Sunshine and shadows

Most of us are in favor of sunshine. And it's easy to forget about the shadows.What interests me is the necessary co-existence of light and dark, day and night, sunshine and shadow--the reminder that gains always bring losses and endings always accompany beginnings.

It's the simple things in life that are the hardest to understand.

Just another day looking out the window...

Be a better follower

Follow your heart. Follow your dream. Follow your intuition. At the start of a new semester, I am making a conscious effort to be more of a follower. I'm going to encourage my students to do the same.

The blue ocean

In the midst of providing feedback on written work, I found this gem from a student:

"They consistently looked around Blue Ocean, a new market which has a lot of possibility to succeed."

The poetry is unintentional, I think, as this student is bi-lingual and less comfortable in English than in the first language learned. But I love the image of the blue ocean (associated with blue ocean strategy) as a real place, one worthy of the name where we can spend time looking around until we find something we think will succeed.

Perhaps the grammar could use a bit of tweaking...but I think I'll leave it as it is.

Ill-defined problems

This semester, I have another capstone class designed to prepare seniors to use what they've learned in their degree program to tackle the reality of doing versus studying. We've completed job searches (to assess knowledge, skills, and abilities needed), completed self-assessments, and looked at the learning they've acquired from life and academic failures, all as foundation for the realities of doing.

Last week, we (and I use that pronoun with intention) embarked on a project for a stakeholder. The project contains opportunities to use and/or learn the knowledge and skills needed for the work the students want. And some of them are frustrated and angry. They want to be told what to do with the ill-defined problem we have at our disposal as a learning opportunity.

And this is what puzzles me every time I encounter it: Students who want responsibility, want to be hired, want to be promoted...and who want to be told how to do their work. I understand the frustration, as it's a natural part of learning. I don't understand being angry about the lack of a clear path to follow. Perhaps it's because we have not introduced our students to ill-defined or ill-structured problems often enough or early enough:

Education research has shown that an effective technique for developing problem-solving and critical-thinking skills is to expose students early and often to "ill-defined" problems in their fields. An ill-defined problem is one that addresses complex issues and thus cannot easily be described in a concise, complete manner. Furthermore, competing factors may suggest several approaches to the problem, requiring careful analysis to determine the best approach. (1)

There may be more than one best approach in some fields, but the "careful analysis" part is required regardless of the field or discipline. And the traditional approach to teaching (three tests and a final exam) rarely require careful analysis of an ill-formed or ill-structured problem. And those are the only real problems I have encountered in my years as an employee, a consultant, an executive, a teacher, or a parent.

In the language of design (or design thinking), the term wicked problem is sometimes used. Complexity may not always be synonymous with wicked or with ill-defined, but the only way to assess the complexity and the degree of (ill)structure or wickedness is to do the careful analysis.

Careful analysis is hard work. The pay-off for doing it well is usually large. The motivation to do it at all is what seems to be in question, but perhaps what appears to be a motivation problem is the fear of failing--because we clearly have not been consistently teaching students how to approach these problems.




(1) The use of ill-defined problems for developing problem-solving and empirical skills in CS1. David Reed, Department of Math and Computer Science, Creighton University.

Picturing failure

Our educational system rewards success and penalizes failure.  To most people, that seems right. We want to create successful citizens able to make well-informed choices, vote, hold jobs, raise families, and make the world a better place.  Yes, we do. We want all of that. That's part of why we provide access to education.

But while we have the best of intentions, we forget that the path from here (wherever that happens to be) to success is paved with failure. Individual failure, collective failure, smart failure, fast failure, failure that teaches us what we need to know and propels us further along the path.   Failure is the part of the scientific method that we tend to forget, as testing a hypothesis requires that we be as open to the possibility of failure as to possibility of success when determining what the data actually tell us.

The mantra to fail fast, fail smart, fail cheap is intended to remind us that failing become less likely to hurt us when we embrace it on a daily basis.  The large and/or tragic failures are sometimes quirks of fate; other times, however, they reflect a refusal to fail earlier, when the stakes would have been lower.

Picture yourself failing, learning from the failure, and making better choices as a result. It's amazing how freeing that can be, whether from self-denigration or the equally destructive criticism of the failures of others.

A marshmallow world

Though not what Carl Sigman, Peter DeRose, Bing Crosby, or Dean Martin meant by the phrase, we created our own marshmallow world in class this morning. Graduate students in a multi-disciplinary course in Innovation and Creativity took The Marshmallow Challenge.  It was engaging, fun, and a good way to start a snowy, cold Monday.

The best educational experiences provide both the experience itself and a tool for later use.  Building a free-standing structure of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow (which must be on top) in 18 minutes is a quick way to illustrate the value of  prototyping, the importance of diverse skills, and the many marshmallows we encounter in whatever work we do. The students enjoyed the challenge and the winning team (all male) sent photos to their moms.

It's a marshmallow world in so many ways.

The winning tower at 28 3/8 inches.

Snow day

Today is a snow day on our campus.  No one is sad about this, with the possible exception of the maintenance crews clearing the sidewalks and streets.  Unlike other winters, this is likely to be the only weather-related closing for the semester.

What does it tell us when students and faculty embrace an unplanned day away from lectures, labs, and office hours? Perhaps nothing more than the appreciation of finding something both unexpected and appreciated--an extra cookie in the package, a bonus in our paycheck, a coffee paid forward by the person ahead of us in line, or an anonymous flower left on a desk.

I wonder, though, if our highly structured and routine lives increase the likelihood of becoming dry and dull in our experience of and openness to the world around us.  I'm still surprised when graduate students write that an assignment for a creativity course is what gave them permission to try something new or revive a passion left unattended. Why do we need external motivators to rise above our lock-step lives?

Teacher or student? Yes.

Some teaching opportunities benefit the instructor as well as the students.  The three years (seven semesters) teaching this one one course have challenged me to be a better teacher, as well as a better person. I'm looking forward to new classes I'll be teaching in the fall, but the students who've been a part of this very hands-on course have a special place in my heart.

Asked to teach this course three times before I reluctantly agreed, my reasons for refusing were that I'm not a sales person (at all) nor an alumna (the target market). When I finally said "yes", I had no idea how much the hybrid business-class model would be challenging, energizing, frustrating, and addicting

The students really do manage every aspect of an ongoing small business. This is both the good news and the bad news, as typically 50% of the students leave each semester (by design) and the compression of the learning is intense. Some of the unique features of this type of course:

• The business oversight requires experience that few faculty possess. 
• The academic responsibilities require experience that few business owners or entrepreneurs possess. 
• Implementation of entrepreneurial vision is limited by the semester calendar, which also creates operational challenges (students cannot be held responsible for the business when they are not enrolled). 
• The existence of a not-for-profit corporate structure within a state-funded entity to allow students to run a retail business creates complexity and challenge in accounting, procurement, payment (to vendors), student travel, and business operations. 
• Continuity of processes and institutional memory are ongoing challenges. Though the class has been in existence in various formats for 16 years, the processes, product portfolio, and supplier relationships change quickly enough (sometimes through entropy; sometimes due to turnover) for the current class to be both markedly different from and very similar to those of just five years ago. 
• Entrepreneurs do not generally travel in packs and star performers (independent contributors) may create management challenges (for their peers) in a venture where collaboration is required for success. 
• Students who have 4.0 grade point averages have “aha” moments of realizing they may have learned less than they realized in many of their courses. It is common to hear “Yes, we studied that, but I didn’t really get it until just now.” 
• Students seem to blossom, mature, gain confidence and get it almost overnight. It’s as though a switch is flipped, a neural circuit fires, or they complete a rite of passage that separates them from peers. 
• Employers recruit students from this program because of the nature of the program.
• Former students who are recognized across the state (and sometimes across the country) for professional accomplishments credit this program with as being pivotal to their success.

This has been one of my most challenging adventures. I’m going to miss it. But I have every confidence that the river will continue to flow.

Building(s)

It may be an old friend you haven't called.  It might be a long-overdue apology or some other wrong you've long intended to set right.  But the longer you let whatever it is go, the harder it seems--or, perhaps, the harder it actually becomes--to take the much-needed action.

What is that tipping point in favor of (finally) doing versus leaving something to decay in the murky well of intention? I don't know the answer to that question, if there's an answer to be known.  But I know the small choices to do or not to do (Shakespeare's Hamlet who cannot decide whether to be or not to be) define us as surely as a building is built brick by brick.

Feedback and fruitcake

The first round of peer evaluations are in.  Eleven undergraduate students and one graduate student have provided quantitative and qualitative feedback to classmates who are partners in maintaining (and, ideally, improving) a retail business for class credit. The challenges?  Giving useful feedback, learning to receive feedback, and preparing for the day when both giving and receiving feedback will affect raises, bonuses, promotions, and corporate survival.

The students have the same challenges as the upper-level managers with whom I've worked: Who said that about me? That's just wrong; I'm not that way at all.  Why would someone say that?  How can I respond to feedback that is inconsistent with other feedback? Do I try to change my behavior? If so, how much do I change and which feedback do I use?  How do I rationalize quantitative feedback that says I'm a superstar with qualitative comments that tell me I have lots of room for improvement?

My goal is to help them understand that feedback is (trite though it sounds) a gift.  It's an indication of how others view your actions, though it's far from being an unbiased statement of fact. It's an awareness that not everyone loves you, likes you, approves of you, or even has a clue about you.

More than anything else, feedback from peers is a call for rigorous self-assessment. It is the opportunity to determine whether and what you will change...or not change.  It is the sometimes painful realization that motivation can be both misunderstood and harshly judged.  As with the ubiquitious holiday fruitcake, few people really enjoy feedback, despite the tradition of giving and receiving.

Creativity in a box

Conventional wisdom is that the more we learn, the less we know.  It's not that learning makes us stupid (at least not by design), but that a broader understanding of the world in which we live or a deeper understanding of a given subject shines a harsh and unforgiving light on simple solutions and easy answers. Thus, the longer I teach, the more questions I have:

• How can creativity be taught or explored within a traditional academic course bound by a traditional academic calendar?
• If research indicates that knowledge and facts have little bearing on the decisions we make--that, in fact, passion and existing beliefs have far greater bearing--what is the role of education?
• Do taxpayers understand or care about the reality that tax dollars support the academic practice of providing guaranteed salaries for tenured academics and the increasing size (and salaries) of administrative oversight?
• Have we constructed (or allowed the construction of) political and educational systems that are, for all practical purposes, mostly divorced from the people they are charged with representing and educating?
• Within the boxes of our making, how do so many people still manage to find beauty around them, value in a life well lived, and purpose in brief existence?

Perhaps the last question is the necessary but not sufficient condition for grappling with the others.

Freedom vs. responsibility

There is a raging debate among the faculty on my campus.  Coalitions are forming, email debate is at an all-time high, and tempers are flaring.  The committee that provided a recommendation is being challenged in sidewalk conversations, meeting sidebars, and faculty lounges.  The topic?  Faculty responsibilities when students have excused absences from class.

Yes, you are reading that correctly.  The faculty at large is up in arms over fair and equitable treatment of students who miss classes, with the emphasis on those students who have university-sanctioned or other legitimate reasons for their absence.  To be perfectly clear, the concern is not whether we are being fair or how to be fair, but over whether faculty can be held to any consistent expectations regarding their behavior and their policies in the classroom.

The recent hullabaloo is over a proposed addition to existing policies and, in the process of voicing strong objections to the proposed addition, most faculty are taking issue not with the proposal, but with the existing and unchanged policies.  As these policies have been in place since (according to faculty who've been here far longer than I) 1999 and are publicly available online, this puzzles me.

What I have learned from observing this process is that most faculty (regardless of how many years they have been teaching or whether or not they are tenured, tenure-track, or the all-encompassing-and-convenient other) are unaware that (1) the university has a written attendance policy, (2) the university has a policy regarding university-sanctioned absences, and (3) none of this is about academic freedom.

What alarms me is the lack of understanding by people who hold the privileged status of tenure about the nature and the limits of their privilege.  We are a publicly-funded university. Our state board of education determines the number of hours required for a degree, the funding allocated to our institution, and policies about the number of classroom hours required for an online versus a face-to-face class.  Everyone who teaches for the university is expected to adhere to policies regarding travel, expenditures, and the academic calendar.

Faculty discussion, debate, and disagreement about policy are signs of an engaged and thoughtful faculty. Using the argument of academic freedom to be exempt from those policies is not one of those signs.

Semantics

A recent article expounding the virtues of a life-sized maze--complete with photo and description of the maze--was captioned by a reference to a labyrinth.  That represents both sloppy journalism and sloppy thinking, a confusion of two things with some common characteristics but very different functions

The recent public press about grade inflation (which essentially means an increasing percentage of the "higher" letter grades) suggests that the increase in grades must mean a lowering of standards.  Perhaps it does.  But before I am willing to argue whether standards are slipping, I would like to see us stop conflating student ability (which is represented by various measures whose scores or results are normally distributed, thus, the ubiquitous normal curve) with student performance against a clear and measurable set of standards.

If the standards are clear for a course and most students are able by the end of the semester to reach those standards, does that necessarily mean the course standards are too low?  Could it mean, in fact, that the instructor is among the best and able to take a range of students with varying abilities and get most of them to the standard by the end of the course?

Our thinking about the goals and objectives of education is not just semantics. Sometimes it's confusion or conflation or both.

Thinking about Africa

Last week, I spent time with 25 participants in the Young African Leaders Initiative. Trust me when I say I was truly humbled to be conversing with the group, as every one of them is equally or more skilled in facilitation.  They are well educated, well read, and well spoken.

While waiting for the entire group to return from lunch, I reviewed the schedule for their experience here and saw a detailed, packed agenda of sessions, events, and activities.  When I saw it, I understood why the early arrivals seemed tired.

A week later, what the group said to me has caused me to wonder (again) about the tendency of academic institutions to do what we've always done, rather than what might work better.  If I understood what these young leaders were saying, they know the challenges they are facing in Africa, they largely know what they need to do, and the realities of their lives make it difficult to plan, think, and act for the longer term. They describe Africa as in "a constant state of emergency."  The need for quick action competes with the need for thoughtful building of coalitions to achieve the goals for their communities, organizations, states, and continent.

These leaders are here in the United States for six weeks.  And I am still wondering after my brief interactions with them whether the academic "challenge" for these leaders is best served by the appearance of rigor in the schedule, the topics, and the presenters.  One wonders whether the academic challenge is how to use the six weeks (while they are at least physically removed from the crises) to collaborate on meaningful deliverables that reflect their diverse perspectives--deliverables (action plans, proposals, budgets, training plans, etc.) that have been created by the collective, allowing these leaders to model collaboration, return with useful next steps, and develop the network they will need to draw upon when the next crisis threatens.

The schedule might look less scholarly, but the outcomes might be more lasting.

It's all connected

Grand Central Terminal.  It embodies history, architecture, advocacy, politics, fiction, romance, astronomy, art, travel, industry.  It's more than metaphor for how everything is connected.

Recently, I was fortunate enough to attend the Best Teachers Summer Institute, made all the more enjoyable by the proximity to New York City.  And I found myself standing quietly inside Grand Central, watching the bustle, hearing bits and pieces of conversation, and cataloging all the dots that intersected in that space and time.

For me, the dots began with childhood impressions of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, who advocated for the preservation of Grand Central, intersected a work of fiction (and the love who introduced me to it) featuring Grand Central, and included the quiet moments in the midst of a busy terminal surrounded by strangers with whom I had no and every connection.

One of the gifts of time is the breadth of perspective that allows us to see more clearly from a distance. And it's odd to be a better teacher now than in my earlier years, largely due to breadth and distance that allow invisible webs of connection to be seen...or at least felt.

Perhaps not being able to articulate very well (in the classroom) how everything is connected to everything matters less than being willing to stand quietly in the midst of it all.  That, I can do.

Gone to the next adventure

The morning was cool for June and a bit cloudy.  Before I finished my rounds at the local farmers' market, the clouds turned darker bringing the first of several small showers.  Undeterred, I made the planned trip to the national cemetery and to spend some quiet time walking and remembering.

The most poignant part of the cemetery for me is seeing the headstones marked only with Unknown U. S. Soldier.  I always wonder about families somewhere whose loved ones are buried here.  Unknown. Unnamed.  Whether sentiment or reality, I think my best photographs from the national cemetery have been taken while surrounded by these unknown soldiers.

But today, for the first time, I saw a headstone that stopped me in my tracks. Surrounded by headstones with epitaphs for beloved wives (those who chose to be buried here are memorialized on the reverse side of the soldier's headstone) is a headstone with the words Gone to the Next Adventure. It's perfect. It captures everything about living life to the fullest, accepting transience, and embracing the chance to learn here before moving on. And a relationship that honored not just this adventure but also the next one.

I hope my time as a mother, daughter, sister, friend, lover, or teacher has some positive impact on others; I know for certain these roles have taught me much and provided more adventure than I have often (too often, perhaps) been willing to embrace.  But I love the thought of a next great adventure and rushing to embrace it when this adventure concludes.

________________________________

Other cemetery visits:
My cup runneth over 
It's rarely the one we think
The dark side

A still and quiet moment

The longer you teach, the more students touch your life. They make an imprint, graduate, and move into the next chapter of their own lives. Each beginning is fresh and new to the graduate, a time of pride for the family, and a moment of reflection for the faculty who are privileged to teach.

It's so easy to get lost in the number of papers or projects to grade, the grades to be submitted, the flurry of deadlines to meet, or the dance of grade disappointment.  What matters to me in this particular moment, however, is a different tally, the one that represents the reason we do what we do.

This semester's teaching tally is two undergraduate classes (34 students), two graduate classes (36 students), and two Honors theses.  And from that teaching, twenty-one graduate students receiving degrees tomorrow (a third of whom have traveled from Panama) and another 10 or so undergraduate students who've allowed me to guide them through running a retail business or writing a thesis or both.

While the students may not know how much they have challenged me to think, stretch, laugh, and risk, I am a better teacher for their brief sojourn here. So in this still and quiet moment before the Honors ceremony, the Graduate School graduation party, and the pomp and ceremony of commencement, I am thankful for the silent brush of butterfly wings on heartstrings.

Whether or not you see it...

On a chilly and foggy morning, the invisible suddenly becomes noticeable.  It isn't really invisible, you see, but easily overlooked until circumstances make it impossible to miss. In this particular case, what suddenly becomes visible is the almost-magical carpet of webs spun nightly along the ground, between plants, across grasses, and at the top of the most unimaginable spindles.

What makes the sight so breathtaking is knowing that the webs are always there; we just don't see them.

Much as fish don't see water and the prejudiced are sure they aren't, many things in life are invisible due to attitude, upbringing, rank, privilege, status, nationality, or a plethora of blinders, blind spots, and blindfolds. It's so difficult to see what's right in front of us that the wise intentionally seek different perspectives in the knowledge that collective sight is sharper and less obtuse than individual sight.

And the foolish among us?  They seek the bland homogeneity of agreement, convinced that the number of people who see it (or don't) is the litmus test of "truth."

Milestones

This year, the Panama Canal has been in operation for 100 years, including the Miraflores locks. One of three sets of locks along the canal, the Miraflores locks are the most proximate to Panama City, making them both the most visited and the most recognized.

I've spent the last four days teaching classes as part of an Executive MBA program in Panama.   As is so often the case, I could never have predicted that I would be marking a personal milestone in Panama City in the same year that the canal celebrates a centennial.

Over the past week I have tasted authentic empanadas, marveled at bunion trees, walked for miles (with both sunburn and blisters as silent witness), photographed the marvel that is Panama City, developed relationships, and wondered about the life we plan versus the life we live.

For as long as I can remember, I have seen photographs of Panama, including the locks, the trees, and the first house in which I remember living.  I'm not sure how to describe revisiting all of these many years later, mindful of the importance of this place to my parents, the distance I have traveled personally since leaving Panama, and the profession which made celebrating this milestone possible. Though it may take a while to find the words, I am thankful for the experience.

The Panama Canal celebrates 100 years. I am celebrating my small part.

Relationship "failures"

Conventional wisdom has it that relationships (or lack thereof) consume more thought and reflection as we age and/or as we are reminded of our mortality through illness or death.  Our television and social media habits seem consumed with relationships--situation comedies, "reality" T.V., and dramas where the interactions among the detectives, sales representatives, doctors, attorneys, or other variety of co-worker are as important if not more important than the outcome of the specific case or incident.  And classic literature, whether prose, poetry, or play, is, essentially, a study in the nature and complexity of relationships.

And yet, in higher education, how often do we take the time to examine what constitutes failure or success in relationships?  How do we know we've failed? How do we define relationship "failure"? What did we learn from those interactions we deem to be other than a success?   And perhaps the most important question: Why does it matter?

If our emphasis is entirely a sense of urgency to accomplish whatever the objective(s) may be or how many countable things (dollars, sales, awards, grade points, tweets, houses, toys, etc.) we can acquire, why focus any attention in our education or in our lives to the relationships that will matter the most when those very lives are brought into sharp focus?

Perhaps we are too busy being successful in other areas to give relationships much attention. Perhaps that doesn't really matter, as long as our students get good grades, good jobs, and a good lifestyle.  Does it really matter if we get along with our colleagues, work well within our department, support our team, or take the time to put people at least on par with work?

Turns out that it may matter to employers.  And that we may need to help our students see and understand their relationship failures, something Google calls "intellectual humility." 

Without humility, you are unable to learn. It is why research shows that many graduates from hotshot business schools plateau. “Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don’t learn how to learn from that failure."  [How to Get a Job at Google.  The New York Times.  February 22, 2014.]

This may be a bit of a challenge in traditional higher education, where the emphasis on research, publication, and tenure may have left the mentors and teachers ill-equipped to mentor and teach. In my own college, for example, there is a strong commitment to using business simulations to prepare both our undergraduate and our graduate students for the world of business and the making of good business decisions.  

If one thinks about that for even a few minutes, one wonders why we would prefer a teaching method devoid of the relationship dynamics upon which future success will depend. And don't even begin to explain how the teams in which we place students for the purpose of completing simulations replicate future relationships in the workplace. They don't. Never again are our students likely to be with surrounded by equally bright co-workers focused on a single task that they all know how to address with the least possible work for the greatest possible common and equal benefit.  Legally and ethically, that is.

Perhaps the relationship failures (or lack of attention to them) in higher education start somewhere in the formation and preparation for an academic career.  One does wonder.