Having already voted I found myself look forward to the week after election day, hopeful that things will calm down and that I can go back to some enjoyment while reading the news. Surely we are all living in a Roberto Duran moment, No Mas! As soothing as this little reverie was, it didn't last very long at all before a frightening thought occurred to me. What if it doesn't calm down at all? What if this horrible horrible election season has legs and indeed becomes the new normal?
Here's how it might happen. Let's take as our starting point Clay Shirky's really wonderful blog post from several years ago, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. To make for an imprecise metaphor, Newspapers are a latter day Dinosaur and Web 2.0 is the latter day equivalent of a large meteor crashing on earth and upsetting the evolutionary balance. Back when Shirky wrote that post, Newspapers were facing an existential crisis.
Take next the role of social media in Tahrir Square and Occupy and the subsequent embrace of social media as venting. This is where Shirky partly got the the story wrong. Most people are not so interested in being citizen journalists. But everyone, it seems, wants to write their own Op-Ed and social media provides an affordance to indulge that desire. Further, tone-wise, such posting enables people to remain somewhere between slightly and strongly affronted in their online personae. Indeed, the technology seems to be encouraging their venting.
The last bit of the vicious cycle is the wounded lion phenomenon, here applied to for profit newspapers (and TV News shows as well). Survival becomes the preeminent concern. The mantra changes from All The News That's Fit To Print to All The Eyeballs We Can Possibly Attract. As bad as Drumpf has been for the nation, dragging our political rhetoric into the muck, he has been a boon for the media. The eyeballs have come in droves, if for no other reason than to find pieces than can be cited in their own missives posted to social media.
Having tasted the the thrill of a surging readership (viewership) can the traditional news media outlets return to a more sober form of journalism? Or have they become hooked on the tabloid form and then will continue to propagate it even if Drumpf fades into the sunset (or returns fully to reality TV, the more likely scenario)?
Until this election cycle, my favorite part of the NY Times was the Opinion section, where I looked forward to reading cogent analysis provided by thoughtful writers. Thank God for Thomas Edsall. He still delivers on that. Alas, all the other pundits seem to have been co-opted. Piece after piece have been churned out about the Drumpf with literally zero incremental value add for the reader. How is this possible? I suppose each of the columnists have editorial freedom in their topic selection and in a normal universe that would seem to be a good thing. But every authors wants an audience. These pundits are no exception.
Can they unlearn the bad habits they've picked up in the last year or so? I hope they can, but if I were betting I'd bet against.
Thursday, October 27, 2016
Wednesday, October 19, 2016
When Students Don't Get It
In the fall semester 1975, the last semester where I took courses for credit at Cornell, I was enrolled in a course on Philosophy and Law taught by a popular instructor, whose name I can't recall now. Among our readings were pieces by Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls. For the most part I enjoyed that class quite a bit and think I got something significant from it.
But there was a term paper that I really mangled. I was writing on the question - is punishment necessary for the law? The essay should have focused on the role of conscience. Where conscience is active external punishment as deterrent is unnecessary. But for whatever reason, I eschewed the discussion of conscience entirely and instead rendered a cost-benefit analysis. (I didn't know much economics at the time but perhaps my decision to attend grad school in economics mattered here.) This was entirely outside the philosophical issues that were important for the course. I got a poor grade on that paper. I recall a brief chat with the professor after class one day where I admitted my error and after that may have promised him that it would not happen again.
There are probably many more such incidents in my career as a student than I care to admit. But I was a pretty good student and for the most part I did get it or I knew in advance that I didn't care about the subject matter (mainly foreign language) so if I didn't get it then I was entirely untroubled by that consequence. In contrast, if I was stuck on something in my bread and butter areas, math in high school and college, microeconomics in grad school, I was then all in about getting unstuck and I wouldn't let go of the thing till I reached a satisfactory resolution.
Of course, there are also things that I don't get that are more a matter of taste. For example, my parking spot at the university is behind the Business Instructional Facility and there are a fair number of BMWs in the parking lot much of the time when I get there before teaching my class. I know that Business faculty are paid quite well, so that they can afford these vehicles is certainly true. But we are a public university that is struggling to make ends meet budget-wise. In my view, these personal displays of wealth are in bad taste and I don't get why everyone else doesn't see it the same way. (Some people do get this, for sure. But it is definitely not universal.)
Before I turn to students on this score, let me note on these matters of taste more broadly considered that we are all creatures of how we were raised. For me, while a variety of factors matter, I think they can be broadly summed up in a few considerations. My family practiced a very reform Judaism; I grew up in New York City where the Catholic kids often when to parochial school, so the public schools I attended had a large swathe of kids who were similar to me in background, and I started college in the early 1970s, where the end of the Vietnam War and then Watergate were the most prominent public events shaping my emerging adult consciousness.
Let me close this section by observing that I believe there is some unity between the matters of taste and the cognitive/intellectual as far as giving purpose and motivation. Making sense of what is going on is very high on my list of priorities about what we should be doing and what we should be teaching our students to do.
* * * * *
Sometimes it is useful to me to go back and read things I wrote quite a while ago, if only to help me recall that I've been confronting the same issue for much longer than my memory otherwise would recognize. On the students not getting it front, I wrote the following paragraph about students in our Campus Honors Program. The paragraph itself is an excerpt from this blog post.
Before moving on, let me make a conjecture suggested by the experience discussed above. Even very good students nowadays don't read much good writing intended for a general audience. Among the various problems we have with college education today, this may not be the number one issue, but surely it is in the top five. And, if the diagnosis is correct, it is not clear what to do about it. There is some conceit in educational circles to the effect that if only the right pedagogic approach is adopted then meaningful learning will ensue. My own view on this is that pedagogy can, at best, be part of a mix of causal factors for learning. The other obvious factors are first, student motivation, students must want to learn and put in the effort it takes for that and second, student agency with regard to their own learning, students must feel that they can get it if they apply themselves. I don't believe that pedagogy itself can bring forth these other factors from the students. These factors must be present already as a prior condition.
Students can self-educate this way, by putting in the time reading good general interest writing and then reading related pieces that connect to one another. It is much easier to make sense of something one reads if the reader already has a good and appropriate context in which to consider the piece. One might call that the reader's worldview. I seem to recall watching on TV the playwright David Hare discussing this idea of worldview, how important it is for an adult understanding of things, and that the audience liked his plays because it helped them to consider their own worldview. Alas, I couldn't find a link to that particular conversation.
I really don't know the worldview of my students, though some of it gets revealed in their blogging for my class and perhaps a bit more of it makes itself known via how the students interact in the classroom and how they handle the other course requirements. I will conjecture about this below.
First, I want to note that in my class this semester I have witnessed several instances where the class as a whole doesn't seem to get it. Here are a few examples. I had the students write a blog post about "opportunism" as well as to provide an example when the student had a chance to act opportunistically but ended up refraining from doing so. In my course "the holdup problem" is a big deal and provides a rationale for why there is vertical integration been a firm and its input supplier. So this blog post was aimed at getting students to see if they had any personal experience that would give them some insight into the holdup problem and how it might be resolved. Alas, many students confounded "having opportunities" with opportunism, and so wrote about something that really wasn't relevant to what the class was discussing. Only one student had the presence of mind to do a dictionary lookup of opportunism. For the rest, they simply assumed they knew what they were talking about. Part of my issue as an instructor is whether it is reasonable for me to expect that everyone in the class would do such a lookup, if they hadn't already gotten the meaning of opportunism from reading our textbook.
Another example happened when we did a bargaining experiment in class, my sole attempt at a real active learning experience for the live classroom this semester. Students were assigned to either be a buyer or a seller. Each student was given a slip of paper which for the buyers had their values for buying units of a good and for each seller had their costs for selling units of the good. Further, the slips of paper put them into a scenario where a buyer was paired with a particular seller in a predetermined way. They were then to bargain about price, with the goal to maximize surplus on their side of the bargain. The aim of the experiment was to see if this bargaining would produce the efficient volume of trade.
The experiment failed because most of the students ended up acting in an irrational way - producing more trade than was efficient (meaning producing some trades where both the buyer and the seller were made worse off). I wrote up my analysis of that experiment and shared it with the students. I was very disturbed by this outcome. The students, in contrast, didn't seem to be bothered much by it at all. I can't really tell if they were actually bothered but didn't want to show that or if they were simply not concerned about it. I fear, however, that for the most part it was the latter.
The last example happened just this week. I had students write a blog post in mid semester to do a "connect the dots" exercise with their previous posts and to give them a retrospective on what we had been doing. In both my comments on these posts and my in class discussion of them, I encouraged the student to take the prompt I give them and ask why that prompt is there and in addition ask how the prompt ties into the economics we are studying. I encouraged them to make those questions and answers part of their posts. We've had one additional blog post since. Not one student did this. They all wrote to the prompt without inquiring at all why this was a course related thing to do.
* * * * *
Here is a little sketch of my conjectures that "explain" these observations. First, the college degree is prized above any learning that the degree is meant to signify. This is education as a passport. The students definitely want the passport. They seem much less interested in the personal transformation that the the passport should represent. They are either unaware or unconcerned with this apparent contradiction.
Second, school is perceived as a bunch of hurdles to get past in any possible way. If students can get through a tough course with a decent grade (e.g. Calculus) they are satisfied. In turn, the system lets many of these students through, because high failure rates are intolerable to many and the costs of imposing a high failure rate in a particular class are disproportionately borne by the instructor of that class rather than by the institution as a whole. This is a national issue, as illustrated by this piece in today's Inside Higher Ed.
Third, the more courses are perceived of as hurdles, the more students experience what should be entirely alienating - getting credit for learning something without really understanding what's going on. Even if this is disturbing to the students the first few times it happens, eventually they get numb to it. So they go about their coursework without an expectation that it should produce an understanding and they do this coursework purely out of a sense of obligation rather than for any other reason.
Fourth, and now I will restrict attention to students who are from the suburbs of Chicago, a majority in my class though there is a significant minority of students from elsewhere, schoolwork is subordinate to their social life, which is wrapped up either in the Greek System or in going to the bars around campus and in either case entails quite a bit of drinking. Just about all my students are over 21, so they are legal this way. I can't say that I blame them. In fact, I do think kids this age should have a good deal of fun. But the way it seems to be happening here, there is too much nihilism and a contributing factor is that the schoolwork produces such dysfunction.
I associate a good chunk of this with a culture that prizes money, which is embodied in the image of the country club as the good life, and is moderately anti-intellectual. To me, this characterizes much of what upper middle class life in the Midwest is like, especially as it is perceived by someone with my background.
* * * * *
It is very hard to look at this from a longitudinal perspective. I don't have data for this that goes back more than a few years. And I've only taught with blogging since I've retired (apart from that one CHP class). But my sense is that things have been getting worse.
The reader will note that I have not made any appeal to technology as a driver in the above. Technology might explain deterioration in student performance in producing understanding. Consider, for example, this piece from earlier in the year about the perils of multiprocessing. Students seem to live by staring into their phones. So that clearly is one possibility. There are others. The accountability movement, embodied in the persona of Margaret Spellings and in the law by No Child Left Behind did enormous damage, in my view. I can't recall hearing anything about K12 in our current Presidential campaign and for college the discussion is all about cost not about learning. We don't seem to have the mental bandwidth to consider the learning issues now. Perhaps we will return to it when the election is finally over.
Let me close with my pipe dream hopes for how the issue might resolve. The thought is to marry this social problem of too many students not getting it with another social problem and try to resolve both at the same time. The other problem is that there are too many people getting PhDs in the humanities, meaning they can't find gainful employment in their fields after they've written their dissertations.
Suppose that students can be coached in learning to get it, but such coaching is labor intensive and should happen in rather small cohorts of students, which persist in the activity for an extended period of time. In the old days, we would have called this teaching reading comprehension. Nowadays, there probably would need to a different label attached to the activity to make it more glamorous and meaningful to the participants, so that being part of it is desired and not perceived as a consolation prize. Beyond that there, of course, would need to many many details worked out. And as I'm writing this, I've got that old New Yorker cartoon in my mind. So, if a bet on whether something like this would succeed were placed in front of me, I would surely bet against. Still.....
But there was a term paper that I really mangled. I was writing on the question - is punishment necessary for the law? The essay should have focused on the role of conscience. Where conscience is active external punishment as deterrent is unnecessary. But for whatever reason, I eschewed the discussion of conscience entirely and instead rendered a cost-benefit analysis. (I didn't know much economics at the time but perhaps my decision to attend grad school in economics mattered here.) This was entirely outside the philosophical issues that were important for the course. I got a poor grade on that paper. I recall a brief chat with the professor after class one day where I admitted my error and after that may have promised him that it would not happen again.
There are probably many more such incidents in my career as a student than I care to admit. But I was a pretty good student and for the most part I did get it or I knew in advance that I didn't care about the subject matter (mainly foreign language) so if I didn't get it then I was entirely untroubled by that consequence. In contrast, if I was stuck on something in my bread and butter areas, math in high school and college, microeconomics in grad school, I was then all in about getting unstuck and I wouldn't let go of the thing till I reached a satisfactory resolution.
Of course, there are also things that I don't get that are more a matter of taste. For example, my parking spot at the university is behind the Business Instructional Facility and there are a fair number of BMWs in the parking lot much of the time when I get there before teaching my class. I know that Business faculty are paid quite well, so that they can afford these vehicles is certainly true. But we are a public university that is struggling to make ends meet budget-wise. In my view, these personal displays of wealth are in bad taste and I don't get why everyone else doesn't see it the same way. (Some people do get this, for sure. But it is definitely not universal.)
Before I turn to students on this score, let me note on these matters of taste more broadly considered that we are all creatures of how we were raised. For me, while a variety of factors matter, I think they can be broadly summed up in a few considerations. My family practiced a very reform Judaism; I grew up in New York City where the Catholic kids often when to parochial school, so the public schools I attended had a large swathe of kids who were similar to me in background, and I started college in the early 1970s, where the end of the Vietnam War and then Watergate were the most prominent public events shaping my emerging adult consciousness.
Let me close this section by observing that I believe there is some unity between the matters of taste and the cognitive/intellectual as far as giving purpose and motivation. Making sense of what is going on is very high on my list of priorities about what we should be doing and what we should be teaching our students to do.
* * * * *
Sometimes it is useful to me to go back and read things I wrote quite a while ago, if only to help me recall that I've been confronting the same issue for much longer than my memory otherwise would recognize. On the students not getting it front, I wrote the following paragraph about students in our Campus Honors Program. The paragraph itself is an excerpt from this blog post.
I taught two more CHP classes after that. One was in 2006, a repeat of Econ 101. The other was in 2009 and was not an Economics class. It was a course on Designing for Effective Change that I wrote about in this piece in Inside Higher Ed called Teaching with Blogs. After about two weeks of proceeding as I had done in the Econ classes, the students complained that I was monopolizing the discussion and requested that they lead the discussion themselves. I assented to this request, though its implementation required me to bite my lip repeatedly. During the next class session I had the urge to intercede, but suppressed that. The class was discussing Atul Gawande's The Bell Curve, one of my favorite essays. They never got to the gist of the piece. They spent the entire time on some of the early facts in the setup and iterated on those. Afterward I criticized them. Using the metaphor of swimming in a natural body of water, I told them there was this beautiful lake but they never made it to its center. Instead, they spent the entire time swimming in the reeds. This outcome was rather disturbing. CHP students are the best we have on campus and they weren't making good meaning of an essay that was written for a general audience. I didn't know if the cause was their individual lack of reading comprehension or if, instead, the group dynamic kept those who did understand the piece from driving the conversation to the meat of the essay. I never learned the true cause, but thereafter we opted for a mixed mode where sometimes the students would drive the discussion and other times I would drive.
Before moving on, let me make a conjecture suggested by the experience discussed above. Even very good students nowadays don't read much good writing intended for a general audience. Among the various problems we have with college education today, this may not be the number one issue, but surely it is in the top five. And, if the diagnosis is correct, it is not clear what to do about it. There is some conceit in educational circles to the effect that if only the right pedagogic approach is adopted then meaningful learning will ensue. My own view on this is that pedagogy can, at best, be part of a mix of causal factors for learning. The other obvious factors are first, student motivation, students must want to learn and put in the effort it takes for that and second, student agency with regard to their own learning, students must feel that they can get it if they apply themselves. I don't believe that pedagogy itself can bring forth these other factors from the students. These factors must be present already as a prior condition.
Students can self-educate this way, by putting in the time reading good general interest writing and then reading related pieces that connect to one another. It is much easier to make sense of something one reads if the reader already has a good and appropriate context in which to consider the piece. One might call that the reader's worldview. I seem to recall watching on TV the playwright David Hare discussing this idea of worldview, how important it is for an adult understanding of things, and that the audience liked his plays because it helped them to consider their own worldview. Alas, I couldn't find a link to that particular conversation.
I really don't know the worldview of my students, though some of it gets revealed in their blogging for my class and perhaps a bit more of it makes itself known via how the students interact in the classroom and how they handle the other course requirements. I will conjecture about this below.
First, I want to note that in my class this semester I have witnessed several instances where the class as a whole doesn't seem to get it. Here are a few examples. I had the students write a blog post about "opportunism" as well as to provide an example when the student had a chance to act opportunistically but ended up refraining from doing so. In my course "the holdup problem" is a big deal and provides a rationale for why there is vertical integration been a firm and its input supplier. So this blog post was aimed at getting students to see if they had any personal experience that would give them some insight into the holdup problem and how it might be resolved. Alas, many students confounded "having opportunities" with opportunism, and so wrote about something that really wasn't relevant to what the class was discussing. Only one student had the presence of mind to do a dictionary lookup of opportunism. For the rest, they simply assumed they knew what they were talking about. Part of my issue as an instructor is whether it is reasonable for me to expect that everyone in the class would do such a lookup, if they hadn't already gotten the meaning of opportunism from reading our textbook.
Another example happened when we did a bargaining experiment in class, my sole attempt at a real active learning experience for the live classroom this semester. Students were assigned to either be a buyer or a seller. Each student was given a slip of paper which for the buyers had their values for buying units of a good and for each seller had their costs for selling units of the good. Further, the slips of paper put them into a scenario where a buyer was paired with a particular seller in a predetermined way. They were then to bargain about price, with the goal to maximize surplus on their side of the bargain. The aim of the experiment was to see if this bargaining would produce the efficient volume of trade.
The experiment failed because most of the students ended up acting in an irrational way - producing more trade than was efficient (meaning producing some trades where both the buyer and the seller were made worse off). I wrote up my analysis of that experiment and shared it with the students. I was very disturbed by this outcome. The students, in contrast, didn't seem to be bothered much by it at all. I can't really tell if they were actually bothered but didn't want to show that or if they were simply not concerned about it. I fear, however, that for the most part it was the latter.
The last example happened just this week. I had students write a blog post in mid semester to do a "connect the dots" exercise with their previous posts and to give them a retrospective on what we had been doing. In both my comments on these posts and my in class discussion of them, I encouraged the student to take the prompt I give them and ask why that prompt is there and in addition ask how the prompt ties into the economics we are studying. I encouraged them to make those questions and answers part of their posts. We've had one additional blog post since. Not one student did this. They all wrote to the prompt without inquiring at all why this was a course related thing to do.
* * * * *
Here is a little sketch of my conjectures that "explain" these observations. First, the college degree is prized above any learning that the degree is meant to signify. This is education as a passport. The students definitely want the passport. They seem much less interested in the personal transformation that the the passport should represent. They are either unaware or unconcerned with this apparent contradiction.
Second, school is perceived as a bunch of hurdles to get past in any possible way. If students can get through a tough course with a decent grade (e.g. Calculus) they are satisfied. In turn, the system lets many of these students through, because high failure rates are intolerable to many and the costs of imposing a high failure rate in a particular class are disproportionately borne by the instructor of that class rather than by the institution as a whole. This is a national issue, as illustrated by this piece in today's Inside Higher Ed.
Third, the more courses are perceived of as hurdles, the more students experience what should be entirely alienating - getting credit for learning something without really understanding what's going on. Even if this is disturbing to the students the first few times it happens, eventually they get numb to it. So they go about their coursework without an expectation that it should produce an understanding and they do this coursework purely out of a sense of obligation rather than for any other reason.
Fourth, and now I will restrict attention to students who are from the suburbs of Chicago, a majority in my class though there is a significant minority of students from elsewhere, schoolwork is subordinate to their social life, which is wrapped up either in the Greek System or in going to the bars around campus and in either case entails quite a bit of drinking. Just about all my students are over 21, so they are legal this way. I can't say that I blame them. In fact, I do think kids this age should have a good deal of fun. But the way it seems to be happening here, there is too much nihilism and a contributing factor is that the schoolwork produces such dysfunction.
I associate a good chunk of this with a culture that prizes money, which is embodied in the image of the country club as the good life, and is moderately anti-intellectual. To me, this characterizes much of what upper middle class life in the Midwest is like, especially as it is perceived by someone with my background.
* * * * *
It is very hard to look at this from a longitudinal perspective. I don't have data for this that goes back more than a few years. And I've only taught with blogging since I've retired (apart from that one CHP class). But my sense is that things have been getting worse.
The reader will note that I have not made any appeal to technology as a driver in the above. Technology might explain deterioration in student performance in producing understanding. Consider, for example, this piece from earlier in the year about the perils of multiprocessing. Students seem to live by staring into their phones. So that clearly is one possibility. There are others. The accountability movement, embodied in the persona of Margaret Spellings and in the law by No Child Left Behind did enormous damage, in my view. I can't recall hearing anything about K12 in our current Presidential campaign and for college the discussion is all about cost not about learning. We don't seem to have the mental bandwidth to consider the learning issues now. Perhaps we will return to it when the election is finally over.
Let me close with my pipe dream hopes for how the issue might resolve. The thought is to marry this social problem of too many students not getting it with another social problem and try to resolve both at the same time. The other problem is that there are too many people getting PhDs in the humanities, meaning they can't find gainful employment in their fields after they've written their dissertations.
Suppose that students can be coached in learning to get it, but such coaching is labor intensive and should happen in rather small cohorts of students, which persist in the activity for an extended period of time. In the old days, we would have called this teaching reading comprehension. Nowadays, there probably would need to a different label attached to the activity to make it more glamorous and meaningful to the participants, so that being part of it is desired and not perceived as a consolation prize. Beyond that there, of course, would need to many many details worked out. And as I'm writing this, I've got that old New Yorker cartoon in my mind. So, if a bet on whether something like this would succeed were placed in front of me, I would surely bet against. Still.....
Sunday, October 02, 2016
Mental Associations
The gingham dog and the calico cat
Somewhere in the vicinity of 2 or 3 AM I am making my usual rounds, to and from the can, when this line of verse appears in my consciousness. We read The Duel in school, but whether that was elementary school, junior high, or high school I really can't recall. I'm pretty sure I haven't thought of it even once since, until early this morning. That's a span of somewhere between 45 and 50 years. Neither gingham nor calico are part of my working vocabulary. When it comes to fabrics - cotton, flannel, and wool are my standbys, with some thought I might be able to come up with a few synthetic alternatives. The point is that I don't pay attention to fabrics. Yet that line was occupying my thoughts earlier today. I was puzzled as to why.
After failing to go back to sleep, due partly to discomfort from arthritis and partly because I now had this challenge to grapple with and when that happens I find it very hard to let it go, I sit down at my computer and begin to retrace my steps from the evening before.
The Internet has ways to feed the narcissism that is in all of us. In my case I use a tracking program called statcounter to monitor hits on my blog. Once in a while somebody finds an old post I made that is seemingly unconnected to the topics of the day and yet is also not utilitarian (so it is not about some online technology). Then I will often amuse myself by going back to the post and reading it anew, revisiting the issues I was grappling with at the time of writing.
In this case the post is called Maladies and Malaise. It was written at an odd time for me. The Campus had just announced a paid separation program aimed at reducing the number of staff. There was budget hell and this was one of the more responsible ways that the Campus addressed the problem. For a variety of reasons, I thought I was a good candidate to leave the university then. While I had not yet signed the contract, the thought of doing so was weighing pretty heavily on my mind. Then there was a different source of strangeness. I was part of an online reading group called Motley Read, where we negotiated our way through James Joyce's book of short stories, Dubliners. This was my first and so far my only experience with such a group. And while a few of the members I was vaguely aware of ahead of time, particularly Alan Levine and Christ Lott, I really didn't know them. Barbara Ganley was the only member of the group with whom I had substantial prior interaction.
In this post I am grappling with notions of imagery - in pictures, in writing, and in our minds. I am reacting to the story Two Gallants, which is rather disturbing yet without being much of a story at all. And I am reacting to a postcard that Barbara had sent me about the story Eveline. There is then the question of causality between image and story. We have a bit of an exchange on this in the comments.
This is the precursor that was already in my head. Not that much later I went to sleep. I really don't know whether this is an old wives tale or real science, when you have some problem that vexes you, sleep on it and let your subconscious have a hack at it. Then when you wake up, you may find that you've solved the problem. In this case I didn't even realize I had a problem to solve. It seems my subconscious felt otherwise. And it came up with - The gingham dog and the calico cat.
Now things get a little weirder. It almost seems an act of clairvoyance. After I get up for real and have my first cup of coffee, I start to read an Op-Ed by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, part of which sketches formative experiences in her life on her path to becoming a Supreme Court Justice. One of those was as an undergrad at Cornell. She studied writing with Vladimir Nabokov who taught her that effective writing constructs pictures. Reading this was almost too much for me to bear. I had already seen that movie, earlier in the morning. And, by the way, I too am a Cornell grad and not that long ago read a Nabokov novel, The Defense, writing a couple of posts about it including this one entitled Optical Ill Luzhin. The planets must be aligned to create associations like this.
One of my regular habits is to play Sudoku. I find it relaxing, a pleasant combination of pattern recognition and deductive logic. There is a certain reward in finding the pattern, especially when it is not immediately obvious. It is that feeling of discovery which encourages repeated play. So before reading other Op-Ed pieces I indulge my habit. But my brain feels like it is operating in slow motion. The patterns do not come quickly at all. Often when I can't find the pattern I will cheat a little. Doing the Sudoku online enables that, one reason I prefer that to doing it on paper. It also times you when you do it online. Most puzzles take me between ten and fifteen minutes to finish. This time it takes much longer, more than 35 minutes, the longest it's ever taken, but I somehow managed to resist the temptation to cheat and instead let the patterns emerge at their own pace. While there is always some uncertainty about whether the pattern will make itself apparent or not, this morning I seemed to feel confident it would happen though I was very slow with the pattern recognition. That combination is unusual for me now. It may have been more routine 25 or 30 years ago when I writing papers in economic theory. Now I either feel mentally agile, usually that requires a good night's rest as precursor, or I lack confidence in my own capacities, which seemingly occurs with increasing frequency as of late. This morning was different. I was in a kind of reverie. But eventually that broke and I returned to the glum thoughts that have been occupying me.
The last few years I've really struggled in my teaching because the students don't see it as part of their job to produce associations beyond the ones that come immediately; and yet that is what I'd like to encourage them to do. I wrote about this in a post for the WAC@Illinois blog, Making connections via mental puttering. I wonder if students ever have the sense of discovery that I wrote about in the previous paragraph. Absent that, the reason to persist in thought and let subconsciousness assert itself would appear to be lacking. But everyone dreams, right? Does everyone daydream too? Or does the head that is always staring at the screen live in a surface world only, where all the images are provided externally?
Let me close with this. In my Facebook feed this morning a status update of mine from a year ago appeared. It was about Sherry Turkle's seeming omnipresence (I linked to three different pieces she had produced) and her warning that multiprocessing is killing real learning. This piece, which appeared in The Chronicle, is still worth the read even now. Turkle shouts the alarm louder than I ever could. Still, slow reflection is a tough sell. In this market we need more buyers. How do we get them?
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