What does it mean to be college educated anyway?

COVID-19 has upended our lives in so many different ways that most of us would never have ever imagined.  How many among us imagined a situation, for instance, when students of all ages would be forced to be in their homes because of closure of all schools and colleges?  And on top of that, they would learn remotely?

In higher education, remote learning has compelled teachers to think about what exactly do they want students to learn from their classes and, therefore, how they should go about teaching it.

Now, pause for a minute and forget the coronavirus.  Shouldn't teachers have always been thinking about what exactly do they want students to learn from their classes and, therefore, how they should go about teaching it?  Isn't that fundamental to teaching?

I think so. I believe so.

But, not all teachers did.

I even tried to engage in discussions on what exactly it means to be college educated in the 21st century and, therefore, what does it mean to be a faculty in the 21st century.  It was a disaster, with most colleagues pooh-poohing it all.  Of course, it could be that the messenger was the problem, but I think it was more than that.

When I became a full-time academic, within a couple of years it became clear to me that the traditional approach to college was not working.  In fact, it was often counter-productive.  I have even blogged in plenty about it here in this blog.

I wrote in this post, for instance, "One would think that all these mean that now is a real good time to seriously think about what it is to be educated."  And that was in April 2013.  Seven years ago, to the date, almost. The missed opportunities; what a shame!

The following is from April 27, 2013, unedited:
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Even if I am a total dud in helping students in my classes understand and appreciate the materials, I bet there are very few who doubt my commitment to liberal education.  If they paid attention to me, then they also know that even as they go through a rigorous liberal education, they have to keep thinking about their career plans as well.

In this structure, problems are in plenty.  Universities offer such a diluted and distorted version of liberal education that we insiders are the ones giving liberal education that awful stink.  Here is an example: at my university, a student can major in the social sciences and minor in geography, and successfully graduate with not even a tenth of the requirements coming from the sciences.  This is merely one of the gazillion possibilities of students legitimately avoiding being liberally educated even as they earn their diplomas at the colleges and universities all over the country.  Not the well-rounded liberal education at all.

My point has always been that such an education is a waste of time and money.  We might as well merely offer professional training.  We should stop referring to what we do as liberal education.  Why call it liberal education and offer something else?

At the same time, we have been completely marginalizing professional education too.  Instead of providing career and technical education to those students who might prefer that, we put that down as some kind of an inferior option and we force all students to go through the hoops of whatever that is we do at four-year schools anymore.

No wonder then we are finding ourselves all twisted trying to figure out the "real payoff of a college degree." To a large extent, Ronnie L. Booth, president of Tri-County Technical College, near Greenville, S.C., articulates the points that I try to get across to people:

A vocational degree is not for everyone, he readily admits, but many of his students are arriving with four-year degrees in hand, looking for something practical. In coming months, he will direct Tri-County's academic counselors to more aggressively steer students away from fields and majors that might prove a bad fit. Don't like the sight of blood or the smell of bodily fluids? Nursing might not be for you. Interested in engineering? Let's have a serious talk about your grades in algebra.
"Better to find out on the front end," he says. "I believe in truth in advertising."
More parents and students, he says, need to "understand that someone has to pay the bills." In his region, he frequently meets waiters and waitresses who have four-year degrees, and he has a friend whose daughter went to college to study dance. She is working in retail.
"That is not what Daddy had anticipated," Mr. Booth says in a Southern drawl. "I believe in a broad educational program, things that make you a good citizen, but I am not sure that it is necessary to rack up $50,000 or $100,000 in debt to get that—and then not to be able to get employment. I have told my children that one of Daddy's goals is to get you off my payroll."

In healthcare, which has been one of the fastest growing sectors, ""It looks like B.A. is now entry-level, or it's becoming that way."  The jobs that didn't require a four-year degree are rapidly evaporating:

The erosion of midlevel jobs goes beyond nursing. Experts say several forces are at work. Automation has eliminated many transcription and clerical jobs. Cost pressures have led hospitals and other health-care providers to push many routine tasks onto medical assistants and other lower-paid workers.
Pharmacies, for example, increasingly employ a mix of licensed pharmacists—who now often need a doctorate—and technicians who fill prescriptions with only limited training.
The shift to electronic medical records, meanwhile, has eliminated many traditional jobs maintaining patient records but has created a wealth of new opportunities for those with coding skills.
At the same time, the increasing complexity of medicine, along with an increased focus on measuring and improving patient care, has raised the bar on educational requirements for some jobs. An Institute of Medicine committee in 2010, for example, recommended that 80% of registered nurses have bachelor's degrees by 2020, meaning nurses with associate's degrees may soon find themselves in the position LPNs face today.

The system is so rigged that the youth seem to have no choice but to get a college degree, even if it means that they will be underemployed:

In the short term, we're still obviously digging out of the jobs hole left by the recession. Unemployment for college graduates is higher than normal. Underemployment is more prevalent, though it's less severe than college critics portray, and perhaps no worse than during the Reagan days. It's the long view that's cloudier. Maybe, as the recession's impact fades, the economy will naturally go back to quickly churning out more jobs for high skill workers, and academics like Beaudry and his colleagues will be proven wrong. Or, perhaps they're right, and we'll need to wait for another great tech revolution before the market for educated workers goes back to growing the way it did 15 years ago.We can't say for sure. But we do know that young people are safer with a degree than without one.

One would think that all these mean that now is a real good time to seriously think about what it is to be educated.  Here is an example: how much math should we require that students do?  Or, even if we think that the math will do them good for critical thinking skills, which I believe it does, should we reconsider how we teach math?  We need to look into such questions because "less than a quarter of U.S. workers report using math any more complicated than basic fractions and percentages during the course of their jobs.":

And, here is the interesting aspect of it all.  Remember how we systematically treat technical training as some kind of a second-class option that the young should be discouraged from?  Ahem, they need math!

Upper level blue collar, e.g. craft and repair workers like skilled construction trades and mechanics

Lower level blue collar, e.g. factory workers and truck drivers

So, quo vadis?

Imagine!

Read the following:

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

Who do you think said that?

Even if you can't name the person, any guesses on what that person--a famous one--was known for?

The keyword there is "imagination," right?  And this imagination is linked to knowledge. And the quote begins with "artist."

We might be tempted to think that it was a famous person in the arts.  That's what I would have thought.

Think again.

It was Einstein!

Aha, you say, because we are immediately reminded of Einstein's famous thought-experiment approach to big questions.

It is not only Einstein.  Science itself requires imagination.

[It] doesn’t take an Albert Einstein to observe that, without the essential first step, without a creative reimagining of nature, a conceiving of hypotheses for what might be going on behind the perceived surface of phenomena, there can be no science at all.

Now think about your own science classes.  Did you ever get a feel that science called for imagination?  To the contrary, chances are great that the classes came across as one boring thing to memorize after another boring thing, right?  I tell ya, every day I am amazed that we humans have progressed this much despite our best attempts to kill curiosity, learning, and imagination.  As Picasso--another imaginative mind, though a thoroughly flawed human--said, through schooling we make sure that students do not become artists!

Science education favours the presentation of results, and a focus on knowledge, rather than the human stories of wonder, imagination, failed ideas and those glorious and uninvited moments of illumination that thread through the lives of all who actually do science.

The older I get, the more I am frustrated by our screwed up approach to education.

I have blogged before on the role of imagination in science.  Like here, in which I quote Freeman Dyson:

Science is a creative interaction of observation with imagination. ... Imagination by itself can still enlarge our vision when observation fails. 

Of course, the imagination is cross-checked by experiments and evidence, which is why string theory, for example, hasn't broken through--great imagination, but no proof. At least, not yet.

I have always known that I lack that kind of imagination.  But, as I noted here:

Education and learning are perhaps also about stretching one's imaginations.  It is easy to walk around with a limited view of the world, but is a challenge to expand that view.

I try my best to get that view across to students and colleagues alike, even though I know fully well that I am not winning.

Do not lean on me. Lean on the robot?

I try my best not to use the turn-by-turn navigation instructions from the smartphone.  In fact, preparations for a road trip include going to the local AAA office and picking up the relevant maps. Yes, the old-fashioned printed maps.

Will this practice of consulting with maps and figuring out directions go away as we humans begin to rely more and more on smartphones that direct us?

Technology is rapidly removing the "need" for many aspects of our lives.  Where will it all end?

There is something new in us not "needing" the old ways of knowing things.  Of course, even in the olden days, not all of us knew how to grow crops or fix the broken doors.  We got these done through cooperation:

We are constantly engaged in ‘memory transactions’ with a community of ‘memory partners’, through activities such as conversation, reading and writing. As members of these networks, most people no longer need to remember most things. This is not because that knowledge has been entirely forgotten or lost, but because someone or something else retains it. We just need to know whom to talk to, or where to go to look it up. The inherited talent for such cooperative behaviour is a gift from evolution, and it expands our effective memory capacity enormously.

We relied on fellow humans.

This time it is different.  We cooperate with "smart machines."

How then ought we to approach education?  Leave alone higher education for a second.  What should we teach kids in elementary schools?  How much should they be allowed to cooperate with smart machines? Without the smart machines helping them, will kids be way less smart than they seem?  Will that matter?

But in an educational setting, unlike collaborative chess or medical diagnostics, the student is not yet a content expert. The AI as know-it-all memory partner can easily become a crutch, while producing students who think they can walk on their own.

The changes are happening incredibly fast for us to collectively think through such issues.  Before we have thought about them and made a decision one way or another, a lot more changes happen.  We are forever behind when it comes to acting on these important issues that will profoundly affect the future.

My selfish answer is that it is not my problem anymore, given my age.  But, I worry. A lot.

The background drone of the tambura connects the dots

In an email to a few colleagues, I quoted the following:

Since the early 1970s, higher education has suffered from increasing specialization and, correspondingly, excessive professionalization. That has created a culture of expertise in which scholars, who know more and more about less and less, spend their professional lives talking to other scholars with similar interests who have little interest in the world around them. This development has led to the increasing fragmentation of disciplines, departments, and curricula. The problem is not only that far too many teachers and students don’t connect the dots, they don’t even know what dots need to be connected.

Of course, I have used that in my blog. Years ago.  How do you think I easily tracked down the quote?  What I write here is no different from what I write to my colleagues, which is no different from what I tell my students.  The only difference is that in the blog, I allow myself to freely express my emotions, dammit ;)

In my intellectual approach, I am always drawn to connecting the dots.  To me, there is simply no other way.  How else can we understand this world?

Which is why I end up reading essays that sometimes are difficult reads for me.  But then I freely admit to my ignorance and try my best to learn the lessons for me there.

Today's complicated essay is this, authored by a president of a prestigious liberal arts college--Middlebury.  She is also an accomplished poet.  The essay involves a lot of poetry.  I am ignorant there.  But, I kept reading.  Because, I know well enough that if I struggle through, there will be gems that will help me connect the dot.

And the gems started appearing; she invokes "the Tanpura Principle."

I practice what I tell students all the time--be an engaged reader.  So, of course, red flag alert right away.  Tanpura, as in the tambura that we refer to in Carnatic music?  Have I been incorrect all my life in referring to the tanpura as the tambura?  So, where did the tambura come from?  And, yes, what the hell is " the Tanpura Principle"?

Connecting the dots.  To help me understand the world.

I paused reading the essay, in order to find out about this tambura/tanpura.  Wiki says that the origin of this instrument is Persian!

The name of the instrument derives from Persian تنبور (pr. tanbūr) where it designates a group of long necked lutes (see tanbur). Hindustani musicians favour the term 'tanpura' whereas Carnatic musicians say 'tambura'; 'tanpuri' is a smaller variant sometimes used for accompanying instrumental soloists.

WTF!  How come I didn't know this Persian connection all these years!  Do the Hindu fundamentalists know that they are using an, ahem, Islamic musical instrument for their bhakti?  I am sure they know that the violin is not Indian, but the tambura?

So, what is the tanpura principle?

The tanpura is a long-necked, lute-like instrument in Indian music that sustains the other instruments by providing a drone. Tanpura players do not provide their own melody, but pluck the instrument’s four strings in a continuous loop of rich tones, to provide a base from which the soloist can draw in singing or playing the raga melody.
The Tanpura Principle in writing is the idea that much of writing occurs while doing something else, because the base of poetic inspiration, the supporting drone, is always there.

Aha; go on:

There are times when we don’t hear the drone, because we are too tired or too overwhelmed with other emotional, spiritual or even logistical challenges to know it. But the point is not then to “cultivate inspiration,” rather, it is to remember that the drone is always there, perhaps even especially there, in the fatigue and frustration of our “other” work.

Think about the dots that this blog has connected.  By themselves, the dots seem unrelated.  But, when connected this way, the world makes sense.  We try our best to make sense of the world which is really incomprehensible.

I did it my way?

Over the years, I have had quite a few students exclaim in classes that they are visual learners or auditory learners. Using these justifications, students have attempted to explain to me why some of the learning materials, or my approach to teaching, did not work for them.

I have always politely nodded my head and moved on.

Left to me, I would have engaged them about where they got such notions that they were visual or auditory or whatever.

Until today, I had no idea such sorting was being done on a large scale in K-12!

Experts aren’t sure how the concept spread, but it might have had something to do with the self-esteem movement of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Everyone was special—so everyone must have a special learning style, too. Teachers told students about it in grade school. “Teachers like to think that they can reach every student, even struggling students, just by tailoring their instruction to match each student’s preferred learning format,” said Central Michigan University’s Abby Knoll, a PhD student who has studied learning styles. (Students, meanwhile, like to blame their scholastic failures on their teacher’s failure to align their teaching style with their learning style.)
Either way, “by the time we get students at college,” said Indiana University professor Polly Husmann, “they’ve already been told ‘You’re a visual learner.’” Or aural, or what have you.

Oh my!  I certainly understand that there are different ways in which we present information and convey advanced knowledge.  We read ideas that were written down. We listen to lectures. We watch videos, even of lectures.  But, does such multiplicity does not mean there are different learning styles; "a lot of evidence suggests that people aren’t really one certain kind of learner or another."

Unfortunately, such crap has rapidly diffused all over:

The "learning styles" idea has snowballed—as late as 2014, more than 90 percent of teachers in various countries believed it. The concept is intuitively appealing, promising to reveal secret brain processes with just a few questions. Strangely, most research on learning styles starts out with a positive portrayal of the theory—before showing it doesn’t work.

As I often remind students, almost always what appeals to our gut feeling is wrong.

What do successful learners do? "really focus on the material."  Yep, there is only one formula--focus on the damn learning materials instead of blaming the materials that do not match with "my learning style."

Oh, btw, if you really want to remember what you learnt, stop binge-reading, and give your brain time to process what you just read.  Take a break after reading this blog-post ;)

The rampant professional malpractice in colleges

A new academic year and I once again start worrying whether students will gain anything from my classes.  It is not merely the subject matter that I am concerned about.  In fact, I have often told students that the subject that I teach is merely a vehicle for something way more important, which in our university we have defined as undergraduate learning outcomes.  A college degree is not merely about the degree.

If this was a challenge in the past, it is becoming even more of a problem now, thanks to the ubiquitous technology that lies on the palms and laps of students, to which they are attracted like moths to a light.  Two essays at two different places both address this same issue: Can students who are constantly on their devices actually learn? asks one, and the other essay's author has a simple bottom-line to students: Welcome, freshmen. Look at me when I talk to you.

The two authors are no Luddites--they even teach classes with and about technology.  I too--with all my use of technology in my personal and professional life--am no Luddite.  From what we see in the classroom, we fear the impact of technology on student learning.

The problem is their use of technology in general. Technology demands a significant amount of time and attention and has conditioned them to not question it. It takes up more and more of their bandwidth, and the net effect is lobotomising.
Consumed by technology that they cannot bear to disable or ignore, my students lose awareness of what’s going on around them. They don’t know what they’ve missed – often, they don’t know that they’ve missed anything. They’re still accountable for it, but such mindlessness has become an epidemic

Even in the old days, we faced a challenge in making sure that students understood concepts and picked up skills that they would build on from one class to another.  Now, it is worse.  Because, most of the time, students think they are getting a lot done by juggling one too many things at the same time--multitasking--when the evidence is otherwise.

An even bigger problem is the way that technology damages critical-thinking skills.

Critical thinking does not come naturally to an overwhelming majority of us.  We have to work on gaining that skill, which we do in many different ways.  Googling ad nauseam ain't a substitute; focused attention is needed, but that's exactly what is missing too.

This blog by itself is an example of digital technology providing immense opportunities for learning, but "they also present dangers, which we should explain when digital natives arrive on campus."  Most educators do not discuss these dangers with students.  New student orientation is all about alcohol, drugs, safe space, trigger warnings, sex, free condoms, how to wipe one's butt, ... everything except the very reason why the freshmen are there in the first place: Learning!

Some frightening data suggests that habitual computer activity, especially on social media, hampers our social and emotional development, particularly our ability to empathize with others. Clifford Nass saw this firsthand while serving as a dorm adviser at Stanford, where he urged students to turn off their devices and converse directly with one another.
"We’ve got to make face-to-face time sacred," Nass told a Stanford audience in 2013, a few months before he died, "and we have to bring back the saying we used to hear all the time and now never hear: ‘Look at me when I talk to you.’ "
It’s hard to know why our colleges have been so slow to share this information with our students.

As I have often blogged about, empathy is one of the most valuable and important aspects of what it means to be human.  Empathy can't be Googled.  Online, one can be anonymous and easily be the least empathetic low-life douchebag ever.  Harshness and bullying are de rigueur in the cyberworld!

Empathy has to be experienced and learnt in the real life, by engaging with real people.  But, higher education increasingly fails at this.

Our students won’t learn much of that by sitting in front of their screens.
And they won’t learn nearly as much in college — from one another or from us — if they’re living online. That’s not an opinion; it’s a fact. Hiding it from our students is worse than embarrassing, to our profession and ourselves. It’s malpractice.

And thus I begin another academic year.  Maybe even more students (and faculty and administrators too) will get highly irritated with me for not going with the flow and asking for more money.  But, I need to continue with my approach that keeps my blood pressure low and lets me sleep well--so that I can exit healthily ;)

Trigger warning: No safe space in this blog!

We have a presidential candidate who, for months, has been at ease behaving worse than an insult comic.  At least the insult comic makes us laugh!  Everything is in the open, so much so that if I had a kid at home, I would be worried about the language.

In fact, offensive language has pretty much become the norm in popular culture.  Popular music is not the "At last" lyrics that Etta James melted us with, and movies for grown-ups rarely are clean enough to watch with one's grandmother.  The other day I was waiting at the traffic light when two young white guys were addressing each other with the n* word.  The words f*k and b*h have become so normal that they have pretty much lost their shock value.

The irony, the bitter and tragic irony, is that against this backdrop, college students apparently want to be treated as kids, and plenty of professors and administrators at colleges and universities are willing to bend over backwards to make sure that these legal adults will be treated as kids!  How bizarre that "safe spaces" and "trigger warnings" have become a part of our daily conversation!

I have always been an ardent supporter of free thinking and speech when it is adults all around.  Especially in a university setting, where we are in the very business of inquiry that is not constrained.  Which is why the letters to students from two private universities encourages me.  The following is from the letter that Claremont McKenna College sent out:

To benefit fully from the free exchange of challenging ideas, we must ensure that all people with different viewpoints, experiences, and analyses are included in our conversations. We protect the freedom of association as an individual and collective right. We reject exclusion and ad hominem attacks as barriers to learning. All of us —- students, faculty and staff -— must commit to high standards of civility, respect, and appreciation for differences. All of us must value and support one another in challenging ourselves to analyze issues from many sides, to develop rigorous tools of intellectual inquiry, and to cultivate the habits of mind of an educated citizen.

Now, just because I encourage students to think, it does not mean that they can freely use words like f*k or b*h or n* in the classroom.  They cannot.  Engaging in ideas is what we do, and we can easily do that without the Trumpian language.  However, it is the engagement with ideas that apparently "kids" these days are worried about.  How strange and how disappointing!

Claremont's leaders make it very clear:

We encourage our professors to challenge our students intellectually. We teach sensitive material. We do not mandate trigger warnings.

 Awesome!

I was intrigued by the name of the president: Hiram E. Chodosh.  Not your 'John Smith" name.  So, I looked it up; the guy has some impressive credentials.  I spotted this:

He worked in more than 20 countries in Asia and the Middle East, serving in advisory positions on pressing problems in justice reform for the World Bank Justice Reform Group, the International Monetary Fund Legal Department, and many court systems, non-profit organizations, and national commissions. He also served as a Fulbright Senior Scholar in India in 2003.

Hey, there is an India connection as well!

The letter was co-signed by the provost, Peter Uvin; this name also interested me--sounded "foreign."  It is; "a native of Belgium."

His academic specialization has been in the development, conflict, and human rights areas, foremost in Rwanda and Burundi. The African Studies Association honored his Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda as the most outstanding book of 1999. In 2006, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which he used to conduct research in Burundi, one of the poorest countries in the world, on life in a post-civil war environment.

These two have spent a good chunk of their lives trying to understand some of the toughest problems in this world, in some of the most materially deprived societies.  I imagine students who want "safe spaces" going to either one of them, and the president or the provost telling them something like "let us talk about the unsafe spaces in Rwanda or Iraq."

Is it too much to ask adults to behave like adults?

Hey, my parents never read books to me!

Life in the adopted country means that I am simultaneously an outsider and one of them.  While some might fret about such an existence, I don't.  It is a fascinating way, a rare opportunity, that people have to understand the world and our existence.

One of the puzzling aspects has always been the hype about reading to the kids.  Especially when the kids are in bed getting ready to sleep.  Movie scenes and sitcoms routinely featured them, and continue to do so.  Academics, too, spend a great deal of time talking about the importance of reading to the kids.  Libraries organize events where books are read to kids with a great deal of theatrics as well.

I gave away what I think about this with the word that I used, right?  Hype ;)

I do not recall my parents or grandparents or anybody ever reading anything to me or any of us kids.  Not when I was sitting down. Not when I was lying down. Not when I was standing either.

But, the older folks did read.  They read the weekly magazines. They read novels. The environment of everybody reading, especially in those dark ages before the internet--heck, even before television--automatically infused in us kids the reading habit.  I can still recall my brother and I fighting over the latest issue of Ananda Vikatan that had arrived and, yes, we tore it up as we both grabbed the magazine to be the first ones to read it.  For which the elders yelled at us.  Yelling is all they did because there was no spanking the kids!

For the most part, kids are like monkeys that do what others do.  If the parents and older folks read, the kids also read.  If the parents and older folks watch television, then that is what kids also do.  Kids, I have always felt, cannot be easily fooled with advice from the older folks when that preaching is not practiced by the elder.

Thus, I had more than a chuckle when I read (get it? I read!) yet another article on the difference that reading to a child makes!

British researcher Don Holdaway was the first to point out the benefits of shared reading. He noted that children found these moments to be some of their happiest. He also found that children developed positive and strong associations with spoken language and the physical book itself, during these moments.
Since then a number of studies have been conducted showing the value of shared reading in children’s language development, especially in vocabulary and concept development.

You, with a sharp and critical mind, are thinking, "but, hey, haven't we moved past books now, in this digital age?"  Yes.  Which is why the research also spews bullshit like this:

While shared reading is often associated with print books, shared reading can be extended to digital texts such as blogs, podcasts, text messages, video and other complex combinations of print, image, sound, animation and so on.
Good video games, for example, incorporate many learning principles, such as interaction, problem-solving and risk-taking, among others.

Yes, now the kid and the parent can play "good video games" together ;)

I suppose the more "advanced" we get, the more easily we forget the simple, basic, aspects of life, such as if you want kids to do something, well, first make sure you do that yourself.  Practice what you damn preach!

Master of my domain

Last term, during an exercise in which I forced students to think about their progress towards the undergraduate learning outcomes, one student who will be graduating in June said that she and most students were not prepared for the world outside the classroom.  Her point was something like this: "Here, we are told what we need to get done, and we do it.  But, at work, we have to show some initiative."

Most other students nodded in agreement.  I asked, "what prevents you folks from taking charge of your own education?"

It is not that I want students to set the curriculum and design courses.  But, there is a sense of agency that is missing in most students, especially the good ones who merely follow the orders.  In the post-industrial digital economy, there are fewer and fewer rewarding opportunities for those who merely carry out what the boss tells them--those are the jobs that are easily outsourced and offshored.  Loius Menand also writes about this, in an entirely different context however:

Today, if you were starting up a tech company (hey, maybe you are!), you would simply outsource your customer relations. In house, you would want your employees to be innovative and flexible, able to work in teams and adjust to new goals as they arose. You’d want to encourage your employees’ creativity by making them feel valued partners in the enterprise, active agents rather than code-writing drones. You’d be looking to maximize the ratio of brains to adaptability. You’d try to insure your employees’ commitment by making them feel that they were generating their own tasks and measures of performance, by having them “take ownership” of the workplace. You’d want reliable people who can also think “outside the box,” not people who think that successful performance means merely meeting preset goals. You would reward the most loyal employees with stock options.

Menand, unlike me, is a real thinker and writer, who has been an academic forever at a real university.  He is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard, and has been a writer for the New Yorker for more than a fifteen years.  Borrowing from the math concept that Vimala Sitaraman taught us decades ago, I like to think that Menand and I are similar triangles--his triangle is way, way, way bigger though.  Menand writes:

I don’t work in a startup. I work in a brick-and-mortar university, one of the most institutionally conservative workplaces in the world outside North Korea. But my colleagues and I all value flexibility and innovation. We are against routine thinking and rote learning. We teach our students to think outside the box and to be comfortable with failure. We stress the importance of teamwork and interaction; we seek to have our students take ownership of the classroom and to insure that they have a psychologically safe space in which to discuss their ideas. We want them to be smarter, faster, better.

Exactly!  (Though, I am not sure about "my colleagues" aspect.)  If students are even barely attentive in any of my classes, then they would have easily understood my comments on flexibility, innovation, rote learning, failure, teamwork, interaction, and--yes--ownership.  But, hey, when has the world ever paid attention to me and why should students, right?

At a higher education conference that I attended not too long ago--perhaps  the university regrets having sent me there--the presenters at one session emphasized "intentionality and reflective action."  As we got into the discussions, I asked them for tips on how to develop in students a sense of agency, so that they can take ownership of their education.  Of course, there is no easy formula for that.

Teach your children well. To code. And they'll love you!

My first day at university where I now teach, I met my fellow-newbie faculty colleagues.  One of them was a physicist, with what seemed like an intense New York way of speaking.  When talking with him, I found out that he was the physics department--there was no other physics faculty at the university.  I was shocked, of course, especially when that was my first ever love.

At small universities like ours, physics is not one that we care to educate students about.  As with many aspects of higher education, this too is something that disappoints and depresses me.  In a related context, I recently wrote in an email to a couple of colleagues, "Whatever happened to the old-fashioned notion of exploration of ideas in a liberal education setting?"

We have moved far, far away from exploration.  As this young commentator puts it, "exploration for its own sake is under siege" while writing about the assault on exploration whether it is the arts, or philosophy, or outer space:

The problem is that both space exploration (as well as all other undirected scientific inquiry) and the humanities are in danger, and the conceptual line we draw between them is obscuring the fact that it’s the same danger, and that it comes from the same source: a cleaving to market-determined value and a desire for immediate return on investment.
We could argue about whether that desire is a consequence of the instant-news environment, the Great Recession and the economic pressures of globalization, or the myopia resulting from the need for political wins.

If there seemingly is no answer to "what job can you get with that, and how much will that pay?" then apparently it is not worth for society to fund it?  After all, we could be exploring the universe for ever, and could hunt for extra-terrestrial intelligence until we are all dead, and not being able to monetize the investment within a few years means that those are not worth exploring!  This approach is rapidly filtering down to the high school level where, for instance, even learning a foreign language is now considered to be wasteful compared to learning a programming language!  Should we wonder then that right from when they are kids, there is a push to teach them how to code!

Such a contemporary approach to education and knowing, and the push for specialization in order to "grow the economy," cannot possibly help us in the long-run.    Buckminster Fuller said it best:

Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual’s leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which in turn leads to war.

We need to understand how we relate to other humans, to other life forms, to the rocks and the rivers, and to outer space.  But, we cannot expect all these to miraculously happen if we take away exploration from education.  All we will end up with, as a former colleague used to say, is a society of automatons!

I don't teach. I want students to learn.

When I meet young people, I feel an urge to flood them with what I have learnt in life so that they can avoid the mistakes that I made and take the shortcuts that I have found.

But, I know better.  No young person wants any advice from a balding, greying, middle-aged guy who talks funny in any part of the world.  So, STFU is the reminder I always give myself.  It has worked quite well so far.  I have an impressive record of only rarely ever volunteering any advice!

Thus, even with the young relative, I merely engaged in a conversation without becoming the older uncle who tells her how to lead her life.  During the chat, I described how I work with students, when my father chimed in with "in India, students are taught, whereas in America students have to learn."

If only a majority, in India and America alike, understood the importance of students owning the responsibility to learn.

There is a role for "teaching," no doubt.  But, for the most part, it is the learning that students need to focus on, which they seem to forget.  As I often remind students, I could be the worst teacher ever, but because it is their life, they need to pay attention to their own learning despite the terrible person standing across from them.

But, they don't listen to me; need I remind you that no young person wants any advice from a balding, greying, middle-aged guy who talks funny in any part of the world!  And they end up writing positive comments and sending me thank-you notes and gifts ;)

I wonder if I was merely lucky that I kept after learning even without anybody ever telling me that education is about learning.  As far as I can recall, right from my early school days.  Like in that physics example, too, in high school; ahem, it is not as if I went to school only for that one girl!  What if high school and college students do not know that education is about learning?  What if nobody has even bothered to clue them in?

I have joked with students--because advice is not well received--that at the end of every term, they should ask themselves, "what have I learnt from the classes that I took?"  If they are not able to easily draw up a list, they should  approach the university president for a refund of the tuition is my joke.  Hahaha!  Humor can deliver truth easily and well--if one gets the joke.

Very few seem to care about learning.  Even in daily life, outside of the classroom environment, there seems to be very little interest in learning.  After all, we need to learn about personal health, finance, ...  Learning is hard work though, which most of us prefer avoiding.

Perhaps it was always this way.  Maybe that's why Socrates had to walk around Athens reminding people about the importance of an examined life, for which learning is a fundamental requirement.  Oh well, I too will "learn" when I am handed a cup of delicious hemlock infused coffee--I hope that will be at my 75th birthday celebrations ;)

This day ... three years ago (3)

(Re-posting from 2012)

No noise in the classroom, please. Students are asleep!
As enrollment has increased in the college where I teach, there has been an increase in the number of students who go through some of the classes that I teach.  The opportunity to help more numbers of students understand and interpret the world certainly pleases me.

However, along with the larger numbers, I notice that there is also a much higher increase in the percentage of students who don't show up even though they are registered for the class.  Sometimes they are no shows during the entire term.

Yesterday, at class time, only 15 out of the 36 were in attendance.  A couple more came in late, but we didn't even reach the 50%-plus-one that would be required for a quorum!

It worsened after the break--we were down to twelve.  Only a third of the class.

Yes, there was absenteeism even in the old days.  Ten years ago, when I started teaching here, of course, students did skip class.  I have never recorded attendance because, as I tell them, they are adults and I do not have to babysit anybody.  But, I don't even need any hard data to understand that the trend has been of decreasing attendance.

It sunk to a new low yesterday.

One reason could very well be that I am a crappy teacher, and such teachers might not be making their classes exciting enough for students, who need to be "edutained."  But, as I joke with students, if they thought I am crappy now, well, I was incredibly crappier years ago.  (One term, a student, who mistook my humor, told me in all seriousness "if you think you are bad, Dr. Khé, you really don't know what bad teaching means."  That was one awesome compliment I received that term!)

Thus, absenteeism has been on a steady increase even as my teaching has gotten better; how about that!

My hypothesis to explain the rapid increase is simple: we now have a lot more students than before who are simply not interested in higher education.  Yet, they are here because of the societal contexts that force them to be in classrooms.

Is it worth all this trouble?

When 24 students decide to skip class, it is a huge waste of precious dollars too.  At the approximately sixty dollars it costs each student for each class meeting, that was $1,440 flushed down the toilet in a little more than an hour.  Mine is not the only class where we witness absenteeism.  Now think about all the other classes that are offered at this university alone.  And then all the classes across all the colleges and universities.

I do not mean to suggest that coming to class is always better than not coming to class.  We have to count the number of students who do come to class and promptly fall asleep.  Yes, asleep.  A few years ago, a colleague, who since left for greener pastures, described to me what he did when he saw a student fast asleep with his face down on the desk.  The colleague walked up to the classroom door, and banged it shut.  The sudden loud noise jolted the student from his sleep and the rest of the class apparently had quiet smiles on their faces.

I don't do anything like what that former colleague did.  I might ask students whether they think it will be ok with their boss if they didn't show up for work, or if they slept on the job.  That is the extent to which I go about reminding them that their habits are not healthy.  I don't have to, nor do I want to, babysit adults.

Do students ever ask themselves whether all this fun and sleep is worth the $25,000 debt that they graduate with, on an average?

Should voters ask ourselves whether we should worry at all about the student debt accumulated via such a process?

Given that there is also public money involved in universities like the one where I teach, I am sure taxpayers are not going to be thrilled to know that they are subsidizing students who choose to skip classes, or treat class time as nap time.

I would love it if taxpayers routinely observed our classrooms and judged for themselves whether their hard-earned monies are being put to good use.  I am confident that if they did, well, that will be the end of even the little bit of funding that we currently get for higher education.  I, for one, would not blame taxpayers if they chose to do that.

After that, the taxpayers should also sit in on faculty meetings.  I suppose I would be blamed if it results in them jumping off the nearest cliff.  I bet quite a few administrators will gladly push them over too!

Welcome to the university, and have a nice day!

On the making of teachers ...

Until I joined graduate school, I had never thought about where school teachers came from.  All I knew about school teachers, especially the awesome ones, and the awful ones too, was from the experience as a "lifer" in that wonderful school, and from two relatives from my father's generation who were high school teachers.  I had never spent even a minute into thinking about the making of a teacher, and questions like: Who trained them?  What makes people wanting to teach?

In graduate school, depending on my mood, I would wander into any one of the libraries on campus and either do my own work or read something from the collections there.  Others perhaps call this as "wasting time" but I enjoyed such intellectual wanderings.

USC Doheny Library, summer 2009

One of the libraries was at the School of Education, which is also where I got into the habit of reading The Chronicle of Higher Education.  It fascinated me that there was a School of Education.  There were even undergraduate students who were on a teacher preparatory path.  All through my years in India, I had never known of any young person who was studying to be a school teacher.  This was all getting to be really interesting.

When I started teaching in California, it turned out that quite a few students who were in my economic geography class were there because it was required for their teacher-prep majors.  Now, I started getting some insights into the making of a teacher.  I was impressed with a few of them.  And was disappointed with most of them--if their attitude towards learning was this awful, how would would they ever inspire their students to learn!

Here in Oregon, a math colleague, who a few years ago moved across the continent to be closer to her family, once remarked at a faculty senate meeting about the immense responsibility that we faculty have.  "We blame high schools for the bad quality students they send us; the high schools blame the middle schools; the middle schools point their fingers at elementary schools.  We forget that we are the ones preparing teachers for all those schools."  I was the only one who was impressed with her plea--the rest couldn't care; I suppose they could not wait to get back to writing their journal articles and books and here she was wasting their precious time!

The interest in making sure we have good teachers is huge outside the academic walls.  Everybody, from the President to the kid on a skateboard has firm beliefs on what is wrong about teaching and teachers.  Some opinion writers even claim that a high school diploma is all one needs to teach kids.  How can we make sure that we have wonderful teachers for kids?

Policy makers have debated the best way to evaluate teacher effectiveness, but have shown little interest in the training that is supposed to make them effective in the first place. That’s changing, but it’s not obvious where and how to intervene. Tougher entry requirements for teacher training? A more challenging certification test? New accreditation standards for teacher training programs? The problem is that many different organizations influence various aspects of the teacher training process. 

It is cacophony out there!

Meanwhile, I am now left thinking about yet another issue: how come in the vast extended family we have engineers and doctors and MBAs and college professors and whatever else, but no school teachers?  Is it because it is not considered worthy enough a profession?  Nothing makes sense the older I get!

And thus begins another academic year ...

After a record-breaking number of 90-plus degree highs on summer days, the temperature is beginning to cool down. No surprise, therefore, that while filling gas on my way to campus, the small talk at the pump was all about the summer heat and the drizzle that had started falling.

"The drops are getting bigger" the attendant said, to which from the other car came a reply, "I hope it rains well.  We need it."  All our heads nodded, in perfect unison.  I suppose no "real" Oregonian ever says anything against the rain.  After all, we know all too well that there is no green without the heavenly waters.

The little bit of rain and the clouds was a wonderful way to welcome in a new academic year.

Too bad the year always begins with meetings.
Dull and boring meetings.
Meetings where people pontificate.
Meetings where it is the same bullshit over and over again.

But then roses come with thorns.  The beautiful lotus is always in the most awful ponds.  Perhaps the ugly makes the beautiful that much more awesome.

I walked into my office and saw the roses--the cards I have received from students over the years.  If only I had had the sense to retain the ones from the early years of my career.  While I did appreciate getting them even when younger, it is with age that I have learnt to value and treasure them.  Especially in the era of email and Twitter, the handwritten thank-you notes are priceless.

To say thanks, with the deepest of sincerity, is not something that I knew when I was young.  The old country traditions did not even have a place for "thanks" in the interactions.  Now, when I visit with family and friends, and on occasions that merit a heartfelt thanks, I convey my thanks to them.  Once, after returning to Eugene, I mailed thank-you notes to my parents' neighbors who helped out when my parents came down with the flu.  I came to know later that those thank-you cards were the talk of the building for a few days.

I was walking back to the car when I heard my name being yelled.  Back in the old country, a gazillion male heads would have turned in response.  Here, there is perhaps no other Sriram within a hundred mile radius ;)

It was one of the roses from the past.

There couldn't be any better beginning to a new year.

For a good education, you need to have good teachers. But, that ain't me?

I can feel in me the seriousness, the urgency, of the upcoming academic year and the conference.  My senses are so focused that even when I took a break to play a few minutes of bridge, I was lethally there.  It is as if I knew exactly what the other hands were.  When we are focused, we see things--as simple as that.

A focus on intellectual and emotional preparation for the courses means that all of a sudden I see that essays are popping up from every direction for me to read, reflect, and, of course, blog about too.  But, the essays that I read today made me wonder why students are not enrolling in my classes even when I am doing exactly what those authors seem to describe as habits of a good teacher.

Exhibit I is from this essay in Slate, by William Deresiewicz, who is all over the thinking-circuit after his lengthy cover essay in The New Republic:

In class, you do not spend your time transcribing information. The proponents of distance learning are not incorrect to believe that lectures are usually an inferior form of instruction. That is why a significant portion of classes, at least, should be small enough to run as seminars. The purpose of a seminar is to enable your professor to model and shape the mental skills she’s trying to instill. She conducts a discussion about the material, but she doesn’t simply let you talk. She keeps the conversation focused. She challenges asser­tions, poses follow-up questions, forces students to elaborate their one-word answers or clarify their vague ones. She draws out the timid and humbles (gently) the self-assured. She welcomes and en­courages, but she also guides and pushes. She isn’t there to “answer questions,” at least not for the most part; she’s there to ask them.

This is exactly what I have been doing for years now, ever since it dawned on me that my role in the classroom is to help students explore and understand not via any monotonous lectures aided by fancy Powerpoint graphics but by asking questions and making them think. But, then I think of this one student, who perhaps articulated aloud what many think within, when she said something along the lines of "I know you want us to think about this and understand the importance, Dr. Khe, but I really don't care about the subject. I just want to get going with my life."  I was shocked at her brutal honesty, but much preferred that to complete nonchalance.

As I read this part of Deresiewicz's essay, I kept thinking to myself that, again, this is exactly what I do as an advisor:

 You do not talk to your students; you listen to them. You do not tell them what to do; you help them hear what they themselves are saying. You ask the kinds of questions that Lara Galinsky talks about as being im­portant at times of decision—those “why” questions that help peo­ple connect with what they care about. Most advisors just tell you what courses to take, a student at Brown remarked to me, but the best ones “help you to think in a different way about the choice.” As Harry R. Lewis suggests, a mentor looks for the questions behind the questions their advisees ask. “The most important job of the advisor,” he writes, “is to help students understand themselves, to face and take responsibility for their decisions, and to support and to free them to make choices that are at odds with the expectations others have for them.” 

A few years after a student had graduated, when we met again, I asked her during that lengthy chat how she decided to reveal to me, of all people, the problems that she was having with her boyfriend.  To her it was simple.  "You are a good listener" she said.

Finally, Deresiewicz writes this:

Great teachers, as Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus remark, are not bound by disciplinary ideas of what they’re allowed to say. They connect the material at hand, in a way that feels spacious and free, with anything to which it might be relevant. They connect it to ex­perience, and so they shed light on experience—on your experience. Just as great art gives you the feeling of being about “life”—about all of it at once—so does great teaching. The boundaries come down, and somehow you are thinking about yourself and the world at the same time, thinking and feeling at the same time, and instead of seeing things as separate parts, you see them as a whole. It doesn’t matter what the subject is.

That is precisely what I do too.   It is always about helping students see the connections, and to make sure they don't develop a tunnel vision of sorts of the world via some narrow disciplinary thought.  I am that way in the life outside the classroom too.  The other day, the friend asked me how my mind connected between two things and I told her that it just happens.  That is how I am wired, I think.  I even wrote an essay on this, back in 2005, in the context of the Honors Programs--click here to download that short essay and read it.

Which means, I, as a failing professor who cannot seem to bring in more than a couple of students to my classes is a living and breathing example of if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and even quacks like a duck, well, I ain't no duck!

It is one hell of a crappy reality, it seems.  But, am enjoying it; so, who cares!

Tomorrow, Exhibit II, after which you might treat me to a cup of delicious hemlock ;)

"Stop lecturing me" he says.

Who you gonna believe--a Nobel Laureate or me?

Not a hard question to answer, eh!  I know what you're thinking: who cares for the Nobel winner! ;)

What if the Nobel Prize winner that I am going to quote here essentially says the same things that I have been blogging about for years, and practicing for even longer?  Intrigued?

Carl Wieman, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001, writes about "a fundamentally flawed understanding of learning":

Most people, including university faculty and administrators, believe learning happens by a person simply listening to a teacher. That is true if one is learning something very simple, like “Eat the red fruit, not the green one,” but complex learning, including scientific thinking, requires the extended practice and interaction described earlier to literally rewire the brain to take on new capabilities.

See, I told you that a Nobelist and I are on the same metaphorical page.  And, yes, Wieman is the "he" in the title of this post.

Universities continue on with the old, old, idea of lecturing despite all the evidence one would need on why lecturing does very little to student learning when compared to an educational environment in which students are active learners.  Why the heck don't they change?

Part of it is just habit; lectures began at universities because they did not have books, and so information had to be dictated and copied. Teaching methods have not yet adapted to the invention of the printing press.

I tell students all the time that they now have access to information that even the brightest minds of the past could never have imagined. Class meetings are not at all for me to transmit information to students.  Instead, well, let me quote myself here:

I, too, routinely tell students that they don't need to come to classes, and that they don't need to take courses, and that universities aren't warehouses of information. "You've got to think for yourselves" is what I keep emphasizing to them, while reminding them that thanks to the internet they have access to all the information they possibly need, and more. "So, why do you think we have classes?" is a question I often ask students, who perhaps view that as some kind of a trick question.

By now you are thinking, "if that is the case, then why do insist on continuing with some Middle Age practice of lecturing?"  Good question.  The answer is simple.  "There is no incentive."

Faculty and universities are recognized and rewarded only for how successful they are at pursuing the $40 billion a year of federal research money. There is zero incentive to use effective research-based teaching methods rather than pedagogical superstition and habit, and in fact, very few, if any, universities in the U.S. track what teaching methods are being used in their classrooms. As long as this holds true, prospective students have no way to compare the quality of education they will receive at different institutions, and so no institution needs to improve.

No institution needs to improve. So long, suckers!

The courage to be ignorant ... is an asset in education

In my classes, I often feel like I am re-enacting, over and over again, the wonderful scene from Life of Brian, which makes me laugh hysterically every time I watch it. What? You don't remember that scene? You have never watched that Monty Python classic?



I, too, routinely tell students that they don't need to come to classes, and that they don't need to take courses, and that universities aren't warehouses of information.  "You've got to think for yourselves" is what I keep emphasizing to them, while reminding them that thanks to the internet they have access to all the information they possibly need, and more.  "So, why do you think we have classes?" is a question I often ask students, who perhaps view that as some kind of a trick question.

But, there is always a thought in the back of my head that neither the students nor the folks at the university would care for such a message. The faculty and administrators of the university, any university, aggressively market higher education and their own respective institutions and they will not have any soft spot for me and my views on the overselling--not even mere selling--of higher education.

Even more is the worry that students, too, might not prefer to hear my bottom-line that they are individuals who need to think for themselves.  It shifts the responsibility, a burden, on to them.  It is a lot easier, perhaps, to simply do whatever one is told to do, especially where there is no genuine interest, than to take ownership for what they want to learn.  I don't blame them--the system has trained them well, as much as the system in which I grew up trained us really, really well.

Though in a different context, this essay notes parenthetically:

Socrates challenged such thinking in his day, and it did not end happily.

This, too, I often joke with students.  I tell them following Socrates means that one of these days I might be given the option of exile or death (though, given that I have already been exiled, a cup of tasty hemlock is no longer an option?  Haha!)

In this essay titled "The courage to be ignorant," which sounds like the title of my autobiography if I were to ever write one, there is practically nothing for me to disagree, even though it is in a context of art, music, and architecture:

classes consist in the delivery of scholarly knowledge that only serves to exacerbate the distance that the students feel from the material itself. Instead of learning how to look at an artwork or listen to a piece of music, students learn how to categorize them: this is early Renaissance, this is Impressionist....
The two skills don't have to be mutually exclusive, but on a practical level, they most often are — and I would rather that my students begin by gaining the confidence to analyze and respond to a work and only then delve into the historical and scholarly background according to their interest. We live in a time where there's no shortage of access to facts, but college may be their one chance to develop a real understanding of how art and music work.

Wait, there is more:

 It has pushed me to think more about holding students accountable for the ways they reach their own answers than about how best to give them — or Socratically help them stumble upon — the “right answer.” Even in classes where I bring much more to the table, the focus is and must be the material we're working on together, not all the information I'm bringing from the outside. More than that, though, all that information must be put to the test of the material itself, so that I always have to be open to the possibility that the interpretation I brought to the table is wrong, or at least not the whole story.

Should any of the current or former students make a mistake of reading this blog post, chances are that they will agree that this is very similar to what I, too, tell them.

The liberal arts approach in particular provides a unique opportunity to form broad-minded critical and creative thinkers who have the right combination of intellectual boldness and intellectual humility to enter a wide variety of professions and explore many bodies of knowledge. A crucial part of that formation is learning to have the courage to admit one's own ignorance, and I believe students would be better served if faculty members were more commonly called upon to display that same courage.

Imagine that!  Asking the egomaniacs that we academics are to admit that maybe we don't know it all. Hah!

Pay to teach. Pay not to learn?

It is the middle of the academic term. Which means tests and papers.

I hear things. Some make me smile. And then there are others, like the one that resulted in this tweet of mine:

I overheard a student asking another "are we supposed to bring a scantron sheet for the midterm? I could have puked! http://t.co/qBlOTfwT6L
— sriram khe (@congoboy) October 31, 2013

That reaction was triggered by the "scantron" word, of course.

Thus, the middle of the term provides me with yet another reason to ponder about the state of higher education.

I passed by a classroom where the instructor was going over materials from a page of the book used by the class.  How do I know that?  Well, because that page was projected on the screen.  It was a page with factoids like what you would find at a typical Wikipedia page.

If an instructor is merely presenting materials that are there in a textbook--with information no longer an issue in this web age--and if students will be asked to demonstrate their understanding of the materials by bubbling in their responses on scantron sheets, then where exactly is the learning happening, and where precisely is the value being added, if any?  What are we trying to achieve in higher education?

I wonder whether most students, too, might not care as long as they get the grade they are shooting for, and walk away with the diploma that they think is all that matters.

If only things were otherwise!

Teaching the Ape to Write Poems
By James Tate
They didn't have much trouble
teaching the ape to write poems:
first they strapped him into the chair,
then tied the pencil around his hand
(the paper had already been nailed down).
Then Dr. Bluespire leaned over his shoulder
and whispered into his ear:
"You look like a god sitting there.
Why don't you try writing something?"
                                                        Source

The shutdown is affecting my class. It is a shitdown!

My grandmother often warned against certain kinds of practical jokes with an advice, "you joke too much about it and it will come true."

Even though I wanted to, I didn't even crack that joke about class being canceled because of the government shutdown and yet it came true!  I am mad as hell--not because I missed out on the opportunity for a prank, but because this shutdown messed up my class discussions and students learning.

From now on, I want to call this shutdown as shitdown!

As I often remind students, the wonderful advantage with teaching and learning now, as opposed to even ten years ago, is the phenomenal availability of all kinds of information at the mere click of a mouse button.  And for free.  A contrast to the world in which I was a formal student.

This different world means that I teach very differently, even from many other fellow-faculty.  As I walk past classrooms, I am appalled to see faculty still doing the old lecture routine, with dull and boring text on the slides.  Sitting in those classrooms might make one wonder if it was 1913 or 2013.

Here is how the shitdown messed me and my students.  When introducing students to the ideas of population dynamics, I make them develop hypotheses for which I then directly pull up the data and charts from the US Census Bureau's database.  It is a phenomenal database on all the countries of the world, not merely the US.  I would ask students to choose any country, offer their hypothesis on population conditions--fertility rates and birth rates--and how they might also be into the future.  This approach is vastly superior to me lecturing on and on and on because it gets them thinking and engaged.

So, I pulled up the link, and the projector displayed this on the screen:

A couple more tries and it brought up the same screen over and over.  I was pissed off then, and I am pissed off even now.

A phenomenal advantage with information on a website is that we do not need personnel to answer questions once the data are out there.  Why did they have to shitdown this database when it is run by computers?  Granted that databases have to be constantly updated, and other features have to be worked on too.  But, they could have kept the database accessible and the updates could have happened whenever the politicians ended their pissing contest.  Instead they shitdown the entire site?  How awful!  Pox on all these people who are messing up our lives!

I did a few other things, but had to end class fifteen minutes early.  If the morons (mis)governing the country do not end the shitdown before the next meeting on Tuesday, then my students and I will miss out on a valuable teaching and learning opportunity.

This shitdown is one of those terribly ugly warts on democracy's beautiful body!

My turn to gift. A box of chocolates. To a teacher!

As I sat down on the dental chair, I told Lori, "you know how much I hate flossing."

She smiled and nodded as I continued, "well, since the last time, I have taken up flossing."

Now Lori was all smiles.

But then she is always smiles.  That's how she has been for the eight-plus years I have been to her for dental hygiene. Unless there is a Jekyll/Hyde in her, and I can't imagine that at all, I would think that her husband and kids experience her smiling personality all the time.

Perhaps she was smiling in advance because she was expecting some lame joke from me--the reputation!  But, I was serious.  "It is not that I floss every night, but easily at least half the nights I have flossed over these months."  Lori knows that I am quite maniacal about brushing my teeth--twice, if not thrice a day!

"So, when you examine my teeth and gums, I want you to give me a real, factual, feedback on whether the flossing has made a difference."

On the one hand, I would have been disappointed if Lori's verdict was that it was all the same as before.  On the other hand, that same verdict could mean that I don't have to floss anymore, but will have to floss if there is a significant positive difference?  Damn, as I get older, it is difficult to figure out if something is really a loss or a gain.

Reminds me of that Chinese parable about a young man rushing to his parents to tell them about a stray horse wandering into his field and that he is now the owner.  "It is good news or bad news?" ask the parents.  A few weeks later, he hobbles in and says that he fractured his leg after he fell off the horse.  "Is it good news or bad news?" ask the parents again.  The parable goes on to build situations like this to highlight the moral that we don't really know if something is good or bad until much later in life, with the events that unfold.

But, of course, in the case of flossing, I am exaggerating.  I knew very well that whatever her verdict, I was going to floss more and not less.

A few minutes after peering into my mouth, Lori said, "yes, I can see a big difference."  And she gave me the gross details, which I shall spare you, dear reader.

I gave her the reason for why I started flossing.

"After the last time, it occurred to me that you might be frustrated with patients like me, the same way I get frustrated with students when they choose to ignore the valuable tips I give them."

Lori laughed and said, "well, it is your health, and all I can do is advise."

"Exactly. That is exactly what I tell students too--that it is their life and they can do whatever, and all I can do is advise."

When that thought struck me, the thought that I was behaving no differently from my students, it felt so wrong.  And the only way to right that wrong was, well, to start flossing.  Which is what I have been doing, though not consistently.

After the end of it all, as I was driving to work, I thought to myself that I ought to thank her for the teaching that she has done all these years. For how she put up with this crappy student with a bad attitude.

Maybe instead of merely waiting for students to thank me with chocolate, I should thank this teacher with chocolate.  Without boring her with this back-story.

That's what I did.

I used one of the thank-you cards from home.  I had printed them a while ago using some of my travel photos.  And, on the envelope, of course I had to try to be funny!

I took that card along with a box of chocolates--the ones that I always associate with my daughter, for how she used to gobble them up while watching Grease for the gazillionth time!

I walked into the dentist office and gave her the gift.

Lori was all smiles.