The Time Machines In Our Minds

Taking A Chance on Love Performed by Ella Fitzgerald
I thought that cards were a frame-up 
I never would try 
But Now I'm taking the game up 
And the ace of hearts is high.

I first confronted this song while taking piano lessons at our house in Bayside. These lessons were taught by Mr. Anson and after a while those lessons developed a familiar pattern.  The two pieces I had been given the previous week would be performed first, to show some mastery.  Then the two pieces for this week would be introduced and tried.  Of the two pieces one was classical.  (Clementi Sonatinas convey the right sense of these.)  I seem to recall that we had a few books of classical music at the house and Mr. Anson would choose selections from these sources.  The other piece was sheet music that Mr. Anson had rexographed and punched holes in.  We (my brother and sister also took lessons from Mr. Anson) would put the new piece into a loose leaf binder that had the shape to contain this type of music.  The music itself had notes for the melody, but for the accompaniment there were cords written in.  This meant that when you played the accompaniment you could either play block chords, perhaps varying the note sequence within the chord, or as an arpeggio. This, along with the volume and perhaps the pace at which the piece was played, gave the rendering a sense of improvisation.

I'm Getting Sentimental Over You Performed by Frank Sinatra

I thought I was happy,
I could live without love
Now I must admit love 

Is all I'm thinking of.

I took piano lessons for 5 years.  For the first 4 years, I would practice about a half hour per day.  During the last year, in which I had started taking clarinet lessons as well, I did not practice piano on many days.  It was an indicator that I was ready to stop taking lessons.  Until then, however, I developed a skill that has survived into adulthood.  I could take a piece of sheet music where I already knew the tune and give a tolerably good rendering on first playing, as if I were playing by ear.  (The issue for me now with this is the font size of the music that we have.  I often can't tell if the note is between the lines or on a line.  That has made the playing less fun.)  

While I don't remember this explicitly, I must have sung the lyrics while playing the songs, as I now know the lyrics of many of these songs by heart.  (In contrast, I have no such ability to play the classical music now and for the most part don't try to play those pieces at all.). Indeed, this playing and singing was a kind of emoting, my first recollection of doing this sort of thing.  This sense of emoting must have been helped by the nature of the music, much of which was love songs with a common theme in the lyric.  (I've selected the bits of lyric to illustrate that theme.) It is conceivable that such emoting could have happened with the painting we did in elementary school.  Perhaps with other children more skilled than I was that is where they developed their sense of self-expression.   But it didn't work that way for me.  I had the piano playing and once in a while in a social situation some ability to express warmth with a verbal observation.  If that too was learned, it happened very early, perhaps in nursery school. My inclination now is to treat such expressions of warmth as part of my disposition. 

Try to Remember Performed by Jerry Orbach
Try to remember the kind of September
When you were a tender and callow fellow.

I was never good enough to play the piano in a public recital.  But my skill level was sufficient to have family and sometimes friends gather around the piano to sing along.  My dad especially liked to do this, as a form of entertainment.  Try to Remember has to be the best possible song for this purpose.  The melodic line is very simple and the lyrics are so sentimental, a real tearjerker.  I recall being at the piano like this with other kids in my dorm my second year at MIT (where they were lubricated with beer and/or gin and tonic).  A girl who lived the floor below me at Senior House sat on the piano bench with me and turned the pages.  Others were standing around, close enough so they could read the lyrics on the page.  It was evidence that some people want group singing as part of their social life, especially if the songs are familiar and sweet.  Indeed, after I was married we'd often do this with extended family members.

Here is a different set of experiences that might be more unusual.  When we were still in Vancouver BC, living together, engaged but not yet married, my not yet wife and I would sing while driving to wherever we were going.  (We ate out a lot then and occasionally went to the movies.)  The favorite song was definitely Ol' Man River, another song that Mr. Anson had me play.  I would not characterize it as a love song, but there is some romance in it.  And the melody ranges across a few octaves.  Singing the base line in each verse is its own reward.

After my kids were born I learned to put the baby to sleep by holding the baby with his head on my shoulder, touching my ear, and then singing in a gravelly voice.   My favorite then was Haul Away Joe, a song my dad favored.  But once in a while I'd do a little Cole Porter for variety or other show tunes, often from Fiddler on the Roof.  The warm feeling created then was much like the feeling we'd get a year or two later when we would read a book before the kid went to sleep.  Goodnight Moon was one of the favorites then.  We'd never got tired of reading that.

* * * * *

While some of me still remains a tender and callow fellow, I think it helpful to look at two distinct segments of my life, to sort my behavior.  In reverse chronological order,  the first started when I became an ed tech administrator and lasted till now, even though I've been retired for almost 10 years.  At the start, I had already been married six years and had two young kids.  Over time I developed friendships and collegial relationships with many different people on campus, within the CIC (which then was the academic arm of the Big Ten) and nationally.  I had very warm feelings for these people that I wrote about in a post called Affection. And for the most part, the gender of the colleague didn't matter at all in our one-on-one interactions.  I won't say that gender didn't matter at all in the group dynamics, but it was of secondary importance there as well.  (At a national conference the guys from the CIC Learning Technology Group would go out to dinner and the women would do likewise.  The night before an LTG meeting, we'd all go out to dinner together.)

These sort of warm feelings in work are perhaps a byproduct, as the work itself comes first.  But they end up being the reason the work itself becomes enjoyable.  (I don't want to over romanticize this.  There were plenty of headaches too, but I'll abstract from those here.)  I actually try to teach about this in my course on The Economics of Organizations, where we do Akerlof's model on Labor Markets as Partial Gift Exchange.  This is as close as economics comes (and it is part sociology) to a workplace that would generate the type of affection I described above.  The emphasis in the economics is not on the warm feelings generated.  It is on the improvement in productivity that occurs in such a work environment.  The two go hand in hand.

The earlier period is my years in school, from junior high through graduate school, and then including my time working at Illinois till I met my wife, about 8 and a half years into being a faculty member.  While the relationships with male friends were pretty much the same as when I was an ed tech administrator, there was more nuance then regarding affection with female friends, because there was a gray zone of uncertainty where the relationship might take a romantic turn.  I was pretty bad at managing that gray zone.  Out of shyness I often wouldn't ask - would you like to take a walk?  would you like to go to dinner?  would you like to have a drink?  or other questions of that sort.  I don't think the shyness was ever overcome.  Instead, the frustration from what in retrospect seemed a missed opportunity became a spur for being more forthcoming the next time around.

It is also worth noting that while I continue to hold rather romantic ideas about these things, there is no denying that we were exposed to sex in a much more raw way during adolescence and thereafter.  If you watched TV or went to the movies, you couldn't avoid it.  I will mention just two things here as illustration.  The first is this Noxzema TV Commercial, where Joe Namath gets creamed by Farrah Fawcett.  The second is  The Avengers TV series.  Many of my male friends had a thing for Diana Rigg, moi aussi.  We were taught that sex sells, which it evidently did.  I don't think we needed to be told that, but that we were, repeatedly, and that added to the sense of failure in the missed opportunities.

* * * * *

Before I ever learned as an administrator the need for doing a post mortem at work when a project would go awry, to identify the causes and see if we could learn from our mistakes so we wouldn't repeat them, I would review these episodes from the earlier period, imagine that I played my cards differently in the review and then it followed a path that had a happy ending.  This is one type of time machine that I'm referring to in the title of this piece. I've "learned" from reading some popular psychology pieces about this sort of imagining that many people do this.  (Note, I'm not referencing such pieces here, an indication that I'm not sure whether it is science or bs, though it is comforting that at least some others do seem to do this.)

I have not included the interim period, where I was much more satisfied with how things went.  In fact, the year we were engaged I can recall exactly two fights.  One was in Vancouver and was about how to cook broccoli - boil it or steam it.  (I was on the wrong side of that one - boil it - and afterwards I bought flowers to patch things up.) The other was on the drive back from Vancouver to Champaign.  After a very romantic night in Yakima Washington, we had a dreadful time in Butte Montana.  The hotel we stayed in was very shabby.  But we rebounded after that and had a good time on the rest of the trip. We did make a whopper of mistake later on.  While planning our wedding we also purchased the house we would live in soon after we married.  Doing either of those things individually would have been very stressful.  Doing them together was overwhelming.  But that's spilt milk and I'm not crying about it now.

As I can write about certain aspects of that time and do view it as such a happy part of my life, I don't have need for the time machine to fix what might have happened but didn't. And I will observe the transformation from academic economist to ed tech administrator happened in stages and was facilitated by the novelty that was entering our lives in the early days of the Internet, a factor so large that my mental time machine couldn't do anything about it, even if it had wanted to. Before that interim period it's a different story.

And there are episodes from different junctures of that - when I was a counselor at a sleep-away camp, as an undergraduate at MIT, and again after I transferred to Cornell, as a graduate student at Northwestern, and then when I started working at Illinois.

The funny thing is, I don't travel back in time to each of these places with equal frequency.  The focus is on graduate school, especially the first two years.  There are two main reasons for this.  Between Cornell and Northwestern I lost about 50 pounds.  Being overweight was definitely a liability on the romantic front. At Northwestern, my appearance was normal and I was making a fresh start.  As I told a friend recently, my mind didn't make the adjustment nearly as readily as my body did.  This made that first year a challenge, even as opportunities did present themselves. (Actually, the first quarter at Northwestern was so intensive that there really weren't opportunities then.  I'm talking about after that.)

The second year was a bit different.  At Northwestern in Economics at least then, 1977-78, being a TA was a degree requirement for the PhD.  And the Department, which was having some funding issues then, upped the requirement from 4 sections (2 per quarter for 2 quarters) to 6 sections (2 per quarter for all 3 quarters).  During this time I was the rep from my class to the Grad Studies Committee.  This change clearly wasn't made for the educational benefit for the graduate students.  (As an aside, I was on fellowship.  So I didn't get paid anything in addition for being a TA.  Further, because it wasn't income, I didn't have to report the TA activity when filing my income tax.  Indeed, that was the real reason behind some of these shenanigans.  Eventually the IRS caught up with this and disallowed the practice.)

The prospect of being a TA brought a different wrinkle into these gray area interactions.  The song by the Police, Don't Stand So Close To Me, conveys some of the idea.  As a TA, I was very well regarded by the students.  I was quite knowledgeable and passionate about the economics.  During that year, several male students told me I was their favorite TA.  This was based purely on the teaching of the economics.  I, of course, can't know this, but I intuited that some female students developed a crush on me.  This was manifest not so much in live class sessions, though it did happen sometimes there as well.  It was mainly evident during office hours, which I conducted in the Library lounge, a public space.

Writing the previous paragraph was a challenge, as if I was threading a needle, because nowadays sexual harassment on campus is such a big deal issue.  So I want to emphasize that in actuality nothing untoward happened, in the classroom nor in office hours.  I performed my TA function as it should have been performed.  All the action was in my head and possibly in the head of the female student. The most dynamic of these episodes happened in real time as I was performing my TA function, rather than as reflection afterwards.  That contributed to the intensity of the experience.  Another factor that might have mattered is how Northwestern differed from Cornell regarding student culture.  At Cornell, at least among the students I knew, there was an ethos that prevailed about not displaying wealth even if you had plenty of it.  As a result, most students dressed down when going to class.  I continued to do that as a graduate student, a flannel shirt and jeans my usual attire. But many of the students I taught at Northwestern dressed up when coming to class.  Either the Midwest was a different animal than the East Coast, or the times they were a changing.  I had sensed the former ahead of time and was fearful about the culture difference. When I seemingly cut through that, there was exhilaration.

I didn't teach my third and fourth years in graduate school.  I resumed teaching when I came to Illinois and I did experience some of what I had previously experienced as a TA, but the situation was more muted this time around.  One reason for that is distance in authority.  A TA is in between the professor and the student.  At Illinois when I taught I didn't have a TA, but I was now the professor.  It's interesting how young faculty establish their authority.  One of my colleagues wore Brooks Brothers suits while teaching - authority demonstrated in appearance.  In contrast, I had a tendency to make my course more difficult than it should have been.  My approach made some of the students negatively disposed to my class and that blocked the romantic sentiments of those students.  There is also that I was a little older and a little more mature.  I was only 22 when I started as a TA.  I did eventually modify my course difficulty level and I think it generally true that students feel more comfortable with a younger instructor.  But its also true that then my office hours were actually in my office, and the students typically came in groups - strength in numbers.  So there was a different dynamic at play.

I now want to turn to a different time machine, the one the brings our past episodes and incorporates them into who we are at present and how we regard others.  Let me describe the underlying issue first. In the simplest economic model of productivity, the person either puts in effort or the person shirks.  Effort should be rewarded.  Shirking should be punished.  But now, let's complicate things by adding the mental state of the person.  The person can be mentally healthy, in which case things are just as they were before, but if the person has mental health issues, perhaps the person is suffering from anxiety and depression, then productivity-wise the person can look like the healthy person who is shirking.  But the right response is not punishment.  It is to be caring and helping.  There are two issues to confront when the person we are talking about is a student and I am the student's instructor.

The first of these issues is how to identify the student with mental health issues and distinguish the situation from the case of the mentally healthy student who is shirking.  The second issue is how to develop an attitude to want to be helping the student in this instance.  Helping the student, for example by accommodating work that has been turned in very late, well past the deadline, might be thought of as something of a bother.  There is no contractual obligation to do this.  What then might encourage it nonetheless?

What I've found, whether this is true only for me or if it might work for others as well, is that I need to feel affection for the student, more like how I felt affection for my ed tech colleagues, but it would be okay even if some of the feeling was like it was when I was a TA.  The likelihood of a romantic relationship with a student now essentially nil for me, while the student's need for help is real and evident, anything that can create this sense of affection is for the better.  What triggers the affection is evidence of the student struggling, e.g., not coming to class for a while and then reappearing and with a doleful look on the student's face.  Sometimes it is even more obvious.  In an email the student describes the struggles.  As I've written elsewhere in this blog, the number of students who are having like experiences has been rising dramatically, even before the pandemic.

Beforehand, I would not have seen this connection between ethical behavior and having a sense of affection for those who will receive my help.  Now I believe these two things are inseparable and is a very important lesson learned from all the frustration I had with romance when I was younger.

* * * * *

About 10 days ago, a bunch of friends from high school, Benjamin Cardozo in Bayside Queens NY, had virtual happy hour in Zoom.  There were 21 people on the call.  The number of students in our graduating class was well over 1100, so I would hesitate to call it a reunion because of how many others were not on the call.  But it had the feel of a reunion. And it precipitated many subsequent one-on-one interactions by participants in the call as well as all-group exchanges by email.  This post represents me trying to make sense of the call and the follow up as it ties into my life.

There is no doubt that for me the follow up was more fun and interesting than the call itself.  On the technology side of things, Zoom calls where everyone participates equally (as distinct from Webinars where the audience is in a more passive role while the presenters are more active) need to have fewer participants and/or require a moderator who keeps those who do speak to a strict time limit so as not to monopolize the conversation.  If we had met face to face, there is no doubt we'd have broken into smaller groups, and then some would mingle with other groups after that.   There is also that I organized the call based on my friends in Facebook from Cardozo, then there were a few friends of friends who were added to the call.  But the fact is that if two people are friends of mine, they need not be friends of each other.  So many in the call felt affinity for a subgroup on the call, but not for everyone who participated. 

I'm still uncertain how things should play out from here.  I'm going to content myself with a few observations based on the follow up activity where I was directly involved.

The whole thing was encouraged by the stay-at-home behavior we are all living through now due to the pandemic.  A reunion call offered some novelty in interaction.  We graduated 48 years ago and while we have occasional exchanges in Facebook we don't have real conversation.  So there was some hunger for this beforehand as filling a need.  I'm curious to know how the participants perceive that need now.  I did calls with several friends, sometimes in Zoom, others by phone.  And I had email exchanges or Facebook Messenger exchanges with a few others.

Some of the calls were with friends I had been pretty close with in high school.  Others were with friends where I can't recall previously having an extended one-on-one conversation.  I made a point earlier in this post of noting the my professional interactions after I became an ed tech administrator made gender a subsidiary issue, at most.  That was not true in high school, at least for me.  Then I had several deep relationships where we had meaningful one-on-one discussions that engaged me and from which I benefited greatly.  All of those were with other boys.  I can't recall any deep conversations with girls with whom I had Platonic relationships.  Might that have been possible then, but I simply didn't discover it?  I don't know.  In any event, it is certainly possible now.  Indeed the conversations I had with women were in tone much like the conversations I would have with my ed tech colleagues, though the subject matter was different, of course.

Most of these conversations focused on the present and had little or no nostalgic elements.  Some of the conversations did have discussion, not so much about what we did in high school, but rather about things in the past that happened since high school.  In one case where I had an extensive email thread, there was quite a bit of nostalgia, coupled with a time-machine-like look at what might have been.  I found it delightful and fascinating, as I've never previously externalized any of my time machine sojourns.  Yet unlike those sojourns, where I on multiple occasions return to the same episode for still another look, this externalized sojourn was one and done.  And it begs the question, do we have a lot of other territory from high school still to examine or will we soon grow tired of the nostalgia and then, perhaps, grow tired of each other?

I have a more academic reason for maintaining this connection.  I have a sense now that school is broken.  I mean high school and college taken together.  The mental health issues are the canary in the coalmine.  There is no balance between learning for the joy of learning and going to school to get a good job.  It's all the latter and none of the former.  But I believe that when I was in high school there was a true balance between the two.  Indeed, for me it was mainly the former, with the latter a byproduct only.  I still want to learn from my high school classmates how it was that way for them.  Learning about that would help keep me from getting tired of them.  Yet this is my question, not theirs.  Might there be something else that gets them to keep wanting to come back for more?

Many of us have tsoris of one sort of another, mainly health or money issues, sometimes both.  I've got my share of the health variety, which I've written about elsewhere but haven't brought up in this context much at all.  As remedy, I have found that later in life kvetching can be a joy, one that consistently delivers and requires no great creativity to produce.  A group kvetch might be a stretch, but I'd go for it if the others would as well.