...but not developing his or her own point of view.
I found this quite a compelling show to watch/listen to. Many of the themes I've been railing about over the years regarding undergraduate education come up in this discussion. And there are some themes, such as the relationship between parenting a la Amy Chua and how the kids go about their college years, which is intensely interesting and I haven't written about it much at all except in regard to my own situation when I was in high school.
I know Loury a little. He was an Assistant Professor at Northwestern when I was a graduate student there. I had never seen Deresiewicz talk before. He sounds like a faculty member, which he once was but no longer is. He does seem to be getting a lot of mileage from his book Excellent Sheep. One wonders what is next for him.
I thought Loury's style in doing this interview quite interesting. He never really contested any of the assertions made by Deresiewicz, though he paused a few times without saying anything, as if he had told himself ahead of time to hold his tongue. The questions he asked were all what I'd call framing questions. They were aimed at sharpening the argument, not at derailing it. From my perspective, the diagnosis of the problem part of the discussion is pretty much spot on. The more speculative part of the discussion, what might be a cure, was less satisfying and seemed totally infeasible to me in the current environment.
There is a specific discussion of the Economics major at around the 18:00 minute mark. It is especially revealing about the mercenary tendencies of the students. I would say the argument applies to the students I've seen at Illinois pretty much intact, with the exception that standardized test scores here are lower in Liberal Arts and Sciences (the college where the Econ department is situated) than they are in Engineering and Business. To a certain extent, the statistics that Deresiewicz cites about the Econ major probably don't consider whether there is also an undergraduate Business major or not. I suspect at many of the schools he focuses on don't have an undergraduate Business major and Economics then serves as a proxy for it, which it also does at Illinois to some extent because there are many students who want into the College of Business but can't get in.
The one bit of this that I found distracting is the angle of the camera on Loury. It is not so terrible in the screen shot above, but when he leans back in his chair his face takes up only about a quarter of his side of the video. It would be better if the camera were set so he is looking squarely into it. He probably cares about this not a whit. But he does seem to care about his viewers. So he should make this adjustment for them, if not for himself.
Saturday, September 27, 2014
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
Intensity, Craziness, and Creativity - Vincent Van Gogh
I have some vague recollection from childhood about The Agony and The Ecstasy and that it was a big deal. Perhaps I saw a promotion for it on a billboard in Times Square, something akin to Cleopatra in its spectacle. Or maybe it was because the Pietà had come to the World's Fair in Flushing Meadows and as a result all of us became more aware of Michelangelo. Then, too, we had neighbors who lived diagonally across from us on the corner of 56th Avenue and 212th Street, and they were Italian. Perhaps some of their cultural interests rubbed off on us. I'm pretty sure that for a while my mother had the book on her nightstand. She was a voracious reader of novels (yet not at all of the newspaper). There were certain authors who especially appealed to her. The works of James Michener emblematized the genre.
Mostly my taste for fiction diverged from my mom's. I did read Exodus by Leon Uris, probably in my high school years, this without any provocation from her. Much later, I read a book that she had urged me to read as a teen, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. I liked it very much and wrote a blog post about it soon after I had finished reading it.
All of this to say that I've been aware of Irving Stone since childhood, but I never did anything with that knowledge until recently. Part of this may have been a phobia about art. Though I felt compelled to take myself to a museum now and then, and one day while I was a teenager I "ran away from home" and went to both the Guggenheim and the Met, all via walking after getting out of the Subway at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, I did this more for the solitude and sense of independence it gave me than from any spiritual uplift from the paintings. I didn't "get" art then, just as I didn't get poetry. Mostly, I still don't.
From time to time I would see a movie or read a book that touched on art in some way. While in graduate school I recall seeing Savage Messiah. More recently I've watched Pollock, after it came to satellite TV. Soon after it was published I read Einstein and Picasso, a book that really helped me because it explained the big picture goals that both Einstein and Picasso were after, this to understand simultaneity in their respective mediums. There are probably other movie and book titles I've encountered that tie to art but that don't come to mind now.
So it's been a low level and very casual interest. I have an upside down curiosity about art now, as I have an interest in what spurs creativity and how creativity manifests. Further, there is trying to understand myself and my motivation. When I read a biography about a very creative person, there is always the question - what bits of personality do we have in common? For example, when I read Richard Ellman's biography of James Joyce, I saw some parallels between Joyce and me when in early adolescence, though these were mainly in outer manifestations, not in the creativity itself. And with connections of this sort apparent there is a further question that emerges. Is there a personal philosophy to embrace that matches the personality?
It is with these thoughts in mind that I want to discuss Vincent Van Gogh via the film Lust for Life, the book on which it is based written by Irving Stone, and another movie called Vincent and Theo that gives Van Gogh's brother and confidant equal billing. Stone's book is fictionalized biography, but it is based on actual correspondence between the brothers. The artist was also a prolific reader and writer. These other forms of expression helped him with his art. The writing especially allows us to regard Stone's work as close to the truth in most places. Particular dialog is imagined, of course. And there is one love scene that is pure fantasy. But otherwise the work is true to the letters on which it is based.
Van Gogh's life challenges us in our conception of success and what it means to be successful. By the middle class standards that I was raised in, he was a failure, many times over. His paintings didn't sell at all for most of his life. Many of great Impressionists, contemporaries of Van Gogh, suffered a similar fate. The patrons of the arts weren't yet ready to procure the works of these artists. These rich buyers were too conservative in their tastes and thus didn't understand the impact these works would eventually have.
Nowadays, we have the (not quite) myth of the actor in waiting who struggles to make ends meet by waiting tables or doing other unskilled work, until the big break arrives. It is unclear to me whether a struggling artist in France in the 1870s could live such a divided life, making enough to survive on while practicing one's art in odd hours. In any event, Van Gogh did not. For the most part he was sustained by an allowance provided by his brother. Theo was an art dealer, an employee of one of the better houses in Paris. He made a decent but not fabulous living. The allowance was carved out of that. In recompense, Vincent sent Theo all of his paintings, with the hope they might sell. They didn't.
The above understates how much Vincent failed and how he regarded himself as a failure. Vincent actually got into painting late, in his mid to late 20s. He did other things before that and made a botch of things, both in his work and in his love life. He started out as an art dealer in London. His family had that profession in their blood, which is why both he and his brother took a go at it. While in London he fell in love. Only she didn't love him back and got engaged to somebody else. Heartbroken by the result, he left London and the work as an art dealer to follow in his father's footsteps, so he went to school to become a minister.
He performed poorly at the school. He could not commit a sermon to memory nor could he speak extemporaneously. So he had to read his sermon from his hand written text, long and awkward constructions. This was ineffective and his teachers dismissed him - the worst student they ever had. Yet he wanted to serve and that conviction enabled him to become a minister in the Borinage, a very poor mining region in Belgium, not a place to send the more able students.
The miners and their families had a dismal life, earning a subsistence wage only, maybe even less, being exposed to health risk on a daily basis from the coal dust, with fatal accidents in the mines also a possibility. There was child labor in the mines. It was all very brutal. Vincent's job was to minister to these poor people's spiritual needs. He began in earnest with what he had learned at the school, but this was a surface kind of ministering only, and didn't at all address their deprivation. So he changed his approach to be more like them, live like them, and aid in their physical needs. He gave away most of his worldly possessions to the families of the miners. He likewise gave away much of his food. He often went hungry, for days on end. He endured personal suffering (which would continue later when he turned to painting). And he lobbied the mining company, unsuccessfully, to raise the wages of the miners. When visitors from the church hierarchy came to look in on him, they disapproved of his approach; it was undignified.
Much later in Stone's book there is a recollection of this time by another artist who had visited the Borinage while Vincent was there. He recalled stories of the Christ minister. This seems like a good image to have of Van Gogh. He had a purity about him that others don't possess. He was entirely unconcerned for his own physical well being. He believed strongly that these poor as dirt miners were deserving people and that they should have a somewhat better life. After all, they toiled, doing honest work. Later, when Van Gogh was in Paris, he became known as a Socialist among his fellow artists. The roots of his political beliefs are to be found in this experience in the Borinage.
I do not want to recount all of Stone's book. It's better to read it yourself. (I got a copy from the Undergraduate Library.) But there is one more aspect of his life that needs mention before talking about his creativity. That is his mania. Later in life he had seizures, one of which occurred during the famous episode where he cut off his ear. The Wikipedia entry on this matter makes it clear that there is no consensus view as to cause. In Stone's version of the story, epilepsy is the primary explanation.
Further, Stone introduces the idea that the mental illness was part and parcel of Van Gogh's personality. He does this first by describing at great length the high intensity, long time commitment, and total dedication that Vincent demonstrated while painting. Then, later, after Vincent has befriended Paul Gaugin, Stone has Gaugin critique Vincent's painting style as if epileptic. Images from the painting burst from the canvas and it is evident that Vincent in the construction of these images worked in great haste and that he himself was bursting, getting paint from his palette onto his canvas. So the reader is left with the impression that Vincent is exploding inside his head with ideas of how to render nature through art.
That much of Van Gogh's personality I can identify with via my own experience, writing this blog during the first year. I had many ideas in my head that wanted expression and I didn't have enough other outlets for that. (One alternative outlet was having conversation with colleagues in the CIC Learning Technology Group, many of whom had comparable positions on their campuses to my Assistant CIO for Educational Technologies position at Illinois. But our frequency of meeting was only once every three months or so and then typically only for a day at a time, and we had official business to conduct much of the time.) I found I could generate reasonably good prose (about 1500 words per post) in fairly short order and do so every day. I also found that I could experiment with style and a little bit with topic. But after a year or so I slowed down. I began to exhaust the set of issues I found pressing. In contrast, Van Gogh kept going, developing his technique and sense of confidence. He didn't slow down at all until the fits of mania made him slow down.
(One of the things, I'd like to learn in the future is to know Van Gogh's paintings themselves, understand something of the issues he was trying to address in their making, as well as to learn when they were done so to understand how Stone's telling of the story maps into those paintings we consider masterpieces today. In the movie, some of these paintings are on display. But in my ignorance of the art itself I couldn't distinguish a masterpiece from a prop.)
Van Gogh's need to draw preceded his becoming an artist as his life work He did it as a hobby, a way to express himself and to relieve the stress from his other work. He drew, for example, in the off hours while he was a minister. (One has a sense that he slept very little, even then, and would labor till he was exhausted. This behavior, in itself, may be have at least part of the reasons for the subsequent mania.) So when he turned to art as what he would do, he had an inner knowing that it was right for him.
He struck out miserably, however, in terms of receiving recognition and emotional support for the work, apart from his brother Theo. In fact, where he initially got support and encouragement from other relatives, he eventually got rebuffs that he wasn't making progress with his work. He remained too primitive in his approach. In this case, it was the relatives who were wrong, but how would Vincent have been able to determine that in any objective way at the time? And in the absence of such confirmation, wouldn't his resolve to continue working become shaky? The issue seems all the more important because he was living off that allowance from Theo and if the work wasn't very good then devoting all his time to painting was being irresponsible, while at his core Vincent tried very hard to be an ethical human being.
Eventually, when in Paris, he met a community of fellow artists with whom he could exchange ideas as peers and as friends. This provided some of the confirmation that he was on the right track, though his paintings still didn't sell.
Now I want to posit an odd conjecture. Vincent had no fear of privation, even if it destroyed his health, and later his mind. He learned to accept it when a minister. Once privation becomes a normal occurrence, the fear of failure that haunts most of us disappears. Failure can then be a good friend and an able teacher. And Vincent trusted himself enough to learn from his errors. Indeed he was inventing technique as he learned. He had the independence of mind to do that.
Vincent also spent an enormous amount of time alone, with his paints and his canvases, but without other companionship. This was true when he returned to live with his parents and again when he was in Arles. (Though when at his parents' place he did have a one-sided love affair with his cousin Kay, who entirely rebuffed his advances.) His work was primary for him and he toiled on it till exhausted.
Again, thinking of my own situation, I have the sense that creativity is blunted by various buffers in my life - work, family, and friends. With each of these "being reasonable" is an important value and enjoying the comforts provided by the circumstance an immediate reward. But there is also a different thing about me that I learned a long time ago. After I've had my own bursting and release of creative energy, I need some fallow time to refresh myself. If I'm too tired I can't think at all and can't produce anything worth a damn. Van Gogh was totally different in both respects. There didn't seem to be anything moderate about his personality at all. He had very few buffers to produce such moderation. While he did relax some, compared to other talented people I know he did comparatively little of it. And apart from those brief times of relaxation, I got the sense that Van Gogh was "on" most of the time, leading to prodigious creativity but the mania too. This comes across more from the reading of Stone's book than the watching of the movies.
Sylvia Nasar's book on John Nash, A Beautiful Mind, is another that I've read which marries intense creativity in the individual with mental illness. In Nash's case it was/is schizophrenia. The difference between Van Gogh and Nash, from the reader's perspective, is that for Nash all the creativity was going on in his head and it is much harder to represent what that is like to the reader, even for as able a story teller as Nasar. As an economist who has done a fair amount of math modeling, I probably have a leg up on most readers in considering what Nash did, yet his process is still entirely opaque to me. In contrast, Van Gogh's creativity had a physical expression that anyone can understand. The movies are good for this, because they do convey a sense of what it is like to paint, especially on a wet canvas that is near completion but not completely done. You can almost smell the oils in the viewing.
Let me close with reference to this piece in Slate, people don't like creativity. I had always thought of myself as an exception to that rule. (I do concur with the thesis in the Slate piece.) Thinking about Van Gogh has got me to reconsider how much of an exception I actually am. I like my moderating influences, often prefer to compromise than to remain a purist, and my drive is nowhere near as strong as Van Gogh's. None of this says anything about talent. But it speaks volumes about motivation. Though I teach microeconomics, which at root is about making tradeoffs, I live my life trying to have it both ways. This shows in one fell swoop that I don't practice what I preach and that I'm human. But it also gives me a different sort of appreciation of genius. There are plenty of bright and very talented people to go around. The vast majority of them, however, aren't willing to pay the ultimate price. Van Gogh was among the very few who were willing.
Mostly my taste for fiction diverged from my mom's. I did read Exodus by Leon Uris, probably in my high school years, this without any provocation from her. Much later, I read a book that she had urged me to read as a teen, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. I liked it very much and wrote a blog post about it soon after I had finished reading it.
All of this to say that I've been aware of Irving Stone since childhood, but I never did anything with that knowledge until recently. Part of this may have been a phobia about art. Though I felt compelled to take myself to a museum now and then, and one day while I was a teenager I "ran away from home" and went to both the Guggenheim and the Met, all via walking after getting out of the Subway at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, I did this more for the solitude and sense of independence it gave me than from any spiritual uplift from the paintings. I didn't "get" art then, just as I didn't get poetry. Mostly, I still don't.
From time to time I would see a movie or read a book that touched on art in some way. While in graduate school I recall seeing Savage Messiah. More recently I've watched Pollock, after it came to satellite TV. Soon after it was published I read Einstein and Picasso, a book that really helped me because it explained the big picture goals that both Einstein and Picasso were after, this to understand simultaneity in their respective mediums. There are probably other movie and book titles I've encountered that tie to art but that don't come to mind now.
So it's been a low level and very casual interest. I have an upside down curiosity about art now, as I have an interest in what spurs creativity and how creativity manifests. Further, there is trying to understand myself and my motivation. When I read a biography about a very creative person, there is always the question - what bits of personality do we have in common? For example, when I read Richard Ellman's biography of James Joyce, I saw some parallels between Joyce and me when in early adolescence, though these were mainly in outer manifestations, not in the creativity itself. And with connections of this sort apparent there is a further question that emerges. Is there a personal philosophy to embrace that matches the personality?
It is with these thoughts in mind that I want to discuss Vincent Van Gogh via the film Lust for Life, the book on which it is based written by Irving Stone, and another movie called Vincent and Theo that gives Van Gogh's brother and confidant equal billing. Stone's book is fictionalized biography, but it is based on actual correspondence between the brothers. The artist was also a prolific reader and writer. These other forms of expression helped him with his art. The writing especially allows us to regard Stone's work as close to the truth in most places. Particular dialog is imagined, of course. And there is one love scene that is pure fantasy. But otherwise the work is true to the letters on which it is based.
Van Gogh's life challenges us in our conception of success and what it means to be successful. By the middle class standards that I was raised in, he was a failure, many times over. His paintings didn't sell at all for most of his life. Many of great Impressionists, contemporaries of Van Gogh, suffered a similar fate. The patrons of the arts weren't yet ready to procure the works of these artists. These rich buyers were too conservative in their tastes and thus didn't understand the impact these works would eventually have.
Nowadays, we have the (not quite) myth of the actor in waiting who struggles to make ends meet by waiting tables or doing other unskilled work, until the big break arrives. It is unclear to me whether a struggling artist in France in the 1870s could live such a divided life, making enough to survive on while practicing one's art in odd hours. In any event, Van Gogh did not. For the most part he was sustained by an allowance provided by his brother. Theo was an art dealer, an employee of one of the better houses in Paris. He made a decent but not fabulous living. The allowance was carved out of that. In recompense, Vincent sent Theo all of his paintings, with the hope they might sell. They didn't.
The above understates how much Vincent failed and how he regarded himself as a failure. Vincent actually got into painting late, in his mid to late 20s. He did other things before that and made a botch of things, both in his work and in his love life. He started out as an art dealer in London. His family had that profession in their blood, which is why both he and his brother took a go at it. While in London he fell in love. Only she didn't love him back and got engaged to somebody else. Heartbroken by the result, he left London and the work as an art dealer to follow in his father's footsteps, so he went to school to become a minister.
He performed poorly at the school. He could not commit a sermon to memory nor could he speak extemporaneously. So he had to read his sermon from his hand written text, long and awkward constructions. This was ineffective and his teachers dismissed him - the worst student they ever had. Yet he wanted to serve and that conviction enabled him to become a minister in the Borinage, a very poor mining region in Belgium, not a place to send the more able students.
The miners and their families had a dismal life, earning a subsistence wage only, maybe even less, being exposed to health risk on a daily basis from the coal dust, with fatal accidents in the mines also a possibility. There was child labor in the mines. It was all very brutal. Vincent's job was to minister to these poor people's spiritual needs. He began in earnest with what he had learned at the school, but this was a surface kind of ministering only, and didn't at all address their deprivation. So he changed his approach to be more like them, live like them, and aid in their physical needs. He gave away most of his worldly possessions to the families of the miners. He likewise gave away much of his food. He often went hungry, for days on end. He endured personal suffering (which would continue later when he turned to painting). And he lobbied the mining company, unsuccessfully, to raise the wages of the miners. When visitors from the church hierarchy came to look in on him, they disapproved of his approach; it was undignified.
Much later in Stone's book there is a recollection of this time by another artist who had visited the Borinage while Vincent was there. He recalled stories of the Christ minister. This seems like a good image to have of Van Gogh. He had a purity about him that others don't possess. He was entirely unconcerned for his own physical well being. He believed strongly that these poor as dirt miners were deserving people and that they should have a somewhat better life. After all, they toiled, doing honest work. Later, when Van Gogh was in Paris, he became known as a Socialist among his fellow artists. The roots of his political beliefs are to be found in this experience in the Borinage.
I do not want to recount all of Stone's book. It's better to read it yourself. (I got a copy from the Undergraduate Library.) But there is one more aspect of his life that needs mention before talking about his creativity. That is his mania. Later in life he had seizures, one of which occurred during the famous episode where he cut off his ear. The Wikipedia entry on this matter makes it clear that there is no consensus view as to cause. In Stone's version of the story, epilepsy is the primary explanation.
Further, Stone introduces the idea that the mental illness was part and parcel of Van Gogh's personality. He does this first by describing at great length the high intensity, long time commitment, and total dedication that Vincent demonstrated while painting. Then, later, after Vincent has befriended Paul Gaugin, Stone has Gaugin critique Vincent's painting style as if epileptic. Images from the painting burst from the canvas and it is evident that Vincent in the construction of these images worked in great haste and that he himself was bursting, getting paint from his palette onto his canvas. So the reader is left with the impression that Vincent is exploding inside his head with ideas of how to render nature through art.
That much of Van Gogh's personality I can identify with via my own experience, writing this blog during the first year. I had many ideas in my head that wanted expression and I didn't have enough other outlets for that. (One alternative outlet was having conversation with colleagues in the CIC Learning Technology Group, many of whom had comparable positions on their campuses to my Assistant CIO for Educational Technologies position at Illinois. But our frequency of meeting was only once every three months or so and then typically only for a day at a time, and we had official business to conduct much of the time.) I found I could generate reasonably good prose (about 1500 words per post) in fairly short order and do so every day. I also found that I could experiment with style and a little bit with topic. But after a year or so I slowed down. I began to exhaust the set of issues I found pressing. In contrast, Van Gogh kept going, developing his technique and sense of confidence. He didn't slow down at all until the fits of mania made him slow down.
(One of the things, I'd like to learn in the future is to know Van Gogh's paintings themselves, understand something of the issues he was trying to address in their making, as well as to learn when they were done so to understand how Stone's telling of the story maps into those paintings we consider masterpieces today. In the movie, some of these paintings are on display. But in my ignorance of the art itself I couldn't distinguish a masterpiece from a prop.)
Van Gogh's need to draw preceded his becoming an artist as his life work He did it as a hobby, a way to express himself and to relieve the stress from his other work. He drew, for example, in the off hours while he was a minister. (One has a sense that he slept very little, even then, and would labor till he was exhausted. This behavior, in itself, may be have at least part of the reasons for the subsequent mania.) So when he turned to art as what he would do, he had an inner knowing that it was right for him.
He struck out miserably, however, in terms of receiving recognition and emotional support for the work, apart from his brother Theo. In fact, where he initially got support and encouragement from other relatives, he eventually got rebuffs that he wasn't making progress with his work. He remained too primitive in his approach. In this case, it was the relatives who were wrong, but how would Vincent have been able to determine that in any objective way at the time? And in the absence of such confirmation, wouldn't his resolve to continue working become shaky? The issue seems all the more important because he was living off that allowance from Theo and if the work wasn't very good then devoting all his time to painting was being irresponsible, while at his core Vincent tried very hard to be an ethical human being.
Eventually, when in Paris, he met a community of fellow artists with whom he could exchange ideas as peers and as friends. This provided some of the confirmation that he was on the right track, though his paintings still didn't sell.
Now I want to posit an odd conjecture. Vincent had no fear of privation, even if it destroyed his health, and later his mind. He learned to accept it when a minister. Once privation becomes a normal occurrence, the fear of failure that haunts most of us disappears. Failure can then be a good friend and an able teacher. And Vincent trusted himself enough to learn from his errors. Indeed he was inventing technique as he learned. He had the independence of mind to do that.
Vincent also spent an enormous amount of time alone, with his paints and his canvases, but without other companionship. This was true when he returned to live with his parents and again when he was in Arles. (Though when at his parents' place he did have a one-sided love affair with his cousin Kay, who entirely rebuffed his advances.) His work was primary for him and he toiled on it till exhausted.
Again, thinking of my own situation, I have the sense that creativity is blunted by various buffers in my life - work, family, and friends. With each of these "being reasonable" is an important value and enjoying the comforts provided by the circumstance an immediate reward. But there is also a different thing about me that I learned a long time ago. After I've had my own bursting and release of creative energy, I need some fallow time to refresh myself. If I'm too tired I can't think at all and can't produce anything worth a damn. Van Gogh was totally different in both respects. There didn't seem to be anything moderate about his personality at all. He had very few buffers to produce such moderation. While he did relax some, compared to other talented people I know he did comparatively little of it. And apart from those brief times of relaxation, I got the sense that Van Gogh was "on" most of the time, leading to prodigious creativity but the mania too. This comes across more from the reading of Stone's book than the watching of the movies.
Sylvia Nasar's book on John Nash, A Beautiful Mind, is another that I've read which marries intense creativity in the individual with mental illness. In Nash's case it was/is schizophrenia. The difference between Van Gogh and Nash, from the reader's perspective, is that for Nash all the creativity was going on in his head and it is much harder to represent what that is like to the reader, even for as able a story teller as Nasar. As an economist who has done a fair amount of math modeling, I probably have a leg up on most readers in considering what Nash did, yet his process is still entirely opaque to me. In contrast, Van Gogh's creativity had a physical expression that anyone can understand. The movies are good for this, because they do convey a sense of what it is like to paint, especially on a wet canvas that is near completion but not completely done. You can almost smell the oils in the viewing.
Let me close with reference to this piece in Slate, people don't like creativity. I had always thought of myself as an exception to that rule. (I do concur with the thesis in the Slate piece.) Thinking about Van Gogh has got me to reconsider how much of an exception I actually am. I like my moderating influences, often prefer to compromise than to remain a purist, and my drive is nowhere near as strong as Van Gogh's. None of this says anything about talent. But it speaks volumes about motivation. Though I teach microeconomics, which at root is about making tradeoffs, I live my life trying to have it both ways. This shows in one fell swoop that I don't practice what I preach and that I'm human. But it also gives me a different sort of appreciation of genius. There are plenty of bright and very talented people to go around. The vast majority of them, however, aren't willing to pay the ultimate price. Van Gogh was among the very few who were willing.
Friday, September 19, 2014
The Eyes of Aging
After more than a week where my weight remained on the same plateau, I was 2.4 pounds lighter at this morning's weighing. I didn't believe that so I got off the scale and tried again. I got the same number. How is this possible? Life is full of little puzzles that we never solve. The next couple of days will show whether this is real or an aberration. If it is trustworthy, it marks the crossing of one threshold and the nearing of another. I'm now marginally lighter than I was in high school. And with another half pound loss, it will be 30 pounds since I started on this regime, which is getting me close to halfway on the ultimate goal, to weigh what I did when I got married.
In my Econ class I talk about monitoring as a way to overcome opportunism. The idea is that monitoring is a cost incurred to reduce other costs that the organization does not want to incur. But I'm aware that much monitoring happens for no reason other than obsession, particularly when its our own performance to consider.
Those who are old enough will recall the ad campaign from 40 years ago, The Special K Pinch. If I start doing that but then move my hand forward toward my belly about an inch or so, I can do something I call the Special K grab. I could do that easily before I started the diet. I still can. It's a reminder that the more things change...
The last few weeks I've come to do a different sort of grab, under my arm between the elbow and shoulder, seemingly all flesh with no muscle whatsoever to be found. This to me is an unmistakable sign of age. You'd think you wouldn't want to be reminded of the point, but I find myself unable to stop grabbing at certain times of the day. The feel varies from time to time. It is never supple. Sometimes it sags miserably. I've come to understand that at those times my blood sugar is low and perhaps I need to drink some water too. At other times there is more substance to it, but it is still a far cry from a young person's skin.
One other such grab I try is while I'm sitting. The object is the area under the hamstrings. In this case, there is far less loose skin than in my upper arm and you can't really pull it away from the hamstrings. But the skin is droopy there too. The inner thigh, for whatever reason, I don't measure nearly as often. It's an area where no muscle is apparent, more like the upper arms.
Before the diet started, the notable skin wrinkling was on my eyelid and just above, particularly in the early AM. Goodbye boyish looks. Hello to the rest of your life. Recently I've found a different place to look for the wrinkles. I rotate my left hand a quarter turn outward and then swing the arm, from the elbow down, to the left a few inches. Sometimes the look is like an aerial view of the Badlands from on high. Other times the wrinkles are present, but barely so.
I am getting exercise pretty regularly and I do try to stay hydrated. These consequences are happening anyway. It is impossible to tell now how much of this is the diet and how much is aging. Because my dad, who was never overweight, had the droopy skin in some of the spots that I've mentioned, at least since he retired, I suspect that aging is the primary cause and the dieting may be accelerating its effects.
With these external changes readily apparent, I asked myself what sort of internal changes are happening too. One is that fatigue seems to come more frequently and then even from modest exertion. Yesterday after teaching I felt exhausted. It was a glorious day so I took a brief walk before class, 10 minutes or so, nothing more. During class I'm on my feet when at the board, but nobody would mistake this for high physical exertion. It may be that it's the emotional stress from being in the classroom which is getting to me. Yesterday a student, who is otherwise diligent about doing the coursework, started to pack up her things about five minutes before the end of class. That irked me and I asked her to stop doing it, a bit out of character for me, though maybe not. I'm more apt to be crotchety now. As for the students, it's a symptom of a more general issue. Too many of the kids are going through the motions and not really getting into it. Youth is wasted on the young.
Another internal change, this one for the better, is that the arthritis pain seems to be less. When it first started to get colder outside I noticed it in my joints. That feeling has gone away. The main purpose of the diet was for me to take a positive step on my own to keep the pain from occupying my thoughts. For the time being that seems to be working. Let's hope it lasts.
I have been procrastinating on a post about Vincent Van Gogh that I hope to return to over the weekend. From time to time I've wondered what lessons the rest of us can take from the lives of very creative people. Van Gogh spent years and years perfecting his art and did so with an enormous drive for self-expression. The first few years of writing for this blog I was aware of trying to do something similar, but more recently I haven't seen improvement in the writing itself, nor do I now feel impelled to experiment with technique. I'm aware of my analyst disposition, as an INTP, and that sometimes I can provide value add by giving an analysis of issues others haven't thought about at all or have considered but less than fully. It is still absorbing for me to analyze a novel situation. But I'm far less sure if at this point there is growth for me in doing these exercises or if it is merely forestalling the inevitable feeble mindedness that comes with age.
Yesterday after teaching, tired but not yet napping, I got into a reverie about being a grandparent, singing to the baby - songs from Fiddler on the Roof, holding the baby close till fast asleep, surprising even the parents with my willingness to change the diaper. This will remain a fantasy for the time being. I will have to wait till it becomes a reality. The over and under for the real McCoy is upward of ten years. Arvan men are slow in this department.
This is an odd way to construct a time window for what should come next. But it is the way I now think about things. So I asked myself, what might be done in that time window? Two imperatives arise from that inquiry. One is more income generation. There is no immediate need. There are only potential threats down the road. The biggies in this category are that the State of Illinois might fink on its pension obligations and long term care needs might emerge sooner rather than later. My wife and I have some buffers to address these contingencies. Those buffers could be more amply funded. The other is to find something sufficiently substantial to occupy my thoughts when I otherwise feel productive. For the last half dozen years or more, I've mainly been doing that by playing a latter day Paul Revere vis-à-vis residential undergraduate education, particularly at public research universities. The need is still there for somebody to do that. But it is getting stale for me. I would like to see somebody else take up the mantle.
A different theme that I could see occupying my time is how society is now wasting the human potential in people like me - old enough to have already had a full career, yet young enough to still have something left in the tank. With the current labor market softness I doubt anybody will pay much attention to these issues in the near future. But given current demographics, these are issues society will be grappling with for the indefinite future. I have written about this in the past, multiple times. This was my first stab at it, where I tried to tie the issue to the schools. Yet that early thinking is fairly primitive. And it is not sufficiently pragmatic. There is a need for a more sophisticated line of thought as to what can work. Nowadays, particularly in academia, many people hold onto their jobs for too long. But who can blame them? There isn't anything next to look forward to and thus encourage the graceful bow out.
All of this is too somber thinking on which to conclude. I have a need for lighter fare. Almost immediately, that triggered thoughts about the Sunsweet Pitted Prunes commercial from almost fifty years ago. They got rid of the pits, but haven't yet gotten rid of the wrinkles. I hope they're still working on it.
In my Econ class I talk about monitoring as a way to overcome opportunism. The idea is that monitoring is a cost incurred to reduce other costs that the organization does not want to incur. But I'm aware that much monitoring happens for no reason other than obsession, particularly when its our own performance to consider.
Those who are old enough will recall the ad campaign from 40 years ago, The Special K Pinch. If I start doing that but then move my hand forward toward my belly about an inch or so, I can do something I call the Special K grab. I could do that easily before I started the diet. I still can. It's a reminder that the more things change...
The last few weeks I've come to do a different sort of grab, under my arm between the elbow and shoulder, seemingly all flesh with no muscle whatsoever to be found. This to me is an unmistakable sign of age. You'd think you wouldn't want to be reminded of the point, but I find myself unable to stop grabbing at certain times of the day. The feel varies from time to time. It is never supple. Sometimes it sags miserably. I've come to understand that at those times my blood sugar is low and perhaps I need to drink some water too. At other times there is more substance to it, but it is still a far cry from a young person's skin.
One other such grab I try is while I'm sitting. The object is the area under the hamstrings. In this case, there is far less loose skin than in my upper arm and you can't really pull it away from the hamstrings. But the skin is droopy there too. The inner thigh, for whatever reason, I don't measure nearly as often. It's an area where no muscle is apparent, more like the upper arms.
Before the diet started, the notable skin wrinkling was on my eyelid and just above, particularly in the early AM. Goodbye boyish looks. Hello to the rest of your life. Recently I've found a different place to look for the wrinkles. I rotate my left hand a quarter turn outward and then swing the arm, from the elbow down, to the left a few inches. Sometimes the look is like an aerial view of the Badlands from on high. Other times the wrinkles are present, but barely so.
I am getting exercise pretty regularly and I do try to stay hydrated. These consequences are happening anyway. It is impossible to tell now how much of this is the diet and how much is aging. Because my dad, who was never overweight, had the droopy skin in some of the spots that I've mentioned, at least since he retired, I suspect that aging is the primary cause and the dieting may be accelerating its effects.
With these external changes readily apparent, I asked myself what sort of internal changes are happening too. One is that fatigue seems to come more frequently and then even from modest exertion. Yesterday after teaching I felt exhausted. It was a glorious day so I took a brief walk before class, 10 minutes or so, nothing more. During class I'm on my feet when at the board, but nobody would mistake this for high physical exertion. It may be that it's the emotional stress from being in the classroom which is getting to me. Yesterday a student, who is otherwise diligent about doing the coursework, started to pack up her things about five minutes before the end of class. That irked me and I asked her to stop doing it, a bit out of character for me, though maybe not. I'm more apt to be crotchety now. As for the students, it's a symptom of a more general issue. Too many of the kids are going through the motions and not really getting into it. Youth is wasted on the young.
Another internal change, this one for the better, is that the arthritis pain seems to be less. When it first started to get colder outside I noticed it in my joints. That feeling has gone away. The main purpose of the diet was for me to take a positive step on my own to keep the pain from occupying my thoughts. For the time being that seems to be working. Let's hope it lasts.
I have been procrastinating on a post about Vincent Van Gogh that I hope to return to over the weekend. From time to time I've wondered what lessons the rest of us can take from the lives of very creative people. Van Gogh spent years and years perfecting his art and did so with an enormous drive for self-expression. The first few years of writing for this blog I was aware of trying to do something similar, but more recently I haven't seen improvement in the writing itself, nor do I now feel impelled to experiment with technique. I'm aware of my analyst disposition, as an INTP, and that sometimes I can provide value add by giving an analysis of issues others haven't thought about at all or have considered but less than fully. It is still absorbing for me to analyze a novel situation. But I'm far less sure if at this point there is growth for me in doing these exercises or if it is merely forestalling the inevitable feeble mindedness that comes with age.
Yesterday after teaching, tired but not yet napping, I got into a reverie about being a grandparent, singing to the baby - songs from Fiddler on the Roof, holding the baby close till fast asleep, surprising even the parents with my willingness to change the diaper. This will remain a fantasy for the time being. I will have to wait till it becomes a reality. The over and under for the real McCoy is upward of ten years. Arvan men are slow in this department.
This is an odd way to construct a time window for what should come next. But it is the way I now think about things. So I asked myself, what might be done in that time window? Two imperatives arise from that inquiry. One is more income generation. There is no immediate need. There are only potential threats down the road. The biggies in this category are that the State of Illinois might fink on its pension obligations and long term care needs might emerge sooner rather than later. My wife and I have some buffers to address these contingencies. Those buffers could be more amply funded. The other is to find something sufficiently substantial to occupy my thoughts when I otherwise feel productive. For the last half dozen years or more, I've mainly been doing that by playing a latter day Paul Revere vis-à-vis residential undergraduate education, particularly at public research universities. The need is still there for somebody to do that. But it is getting stale for me. I would like to see somebody else take up the mantle.
A different theme that I could see occupying my time is how society is now wasting the human potential in people like me - old enough to have already had a full career, yet young enough to still have something left in the tank. With the current labor market softness I doubt anybody will pay much attention to these issues in the near future. But given current demographics, these are issues society will be grappling with for the indefinite future. I have written about this in the past, multiple times. This was my first stab at it, where I tried to tie the issue to the schools. Yet that early thinking is fairly primitive. And it is not sufficiently pragmatic. There is a need for a more sophisticated line of thought as to what can work. Nowadays, particularly in academia, many people hold onto their jobs for too long. But who can blame them? There isn't anything next to look forward to and thus encourage the graceful bow out.
All of this is too somber thinking on which to conclude. I have a need for lighter fare. Almost immediately, that triggered thoughts about the Sunsweet Pitted Prunes commercial from almost fifty years ago. They got rid of the pits, but haven't yet gotten rid of the wrinkles. I hope they're still working on it.
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
Honor Thy Father
Ask yourself, what little lessons from childhood stuck? I have a couple of these that come from the weekends in the fall. The first - you don't have to do a perfect job. This came from raking leaves, of which there were so many it was hard to keep up. Get most of them into a pile. Then get most of the pile into the trash can. As for the rest, they'd get picked up the next time. The second - give him a chance. We'd be playing association football in the street and when on defense we would want to tag the guy with the ball before the play ever really started. My dad, who'd be playing along with us, would prevent us from making the early tag. Give the guy who first gets the ball time enough to get started. There's more fun in doing it that way, particularly when the players are unequal in skill and one of the less skilled players is the one who starts with the ball.
My dad was no philosopher. But he had a sense about how to go about doing things that he imparted on his children. I see him in my own values now. Though the context is quite different, the issues that pop up are similar. The students on campus now are like the fallen leaves in our yard from my childhood. There are so many of them. Doing a perfect job is out of the question. Do these kids even get to where they're supposed to go? Then, when you have a struggling student in your class, do you give him a chance? Suppose doing so means you break the rules from the syllabus, because the kid only begins to initiate on homework after the deadline. Which values should prevail? There is a logic that says enforce the course rules throughout, because if you don't then when some kid is late with homework during the second half of the semester when you no longer want to do accept work after the deadline, don't you have to give him an extension too, out of fairness? My head understands that argument. Yet it is not the conclusion my dad would have reached.
We are in week four of the term. My class meets Tuesdays and Thursdays. I number my class sessions in the course calendar so I know yesterday was the seventh session. That's still early in the semester by my count. I queried my students in class about who was having a midterm already this week. I tend to ask such questions a minute or two before the real class session starts, hoping some of the stragglers will get there before I really get going. One student answered that he had a midterm later that afternoon. Several other students indicated their first midterm would be next week. I followed up by asking them: do they prefer to have their tests concentrated over a short period of time or spread out? Among those who responded, they were universal in preferring their exams to be spread out so they could make proper preparation for each test. It's a small class. Treat that result as suggestive, not definitive.
Personally, I don't see the point of exams, in an upper level class like mine. Where is the value add in that activity, especially if you have other low-stakes activities that motivate students to learn and enable them to express their level of understanding? In my class the students do two different types of homework most weeks. One is a weekly blog post, supposedly 600 words minimum, so this is in the spirit of "slow blogging," not of Twitter. I write a comment on each post and then we discuss the posts collectively in the live class session. The other is analytical content done in Excel, where they receive immediate feedback for their answers and where they are instructed to do the homework till they've answered each question correctly. The spreadsheet then spits out a key which they are to copy and paste into a Google Form and select their class-assigned alias along with that, for further identification. Below is a snip of the submitted data for the homework that is due tonight.
Reading the comments you can see there is substantial variation among the students in their prior preparation and in their current understanding of the material. Exams, in my view, measure as much or more differences among the students that were present before the class started than they do value add since the class has begun. So the rich (academically-wise) get richer and the poor get the C's, or drop the class because they do even worse than that. The only reason I give exams is because the department has mandated them. And that mandate, in turn, is to prevent instructor shirking. That, rather than student learning, is the fundamental reason to require exams. Even with the mandate some instructors cut corners. They make their final optional and give a third midterm on the last day of regularly scheduled class. I don't know if that reduces the amount of grading they do or not. Clearly, it does allow them to start on vacation earlier than is intended by the schedule. On can see that if any of this helps the struggling student that assistance comes via serendipity, not intentional planning.
There is similar variation among students in their diligence as to getting course work done and in attending class. Not enough of the students bring their A game as the norm in their own behavior. I would much prefer that all the students come to class (except those who are really sick or who have a legitimate reason to be out of town, such as to go on a job interview). We've been debating this issue about the benefit of attendance ever since I got involved in teaching and learning with technology, 20 years ago. And I'm sure it was argued for many years before I paid attention to the debate. Here I simply want to note that it is a different thing blowing off a lecture in Foellinger Auditorium at 8 AM to missing an upper level class with total enrollment of 25 students at 11 AM. I'm afraid habits developed about the former come into play when making choices about the latter. Those same habits will negatively impact these kids later, after they've left the U of I and try to make a place for themselves in the world.
Those same habits come into play in not doing the homework altogether or in getting it done late. I would much prefer that all my students have good works habits. But as an instructor you have to play the cards your dealt. The issue is what to do, given that the reality is quite far from the ideal.
Last week in class we spent much of the time discussing transaction costs (Coase). The blog posts the students wrote were to discuss their own experiences in organizations, with an eye on the transaction costs they witnessed.
I don't grade individual posts. I do give extensive feedback as comments, but only give a grade at mid semester (and again at end of semester) on the collection of posts within that grading period. I expect the students to improve in these over time and the grading is meant to take that into account. Yet while there was no grading this time, the posts did serve as a test of student understanding. Alas, most of the students showed they didn't really get what transaction costs are about. So we spent much of yesterday's class on transaction costs, again, though this time doing it from a different angle.
Transaction costs are those costs that govern transactions (as distinct from those costs that produce transactions, which we refer to as production costs, though parsing the two is easier in theory than in practice). Transaction costs include monitoring performance, coordinating activities, and motivating participants to produce high quality. So we spent some time in class discussing each of these activities, first using our class as an example, then using the content of their blog posts for further illustration. When it came to discussing motivation costs, we focused on non-wage methods of motivation. (We'll take up the wage methods in a few weeks.)
In that context I talked about reciprocation, a powerful social method of motivation, one often overlooked in economics courses. It is the basis of my favorite paper for this course, Akerlof's model of Labor Contracts as Partial Gift Exchange. We will cover the ideas in that paper later. Yesterday I contented myself with talking about random acts of kindness and leadership by example. Since both encourage reciprocation they are potential ways to raise productivity in an organization by having the followers reciprocate in kind.
What I do is a meld of Coase filtered through Akerlof and my dad. My dad would probably have been okay with Akerlof, but not with Coase, who was very Conservative in his views. But then Coase might disavow what I do as too much wishful thinking, so it kind of equals out.
I try to write real and substantial comments on each of my students' posts, with the hope that the students will respond in kind and do this with real and substantial posts of their own. Likewise, with the give him-a-chance-approach for the laggards, and note that it is him only and not her in this case, in other words gender does seem to matter on this score, the hope is that these kids will reciprocate by getting their work done on time thereafter and coming to class on a regular basis.
Last year I had mixed success doing this. This time around I've been more explicit with the class in talking about reciprocation. Several of those who got to submit work beyond the deadline have thanked me for that electronically. One student came up to me after class yesterday, expressing his gratitude, saying he was surprised by my comments on his post, and then talking through what his obligations were for the class moving forward. This kid has spoken up in class before and in my quick calculation he seemed to be among the few who had something on the ball. (Some kids are diligent about the work but not particularly insightful about what is going on. This kid appeared the opposite.) It would be a real shame if this kid didn't engage with the class because he missed some of the deadlines before we really got into the subject matter.
There is another dimension to this issue. I've got a high proportion of the class being students from China and for some of them their English is rather poor. The language barrier serves as an additional hurdle and can be the cause of delinquency with the assigned work, even for students who are otherwise diligent. On Sunday evening I had sent out emails to several students who hadn't complete some of the previously assigned work. Among these two were Chinese students from whom I had received no work whatsoever.
On of those responded to my email the next evening and we arranged to meet Tuesday morning at 9:45. (My class starts at 11.) He blew off the meeting, which irked me. He also didn't show up in class. But the other guy (the two proved to be friends) did come to class, late. And after class he came up to me and started to explain his problems. In the middle of that, the other kid also shows up, deeply apologetic. As I gather what is going on I propose we find a table in BIF, get our laptops out, and see if I can get them caught up enough so they can do the rest of the catch up on their own. This is what we proceed to do.
But only one of them has a laptop. The other, who came to class late, apparently is having trouble with his campus email, so he never received the message from me on Sunday evening. I resent that message to him from BIF, this time to a Gmail account. And the one with a laptop discovers that he can't boot it. The battery has run down. Further he has no charger for it. He proposed to go to the Undergraduate Library to get a charger. I nix that idea, because I don't have the patience for it. I'm also saying to myself, how can this kid carry around a laptop without also having a charger with him? Instead, we go to the basement of Wohlers Hall, where CITES has a computer lab. I get them up and running there. They are very appreciative of the help and assure me they will get caught up ASAP.
(In the old days, meaning the late 1990s, I used to make it a requirement for my students to do an orientation session in a computer lab so I was assured they all were capable of doing the online portion of the class. I stopped doing that when I started to teach smaller classes as an overload to my work as an administrator. There really didn't seem to be a need. But the reality is that there is still a need for some small fraction of the students to have such an orientation. The issue, then, is how to manage that.)
Later that afternoon I started to get peppered with questions by email from one of these kids on how to complete the Excel homework. Now that he has connected with me it is easier to ask the prof than to labor through figuring it out himself. I did respond to the first few of these but then got the feeling that he has crossed the line in the other direction. Students need to respect that the faculty member's time is scarce.
My approach doesn't convey that idea well. In that sense it is not a model of what might diffuse more broadly yet still have some of my dad's give-him-a-chance as part of the whole. So I've been wondering what else might diffuse more broadly and still embrace my father's spirit.
On Monday evening I went to a reception for the I-Promise program. The Chancellor spoke and then there were presentations by students, one currently in the I-Promise program, the other an alum who now serves as a mentor to another I-Promise student. Part of the program is that mentoring is made available to all students who enter the program. The mentoring is an option the students can exercise or not as they see fit.
Three years ago I mentored an I-Promise student, my first experience doing so. Two years ago I started out mentoring a different student, but then I had rotator cuff surgery which produced complications afterward. I had to drop out as a mentor. Last year I didn't get matched with a mentee. There were more of us mentors to go around than there was expressed demand. Part of the reason for going to the reception this time was to meet some of the new students and see if one of them would like to have me as mentor. We'll see if that happens.
In the meantime a different thought has occurred to me. The laggard students in my class are emblematic of a population of students who'd benefit from having a mentor, even if they are not from low income families. That the need is there seem obvious. How to identify such students surely is an issue, especially when they are freshman, where the mentoring would do the most good. The campus is probably unable to extend the option provided to I-Promise students to all entering students. There wouldn't be enough mentors to go around and matching mentees and mentors would be a gargantuan task if attempted at that scale.
So maybe the approach, if it happens at all, has to occur de facto rather than de jure. Those who confront struggling freshman should embrace a give-him-a-chance approach as best as they can, in whatever context in which they operate. Yet that does cut against the culture, particularly in the high enrollment classes students are apt to take while they are freshman.
Do these arguments mean we do nothing? I hope not. There is a significantly sized population of discontented students. And it doesn't have to be a perfect job.
My dad was no philosopher. But he had a sense about how to go about doing things that he imparted on his children. I see him in my own values now. Though the context is quite different, the issues that pop up are similar. The students on campus now are like the fallen leaves in our yard from my childhood. There are so many of them. Doing a perfect job is out of the question. Do these kids even get to where they're supposed to go? Then, when you have a struggling student in your class, do you give him a chance? Suppose doing so means you break the rules from the syllabus, because the kid only begins to initiate on homework after the deadline. Which values should prevail? There is a logic that says enforce the course rules throughout, because if you don't then when some kid is late with homework during the second half of the semester when you no longer want to do accept work after the deadline, don't you have to give him an extension too, out of fairness? My head understands that argument. Yet it is not the conclusion my dad would have reached.
We are in week four of the term. My class meets Tuesdays and Thursdays. I number my class sessions in the course calendar so I know yesterday was the seventh session. That's still early in the semester by my count. I queried my students in class about who was having a midterm already this week. I tend to ask such questions a minute or two before the real class session starts, hoping some of the stragglers will get there before I really get going. One student answered that he had a midterm later that afternoon. Several other students indicated their first midterm would be next week. I followed up by asking them: do they prefer to have their tests concentrated over a short period of time or spread out? Among those who responded, they were universal in preferring their exams to be spread out so they could make proper preparation for each test. It's a small class. Treat that result as suggestive, not definitive.
Personally, I don't see the point of exams, in an upper level class like mine. Where is the value add in that activity, especially if you have other low-stakes activities that motivate students to learn and enable them to express their level of understanding? In my class the students do two different types of homework most weeks. One is a weekly blog post, supposedly 600 words minimum, so this is in the spirit of "slow blogging," not of Twitter. I write a comment on each post and then we discuss the posts collectively in the live class session. The other is analytical content done in Excel, where they receive immediate feedback for their answers and where they are instructed to do the homework till they've answered each question correctly. The spreadsheet then spits out a key which they are to copy and paste into a Google Form and select their class-assigned alias along with that, for further identification. Below is a snip of the submitted data for the homework that is due tonight.
Reading the comments you can see there is substantial variation among the students in their prior preparation and in their current understanding of the material. Exams, in my view, measure as much or more differences among the students that were present before the class started than they do value add since the class has begun. So the rich (academically-wise) get richer and the poor get the C's, or drop the class because they do even worse than that. The only reason I give exams is because the department has mandated them. And that mandate, in turn, is to prevent instructor shirking. That, rather than student learning, is the fundamental reason to require exams. Even with the mandate some instructors cut corners. They make their final optional and give a third midterm on the last day of regularly scheduled class. I don't know if that reduces the amount of grading they do or not. Clearly, it does allow them to start on vacation earlier than is intended by the schedule. On can see that if any of this helps the struggling student that assistance comes via serendipity, not intentional planning.
There is similar variation among students in their diligence as to getting course work done and in attending class. Not enough of the students bring their A game as the norm in their own behavior. I would much prefer that all the students come to class (except those who are really sick or who have a legitimate reason to be out of town, such as to go on a job interview). We've been debating this issue about the benefit of attendance ever since I got involved in teaching and learning with technology, 20 years ago. And I'm sure it was argued for many years before I paid attention to the debate. Here I simply want to note that it is a different thing blowing off a lecture in Foellinger Auditorium at 8 AM to missing an upper level class with total enrollment of 25 students at 11 AM. I'm afraid habits developed about the former come into play when making choices about the latter. Those same habits will negatively impact these kids later, after they've left the U of I and try to make a place for themselves in the world.
Those same habits come into play in not doing the homework altogether or in getting it done late. I would much prefer that all my students have good works habits. But as an instructor you have to play the cards your dealt. The issue is what to do, given that the reality is quite far from the ideal.
Last week in class we spent much of the time discussing transaction costs (Coase). The blog posts the students wrote were to discuss their own experiences in organizations, with an eye on the transaction costs they witnessed.
I don't grade individual posts. I do give extensive feedback as comments, but only give a grade at mid semester (and again at end of semester) on the collection of posts within that grading period. I expect the students to improve in these over time and the grading is meant to take that into account. Yet while there was no grading this time, the posts did serve as a test of student understanding. Alas, most of the students showed they didn't really get what transaction costs are about. So we spent much of yesterday's class on transaction costs, again, though this time doing it from a different angle.
Transaction costs are those costs that govern transactions (as distinct from those costs that produce transactions, which we refer to as production costs, though parsing the two is easier in theory than in practice). Transaction costs include monitoring performance, coordinating activities, and motivating participants to produce high quality. So we spent some time in class discussing each of these activities, first using our class as an example, then using the content of their blog posts for further illustration. When it came to discussing motivation costs, we focused on non-wage methods of motivation. (We'll take up the wage methods in a few weeks.)
In that context I talked about reciprocation, a powerful social method of motivation, one often overlooked in economics courses. It is the basis of my favorite paper for this course, Akerlof's model of Labor Contracts as Partial Gift Exchange. We will cover the ideas in that paper later. Yesterday I contented myself with talking about random acts of kindness and leadership by example. Since both encourage reciprocation they are potential ways to raise productivity in an organization by having the followers reciprocate in kind.
What I do is a meld of Coase filtered through Akerlof and my dad. My dad would probably have been okay with Akerlof, but not with Coase, who was very Conservative in his views. But then Coase might disavow what I do as too much wishful thinking, so it kind of equals out.
I try to write real and substantial comments on each of my students' posts, with the hope that the students will respond in kind and do this with real and substantial posts of their own. Likewise, with the give him-a-chance-approach for the laggards, and note that it is him only and not her in this case, in other words gender does seem to matter on this score, the hope is that these kids will reciprocate by getting their work done on time thereafter and coming to class on a regular basis.
Last year I had mixed success doing this. This time around I've been more explicit with the class in talking about reciprocation. Several of those who got to submit work beyond the deadline have thanked me for that electronically. One student came up to me after class yesterday, expressing his gratitude, saying he was surprised by my comments on his post, and then talking through what his obligations were for the class moving forward. This kid has spoken up in class before and in my quick calculation he seemed to be among the few who had something on the ball. (Some kids are diligent about the work but not particularly insightful about what is going on. This kid appeared the opposite.) It would be a real shame if this kid didn't engage with the class because he missed some of the deadlines before we really got into the subject matter.
There is another dimension to this issue. I've got a high proportion of the class being students from China and for some of them their English is rather poor. The language barrier serves as an additional hurdle and can be the cause of delinquency with the assigned work, even for students who are otherwise diligent. On Sunday evening I had sent out emails to several students who hadn't complete some of the previously assigned work. Among these two were Chinese students from whom I had received no work whatsoever.
On of those responded to my email the next evening and we arranged to meet Tuesday morning at 9:45. (My class starts at 11.) He blew off the meeting, which irked me. He also didn't show up in class. But the other guy (the two proved to be friends) did come to class, late. And after class he came up to me and started to explain his problems. In the middle of that, the other kid also shows up, deeply apologetic. As I gather what is going on I propose we find a table in BIF, get our laptops out, and see if I can get them caught up enough so they can do the rest of the catch up on their own. This is what we proceed to do.
But only one of them has a laptop. The other, who came to class late, apparently is having trouble with his campus email, so he never received the message from me on Sunday evening. I resent that message to him from BIF, this time to a Gmail account. And the one with a laptop discovers that he can't boot it. The battery has run down. Further he has no charger for it. He proposed to go to the Undergraduate Library to get a charger. I nix that idea, because I don't have the patience for it. I'm also saying to myself, how can this kid carry around a laptop without also having a charger with him? Instead, we go to the basement of Wohlers Hall, where CITES has a computer lab. I get them up and running there. They are very appreciative of the help and assure me they will get caught up ASAP.
(In the old days, meaning the late 1990s, I used to make it a requirement for my students to do an orientation session in a computer lab so I was assured they all were capable of doing the online portion of the class. I stopped doing that when I started to teach smaller classes as an overload to my work as an administrator. There really didn't seem to be a need. But the reality is that there is still a need for some small fraction of the students to have such an orientation. The issue, then, is how to manage that.)
Later that afternoon I started to get peppered with questions by email from one of these kids on how to complete the Excel homework. Now that he has connected with me it is easier to ask the prof than to labor through figuring it out himself. I did respond to the first few of these but then got the feeling that he has crossed the line in the other direction. Students need to respect that the faculty member's time is scarce.
My approach doesn't convey that idea well. In that sense it is not a model of what might diffuse more broadly yet still have some of my dad's give-him-a-chance as part of the whole. So I've been wondering what else might diffuse more broadly and still embrace my father's spirit.
On Monday evening I went to a reception for the I-Promise program. The Chancellor spoke and then there were presentations by students, one currently in the I-Promise program, the other an alum who now serves as a mentor to another I-Promise student. Part of the program is that mentoring is made available to all students who enter the program. The mentoring is an option the students can exercise or not as they see fit.
Three years ago I mentored an I-Promise student, my first experience doing so. Two years ago I started out mentoring a different student, but then I had rotator cuff surgery which produced complications afterward. I had to drop out as a mentor. Last year I didn't get matched with a mentee. There were more of us mentors to go around than there was expressed demand. Part of the reason for going to the reception this time was to meet some of the new students and see if one of them would like to have me as mentor. We'll see if that happens.
In the meantime a different thought has occurred to me. The laggard students in my class are emblematic of a population of students who'd benefit from having a mentor, even if they are not from low income families. That the need is there seem obvious. How to identify such students surely is an issue, especially when they are freshman, where the mentoring would do the most good. The campus is probably unable to extend the option provided to I-Promise students to all entering students. There wouldn't be enough mentors to go around and matching mentees and mentors would be a gargantuan task if attempted at that scale.
So maybe the approach, if it happens at all, has to occur de facto rather than de jure. Those who confront struggling freshman should embrace a give-him-a-chance approach as best as they can, in whatever context in which they operate. Yet that does cut against the culture, particularly in the high enrollment classes students are apt to take while they are freshman.
Do these arguments mean we do nothing? I hope not. There is a significantly sized population of discontented students. And it doesn't have to be a perfect job.
Thursday, September 11, 2014
Ten years after - Dialogic Learning Objects/Embedded Assessment
I still design interactive homework in Excel and have already produced a couple this semester. This tutorial, which should be accessible to anyone with a recent copy of Excel, whether they know how to use it or not, is training not on Excel per se, but rather on how to do my homework in a way so as not to get stuck on silly matters. (Getting stuck on the economics is not silly. That's how one learns. Getting stuck on the technology is silly.) It also provides some rationale for why it is good to have homework of this sort. (If you plug in something in the NetID field and chose an alias from the pull down menu, and then proceed to answer all the questions in the tutorial correctly, you will get a Key for submitting online. Please don't do that as the online submission of the key is meant only for students in the class.)
This next exercise on efficiency, which I made a couple of years ago, begins to look like real homework done this way. It is review of what students should have learned in Intermediate microeconomics, though it turns out that the second worksheet is actually new content for a significant chunk of the class.
And this last one on a strategic view of the Efficiency Principle (which says that parties in a bargain tend to arrive at efficient outcomes for the parties involved) I just finished writing yesterday. If you go through it you will note that there is quite a bit of discourse in it. The assessment that is within is in response to that discourse. It measures understanding of that. It is not assessment to test understanding of things presented elsewhere, where the student was expected to read that content first.
The idea that students learn new stuff while they do homework seems natural to me, but it is alien to much practice, which views homework as drill on content previously developed elsewhere. My sense is that this is a the predominant view. But it archaic and really should be replaced by something better. If the students are learning, they are motivated. If they are not learning but are made to go through hoops like circus animals do, that may satisfy somebody else in terms of providing evidence that the student has learned, but it does nothing whatsoever to light a fire under the student.
This view, of new content mixed with assessment in a kind of back and forth, I called it Dialogic Learning Objects 10 years ago. Others have referred to a similar idea, using the expression Embedded Assessment. The assessment is embedded in the presentation. Yet whatever you call it most disciplines have not moved perceptibly in this direction.
It is my contention that the Publishers are primary force for stasis and that is because they make their money by selling textbooks, which are primarily presentation only - assessment done elsewhere as an add on. Textbooks typically do have end of chapter problems and middle of chapter demonstrations that might be like the end of chapter problems. But for giving student credit, they tend to rely on still something else.
A few years back, perhaps it's now more than a decade, it became obvious that many students were not reading the textbooks, which suggests there should be less reliance on the textbook as part of the model for learning. But it is still the way the publishers make their money.
It is my view therefore, that in this case sunk costs matter! (Contrary to the preaching of my discipline.) Prior authored textbooks crowd out not yet authored dialogic learning objects, which are harder to produce and which name authors probably would be too impatient to develop.
Somebody should be asking - what can break this logjam? That's the reason for this post.
This next exercise on efficiency, which I made a couple of years ago, begins to look like real homework done this way. It is review of what students should have learned in Intermediate microeconomics, though it turns out that the second worksheet is actually new content for a significant chunk of the class.
And this last one on a strategic view of the Efficiency Principle (which says that parties in a bargain tend to arrive at efficient outcomes for the parties involved) I just finished writing yesterday. If you go through it you will note that there is quite a bit of discourse in it. The assessment that is within is in response to that discourse. It measures understanding of that. It is not assessment to test understanding of things presented elsewhere, where the student was expected to read that content first.
The idea that students learn new stuff while they do homework seems natural to me, but it is alien to much practice, which views homework as drill on content previously developed elsewhere. My sense is that this is a the predominant view. But it archaic and really should be replaced by something better. If the students are learning, they are motivated. If they are not learning but are made to go through hoops like circus animals do, that may satisfy somebody else in terms of providing evidence that the student has learned, but it does nothing whatsoever to light a fire under the student.
This view, of new content mixed with assessment in a kind of back and forth, I called it Dialogic Learning Objects 10 years ago. Others have referred to a similar idea, using the expression Embedded Assessment. The assessment is embedded in the presentation. Yet whatever you call it most disciplines have not moved perceptibly in this direction.
It is my contention that the Publishers are primary force for stasis and that is because they make their money by selling textbooks, which are primarily presentation only - assessment done elsewhere as an add on. Textbooks typically do have end of chapter problems and middle of chapter demonstrations that might be like the end of chapter problems. But for giving student credit, they tend to rely on still something else.
A few years back, perhaps it's now more than a decade, it became obvious that many students were not reading the textbooks, which suggests there should be less reliance on the textbook as part of the model for learning. But it is still the way the publishers make their money.
It is my view therefore, that in this case sunk costs matter! (Contrary to the preaching of my discipline.) Prior authored textbooks crowd out not yet authored dialogic learning objects, which are harder to produce and which name authors probably would be too impatient to develop.
Somebody should be asking - what can break this logjam? That's the reason for this post.
Thursday, September 04, 2014
The Consequences from Finding Alternatives to Tax Revenues for Higher Ed Funding
A wise writer of detective fiction once remarked - follow the money. The puzzle to be solved in this case is for public Higher Ed institutions that appear to be fiscally healthy. First, how are they doing it, given the decline in state funding? (Or, alternatively, given a rising cost environment with flat state funding?) Second, are there strings attached to the new revenue sources and, if so, what sort of strings are they? Of course, we should also include public sources, where there have always been strings. For example, at Illinois there are lower bound constraints on how many students from in state would be admitted to the university. There are also a host of state regulations that the university is subject to. (The most recent one of these that I am aware of, instituted during my last year of of full-time employment 2009-10, is time reporting for full-time faculty and staff, an example of bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake.)
At Illinois,where there has been a to do about the Salaita matter, we've been getting a real time lesson about strings attached to gift income for the university, particularly when that income comes from donors who give a lot individually. If the university engages in an action that the donor doesn't like (here I'm not going to get into whether that donor belief is reasonable or not) then the donor can threaten to withhold future donations, which may have already been anticipated by the university in its budgeting. Apparently, several large donors made just such threats over the Salaita appointment. Put a different way, in addition to the tax deduction the donor receives and the benefit that the gift the donor gives will provide (say to fund an endowed chair, in which case the benefit is to support the research of the chair holder), the donor expects to have some influence on future decisions the university will make. Much of that influence is probably exerted outside of public view, by having private audience with top university administrators. On the flip side of this, it is well known that much of the time that the campus top administrators put in goes to fund raising. That often happens without much comment at all, as if the gifts are "free money." One thing the Salaita case surely has done is to remind us that there are strings attached to these gifts.
In this piece I'd actually like to focus on a different source of funding, using the above only as motivation to ask the question. The other source is the tuition revenue generated by international students. (See line 3652.) There has been a near doubling of international students on campus in the last 10 years. The base rates for tuition of undergraduates can be found at the link. (Many colleges have a surcharge beyond the base rate. LAS does not.) Together these two tables create an interesting picture.
I'm old enough to remember back when US News & World Report would rate the U of I as a "best buy" for undergraduate education. (In contrast, now even the in state tuition is pretty hefty.) At the time the fraction of in state students exceeded 90% of the total undergraduate population. And then, in my view, the students would have benefited from there being more out-of-state students, primarily because there tends to be a kind of provincialism of the kids, who are mainly from the northern and western suburbs of Chicago. So having other students around who've grown up in different environments would have been a benefit unto itself. Yet that doesn't explain what is going on with international students now.
Though there isn't published data on who pays full tuition and who is getting some discount, it is evident that the bulk of the international students are paying full fare. And it is further evident that the vast majority are from Asia, mainly China. The tuition these students pay is making up a good chunk of the shortfall in state funding. Is this found money? If it is not, what are the strings attached?
The above is factual. Now I will venture into guesswork, but there is some economic basis for the guesswork. The economics is that the "demand" for spots at the university by international students is far more elastic than the demand by in-state students, because once you're paying international student rates there are a host of institutions that might be attractive to such students, including universities outside the U.S. and private universities within the U.S. So, purely on the economics, it appears to me that my campus has a not-well-diversified portfolio of international students (diversified in the sense of coming from many different countries around the globe) yet where, looking into the future, the demand of such students is fairly elastic. This looks like trouble in the making. In other words, the near future is likely to look unlike the recent past. Let me explain why.
The university has a great reputation in Asia, particularly for Engineering. That explains the current demand. Also, the high rating of the Accounting department for undergraduate education, in particular, has spurred the international demand for seats in Business. But the numbers of international students has gotten sufficiently great that many of them must enroll in other colleges, notably LAS.
This semester in my Economics of Organizations class, out of a total enrollment at present of 25 students, 9 have Asian sounding surnames. Of these 7 are from China, 1 is from Korea, and 1 from New Jersey. (When I was growing up in New York City, we used to think of New Jersey as a foreign country, but that is a different matter.) All the other students are in state. If you compute the fractions, I have 32% international students and 36% from out of state, a bit higher than would be predicted from the campus averages. Perhaps those Asian students in LAS find Economics an attractive major. I don't know and the numbers are too small for my class to speculate further based on just that.
But if you look at a rating of undergraduate economics in the U.S., such as this one, you can see there are alternatives to Illinois that are rated higher, including four public universities from within the Big Ten.
To my knowledge, the campus has not yet gone on a program to shore up offerings in departments outside of Engineering and Business that would appeal to students, particularly from China. Doing so would require additional resources, which have already been allocated to other purposes. Rather, it seems that the campus has followed a strategy of "cashing in" on the its reputation. What will happen when there are a sufficient number of Chinese alums from Economics, and other departments that are now a haven for Chinese students, especially if in retrospect their views of their own education are not so glowing?
A possible alternative approach in anticipation of a weakening in such demand would be further belt tightening now. But belt tightening in Higher Ed is always done grudgingly or is resisted outright, with a prayer that the revenue shortfall is temporary and some bailout will be forthcoming soon. Now, when there do seem to be adequate revenues, it is hard to imagine how such belt tightening will happen.
Until now in this post, I have focused only on economic issues. Let me briefly consider social/political issues. This is not by any means to exhaust the possibilities. It is merely to suggest that the scope of strings attached is quite broad and also to raise the possibility that many of these will be hard to anticipate ahead of time.
One that is plain is that international students are here in part for reasons of acculturation. What is it like to be American? How do American students act in college? Since there seems to be a clustering of students outside of class by national origin, this puts a premium on in class interactions. In this view, the American students who speak up in class are providing a cultural benefit to the Chinese students. Those American students who remain quiet are not. In my class, where there is also online writing, something similar is afoot there. But since all students must blog in the class, it is a course requirement, with the writing it is the lively bloggers who provide the cultural benefit for the other students.
Take the above and now consider kids from the Chicago suburbs versus kids from down state. The latter are likely to have gone to a smaller high school, one less well funded, and with fewer options for enrichment. Over the years, the campus has felt some imperative to admit such students because of their potential, coupled with the geography; their county is underrepresented on campus. But, it should be recognized, these kids are more likely to feel like a fish out of water when attending the university and even if they overcome that feeling to some degree, they are more apt to be quiet in class. That may not have been much of a liability in the past. Will it increasingly become a liability as we move into the future, given this new economic model?
I don't see these sort of questions being asked elsewhere. In my view, they are issues that need to be discussed and thought through.
At Illinois,where there has been a to do about the Salaita matter, we've been getting a real time lesson about strings attached to gift income for the university, particularly when that income comes from donors who give a lot individually. If the university engages in an action that the donor doesn't like (here I'm not going to get into whether that donor belief is reasonable or not) then the donor can threaten to withhold future donations, which may have already been anticipated by the university in its budgeting. Apparently, several large donors made just such threats over the Salaita appointment. Put a different way, in addition to the tax deduction the donor receives and the benefit that the gift the donor gives will provide (say to fund an endowed chair, in which case the benefit is to support the research of the chair holder), the donor expects to have some influence on future decisions the university will make. Much of that influence is probably exerted outside of public view, by having private audience with top university administrators. On the flip side of this, it is well known that much of the time that the campus top administrators put in goes to fund raising. That often happens without much comment at all, as if the gifts are "free money." One thing the Salaita case surely has done is to remind us that there are strings attached to these gifts.
In this piece I'd actually like to focus on a different source of funding, using the above only as motivation to ask the question. The other source is the tuition revenue generated by international students. (See line 3652.) There has been a near doubling of international students on campus in the last 10 years. The base rates for tuition of undergraduates can be found at the link. (Many colleges have a surcharge beyond the base rate. LAS does not.) Together these two tables create an interesting picture.
I'm old enough to remember back when US News & World Report would rate the U of I as a "best buy" for undergraduate education. (In contrast, now even the in state tuition is pretty hefty.) At the time the fraction of in state students exceeded 90% of the total undergraduate population. And then, in my view, the students would have benefited from there being more out-of-state students, primarily because there tends to be a kind of provincialism of the kids, who are mainly from the northern and western suburbs of Chicago. So having other students around who've grown up in different environments would have been a benefit unto itself. Yet that doesn't explain what is going on with international students now.
Though there isn't published data on who pays full tuition and who is getting some discount, it is evident that the bulk of the international students are paying full fare. And it is further evident that the vast majority are from Asia, mainly China. The tuition these students pay is making up a good chunk of the shortfall in state funding. Is this found money? If it is not, what are the strings attached?
The above is factual. Now I will venture into guesswork, but there is some economic basis for the guesswork. The economics is that the "demand" for spots at the university by international students is far more elastic than the demand by in-state students, because once you're paying international student rates there are a host of institutions that might be attractive to such students, including universities outside the U.S. and private universities within the U.S. So, purely on the economics, it appears to me that my campus has a not-well-diversified portfolio of international students (diversified in the sense of coming from many different countries around the globe) yet where, looking into the future, the demand of such students is fairly elastic. This looks like trouble in the making. In other words, the near future is likely to look unlike the recent past. Let me explain why.
The university has a great reputation in Asia, particularly for Engineering. That explains the current demand. Also, the high rating of the Accounting department for undergraduate education, in particular, has spurred the international demand for seats in Business. But the numbers of international students has gotten sufficiently great that many of them must enroll in other colleges, notably LAS.
This semester in my Economics of Organizations class, out of a total enrollment at present of 25 students, 9 have Asian sounding surnames. Of these 7 are from China, 1 is from Korea, and 1 from New Jersey. (When I was growing up in New York City, we used to think of New Jersey as a foreign country, but that is a different matter.) All the other students are in state. If you compute the fractions, I have 32% international students and 36% from out of state, a bit higher than would be predicted from the campus averages. Perhaps those Asian students in LAS find Economics an attractive major. I don't know and the numbers are too small for my class to speculate further based on just that.
But if you look at a rating of undergraduate economics in the U.S., such as this one, you can see there are alternatives to Illinois that are rated higher, including four public universities from within the Big Ten.
To my knowledge, the campus has not yet gone on a program to shore up offerings in departments outside of Engineering and Business that would appeal to students, particularly from China. Doing so would require additional resources, which have already been allocated to other purposes. Rather, it seems that the campus has followed a strategy of "cashing in" on the its reputation. What will happen when there are a sufficient number of Chinese alums from Economics, and other departments that are now a haven for Chinese students, especially if in retrospect their views of their own education are not so glowing?
A possible alternative approach in anticipation of a weakening in such demand would be further belt tightening now. But belt tightening in Higher Ed is always done grudgingly or is resisted outright, with a prayer that the revenue shortfall is temporary and some bailout will be forthcoming soon. Now, when there do seem to be adequate revenues, it is hard to imagine how such belt tightening will happen.
Until now in this post, I have focused only on economic issues. Let me briefly consider social/political issues. This is not by any means to exhaust the possibilities. It is merely to suggest that the scope of strings attached is quite broad and also to raise the possibility that many of these will be hard to anticipate ahead of time.
One that is plain is that international students are here in part for reasons of acculturation. What is it like to be American? How do American students act in college? Since there seems to be a clustering of students outside of class by national origin, this puts a premium on in class interactions. In this view, the American students who speak up in class are providing a cultural benefit to the Chinese students. Those American students who remain quiet are not. In my class, where there is also online writing, something similar is afoot there. But since all students must blog in the class, it is a course requirement, with the writing it is the lively bloggers who provide the cultural benefit for the other students.
Take the above and now consider kids from the Chicago suburbs versus kids from down state. The latter are likely to have gone to a smaller high school, one less well funded, and with fewer options for enrichment. Over the years, the campus has felt some imperative to admit such students because of their potential, coupled with the geography; their county is underrepresented on campus. But, it should be recognized, these kids are more likely to feel like a fish out of water when attending the university and even if they overcome that feeling to some degree, they are more apt to be quiet in class. That may not have been much of a liability in the past. Will it increasingly become a liability as we move into the future, given this new economic model?
I don't see these sort of questions being asked elsewhere. In my view, they are issues that need to be discussed and thought through.