Walking The Walk And Guessing

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 Meno 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.

Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, p 24.

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.

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 Microsoft announcing layoffs. 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.

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 my university embarked on a big ERP project 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.

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.

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 transparency and responsibility in his administration. (Updating this a couple of weeks later after Tom Daschle ended his bid for Secretary of Health and Human Services, 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.

What about responsibility in more ordinary day to day transactions? In his inaugural address, President Obama stressed old virtues and deep traditions 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. (There’s a sucker born every minute.) Or consider sleights from the mouth of W.C. Fields. (Never give a sucker an even break.) Or the old maxim, a fool and his money is soon parted. 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.

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.

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?

* * * * *

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.

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.)

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.

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.

* * * * *

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.

While these budget issues are happening on campus, I’m reading The Essential Drucker. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 CyberProf, 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.

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 retrospective after attending the first annual Redesign Alliance 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.

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.

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 Perry Hanson, a fellow faculty member at the Learning Technology Leadership Program, 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.

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.

* * * * *

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.

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 Labyrinth, 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.

Another one of those toys is Shoot The Moon, 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.

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.

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 Aesop Fable about the Tortoise and the Hare, “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.

Walt is a Professor of Animal Science (he teaches courses in Lactation Biology), very accomplished in his teaching, indeed a Campus Distinguished Teacher/Scholar. 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 The Virtual Cell, 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.

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.

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.

* * * * *

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 I’ve written about this elsewhere, 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.

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.
Leonard Bernstein (1918 - 1990)

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.

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.

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.

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.

* * * * *

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.

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.

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.

* * * * *

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.

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 written about elsewhere. 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.

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.