Confessions of a micromanager

Micromanagement is a bad thing. How on earth did I end up editing a bunch of handbooks and surveys, and answering dozens of emails a day about technical bugs? - Surely NOT because I like to do everything myself, and not because I don't trust my colleagues and staff. Here is my story this semester:

Much of my summer prep work went into grant writing. I found myself late in August scrambling to change the data collection systems for our PTEP programs. Because I was scrambling, I did not really have time to talk to coordinators and staff about what has changed, and how the new processes work. Delegation of responsibilities requires time for discussion, and training people, especially if a new technology is involved. None of that happened. The result of it is that we had many organizational and technological glitches (if you discuss a change a lot, and test extensively, less of this happens). But remember, I did not inform and train other people to help with those glitches, so I ended up doing a lot of trouble shooting myself: no one knew how to help. This creates a vicious cycle: I run around and plug the holes, and therefore have no time to catch up on information and training. The end of the semester came unexpectedly (who knew, right?), and I find myself in the same position again: rewriting the handbooks for the next semester, no time to talk to others. Besides, a couple of unplanned problems came up, some very time consuming, others less so. But again, they always do come up and should be time-budgeted for.

Could this be avoided? I am not so sure. The cost of delaying the changes is also high. I think our new data collection system is a lot better than the old one; it will eventually become much better, when the kinks are worked out. It is almost completely paperless, gives us much better data much faster, and involves significantly less work for students, cooperating teachers, and supervisors. I also learned that if you delay a change for a semester, it ends up being delayed for three years. Why? - Because if you don't do it during Summer, you surely will miss December, and then something may come up in the next Summer. And those are really two windows of opportunity for implementing changes. However, in Summer, very few faculty are around. In December, they all run around looking exhausted, and will shoot without a warning if I call a meeting. The world we live in gives no time to improve things, because we're too busy doing things that need to be improved.

The lesson I've learned is that getting involved in just one too many projects may have a chain-reaction effect on a whole number of other projects. I also learned that one may become an involuntary micromanager. Just need to get a grip and start planning how to get from under this one.

For those of you who do not know, the new system is pretty simple. All PTEP programs (we still need to convert two more) collect the following data:

1. Work Sample portfolio through http://iwebfolio.com; they all have rubrics that collect evaluation data. We also figured out a way for students to feed data back to iwebfolio, and scan and upload needed documents (mainly, the Diverse Field Experience, and the last lesson observation form).
   
2. Standardized lesson observation form: those are short, make sense to us, and incorporate different content knowledge areas.
   
3. On-line Final Evaluation modules for cooperating teachers and supervisors, AND Exit Surveys for graduates; both on http://uncsurvey.org.
   

It is not surprising, given our numbers, that many technical and communication bugs need to be eliminated for this simple scheme to work. That's been my project for almost the entire semester.

Scarcity and decision-making

It is easy to be a leader in the times of abundance; it is less fun in the times of scarcity. For example, when we had few faculty members, there were plenty of classes to go around – for anyone who wanted an overload, or a summer class, or a convenient schedule. There was enough left for adjunct faculty, who provide an essential safety network for us without any meaningful commitments from us (I am not sure if everyone understands what an important part of our operations these people are). Of course, the abundance of opportunities created scarcity of people – we did not really have enough to serve on committees, to oversee classes, to pay close attention to curriculum. Now we have more people which is wonderful, but fewer classes. That brings an essential problem of all human groups: how do you divide goodies when we don't have enough for everyone?

It is my job to manage this process, somehow. What I really don't want to happen is for me to become a ruler who bestows favors to a few, at the expense of many. That would be an awful deal for everyone, including the few and the many. This is why we designed a set of rules, which are about as specific as can be expected. They can never cover all the circumstances, however, and are by necessity quite flexible. The Charter gives the Director much power in assigning classes. (The same could be found in the BOT policy manual: deans and directors are expected to play a large role in assigning work). This was something the initial Charter committee clearly understood, and that is what the faculty members voted for. It was clear to everyone that dividing up the goodies cannot be a matter of simple democratic voting. It does not work like that, because of the issues such as competency are involved. Those cannot be discussed publically without a lot of people being hurt. It is also impractical to subject hundreds of small decisions to the democratic deliberations.

OK, I am stuck with these powers I don't really want. I wish a computer could just do that, but no algorithm has been invented for these kinds of things. What can serve as system of checks and balances? What I figured out over the years is this: if I am asked how a decision was made, I have to have a rational explanation, consistent with the rules spelled out in the Charter. It does not matter that I am actually very rarely asked; it is simply an application of the defensibility criterion, a way of talking to myself, if you like. Can a reasonable person listen to my explanation, and if not agree, at least find it reasonable?

My colleagues vary to a great degree in what and how they are asking. Some will go to a great length to negotiate a two-day a week schedule, classes at only certain times, and maximum allowable overloads. Others are so shy, they never ask for anything, so I have to pry out of them what it is they want. Some will insist on seniority rights, even though they are not in the Charter. Others will argue fiercely for what they perceive is the best interest of their program or area. It is all good – I always say yes and will not question the reasons as long as the request does not conflict with someone else's interests. My practice is to try to follow the rules, to have a good story to back up a decision, to look for compromises, and never bring the conflicting parties face-to-face. I wish those little decisions could be transparent, but they cannot be: these stories are both exceedingly boring and potentially hurtful. What a paradox, but it is true.

Is this working? I think so, but then again, maybe I am wrong; please let me know if it does not work for you. Should we develop a more formal process? Should there be a committee overseeing staffing? We still have very few conflicts like that, which is quite surprising. We still have a lot of options in comparison to other institutions; we still were not force to make many hard choices. The situation of true scarcity may or may not confront us, but it is a good idea to think ahead – how would we handle it if it arises?

A week’s worth of life

I looked through my calendar, and ransacked my memory, with a single question in mind – was it worth it? Which portion of the week did I spend doing something good, which portion did I enjoy, and which was wasted or drudgery? Ah, I wish there was a calculus of life, and the minutes and hours were easy to separate into the good and bad baskets.

For example, on Monday, I spent an hour training Early Childhood students how to pass the PLACE test. Was it good? I enjoyed helping these students very much, because this is something they need, and I was actually able to help a little. But then, the test itself seems to be ill-conceived, and hardly meaningful. So, in the grander scheme of things, both the students, and I probably wasted our time. But then again, is watching a movie, or hiking a waste of one's life? If you go so far as to say something like that, what is life itself, if not enjoyable waste of time?

Then there are completely wasteful activities, which irritate us all, for they are neither enjoyable nor useful to anyone in particular. For example, we submitted all required paperwork for our new position in Colorado Springs, but someone from a higher office wanted me to submit the organizational chart of our School, with all the position numbers listed. Not just a list of faculty – they have that – no, an organization chart. As a result, I have to spend maybe another hour or two fishing for this information, playing with graphics, etc. – all of this, I am pretty sure, for no particular reason, just because someone has the power to require me to do so. But then again, maybe that person had a good reason to ask, and I just fail to imagine the reason? It's like that every time. We never know fully the value or significance of our actions, although we can certainly guess. But this impossibility of full knowledge is both frustrating, and what makes life so delicious.

It is about to snow. Svetlana and I have bought some food, some plum wine, and are going to hunker down, and survive the winter. She's buying some cookies, and I sit in the car and watch snowflakes fall down from the sky.

Snow falls, snow falls;
To the white stars in a blizzard
The geranium flowers reach
Beyond the window sash.

Snow falls, and all's in tumult
All around, the world takes flight:
The back door's unstable staircase
And a crossroads in the night.

Snow falls, snow falls,
as though it's not flakes
but in a patched coat
the sky descends to earth.

As though it is like a fool
From the uppermost landing
Stealthily, playing hide and seek,
The sky descends from the attic.

Because life does not wait,
Before you know it, it's Yuletide.
But a short span,
And look, there's the new year.

Snow falls, extremely thick    
And in synch, with the same steps,
In that tempo, with that sloth*
Or with that same quickness,
Time passes, perhaps?

Perhaps, year after year,
People follow how snow falls
Or like words in a poem,
Perhaps time passes...

Snow falls, snow falls,
Snow falls, and all is tumult:
A whitened pedestrian,
Surprised plants,
The turn of an intersection...

Boris Pasternak, 1957, not sure whose translation

Tired

Sometime in the middle of this week, it suddenly became clear to me that I feel very tired. Not sure why this is the case; maybe because I did not get a real vacation for longer than a week in about 15 years? Maybe it is this weird virus that is going around? Not flu, but something like that. Does not make you very sick, but makes you tired?

I then realized that many people around me are in the same position – they look a bit tired, sound somewhat overworked. Not to mention that a lot of people are actually sick with all kinds of flus, colds, and bronchitis. Honestly, I felt some remorse for my endless pushes to do more, to do it better, and faster. There were several push-backs, when different people either told me to bug off, or to slow down, or to leave them alone. Sometimes, it was told directly (which I always appreciate), and sometimes indirectly (which is OK, too, but make sure I get the message, because I don't always get it). But something was going on for the last couple of months – maybe the solar flares, maybe the virus – which made many of us just tired. It also does not help when the economy collapses, and all you hear is bad news. Even though it is somewhet becoming better, people we know and don't know have a lot of troubles.

We came a long way since the Fall of 2006. We did a lot of changes, revisions, improvements, reorganizations. And it was always fun and not overwhelming – not to me anyway. Maybe we just hit a wall in terms of how much and how fast people can do and what level of change they can tolerate? But if it is true, how do you slow down? Our students can't wait: classes, curriculum revision, scheduling, reporting calendars are all going as usual. The relentless machinery of the university life is still churning its wheels. There are e-mails to answer, papers to grade, books to write.

But let's just agree to find some time for ourselves. Take a weekend as weekend – no work. Postpone a project that can be postponed. Take it easy for a while, will ya? I will try to do the same. For the next month, I therefore ban all e-mails marked as High Importance, with the goddamned red exclamation mark! There is nothing that important.

The structure of change

The world around us is changing fast, faster than ever before. Just a few things: the State budget is heading to a cliff; a perfect storm for teacher education is brewing; the technology revolution has really started to affect education. Yet our University like most others, does not seem to be able to change. We definitely improve our programs, and the organization is improving. But all of it is happening at such a slow pace that the world seems to be hurling past us. Whatever improvements we manage to accomplish are just nibbling at the edges; they are neither revolutionary, nor profound. Universities are sitting on a large stock of human capital: some of the most educated and creative minds in the nation. Yet they seem to unable to use those minds for fostering innovation. The rate of innovation in private business world is many times higher than in higher education. We all remember the first PC's with blue screens and no mouse. Some people may remember Gopher. We now have vastly superior computers plus iPhone, Kindle, iPod, plus Google, FaceBook, Wikipedia, and many others. Even old technologies like cars manage significant improvements every few years. They are safer, more efficient, and more comfortable now than just five years ago. Yet our classrooms look and feel just like they did in 1950-s, with only slight and uncertain improvements.

Part of this is the institutional culture. Whenever a faculty committee is asked to think about a new or revised program or procedure, it meets once a month for an hour each time. It always takes a year to design a change. And because we are used to collaboration, the committee will agree on something most acceptable to all – which virtually guarantees only minor changes. I just served on two of these: we spent a great deal of time, talked a lot of smart talk, but accomplished something very modest, none of it is game-changing.

The University bureaucracy is no faster either. We revise curriculum once a year, because of the arbitrary deadline the printer imposes on us to change catalogs. Memos can sit on various administrators' desks for months and months. And not just ordinary memos – a new and promising program we designed was just recently approved, although we submitted it in March. What is more important that bringing new programs and attracting new students to this campus? Apparently, there is. We think in terms of years; the world thinks in terms of days. Universities are really pathetic where it comes to change.

Innovation, like anything else, needs a special support structure. For example, our university has nothing like an R&D unit. No one is really expected to come up with new ideas, or support new ides as a part of his or her job. There is absolutely no process for submitting new ideas – no place to send them, and no one to consider their merits. There are no incentives for individual people or groups of faculty and staff to work on innovations. Why take the risk, if you need to play it safe to get tenure? There is no chance for any of us ever get rich and famous from a brilliant idea, because the University is vigilantly egalitarian and jealously hierarchical. We need to change that and provide specific, tangible rewards for groups of entrepreneurial faculty, as well as recognition and support.

Empowerment and discontent

All democratic systems of governance share a paradox. If you hold strong beliefs, you will be surprised and upset when your particular view does not emerge victorious. A fallacy is at work here: if I live in a democracy, things should go my way. But this is not true, of course. Democracy is about sharing the space with other people, who may also have strong beliefs, different from yours, and whose opinion may prevail.

It is the same with faculty governance at universities, only complicated by having a specific power-sharing agreement between faculty and administration. When things are not going your way, you may think this is because the administration is usurping faculty's power. However, administrators intervene in decision-making for different reasons: sometimes, they just want to pursue larger interest of the organization, and sometimes, they interfere against one group of faculty on behalf of another group. There may also be a selfish or egotistical interest of an administrator at work. The difficulty is to figure out which is which, considering that we normally cannot read each others' minds.

Here is my story: last spring, I ventured to revise the annual evaluation guidelines, mainly because of request by different faculty to clarify certain things. I was also concerned that there seems to be a lack of reliability in our evaluations. When I proposed the revision to the whole faculty, members of the Evaluations Committee asked to take the feedback from the faculty and prepare the proposal for the vote. However, they disagreed with the entire proposal, with the exception of one clause. So far so good, no harm done, and we have always found a way to disagree without any animosity. The committee said what it felt, with best of intentions. However, I became worrying about the integrity of the process. Intuitively, it did not felt right, because the proposal was meant for the whole faculty, and yet it got considered by a very small group. I started checking with the Robert's rules, and found that yes, indeed, a pending proposal cannot be amended without the proposer's consent. That makes sense, doesn't it?

In other words, this is not about my proposal – which is, I must say, represents a fairly minor change of a very minor part of our work. The change itself does not merit much airtime. This is about the integrity of faculty governance process. We cannot decide things by consensus at all times, although we should when possible. We cannot allow some of us to have the implied veto power over our decisions, even if it is presented (and honestly thought of) as consensus-seeking. We cannot act because of "anonymous faculty concerns," because it is not clear what the concerns are and how many people have them. Short of an actual vote, we would never know that.

Of course, the conditions of the voting process itself are also important, which is why Robert's rules have all of these subsidiary motions that allow an assembly not only to make decisions, but also decide how each decision will be made. We would really be better off if everyone knew at least the basic rules. That would put us all into a more equitable position, and allow people to argue for or against certain ideas, without the democratic discontent. The dictatorship of mutually agreed rules is the only alternative to a dictatorship of individuals.

The First Snow

This morning, I woke up to the unmistakably different light that fills the room after a snowy night. You don't have to look down on the ground to know – it was snowing. In Western Siberia where I grew up, the first snow is a bigger deal. We have long, rainy and cold autumns, and the first snow ends it all, usually abruptly and irreversibly. Snow paints over the messy and imperfect picture of the last year, and primes the canvas for something new. The world is white like a sheet of paper waiting for a poem to be written on it. I love snow, and the first snow especially. It is nostalgic, poignant, and hopeful. We went to Boulder, and walked on Pearl Street. The leaves were caught in the early snow, still green but down on the brick pavement. They smelled like freshly pickled cucumbers, maybe because the salt on the street. We ate a little sushi and had some hot sake befitting the weather. Then we went to the Borders on 29^th street; I read The New Yorker, while Svetlana browsed art books and journals.

What makes a good day, a day worth living? Is it what we are able to accomplish? Or is it what we were able to experience and to enjoy? With our jobs, there isn't really a border between work and leisure anymore. What I read in The New Yorker may show up as an idea useful for my job. At work, my experiences are often as enjoyable as today. We don't work to live anymore, nor do we live to work, I hope. The art of living well has something to do with finding pleasure and beauty in both work and leisure. I am certainly still have to master it, so don't ask me for advice on how. But some people – very few – find something enjoyable and entertaining in almost anything they do. Every day is the first snow day to them. That is what we all should try to achieve.

How to save UNC

We are less than two years away from the financial cliff, created by convergence of the Colorado TABOR law and the recession. While the Feds have bailed us out this year and the next year, in the year 2010/11, we can lose $14 million of our $44 million, according to President Norton. This is not a time for gradual measures or slow change. We need to learn radical thinking very fast, so we have the time to prepare.

Here is how we can make up for lost state subsidies. The most disruptive competitive strategy is to cut the cost of your commodity or service. It allows stealing many customers from your competition. If we charge students only half of current tuition, a well-publicized campaign could recruit 8000 new freshmen and transfers, who would otherwise go to other universities. It would bring about $20 million dollars.

How can we add 8000 students to the campus that can barely accommodate 12000 students? When students come to campus, they pay for the college experience as much as they pay for actual teaching services. But this can be made an optional service. We will make a deal with a special category of students (let's call them riders): you get to pay only half of regular tuition, and get your degree, under one condition: you cannot come to classes. Dozens of regular on-campus students (let's say "cameramen" and "camerawomen") will be hired to take their regular classes with digital cameras, film every class, and then upload the films on a server on the same day. The riders will organize in groups, following one of these student workers, watch every class, do all the assignments, and participate in a limited way through the Blackboard. The riders would have to be self-directed learners, but their experience would not be much different from a regular on-campus student that does not say much in class. Our faculty won't have to deal with technology at all, but will be paid extra to grade the extra assignments and answer the riders' questions. Or they will be given a choice to hire an adjunct to help with those activities. This is not exactly on-line teaching, because faculty won't need to learn new skills or redesign their courses, but not exactly face-to-face experience either. It might actually be not only cheaper, but better than a typical on-line course. We learn from observing others as much as we learn from participating in activities. The "cameramen" would also act as peer advisers to their rider group, helping to figure out classes and homework, and maybe even film an occasional homecoming or a dorm party.

If we do something like that, there is no time for pilots, or trying it small scale. We need the economy of scale – developing and testing of technological solutions, financial arrangements, and practical procedures would be expensive. The cost can only be justified by going all the way right away. We cannot have several administrative groups and Senate committees studying the issue for a few month, and different units figuring out their parts. We'd need a direct and urgent conversation with the campus community; we need a wide-spread buy-in. We also need a coordinating center with a small team of faculty, administrators and IT types entirely dedicated to the project, with adequate resources. We need a leap of faith. There is no better time for innovation that a good crisis. No crisis should be wasted.

Do I want to be doing all this running around, planning, advertising, tweaking hundreds of classes, taking the risk without knowing if it is going to work? No, I don't. However, I also don't want to have a meeting about which colleague we are going to let go, which classes will have to double in size, and how many unpaid overloads we will are going to teach. You have to decide which of the two a lesser evil – working on something new is or firing friends?

 

Solar flares and chicken soup

I have absolutely no idea why this happens, and therefore choose to attribute it to solar flares. It maybe a particular influence of the planets, which is as good a theory as any. But it definitely happens in specific times, which have little to do with season. Sometimes it happens in the spring, and we think it's the cabin fever. In other times, we find another good explanation, like stress of such and such event. However, this is utterly inexplicable, so I will go with the solar flares.

Many different people would just get very nervous, and over-react. I am not only talking about things I refer to, however vaguely, in my last two blogs. In the last month, I had to deal with a dozen different, unconnected small crises. For some reason, students complained remarkably more than usual, completely uncharacteristic for the beginning of a semester. Several people got into conflicts, in some cases with no previous history of it. A simple question would result in people getting angry or upset. Rumors that are normally ignored, would suddenly gain currency. I must admit, my own actions do not seem terribly wise either, so I am not immune to the solar flares. Although speaking objectively, I could not have caused all of these little crises. It was just a difficult month, for me and for many people I know. Solar flares, definitely solar flares. My computer's hard drive fried, too.

But some people obviously are immune – they are happy, not noticing any tensions, and just going on about their business as usual. About others, I just don't know; please tell me so we can run some statistical analysis. Was the time from the end of August to now hard for you? Were you nervous? Anxious? Did people seem a little less sensible and pleasant than usual?

What are we supposed to learn from this? Simply put, we don't always know why something happens. Err, make it – we rarely know why something happens. We know very little about the social dynamics; there is no good theory, and little in a way of predicting and affecting it. We don't know how small events can sometimes cause large consequences, and why human groups sometimes become more anxious and agitated. The cure is very simple: like a seasonal flu, it will go away. When you are sick with flu, you may feel so bad; you think you're going to die. But we, of course, know that it will pass, and this is not really the end. In fact, you did not know about how influenza usually ends, you could really get scared and hurt yourself by applying drastic measures. Bu we know better: it's just feels yucky for a while, but it will go away. Chicken soup, some rest, and it will be over.

La Comédie humaine

La Comédie humaine is a collection of inter-related novels and short stories by Honoré de Balzac, a 19^th century French novelist. It is actually not funny (the title probably refers to Dante's Divine Comedy), but is richly amusing in showing how people can behave in different circumstances. It's a parade of characters and stories. In the last couple of weeks, I felt like Balzac, wondering about the way people think, act, and make decisions. I was particularly interested in how a coincidence of smaller events, half-understood and half-misstated phrases, accumulated tensions, and undefined relationships can all conspire together to create drama. The world of humans is truly unpredictable, and prone to disruptions. Whatever peace, whatever community we create together, is always fragile and in need of defense, maintenance, and constant restoration. And when people become closer to each other, it does not necessarily mean their relationships necessarily improve or become stable. Rather, the opposite is true: it is easy to be civil and generous with a stranger, with whom you have no overlapping interest or common affairs, and whose actions you don't need to understand. Once you become closer, and interact for a longer period of time, the Other comes into your scrutiny, and you are forced to make conclusions about his motives. The Distant Other is easier to like than the Close Other. I was always struck by the radical and pointed challenge of "Love thy neighbor," as opposed to asking to love the stranger, the traveler, and the distant.

Most people judge too quickly, because by nature, humans are story-tellers. If we know a little, have an incomplete picture, our brains just go on autopilot to construct the missing pieces into a coherent story. We MUST make sense, otherwise we are miserable. That story then takes on a life of its own, especially if it is emotionally charger. Do you ever become caught in a vicious cycle when the more you think about something, the madder you get? It's because no new information is coming in, and your mind keeps refining the story it has created, making it more coherent, more logical, and nastier. Once constructed, it becomes a framework for interpreting all the consequent interactions with the Other. The new events tend to strengthen the old frameworks, because they already come into a coherent narrative. Suspending one's judgment is perhaps one of the most difficult skills to master, hence the other most radical advice ever give to humanity: "Do not judge." Why? Because the initial story that you make up might be just wrong; it may or may not be accurate. Of course, we need to judge, but we also need to learn to not judge, or change our minds. If I learned one thing on this job, it is how easy for a misunderstanding to perpetuate, multiply, grow, and create a conflict.

Evaluation Anxieties

For some reason, whenever we talk about the annual evaluation process, some people get anxious. I am not exactly sure why; for me this is just another project of constant improving processes and procedures. Perhaps the anxiety is there because of some history before me, maybe because in general, people do not like to be judged and evaluated. Maybe I failed to explain my intentions.

A simple efficiency is the only agenda I have. The level of rigor we have is just fine, which last year's results have shown. We have a well functioning system already, and I'd be happy to keep it as is. But last year, several faculty came to me with questions – what do you mean by this and that, and maybe we should clarify certain things, and they did not know something. So, last March, I dutifully pulled out the Evaluation guidelines file and started to write some definitions – what does it mean to have a paper in print or accepted, or in revision, etc. Then I read the whole document, and gradually found more and more things to clarify, so it is easier to read, and faster to evaluate. This is something I do all the time – if I see something can be done better, I will suggest another form or another process. Can you see me getting engrossed in the document? That's what happened. We have a growing School, and it just takes too much of faculty time and my time to look through thick dossiers, especially if they are poorly organized. Several people suggested that it is easier to read dossiers that are identically ordered, and where the most important information is summarized. Anyway, I felt like I am doing a good service to the School, and I was not quite ready to hear that at least some people think I am trying to impose something on them. Why would I want that?

This is a faculty decision, and there is simply no way for me to implement any of the changes. We do have faculty governance, remember, which is a democratic system. In fact, we will go through the proposal item by item, and discuss their respective merits. We are a community of scholars, and have always had open and honest conversations; our disagreements have never produced personal animosity in the past. We value rational argument and respect evidence. Whenever there is an objection, we will put each specific item to a vote, and use a secret ballot to decide, so there is no pressure of any kind. That is how we did it the last two times, and this is how we will do it again. If something passes, it passes, if not – so be it. I am certainly not about to lose my sleep over a few hours of work that may not turn out to be useful. We really have larger fish to fry, and cannot afford to spend too much time – and emotions – on this routine process.

How to tell a good meeting from a bad one

My calendar for this week shows 19 meetings, one of which I skipped, totaling about 17 hours. If we assume a 40 hour work week (mine is a bit longer), it is close to half of the work week, if you include a number of unscheduled ones. Some thoughts on meetings:

• A lot of meetings are actually fun, when you get to meet people from other areas and units. Hanging out with a lot of smart people is one of the main benefits of our jobs.


• A meeting can also be an opportunity to take a break, and just rest a little. They are never as intense as working alone.


• Whoever is chairing it may or may not be effective at making it a social occasion, and put everyone at ease. But it is an important dimension of any meeting. We are social apes, and need to be comfortable with each other when there is a common task.
  
• A meeting is useful when there is a specific, practical issue that needs to be resolved. When a committee is created without an urgent need, it produces bad meetings, where people are not sure why they are there, but are too embarrassed to ask.
  
• Scheduling a meeting sometimes takes longer than the meeting itself. If only people used their calendars and kept them up to date, we won't have a problem, and would save hours and hours for more productive work. This is where technology really- really helps.


• Getting people together to convey information to them is a complete and utter waste of time, unless the information is confidential. If you want to share information, write what you want to say, and send it to me, and stop wasting my time on useless meetings! Remember, writing was invented for these exact purposes. A meeting is only needed when you want active input from other people, when you want a discussion, or want to see their reactions. No conversation – no meeting. If you must talk rather than write, record a vide and send it to me.


• I never take any paper with me other than doodling paper, because no meeting has ever resulted in more than half a page of actionable items. Those can be scribbled on the back of the doodling paper.
  
• The best meetings have a small group of people; they last only half an hour, an each comes out of it with a list of things to do.


• The best of the best meetings are those that solve a specific problem, and make everyone's lives easier.
  
• The worst of the worst are meetings where people talk about generic problems, without ever hoping to solve them.
  
• Larger group meetings are sometimes inevitable. They are very good for getting complex feedback, a reaction on a specific plan or proposal. Large groups of people are great at imagining how things can go wrong and what could be some unintended consequences. Groups over 10 are terrible at coming up with new ideas, and at working through a plan or a program of some sort. Why? Because the most banal ideas always win, and best proposals get ignored. Large meetings are for critical input, not for productive one.


• As a colleague commented recently, I am a bottom line thinker. Therefore, I enjoy meetings that actually have the bottom line visible, so it can be discussed. A gathering where agendas of people are unclear is a fancy dance of power interests – sometimes interesting, but always pointless.
  

Here is one of my doodles for the week. It does not mean I am not listening or thinking.

Administrative pests

In the last couple of weeks, I have been greatly irritated by various administrative pests we have in this Universities – forms, practices, and rules that eat more time and resources than they save and produce. I am probably becoming a pain in the butt for various departments and units for asking them to reconsider how they run their business. No, I am pretty sure of that.

Here is one example, just bear with me. To travel to a conference, a faculty member must submit the Travel Authorization form, along with a conference program. There can be up to five people signing this document: the traveler, School director, the Dean, SPARC or grant administrators, if these money are involved, and in some cases, VP for finance. These people must approve in advance things like the 2^nd bag fee. The only reason we even have this form is that some 10 years ago there was an embarrassing case of travel abuse. But we are still so scared; every trip must be obsessively authorized in advance, and then the reimbursement is authorized yet again, just to confirm that the first authorization is still valid.

Then when you come back, you must submit all receipts, of course, and complete another form – it has to be signed by hand, by all the same people again, in sequence – by sending the hard copy from one office to the next. In up to seven moves through campus mail, at least two people handle these forms – the administrative assistant, and whoever is signing it. Each of them can be on vacation, or too busy. Each of them can put the forms in a wrong place and then forget about them. The traveler, who needs the money, will eventually come to Karon who originates this entire paper stream. Karon will start calling through the 3-7 offices, trying to find out where the papers are. All of this takes literally thousands of work hours every year, and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, for no particular benefit. Remember some of the people involved are highly paid individuals, and administrative assistants, although they are not highly paid, still spend a lot of time on mindless activities instead of working with students, faculty, and keeping us on track.

When we reimburse travel for routine things like field supervision trips, we must use two different accounts, because many years ago someone thought it would be interesting to see how much money student teaching really costs. They were never able to do that (we still don't know how much it costs), but we are stuck with the two accounts. Now, if you supervise several students for different field experiences, you must submit two different reimbursement forms to two different admin assistants.

And I can give you at least a dozen examples of pests: pointless paperwork, unnecessary irritations and hoops we make each other jump through. Why? - Because no one is really paying attention to these things. Faculty are very powerful on campus, but they don't see the underlying organizational grid, and just want to see things done. Administrators like me are highly compartmentalized, and can barely keep up with our own operations, partly because we're inundated with the pests. We are not in a position to address campus-wide systemic problems. And when we do, we get a cold shower from other administrators who suspect we are invading their turf. Administrative assistants see most of the pests, but they lack voice and power to demand change.

Amongst all the frustration, my week had a great highlight. After years of enforcing it, we were able to abolish the TB test requirement. After a letter from CDHE, and our own investigation, we realized that none of the largest school districts we work with require the test anymore. They all abandoned the requirement over the years, but forgot to tell us, and we forgot to ask. Every year, 11 hundred students or so line up with their $30 in hand to get a TB test, and bring us a copy. Each student does it 2-4 times over the PTEP program. Dead, abolished, nevermore! Nothing gives me more satisfaction than killing administrative pests like this. I can kill them all day, every day.

Doomsday scenarios

Chinghiz Aitmatov once made fun of Muscovites' obsession with weather forecasts. Considering that Moscow's climate is really mild, and nothing dramatic ever happens, it is a really funny quirk. Americans, similarly, love various end-of-days stories. Hollywood keeps pumping out movies about comets hitting the Earth, aliens invading, robots taking over, etc., etc. My son Gleb pointed out that Germans, Russians, and Japanese do not make apocalyptic movies, perhaps because they have major catastrophes in the living memory, and Americans have not.

The same tendency makes American media exaggerate the extent of various economic crises, like this one. Someone not familiar with this American obsession with crises may think the end of days is very near. In fact, we're talking about a relatively small recession, and a minor increase of public debt and unemployment. All the stimulus spending are nowhere near to what the U.S. had to spend during and right after the WWII, and the U.S. levels of debts are still lower than those of Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Canada, and 25 other countries.

At our recent leadership meeting, we discussed a (somewhat remote) possibility of a 10% budget cut. Of course, we should do that as good managers, but I just found it funny how dramatic our discussion sometimes becomes. Just like those Muscovites dropping everything to listen to a TV forecaster telling about 30% chances of light rain, as if their life depends on it. I think it is more of a subconscious wish for an adventure rather than an expression of actual fear.

In a very stable, very secure environment, small differences tend to become larger than life conflicts, petty differences take place of serious drama. People know they are in the middle of a storm in a tea cup. They long for a real challenge, a big adventure, and perhaps for the doomsday. Fortunately, or unfortunately, it is very unlikely to come, and we should not worry too much, even if it is tempting to worry.

The swine flu semester

There is a small chance that the swine flu will come back in the Fall, and we will have to close campus for some time. It would be great to have a plan B, so we don't panic, and students can complete their courses as scheduled. Here is a very short plan; I think it will work.

1. Try to use Blackboard as a course supplement, if you do not do it yet. It could be as simple as putting your syllabus file up. But if you have a shelf and it is active, it will take you less time to get up to speed, and students will be used to having an active shell for your course. But you NEED to know the basic tools available in Blackboard – threaded discussion, announcements, e-mail, grade book, and chat room.
   
2. If campus closes, send an e-mail to your students, reassuring them that things are going to work out. If you need a few days to rework the course, say so, and tell them when to check back for the new plan. Make sure the new plan is doable, equitable, and as rigorous as your regular class. There is nothing wrong with asking students if the new plan looks OK to them. In fact, they may have a lot of suggestions you have not thought about.
   
3. Think of a plan B for your courses; even if it is very vague and all in your head. A vague plan is better than no plan. Some tips for developing one.
   
   1. One error common to on-line newbies is the attempt to mimic what is going on in f2f classroom in the on-line environment. For example, if you had a discussion, you try to do a chat room; if you normally have students work on projects, you ask them to do the same in the virtual world. A much better approach is to step back, think what your regular project or activity was trying to accomplish, and then create an equivalent from available on-line tools. For example, if you expect students to teach a mini-lesson to their own class, and then have others discuss and critique it – what does this accomplish? What do you want them to learn? Break it down by very specific elements. For example, students may be learning to explain math concepts to children. Ask them to write three ways of explaining what fractions are. Each should have a mental image or a manipulative. If the objective is to learn timing, have an assignment for students to tape themselves speaking (audio or video), then listen with stop-watch and reflect on their own timing. These are just examples. If you start slicing learning objectives thinly, every single one of them can be accomplished with an activity that does not require presence in the class. Just avoid the mimicking error. Here is a tool, somewhat helpful: http://fm.iowa.uiowa.edu/fmi/xsl/tgi/data_entry.xsl?-db=tgi_data&-lay=Layout01&-view
      
   2. If you're explaining and demonstrating a lot in class, consider either taping yourself and putting the video on YouTube, or using hundreds of teaching clips already existing there. Here is one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEV9C7Ld1Bw, on using the long division. Here is a 1^st grade lesson in Social Studies, on Holidays: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqmxJ2WnX8Y. Here is one on numbers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2bkXs_Mu0E&feature=channel. You might think that you're so brilliant that no one else can explain it just the right way. That is probably true… However, check the YouTube first!
      
   3. Another most common error in on-line teaching is monotony. Instructors can't think of anything, so they ask students to read a chapter, comment on it, and then maybe comment on each other's comments. Then they read another chapter, and do the same over and over again. Instructional variety is important, and to avoid monotony, do the same thing as with error #1: slice your learning objectives a little thinner, and you will see many more possibilities. For example, instead of asking to "comment" or "reflect," consider "find a flaw in the argument," or "give your own example of the concept or theory," or "think of an exception to the rule," or "will this work in another setting?"
      
   4. Be careful with evaluation of student work, especially if you had to quickly redesign the class. It takes a long time to develop and calibrate a good instrument, and students know that as well. Remember, we're working mostly with teachers; they do learn something about teaching, and apply what they know to us. If there is a bottom line knowledge set or a product you must see for students to pass the class, just say so. For example, you can say: OK, we will change the grading policy because of the flu, and I am not yet sure how it will look, but you all need to know that I cannot pass you without an acceptable thematic unit; I cannot give you an A without an outstanding thematic unit… Or something like that. In a situation of changing plans, simple accumulation of points is not a good indicator of a grade; a clear understanding of the bottom line will works better.
      
4. And if something like campus closure happens, remember, it is an opportunity to create a sense of community in our programs. It is the best time to show your human side, to be compassionate, and understanding. We are here not to enforce rules, but to help our students learn. Our authority comes from what we know and what we can do, not from the ability to give grades.
   
5. The most difficult courses are those with field components, but again, there are always solutions. We can waive some field hours (within the state law limits), we can substitute some of them for meaningful virtual experiences, and we can always give students incompletes, if needed.

The joy of planning

This week, I was able to do some preparations for the next year, which included scheduling, planning, thinking over our priorities and objectives. Why is this fun, exactly, I don't know, but it is. Part of it is the seasonal buzz we all get when sensing the beginning of a new school year. By "we" I mean people working in education. Each new school year brings its own energy to us. Each new school year is a chance to start from scratch, to meet new students, to rework that course, to do something different. Another part of it is the permission to let one's imagination loose. Planning is like writing fiction: it has to believable, but it does not have to be true. A plan is not a promise, it is only a pledge to try, intent to achieve. It feels both powerful and irresponsible, like a game.

Of course, in the next few days, I will have to turn on the critical side of my brain and scrutinize everything – can this be realistically achieved? Who is going to do it? When? What is more important? By the time I come with a draft to the School retreat, it will be a much more realistic document. And then we will do the same exercise together – from what we would like to do, to what we really have to do, and what we can possibly achieve. It is like working on a puzzle: different people's interests, strength, and commitments can be put together in one more or less coherent picture; it just takes some work, and some persistence. And because we are so different, so uniquely shaped, finding areas that lock together is its own special work/play. Nothing is more satisfying than seeing someone enjoy what one's doing and at the same time contribute to the common good. When we succeed in helping each other do that, we all are better off. When we try to make everyone the same, we fail. Appreciating of each other's profound weirdness is probably the strongest communal bond.

This playing with alternative realities is just interesting to experience. I am not sure if I am describing it well, but I which more people would take more time just imagining the future – the near future and the long shot.

The other kind of writing

In the last three weeks or so, Carolyn and I spent much of our time writing a grant application. It turned out to be for about 2.5 million in federal funds. We have submitted ten documents, the two biggest ones are 50 and 80 pages; the rest are much smaller. Carolyn did the majority of narrative writing, Harvey was essential in getting partner BOCES and a good external evaluator on board, I did most of the budgeting, and putting documents together. The little crew of GA's from the Dean's office found, analyzed, and presented data needed to qualify for the grant. After working on it, on and off, for three months or so, we turned it in on-line 40 minutes before the deadline.

My report: some of it quite interesting and creative. Designing the program was fun, writing some pieces, and even finding a creative solution for a very challenging budget (it has a 100% match). But much of it is pure drudgery – addressing some arcane regulations, going back and forth to various people, who do not respond, learning all the rules, and then redoing what have been done already, etc. One lesson for me – it would have been clearly impossible to do this for any one person alone. The second is the uncertainty: we have no idea whether it is going to be funded or not. Hence my advice to junior faculty: don't take a lead on a large federal grant until you're promoted. The expenditure of time and effort is so great, and the risk is so significant – it is not worth it, really. Wait for someone inviting you to be a junior partner, or go for smaller local grants. If you don't get the big one, there is nothing to show on your CV. Carolyn, Harvey and I can do it in our points of our careers, because we have tenure, and don't have to publish or perish. However, senior faculty should probably try it at least once or twice. The grants do not ring a lot of money to universities, despite a popular belief, but they certainly can help to have one's own project and obtain a certain amount of autonomy. The grant writing counts as scholarship for a good reason – it does require similar expertise, and similar efforts.

It was amusing to see how disorganized the Federal Government really is. The Department of Education has released the RFP very late – I believe 40 days before the deadline. It has changed the RFP several times since the issuing. The day before the deadline they said there will be another deadline, in case you were unable to beat this one. I called to verify a relatively important financial question, and was told by the program officer, "Not sure about that, we did not make a decision yet." The University's various departments were supportive and cooperative, although chronically understaffed and overworked, and hence not always fast or efficient.

It is a very different kind of writing though: much of it is showing endless compliance with the incredibly prescriptive rules. The application package alone is 95 pages of single-spaced stuff, with endless lists of requirements. The application checklist alone is 9 pages long. It includes requirements like this one, randomly picked:

(1) (F) Developing and implementing effective mechanisms to ensure that the eligible partnership is able to recruit qualified individuals to become school leaders through the activities of the eligible partnership, which may include an emphasis on recruiting into school leadership professions—

1. individuals from underrepresented populations;
   
2. individuals to serve as superintendents, principals, or other school administrators in rural and geographically isolated communities and school leader shortage areas;
   
3. mid-career professionals from other occupations, former military personnel, and recent college graduates with a record of academic distinction.
   

The intent is, of course, to attach a lot of little strings to the federal money, just to make sure people do a good job with it. But of course, the prescriptive approach also limits people's imagination. All of these programs funded by this particular grant will look like twins, because they all followed the same recipe. However, no one is sure if the prescription is sound. It is just something that seemed like a good idea at the time people wrote the RFP, and something that would not raise too many political objections. It is very difficult to apply effort complying with rules and requirements, if you are not convinced they make sense. That's the lesson for us all. The rules we apply to our own students should be few, rational, and enforceable. And they need to make sense not only to us, but to those who have to comply.

The ethics of reporting

Because of certain events in our University, I was asked what is the responsibility of faculty to report? For example, if you hear a rumor, or a student has shared something in confidence – what should you do with this information? This is not exactly obvious, and I don't think we have a good policy or guidelines. Here is what I think, and please don't take it as the official University's line.

All information about intimidation, harassment, or inappropriate behavior should be immediately reported to me or to the Dean. Such behavior can be by faculty, staff, students; it can be related to sexual harassment, or racial, or gender, or other forms of prejudice, or just random. Every faculty and staff member is representing an institution, and should care about its well-being. It does not matter if you heard it in confidence, or indirectly, or believe it was exaggerated. If you hear something remotely credible and did not do anything, you accept a part of responsibility for what may or may not be another ugly story. Not reporting is condoning. University's administration has a responsibility to investigate, and to take actions, but it won't do anything until it knows something. Do not assume that if something was conveyed to you as a common knowledge it is a common knowledge.

Now, if you hear that so and so is not a fair teacher, or is weird, or dishonest, you do not have the same ethical obligation to report. It often makes sense to bring someone else's attention to the problem, but it really up to you who to talk to and if you want to talk at all. People's personal and professional weaknesses may be just as annoying or even damaging our community. However, if there is no harassment, intimidation, or inappropriate behavior, it remains squarely within your own common sense judgment to decide what to do with this information. As many of my colleagues have realized, I am generally nosy and like to know what's going on. But none of you have an ethical or professional obligation to indulge me on this. It is perfectly fine to keep the information confidential; you will not be responsible for doing so.

And the third class of information is when someone makes a mistake on the job. Those in general should not be reported, unless one of these conditions is true:

1. It was a repeating error, a part of a pattern;
   
2. It had costly consequences, in money or time, or reputation;
   
3. You have a suggestion on how to prevent such mistakes in the future.
   

How do you distinguish between these kinds of things? One good way would be applying the Denver Post headline test. Compare these two headlines:

• A UNC professor threatens a student with violence
  
• A UNC professor loses a paper and gives an unfair "C"
  

Which one you think is more realistic? If your story is more like the second, it is probably up to you to report or not report it. If it more like the first, you have little choice but to report. Another way to figure it out is to imagine yourself or your child to be in the place of the alleged victim. Are you simply upset or enraged? If it is the latter, report, if the former, it is entirely up to you.

One way that is not so effective is asking whether we can be sued over this. First, most people don't have a good idea of what is and what is not a credible court case material. There are many myths and fears about being sued, but the University has a Council, let him decide those things. It is generally not very easy to bring a credible case to court without a specific damage or injury. And we are not in a very damaging business. Second, people litigate over so many things; it would be just paralyzing to always think about the threats of legal nature. The focus should be on us – are we doing right, honorable, reasonable things or not? If yes, the law is likely to be on our side.

The fine art of teaching

Mean	What you see here is distribution of mean student evaluations for our School faculty in the Spring of 2009. Each line is one faculty member, so if she or he taught more than one courses, those are averaged. Not a perfect indicator, but it shows we can really be proud. The waited mean for the whole School is 4.35 on a 5-point scale. We do have some awesome teachers, and students really appreciate what we do. The more student evaluations I read the clearer it becomes; it is not about being nice or amusing anymore. Some of the nicest people get the lowest scores sometimes, although being angry with students usually tends to lower the scores. But our students learn to appreciate those instructors who teach them something. Naturally, my eye is wondering to the outliers at the bottom of the list. What went wrong, and what can I do to help? My biggest concern is about people who have done it for a while, and still cannot get decent evaluations from students. I believe, this is an issue with just the level of effort. When students see a poorly prepared syllabus, no rubrics, a grading system that seem to change every week, or a professor reading a textbook aloud in class – they have little respect for the instructor. Not putting enough time into thinking through one's class is probably the biggest contributors to the low scores. And it does not matter how much experience you have, and how much you can improvise – homework is essential. In fact, I believe people who are more improvisational in their teaching, have more difficulties relating to our students as time progresses. This is because we all compete against each other in the eyes of our students. Once they see a well-designed course, which is well-paced, relevant, and engaging, going back to a long lecture with questionable relevance is very hard. A variety and density of instructional methods also seems to be important. Our students are future teachers, so they are not impressed by the same activity repeated again and again. Nor are they convinced by endless small group discussions without a clear focus. Long stories about one's life and teaching experience are clearly irritating. Time needs to be compressed, and used wisely. I am less concerned about one-time low scores; we all have classes that don't go well, one in a while. Nor am I worried about new people getting lower scores. It does take time to adjust and to find your own teaching voice and style – this is true even for those who already had successful college teaching experience elsewhere. This is a different university with its unique culture, and we are dealing with some very sophisticated students. We talk about teaching, and there is always an opportunity to learn more. My real worry is about people who seem to be stuck in one place and cannot get out of it. Sometimes it is simply laziness. To be honest, I don't know how some people I know and used to know fill their days. Anything they do seems to be done on the fly, without much thought and preparation. And it is not like they are preoccupied with grants or research or service. Producing evidence of a 40-hour work week is a challenge for them. For these people, working at home seems to be difficult. I recommend coming to the office 5 days a week, and spending 8 hours there – you'd be amazed how much can be accomplished. Sometimes it is anger. Once you get angry at students who are not smart enough or honest enough for you, it is very-very difficult to improve as a teacher. Every failure will serve as an evidence of how spoiled, stupid, unfair, and dishonest your students are. This is a dead-end, because think of it: if all students were bright, capable, prepared, and proficient, why would they need us? A teacher who is angry with his students is like a doctor, complaining how sick his patients are, and how nice it would be to treat healthy people! Anyway, I just wanted to say how well we really do overall, and how proud I am to be among such wonderful teachers. Also wanted to tell everyone, I pay close attention to the evals, understand the problems, and am here to help should you ask for it. Heaven knows I have had my own share of teaching problems, and - my students will probably say - I still have them. If there was a good way to rank, I would probably be somewhere in the middle among my colleagues, and certainly not at the top. I can help by facilitating conversations, by putting people in touch with each other, and of course, by sharing the few tricks of my own.
5.00
4.98
4.96
4.94
4.91
4.90
4.89
4.86
4.85
4.85
4.83
4.76
4.66
4.66
4.61
4.57
4.56
4.53
4.46
4.38
4.33
4.27
4.24
4.21
4.07
4.05
4.01
3.90
3.78
3.56
3.38
3.31
3.09
2.00

 

About blogs

OK, I have been doing it for three years. My first blog was published on July 2, 2006; I have 123 entries since then. Did not keep track from the start, but in the last 6 months, the site had 836 Visits with 478 Absolute Unique Visitors, and 1,189 Page views. Here is a little stats table thanks to Google Analytics:

Count of visits from this visitor including current	Visits that were the visitor's nth visit	Percentage of all visits
1 times	475.00	56.82%
2 times	77.00	9.21%
3 times	37.00	4.43%
4 times	28.00	3.35%
5 times	20.00	2.39%
6 times	17.00	2.03%
7 times	15.00	1.79%
8 times	13.00	1.56%
9-14 times	46.00	5.50%
15-25 times	27.00	3.23%
26-50 times	32.00	3.83%
51-100 times	49.00	5.86%

What does it mean, exactly? Even though I don't get many comments, at least some people read it, which is already a good sign.

The plan was to keep a journal of things that I learned, and make my thought process a little more visible. At first, it included both ruminations about our own institution, and about all things educational. Then I created another blog on wider educational issues, and focused this one on what is of interest, mostly, to people with whom I work directly. But every week, I struggle with the same choice: what is interesting and amusing to me, may or may not be as equally amusing to others. That's the central tension of blogging as a new medium. Your old paper journal was never read by anyone else, so it did not mind being a little self-centered and narcissistic. The blog, however, is read by other people, and it becomes annoying if focused on the author entirely. However, it is not exactly a newspaper article, and must maintain a strong personal voice.

For example, last week, I spent a chunk of time working on two different grants, and of course, learned something new about that. I've also learned a lesson about how a small technical error at the beginning of the process can lead to a tense argument, misunderstanding, and to an unnecessary problem. I suppose, my conclusion could be like one of the two:

• Projects, like children, disproportionally depend on early stages of their development. A right onset can go a long way in ensuring the project will grow strong and succeed.
  
• People must not get annoyed with each other without first investigating the origin of their disagreement.
  

That has been, more or less, my formula. I take a case, and draw a conclusion – either a purely managerial one, or one with a human dimension. The blog entries become either a sermon or a short management article. But I always feel uneasy about the sermons, and am never sure if the management pieces are of interest to anyone.

So, if you're reading it in the middle of the summer, please give me some feedback – comment here, e-mail, or just tell me. Should I keep going? Why are you reading it? Is the blog helpful? Should I change it? Ger rid of sermons? Get rid of management? Keep both?

A reminder: Comments are moderated to protect the site from spam. All legitimate comments will appear, just after a short delay. Thanks!

Cataloging trouble

The Catalog working group, of which I was a member, just finished its tasks of redesigning the University catalogs. The group was great to work with; it was UNC at its best – willing to change, innovative, informal, and deeply caring about students. I think we made a lot of progress, and 2010/11 catalogs will be much more user-friendly, and easier to navigate. I am still wondering why a simple question – Which courses do I need to take? – requires such a complicated answer. We have the Catalogs, check-sheets in various offices, four-year plans, and a whole host of advisers who interpret the mysterious written word of the catalogs for students. The paradox is, by trying to make college easier, we make it a lot more complicated than it has to be. To off-set this complexity, we spend a whole lot of resources trying to explain the complexity away. Here are some examples:

• As one of our group members noted, the Catalog reflects the logic of program creators, not of program users. For example, faculty members divide courses in core and supporting, major and Liberal Arts Core, within the main discipline and in other disciplines. But very few of these categories matter to students; they simply need to know which courses they have to take for sure, and with which they have some choices. They also want to know which courses can be more useful for the future, which are easier to get into, which are fun, and which require too much work. It becomes a simple conflict of categorization. It's like going to a pharmacy and finding the medicine arranged by price rather than by the kind of trouble you might be experiencing.
  
• If we leave students to their own devices, their rate of error in planning the coursework would be very high. We then require them to see an advisor to get a PIN, so they can register. But getting to see an advisor is another obstacle, another hoop to jump through. Most of the advisors on campus are faculty, who are not here all the time. Every year, many of them are new, and have their own trouble reading and understanding of the catalog. As a result, in an effort to reduce errors, we introduce a whole new layer of complexity which generates new errors and more frustrations.
  
• The whole Liberal Arts Core idea is very old and venerable, and designed with the best intentions. Ideally, it should give every student a broad education, and allow easier transfer to another institution. However, people have been messing with the LAC for years. For example, when they simply wanted to expand the major, certain LAC courses became "Specified required LAC courses." This move, of course, defies the purpose of choice and transferability. Instead of calling it what it is – a larger major – these programs just add a level of confusion. Moreover, some of the major courses proper also satisfy the LAC requirements, and therefore can be double-counted. So the two categories overlap significantly, and make figuring them out very difficult. The LAC list itself is a maze of categories, subcategories, and rules.
  
• Then, of course, the State of Colorado requires the majors be different than teacher education programs (PTEPS). It comes from an obscure ideological stance requiring teachers to know enough content. Therefore, we list PTEP courses as a different set of courses, further confusing students. And of course, the difference between PTEP and major courses makes no sense, and the two categories overlap also. In some majors, some of methods PTEP courses are also counted as major courses, and in others, they are not.
  

It is not only that these things are difficult to explain to an 18-year old, who is fresh out of high school. What strikes me as absurd that we need to explain these things at all. They truly don't care, and should not care about these categories. What makes it complicated for students is that they also have no idea how often courses are offered, how hard is it to get in them, and which courses are "stacked," which means some are pre-requisites for others, and cannot be taken just at any time. Here are my conclusions/recommendations:

1. Advising is supposed to be important, and it connects students to faculty on a more personal level. But if much of it s spent on explaining the same catalog mysteries over and over again, perhaps it is not what we hope it is. We need to make another, more radical step in making the catalog easy to understand by purging the categories relevant to program creation. Maybe we should ask students for help.
   
2. Students need to have easy access to the same data faculty have access to: history of course offerings, how full do they tend to be in the past, as well as the schedule as it is being developed. Last year, I copied advanced schedules from the report portal and e-mailed it to two thousand teacher education students. Many were very grateful, because it allowed them to plan better. But why is this information hidden from them in the first place?
   
3. We need to learn to build logic models of student scheduling. Following the many complicated rules associated with course choices is better done by a computer than by a human mind. One simple step toward this: we already have a degree check feature in Ursa. However, there is no way for students to run their mock 4-year pan through the degree check, and see if they would graduate with a given set of courses. So if we allowed them to build a 4-year plan, and run through a pretend graduation, it would eliminate a lot of errors, and reduce the burden of advising.
   
4. In all out programs, we need to keep only those choices that make sense, and eliminate all of those choices that are only there to support the idea of choice. Many of the choices we announce are unobtainable because courses listed there are never offered, or limited to majors. In other cases, choices serve no discernable reason to exist, or are results of turf wars and turf peace-making. If we eliminate those, it will probably reduce the choices by 2/3. And when we keep the choice, we need to be able clearly explain what are advantages of each option, and what are implications of choosing one option over another.
   

 

The Spreadsheet fallacy

Perhaps people don't remember it, but VisiCalc, which was Excel's forefather, was one of the crucial forces to unleash the personal computer revolution. Excel is great; it allows running infinite number of scenarios quickly, make patterns and ratios visible, and generally, it is a good way of making a solid argument.

However, the whole idea of numbers came about when people started to deal with large quantities of essentially the same or very similar things, like bushels of grain, heads of sheep, or buckets of beer. Almost none of the hunting-gathering societies generally count beyond 3 or 4, because if you had 10 arrows, they were all different, and you remembered them all individually. If you saw a herd of animals, that's what you called it, and there was no need to count them. If you don't deal with identical things, you cannot count them. Or rather, they have to be identical in at least one practically important aspect. For example, you cannot count loafs of bread, if they are very different in size. I mean you can try, but won't be happy with outcomes, because you may end up with more loafs but less bread. So, the sameness of things you're counting is the most fundamental assumption of mathematics.

Here is where the Spreadsheet fallacy comes in. Excel spreadsheets are so compelling that people are tempted to count apples and oranges as pieces of fruit, but then make conclusions about their average skin-thickness. For example, we have some classes that are real classes, and other classes that are independent studies, and still others that are checkpoint courses (which are not classes at all, but tricks to make our registrar database keep the information we need). We have classes for each people are getting paid, and classes that are done as service. Some classes are methods, while others are theory; still others are tutoring classes. Some classes are co-taught by different content specialists, while others are co-taught because it is easier to have one large class than 4 smaller ones. These all require different enrollment caps, different forms of compensation, different rooms, etc. When you put all of these things into one spreadsheet, you must assume that 1 credit=1 credit, and 1 instructor=1instructor. But the basic assumption of sameness, of the consistent unit of measurement just does not work. If the only source of your information about reality is the numbers in the spreadsheet, you may see phantoms rather than the reality. By trying to be objective, you may actually become less objectives. Numbers are only good when they measure something real.

We receive a lot of spreadsheet reports from the University. I am always impressed with their authors' Excel skills, but can rarely see the raw data that goes into the calculations. In more than one occasion, I discovered that the input included numbers that cannot even be added together, because they compare incomparable things. Thank god, most of these reports have been inconsequential so far. However, when some actual decisions and policies can be made based on the Spreadsheet fallacy, remember the rule:

SHOW ME THE RAW DATA!

The limitations of grapevine

We all relay on informal information exchanges; I have written about it before. Here is another story that shows what are the strengths and the limitations of the grapevine as an information channel. In Spring, I have received several informal reports about one of our adjunct faculty having problems in interaction with students, with work ethic, and perhaps with competence. We are not obligated to provide work to any part-timers, and actually have a large reserve pool. My plan was to check on the rumors, and if they prove to be correct, look for someone else to hire.

We have collected student feedback from a series of surveys, so there was actually some data to verify the story. What I discovered is that just one unhappy student was the source of all the reports I received. Imagine how it works: this one student has several classes, and voices the same concern with several instructors. She may pose it in a way that implies other students were also treated badly. The instructors all tell me that there is something I should know about. Of course, they don't mention the student's name, because of confidentiality of the initial conversation, and because the source may have strengthen her case by implying it is a larger problem. Because the story changes with each transmission, soon it sounds like three different stories. Moreover, faculty talk among each other, and a person who have heard it from another faculty, tells me about the problem in yet another form. Considering that I actually receive an astonishingly small number of complaints, three or four comments about the same person sound like a lot.

From the students' comments, it transpires that we perhaps did not provide clear enough instructions and expectations to this new part time faculty. Not only am I no longer sure if there is a personnel problem in the first place; it may have been our program's problem. I am now thinking it may have been only a small personnel problem, which is easier and fairer to solve by providing a little more training and support to the instructor, rather than rushing to replace her or him with someone else. The new person may have other problems, after all. And who does not?

The grapevine is a great way to alert about a possible problem. It is not really good at determining cause or the extent of the problem, nor is it a good helper in making any decision. This blog is more of a note to self, because I don't want to discourage people from sharing what they know with me or with each other. This is how we improve, and develop our professional community.

Pushing back

Here is a story from last week that really made me feel good. I noticed that when we get graduates licensure applications, we make a hard copy, send the original to the State, then scan the copy into our digital archive, and then shred the hard copy. This seemed to me like a redundant process, because our copier that makes hard copies can also be used as a scanner. So, I figured, we can save a step by scanning the originals, and then simply uploading these copies to the digital archive. Three people are involved in the process: Vicky, Marissa and Lynette. Vicky did not like my idea right away, Lynette had a lot of doubts, and Marissa did not say anything, but I could tell she did not like it either. They thought it would actually be longer to scan everything right away. But I pushed hard, because I like new solutions, and because it just made sense to me to skip a step and save a little paper. After some discussion, we agreed that they will try the new process I developed (and I had to work out a few technical kinks; probably two hours worth of work).

They did try it, timed themselves, and have proven that the new process takes twice as much time as the old one. Lynette had the killer argument: the new process takes a lot of concentration, and at her busy front desk station she is likely to make more errors. Vicky and Lynette broke the news to me at the end of the day, so I was forced to retreat, and acknowledge that I was wrong. Licensure is very time-sensitive, because graduates need to get jobs, and every day of delay may affect someone's job prospects. The paper, however, is cheap. The illogical process actually works better, and reduces the time in limbo, when a particular record is inaccessible (there is a time gap between scanning and indexing). The possibility of an error is a big thing: we learned the hard way how costly such errors can be.

But what made me really happy and proud was the fact that they did not give up, and kept pushing back, because they could prove the point. A school director has a lot of administrative power over staff, and it is not easy to have a culture where people feel comfortable defending their ideas, and telling the boss he is wrong. In part, we have it just because who these people are: Vicky, Karon, Marita and Lynette all have many years of experience, and a good common and professional sense. They know what they are talking about. But I also felt like I was doing something right, because our little debate did happen, and because I was wrong this time. The last thing I want to do is to make staff's work more difficult.

We did improve a little part of it though, reducing one step where Marissa has to look up every applicant in Ursa. We tricked our SIMS database into generating ready cover sheets for majority of applicants.

The Russian trip

OK, we did it. A group of 17 Americans went to Moscow, then to Novosibirsk, and Saint Petersburg. We did have a conference, of course, and actually it worked well despite the language barrier. But for most people, it was also an adventure, an experience, and an event.

Can't speak for others, but here is my impression. It is rather interesting to see my own country through the eyes of my American friends. It does look a little different, a bit more exotic, and somewhat less explainable. The country has changed so much since I left it in 1991. Even though I have been back almost every year since 1996, it does feel like a different country. It is very familiar, and yet strange.

I just had to remind myself that every time I go to Russia, it is a holiday: I don't have to work, I see old friends and family, I get to be nostalgic. Vodka, banya, shashlyk, sightseeing – this is not real life, not everyday experience of a typical Russian. It is tempting to just come back, but I probably never will return for good. Like a transplanted tree, I have too many roots here, I like my job too much to abandon it. Our kids are here, one of them is married to an American, and neither will consider going back to Russia permanently. But it is fun to visit, and I would like to be more involved with Russian education. We do have much to learn from each other, and I hope we will. I was very happy to see how well my Russian and American friends got along with each other, considering all the cultural differences and the history of Cold War. I always believed Russians are much closer to Americans than to Asians or to Europeans, and this is just more evidence. Both cultures have a strong egalitarian streak, both value directness and openness in relationships. Both countries have revolutionary experience and can be mistrustful of governments and politicians, which they compensate by excessive believe in personal encounters. There are many profound differences, of course, about which I will write separately one day.

Just before my flight back to the States, I had some three hours to kill in Moscow, between 6 and 9 AM. I just walked the streets. Moscow is a beautiful city in the early morning. Muscovites are not early risers, and the streets were sunny and almost empty. The city is just incredibly varied – from ancient churches to Stalin's high-rises, to ultra-modern contemporary buildings. All of it is almost randomly thrown together, and yet there is some common sense to it. Anyway, it is hard to ex-plain, but I had the most wonderful walk through the city – from Belorusskiy Tran Station to Barrikadnaya Metro Station. Here is my exact rout, with some photographs which you can repeat, thanks to Google's magic. It is just hard to explain, but this was a wonderful walk.

A couple of links to our own pictures:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/uncoeducation/ and http://picasaweb.google.com/eugene.sheehan/Russia2009?authkey=Gv1sRgCNa79ff-nJmNaQ&feat=email#

What I have learned in kindergarten

Robert Fulghum wrote a book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten in 1989. It was one of the very first books I read in English some 15 years ago, and liked it very much. It taught me appreciate the uniquely Anglo-Saxon gift for simplifying complex ideas; something most European philosophers usually lack (the Germans, the Russians, and the French in particular). Here is his original list of things you really need to know. What I learned last week reminded me of this book, because it was so basic, something everyone already knows, and we just need reminders once in a while. It also occurred to me that I am fascinated with technocratic solutions to complex logistical problems. However, even more complicated human problems usually need simple, kindergarten solutions. And they work as best as it is possible. So, here is my list, which does not apply to any particular case or situation. This is simply a list of things for me to remember:

1. If you are really mad at someone, ask, why are you so mad? If the person you're mad at is not evil, there is no reason to be that angry. If the scope of your anger does not match the offense against you, you have a problem.
   
2. When you screw up, apologize, and try to be sincere. An apology goes a long way. Remember, South Africa managed to escape a horrendous civil war through the some simple acts of apology.
   
3. When someone is wrong, and has offended you, do not assume you are automatically right. As Anton Chekhov said, "Чужими грехами свят не будешь"(Someone else's sins won't make you a saint). Victimhood in does not make one a better human being; the opposite is often true. So, apologize back, and try to be sincere.
   
4. A conflict between two people hurts everyone else in the group; it is not a private or personal mater. We have a stake at having a decent, cohesive community, and will not tolerate on-going conflicts regardless of its cause.
   
5. Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy? You cannot be both.
   
6. Allow others to save face. There is no benefit in cornering someone who has done wrong to you.
   
7. What you are trying to say is not important. How other people perceive your message is important. If you don't know the latter, make an effort to find out.
   
8. What do you want?,- ask yourself often. You will find out very soon, that what you feel like doing is not at all what you need to be doing to achieve what you want.

Chronophages

This word does not exist in English, but it does in French and in Russian (although it is still a very obscure word). According to André Maurois, Henry de Montherlant made it up in French. A chronophage, literally, means the devourer of time. Here is an example: someone puts together a large meeting, invites many people, only to accomplish a very modest task that can be accomplished by a couple of e-mails. People gather only to find out that there is nothing really to talk about, there is no plan, no proposal, just a general talk. Or, someone send you a request to participate in a survey of some kind, and it is not clear what it is for, and the questions seem to be haphazard. Or someone puts together a public panel only to provide legitimacy to a proposal that is actually developed, and really does not need any input. Or, an official calls a meeting and lectures for an hour. A chronophage will present a small problem to be a large one, therefore demanding that people pay attention to it.

Don't get me wrong: I welcome and embrace nterruptions. I love when faculty drop by to talk about things that are on their mind. It is an interruption, but almost always a welcome one. I learn something, and I am able to answer questions, and ask questions. This is how we know what is going on, and how people are doing and feeling. That is not at all a problem. I also always see a student who dropped by, because it is important for us to maintain an open, welcoming office. It is also very important to meet face to face to solve complex problems, hence my deep appreciation for a good slowtalk.

The problem is when someone eats your time without regard for you or for others. A chronophage does not value you or your time. I missed an important phone call, just because three or four chronophages ate a few hours of my time this week. A really good person got upset with me, because I did not return his call in two days, and it was urgent.

Why do they do it? Well, I have a theory. A chronophage derives the self-worth from eating other people's time. It is really a childish need for constant attention. A chronophage perceives the time that he takes as a tribute, paid to him by others. It is a tax, an obligation, a sign of respect. Eating other people's time sustains this person's illusion of importance. And because people will start to avoid the chronophage, he will feel threatened and insecure. The chronophage gets hungry for time. To fix that, he will devise more and more complicated ways of eating other people's time. And the more authority he has, the easier it is to do, and the more difficult it is for us to resist him.

Therefore, I proclaim a holy war against the chronophages. Resist! Fight back! Do not get eaten alive! When asked to do something, to meet or to answer, ask why, who needs it, and what would be likely outcomes. Ignore salesmen! Doubly ignore salesmen who pretend not to be one! Always ask if there is a plan or a proposal. Ask to send you something first. Ask what it is about. A noble cause does not always indicate a worthy project. A lofty title may disguise a dog and pony show. You are the master of your own time. Someone might need it more than the chronophage.

Well, let's just say, it was a busy week, maybe a little more than usual.

Tinkering with the machine and crap shoveling

There is a side of our enterprise I like to call the machine: calendars, schedules, catalogs, web site, handbooks, policies, routines, and tasks. Those things do not directly affect what is going on in classrooms. However, when the machine is faltering, it can create a lot of problems. For example, students and faculty get confused or frustrated. In rare occasions, a poorly designed policy or procedure can have serious negative effects on people's lives. Thank god, this is an exception; otherwise we'd be in trouble, for the machine is faltering all the time.

When I just came to UNC, one of my aims was to simplify and fix the machine. Naively, I thought it could be done in a year or two, and then we all will have more time for the task of radical improvements of our programs. But the machine needs fixing all the time! I find myself tinkering with it again and again. For example, just in the last two weeks, I was helping to re-re-revise the student teaching handbook for the umpteenth time. And then just yesterday, I realized that the Diverse Experience form is not there. It is mentioned on the website, was discussed many times in many forums, and yet is not to be found in any of the student teaching handbooks. Besides, faculty found more need for revisions of what we have just revised last Fall. Fundamentally, those two factors cause a lot of machine maintenance: improvements and errors. Let's just say we want to revise the exit survey for students, common for three programs. Who can do it? Program coordinators are very busy this time of year. Our staff members are very knowledgeable and hard working, but they don't know all the nuances of the data we need to get. So, I am trying to do it almost solo. But, all projects done solo are bound to have errors, – both technical and of judgment, – because there is no one to check what I do. Carolyn and I will help each other when we can, but it is not the same as a deliberate, involved process of working with the entire faculty that is really needed. The choice is to let this little piece of machinery idle (skip the survey this year), or do it in the imperfect fashion. In other words, the option is to put the duct tape on it, which I did.

In addition, our machine is a part of even bigger machine of the University, which adds a layer of complexity. Who needs to know? Who gets to decide? How will it jive with the rest of the University? Here is another example. In December, I took large part of the Winter break time to revise the licensure parts of our catalog. It needed to be done badly, for no one could find anything in the catalog. However, we got only a few days for proofreading, and we simply missed the licensure part. Quite by accident, I discovered on Thursday that those changes were omitted. This is long past deadline, so I had to send some panicking e-mails, and the catalog people agreed to make the changes. However, every time you revise the catalog, other errors are introduced. For instance, Art Music and PE PTEP programs disappeared – inadvertently, of course. So, I had to put them back in. But the catalog is going off to the printer on Monday, so I did not have the time to consult with those programs, and I probably gotten these programs wrong, too. They will probably be mad at me, because the errors would be ultimately caused by my initiative to revise. So, we're virtually guaranteed that this piece of the machine will need another fix next year. Continuous improvement or continuous tinkering?

This tinkering work is absolutely endless. There is always something to fix, a process to improve, a form or a handbook to rewrite. It is fun at times, because sometimes I get to solve real problems, and find some new solutions. For example, on Wednesday and Thursday, I finally found a way to track our graduate admissions, something that eluded us forever, and costs us a lot of labor. However, it is one thing to find a solution, and quite another to make it work. Someone has to have it on their calendars, instructions need to be written, people trained, etc. Anyway, tinkering is mostly fun, but just in the last week got a little bit frustrating, and tedious.

And of course, quite independently of my tinkering, we were exposed to a case of irrational bureaucratic whim. Those of you in the School probably know what I mean, for those outside, it is not important. Tinkering with the machine – I embrace if not always enjoy. I understand why we have to do it. Shoveling crap is something else entirely. Here is my highly scientific definition of crap shoveling: dealing with unnecessary problems resulted from someone else's arbitrary decisions. So if I appeared cranky for this last week or two, now you know why. My apologies anyway, if I neglected or offended you in any way. I'll lighten up next week, promise.

Student complaints

It's been busy in the last couple of weeks. Two trips, several ceremonies, search, a couple of new projects – all of these worked out just fine. Things are going really well for me, and I want to believe, for the School. Yet problems that don't have a good resolution are on my mind, as always. Certain problems just don't have a clear cut solution, no matter how creative you are, or how hard you think, or how much you know. One of them is student complaints.

I am very fortunate to receive very few of those, but when I do, it is never clear what to do about them. Students who come forward to complain always have a mixture of motives and interests. They are always concerned about the quality of instruction, and almost always bring up valid criticism of someone's instruction. However, a student who complains before the end of the semester always has another motive – an attempt to get a higher grade. Even if they don't realize it, objectively speaking, they have a conflict of interest. The complainer is not a disinterested bystander reporting some problems out of JUST the moral duty. Students are often overestimate the influence an administrator can exert over faculty teaching. Or rather, they do not really know what they want to be done.

When I convey the sense of complaint to the instructor in question, everyone without an exception is hurt. A student complaint violates both trust and authority embedded in the teacher-student relationship. "Why didn't they talk to me?" – is usually the first reaction. And then, inevitably "This is simply not true." And almost always: "Let me tell you about this student." It is very hard to be in a position of power, and to sense the imbalance of power. You think, if I am open and honest with students, they should feel free to criticize me openly, to bring their concerns to me. But again, the objective situation of power imbalance makes this relationship look different from the other side. Power is one-way mirror: if you have it, all you see is the benevolent you. If you don't, you see the other, big, powerful, and scary. Therefore, I cannot simply turn away complainers and send them back to those against whom they complain. Even when students complain against a faculty from a different School, and even listening to them may look like invasion of someone else's turf, turning complainers away just is not a good option. There is no growth without knowledge of problems.

In those complaints, there are exaggerations, misinterpretations, although very rarely outright lies. Knowing that, I always try to check the facts with the instructor, and provide an opportunity to tell his or her side of the story. But – and it is a big and important but – the very fact of checking is already offensive to the instructor. The implied response is always "How dare you to even admit a possibility that the student is right, and I am wrong? Whose side are you on anyway?" No matter how much I tell that I am not inclined to believe student complaints, especially if they do not reoccur, faculty always feel offended and maybe even harassed. No one likes to be accused, and everyone feels the right to confront one's accuser. But because of the power situation above, it is often impossible. This is not a court of law.

And as I noted on another occasion, different perspectives can lead to different version of the same story both being true. To explain why someone would see the story differently, you almost have to evoke the moral argument: the other person is biased, unfair, and manipulative. That is where "let me tell you about this student" argument comes from. People in general have a hard time separating facts from their interpretation, and interpretation from the source. Yet how do you go about doing our everyday business without knowing each other's business? How do we improve if we do not get to reflect on our students' concerns and perceptions?

I hope you all see now how tricky this can get, how many layers of meanings can be revealed, and how many conflicting interests and considerations are at work. I wish I had an answer, but have some rules for dealing with student complaints:

• Ask if the student tried to bring it up with the instructor, and if not, why.
  
• Ask for details – what exactly was said? Can you show me your assignment? Can you show me your syllabus? Do you have your paper with you? What exactly happened? How many times, etc.
  
• Ask what the student wants to be done (learned that from Eugene), and when they want intervention. It is important, because to intervene before grades are in is to disclose the student identity to the faculty. There should be some cost to the complainer: to prepare evidence, to risk confrontation, or other unpleasantness, etc. If you make complaining "free" it encourages frivolous complaints.
  
• If the student wants to wait till the class is over, encourage to use evaluation forms. Inform about the grade appeal process.
  
• Inform about the scope and limits of my own authority. For example, I cannot tell an instructor to change someone's grade, but I can ask to develop a better grading system.
  
• Write an e-mail which focuses on facts, and send it to the instructor – immediately or after the end of semester, with or without student's name depending on what the student wants.
  

This is basically it. We have no policy or procedure on dealing with student complaints. In most cases, it just stays between me and the instructor. I don't know how to follow up, or how to make sure basic standards of good teaching are followed. Sometimes I keep a copy of the correspondence, but no one ever sees it. Maybe this how it should be, but it just strikes me as a lost opportunity. Ultimately, we must create a culture where our students are our allies, our sounding boards, and our critics and helpers. But we do not want to open the floodgate of ridiculous complaints whose only aim is to manipulate the system and get a better grade. What we really need to encourage is not complaints, but a steady flow of feedback from students about what and how we teach. They have many professors, and can see and compare; they usually know what works and what does not, what is a waste of time, and what is valuable. Faculty members do not have the time to visit each other's classes, so a lot of discoveries, tricks, and tips are not shared. But our students see it all – the good, the bad and the ugly. I don't want to see just the ugly; I want to see the good, and make sure everyone else learns from it.

The question of the day is this: how do we use our students' knowledge of college instruction to improve our teaching? How do we do it outside of the framework of complaining?

The Great Wall of Thanks

In my last blog, I was wondering about how exposure to different information affects how we view and evaluate each other. The resolution was this: "Note for self: create more opportunities and spaces for faculty to talk about their work to each other." And of course, this does not affect faculty only. We also have five full time staff people, five work-studies, and several GA's working with us. And although staff members work in close proximity to each other, they do not necessarily know everything about each other's work. The challenge is to improve the horizontal sharing of information for all of us. It will help to be aware of the things that are going on in our School, and also to appreciate better each other's work.

The problem is with information competition. The information space is overloaded already. I am very conscious of this, hence the weekly updates: I try to filter information, and only include something important, and do it only once a week. Otherwise, people will not read my e-mails. Even the weekly updates are probably read by no more than three quarters of our School (although I try to enforce it gently, by making fun of people who missed an important bit of news included in an Update). By the way, they all are archived in W:\STE Documents\Weekly updates (the link will only work for PC's); there are now 79 updates.

But back to the main point: Too much information is just as bad as too little information. If I start including in the updates long lists of things that I know people have been working on, no one will read them. Moreover, it creates a lot of work for me, which I am not anxious to take on.

The solution I want to try uses the strengths of the internet-enhanced social network technologies. Twitter.com has been a remarkable new tool, and receives a lot of attention, as well as much scorn. US Senators twitter from the chambers; kids twitter in class. Eyewitnesses of the Mumbai attacks broke the news through Twitter. Just check out the latest news about Twitter to gauge the scope of the phenomenon. Basically, Twitter is a mini-blog that allows people upload short blurbs of 140 characters – from their computers or cell phones. Others can follow the twitter as often as they like. I tried to create one for myself – and it is a waste of time, because my days are not so interesting, and no one wants to follow my adventures anyway. My attempts to convince my kids to twitter failed. Svetlana and I would like to follow their pursuits closely, but they won't bother to update. So, I am probably going to close my account.

However, this technology maybe just right for what I am trying to achieve with horizontal information sharing. Therefore, I created another Twitter account which we will share. Anyone associated with us can use the same login "uncste" and the same password "steunc" (Sorry, they cannot be identical to each other). The account is called The Great Wall of Thanks. When you know about something special done by one of us, just open that bookmark, and type a very short blurb. It won't let you go over 140 characters. Moreover you can subscribe to an RSS feed, which is basically a subscription service that will provide all this information to your Outlook or Entourage, or just t the browser without any effort. You can ignore it, or read it, or skim it. This augments or replaces informal conversations more typical of earlier, simpler times, when you ate lunch with your colleagues, or went out for a drink with them. Many people don't have the time or opportunity for these kinds of things anymore. Those who live farther away from campus are at a special disadvantage: it does seem silly to drive here for an hour just to catch up on gossip, or tell people about what you did last week. However, we can still keep up with each other through other means.

Of course, no one has any idea if this is going to work. Not many people have much patience for another on-line gadget. But Twitter is so simple to use, and I think we clearly have the need to be updated: I just hope people will give it a try. Check it out: I put a few notes there already for everyone to see. Sorry if I forgot anyone; it just what occurred to me today in the afternoon.

To submit and read:

• Click here: Twitter.com
  
• User name: uncste, Password: steunc
  
• Add to Favorites or Bookmarks
  

To subscribe:

• click here
  
• Click on "Subscribe to this feed"
  

 

Candy in the box

Two full days: that is how long it took me to do evaluations this year. It is a tense time of the year, because of the spring fatigue and the evaluations. I am called to judge my friends and colleagues, with whom I work every day. No one likes to be judged, because no one else knows better how hard one worked and how much one has accomplished. The easy way for me would be to rubber-stump the results of peer evaluations and be done with that. It is a temptation, of course, but it does not work. The reason for several levels of review is exactly to ensure that sometimes I can disagree with faculty, and the Dean can disagree with either or both of previous evaluations. This is because we have different information, and develop different view on things, so our assessments average into something fairer than one person is capable of producing.

One thing I noticed this year is that faculty members do not always know the extent and the nature of work that a program coordinator performs. Much of this work is unglamorous; it does not attract much attention, and does not place one in the spotlight. I know more about these things, just because much of it interacts with me and the School office. So, I have an idea of how much time, effort, and creativity it takes, for example, to figure out a schedule, to hire a new part time faculty, or respond to one of many student crises. But we rarely have time to talk about this at our meetings, so people who do not talk a lot about what they do may not be recognized enough. Note for self: create more opportunities and spaces for faculty to talk about their work to each other. Highlight people's accomplishments and achievements more often, even though they are not as sexy as a new book or a new grant.

The general rule is this: no one can know everything; our information access is always limited. Because of this, there is a grown-up version of what psychologists call egocentrism. I quote from the Wikipedia article linked here: "if a child sees that there is candy in a box, he assumes that someone else walking into the room also knows that there is candy in that box. He implicitly reasons that "since I know it, you should too"." We supposedly grow out of it in adulthood, but not completely. It is hard to remember that the work I did with person A or person B maybe completely unknown to the rest of the faculty. This applies, by the way, both accomplishments and shortcomings. So, you find yourself wondering: why on Earth would they make that judgment? The more often than not answer is: they don't know what you know, and they know what you don't know. Another version of the same explanation is: they don't have the same objectives as you may have, so they think differently.

Of course, in the peer evaluation process, people put together their dossiers, and present what they accomplished. But here, again, the same adult egocentrism works in its subtle ways. The way most people present their work includes many assumptions about others' knowledge that are often false. And this also goes in both directions: you may simply mention something, assuming everyone will immediately recognize what an accomplishment it is, and they may have little idea about it. Or, you hype your accomplishments too much, or go into too much detail, or embellish them just a little, and your readers lose confidence in what they see. As a result, they underestimate your real achievements. And of course, we don't know what is real. If the outcomes of scholarship and teaching are more or less measurable in principle, service is entirely different. The number of committees one serves on is not a good criterion. Keeping track of one's hours seems embarrassing. Some people tend to seek high-profile service commitments, while others do low-profile things that just needed to be done. Some people create enormous value to the group through informal channels, without ever forming a committee. Others do a lot of good, just not for this School. How do you measure and compare any of it? And almost everyone believes that their service is the hardest, the most needed, and the most important. That's because every one of you have the most abundant, excessive knowledge of only one person – yourself.

It gets more interesting when people discover that faculty, or the director, or the Dean disagree with them on their self-assessment. If you forget about the information asymmetry, the only possible explanation is value-laden – those people are mean to me, don't like me, or not too smart. But if you think about it, this is not too far from the child's "since I know it, you should too." And if you start entertaining the emotional explanations, then your own lenses as an evaluator also get skewed, so a little vicious game of retaliation may creep in, unnoticed.

We're not in danger of corrupting the process; far from it. Most people do a lot of good work, and most people approach each other's records very fairly. We improved the whole process enormously, thanks to the faculty of this School. We have a lot of trust and respect for each other. Just to make sure we keep it that way, and make it better, I would like to remind everyone about the egocentrism and information asymmetry. If you see that candy in the box, it does not mean others see it. Nor does it mean that if you tell them about your candy in your box they will necessarily imagine it the same way.

How to lose $240,000 in 30 days

On Jan 14, which is actually 36 days ago (30 just sounds better in the title), I sent this e-mail to one of UNC administrators:

If we "supersize" our Elementary PB cohorts to 30 people in each, can we also pay instructors a little bit more for the large classes? For example, if we assume 25 students is the maximum normal size, then each student is 4% of the load. So, we would like to add at least 4% on top of maximum pay ($1500 per credit) for each student above 25. 26 people would be 1560 per credit, 30 people will be 1800 per credit. We will use a similar formula to increase coordinator's stipend. […] I know it is complicated to keep track of, but extra 15 people will bring in an extra quarter million. It is definitely cheaper than opening a new cohort. We seem to have enough qualified candidates.

For those of you who don't know, the math works like this: the program is 48 credits, at $340 per credit. This means each additional student would bring in $16,320. 15 additional students would generate $244,800. If we paid the instructors a little extra, it would cost us $2,880, plus perhaps $2000 more for coordination, total of $4880. The university is tax-exempt, so we would clear $239,920 in one year. Keeping in mind that the University is expecting a $2.9 million shortfall, this would not be a bad little something, all at a price of saying "sure." The catch is – we needed the permission quickly. To manage the increase, we would have to make sure most instructors are OK to teach the larger classes, we'd need to extend the official deadline, and make sure the admission process is still rigorous and fair, and people still have the time to apply. We cannot hold admission decisions, because students won't be able to meet the priority deadline for financial aid. It is entirely too late now, and I still have not received a decision. I did remind, and was told – this decision needs to be made at a higher level. And yes, of course, I did make a point this was time-sensitive. So, I scratched this one from my to-do list. We have other things to do, and this particular program is already successful, large, and gives more than enough work to its coordinator and our off-campus program manager.

Of course, the story is more complicated than that. The University is trying to make its operations more orderly and more equitable. For example, the increase of pay for off-campus classes has been discussed last year, and it was decided that there would not be a difference between on- and off-campus compensation, because it creates negative incentives for faculty to teach on-campus. I actually was in favor of it then, but this is a different proposal – not a blank increase, but a formula for oversized classes. This proposal has a clear rule attached to it.

As the Provost rightfully noted at our recent meeting, you cannot have two different accounting systems, one with large incentives, and another with small, or no incentives at all. I agree, and have written about this in June of 2008. So, there is a valid hesitation to just let people to do whatever they want, and to make separate deals with every unit on campus. There has to be a clear chain of authority, and the interests of the entire campus must be protected above those of each individual unit. I understand all this, but still, the answer should not and cannot include decisions that lose us all a lot of money, and let's not forget, deny 15 potential students access to education they need. Yes, we need a better, more orderly, more equitable system. Yes, the University s entitled to the lion's share of the profits we help generate. But you cannot innovate or grow if the decision-making channels are shut down. A new set of regulations should be firmly in place before the old chaotic system is yanked from under our feet.

And the financial emergency is not an excuse. Many economists believe that the Great depression was significantly compounded by the Federal Government trying to cut spending, raise taxes and retreat to protectionism. The same psychology is at work at our level. If you're in charge of an institution and it is facing financial problems, your first instinct might be to clamp down. You confiscate extra cash from all the units sitting on it, so you can allow them to operate more or less normally, no keep their own people employed, to avoid cancelling searches, etc. You try to normalize the cash flow back to the central office, so resources are not being horded and stashed away in hundreds of different accounts. It is, you figure, a small price to pay for making it through the emergency with minimal losses. I am not sure if I won't be doing something similar if I were in their position. But you cannot lose quarter a million dollars in 30 days, no matter what. Small decision or indecisions have large consequences. A time of crisis is the time to unleash people's initiative and creativity; it is the time of experiments and bold moves. You have to be very cautious when the times are good, and take risks when the times are not so good. To be agile and flexible, the institution needs to trust its people to have good intentions and to make good decisions. The last thing you want to do is to freeze up initiative.

On the future of higher education

There are at least three paradoxes inherent in the current higher education system:

1. Professors give grades to students, and grades are the main way of evaluating students work. However, if you give everyone poor grades, it reflects badly on your own teaching. Therefore, professors evaluate themselves, and this is a conflict of interest. In the K-12 world, state tests at least partially address this issue; nothing like this exists in higher education. Let's call this the paradox of the fox guarding the chicken coop.
   
2. Most universities outside of Ivy League depend on enrollments to maintain their budgets. They also are supposed to be selective and maintain high academic standards. Most reconcile this conflict by admitting a lot of unprepared freshmen, and then either helping them to achieve, or making them drop after the first year. Nevertheless, it is a conflict of interest. If you charge someone money, and that someone can take one's money elsewhere, you will eventually lower your demands. This is the race to the bottom paradox.
   
3. Universities charge students per seat time (per credit), so students pay for out attempts to teach, not for actual help with learning we are able to provide. It is very difficult to demonstrate that there is a direct relation between seat time and competency. Students have no say in how much help and what kind of help they need from us (see a related blog "Till When?"). But because higher education consists of relatively independent courses, bundling them makes very little sense. More teaching does not mean better learning, because learning depends on the level of effort by students. And what we have is a system that encourages a lot of teaching, and not enough learning. Unlike any other industry in the world, colleges brag about low student-professor ratios. Just imagine a company advertising that their bicycles are better, because it uses twice as many people to put them together. So, there is a perverse incentive for universities to become less and less efficient. It is the boutique paradox: a boutique store can charge more than Wal-Mart, but it can never become larger than Wal-Mart. Many middle-rank universities are trying to catch up with harvards of the realm, not realizing how self-defeating such a strategy is. In the meanwhile, the bottom-feeders whose names I will not name, flooded the market with cheap diplomas of suspicious quality.
   

In my mind, the reform of higher education can be sketched out. First, we need to develop an impartial assessment system which does not rely on instructors. Bar exams in medicine and law are probably the best available models for now. I don't see why something like that cannot be implemented in all other fields. Universities should also measure the level of incoming freshmen, and then report to the public on the value added, not on the final results. In other words, it is important to see how much your students have grown, not how you are able to attract the best high school graduates. The value-added measures can be clearly laid out with respect to the cost of tuition, so people can make rational choices about which university to attend. This will put an end to the practice of selling the brand, where people pay hundreds of thousands of extra dollars just to have a big name on their diploma. I would also legally ban employers from asking what university an applicant has graduated from. This is none of their business; they should not discriminate on the grounds that have nothing to do with competency.

Second, we should control the cost of higher education by charging students more if they require more help, and charge less if they can do more of learning on their own. Students should be able to determine what kind of help they need: a semester-long class, a shorter overview, individual tutoring, or none at all. This would create an incentive for every student to work harder, and for universities to stop wasteful teaching. Of course, for this to work, assessment should be divorced from instruction: you cannot have the same people teaching and evaluating the results of teaching. The State of Colorado made a feeble attempt to implement something like that, by requiring colleges to allow students to test out of courses. I still know of no student that did, and it is mostly because there is no fee per test a university can charge, and because you would take the exam with the same professor whose class you claim not to need at all.

Third, the nation's faculty should put a stop to the racket of publishing houses. Most textbooks contain little original research or even original ideas. They can be created by volunteers (like Wikipedia or Wiki Books) and cost nothing to students. We just need to organize; and perhaps AAUP can lead the effort.

These are ideas that maybe a little too radical for most people to accept or even to consider. And I am certainly not saying we should start some crazy experiment next month. If I learned something on my job, it is that the bigger the change, the more careful you must be while implementing it. It would take years of experimenting and discussion. However, we must realize, time is not on our side. In the long-term perspective, we will not move forward without addressing these paradoxes. As the cost of higher education is rising, and competition is getting stronger, something's got to give. Not today, not within next 10 years, but eventually the higher education system will have to reinvent itself.

Being a student

This semester, I am a student again. I am taking GER 202, Intermediate German II. This is a hopeless attempt to remember the language I have studied in school quarter a century ago, and has not used much since. So, I am sitting there, with my long beard, amongst a bunch of 19 year olds, who speak and understand the language so much better than I ever will. Just today I was trying to give a presentation on the brochure I created in German. It was very embarrassing; I turned red like borscht, and mumbled something incomprehensible. The kids were polite, and the instructor was wonderfully encouraging. Yet it was really hard and somehow emotionally very difficult. Now, I have no stage fright, and am OK with public presentations. Nor do I have any desire to be perfect at everything I do. It's just my German is very weak, and I found myself in a class that is two years ahead of me. This happened to me when I first learned English, too. However this is not about learning languages (although this process has some unique emotional qualities). We all had these experiences; they come with being a student, from struggling to learn in a public space. To be a student means to subject yourself to judgments of others, and to run a risk of exposing your own incompetence. It also contains the risk of comparing yourself to others in the room, and perhaps finding yourself at the very bottom of the ranking order.

Most of us forget or repress these memories, which is why I highly recommend that all my colleagues occasionally experiment on themselves. Take a class in a subject where you know you're not that good at. Take a math class if you're a math-phobic. Take a technology course if that is where you are not as strong. It is easy to forget how it is to be a student, still easier to forget how to be a poor student. I always try to be decent to students, but like any teacher, I will sometimes be irritated by someone's incompetence, inability to perform the easiest task. And if we go real deep, that irritation is probably an outward manifestation of my own insecurities projected onto others. The more you identify with a struggling student, the more irritated you may become. Of course, everyone knows by now, I am a fan of Freud.

We always have those students at the bottom, who are painfully aware of their position. I am not sure if one can be compassionate to them without experiencing something similar: embarrassment, denial, lack of self-efficacy. We struggle to overcome and hide vulnerabilities, and yet those maybe the best gift we have as teachers. Thinking about it, all the great teachers I knew are very aware of their own limitations, which probably what makes them able to relate to a struggling student.

Don't get me wrong – Deutsch ist Spaß. German is a lot of fun, and I enjoy those classes immensely. Thanks to the Board of Trustees for the free credit. I am just curious and puzzled about the peculiar mixture of pleasure and pain that is called learning.

On laziness and long-term perspective

My brother Konstantin is an engineer, a creative mind, and a pub philosopher. He likes to tell people that all progress in the world comes from laziness. What he means is that most people dislike routine and monotonous work. But some individuals hate routine and monotonous work with such a passion that they will spend more time trying to find a way out of doing this work than the actual work would have taken. Let's call it laziness, although I suppose it is not a common usage. I must confess I am lazy, which may or may not be a good thing for the School I am trying to lead.

Looking for ways to reduce work feels like a creative activity; it is fun, and definitely beats doing the actual work it is trying to improve. For example, if I have to do the same operation in word processing more than 3 or four times in a row, my mind immediately starts looking for ways to make the machine do the repetition. What would have taken most people half an hour to do, may take me an hour or more: 59 minutes to figure out a solution (like writing a macro), and then 1 minute to run it. There is a chance I will face the same issue again, and then this time will pay off. But there is also a good chance that this was a unique problem, and the solution will never be used again and is thus wasted. I remember hundreds of these things I figured out once, and then never used again. My kids always give me a hard time about this particular obsession: "Oh, Dad, not another shortcut!"

In the last three weeks, I found myself trying to streamline and simplify several of our operations: graduate admissions, scheduling, placements, doctoral program policies, collecting data for the DPS project, etc. These efforts include talking to people, understanding their work, asking for their suggestions and for critique of possible solutions, working on technical issues, looking for resources, etc. This took probably 20% of all my work time, plus some homework. And I am not convinced it is all time well-spent. Actually, some of my little projects turned out to be duds. For example, I really liked the idea of matching cooperating teachers and teacher candidates via a social network website for the purposes of student teaching placements. I spent perhaps 4-6 hours investigating it, playing with the sites, writing it up, and explaining to various people, only to realize that the organization culture barriers are too high for this solution to work. Too many players, too many unanswered questions. Another example of waste: we archived a part of our SIMS database last Fall to make it faster. However, this created a major reporting problem, which we did not see at the time. So, on Friday, I spent about two hours undoing damage from my own mistake. And then, of course, it is unclear whether our new way of processing graduate admissions will work better than before. I think it will save us hundreds of hours every year, but there is no way to anticipate how many new problems it will create. For example, the Graduate School is suddenly concerned about us having our separate on-line application (it never bothered them when we had four different additional paper applications).

Like my brother, I really enjoy this, and do not get upset when something is not working. However, I just re-read my earlier blogs, and realized that I may have gone too far. After all, a School Director is not an efficiency expert. While I designing new ways of improving our operations, what do I miss? For example, we slowed down our work on curriculum improvement. This maybe just a result of working out kinks of already implemented, or maybe because I quit pushing? We have such complex, multilayered set of programs and procedures that it is hard to keep a clear sight of priorities, and how they should be structuring my own work day. I will see to the grad admissions puzzle being solved, just because so much time and energy has been invested already. But we really have fixed the most urgent operational problems, and managed to create a few new programs and cohorts. It is time we begin a serious conversation about the long-term goals. We tried a couple of times to do it before, but perhaps the time was not right. We had too many immediate pressing needs such as accreditation, catching up on educational technologies, maintaining and revising existing program, etc., etc., etc. But now we should start to take on the long-term perspective seriously. I don't want to rush or force this conversation. It just occurred to me as I was fixing the database on Friday that while it is fun, we may have bigger game to catch.

Flipcharts and Brainstorming

In the last few months, I have found myself at a table with a few other people, a flipchart stand with markers beside us. We were either brainstorming or prioritizing, or doing something like that. Everyone probably has done something like that. And many have wondered why this inevitably fails to produce anything worthwhile: new ideas, good analysis, or workable solutions. These brainstorming sessions make people feel included, and may generate some buy-in, but ultimately, they fail to produce any good ideas.

Why? – It is very simple. First, people need time to think. If you ask them to think on the spot, they are unlikely to produce good ideas. Second, in a group of people who often don't know each other well, one is unlikely to feel safe enough to propose a truly creative idea. The inner censor starts working; we want to be accepted, not weird on non-conformist. Third, even when an interesting idea does emerge, the person who is taking notes usually ignores is, simply because she or he is thinking about presenting it to a larger group, so the internal censor works again. Those who volunteer take notes often want to make an impression on the large group. Fourth, the teammates are very unlikely to offer support for a truly unusual idea. They will support ideas with which they already agree, and these, by definition, are common-place thoughts. To accept something new, one also needs time, and a new idea needs to be critiqued, and considered at length before it can be accepted. Fifth, the meeting organizers will then summarize ideas presented on all flipcharts. The way you do it is by retaining ideas that are common across all groups, and ignoring the outlying, weird, and improbably suggestions. Once you sift through all generated output through these five filters, you are almost guaranteed to find a list of trivial points well known before your meeting ever took place. So, you waste time of many smart people only to receive a bunch of platitudes in the end.

Why do organizations – from the Governor's office to this university - keep doing it? Mostly, of course, to produce the warm feeling of collaboration, to make the invited individuals feel a part of the common project. Yet it is very dangerous, because everyone leaves with a vague feeling of failure. I mean, everyone can look back at the flipcharts, and see they contain nothing but trivialities. They may also be a little grateful for being asked to contribute. However, the balance is usually negative. You go through these exercises a few times, and you become a cynic. A cynic's buy-in is not worth much.

Small group work is very effective for critiquing a possible idea or a solution. To imagine how things can go wrong, and what unintended consequences are – for these tasks the groups are indispensible. We had some wonderful discussions in which people did come up with good ideas, but only when there was no expectation to do so. A multitude of voices and opinions is also helpful in outlining a scope of possible solutions. All of together know more than each person individually. The genuinely new ideas almost always come from one person, and it is a job of a leader to encourage those ideas to come forward, and then to be discussed, and vetted by all affected and interested. People don't want to be ignored when decisions are made. But the flipcharts and group brainstorming is a path to guaranteed mediocrity.

Hard times ahead

I am back from vacation and glad to find all things in decent shape. We are ready for the next semester. It is nice to see colleagues trickling back into McKee: just as smart, dependable, and funny but not as tired as in December.

That was the good news. The bad news is that we still have not received any money from last academic year's Extended Studies revenues. Again, we are flying blind financially. Our Dean is in the same position, and so is the entire University. This encourages hoarding behavior. For example, the Provost is holding back our money, because he does not know what is going to happen to the University budget. As for the Dean, I can see him tightening his fist for the same reason. Because no one knows how much money we have, everyone assumes the worst. Colorado is one of the states that are required by their constitutions to balance budgets. This means that if tax revenues drop significantly, we might be required to return money to the State. Last time it happened in 2002, and the university took drastic measures: cancelled searches, implemented a hiring freeze, eliminated travel budgets, cancelled salary raises, etc.

We worked really hard to earn the off-campus revenues. Over the last three years, we virtually doubled the revenues while providing much needed services to the community. The assumption was always that at least a small fraction of the money could be used for our travel funds, program development, technology, furniture, etc. Now I am told that everything we earned can be taken away from us. Although I understand the nervous administrators above me, it is still very hard to accept such a turn of events even as a possibility. Instead of being invited to solve the shared problem as partners, we are treated like peons: the people above know better. Instead of engaging our brains, and our knowledge of the details at the ground level, we are being ignored and dismissed.

The truth is, the people at the bottom of the pyramid can both save money and make more money. To do that, we need to be able to count on a certain portion of these savings and earnings. Otherwise, we have absolutely no incentive to be creative about either savings or earning. The confiscation policy will kill the goose that lays golden eggs.

No one knows the extent of the budget shortfall. It can be negligible, or huge. But what is the best way of dealing with uncertainty? Perhaps it can be done best by trying to operate as normal as possible, by honoring previous commitments, and by developing plans B and C. The worst way is to cause panic, to make every unit hoard its resources, and to damage long-term expansion plans.

Perhaps this is an imperfect analogy, but it works: The Great Depression could have been another short-term recession, if not for Hoover's stupid idea that that was a good time to balance budget. What the feds are doing now is to provide a large stimulus to the economy, even if it means bigger deficits. I know we have nowhere to borrow from, but we need to keep people working and thinking creatively, not to freeze all activity just to wait the crisis out. The solution is simple: honor the previous agreements, distribute the money to the units, then come back to us and ask to pitch in to solve the shortfall if it becomes a reality. We may even give most of this money back. Or better else, STE will lend money to the University, at a moderate interest.

Ode to simplicity

Svetlana, Gleb, Prosha and I took a walk in the snow – a mile, maybe a mile and a half. It was one of those experiences that take you back in time. Cold air on my face, squeaking snow, and a white, colorless plain around us: I always miss the stark austerity of winter, the white and black, without color, without much detail. It puts me at ease, and resets my mind into a state of balance and clarity. My craving for simplicity comes from a similar source. I dislike unneeded complications, excess of detail, layers and additions. Things should be simple, elegant, and dependable.

Here is an example of an unnecessary complicated process. To place student teachers, we ask them where they want to go. Most just need a geographic area, but some want a specific building or even a specific teacher. We collect all this information from 300+ students (thank God, electronically), sort it, filter it, and send to individual school districts. A district HR person then sorts these requests, clears them with the district's authorities, and passes them on to building principals. Then each of the overworked, distracted principals will have to take these requests, think about matching them, then talk to each teacher, and send a confirmation to the district. The district then approves a match, and lets us know. We, in turn, create a confirmation letter and send it to our student.

What's wrong with this picture? - Almost everything. First, there are too many steps, which take a lot of time to complete. Second, there are bottlenecks for information flows. Marita, our student teaching coordinator cannot process all requests at the same time. Each district cannot do it fast either. Everyone tends to lose track of their requests. Building principals are tasked with an additional work which they tend to put off, because very often, other things are higher on their list. Is it working? Yes; we have never left a single student not placed somewhere. But it is not simple, not elegant, and not snow-like. The process takes too many steps, too many decisions, most of them unnecessary. It involves too many points of information transfer.

Essentially, two people should find each other – the host teacher and the student teacher. They are the primary players in this game. The only reason we won't allow students to find their own placement is that it is too intrusive for the life of schools. There are also three parties to give consent to the match: UNC, the building principal, and the district. In some cases, it is     just the principal and us. But it is clear that people who should just have the power of consent, are also involved in passing the information to each other. Moving information is not the same thing as giving approval, and it does not have to go together. And this confusion is what creates the friction in the system.

What we should do is use matchmaking software, where people look for each other by certain criteria: location, grade level, perhaps even teaching philosophy. The three parties approving the match can actually give their permission in advance. For example, a teacher needs to be cleared to post his or her profile. A UNC student can only select a host room under some criteria, known in advance. We do not have a stake in knowing too much about the process, and certainly don't gain anything by passing a lot of information.

Of course, there is some distance from an idea to reality. But once it's done, it is going to be so clean, so white, like snow. I am looking forward to it. Peace.

The grading season

It is this time of the year, when our kind spends hours and hours over student papers, portfolios, and exams. As I school director, I get to teach only one class, which brought me only 90 pages of single-spaced text to read. I am on page 52 out of 90 right now. But I remember times when my end of semester load included 4300 pages of undergraduate writing, to be read, commented on and graded in three of four days. People who don't do this kind of work, cannot imagine how hard it is to focus on student papers, to force oneself to understand the points, and to provide intelligent feedback. It is harder to remain compassionate, to avoid getting irritated by the same silly errors and platitudes, and to remain an even-handed and fair grader. At least this time, I am working on doctoral students' papers. Doc students are all competent writers, and good thinkers. Someone before me graded their awkward, badly written, choppy papers in high school and college, so I can enjoy the good writing and thinking they produce now. Writing and thinking are complex, slowly developing skills. If you ever doubt it, pull out your own freshman paper, and read it.

There does not seem to be any way to make grading more efficient or less time consuming. Not sure about others, but at the end of semester, I always feel guilty about not providing enough feedback before, not reading enough drafts, not spending enough time on students. Grading is exhausting, no matter what you do; there is never less of it, nor it ever gets done as thoroughly as one would wish.

It is also not very gratifying. Students who do well tend to ascribe their success to their own efforts and own smarts. Those who do poorly tend to blame us, and find our grading unfair, prejudiced, or sloppy. Neither group reads the comments produced by our hurting brains late at night. But we chose to avoid acknowledging this sad fact: grading is still teaching and we try to be helpful anyway. So friends and colleagues slaving over student papers, I am with you, I feel for you, and thank you for your hidden, unglamorous Sisyphean labor.

It is easier when you reflect on how much students actually progressed from when you first met them in class. Education is still a highly inexact, wasteful, and amateurish enterprise. Yet somehow it works, and people visibly learn something useful. It is less visible in the span of one class, but is very obvious when you compare, for example a freshman with a senior in college. Whatever we do with them must be somewhat effective. That's the mystery for today. The grades are due on Wednesday 5 PM. Happy grading.

The Year of the Bear

One of the highlights of my week was the gift wrapping party, organized by Susan and Jenni. A few early childhood students and some faculty first collected Christmas gift for children, and then wrapped them. Parents who lack the money for the holiday can just get these, so kids do not left without a gift. It felt great, and we had much fun. I must confess, a part of me immediately started to worry: not enough students are involved, and how can we make these important experiences available to more of the future teachers. Well, Susan set me straight – you cannot always focus on improvements; you must be able to appreciate what we are doing right.

And she is right, of course. Many people have some professional deformations. For example, school teachers tend to explain everything to everyone, sometimes the simplest things, and do it at length. Administrators like me tend to look for improvements, and therefore focus on problems to be solved. But it is also important to appreciate and acknowledge what we have accomplished, and continue doing right. There is the deep reason for the Thanksgiving Day to exist. It is a chance to appreciate what we have, so it is not all about complaining and improving. For example, it was just so gratifying to see over a hundred elementary and early childhood students at their student teaching orientation meeting. Sharp, cool, and prepared, they will become someone's favorite teacher, and change many lives. We just completed a complicated multi-stage program revision and transition – not without screw-up, but also without any major disasters. The first Early Childhood cohort will student-teach in the Spring. The first Secondary Postbac cohort will do the same. Our Longmont Reading cohort will wrap up this Summer; an LDE cohort will start in January. And all our existing programs are strong and growing. We just hired two more good people, and will try to hire two more. I am deeply grateful to all our faculty and staff for making all of this possible.

And then there is the gift-wrapping party. It is perhaps the most important of all developments. Our first step was to become a professional community that can work well together. The next challenge is to become a community that has a larger purpose beyond simply professional one. We are strong enough to take on more. We can give our students the best of all gifts – an opportunity and the ability to give. We also need to remember, that many people have very hard time right now, and for the time being, we are more or less safe from the recession. We still have jobs, and those are good, secure jobs. It's our turn to help. This is why I think we should focus on our nascent Bear Hug project, elect its governing board, create some plans, and generally get it moving.

Therefore, by the authority given to me or usurped, I declare 2009 the Year of the Bear, contrary to the Chinese calendar assigning it to Ox.

Reality Check

Just a couple of weeks ago, I was writing on problem solving, and mentioned a small problem we were able to solve, and the sense of satisfaction it brought. Well, guess what – it did not work. Once we asked more people involved in it, the solution turned out to be impractical. We had to develop another one later, and it turned out to be wrong also. Now we are on a third version, and the newest seems not as elegant as the first one, but it shows a better promise… We'll see.

The reality check comes in two forms: first, you have to run your solution by all people who are involved. They just see the aspects of the problem you do not necessarily see. The ability to overlook things is endemic to human beings. We don't want to ask ourselves a question that we suspect is not easy to answer. So, reality is other people. While not everyone is equally gifted in the solutions department, most people are great at imagining why something won't work. And it is a lot less expensive to imagine possible problems than encounter them in reality, and then fix. And because we all have different jobs and different experiences, involving more people helps to prevent many blunders.

The reality is also in trying it out, and being ready to adjust. We lived through many changes in the last two and half years, and this much is clear: any change needs tweaking after it is implemented. There is change fatigue, when you just want things to settle down. However, if problems keep coming up, they should be addressed. And then there is a level of a good-enough process. You can improve things endlessly, but at some point, the cost of change outweighs its potential benefits. If you can't fix it any more, it ain't that broke.

And finally, reality is the limitations we all have as people. The job interviews, which we had a plenty last two weeks, are a reminder. Every time we talk about a potential candidate and find some small flaws, I always think about myself, and my own flaws. I also think about my colleagues – it is great to work with all of them, and we have so much energy and fun, but it is not to say that they all are perfect. There is no such a thing as a perfect person, which really what makes people interesting. In every one of us, there are just certain limits that cannot be transcended. A very good solution may not work just because of the people who implement it.

The eventness of being

The eventness of being (событийность бытия) is a term invented by Mikhail Bakhtin, my favorite philosopher. It does sound rather highbrowed but it really isn't. If you have ever had goose bumps just from realizing that something is happening around you, you know what it means. Nothing makes life more real than its eventness, its ability to progress, to change. However you voted, you probably felt the significance of the event, when Obama walked on the stage on Tuesday night. Some felt joy, while others were disappointed and threatened. Yet if you did not feel the eventness of our existence, you're probably dead inside.

The eventness of being is easier to notice and appreciate when we have time to prepare, like it was with the elections. It is actually happening, you think, because you had imagined something like this before. 9/11 was an event that was hard to miss, too, although no one was preparing for it. it is the magnitude and the visual images that made it so real and unforgettable. Yet we often ignore the eventness of being when events are smaller, and less dramatic. Many of us enjoy stability, and comfort of knowing what will happen tomorrow. This is probably built into our DNA. Yet there is another kind of pleasure in life that comes from the new, the unexpected. When the waves of events wash over your body and soul, try to feel the tiny vibrations of the changing world.

It is easier said than done, because we like to control our destiny. Many people take it too far, and get extremely uncomfortable when things go not as anticipated. I don't enjoy it, when things go wrong either. But I must admit that there is a part of me that marvels the unpredictability, even when things are going wrong. You learn something new about the world when things go wrong. And I always feel sorry for people who just cannot take anything unexpected. Because they don't see the eventness of being, they have to attribute the unexpected to human will: good things happened because someone did a good thing, and bad things are happening because someone is incompetent or ill-intended. This is the view of the world that is very hard to live with. Any small deviation from the norm will look like evidence of poor judgment or ill intent, and will require that the guilt is assigned to someone.

Contrary to what some people may believe, I don't have anyone particular in mind. These are ramifications on human nature; they apply to all of us, maybe in different degree. I am certainly not always in touch with the great vibe of the eventful world, although it is my habit to try. It is tempting to attribute successes to myself, and failures to someone else, even though my mind knows both are largely accidents.

Here is a very small event that sent chills down my spine. My daughter's department (she just started grad school) has a tradition: every Halloween, they gather around Bronisław Malinowski's grave and read their favorite passages from the great anthropologist's writings. I was just there, thinking about the eventness of being, about this guy who died in 1942, and was thinking about the "imponderabilia of everyday life." He discovered the participant observation method, by accident, of course. And - I don't quite know how to explain it – this all really happened, and here is his grave, and here are the people that read his work. The life is a flow of happenings; it is not a list of projects.

The Russian Method

The group of Russians just left UNC a couple of days ago; they were here for a conference on teacher education. The visit was a lot of fun; we went to different places and talked about our work. I got to translate 9 presentations, which again brought me to the problem of translation. If Russian psychology can be translated (Vygotsky and Leontyev, for example), its educational theory and practice remains almost completely unknown in the English-speaking world. Rooted in the same Progressive education ideas of the early 20-th century, Russian educational tradition then developed largely independent of the West, and produces both the most authoritarian forms of education, and some of the freest and most creative. The problem is what the Russian educators use a completely idiosyncratic terminology and conceptual frameworks that are hard to translate. I discovered it very early in my American career, because virtually nothing from my Russian publications could be used for my American dissertation. I had to start from scratch. The literal translation just does not make much sense. For example, English does not have a word for Russian vospitaniye. It is a term for the part of educational theory and practice that is not about knowledge and skills, but is about attitudes, dispositions, and character. Vospitanie is sometimes defined as helping a person to grow, and in a sense, wider than education. Another problem is that Russian theorists tend to use awful jargon, which does not make much sense in Russian either, and certainly does not help people understand the discoveries Russian practitioners made. So, OK here is my attempt to summarize the Russian method in a few lines:

1. Transformation of peer culture into an educationally sound community. This is, of course, not a new idea; it was known to Jesuits for sure, and to many Progressives; it was and is used by Boy Scouts and many other children groups. The difference is that the Russians for the first time figured out a way of creating such peer communities without religious undertones, and make it inclusive. They also created a number of techniques that can be reproduced – the communities do not depend on a charismatic leader. Apparently, this works in both the K-12 and Higher Education world. The student communities can be integrated with the academic learning. Adults and children build relational network which them create additional motivation to learn.
   
2. The next discovery did not come until late 50-s. An educational community needs a project, a goal larger than itself. It is hard to provide such a goal for children and adolescents, because they are largely excluded from production, nor do they need to sacrifice themselves in a war, or help others. If religion is out also, it is not easy to find a project that would require working together. A number of Russian educators stumbled upon the same idea: they used techniques borrowed from the Russian theater actor training tradition (Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Mihail Chekhov), and from some cultural forms of Russian intelligentsia. They invented the so-called collective creative activity – something between improvisational theater, an elaborated game, or an invented celebration. It is hard to explain, and was not really explained well in the literature, but this strange activity provides enough social glue to hold these communities together. I suspect the exact configuration of the collective creative activity depends on the Russian cultural stereotypes and traditions, so it is not easily exportable.
   
3. The Russians re-discovered group therapy methods. Basically, if you consistently discuss with kids the relational side of things, it helps to accelerate the community development. Again, over the years, these techniques were standardized to a point where almost any competent adult could do it.
   
4. And finally, just in the recent decades, it became apparent that the method works better if weaker dozes, where communities are not as strong and tight, but still "good enough" to allow for the level of safety, engagement, and satisfaction to keep most children happy.
   

I am not sure if any of this makes any sense, but here it is. Is there a potential book here?

Problem Solving

I greatly value people's ability to solve problems. It brings me great pleasure to see how an unexpected solution emerges. There is a little bit of magic in it – just by thinking about some problem or difficulty in a different way, people are able to overcome the problem or difficulty. Just by thinking. When I see a new gadget or a piece of software, or just a simple thing like a tool or an office form, I always look at a clever idea, at an elegant solution. And when it is there, I feel a strong connection to the unknown to me person whose mind created something out of nothing; some value out of an idea. It is also makes my day or even a week, when I find such a solution, or am helping someone else to find it. The occasion for this was a really simple solution for one organizational problem; the nature of it is really unimportant. My colleague actually found it, and I was just able to contribute to it a little. It may still not work, but it just felt great. So, I am sharing my joy.

An elegant solution is not always possible. We live with some problems for years and years, and nothing seems to be working. Or we have only small, weak, unoriginal and temporary fixes. Or we employ ugly solutions which are too wasteful, or harmful, or just …ugly. And when I see people doing something without an attempt at originality, it irritates me. It also bugs me when I am unable to figure out a way out of a dead end, big or small. And it happens very often.

I am not sure if this makes any sense, but this looking for good ideas in other people's lives and in my own is what really makes me tick. It is addictive and not always productive, because it often makes sense just to leave things alone. Not every problem deserves solving. Not every known thing needs improvement. A hammer is a hammer, and yet my heart sings when I see a clever hammer design in a hardware store. Observing and experiencing creativity is the most profound and also a very strange pleasure.

Oleg Gazman, a wonderful Russian educator is credited with the motto "Every action must be creative, otherwise why bother?" Is this an overstatement? Perhaps; he was just placing a lot of emphasis on creativity, because it empowers children, gives them the sense of agency, and also ultimately helps them to learn and mature. I.P.Ivanov, S.A.Shmakov, O.A.Gazman and other founders of the Communard's Movement elevated creativity to the level of a moral value, not just a skill or preference. In their eyes, one must be a problem solver, and a creative thinker. It is not a choice, but an obligation. Creativity is, of course, is really an aesthetic, not an ethical ideal. Yet somehow it makes sense to me. That is where my search for creative ideas probably comes from: many of my teachers were connected to the movement. I am not making any value claims here, just trying to explain myself. It is not motivated by the ego, not at all. In fact, it is just as much fun to observe human creativity as it is to engage in it. I am not overly concerned with work efficiency (although it does enter my reasoning, for the obvious reasons). It is just the appreciation of the process. I just love to see those elegant solutions hatch and grow, and love to contribute. Creative work is double fun when it is collective. So, it was a good week.

The theory of set

In the first half of the 20s century, a great Georgian psychologist Dmitri Uznadze developed the theory of set. He and his followers measured how our actions are shaped not so much by stimuli as by readiness to act in a certain way. When we act, we unfold pre-written scripts. This is why different people can look at the same thing, and see completely different pictures. We all tend to screen information according to the pre-existing beliefs and attitudes, unconsciously. Sometimes these differences become so large that people do not understand how others see the world so differently, without lying, or being dumb.

I still remember the effect of the Simpson trials, where Black and White Americans realized they saw the same evidence in a strikingly different light, and came to the opposite conclusions. Political seasons usually lead to similar experiences. For example, how can the same woman, whose life is very much exposed to everyone, cause such a different reaction in different people? While conservatives tend to love Sarah Pailin, liberals are genuinely in disbelief that anyone can do that. These gaps in perceptions need to be explained, and when the gap is very large, only two explanations generally work: the other guys must be evil or stupid. So, liberals consider regular people who vote Republican stupid hicks, and the Republican leaders are just plain evil. Conservatives tend to do the same: the liberals are stupid, corrupt, or perverse, or all the above. Again, this is done not to just malign people; how else do you explain the differences in perception? The famous principle "agree to disagree" is a really difficult trick to pull off. It requires one to have no theory of other person's motives. Humans have a hard time being agnostic about each other's motives; it is almost unbearable for us to not know why people act the way they act. We need a theory of the other to stay sane; we are built to interpret other person's actions. This is actually, what most of our complex brains are designed for.

Now, because of these gaps, and theories that explain them, it is very difficult to talk to each other. For example, if I want to point out a character flaw in Pailin that has nothing to do with her political view, my Democrat friends will ignore it, because it does not matter. Republican friends will ignore it, because I just talk like any other liberal. (By the way, what concerns me about Sarah Pailin is that slight motion of her lower lip when she is angry, like that of a child determined not to cry. If you don't know what I mean, turn off the sound, and watch her speak – the convention and the debate. I think it is more important than her inexperience, or lack of knowledge, or her religious beliefs; she's got some major issues with self-esteem, and is driven to success to compensate for it, not to achieve something. She should never hold power over other people; it is just too dangerous for her and others.) See, there is no room for details like that in the regular political discourse, because of the gaps.

This is not a political blog, so I also want to connect to our much smaller and much better world. We all face that challenge from time to time. Sometimes other person's actions are just so difficult to explain, especially if you and that person are facing the same set of facts. But remember Uznadze: we carry sets – complex, holistic tendencies to see and act in certain ways. While we may be looking at the same thing, we might see very different things. Then we tend to attribute evil intentions or stupidity to other people who might possess neither. The solution is to suspend judgment, and try to understand and give credit to other people. Agree to disagree does not work; try to develop a habit of inventing multiple explanations of other people's actions. This skill is essential for what Maxine Greene calls the moral imagination.

In Praise of Email

Yesterday, Friday 9/19/2008, I have sent 51 emails. The first one, at 9:30 AM, was to Vicky. She told me than Layne is out ill today, and in the afternoon, she might need my help covering the front office. I simply said, I am on my way, and will cover. The last one, at 11:37 PM, was an acknowledgement that I received the Russian visitor's flight itinerary, and wished them luck at the interview with the American Embassy.

Yesterday, I received exactly 70 emails, not counting those The Barracuda ate (No, not Sarah Pailin, the other one). First one was at 1: 12 AM from my editor. He is in the Netherlands, hence the odd timing. It was a short message, stating that if Svetlana agrees to do cover art for my book, she can just use a PDF format. The last one, at 10:42 PM, was from Lena, our Russian contact, with the aforementioned itinerary.

This is quite typical, and I am not complaining about the amount of emails. I am sure your inboxes are of similar sizes. Some of my colleagues, who coordinate large undergraduate programs, probably receive and send more. This is not a complaint, but a reflection on this wonderful tool of communication we have. Because it can be annoying and seem overwhelming, we forget how wonderful it really is.

It is very versatile. For example, yesterday, I issued two official requests to process payments for two people, and asked at least two staff members to perform specific tasks. I helped nominate two students for the Graduate Dean Excellence Citation Awards. I accepted a formal dinner invitation. I asked a Registrar person to investigate a technical solution with Ursa which potentially can really simplify our PTEP compliance procedures and perhaps improve testing data we receive. Two other school directors discussed two different issues with me: One has to do with staffing policy and a short-term solution, the other – with payments from school to school for cross-program teaching assignments. I made a goofy error while confirming a guest speaker for my class, and then corrected myself within three hours or so. A faculty senator and I had three exchanges about a possible motion I want the Senate to consider. Several people were involved in an on-going discussion about implications of another abrupt CDE policy change; I also sent an update to some people about it. Three messages were exchanged with a Loveland woman who adopted a couple of Russian orphans, so we set up a meeting to talk about them. I answered a few of student and potential inquiries. I've sent the Dean a list of faculty publications for 2008 he requested a week ago. There were two faculty inquiries about policies and program requirements. But this is not all – there were several equivalents of a water cooler chat: how are things, and did hear that, or seen this? Several e-mails were very brief and are either confirming something or asking to do something.

It is obvious to me that all of these things could not be done without this technology in the same amount of time. I am not sure if it is good or bad that we do so many things, but we certainly could not accomplished them all with a telephone, hard copy notes, and face-to-face meetings. Of course, I probably made a lot of errors, just because of the speed of communications. Perhaps some decisions would benefit from a more thoughtful deliberations. However, the overall efficiency of what we all do has to be much higher than what was going on 10 years ago. Just student inquiries alone probably save us hours and hours ever week. An e-mail is much faster than a phone call or a visit; it can also point to other information (I find myself inserting web links into almost every student or applicant inquiry).

Another great feature of email is that it keeps a written record of everything. It counteracts our forgetfulness and a tendency to edit our memories. In the world of mostly oral communication, people always forget, deny, or remember a conversation differently. This is one reason for many meetings – you want many witnesses to confirm what was said and agreed on. Email is not only versatile and fast, but it is also exact and retrievable (which also makes it subpoenable).

Of course it works only when there is a certain amount of trust. One should trust the technology is working, and the message is going to be delivered. The newest casualty of the anti-spam war, is, unfortunately, a chance that Barracuda will eat an important message, along with all the garbage it swallows. Email also needs an understanding that an e-mail should contain an explicit or explicit permission to forward to others, or add more people when you reply. You should also trust that the BCC field is for exceptions only, and not a rule. I am still not sure what the ethics of BCC are. I think it is only for those cases when it is understood other people have been or will be involved in the conversation, and your correspondent knows that, but you want the respondent to answer to you only. Anyway, I think most people have a very good intuitive grasp for these rules, and we all have learned a lot about it in the last 15 years or so. Long live email.

A Study of Human Nature

The most challenging and the most interesting part of my job is dealing with people, with their quirks and peculiarities. Sometimes I think this entire experience is one big experimental study of human nature. And I even did not have to go through the human subject review board!

Here is one finding: there is a big mismatch between the intellect and the emotion. Otherwise perfectly rational, very smart and competent people will suddenly exhibit irrational likes or dislikes, take childish actions, and otherwise behave as if their rational brain is turned off for a moment. A wonderful and much-loved teacher will suddenly through a fit in classroom, yell at students, and slam the door, leaving. Another great person will have an episode of flash rage, and do something, then regret it and deny ever having done it. Someone with a great potential will sometimes say things about which she has absolutely no idea, just to experience the sensation of being always right and always competent. A person will suspect being set up for failure. Another person will believe in a great conspiracy against him. An experienced faculty member will read a student's confidential e-mail to the whole class, and humiliate the author publicly. She will consider every student question as a way of undermining her authority. Two people who have not known each other will suddenly take dislike of each other without any reasons. A person will demand special treatment with an infantile egocentrism and blindness to the needs of the whole group. Of course, my very position makes me aware of more of these things than anyone else, just because information of such nature tends to flow towards me. Authority attracts anger like lantern attracts moths; with similar consequences. It is endlessly fascinating; and never gets old. It also helps to reflect on my own actions, and sometimes even see my own "brain-off" episodes coming (although not usually).

The atavistic, caveman parts of our brains are very much alive and strong. They interact uneasily with the more modern, sophisticated parts of the brain. The caveman then forces the rational brain to come up with very complicated and believable rationalizations. After all, when your rational brain comes on line again, it needs to integrate what you just did into the life story, and into the sense of a coherent self. I am not sure the self really exists; it does looks like a story that really makes little sense. You probably have seen some movies where the playwright had a hard time coming up with a plausible ending, and just shoehorns everything into an arbitrary, unbelievable ending. That's what we do about ourselves: we take all these random behaviors, and give them the reasons later:"Here is why I did it; I had every right to do it." It is too bad the culture does not allow for just simply irrational behaviors. I think the problem is not with the caveman brains we have, but with the constant pressure to hide their existence. I wish people would just say, "Sorry, it was a brain-off episode."

Unfortunately, different people will have different relationships with their caveman brains. Some acknowledge it, and learn to live with it. Others don't acknowledge, but still have ways of controlling it most of the time. And then some people just have no idea about how irrational their behavior really is, how much it hurts them and others. They are so busy rationalizing their own actions that no time is left for actually doing something good. The need to rationalize all of our actions actually enslaves us to the caveman brains, makes the truly irrational actions indistinguishable from regular, rational actions.

On Academic Ethics

Last night (yes, Friday night), I met with my doctoral class, EDF 670, Introduction to Research Literature. We had four guest speakers – faculty from our college, to whom I am very grateful. The class is focused on helping doc students to write their literature review chapter. However, as the evening progressed, the conversation came to ethical questions. Who do you include and who do you exclude from your lit review? What do you read and what do you skim? How do you deal with disagreements on your committee? What do you stop taking all recommendations and assert your ownership over your own dissertation project? Can you approach a scholar you don't know? The conversation just made me reflect on how important the ethical considerations are in doctoral education. The professional norms are more important than legal and policy frameworks. Of course, there is a plenty of abuse and just bad behavior, but a doctoral degree still means a specific moral commitment to seeking truth with evidence and rational argument, to scholarly egalitarianism, and to integrity of scholarship craft. Training a doctoral student is intensely personal, and a largely altruistic job.

We don't have the same understanding with undergraduate and even Masters level students. Thos relationships are much less personal, and are guided by policy and law more than ethics. Some of it is understandable: we teach many more undergraduates than doctoral students. However, there is still an issue that needs to be addressed. NO faculty will sign her or his name on a dissertation project that is not good enough and can be an embarrassment. But many people will give a grade to an undergrad student without much evidence that the student has a good enough competency. We have quite a few students that "slip through the cracks." Every college professor probably had this experience, wondering how this or that student ever made it that far? In most cases, we let them through even further, wanting to avoid conflict. And after all, he has enough points to pass.

In a private e-mail, Dr. D.Raja Ganesan suggested to me that the names of professors should be printed on student transcripts, along with the title of the course, and the grade. I think it is an excellent idea, and can add a measure of personal responsibility to our actions as teachers. It will also encourage more university professors to care about their reputation as teachers, not just researchers. It will allow more interactions among professors about specific students, and may even help aligning curriculum and protect against the curricular drift. Because all student transcripts are available to all professors on-line, I imagine more conversations among professors like this: "So and so got an A in your class, but has problems with mine… How can I help her?" "So and so claims you never covered this concept in your class. This does not seem right, but I want to double check with you." "Was so and so absent a lot from your class, too?"

I bet it is very easy to implement now, with unified registration database. All we need is a faculty Senate discussion and a decision. In a mid-size university like ours, it will be the most interesting to try.

Till When?

I was trying to rent a van from UNC facilities, for the Nomadic conference in October. No problem, but they require each driver to take a 75 minutes class on van driving safety and state policies. Even though I drove a 15 passenger van for thousands of miles and hours, there is no waiver. Even though I can probably read the state policies myself, in just a few minutes, I'd have to go and listen to someone about them in person. Can you test me on policies? No. This whole thing irritated me somewhat, because it does sound like a waste of my time. There has to be a better way of ensuring safety and compliance than making everyone, regardless of experience, and of how we prefer to learn.

So, I was irritated until I realized that this is exactly what we make our students to do, only a lot more. No matter how much they already know and are able to do, there is no practical way for them to test out of a class. Even though some of them are like me; they prefer to read information quickly and try to apply it right away – we still want all to come to classroom and listen to our ramblings, our posturing, and our stories. The time spent in the holy union of buttocks with chairs is still the main measure of someone's education. We are just so used to this that the absurdity of the situation is hard to notice.

How long can we sit out in our narcissistic castles of education? In the age of Google Book and Google Scholar, the Wikipedia and the on-line research databases, we still measure education in credits – seat time, really, – and we insist on being paid for it on per-credit basis; and we want more and more, when information became so cheap it is really free. Whatever miniscule accountability measures we adopt are all on top of the seat-time machinery, not instead of it. I just don't think this is going to hold much longer.

We will probably rent the van from a private vendor, even though it is slightly more expensive. At least, they don't require me to learn what I already know, and to hear a lecture where a brief reading will do. Sooner or later, our students will make the same choice. Someone will force the legal changes undermining our monopoly on education. Someone will figure out a way of determining how much people already know, and how they can demonstrate their competency. Finally, someone will also figure out how to put control over learning into learner's hands, so they can chose how they want to learn, as long as learning takes place.

I am not sure when this is going to happen, and who will figure out all these things. I want to be one of them, for sure, not to watch our common ship slowly sink into oblivion. There should be a better way to teach and learn.

White Privilege

This week, we had a diversity workshop for college faculty on white privilege. By all accounts, it was very well done. The conversation was meaningful, and it felt right. The presenter Linda Black used a framework that originates with Peggy McIntosh's White Privilege concept. Most of us, college professors either knew the concept before, and if not, had no trouble grasping it. What remains unanswered though is what to do about it. One can say that as college faculty, we have an obligation to teach the White privilege to our students, so they understand how it works. However, it simply pushes the question one level down: once we manage to explain our students how the privilege works, what then? They will ask us what THEY should do about it.

The real problem is not with understanding that there exists the invisible privilege associated with one's race, class, sexual orientation, etc., but with what to do about it. This is a relatively new historical phenomenon. In the past, privilege was explicitly claimed by specific dress, language, behavior, or other visible markers. Now much of privilege exists by the means of not marking itself, and instead by marking everyone else. He is an African-American writer, we say, but she is simply a writer. These guys are Islamic terrorists, but Timothy McVeigh in is simply a terrorist. I do not wear "I am straight" sign on my forehead, but will silently assume we all know I am straight. Because the power is manifested by being "normal," buy being non-exotic, how do you refuse to exercise it? In other words, how does a White guy refuses to exercise the privilege, if it is exercised by doing nothing? How do you not do nothing?

One way to do control one's privilege is by watching one's behavior and language. His is what I and many of my colleagues do. It is surely important, and can be learned. However, let us be honest, these measure are not too effective. Just by bringing my White face into a conversation, I may change the power dynamics of a conversation. The same goes for gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc. We can control our behavior and language to some degree, but cannot control our skin color, gender, and sexual orientation. There is bias by behavior and bias by being; the former can be somewhat changed, the latter – I am not so sure.

What makes it more complicated, is that the White privilege is always contested, and sometimes very successfully. In certain settings and situations, women, and minorities will claim their own privileges. A small example: let's say the conversation changed to childbirth. Most (but not all) women will immediately reverse the power equation to imply that only they can produce any valid judgment about it, and men's opinions are not taken seriously. We all do that code switching hundreds of times a day; we manipulate contexts of social interactions to claim and exercise power. We claim many kinds of authority and privilege over each other, unconsciously. In these games, it is very difficult to distinguish the systemic kinds of privilege McIntosh is taking about, from other, less systemic, and more contextual power plays. I'd risk claiming that most people are incapable of making these distinctions on the go. A regular White guy who feels momentarily powerless will generalize this feeling into the entire issue of White privilege. The absolute majority of men, Whites, upper class, straight people – you name it – do not feel very powerful, and thus have a hard time recognizing the concept of the invisible privilege, even when they have a good intellectual grasp on it.

I am just trying to outline the real difficulty that anti-bias project faces. The solution seems to lie with some process of de-normalizing Whiteness, maleness and heterosexuality. While there is a lot of good thinking about these issues going on in scholarly communities, I don't think we are really there yet. In other words, the issue is not only with lack of efforts, but also with the lack of practical, manageable solutions. How do you make the normal questionable? Can there be no norm at all?

I imagine there could be a way to systematically analyze our institutional policies, documents, and practices for normativity or privilege (I am sorry for the jargon; not sure how else to say it without writing a long essay). But I don't know if such a process exists, or if there are instruments helping to do that. I am sure anyone can find a few examples where, for example the choice of textbooks or T&P documents, or illustrations may reinforce certain group privileges. Any social practice can be examined: who is likely to benefit? Who is likely to be left out? However, I am not sure if there is a more holistic and systematic way of assessing our institutional practices. Does anyone know? And if it does not exist, can we try to develop it? Something practical, manageable, with lists, criteria, ratings, that would allow to focus on the most important things, and be done in a reasonable time with reasonable effort? Not too complex to invite faking?

My hope is that our College Diversity committee would try to do something like that. We can always use more workshops; let's also focus on sensible self-examination.

Ten Profound Truths about the Japanese culture

Can one visit a country for a week or two and then claim any level of understanding its culture? Not really; it always annoys me when people make deep comments about the two countries I really know well – Russian and the U.S. – after doing the touristy things. So, to be fair, my brief visit to Japan taught me nothing about the Japanese culture or way of life. But the doing the superficial observations is such fun! So, let me embrace my shallowness, and talk about the small things.

1. The Japanese have a thing about their toilets. First, there are a lot of them, unlike in major US or Russian cities. They are all free. Most toilets in decent places have seat wormers; some also have built-in bidets, which will wash and spray your bottom at a push of a button. Wasteful? Not at all. Like Europeans, the Japanese figure that if you wash only the certain parts of your body often and on demand, you're less likely to take many showers a day and conserve water. However, besides the luxurious warm toilets, they also have the squat toilets, if you prefer that. The trick is to figure out in which direction to sit on those, because they are located with your side to the door.
   
2. You need a small towel with you at all times to wipe off the sweat from your face and neck. That and a hand fan are pretty much a necessity. You can get away with napkins, but you need to go to Starbucks to get napkins, because the Japanese has a prejudice against paper napkins, and you won't get them at most places, even where you buy ice cream.
   
3. The Japanese overwhelmingly don't speak English, despite having studied it in school and college. Language instruction sucks everywhere, in case you're wondering. When you have no reason to learn a language, no school will help you do that.
   
4. Everything costs about twice as much as you expect, which is a function of the weak dollar. However, fruits cost about ten times of what you expect. Why in such a warm and rich country do they have a shortage of fruit? I have no idea.
   
5. Everything is about half of the American size: cars, fire trucks, benches, seats, meal portions. Overweight Japanese are a true rarity.
   
6. Sushi in Kyoto on Shijo street, next to the river are to die for. That is the sushi heaven. Whatever you do, don't eat the sea urchin roe in the raw; it will make you puke. However, the rest of the food is delicious, not spicy, and looks quite healthy.
   
7. My wife Svetlana thinks that the Japanese are the best people on Earth, and everyone else is a troglodyte in comparison. Of course, this is because she is an artist, and Japanese really do have a great sense of style, balance, and color. It is evident even for me, not a great designer. She claims that even a Japanese janitor or landscaper is a true artist, judging from the way they arrange and adorn little things. She says the subdued color schemes they use are unparalleled, maybe with Italy coming as close second. Japan is virtually kitsch-free. America is drowning in kitsch, Russia is the kitsch empire.
   
8. The Japanese don't only drive, but also walk on the left. It is hard, but important to remember, or else you will run into people all the time.
   
9. Japanese nod a lot; or rather, these are short bows. And they bow a lot, even when they say "No." They also say thank you and thank you very much and thank you oh so very-very much all the time, especially when they try to sell you something. However, they don't try to sell very hard, and their store clerks are not nearly as annoying as the American ones, and not nearly as rude as the Russian ones. All shops are air-conditioned (remember the sweat towel) which makes shopping there an enjoyable experience, except for the item #5. I am otherwise extremely annoyed and bored by shopping. But if it is 100 degrees with 100% humidity outside, that cute little Japanese shirt looks rather interesting.
   
10. The Japanese are a lot like us.
    

These are the ten most profound truths about Japan I could produce.

Plagiarism

A happy week was completely ruined by plagiarism cases I discovered in my graduate class. I don't really know why, but it always makes me very upset. Somehow, it always feels like I failed, too. No matter how many times I warn students, and how explicitly the policy is stated on my syllabus, it still feels yucky, like when you see someone stealing. I might be just grumpy today, but it really is unpleasant to be deceived. I am sure those of you who ever was deceived or robbed remember the feeling of being violated. It is not the stuff or money that you miss, but your own sense of… I don't know, cleanliness?

Why students do it, I am not entirely sure. I don't remember having any inclination or temptation of cheating when I was a student, so it is hard for me to relate. Partly, it just became very easy to do. The instant access to information means instant, effortless stealing opportunity. I don't believe for a minute that students now are less honest than before. In the past, it simply took too much effort to plagiarize. One had to go to a library, find a book, re-type some text. Plagiarism is usually a cope-out for people who are insecure, stressed, and overcommitted. Dishonest, too. But because they are also short on time, effort makes a lot of difference. Old plagiarism was less harmful, because simply retyping text made the offender learn something. Copying and pasting teaches one nothing except for the skill of copying and pasting.

Of course, professors can fight back, and that is what we should do. If we don't, we may as well just sell the diplomas; we are no better than snake oil sellers. As objective standardized tests are used less and less frequently, we must make sure the performance-based assessment is not compromised, or we will run into deep trouble. Unopposed, plagiarism will ruin higher education in no time, because no link between credentials and competence will remain. So, this is a call to arms.

As a first step, ask your students to submit a file even if you prefer to grade hard copies. We should try to check very paper for every class.

• Open a blank file, go to Insert, Object, Text from file. Then select all files student submitted, and insert them all at once. You will get a huge, hundreds of pages file. Of course, you can do it with individual files, if they look suspicious.
  
• Then go to ANY shell of Blackboard, Control Panel, and click on SafeAssign.
  
• After that, click on Direct Submit, and then on Submit papers button.
  
• Once you submit, give it several minutes to work its magic. It will produce a report that will begin with something like this:
  
• Click on all instances of plagiarism (they are numbered in little green circles), and on Highlight All, and then manually recheck. Sometimes a student uses legitimate quotes, and the system does not know it. However, it also finds real instances, even if a few words are changed to conceal plagiarism. It is important to re-check manually though, to avoid false accusations.

On stupidity

Two nights ago, I was building a headboard for our bed; something I promised Svetlana to do for a very long time. Like most men, I have to look at the materials (nice pine boards) for some time, and make a mental plan, step by step, of how things should work. Then I started to work, and one thing was annoying. Because I have only one drill, I had to constantly pull out the drill bit, and put in the Phillips bit for screws, and then back. It's not essential to know the details; basically, in this particular project, you could not pre-drill all holes and then screw in all screws, not without spending another hour calculating fractions, and measuring everything very precisely.

Anyway, about half-way through, I realized just how stupid my plan was, and that there was a much easier solution: nail all the boards lightly just to keep them in place; then drill all the holes, every time putting the nail back into the hole to hold the construction, and then screw all in. I think everyone had that experience, the sudden acknowledgement of one's own stupidity. It does not have to be carpentry, of course. Sometimes you ask a question, and before you finish, you just realize well, this is a really stupid question, because the answer is quite obvious. The headboard project made me think about the nature of stupidity.

It is not mental retardation or low intellect; that is not what I have in mind at all. Rather, it is when regular, reasonably intelligent people do something stupid, as if the brain just checks out for a moment (sometimes for longer periods of time). It is obvious that everyone has those moments; some of us are better at hiding those, while others are great at denials, and will always find someone else to blame for their brain malfunctions. Teachers, for example, tend to attribute kids' stupid actions to immaturity; they routinely deny or ignore their own blunders. Stupidity is embarrassing, and it takes a great amount of trust to acknowledge and own up to it, especially when other people are involved. Notice, my example was extremely safe: it only cost me an extra hour or so of work, and did not hurt anyone. I could probably come up with a more relevant and recognizable one from work, but then it's too embarrassing, and involves others.

What bothers me is not the stupid things we all do on occasion, but the denial that we do them. For example, one can do the same dumb thing for years, simply because one denies that it is excessively stupid. Instead of acknowledging (even to oneself), and fixing the problem, one just continues doing it. This is not inertia, or lack of imagination, not that. A more subtle mechanism is in place: if you try to change certain process, you implicitly acknowledge that what you did before was, well, not that smart. The question that inevitably arises is, why did you put up with that all that time? Paradoxically, greater tolerance to stupidity is the main way of reducing its sway.

Embrace your inner idiot.

Virtual course

We had a great slowtalk with Elementary PTEP program this week. It is good to talk about the nitty-gritty of curriculum, and not about data, accountability, and other such boring stuff. One interesting issue we encountered is with curriculum strands. For example, we do not have a special class on classroom assessment. It would make sense to teach this content in several different classes, as a curricular strand or a theme. However, once you try to figure out how it works, the task is not simple. Do we hit the same skills and content in different classes? But then it might be redundant. Do we build a specific sequence of skills and content? But how do we make sure there is continuity, and that all instructors teach it? This is an interesting challenge, because we are used to think in terms of courses: there is specific content, outline, calendar, readings; one person is in charge of it; it has assignments, tests or other evaluations, and a grade. The strands or themes are hard to conceptualize and implement, because they encroach on faculty independence, and just require too much time for constant collaboration. There is no mechanism of enforcement.

Here is one possible solution. What if we use the same mental tools that we are used to, to manage the strands? In general, it is easier to think about a new problem, if you can cast in terms of an old problem. We can develop a virtual course called "Classroom Assessment." It will have a syllabus, content, readings, assignments, and tests, just like any other course. However, within it, there will be several sections: "You will learn this in EDEL 350, as a course within the course. It will be 20% of your course grade." And then the next section: "You will learn this in EDEL 445, and it will make 10% of your grade." The course will take three or four real courses to complete, and students themselves would carry records from previous evaluations from course to course. Instructors of each real course will then be more or less bound to the virtual course's syllabus, because students will expect it. Students will be able to see some coherence in the strand, so that assignments build on each other to reinforce and develop skills, and that their knowledge is gradually expanding. It will also avoid redundancy, where instructors use the same reading, or the same assignment, or just cover the same content.

Everyone likes to tweak what we teach and how we teach, hence the curricular drift. But if we have a virtual course syllabus, whoever is changing his or her portion of it, will be compelled to see if the change does not affect other parts of the syllabus (again, in terms of redundancy and connection).

Taking this idea a little further, course sequences (for example, the literacy sequence), should really be thought of in terms of one long course, with one super-syllabus. The same objective: to make sure readings, content, assignments, and tests build on each other, rather than overlap. And if they overlap, it is by choice, to reinforce certain concepts. What do you all think?

Summer reading

Summertime, and the living is easy. I don't know how other people spend their down time. I was reading (and also listening to podcasts) abound mind-enhancement drugs, child sexuality, the Iberian Celts, robots, beekeeping, and other such unrelated stuff. In between, I am reading Jude the Obscure by Thomas Harding, editing my manuscript, watching good and bad TV.
My mind delights in random ideas; I love to know about human creativity, and about people's profound weirdness. Not sure where this comes from; probably genetic, from my nomadic ancestors. This always happens to me between writing projects; my brain needs food. It does not have to be educational research or philosophy. Rather, it has to be something different, something from the fields I don't actually know much about. That is the only way I know how to think.

Among other things, the eclectic summer reading puts me in an optimistic mood. As a species, we are at the top of our creativity. We have enormous creative powers, and have not been using even a portion of it. And nothing makes us more creative than a decently sized crisis. The $4 a gallon gas created the buzz of new ideas; people drive less, carpool more, and share efficient driving tips. Americans have cut back 30 billion miles over the last six months. Another two dollars increase, and we will start building public transportation. Isn't that the best thing that happened to America in the long time? I am waiting for that plug-in hybrid, and till then, my 84 Honda Civic will do nicely. Uninterrupted prosperity is a recipe for complacency. Our little corner of the woods, higher education, has been remarkably stable and successful. Just watch what happens when this model unravels. We all will become very creative and innovative overnight. Life is good, and it is going to get better.

Silentium!

By Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev, 1830

Speak not, lie hidden, and conceal
the way you dream, the things you feel.
Deep in your spirit let them rise
akin to stars in crystal skies
that set before the night is blurred:
delight in them and speak no word.

How can a heart expression find?
How should another know your mind?
Will he discern what quickens you?
A thought once uttered is untrue.
Dimmed is the fountainhead when stirred:
drink at the source and speak no word.

Live in your inner self alone
within your soul a world has grown,
the magic of veiled thoughts that might
be blinded by the outer light,
drowned in the noise of day, unheard...
take in their song and speak no word.

/trans. by Vladimir Nabokov/

Молчи, скрывайся и таи
И чувства и мечты свои -
Пускай в душевной глубине
Встают и заходят оне
Безмолвно, как звезды в ночи,-
Любуйся ими - и молчи.

Как сердцу высказать себя?
Другому как понять тебя?
Поймёт ли он, чем ты живёшь?
Мысль изречённая есть ложь.
Взрывая, возмутишь ключи,-
Питайся ими - и молчи.

Лишь жить в себе самом умей -
Есть целый мир в душе твоей
Таинственно-волшебных дум;
Их оглушит наружный шум,
Дневные разгонят лучи,-
Внимай их пенью - и молчи!..

What is happening to public higher education?

As we are testing waters in various off-campus ventures, I get a sense that some rules of the game are changing. Mainly, it is the kinds of questions potential applicants are asking and the kinds of responses or non-responses we get from people. It is not a secret generally; see for example, Lloyd Armstrong's blog. Basically, higher education is entering the world of competition, something most of other industries have been operating in for a long time. We are not there yet. For example, our recent drop in enrollments did not get anyone worried about our job security, or the imminent bankruptcy. I remember from my days of working for a small company, it was a very different feeling. We knew that if this state contract is not awarded, or that client leaves us, we all lose our jobs, at any time. Or, compare this to American car manufacturers: SUV's and trucks are not selling, so they just closed down a lot of factories, and fired a lot of people. We are not there yet, and hopefully, not even close. But we are definitely on the road to operating in the same situation of competition.

Just a couple of examples: a school district we were trying to talk into opening an off-campus cohort in, invited us and another university to present on the same day. Or another example: a recently admitted student shares that he shopped around, and we won his business because we had someone on the phone to talk to. Our partner schools tell us: you are good, but another university pays more to cooperating teachers. And finally, we seem to be losing the enrollment race to CSU and CU, see the recent Tribune article by Chris Casey.

Of course, the situation is not dire yet; we will always have traditional students, even if in smaller droves; our education programs are first-rate, and we seem to be working on overdrive all the time. So, there is no real sense of losing business; not on personal level. However, I just think we and other similar universities are not ready for the world of competition, and it may come sooner and much more suddenly than we imagine.

We are not prepared because of the outdated organizational structures and culture. We are not flexible, we are slow to react, and we cannot count money. UNC, like any other university, has the commercial arm, the Extended Studies. ES is much more efficient simply because they have more organizational and financial flexibility. Ideally, the rest of the university should operate just like the Extended Studies, constantly monitoring revenues and expenses in each college, school, and individual program. While not every program has to break even, everyone's financial situation must be transparent. I really don't mind subsidizing another program, but I would like to be told about it, and to know that this is done for the good of the whole, not because no one is paying attention. Revenue streams must be traced to their originators, and the patter should have a right to use some of it to experiment, take risks, and invent new educational services.

A part of the problem is that there is a further division within the University, and an invisible wall separates the Academic Affairs and the Extended Studies. While legal rationale for this separation is clear (state funded versus cash funded), ideally, academic units, faculty and students don't have to know or care about the difference between the two. There is no justification for the absurd situation when our new growing Early Childhood program only costs us money, while our off-campus Postbac programs are the main source of our discretionary income. Those are both very good, and both require a lot of work, dedication, and creativity. Much of risk-taking is dampened by the perceived shortage of faculty, and incongruence of ES vs. on-campus policies and procedures. We are caught in the perpetual catch-22: we cannot grow, because we do not have faculty to grow; we do not have faculty, because we do not have funds to hire them. Almost all new initiatives are coming out of someone's hide, and those hides are not inexhaustible.

What would a business person do? Come up with a plan, and then borrow money or find an investor to make it happen. Then hire great people to work on it, and just get the project going. Use of credit is the life-line of all modern economy, and it was invented exactly to get out of the catch-22 situation. But of course, we are not allowed to do what everyone else is doing, because we are a university. We are not about money. Sometimes I think we are about the absence thereof.

Another example: at the end of the calendar year 2008, our School will have taught 51 credits of off-campus credit hours. That is an equivalent of two full-time instructors. However, we cannot hire two new instructors using Extended Studies funds, because such people would need to teach for ES only. But this simply won't work, because no one can teach all of these various courses; one need to be a specialist. We could hire someone on ES funds, but who would teach in both off-, and on-campus. What's the difference, after all? It would not have been cheaper; full-time faculty cost slightly more than either adjunct instruction or overloads to existing FT faculty. However, we can expect a full time faculty to work with us on curriculum, on new programs, take lead in developing new projects, serve of committees, write reports, etc.

There are other institutional barriers; I won't mention them all. It is probably too boring already. I am just worried about what is coming next. We might not see that bus closing in on us. As we can see, the economy experiences wide swings, and dramatic changes. Who knew five years ago people will be dumping their SUV's and your house would lose value? How do we know what the landscape of higher education will look like 5 years from now? Will there be enough for everyone? Which other players will enter the field and open their brick and mortar or virtual campuses next door? I think public universities like ours should start to transform themselves into more flexible organizations now while we still have time. There is other one legal mandate or a fiscal rule or another to stop us from changing. But then again, Colorado is a smaller state, with a smaller, friendlier government, and we can change all these rules if we really wanted. In 2006, Colorado ranked fifth in the nation on the "Best States for Business" rankings by Forbes. And I am confident we can do it, because we have the most educated and creative workforce among all industries. Another option is to wait and see.

Fall Offense Planning

I have written here before, that I divide all work into defense and offence. Defense is reacting to things that are coming my way: reports, requests for information, trouble students and trouble faculty, personnel issues, routine office management issues, things to sign, and things to check on, schedules, workloads, staffing, contracts, finances, responses to student inquiries, teaching. This actually adds to quite a bit, especially in Fall and Summer.

Offense is new projects, such as grant applications (we just submitted one), program revisions, attempts to expand out off-campus empire, thinking about where we want to be in the future, developing some efficiency tools (for example, the SIMS database, and I started on a new scheduling database), considering changes in policy (such as a new system of payments for consultants), looking for ways to save money, developing a plan of action or the year. Just lie a military offense, each academic year needs to have some preliminary planning work done: what should be accomplished, and then, narrow it down to what can be accomplished.

In the next academic year, we have a number of biggies. NCATE comes in November for a site visit. In October (tentatively, 10-17), the Russians are coming for the First International Teacher Education conference (See the Nomadic Conference blog for the original idea). If that happened, then we are to travel to Russia in May for a visit. If we like the whole thing, we can start planning another one, with a different country. If the Jordan Early Childhood grant is funded, Jordanians will come for a visit sometime in the Fall as well. Now, we absolutely must start another off-campus cohort in MAT/LDE next year, expand Secondary Postbac, reignite the Bridge Postbac program, and plant seeds for perhaps three more programs, hoping at least one of them will work (I am thinking, we can take MAT/Elementary off-campus to Denver, start an Early Childhood PTEP cohort in one of community colleges, and begin developing a quality Ed.D. on-line). The Elementary PTEP and Postbac assessment system overhaul needs to be completed next year; Secondary and K-12 also moved forward considerably. We need to keep ironing out the kinks of our PTEP tracking system (the checkpoint courses), and keep debugging curriculum (that seems to never end). Elementary transition should complete by the end of the year, so we need to see what bugs are there. Early Childhood program will mature to adulthood (it's a pun), so we need to review the lessons and adjust. We need to take a hard look at our annual budget, estimate PT costs, and see how much money we can really invest in professional development and curriculum development. I am also going to teach a new doctoral class in the Fall, and am still quite unsure about it.

Now, these are too many projects to just keep working on them at the same time, so we need a plan, with some timeline, and specific tasks in each project. In other words, we need a script for the year. There is not a slightest chance for me to do most of it, so the play needs a cast, with specific roles assigned. Wait, I am mixing my metaphors here: started with military and ended with theater. But I guess it is the same idea; both involve what they call project management in business. In the last two years, I have tried to be more or less systematic about each individual project, but not about all of them. So, that's my Summer project, to spell out the big plan, and try to see how different parts interact with each other. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

The tasks of improvement

Some of the units at our university, which shall remain unnamed, cannot improve. They run into the same problems semester after semester, and heroically overcome those, every time. The people there work just as hard as anyone else, if not harder. They are always friendly, helpful, and get things done. And we end up talking to them quite a bit, because, well, there are problems; the same ones again and again.

How does t happen that people are so busy working, they don't have the time to figure out a way of doing their work better, more efficiently, with fewer errors? Not that I don't know how, for our little operation at STE has its own backlog of unsolved issues. We simply don't have time to get to them. But it bothers me when serious, chronic problems, all of which are solvable, get put off again and again. What bothers me is a day-to-day mentality, where things are done for the day, as if they are done for the last time. Next day brings the same exact problems, but we are just waiting for the day to end.

I don't want our School be among those units that will remain unnamed. We need to keep improving things, small and big, even just to keep ourselves moving. So, let's take a look at what we do, and make sure we spend our time and energy on doing more complex, more interesting work, and don't waste our lives stepping on the same rake every day. Here is my set of adages to help:

• If you work too hard, it probably means you don't work too smart.
  
• The best use of time is in thinking where all your time goes.
  
• Thinking is noticing patterns, and everyone notices if you work without thinking.
  
• The most interesting work is getting rid of uninteresting work.
  
• When we try to ignore how stupid something is, we say "it's always been done that way."

The wheel reinvention factory

How long does it take to develop a course syllabus? For a course you taught for many times, it still takes a couple of days: to change the calendar, to tweak assignments and grading rubrics, to update reading lists, to order books, etc. If it is a new course, or a significantly revised one, it can take weeks. That is exactly what I did this week: revised a graduate course I taught once before. It is a labor-intensive process, and results of it are often imperfect. It took me at least five years to get my undergraduate Social Foundations class where I wanted it to be, and I had more time to play with curriculum back then. For this course, I do not have all the time in the world, and simply cannot invest two weeks in it. Considering I may or may not teach it in the future, this might not be a vise investment of time.

Of course when I see something takes too much time or effort, my brain starts churning. After all, every time we do it, we reinvent the wheel. The mental process of an instructor follows more or less the same patterns: What do I want them to learn? (Learning objectives). What kinds of activities and assignments can work to help them learn? What sources have the main concepts and fact? How can I make sure they learned what they need to learn? How to make grading system clear and fair? How to space all of this throughout the course in a logical manner? And finally, how to explain it all in a syllabus? Those are fairly common, repeatable questions, which from a semblance of an algorithm. Moreover, there are only a limited number of answers to each question, and each choice narrows the choices in the next step. For example, most courses' learning objectives include mastering certain concepts, and certain facts, as well as development of certain skills. While the number of concepts is unlimited, the skills are limited: those are skills of reasoning/thinking, and performance kinds of skills (how to present information, to speak, to show, etc.). The facts can also be broken down into, say, dates, names, statistics, cases. But then, if your course is heavy on concepts and their applications, there are only limited choices on how to help people learn concepts. For example, you can give a case, and show the concept at work. Or, you can define it. Then you always want people to use concepts in context different from the original example, so you can be sure students learned to use the concept. Then you can test how sophisticated is their use of a concept by asking to use it in a more difficult case, etc., etc. Class schedule narrows down the choice of activities. A 3-hour class cannot contain only lecture or only discussion; it must have some combination of various activities. Also, there are really a limited number of activities, and they are all good for a specific task. Let's see, there are lectures, demonstrations, large class discussions, small group discussions, debates, simulations and simulation games, skits, teaching segments… OK, probably about a dozen more. Still, not unlimited. Those can be classified by engagement level, and focus on content, by instructor-led vs. student-led. I am just giving some examples, so do not expect complete lists.

This really does look like an algorithm. Can a computer program take guesswork out of this, so I don't forget any important steps? For example, imagine smart software like this: You want to design a course?

• Step One: Please enter the key concepts you want to teach (it looks for definitions, so you only need to pick one out; it also looks through Goggle Scholar to suggest key readings). OK, which skills from this list are the most important? Great. Which facts do you want students to know and understand: Enter names (it churns out an internet search on them), historical events (does the same). Will they need to know any demographic, economic or other facts? Or copy and paste appropriate profession standards, so we can analyze them for concepts, skills, and attitudes.
  
• Step two: it tells you your course is overloaded with concepts and facts; please reduce to make it appropriate for sophomore level.
  
• Step three: Identify your time budget: contact classroom hours, homework hours, grading hours. Here is a list of appropriate activities. Each takes so much time from classroom contact time, so much home work, and so much grading time. If you select one, it reduces the budget until you exhaust it all.
  
• Step three: here is the recommended mix of activities and assignments, based on your schedule. And here is a list of suggested assessments; select from the list.
  
• Step four: check your course, click here to print the syllabus. Click here to generate and edit classroom activities handouts.
  
• After each class, rate activities and assignments, so the system learns which ones actually work, and which do not. Share the learning curve with other professors teaching the same course.
  

The point of automating tasks is that more time can be spent on actually creative, deep thinking about teaching. It is also to minimize omissions, miscalculations of time and effort, poor grading practices, repetitive activities, vagueness of objectives, mismatch between objectives and assignments, between what we teach and what we assess. This is no more complicated than the TurboTax; it uses the same level of algorithmic complexity.

Anyone wants to go in business with me? We can pitch this to a venture capital firm, raise 2-3 mln, and pay ourselves nice salaries for 5 years, waiting for this to succeed. Or fail.

The language regime

Over the last weekend, I attended my son's graduation. On Monday through Wednesday, I spent a lot of time on a grant application. On Thursday I drove by Windsor that was hit by a tornado, and saw the destruction on TV. I also got rid of weeds in our yard, cooked myself a meal, read a book, and answered a few e-mails. How do you put all these events next to each other? We are always forced to distinguish important from unimportant, to rank the events in our lives according to some obscure principle. But what is it? The tornado is of course, the biggest news story. Some 200 homes and businesses are damaged; one person died. Nothing can be more important than that at the moment. However, human brain is a peculiar thing, and the smallish, unimportant thoughts and concerns will pop in and crowd out the most important ones. The mind wonders in different direction, and does not seem to care what we acknowledge to be more or less important. We hide it of course. When a tornado hits the town next to you, you do not share with other people the concern about yard weeds, and how to get them out without killing your good plants. Sharing such a thought would appear to be callous and inconsiderate of others. I remember in the days following 9-11, all conversations not related to the tragedy dropped for a while, and comedy shows were cancelled for about a month. In fact, we always carefully censor topics of our conversations, bringing up what looks appropriate, and hiding silly, insignificant, or strange thoughts we have. The appearance of normalcy is heavily dependent on our ability to project an appropriate image through words.

This is how we operate, and not just in time of the disaster. Most people underestimate the degree to which we all self-censor our speech. This is one reason it is so difficult to figure out what people really think. In fact, we don't really want to know what others are thinking. A device that actually reads minds would have been a social disaster, because we all are so used to the barrier between thought and speech. We would be shocked and disappointed at the mixture of inappropriate, bizarre, random, and trivial thoughts in other people's minds – because we are not fully aware of the mess inside our own heads. I am writing this as a blogger; as someone who needs to constantly organize his thoughts for public consumption. But all of us edit our thoughts all the time, and this editing, in a larger sense, constitutes social norms. The inner censor is so strong, it can push the entire levels of thought completely under the level of awareness, which creates the subconscious. The most serious taboo thoughts are so unspeakable, they also become unthinkable (yeah, Freud again, but also Bourdieu and Voloshinov, if you're curious).

We also have mechanisms of thwarting the inner censor from time to time. It is very important to do so, because much of creativity stems from our ability to hold off the censorship. Humor is one such mechanism. When you say something everyone else thinks but does not dare to say, that's funny... up to a certain degree. And laughter is probably just a social signal to let people know they violated certain social norm, but not too much. So, laughter is the first warning, anger is the second warning. A mental illness diagnosis or a prison sentence is the third and final warning. These are the society's lines of defense against its members' chaotic brains.

I am thinking about language: which discourse is permissible, and which is not. I was recently told that at least some of my colleagues are offended by my use of "Jesus" as an emotional/humorous expression. I had no idea and am thankful to friends who let me know. And I am sorry if it offended anyone. However, I just watched the news, and don't believe the level of policing the language applied to our political candidates is healthy. They are now not only expected to heavily police their own speech, but also be responsible for things their supporters say. Where is the line that separates the good censor from the bad one?

It is my hope that we, in our School, will have a language regime that is teetering between common decency and certain tolerance. This is not just because I am particularly attach to certain expressions, or want to make my life easier, or impose my language regime onto others. No, it is simply a concern for the spaces of humor, creativity, and tolerance to remain open. We are a rowdy bunch, with many interesting, diverse personalities and beliefs, which is what makes me so happy to be here. To make our little community work, we must both be sensitive to each other's rules of discourse, and be very tolerant to those who violate them. Some of us find the casual usage of the word Jesus offensive; others are sensitive to verbal indications of sexism, racism, classism, and ableism. There are many other nuances, such as who is from where, who has been here longer, who went to which school, and who is a more productive scholar or better teacher. It is very easy to offend someone inadvertently. However, one can always refuse to be offended, and laugh instead. So, let's use the first warning signal often and generously, and hold off the second warning as much as we can.

Flexible but sticky

At the end of the academic year, I reflect on what worked and what did not, and if there is any pattern that separates the two kinds of projects. Unfortunately, my little self-analysis does not bring that many generalizations. No discernable pattern emerges. For example, projects that I thought were well thought out, and on which we worked really hard, did not materialize (for example the off-campus cohort in Alamosa), for reasons beyond our control. Others I considered to be risky, worked out just fine (both the checkpoint system and the new student teaching placement database). Where I did not expect any complications (our scanning project), such complications occurred. Things I thought really simple and doable (the study abroad in Siberia project) did not work. Most of our projects are still working themselves into something definite, the jury is still out. For example, we are yet to see if the massive revision of the Elementary program will bring real results. We don't know if our Secondary Postbac program will work or not. Some projects appeared from nowhere, they were simply opportunities: The Jordan Early Childhood grant project, or the Content Reading project, or the partnership with Association of Retired Educators. Many other things though worked out about as expected and did not create major surprises one way or another. We worked hard on NCTATE reports and State reauthorizations, and both went well so far. I wanted to sign a book contract, and it took longer than expected, but it happened. I worked on my last PES conference, and it went on as planned, more or less. Many of my colleagues did a lot of great things, and I am sure they all have had a successful year. But not everything worked as planned.

OK, this is getting tedious. But all I want to say is that there is not a lot of predictability in what we do, and good planning and good effort do not guarantee success, although make it much more likely. The world of a university like ours is not all that stable; it has much fuzziness, and changes fast. What shall we do in a world like this? My strategy is to diversify efforts. We should always pursue slightly more projects than we are able to maintain. This is simply because not all of them will succeed. However, it is also important to identify priorities, in which if one attempt fails, we should get back on our feet and just start over again; try something new. For example, there might be temporary defeats, but no failure in three areas (there are probably more; this is just an example):

• We must work on improving curriculum and pedagogy. It does not work as fast as I would like, and perhaps it should go slowly, but we will be doing it until we all are dead. This is what business people call our core business, and everything depends on our ability to train teachers as good or better than anyone else in the world. Whatever else is going on, whatever budget crises or economic collapses, we need to do our thing well.
  
• We must have a little extra money to have some sense of self-respect. Although we are relatively low-paid, we should always be able to travel to conferences, to have comfortable chairs, and working computers. If the civilization ends, and everyone goes back to the Stone Age, we should have decent stones to sit on. I just think it is important; small but important.
  
• I think we should constantly work on fairness and morale. This includes evaluation processes, many big and small decisions, and the climate in which we work. Again, it does not just happen without constant, multi-year effort.
  

The challenge is to be opportunistic and adventurous, but still stick to the most fundamental concerns, and never lose sight of them.

Of course, this is a bit of wishful thinking. The reality is such that problems and successes come and go. Every day brings something different, and we all forget about something, we drop the ball, ignore that memo, etc. In truth, some of the projects (not listed above) did not work because we screwed up; OK, I screwed up. Flexible but sticky is just a phrase, perhaps it is my understanding of the ideal. This is how organizations should work, not necessarily how we work. My hope is that we will develop that style eventually. We will be highly mobile, creative, and opportunistic, but will cling doggedly to what is really important to us, and never let it go.

Colorado Tease

That is what they call the spring season here in Colorado: the Colorado tease. It may snow at night, only to go up to 60 the next day. The weather is not just changing quickly; the astonishing fact is that it keeps doing it for over a month: back and forth, back and forth. The atmospheric pressure is like a mad see-saw, sending people with blood pressure into emergency rooms, and taking the rest off balance. And of course, all is complicated by the expected cabin fever. It is a nervous time of year, doubly so in Colorado. I hear reports of otherwise mildly mannered professors blowing up in class and yelling at students. I learn of one or another intrigue brewing where should normally be none (no real reason). Moreover, I find myself off-balance and irritated about all the wrong, small things. Is it the weather? Are we all tired at the end of the school year? Is it the pressure swings?

What is the difference? One of the signs of maturity is the ability to observe yourself and people around you, and notice the changes, so you can adjust. I guess I am average at that; sometimes I notice things a bit late, and I don't always know how to deal with them. Some people are a lot better, but most are terrible at this. Most people I know pay no attention to the subtle shifts in the emotional pulse of a group to which they belong, nor are they able to monitor their own emotional tonus. Most people will attribute their own mood changes to good or evil actions of others. I am just wondering why it is, and how we all be educated people without such a basic survival skill.

(As I was typing the previous paragraph, I caught myself thinking that its tone is a bit too harsh, a bit arbitrary and perhaps tiny bit dogmatic. How can I claim that most people are quite ignorant of their own emotions? How do I actually know that? Is this the consequence of the same weird atmospheric phenomena, or actually a good point? Where does my authentic "deep" self end, and the untrustworthy and shifty emotional layer begins? Oh, well, I will stick to my claim here anyway; after all, this is not a peer-reviewed journal. So please ignore all of this as complete and utter nonsense.)

Hellenistic philosophers and Buddhists both call for control over one's emotions, but what they mean has nothing to do with suppression of one's emotions. Rather, they meant a way of knowing one's own emotional self, and then being able to detach oneself from destructive emotions, or at least reduce one's dependency on them. But I am not even talking about some spiritual discipline; I want basic, rudimentary awareness of the one's own and the collective emotional tone. And it is possible, because I know at least a few people who are extremely good at it; so good they put me to shame. This does not seem to be an in-born quality; I bet it is a skill, and a bit of an effort and attitude. It's the ability to say the right thing at the right time, to see when someone in trouble and reach out to that person. And especially important is the ability to see a whole group of people (colleagues or students) as if it was a single organism, a person who can be also in trouble, or in need to unwind, or something like that.

By the authority entrusted to me, I thereby declare the week of emotional literacy. Everyone at the School of Teacher Education must learn to pay attention to him or herself, to notice when you are angry or irritated, or happy and calm, and make a mental note of it. No, better yet, you must keep a journal. The, I order people to think about others in the same way: think who might need a friendly conversation, and offer it. I command people to stop worrying excessively, and to invent some sort of breathing technique, no matter how bizarre or ineffective. Then teach at least one other people the technique. All must report on their findings and experience to me next Friday. In writing. In triplicate. 10-20 pages. Single-spaced. 10 point font. Thanks in advance.

Homecomings

Mister blog, I am back. I took a trip to Russia where I attended a conference at my alma mater, the Novosibirsk Teachers' University. I then went to Roslavl in Western Russia to see my Mom, my brother, and his family.

Going home has to do with resurrection of old memories, bringing back old anxieties, but also reliving the good memories. It is fascinating to observe oneself; not just what cognitive memories still there, but also, how much your body remembers. I could not recall some names, but have an indelible map of our old building. Some episodes came back vividly, in full force, while others are completely gone. The narratives we construct about our own lives are so incomplete and fragmentary; the only way to remember your life is to go to the places where you have been in the past, and look for triggers of old memories.

But people in Russia are not really interested in my nostalgia. They have lived through some difficult and eventful years. Let's see, I missed two military coups, a depression twice as deep as the American Great Depression, and then unlikely economic recovery; they experienced chaotic democracy and returning authoritarianism, went from deepest national humiliation and dramatic population plunge to a new sense of national pride, and the relative stability of Putin's era. I had a very different experience of immigration. This chasm in experiences creates interesting disconnects. People who I have been friends for years suddenly do not find some of my jokes funny. Their language is now interspersed with words I find annoying and distasteful; they are probably equally irritated with my language that now has traces of the English syntax. For some reason, the English words that are flowing freely into Russian usage I find especially irritating. Less troublesome are the criminal slang expressions that have invaded mainstream. The Russians did not freeze in time when I left; they kept thinking and working, and acquired a whole new set of ideas and skills, new institutions and habits.

Coming home creates this very ambivalent and delicious feeling of familiarity mixed with estrangement. People and things are the same and yet not the same. The interplay of recognition and misrecognition, of being completely comfortable and accepted yet being alienated, separated by an invisible membrane. A classmate of mine, who was the social center of our little group, gave me a run-down on the entire cohort (we had about 25 people in it). One of our classmates is serving a prison term for contract killing, while others are successful businessmen. Most are still in education. None of the stories really surprised me, but none was also entirely predictable.

Coming home disturbs the familiar-unfamiliar continuum, and creates another class of feeling, which has to do not with re-experiencing the past, but with imagining yourself in an alternative life. What if we all stayed home?

Yet another reform

Governor Ritter is proposing a new bill. Basically, the standards will be revised, and then re-revised every two years, and aligned from pre-school to college. There will be two-tiered high school diplomas: one indicating certain attainment, and another indicating completion of high school. This seems to be similar to New York's "Regents' diploma" scheme; only 42% of students actually receive it. Several other states have similar two-tiered high school diplomas. The intent of the bill is not new, and it is a reaction to the testing dilemma. Make the tests too easy, and everyone passes, so we have no standards. Make tests hard but inconsequential, and kids will not try hard, and your data will be meaningless. Make them hard and tie to graduation, and a lot of kids fail, and what do you do with them? Tell them they need to work harder? So, the compromise that many states use and Colorado seems to be going to is the two-tier diplomas. But that really means that the failing students will get a meaningless pieces of paper, and the diploma that counts will be in the possession of those with privileged backgrounds. The two-tier high school diplomas have been tried in other states, and I do not see any evidence it was successful.

What bothers me about the bill is not its intent and not even its proposed solution, but the utter lack of original thinking in it. I don't know how about others, but I am becoming increasingly bored with educational reform. All fifty states do the same things, call them something different, and fail to learn from each other's errors. The bill will produce a lot of revising and revisions of standards, tests, report matrixes and other stuff without perceptible benefits for K-12 or higher education. Instead of looking for true innovations, Colorado seems to be doing more of the same. The bill reads like a lecture on everything that is right and good, and it is hard imagine the State's power is best applied to lecturing through the law. The substance is lacking.

There is a rival bill in the State legislature, which has much narrower focus. It simply replaces the CSAP for juniors with ACT. It is not that exciting, but at least makes a practical kind of sense. The kids would be trying harder, because colleges really look at ACT scores. But again, it is not clear what level of consequences passing or failure would entail. Those who really hoping to get into college will try their best; those who do not will still pretend to take it, ar won't take at all.

The fundamental problem is this: you cannot require people to do something for free, and require to do it well. It's as simple as that: to test people on how well they do something you need first to make sure they want to do it. If certain activity is involuntary, you can increase the effort in one of two ways: one is fear, and another is to make it voluntary and pay for doing it. While tightening standards and improving teaching seems to be the logical thing to do about elementary education, it is not clear that we are doing something remotely effective on the secondary education. The problem seems to be one of motivation to learn, not of the standards or testing requirement.

Refuse to be second-rate

Like everyone else, our School has a vision. It is better, less bland than most of its kind, but I doubt it really guides our every-day activities. Yet every strong community needs an idea, a one-liner that captures its spirit and sets certain norm. Some people call it the ideology, some prefer vision or belief; in some organizations it is an image or a memory, or a founding myth, but every group needs an idea, an authentic expression of its ideal self. When I first came here almost two years ago, I was asked about developing a vision. My reply was that finding a vision is a process, and it has to come from within; it may never be brought from without. I agreed to be on a look-out, and now I may have found it. This is not something we would put on our promotional materials, but I believe this idea (a motto? a dictum?) captures the essence of what we are all about. This can really be our private vision.

It came about in a casual conversation with one of my friends and colleagues, whose name shall rename unknown. We were talking about something, and considered certain pluses and minuses of a possible decision. And he said in support of his argument "I just refuse to be second-rate." The more I think about it, the more this simple sentence captures our ethos; it acknowledges the challenges we face, and gives us a measuring stick to apply to everything we do.

The challenges are numerous: we are in a state college, besieged by funding shortages. Our salaries are low, workload is large. Our students tend to be first-generation in college, and many have to work through to support themselves. Many are very intelligent, but many also experienced gaps in their K-12 education. College professors, our peers in R1 schools do not necessarily consider us to be their peers; they have incomparably stronger institutional support for their research activities, and considerably lighter teaching load. So, their resumes tend to be thicker than ours, partly because grants and publication game is biased in their favor, partly because we simply do not have as much time to research and write, or lack elite connections in our respective field. On top of all of these pressures, there is a creeping internal pressure to succumb. Some of us allow too many compromises; let themselves to lower standards in both teaching and research. Once they enter into that mode of defeat, they start to water down policies and standards to justify the defeat. Sometimes the university policies tacitly accept the second-rate mentality. For example, our policy allows people to get tenure with half plus one votes, while most universities require 2/3 of the votes. Our vita template uses the designation for publications "Juried: (reviewed by editorial board, or refereed)." This is significantly below a true peer-refereed publication standard everyone else uses.

And yet what we can and should do in the face of all these pressures is just this: refuse to be second-rate. Being second-rate is really a state of mind, a set of operating assumptions. We should try to act as if we were among the best. Should we hire someone who is only OK, and no one is especially excited about? Well, would you even ask this kind of question if were a Stanford or Yale faculty? - Probably not. So refuse to be second-rate and operate as if you were the best of the best. Similarly, if you're working on an article, should you aim for the top journal or for the regional one where the editor is your friend? Again, the hesitation before answering it may betray the second-rate mentality. Aim high, and then if it does not fly and you've lost interest to the project, OK, maybe send it to a less rigorous publication.

And finally, one more point. We beat the harvards of the world by the value-added measure. They accept the best of the best, who are either exceptionally talented or exceptionally privileged. We accept students from various backgrounds, from some good and some bad public schools, and almost never from the very elite schools. Our teaching may very well be much more effective than that of harvards'. Just as an aside, would it not be awesome to know this for sure? To measure teaching effectiveness on a fair, consistent, and value-added basis? The elite institutions' teacher education programs tend to be small and selective or non-existent; ours are large and successful. At the end of the day, a head-to-head comparison between our graduates and their graduates will probably reveal similar results even though our freshmen come at lower academic levels. And finally, we have a mission no one else can fulfill. What am saying is that the pride and self-respect I advocate is not self-delusional, or purely inspirational. We do have much to be proud about, we can do a lot more; we just need to always refuse to think and act as a second-rate institution. I am asking everyone, before making any decision, just remind yourself to refuse to be second-rate.

Slowtalk

Much of my interactions with people are fasttalk through e-mail, in person, or phone. However, certain kinds of problems can only be effectively resolved through slowtalk. Slowtalk is a unique, powerful communications tool, although it is quite expensive in terms of time. On the practical level, Eugene Sheehan's three emails rule works well: when you exchanged more than three emails with someone on the same subject, it is time to set a meeting. It means the fasttalk ceases to be efficient, and becomes wasteful or worse. What kinds of issues can be dealt with though fasttalk, and what requires slowtalk? What does it do that fasttalk does not?

• Slowtalk minimizes the mismatch in assumptions. When you fasttalking, your counterpart may have a completely different background information, and therefore different set of assumptions. Fasttalk is just to get a point across as quickly as possible. Slowtalk allows one to react to the smallest mismatches of meaning between oneself and a conversation partner. That is why in slowtalk, you can often hear admissions of cleared misunderstanding: "Oh, I thought you mean this, not that," or "I assumed you knew that." But how do you know that your partner has different assumptions? By reacting to the mismatch of meaning; that is, when you have difficulties interpreting your partner's words, because they mismatch to your understanding of the background.
  
• Slowtalk clarifies the affective component of the problem. We are emotional animals, and always keep track of what we think is friendly or not friendly actions by other people. That is just how our brains operate. So we tend to attribute much of people's actions to their intent. So, the slowtalk helps to find out if indeed there is another, emotional agenda, or it is just an issue to be resolved. Fasttalk, on the other hand, tends to ignore the affective component, and thus reinforce errors in understanding.
  
• One of the best uses of slowtalk is to consider complex solutions. In However, if a problem is indeed serious, and no close precedents exist, the only way to weigh in all the possible consequences is through slowtalk. Slowtalk allows people model the future much more effectively than any of them can do individually. Multiple participants model multiple interests, so we tend to disagree with each other a lot more than we disagree with ourselves.
  

Fasttalk and slowtalk are two very different modes of communication, and should be used appropriately. For example, I refuse to engage in slowtalk about the colors of our walls; I don't think that be a good way of discussing it, because fasttalk is just enough. However, the recently discovered glitch in our digital archiving system deserves some slowtalk. It is a truly new problem; it can be potentially very serious. So, folks, if you think you see an issue deserving slowtalking, don't hesitate to set aside time and meet; it may be in the end much more efficient than series of fasttalks. However, estimate the scope of the problem, too; if it is not that important, fasttalk is just fine: brief, to the point, yes or no.

Due Diligence

Wikipedia defines due diligence (also known as due care) as the effort made by an ordinarily prudent or reasonable party to avoid harm to another party. This applies to areas other than civil law. For example, this is something I am learning to do in my job. It is not easy, and I probably fail a lot, but I am trying.

Someone like me finds oneself at the center of many different interests and agendas. People come to me to talk about their problems and issues, and I made it very clear that this is very welcome. We cannot operate without informal information exchange. However, most people’s problems have to do with other people, and I am always drawn into discussions of someone’s actions when that person is not there. Some people take the high moral ground and refuse to discuss others in absentia. This is highly impractical, because it would shut down most of vital conversations. Such a strategy would certainly be impossible to carry on in my position anyway. However, discussing someone when that person cannot be a part of the discussion has its ethical and practical problems, which need to be taken good care of. Impracticality if a radical ethical position does not imply lapse of all moral obligations. The problem is with asymmetry of power. Imagine A comes to me to complain about B, but B does not know about it. A just got an unfair advantage over B. This is not necessarily a conscious attempt to manipulate me against B; rater, A has a particular view of B’s behavior. In a conversation, people tend to agree when possible, so my tendency is to see the point A is making about B. It is important to understand that any conversation implies some readiness to accept your partner’s premises, at least to some extent. Otherwise, there is no conversation. So, by the virtue of having my ear, A has created a story that becomes a part of what I know. B does not necessarily have a chance to challenge that story, because she might not know about A’s complaint. Due diligence requires me to find B’s side of the story to avoid imbalance. However, how do you do that? What A is telling me might be said in confidence. If I came back to B and ask, say, I have hear you did this and that?, this will give away the fact of our conversation with A away and breach confidentiality. However, if I never ask, I will never know the other side of the story, and become a hostage of A’s allegations.

This is the dilemma. Whoever comes first, gets a certain narrative established, and it is not easy to exercise due diligence. What do I do? There are several tricks. One of them is to try to challenge A’s story by suggesting different, more generous interpretations of B’s actions. The risk is that A thinks I am taking B’s side in the conflict, because I am looking for excuses for B. In general, when you are trying to challenge or investigate someone’s story, you inadvertently challenge that person’s honesty. Not many people routinely recognize that their perceptions might be limited, and dependent on their interests and positions. Another trick is to delay any kind of actions and decisions, and then try to verify the story indirectly. It does not always work, because a question about a specific incident will almost always allow the person in question to trace the source of information. And yet another trick is to ask someone other than A and B about the same story, to get an independent opinion. The risk here is that any C who knows about the story might already been in my position, and have been influenced by A or B for exactly the same reason as I get influenced by whoever bring the story to me.

Why am I dwelling on all these complications of human interactions? For a very simple reason: I don’t want people to be offended or put off by my exercise of due diligence. I simply need to know other sides of the story not because I mistrust their account, but because we all have specific points of view, and I cannot do anything that can potentially harm someone else without due diligence.

The Spring Fever

There is a faint smell of Spring in the air. Birds are not chirping yet, but they are thinking about it. His last stretch of winter is especially hard on human bodies and psyches, so everyone is a bit more irritable, and less tolerant of others. Fingers at keyboards get a bit jitterier; fuses become a bit shorter. Of course, in the Academia, this biological phenomenon is exacerbated by the evaluations season. For some it has high stakes such as tenure and promotion. However for most, the stakes are pitifully small and yet the passions run unreasonably high. My instinct is to tell people to chill out, and look at all of this from a larger perspective. Of course, this is easier said than done. If you're anxious, and someone tells you to relax, it can get you even more excited and mad. So, here is a portion of cognitive therapy. What you find below is an absolutely irrefutable rational proof that we all should step a little back and relax, and perhaps have a good laugh about it all.

1. It is not life and death, not even consequential for one's wallet. There might be consequences for self-esteem, but again, those are as large as we allow them to be. Higher education is notoriously gentle with its work force. What in the private sector will get you fired, will result in someone's finger shaking at you, if you're lucky to be employed by a university. So, celebrate your good fortune, and ignore minor worries.
   
2. There is no such a thing as absolutely fair evaluation. Any system will benefit someone and disadvantage someone else. So, what? We are in this profession because there is an inner drive; we do it for our own deep moral convictions and because we want to do it. If the evaluation system treats us a bit unfairly, or it FEELS that way, this is no reason to ruin your mood over it, even for a day.
   
3. In the long run, being nice to everyone, including those people you dislike or mistrust is the best strategy. Getting angry is just a way of making people do something you want. Aggression in general is behavior manipulative technique. It rests on a premise that other people will afraid of you and therefore will do your bidding out of fear. But the society has been changed since we developed all those instincts, and non-violent, legal and administrative procedures took over conflict management. So, getting angry, or rather, showing one's anger does not really work anymore. It is but an atavism. So, cheer up, be nice to everyone, and do whatever you have to do to protect your rights through various appeals, legal challenges, etc. There is just a lot more chances to prevail, if you're civil to other people. The civility credit goes a long way, because it indicates you accept the rules of the game.
   

On another note, there is Spring just around the corner, and the birds are seriously thinking about chirping. When we are very old, and our great-grand children will ask us what have we done in life, none of us will say: "I received great annual evaluations." We have to think about something else. Let's start now about a possible answer.

The dream of reason produces monsters

There are two different conversations about quality in teacher education. One has to do with compliance. How do we gather data that will allow us to report to the State and to NCATE? The other is about what makes sense for teacher preparation as such. Both are probably needed, but what I find more and more troubling is that the first tend to crowd out the second one. Among other things, we tend to create incredibly generic assessment instruments the sole purpose of which is to "cover" certain standards. For example our Elementary teacher candidates get evaluated at the end of student teaching, with this rubric:

1. Uses knowledge of math and social studies and standards to plan instruction and support student achievement.
   
2. Creates a learning environment characterized by acceptable student behavior, efficient use of time or gaining knowledge, skills, and understanding.
   
3. Applies sound disciplinary practices in the classroom.
   
4. Develops/selects/utilizes resources to enhance the learning of students with diverse backgrounds, experiences, abilities, values and perspectives.
   
5. Applies appropriate assessment and intervention strategies consistent with a successful learning environment.
   
6. Uses strategies to keep students on task to support learning processes.
   
7. Demonstrates instruction which is consistent with district goals and state standards.
   
8. Teaches students within the scope of teachers' legal responsibilities and students' rights and follows procedures as specified in state, federal, and local policies.
   
9. Reflects on and evaluates his/her own performance to improve teaching.
   
10. Is dependable, reliable, and punctual.
    
11. Demonstrates effective interpersonal communication skills with students, staff, parents.
    

Our Secondary candidates are evaluated with a 6-page long instrument that is somewhat similar, although more detailed (the STEP Instrument). If you think of it, it is incredibly difficult to assess these with any degree of accuracy. We do not, agree on what are sound disciplinary practices. Moreover, we do not teach those practices. We do not make judgment on whether such an application is effective or not; it is just "applies." Number 6 is simply funny, because everyone uses strategies, some just use better ones. The room for error is huge, criteria are very subjective, and there is no way to assess the validity or reliability of these monster rubrics. Yet the people who designed those rubrics are very smart, competent educators who certainly know what makes a good teacher. What happened? Very simple: the demands of accountability. The State of Colorado in its infinite wisdom has developed standards (not really bad ones), and demands us to show how we meet all of them. The most efficient way is to copy the standards almost exactly into the rubric, and then have some poor supervisor to check – advanced, proficient, or just good enough. The value of a monster rubric is minimal, because its sweep is so broad. However, the compliance conversation tends to ignore the common sense, and instead leads us to accept the absurd as the normal. The whole last year we were thinking about curriculum and assessment, and yet we were not thinking about curriculum and assessment. Our horizon was artificially limited to those things that produce good compliance records rather than good teachers. It is ironic how the quality movement actually detracted us from working on improvement of quality.

Several colleagues and I have attended the AACTE Conference last week. One of the highlights was the lecture by Deborah L. Ball, Dean, School of Education, University of Michigan. Her point was that teaching is really a precise, highly skilled occupation, which should involve a lot of training, and not a lot of improvisation. She suggested that teaching should be analyzed to its basic elements, and teacher candidates are to be trained in very specific behaviors and ways of thinking. This is simple enough, and we can probably do it right here, within our school. The combined expertise among my colleagues is enormous, and we certainly have the desire to do the absolutely best we can. However, we're running round thinking how to comply. We have no time or strength to think about the substance of what we do.

I say we stop now. Let's ignore the compliance worries, and focus on what we teach and how do we know if we did a good job. Let's look at very fundamental elements of good teaching and then concentrate on how to do more with less. Let's get rid of all monster rubrics, monster portfolios, monster assignments, and make a few very good assessments. Let's find wholes in our programs and plug them all. There is no accrediting body on Earth who could touch us with a six feet poll if we do that. We can always come back and say that these standards are covered by this and that. However we need to stop being afraid and only do what is good for our students. We should put our foot down and only comply to demands which does not hurt what we do. Enough is enough; let's take charge of our own affairs.

Let me try to begin brainstorming. I think we should be able to see a teacher candidate to do the following:

1. To explain a concept or an operation to children, in several different ways
   
2. To assess whether kids get it or not, and then re-teach it in yet more ways.
   
3. Organize a learning activity
   
4. Respond to kids' questions and problems
   
5. Address behavioral problems in classroom and relate to children well
   

I think this is about it. Well, perhaps I am missing something, but let's keep it short and manageable. The standards movement has ran into problems precisely because no one had the guts to stop proliferating the standards.

X, Y, and Z: The University Habitat

There are three species of university faculty. Let’s call them X, Y, and Z. X’s are good scholars; they do research for fun, because they like it, and therefore are successful. It might be the other way around: people who do well start to like it after a while even more. There is a subspecies of X (b) who are no good as teachers, but in our habitat none of those survive for long. Every X here is also a good teacher, and contributes abundantly to service. X’s are good people.

Y’s often go beyond the traditional forms of scholarship, or focus on teaching or advising or administration. However, they all have found other important ways to contribute and to enjoy their work: it could be less traditional forms of scholarship; they may take on administrative duties, or devote a lot of extra time to teaching and curriculum development. Y’s often find their satisfaction in more demanding forms of service. What is important about the Y’s is their work ethic: they work hard, and maintain intellectual curiosity, willingness to take risks, and commitment to our common enterprise. Y’s often have a genuine disagreement with the X’s about the role and the mission of a given university. The difference between X and Y is not that of values, but of preference. Y’s are just turned on by different things than X’s. I am now a Y, although I used to be more of an X. Y’s are good people.

And then there are Z’s, who are just not performing that well for a variety of reasons. Perhaps one day I will become a Z, but just not yet. Z’s are good people.

Now as we introduced the cast of characters, let me show how these three species occupy the same habitat. The X’s, again, are wonderful people who contribute a lot to the common good. However, they also tend to confuse Y’s and Z’s, and confuse low performance with different performance. The Y’s, of course, are threatened by X’s, because they believe that the X’s standards are a bit too narrow. Y’s’ sometimes to seek allies among the Z’s. And of course, Z’s often consider themselves to be Y’s and are trying to sell the lack of effort as the difference in interests.

Then comes the annual war ritual called evaluations. X’s are honestly trying to raise expectations, because they are invested in the future of the institution, and it reputation. Z’s are trying to water down any expectations to the point of non-existence. Y’s are usually caught in between: they want recognition for their various ways of achievement, so they may end up disagreeing with the X’s and with the Z’s, which is a difficult position to defend.

This ecosystem will function well when there is a compromise, an agreement between X’s and Y’s, but not with the Z’s. Both X and Y have a deep ethical kinship, and can be immensely useful to each other. Z’s can be encouraged to join either species. The way to reach the compromise is to allow a broader range of contributions to be counted as productive, but hold a clear line against low expectations. I am not sure if it is possible to achieve through a perfect evaluation document. Rather, mutual understanding should be reached first, and then the practices of evaluations will reflect it.

All people deserve respect, X, Y, and Z alike. Each group should clearly understand that the need for compromise. X’s should allow for a broader interpretation of scholarship (but we do need to have decent scholarship standards to maintain credibility as a university). Y’s should see clearly acknowledge the difference between broad standards and low standards. Z’s should demonstrate the level of effort consistent with the notion of group solidarity (and join X’s or Y’s). And we all need to take it easy, cool down, and not take our differences so seriously. There is an X, Y and Z in all of us, and of course, this is but a simplification.

Tell me, otherwise I won’t know

Kurt Lewin has invented the T-groups in mid-1940s, by accident. They became very popular in 1960-s and 70-s, and still used today in a different form. A Russian educator Igor P. Ivanov has independently invented something similar, in late 50-s (sorry, no English references; nothing has been translated). The basic premise of T-groups is very simple: in normal life, we do not know how we are perceived by other people. We have a general idea: someone smiles, or frowns, at what we say, etc. The problem is, most people are quite bad at reading these signs, and some people cannot read them at all. Even the best of us make mistakes all the time, because they attribute the feedback signs to something else. In most cultures, the norm is established through a system of reprimands and encouragements; however, in today’s highly complex and multicultural society, the old mechanisms simply do not work. We interact a lot, very often and very fast. We all have slightly different cultural assumptions about the normal vs. abnormal. Yet we always interpret each other’s behavior.

To counter this subtle cultural change, T-groups offered very simple technique: people tell directly how they perceive each other, and what sorts of words and actions lead to what kind of emotional response. What Lewin and Ivanov both discovered was that such groups learn to cooperate a lot faster than a regular group. People who have been trained in a T-group are a lot more sensitive to other people’s reactions, but what is more important, they are ready to communicate their perceptions of others to those others. Of course, all of this requires a level of trust that would guard one’s feelings from being hurt. It should be done in the spirit of mutual help, rather than criticism. If I see you doing something unwise, which might hurt you or others, I feel an obligation to find a way of pointing this out to you. So, you should do it for me, too.

I am not going to suggest anything like the T-group at our School. Many years ago, I used to facilitate such groups, both Lewin’s style and the Russian style (there are significant differences), and know that those are risky, delicate, time consuming, and did I mention risky? What I want is for other people (especially the more secure senior faculty) to tell me how they perceive me, especially when I make a mistake, or they think I make a mistake. For example, there is absolutely no way for me to know that my frequent forgetting to turn off the cell phone during meetings is annoying, and may be perceived as a sign of disrespect. Someone has to tell me that directly, and I promise I won’t get offended. To the contrary, I will appreciate the information and appreciate the trust, whether I agree with the assessment or not.

This is a small example, of course. However, the small things tend to accumulate, and pretty soon we become unhappy, annoyed with each other, and don’t even know why. As everyone knows, familiarity breeds contempt. And God knows, the Academia is full of departments where people have been working together longer than most marriages last, and hate each other for no particular reason. But why does familiarity breed contempt? -- Mainly because people who know each other well don’t really know each other well. They tend to accumulate small misunderstandings, annoyances, errors, and never get around clearing this stuff out. Pretty soon a mistake becomes recorded in history. We do not adjust our behavior because we do not realize we should. Communication errors clog the relational veins, unless they are countered by direct, open communication. I don’t want this happen to us as a group, and especially to me in this group. So, please, do tell me, otherwise I won’t know.

Politicization of Teacher Education

Yet another report on teaching and teacher education hit the waves. This time, it is National Council on Teacher Quality Policy Yearbook. We've got an overall grade "needs significant improvement," with GPA 2.33, if you average these grades:

• D for Meeting NCLB Teacher Quality Objectives.
  
• B for Teacher Licensure
  
• D for Teacher Evaluation and Compensation
  
• D for State Approval of Teacher Preparation
  
• C for Alternate Routes to Certification
  
• D for Preparation of Special Education Teachers
  

Hmm, but how is the grader? Who asked this group to grade Colorado's teacher quality, and how did they do it? First of all the organization claims to be non-partisan, and it states that it does not accept any direct funding from federal government. That is not quite true; it received $677,318 in 2003 – 2004 form the Federal Department of Education. But OK, it may no longer receive any federal money, not recently. But if you read the criteria under which they judge, it becomes clear that this is an attempt to influence the State's policy through pretense of giving it an objective assessment. Here is a recipe: Put together a non-profit, get some private funds, release a sleek report, and give states grades. Then release the report to the media, try to get headlines like " Colorado Gets a D on teacher quality." The more the merrier. Then an outraged politician will think, oh, well, we need to do something. Who do I ask to propose a new legislation? Why, of course, the group that gave us a D, or perhaps someone they know and recommend.

The reality is, two groups of researchers, with specific political leanings produce very different findings about quality of teachers or teacher education. They largely ignore each other, or engage into skirmishes, criticizing each other's methodology. There is a wide political campaign against teacher unions, public schools in general, teacher education faculty, certain methods of teaching reading, etc, etc. So, NCATE-bad, alternative certification-good. Content knowledge- good, methods courses – bad. Testing – good, standards – bad. Teacher merit pay – good, teacher tenure – bad.

I do not necessarily reject all of these people's proposals, but I question their way of pushing these proposals; it strikes me as manipulative. People used to run for public office to influence policy. Now they influence policy in order to get into public office. Because let's face it: for the Republican Party to ensure its long-term survival, the power of teacher unions needs to be diminished, number of public employees needs to be reduced. Hence the attempt to inflict the death by a thousand regulations onto public schools and traditional teacher education programs. However, regulation is contrary to Republicans' own long-standing deregulation philosophy. I am not saying the other side is any more principled. The Democrats are just interested in the unions' support, so they have become the educational conservatives who preserve the not-so-glorious status quo. The two parties' distinctive ideologies stopped beliefs and became means of getting elected.

Here is an interesting quote from the report, page 118:

A few more [STATES] have required that all in-state programs, public and private, attain national accreditation. These policies are inappropriate, since they require that public funds and institutional resources be spent meeting the standards of a private organization that has yet to be recognized as the undisputed guarantor of minimum quality in its field.

Yet the organization that writes the report is also a private organization, and it believes public funds should be expended to meet its recommendations. Is there any evidence that states that heeded to their advice do better in preparing quality teachers? The report than suggests that all Social Foundations of Education are all but useless, but then gives a list of sample topics that should be covered in a teacher education program, including "The social and cultural roots of the achievement gap; learning challenges from poverty." But that's what we teach in a foundations course.

Here is another logical pearl:

NCTQ's research shows that there are teacher preparation programs in the majority of states where teacher candidates are required to complete 60 or more credit hours of professional coursework. We found programs in still more states where candidates are required to complete 50 to 59 credit hours of professional coursework. [UNC requires 40-44 — A.S.]These are excessive requirements that leave little room for electives, and often leave insufficient room for adequate subject matter preparation. Though there is no research data to confirm this, it seems likely that such excessive requirements are likely to discourage talented individuals from pursuing teacher preparation—and public school teaching.

They are adamant about requiring evidence, except when they claim something weird. NCTQ is very much concerned about the availability of alternative licensure, but none of its goals include strong induction programs and in-service training. Wouldn't this be an interesting area to explore? What if support provided to novice teachers actually increase their chances of success?

I could go on and on — the bottom line is, if you put out such a self-assured, cocky assessment full of recommendations ("The State should" phrase is used 118 times), it does not hurt to check if the standards you want others to follow apply to your own report.

On the Science of Lawmaking

Yesterday in Denver, there was another meeting on the proposed dyslexia legislation. The State Representative that heads this initiative, made an interesting if inadvertent admission. "This is the first time, - he said, - that I develop a bill with various groups represented around the table. Usually, a special interest group just comes up with a draft of the new law." He was a bit frustrated, because there were a lot of ideas, and some disagreements, but there was no specific language he could put in a bill. Yet this remark made me think about how laws are developed.

Many major professional activities have recently move toward some rational way of decision-making. There is the Evidence-Based Medicine, God knows education has been struggling with accountability, and outcome-based education. The best practices movement in business, programming, construction, insurance, and accounting slowly but surely change the way people do things. However, lawmaking remains a game of competing rhetoric, trial and error, and special interest influence. Laws are passed constantly, but their effectiveness is often unknown or minimal. The same is true about public policies that interpret and implement the laws. The major example is the No Child Left Behind act, if you discount the Texas Miracle (and you should). It was premised on the idea that raising accountability plank will improve educational outcomes. It seems obvious and self-evident, but is actually an untested idea. Colorado Governor Ritter just came up with another "most revolutionary shift in education policy" in years. Not that I am opposed to it necessarily, but I am cautious about another set of laws that will inevitably follow, the revision of the Colorado Content Model standards, and the work of revamping K-20 curriculum to meet them. Perhaps if someone shown me some evidence it's going to make any difference, I'd be less skeptical. But no, people want me to take their word for it, and I just have hard time doing it.

People who write laws are very smart, well-meaning, and experienced; no doubt about this. Yet all those doctors who for years prescribed drinking more fluid to flu sufferers (does not help, actually), are also all smart and experienced. It's just that the scientific methods allow us to go beyond the individual life experiences, which are statistically speaking, are often useless.

Let me begin a rough list of law-making standards here; perhaps people with better knowledge of law and policy can expand or dispute these. I will turn them into questions. I believe each bill introduced should have an accompanying package of materials questions like these should be answered. Right now, nothing like this is available; so the proposed laws maybe great or poor, we simply do not know. It is expensive, and perhaps it is time there were private independent law audit agencies, like in accounting, that would study these things. it might be expensive, but no more expensive than a poorely conceived law and policy. I know some of the questions below are asked one way or another; that's not the point. What I want is a set of standards, with some evidence of meeting them.

1. Is there an existing law on the books that already covers the same ground? If yes, why has it been ineffective? How is this one better?
   
2. Is the intended result of the law clearly defined? Is it measurable?
   
3. Is the effectiveness evaluation mechanism built into the law and adequately structured and funded?
   
4. Is there a sunset clause that allows ineffective law to expire if it has not shown effectiveness?
   
5. Has a similar law been passed by another state or another country? If yes, is there any evidence it worked?
   
6. Have unintended negative consequences been systematically considered and ruled out?
   
7. If negative consequences are unavoidable, does the law include measures for mitigating it?
   
8. Does expected benefit outweigh the expected loss?
   
9. Is it feasible to comply with the law?
   
10. Can compliance be actually measured, detected, and enforced?
    
11. What is the cost of compliance, including the reporting burden cost? Is there a funding mechanism to cover it?
    
12. Who specifically has written the draft of this bill (names, affiliations)?
    
13. Who is likely to benefit and who is likely to lose?
    
14. If the law is written by those who is likely to benefit, are the losers' representatives consulted in advance?
    
15. Are the opponents arguments included?
    
16. How does the law help or hurt its sponsor's political career?
    
17. Which agencies and institutions will carry the burden of compliance and enforcement? Were they consulted on the law's feasibility, and compliance cost?

On writing

I was able to write a little over the break, and reflect on joys and pains of writing. My current project is a book, with a working title Labor of Learning. This is a treatise on economics of learning; a project I have been engaged in for several years. I have some ten papers written and published with this book in mind. However, when they all are put together next to each other, and I begin a search for some logic, it becomes apparent that there are some glaring gaps. For example, there is no way to write this thing without confronting Dewey directly. I was avoiding doing it, mostly because Dewey scholars expect a lot of detailed knowledge about Dewey in all writings about him, so it is almost impossible for an outsider to publish something in a refereed journal. They always say "But you omitted this passage from the Public and its Problems…" Or whatever. They also love the guy too much. Dewey was a prolific and an incredibly dense writer, and I cannot imagine reading all of his stuff. That would kill me. Yet I must engage with his main ideas, because mine contradict his. Anyway, here is where a non-refereed publisher helps – I can say whatever outrageous things about Dewey, and it will get out.

But my goal is to understand the particular drive; what is it that moves me and many other people to do this? The work is tedious, incredibly time-consuming. It takes one away from real human interaction with family, colleagues, students. The returns of it are not that great: unless you write a best-selling textbook, money is puny. There is not much glory in it either: with the exception of a few academic superstars, most academic books never break a 1000 copies sold ceiling; out of those sold most are never read, because libraries buy them. The whole industry of academic publishing seems to be in great peril, with opportunities to publish a book dwindling. I have finally gotten a book contract with a start-up publisher out of the Netherlands, after some thirty rejections. Also, as an administrator, I am not expected to keep up with academic publishing to the same extent as faculty. In other words, it is a lot of hassle without much in return.

And yet, any time I have any time, my mind inevitably wanders into one or another writing project; it just does. It starts laying out logic, structures, points to be made, etc. SO, here is my hypothesis: people like me are easily bored, and are not good at relaxing. We create an alternative reality; so writing is a lot like computer games. The world has certain rules, certain obstacles, and one can overcome them all and reach an end. That's it, it is a pure mind game, a way of glorified entertainment. It has the same sense of agency without really any danger and much responsibility like computer games. Reading fiction does similar thing, but it is too passive; you don't get to act.

I don't think it is possible to write because of the tenure expectations, or because you want to improve the world, or because it is your job. None of these strike me as strong motivation. People who find other ways of occupying their brains are not addicted to writing, and do just fine without it. This particular way of living and acting does not appeal to everyone. It is easy to judge someone and claim my particular preference to be more honorable and more advanced. We always like to measure ourselves with a stick to which we measure well. So, being good at chess – good; being a computer game champion – bad. Scholarly writing – good; spending all the time teaching – not so good. The institutions we create are biased in favor of some people and against some others. I don't think it will ever be corrected, although some openness and some broad-mindedness should be welcome.

Educational Reform: The Denial of Ignorance

As the presidential campaign flares up, No Child Left Behind seems to be in big trouble; see the NY Times account. Virtually no one wants to keep the law as it is; everyone wants to either change it or scrap it. What is conspicuously absent? You guessed right: alternatives. There is a talk of changing the emphasis from testing to teaching, of changing the punitive aspects of the law, etc., etc. It seems most people, especially on the Left, imagine some vagueS softer version of accountability and perhaps more funding for schools. Folks on the Right still hope for deregulation in education, with vouchers or other form of competition unleashing market mechanisms to improve education. Of course, the Democrats are almost forced to make it an election issue, but all they can do is the negative stance against NCLB. The entire bent of Democratic strategies is anti-Bush rather than pro-anything (with the exception of the host of tame medical reforms); education is a part of this: anti-Bush, and pro-very-little. That and some personal innuendo about who’s got more experience and who’s more of a non-Bush.

However, the political discourse on education suffers not only from the normal campaign-induced shallowness, but from a genuine absence of any plausible alternatives. I wish a politician of any kind, let alone the pres candidates, would just stand up and say: “Folks, we’ve got no idea what to do with K-12 education. There were a couple of ideas, and none of them seems to be working. I am pledging significant support to generating new ideas, which then will all be discussed and tested.” Sounds highly unlikely doesn’t it? Yet that would be the only practical position to take. We do have a problem after all: the educational gap between rich and poor kids is still tremendous, which means education for the poor can and should be improved. We don’t have anything close to consensus on what should be done. Moreover, all existing approaches so far have proven ineffective, or very difficult to replicate.

So, what? We have a number of other problems without solutions; deadly diseases is the most obvious example, but also crime, teenage pregnancy, social inequality, etc. Why is it OK to admit that there is no cure for cancer or even common cold, but not OK to admit there is no cure for education? There is a peculiar phenomenon I would call “the denial of ignorance.” Our culture allows for certain things to be unknown, while others have to be known; we do not admit our ignorance about them. Education is clearly one of these areas of “must-know”; politicians have especially hard time admitting having no clue. Or as Dewey used to spell it, no clew.

See for yourself: OK to say, “I don’t know…”

• …How to influence price of gas
• …How to treat Alzheimer’s
• …What is going to happen with stock market
• …How to win all elections
  

Not OK to say, “I don’t know…”

• …Who I am and what my beliefs are
• …What’s right and what’s wrong
• …What to do with education
• …How to fight crime

The truth is, most people individually, and we as a society, collectively, have no more clarity about the first set of claims than we have about the second one. Our ignorance is abysmal; our knowledge is frustratingly limited. Among other things, we have created the wonder of contemporary schooling, which turned out to have some nasty side-effects, and we have very little idea about fixing it.

The existence of the “denial of ignorance” is an interesting phenomenon; it is a special case of a knowledge claim. Some institutions are based on implicit knowledge claims. For example, it is very hard to claim an autonomous self, if you cannot define who you are. One who is in doubt about right and wrong cannot claim to have ethics. Once you build an extensive public schooling system, and collect tremendous amount of taxes to support it, you’d be a fool to admit that you have no idea how to make it work properly. Such an admission undermines the legitimacy of the whole enterprise. Yet explaining does not mean justifying. I still think an honorable position for presidential candidates would be to admit the ignorance – not personal one, but our quite obvious collective ignorance, and seek real sizeable resources in finding solutions. Admitting the ignorance about educational reform may actually serve as evidence of being informed. A part of the position of ignorance is to leave the system to its own devices, until a solution is to be found. We simply cannot continue experimenting with the huge national system of K-12 education with unproven interventions. Just to remind everyone: no one has shown that accountability measures will positively impact learning achievements; it was simply assumed (wrongly) to be self-evident. What we need is a moratorium to new reforms, a freedom for states and districts to experiment, and most importantly, a call to develop new models of educational reform.

Of course, I am biased, because I have a proposal, which may be one of many. The point is, by pretending that we have a solution, we waste our time and energy on politics, on little fights about this kind of reading instruction versus that kind of reading, etc. If we focus our energies on developing a new, truly new approach to educational reform, well, we might actually get there.

Right-brained Teachers

Here is an argument by Daniel H. Pink which I find convincing. You can read a short version on-line, or get his book. Basically, his point is that the linear, logical, sequential thinking is becoming less important, for economic reasons, while right-brain "inventive, empathic, big picture capabilities" come to be the most valuable. His reasoning is quite simple: the computer-like information processing that can be reduced to a number of algorithms, can be handled better by computers, and is easily shipped overseas where it can be made cheaper. We see the evidence of this right here, in our School: instead of paying computer programmers some 30,000 for developing a database, we used a commercially available (although quite sophisticated) software and did it ourselves. Too bad for the company that was hoping to sell the thing to us; great for us. I just got a Christmas card from the company, and feel sorry for these people, but we simply do not need their skills; one does not need to know code to develop databases.

However, my point is this: Teaching seems to be going in the opposite direction. We still are trying to boost very technical skills in teachers. Scripted instructions and standardized assessment seem to call for sequential, linear thinking among teachers. One is supposed to know the curricular standards, and then go through an algorithm to plan instruction, assess, adjust, re-teach, and start over again. Teachers become more and more like knowledge workers and some people link hopes to professionalize teaching with the mastery of knowledge processing. There is nothing wrong with that, except this seems to be too late. We're trying to catch up with a train that is left already; instead of going ahead of the next one. Here is what the new age is calling for, and what we need to teach teachers to do:

High concept involves the capacity to detect patterns and opportunities, to create artistic and emotional beauty, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into something new. High touch involves the ability to empathize with others, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one's self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian in pursuit of purpose and meaning (Pink).

Somehow news reaches education much later. One of my doctoral students, Jen Davis, just turned in a paper which convincingly shows that schools use an outdated model of literacy; they are trying hard to reach a wrong goal. Similarly, teacher education might be improving fast but in the wrong direction.

The routine parts of teaching should and will be taken over by computers. For example, computer systems, such as the PLATO are much better at delivering the right curriculum at the right pace, and minutely assess the progress. They are also much better at individualizing the pace of instruction. Sometime soon they will also be able to individualize by learning style and learning disability. Therefore, instead of focusing on what machines can do better, we need to train teachers to relate to students and their parents, to figure out motivational and learning problems, to build supportive communities in their classrooms, and to spread joy. Creativity specifically can be cultivated in people; instead, we send them through compliance school. Our students are so used to complying; they get anxious when directions are not too clear, and the situation is ambivalent. But teachers should thrive on ambiguity and be non-conformists.

Paradoxically, to be creative, teachers need to know which parts of their work can be delegated to computers, and how to use the new informational universe. To even make a distinction between a linear information processing and an insight takes some skills. We still teach our students how to use PowerPoint, which is simply a glorified chalkboard. However, we spend very little time teaching them how to use the course management systems, or ways of creative Googling, etc. We spend almost no time on development of people skills; such as empathy, the ability to interpret emotions, how to listen, how to read body language, how to modulate one's voice, how to act, etc.

I taught a class like that in Russia for a couple of years. It was somewhere between an Encounter group, or socio-psychological training group and acting class. I taught them how to look in the eye, and how to walk in class. We trained for ability to withstand aggression, how to use self-suggestion, and to command attention. I taught them how to smile and charm parents, how and when to touch people. We practiced reading facial expressions. Not sure if they still do it, but that would be some right brain training.

Special Interest and Teacher Education

In the last few months, our College has been approached by several groups; among them the Teaching about the Holocaust group, teaching about American Constitution group, the teachers unions, and the alternative non-union teacher associations, the dyslexia advocacy group. Each wants us to do add their specific concern to our teacher education programs. Some are more effective than others, because they come with willingness to help, to contribute resources, and see how their specific agenda fits into our larger objectives. Others just come insisting we should change our curriculum to address their concern, just on the merits of that concern. All come in hope of getting their agendas extra-mileage, because of the scope of our reach. Indeed, we graduate, some 600 teachers a year, each of them will teach thousands of children over her or his life time. The potential reach is enormous, that's why they all come.

Here is an example of some of the most dangerous, although also well-intentional attempts to influence teacher education. On Wednesday, Harvey Rude, the Director of the School of Special Education, took me and two of his faculty along to a meeting with a State Representative, who is considering introducing a bill on dyslexia in the Colorado General Assembly. The representative is a former teacher and is sympathetic to concerns of dyslexic children, so he all but made a commitment to introduce a bill. The question is, of course, what kind of a bill, so he asked for our input, which is a very reasonable.

Yet the dynamics of such an initiative is very troubling. The special interest group is well organized and well connected. They have a very good cause to defend, and have aggregated a lot of expertise on the issue. The group feels, justifiably, that dyslexic children may be misdiagnosed or not diagnosed at all, and neglected by the schools. The problem is, of course, that they see the world through the lens of this specific issue; everything else takes the back seat. So, they would like to see something like a special course in all teacher education curriculum, and if not that, a special procedure for reporting to the State how the information on dyslexia is a part of teacher education curriculum. In other words, they would like to see the State agencies such as the Colorado Department of Education to enforce a mandate from the state. The narrow focus and belief in unfunded state mandates are the two problems; the third one is the assumption that teacher education does not do its job, and our graduates are ignorant in dyslexia issues, and just about everything else.

Let's consider all three assumptions:

1. "My issue is more important than your issue." It is very easy to believe, especially if you have a child of your own who suffers from a particular disability. The special interest groups by definition do not attempt to reconcile their interest with others. However, it is a deeply unethical assumption. What would you like us to remove from curriculum to make room for the dyslexia education? What about other disabilities? Other concerns about teacher training? Also notice that disability does not know class distinction, which is why these groups can recruit a lot of middle class, educated parents to argue for their cause. We never see Latino parents lobbies or poor parents or single moms lobby at our doorsteps, simply because they have little resources to organize. And their children deserve to have a teacher who can individualize instruction to meet their needs, and be sensitive to their specific issues. So, I argue, to be effective a special interest group must be not so special, and show empathy for other causes. They must form broader coalitions, and figure out broader solutions, and make an effort to be useful to people whose work they want to change.
   
2. "Just tell them to do it." Many special interests groups just do not know how higher education and its teacher education branch work. They tend to assume that the State law can effectively change curriculum. In fact, new mandates without any funding attached to it wreck havoc on higher education, and do more damage than good to whatever just cause they are supposed to help. Part of it is that such states as Colorado keep their public colleges on a starvation diet. So faculty feel resentful, tired, and hate new demands. Second, state mandates can create a flurry of reporting activities, but rarely change what is going on in college classrooms. Short of monitoring every classroom, how do you ever know that what we report is actually happening? Third, university faculty's sense of self-esteem comes from being specialists in their fields. State mandates always ignore controversies in scholarship, and prescribe something at least part of faculty does not agree with. Dyslexia is a case of this. When I listen to the advocacy people, they seem to be hundred percent sure about what works and what does not. I come back to my colleagues who actually research the issue, and they are telling me, wait a minute, it is not really that clear, and we do not know much about dyslexia, or even how to define it. Telling a faculty that the State mandate must override his or her scholarly knowledge is most often counterproductive.
   
3. "You suck, because there is a problem." The special interest groups rarely find out what we already do. Their logic is this: there are reports from schools that our issues is not addressed adequately, therefore teachers are not adequately prepared. For example, such and such percent of US population cannot say how the Constitution begins. Therefore, teachers are not prepared to teach it. Notice no one claims that because certain percent of cancer patients still dies, we have a disaster on our hands with medical training or medical research. People who care about cancer get together and find ways of raising money and helping raise awareness. People who care about K-12 schooling mostly get together to lobby state governments to pass laws. Lobbying is a lot cheaper than research. I would like to propose a law to cure cancer by the year 2010, and have all hospitals send the State government annual progress reports… The deep fallacy here is that everything is believed to be possible in education, while in medicine, there are limits to what can be done. In fact, all areas of human activity have intrinsic limits of what is possible. Back to dyslexia: it is possible, that after a careful study, one could find that within the limits of the possible we indeed do not do as much as other comparable institutions do in these areas. However, no one has done such a study to make such a claim. Instead, someone has spoken with this woman who is a UNC graduate, and she even did not know what dyslexia means. On the basis of such "evidence," the entire State of Colorado may introduce a new law.
   

This is not about us protecting our turf, but rather about the unhealthy blend of special interests activism, popular conceptions about education, and reckless law-making.

If you're not too tired yet, here is the entire letter I have written to the State Representative after our visit:

Dear Representative Merrifield:

Thanks for inviting us to yesterday's meeting on dyslexia, and for allowing us to provide further input. Here is my five cents.

1. The Performance-Based Standards for Colorado Teachers already include Standard Six: "Knowledge of Individualization of Instruction: The teacher is responsive to the needs and experiences children bring to the classroom, including those based on culture, community, ethnicity, economics, linguistics, and innate learning abilities. The teacher is knowledgeable about learning exceptionalities and conditions that affect the rate and extent of student learning, and is able to adapt instruction for all learners." Our Teacher Education programs are authorized by CDE on these standards, and it would be very difficult to show actual evidence that these regulations are not enforced. Of course, you can suggest that this specific standard receives more attention or that CDE introduces the Dyslexia Directorate to make a whole new set of standards out of this already quite specific standards. As I mentioned at the meeting, there is a fundamental problem with this sort of regulatory enthusiasm. Among other things, multiple sets of standards present an oxymoron: a standard only makes sense when there is only one. We already have four sets to comply with; three of them overlap greatly (The Licensure standards, the PBSCT, and the Reading Directorate).
   
2. I believe The Colorado Educator Induction Statute (see how CDE is applying it at http://www.cde.state.co.us/cdeprof/cdeprofsvc/iheprograms/downloads/IPTemplateteachssp.pdf) can be amended to include more incentives for partnership for collaborative efforts between higher education institutions and school districts in induction programs; and also include partnerships with non-profit entities such as IDA who have collected a wealth of expertise. Such partnerships were encouraged by the Statute, I believe in 1994, but as far as I know, none established with UNC. Perhaps the Statute can be amended to give more teeth to requiring meaningful induction programs. Teacher Education research has plenty of evidence that good beginning teacher training is more effective than piling up a lot of stuff in pre-service programs.
   
3. I also suggest that Colorado experiments with state-NGO partnership models. Frankly, the State has no funds and limited expertise in such highly specialized areas as dyslexia or other learning disabilities. However IDA and its peer organization do have significant expertise and some resources. So, why not use them not only for legislative activism, but also as a resource to promote their causes with State's help? For example, CDE can serve as a clearing house for resources to be used in higher education instruction; to have a list of guest-speakers, of adjunct instructors with specific expertise, etc. In my experience, relatively little money used as mini-grants can generate a lot of interest among university faculty. It can be a mixture of the NGO's money and State matching funds. NGO's such as IDA can help review applications and evaluate the results of such mini-grants. University faculty's buy-in is incomparably higher if they are enticed rather than forced to comply.
   

You also invited us to comment on the Colorado Reading Directorate.

1. The core problem as I see it is that CDE is trying to regulate the input rather than the outcome. CDE and CDHE should be mandated to stop wasting public money and use national accreditation to the extent allowed by Colorado statutes. For example, 39 states have adopted or adapted the NCATE unit standards as their own and apply them to all institutions for purposes of state approval. The national accreditation agencies simply have more resources and have better accreditation systems, which are increasingly performance-based. CHEA is another example.
   
2. The legislature should regulate the regulators. Can we put limits on how much reporting and what kind of reporting a State agency can demand? Can the regulators be held accountable for following the best practices of regulation? Does anyone actually check their review process for integrity? Can someone ask them to prove that their specific way of authorization actually does ensure quality of programs? You guys pass a statute, which then is converted into rules and regulations document that may or may not have anything in common with the intent of the law. For example CRD, in my view, clearly exceeds the authority granted to CDE by the State law. The line between regulating and prescribing which textbooks to use in which course has been crossed; with absolutely no reason to believe it will do any good to anyone.
   

Anyway, thanks for listening. If you want an angrier version of the regulations argument, feel free to read http://sidorkin.blogspot.com/2007/05/what-makes-me-angry.html

Something uplifting

A colleague told me last week, “Why don’t you write something uplifting in your blog; this is the holiday season.” What she meant to say was that many of my blogs read like litanies of problems and complaints. You read them and think the guy is working at a horrible place full of problem. Of course, she is right. The blogs are intended to share my world with my colleagues, and my brain works in such a ways as to focus on problems, and their solutions. This can present a somewhat skewed picture, so let’s count our blessings.
First, STE is generally a very happy place. We all are a bit overworked and sometimes cranky. However, our little group has a tremendous amount of good will and good energy. Simply put, most people do not walk away from problems, and embrace new things. Every time we accomplish something, I have a funny feeling: is this all it took? A complete list would be boring to read, but just a few things: we finished NCATE program reviews this fall, and working on the State review; we revised out biggest program twice; we have a new and growing teacher preparation program; our Doctoral program is revamped, and growing, our off-campus offerings have doubled, we agreed to learn on-line and hybrid pedagogy, our people get grants and publish books and articles… Anyway, this is not a newspaper, so no more bragging, although this could go for another page or two. I guess the kick I get out of all this is connected to the sense of agency. Hope others experience this too. There is nothing worse than knowing something should be done, and not being able to do it. Conversely, the knowledge that if we agree to do something, it can and will be accomplished, this feels really good.
Second, we are a very collegial group. I would love to claim credit for it, but cannot. My colleagues have made a collective decision to get along and become one cohesive community, and they carried it out. Considering the history of typical academic mergers and splits, plus some unfortunate past personality clashes, our School is a remarkably professional and cordial group. This demonstrates that any community has cultural mechanisms of healing. While there are clearly differences in opinions, they rarely grow to become interpersonal conflict. For example: my own proposals and ideas are just as likely to get voted down as they get to be supported. And this is, of course, OK with me and everyone else. At the same time, I am proud to say, I have no enemies. Moreover, there is very little animosity among my colleagues.
Collegiality is very important; so important that pre-tenure faculty cite it as more important than compensation in job satisfaction. Court consistently recognize the lack of collegiality as a valid reason for termination of employment or tenure denial, even if it is not specifically spelled out in contracts and tenure and promotion documents (references are available upon request). A lot is at stake with collegiality; not just warm and fuzzy feelings, but life or death of an institution. A lot of my colleagues understand it better than I do, and we try to keep this place friendly and collegial.
Thirdly, we have some of the best jobs around. Even though faculty and staff are relatively underpaid, our jobs are not boring; they include a lot of intellectual and emotional stimulation. Tons of people would like to be where we are now, so we should really feel fortunate. Thos who complain about working at a university most likely have not really tried anything else, or have forgotten.
So, let’s reflect on what we have, and what we have achieved. This will help us develop an ambitious view of what could be yet achieved. Or as Randy Bachman said and Al Gore repeated, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Relational disorder and the question of power

Writing these blogs made me so transparent, there is no mystery anymore. Those who read them probably know already how I think and what I worry about. However, there is a whole set of things that cannot be disclosed, that will never make it to these blogs, other than in abstract and metaphoric form. Those are, of course, problems related to other people.

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a professional development workshop for School Directors, entitled “Things that keep you awake at night.” What transpired from the conversation is the common concern about faculty. Specifically, when someone’s behavior negatively affect students, programs, and other faculty, and we have very limited range of powers to address the situation. The frustration comes from the very nature of our position: it is our job to make sure the environment is good, and people are comfortable; all people: students, staff, and faculty. Because we are the lower-level managers, we receive all the complaints. None of the school directors believe everything we hear. All agreed that one should always listen to all sides of a dispute. These old tried techniques work well, and most of conflicts can be resolved with time and patience and with a little bit of luck. All human cultures have developed some mechanisms of forgiving and forgetting, otherwise no social life would have been possible. Thank God for holidays, breaks, parties, and other things that help us forgive and forget.

However, each of us had some cases where complaints are numerous, credible, and persistent. They seem to be rooted in certain personality traits rather than from miscommunication, specific conflict, or differences of opinion. We all have troubling and troubled individuals who seem to invite conflict, complaints and resentment. None of these people realize they have a problem; they always place the blame in others, no matter how numerous those others are. The power of denial is a tremendous force; people sometimes come up with a completely irrational, far-fetched version of reality just to avoid acknowledging “I have a problem.” Unfortunately, in an academic setting, we have little power to protect other people, especially students, from individuals with the relational disorder. Once someone is tenured, supposedly to protect one’s academic freedom, it becomes very difficult not only to let one go, but also to effect any changes in behavior.

At least some of my colleagues believe that the solution is in more power; wouldn’t it be nice if we could fire someone who is clearly a trouble. I don’t think so. I don’t like to have power, and dislike exercising it. There is a risk in having power concentrated in someone’s hand, both for others, and for those who are given power. It is an old tradition among Russians, which originates in the Orthodox theology, to treat power with suspicion, and try to avoid it as something spiritually corrupting. In my view, the collective power of faculty should be sufficient to solve problems such as relational disorder. However, I would like to comment on a systemic problem: all the good news are openly shared, and people tend to know about each other’s achievements. The bad news, however, accumulate in my file folders. Complaints are dealt with discretely. I am happy to share some of the bad news with the Dean, but he is in the same position: there is no way to make the bad news public, for the obvious reasons. However, faculty have a lot of say in peer evaluation but they basically operate without inadequate information. Some of it, of course, gets through the rumor mill, but that’s just it, the rumor.

Because of this curious mismatch in information flow and decision-making power, administrators sometimes look like the bad guys. They make a decision that, given equal access to information, everyone else would have made exactly the same way. However, because others did not have the same information, they may see the decision as unjust or frivolous, or worse, motivated by personal likes or dislikes. The power balance between faculty and administrators is needed, in part, precisely because of the difference in information to which they have access. However, for it to work well there should be some initial trust on both sides. When I learn of someone’s decision which I consider to be erroneous, I must first assume that the person who made it is not an idiot and not evil. Most like she or he know something I don’t. This does not prevent me from questioning, and demanding clear answers, but the initial hypothesis to be proven or disproven should be exactly this: something I don’t know has led to the decision I do not understand.

Thinking with Ursa

A significant portion of my week was spent working on curriculum changes. It is an interesting work, actually, because a lot of it deals with imagination. When you set curriculum as described in catalogue, you have to imagine all possible implications such changes may have. For example, we have found a few bugs that created problems in this registration session; none of these were on our radar screen last year when we introduced the changes. For example, we added a certain prerequisite because program faculty who teach it believe the course should be taken later in the program. We missed of course that it is mathematically impossible for students to fit the specific course so late in the program, because of other requirements. So, they all need to be manually cleared, which is exactly the problem we were trying to solve in the first place. Here is another example: some courses had Provisional admission to a program prerequisite. However, some students went directly to Full admission, and skipped the provisional. In any person’s mind, full supersedes provisional, but computer read these two as separate codes, so it wont’ let fully admitted people to do what provisionally admitted can. We failed to think like a computer, and in a contemporary organization, such a skill is a must.

It is funny how we talk about Ursa (our registration software). She is really a person, but then she is a very peculiar one, with her own logic, her own quirks and obscure rules. We say “Ursa thinks they have not met the requirements,” or “Ursa read this course on their transcripts, and she cannot read the attribute after that.” Ursa has its own logic, so we need to learn to think like Ursa. We wonder how to make Ursa understand something, how to translate our point into Ursa’s logic. YOU cannot argue with her, but you can trick her into doing what we want, only if you understand the way she thinks.

It is all about imagination. We consider possible implications of our curricular changes for students, programs, faculty. It is all but impossible to anticipate all consequences of a change, but we need to see at least the major ones. My wonderful curriculum team, Vicky and Karon, and I take one change, one specific adjustment, and then we basically let our imaginations run. How is it going to affect A, B, and C? What about past and the future? Let’s imagine those students two years from now? What about all these special circumstances we know about? In a way, it is like writing a fiction story, where circumstances are imagined, but they need to have some level of plausibility to them. I guess other people would call it modeling. It is an interesting intellectual and creative challenge though. It requires contextual knowledge of the multiple programs. Funny how computers themselves are not capable of doing such imaginative work. Computers relieved us from a lot of tedious work, but it seems like there is even more demand for human brains that can connect seemingly unrelated dots, and imagine real-life scenarios. Human brains can pick on subtle patters that computer completely ignore, and their owners actually enjoy doing it.

Junior high politics

Junior high politics can be brutal. Adolescents discover the world of relationships, and engage in it with enthusiasm of zealots. One essential feature of human relationships is their selectiveness. Being a friend with certain people means you’re not friends with other people. If you are friends with everyone, this removes any meaning from the concept of friendship and renders it empty.

Of course, by definition, adolescents have not yet established long-term relationships; they are trying it out. So, there is the constant sense of being unsure. The affiliations and alliances change, shift, they fail and are reestablished, and consequently, not much trust exists among adolescent friends. And because power comes with the quantity and quality of friends one has, the constant fears of betrayal are only heightened.

What comes with mistrust and insecurity? It is constant demands to prove loyalty, and to dispel suspicion. For example, if Lucy your best friend, and Sarah is your worst enemy, Lucy may not be friendly with Sarah, even in passing, even briefly. And if she is, she has some explaining to do. This is about the appearance of friendliness. However, if Lucy openly suggests that she would like to be friends with both you and Sarah, well, that is an open invitation to break the friendship.

Adults develop a lot more sophisticated understanding of relationships. First, they will learn the shades and gradations of friendship, and will develop a repertoire or f relationships that is much richer than friend/enemy dichotomy. Second, they will realize that no relationship is truly inclusive, even the most intimate ones like marriage: spouses must still have their own friends, and a whole range of other working and personal relationships. Healthy relationships of all kinds require certain amount of trust and predictability. Adults also learn to calibrate their assessment of relationships. Someone who disagrees with you, or who even has lost temper with you, is not necessarily your enemy or dislikes you. We learn this one way or another, to a different degree.

This is how things normally work. However, when adults experience certain traumatic, dysfunctional communities, they sometimes revert to junior high level of politics. This has little to do with individuals, or their maturity. It’s just the lack of trust that comes from past experiences. If you do not believe the relationship you develop with someone is safe, you will be scrutinizing the other person’s behavior for signs of betrayal. You will interpret her or his friendliness with your enemies as a worrisome sign.

Whoever is in the position of leadership has to be careful treading the relational waters. She needs a support group, those people who most close to her in outlook, and just simply people she draws emotional support from. However the leader cannot engage in junior high politics. He cannot ensure the support of his base by alienating the others. The temptation to anoint friends and enemies is great, especially if there is some genuine dispute within the group, and especially if the leaders feels he has the majority’s support. Nothing unifies your base group as a defined enemy, the others. Nothing brings people closer than a warm discussion about shortcomings of those not currently present. But that is exactly the strategy that would erode trust and plunge the whole group into junior high politics. This has to do with power asymmetry. Although in an academic setting administrators’ power is severely limited by faculty governance, faculty and administrators still have different kinds of powers to balance each other. It all goes wrong when an administrator or a faculty member attempt to tilt that balance by augmenting their powers by personal relations.

Social systems are powerful, but not all-powerful. Systemic problems can nudge a person towards reverting to junior-high politics, but we all have the choice to remain adults.

Just-in-time scheduling

We live in the midst of an incredible information technology revolution. We ask questions that were never asked before, we can know things that otherwise simply could not be known. For example, here is a simple question: how many students will need class X in the next semester, and what time of the day will accommodate the most? To answer this question, we usually use the last year’s experience, some informal feedback, and whatever other hunches we might get. To prepare for especially hard-to-plan course like student teaching, we use some sort of application process. However, we can never account for fluctuation in numbers and scheduling conflicts.

Let’s assume the Math school decided to move their MATH 283 two hours down, simply because they cannot have faculty who can teach it during their regular hours. This means that Elementary kids cannot take our EDRD 419 class. So, a lot of them decide to try it in the following semester, and we cancel a low-enrolled class. Yet in the following semester, there is a bubble we have no idea about: kids whose time is it to take 419, plus all those who delayed last time because of Math, all want to take the class. They try to get in, they cannot, and then they start complaining to the Dean. So we realize there is a problem, create a sign-up list, struggle to find an instructor, and finally offer it anyway. All of this is OK, but costly: students are upset, our FT faculty maybe underemployed when we cancel, but then we have to pay an adjunct extra. School Director’s valuable time is wasted.

What we need is a data management system. Students will develop their four-year tentative plans, so the system will know how many students need what when, for at least a couple of years in the future. The closer it gets, the more accurate picture of student demand we will have. We would also have a better idea of our expenses in the future, and could plan our budgets accordingly.

Then if Math 283 will happen to get scheduled first, the system will know that students who need it also need EDRD 419, and will suggest the best times for it and other yet unscheduled classes, so most students do not have conflicts in their schedule. Of course, if we schedule first, Math folks have to use the free time available.

Of course, something like this does exist already; just check out all these products. Yet it does not appear any of them have the capacity to look several years ahead; they basically play one semester in advance, and help match people’s preferences (they ask students and faculty when they would like to teach or take classes). Of course, no student wants to drag his or her behind on campus at 7:30 in the morning, and faculty may have their own preferences. So, the system can keep track of three factors: how many people need a class, when they are available to take it, and when they would rather take it.

It is not really that complex, and probably not that expensive to develop. Other industries such as shipping may have used similar algorithms to manage different processes. Any takers?

Morsels of the Real

This is my sixtieth blog, and I am not sure how many more things I have to say about all this life. I have something today though.

We had a good conversation with my Philosophy of Education class last week. We talked about Buber, and about I-Thou relations. Basically, Buber says that what’s important in our lives is not necessarily what takes the most time, nor is it something you can pinpoint as a behavior or a principle. The brief, infrequent, fleeting moments is what’s most important. Otherwise, the routine of everyday work and home worries and interactions sweeps away the very humanity we all possess. Buber suggests that the usual lives we live are not completely human, that the only way to become a full human being is to seek and appreciate these fleeting moments, when another person comes in direct relation with me, and as Buber writes, fills the heaven. It is when we relate to another person outside of restrictions and considerations of our relative positions, characteristics, stereotypes, and expectations. Those moments are the morsels of the real that actually make our lives worth living. Just thinking about scheduling, budgeting, big and little conflicts, programs, curriculum, etc, etc. – just thinking about this is actually quite depressing without some sort of a window to the real.

Our lives in big bureaucratic institutions and impersonal suburbs actually make this worse: we do not go to war, do not get lost in the desert, do not think about survival. The opportunities to reflect on our lives are not that plentiful. So, small problems tend to look bigger than they really are, petty fights look like big fights, and generally, the routine tends to eat us alive. How do we develop the capacity to always be on for the real? How do we manage to also pass this capacity on to our students?

What I am talking about may or may not be spiritual life. It’s basically, the ability to encounter other people without BS, directly. Lots of deeply religious and deeply atheistic people develop such abilities, although many others never do. Some people are a lot better at it than others. The problem is, we never specifically learn or teach how to seek the I-Thou, and how to recognize it once found.

What worries me is that this will sound crazy to many people. Then you ask them to tell a story about their lives, and how they sometimes feel a very deep connection to another person in a specific moment of a specific conversation, when the outside world somewhat disappears. And they suddenly remember, and agree that yes, it felt real, somehow profound. So, here is my suggestion: let’s amend the Performance-Based Standards for Colorado Teachers as following:

Standard Nine: I-Thou relations

The teacher has demonstrated the ability to:

1 Seek dialogical relations with his or her students
2 Maintain openness to the Other
3 Develop the need and ability to experience live in its fullest
4 Create classroom situations conducive to spontaneity, complexity and carnival

Or something like that...

I look at the list of my 59 blogs and wonder: how many of them about the real, and how many are about the superficial? Hmm, perhaps not that many.

1. How to alienate people and damage relationships
2. The Nomadic conference
3. Authority and power
4. Going with the flow: On the horizontal transparency
5. On-line is on the line
6. Playing the “you”
7. Switching gears
8. The Organizational Drift
9. Can you ever go home?
10. Dances with Data
11. Churchill and tenure
12. Freud for teachers, amended
13. Weddings, rituals, and memories
14. Curriculum and communication
15. Shift Left
16. The 90/10 rule
17. The cost of fairness
18. What is the most important
19. Zeno, Buddha and Program Development
20. What makes me angry
21. Gospriyomka and NCATE
22. Time density
23. The clouds glide by
24. The ethics of rumoring
25. Time Management and Sorry
26. The Lake Wobegon Effect
27. The “B” Word, or How do you know what you say you ...
28. Notes from AACTE, or American Absurdities
29. On Scholarly Productivity
30. Memories and time Symbolic violence
31. Merit, Shmerit, or “Evaluate not and thou shall no...
32. Why are we poor?
33. Midwives, matchmakers, Napoleon, and Kutuzov
34. On failings of humans
35. On the Money
36. What makes a problem hard to solve
37. UNC’s Organizational Culture and Change