Several contradictory experiences of the last week allowed me to see a pattern. I had a few frustrating moments trying to navigate through UNC’s on-line catalogue. To say it is a mess is an understatement. Just try to find Elementary PTEP, the largest teacher education program on campus. The system of internal references broke down, the Index is incomplete, inconsistent, and confusing. No one can navigate it. At the same time I know that the University’s IT team is highly competent, and the web administrators are also very knowledgeable and dedicated. We have a problem that like most, cannot be blamed on individuals.
Our School had a retreat, a very productive one. It made me appreciate again the professional strength and dedication of my colleagues. Meetings like this make me remember why I chose to work in higher education: to hang out with smart people. I also had to look at some curricular pieces in the last two weeks, and was again impressed with the thoughtfulness and expertise that went into development of the programs and individual courses. Yet our programs seem to have gaps and overlaps.
What happens is what I would call organizational drift; it is somewhat related to the concept of organizational entropy. What happens is really simple. Let’s say a group of faculty have developed a new course together; they have a good understanding of the course, and all teach similar things. Then some of the original group members are replaced, so they teach the course slightly differently. The original authors also change and update the course as a matter of good pedagogical practice. While each section of the course is improved in comparison to the original design, they also drifted apart, sometime significantly. This creates a problem of inconsistency: the same course taught by different professors looks completely different.
Of course, the original course was designed to fit into a specific program or even to several programs. While the program was originally designed in a certain way, each of the courses have been continuously improved or just changed because of the faculty turn over. The drift is natural, inevitable, and wholly expected. The same happened to the catalogue: it is a complex system with internal references among multiple parts. Different people are in charge of the individual parts, and no one can have a view of the entire system. As the parts drift apart, the references disintegrate and the system collapses. Our programs are not in the Catalogue’s position yet: the systems were designed relatively recently, and designed rather well. They are small enough for some communication to take place and to maintain their integrity. Yet the tendency is evident; where there is flexibility, there is also the drift.
One solution is to limit change: to redesign once and for all, and them limit any change. Some organizations do that: here is your syllabus, here is your textbook, and this is how you’re going to teach. It leads to stagnation and turns people off, but such a solution hold the drift in check. It also very difficult to enforce in Academia: people chose to work here because they are creative, and like to experiment and be independent. Without change, we simply would not survive for a long time, because education is in constant flux, and we need to run just to remain on the same place. The standards movement is another version of the same solution: it seeks to limit certain parameters of change by introducing a permanent set of references around which everything must order itself. It does not work like this, because professors largely ignore the standards. Or, rather, we claim to follow the standards after the fact of delivering curriculum. We do this not out of stubbornness or defiance, but because standards are too crude to keep the system organized. We understand that standardization means the death of the system that loses its ability to innovate. On the local level, the curriculum approval process seeks to limit the drift. However, as everyone know, most people ignore officially approved syllabi, for the same reasons.
Another solution is to make all changes transparent and encourage all parts of the system to react to every change in one individual part. In other words, the solution is to have constant meetings, and make all changes totally visible, while adjusting every little part to every little change. We are planning to do something like this in our in-service days. Smaller institutions do that constantly, and are often very successful in designing coherent programs. They can do this over a lunch meeting with a few people. But for a larger organization like ours, such efforts if they are continuous would take enormous resources. The constant information flow will become incredibly taxing in terms of time and resources. Going back to the catalogue example, the second solution of that problem looks like this: all school directors plus the registrar staff plus IT (about fifty people?) would have to spend a day or two going through the catalogue page by page to ensure the coherence of the entire system. Of course, we simply cannot do that even if we wanted to. If I remember correctly, groups of Microsoft staff at one point read together millions of lines of code to eliminate bugs; this was a very expensive solution, and their programs are still buggy, mainly because they are so huge and because of the drift.
The third solution is, I a way, a combination of the first two: you’d break the system into smaller chunks, explicitly define responsibilities of each one towards another, limit any changes in relationships among the chunks, but allow changes and abundant information exchanges within the chunks. This solution has its own limitations. For example if we were to create small teams, one in charge of literacy instruction, and another in charge of, say Social Studies and Math methods, and then another working with Art, Music, and PE, OK, they would work fine to improve their specific area, but then the areas will start to drift from each other. As a result, we would have no unity on matter that run across different areas: knowledge of diversity, classroom management, sound assessments, etc. In other words, we would export entropy to a different level, as biologists might say, but there will be about the same amount of it in the system. And this is what we have been doing anyway.
The radical solution will have to be based with self-organization processes and with alternative ways of information flows. I don’t have the solution; I just have a vague idea, even less than an idea, an image, a dream. Somehow, I see our students keeping track of their own learning needs: what they already know, what skills they still lack and need to work on, and what they should learn. I see them constantly checking these skills and knowledge with a constantly available testing service and then entering requests for specific knowledge into a database. Here is what I need to learn in the next semester… Then the computer matches those requests against our faculty’s expertise, and voila, it delivers a schedule. It does not look like our present schedule; it is a lot more complex: we have courses that last from one day to the whole semester. They have long names like: Elementary Social studies curriculum with use of storytelling and ideas on classroom management in urban classrooms. Or: philosophies of education plus professional writing skills plus research skills. The schedule is different every semester; it prompts professors to gain expertise in areas that are in high demand, and constantly update what we already know. Those professors whose expertise is not in demand, have to leave or work as assistants to other, more effective professors. Students are in charge of their own learning; those who cannot master skills, are forced to leave; those who can do most of their learning on their own, save time and money. The distributed knowledge makes the system self-organizing: no one knows everything, but everyone knows what she or he needs.
Anyway, that’s my Saturday afternoon dream?
Academia as a habitat
I have been writing this blog since 2006. In 2024, I created another blog called "AI in society" . This one will return to postings about life in academia and personal musings.
Aug 25, 2007
Aug 17, 2007
Can you ever go home?
My Russian in-law family, six of them, stayed with us for a while. We had a lot of fun, and some very good, very Russian conversations. A visit like this always brings forth questions of identity. This country versus that country, where one should live, how do we lives, what makes one Russian, and what makes one American. The precarious bridge to the old country has been briefly reestablished, and at least in imagination, crossed back and forth. Svetlana and I have always considered going back; we have been held back because of practicalities such as lack of good jobs in Russia, kids that went native and the large American debts. There are other considerations though. In 16 years we were gone, Russia has changed dramatically, not once but twice: from crumbling Soviet Union to the deepest economic depression imaginable, back to oil revenue-prompted relative prosperity and stability. From the excitement and hope of Glasnost era to despair of chaotic democracy and lawlessness, it then became a semi-authoritarian, but stable and mostly functional state. I watched two coupe d'etates on CNN, have seen and heard tragic and uplifting news from what seems to be an intensely familiar, but also more and more mysterious country. I traveled back five or six times, each time struck by how little have changed, and how completely different the country has become.
Like all immigrants, I am caught in this interesting space in between two cultures. People like me are foreigners everywhere. With virtually non-existing English, I came to Indiana at the ripe age of 29, thus the accent that is impossible to eliminate. Moreover, the accent itself becomes a part of one’s identity; you become known as the Russian guy with an accent. Even if it were possible, I would not get rid of it. I could have become a generic Alex, but instead insisted on remaining an exotic Sasha for the same reason: Russian Alexes whose number is a million are too eager to blend in; they are afraid of remaining foreigners fearing discrimination and sometime wishing to forget. Anyway, foreigner I am, which is a mixed blessing. The American Academe tends to be remarkably tolerant to foreigners (especially to White Europeans); tolerance matched only perhaps by that of the business community and unparalleled in the world. As a foreigner, one can always claim the bogus authority of an outsider, of someone with a different perspective; the Academe values that. At the same time, people often expect you to be naïve and know nothing about simple things, and having little facility with the English language. Especially touching are complements on the comprehensibility of one’s accent, and on the fact that I can actually write. I had a very hard time getting my first teaching job, chiefly because of the obvious foreignness. But this was a long time ago, and now my job is great, and at least some people in the field claim to respect my scholarship. All’s good.
Of course, the Russians treat me like a foreigner, too. Their attitude varies between patronizing to hostile, but the message is always the same: you did not go through this with us, so you wouldn’t understand. Or, you have been away for too long, you forgot how this is. The deep seated anti-Americanism of many Russians stems from the wounds to the national dignity. The wounds are mostly self-inflicted, but when it hurts one must hate someone, anyone. The Russian Americans will always get some flack on behalf of the entire American nation for everything from obesity to the Iraq war. One sure sign of becoming a foreigner is this: you cannot criticize Russia anymore. What is perfectly allowable to a real Russian (for example, criticism of Putin’s slide to autocratic rule) will not be permitted to you, the emigrant, because you are no longer one of us. Americans do not always understand this sensitivity, because their tolerance to criticism of America is rooted in implied assumption of own superiority. What a sentence… My writing has been ruined by the practice of philosophy. Anyway, back to the point: People like me are foreigners everywhere, and we end up always defending Russia in America, and defending America in Russia. In both cases we are basically defending ourselves, the parts of our identity that do not sit easy with people around us. It is much easier in a third country, where you’re simply a tourist, and no one gives a damn about your identity.
This place in between has been described many times by dozens of immigrant writers. They all try to make people appreciate how rich and complex the creatures of cultural border crossings are. So there, see how complex I am? Can I get some respect for this? The truth is, our experiences are not at all unique, and are a variation on the universal human story of going away from home; the home to which one can never return. It is a story of nostalgia, of growing up and betrayal of one’s youth, of embracing new things but longing for the old. We are all immigrants from home; even those who have never left the home town.
I feel sad for people who have a hang up on national culture, and cannot see past it. I doubt the very notion of culture, especially applied to such large entities like the Americans or the Russians has any usefulness. In other words, one can always make some generalizations: Americans are that, Russians are this, and Chinese are something else. But how would you use such generalizations? For what? If you try to apply them in any kind of real-life situation, they will turn out wrong more often than right. In my pragmatist epistemology, that means national cultures do not exist; they are fiction, myth useful to manipulate people, but useless to do anything good. But that’s another blog.
We could go back one day, when the practicalities of such a move are resolved. Russia is so much more unpredictable than the US, it is so much more frightening and exciting, it is hard to resist.
Like all immigrants, I am caught in this interesting space in between two cultures. People like me are foreigners everywhere. With virtually non-existing English, I came to Indiana at the ripe age of 29, thus the accent that is impossible to eliminate. Moreover, the accent itself becomes a part of one’s identity; you become known as the Russian guy with an accent. Even if it were possible, I would not get rid of it. I could have become a generic Alex, but instead insisted on remaining an exotic Sasha for the same reason: Russian Alexes whose number is a million are too eager to blend in; they are afraid of remaining foreigners fearing discrimination and sometime wishing to forget. Anyway, foreigner I am, which is a mixed blessing. The American Academe tends to be remarkably tolerant to foreigners (especially to White Europeans); tolerance matched only perhaps by that of the business community and unparalleled in the world. As a foreigner, one can always claim the bogus authority of an outsider, of someone with a different perspective; the Academe values that. At the same time, people often expect you to be naïve and know nothing about simple things, and having little facility with the English language. Especially touching are complements on the comprehensibility of one’s accent, and on the fact that I can actually write. I had a very hard time getting my first teaching job, chiefly because of the obvious foreignness. But this was a long time ago, and now my job is great, and at least some people in the field claim to respect my scholarship. All’s good.
Of course, the Russians treat me like a foreigner, too. Their attitude varies between patronizing to hostile, but the message is always the same: you did not go through this with us, so you wouldn’t understand. Or, you have been away for too long, you forgot how this is. The deep seated anti-Americanism of many Russians stems from the wounds to the national dignity. The wounds are mostly self-inflicted, but when it hurts one must hate someone, anyone. The Russian Americans will always get some flack on behalf of the entire American nation for everything from obesity to the Iraq war. One sure sign of becoming a foreigner is this: you cannot criticize Russia anymore. What is perfectly allowable to a real Russian (for example, criticism of Putin’s slide to autocratic rule) will not be permitted to you, the emigrant, because you are no longer one of us. Americans do not always understand this sensitivity, because their tolerance to criticism of America is rooted in implied assumption of own superiority. What a sentence… My writing has been ruined by the practice of philosophy. Anyway, back to the point: People like me are foreigners everywhere, and we end up always defending Russia in America, and defending America in Russia. In both cases we are basically defending ourselves, the parts of our identity that do not sit easy with people around us. It is much easier in a third country, where you’re simply a tourist, and no one gives a damn about your identity.
This place in between has been described many times by dozens of immigrant writers. They all try to make people appreciate how rich and complex the creatures of cultural border crossings are. So there, see how complex I am? Can I get some respect for this? The truth is, our experiences are not at all unique, and are a variation on the universal human story of going away from home; the home to which one can never return. It is a story of nostalgia, of growing up and betrayal of one’s youth, of embracing new things but longing for the old. We are all immigrants from home; even those who have never left the home town.
I feel sad for people who have a hang up on national culture, and cannot see past it. I doubt the very notion of culture, especially applied to such large entities like the Americans or the Russians has any usefulness. In other words, one can always make some generalizations: Americans are that, Russians are this, and Chinese are something else. But how would you use such generalizations? For what? If you try to apply them in any kind of real-life situation, they will turn out wrong more often than right. In my pragmatist epistemology, that means national cultures do not exist; they are fiction, myth useful to manipulate people, but useless to do anything good. But that’s another blog.
We could go back one day, when the practicalities of such a move are resolved. Russia is so much more unpredictable than the US, it is so much more frightening and exciting, it is hard to resist.
Aug 3, 2007
Dances with Data
Carolyn, our NCATE Queen, and I were dancing with and around data a lot. Our dependable work studies have been diligently punching in numbers; our smart graduate assistants played with spreadsheets and produced nice tables. Program reports are due soon, so we are having a close look at what information we have gathered, and which of it makes any sense.
We have learned several things so far. One is that when you set up some data collection process, you don’t really know if the data in the end is going to be useful. You also never realize what will be missing. When it is aggregated, it looks differently than when you are looking at a single item or few items. Data can look really boring, when there is no variation, and everyone is proficient. Data can look weak, because it does not prove what it is supposed to prove. We also realized that data collection must be systematic from the get go: we collect too much data, actually. Each individual sheet or form has been added sometime in the past for what seemed to be a good reason, but now many serve no purpose, or are never used for anything. So, when you have too much data, you end up spending more time digging out what is somewhat useful from what is obsolete. So, it should be very limited, very focused, and have some validity. Not just what statisticians like to call concept validity, but what I would like to call the gut feeling validity: can we actually believe it measures what we say it measures? Can we stand by it?
In the institution of our size, bureaucratic procedures for data collection are crucial. Someone has to visualize the journey a piece of paper makes, and find that critical point where we can get a copy of it, and then enter it into a database. A lot of things could go wrong here: an instructor may forget to turn his or her sheets; a staff person can be recent and not realize that certain piece of paper needs to be collected, or may not know what it looks like. A paper may be filed improperly, or not filed at all, then the information may never be entered into the database, so we have to pull paper out of files, and enter it. Time also plays tricks with us: “I believe I turned it in to A,” says B about an event that happened many months ago. “I don’t remember receiving anything from B,” says A. Both suspect C might have the stuff, but C is no longer working with us C says he turned everything to D, who is also gone and out of reach, so I go into the D’s office where stuff might be, but find nothing. End of search. Now this may look like a lot of incompetence, but it is not. Data collection is a complex process highly vulnerable to error and to organizational changes. It easily disintegrates under pressures of time, large volume, and lack of strong motivation. Data needs evolve constantly, because of changes in various laws, program revisions, turnover of instructors, administrators and staff, and changes in technology.
However, the most important reason for our difficulties with data is that colleges have not learned yet to deal with accountability data. Of course, teacher education is on the forefront of the accountability movement. Most of our A&S colleagues are really behind us, and may have no idea at all about any of this. Most are making their baby steps in learning to dance this dance. However, even for NCATE accredited institutions like ours, the data collection challenge is still relatively new. Institutions have different scale of time: what is a long time for an individual, maybe just a blink in institutional time. While individuals can learn things quickly and remember what they have done, institutional capacities and institutional memories are very different – not as quick, not as reliable, and heavily dependent on writing things down. Having someone highly competent around does not necessarily solves the organizational problem.
In the end, a lot of data comes out a bit unconvincing. I treat it as a learning experience: I certainly learned a lot about dancing with data in this NCATE cycle, and many of my colleagues did the same. My worry is how to make the institutional memory and skills stronger. So, OK, we are starting fresh in this coming academic year. We need not only to revise the list of data items we collect, and revise out instruments; we need not only develop logistics for collecting and analyzing it, but also somehow make sure this process is sturdy enough to withstand changes. When we have new faculty, new secretaries, new work studies, etc., how will they know what to do with data and why we’re doing it? Next time we change something in information collection, how will that information spread? Who will make sure little pieces of data come together? How do we make this process less time consuming and therefore less expensive? And most importantly, how on Earth do we collect only meaningful data, and stop collecting crap WITHOUT failing our next NCATE review?
I am fairly confident we will pass most of this cycle, partly because Carolyn and others did a great job setting data collection in motion before I ever got here, and the process of actually writing the reports is well organized. Partly I am confident because NCATE has shown appreciation to the challenges of the institutional learning curve, and was not indifferent to the issues specific to large units. So, this is not a grade anxiety, but thinking about converting this whole accountability dance into something we can actually enjoy and look good doing.
We have learned several things so far. One is that when you set up some data collection process, you don’t really know if the data in the end is going to be useful. You also never realize what will be missing. When it is aggregated, it looks differently than when you are looking at a single item or few items. Data can look really boring, when there is no variation, and everyone is proficient. Data can look weak, because it does not prove what it is supposed to prove. We also realized that data collection must be systematic from the get go: we collect too much data, actually. Each individual sheet or form has been added sometime in the past for what seemed to be a good reason, but now many serve no purpose, or are never used for anything. So, when you have too much data, you end up spending more time digging out what is somewhat useful from what is obsolete. So, it should be very limited, very focused, and have some validity. Not just what statisticians like to call concept validity, but what I would like to call the gut feeling validity: can we actually believe it measures what we say it measures? Can we stand by it?
In the institution of our size, bureaucratic procedures for data collection are crucial. Someone has to visualize the journey a piece of paper makes, and find that critical point where we can get a copy of it, and then enter it into a database. A lot of things could go wrong here: an instructor may forget to turn his or her sheets; a staff person can be recent and not realize that certain piece of paper needs to be collected, or may not know what it looks like. A paper may be filed improperly, or not filed at all, then the information may never be entered into the database, so we have to pull paper out of files, and enter it. Time also plays tricks with us: “I believe I turned it in to A,” says B about an event that happened many months ago. “I don’t remember receiving anything from B,” says A. Both suspect C might have the stuff, but C is no longer working with us C says he turned everything to D, who is also gone and out of reach, so I go into the D’s office where stuff might be, but find nothing. End of search. Now this may look like a lot of incompetence, but it is not. Data collection is a complex process highly vulnerable to error and to organizational changes. It easily disintegrates under pressures of time, large volume, and lack of strong motivation. Data needs evolve constantly, because of changes in various laws, program revisions, turnover of instructors, administrators and staff, and changes in technology.
However, the most important reason for our difficulties with data is that colleges have not learned yet to deal with accountability data. Of course, teacher education is on the forefront of the accountability movement. Most of our A&S colleagues are really behind us, and may have no idea at all about any of this. Most are making their baby steps in learning to dance this dance. However, even for NCATE accredited institutions like ours, the data collection challenge is still relatively new. Institutions have different scale of time: what is a long time for an individual, maybe just a blink in institutional time. While individuals can learn things quickly and remember what they have done, institutional capacities and institutional memories are very different – not as quick, not as reliable, and heavily dependent on writing things down. Having someone highly competent around does not necessarily solves the organizational problem.
In the end, a lot of data comes out a bit unconvincing. I treat it as a learning experience: I certainly learned a lot about dancing with data in this NCATE cycle, and many of my colleagues did the same. My worry is how to make the institutional memory and skills stronger. So, OK, we are starting fresh in this coming academic year. We need not only to revise the list of data items we collect, and revise out instruments; we need not only develop logistics for collecting and analyzing it, but also somehow make sure this process is sturdy enough to withstand changes. When we have new faculty, new secretaries, new work studies, etc., how will they know what to do with data and why we’re doing it? Next time we change something in information collection, how will that information spread? Who will make sure little pieces of data come together? How do we make this process less time consuming and therefore less expensive? And most importantly, how on Earth do we collect only meaningful data, and stop collecting crap WITHOUT failing our next NCATE review?
I am fairly confident we will pass most of this cycle, partly because Carolyn and others did a great job setting data collection in motion before I ever got here, and the process of actually writing the reports is well organized. Partly I am confident because NCATE has shown appreciation to the challenges of the institutional learning curve, and was not indifferent to the issues specific to large units. So, this is not a grade anxiety, but thinking about converting this whole accountability dance into something we can actually enjoy and look good doing.
Jul 27, 2007
Churchill and tenure
Professor Ward Churchill was just dismissed from UC Boulder for plagiarism and fabrications. He claims the accusations are false, and he is really being fired for his 9/11 essay. Of course, people started digging in his research after the controversial essay have been publicized, but this unfortunate fact does not negate the strong evidence of actual plagiarism and other misconduct, including fabrications. Interestingly, the Committee charged with investigation questions the timing and the motives of the University’s investigation, but cannot ignore the evidence. Churchill did cut a lot of corners to inflate his academic standing. He actually hurt the cause of the freedom of speech, because of the unrelated transgressions. Now people may be threatened to speak, seeing what happened to him. Thanks, Dr. Churchill, thanks a lot. Everyone by now knows the story; I just want to comment on academic tenure and its uses.
Does a professor have the right to say controversial, offensive, stupid things? Yes, of course, because academic freedom is a special, especially protected form of freedom of speech, and it serves an important social function. This is why the institution of tenure was created in the first place. It cannot, of course, shield from plagiarism and other misconduct. It is in the interest of university faculty to make sure tenure is used for its intended purposes. Let’s imagine for a second that tenure will be widely abused: instead of protecting academic freedom, it will be used to protect lack of effort and leisurely life styles. It is very likely that wide-spread abuse will result in a public backlash, especially in state schools supported by taxpayers. Such privileges are always conditional, given by someone for a reason, and should never be treated as unalienable rights. Everyone has the freedom of speech, or freedom of associations, but the privilege of having permanent employment is not such a right; it is a privilege granted to university faculty on certain conditions, in exchange for a specific public benefit.
Generally, anyone given special privileges – either political power, or wealth, or immunity from prosecution, or perks – should make sure these privileges are used properly, or they will be taken away. The basic human and civil rights should be guarded against governments, the conditional privileges must be self-policed. The Bush administration clearly abuses the executive privilege and thus jeopardizes having such privilege for all future presidents. So, this is not about this or that person, but about institutions, their long-term survival and efficiency.
And as an administrator, I see this as my primary concern. When I see someone abusing the privileges of tenure, I worry about other faculty, the overwhelming majority, who do not. For example, our university signs a 15-credit contract with faculty, which typically includes 9 credits of teaching, 3 credits of research and 3 credits of service. Roughly, that means that each faculty member must spend about one full day a week doing research, and another full day providing service to the institution and to the community. So, 38 or so weeks of the 9-month contract should result in some 300 hours of research activities and the same amount of service. It’s 38 full days of work for each research and service. What if someone does research for, say, only 50 hours a year? That, of course, constitutes fraud, because the person in question have signed a contract (promised to the University) to do research for 3 credits. Let’s assume a faculty member clearly cannot account f for all 15 credits of contractual work load, and can really show for, oh, just 12, or 80%. This amounts to stealing 20% of the salary; or if you earn $70,000, a $14,000 a year theft. Now, if I, the School Director, saw someone actually stealing 14 K in cash from the University coffers, I would, of course raise alarm, and try to stop this. Now what’s the difference with salaries? What if I cannot, in good conscience, account for the 15 contractual credits actually being performed? I cannot hide this, and moreover, there are other people, who are not necessarily friends of higher education, who can do the simple math. So, they will go ahead and cut our budgets, because they conclude, justifiably, that we might be inefficient in use of our current budgets.
Of course, we make it only because other faculty, both pre-tenure and tenured, put in 50, 60 and 70 hours a week to keep the things going. They do it because they care about the world, and about their profession. And many of those do not mind tolerating a 30-hour a week colleague, because of the sense of solidarity. But we cannot afford to do this anymore, because the whole institution is in jeopardy. If we continue to be too nice to each other, our tenure will follow the path of the labor unions, into the sunset. And with that, the true purpose of academic freedom will disappear also. The society as a whole will become more efficient, but less dynamic, and less free.
Does a professor have the right to say controversial, offensive, stupid things? Yes, of course, because academic freedom is a special, especially protected form of freedom of speech, and it serves an important social function. This is why the institution of tenure was created in the first place. It cannot, of course, shield from plagiarism and other misconduct. It is in the interest of university faculty to make sure tenure is used for its intended purposes. Let’s imagine for a second that tenure will be widely abused: instead of protecting academic freedom, it will be used to protect lack of effort and leisurely life styles. It is very likely that wide-spread abuse will result in a public backlash, especially in state schools supported by taxpayers. Such privileges are always conditional, given by someone for a reason, and should never be treated as unalienable rights. Everyone has the freedom of speech, or freedom of associations, but the privilege of having permanent employment is not such a right; it is a privilege granted to university faculty on certain conditions, in exchange for a specific public benefit.
Generally, anyone given special privileges – either political power, or wealth, or immunity from prosecution, or perks – should make sure these privileges are used properly, or they will be taken away. The basic human and civil rights should be guarded against governments, the conditional privileges must be self-policed. The Bush administration clearly abuses the executive privilege and thus jeopardizes having such privilege for all future presidents. So, this is not about this or that person, but about institutions, their long-term survival and efficiency.
And as an administrator, I see this as my primary concern. When I see someone abusing the privileges of tenure, I worry about other faculty, the overwhelming majority, who do not. For example, our university signs a 15-credit contract with faculty, which typically includes 9 credits of teaching, 3 credits of research and 3 credits of service. Roughly, that means that each faculty member must spend about one full day a week doing research, and another full day providing service to the institution and to the community. So, 38 or so weeks of the 9-month contract should result in some 300 hours of research activities and the same amount of service. It’s 38 full days of work for each research and service. What if someone does research for, say, only 50 hours a year? That, of course, constitutes fraud, because the person in question have signed a contract (promised to the University) to do research for 3 credits. Let’s assume a faculty member clearly cannot account f for all 15 credits of contractual work load, and can really show for, oh, just 12, or 80%. This amounts to stealing 20% of the salary; or if you earn $70,000, a $14,000 a year theft. Now, if I, the School Director, saw someone actually stealing 14 K in cash from the University coffers, I would, of course raise alarm, and try to stop this. Now what’s the difference with salaries? What if I cannot, in good conscience, account for the 15 contractual credits actually being performed? I cannot hide this, and moreover, there are other people, who are not necessarily friends of higher education, who can do the simple math. So, they will go ahead and cut our budgets, because they conclude, justifiably, that we might be inefficient in use of our current budgets.
Of course, we make it only because other faculty, both pre-tenure and tenured, put in 50, 60 and 70 hours a week to keep the things going. They do it because they care about the world, and about their profession. And many of those do not mind tolerating a 30-hour a week colleague, because of the sense of solidarity. But we cannot afford to do this anymore, because the whole institution is in jeopardy. If we continue to be too nice to each other, our tenure will follow the path of the labor unions, into the sunset. And with that, the true purpose of academic freedom will disappear also. The society as a whole will become more efficient, but less dynamic, and less free.
Jul 20, 2007
Freud for teachers, amended
It’s been very hot in Northern Colorado, and air-conditioning was, of course, scheduled to be repaired exactly at the same time. Not in March, not in October, when the weather is mild, but in the dead of the summer, in July. I could have done most of the work at home, but solidarity with our classified staff prevented me from going home. Here we are, sitting in our hot offices, trying to concentrate on work. We could not rent or buy window AC units, because we have no windows, and according to the laws of physics, to cool something, you must first heat something. The laws of thermodynamics apply to human relationships: we take in before we can disperse. Our good emotions and bad emotions need to go somewhere, and other people are most readily available conduits (although there are others like art, religion, etc.).
I have spent a few hours grading my students’ educational autobiographies, the first set of papers from this graduate class. It is actually a pleasure to read these: most of our students are very good writers, they are intelligent, and experienced. I feel good about our graduate programs. Of course, most are still lacking the powers of analysis and conceptualization, but hey, this is what graduate school is for, and I am certain we will make significant progress by the end of the semester. What strikes me though is how vivid, how sometimes painful the memory of early schooling are for most people. Those successful, and those deeply wounded, the A student and the special education students – all have a story to tell; all remember particular events rather well. All seem to link their present selves with those distant school children from many years ago.
Freud was right that the experiences of childhood determine who we are as adults. He was wrong, however, to concentrate on the early, pre-linguistic stages of human development. IN Freud’s view, it is precisely because we cannot directly access many of early memories, they become untamed, unprocessed, and perhaps more traumatic. This is all true, but early schooling can be as significant, and as traumatic, because we allow ourselves to remember only certain parts of it, and in the context f a specific discourse. For example, most people believe that since they are successful now, and since success can be attributed to learning (and schooling in particular), then whatever pain and humiliation they have experienced was ultimately good for them. It’s the same reasoning as in “My dad used to beat me up, and now I am OK, therefore beating children is OK.” Now, people do not make such conclusions because their power of reasoning is weak; rather, there is an active suppression of memory that is going on. Childhood is supposed to be a happy, care-free time; kids are not supposed to understand what is good for them; it was all worth it; schooling is child’s happiness, while manual labor is a curse – these are the boundaries of our predominant ideology of childhood. We do not dare to question those assumptions; thinking otherwise is unacceptable. (A well-informed reader may notice influence of Valentin Vološinov’s take on Freud here).
Raising your own children is an unending, continuous dialogue with your own parents. Similarly, teaching is always a dialogue with your own teachers. Teaching is impossible without some grasp of one’s own educational path, without making peace with your teachers, your parents, and your own earlier self. What is it that I have done? What was done to me? Why am I the way I am now? In psychiatry, the focus is, understandably on understanding one’s fears, frustrations, and other things that make us suffer. However, teachers must also understand the sources of their own compassion, empathy, and desire to do and be good. Otherwise, this desire to help can be tragically misplaced, when doing good takes precedence over those for whom the good is intended. Teachers must know not only the dark corners f their souls (which everyone has), but also the brightly lit corners. In what I am doing, how much is what have been done to me?
I have spent a few hours grading my students’ educational autobiographies, the first set of papers from this graduate class. It is actually a pleasure to read these: most of our students are very good writers, they are intelligent, and experienced. I feel good about our graduate programs. Of course, most are still lacking the powers of analysis and conceptualization, but hey, this is what graduate school is for, and I am certain we will make significant progress by the end of the semester. What strikes me though is how vivid, how sometimes painful the memory of early schooling are for most people. Those successful, and those deeply wounded, the A student and the special education students – all have a story to tell; all remember particular events rather well. All seem to link their present selves with those distant school children from many years ago.
Freud was right that the experiences of childhood determine who we are as adults. He was wrong, however, to concentrate on the early, pre-linguistic stages of human development. IN Freud’s view, it is precisely because we cannot directly access many of early memories, they become untamed, unprocessed, and perhaps more traumatic. This is all true, but early schooling can be as significant, and as traumatic, because we allow ourselves to remember only certain parts of it, and in the context f a specific discourse. For example, most people believe that since they are successful now, and since success can be attributed to learning (and schooling in particular), then whatever pain and humiliation they have experienced was ultimately good for them. It’s the same reasoning as in “My dad used to beat me up, and now I am OK, therefore beating children is OK.” Now, people do not make such conclusions because their power of reasoning is weak; rather, there is an active suppression of memory that is going on. Childhood is supposed to be a happy, care-free time; kids are not supposed to understand what is good for them; it was all worth it; schooling is child’s happiness, while manual labor is a curse – these are the boundaries of our predominant ideology of childhood. We do not dare to question those assumptions; thinking otherwise is unacceptable. (A well-informed reader may notice influence of Valentin Vološinov’s take on Freud here).
Raising your own children is an unending, continuous dialogue with your own parents. Similarly, teaching is always a dialogue with your own teachers. Teaching is impossible without some grasp of one’s own educational path, without making peace with your teachers, your parents, and your own earlier self. What is it that I have done? What was done to me? Why am I the way I am now? In psychiatry, the focus is, understandably on understanding one’s fears, frustrations, and other things that make us suffer. However, teachers must also understand the sources of their own compassion, empathy, and desire to do and be good. Otherwise, this desire to help can be tragically misplaced, when doing good takes precedence over those for whom the good is intended. Teachers must know not only the dark corners f their souls (which everyone has), but also the brightly lit corners. In what I am doing, how much is what have been done to me?
Jul 15, 2007
Weddings, rituals, and memories
OK, these are the threads I need to tie together: being back from vacation, my daughter’s wedding, and one year on this job. Too much for one blog isn’t it?
OK, here are some wedding pictures. My son Gleb made an entire DVD with movies and slide shows, if anyone cares to see it. It was actually a lot of fun, mainly because Maria and Alexander did not want it to be too formal, and too planned ahead (smart kids). They held their expectations open and vague, so there was no disappointment, but a lot of improvisation. We were incredibly lucky with the capricious Seattle weather. Weddings are just so hopeful and so optimistic; they charge up everyone involved, and help renew people’s relationships.
We form major memories by coding them with emotion. Those events without an emotional coloring quickly fade away, reduce to a bare minimum or to nothing. This is how we keep the storage capacity of our brains available for new memories. However, memories colored by strong emotions tend to stay much longer, and thus become significant in helping to explain the stories of our lives. Rituals such as weddings are simply cultural methods of infusing memories with emotion. We make ourselves remember certain events and give them more significance. A good ritual is an emotional one, hence the songs, the readings, and processions. Then, of course, every culture has a way of periodical recalls of significant events, when people activate their memories and verify them against each other’s.
In reflecting my one year on the job, I see the same pattern: many events I cannot recall at all, others are reduced to a stub of a memory. Sometimes, inconveniently, the important decisions and agreements cannot be recalled at all, so I need to search Outlook. Thanks god for e-mail that remembers all the boring stuff. However, other memories are right here, available for recollection on demand, with vivid details and attendant feelings; I will have them many years from now. In sum, the year’s memories add up to something very good for me. I have met and got to know many wonderful people, managed to get a few things done, had a lot of fun, and many opportunities to think and be creative. Isn’t that what life is all about? Among regrets, I have not been writing much of anything besides these blogs, and made a few mistakes on the job. Let’s not get into details here, OK? So, it is great to be back, even though there is always catching up to do.
OK, here are some wedding pictures. My son Gleb made an entire DVD with movies and slide shows, if anyone cares to see it. It was actually a lot of fun, mainly because Maria and Alexander did not want it to be too formal, and too planned ahead (smart kids). They held their expectations open and vague, so there was no disappointment, but a lot of improvisation. We were incredibly lucky with the capricious Seattle weather. Weddings are just so hopeful and so optimistic; they charge up everyone involved, and help renew people’s relationships.
We form major memories by coding them with emotion. Those events without an emotional coloring quickly fade away, reduce to a bare minimum or to nothing. This is how we keep the storage capacity of our brains available for new memories. However, memories colored by strong emotions tend to stay much longer, and thus become significant in helping to explain the stories of our lives. Rituals such as weddings are simply cultural methods of infusing memories with emotion. We make ourselves remember certain events and give them more significance. A good ritual is an emotional one, hence the songs, the readings, and processions. Then, of course, every culture has a way of periodical recalls of significant events, when people activate their memories and verify them against each other’s.
In reflecting my one year on the job, I see the same pattern: many events I cannot recall at all, others are reduced to a stub of a memory. Sometimes, inconveniently, the important decisions and agreements cannot be recalled at all, so I need to search Outlook. Thanks god for e-mail that remembers all the boring stuff. However, other memories are right here, available for recollection on demand, with vivid details and attendant feelings; I will have them many years from now. In sum, the year’s memories add up to something very good for me. I have met and got to know many wonderful people, managed to get a few things done, had a lot of fun, and many opportunities to think and be creative. Isn’t that what life is all about? Among regrets, I have not been writing much of anything besides these blogs, and made a few mistakes on the job. Let’s not get into details here, OK? So, it is great to be back, even though there is always catching up to do.
Jun 15, 2007
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?
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?
Jun 8, 2007
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 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.
Jun 1, 2007
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.
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.
May 25, 2007
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?
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?
May 17, 2007
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.
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.
May 11, 2007
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
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
May 4, 2007
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.
Apr 27, 2007
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.
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.
Apr 20, 2007
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.
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.
Apr 13, 2007
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.
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.
Apr 6, 2007
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.
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.
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