Thanks to Craig Fratrik, Tom George and Sean Curley.
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At Berkeley, I found that the more I let my students decide for themselves what to learn, the more they learned. What they chose to learn was more valuable to them than what I might have taught. A student with severe fear of public speaking decided to give a talk to a high-school class. Every step was a struggle, but she did it. “I have learned I can conquer my fears,” she wrote.
I told a friend of mine, a German professor of journalism named Lorenz Lorenz-Mayer, about this. He told me about some independent students in his department:
They were students in the class of 2007 in our online-journalism program at Hochschule Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences. [They had just graduated from the German equivalent of high school.]
During their very first term as freshmen, instead of focusing on new-media projects as we expected, they started producing a kind of city magazine for students, called Darmspiegel. The name is a pun on the unsavory name of the city we work in (Darmstadt = Bowel City), and Germany’s most important newsmagazine, Der Spiegel. Darmspiegel literally means colonoscope. Another idea we couldn’t talk them out of.
Because they couldn’t afford to print their magazine they started with a pdf version. After some experience with it, they started a marketing department, acquired advertising, and successfully printed something like four more issues.
After having done this for a year and learned their lessons, they chose their next project, which was to be . . . a book. This was when the group, something like 60% of the 40 students in the class, together with some two dozen friends from other departments, asked us to make them media partners for a term project, voicing the unforgettable threat: “You can of course coerce us to do some other project, but you should reckon with the possibility that our heart will not be completely in it. If, on the other hand, we do this thing together…”
So two of our professors negotiated a compromise: It would have to be a book on Darmstadt. The outcome:
“nachts in darmstadt” turned out to be wonderful book, full of moving stories, beautiful pictures, even an oil painting on the night the bombs fell on the city at the end of WW II was painted, dedicated to become one of the illustrations. A delegation went to far north of Norway to see the midsummer sun in Trondheim, a partner city of Darmstadt. They used a Wiki to coordinate their efforts and a weblog to promote the ongoing project:
They tried several old and new forms of marketing (like nightly “guerrilla gardening”, illegally planting flowers in Darmstadt city). The book was published and — predictably — soon sold out.
Some minor projects followed, then the class had to do their obligatory 6 months of internship in different media companies. After returning, some of them majored in Public Relations, others continued Journalism, never quite reaching the prior level of productivity, as a team. Three of the group have burnt the midnight oil again (while still finishing their studies) and together with friends started a bookazine publishing house:
They’ve already published one multi-lingual magazine issue, on fashion topics (each issue is going to have a different topic), collecting and curating texts and pictures from fashion blogs:
A second issue on travel is ready for print, they have started taking preorders.
Wow! They did so much. I get the same impression I got with my students: Something powerful inside of them had been freed.
I have no problem with Holocaust deniers. They are probably a good thing — a mild irritant keeping the rest of us on our toes (like fermented food). Being forced to look at evidence will do most people good. The people who scare me, who do real damage, are the ones who want to silence Holocaust deniers. They don’t meet enough resistance. That Holocaust actually happened is exactly why we should be so afraid of intolerance in any direction (e.g., pro- or anti-Semitic). But Holocaust deniers are too intellectually feeble to do a good job of defending freedom of thought. So, by and large, it is poorly defended. Sure, most “unthinkable” views (such as Holocaust denial) are nonsense. But not all.
The paragraph you just read (“I have no problem…”) is a terrible defense of academic freedom. It’s vague, argumentative, unemotional, impersonal, and abstract. I think the best defense of a belief is to practice it, which is why, in my lifetime, the best defense of academic freedom has been The Man Who Would Be Queen (about male homosexuals) by Michael Bailey, a professor at Northwestern. The book led to a campaign of vilification against Bailey led by Lynn Conway and Deidre McCloskey. I blogged and corresponded with McCloskey about it.
Bailey has again defended academic freedom by practicing it. Last week Bailey’s Human Sexuality class caused controversy because of an after-class demonstration in which a woman was brought to orgasm on stage using an unusual device. Again we are learning the actual consequences of academic freedom, as opposed to simplistic arguments (like mine) or homilies about how good it is.
The Human Sexuality controversy led to publication of this story (which I have shortened):
As an undergraduate at Northwestern University, I only saw one professor argue with his students. It happened several times in the same class, Human Sexuality. [The first time was in 2005.] The professor, J. Michael Bailey, had been leading us through some provocative research, which suggested that if you control for a whole variety of factors, adults who were sexually abused as children are not much more likely to have psychological pathologies than adults who were not.
[During the question period] a dark-haired young woman in the back of the class stood up right away. Hundreds of heads turned to look at her.“You’re talking about sexually abusing children,” she said. “No matter what the research says, that is morally wrong.”
Bailey said that his moral judgment had nothing to do with the matter, that he was presenting research and that was all.
The student said, “What would you say if one of your daughters was molested?”
“If one of my daughters was molested, I would be devastated,” he said. “But I would take comfort in knowing that the molestation would not necessarily ruin her life.”
The young woman sat down. Bailey got back to his lecture.
What have I learned from this? At the simplest level, here are two stories — two pieces of evidence, two things to think about. Something more subtle is that a blunt argument (e.g., my first paragraph) is a kind of intolerance all by itself. The opposite of blunt argument is telling a story.
I remember the first time I encountered Spy magazine. It was at Cody’s Bookstore in Berkeley. One of the articles attacked Bill Cosby. Wow! I thought. You don’t see that every day.
Which is why Inside Job, which just won the Oscar for long documentary of the year, is so important: It attacks prestigious professors at Harvard and Columbia and to some extent the institutions themselves. You don’t see that every day. Larry Summers, former Harvard president, is one of the main villains of the piece. Few intellectuals have combined poor understanding and power as much as Summers has. (With bonus points for nauseating treatment of staff.) Perhaps none has done so much harm. Had Summers not blocked Brooksley Born from regulating derivatives, the world would be a different place. And it isn’t just Summers. The movie shows that John Campbell, chairman of the Harvard economics department, has trouble understanding the concept of conflict of interest. What this says about Harvard, the most prestigious academic institution in the world, is not something Harvard professors are going to want to think about. Harvard, of course, is the home of Joseph Biederman, the most ethically-challenged professor I know of.
Michael Moore’s Sicko did a great job of provoking outrage. At the same time, however, it was empty of interesting thought. It was not a new idea that American health care might benefit from imitating other countries. So the outrage boils away unused. In contrast, Inside Job contains the beginning of a thoughtful critique: It says that economics professors were corrupted by all the money they could make praising and doing the bidding of Wall Street (e.g., resisting regulation). Summers made out especially well. You won’t find this critique in The Big Short, All The Devils Are Here, Too Big to Fail, or How Markets Fail. A viewer of Inside Job might stop giving money to Harvard until Harvard enacts conflict of interest rules for economics professors.
I don’t think conflict of interest is the whole problem with Summers et al. Poor understanding is a big part of it. A friend of mine at Berkeley took introductory economics. What about data? I asked her. Where’s the data for all these assertions? She went to her professor. Where’s the data? she asked. Don’t worry about data, he said. Economics professors have started paying more attention to data (Steve Levitt, John List), but they have a long way to go.
Since the Educational Testing Service is responsible for measuring intelligence, it is disturbing when they appear . . . not intelligent. A Chinese student of mine sent me the following question, which appears in a set of study questions. You are supposed to identify the “flaw” in the argument.
The article entitled ‘Eating Iron’ in last month’s issue of Eating for Health reported that a recent study found a correlation between high levels of iron in the diet and an increased risk of heart disease. Further, it is well established that there is a link between large amounts of red meat in the diet and heart disease, and red meat is high in iron. On the basis of the study and the well-established link between red meat and heart disease, we can conclude that the correlation between high iron levels and heart disease, then, is most probably a function of the correlation between red meat and heart disease.
By “is a function of” I suppose means “is due to”. Sure, there are several imperfections, unstated assumptions, in every argument, including this one, just as every piece of research has several imperfections. But are there obvious important flaws in this argument? I think it is reasonable to assume that red meat is the main source of iron.
Since many scientists have trouble interpreting correlations (they think “correlation does not equal causation” is not misleading) presumably an ETS question writer has even more trouble. And this question reflects that. But maybe not.
The New York Times reported a study in Science that found that testing yourself on material you have learned is a good way to improve retention. Then they published a set of letters about it.
John Taylor Gatto, whose books I like, wrote:
Real learning is measured only by utility, by application. In the case of this research, the success claimed for practice testing is being measured by further testing — not by any real-world application.So what? Nobody should care whether memorization is enhanced by practice testing or not.
I disagree. Every day I study Chinese. A lot of that study is memorization, such as what characters mean. Learning what the characters mean while studying in my apartment really does help me understand what they mean out in the world. I care a lot how to memorize better.
A Pace University professor and “director of learning assessment” wrote:
Studying, not test taking, is the key to learning. . . .Testing, particularly standardized testing, does nothing to enhance knowledge and hinders the development of an appreciation for learning that should begin in school and last a lifetime.
I couldn’t disagree more. After I have studied Chinese, frequently testing myself on what I’ve learned turns out to be essential to long-term retention. Without those tests — say, daily for a week, and less often after that — I forget what I’ve learned.
Standardized testing is especially helpful because it helps me see what works and what doesn’t work. It makes it easier to compare various conditions, in other words.
“Development of an appreciation for learning that should begin in school . . . ” Should? I enjoyed learning long before I started school.
It has taken me a few years to figure out how to learn Chinese. Now I think I am on the right track but these letters illustrate what my self-experimentation also taught me: Experts say the darndest things.
In an article about how law schools deceive prospective students, one way astonished me. Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego reported that 92% of their graduates are employed 9 months after graduation. That 92% included the 25% of the students they couldn’t locate. Which is in accord with the guidelines, said the associate dean of student affairs.
A friend of mine majored in design at Tsinghua and is now working as a designer. Her opinion of her education has gone down. Designers from other schools are better trained than she is, she sees.
At Tsinghua, her teachers denigrated learning to use this or that software program. To design something using a computer program was to be a design farmer, they said. They preferred to talk about big ideas. “I hate big ideas,” said my friend.
Her comments reminded me of law professors who would rather teach philosophy than how to be a lawyer (and are surprised when students play solitaire during class) and education professors who don’t teach their students how to teach.
This year I got two:
1. I taught a class about R and data analysis. On Christmas, one of my students wrote, “Thanks for what you taught us on the class. I love your class. I learnt a lot!” I hadn’t taught it before. A few weeks ago I had been abashed to discover a midterm exam from Phil Spector’s R class at Berkeley. I know Phil and like and respect him. His students had learned a lot more than mine, it seemed. I had consoled myself by thinking that I couldn’t answer some of the questions.
2. Cleaning a cupboard, also on Christmas, I found a “gift” derived from buying a water heater in March. (Buy the water heater, get the “gift”.) It looked like an ordinary glass teapot, which is why I had put it in semi-storage. When I opened the box I discovered it wasn’t. It has a basket where you put the tea and hot water; when the tea is ready you press a button that releases the water into the bottom of the teapot, stopping the brewing. I drink a lot of tea. A month ago I barely knew these things existed. Then I bought one and thought it was wonderful — but small. The uncovered one is the perfect size.
1. Studying Chinese-character flashcards while walking on a treadmill is as pleasant as drinking something when thirsty. Unlike actual thirst and drinking, the pleasure lasts a long time and the desire is under your control (to turn it on, you start walking; to turn it off, you stop).
2. What is the opposite of betrayal? There is no antonym. The opposite is so rare it isn’t even obvious what it is. Betrayal is when your friend becomes your enemy; the opposite is when your enemy becomes your friend. Living in China and not knowing Chinese was not exactly my enemy but it was certainly negative. This treadmill discovery turns it into a positive: Chinese becomes an inexhaustible source of dry knowledge that I can enjoy learning.
3. Learning is the central theme of experimental psychology and perhaps all academic psychology. Psychology professors have done more experiments about learning than anything else. Practically all of those experiments have been about efficiency of learning: The amount of learning (e.g., percent correct) in Condition A is compared with the amount of learning in Condition B, where A and B “cost” about the same. As a result, we know a great deal about what controls efficiency of learning, at least in laboratory tasks. I think many psychologists are surprised and disappointed that this research has had little effect outside academia. I have never heard a good answer to the question of why. If you’d asked me a month ago I would have said it’s because they haven’t discovered large non-obvious effects. That’s true, but says nothing about how to discover them.
My treadmill experience suggests a more helpful answer: Hedonics matter. Learning exactly the same material can be more or less pleasant. When Learning X is pleasant, it is learned easily; when Learning X is unpleasant, it is learned with difficulty or not at all. In the real world, hedonic differences matter more than efficiency differences. If they want to improve real-world learning, psychologists have been measuring the wrong thing. It is a hundred times easier and ten times more “objective” (= “scientific”) to study how much has been learned than to study how pleasant was the experience. But that doesn’t mean it is better to study.
Michel Cabanac, a physiologist, strikes me as someone on the right path. Cabanac has studied how the pleasantness of this or that experience goes up or down to help us properly self-regulate. A simple example is that cold water feels more pleasant when we feel hot than when we feel cold. A common example is that exactly the same food becomes less pleasant during a meal. The food doesn’t change; we change.