a drug, a low dose will have little effect simply because it is low, while a higher dose may have substantial effect if the drug actually works. So taking a high dose is more informative than taking a low dose. The economic theory prediction is that early on part of the drive of choice is experimental consumption, to encourage learning. Ultimately the choice settles down to what is optimal given beliefs. (In some cases beliefs reach the truth with certainty, but there can be instances where beliefs are stable with residual uncertainty.) This approach can rationalize the binge drinking of teenagers.</div>
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Really, the two approaches are distinct. Sample is contemplating a large decision that once made remains fixed for quite a while. The theory of experimental consumption focuses on repeated decisions of a smaller nature. The information gathering that Sample has in mind is also different from the statistical approach in Bayesian Theory. One metaphor that might help in understanding the Sample view is to imagine having to understand a three dimensional object from getting to view a finite number of two dimensional snapshots of the object, each taken from a different perspective. Another snapshot from essentially the same perspective doesn’t really help. One from a new perspective helps a lot. Sample doesn’t argue that we get to choose the perspectives from which we get to take the snapshots. He just argues that we have a better understanding with more perspectives.</div>
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Much as I like Sample, however, he is an engineer by training and he leaves you with the impression that after all the information is in the situation and high intelligence he brings applied to the situation more or less dictates the solution he comes up with. Mostly, I don’t think it works that way. Prior disposition and point of view matter for these decisions. Consider this episode from the West Wing called <span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://westwing.bewarne.com/fifth/517supremes.html">The Supremes</a></u></span>, with Glenn Close as Judge Evelyn Baker Lang (very left of center) and William Fichtner as Judge Christopher Mulready (just as far right of center). Mulready exemplifies the F. Scott Fitzgerald conception of a first-rate mind; he is able to articulate the Liberal view better than the staffers at the White House while he comes at his opinions from an opposing vantage. We care about the politics of our Supreme Court Justices because in the way they decide on cases their politics matters. In the context of judicial opinion, that is an unremarkable assertion. In broader contexts prior disposition plays the role politics plays in the judicial case, hence there is an inherent subjectivity to the decisions. Sample conveys the idea of an optimal (and unique) solution to his decisions as the afterward of thinking gray. Optimal is the engineer’s credo. Though as an economist I was trained to think that way as well, my experience as an administrator suggests there are multiple possible approaches, none a priori optimal, with preference over a particular alternative determined by prior disposition. So I’m inherently subjective in my approach and my interest is in understanding the interplay of that subjectivity with the facts. </div>
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My first semester at Illinois I was an instructor rather than an assistant professor because I hadn’t yet completed my dissertation and wouldn’t do so till the following spring. I taught one class that term, intermediate microeconomics. I had been a popular TA at Northwestern, but this course was a bomb. I took what proved to be a “blow them out of the water” approach, partly as a result of my graduate training, partly because I hadn’t taken the equivalent course as an undergraduate so didn’t have a sense of what should be in it, but mostly because of my own insecurities. How else would I establish my authority than by teaching a tough and demanding course? I didn’t concern myself with what the kids could grasp or not. How could I know that? It turns out I frustrated a lot of the students that way. They had their revenge; they gave me awful teaching evaluations. </div>
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On the final exam I wrote an essay question based on <span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/articles/akerlof/index.html">Akerlof’s Market for Lemons</a></u></span>. One kid in the class aced the question. The rest flubbed it. I gave that kid an “A” for a course grade. He had a solid “C” going into the final. My reasoning was that this kid had shown a flash of insight into an incredibly important problem in economics. Insight needs to be rewarded. I believe that still. Another student who knew this kid was offended by my approach. She had a high “B” going in and that’s exactly how she performed on the final. She got the basic stuff right, but on deeper perception, nada. </div>
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Nowadays grading according to rubric is quite popular wherein there are various criteria that count for the grade and for each criterion there are performance standards – what counts for poor performance, what counts for good performance, and what counts for superior performance. Finally, there is a way to aggregate performance rankings across criteria. Each ranking gets a certain number of points and those points are added up. I maintain some disdain for grading rubrics (I do understand that it helps to reduce arbitrariness in assessing student work) because it rewards and therefore encourages consistent mediocrity. True insight is difficult to put into the rubric because it is so rare. In a country addicted to <span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lake-Wobegon-Days-Garrison-Keillor/dp/0140131612">Lake Wobegon</a></u></span>, reserving the superior performance standard for true insight means most of the students will not be happy campers. Engineering colleges have a reputation of grading this way. The rest of us have grade inflation.</div>
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In his book, <span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.gladwell.com/blink/index.html">Blink</a></u></span>, Malcolm Gladwell talks about <i>thin slicing</i> information and the power in doing that. In grading that final exam, I was thin slicing the student performance. Thin slicing is quite different from understanding the total view of an object. When you thin slice you look for a particular aspect and throw away a lot of other information, because that other stuff is of secondary importance. You pay attention only to the really informative stuff. If you know what to look for ahead of time, you sit in waiting ready to pounce when it shows up. If you don’t know what to look for ahead of time, but you thin slice nonetheless, you’ve got to search for it. </div>
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As the essay by Akerlof previously cited indicates, economics is a peculiar discipline in that it provides insight by isolating on particular variables of economic interest and ignoring much else, sometimes of substantial social importance. My second year in graduate school I had the good fortune to take a course from <span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/%7Edtmort/">Dale Mortensen</a></u></span> on Micro Foundations of Macroeconomics. In that course we spent a good deal of time learning about search theory, the economic variety. In the simplest possible model the unemployed worker is looking for a job characterized solely by the wage it offers. Time is scarce. Each period the worker gets a random draw from a time invariant wage distribution. The worker has to decide whether to keep the job or, like the fisherman, throw it back into the pool to hope for a better catch in the future. The optimal strategy is characterized by a reservation wage. The worker takes the first job with an offer above the reservation wage and throws back all other offers before the one that is accepted. The theory is the basis for what has come to be known as “<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_types">frictional unemployment</a></u></span>.” </div>
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Real world search is unlike how it is modeled in economics. The idea that time is scarce certainly is correct but actual search is not a random draw from a distribution. Much of it is driven by…….guessing. Smart guessing is about generating searches that are apt to come to a satisfactory solution quickly. Actual search is also not about thinking gray, at least on the point of whether the searcher can use whatever the current search has returned to address the issue at hand. That judgment is made immediately. One doesn’t wait to perform other searches and make a comparison across the set of them. Because time is scarce if the results of the current search will do the trick, that’s all she wrote.</div>
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I have never seen a discussion of <span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/issues/infolit/informationliteracy.cfm">information literacy</a></u></span>, a topic of increasing importance in considering how we go about teaching our students, that distinguishes finding information for a thin slice decision from finding information for a thinking-gray seeing-the-whole-picture exercise. Google is incredibly useful for the first type of search and one of the key skills for good guessing in this instance is to know what to type in the Google text box to initiate the search. </div>
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A week or two ago we had a problem with our home computer. It was giving an error message on accessing both my College of Business email via a browser interface and in going to Google supported sites, such as Blogger. I had no idea what was wrong. I feared that there was a virus on the computer. I had read of some new virus from one of the blogs I follow. Getting a little distressed by the whole thing but with some hidden hope that it might be something else than a virus, I thought to take the text from the error message that Google produced and do a verbatim search on that. I found the source of the problem immediately. My clock had gotten out of wack. It was running 15 minutes late and the year said 2004 rather than 2009. Why the clock settings got changed is a mystery I can afford not to solve. Adjusting the settings back to the correct time fixed the problem we were having and that was enough.</div>
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One tries to reduce a seeing the whole picture kind of search into at most a few thin slicing type of exercises done first that allow you to “do your homework,” gather information to address a particular issue or question. When I was writing papers that I hoped would get published in leading economics journals, I would first find a topic that piqued my interest, then I’d look for a related paper on that subject and simultaneously look to see if there is a seminal paper in the subfield of study. If I could identify that seminal paper and see how other derivative papers departed from that original, I’d then have a fair understanding about how what I wanted to write about would fit in. Which to read first, the seminal paper or the derivative one might be determined by other factors – did I know the name of the author, did one seem easier to get through, which I would stumble upon first, etc. I would still spend a lot of time reading other related papers, but with this approach I’d have a better basis to understand the contributions of what I was reading. More or less coincidentally, I’d also be working on understanding the model I’d be building. My model would offer a separate pathway into the issues, giving me a different center of gravity to determine what was important and separate that from the chaff, and it also allowed me to indulge in something I enjoyed and felt comfortable doing. So I’d advocate for taking at least two and possibly more pathways into the subject to see the whole picture. Preferably those pathways are independent. That they converge in perspective later on should not be a driver initially. Convergence needs to be a conclusion, not a supposition. </div>
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I do something similar for my job where I constantly need to get perspective on what is going on. I will talk with different people about the same issue so as to “triangulate” the information I’m getting. I believe this is indispensible for understanding. Sometimes that is simply confirming what I already know. Other times, there is new information. And still other times it is the same information but with a different spin. All are useful. </div>
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A hard question for which the answer has to be subjectively determined is whether to keep on gathering information or stop and focus on something else. We really don’t help students learn to do this well at all, with our requirements about having so and so many sources from such and such places in their term papers. A sense of taste plays a very important role here and we teachers should be spending a lot of time cultivating students in their sense of taste on how to answer that sort of question. </div>
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If I’m gathering information to write something, I know in advance I value subtlety and nuance and I also value making some sort of contribution, a reframing of a familiar argument, connecting ideas together that have previously not been associated, or bringing in a personal experience to show how I’ve come to think about the issues. If I have enough information to do that, I can stop searching. In my earlier chapter on Writing as Guessing, I went into some detail on the point that the search might resume in the process of writing because a new twist occurs to the writer and then there is an on the spot investigation of that. How long that takes is determined by the same principle. </div>
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The information literacy issue is frequently framed about how much trust the reader should place on the source. I have always found this somewhat strange, particularly for doing economics, especially at the undergraduate level, because there are other factors that have to be brought to bear to make the source useful in advancing the student’s thinking. There is first the question of whether the student has enough background and perspective to read the paper in question. Often that background is absent. The paper might be brilliant but it can nonetheless be inappropriate for the students; the paper is opaque to them. The second issue is whether the students have the technical wherewithal to slug through the paper, where again opaqueness is the concern.</div>
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The issue isn’t just for students. It applies to professional economists as well. As <span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://lanny-on-learn-tech.blogspot.com/2005/12/intuition-rigor-and-visualization.html">I’ve pointed out in my blog</a></u></span> a few years ago, there was a paper by Roy Radner that preceded Akerlof’s Lemons paper by a couple of years that correctly modeled asymmetric information and with much greater generality than what Akerlof produced. But nobody understood the implications from Radner’s paper in practical terms. So Radner’s paper became a theoretical curiosity, nothing more. Akerlof’s paper communicates the ideas with less generality but nonetheless more powerfully; because the model is so simple everyone can understand it. </div>
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True as that is, the search for powerful but easy to understand information can be a path to the slippery slope. Wrong ideas can seem plausible, especially to the novice who doesn’t check through them carefully for their correctness. For example, due to the NCAA tracking the academic performance of student athletes, there is now publicly available information about graduation rates at all NCAA member schools. Some have inferred that those graduation rates can be taken as a measure of school performance, just as they have taken that patient success rates are a measure of hospital performance. But such measures in and of themselves don’t account for how talented the students are or how sick the patients are. More talented students have a greater likelihood of graduating, irrespective of the college they attend. Likewise, sicker patients are more likely to fair poorly, even when they receive excellent treatment from the hospital. The raw measures may be of some interest in themselves but using them to judge institutional performance conflates inputs with outputs.</div>
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It’s not just latching onto wrong ideas. Correct ideas can nonetheless be of minor consequence. It is certainly true that quality of life in Champaign-Urbana would be better if we had jet plane service to several major metropolitan areas in the U.S. But the likelihood of getting such service is nil so trying to base our approach to retain highly regarded cosmopolitan faculty members is foolhardy indeed. Finding a retention strategy that will be both successful and do-able is a hard problem. That sense of taste comes in identifying the nexus between what will work and what is actually possible to achieve.</div>
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If we think of information literacy as dealing both with accessibility of the source and its trust worthiness, that is closer to the mark in my view. But then we need to understand that these two dimensions can compete with one another. Taste serves to resolve the tension. </div>
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I fear that the <span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2008_11/015591.php">Republican Anti-Intellectualism</a></u></span> has had an enormous consequence entirely outside the political arena; it has a pernicious impact on learning by its appeal to take ideas on faith rather than to work them through based on evidence and reason. Contrary to what David Brooks argued in <span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/opinion/10brooks.html">his belated acknowledgement of the problem</a></u></span>, the Reagan years were the beginning of alienating youth from reasoned argument. The embodiment of the problem was the CNN show <span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossfire_%28TV_series%29">Crossfire</a></u></span>. <span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE">The critique offered by Jon Stewart</a></u></span> when he appeared on the show (soon thereafter the show was cancelled) demonstrates that many others are aware of the problem insofar as it has affected the general discourse. The <span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=r6w9AAAAIAAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA212&dq=Obstacles+to+Open+Discussion+and+Critical+Thinking&ots=exkpTJxD2Z&sig=pbiZMg_4PAKLPZyyYlbSS-B1gYU#PPA212,M1">ethnographic work of Carol Trosset</a></u></span> convincingly illustrates the problem with college students. Argument is not about learning; it is about cajoling the uninitiated. Most of us don’t want to listen to a sales spiel that we ourselves have not encouraged. Nor do we want to be bullied into our ideas. We want to retain the power to make our own judgments. </div>
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There is a history of great debate in this country, none more famous than the <span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu/lincolndouglas/index.html">Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858</a></u></span>. Information traveled slower then. Vitriol and venom may be effective in their immediacy, but the impact does not endure well at all. The Lincoln-Douglas debates were high minded and there was a great deal of respect between the adversaries. That, in large part, is why their reputation has endured. When I was growing up in New York City, there were both the Times and the Daily News. They could peacefully coexist, with essentially distinct readerships. Cable television has encouraged a kind of Gresham’s Law of argument. Now there is only polemic and posturing. It is theater of the absurd. Our youth need to see an alternative, but there is none to be provided.</div>
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There is another reason to embrace objectivity in considering issues and to avoid overt demonstrations of subjectivity in analyzing information, namely self-protection. If optimism flows from good news and pessimism from the reverse then to stay on an even keel one needs to treat the news as neither good nor bad, just more information to process. Objectivity is then associated with discipline and detachment, a way to stay on an even keel, while subjectivity is identified with self-indulgence and self-absorption, producing a path full of mood swings. One wonders whether it is possible to exercise a strong point of view and yet maintain an even disposition. To me, this is the search for the Holy Grail. I’ve not yet found how to do it. </div>
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What I have to offer instead is to recognize the importance of looking inward on occasion. Sometimes there will be anger, or dullness, or alienation. Other times there will be joy, or great creativity, or intense engagement. Even if it is a bit of a roller coaster, hold on for the ride.</div>
Lanny Arvanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05597426421997599777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331075451664544793.post-69616991583006344112008-12-20T10:52:00.000-06:002008-12-20T10:56:05.367-06:00Groups that Guess and LearnhelloLanny Arvanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05597426421997599777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331075451664544793.post-26047163371428852582008-12-19T06:31:00.000-06:002008-12-19T06:32:13.554-06:00Learning Frameworks As Structure For GuessinghiLanny Arvanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05597426421997599777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331075451664544793.post-70667661844171826112008-12-18T11:10:00.010-06:002009-05-14T06:43:42.273-05:00Walking The Walk And Guessing<p class="western"><span style="font-size:100%;"></span></p><blockquote><p class="western"><span style="font-size:100%;">Such indeterminate commitments are necessarily involved in any act of knowing based on indwelling. For such an act relies on interiorizing particulars to which we are not attending and which, therefore, we may not be able to specify, and relies further on our attending from these unspecifiable particulars, connecting them in a way we cannot define. This kind of knowing solves the paradox of <i>Meno</i> by making it possible for us to know something so indeterminate as a a problem or a hunch, but when the use of this faculty turns out to be an indispensable element of all knowing, we are forced to conclude that all knowledge is of the same kind as the knowledge of a problem.</span></p><p class="western"><span style="font-size:100%;">Michael Polanyi, </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Tacit-Dimension-1ST-Michael-Polanyi/dp/B000U2C9AM/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231439771&sr=1-5"><span style="font-size:100%;">The Tacit Dimension</span></a></u></span><span style="font-size:100%;">, p 24. </span></p></blockquote><p class="western"><span style="font-size:100%;"></span> </p> <span style="font-size:100%;">As I’m writing, it’s day three in the reign of number forty four. Jim Brown, Ernie Davis, and Floyd Little each with sublime ability and wearing number 44 as a running back at Syracuse, captivating the fandom with their performance. Run past them, through them, and around them President Obama. Willie McCovey wore number 44. He’s in the Hall of Fame and the San Francisco Giants retired the number. Reggie Jackson also wore number 44. He too is in the Hall of Fame and the New York Yankees retired the number. Keep knocking the ball out of the park, President Obama. We’re all rooting for you. </span><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;"> </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Judged by the coverage of the inauguration and all the accompanying festivities much of the country feels the same way. The optimism is cautious. People are worried, not doubt. Borrowing a metaphor from my son, it’s as if we’re all one big cartoon character that has just gone over a cliff and, unfortunately, looked down. We can agree the fall is inevitable. We might not agree whether we’ve hit bottom yet. Today’s front page news includes a story about </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/technology/companies/23soft.html?hp"><span style="font-size:100%;">Microsoft announcing layoffs</span></a></u></span><span style="font-size:100%;">. At the University of Illinois where I work, yesterday we got a rather grim email from our President, B. Joseph White, letting us know about how the state budget shortfall will impact us. </span> </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">My concern is not with the immediate situation. There is not much to be said about it that others aren’t already saying. Grim as things seem to be, I worry there are hidden costs that people have not yet considered which will adversely impact the long term. Ten years ago </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.sungardsct.com/Education/clients/c_cs_UofIllinois.html"><span style="font-size:100%;">my university embarked on a big ERP project</span></a></u></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> to the tune of $200 million. (ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning. Much of the work done on campus is transactional – registering for class, applying for financial aid, promoting a staff member – and those transactions must be recorded, suitably aggregated for generating reports, and then access to the information must be provided for those duly authorized. That’s what ERP systems do.) That $200 million might seem like chicken feed measured at a national scale. Both the TARP program and the proposed fiscal stimulus are three orders of magnitude larger. But to us at the time, the ERP seemed enormous. And here’s the thing. That $200 million figure does not represent full cost. It’s only the amount that was explicitly budgeted for the project. </span> </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">At the time there was much talk about whether an ERP at a place as big and complex as the University of Illinois could accommodate the business processes in place or if instead whether those business processes had to change to come into accord with the system. As it turned out, there was much work done at at more disaggregated level (the level not budgeted for in the planning) where “shadow systems” were developed to use the data from the ERP to sustain existing practice. And there was much staff time chewed up in entering data into the system, in many cases where that had been previously automated. Nobody really knows the added cost of those accommodations. The guess here is that it’s of the same order of magnitude as the budgeted amount for the project. </span> </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">At the time you couldn’t talk about those hidden costs with central administration information technology types who were supporting the project and there was a lot of tension and ill will as a consequence. Similarly, it seems to me today we’re not talking about the core issue at hand. President Obama is right to stress </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/opinion/22cohen.html?ref=opinion"><span style="font-size:100%;">transparency and responsibility</span></a></u></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> in his administration. (Updating this a couple of weeks later after </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/us/politics/04obama.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=daschle&st=cse"><span style="font-size:100%;">Tom Daschle ended his bid for Secretary of Health and Human Services</span></a></u></span><span style="font-size:100%;">, it is apparent that transparency and responsibility are scarcer commodities than Obama had anticipated.) This will come at some significant personal cost to the administration as a whole and to each individual member. What about the rest of us? How do we remake our own transparency and sense of responsibility? At the moment the issue is being cast as whether we’d come to aid of people who are obviously seriously distressed. At best, that’s an interesting hypothetical we can ponder and feel good about, most of us answering yes. But it is the wrong test. </span> </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">What about responsibility in more ordinary day to day transactions? In his inaugural address, </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28755624/"><span style="font-size:100%;">President Obama stressed old virtues and deep traditions</span></a></u></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> as a way to rejuvenate us all by throwing off the excesses of the recent past and returning to more temperate aspirations, with greater diligence in pursuit of those ends. Yet our deep traditions include excesses of their own. Think of P.T. Barnum. (</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://thinkexist.com/quotation/there-s_a_sucker_born_every/187915.html"><span style="font-size:100%;">There’s a sucker born every minute</span></a></u></span><span style="font-size:100%;">.) Or consider sleights from the mouth of W.C. Fields. (</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/w/wcfields164173.html"><span style="font-size:100%;">Never give a sucker an even break</span></a></u></span><span style="font-size:100%;">.) Or the old maxim, </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.bartleby.com/59/3/foolandhismo.html"><span style="font-size:100%;">a fool and his money is soon parted</span></a></u></span><span style="font-size:100%;">. Don’t these capture the tenor of the times? Do we expect those who’ve worshipped the false idols Barnum and Fields to now have their Come to Jesus moment? And for the rest of us, neither villain nor saint, what do we do to distinguish ourselves from the riff raff who’ve wrecked such enormous destruction? To seriously address this question, I fear, we must incur a substantial as of yet hidden cost. </span> </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Simply put, the average Joe will be inherently less trusting than he was a few years ago. Having been burned badly himself, he won’t let that happen again. His first instinct will be skepticism and doubt, not trust and belief. He’ll require more convincing than before, convincing of a different sort. We who want to build the trust and who rely on trust in our ordinary interactions will find ourselves spending much more of our time in activities aimed to establish trust, quite possibly with less to show for it than we expect. </span> </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">With that worry to foreshadow my thinking, I’ve been scratching my head about friends and colleagues whom I have come to trust a great deal. Why did those feelings develop? What is it in their behavior that encourages those feelings? Can that be taught so others can emulate? </span> </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">* * * * *</span></p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Nowadays the non-traditional student is a commonplace, with family and work responsibilities added to the burdens imposed from the studies. But when I was graduate student more than thirty years ago, such students were a rarity, particularly in full time programs with classes and seminars during the work day, and studying in the Library during the evening. The first year was especially brutal. Twenty seven students entered the doctoral program in Economics at Northwestern in fall 1976. Of those, only thirteen returned the following fall to sit for the Prelim exam that served to qualify students for the rest of the doctoral program. </span> </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">One of those who came back, passed the Prelim, and earned his doctorate is Ed Kokkelenberg, a good friend, a frequent dinner partner, and sometimes racquetball opponent during those years at Northwestern. If you knew that less than half of that entering class would continue through to get their Ph.D.’s and had to forecast those who’d make it, you wouldn’t have picked Ed in that group. He prevailed against the odds when many other very bright people did not. (The story we were told late in our first year by the program was that you could stay on and become an academic economist or you could drop out, get an MBA or go to work directly, and double or triple your lifetime earnings.) </span> </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The program was intensely mathematical. That fit my personal strength so I found myself well prepared in spite of taking very little economics as an undergraduate. Ed had a Bachelors in Engineering from 20 years earlier and an MBA 10 years after that but still quite a span between that and the Ph.D. program. He had been a working engineer, spent a brief spat as a College vice president at an institution that went under, and I believe had a few other distinct jobs aside from that before going to Northwestern. He also had kids who were in their late teens or beyond and he was soon to start a new marriage. The math within the economics was a real challenge for him. There was no good way to for him to wrap his arms around it. He simply had to struggle through. And being out of school for so long, the pace in the classroom probably wasn’t right for him. Since I was with him a fair amount in social settings, I know he liked intellectual leisure spending time in bookstores or over dinner discussing a film. Where ideas presented were both dense and terse, that was the style of the times in economics, Ed wanted expanded conversation. That was how he came to appreciate things. Yet he saw the graduate school experience through.</span></p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Ed represents three traits I admire tremendously. He’s amiable and gentle but also remarkably perseverant. When I think of characteristics that help to earn my trust, those are on the top of the list. </span> </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">* * * * * </span> </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">In universities it’s lonely at the top, all the more so these days because budget cuts forced by loss in previously anticipated revenues are going to force some unpleasant decisions, while those further down the ladder hold on grimly, clutching to their jobs and praying they will not get the axe. I’m not even half way up the ladder and I feel the loneliness rather intensely. I continue to ask myself whether I understand what’s going on, if I have the right information to make heads or tails of what is happening, and if I do whether I’m framing the issues correctly. </span> </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">While these budget issues are happening on campus, I’m reading </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Drucker-Druckers-Management-Essentials/dp/0061345016/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233607482&sr=1-1"><span style="font-size:100%;">The Essential Drucker</span></a></u></span><span style="font-size:100%;">. It will be one of the required readings in an Honors class I will teach next fall. I’m finding that while reading the book I’ve got the sensation that Drucker has been reading my mind. All my issues are there. The principles well thought through. Apart for some jargon, which I wouldn’t use but he does, we seem to be mostly in agreement. In the middle section of the book, on the individual, he argues that leaders want subordinates who will argue with him. Drucker argues in turn that since employees are intelligent and not prone to make basic mistakes, arguments usually arise because the people have access to different information. Hence arguments are a good indicator that there is important information that has not yet been factored in. That makes a lot of sense to me, though I’ve been aware in that past that sometimes subordinates are not forthcoming for they fear doing so will tarnish their image or that they’ll be forced to capitulate in midstream, it not really being a fair fight. </span> </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Partly for that reason, also because of force of habit, and then too because I think it’s not just different information but also difference in perspective and frame in considering that information, I’ve found it very helpful to identify peers with whom I can compare notes and check to see if my conjectures make sense to them. Drucker focuses on the business world, where such peer conversations either may be blocked entirely because the important information to consider is proprietary and hence can’t be shared with peers or because the interactions simply don’t happen with enough frequency to be useful. I’ve found that in the university setting where I work, these interactions are available if you look for them and take advantage of serendipity. Further, they are extremely valuable to me.</span></p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">When I was an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department at Illinois, I hung out with other Assistant Professors, at work and after hours as well. Their world view became one we all shared. I started in 1980-81 and that year I was the only new guy. The rest of them already had been through trial by fire, which produced certain attitudes and beliefs about the environment. I learned from my peers and embraced their perspective. The next year there were a few folks who returned from being elsewhere, so they were new to me, but each of them had been at Illinois before. I remained the new guy who arrived in an already fully formed world that my friends understood all too well. </span> </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">This was also the way it seemed when I was an undergraduate at Cornell. I transferred there in the middle of my sophomore year. As a junior I moved into an apartment house that was once a fraternity. My roommate was someone I knew from High School, but I soon didn’t hang around with him. There were others in the house and we became kind of a crowd – playing softball or touch football, listening to music, going to Hockey games, or just hanging out. These others were older than I was and a good many of them were grad students. So I took a lot of my sense of the environment from them. I participated fully, to be sure, but the culture was already there. </span> </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Things were different when I first started as an administrator. There were many senior people who were friendly and willing to help me. But we weren’t close in the way I was with my peer assistant professors and with my housemates at Cornell. I had some of those same sort of collegial interactions with faculty peers as an early adopter of learning technology, sharing what we did and talking about the teaching issues, but I didn’t have those interactions as an administrator. It was too early. I didn’t know it was going to be my new permanent gig. And I didn’t have counterparts who had gone through essentially the same experience.</span></p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Over time and without anyone telling me to do so, I fell into some peer relationships that have become lasting friendships, in a few cases with people on my own campus. The one I value most is with Deanna Raineri. At present, Deanna and I have parallel jobs, hers in the College of Arts and Sciences, mine in the College of Business. </span> </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">When I first met her, our roles were asymmetric. She was teaching a very large Microbiology class, using the Web to deliver simulations that she and her group had made of biological processes and for delivering intelligent online homework in a system called </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.howhy.com/home/contact/contact.html"><span style="font-size:100%;">CyberProf</span></a></u></span><span style="font-size:100%;">, designed by Alfred Hübler. The organization I ran gave out grants and in that function I funded some of Deanna’s work, particularly in making virtual labs. That must have been 1997 or 1998. The world of online learning was different then. My campus was a hotbed for this stuff. There were the doers on the one hand, the real techies who either designed software for the rest of us to use like what Alfred did or who made simulations that would knock your socks off like what Deanna did, and on the other hand there were entrepreneurial types like me (wearing my teacher hat, not my administrator hat) who’d use the stuff these others would make and bring it into their own course. I’ve always admired the real techies who got good results from their implementations. They have a wherewithal and a sense of taste attached to that capability. I believe I have the sense of taste, but oftentimes I have to connect the dots as to whether the technology really can do what I’d like it to and on just how hard it will be to implement. </span> </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Considering our respective career trajectories, I did have a few advantages. I started in a relatively plush, soft money job. That allowed for freedom and flexibility and a way to try things without too much pressure on me at first. (There was some pressure, to be sure. I wrote about that in a </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://lanny-on-learn-tech.blogspot.com/2007/03/whats-next.html"><span style="font-size:100%;">retrospective</span></a></u></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> after attending the first annual </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.center.rpi.edu/RA.htm"><span style="font-size:100%;">Redesign Alliance</span></a></u></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> meeting in spring 2007.) Deanna started in a complete mess when she took the LAS job. There was no rhyme or reason to how information technology was being supported in her College and a strong tendency for each department to do it themselves, whether they had the funding and intellectual resources to pull it off or not. Think of the former Yugoslavia right after Tito. That will give you a good picture. As an Assistant Professor, Deanna had (rightly) been sheltered from a lot of bureaucratic nonsense by a Senior Professor who served as her mentor and by the Director of Molecular and Cellular Biology, so she could focus on the good work she was doing. When she became an administrator all of that changed suddenly (though she developed a new mentor, the Dean). She was now the boss, highly visible, needing to rationalize what had been a maelstrom. She had to step on a few toes to come up with something that worked. Since then, she has grown a lot. </span> </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Deanna is a quick study, attracted to very bright and articulate people and, most importantly for me, she rarely pulls her punches, appreciating others who are straightforward and resenting those who appear to be manipulative. When I first started to meet with Deanna regularly as peer, I was directing a campus Center for Educational Technologies and part of the idea of meeting was so our respective staffs would do likewise. The conversation morphed after my Center merged with the main campus computing organization. Of necessity she and her folks interfaced with that merged unit in many dimensions. We talked about my particular area, certainly. We also talked about the organization as a whole and lots of other interactions on campus. </span> </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">We served on several important committees together and I believe our interactions flourished as we came to understand the work of those committees and provide some leadership there. I have since had a gut feeling confirmed by </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.educause.edu/Community/MemDir/Profiles/PerryOHansonIII/38983"><span style="font-size:100%;">Perry Hanson</span></a></u></span><span style="font-size:100%;">, a fellow faculty member at the </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://net.educause.edu/TheEDUCAUSEInstituteLearningTechnologyLeadershipProgram/6273"><span style="font-size:100%;">Learning Technology Leadership Program</span></a></u></span><span style="font-size:100%;">, that committee work really happens not when committees meet as a whole, but rather via a series of one-on-one meetings held prior to the meeting of the whole, meetings where privately held views can be aired. In the case where a single member of the committee played the role of whip, having one-on-one meetings with all the other members, Perry called the activity politics. The idea is not so much to twist arms as it to find out what people are really thinking and then come up with a proposal that incorporates their views so they can embrace the proposal. In that sense much of what Deanna and I do is politics, but it is fun, stimulating, and absolutely essential. (When I was the Assistant CIO for Learning Technologies I played the whip role, mostly with interested faculty members but also a bit with those who provide technology support.) One of the main reasons why we have difficulties with information technology on my campus is that not everyone else at our level sees the need for such politics or is not comfortable having these sort of conversations. Now there is no whip. So trust isn’t built up and proposals end up being more an individual’s conception than a synthesis of views. I can only guess why the whip function is no longer being filled; either there is no will or no perception that such trust must be built. </span> </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">With Deanna, trust is implicit. And it is self-reinforcing. We each crave information about what is going on now and about whether we are reading the situation correctly. The back and forth we have helps satisfy the cravings. In the process, it supports our friendship. In one way what Deanna and I have is very much like what I had with my fellow Assistant Professors more than twenty five years ago; we are very close about the work related issues. But in another way it’s different. At this point we’re both experienced in our jobs and each of us does some substantial things to shape the environment in which we work. We have a good deal of mutual respect as a consequence although from time to time we don’t see things eye to eye. That’s ok. In the main we do. We’re willing to test our ideas to tell the one from the other. Sometimes in polite company people aren’t willing to put ideas to the test for fear of creating offense. Because they don’t open up, it’s impossible to tell whether they have insights on what is going on or if they’re even interesting in trying to figure that out. This is why Deanna’s frankness is such a joy. </span> </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">* * * * * </span> </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;">Drucker has a chapter about knowing yourself and working on improving your strengths. The admonition is to ignore weaknesses because they will rarely if ever be used in work; someone else will provide that function. Strengths will be used repeatedly so that’s where the focus should be. Over time I believe I’ve come to understand my own strengths, but I don’t have a sense whether others would agree on my own identification. Part of trust comes from recognizing bits of yourself in the other. Though Deanna and Ed are quite different, I see parts of them in me. I will do one more bio sketch, this time to focus on differences. That too can be a source of trust but it takes greater time to build. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;">It’s amazing that some of the best toys I had as a kid some forty years ago, purely mechanical in their design, persist to this day in spite of the fact that electronics and video now dominate in conception. One of those toys is the <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Brio-34000-Labyrinth/dp/B000XQ4VE2/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3?ie=UTF8&s=miscellaneous&qid=1233856822&sr=8-3"><span style="font-size:100%;">Labyrinth</span></a></u></span>, a wooden contraption with a left-right control and a front-back control, holes in the board where the metal ball could fall through, and a path to follow from start to finish that the player aims for the ball to follow. My guess is that if you had one around now it would captivate. The skill required to do it well is not replicated readily in other things we do, so apart from the challenge there would be learning by doing that keeps it entertaining. My recollection of how to do it well is that the ball should have a little bit of motion to it all the time. Then altering direction is not as hard. If it is fully at rest, you lose control of the ball to overcome its inertia. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;">Another one of those toys is <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Shoot-the-Moon/dp/B000XQ8R4W/ref=pd_bxgy_misc_img_b"><span style="font-size:100%;">Shoot The Moon</span></a></u></span>, where a metal ball seemingly rolls uphill along two metal rods that can be pulled apart or pushed together. Pull the rods apart too much and the ball falls through onto the wooden track below. The further along you can get the ball before it falls through, the more points you get. If you can get the ball all the way up on the rods without it falling through, you’ve shot the moon. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;">Playing this game repeatedly is a lesson in Applied Physics. At first, lacking skill to control the ball, it falls through almost immediately. Then, as you get a little better, you notice that if you allow the rods to stay open for a little while longer so the ball rolls up a little further, when you do start to close the rods you get more of a push on the ball and it goes even further. The winning approach is to go for maximum push without letting the ball fall through. After you’ve done that a few times, I recall the rods starting to bend and then you could get so much push you could shoot the ball entirely off the rods. But it takes quite a while to get to that point. Before that when the rods have their initial stiffness, you gingerly open and close the rods, doing small experiments to see how to get a little further. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;">My own approach to learning, irrespective of the context, is to search for that maximal push. I play to my heart’s content while I’m looking for it. Once I find it, I soon lose interest in that subject and turn to something else. My virtue is finding those areas of big push rather quickly. My vice is not always mining the situation fully and tolerating long periods of fallow where there doesn’t seem to be a new game to play. My friend and colleague Walt Hurley is the opposite. Walt is a testament to the <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.storyarts.org/library/aesops/stories/tortoise.html"><span style="font-size:100%;">Aesop Fable about the Tortoise and the Hare</span></a></u></span>, “slow and steady wins the race.” He plays the game by gingerly opening and closing the rods. Over time, he has come to play many games and he has made a lot of progress that way. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;">Walt is a Professor of Animal Science (he teaches courses in Lactation Biology), very accomplished in his teaching, indeed a Campus <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://provost.illinois.edu/programs/distinguished/index.html">Distinguished Teacher/Scholar</a></u></span>. Yet Walt is far from a natural. When I first met Walt, while I was running that Campus grant program, he was like the player to be named later in a trade of major league baseball players. Walt’s wife Carol, who is in Plant Biology, was involved in an online project called <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.life.uiuc.edu/plantbio/cell/help.html">The Virtual Cell</a></u></span>, with another faculty member in the department and some of his students. I believe the connection with Walt was first established through Carol. When I first interviewed Walt in his office, I recall we had a nice conversation but inwardly I was thinking that to myself his use of technology was kind of dull – mostly he was just putting his lecture notes up online. Many of the other folks I interviewed then seemed like naturals with the technology. Walt seemed uncomfortable with it.</p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;">The thing is, Walt knew that what he was doing was not sufficient. Yet Walt was content with that small experiment. I’ve learned that he is most comfortable knowing that he can manage the situation, irrespective of how it turns out. But the other thing is, he always seems to be doing some experiment with his teaching. That’s the part I couldn’t see when I first met him. There have been many instructors who flirted with improving their teaching by introducing technology and by making changes in the activities that happen during the live class session. But only a few have made it an ongoing regime to test things the way Walt does. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;">Ironically, Walt meets Drucker’s description of a leader to a tee. Innovation is hard work. Diligence in pursuit of the idea is rewarded. Innovations need to be simple. That’s the only way others can take advantage of them. Walt does those things. I admire him for it. In much of this, I believe Walt is like Ed but I wasn’t in a position to watch Ed grow professionally over a long period of time. I only saw Ed from a work perspective in those years as graduate students, where it was more like having survived a natural disaster and we were trying to preserve some semblance of our humanity in the aftermath. I’ve watched Walt’s behavior for more than 10 years, in committees, seminars, and the occasional social gathering. The passion in what he does becomes evident as much from the durability as it does from the behavior in any one instance, where he is apt to seem modest, perhaps exceptionally so. That’s the important thing.</p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;">* * * * * </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;">If a teacher wants her students to walk the walk, whether in guessing or some other approach to learning, she first needs to create a bond that the class shares. Specifically focusing on guessing as the approach, the teacher too needs to walk the walk and thus design a set of activities, each guesses in themselves, which if they pan out will provide the necessary bond. I’ve had some success with this in teaching Campus Honors Students with the initial assignment in the class, when they were not yet ready for my shenanigans and where part of my guess is that I could leverage their habitual tendencies – complete assignments even if doing so didn’t make sense just because they’d get some course credit for it – and then leverage the deconstruction of the joint performance as common bond. As <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://lanny-on-learn-tech.blogspot.com/2007/03/whats-next.html">I’ve written about this elsewhere</a></u></span>, I won’t elaborate here. Indeed, I want to criticize making too much of this example. After all, if it’s really a guess for the instructor, it can’t be something that is tried and true. There needs to be more novelty and uncertainty in outcome. That introduces other issues.<br /></p><blockquote>Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.<br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Leonard_Bernstein/"><b>Leonard Bernstein</b></a></u></span><b> (1918 - 1990)</b></blockquote>What does the instructor do when she tries an uninspired guess at creating the bond only to subsequently learn that the guess was flawed? Eight or nine years ago when I was still teaching a large class in intermediate microeconomics, a course required of Business students, who didn’t see its relevance, I tried something new and strayed from my usual introduction from the subject. There were about 180 students in this class and it seemed as if they all sat in the back of the room. I wanted to give them something that would encourage them to chime in. <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;">I came up with something that I reasonably guessed they’d care about because of my sense as to where the students were in their political persuasion. Most of the students were from the northern and western suburbs of Chicago. Based on that I decided to focus on early school programs like Head Start, but rather than focus on the program itself I wanted to do an economic analysis on measuring what sort of advantage a kid from the upper middle class had compared to a kid growing up in poverty and could we come up with a dollar measure of that advantage, making sure the kids understood this was supposed to be a rough estimate, not a precise calculation, perhaps right by order of magnitude rather than by amount. We ended up working through a calculation based on the opportunity cost of the parents’ time and the amount of time per year parents interact with their kids. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;">I was able to show through these calculations that Head Start was an order of magnitude too small and therefore the finding that the early gains vanish later is not very surprising. (Incidentally, this is not my point originally. I learned about it from hearing a talk by the Nobel Laureate James Heckman when he came to campus and discussed other programs which had more impressive gains than Head Start but were much more expensive.) That session worked really well. The students were lively during the session and afterwards several of them came to the front to chat with me. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;">It was a good guess, the right sort of thing to do in this course, at least occasionally. The flaw was that I had no encore and I had no way to generate activities for the students where they could produce encores on their own. We soon reverted to my tried but not true approach and like Head Start itself the gains from that early session soon disappeared entirely. It remains a puzzlement for me how to effectively extend that early session to the entire course and yet stay within some reasonable range of contact with the content that is typically covered in such a course on price theory given both the prior disposition of the typical students and the high enrollments. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;">* * * * * </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;">This June marks the tenth anniversary of my father’s passing. I remarked at the funeral and many times since that I feel as if I’m turning into him. The last few weeks I’ve had dreams where as him I’m teaching a class or having a date with an attractive woman, only to find as things start to get interesting that I go into an insulin reaction. My dad was a brittle diabetic, a factor that dominated much of our family life when my siblings and I were growing up. I attributed ending up studying economics in large part to that. As it may seem an obscure point, let me elaborate.</p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;">One of the areas where economics sheds lots of insight is how expectations of the future impact the present. (The point couldn’t be more obvious now, in the current downturn.) Insulin reactions meant my dad’s normal self-preservation instincts weren’t sufficient to right himself and if left untreated real harm would be created. So first and foremost, it meant anticipating when they were likely, and seeing if they could be thwarted ahead of time by getting my dad something with high sugar to eat and trying to be in a place where that could happen. Were this the only problem to solve, it could be addressed by following a rigid regime of measurement and diet. But that’s a horrible cure. It would have made my dad a prisoner of himself. He had a lively spirit that demanded freedom. So another part of the solution was to be efficient in dealing with the situation once it happened – remain calm, get a glass of orange juice and make sure he drinks it, get a towel to wipe the perspiration that would surely materialize, get some solid food that is starchy say a sandwich or a piece of cake or something else depending on the time of day and when he last ate, get a fresh undershirt and shirt because his clothes would surely be soaked, and then after his normal self starts to return help him upstairs to bed because he would be tired from it all. I know this all too well. And I know about the risk from having too high blood sugar as well, and about taking the insulin. For a time I was the one who gave him his shot in the morning. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;">Now, as I turn into him, I see my lesson is to understand how totally dependent he was on other people. He sometimes got angry. As a teen I didn’t understand that at all. He wanted to get as much as he could out of life when he was functioning normally. Much of the root of that anger is from the dependency itself and how it would deny him from getting what he wanted and the related fact that he had to exercise less control in things he did precisely because of that dependency. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;">* * * * * </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;">Teachers are entirely dependent on their students. Drucker talks about how in communication the active player is the recipient. The recipient can choose not to pay attention or might not understand even if he does pay attention. It is similar if not identical with the teacher and the student. People like Ed and Walt make excellent teachers in part because their natural disposition shows they understand this relationship intimately. When student have teachers with gentle tone and perception on the subject the students also know, via the indwelling and indeterminate commitments that Polanyi discusses in the passage that opens this chapter, that they should walk the walk. It becomes an imperative they willingly obey, the basis of trust. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;">After the initial bond the relationship must continue to grow. I would like to have with my students the same sort of relationship I have with Deanna, open and frank. It is hard to do. This too I’ve <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://lanny-on-learn-tech.blogspot.com/2006/06/killing-puppy.html">written about elsewhere</a></u></span>. The grades culture and the power relationships that engenders makes it difficult to get past. The teacher must guess that the students want it even if there is some initial resistance. In a large class where the students can see the behavior of their classmates, it may simply be too hard to achieve.</p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14in;">Surely there is a strong emotional aspect to walking the walk. We don’t talk about the emotions much when we discuss learning. We should. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p>Lanny Arvanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05597426421997599777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331075451664544793.post-23304781049139615492008-12-18T11:08:00.010-06:002009-03-24T12:10:33.367-05:00Guessing In Math<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p><blockquote>Q: <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.exiles.com/bertandipage.htm">Which way to Millinocket?</a></u></span><br />A: You can’t get there from here.</blockquote><p></p><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I’ve been a fan of the “Sidney Awards” that David Brooks gives out around the start of the New Year. Originally dubbed the <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/25/opinion/25brooks.html?scp=23&sq=david%20brook%20sidney%20awards&st=cse">Hookie Awards</a></u></span>, the name <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0DE2DC1330F93AA15751C1A9639C8B63&scp=16&sq=david%20brook%20sidney%20awards&st=cse">was changed the next year</a></u></span> to signify a more adult designation. The awards are a tribute to the philosopher <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i11/11a01801.htm">Sidney Hook</a></u></span>. The winners are essays that Brooks deems enlightening and good reads. I appreciate getting reading suggestions from all sources and during the holiday period am apt to read things I wouldn’t otherwise get to during the school year. <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/opinion/02brooks.html?scp=1&sq=david%20brook%20sidney%20awards&st=cse">This time around</a></u></span>, unfortunately, I had already read two of the essays – Michael Lewis’ piece The End in Portfolio Magazine, which <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/opinion/02brooks.html?scp=1&sq=david%20brook%20sidney%20awards&st=cse">Tom Friedman had recommended earlier in his column</a></u></span> (Brooks shouldn’t be allowed to choose Sidney winners from among essays his fellow columnists at the New York Times recommend so readers like me have more of a selection) and an essay by “Professor X” in the June 2008 issue of the Atlantic, <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200806/college">In the Basement of the Ivory Tower</a></u></span>, very depressing but definitely a good read. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Professor X is an adjunct instructor of English, teaching introductory classes at night at two different colleges, one a small private college, the other a community college, doing this to pay the bills till he can find a better gig, i.e., a traditional tenure track position. The students are adults going to school part time, almost certainly to get some certification for work. The crux of the piece is that many of these students are not prepared for college, are uninterested in what is taught in the English class largely because they don’t read, and while as a business proposition their paying tuition is a money maker for the hosting college (adjuncts don’t make very much and by holding the classes at night they are utilizing space that would otherwise be idle) as an ethical proposition attending college for many of the students is a sham because these students aren’t ready. The implication is that things are better for the students who attend full time during the day. Perhaps.</p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">At a New Years Eve dinner party hosted by my good friend Larry DeBrock, I got to talking with another friend, Denise, now retired but who had been my wife’s boss and I believe her job title was Associate Provost for Human Resources, a very important position on Campus. I’ve known Denise for a long time. Her husband Wally, also now retired, was a faculty member in the Econ Department and an expert bridge player. He taught several of us assistant professors a stripped down “Standard American” bidding system in bridge which we used when we played over the lunch hour and occasionally in the evenings. It was good fun, an entertaining diversion from work. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Somehow during the conversation Denise brought up to another friend, Diane, who is from out of town but for many years has come to the DeBrock’s house for New Years, that I would on occasion tutor Denise’s daughter in math, both in high school and in college. Really what would happen is that Wally would give me a phone call and we’d talk through some homework problem she was assigned, a quid pro quo for the bridge lessons. Wally thought taking Math was important and had made an agreement with his daughter that she’d go beyond the required courses at Illinois. So she dutifully took Differential Equations, kind of an odd course for an Accounting Major to take. Barbi, the daughter, has done spectacularly well in her Accounting career. But she really had no clue about Differential Equations. She got through by memorizing the solutions to the problems in the textbook, an awesome feat of will but not a very satisfactory way to learn the math. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Denise and Wally both grew up in the San Francisco Bay area and both attended Berkeley as undergrads. Wally also did his graduate work in Economics there. Denise went to graduate school later, after they had moved to Illinois. During the dinner party Denise confessed that she struggled with math in high school, algebra and geometry were opaque to her, let alone trig. Somehow she got by. She was a very good student at Berkeley and reported she thrived in the large intro classes, doing better than most of her peers. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I’ve taught a lot of Intermediate Microeconomics, which requires a fair amount of analytic geometry, the type you’d learn in high school math. Many of my students would struggle with the math. Somehow, they too got by on the math requirement, but cognitively math was a foreign language to them, one they didn’t speak. Even though Illinois is a selective and highly regarded university, and I’m talking about full time students, the traditional 18 – 22 year olds, the situation with math for the non science or engineering students is pretty much the same as what Professor X describes for his English students. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Something is terribly wrong here.</p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">* * * * * </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I used to believe in the math gene, that I have it while my wife doesn’t, and that with our kids I wasn’t sure but it seemed like the older one has it and the younger one doesn’t. Until this year (trig) the older one was getting A’s, seemingly easily, and if he’s doing fine I’d just as soon keep my nose out of it, let him learn on his own, try to tone down the pressure that inevitably comes from being the child of academic parents. The younger one had some issues with algebra last year and geometry this year so we’ve gotten into the routine where I check his math homework. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Last year in addition to the checking I spent substantial time coaching him on the math to talk through the thinking and help him conceptualize about what he is doing. Once in a while we seemed to make progress. Much of the time, though, it was tough sledding. In other contexts, such as the history he’s learned from playing computer games, he is extremely fluid and gets to the result very quickly, seemingly without effort. I believe he has an expectation that math should be the same way, instead of a sequence of steps, some a labor to take. This expectation impedes his learning. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">This year I’m coming to believe that the behavior is a consequence of how math is taught. Homework is a set of perhaps twenty problems from the textbook, most in the drill category, many little perturbations of what came previously. The emphasis is not on derivations, but rather on getting familiar with a class of problems. This encourages learning math as a bunch of formulas to be applied rather than figuring things out based on primitives and context. Partly because I get home from work late many evenings and partly because I’m not happy with these assignments, this year I’ve done much less coaching and instead have simply done the checking. I do have to figure them out, at least the first one in a category, and sometimes that takes time. I need to draw diagrams, go through some steps, some of which are not immediate, to get to an answer. My son, and this I’m sure he gets from me, tries to do this in his head. There often aren’t any diagrams or only scant drawing. Sometimes he gets stuck and doesn’t know how to do a problem at all. Then he’ll leave it blank and ask for help, but that’s help on getting the answer, not on how to work the problem. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Because we’ve been anxious about grades and getting into a good college, I asked my older son to show me his trig book so I might help him study for his final. He said he was having difficulty with formulas of the form cos(<span style="font-family:Symbol,serif;"> </span>+<span style="font-family:Symbol,serif;"> </span>), the cosine of the sum of two angles. There’s a chapter on this and related formulas so I looked at his book to see what that chapter said. It suggested the student memorize the formulas! This is not the way to teach math.<br /></p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">There actually is a book called The Math Gene. This <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.maa.org/reviews/mathgene.html">short review</a></u></span> is worth the read. Keith Devlin, the author of the Math Gene, makes a compelling case that math ability is a property of our species and it is intimately tied to facility with language. Those who are good in math developed some affinity for it early on but everyone is capable of establishing such affinity. The question then is why so many don’t. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">My guess is that at some point, possibly in Elementary School, maybe in Middle School or High School, most kids hit a blockade with math, their prior method of learning math no longer seems to work. They become frustrated and ashamed. They need a way to work their way through this, but they don’t have that capacity on their own. They need coaching. The best sort of coaching, in my view, would help the student develop his own capacity so he can make further progress on his own. Too much tutoring is aimed at getting students through the next test. Damn the test. The stakes are too high to worry about the test. We’re talking about developing a lifelong capacity for abstract thinking. If the kid is stigmatized, what else would you call it if he passes the test but doesn’t have a fundamental understanding of what is going on, that lifelong capacity will not fully develop. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">If the math teacher has 20 students per class (most have more) and teaches 5 different classes (which I take is the standard load), that’s a lot of students who potentially need individual attention. It’s probably not fair to expect the teacher to be the coach, though perhaps in some cases that can happen. Most kids won’t have a parent who was a math major in college and who earned a doctorate in economics, a field akin to applied math. At some point in most kids’ schooling the parent won’t be able to serve as the coach. How does this problem get solved?</p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I’ve been seriously stuck in math a few times in my life. For at least a couple of those I was having emotional problems simultaneously, though I’m not sure about cause and effect. In the first semester of my sophomore year in college I was taking both Abstract Algebra and Analysis at MIT. Both were over my head. It was frightening. I was a math major and I was supposed to be a bright guy. I transferred to Cornell the following semester. As a junior there I took a Topology course from a really great teacher who forced us to talk through all the concepts, many of which were similar to those from Analysis (open and closed sets, compactness, etc.). I found his homework interesting and I put in a great deal of time working through the problems. What I couldn’t do as a sophomore in one setting I could do as a junior in a different place. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">We need the great teachers who help the students work through their conceptual struggles and inspire the students to figure things out on their own. Many of those teachers should be working with Middle School students or High School students, but probably only a handful at a time, so their work would differ form what the regular teachers do. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">* * * * * </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">There is a school of thought that students should spend their time on open ended real world problems as those are <i>authentic</i>. Certainly such problems offer good motivation for learning because students will have interest in the circumstances and thus in identifying remedies. But by the very nature of these real world problems, students will not be able to test whether a proposed remedy is effective unless it is actually implemented. Consequently, I believe there to be substantial value for students to work on closed ended problems but those that have some originality to them – they are unlike other problems students have encountered so the students must use some ingenuity in finding the solution. They will themselves know whether they’ve found a good solution, because math provides a way to logically test whether the solution holds. It is the ingenuity and the logical testing that we want students to learn. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Students who do learn these things will address the complex real world problems in a different way than their peers do. The math savvy students will construct an abstract representation of the real world problem, analyze and solve that, then use this solution as the basis of their plan for the real world problem. They may then critique their own abstraction by considering what was omitted in the process and how including that might affect their solution. They will develop a sense about how much of the complexity can be accounted for into the model before it gets too unwieldy to analyze. In other words, they’ll understand the limits of their own ingenuity. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Most math classes in Middle School and High School don’t have students work original problems, except perhaps for extra credit. (Some examples of such problems are the <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/The12CoinWeighingProblem/">12 coin weighing problem</a></u></span>, the modified donkey theorem, <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.mathwarehouse.com/geometry/congruent_triangles/angle-side-side-postulate.php">this site shows why the donkey theorem fails as a general proposition</a></u></span> but it holds if the angle is the largest in the triangle, and determining how many cubes of side 1 can fit into a sphere of radius 2.) When I attended Cardozo High School (1969-72) outside the Math Office there was posted a “Problem of the Week.” I can’t recall whether those who got a correct solution had their names posted or not. My sense is that you’d try these for the challenge rather than for the recognition. Puzzles engage people; witness the popularity of Sudoku today. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">We did more of these on the Math Team, with the difference that the <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.themathleague.com/">contests</a></u></span> were timed, three 10 minute slots with two problems per slot, so you had to get an insight quickly or you wouldn’t be able to do it at all. Since the problems had novelty to them, being good at doing these problems meant you had to be a good guesser. I believe that is a skill that can be learned as long as there is some recognition beforehand about what constitutes a good guess. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">To get insight into these problems the trick is to come up with a picture or a framing question that lends itself to analysis and that gives a ready view of the problem. Consider the cubes inside the sphere problem. That was one of problems from the Math Team. I didn’t get it. I didn’t come up with the appropriate visual. But I thought about it again, not too long ago (more than 35 years after I missed it the first time around) this time having in mind <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.rubiks.com/">Rubik’s Cube</a></u></span>. If each of the little cubes within Rubik’s Cube has side equal to 1, can the full Rubik’s Cube be squeezed into a sphere of radius 2? The answer is no, it can’t. You can’t even get one face of the cube in because the diagonal of a face will be longer than 4 since the face itself is 3x3. But you can get in the cubes that form the x, y, and z axes comprised of the middle cube and each cube that shares a face with the middle cube (there are 7 1x1 cubes that make up these axes). It turns out you can squeeze in a few more 1x1 cubes in addition. So now there is a way to count what’s possible and come up with an answer. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I don’t remember ever being told to find a picture to solve a math problem although in common parlance in math class we talk about “seeing” the solution. Just what is it that we see and how do we find it? It’s as if we’re lost in the woods, looking for a way out. How do we find a path that works? </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Practice matters for this. We get better at finding the path over time. My sense of why we see some kids with high math ability and others not is that some have early success and hence they continue practicing. Others have an early stumble and they stop. Over time the lack of practice translates into, “I’m no good at math.” Had the kid recovered quickly from the early stumble, he may have done very well in math thereafter. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">If that’s right, then teaching such kids we need to do two things. First, we need to watch for those early stumbles and make sure the kid overcomes that soon before a permanent scar forms. Then we need to keep it interesting so the kid wants to practice. If practice is a drudge, most kids won’t do it. Instead, they’ll get by. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Beyond that there may still be differences across students in math ability. But what we observe mostly, say from how students do on standardized math tests, is performance of a bunch of kids who’ve been stigmatized about math along with the performance of a smaller set of kids who weren’t so stigmatized, so the variation in ability seems much greater than what it actually is. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">* * * * * </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Math may seem esoteric and not especially relevant to students, particularly if the field they choose to pursue is unlike physics, engineering, or economics, which clearly rely on math quite a bit. In my view, however, it is very useful in a host of other areas. Consider such down to earth activities as printing out a picture from your digital camera and resizing the image to best fill the page, or redesigning a kitchen, or doing household finance. All require some basic math. So certainly an argument can be made that some math competency is essential for adult functioning irrespective of field of endeavor.</p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I want to advance a different argument. Math is critical for us as thinkers. It helps in any domain where abstract thought is helpful, which for me is just about everywhere. The type of thinking one does in math is very useful in writing. It helps in making arguments, in seeing relationships between different ideas, and in developing a sense of elegance in thought. This is not merely about becoming proficient with logic. It is about being conscious of representations and becoming comfortable reasoning this way. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Perhaps more importantly, good math knowledge is crucial for decision making, particularly the type of decisions that executives make. It forces the decision maker to be cognizant of the assumptions being made and to develop a sense of humility – the assumptions may not be valid. It encourages the decision maker to avoid making conclusions that are leaps of faith, not based on the assumptions, and to encourage an empirical rather than a faith based way of assessing the goodness of any particular decision. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">This idea doesn’t seem to have found its way into the press. When folks like Tom Friedman talk about math education, see this <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0JSD/is_/ai_n24267441">interview between Friedman and Daniel Pink</a></u></span> for example, they argue that math is (part of) the gateway to the next generation of World products and therefore math knowledge fuels the economic engine. This <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/opinion/04lewiseinhorn.html">piece by Michael Lewis and David Einhorn</a></u></span> on the End of the Financial World as We Know It is getting closer on the role math plays, as a check on irresponsible decision making and as a general validation device, but it still gives the impression (I don’t doubt it is accurate I’m just questioning whether it's desirable) that the guy who knows the math is the nerd in the back room. The big wheels ignore it in their own thinking. In this particular case the argument is that there was information about the Madoff scandal dating as far back as 1999. But the information stayed within a relatively closed loop. It didn’t disseminate broadly. Might that be in part because people were incapable of explaining why it was a Ponzi scheme? </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">So I believe we’ve undersold the importance of math understanding and that, in large part, has enabled our culture where so many otherwise well educated people are math phobic, while many others think they know math when what they really have is formulaic mastery but little to no knowledge on how to use math to solve actual problems. This is a cultural issue as much as an educational one. We need to change this culture. Doing so will require a big time investment of people. And the aim should be clear – sophisticated math understanding, not graduate level math analysis but rather understanding mathematical argument, being able to make such argument, and being able to evaluate the argument of others. This needs to be a universal outcome from our education system, not just the domain of an elite few. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p>Lanny Arvanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05597426421997599777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331075451664544793.post-49305569677340139072008-12-18T11:04:00.009-06:002009-05-13T19:21:21.811-05:00Writing As Guessing<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p><blockquote><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.</p> <p class="western" style="margin-left: 0.5in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Dwight_D._Eisenhower/"><b>Dwight D. Eisenhower</b></a></u></span></p></blockquote><p class="western" style="margin-left: 0.5in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Dwight_D._Eisenhower/"><b></b></a></u></span></p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">My family is now back home after a week of Christmas Holiday in San Antonio, lots of Mexican food including the traditional <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.cookinglight.com/entertaining/holidays-occasions/christmas-eve-tamales-00400000003271/">Tamales on Christmas Eve</a></u></span>, and much time spent with my wife’s siblings and their families. As the sports world reminds us, tis the season both for <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=3800768">painful separations</a></u></span> and for possible rejuvenation in new relationships. I’ve not watched nearly as much sports this year (Olympics included) as I’ve done in the past, possibly because two out of the three teams I root for (Yankees, football Giants, Illini basketball) haven’t been very good or maybe my attention is simply focused elsewhere. Last night I did watch the <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.suntimes.com/sports/colleges/1356027,CST-SPT-ill31.article">Illini beat Purdue</a></u></span>, a frustrating game to watch due the ineptitude in play, but there were some bursts reminiscent of the glory days and that proved sufficient for us to prevail. One of the bright spots was the shooting of <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://sports.espn.go.com/ncb/player/profile?playerId=36188">Alex Legion</a></u></span>, a highly touted transfer from Kentucky, an example of how breaking off an old relationship and starting anew can be good for the person, even if that comes with some loss in prestige and if in the transition it seemingly implies a lack of personal commitment. I’ll return to following the Illini this season. The potential for them to be a good team is there.</p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">During the vacation I got to thinking about separation and predicting whether it would happen from reading <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.gladwell.com/blink/index.html">Blink by Malcolm Gladwell</a></u></span>. The first chapter discusses predicting divorce by watching short clips of couples arguing through contentious issues and using that viewing as a decisive information source for predicting viability of the relationship. Gladwell focuses on the work of <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.gottman.com/">John Gottman</a></u></span> and that he has the ability to “thin slice” these videos and make accurate predictions based on this sort of watching, because <i>he knows what to look for</i>. The critical variable is contempt. If at least one of the partners demonstrates facially contempt for the spouse, rolling the eyes is a dead give away even if it is on screen for only a second or two, then the relationship has serious problems. Contempt implies rigidity in held positions, a lack of willingness to negotiate issues through to an acceptable conclusion, a lack of trust in the partner. Gladwell is quite convincing on this finding. This chapter serves as a great introduction to the power of thin slicing and to what we learn by reading faces. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Owing to the nature of the book, Gladwell doesn’t ask from where the contempt arises. Was it there before the marriage? That would be hard to understand. Why would someone enter into a voluntary relationship with feelings of contempt for the potential spouse? If it was there does it arise because of a temporary blindness due to infatuation? Or does the contempt emerge after the honeymoon is over, triggered by observing some behaviors in the spouse that are viewed as unattractive, perhaps even reprehensible, in which case the contempt results from overwriting the earlier feelings of infatuation, replacing them with a darker, more sinister view? And might that be all too common because of one’s own lack of maturity in knowing how to forgive and to forget as well as how to negotiate through on a contentious matter without that escalating into hostilities or in producing an unsatisfactory outcome, one that can’t possibly succeed? I don’t know, but I’ve got a guess on this score. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Many people get married too early, in their late teens or early twenties, with kids coming soon afterwards. These marriages inevitably are cast in the <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/A/htmlA/adventuresof/adventuresof.htm">Ozzie and Harriet</a></u></span> stereotype, with the man as the bread winner and autocrat and the woman as homemaker, quite possibly repressing her desires for a career as a working professional. The asymmetry in roles encourages lack of communication on more serious matters, quite possibly blocking personal growth, particularly for the woman. It is much harder to start a career after many years, waiting for kids to be old enough to fend for themselves, in the meantime losing out on that period right after college when others cut their teeth in the job market and start working their way up the job ladder. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">My guess is that deep down most of us don’t know what it is we want. We only learn what we want from experience. Early infatuation that leads to marriage masks this ignorance. The subsequent marriage can block the learning. The seeds for contempt of spouse are there in this structure. Particular episodes might trigger the feelings of contempt, but really they are symptoms, not root causes. If this is right, early marriages where the kids are deferred have a better chance of success, but even here there may be an asymmetry that creates stress on the marriage if the wife works while the husband goes to Professional School and if she doesn’t herself go to Professional School thereafter or find a meaningful career based on her earlier participation in the labor force. Marriages that don’t occur till both partners have established careers have the best chance of all because the partners know much more about themselves. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">* * * * *</p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I got married when in my mid thirties. It’s not like I planned it that way. There was a lot of social awkwardness beforehand, perhaps because I was overweight in High School and College, losing about 60 pounds in the summer before graduate school with my intent to get back in the game, but then not knowing how to overcome my naiveté. The awkwardness was painful. Oftentimes when we struggle we don’t appreciate it as preparation for something else. Only in retrospect did I realize it gave me a chance to learn about myself, what I could tolerate and what I really wanted. When I met my wife while on sabbatical at the University of British Columbia I was ready emotionally, secure in my career and with an established adult sense of values. My wife was similarly situated. It was a joyous time of life for both of us. The year leading up to the wedding and the first year of marriage was like an extended honeymoon, full of laughter, romance, and many things new. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Of course, there are also disadvantages to getting married at a later age. We get more settled in our ways, sometimes developing unattractive habits that are hard to break. The biological clock keeps ticking. I wanted to keep that honeymoon phase going, but my wife and I both wanted to have kids and there would be risks if we delayed. As it was, when we took <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://kidshealth.org/parent/pregnancy_newborn/pregnancy/birth_class.html">Lamaze class</a></u></span> about another year later we felt we could be the parents of some of the others taking the class. That and the sonograms and the change in my wife’s diet marked a new focus for us. For my part, I put aside <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Joy-Sex-Alex-Comfort/dp/074347774X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230768032&sr=8-1">The Joy of Sex</a></u></span> and started in on <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0743476670/ref=dp_olp_used?ie=UTF8&condition=used">Dr. Spock</a></u></span>. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">We had a wonderful pediatrician, <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.wellness.com/dir/981192/nephrologist/il/champaign/jane-striegel-carle-clinic-association-md">Dr. Jane Striegel</a></u></span>. After a fashion, we called her Dr. Giggle, since we went to Carle Clinic so often in those days and didn’t want it to seem like a burden for the kids. She really helped us through the anxious times of being new parents. We didn’t know much on that score beforehand and didn’t have extended family living nearby to help us. So we fixated on issues including some that ultimately proved to be benign. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">On our first trip down to Boca Raton where my folks lived to show them our son Nathan, my wife Leslie (she’s Methodist) learned some Yiddish (she already knew she was a shikseh, but that was about the extent of her language training). First my mom, then some of the neighbors, and then even strangers who we saw at the shopping center would look at the baby’s legs, give a little pinch, and say “pulkes” (pronounced pull-keys and meaning chicken thigh, intended in a humorous fashion). He seemed to be always hungry (a trait from my side of the family) and too big. Every time we went to see Dr. Striegel, her nurse would measure height and weight and make recordings of that. We sometimes looked at the plot of the results, which were outside the 95<sup>th</sup> percentile curve in each category. This fed our anxiety. Dr. Striegel didn’t worry about that. She cared more about the trajectory than the level and she showed us that the trajectory of the plots tracked the 95<sup>th</sup> percentile curve almost perfectly. She was right. Though he was a large kid his growth slowed earlier than most other kids and eventually he learned to eat moderately and slimmed down as a consequence. This was a big lesson for me. Focus on growth, not on snapshot views. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Dr. Streigel taught us many things, all in an extremely warm and down to earth way. One of those was about the baby’s cognitive development. She encouraged us to make a smiley face, hand drawn with crayon and done in primary colors, to show the baby for both stimulation and comfort. Leslie drew this on cardboard, cut it out and mounted it on a wooden stick, which we could use to wave the face in front of the baby. We called the product Mr. Face. Placing Nathan on his back on a blanket on the floor, one of us would kneel next to him and wave Mr. Face slowly about 8 to 12 inches from Nathan’s face. We’d watch his eyes follow the image intently. Soon afterwards, I put this to a very simple song of my own creation.</p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p><blockquote>Mr. Face,<br />Mr. Face,<br />Mr. Face, Face, Face.<br />ooooooooOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOoooooooo.</blockquote><p></p><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Then it repeats. Waving Mr. Face while singing the song was surprisingly compelling, for parent as well as child. Mr. Face went everywhere that Nathan went. We depended on him a great deal. It was another big lesson. Our job was not just to attend to the baby’s immediate needs. We were to provide for his education. Mr. Face was the start of that. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Nathan went to daycare and we soon learned to hire the teachers there as baby sitters. One of them, named Wei Wei, was constantly teaching Nathan as she cared for him, how to climb the stairs, other things he could do to fend for himself, there were so many practical lessons. All of it was an education for Nathan – another lesson for me. We were very sad when Wei Wei moved away.</p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">* * * * * </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">This story is about a search for origins. I want to understand the source of my own motivations for learning and for writing, to discover the primitives that drive me. It stands to reason that these will be found by looking at early childhood, where much of personality is formed. But the memories of my own childhood are scant, the cupboard is bare with not enough for even the dog to pick at. A man in search of his own origins will try to find them in his children, letting them relive the youth he has lost and forgotten. That is my guess. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">When Nathan was nearly four and his younger brother Ben had already turned two, I happened onto a fork in the road choice about my career – remain a full fledged academic economist or start anew as an administrator in learning technology. I opted for the latter in a series of small steps, each till the last looking like it was a reversible decision, the whole process seemingly a happy accident. I had neither background in learning technology nor as an administrator. What I did have was my original motivation for embracing learning technology in my own teaching – I knew my Intermediate Microeconomics course wasn’t working for most of the students, though there were a handful who really liked it, and I wanted to know if the problem was me or them – and I had not quite a year of experience with learning technology trying to make improvements with the concomitant benefits from learning by doing from that process. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">That hardly seemed enough. I did a variety of things to try to give myself firmer footing. One of those early on, I had taken books out of my parents house in Bayside before they sold that to move to Florida full time. Some of those were from when my dad went to college at NYU, 1933-36. He had a paperback copy of John Dewey’s <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Education-John-Dewey/dp/1438503695/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230909395&sr=1-1">Democracy and Education</a></u></span>, the paper yellowed from age, when turning a page the leaf would sever from the binding, an odd experience to be sure. I only bought a new copy of the book afterwards, in case I wanted to reread it. At the time of reading the decision was tentative and I hoped reversible, so I was loathe to make a greater commitment. I remember very little of the detail but I do recall a general sense from the book. There were passages of pure insight about learning, ideas that would light a fire in anyone who cared about those issues, but interspersed with some rather dull philosophical stuff that were a labor to slug through. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">From there much of what I read about learning came from the suggestions of others. Over time I read <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Reflective-Practitioner-Professionals-Think-Action/dp/1857423194/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230913530&sr=1-1">Donald Schon</a></u></span>, <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Actual-Possible-Worlds-Jerusalem-Harvard-Lectures/dp/0674003667/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230913593&sr=1-2">Jerome Bruner</a></u></span>, <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=168512">Jones and Spiro</a></u></span>, and much more that I found resonated with me. I also learned some important bits from my own practice. One was that many faculty, irrespective of their discipline, were quite willing to discuss their teaching issues with me and that I enjoyed participating in those conversations. Another was that many people were willing to regard me as an expert in the field, in spite of my lack of preparation. I took advantage of both of these in my interactions.</p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Yet implicitly I understood another need I had that in retrospect seems obvious but at the time I could only feel my way to it. I had to learn about my own learning, an inward looking journey that didn’t rely on what I garnered from my readings, an examination of self that would address whether I’m essentially the same as my students in learning or fundamentally different. Was what I was learning from other sources for me too, or only for my students? Could I teach them by feeding my own needs? </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">So though I didn’t fully realize it at the time, those happy days with the kids, reading to them while they were sitting on my lap or going to bed, watching movies or cartoon shows as a family activity, watching them watch and emote, provided a pathway into myself. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I did have fond memories of <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/A.-A.-Milne/e/B000AP7ID2">A. A. Milne</a></u></span> and <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Theodore-Seuss-Geisel/e/B000AP8MY6">Dr. Suess</a></u></span> and easily developed a love for <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sandra-Boynton/e/B000AP9SWQ">Sandra Boynton</a></u></span> (a hog and a frog cavort in the bog), <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Goodnight-Moon-Margaret-Wise-Brown/dp/0060775858/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230919430&sr=1-1">Goodnight Moon</a></u></span>, <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Thomas-Engine-Story-Collection-Railway/dp/0375834095/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230919467&sr=1-1">Thomas the Tank Engine</a></u></span>, and many others. Reading with the kids was physical in a way that it isn’t as an adult. Of course, reading and snuggling go hand in hand. Young kids spend a lot of time in their pajamas, the type that are skin tight and with the feet sewn in. But reading is also about guessing games with pointing. The books have pictures. The kid points to a place in the picture. The parent nods assent. Reading is a back and forth show and tell. The kid wants to show he understands. He is giving a command performance; yet one that he fully enjoys because it is wrapped up in play, affection, and family. Our kids had two themes that started from the reading, trains and dinosaurs, but that soon extended to the outer world with the show and tell part of it all. I believe it is this early joy from show and tell that is the source of <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik6yCiDmp-s">the look at me, look at me, look at me</a></u></span> many of us feel as adults. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The movies we watched offered a different way for the kids to learn since the stories were much more intricate. Disney is extremely shrewd in making its featured animated films so they appeal to adults on their own level, while entertaining the kids too. Vegging out after returning from San Antonio I spotted <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://disney.go.com/disneyvideos/animatedfilms/mulan2moviecollection/">Mulan</a></u></span> on the Disney Channel and started to watch it, my wife joining me in the viewing after a few minutes. The appeal is still there, not least because the villain Shan Yu is drawn in a way to resemble <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.theninthconfiguration.com/tnc/myspace_kane.jpg">Stacy Keach</a></u></span>, but also because of well done production numbers and mature story line, though the kids are now too adult now to watch this sort of thing. <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110357/">The Lion King</a></u></span>, <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101414/">Beauty and the Beast</a></u></span>, and <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112453/">Balto</a></u></span> all have this same sort of appeal. When the kids were small we watched those and other Disney films, <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114709/">Toy Story</a></u></span> and later films from Pixar, and the first four or five of the <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095489/">Land Before Time</a></u></span> series. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">At first I didn’t anticipate that the kids would want to know these stories by heart, but they did. So we watched them over and over again, rotating through our expanding collection of full length cartoon movies. Once the kids knew the story well enough, they play acted while they watched the movie, inserting themselves into the story, making motions while looking at the screen. (They did this individually, not as a team.) There was no script for the kids to follow. They made it up as they went along, a type of make believe prompted by the movie. As the story became part of them, they became part of the story. This is something I didn’t know about how kids learn. It was fascinating to watch all the more so because they did this without any prompting from me or my wife. It was natural for them. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I’ve got less of a sense of how much other make believe the kids did early on, because I wasn’t there to watch them most of the time. But from the movie viewing I’ve come to understand that good stories begat make believe, which in turn morphs the story <i>ad infinitum</i>. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Although I recall those times with much fondness, there were some dark clouds. The <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%25C3%25A9mon_%28anime%29">Pokemon</a></u></span> craze, which started around that time, bothered me. The TV show, my kids first taste of anime, was ok if that was all there was to it. The first full length feature movie was horrible because they made the story for kids only, but I really can’t fault them for that. It was the tag line – got to catch them all – that got to me. The tag line started to seem like part of a <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme">Ponzi scheme</a></u></span> when the neighbor kids, who were a year or two older than ours, talked about their trading cards. My kids got wrapped up in that for a while, but fortunately there was no carry over from that to their subsequent interests. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">A few years later, Ben got very into <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.nick.com/shows/spongebob_squarepants/index.jhtml">SpongeBob</a></u></span>, an improbable story line and setting where I confess that I didn’t see the appeal. (Time Magazine named it <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1651341_1659196_1652730,00.html">one of the top 100 TV shows of all time</a></u></span>; shows what I know.) It was an early example of the child leading the family in its pursuit of entertainment and culture. Sometimes there is learning simply from embracing the popular. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">* * * * * </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">As a teenager in Bayside there were various chores to do around the house. I could take or leave yard work – raking the leaves and mowing the lawn, didn’t like the work I had to do for earning an allowance – taking out the trash and watering the plants, but ultimately learned to like washing the dishes, a job I fell into because my High School was on split session and in 10<sup>th</sup> grade I was home in the mornings and had free time to do the dinner dishes from the night before. By that time my sister was away at College, my mom worked as a High School teacher herself and she also did language tutoring at home in the late afternoon and into the evening, my dad commuted to Manhattan for work, so this task fell on me as the next oldest among the kids. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">We had a dishwasher but only used it to rinse the fancy plates and silverware when we had company. The regular dishes were hand washed. There was only one sink, not the two side by side that you find in a modern kitchen today. So it was a bit of a trick to first wash and then rinse each dish before placing in the rack to air dry. One of the reasons I liked doing the dishes is that I came up with my own algorithm on how to manage the chore: first the glasses, then the plates, then the bowls and cups, then the silverware, and finally the pots and pans. We were a little primitive as a household in all of this. I don’t think I learned about dish soap for another year or two, so originally I did this with a bar of ivory, leaving a soap film even after the rinsing. It was kind of like the story about folks growing up poor. Nobody said anything about it so I didn’t trouble myself on that account. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The real reason I liked doing the dishes was because I could daydream while doing the work. Other chores demanded paying closer attention. Our dishes were inexpensive and pretty much unbreakable. I did have to scrub them well, but otherwise my mind could be elsewhere; and it was. I used the time to explore all sorts of fantasies and play through ideas, just for my own enjoyment. Most of those are long forgotten but a couple I still recall. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The next to last year I attended <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://oxfordguilford.homestead.com/mainpage.html">Camp Oxford</a></u></span>, I believe it was summer of 1967, I got put into the Senior group, Bunk 18. (The groups were Frosh, Cubs, Sophomores, Middies, Juniors, Seniors, and Super Seniors. After that you became a waiter, then a counselor.) I started in Bunk 3 as a Cub, then another year as a Cub in Bunk 5, then Bunk 9 as a Soph, Bunk 13 as a Middie, but then I skipped the Juniors entirely by getting put into Bunk 18. After several years of being one of the older kids in my group (Bunk 5 was oldest in the Cubs, Bunk 9 was oldest in the Sophs, and Bunk 13 was oldest in the Middies) I was now in the youngest bunk back with older kids whom I hadn’t been with since I was a Cub in Bunk 3. We played a lot of basketball then and it was competitive. I played with the better kids, not because I was particularly skilled, but because I was the biggest. During rest hour one of the counselors coached me one-on-one, trying to get me to learn a hook shot and make a pivot in the post. When we played inter-camp games, I was the starting center. And in our normal competition during the summer where we were divided up into three permanent teams within our group for all team sports (softball, volleyball, flag football were the main others) I was the second leading scorer on my team and surely the leading rebounder, catching my own misses from right under the basket. For whatever reason, that experience stuck with me and while washing the dishes and maybe also when going to bed I fantasized about a 10-team basketball league with kids that age, populated by the better athletes in the Senior group and other kids of approximately the same skill level, all of us becoming good players in the process. The next year at camp many of those other kids had gone on to become Super Seniors while I remained a Senior so the experience was one and done, but the fantasy about the basketball league stuck with me for quite a while thereafter. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I got a completely different idea perhaps from growing up so close to <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.nycroads.com/roads/long-island/">the Long Island Expressway</a></u></span>, we lived on 56<sup>th</sup> Avenue two blocks north of the LIE, and maybe from seeing futuristic stuff at the <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_New_York_World%27s_Fair">World’s Fair</a></u></span>, which was near where Shea Stadium was sited, Willets Point Boulevard on the IRT #7 line. I envisioned a series of moveable sidewalks to replace all car traffic. Each sidewalk would move at a different speed, the outer ones quite slow, the inner ones much faster, and the relative speed of two adjacent sidewalks would be such that you could cross over from one to the other without feeling it dangerous. The innermost sidewalks would be moving at 40 or 50 miles per hour so you could get around town in a hurry by riding them – traffic wouldn’t delay you like it would on the LIE. And because it would all be electric powered, there would be no pollution from burning gasoline. A perfect “what if” that never saw the light of day. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Washing dishes I could think about stuff like that, spending a lot of time for my own personal enjoyment on these mental sojourns. I don’t know what got me into the habit of doing that nor do I know whether other kids I knew did likewise. I didn’t talk about these fantasies with my friends. But these other kids had to do chores too, maybe even wash the dishes. What did they think about while doing their work? </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">* * * * * </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The argument I want to advance about writing, here I’m talking about the adult sort of writing that we’d like our College students to be able to accomplish, is that for it to seem natural and part of our daily existence we need to think of it as the culmination of many behaviors learned earlier in life including some that one would not consider as writing at all but that were natural in their own setting. Unfortunately, many students who are taught writing believe it to be a thing unto itself, hence something alien from their own experiences, a rare activity to engage in only when forced to do so, something painful and not at all elevating, done because school requires it rather than because they feel a need to give voice to their own ideas. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I suppose at this point I need to pay homage to <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www2.hawaii.edu/%7Eweisser/Murray.pdf">Donald Murray</a></u></span>, the father of the concept of writing as process. I will borrow from him liberally in what I have to say. But I have some reservations that I need to get out beforehand. First, and though I have some very dear friends who teach writing and I value their friendship especially because they seem so generous in spirit, much more so than economists where the modifier “grouchy” is almost surely an understatement, I’m quite unclear on whether there should be courses aimed at teaching writing. Writing is always about something and if there is a course dealing with that something shouldn’t that be where the writing happens? The ideas that emerge from the writing do require critique. Who should provide that? Also, writing and semesters don’t mix, in my view. (Maybe learning and semesters don’t mix either, but for now I’ll content myself to zero-in on writing.) Writing takes as long as it takes. If the semester concludes but the writing process is still in mid stream, what then? I’m afraid students get the wrong idea this way. For them to be passionate about their own ideas, those ideas must be pushed to some meaningful conclusion; there is reward in that.</p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Second, when we are discussing that something and asking students to write about it we have to squarely confront the dilemma that they are novices on the subject, reading the writings of experts, so it is fair to ask what possible contribution can they make and is the writing assignment well conceived to elicit those contributions? The students are well aware of the dilemma and it can paralyze them in the writing, inviting a going-through-the-motions approach, plagiarism too. Without the student seeing the personal value add, the assignment is ill conceived. How does one convince students that they can contribute especially when, according to Murray, the focus is away from product? And if they feel they can’t make a contribution are they entitled to opt out of the work? </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">While this one looks like we’re painted into a corner, there is an obvious way out. If young kids can through their make believe change the story by becoming part of the story, why can’t older kids do likewise? If that’s the right response, the trick then is getting the students to see that is their role. It’s some trick. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Third, what do we know about the students daydreaming or about the students engaging in intellectual conversation that is an end in itself and happens entirely outside the context of the writing class? Do we know whether it happens, where it happens, when and how? If it is not happening are the students really ready for writing? Should there be pre-requisites, a course on daydreaming, another on witty and engaging conversation? Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? My great fear is that our culture where students, particularly students from good middle class homes, are either so heavily scheduled or always connected with friends or family that they have neither time nor inclination to scratch their heads about off the wall ideas. I don’t know how seriously to take <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200812/disney">this essay by P.J. O’Rourke</a></u></span>, he may very well have become too jaded in his evaluation of all things Disney, after all their aim is to appeal to the mass market and maybe because we can learn so many wonderful things online its harder for a place to embody novelty in an essential way, but if he’s right we seem to be turning into a society of dullards. All work and no play is not the formula for Jack to succeed in writing class. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">With those caveats, let’s go back to Murray. He breaks the writing up into three stages, <i>prewriting</i> where the bulk of the effort happens, <i>composition</i> which he is very matter of fact about, and <i>rewriting</i> or editing if you will. Keeping each of those stages distinct in conception seems useful to me, though Murray came up with schema before word processors and personal computers. It may be that nowadays there is a cycling through of these stages repeatedly, just to produce the first draft. My belief is that there is guessing at each stage, though the type of guessing changes from one stage to the next.</p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Prewriting is very much like make believe. It starts with some spark of an idea and then it gets pushed around in all sorts of ways, finding a story line, getting additional ideas to tie in, hearing from the voice in your head about how some of it sounds, building a crescendo of enthusiasm for the subject. For me this is not much different from what I did as a teen while washing dishes. Nobody taught me to pre write. Much of it, I believe, is not teachable. I very much embrace the old Nike logo – just do it. Absolutely correct. Over time I’ve learned how much of this I need to do before sitting down to compose. That’s something you can’t know ahead of time. You have to experience it. Sometimes I can just sit down and compose with the whole thing flowing nicely as if the words and the structure seep out in a continual ooze. That’s fun when it happens, but I’ve come to realize that really I’ve thought about the ideas before, just not right before the composing. It’s more of a struggle to get the sentences out when the prewriting is incomplete.</p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">As I’ve become more ambitious in the type of writing I want to produce, the prewriting phase has gotten longer. It requires patience. Even with the make believe there is a mental testing – does the story hold water? Would anyone care about it one way or the other? (This second one will make you neurotic. How can you know that? Perhaps the best you can do is ask whether you care about it.) Sometimes there is floundering when early tests are not passed or when the day job requires too much attention to allow the make believe to play out. Unless writing is “what we do” that’s bound to happen. The offset, more than sufficient I believe, is to feed our native curiosity and desire to gain some understanding of that idea that sparked it all. Curiosity is the great enabler. Satisfying our curiosity is fun. Prewriting is learning we can do that without becoming smug, even when mom and dad aren’t there to answer all our questions. We can answer them ourselves, build a story to make sense about what we find, revise when we learn something surprising. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I don’t write much down when I do prewriting, perhaps book marking some references, but otherwise most of the work is in my head. I make a sketch of the story rather than an outline – sketches have sentences and perhaps substantial narrative, outlines have bullets and a hierarchy that may make for a logical structure but seems alien to a story. The process is very much like having a conversation with yourself. One real reason I write now is because I don’t have a sufficient number of friends to engage in discussion over issues I care about. Prewriting is the viable alternative. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">As <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://lanny-on-learn-tech.blogspot.com/2005/11/why-i-like-to-write-blog-posts.html">I’ve written elsewhere</a></u></span>, I’m prone to stew on an idea if I get a little bit stuck or if what I’ve got doesn’t seem up to my personal standard. This is deadly because all else stops while I’m stewing. Sometimes I write just to get a sort of closure. Perhaps graduate students at the dissertation stage (or writers of a book like this one) need to learn to get bits out regularly so they don’t stay in one place. Writing requires a sense of motion. Progress contributes to the enthusiasm. I’ve not seen this issue with undergraduate writing, where inadequate prewriting is almost certainly the main culprit for the mediocrity of the results they produce.</p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Composing a sentence on the computer screen is different from making it up in your head. With the latter, if it seems ok you keep going to the next sentence and then the one after that. Once it’s on the screen, however, you reread, first a sentence at a time, then a paragraph at a time. I do that by ear and judge how it sounds. If it doesn’t sound right I rewrite immediately. I also ask whether I believe what I’m saying. I need to be a fan of my own writing. If I can’t root for it, why should anyone else? Like any true fan, I want to know that I’ve touched all the bases. Often in asking that I discover that something seemingly entirely outside the discussion at hand all of a sudden appears relevant. I don’t know if this happens with every writer. It happens quite a bit with me. Murray seems to suggest it is universal with his emphasis on discovery. (How does he know that?) Writing is about discovery. When do you discover something? When you ask are you there yet only to find out that you’re not. But there’s more to it than that. We do many different things in parallel, read from a variety of sources, watch video on TV and online and we try to make sense of that. If we’re writing it’s natural to bring in the parallel ideas, just to see whether they do fit. The discoveries are sometimes forced from without. Finding those sort of connections is surprising and extremely satisfying. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Its time to talk about ego. In the prewriting and composition you’re making something up so ego cooperates and stays out of the way. Thank you ego for doing that. But now ego is back from vacation and is pretty defensive about it all. You’re going to start dicking around with this creation of yours. How can you improve on perfection? Why not just let it be?</p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">This is a challenge every time. I know of no silver bullet to handle it all, but I can offer a few tips and tricks. I start with the mechanical corrections first, typos and punctuation. It’s not that the mechanical stuff is important. Maybe I start with it because it's not important. I’m not ready to pick a fight with Mr. Ego just yet. Those red squiggly lines that word processors produce help on the typo front, though sometimes you want to leave the word as is and to hell with the word processor. Because so much of my writing is by ear, I have trouble with homophones, which can survive several proof readings. I’m aware of the problem. So if I’m a good boy (often I’m not) I put the writing away for a while and go back to it fresh after a fashion. That helps. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Punctuation is harder. Writing by ear makes you conscious of the pregnant pause. Somewhere you read that dramatic effect in writing is a way to draw the reader in. The problem, though, is that on rereading some of those pauses seem stillborn. I have a love/hate relationship with punctuation and with commas, in particular, I’m a little schizo. My process is like doing the <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.scoutsongs.com/lyrics/hokeypokey.html">Hokey Pokey</a></u></span>. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p><blockquote>You put the commas in,<br />You take the commas out.<br />You put the commas back in,<br />And you shake them all about. </blockquote><p></p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">There is humor in self-correction. That’s a good thing. Being defensive is not fun. After a round of going through the mechanical stuff you’re ready to turn to more serious matters. And the axiom to bring to bear is, “know your weaknesses.” So there, Mr. Ego. It’s not all sugar and light. There are weaknesses to confront. Get off your high horse. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">You may be able to produce a long list of weaknesses. I know I can. Best to stick with just what’s at the top of the list, item one only, maybe item two. Go further than that and you’ll be beaten down too much. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">My problem is pontification. I like to give voice to my opinions. Sometimes I do that without caring how it comes out. I need to remind myself of the Aesop Fable about the <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.storyarts.org/library/aesops/stories/north.html">North Wind and the Sun</a></u></span>, <i>delicato</i>. When my writing fails often it’s because it comes off too much like a lecture. It’s not that the points are wrong in a fundamental way, but couldn’t I make them differently so that amorphous reader we all direct our attention to cares about what I’m saying? Then sometimes, not too often but once in a while, the points are wrong too because I can express a strong opinion even when I’ve got no clue to what I’m talking about. That might seem frightening, but really if you guess at things it will happen. The problem is not the guessing. It’s on short circuiting the verification process. The real villain is sloth. Hang the devil. If only I could. I suppose it’s lucky I can’t so I can return to write anew.</p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Murray talks about the student producing draft after draft. When should the writer stop and claim victory? That’s the $64,000 question. When there aren’t external deadlines imposed that dictate the answer the solution is really an economic one. The goal is to maximize the value of the portfolio of writing, not just this one piece. Perfectionism needs to be addressed because it means the writer is solving the wrong problem. To guard against that I keep in mind an expression my friend Larry taught me, “good enough for government work” and another expression from a different Larry (<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.larrythecableguy.com/">The Cable Guy</a></u></span>) “Git-r-done.”</p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">* * * * * </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Much writing that is done for school is via the term paper. I’ve come to conclude that the form is flawed. Do students read term papers of other students, find the ones they like, and then try to imitate the form in their own creations? I’m not talking about plagiarizing here. I’m talking about developing a personal style by first imitating the style of other writers we like to read. I don’t know anyone who reads term papers for entertainment or personal edification. Why do we instructors assign a writing form that students can’t possibly appreciate first as readers? That seems pretty dumb to me.</p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The issue of reading for writing is an important one. It is impossible to be a good writer without reading broadly. The kid who is doing a good bit of reading will pick and choose those things he likes to read and those writers he admires. That’s a good place to start in finding a model for his own writing. It may be, however, that the kid is reading mostly books. Starting off writing a book is too daunting. So some of the reading should be short stories or essays. Substantial magazine reading or short story reading is essential for the fledgling writer. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Nowadays there is much reading and writing done online. As a regular blogger for the past few years, I’m all for that. But I’d urge caution about using other people’s blog posts as the model for the new writer. Blogging is early writing published without review. Reading early writing is fine but it’s good also to read more mature writing that has been polished, to get a sense of how the latter differs from the former and to develop taste as a reader whether there is a preferred form, perhaps to come to self-understanding as to why that preference exists.</p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Once a young writer has found another writer to emulate and starts producing pieces there is a type of guessing going on. We might call it improvisation or variations on a theme. At first there is bound to be some awkwardness and discomfort with deciding how much of the master must show up in the new work. After a while the new writer will have found a comfort level and understand how much of his own persona should come through in the work. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Because we continually want to learn, once that comfort level has been attained the young writer will look for new models to emulate and may watch other writers talk about how they go about their writing. The great playwright, Harold Pinter, in <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3150302824340759417">his last appearance on the Charlie Rose show</a></u></span>, talked about writing a play based on an image he had formed. Heeding Pinter’s advice, the young writer might search for an appropriate image and then base a piece on that. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">A few years back when I was developing my blogging style, I was heavily influenced by watching <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0200276/">The West Wing</a></u></span>, with its fast dialog, <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/24/magazine/24TV.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=%22watching%20TV%20makes%20you%20smarter%22&st=cse">deliberately leaving out pieces in the story so the viewer could puzzle about it</a></u></span>, and with multiple-threads, stories within the story so to speak. I tried to emulate some of that (not the fast dialog but the multiple threads) in my writing. I became conscientious of “weaving” but since I know next to nothing about that that, I had a simpler picture in mind at first. In grade school we did needle and yarn in a mesh, one color for the columns, a different color the rows, producing a checkerboard look. As we moved up in grade the mesh got a little finer but the basic approach remained the same. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I like this analogy because of problems I see with young writers, even very bright students. Their writing tends to be very flat. One thing follows another but there is no tie between them. The sequencing of ideas in their writing creates a sense that they are making a list, not telling a story. They need to self-critique their own approach. The image of the mesh with the horizontal and vertical threads is a good place to start.</p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">My current image is the double helix. It differs from the mesh in that we come round again but this time we’re not at the same place as we were before. Having two strands and circling back with each is what I aim for. There is guessing about what those strands should be and how they relate. There is a different sort of guessing in figuring out where to return. It’s what keeps the writing fun and challenging. </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Since most of us write at a computer our writing and reading have been heavily influenced by Google. There may be some preliminary research that was done in prewriting, but during composition there is more research, which happens every time a thought pops into the writer’s head – maybe this idea from the outside is relevant here. Who has written about that idea and what’s been said about it? Expeditious as ever, the writer does a Google search or two on the idea. Things turn up that seem promising. So the writing pauses and the reading begins. This reading is done online because the writing pause is only temporary. Or is it? There is a fear that the writing is only an <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"><u><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Litella">Emily Litella</a></u></span> thing. Beyond that what we read may be so fascinating that we get wrapped up in it and forget about the writing. If the writing reasserts itself the writer needs to address the issue of how the reading fits in. The Internet, therefore, is responsible for taking Murray’s structured three stage process and jumbling it all up. That’s ok. His essential point about process remains.</p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">* * * * * </p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Let me close this chapter with a challenge. Like marriage, I came to be interested in writing as a thing in itself later in life. It was only a means to an end before that. I was ready for writing by the time I found it. Can students learn all this about writing when they are much younger? That’s the question that needs to be answered. </p>Lanny Arvanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05597426421997599777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331075451664544793.post-81741307429929409912008-12-08T03:29:00.023-06:002009-05-13T20:10:56.798-05:00Why "Guessing" Rather Than Other Fancier Words?<blockquote><dl><dt class="quote"><a title="Click for further information about this quotation" href="http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/32851.html">To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.</a> </dt><dd class="author"><b><a href="http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/George_Orwell/">George Orwell</a> (1903 - 1950)</b></dd></dl></blockquote>Freezing rain over night caused <a href="http://www.champaignschools.org/">Unit 4 Schools</a> to close, part of a larger pattern of school closings in the surrounding area. This is not unusual for around here, especially for December, except today was supposed to be the last day of school before the Winter Break and at the High School today was supposed to be the second and culminating day of Final Exams. How do they plan to make that up? Might it be they don't give the exams at all? What would the consequences be of that?<br /><br />With two kids in High School, grades are such a large part of family life that sometimes we take them for granted and don't think through the implications. Some of the questions we do ask are these: What does it take to get an A? How should the kids prepare for their finals? These are the typical questions.<br /><br />The grades culture for good kids is about personal responsibility. Good grades are the ultimate in signal that the kid is going about his business in the right way. It shows he's not just living for the here and now but making the right sort of preparation for the future.<br /><br />It's also the last day of Finals at the U of I, the time of year I can say with glee, "I'm glad I'm not teaching this semester. I hate grading final exams." And, at least when teaching the large intermediate microeconomics course that was my staple until I became a full time administrator, I pretty much hate everything else that goes with it - students on the borderline haggling over their grades, proctoring to deter cheating, writing a test that if it asked the students to be inventive would get me fried on my course evaluations so instead writing questions pretty much like the practice exam with only minor perturbations, all of which makes me feel more like a bouncer at a speakeasy in the '20s than like a teacher.<br /><br />The students care about their grades in College. They care a lot. It's an obsessive compulsion. We know the My Grades area is the most used component of the online course management system. We know some students take gut courses to pad their GPA while other students drop courses where they are struggling, pretty much for the same reason. And we know a lot of students do their work right before the deadline and come to class nowadays only because the instructor uses "clickers" to track their participation. This seems more like the manifestation of pathology rather than a consequence of responsible young adults making serious choices and collectively putting their best feet forward. What gives?<br /><br />The grades culture is a trust culture. Students in High School (and earlier) aim for good grades because they trust doing so will get them into a good college. Parents have that same level of trust. Both also trust the school that the grades signify real learning, often even when seeing the kid go about his out of school work suggests otherwise. (What kids know versus what they don't know is often very hard to determine. Further, parents intuit <a href="http://www.infed.org/thinkers/polanyi.htm">Michael Polanyi's point</a> that their kids know more than they can articulate. Polanyi is referring to everyone, not just kids.) At least in theory, the trust doesn't have to go the other way, because the schools monitor the kids performance. In the absence of out and out cheating that goes undetected, the test scores, papers, and other projects should be pretty reliable indicators of what the kid is capable of. Further, the parental involvement in the kid's education makes it more of a triangular relationship and helps keep the gears in synch when the kid's personal responsibility is not sufficient to make it all work smoothly.<br /><br />One story that explains the apparent breakdown in College is that the kids are much less accountable to their parents and have to assume responsibility for themselves. Many don't. The pathology then is just the consequence of immature kids wanting to have a good time instead of doing their course work. These kids still trust that good grades will get them a good job or into a decent grad school. So they fake it. They want to get the best of both worlds. Seems like a reasonable explanation, doesn't it?<br /><br />Maybe it's even true for some kids. But mostly, I don't buy it. I think something else is going on. I'll explain what I have in mind in a bit.<br /><br />But first let me continue with the grade culture, because there is another important aspect of it that we should consider. The grade culture separates kids out - the kids with good grades in one bin, the kids with worse grades in another. The separation happens constantly. Anyone not in that top bin gets stigmatized. So the grade culture is about cliques and stigmas. The benevolent word is "meritocracy." The kids in the top bin are there because, to borrow a phrase from E.F. Hutton, "they earned it." So the kids in the top bin get the benefit of their own peer interactions and they get more instructional personnel resource expended on them per capita than do the rest of the students. Just about everyone has bought into the system, even if it is rigged in favor of the children of the rich and well educated.<br /><br />Does the system have an ethical leg to stand on? Think of health care. Do we think health care should be allocated via a meritocracy? Or should access to decent health care be a universal right? If so, why should education be any different in this regard? How can one reconcile the meritocracy approach with this, especially if those bins get fixed early in the kids' schooling and don't change much thereafter?<br /><br />What would a truly democratic approach to education look like? Is it possible to have an approach where all parties want to honor the trust, simply because the behavior entailed in doing so is what they prefer? Those are the questions I'd like to answer.<br /><br />Now let me get back my explanation for the pathology. The key problem is that too many students aren't ready for college, but they are told otherwise. College is a quantum leap for them but they expect it to be a walk in the park. So there is shock, both in the intellectual requirements to do the work and in amount of effort needed to do it seriously. Some students overcome the shock. Many don't. That's the cause for the pathology.<br /><br />Why is college a quantum leap? My guess is that too many students don't stretch themselves intellectually beforehand. These kids need to have developed what elsewhere I called a <a href="http://lanny-on-learn-tech.blogspot.com/2008/12/plas-please.html">Personal Learning Agenda</a>, (PLA) though as a label PLA is overkill. You might call it independent reading and exposure to culture that challenges and encourages the kid to grow intellectually, to ask questions, to avoid settling in on easy answers as a closed book. Preferably the PLA will be diverse and the kid will become aware of ideas in a variety of different and quite distinct areas, perhaps trying to make his own theory of the possible connections between them, but in any event not narrowing his scope of interest too early. The kids with a PLA will, I believe, make the adjustment to college (at least the intellectual part of it) much easier than their peers who either don't challenge themselves much at all intellectually or who do but in areas that are pre-assigned by adults and not of their own choosing. (Think of those extra curricular activities that might look good on the College application but that the kids wouldn't do otherwise.)<br /><br />The other reason is school itself. The teach to the test mindset that is embodied in <a href="http://www.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/index.html">No Child Left Behind</a> has had a pernicious consequence, perhaps not obvious to some, in that it encourages a cookbook approach to instruction. Cookbooks are great.......for cooking. They are less good for seeing the forest. By High School, for sure, probably earlier too, some of what the students are taught should help them in considering context and the bigger picture. I believe we're losing school as a source for that. Most of the kids I see are too heads down about their learning. That needs to change.<br /><br />* * * * *<br /><br />While the above has the gist of my argument, it is still too simple an explanation. The stigmas that kids develop are not merely a consequence of the grade culture assigning them to bins. The kids put themselves in a box, often because they have misconceptions about what the box means as well as about their own performance and ability as part of a process of development, looking at snapshots of themselves and with that consigning themselves to a lower bin, the one for non-performers. I believe this happens for most if not every student, even those who grade-wise are the stars.<br /><br />On a personal note, I know that when I was in High School I didn't think I was creative. Creativity was for the kids who'd attend the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiorello_H._LaGuardia_High_School_of_Music_&_Art_and_Performing_Arts">High School of Music and Art</a> and perhaps the few kids with that sort of ability at my own High School who didn't want to make the commute. The musical in this group could (and did) perform in the school auditorium, giving performances that delighted the audience. I played the piano a bit, could amuse myself that way which was fine, but I knew I wasn't good enough to perform in front of an audience. So on creativity, no. There was the related thing, maybe more important subliminally, that creative guys got the girls (my high school didn't have a football team), the creations being an obvious source of attraction. I definitely wasn't getting the girls. So it was a self-confirming hypothesis. It wasn't till many years later, in grad school, becoming aware that there could be delight in personal idiosyncrasy and foibles as much and maybe more than in performance that attracts others, where I started to lighten up on all of this and see creativity differently.<br /><br />Kids will put themselves in boxes and I don't believe that can be entirely stopped. But I do think we can come up with a democratic approach to learning that doesn't encourage the kids to make their own stigmas.<br /><br />Now let's consider some of those other approaches to deep learning that have been advocated and distinguish them from guessing. We talk about <a href="http://www.philosophy.unimelb.edu.au/reason/papers/Teaching_CT_Lessons.pdf">teaching Critical Thinking</a>. We talk about <a href="http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/imagine-that/200812/teaching-creativity-2-debunking-the-mozart-myth-0">teaching Creativity</a>. Some advocate for <a href="http://chemeng.mcmaster.ca/pbl/pbl.htm">Problem Based Learning</a>. The list could be made longer, but these alternatives will suffice to make my point.<br /><br />Each of these approaches embraces both process and product and typically within the approach a student is evaluated on both process and product by evaluating the product produced. Product evaluation, however, can be the source of stigma. "I'm not very good." A big problem with product evaluation is that students compare their own performance to their peers. "Her's is much better." "I need to be elsewhere because I can't keep up." Guessing is purely about process. Mistakes and failure are built in to the process. Everyone can guess. And everyone will guess wrong now and then.<br /><br />Having an approach to learning which has a healthier view about mistakes is a big reason to take guessing seriously. And because everyone can guess, the approach can be started earlier, say in Middle School. Consider critical thinking as an alternative. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Creating-Contexts-Learning-Self-Authorship-Constructive-Developmental/dp/0826513468/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1229780370&sr=1-4">Marcia Magolda Baxter</a>, among others, has argued that students aren't developmentally ready to be taught that way when they start college, because they embrace a view of absolute knowledge where the professors have it, they don't, and so they have to learn by letting the professors pour the knowledge into their head. Students need to abandon this view, move on to seeing everything as gray, a necessary next step, and then after that to a more nuanced view beyond that where they are active in determining the validity of propositions and in asserting propositions themselves. Not until then can they fruitfully embrace critical thinking. As long as students embrace the absolute view of knowledge, mistakes are things to avoid, as they are evidence that the knowledge hasn't been acquired. So to develop students to where critical thinking can be successfully taught students have to unlearn much of what has come before.<br /><br />The path from simple guessing, as in the <a href="http://ggames-larvan.blogspot.com/2008/12/introduction.html#connect">Connect Four game</a>, to Critical Thinking seems much more straightforward if guessing is allowed to mature throughout. Instead of developmental stages one can think of domains of knowledge, some where absolute knowledge holds - what can be looked up in a dictionary, or encyclopedia, or other source of reference - and other domains where opinion and interpretation hold sway and argument is useful and fruitful for contrasting different views. (Let's agree that the "references" are themselves always evolving. So the domain approach is simply a first pass at categorization, not a precise classification that persists over time.) Understanding the existence of these two domains (and that they cut across all disciplines - it's not that in science there is truth and in politics there is opinion) can be grasped much earlier. And then the entire path of learning from grade school on can be seen by the participants themselves as continuous - no quantum leaps.<br /><br />* * * * *<br /><br />I hate flash cards.<br /><br />My mother, growing up in Nazi Germany, was a very good student and she liked to memorize and recite poetry, particularly Schiller and Heine. She got pleasure from that because of the beauty in the poetry. Because of that or perhaps because of how authority manifest in her own education, she came to believe that much of teaching (she tutored in foreign languages while we were growing up and eventually taught foreign language in High School) was exposing students to rules that they needed to memorize and then apply where appropriate.<br /><br />My mom and dad taught me and my brother how to play bridge, with the rules for bidding conventions and play of the cards (fourth card from the longest/strongest suit) part of the teaching. We played family bridge when I was a teen and I played a fair amount of bridge for the brief time I was at MIT as a freshman and first semester sophomore, then again later as an Assistant Professor. Ultimately, I began to think about bridge as I thought about chess, much more situational in the decision making than rules based. Situational decision making requires on the spot analysis. The rules work for the first card to play but soon thereafter the situation becomes so complex, even in a card game like bridge, where to know a rule for each situation is well nigh impossible. So it's my view that to teach bridge, first teach rules certainly, to understand how the bidding and the play works, but soon thereafter start teaching analysis and insight - inferences from the bidding, how to count in a sophisticated way, considering probabilities and which direction a finesse might be played, those sorts of things. Adhering to rules in teaching for too long inhibits progress in the learning.<br /><br />The problem is big time in the schools and with many of the students. I call it Rote Bloat. It is not that memorization is bad when applied to its proper domain. It is that memorization becomes the sole method for all learning, is applied in many areas where it is an inferior approach, and makes school a source of intellectual pain, because too much of what is memorized is done in a disembodied way where it can't be applied in any other situation than on the exam where it is tested. This is largely a waste of time masked as learning. When the schools require too much of this, they break the trust. When the students do too much of this to pass the test they are given, they likewise break the trust.<br /><br />My view is that what we have in the High Schools, and Middle Schools too, even those schools with many students who will go on to elite colleges, is something akin to the financial markets before the housing market bubble burst. There are outward signs of health. But those are coupled with inward signs of dysfunction. Parents and kids are in denial here because they want school to be the path to the good life. The schools are also in denial because of how they are regulated, because they need to preserve their source of funding, and because they don't have other good ways to measure their performance apart from the standardized testing. A major reason for writing this book is to identify the problems and launch an attack on rote bloat.<br /><br />Guessing and rote need to be done in parallel, with the proportion devoted to each varying with student maturity. I have in mind that in elementary school students are given lists of words to spell and times tables to reproduce and that seems somewhat inevitable to me. But there should be less of this as the student matures. Each new field that the student learns has its own nomenclature and terminology, that must be learned as part of learning the subject matter. So if not rote there must be some other way to get students comfortable with the trappings of the field of study.<br /><br />Mostly, I believe these should be learned <span style="font-style: italic;">en passant</span> as the students produce their own personal narratives about what they are studying and in an iterative fashion develop an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the underlying issues. This is hard at first and the students will find themselves returning time and again to the nomenclature itself to make sure they have the definitions right. But they will do this in the process of making their narrative, which if sensible and in accord with the the wisdom in the field will help the student transfer the knowledge and make good judgments in context. Seen this way, memorizing the terminology outside of the narrative, as things in themselves, is taking a short cut intellectually, one that will lead to a dead end. The desire for short cuts is there because students don't put in enough time to produce interesting narratives that make sense.<br /><br />There is a vicious cycle that needs to be cut. The pieces of the cycle are these. The subject appears difficult and unwelcoming. The student feels incapable of penetrating it. The student needs to pass the course on the subject because it is required. The student procrastinates in doing the work in the course. With the test looming the student crams. Cramming is about rote, not about producing narrative. The student hates doing this but gets an ok score on the exam. The next part of the course partly depends on what the student "learned" earlier in the course so the cycle repeats with the student on a very shaky foundation of the subject. And because the process is painful, the student dissipates a lot of time outside the process simply to provide himself with a source of comfort. The "good students" are the ones who tolerate this pain better and manage their time in a way that the stress is not so great. Very few produce those personal narratives about the subject that show deep understanding.<br /><br />The argument for guessing then is that producing a personal narrative about a subject needs to be a habit that has been developed very early in the student's life. It's an argument about intellectual habit formation. That's the view we should focus on.<br /><br />If the habit exists before College starts the students will approach their courses differently. They will choose their courses (and their majors) in part on the basis of where they think they can best exercise this habit. Aptitude will reemerge as a reason to opt for a field of study and the student will see the choice more from the point of view of matching personal interest to the learning than as a passport to a career. It does not mean that students will avoid finding subjects that are over their head or ultimately not interesting to them. But it does mean that more of what they are exposed to will result in real learning and that they will have their own healthy view of the one or the other. It is our best chance for building the trust.<br /><br />* * * * *<br /><br />Part of the reason for the current morass is that the notions of personal responsibility, deferred gratification, work and play are confused with respect to where learning fits in. I'd call the current view militaristic. School is like boot camp. The teacher is the drill sergeant. And the mantra is, "no pain, no gain." Schoolwork is not just time away from play, it is drudgery or torture. Certainly, it is not a reward in itself. Personal responsibility in this setting means embracing school because of what it will deliver down the road. It is one and the same with deferred gratification. School is definitely work. Play happens outside school. That's why some kids play hookie. This is an <a href="http://www.cyranos.ch/ourg-e.htm">Our Gang</a> view of education. The current emphasis on accountability in the schools reinforces this view.<br /><br />There is an alternative view. Learning is the essence of our nature. Learning, wherever it happens, in or out of school, is how we should spend our time, to be one with ourselves. It may be work or it may be fun, but either way it is compelling because it is natural. We are driven to pursue our own learning. Learning is about self-expression. Along the way we need nurture and help, but not always, only from time to time. Personal responsibility in this view is to do what's natural....now. There is no reason to defer gratification because doing the natural thing now will produce dividends down the road. Learning is about personal growth. Institutions that promote learning and the exchange of ideas are about societal growth. The two go hand in hand.<br /><br />There are, of course, attractions that in moderation are fine but in excess are not natural and that might divert attention from learning. So personal responsibility means finding an appropriate balance between the two and deferred gratification may require limiting access to those attractions that don't promote personal growth. On this score the two views are closest in line. But for the rest they differ substantially.<br /><br />I subscribe to the second view. A program of guessing is the best way to implement it and let the kid find his own way. A moderate level of discipline may be desirable but beyond that most of us won't tolerate and the system will produce false facades with shaky underpinnings. Trust will be better established in a system that is true to our nature.Lanny Arvanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05597426421997599777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331075451664544793.post-87069779265425647072008-12-08T03:23:00.020-06:002009-02-12T12:18:26.377-06:00IntroductionAging is a frightening process, humbling us at times, especially when we're not ready. "This will be an important project." Then a few seconds later, "By the way, what was it that we were just talking about?" And it's not just temporary lapses of memory. It's that thoughts are there yet in incomplete form. "You look very familiar. I'm sure we've met before. Tell me your name, what it is you do, and where I know you from." Then there's the (not) keeping up with our younger peers. For example, while at a workshop finding yourself lingering on a point made perhaps 15 or 20 minutes earlier because it tied into some of your own thinking, spacing out totally on the ebb and flow of the discussion as a consequence, while the rest of them are miles ahead.<br /><br />How do we cope with it? I think it's helpful to look at other contexts. The "face problem," for example, comes up over and over again and not just because we're getting old. Watching a TV program, a new character appears on the screen. By <span style="font-style: italic;">intuition</span>, a sudden feeling of affinity for the situation, the face becomes compelling. It's a familiar face, but from where? Is it from another show or perhaps a movie? That's probably it. But precisely what movie was it?<br /><br />This has been happening to me often as of late. I've gotten into the habit of watching DVDs of TV series while riding the stationary bike, a necessary distraction to get me through the exercise. I've watched through all the seasons of West Wing (twice) and 24 (also twice). Actors in one appear in the other. Other actors appear whom I know from the movies. In the <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0502251/">first episode of 24 Season Four</a> there's a computer hacker, not a regular on show, named Andrew Paige. He's a friend of Chloe O'Brian, the main techie who always comes to the aid of the protagonist, Jack Bauer. Rather quickly during the viewing, maybe within a half-minute, I guess that the guy playing Andrew Paige is the same person as the Kid in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090329/">Witness</a>, Samuel Lapp. Witness is 20 years earlier and he was a pre-teen in that movie, Amish to boot, but they sure seem to me to be the same guy, even though I'm not aware of seeing the actor in other things. (I did watch Witness on TV not too long ago.) So right after getting off the bike, still sweaty, I go to the computer and find the episode of 24 via Google. A few moments later I have my answer; I was right.<br /><br />Why was I compelled to do that? I'm not sure, but it definitely was fun. And it was empowering. As a result I start to look for other connections of this sort. I guess that the first really evil character in 24, Nina Myers, is played by the daughter of the woman who married the football player Alex Karras. To me these two seemed to have the same body type and were similar facially. But it turns out, this was a bonehead play. The wife of Alex Karras is the actress Susan Clark. Nina Myers was played by Sarah Clarke. (Note the "e" at the end of the name.) There is no relation.<br /><br />Undeterred, a while later I guess that <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1113959/">the person who plays the lead Terrorist</a> holding hostages at an Airport in California in 24 Season Five is the same person who plays the Photo Journalist in the West Wing Season 5 episode <a href="http://www.westwingepguide.com/S5/Episodes/111_GAZA.html">Gaza</a>. Their speaking voices were entirely different, but actors can do various dialects so I let that slide. Their head shapes were similar and the physical way they acted also seemed similar. By now, you must realize that they are two different actors, another wrong guess. But this one I don't believe was so bonehead. Short of looking them up in the Internet Movie Data Base, there really was no way for me to tell one way or the other.<br /><br />There are some lessons to take away from this experience. First, I definitely cared about identifying these matches, although the consequence for anything else was nil. Caring was entirely an act of self-expression, something that pleased me, the joy of knowing if you will. Second, when we guess sometimes we're right, other times not. In baseball a batting average of .333 makes you an all-star. I'll take it. Third, and most importantly, intuition triggers it all. What is the source of that intuition? I'm really not sure. But I do know I'm constantly on the alert for that spark. Feeling it is a source of vitality.<br /><br />Matching faces for actors on TV or in the Movies is one thing. My claim is that these lessons are helpful for matching faces with acquaintances, even if the spark doesn't come so quickly, maybe because we're getting older. There is a method to the madness. The method is to look for an intuition, not of the face itself, that's where we're stumbling and likely to continue to stumble. No, look for an intuition about the context where the face might have appeared. Identify the context. That might be easier. If the context is known, then tying the name to the face might not be that hard.<br /><br />This happened recently. I was in line at the Airport for an American Airlines flight from Champaign to Chicago. My ultimate destination was Boston, but all the flights out of Champaign go through some hub. Behind me in line was a face that was familiar but I couldn't place him. So after a minute or two I admitted my ignorance and asked him who he was. What would have happened if I had passed him walking in the airport, I going out on a departing flight, he recently having arrived on an incoming flight. We wouldn't have stood together and I wouldn't have had the opportunity to work up my nerve to ask him. It would have bugged me - who is that guy? I know him. I'm the type of person who lets such nagging questions trump all other items on my personal agenda. Until I get it resolved, it's hard for me to work on anything else. How would I resolve this dilemma?<br /><br />This, I suppose, would be the chain of thinking, though it might not be so linear in practice. First, he must work for the University as I do. How else would I know him? Second, we must have served on some committee together. I serve on a fair number of committees and meet a lot of people that way. Then, having gotten that far, I'd stop doing it all in my head and go to my email. I'd search there to see what committees I've been requested to serve on the past few years. As it turns out, I served with this guy on a Library committee. I'd find an email for members of that committee about committee work and with that I'd see his name in print. There's no guarantee that at that point I'd be able to do the match, but clearly I'd have more clues to do so. Usually with a a few clues the picture begins to fill in. The intuition to look at my committee membership is not directly suggested by seeing the face. Doing so is what I'd call making a "good guess." This book is about good guessing.<br /><br />Let me talk about a related guess, one I can't readily confirm, but one I believe to be true. I used to think that some faculty my age (early to mid 50's) turn their attention to teaching because their research agenda starts to wane. That may be true in some cases. But I'm coming to believe that the aging process itself makes these faculty better as teachers. The good guessing they have to do in order to cope is what they want their students to be doing in order to learn. So these more mature faculty can identify with their students in ways a 30-something faculty member can't. Thoughts come too quickly to the 30-something, who therefore can't personalize the student struggles. The older faculty member can. There is both insight and empathy. I hope this book contributes in those two dimensions.<br /><br />* * * * *<br /><br />As a college student in the 1970s I saw a schlock French film with its own peculiar charm, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Jonah-Who-Will-Year-2000/dp/6302498244">Jonah Who Will Be 25 In The Year 2000</a>. One piece of the film that stuck was the metaphor with blood sausage, really the links in between, to represent "gaps in time," the moments when we come to new understandings, the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Aha-Insight-Martin-Gardner/dp/071671017X">AHA! moments</a> so to speak. Those moments fascinate us all.<br /><br />Like many college aged kids, at around the time I saw the movie I spent a lot of inner energy thinking about the "meaning of life" questions. I suppose most kids put their own twist to these questions, to have the answers speak to their own circumstance. I wanted to understand the nature of confidence, particularly confidence in intellectual ability. (My ability was okay, but my confidence was shaky.) When I had the chance I queried peers on this issue. (It's not the sort of question you can pose at the beginning of a conversation. You need to have the flow going for some time and then allow the question to be part of the larger discussion.) By and large the guys I talked with were confident. But I never got an answer as to why they felt that way.<br /><br />You learn about what's valued by the put-downs people use. The ones I recall are "that's intuitively obvious" and "you are such a <a href="http://www.thefreedictionary.com/patzer">patzer</a>." What's the opposite behavior? I know at the time I was hugely impressed by people who could quote large passages from Shakespeare, because I couldn't do it. But the ability to quote the Bard isn't enough. The opposite of the put-downs is the ability to quote in context where the quotation sheds insight on the situation at hand. In other words, what was valued was being clever, not cutesy clever but ingenious clever. So my meaning of life question really translated into, "where does cleverness come from?" Was it mostly luck and circumstance, the solution already at hand simply waiting for a situation to apply it, or was it a matter of self-expression, a property of the individual, perhaps manifest by force of will. (Coincidentally, while writing this introduction <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/16/opinion/16brooks.html?_r=1">David Brooks had a column</a> about Malcolm Gladwell's new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwell/dp/0316017922/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1229517419&sr=1-1">Outliers</a>, where Gladwell makes a reasoned argument for serendipity while Brooks mildly objects arguing that there is still room to believe in the force of will of the talented individual.)<br /><br />After having put that question aside I returned to it recently, but given my current focus on teaching and learning I posed it differently. Can cleverness be taught or learned via self-study? Fundamentally, cleverness is about "seeing" what others do not and then acting on that vision to achieve some end, the action potentially serving to illustrate the insight to others. Even for the brightest among the very bright, the view is achieved via a series of steps, sometimes with back tracking, and at each step there is .... guessing. Understanding that much and then invoking <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/d/dewey.htm">John Dewey</a>, shouldn't it be that if kids do a lot guessing in context they'll learn to be clever? That's my guess.<br /><br /><a name="connect"></a>On one level, this is a a trivial assertion. An early kid game that my family liked is <a href="http://host.exemplum.com/hasbro/connectfour/connectfour.htm">Connect Four</a> (you can play the computer online by following the link). If each move the kid makes is a guess, then it is certainly true that the kid gets more proficient in play with experience, so in that sense guessing does lead to cleverness. But that's a very limited view of the word. What about across domains? Does gaining proficiency in Connect Four lead to proficiency in other guessing games? My guess is that it does, but that's still not it. I don't want to focus on those games young kids play.<br /><br />I want to concentrate on more open ended situations, the type where there might be a good approach or several good approaches but how do you tell, and where there certainly aren't "right answers" that you could look up. Cleverness in such cases is often about making connections between things we don't know and things we do, leveraging the latter to get insight about the former. Making these type of connections comes from a type of seeing. In turn, such seeing comes from asking the right sort of framing questions, at least implicitly doing so. I believe that asking good framing questions is the meta skill we want ours kids to develop. Many people can do the analysis once a good question has been posed. We're good at teaching how to do that sort of thing. Who can pose the good framing question? That's the rarer talent and mostly we don't teach to cultivate it.<br /><br />A 30-something whiz of a faculty member might be able to zero in on a good framing question almost immediately, but mostly I believe that to be a myth. Even extraordinarily bright people find the good framing question (e.g., identifying a research area for them to mine) only after a struggle, part of which is a sequence of guessing, each guess followed by perhaps pain staking verification often leading to a dead end, before a satisfactory answer is found. I do believe, however, that one does get better at it with practice. Further, I believe that guessing at a younger age is good preparation for guessing about framing questions later on. That's the argument qua guessing. In other words, cleverness is an acquired taste.<br /><br />* * * * *<br /><br />I've had the opportunity on a few occasions to chat with Executive MBA students and get them to reflect on the difference between the current education they are getting and how it contrasts with what they learned as undergraduates. These students have managerial positions at the companies that employ them and are typically somewhere between their mid 30s and mid 40s. They bring a lot of real work experience to their learning so they have wisdom in articulating their views. Surprisingly, they all said essentially the same thing, which I paraphrase here. "As undergraduates we felt we knew everything. Now we're quite sure we know nothing." It's an interesting sentiment.<br /><br />Of course, students tend to speak in extremes while the truth is more toward the middle. So I'm going to translate the above in a way that I think is more accurate. Real managerial decision making happens in an environment of high complexity and substantial ambiguity. Making sense of what is going on is a very hard thing which makes plotting a good course of action terribly difficult.<br /><br />The complex environment can be parsed into things you already know, things you might know but don't know at present, and things you can't possibly know before the fact. This last group of items seemingly becomes more and more critical as the decision maker gets more mature, ergo the sentiment that we know nothing, but really it's less important than the students believe, because the only thing they can do to learn about it is wait till events unfold. The things in the first group are likely things that many people know, so they tend to be discounted in considering choice. The items in the middle group are given short shrift. That's because they're still students and not yet seeing the general approach. It's the items in the middle group where most of the action should be.<br /><br />Since decisions occur in real time the right sorts of questions are how much information in the middle group should be gathered before making the decision, information gathering being a time consuming activity. But that's still too simple. Information is hierarchical in its importance for making decisions. The real question is what bits of information within the vast field of what might be knowable would be most helpful in making the decision and how much of that needs to be learned. The expert, the good guesser with strong intuition, can answer that question. This is the way the expert manages uncertainty. The expert has also acquired knowledge over time about people's comfort zone with making decisions in an uncertain environment. The decision to make a choice now or wait and gather more information itself can't be answered without knowing individual attitudes toward accepting risk. The expert knows this and can project the issue to others who understand the point less well. There is real value in being comfortable making a choice. The expert can assist with that.<br /><br />Even armed with such expertise, mistakes are made. We all make typos and other small mistakes. Those are readily corrected and of no consequence. There are other mistakes we make that are more fundamental and of substantial consequence. To manage the complexity we make assumptions and base our analysis and decisions on those. When the assumptions we make are contrary to fact and that fact is either already known or potentially knowable beforehand, we feel we've made a bad mistake and suffer a sense of recrimination - we should have been smarter about it. Such is the plight of the guesser, even the very best of them.<br /><br />Good guessers learn to live with this, not letting the experience taint their next venture, where the natural optimism that the guess might be right should hold sway. All of it is about having a mature view regarding uncertainty, something that can only be gotten by experience with lots of guessing.<br /><br />* * * * *<br /><br />These are three themes, each valuable in its own right, to consider guessing as a path toward learning. Some of the essays in this book will look at the themes in more depth. Others essays will probe different issues related to guessing. Before returning to the Table of Contents, see if you can anticipate the topics. Let's practice what we preach.Lanny Arvanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05597426421997599777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331075451664544793.post-23875630748610929822008-12-08T03:22:00.008-06:002008-12-19T05:41:39.135-06:00Preface<blockquote>Then there was the Bigger family with Mr. Bigger, Mrs. Bigger, and Baby Bigger.<br />Q: Who was the biggest?<br />A: Baby Bigger, because he was a little bigger.</blockquote><br />Growing up, this was my favorite joke. Every time I met someone new, someone who might become a good friend, I imposed my own personal rite of initiation and told the joke. I had a childlike delight in the telling. And I suppose, though I've never articulated it until now, I wanted to show that to my new friend, to let her know that it's ok to keep her guard down; we won't be doing anything too risqué and the bar is not set very high here; there's more fun for all if we know in advance it's that way.<br /><br />I learned the joke from a book my dad bought for my sister, my brother, and me. The book is called <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000VNCCEI/ref=olp_product_details?ie=UTF8&me=&seller=">Jokes, Riddles, and Puns</a>.* He bought it in 1961 when I was six. His inscription says, "The jokes on me." It certainly was. It kept part of me six forever and ever.**<br /><br />How do you know whether to tell a joke or refrain from doing so because it's not appropriate for the situation? This is one of those things that you can intuit, but you can't know. My dad would do it by feel and circumstance. You knew it was coming because the smile would precede the joke. He enjoyed the telling. And I'm my father's son.<br /><br />There's another way the Bigger joke, and the Absent Minded Professor jokes, and even the Moron jokes, indeed many of the various jokes we all learned as kids, were an education in themselves. They introduced us at a very young age to word play and made that one of our habits. And they showed us that if you've got a joke that a friend hasn't heard then it's your imperative to share it. I have a very slim inventory of jokes that are in the can and that I can bring out in a moment's notice, but now and then I can seem funny with in-the-spur-of-the-moment type of humor that my dad cherished and cultivated in us. Where does that come from?<br /><blockquote><br />In coming up with puns, witticisms, or rhymes that impress;<br />It is critical to make the intelligent guess.<br />Equally important, however, as I must stress;<br />An appeal to a sense of good taste, you must repress.</blockquote><br />This, then, is the the theme of the book. Go for the intelligent guess. Go for it in our own behavior. Then encourage our students to go for it too. Go for it even when a sense of good teaching might say otherwise. If that doesn't seem right, guess again.<br /><br />*It appears the original joke <a href="http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9401EFDB1F3DEE32A25753C2A96F9C946297D6CF">dates back at least to the very early 20th century</a>.<br />**<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Now-We-Are-Six-Deluxe/dp/0525479295/ref=si3_rdr_bb_product">Now We Are Six</a>, by A. A. MilneLanny Arvanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05597426421997599777noreply@blogger.com0