Dreams Are for Losers. A hashtag does not make you Dr King

I love honest and blunt conversations, which are increasingly rare these days.  I care not for those euphemisms and artificial sweetness.  And then I wonder why colleagues shun me and why students do not want me as their instructor! ;)

You can then imagine my sheer delight when my RSS feed (ht) linked to an Ivy League commencement speech, in which the speaker bluntly tells the graduates, "Dreams Are for Losers."

Be a doer, not a dreamer…it’s hard work that makes things happen.

What an awesome line!  If only we can have more such people giving it straight, instead of the the cliched "shoot for the stars" sappy lines.

It is hard work that makes things happen. MK Gandhi was a big time doer--even his walking was not any dreamy, slow pace, but was always at quite a clip that forced a few to nearly sprint and pant while keeping up with him.  MLK did not merely orate about his dreams but worked, and worked hard on the nitty gritty details.  Hard, hard work.  Not daydreams.

The speaker is Shonda Rhimes, who delivered the commencement address at Dartmouth.  I had no idea about Rhimes and, of course, I googled her name.  Darn good credentials.  How could a degree from USC be not good, right? ;)

When people give these kinds of speeches, they usually tell you all kinds of wise and heartfelt things. They have wisdom to impart. They have lessons to share. They tell you: follow your dreams. Listen to your spirit. Change the world. Make your mark. Find your inner voice and make it sing. Embrace failure. Dream. Dream and dream big. As a matter of fact, dream and don’t stop dreaming until your dream comes true.
I think that’s crap.
I think a lot of people dream. And while they are busy dreaming, the really happy people, the really successful people, the really interesting, powerful, engaged people? Are busy doing.
The dreamers. They stare at the sky and they make plans and they hope and they think and they talk about it endlessly. And they start a lot of sentences with “I want to be…” or “I wish”

I, too, get tired of people--young or old--who sit on their butts all day and merely talk about how they wish for whatever.  When the highfalutin wish is from a young person who is clueless about the world, I am all the more ready to slap them to their senses.  Fortunately, the wish to slap them remains just a wish!

Dreams are lovely. But they are just dreams. Fleeting, ephemeral. Pretty. But dreams do not come true just because you dream them. It’s hard work that makes things happen. It’s hard work that creates change.

With that alone, the speech is one awesome and timely speech, as far as I am concerned.  But, Rhimes doesn't stop there.  She does more frank talk:

A hashtag is not helping. #yesallwomen #takebackthenight #notallmen #bringbackourgirls #StopPretendingHashtagsAreTheSameAsDoingSomething
Hashtags are very pretty on twitter. I love them. I will hashtag myself into next week. But a hashtag is not a movement. A hashtag does not make you Dr King. A hashtag does not change anything. It’s a hashtag. It’s you, sitting on your butt, typing into your computer and then going back to binge watching your favorite show.

Awesome!

What a contrast this speech is, especially in a season of cancellations and withdrawals of commencement speakers who were deemed politically incorrect, despite their fantastic achievements as professionals and people.   

I #Wish all #Commencement addresses were this honest!

American students avoid science and math because of ... postmodernism?

When I was a kid, adults encouraged us kids to eat vegetables that might not typically appeal to us by saying things like, "eat this so that you will do better in science."  Or sometimes, it was "eat this so that you will get better at maths."  I am sure quite a few kids held their noses and gobbled up vegetables they hated only to make sure that they did better in science and math.  (Not me: I loved them all--vegetables and science and math!)

I wonder if parents and grandmas say that anymore to India's children.  Perhaps not.  If so, that will be awful, because the kids don't know what they are missing--vegetables and education!

Here in the US, the veggie food route to science and math will never work, given the typical aversion that most children have for vegetables, science, math.  Well, I take it back; it appears that the young might even hold their noses and swallow the veggies if they can entirely avoid science and math.  Again, they don't know what they are missing--vegetables and education! (Except this veggie, of course!)

My initial experiences of Americana were as a graduate student.  Walking or biking across campus from the social sciences area towards math, science, and engineering, well, was often punctuated by an observation about the rapidly decreasing female population.  The few female students in those areas were almost always graduate students from India or China or Europe.  American-born undergraduate science or math majors, male or female, were a minority on campus. 

American students avoiding math and science seems to have only gotten worse.  American-born science and math students are practically an endangered species in higher education. And that is terribly unfortunate.

The higher education system, meanwhile, makes it all the more attractive for students to almost bypass science and math.  While by now I ought to be used to this, I continue to be shocked every single time when I realize how easy it is for students to complete "higher education" and even graduate with a perfect 4.0 GPA, but with barely a couple of classes in science.  And even those science classes tend to be "Mickey Mouse" classes, as one student put it.

The hyper-inflated sense of self that students gain throughout their K-12 system does not help either.  The school system appears to be hell-bent on telling students how special they all are, and that they can do anything they wanted to do in life. Of course, we need to convey the idea that the world is their oyster, but shouldn't we also make sure they understand that hard work is a prime ingredient in a successful formula?  But, it seems that educators systematically dismiss that often one needs to go after difficult tasks, and that life is not simply about plucking those non-existent metaphorical low hanging fruits.

Science and math are by no means any low hanging fruit.  Well, accomplishment in anything, in the arts or languages or whatever, is not as easy to pluck those fruits.

I am convinced that this awful state of education is a result of the postmodernist conditions in education--though I love the postmodernist environment within which I operate.  Modernism and reason have been replaced with arguments of multiple truths.  While philosophically I have no problems with this, and have come to enjoy it over the years, the translation of these ideas into how we educate students means that we are in the mess that we are in now.

The multiplicity of truths, as opposed to the truth, has led us to legitimize any crazy approach to education as equally valid.  Along the way, we have even empowered students to stand up and loudly proclaim their aversions towards science and math.  We have then provided plenty of routes for them to "succeed" without ever having to deal with science and math.  (They do geography, for instance!)

Students educated in this manner in colleges and universities across these United States then go on to become teachers in elementary, middle, and high schools, where they amplify the message that children can do whatever they want to do without ever paying homage to science and math.  Science and math be damned, eh!

I still shudder recalling how an English professor told the freshman Honors students, in a course that I had put together, that it was completely ok if they were not good in science and math.  Because, she was like that and she made it as an English professor.  What a message to give impressionable college freshman, right?

Thus, even a small university like mine has quite an extraordinary amount of fluffy courses (like geography?) where students can excel.  The number of students graduating with the various levels of "laude" honors seems to increase year after year.  A casual scan of the list here indicates the highly skewed ratio of non-science to science majors when it comes to summa and magna cum laude.  Seriously, how many of us will openly admit that for a typical student, earning a B in organic chemistry is way more difficult than earning an A in economic geography?  I will.

What have we gained then as a society after thousands of students thus graduate magna cum laude? 

From curmudgeon to cowboys and commencement

The best lines I read today are from this rather polemic op-ed by the curmudgeonly Harvey Mansfield:

A graduate student in sociology is one who didn't get his fill of jargonized wishful thinking as an undergraduate. Such a person will never fail to disappoint you. But sociology has close competitors in other social sciences (including mine, political science) and in the humanities.

With all his writing on manliness and gripes about a feminized culture, Mansfield does come across at times, if not all the time, as an academic cowboy of sorts.  Atul Gawande uses the same cowboy metaphor, but in a completely different way in his commencement address to the graduating class of Harvard's medical students.  Even if I were not the Gawande fan that I am, well, it is a kind of commencement address that makes a lot of sense.  Speaking about the changes in the medical profession over the last couple of generations, and the spiraling cost of healthcare, Gawande notes that "We train, hire, and pay doctors to be cowboys. But it’s pit crews people need."

The metaphor is easy to grasp--we have seen how fast and efficient the pit crew people work, and work as a team.  We imagine the cowboy to be a lonely horseback rider herding cattle.  And then Gawande concludes with this:

Recently, you might be interested to know, I met an actual cowboy. He described to me how cowboys do their job today, herding thousands of cattle. They have tightly organized teams, with everyone assigned specific positions and communicating with each other constantly. They have protocols and checklists for bad weather, emergencies, the inoculations they must dispense. Even the cowboys, it turns out, function like pit crews now. It may be time for us to join them.

To some extent, the old-fashioned academe too used to function like pit crews more than as cowboys.  But, the rapid and over-specialization of academics even at teaching universities like mine has transformed faculty into pedantic cowboys, I suppose.

Arizona State U.: Commencement and Obama

Simply hilarious:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Arizona State Snubs Obama
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