Curriculum and communiction

My colleagues are awesome teachers. Out entire School’s student evaluations average 4.14 on a 5 point scale. If you take out a couple of problematic part-timers, the average raises to a very impressive 4.48. It may be a flawed, but fundamentally fair process; most students speak their minds. So, we must be doing something right. Some people question validity of these evaluations, mainly because student satisfaction with a class does not always reflect academic achievement. However, we must be doing something right here. The very possibility of identifying a problem speaks to usefulness of the process. Our students expect to be asked for feedback as a matter of course, and many of them provide thoughtful, engaged comments. We have our share of problems, but can feel good about what we do.

However, I have this nagging suspicion that although each course might be good or very good, and most of my colleagues are extremely competent and dedicated teachers, the sum of these courses is less than what it could have been. The very structure of academic courses taught by different instructors may be questioned. It is a very practical, time-tested structure. You have specialists in different subjects who teach their chunks of knowledge and skills. There is an opportunity for each instructor to perfect his or her chunk, and to create a welcoming, supportive environment. However, anyone who has ever tried to either put together, or revise, or evaluate a program, knows that the shortcoming of the subject/course system are as real as its advantages. First, it is extremely difficult to get people to talk to each other and align curriculum. We, university professors, derive both psychic and tangible rewards from success of our individual course, not from the overall success of the program. We tend to be solitary, non-conformist, and fiercely independent people. Certainly, this is one of the main reasons for people to be attracted to the Academe: we want to be in control of our own work. We constantly tinker with our courses, and those drift apart from each other. Inevitably, questions arise: Who is teaching A? Should someone also teach B? Are we all trying to cover C, and waste our students’ time?

Fundamentally, we have very good grasp of individual course, but we do not know what is the totality of curriculum. We know what needs to be taught in a course X, but we have more difficult time understanding what needs to be taught in the whole program. What does an Elementary teacher need to know and be able to do? The State of Colorado, of course, came up with the performance-based standards that try to spell this out; and we pretend to meet them in our various courses. But let’s take a look at them; this one for example:

The teacher has demonstrated the ability to:

5.1 Create a learning environment characterized by acceptable student behavior, efficient use of time, and disciplined acquisition of knowledge, skills, and understanding.

This is an extremely tall order. Our graduates are supposed to know how to make kids behave and to learn. But OK, it’s important. So, how do you even begin to teach them? What specifically, this ability to create a learning environment actually entails? Can anyone give a step-by-step instructions? Are there any exercises we can assign to train these abilities? And if not, if this is still a form of art, how can you demonstrate the ability?

The standards are actually a list of qualities of a superhero; no one living individual can claim to meet all of them. But teaching is a mass profession; we will always have some talented, and some average people in there. Maybe we should begin with a picture of a good-enough teacher, with a much smaller list of very specific, observable skills and specific knowledge? When we are trying to cover all the State standards, we inevitably stretch the truth, and pretend to teach something we do not really know how to teach. We have double-accounting: every one of us is a former classroom teacher, so we know in our guts what’s important, and what cannot be missed. However, explicitly, we proclaim adherence to the super-hero model, and try to cover a lot of ground. We go wide but shallow.

And then, of course, we discover gaps. What is called the classroom management is an 800-pound gorilla; this is where most new teachers’ anxieties are, and for a good reason; the inability to meet the standard 5.1 is probably one of the biggest career-killers in the world of teaching. And yet we treat it as one of many standards. Well, I disagree. I don’t think knowledge of school funding, or school law or even content knowledge are as important as 5.1. It is, of course, related to some other skills: the ability to plan instruction without killing yourself in the process, the ability to relate to children, and to read peer group, etc. One has to have a mental list of what kids of certain age can and cannot do, etc. But please, 7.4:” 7.4 Apply technology to data-driven assessments of learning…” Is it really that important?

All this super-hero stuff keeps us even more entrenched in our classes, because there we at least can prioritize, and ignore the rest. “At least they will have one good class” we think. That is where much of opportunity for learning is lost: we do not explicitly build on each other’s classes, we do not know what no one teaches, and we do not know what is being taught three or four times. We are not consistent in our own teaching practices that our students will inevitably model.

I am just wondering; I do not have an answer. I only know that simple appeals like “let’s talk to each other” are not going to work. I also know that NCATE and State reviews do not achieve their intended goals of forcing people to think in terms of programs, and specific evidence. So, how do we create programs that are less fractured, less territorial, and more focused, more consistent? Perhaps we should start questioning the idea of the subject-based class? Maybe I should have a group of students I will follow through throughout whatever knowledge and skills we want them to have?

Shift Left

I have spent a significant part of this week working on computer. Last Summer, as soon as I came aboard, a problem presented itself: the teacher education database run on Helix had to be replaced. The company that supports it went bankrupt; the program cannot be run on any PC and on new Mac operating system. The database was developed over some 15 years, and contains thousands of records, dozens of screens, reports, and other features. The dilemma we faced was that a new commercial product that would do the same thing costs about $30,000, plus it would require significant annual maintenance fee. The other option was to develop our own database, but we have neither expertise, nor resources to do so.

The Helix is something faculty do not deal with at all: tracking student admissions to PTEP’s, their compliance with fingerprinting, TB testing, and other State requirements, keeping track of their admission to PTEP status, making sure they took all prerequisite courses before proceeding to the next level, etc. Then we place students for their multiple field experiences, and finally, recommend them for licensure. I have to admit, it took me a couple of months just to figure out what is it we do here in STE office. Again, this is something faculty do not necessarily know or involved in, and in a university, what does not concern faculty directly tends to move to background. Our dedicated staff plugs away at all this ever-more complicated processes, without much attention or appreciation of their work. However, all these tasks are essential for the School’s operations, and I had no choice but to try to figure out a solution.

Eugene, the Dean was actually supportive, although he blinked when he heard the amount we are likely to need to buy the new commercial product. “If you really needed, we can find the money,” he said. Then we explored several competing providers, and met with one of them to discuss a possible deal. That is when I got anxious. First, we would be buying a product that does not exactly fit our needs. Then, in order to modify it, we would have to have endless meetings with providers. You see, with the techies, you have to explain in detail what you want, and they will do it for you. But figuring out what you want is well over half of the solution, so you pay them for the work you did. And finally, the new system they were selling to us would be difficult to modify: we’d have to pay them every time we want some change. And who knows if the company will go bust, just like Helix did?

I called for help on our wonderful staff: Karon, Vicky, Marita and Layne, and we brainstormed a solution. What we came up with is an example of the “shift left” strategy, or improvement through radical simplification. Read about the meaning of the expression here. What many people do not realize is that software industry has a vested interest in selling people ever-more complicated, bloated products. I am playing with Office 2007 right now, and boy it is bloated. It has some nice features, and some features no one will ever use, but it is a memory hog I would never pay my own personal money for. Why do they sell us all those monsters? Part of it is explainable with simple lack of imagination, and lack of attention to consumers. However, a bigger part of it has to do with money – in the absence of cheaper alternatives, consumers have to shell out cash for complicated, cumbersome systems. Anyway, I am proud to say, we resisted, and here is our solution:

1. We invented the checkpoint courses – the fake courses in which students will bring whole packages of paperwork, and we will give them credit. Thus, we will be using the existing Registrar’s data base to perform a function that was not initially intended for it. Thanks to the Registrar people for being such good sports and supporting us on this. This took care of more than half of the old Helix functionality, and is going to save us a lot of time on data entry.

2. We bit the bullet, learned Access and developed our own smaller, simpler database. Of course, as the geekiest person in the office, I had to do most of the developing, but the idea is that at least two or three people here would know enough to tweak it when needed: to add or remove a field, to put together another form, etc. Access is unlikely to discontinue; it is a part of the standard Office, and we can always find an expert if we run into difficulties.

3. And finally, we are going to integrate Blackboard’s test feature to collect information from students and then import into our new database. This part is still in development, but I am confident it will work. This will save us more data-entry time.

It is not only that we have saved 30K, plus some 5K annually, but we also were able to simplify and streamline the processes here in the office. One of our staffers jokingly asked, “if you automate everything, will we lose our jobs?” That’s just not the case. Our staff has a lot of expertise and experience, so they will be more closely involved with advising and guiding students through their programs. There is always more work to do; the trick is to replace boring, tedious work with more challenging, more interesting, and more useful work. Of course, in the meanwhile, I am sitting here designing forms, and it is not fun. But I am not complaining, and it is gratifying to see things that you first only imagined actually work.

The “shift left” move is very useful, and not only in software design. Nowadays, we tend to make things more complex, just because we can. We all need to learn to simplify, and to keep it simple.

The 90/10 rule

The data technology revolution is here. Because we live in the midst of it, it is hard to see the magnitude of the changes we experience. Many industries have produced tremendous gains in productivity just because they found better ways of shuffling data. For example, truckers used to spend hours on the phone trying to get through to a dispatcher to assign them a load. Now they use their laptops and find a better load in no time. The global trade is impossible without informational flows on goods and capitals movement. Even fishermen and peasants benefit from improved information about market prices. People started to ask questions they have never asked before, and collecting information that was prohibitively expensive to collect before.

What about us? Has higher education, and teacher education in particular, caught up with the revolution? Has our work productivity increased significantly? The answer is no: the cost of K-12 and higher education continues to rise faster than inflation, while no one was able to demonstrate significant gains in academic achievement. So next time when you are buying a $30 DVD player in Wal-Mart, ask yourself why can’t you pay lower tuition for your kids’ colleges. The technological revolution somehow did not affect the core of educational business.

And it is not because universities do not invest in technology; they buy new gadgets all the time, dig tranches for fiber optics, purchase expensive database management systems, and hire consultants to figure out IT problems. In fact, increases in tuition are often justified with the need to purchase new technology. Yet something is wrong: phone companies do not increase their rates because they switch to computers; in fact, they will cut rates because of technology, and that is the whole idea. How come we buy computers and become less efficient? In education, many things are a lot more efficient now: it is easier to register for classes, to pay tuition, and to contact students. Why does it not translate into higher overall productivity? It is clear that the periphery of educational industry has become more efficient, but the core – the business of teaching – has not. K-12 education is a state monopoly, and thus inefficiency can be explained by lack of competition. However, higher education below Ivy League has a robust competition in many areas, and still tuition keeps climbing up. Why is that?

Part of the answer is in the very nature of teaching: it is individualized, laborious process. For example, for my students to make adequate progress in writing skills requires at least three papers a semester. When I grade them I use a number of technology tricks, like Auto Text entries, automatic calculation of total points, and e-mail notification. All these innovations I worked to implement save, oh, maybe 10 percent on my grading time. I still have to read all the papers, make sense of them, and give specific suggestions to each student on how to improve. No machine can do this yet (although ETS is experimenting with computer grading; it is not that good so far, I checked). While there are many ways to improve teaching, and make it more effective, there does not seem to be a way of increase student/teacher ratio without damaging the result; not without some horrendous Lancaster system or similar monstrosity.

Is there a way to do it though? Much of teaching is about information flows, although it is not always the type of information that is easily transferrable through computers. Teaching also involves highly individualized, and reciprocal information exchanges. In class, I can gauge how well students have learned whatever I want to teach, and quickly adjust to meet them half-way. They can ask questions, and engage in multiple participant discussions. So, the problem boils down to the kinds of informational exchanged, not the amount of information.

I believe there could be significant gains in productivity without the loss of quality, if only we overcome cultural and economic barriers. For example, there are no good training videos for teachers. I can find plenty of sugary videos with teacher stories, opinions, inspirational crap, etc. But can anyone point at a set of practical videos, where you would see, say, a first day of classes in elementary school? How about effective ways of dealing with disruptive students in middle school? How to engage a high school class in deep questioning? Given that we train a very large profession, with very high turnover rates, it is amazing to me no one has done it. We send all these hundreds of teacher candidates to more or less random classrooms, instead of carefully selecting truly best practices and showing them to all.

How about a simulation game? Pilots and military officers spend hundreds of hours in virtual reality simulation environments. Not all teaching can be simulated, but a lot of it can be.

And finally, let us take a hard and unsentimental look at what we, university professors, actually do in classrooms. Each one of us has a library of activities, phrases, little stories, and lecture bits we end up delivering again and again and again. Why not record all of this in either text or video format, so we can save energy on doing what we truly need to do differently for each individual student: answering unique questions, giving specific performance feedback, evaluating. Even then, most of the questions are the same, most of student errors and misunderstandings can be separated in a small number of specific groups, much of evaluation involves providing the same or similar feedback.

Of course, there are two barriers: first, the cultural one. We learned to value personal connection with students. They need personal connection when we intimidate them with unresponsive systems, and do not tell them what they need to learn and why. It is not like professors are so cool, students want to hang out with us. If we make our tremendous hoop-jumping machinery a bit more transparent and easy to go through, very few of us would be sought out for advising. Students need good, carefully selected information and specific feedback on how they are doing. Most professors believe (as in religious faith) that face-to-face interaction with a small class is the only form of effective teaching. Of course, none of them ever tried anything else, so their belief is not based on anything rather than blind faith with a pinch of general conservatism and unwillingness to change.

The second barrier is much more difficult to overcome: there is simply no time for me or any other professor to sit down and invest large amounts of time in designing a perfect course that can be delivered partially through video and other technologies. Such a course would require enormous resources. Of course, it could be then replicated hundreds of times, and can pay for itself over and over again. However, there is no mechanism for a university to make these sorts of investments and then benefit from its results.

In our office operations, I advocate a 90/10 rule: 90% of students should take 10% of time, while remaining 10% of students should take 90% of time. This is how things should work. We have to automate most of the processes so that those really needing individual help can have our time and energy. Well, the same rule should apply to teaching itself: 90% of it should only take 10% of professor’s time, so she or he is free to do what we can do best, and where individual attention is truly needed.

The cost of fairness

It’s Friday before the Memorial Day weekend. Absolutely no one will read this, I hope. People should be enjoying the summer weather, resting, reading trashy novels, taking trips; not working.

I have been thinking a lot of the world of work, and its opposition to the world of leisure. This has to do with my theoretical understanding of learning as a form of labor. But as an administrator, I have to deal with work every day: how do I make people’s work more productive?

Human civilization is, in fact, a complicated device for making people work – to work more, or to work more efficiently, or both. It is also a way of enhancing the world of leisure, although if you take a look at it, we are much more sophisticated in work than in leisure. Our pleasures are still very similar to those of animals, and they revolve around the body pleasures and entertainment. But we have invented a lot of ways making each other work. Why? The further away we are from naturally entertaining hunting and gathering, the more boring most of the work becomes. The division of labor especially made us more efficient at very narrow operations, but the operations themselves become less and less entertaining.

For example, this week I needed some data to be entered – from paper into a database. It’s very boring, but we have our wonderful work study students. Labor relations are very simple with them – they will do it because we pay them an hourly wage; they are free to quit at any time, we are more or less free to fire them at any time. Things get a bit more complicated when we need to do something more complicated, but perhaps just as boring, say, writing various reports. The labor relationships between universities and faculty are immensely complicated, and for a good reason. Faculty are not laborers; they have a great degree of independence and power. This is, of course, what makes it so interesting to work with them, but this is what makes getting things done more difficult sometimes.

If you just ask people to do additional things on top of what they normally do, they may resist for obvious reasons. However, if you try to introduce a by-hour sort of compensation for specific small jobs, they will get offended, because you treat them like laborers. Many faculty work really hard, but most are under the impression that they work harder than the next person, thus the equity considerations. Most people feel strongly about their commitment to students and to our common goals, but they also do not want to be taken advantage of, and do not want someone else to slack off. Of course, those worries are warranted, because some people do work much more than others. But can we know exactly, who and how much more? Not without resorting to some minute hour-by-hour record keeping system. But such a system would be offensive to everyone because it reduces the faculty member status to that of a laborer for hire, mainly because it would rob a faculty member of independence. Such is the price of complete fairness.

This is what happened to K-12 teachers: in search for fairness, equity, and security, they, as traded independence and professional status off for fairness and equity. You cannot be a professional and have the end of school day specified at 3:34 in your contract). This is the dilemma for university faculty, especially in the age of accountability. We do not want faculty reduced to the level of a laborer, and yet we have a strong interest in equity and fairness.

I was thinking about these things as the College Directors were struggling to find a way of distributing summer stipends. I was one of those initially arguing for minute, detailed analysis of people’s work. Some of my more experienced colleagues were hesitant to do so, and they were right. At one point a faculty member told me that he does not want to get paid at all if the compensation is, let’s say, $5 for doing one specific little task. At that moment I began to realize that fairness comes at a price, and it can be humiliating. So, when I started to divide up whatever little money we have, my lenses have changed: I had to think about these sums to be a small, and how people would react to minute, detailed justifications for every dollar. So, some vagueness, and more egalitarian distribution would do better for the morale, even if it is less than fair to individuals. For example, a stipend of $1125 might be offensive, while $1000 might be OK. Getting paid $100 when someone else gets $2000 maybe fair but offensive, while a smaller gap would be more acceptable to both parties.

As universities become more and more business-like and start counting money like any other organization, they will benefit from paying close attention to their specific culture, with strong egalitarian tradition, and genuine concern with independence and respect. However, in order to survive, the universities must learn to be a lot more flexible, competitive, and enterprising. How do you reconcile these contradictory considerations?

What is most important

When I talk to one of our students, I often imagine hundreds of children behind the student’s back, looking at me from some distance, expectantly. These are children our students will teach. An elementary teacher gets to know and teach 25 students a year, a secondary one – up to 150 and more; let average to 75. Over a 20 years career, she or he will have taught 1500 kids. Our School graduates about 500 teachers a year, which means we potentially affect 750,000 children in one year, or 7.5 million in 10 years. OK, not all of them will make it 20 years, so divide it in half, still a huge number. I am a cynical, and an unsentimental guy, but this is awesome. Just imagine once in a while all these hundreds of faces behind your students’ backs, waiting. What they all need is really the bottom line of what we do, not state standards, not laws and not educational fads. They are our main constituency, not that I presume to know what they need.

If you think about what we do in this light, priorities will change. For example, I am less worried that we may fail to provide a specific skill or a knowledge item to our graduates. What I worry about is that some the negative experiences our graduate received here reverberates throughout the years and all those kids. I also worry that we let thorough a mean or incompetent person who will ruin school for many children. We can multiply bad karma really fast. Of course, the opposite is also true: whatever good lessons our students have learned here may multiply and affect thousands of other lives, indirectly, but quite tangibly. And again, it is not about how much algebra the kids are going to learn, but the experience of a relationship with an adult who is willing to lend her powers to others, to help, to listen, and just to be there. So, if we are successful, we can produce a lot of good karma really fast, if there is such a thing.

It is all about relationships, not so much about technical competencies. As Nikolay, my Russian teacher friend once told me, relationships spread like waves on water surface: if teachers treat each other with dignity and respect, they create a pattern that then spreads into kids’ peer culture in wider and wider circles. And when they treat each other badly, the bad patterns spread just as easily. In teacher education, we are at the center of an incredibly large circle: whatever our students see and experience here is going to repeat again and again in many places.

There is a story by Rabbi Jack Riemer’s "The Rabbi's Gift" (although the authorship is unclear; the story appears in M.S. Peck. The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster; 1987:13-15. It was retold so many times, it became a folklore phenomenon). In the story, a rabbi tells an abbot of a dying monastery: “One of you is the Messiah.” The monks then started to treat each other with greates respect, just in case on of them indeed was a Messiah. Here is what happened next:

“Because the monastery was situated in a beautiful forest, it so happened that people occasionally came to visit the monastery to picnic on its tiny lawn, to wander along some of its paths, even now and then to go into the dilapidated chapel to meditate. And as they did so, without even being conscious of it, they sensed this aura of extraordinary respect that now began to surround the five old monks and seemed to radiate out from them and permeate the atmosphere of the place. There was something strangely attractive, even compelling, about it. Hardly knowing why, people began to come back to the monastery more frequently to picnic, to play, to pray. They began to bring their friends to show them this special place. And their friends brought their friends.

Then it happened that some of the younger men who came to visit the monastery started to talk more and more with the old monks. After a while one asked if he could join them. Then another. And another. And it happened, that within a few years the monastery had once again become a thriving order and, thanks to the rabbi's gift, a vibrant center of light and spirit." (Cited on Tufts Hillel website)

OK, this is a cheesy story, and a bit of a cliche, but there is some very good reasoning behind it. Between Nikolay and the rabbi Jack Riemer, it is clear to me that we need to take good care of our own community, and treat each other with respect and dignity. Perhaps this is the most important task we can do, because this will spread through our students to their students, and to their children. We should do it not for any moral or religious convictions, but just because of the place we occupy in the world.

I don’t want to oversell our influence: the wider the circle of waves, the less influential is the center. Many other forces shape our graduates, including family, mass culture, and, most powerfully, their own K-12 experiences. Most teachers teach in about the same way they were taught. This is the very basic mechanism of cultural reproduction in place. However, the narrow window of opportunity to change how schools operate belongs with us. If we take care teaching them well, treating them with respect, good things will happen on their own.

Zeno, Buddha and Program Development

It is the end of the school year, when bodies rebel against indoor confinement, when final exams are nervously taken and mostly passed, and edgy students sleepwalk across campus in not-so-fresh T-shirts. It is finally spring time in Colorado, or so I was told by less than reliable locals. My thinking naturally drifts from the every-day and mundane things like reporting, grades and budgets to observations on human lives and relationships. I was thinking about overinvestment in beliefs.

Many people, from Zeno of Citium to Siddhārtha Gautama, AKA Buddha, argued against excessive attachment, that is, essentially, clinging too closely to anything: desires, ideas, thoughts. I am always extremely suspicious of passionate beliefs people have about anything. I cannot help but wonder, why are you so attached to it? What makes this link between a person and a belief so strong? What is the story behind it, and what does this attachment replace in your life?

OK, let’s assume we have a disagreement among colleagues. Let’s just say some people believe in A, while others believe in B. And it is so happened that B people seem to prevail, because there are more of them. But then A people have hard time accepting the outcome, because they have strong belief that the B people are wrong, and A is the only way to go. Keep in mind that we do not really have any positive knowledge of whether A or B is correct; we simply don’t know, and won’t know until we actually experiment. Knowing how education works, one must admit there is an extremely high probability of being no great difference between A and B. In education, there are no strong effects. In such circumstances, you would expect relatively low level of discontent. Instead, you hear exaggerated claims about certain ruin that awaits our programs, etc. Why is that? How do people grow so attached to A or to B, so they cannot let those ideas go?

The answer is in the phenomenon of switching motives: the disagreement appears to be about a certain issues, but is in fact about something else. The participants may or may not realize the deeper motives for disagreement, but the real ones will never be discussed in public. There was a long history to this disagreement, a history in which one side’s victory gradually became another side’s loss. The history is more about power, respect, mutual suspicions, retributions, real or perceived injustice; it is the history of skirmishes and small victories and defeats. So, the meaning of A/B dichotomy becomes excessively rich in human relationships, and their residue. At some point, it becomes very difficult for people just to say, “OK, whatever”, because all of the relational connotations of the decision.

What is the lesson here? A purely philosophical one was known well to both the Stoics and the Buddhists: do not let yourself be attached to any idea too strongly, especially to a fairly trivial one like A vs. B. Such an attachment will only hurt, whether you end up in a losing of a winning camp. Such attachments will distort reality, create anxiety and generally make people unhappy. They create a need that can never ever be satisfied.

There is also an organizational lesson: Let disagreements be resolved quickly, so there is no time for people to grow strong attachments to competing ideas. Do not create situations where people who are in conflict will be able to latch on ideas to justify their personal animosities. Where there is already mistrust, all A vs. B and C vs .D disagreements are surely to take semi-permanent, exaggerated significance. Resolving them becomes very costly to institutions, because small disagreements grow into huge issues over which people resign, leave or feel alienated. All of this is both unnecessary and damaging to an organization, not to mention personally hurtful and distracting.

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And now something completely different. As we were dancing at yesterday’s party, I thought this Russian’s rock-n-roller has some nice lyrics:

I fear all infants, I fear all the dead
My fingers carefully feel my face again
My insides’re cold from the spasm of dread –
What if I am just like all those people, plain?

All these people who live just above me,
All these people who live just below me,
All these people who snore in the room next door,
All these people who live under ground floor?

I would have given anything for a couple of wings,
I would have given anything for an extra eye,
For a hand with exactly fourteen long fingers,
To breath I need very different air.

Their tears are salty, and laughter is rough,
Nothing for all is ever enough,
They like to see their faces in morning papers,
But yesterday’s papers are thrown to waste

All these people who make little babies
All these people who suffer from constant pain
All these people who shoot at other people,
But who cannot eat food without salt.

They would have given anything for a couple of wings,
They would have given anything for an extra eye,
For a hand with exactly fourteen long fingers,
To breath they need very different air.

—Vyacheslav Butusov, lead singer/song writer, Nautilus Pompilius

What makes me angry

I rarely get angry on the job. Other people’s and my own errors don’t bother me much; I find the institutional quirks amusing and generally acceptable; human conflict seems natural and sometime entertaining. However, this week I got really angry, to the point of fuming. What gets me angry are the large, blunt, and completely irrational policies that know not what they are doing. A bad policy is a like a blind elephant that crushes everything on its way, without really having any ill intentions; it’s just very powerful, and cannot see.

OK, Carolyn, our Assistant Dean and I have met about the incoming State Reauthorization reports. The first news is, the two state agencies, CDE and CDHE, ask for separate reports. They do not get along that well, so they were unable to come up with a unified way of reauthorizing teacher education programs. But CDE is also very proud of its standards, and it will never just switch to NCATE standards like some other state did. As if being a Colorado teacher is somehow dramatically different from being an Ohio or Maryland teacher. So, we’d have to align out curriculum with State standards and the NCATE standards. It gets better: there are four sets of standards the state of Colorado would like us to consider:
1. Endorsements Standards (Program standards in Educator Licensing Act of 1991, 8.0-12.0)
2. K-12 Model Content Standards (What kids in schools supposed to know)
3. Performance-Based Standards for Colorado Teachers
4. Colorado Reading Directorate Literacy Standards

You’d think they all are different, won’t you? Well, the K-12 are different because they are about content knowledge, but 1, 3, and 4 cover the same ground. For example, look at just one standard for elementary school teachers:

Endorsement standard: 8.02 (4) (b) effectively utilize assessment results and related data to plan for appropriate student instruction
Performance-Based Standards: 3.5 Use assessment data as a basis for standards-based instruction.
CRD Standard: Select, administer, and interpret progress-monitoring assessments to evaluate students’ progress toward an instructional goal and determine effectiveness of instruction / intervention and regularly articulate progress to students
ACEI: Candidates administer assessments (i.e., formal and informal) to inform and to make decisions about objectives and materials

Or, as a Russian saying goes, horseradish is no sweeter than radish. Those are the same ideas, some more snottily expressed than others. CRD language is the snottiest, but completely unoriginal.

The State wants us to develop matrices for each set of standards, showing which courses meet which standards. Then they want us to align all our syllabi to meet these largely overlapping standards. And, they want the syllabi, clearly marked with the standards. Imagine a course syllabus of, say an undergraduate Reading course for elementary teachers. It would have a list of course objectives, and each with a mysterious line like this: ESS 8.2 (4), PBS 3.5, CRD 8.1.1, ACEI 4.1. None of our students will ever ask what these things mean. None of the instructors will take the time and pain to explain this to students. No human being can teach a class while constantly thinking about meeting four sets of standards.

The State examiners will look at the matrix, then randomly pick a syllabus, find the code of the standard there – and voila, we are reauthorized. This somehow passes for evidence that we do a good job here at UNC. What makes me angry is that this work is completely useless, and does not help to improve the quality of our programs. The work is wasteful, because we will spend hours upon hours compiling matrices no one will even look at with any degree of seriousness. It makes me angry because we will do this instead of doing something really important, like talking about improvements and program development. But what makes me especially mad is that there does not seem to be any realistic way in fighting the madness. And mind you, ours is a small State where our Dean can pick up the phone and speak directly to most CDE and CDHE officials. It is not a huge faceless bureaucracy; all these people from CDE and CDHE have faces and are well-meaning and generally pleasant. They just have too much power and cannot see.

And it is madness. The very notion of multiple sets of standards is oxymoronic to the point of being simply moronic. You need a standard as long as there are no other standards; that is, roughly, an idea of a standard. If you have both a VHS and Beta, one should be on its way out, because they do essentially the same thing, so one must be better than the other. There should be just one short, clear set of standards, easily measurable by outcomes, not by inputs. And the State should be interested in evidence of whether our graduates can actually perform in the field, not whether we put the stupid codes in the syllabi. Don’t they realize it just does not change anything? Taxpayers should complain bitterly when the accountability process starts damaging the very work for which we are supposed to be accountable. This is wasteful and unethical. It is also horrendously inefficient, and does not serve the purpose. So, the public is interested in how well we spend the dwindling state support money? Well, let us show that our graduates teach well, but don’t pretend the few characters on syllabi mean anything other than our willingness to comply, comply, and comply. The State’s Education Deans for years have asked to find a way of identifying teachers by a college from which they graduated, so kids’ performance can be traced to their teacher’s college. This is too complex, apparently, and has not been done. Yet it is easy to ask for four matrices (multiplied by our dozens of programs) and hundreds of coded syllabi, because the regulators don’t have to prove they actually have read all of this stuff.

As a friend pointed out, this is done by a political party that argues for less government interference. Where are the good fiscal conservatives when you need them? So far, they seem to out-regulate the liberal regulators, at least where education is concerned. Why do they believe the whole economy has to be efficient and driven by the markets, while education must remain state-run and state-regulated to the extreme degree?

Picture a third grade teacher who tells her students: “And now, class, we are going to see how well you can add and subtract. Please write down when did you learn how to add, how did you learn it, how did you feel when you learned it, and finally, tell me if you did learn it and how well, OK? We will do this for the next two weeks. I will expect every one of you to write a book titled How I learned arithmetic” She never asks them to solve any problems, and they skip two weeks of math instruction. Well, this is what the State is, essentially doing with its teacher education programs. The regulators are unregulated, and only interested in maintaining appearances, with total disregard for efficiency or cost of compliance.

Who is going to regulate the regulators? Can we put limits on how much reporting and what kind of reporting the State 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? How about some validity check here? After all, the standards demand that any elementary classroom teacher understands the concepts of assessment validity. Yet the very people that demand it, do not seem to demonstrate any knowledge of the concept.

Can you tell I am still mad? I think we should sue the State for imposing unreasonable reporting expectations. Their case will withstand no court test, and perhaps a law suit can generate some public interest.

Gospriyomka and NCATE

When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, one of the first things he did was establishing a highly centralized federal quality police. It was given an unpronounceable Russian abbreviation name Gospriyomka, which means simply “state inspection.” Its officers had the authority to inspect quality of any merchandise on the premised of any production unit, and deny its release. The Soviet economy had a horrendous production quality problem, and a significant portion of goods were shipped across the huge country only to be discarded as defective by on the receiving end. So, his idea was to stop the waste and at least save on shipping. Of course, it did not work, and could not work. Production stalled, because producers had to fix a lot of defective goods; consumers quickly realized that having bad quality goods was better than having no goods at all. This was one of the last convulsions of the planned economy. It became clear to most that the state has to abandon price control, privatize most of industries, and allow enterprises to compete, so the inefficient ones will go bankrupt and stop producing junk altogether. Of course, it is easier said than done. In the next fifteen years, the Russian economy experienced a tremendous collapse about twice as bad as the American Great Depression (in terms of real GDP contraction). Many of the problems still persists, although high oil prices bailed out the country out of the immediate danger of total economic collapse.

I remembered the Gospriyomka story as our NCATE and CRD (Colorado Reading Directorate) stories unfold. These are local skirmishes of the much larger accountability campaign raging across the educational field, and several other industries. No Child Left Behind is the major battle; ours are much smaller. I hope the analogy makes sense. First, both are well-intended at some level seem very reasonable. Indeed, who would be against improving quality of goods and services? Who would object the need for educational institutions to measure how well they teach and to be held accountable? The Soviet economy was in such an apparent trouble that any means of improvement were welcome. The same could be said about American education: its cost has been rising significantly over the last fifty years, while outcomes remain flat and lag behind other countries. Education is a sick man of American economy, so let’s do something, right? On a smaller scale, Colorado kids do not do that well on reading tests, so introducing some minimal standards to literacy instruction in teacher education cannot really hurt, can it? Considering it does not cost very much to the taxpayers, well the State should do something, or so the logic goes.

Gospriyomka failed not because it was a bad idea. It failed because it was a good idea within a bad economy. It’s like when your car is stuck in a deep mud, at some point it starts digging itself deeper and deeper. Ironically, the more powerful is your car, the deeper hole it digs for itself. If you’re traveling off-road, at some point you realize a simple boat is better than the most powerful 4-weel drive. This is exactly what happened to the Soviet economy: it did OK for a while, but it was simply not suited for consumer economy rigors. It can never produce good quality consumer goods (although it could produce a lot of tanks and missiles, some were not bad). The same thing is happening with American education: it was just fine when it was selective, and most people never graduated from high school. However, it is stuck deep in the mud when most of people now need to be at least somewhat educated. By the way, American education loses the global race not because it is exceptionally inept, but simply because it reached the mud pit first. Everyone else in the world is cheerfully speeding towards the same pit; they just don’t realize it yet.

I have thought long and hard about why NCATE reporting is such an arduous, elusive task. I considered my own ineptitude, other people’s ineptitude, and other theories; they all play small roles. However, there are deeper problems. Again, NCATE reporting is very reasonable in its intent. We do need to collect data and use it to improve our programs. NCATE have come a long way simplifying, streamlining, and making the process user-friendly. It’s the motivation that is all wrong. Our motivation is to comply and to be accredited, so we can accumulate kudos. In order to be effective, the culture of assessment should come from within, from genuine interest in improving the quality of our service. Two people may do exactly the same thing, but one does it much better than the other, because they operate in two different economies and hence have different motivation. Motivation is not a psychological phenomenon, not a personality trait; it is a function of the system.

If you are producing coffeemakers in America, you would be ultimately concerned with people buying or not buying them. From that act of consumption, the motivation to improve and innovate would percolate up to the production process. In the Soviet economy, the act of purchase had no bearings of your production; you were forced to improve and innovate by purely administrative measures: your boss would tell you to do so; yelling was the most common form of motivation. Your immediate concern would be to please the boss, not to sell the coffeemaker. No matter how good your workers and your bosses are, a Soviet coffeemaker would always be inferior to the Japanese or American, or Turkish one. Gorbachev introduced Gospriyomka, which meant that the bosses would apply even more administrative pressures, because they were pressured themselves. So you increase the overall administrative stress, but guess what? Your coffeemakers still suck AND there are fewer of them.

So, at UNC, the President and the Provost both believe NCATE looks good on our list of accrediting agencies. In other states it is not an option at all, and you do not get state accreditation unless NCATE accredits you. Carter Hall applies pressure to the Dean, who in turns applies pressure to me, who in turn will cajole, threaten, bribe, and shame people into doing their assessment bits. Paradoxically, because of all of this flurry of activity, we do not really have the time or the reason to actually sit down, and talk about how we are doing and what data we really need to do a good job. We also don’t really know how good a job we are doing, because we don’t really believe in our own NCATE reports. We produce them to get accredited.

Of course, it is not NCATE’s fault entirely. There is also no meaningful market or informed consumers to apply different kinds of pressure. This is where governments should really step in and create an infrastructure for educational markets. All they need to do is two things:
1. Make it illegal to ask which college you went to in all job applications, so colleges stop selling their brand names, and will start selling actual quality of service.
2. Force all colleges to disclose publicly the educational value added, using the same simple formula (pre-test/post-test ratio by major and licensure area). This could be tricky, but doable, and this is where specialized professional organizations could come up with measurement tools.

If that happens, consumers will quickly figure out what quality they want for what amount of money, and education will cease to be a positional good.

Time density

Time is not like a constant stream; it varies greatly in density. Today, for example, Jenni, Jeanie, Eugene and I were able to formulate a long-term strategy for our off-campus offerings, and solved (imperfectly) some short-term scheduling problems. Besides, there were probably four or five other significant problems that I was able to figure out for myself, again, with great help from other people. So, it was a very-very busy and a very productive Friday; and example of very dense time. Yet some other days feel like walking through deep mud of vaguely unpleasant, irresolvable, and needless problems. The time is thin, watery, and slow. It is filled with people who misunderstand each other, with lost memos and forgotten commitments, with small errors that go unnoticed and cause large problems, with tasks no one wants to do, and no one is sure are needed at all.

How is that possible? How can we work so well together one day, and then things just sort of disintegrate? The machinery of social interaction clearly has different modes, some a lot more efficient and pleasant than others. One day we are capable of very effective communication, lucid thinking, and great ideas. The next day wounded egos, sheer incompetence and ill will take over, and nothing of substance gets done, or things slip backwards. This is not just my personal feelings; I don’t think anyone would seriously dispute the existence of “good days” and “bad days.” The difference between the two can be described as a difference between dense and thin time. Of course, this is oversimplification, because different time density can occur on the same day and be strangely mixed.

But why is that? Why does social time have different quality? My old Honda runs about the same every day. Its performance slightly deteriorates with time, but it won’t run much better, unless I put a new engine in it. If it breaks, you can fix a part, so it works better for a while, but you can always explain why. If human organizations were cars, they would run great for a while, then suddenly stumble and crawl without any visible reasons, then fix themselves and race better than new, then fall apart again. They would never completely stop, but you can’t effectively steer them either. That is not to say that driving skills are unimportant; they certainly are. Different managers will get the same organizations to perform better or worse, on average. However, no one can predict how fast each individual stretch of highway will be covered. Managing an organization is nothing like engineering. We do not really know how things work; we just tinker with these marvelous machines, hoping to get them to work.

I am fortunate too work with very smart, very good-natured people all around me. But groups are very different indeed from individuals. Several good people together may both tremendously increase each other’s creative potential, and the same group may completely cancel each other’s strength and become stuck. Paradoxically, the same group can alternate between the two modes in the course of a week or a day. What we don’t really know is how to increase a likelihood of the former outcome, and decrease that of the latter. Problems that go back many years, and seem intractable, will suddenly resolve themselves without much of an effort. Others that seem insignificant and easily solvable will become monsters that take a lot of time and energy to manage.

So here is my theory. The organizations remain the same, but they encounter different kinds of time. It’s like a vehicle that travels sometimes through the air, sometimes through water, and sometimes in airless space. Because the medium is different, they perform differently, depending on what is the ether through which they move. This week for me, was extremely rich in time textures. A lot of things went right, many things went wrong, and some things went nowhere at all. I know it sounds wacky. That was the intent.

The clouds glide by

When I get too busy, I slow down. This is probably a way of calming myself, and fighting anxiety. I will either read a book that has nothing to do with my work, or will try to figure out some quirky computer thing, or do something else totally irrelevant and low-priority. It really does help, perhaps because a different part of the brain is engaged. After such a exercise for a couple of hours, some creative solution inevitably come, new energies come from somewhere, and life generally looks a lot better. So today is such a day. I have been shamelessly wasting my work time on trying to translate Joseph Brodsky’s poem “The clouds glide by”; also listen to a song written by Elena Frolova on Brodsky’s lyrics.

Now, there is probably a better translation somewhere; and I probably have butchered English poetic expression horribly. Sorry, I still don’t know that well how this language sounds. One rule of a good translation: people can translate into their native language, but never from it. It is also a fall poem, and is out of season. But guess what? I don’t care, this is something I need to do to stay sane, OK? So there. Eugene (he is our Dean), if you are reading this and want to mark this day as vacation, go ahead. I am taking a day off (although I am sitting in my office and answering the goddamned e-mails).
----------------------------------------------------
The clouds glide by

Can you really hear when children sing in the grove,
those voices ringing, ringing over the dusky trees,
vanishing, gradually disappearing into the dusky air,
the heavens vanishing into the dusky air?

Among the trees, the shiny threads of rain intertwine
and quietly hum, quietly hum in the bleached grass blades.
Can you hear the voices, see red combs in children’s hair,
see the small palms raised to touch the wet leaves?

“The clouds glide; they glide by and vanish…”
children sing and sing in the bustle of black branches,
through leaves and blurred tree trunks, the voices rise
in the dusky air, one cannot hug and hold voices back.

Only wet leaves ride the wind, hurry back to groves,
flying away, as if to answer a secret autumn call.
“The clouds glide by…,” children sing in the darkness,
from the grass to treetops, nothing but pulsing, trembling voices.

The clouds glide by, your life glides by, glides by,
Learn to live with it, this death we carry within,
Among the black branches, clouds with voices, loving…
“The clouds glide by…, ”children sing about it all.

Can you really hear, when children sing in the grove,
the shiny threads of rain intertwine, voices ring,
near narrow treetops, in the new dusk, for an instant
do you see heavens fading again, yes, fading again?

The clouds glide by, they glide over the grove.
Water falls somewhere; time to cry and to sing by autumn fences,
to weep and weep, to look upwards, to be a child in the night,
to look upwards, just to weep and to sing, and to know no loss.

Water falls somewhere, along the autumn fences and vague tree rows,
Singing in the new dusk, just to weep and to sing, just to rake leaves.
Something higher than us. Something higher than us glides by and fades,
just to weep and to sing, just to weep and to sing, just to live.

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Thanks to Bob King for providing great feedback. OK, I cheated, and rewrote based on his input.

This is hard. Russian has longer words, so it can use the multi-syllable words to create this peculiar chanting rhythm. In Brodsky’s original, it’s Anapest, the meter where two weak syllables are followed by a strong one. In English, the anapest is not only very difficult to reproduce, but it also sounds silly. Also, Russian has grammatical cases, and a free word order, while English depends on words order to express grammatical meaning. So, the first line in Russian reads, literally “Hear if, hear if you in the grove, children’s’ singing?” Because English word order is relatively locked, it takes a lot more skill to provide a variety of patterns; a skill I clearly lack. Also, because of its long poetic history, English has run out of good simple rhymes a long time ago; that is why rhyming sounds so silly. Russian, on the other hand, has an inexhaustible rhyming bank, because words can be changed with various particles. Although English has a much bigger number of available roots, Russian can produce many more word forms from a smaller number of roots.

Russian does not have articles, so children, groves, fences, and other objects Brodsky has in mind, are all somewhere between “the” and “a”, somewhere vaguely undefined. You would never know if he is there physically present listening to specific children singing or he has some abstract children in mind. The same thing can be said about tenses: Russian does not make a distinction between continuous present and simple present tense. So, you cannot know a difference between “is singing” and “sings,” unless the speaker intentionally uses another way of specifying this distinction. And of course, poets like to keep it vague. Much of Russian poetic expression is derived from this grammatical vagueness of the language itself. English is a lot more specific about the definite/indefinite status of its nouns, and is enormously more precise about the timing of any event. Yet English poets seems to be much more concerned about the sound, about alliterations, internal rhyming, half-rhyming, etc.

As a more or less bilingual person, I always struggle with the limits and possibilities that both languages have. Certain things cannot be said economically in one of the languages. I don’t believe in the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. All people think alike, and anything can be said in any language. However, certain things just sound much better in one language than in another. Here is a couple of examples: try to speak and write for a week without ever using such common words as “issue”, “sophisticated,” “challenge” or “proficient.” Yet all these words are lacking in Russian language. I mean, you can express the same ideas, using different words in different context, but just try avoiding use of these four words. I can give a long list of reverse examples, where a handy Russian word just does not have an equivalent in English.

I have learned to tolerate these linguistic limits, and to work around them. It strikes me that not only in speaking, but in the rest of out lives, we operate within a set of certain limits. Monolingual people often fail to perceive the profound weirdness of their only language, because they have nothing to compare it to. Similarly, people who used to working and living in similar cultural and social systems fail to recognize the implied limits of those systems, but also the unique opportunities the systems provide. Moreover, when exposed to another language or culture, many see difference in terms of hierarchy, and just have to say which one is better and which is worse. How do we get to understand difference without pecking order? One useful exercise is to translate a poem. Another is to see what can and what cannot be done in YOUR organization or culture, and what can and cannot be done if things were otherwise.

The ethics of rumoring

Rumor is essential to any community’s life. It’s the oldest and one of the most efficient means of group communication. People select the most important information and pass it on to the next person. The information spreads really quickly, because the channels of communication are horizontal, and because the information is selected, arranged, and made more interesting with each transmission. Rumors allow for both anonymous and named sources; they also serve as an instant, continuous measure of public opinion and provide valuable feedback to the group’s leadership.

Of course, information also is changed with each transmission. Each transmitter has his or her own agenda, and will put a spin on every message to achieve certain goals. So, the originator of the message does not control the message, like in the mass media. Rather, the message is controlled by multiple players; it mutates again and again. This fluidity is what makes them so appealing to people: everyone gets to be not only a passive recipient, but an empowered creator of the message. While no one likes to find out about a rumor where one figures in a bad light, we must admit that the limitations of the medium are the other side of its strengths. Rumors are also conveniently deniable, because no written record of them exists. It is also impossible to trace the rout of the rumor, so the authorship of alterations is always unclear; they have certain authority without having a real author. It is a profoundly democratic and profoundly unfair medium of communication.

People who argue against any rumors are sadly mistaken about the nature of the informational space. Information is always contested, and messages are distorted in every media; rumors are not exception in this regard. Mass media all do and have always done the same thing. It’s the multiplicity of media that makes the consumer of information free to chose which spin to believe, and how to play all messages against each other in the elusive search for truth. So, if you do not like a rumor, start another one, or counteract it through other kinds of media.

In my experience working in two cultures, I have noticed that Russians are a lot more proficient in rumors than Americans. Because of the decades of alienation from state-controlled mass media, and lack of informational technologies, Russians have developed very efficient horizontal channels of communication. When I worked with Russian groups, all I needed to do is to say to one person: let’s get together tomorrow morning at 9. The whole group will show up, because every member feels an obligation to convey any relevant information to everyone else. In the same way, opinions, stories and explanations are easily spread. Americans will usually make a distinction between official information on a bulletin board and just something someone has said. Their trust for official channels is much greater; they are more likely to believe the official story and ignore the rumors. This is not to say that Americans do not enjoy a good rumor, especially if the official channels of information are suspect for one reason or another. The rumor mills kick in overdrive really fast in the situation of conflict or tension, especially involving authority.

There is still the ethics of rumor. Like any other human activity, rumor mills cannot operate without some norms. For example, a colleague came in this morning to confront me about something I have said about her to someone else. Of course, the quote was wrong and the intent of the statement was reversed. While I wanted to comfort and protect the person's dignity, the message came back as mean and degrading. There were at least two information transmissions here: one between myself and the third person, and another between the third person and the colleague. In both there could have been simple misunderstanding of the content of the message, or intentional change, or some of both. Because rumors are so powerful, and so secretive, most people are actually careful to guard the most affected and vulnerable people against potentially hurtful rumors. For example, you don’t just come to someone and say: “hey, I’ve heard your marriage is falling apart.” Or, “Say, I’ve heard you’ve got cancer.” This is what kids do in junior high, where they just learn the art and the ethics of rumor. Adults who care about each other create protective informational bubbles around each other, and will try to avoid hurting their neighbor.

I know that certain personal tidbits of information about me are circulating among my colleagues, but I also trust they won’t just bring it up in a conversation with me, unless someone is trying to manipulate or fight me. I have made some comments about my colleagues that I need to trust will not get to them. Those comments were made to solve a particular problem, or to vent, or to help someone to find a way of working together. The assumption is such comments are confidential. Confidential means the comments may be shared with most people, but not with the person in question. Rumors rely on trust and sensitivity. Taken out of context of a conversation, most things we say about each other can be damaging.

Another good rule is about crossing the media boundaries. A message that came through as a rumor cannot be directly converted into a mass e-mail confronting the messenger. Of course, if you’re in a middle of a war and there is no real community, those rules are ignored. However, in an everyday normal course of events, this is a violation of the ethics of rumoring. If you received a rumor damaging to your reputation, your first obligation is to trace and confront the source in person, just to find out of the message is correct. This is simply to acknowledge the nature of rumor: it is not designed to convey accurate information, but to tell a story. Any sort of mass media message (including e-mails) requires a fact-finding mission first. The gap between two media cannot be crossed arbitrarily and at will, because each medium follows different rules and assumptions. This is why no real journalist will publish something not confirmed on record. They all know a lot more than they can publish, precisely because rumors are a very different kind of media. It took hundreds of years for journalists to develop this ethics; in the age of electronic media everyone has to learn the same.

Rumors also cannot be used in important, formal decisions. Either good or bad things we hear about someone cannot be used to evaluate one’s performance, for example. For decisions like that, we need hard evidence produced with some rigor. So, one who engages in rumors should have an ability to ignore information gathered by them. They provide much needed background knowledge, but not the foreground knowledge. No one can be hired, fired, or evaluated on the basis of rumors.

Some people simply refuse to discuss someone in one’s absence, and refuse to engage in any kinds of rumor. I think this is unwise and too extreme. Getting along in complex groups is all but impossible without these sorts of discussions. How do you get along with someone difficult if you can never discuss your problem with any third person? It is also helpful that some of these discussions leak into the informational space, so their results can be shared. Rumors can be both healthy and damaging, but they can never go away. Therefore, we just need to work on ethics of rumors to minimize damage and maximize benefits.

Time Management and Sorry

This is going to be short one. I am really behind on many things, which makes me think about my poor time management skills. Or, rather, about what the heck is time management.

The truth is, people like me do not really have a lot of control over what needs to be done and when it needs to be done. Things just come our way out of the left field, at whatever rate they please. What time management means, is, really, a strategy of prioritizing. Then it is a matter of putting some things off, while doing other things really quickly, so we can concentrate on things that have to be done no matter what. One cannot do all things equally well and in a timely manner. However, people on the other end of all these tasks may not share my sense of priorities, so they rightfully perceive some of my actions they really are concerned about as shoddy work, or lack of time management skills. And they are right, of course. I just made another big scheduling error, and keep putting off things like grading my student papers, filing PES taxes, developing out new database, etc., etc. Of course, there are things I was able to do more or less on time, and more or less competently. Yet no one sees everything I do, but everyone around me sees a little thing, and it just possible that the only thing they see is the one I had to postpone or do a quick and dirty job on.

I am not at all complaining about lack of time. That is the silliest complaint; there is no such a thing as little time or being too busy. It’s all about deciding what to do and what not to do. The problem that I have not resolved is how to communicate to people in a respectful and meaningful way these priority decisions. How do you tell someone: sorry, your question will have to wait? Or how do I explain people that I did a poor job on something because it was not really a crucial task for me at the moment?

Again, this is not whining, just a reflection on a systemic problem of an organization that has a lot of centralized decisions and processes. Management books, of course, recommend delegating responsibilities, but it does not always work, simply because of the human resources limits. No matter ho much I want my work to be transparent, how do I really explain the interplay of pressures and priorities to everyone? There is a chance, everyone won’t be that interested anyway. And then, how much time do I want to invest in communications? Perhaps I should put a webcam looking into my monitor, so people can watch what I do all day? Perhaps they can help me better if they really do know?

Anyway, it’s been a tough week, and I was hitting some walls and spinning some wheels. If I screwed up your particular part of the puzzle, I am sorry.

The Lake Wobegon Effect

Here is what Wikipedia says:

The Lake Wobegon effect is the human tendency to overestimate one's achievements and capabilities in relation to others. It is named for the fictional town of Lake Wobegon from the radio series A Prairie Home Companion, where, according to Garrison Keillor, "all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average". In a similar way, a large majority of people claim to be above average; this phenomenon has been observed among drivers, CEOs, stock market analysts, college students, police officers and state education officials, among others. Experiments and surveys have repeatedly shown that most people believe that they possess attributes that are better or more desirable than average.

While my wonderful colleagues were enjoying the Spring break, I spent last three days solid looking through their peer evaluations for annual review. Thanks God, UNC does it together with merit review; my previous institution thought it necessary to do two separate reviews. At any rate, t is extremely slow, frustrating, and taxing work, perhaps the lest favorite of my duties.

The taxing part does not bother me. It is the relational tensions that get me. Let’s face it, no one likes to be evaluated by others, unless the results are congratulatory. No one really likes to evaluate others. As a new School Director, what stake do I have in being harsh on my colleagues? None, for I neither want to make enemies within this actually very friendly group, nor will such harshness make any difference in terms of improving the School. So, everyone in my School is above average, and I just go along with that, with minor variations. I am trying to do my best to make this process constructive, and include some recommendations, but where the rubber meets the road, that is in actual numbers, I am not doing anything drastic.

However, this institution’s long-term survival depends, in part, on its ability to raise its standing, to attract good faculty and good students, and generally to get better. To do this, we need to produce higher quality scholarship, and generally move closer to institutions with a stronger research mission.

The Lake Wobegon practices are clearly against the long-term interests of the whole, although they maybe in the short-term interest of many individual members. How do you crack this paradox? It is certainly not unique to higher education, but more or less describes the main tension of the entire social life. That’s the classic tragedy of the commons. Do I step forward and force everyone to do what’s best for them? Not likely. First, because I do not have nearly enough power to do so, and second, you cannot force people into a paradise against their will. If the expectations are to be raised and more efficiently enforced, this has to be a collective decision, one supported by the majority, if not by all.

Here is how Lake Wobegon effect works in the Academe. First, you need to design evaluation criteria that are…. Let’s just say, flexible. If you lay out, oh, seven criteria, but do not say how many of them have to be met, one can think of a number between one and six. Next, do not be critical towards your colleagues, and nod-nod, wink-wink to their exaggerated claims. Let’s pretend a small local journal run by our friends is an international peer-refereed publication. Let’s list all the non-existent committees, oh, so what? Who is getting hurt here? And finally, convince yourself that because the monetary gains from merit pay are so small, the fight is not worth fighting. Live and let live.

One problem with the Lake Wobegon is that it creates disincentive for highly productive people to produce. Again, from the point of view of the whole group, it is a bad system, because the highly productive people are valuable asset of the group; they generate most publicity, help attract other productive folks, and generate incomes that can be shared by everyone. Of course, they also create envy and are hard to control. How do we learn to accept inequality when it benefits us all?

I actually agree with the merit pay argument. Merit pay does not work when many states are financially starving their state universities AND blaming them for being liberal, or for not teaching the right stuff. If we are to get more rigorous, this has to be done for reasons other than merit pay. So we are now up to two unlikely suggestions: raising the bar needs to be done collectively, and not for any monetary considerations. Can we do it?

The “B” Word, or How do you know what you say you know

I always encourage my students to use the “B” word in their speaking and writing – “Because.” When you act as a consumer or as a voter, your opinion is very important, and you don’t have to explain it to anyone. However, when you act as a member of a professional community, no one gives a rat’s ass about your opinion, unless you can actually show that it is based on something. You can provide empirical evidence, or a good argument, but you need to have the “B” word there somewhere. Your opinion or belief means nothing if you cannot convince other people that it is somehow better than other people’s opinions. And not all kinds of convincing will do; only those the community accepted as reasonable.

That’s my usual routine speech. What I am not telling my students is that their professors do not necessarily do this in their own professional community. Many university conversations, especially those involving difference in opinion, very often degenerate into proving one’s point by insinuating that one has the authority over the matter and thus one’s opinion should not be questioned. The implication is always “trust me, I know.” Well, another mantra for my students is this: “Don’t trust anyone without questioning; especially don’t trust me.”

How do you know what you know? And don’t tell me you know this with your guts, or this is your philosophy, or that you had this long experience in the field. As a philosopher, I am especially offended by statements of beliefs without any justifications. If you think a naked belief is philosophy, you’re sadly mistaken. Sorry, I don’t buy crap, and I won’t buy it from you, whoever you are. Now, people also imply that if you do not believe their opinion, you somehow question their truthfulness or integrity or their qualifications. This is a subtle psychological manipulation, a form of relational violence. OK, I like and respect you, but why should I believe every opinion you might have? And if I don’t believe what you just said to be true, why should it affect our personal relationships? After all, we deal with professional matters, and must obey the rules of rational professional discourse.

For example, some people can call a certain position on program revision a deep commitment to the values of liberal education, while others call the same position a cynical turf grab. Who is to say who is right? Just renaming the position does not change its substance. Or, some say cooperating teachers won’t like this or that configuration of our field experience, while others say they won’t mind. Who is right? Can you ever know every teacher’s preference? Can we base our decision making on gut feelings, or even on conversations with a few teachers? How representative was your sample? How did you frame the question? Was your instrument valid and reliable; are your findings generalizable? As researchers, we all know how important these questions are. As members of this community, we routinely ignore them. All in exchange for feeling good and righteous, for that fleeting sense of having authority no one dares to question. It’s like this: “I just gave you the shakiest piece of data, but if you disagree, you’re calling me a liar.”

In a professional community, we would need to agree ahead of time what sort of evidence and arguments will prove one side or the other correct. We would marshal logic, research, and other good evidence to support each position. We would openly agree that good data is missing (which is true for %90 percent of decisions we make), and figure out the likely outcomes of decisions given the imperfect body of evidence and reasoning. Instead, people dress their frivolous opinions contaminated by personal interest in colorful garb of rhetoric. It’s all about concern for students; it’s what best for them. It’s because of the state or national standards. Oh, this is what any educator with any values would have supported. It’s for justice. But how do you know what you know? How do you think this is best for students? All these questions are rarely asked, because people get caught in the rhetorical battles, and respond to rhetoric with more sophisticated rhetoric. Hence battles without substance, where egos have overshadowed the issues and concessions are not an option. I like to cut to the chase and lay it out on the table, which is not always wise, and gets me in trouble sometimes. But I’ll take the risk, because there is nothing more torturous than a conversation where real motives are never discloused.

When entering a dialogue, one has to allow a possibility of changing one’s mind. If certain beliefs are too deep seated, or too dear to you, an honorable thing would be to disclose that in advance, apologize and say it is non-negotiable. That would save everyone time and effort wasted on conversations with predefined outcomes. The very act of entering a conversation implicitly states willingness to change one’s mind; otherwise it is deceitful and dishonest. If everyone know there are irreconcilable differences, then it is just easier to see who has more power, and whose opinion shall prevail without the empty dialogues leading to nowhere. However, once a conversation begins, all participants must have a shared sense about what sort of reasons will be acknowledged as valid, what sorts of arguments all parties accept as convincing.

Notes from AACTE, or American Absurdities

I was at AACTE conference over the last weekend. One of the most intriguing general sessions was a critic of neo-liberal approach to education. The term is confusing, because it refers to free-market approaches, and such thinkers as Milton Friedman , the author of voucher proposal. In American political culture, that would be called conservative, but because we deal with a world-wide phenomena, it is referred to as neo-liberalism. So, it was a crowd of liberals bashing neo-liberalism, if that makes any sense. All presenters were equally frightened of the horrors market would cause in education.

At the very end, I raised my hand and asked the panel, why there are no neo-liberals among them; why not invite someone who represents the opposing point of view? The panelists were literally at loss to respond, because it might not even occur to them that such a thing is possible. That is deeply disturbing to me. Whatever one’s political beliefs, why not engage the opponent? AACTE represents an entire profession, so how can it be so mindlessly partisan? Why through all the chips on a particular wing of one political party? Is it a surprise no one is taking AACTE and the whole profession seriously in the Congress? We complain that no one is listening to us, but does it occur to anyone that this might be because we are not saying much of substance? Instead of developing balanced, thoughtful positions, the profession seems to relish its old-school liberal roots over the practicalities of the 21 century educational policy. Hence the paucity of new ideas coming from within our profession. We are good at criticizing everything, but not that good at finding any solutions.

Once again, I found myself at a very awkward place, not quite fitting in natural political divisions of this country. My social beliefs are very liberal; all my friends are liberal, and I share the liberals concern for justice and multiculturalism. However, it is very difficult for me to imagine that direct government intervention through taxation will solve any of the issues the liberals are worried about. I have a deep suspicion of unions and other monopolies. So, does it make me a conservative? I have a lot of criticism toward the voucher initiatives; they are not working and are not going to work. But is more of the same an answer to public education’s persistent problems? Not really; we do need to move towards more market-like self-regulating mechanisms.

I find composition of both main American parties absurd and unprincipled. What do religious conservatives have in common with free-market libertarians? What do prolife activists have in common with the right-to-bear-arms crowd? Why do they all cling to the unholy alliance called the Republican Party? Similarly, what do gay rights activists have in common with old-school trade unions? Why environmentalists go along with pro-choice movement? What do urban poor gain from alliance with Hollywood? The Democratic Party is just an absurd a collection of people who have very little in common. Both parties are defined in opposition to each other, and this is the whole reason for their existence.

Logically, if you are against government intervention in board rooms, you should also be against such intervention in people’s bedrooms. If you are for preserving the traditional cultural norms, you should also be for preserving traditional natural environment. If you’re against business monopolies, you should probably be against worker’s monopolies.

Public intellectuals who try to remain rational and coherent in their beliefs have a hard time fitting in. What was heartening to see is that Diane Ravitch received a standing ovation at AACTE, even though she admitted being surprised by it. She does not fit into one camp or another, mainly because her own core beliefs are consistent and independent of political parties. Not all is lost, and perhaps we can get from under the spell of traditional American politics; that is where real possibilities of progress are. And this is not limited to teacher education.

On Scholarly Productivity

Some people find joy and satisfaction in research and writing, while others have found happiness in other things. I don’t believe tenured lives should be exactly the same. Most universities developed systems of subtle humiliations and pressures to induce more and more scholarship from both tenure-track and tenured faculty. I don’t find these systems sensible or productive. One of the major unintended consequences is the proliferation of shoddy scholarship. Publishing for the sake of publishing encourages new journals and publishing houses to pop up every minute, each with slightly lower standards than the previous one. Drastic reduction in publishing costs made this even worse. In today’s academia, there are more writers than readers.

It is also clear to me that most people will only have one or two good ideas in their life time, if that many. It is sad to observe a publishing machine consisting of many poor graduate students and one academic superstar; a machine that keeps churning out the same book under different titles every year. I have a great respect for textbook authors, who constantly revise and improve their very valuable texts, but little respect for so-called prolific writers who have ran out of steam decades ago, and still pretend to be original. On a personal note, I believe I have one more book in me, but that’s about it. Who knows, maybe another idea will come to my mind later, and then I will write something else. Of course, some people are genuinely prolific, and keep coming up with new ideas throughout their lives. Those are the lucky ones, and they are rather exceptional.

However, scholarship is essential to the whole business of being a university. If we only consume but do not produce any new knowledge, how do we justify our ability to teach students? Where does our claim to authority reside, if not in the ability to produce knowledge? This is especially important in graduate education, where we are supposed to teach our students to generate knowledge and original thought, and teach it by example. So, universities are right to demand evidence of continuing scholarship from its faculty. Or, rather faculty are right to demand it from each other.

How do we reconcile this paradox? On one hand, the publishing game as a whole does not seem to be very productive. On the other hand, scholarship seems to be as central to university’s mission as teaching. A complicating factor, but also a possible solution is the concern for fairness and equity. Since the medieval times, scholarly communities had a specific ethos: they are places where excellence is valued, and yet they are self-governed bodies of equals. Fairness is important on both counts. So when a professor A teaches six classes and publishes two or three refereed papers a year, but professor B publishes nothing, and teaches the same six classes, we have an equity problem. It’s just not fair. The most honorable solution would be for the non-publishing colleague to pick up another class and teach it, or take on a large service project and complete it for the benefit of the whole group.

As I was trying to show, there is nothing embarrassing or shameful about quitting the publishing game. It is just an acknowledgement of a certain course one’s life has taken. For example, I am a full-time administrator, so no one will accuse of me of slacking off if my publication record slows down, right? The assumption is that I am busy and somewhat useful to the university in another capacity. The same logic of respect should be applied to people who decide to concentrate on teaching, and take a break from scholarship. If someone wants to claim 80% of one’s workload as teaching, and 0% as scholarship, such a choice should be greatly respected and appreciated by others. After all, teaching 30 students might do more good than writing another paper. It might not, but it might.

Again, it is not as much an issue of employee’s contractual obligations, or an issue of money. Rather, this is an issue of simple equity. Every faculty should apply about the same effort, but perhaps to different things. And as long as those things are not self-serving, but useful to the institution, others should accept and respect various choices. Active scholarship is good for the institution, but so is teaching and some service. In general, people are most productive when they do what they like to be doing. A university will gain from promoting a culture of diverse interest and equitable but diverse workloads. Of course, such a culture will demand some level of trust that others will chose to carry their fair share of work, and some administrative and peer controls to make sure it happens.

To most people, fairness is more important than money or the amount of work. Whatever the grumblings, our jobs are some of the best ones around. Feelings get hurt when people perceive being treated unfairly by either administration, or by colleagues. Feelings get hurt when someone is obviously taking it easy, while I have to work hard for the same compensation.

Here I am, always arguing for incentives, entrepreneurship, and against egalitarianism. Yet fairness is not the same thing as egalitarianism. A fair person is OK with someone else doing better in life, as long as those better off truly deserve it. A fair person does not experience much envy, because she has her dignity and is given respect. A fair person wishes that no one will poor; he does not wish that no one will be rich.

Memories and time

The deepest, most carnal memories come uninvited. Triggered by a particular sensation, such a memory pierces your entire life like a threaded needle. It holds together the loose stuff of accidents and self-justifications we call life. Those ephemeral threads are the only connecting tissue; they allow us to claim kinship with younger strangers that used to occupy our younger bodies. The sound of your mother’s voice, the smell of the small creek in your hometown, the breeze playing with your hair; things like that.

One of mine is walking on a snowy path at night, frigid, snowy night. It will inevitably bring a strange feeling of acute loneliness, as if I am the only one left on this inhospitable, cold, vast planet. At the same time, I am elated and happy to see something beautiful, and just in the right place. Squeaks of snow. Pure paucity of colors. Short wind blows that make me gasp for air, exactly like fish out of the water. The strange depth of horizon, more imagined than real. Walking to school in early Siberian morning; the scratchy scarf against my cheeks; too tight, Mama, too tight, it is not that cold.

I can live in all times of my life at once; with no story, no biographic list of selected events, and nothing to explain. It is simply a different sort of presence in my own life outside of time. What is time, anyway? The biographic time of life span? Isn’t it just a convenient way of telling stories? Isn’t it simply a way of separating events into important and unimportant, and then editing them together in sequence? Time is arbitrary and constraining; time is the dictator whose power is as strong as our willingness to obey. In a very real, bodily sense, my trip to the second grade classroom just happened again several days ago, when it was cold in Colorado. It did happen again, you see.

Not only the past, but future is also already here. I remember the distinct feeling of a complete, transparent life already lived when I was just a small child. You might think I had no idea what is going to happen to me, but I know better. All my life was given to me as a preview. I cannot tell the events that will occur, but I know what will happen; those are two very different things.

The straight, artificial biographical time dominates our lives. We deem events to be important or trivial depending on how well they fit into the novel about ourselves we keep writing. This makes sense, because the biographic time is easy to communicate to others. Yet I just communicated my walk, and most people can relate to something like this just as well. Moreover, there is a serious problem with biographic time: it skews the importance of events in one direction. Jobs, publications, awards, evaluations, promotions, successes and failures, rites of passage, birth, death – all of these take too much of importance, and this is just not good. The events of biographical time do not always go well; we do not always have any control over them. This is where a relatively small unpleasant thing begins to eat at our sense of identity. It just does not fit well into the carefully constructed auto-biographical narrative. This should not be happening to me; and if it is, well, it is because other people are evil or I am worthless (Those two thoughts, by the way, are really identical in their origin). We torture each other because we want others to behave like characters in our own novels. But the characters to do not cooperate and stories do not come out as planned.

If human life is a novel, it has to be richer than the narrative. A simple recital of events makes a very boring reading indeed. Narrative should be punctuated with glimpses from other kinds of time, where the insignificant, dismissed, and forgotten bits of human life suddenly come back in full force and claim their unexpected importance. To live happy, full lives, we should always be on a lookout for the carnal memories I began with. We must constantly search for sensations, parallels, strange thoughts and feelings that take us out of the vicious run of the biographic time. We all are still little children, our parents and grandparents are all alive and well; we all are already dead and forgotten; we can have our first love experienced again and again. It is the same day as yesterday, and all e-mails in your mailbox you have read already. You are just here, and it is the time that keeps running in circles around you. So, stand still, and let the piercing memories and premonitions do their quiet job of threading your life together.

Symbolic violence

Pierre Bourdieu has introduced a fascinating notion of symbolic violence, “the violence which extorts submission, which is not perceived as such, based on ‘collective expectations’ or socially inculcated beliefs” (Practical Reason, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998, 103.). This is when someone reminds you of your duty, or exhorts compassion, or uses value-laden language to make his or her point. For example, someone says to you: “should we not have the interest of the student in mind, not our own personal interest?” This evokes the symbolism of altruism versus selfishness dichotomy. What are you going to say in response? No, we should really protect our own selfish interest and forget about students? Even if that is what you think, the power of social norms make such a statement forbidden, especially in a public setting. Moreover, there are certain things you won’t even allow yourself to think; certain feelings you experience but suppress; which is where Freud and Bourdieu nicely overlap. Everyone has got to love children. No one ever profess dislike for children. Of course, education is important; you can’t say that education is not really that important without losing respect or credibility. Teachers are supposed to love all children, care about them, and accept lower pay gratefully. We are not in it for the moneys, etc., ad nauseam.

We all do this to each other, in small or big ways. “Do you love me? How do I look?” Hmm, let’s see what the right answers are. Or, in another situation: “Students should take responsibility for their own learning.” Or, “This if for your own good.” Much of what appears to be a dialogue is, in fact, thinly veiled power struggle, often using symbolic violence. One has got to be grateful, to return favors, to respect one’s parents, to love one’s own and other people’s kids. In addition, teachers and other educators must appear selfless, not greedy, etc. We all use this; this is just a matter of normal life. This is how we make other people do something they otherwise wouldn’t. Some people are better than others at detecting symbolic violence directed toward them, and some can defend themselves with either unmasking it, or trumping it with another form of symbolic violence. But we all do it.

I recognize symbolic violence as a part of regular social life, but question its efficiency in administrative matters. For example, someone says: “the university is in big financial trouble; we all need to make sacrifice. Let’s find our way out collaboratively.” What’s not to like? Sacrifice, collaboration, solidarity; all wonderful things; one would appear and perhaps feel guilty not collaborating. I’d rather have a direct order: cut your expenses 4%, or better, raise your revenues 4%. Or, something like this: “You are a campus leader; you are a part of this decision making process; you get to decide.” Great, I am a part of the group, therefore I must play along and say what I am expected to say. People want to be helpful, and don’t want to be confrontational. The most interesting part of symbolic violence is that it does not feel like violence; rather it feels like a free choice, except it is not really free.

The symbolic violence is one of many power mechanisms of administrative control institutions use. It works very well in cases of emergency. For example, to fight a war, massive symbolic coercion is needed to mobilize people. If you have one massive financial crisis, it works to get everyone to sacrifice. However, it does not work well as a routine administrative tool. If there is a conflict between self-interest and socially approved norms, self-interest often wins over time. Even if it does not win, people accumulate resentment and feel exploited and demoralized. Sometimes, they don’t even understand why, but in most cases, they do. In the short run, institutional symbolic violence saves resources, because it helps extort more labor for less money. However, in the long run, it backfires, because the quality of labor declines.

I am not saying that only self-serving behavior should be encouraged, or that people should care only about monetary rewards. That’s not the case at all. However, I always like to be clear if I am being to asked to volunteer and to help, or I am expected to do something as a part of my job, or someone will compensate me for doing extra work. If this is a plea for help, I will or will not do it, but most importantly, I’ll do it on my terms, and never ask anything in return. If this is something I should be doing anyway, fine. If you’re paying me, this becomes a different kind of arrangement, where we negotiate a mutually acceptable amount. However, I don’t want to be paid AND feel like someone is doing me a favor; that would be a primitive corruption. I also hate pleas for help which are impossible to turn down, because of the all symbolic BS that’s wrapped around the request. Charity should be between me and my conscience; work should have an accountant sitting between me and whoever wants me to do something.

One can see a clear difference in patterns of performance. If people are really interested in doing something, and are passionate about it, or really need it to be done; they do it really well, because there is a self-serving (albeit non-monetary) component. If they get paid well for doing something, they also perform rather well, especially if a specific accountability measure is introduced. However, when they hesitantly agree to do something, because of the symbolic violence pressure… that’ a whole different ball game. People forget appointments, postpone work, they drag their feet forever, and results are not that impresive either. The paradox is that people may sacrifice their lives for a symbol but they are not able to do a half-decent work for the same symbol, if it is extended through some time.

We need to be able to see through symbolic violence, and make our choices outside of this sort of pressures. I bet, we’d do more things better. I like to hear things like “ OK, I’ll do it, I need some service on my resume, and it might be entertaining.” Or: “I’ll do it, I need the money.” Or, “if I don’t do it, people I care about will be in jeopardy.” When people assume martyred look and pretend they’ll do it because some one has to,… it always smells fishy. In other words, they are saying: “OK, but now you all owe me big, because I do this for the Cause.” This is the symbolic violence directed at the institution, not from the institution. So, we all do it. Let’s just learn to see beyond it.