The value of grades

An interesting discussion of different ways to scale grades using algorithms over at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative.  The comments are at least as interesting as the post.  In the comments, the value of grades emerges as a central concern.

Grades have two main uses:

1. Social
2. Pedagogical

Both are important, but it's very clear that the main social use of grades--as a socially visible and efficacious mark which sets apart the "smart" kids from the not-so-smart ones--is predicated upon the sound functioning of the main pedagogical use--as a form of critical feedback that lets a student know relatively how s/he's performing. Grade inflation is driven by the democratization of the university and the concomitant rise of the social importance of grades. Since a university-level education is now regarded as a sine qua non for a decent job, and since universities use high-school grades as an admissions test (i.e., to make invidious distinctions between students), it's no surprise that enormous pressure is placed on teachers to give higher marks. Similarly, since university students now presume (rather unimaginatively, in my opinion) that a graduate degree is the key to social success, and since graduate schools look at university grades as an admissions test, university students correctly deduce that good grades are key to their social success. And since grades are presented with little context, enormous pressure can be brought to bear on teachers, since it hardly matters how a student gets good grades. The succesful wheedler can expect a level of social success (status and salary) equivalent to that of the class genius.

Students believe that this equation represents the world perfectly.  They are not entirely wrong.

With that in mind, the crucial context that makes it possible to put grades to any use is the relative expectations that presumably animate the teacher's instruction. I always think of this context as having three layers:

1. The student's performance vis-à-vis his/her peers in this particular course (during this semester, with these students)
2. The student's performance vis-à-vis other cohorts taking more of less the same course (i.e., compared to all students who've taken this course with me)
3. The student's performance vis-à-vis the universe of students who have ever taken, are now taking, or will take a course more or less equivalent to this one, in any institution and with any instructor.

Comparing students only among their immediate peers can give a false impression of their performance, since cohorts and classes can and do differ in relative strength. Some groups should skew higher or lower, because the groups are stronger or weaker than other groups. I find this kind of contextualizing to be very difficult, and while algorithms can be helpful as a method, they are no substitute for the judgment that decides which of them to use or whether to use them at all.

There are several universities in the US at which students are given feedback but no grades. Hampshire College, for example, provides no grades: at the end of each course, the teacher and the student both draft a 300-400 word narrative discussing the student's performance. These narratives form the body of the student's "transcript." These transcripts are made available to the entire student body as well as to other institutions at the student's request.  I took two courses at Hampshire, and I found the students to be engaged, engaging, and highly motivated. (Since I attended a different school, which did give grades, my teachers gave me a grade, but I can tell you that the narratives they wrote are far more precious to me. I still have them.)

Even though they still publish evaluations of each student's performance, such institutions obviously have a strong position on the social value of grades. An interesting thought experiment that really pushes the distinction between social and pedagogical uses to its limit is to imagine a university that gives grades, but does not publish them. Students are told what grades they have received, but the records are then destroyed, so that no one can "prove" anything. The students' transcripts are simply the lists of the courses they've taken. Anyone could say he'd gotten an A, but only he and his teacher know for sure, and no on can prove anything. Wouldn't teachers and students then simply regard the grades are a rather autistic and reductive form of feedback? Would giving grades be worth the trouble? Would teaching per se be easier or harder? Relative performance would still need to be graded, in the strict sense of the word, but since the social value of the grade has been eliminated, the only value left is its pedagogical value. So what IS the pedagogical value of a grade?

The value of inconvenience

By almost any meaningful performance measurement, the U.S. economy in the 20th century performed better under Democratic administrations than under Republican ones. Reflecting on this seeming paradox, Christopher Carroll suggests that

perhaps the best explanation has to do with attitudes, not doctrines: Maybe capitalism works better when its excesses are restrained by skeptics than when true-believers are writing, interpreting, judging, and executing the rules of the game. (The Democrats are surely the more skeptical of our two parties).

Most would agree that restraining the excesses of almost anything counts as good sense, but this is only a preliminary step toward a bigger and more interesting idea:

Capitalism works better when it is being held accountable to some external standard than when left to its own devices.

The whole system works better when "held accountable to some external standard," when it is, in a word, constrained. Optimal performance, in other words, is the fruit of struggle. Make things too easy and performance declines.

Relaxed external standards? Check. Highlight reel material? Not so much.

Consider how effective coaches pull outstanding athletic performance from their players. Good coaches don't let their players do whatever they want, without accountability or oversight; they create rules and systems of accountability. A good soccer coach makes you use your weak foot in order to develop it. A good swimming coach pushes you to hold your breath longer. Optimal athletic performance depends upon the measured application of psychological and physiological pressure. (Go watch Gavin O'Connor's Miracle to see a dramatization of great coaching.) Good coaches don't remove limitations--they use them.

Or consider architectural and industrial design. The famous designer Charles Eames (yet another famous St. Louisan) once remarked:

Design depends largely on constraints.

We tend to believe that creativity is best served by removing constraints. If we could just somehow make the process of invention easier for the inventor, we imagine that she would be more inventive. But the opposite is usually true. People get creative--truly creative--when challenged to negotiate constraints. Budgets (within reason) push architects to develop new strategies to solve old problems. (The story of how the design of Seattle's new public library building developed is a great example.) The particularities of manufacturing processes push industrial designers to find solutions which challenge convention. (The story of the how the first commercially viable computer mouse was designed is a textbook example.) Constraints drive creativity.

Artist Andy Goldsworthy creates astonishing ephemeral works using only the materials he finds on site during his wilderness hikes: creativity driven by constraint.

The same is true in business. Real innovation happens where someone discovers a new way to scratch an old itch, where someone thinks through a problem in a new way (even if it's simply a new application of an old technology). When we talk about innovation happening "at the edges" of a market or industry, what we mean is that innovation happens where business rubs up against constraints. (The "mainstream" of anything is where things flow smoothly, right?) We can't have innovation--and capitalism's greatest strength as an economic system is its powerful incentives for innovation--unless we have the right kind of rules and restrictions. (The question of "more" regulation versus "less" regulation is puerile. The kind of regulation matters more than the amount.) The free market, to put it pointedly, is only as free as its constraints force it to be.

Of course, constraints are damned inconvenient. And that's precisely the point. It's often--if not always--in response to inconveniences that people are most creative, most inventive, most innovative. And so we're led inevitably to the conclusion that inconveniences can be useful.

"Traffic lights are just the Man keeping us down! We will not be constrained!"

Some inconveniences, naturally, are more useful than others, but that hardly obviates the necessity of inconvenience for optimal performance. It's easy enough to see how inconveniencing others might be worthwhile, but it's one of the marks of emotional maturity to see the value of inconvenience for oneself. Politics--in the largest possible sense of the word--is only possible because we deliberately accept to be inconvenienced in certain ways (e.g., we don't simply use whichever car is closest, use guns to force our crushes to go out with us, or lynch elected officials from opposing parties). We recognize that our condition is collectively better when we all accept to be inconvenienced in certain ways. (Again, the kind of self-regulation matters more than the amount.)

Finding--and enforcing--the right kind of constraints is key to getting the most out of people, as innovators, as politicians, as artists, as designers, and even as citizens. We would all of us do well to remember that inconvenience--yes, even our own--often serves us much, much better than convenience.

The first rule of student engagement

I'm in Québec City right now, attending a 5-week intensive program in French Language immersion. One of the options I've chosen is an introductory survey course on Quebecoise literature. There are only a dozen students in the course, so the teacher said she'd like to run the class more as a seminar and less as a lecture. Which sounded great--but it turns out our teacher doesn't seem to know how to run a discussion (not an uncommon failing among teachers). She doesn't seem to grasp the first rule of student engagement--actually, the first of intellectual engagement in general. And that rule is this:

People engage with ideas on the basis of what they already know.

The technicalities of revolution are, as everyone who attended the party found out, pretty damn tedious.
(Revolutionary Tedious Party, originally uploaded by abitnice)

This rule has two important practical corollaries:

1. Discussions turn on questions that everyone can answer. Domains where students are largely ignorant offer no footholds for students to establish a stance and launch into a discussion. If you start talking about what you know well, but what your students don't know at all, they won't respond for the simple reason that you're the obvious authority and what you say goes. If you base the discussion in a domain where the students have some knowledge (their own opinions are painfully dependable as a point of departure), you'll be able to introduce the topics you want to cover without killing the conversation.
   
2. Technicalities kill engagement. Technicalities are inevitably the province of specialists. If you're talking about technicalities, you'd better be talking to another specialist (or someone who aspires to be a specialist). If you're not, guaranteed you're boring people in a way that makes them just want to break something.
   

Engagement is the foundation of every learning experience. Engagement can only happen when people take what they already know and either reinterpret it or connect it with new knowledge.

18 inspirations for educators and social entrepreneurs

Some people collect stamps. Others collect curiosities. I collect (among other things) pedagogical models, theories of learning, writings on education, and great educators. Someday I'll boil it all down and give you just the bullion, just the essence. But I need more time. My collection is far from a complete 7-course chowdown; heck, it won't do anything more than whet your appetite... but at least that means I've probably gotten to hors d'oeuvre status.

"My! You have such an interesting collection of... um... what are these, exactly?"

Model Institutions, Organizations, Etc.

1. Danish Folkeuniversitetet ("Folk High Schools"). The keystone of Danish national and democratic identity. One of the great triumphs of modern liberalism (in the strict sense of the term).
2. Hampshire College. The Un-Ivy League. Classes, but no core curriculum. Written evaluations, but no grades. Books, but no teacher's dirty looks.
   
3. The Nueva Escuela ("New School"). A program aimed at the developing world which supports schools as agents of positive social change. Focuses on education which is "active, participatory, cooperative, child-centered, and life-relevant." The story is that the founder asked every Nobel laureate she could get her hands on what kind of school they wished they had attended.
   
4. The KaosPilots (of course). A new kind of business school, aimed at at the fourth sector.
5. The Acton MBA (of course). Business school on steroids, which aims to produce entrepreneurs rather than managers.
6. Y Combinator. Although it claims to be a new kind of venture capital firm, it's really an intense education in how to be a world-class tech entrepreneur.
7. Gever Tully's Tinkering School. Let your kids do dangerous things, otherwise they'll never learn how to handle dangerous things. When I put it that way, it's obvious, right?

Writings Worth Reading

1. "On Education." Ralph Waldo Emerson's seminal essay on the subject, in which he argues that "the secret of education lies in respecting the pupil."
2. "Talks with Teachers." Brilliant lectures on teaching by eminent 19th century American psychologist and philosopher William James.
   
3. "Complicity." Online journal on complexity (read: chaos theory) and education. Be warned: this journal has a rather pointy head.
4. Infinite Thinking Machine. A blog providing coverage of innovation in education.

Models, Movements, and Technologies

1. Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises, by which I mean more than simply the book by the same name. The exercises are a masterfully conceived and carefully refined ethical technique (read: a practice by which one acquires a particular character).
2. Unschooling. Let the child set the educational agenda; teaching consists principally in encouraging and enabling.
3. Moodle. A widely used open source course course management system.

Educators to Emulate

1. Socrates. The gadfly of great Athens.
2. Johan Amos Comenius, the Czech (Moravian, to be precise) "Copernicus of education."
3. Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig, founder of the Danish Folk High School.
4. Amos Bronson Alcott, the original Transcendentalist, and the greatest teacher [.pdf] in U.S. history.

Disorganize the schools!

The NYT covers the--gasp!--new trend of tutoring students (mostly boys) who seem to be having trouble in school. OK, OK, it's not the tutoring itself which is interesting. We've known for some time that tutoring is among the most successful of teaching methods. It's the fact that the tutors aren't teaching subjects, they're teaching habits. In other words, ethical tutoring.

If you want to get 'em educated, you first gotta' get 'em organized.
(Photo by Jim Wilson for the New York Times)

As per their standard operating procedure, the NYT adds zero content to and only a confused, watery viewpoint on the conversation. (When will they stop "reporting" and start giving us the story?) We've known for some time that girls outperform boys in almost every subject until puberty hits, at which point boys edge ahead in math and science. But why? And what to do about it?

The NYT frames the problem as one of organizational habits--which is curious because it focuses not on the problem, but on the (stopgap) solution. Providing boys with better organizational skills will undoubtedly help them do better in school. But doesn't this beg the question of why schools demand that children be "well-organized" in order to receive an education? Why should high-school boys need to develop bureaucratic skills and habits in order to learn? After all, the world itself wasn't color-coded the last time I checked.

A classic case of mistaking your map of the world for the world itself.

Too, the culture's perception of schooling has changed. I believe that parents used to be more focused on the education itself--what the child was learning, how s/he was doing in class, etc. There was a sense that the learning itself was the primary propellant provided by schools to children aimed at moving up in the world. Nowadays there's a great deal more focus on getting the certification at the end. It's the paper that matters--not the process. Especially with No Child Left Behind [free registration required], our focus become fixed on making the grade, and the means seem to matter little.

On top of our intense focus on the finish line, we still teach using methods which we know (and have known for years) don't work all that well. Is it any surprise that energetic, independent students should rapidly come to the conclusion that school isn't worth their time? Why not simply cheat, or cram for the test? And why worry at all, since that silly certificate isn't worth much any more unless you've got the right parents in any case?

Ultimately, it isn't boys who are less organized, it's our pedagogy (and indeed every institutional activity in our culture) which has become more rigidly organized. Turning in your not-very-interesting and not-at-all-important homework on time isn't equivalent to responsibility. It's just punching in. People who focus intensely on thing they themselves find trivial and meaningless are usually pretty unhappy. And no surprise there either.

The myth of "passive income"

A friend of mine, JD, who used to work as a developer in New England, tells me that there's a new board game which is "sweeping the country." The game: Cashflow 101. The object of the game: become wealthy by mastering the art of investing. The game's designer (or perhaps just endorser): Robert Kiyosaki of Rich Dad, Poor Dad fame.

After reading his Yahoo! Finance column a few times, I've come to conclusion that Kiyosaki is a financial charlatan (which means that I refuse to drive traffic his way by linking to his stuff directly). In a nutshell, Kiyosaki's financial advice boils down to "Choose to be wealthy." I'm not kidding. His is the worst kind of quasi-libertarian snowjob, since if you pay for any of his motivational products or services, but don't get rich, why, it must be that you just haven't "really committed yourself" to being wealthy. If you're poor, it's your fault. You just haven't really, in your heart of hearts, chosen to be rich.

"As you can see, my heart of hearts loves poverty more than I do."

While it's true that the acquisition of wealth can be a very subtle art, it's an open secret that (in the US, at least) the most simple, most direct, and by far most common strategy for getting rich is to have wealthy parents. But this is all really an aside. What I really want to discuss is the folly underlying Kiyosaki's game and the worldview it reflects.

In Cashflow 101, each player begins with a randomly selected income-expense profile--a job and a bunch of expenses. After that,

There are two stages to the game. In the first, "the rat race", the player aims to raise his or her character's passive income level to where it exceeds the character's expenses. The winner is determined in the second stage, "the fast track". To win, a player must get his or her character to buy their "dream" or accumulate an additional $50,000 in monthly cash flow.

The whole thing revolves around this mysterious concept of passive income.

He just followed me home. Seriously. So... can I keep him?

Aaron Maxwell has written a pretty good beginner's guide to Cashflow 101, which explains that

[p]assive income is income that comes in with little or no additional effort on your part. If you have royalties from a book, income from a rental property you own, or stock that pays dividends each quarter, you have passive income.

Maxwell immediately goes on the qualify that definition:

Sometimes you'll have to do SOME work - if that rental house develops a leaky roof, you'd better have it fixed if you want to continue collecting rent! The difference is that for a "normal" job, you have to invest your time continually to keep receiving income, and if you work half as much, your income immediately goes down by half or more. With passive income, after you do some initial work up front, you have an income stream that continues with little or no time on your part to maintain it.

And there's the rub. Passive income isn't genuinely passive in the sense that it requires no effort. It's simply that compensation isn't immediately correlated to effort. Passive income doesn't require endless, futile labor to sustain it. Rather passive income represents one flow within a relationship of ownership--and in the opposite direction flows responsibility. We receive passive income from assets for whose condition and behavior we are liable.

Calling the income passive is misleading, because it implies that such income arrives not simply without--or with minimal--effort, but with minimal worry as well. But ask any landlord--you're essentially paid to worry about stuff. Whatever the gods of pop music claim to the contrary, tenants do not call Ghostbusters first. Especially when the heat goes out. First, they call the landlord. Then, they call their lawyers.

I ain't afraid o' no tenant.

Responsibility implies liability. Although rental property income provides the most stark example, other kinds of passive income also admit of analogous forms of responsibility. In exchange for book royalties, the author remains responsible for what he's written. In exchange for stock dividends, the owner becomes responsible for the behavior of the company whose shares she owns. (Warren Buffett famously advocates treating the purchase of stock as equivalent to the purchase of the entire company.)

The point here is that wealth, because it depends upon ownership, entails responsibility and liability in direct proportion. There's no such thing as truly passive income, and anyone who thinks she wants to be rich should be warned that Easy Street is the main thoroughfare in Neverland. Wealth is a sacred social trust, not a ticket to heedless self-indulgence. It is most certainly possible to enjoys the fruits of responsibility, but only for so long as and to the degree that one proves willing and able to bear its weight.

We have a word for those who take the lazy way to easy street, and it ain't flattering.

Knowing what you know

When I found Langdon Morris's book on innovation which boasts an epigram from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, I was understandably excited. "Which passage from Aristotle did he choose?" you ask. Well, he chose:

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

Which is an awesome quote, except that it doesn't belong to Aristotle. As a one-time teacher of the Nicomachean Ethics, I can vouch that this quote accurately sums up Aristotle's position on excellence. But when I went looking for the precise provenance of the quote, I discovered that (according to Wikiquote, at least) while the meaning does indeed belong to Aristotle, the specific words flowed from another's pen. Apparently, the above quote is Will Durant's summation of Aristotle's position in Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics. Since the quote remains a clear, concise, accurate summation--in fact, it's probably better than anything Aristotle wrote himself--we'll keep it.

I expect that Mr. Langdon's ethically sensitive parsing of the innovation process will yield a number of worthwhile insights, but for now I just want to cover one. His definition of knowledge and its implied definition of learning. Definitions appeal to my inner philosopher, and smart definitions are what make the world make sense. Too, the subject is, I think, central to the whole constellation of fields covered by this blog; loyal readers will recall that this blog was launched with a post on knowledge and learning.

Langdon's subtle and sophisticated definition of knowledge (found on p. 61 of the .pdf), boils down to the following:

Knowledge is concerned with "how," with the capacity to do useful things. Such capacity, in turn, comes about as a result of the integration of three other elements, information, theory, and experience. Information is the "what," the basic description [the "facts" or "data"]; theory is the conceptual framework that explains how the world functions [the "context"], and experience is the immersive and multidimensional process of doing and having done [the "practice"].

The subtle shift in emphasis from knowledge-as-what to knowledge-as-how turns our entire educational system on its head. Knowledge isn't something that you have--it's something that you exercise. It isn't an amalgam of friable and discrete facts--it's a layered, nested, and embodied concatenation of practices. It isn't a two-dimensional map of bounded domains--it's a multi-dimensional narrative.

Academic education as internal phrenology.

On Langdon's definition of knowledge learning becomes the subjective fusion of information, theory, and experience. The student generates knowledge for himself by bringing information, theory, and experience into relation with one another. It isn't enough simply to have data; nor is it enough to see contextual possibilities; nor is it enough simply to have one or several experiences. All three must fuse within a single self-awareness, and the resulting knowledge possesses the breadth and depth only of the most limited of the three factors.

And perhaps most importantly for me, as an educator, on Langdon's definition of knowledge teaching becomes a creative attempt to stimulate and/or guide the student to meld the three ingredients of knowledge into practicable know-how. Successful teaching doesn't mean providing students with more or better information; it has to do with process only tangentially. Successful teaching means that students are, after being taught, measurably more effective in doing things. They get more done of what they want to do. It's hard to imagine students wanting anything else from their teachers--which may in itself be the strongest single argument for Langdon's definition.

Responsibility in education

One of my personal favorite pedagogic precepts was best expressed by the laconic Mr. Miyagi, one of the all-time best teachers portrayed in cinema: "No such thing as bad student; only bad teacher."

"Man who catch fly with chopstick accomplish anything."

Which is not to say that even the most gifted teacher will enjoy success with every student. It's just that the most important lessons we learn from our teachers--how to face the overwhelming reality of human ignorance, when and how to (dis)respect authority, when to resort to knowledge and when to resort to compassion--derive not from what the teacher knows but from who the teacher is. That's because good teachers know that learning is not the process by which the student absorbs the teacher's knowledge, but rather the process by the student creates knowledge. The teacher can only either stimulate or suppress the student's personal learning process; or, put differently, what a student really gets from a teacher is an attitude, and if a student internalizes a (teacher's) bad attitude, then that student will find all future learning difficult.

Thus Bob Talbert's corollary to Mr. Miyagi's precept: "Good teachers are costly, but bad teachers cost more." So when I see failure in an educational context, I always look to the teacher (and his bosses) first.

Mr. Whipswitch could never understand why the other teachers kept ending up with the best students.

But it's not always that simple. Take the example of 14-year old Australian Beau Abela, who can barely read, let alone spell. He's in high-school, and has trouble counting beyond 10, so let's just set aside any questions you might have about his performance in algebra class. Beau suffers from a mild learning disability, so in some ways it's not surprising that his performance is subpar for his age, but this seems egregious. Indeed, Beau's condition--unless you're one of those all-too-common philistines who actually embrace incompetence--seems utterly outrageous. As in, it outrages me.

And I'm not the only one who's upset. Beau's father is suing the Victorian educational department for AU $300k. On the surface, seems like they probably deserve it. As you might expect,

Mr Abela [has] said his court action was not motivated by money, but by frustration at the way the system appeared to be letting down children. ... Mr Abela said he would drop the lawsuit tomorrow if the department would guarantee him it would educate (Beau) to a proper level.

I think most people can understand that Mr Abela is frustrated given his son's lackluster academic performance, but what exactly does he mean when says that the system is "letting down children?" Certainly the system doesn't seem to be producing measurable results in Beau's case. But to whom to attribute this failure? Or rather, how should responsibility for this failure be untangled?

Mr Abela concedes that

the Education Department had made significant efforts to help his son, including paying for one-on-one tutoring and providing a laptop. Over the years dozens of assessments and reports have been done to get to the bottom of Beau's problems. ... Documents seen by the Sunday Herald Sun show Panton Hills Primary School and Eltham High have directed considerable time and effort towards the troubled student.

What kind of problems, exactly?

Beau has been on ADHD medication in the past and school reports consistently say he does not concentrate in class or make an effort with his work. ... Eltham High School principal Vincent Sicari said in a recent report Beau's behaviour was increasingly disruptive and violent.

Doesn't sound like Beau's is an easy case. In fact, it rather sounds like the school system has been sensitive, proactive, and generous.

As framed by the Sunday Herald Sun, it looks as though Mr Abela is suing simply because he's frustrated--not because the school is at fault. And even if the school had been less responsive, how much (and what kind of) responsibility for Beau's failure could we honestly lay at the feet of his teachers and their bosses? How much (and what kind) belongs to Beau? Without more particular information on Beau's case, it's impossible to judge the case wisely.

But the very intractability of the case forces one interesting issue to the surface: Why do we persist in regarding education as a responsibility? Issues in contemporary education--especially failures--are almost always framed as a polarized conflict between individual responsibility and systemic sensitivity. The important question, as this line of thinking has it, is how much responsibility belongs to the student and how much to the system (as though responsibility only came in one flavor).

The key assumption which underlies this thinking is that education is a necessity, with all that that entails. And of course, education is necessary for the kind of society we operate [.pdf], the kind of culture we participate, the kind of government we practice. Indeed, few institutions bear more of the weight of our current way of life than universal education. The incredible social importance of education, however, tends to overshadow the fact that education provides (if these guys are to be believed) the most sublime pleasure available to human experience. It's worth remembering that our word school derives from the Greek skhole, which means "leisure"--school is supposed to be what humans do for fun.

In a Protestant culture (and especially in a Puritan culture), even the pleasure of learning is suspect; only the pleasure of discipline passes without question--especially if the one disciplined is oneself.

Wait just a minute? Did I just say that learning is fun? Yes. That's it exactly. We often get so invested in the importance of "an education" (by which we too often mean "a decent résumé") that we forget that we can always recognize real learning when it happens because it is always pleasurable. (Incidentally, this is a non-trivial criticism of contemporary schooling, which is, as everyone knows, no fun at all. When learning happens in an academic environment, it's almost always either an accident or against the rules.)

So I have one question for Beau and his teachers: What does it mean that Beau is obviously having no fun at all "being educated" at Eltham High?

Do values have value?

One of the most pernicious fallacies into which our business thinking is prone to fall--and this is especially true in disciplines like finance and engineering, where numbers are particularly preeminent--is the conflation of measured value and real value. It's an old truism that you cannot manage what you cannot (or do not) measure. But managers, driven by objective results, take it one step further: If we cannot (or do not) measure it, the thinking goes, then for all practical purposes we can act as if it were not real. Oh, the endless debaucheries which descend from this one, simple stupidity.

Who says you can't measure love?

If we reject this fallacy, however, we ipso facto assume the value of CSR ("Corporate Social Responsibility"), which is really just another way of saying that the bottom line isn't really the bottom line. (Although, then again, maybe it is.) There are plenty of us who believe that environmental concerns, labor issues, management practices, and other corporate habits of thought and action impact the bottom line. Many of us also see quite clearly that making lots of money in our stock portfolio isn't worth it if the costs show up elsewhere.

Where else? Well, we might, I don't know, run out of water or something. (Even soft drink company execs, who seem to view potable water as competition, must realize that water is the main ingredient in their product.) Or perhaps canned air will become the only kind of air worth breathing. (Los Angelians must love the smell of cancer in the morning.) Or we pave our "path to financial freedom" using the backs of children. Or maybe we'll get to that point where corporate boneheadocracy seems normal.

After all, who cares? We customers and shareholders don't have to pay to clean up everything up when corporate America poops in the nest. But then who does? We taxpayers do, that's who. But wait. Aren't "customers," shareholders," and "taxpayers" just different roles played by the same flesh and blood human beings? Not only that, but at the end of the fiscal year, there's really only one balance sheet. Costs that corporate America manages to externalize just end up on a different line item on our annual budget, that's all. If we don't pay them as customers or shareholders, we pay them as taxpayers or family members or landholders or what have you. Only the dense, the foolish, and the psychopathic truly believe that the corporate bottom line is their own bottom line.

Burning Beds, Inc. has posted outstanding earnings for the past three quarters, and... hey! That's my bed!

Once you assume that clean water, clean air, happy children, and sane work environments have value (anyone other than these guys want to argue that this stuff is without value?), there are two possible ways forward:

1. Get creative when it comes to measurement. Instead of whining about how some things are "unmeasurable," innovate new mensuration and valuation techniques. Two interesting actors in the field of valuation innovation are Innovest and Communications Consulting Worldwide (CCW). What's this all about? Consider the following example: Say Wal-Mart's got labor troubles (no, really, imagine it); how much does that dent in their reputation cost shareholders? According to CCW, "if Wal-Mart had a reputation like that of rival Target Corp., its stock would be worth 8.4% more, adding $16 billion in market capitalization." That's a game changing assertion, shifting the debate from "Can the effects of reputation be measured (i.e., is it possible)?" to "Can we improve the methodology used in this study (i.e., how well are we doing it)?"
   
2. Stop managing and start leading. Insanity, as AA has it, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. While the methods of bureaucratic management can optimize a banal system defined by quantified data, they are poorly suited to effecting metamorphic leaps in consciousness and/or character. As a rule, our businesses don't need to "do better," they need to "do differently." Better data and better management practices cannot provide a fresh, holistic vision for the future of business--only inspired leadership can do that. Bill McDonough and the Regenesis Group are two interesting players in the field of consciousness shifting.
   

We did not manage our way to the moon.

While I believe that creative mensuration and valuation techniques are effective tools for advancing a CSR agenda, they are useless without the proper outlook. Only competent, inspired leadership--a coherent vision supported by capable entrepreneurship--can truly change things. The incremental approach is appropriate as a rhetorical approach (that is, as part of a strategy of persuasion), but only a true leap in consciousness and character can ever save us from ourselves.

Challenge results

UPDATE: They won!

Well, first-round results are in, and they aren't pretty. The bad news: both of my teams (search for "McGill") landed pretty short of the top 10. In both cases, we were at least partially victims of the evaluation methodology, which allows various judges to give give absolute grades without guidance. (So, for example, one of our judges for the Sustainable Innovation Summit gave us a score of 30-something/100, which seems bad, except that the highest grade he gave was 41/100. How to integrate those results with those of the judge who gave us 81/100? We were the judge's no. 2 choice in both cases....)

We also suffered from a certain confusion among the judges about what innovation actually means. For the Innovation Challenge, we had one judge comment that our idea of making a large retailer's catalog available from within a small concept store was extremely innovative, while another judge castigated us for not putting the small concept in its own special space within the large retailer ("that would have been really innovative"). It's tempting to believe that taking a kind of "average" definition of innovation will take off the rough edges, but it's really just a way to cut corners. Understandable when resources are limited and rough-and-ready solutions are preferable, but increasingly suspect for a competition that wants to become truly global in scope.

An Innovation Challenge judge cogitates intensely.

I fully confess that there are plenty of sour grapes in my comments. I would note, in all fairness though, that I made the same complaints last year when we won.

An interesting observation which my wife made in our conversations about this year's results is that most commentary on innovation concerns process rather than product. There's plenty of information out there on innovation processes, but precious little on how to recognize a truly innovative idea if it hits you in the face. Lots on the how; not much on the what. I'm currently reflecting on this, and will post the fruits of my pondering later.

These disappointing results do have a silver lining, though. I've become pretty good friends with the captain of last year's 2nd place finishers from North Carolina. He's one of the most competent people I've met, he's good a great nose for great ideas, and he's hands-down the best presenter I've ever even heard of. He's in the finals this year, so at least I have someone to root for. Go UNC!

Letters to a Young Teacher

Salon's Mathew Fishbane interviews Jonathan Kozol, author of the recently published Letters to a Young Teacher, in which Mr. Kozol advises school teachers to adopt an "attitude of irreverence." Thank goodness at least one person who testifies before the U.S. Congress is saying it.

Learning in time

Over at FutureLab, Jack Kenny has an article discussing the importance of time in learning environments and experiences. Kenny details the experiences a number of schools in the UK have had in changing the way that time and learning interact. Faithful readers of this blog will recall the post on thought/days, in which I suggested a supplementary time measurement for learning (in addition to the now-standard credit/hour).

I think the most important point raised by Kenny's article is that "a [rigid] timetable is restrictive when teachers are working creatively." Clock time and learning time are related, but they're not necessarily isometric. To illustrate this difference, you need only reflect on what happened to clock time during one of those magic moments when you became completely immersed in an enjoyable learning experience...

The MBA: new, improved, or simply on steroids?

In Austin, Texas, a bunch of teachers at the Acton MBA program have uncovered the secret of American greatness (such as it is):

We believe that thoughtful, principled entrepreneurs are the secret to America's success, and her scarcest resource.

Anyone who doubts whether or not Acton's founders are correct in this surmise should stop and think about the meaning of the word entrepreneur. I hardly think it unfair to qualify Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, and King as entrepreneurs. It's just that their domain was politics rather than commerce. The US owes all of its greatness (again, such as it is) to its most entrepreneurial members. Better US entrepreneurs can only mean a brighter future for the US.

But setting aside for the moment the whole question of social entrepreneurship, Acton claims as its goal

to educate a new kind of MBA: one who is equipped to add value from day one, build successful businesses, raise a healthy family, and give back to his or her community.

Having considered business school in the past, and having cheered from the sidelines as a spouse paid her two years of dues, this sounds great. Your average garden-variety MBA program makes it a rule to thwart whatever entrepreneurial impulses its students may bring to its doors. So maybe Acton really does offer something different. At the very least, it has proven itself capable of convincing already successful entrepreneurs that it offers something worthwhile:

Acton is the only MBA program in the country that offers every student a $35,000 Acton Fellowship to cover the full cost of tuition, fees, and materials.

Seems like a hell of deal, if the curriculum is any good. And the curriculum looks pretty damn good to me. They use the the case method, but with a focus on entrepreneurial issues rather than managerial ones. They include hands-on experience in sales, complex simulations, and site visits as part of the package. And one of their core curricular segments is entitled "Life of Meaning," suggesting that they're not merely about enabling corporate greed. And to top it all off, it's all taught by seasoned entrepreneurs, not by researchers. It looks like a fantastic curriculum, and I'd endorse it wholeheartedly except for a few little details which set my nose to twitching.

(A) First off, the workload is 80-90+ hours per week. Now, it's only a one-year program, and traditional MBA programs seem to work their little serfs 50-70 hours per week for two years, so perhaps it's not so bad by comparison. It's just that that kind of workload sends several important messages:

1. it suggests, by sealing people hermetically into their program so that they barely even see their spouses, that success in business depends upon sacrificing everything else (from the FAQ: "We offer several sessions throughout the year in which students and their significant others get together with the Life of Meaning teacher to discuss the contributions and sacrifices each has to make throughout the year-long program");
2. it teaches the phony lesson that working harder is more important than working smarter;
   
3. and because it lasts an entire year, it creates habits of dissociation (an addiction to work really is a spiritual disease) which can reappear at any time.

(B) Second, it looks like the school is staffed by only (or almost only) white males. Lord knows that a lot of diversity can exist beneath identical skin colors and genders, but it's nevertheless hard to believe that this kind of homogeneity doesn't reflect a certain homogeneity of outlook. Driving forward relentlessly has been a very successful strategy for white males, but I can't help but wonder whether or not there may be other strategies.

(C) Third, and most importantly, it's still a curriculum taught by faculty at a school where students come and sit in classrooms to "learn at the feet of the master." Acton notes that "traditional MBA faculty see themselves, not their students, as the customers," thereby suggesting that at Acton, students are the customers. That is to say, the students are the boss. But while "clear contracts and a competitive grading system" probably do provide for quite a bit of the pressure experienced by students, I fail to see how they "encourage... perspective, discipline and accountability." Perspective comes from broad understanding--not from narrow focus; discipline arises as a result of self-knowledge--not from external standards; and accountability arises from a sense of connectedness to other persons and things--not from abstract contracts, however clear.

From its website, Acton appears to be a smarter, leaner, and perhaps meaner MBA, but it's still an MBA. In many ways it returns to original intent of the MBA, which was to provide to rising managers (who already had some real-world experience) a suite of tools to help them manage more effectively. And in several ways it has outgrown its roots: its focus on entrepreneurship is welcome; its penchant for hands-on teaching is laudable; and its ability to support its students financially is breathtaking.

Without visiting the campus and conversing, face-to-face, with its students and teachers, I don't think it would be possible to render a more complete judgment. (I despair of the possibility of any student giving me any time for conversation.) It's an extremely exciting project, but I think it's still mostly a large step in the direction of faster and more, and only a small step in the direction of better.

Thought/days (a new measure for slow learning)

Our culture is all too quick to prejudge in favor of high speed, and nowhere is our prejudice so evident as in education. The idea of "slow learning" would probably seem to most people to be something to be avoided. Children who learn slowly, after all, are called disadvantaged.

I've been doing some reading and thinking about learning, though, and I have a bone to pick with our speed prejudice, particularly as it relates to environmental issues. To begin, I'd like to cite David Orr's lecture on "Environmental Literacy," in which he distinguishes between cleverness and intelligence, giving the nod to intelligence in part because it is slower:

From an ecological perspective it is clear that we have often confused cleverness and intelligence. Cleverness, as I understand it, tends to fragment things and to focus on the short term. The epitome of cleverness is the specialist whose intellect and person have been shaped by the demands of a single function. Ecological intelligence, on the other hand, requires a broader view of the world and a long-term perspective. Cleverness can be adequately measured by SAT and GRE tests, but intelligence is not so easily computed. In time, I think we will come to see that true intelligence tends to be integrative and often works slowly while mulling things over. Further, intelligence can be inferred, according to Wendell Berry in Standing By Words, from the “good order or harmoniousness of [one’s] surroundings.” In other words, the consequences of our actions are a measure of our intelligence, and the plea of ignorance is no good defense. Because some consequences cannot be predicted, the exercise of intelligence requires forbearance and a sense of limits. Ecological intelligence, in contrast to mere cleverness, does not presume to act beyond a certain scale at which effects can be known and unpredictable consequences would not be catastrophic.

While I don't care for Orr's diction (cleverness and intelligence seem too close in terms of connotation and valence in my view), his more general point that there exists a kind of quick intelligence and a kind of slow intelligence is well taken. I would suggest further that his distinction be extrapolated a bit: there's also a kind of quick learning and a kind of slow learning, both of which are good. Children who suffer from learning disabilities are simply "slower" (than average) when it comes to the quick kind of learning. The slow kind of learning can't really be measured in the same way. In fact, I believe it requires an entirely different conception of time.

Clive Holtham, et al. n their article Slow Knowledge: The Importance of Tempo in Debriefing and in Individual Learning [.pdf], discuss some of the key qualitative differences between "fast time" and "slow time." Without getting too deep into their work (which is worth at least skimming), they specifically advance the notion of tempo (fast tempo vs. slow tempo) as a conceptual overlay for understanding time as it relates to learning. Tempo means rhythm, and it is precisely the notion of rhythm as it relates to learning which I want to refine.

We currently measure quantity of learning (quite apart from quality, which has its own issues) in terms of credit/hours, instruction/hours, or something similar. We measure, in other words, learning time from the instructor's point of view. Or, to put it slightly differently, we measure time from the subject matter's point of view. As if the sheer number of hours a subject matter and a mind were in contact were meaningful. And it is, under certain conditions and within limits.

Student learning + instructor timetable = VERY slow learning.

I'd like to propose a new measure for quantity of learning. (Not a substitute for credit/hours, but a complement.)

The thought/day: a day in which specific, conscious mental attention is brought to bear on a particular idea-cluster. Thought/days are typically measured within a larger context, just as credit/hours are. One generally doesn't simply assign 50 thought/days to a project; one assigns 5 thought/days per week for 10 weeks.

The thought/day attempts to guide and quantify reflection rather than the co-presence of "learner" and "subject matter." Naturally, thought/days have no significance unless the learner is committed to reflection. Since, however, the student is the independent actor and the instructor the dependent actor in a teaching system, thought/days don't offer the temptation of education-as-body-processing which is all too common under credit/hour regimes.

Again, though, thought/days cannot replace credit/hours, but they can supplement them. They are especially helpful in disciplines such as philosophy, theology, and creative writing, in which reflection (spiritual digestion) is more important than the absorption of information.