Top and Bottom Versus Middle

Seth Roberts11 Comments

I liked many things about this talk by Jacqueline Edelberg, a Chicago artist and political science Ph.D., about how she and other moms transformed their local school. Edelberg has written a book about it called How to Walk to School: Blueprint for a Neighborhood Renaissance. The man who introduced her told a story: In a classroom, he noticed a girl drawing a picture. What are you drawing? he asked. I’m drawing God, she said. You can’t do that. No one knows what God looks like, he said. They will soon, she said.

Edelberg’s story did sound miraculous: Her crummy neighborhood public school, within a year, became an acceptable place for her children. The change had many elements, including an after-school program, a farmer’s market, and painted doors, but I think the most important piece — which Edelberg said little about — was this: Parents were allowed to attend every class. Within two years, said Edelberg, all the bad teachers left.

I call this way of governing top and bottom versus middle. In this case the top was the school’s principal (Susan Kurland, Edelberg’s co-author), the bottom was the parents, and the middle was the teachers. Acting alone, the principal couldn’t control the teachers — she couldn’t fire the bad ones, for example. With the parents’ help, she could control them.

It’s as old as Moses:

1. As I’ve blogged, the Ten Commandments was an agreement between Moses (top) and the preyed-upon men in his community (bottom) against the men who were preying upon them (middle) — stealing from them, for example.

There are other examples:

2. One reason surgical checklists — implemented by hospital administration (top) — work so well, I believe, is that they give nurses (bottom) power over doctors (middle). A nurse can tell a doctor to follow the checklist. The details of implementation also empower the lower-ranking members of the surgical team.

3. In China, what are called (in Chinese) human-flesh searches — a kind of cyber-vigilante-ism — go on with the approval of the central government (top). These searches, which are actually mini-crusades, allow ordinary citizens (bottom) to punish corrupt or otherwise misbehaving local government officials (middle).

I predict that someday someone in the American government (top) will realize that a way to greatly improve health care is to empower patients (bottom) against doctors (middle).

Teaching: What I Learned Last Semester

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Andrew Gelman’s thoughts about teaching led me to mull over what I learned last semester from teaching at Tsinghua. I taught two classes: a freshman seminar that covered a wide range of psychology research; and a class for graduate students about R.

Some things worked well:

1. In the freshman seminar, one of the assignments was to design a Mindless-Eating-type experiment. (Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink was one of the reading assignments.) One of the students designed a really good experiment in which people on different buses get different treatments. She happened to be a senior applying for graduate school and her work on that assignment helped me write a really strong letter of recommendation for her.

2. I graded the students on their comments on the reading and set the bar very high to get a full score (3 out of 3): they had to say something that interested me. A fair number managed to do this. The bar wasn’t too high.

3. I had lunch with all the students in the seminar (about 5 per week). The students seemed to like it. I certainly did.

4. There were classroom debates about which paper was the best (one week) or the worst (another week). They got everyone involved, was far less passive than listening to me talk, and gave them practice speaking English.

But there was plenty of room for improvement:

1. Students in the seminar were frustrated by the vague criterion (“interest me”). Toward the end I posted the comments that got the full score and that seemed to help.

2. In the seminar it was hard to get feedback about how well I was being understood. The best I could do was pass out slips of paper and have the students write down what percentage of what I said they understood. More immediate feedback (e.g., when I used a too-difficult word) would have been better.

3. In the R class I hoped the students would analyze their own data. This was too hard for quite a few of them. In the future I’ll give them a data set.

4. One student dropped the R class because my English was hard to understand.

5. In the seminar, some students (freshmen) complained that other (older) students, whose English was better, talked too much. They had a point and I should try calling on people randomly. I also should try to get general feedback after each class (e.g., “tell me one thing you liked and one thing you didn’t like about today’s class”).

6. In spite of my constant complaint that professors treat all of their students alike (e.g., all students get the same assignment) when they aren’t all alike — they differ substantially in what they’re good at, for example — I pretty much did the same thing.

7. I should have at least tried to learn my students’ Chinese names.

Why Do We Dislike Short-Range Repetition?

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Here’s something I wrote a few days ago:

In graduate school, I studied experimental psychology. I wanted to learn how to do experiments. The best way to learn is to do, I thought, so I started doing self-experiments in addition to my regular research (with rats). One thing I studied was my acne. My dermatologist had prescribed tetracycline and benzoyl peroxide. In a few months, my self-experiments showed that tetracycline didn’t work and benzoyl peroxide did work — the opposite of what I originally believed.

Emphasis added. I wanted to write “the opposite of what I originally thought” but the earlier use of thought made me use believed instead. Avoidance of this sort of repetition is standard practice. It’s even important scientifically. The linguist David Stuart made a big advance in understanding ancient Mayan when he realized that different symbols mean the same thing. The different symbols appeared in the same block of text, like my thought and believed.

My question is: Why? What’s the evolutionary reason? Maybe it’s part of a push toward novelty, so that nobody says, “Today I went to the store. Today I went to the store.” Or maybe it’s a way of pushing us to make distinctions, invent new words, and learn new words. It pushes us to make distinctions because it pushed me away from lazily writing ” . . . thought . . . thought”.

One reason this interests me is my interpretation of why we like repeated decorative elements. Many sorts of decoration involved repeated elements — identical things or pictures placed side by side. I believe we like this sort of thing so that we will place similar things side by side. When we place them side by side it’s easy to notice small differences that would otherwise be hard to see. Noticing small differences makes us connoisseurs. Connoisseurs are important economically because they are willing to pay more for finely-made stuff. They support cutting-edge artisans.

The invent-new-words explanation strikes me as the most plausible. First we do what the Mayans did: invent new words that mean exactly the same thing as the old words, purely to avoid short-range repetition. As the words get older, their meanings drift independently and they start to mean slightly different things (such as job and profession). Thereby the language does a better job of keeping up with technical/economic progress, which keeps generating new things that need new names.

One Man Vs. All Education Professors

Seth Roberts16 Comments

According to a recent New York article about Rupert Murdoch, Robert Thomson, one of Murdoch’s top editors,

thinks most [journalists] are liberals overly concerned with writing stories that will impress other liberal journalists and win prizes in journalism competitions.

Well, yes. Not everyone is a liberal, of course, but basically everyone wants to impress their colleagues. Scientists have an amusing spin on this: They call it “peer review.” The amusing part is that somehow no one else’s opinion should matter. (E.g., all journals must be peer-reviewed.) Scientists get away with this bizarre view of economics (thinking someone should pay you and get nothing in return) perhaps because it is indeed difficult to assess the quality of this or that bit of science if you’re not in the field and because science has produced huge benefits for the rest of us in the past.

As I said, this is just human nature. As far as I can tell, professors act this way — try to impress colleagues — in every academic department. In schools of education, the result is this:

Amy Treadwell . . . received her master’s degree in education from DePaul University, a small private university in Chicago. . . . But when she walked into her first job, teaching first graders on the city’s South Side, she discovered a major shortcoming: She had no idea how to teach children to read. “I was certified and stamped with a mark of approval, and I couldn’t teach them the one thing they most needed to know how to do,” she told me.

It’s no secret that many schools of education do a poor job of training their students to teach — which is nominally one of their main goals. I am just repeating what Veblen said long ago.

What’s new is this: One man, Doug Lemov, working mostly alone, has figured out how to make people better teachers. One man. Not a professor. Did he build on the work of others? No, he started from scratch. He’s made a list of about 50 techniques. They are teachable. He gives workshops about them. As far as I can tell from this magazine article, Lemov has done a better job of figuring out how to train teachers than all the education professors in the world put together. If you arrived on earth from outer space, and didn’t understand human nature, you’d think this couldn’t possibly be true, but apparently it is. It’s like something out of a comic book.

Assorted Links

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  • the I Practice My Own Methods Developed From Self-Experimentation group. Which, when this was written, had one member. She has Parkinson’s Disease and found that yoga helps. “I started watching yoga on tv because [my husband] had the tv on and he likes to watch attractive women expressing themselves physically.”
  • umami basics. “Maturation increases the content of umami.”
  • reasonable talk about addiction by Gabor Mate, a Vancouver doctor. “The first time I took heroin, it felt like a warm soft hug.” Mate says his addiction to classical CDs was like a heroin addiction. Sure, you laugh, he says, and goes on to say that one weekend he spent $8,000 on classical CDs, that his wife could tell when he’d been classical-CD shopping, and he once neglected a woman in labor (he was an obstetrician) because he was buying classical CDs. “In effect, our system punishes and prosecutes people for having been abused in the first place.”

Thanks to Bob Levinson.

Mood and Attentiveness

Seth Roberts8 Comments

In Jonah Lehrer’s article about the benefits of depression, nothing seemed solid until I came across this:

[Joe] Forgas [an Australian psychology professor] placed a variety of trinkets, like toy soldiers, plastic animals and miniature cars, near the checkout counter. As shoppers exited, Forgas tested their memory, asking them to list as many of the items as possible. To [vary] mood, Forgas conducted the survey on gray, rainy days — he accentuated the weather by playing Verdi’s “Requiem” — and on sunny days, using a soundtrack of Gilbert and Sullivan. The results were clear: shoppers in the “low mood” condition remembered nearly four times as many of the trinkets. The wet weather made them sad, and their sadness made them more aware and attentive.

I found the scientific article that reports this experiment, in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Memory for the trinkets was measured two ways — recall and recognition — and both ways the “sad” shoppers did much better. I didn’t know about this; the size of the effect suggests it’s important. Calling it variation in “memory” is odd, since the remembered event was only a minute ago. Variation in attentiveness is a better summary.

Whatever you call it, I like the general point made in the scientific article. When you are in a good mood, you pay less attention to your surroundings than when you are in a bad mood. When you’re in a good mood, the model of the world in your head is working well. No need to change it. When you’re in a bad mood, the model of the world in your head isn’t working well. Time to gather more data and revise it.

My colleagues and I have studied a different effect along these lines (in rats): When things aren’t going well, you vary your actions more. You try new things more. That’s another way to update your model of the world.

More Movement, More Learning

Seth Roberts13 Comments

This comment on my boring+boring=pleasant post persuaded me to look for research on how movement affects learning. I found this comment by Anne Green Gilbert:

Movement is the key to learning. I first became aware of this as a third-grade student . . . Movement was central to my teacher’s curriculum. . . . Everyone liked school that year, we all got along, and the knowledge imparted is still in my memory bank forty years later. . . .

When I became a third-grade teacher myself fifteen years later . . . I remembered this concept and used movement and dance to save myself from drowning in a classroom so heterogeneous I felt I was teaching in a one-room schoolhouse. Spelling words by forming the letters with bodies, forming punctuation marks and expressing the feeling of sentences through movement, learning multiplication by moving in sets of threes and fours, discovering the difference between lunar and solar eclipses through planet dances, and choreographing our way across the Oregon Trail somehow made everyone equal. The gifted children discovered a new and exciting way to learn, the slower learners quickly became actively engaged and successful, the non-English speaking students could finally understand the curriculum through our new nonverbal approach. Instead of dreading the long school day, we eagerly awaited our next movement experience. Attendance went way up; test scores rose substantially: there was laughter; racial tension dissipated. . . .

Five years after my own experience as a third-grade teacher in Illinois, I was training teachers at the University of Washington and received a federally funded grant to conduct research in the Seattle Public Schools. During the 1977 school year, 250 students from four elementary schools studied language arts concepts through movement and dance activities for twenty weeks. The third grade students involved in the study increased their MAT [?] scores by 13 percent from fall to spring, while the district wide average showed a decrease of 2 percent! The primary grade project [?] students also showed a great improvement in test scores. Most significant was the direct relationship the research showed between the amount of movement the classroom teacher used and the percentage increase of students’ test scores.

I find this very convincing: three situations, many measures. The way the movement lessons attracted diverse students is especially interesting; IQ tests were invented to reduce diversity in classrooms.

Partly I’m struck how this idea seems to have been ignored . “Everyone liked school that year.” Which seems to imply less liking of school other years. So the third-grade teacher used lots of movement, her kids loved it, but somehow second- and fourth-grade teachers didn’t imitate her. (Perhaps they did later.) “When I became a third-grade teacher myself . . . I remembered this concept.” Implying it wasn’t taught in her teacher-training program. On the other hand, it was emphasized in the teacher-training course that the commenter took (“I remember learning in my M.Ed that people learn better while moving and that we should therefore incorporate kinesthetic activites into instructional design”).

I’ve read many studies about learning by experimental psychologists and never encountered any study of the hedonics — what makes learning more or less pleasant. Learning is one topic, motivation (e.g., thirst, hunger) is another. There are a few studies of curiosity (in animals, not people) but they don’t show how to vary it. A professor of psychology might pooh-pooh the Gilbert stories: Sure, third-graders don’t like to sit all day. But my treadmill/language-learning story suggests it’s not that simple.

Assorted Links

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Robert Reich Lectures at Berkeley

Seth Roberts12 Comments

Yesterday I worked in a Berkeley cafe. The student sitting next to me said she was taking a course from Robert Reich called Wealth and Poverty. Most famous profs she’d found disappointing, she said, but not him. I was impressed that Reich was teaching undergraduates. Most profs in the Goldman School (UC Berkeley’s public policy school) don’t teach undergrads. The class is once/week for 1.5 hours (followed by a half-hour “salon” — meaning discussion) in a large lecture hall (Wheeler, 5 pm Wed). It met in a few hours. I went.

The topic was communities attracting large businesses, such as Boeing. Today’s topic should make you feel bad, Reich said. That was one of his goals, clearly — to make students neither complacent nor despondent. And he wanted them to be sophisticated: He didn’t want them to have a “bad-guy theory of the world”. Fine. I liked the way he walked around the big room, instead of staying on stage, and he had a great conversational manner. I also liked the way he used the first ten minutes to sum up what he’d said earlier.

What I didn’t like was the content. It was example-free — unless you count saying that Boeing moved to Chicago. As the lecture continued, my eyes widened: Is this what a good undergraduate lecture at Berkeley is like? There were no stories! Not one. He discussed, in purely hypothetical terms, how Boeing might decide where to move. They’re considering a number of cities, Chicago, Long Beach . . . Los Angeles. What will Los Angeles offer them? Tax breaks and subsidies, said Reich.

STUDENT What about good weather?

Reich didn’t answer. He went on to ask, rhetorically, were the tax breaks and subsidies a good thing? No, because they left less money for education. At this point I left. Except for being surprised by the low-quality content and amused by the student’s comment, I’d been bored. As education, it was thin gruel. The disjunction between Reich’s excellent intentions, great reviews (the room was packed), and great manner and his dreary content didn’t remind me of the name-dropping throat-clearing Yale prof but of the Los Angeles graduation where none of the speakers told a story. Somehow this simple point about how to teach — tell a story — had been forgotten.