Personality and Guessing

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.
Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being

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; “Plastics” wasn’t the first come on, nor was it the last. We couldn’t just sit there and soak it in, could we?

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.

Playboy didn’t invent the genre. The Way We Were 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.

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 Scarecrow, 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, The Conversation, 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, The Missouri Breaks, a low keyed film between films with Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando and a surprisingly good performance from Kathleen Lloyd, and Shock Corridor, an earlier vintage B-Movie classic from Samuel Fuller starring Peter Breck of The Big Valley fame.

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.

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.

These characters are inevitably either boys, Homer Hickam (Jake Gyllenhaal) in October Sky, or are women, Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) in Contact, George Sand (Judy Davis) in Impromptu, and Dian Fossey (Sigourney Weaver) in Gorillas in the Mist. 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 The Rookie, both Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) in The Matrix. 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.

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.

The timing was different with Impromptu. I already had an infatuation with Chopin piano music after watching The Pianist 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.

I would term each of these film characters a self-actualizer, 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 The Fifth Discipline 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.

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 Fatal Attraction. My own favorite is Jessica Walter in Play Misty for Me. 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.

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.

* * * * *

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.

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 Writing as Guessing, 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.

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 INTP, 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.

The Myers-Briggs theory 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 learned behavior in the sense of Seligman. We may avoid contexts where we might confront people we don’t know. This blocks learning.

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.

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.

* * * * *

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.

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.

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?

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 P.S. 203, 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 Bic pen 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

* * * * *

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.

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 The Atlantic by Jeffrey Goldberg typifies the thinking.

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.

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.

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 Second Careers and K-12. 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.

More recently I’ve written a piece about Personal Learning Agendas, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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 the distinction between being serious and being solemn. Let us strive to be serious and then, have fun with it