Pandemic consumption

I have a weakness for English majors.  A case in point is Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University, and editor of The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Networking.  In the eight-page introduction alone, I found several gems:

• In wondering about 6,901 comments posted in response to a 2,500-word newspaper piece, Bauerlein questions "what readers think when they encounter 4,838 comments to a news story and believe that post #4,384 really matters.  Is this democratic process or fruitless vanity?"
• "How many decades passed between the invention of the telephone and its daily use by 90 percent of the population?  Today, the path from private creation to pandemic consumption is measured in months."
• The phrase "reclusiveness in public spaces" aptly describes how we "look the same" to others (at the coffee shop, for example) whether we are reading a book online, checking Facebook, or contributing to a malicious gossip site.  "Nobody can tell, and that precise shelter removes one of the long-standing curbs on vicious conduct, namely, exposure."
• And, in the final paragraph:  "If we let the human realities that accompanied those older tools fall into oblivion...then we lose a part of our humanity, a historical sense of our recent selves."

More reading material...woo hoo!

Things fall apart

Poets craft distillates of our existence and experience.  Take Yeats, for example, who wrote in his The Second Coming that "(t)hings fall apart; the centre cannot hold."  Though Yeats was writing in the aftermath of the war that could only be described later as World War I and he was, arguably, deeply affected by what he had experienced, his observation transcends space and time.  Things do fall apart, despite our efforts.  And perhaps that is as it should be.

We create, we quest, we seek, we strive.  Our possessions slowly take possession of us; our tools change us.  We journey to the center, only to find that it cannot hold, regardless of the intended destination.  I am as much a product of my culture as of my DNA, which may explain some of our Western lament that things won't stay where we put them.

I realize there is a fine line between fatalism and acceptance, largely because I dance all over it most of the time.  I can argue passionately (for those who've read more of Yeats, feel free to make your own interpretation) for preserving Knowledge (which assumes there is a known or knowable body of same) and doing so in my personal favorite format--the written word.  I love my books and, while I appreciate the benefits of technology and the vast stores of information available via the internet, I am loathe to part with my sacred (to me) texts.  

But I am aware that part of my love for books is the necessary boundaries they provide. Generally speaking, my tomes don't fall apart and they hold their center quite well, both literally and figuratively.  They provide a comforting illusion, perhaps, that allows me a respite from the realities Yeats captures so well.

So, I find it oddly comforting and disturbing that David Weinberger (co-director of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab and a researcher at Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society) has given this title to his latest book:  Too Big to Know:  Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room.

And the premise?  That "business, science, education, and the government are learning to use networked knowledge to understand more than ever and to make smarter decisions than they could when they had to rely on mere books and experts."

I can't wait to read it.

Seeing the forest...and the trees

We call them Instructor and Course Evaluations and I just received the latest ones.  I tell students that I separate the feedback forms (we are in the midst of a transition to electronic feedback, so this is the last time I'll be able to use this process) into three groups based upon the pattern of responses to the 21 computer-scored statements on the front.  The three groups I use are (1) Walks on Water, (2) Spawn of Satan, and (3) Other.  I glance at the Walks on Water data to see where I could do better, I ignore the Other pile, and I study the Spawn of Satan pile to see just how many students were dissatisfied and in what areas.  I realize (and explain to students) that I am neither good enough to walk on water nor bad enough to be a true spawn of the devil, but I understand how the process works when student feedback is limited to a one-shot event.

So, after reviewing the front sheet, I turn all the forms over to the section for student comments and pull out the forms with writing.  Then I read the comments carefully, trying to understand the feedback and glean what I can for the next semester.  This is my favorite comment from the latest group:

She presents the material from the book effectively, but the assignments that we do that supplement the simulation are ambiguous and it's hard to know exactly what she wants.  Then she grades somewhat hard so that makes it difficult.  The grading system has changed in some parts and I'm still confused on what I'm actually being graded on.  But she is a good lecturer and does care about the students.  She enjoys teaching and is passionate about the subject so I respect that.  She is a little sassy but keeps it tolerable most of the time.  Overall, she is better than most I've had in (the department).

What I like is the student's ability to provide constructive, useful feedback...and how accurately my challenges and successes for the semester were evaluated.  I did struggle with grading this required course taught by multiple instructors.  I'll struggle with it again next semester, as I try to balance the content we are all expected to teach with the content I think is more useful and interesting to the students.  And, in the midst of that balancing act, I'll wrestle again with how to evaluate (aka grade) both the common content and the unique content.  Clearly, I have room for improvement.

But what I like even better is the student's ability to see both strengths and weaknesses.  We talk in class about how giving and receiving feedback is often challenging, both in professional roles and in personal roles.  The tendency to allow one or two areas of difficulty, disagreement, or disappointment to skew perception of the whole is far more prevalent than the ability to see both the parts and the whole.

I can't take credit for this student's ability to provide useful feedback, but I can certainly gain from it.  I'm not at all opposed to some ambiguity in assignments, but I can provide more clarity and a bit more consistency when it makes sense to do so.  I'll continue to be passionate...and probably won't worry too much about being a little sassy.  Some days, it's the only coping mechanism I have.

Iatrogenesis

Though I generally try to take both the high road and the optimistic perspective, it's harder some days than others.  As I begin my personal transition from several months of full-time project management back to teaching next semester, I am struck by the stark contrast between academia and what we'll just call The Real World.

The contrast is not just in my own line of sight, but also in the communication I receive from former students.  And it may the academic version of iatrogenesis.

Colleges and universities are both institutions of higher learning and institutions of hiring.  And it's the hiring part that seems somewhat quaint and curious, when compared to other employers.  In what may very well be a historical relic, colleges and universities strive to protect academic "freedom" through a process of granting a tenured or hired-for-life (essentially) status to those academics who devote themselves to studying and writing about their chosen discipline or subject.

The unintended consequence of a search for someone willing to start early, focus on a subject matter (researching, writing, publishing), and provide value to the university in return for the hiring investment is the early identification of potential tenured faculty members while they are finishing their own doctoral programs.  In fact, the last year of the doctoral program is understood to be heavily focused on interviewing with hiring institutions of higher learning.  And this is where the disconnect begins, I think.

The brightest doctoral students become the most-sought-after junior faculty members.  They continue to delve into their chosen fields, standing upon the shoulders of the learned who came before them, and adding to the body of knowledge through their research and writing.  And they are entrusted with teaching in their chosen field, the field in which they are experts.  They become specialists who teach what they have studied.

What seems missing in this equation is the practical application of a subject matter or expertise, since the majority of the students in a four-year undergraduate program will be hired by non-academic employers.  And it's those non-academic employers who are seeking problem solving ability, critical thinking, teamwork, innovation, and a nimble responsiveness to change.  Today, this does not appear to be a workable  model.

Made in America

In the midst of the usual morning madness to get us both out the door and to our respective destinations on time, my teenager asks "Is WD-40 an American company?" Since the non sequitur is a common occurrence in our conversations, I offer "I'm not really sure; why don't you Google it?" without missing a beat.  And, since focused pursuit of the information in question is also a common occurrence, it takes only a few minutes to hear "I thought so.  It had to be, because Toby Keith sings about it."  And it's a perfect moment.

What's perfect about this moment is the combination of natural curiosity (hers), testing a hypothesis (also hers), and the tracking of seemingly separate thought processes (ours).  My daughter had been listening carefully to the lyrics of Toby Keith's Made in America:

My old man's that old man
Spent his life livin' off the land
Spend a little more in the store for a tag
In the back that says "USA"
He won't buy nothin' that he can't fix
With WD-40 and a Craftsman wrench
He ain't prejudiced, he's just
Made in America

Made in America.  It's a song title, a television series (quite a good one, in fact), a news worthy topic, and a union rallying cry.  Google it and you'll find "about 953,000,000 results."  We talk about it, we write about, we read about it, we debate about it...and we are, as a nation, still fairly clueless about it.

To have products that are made in America--or products made in any country, as it's not just about the country where I happen to live--requires facilities and skilled workers.  And that--the skilled workers--is what's on my mind as a citizen, an educator and a parent.

I can't express it any better than the interview provocatively titled "John Ratzenberger on Why We're Becoming a Third World Country":

The view of most guidance counselors is that if you don't go to college you're a failure.  And it's just not true.  The manual arts have always taken precedence over the fine arts.  There's no exception to that rule.  Michelangelo couldn't have gone to work until someone built that ceiling.

We continue to measure success by the color of our collar. That, too, is made in America.

I know his name now

Recently Chris, a former student of mine, posted this on his Facebook page (which I quote here with his permission):

When Steve Jobs passed away everyone was bawling because a billionaire died. A man who evaded taxes, denied fathering his daughter, cheated others out of organ transplants, basically sued for or stole most of his ideas and did very little philanthropically with his mountains of cash. He was a beloved crook and marketing talent who swindled communities into some feverish orgy of brand loyalty.

Meanwhile, every last person who has ever touched a computer in basically any form owe their livelihoods, entertainment, ability to communicate, hell even their lives to Dennis Ritchie. He was a Titan to the IT world who truly crafted a thing of infinite genius, and everyone, everyone has been standing on his shoulders since. Here is someone to write articles about and ponder their impact on us all, and no one knows his name.

Given the time I've spent with Chris, I know his opinions are thoughtful and based upon considerable research.  And, since I was one of the people who did not know Dennis Ritchie's name, I began to read. 
 
In Greek mythology, the Titans were the gods who ruled before being overthrown by the younger Olympians. First generation Titans include Uranus, Oceanus, Cronus, Phoebe, and Mnemosyne (one of my favorites); their off-spring include Atlas and Prometheus.  Before being overthrown, they were powerful rulers during the Golden Age.  The 12 Olympians (including Zeus, Hera, Apollo, and Poseidon) who replaced the Titans are arguably better known to purveyors of comic books, superheros, and popular movies.  

Dennis Ritchie "helped shape the digital era."  Oddly or, perhaps, poetically, he died just 12 days after Steve Jobs and is rightly described as a Titan:

Ritchie was the principal designer of the C programming language and co-inventor of the operating system Unix, two inventions that revolutionized modern technology.

The C programming language was widely considered simple and elegant compared to the more cryptic and inaccessible B language that preceded it, and is now widely used. Based on C, Ritchie and Kenneth L. Thompson invented Unix, which is the foundation of today’s predominant operating systems.

Not a flashy man, Ritchie worked for one company (Bell Labs) his entire career and did not seek the spotlight. He was well liked, well respected, and paved the way for the younger Olympians who stood on his shoulders...and who are far better known.

I'm left with the same question Chris raised.  But now I know Dennis Ritchie's name.  Thank you, Chris.

Some days are like living in a blender

Yesterday, it was Frank Deford on NPR, quoting former University of California, Berkeley chancellor Clark Kerr:

The three purposes of the University?  To provide sex for the students, sports for the alumni, and parking for the faculty.

Today, it was finding a forgotten electronic bookmark to Max Ehrmann's Desiderata and wondering how, in my youth, I missed this:

Take kindly to the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.  Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.  But do not distress yourself with imaginings.  Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Two months ago, it was a faculty retreat on excellence in teaching, where a colleague pondered how to engage students who do not wish to be engaged.  And for the past several weeks, it's been my walks across campus, observing the masses of students, reminding myself that each and every one of them is loved by someone (whether parent, sibling, or friend) and that very few of them are on our campus because they love learning.

And if that weren't enough to keep my mind occupied for a while, I've also been remembering a Mark Helprin quote from Winter's Tale:

(T)ime was invented because we cannot comprehend in one glance the enormous and detailed canvas that we have been given - so we track it, in linear fashion piece by piece.  Time however can be easily overcome; not by chasing the light, but by standing back far enough to see it all at once.

How, then, do teachers rise to the challenge of engaging hearts and minds, knowing full well the lessons needed, understanding the youthful resistance to learning, and realizing much we offer will not be embraced for many years (if at all)--all without giving in or giving up?  I wonder if each one of us who teaches (regardless of where or what) must struggle to find our own place to stand, one that provides enough distance to see it all at once and enough proximity to remain engaged.

Some days I get it in an instant; others, not so much.