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.