Online v. In-Classroom Education: Not Quite a No-Contest

“AH, you’re a professor. You must learn so much from your students.”

This line, which I’ve heard in various forms, always makes me cringe. Do people think that lawyers learn a lot about the law from their clients? That patients teach doctors much of what they know about medicine?

This is an exceedingly strange way of beginning an essay–purportedly underwritten by a humanist perspective–advocating for face-to-face education in the classroom. I’m afraid Mark Edmundson’s effort (‘The Trouble With Online Education,’ New York Times, July 19, 2012) in this direction does not get much better from there on.

Edmundson commits the classic fallacy of condemning Option A (online education) in comparison to Option B (face-to-face classroom instruction) by exclusively comparing the worst of A to the best of B. When face-to-face education goes well, it can approach the lyrical heights its enthusiasts are fond of pointing out. But often it does not. I am quite fond of recounting the story of the computer science professor who, in one of my first graduate school classes, liked to pay attention to his Chinese and Indian graduate students by mimicking their accents when they spoke up and asked questions. Perhaps those students would have preferred the online version of his class? A pathological case, you say. But the  interactional idiosyncrasies of teachers are burdens that face-to-face classroom education has to bear; they are not bugs, they are features, ones that can sometimes work against a student and the pedagogical process.

Examples like these can be multiplied by the dozen: rude, inattentive, unprepared, disorganized teachers are all possible in the classroom (as are rude, unprepared, inattentive, disorganized students). Shall we compare the pedagogical disasters that follow with what happens when the well-prepared online lecture-in video or text form–suitably annotated with follow-up material, is worked through by the diligent, motivated online student?  Edmundson speaks of the necessity of dialogue. Is a dialogue present in the pathological cases I point out? Is it absent in the online case I indicate? Does the teacher have to be physically present to enter into a dialogue with the student? Is no dialogue possible in online forums associated with a class? It would be strange if not, given the amount of ‘conversation’ that takes place in internet meeting spaces.

Online education is often as bad as its detractors make it out to be. But sometimes it can work well, meeting educational objectives for a particular student population in a way that traditional classroom education cannot. As my examples above should make clear, in saying this, I am not just pointing out the obvious logistical advantage demonstrated by online efforts such as those of Udacity and the Khan Academy: that educational materials can be made available to a large demographic that benefits from them. This is not insignificant; it is quite possible that the scaling options available in online education may be the only way to enable  some forms of specialized education to a large number of students.

Edmundson asks in a tone of anticipatory triumphalism:

But can online education ever be education of the very best sort?

Perhaps not. But is the education offered in classrooms always ‘education of the very best sort’? If the answer to that is ‘no,’ then on what grounds does Edmundson refuse even a cursory examination of the possibilities of online education?

The Olympics Are Here, I’m Leaving

I am a sports fan. I have spent many hours, days, weeks–I’d better stop now before this gets depressing–of my life centered around the sports I follow. Cricket most notably, but football (Association and American), tennis, boxing, baseball, basketball, track and field–the list goes on. It might therefore be a reasonable surmise that I should be excited and agog–drinking and eating supplies handy–by the prospects of the Olympics, due to be staged in a couple of weeks time in London. Yet, not only am I not going to be close to a television for most of the games, my central reaction somehow seems to have to come to a ginormous ‘Meh.’

Why so blasé? The first Olympics I paid attention to–the 1976 Montreal Games–riveted me; I watched highlights diligently, experienced heartbreak and exultation, read as many books on the Olympic  Games as possible, swallowed the legend whole. In 1980, a downhill slide commenced. The US boycott of the Moscow Games ruined those games and the Russians then followed up with a tit-for-tat boycott of the 1984 LA Olympics. Thus did I become aware of the enmeshment of the Games with political and nationalist imperatives. (I was too young to pay attention to the African boycott of the 1976 Olympics.) I still followed the games, but the notion of a ‘devalued’ gold medal considerably diminished my enthusiasm. In 1988, I was in the US, and was treated to the spectacle of a tape-delayed Olympics. In 1992, the Dream Team reminded me the era of amateurism was over. I paid a great deal of attention to the 2000 Olympics because, well, I was living in Sydney, and it was hard to get away from the hype in a sports-crazy country like Australia. (I even bought tickets to India’s disastrous failure to qualify for the field-hockey semi-finals.) But I barely remember the 1996, 2004 and 2008 games.  This year, I’ve come to realize my estrangement from the Games is complete.

Most superficially, the Games are too big. There are too many ‘sports’ that don’t seem like sports–equestrian dressage and synchronized swimming for instance. I’d prefer an Olympics concentrated on track and field, weightlifting, boxing, hockey, swimming, basketball, wrestling, and volleyball. But to say that is do no more than list preferences for one’s favorite Olympic sports. Other sports fan might well say, ‘Just watch the ones you want.’ And they’d be right. The reasons for my disillusionment lie elsewhere.

I suspect the central problem is that the Olympics have come to be associated with: cities brought to the brink of bankruptcy; gigantic white elephants, er, sports facilities that sit around unused, often in cities that lack adequate, affordable housing; relentless, rapacious, crude commercialization; the ludicrous deployment of ‘intellectual property’ legal regimes; persistent, pernicious, vicious nationalism; and of course, Olympic committee corruption. The Olympics now speak of a grinning cabal of salivating commercial sponsors, local and national politicians, and always desperate sports associations, happy to render the population of a city miserable in order to ‘bring’ the Games to them. They speak of gargantuan bureaucracies enmeshed with the worst of sports.

Bureaucracies, unhinged commercialization, nationalism. No thanks. I’m turning off my television and hitting the road. I’ll catch the highlights when I return.

Note: My critique of the Olympics is easily extended to most sports that I do follow; it is just that the Games brings it all together on a scale quite unlike anything else.

The ‘Narcissism of the True Artist’ and Reading What One Writes

In his seminal Nietzsche: The Man and his Philosophy, RJ Hollingdale, after noting that Nietzsche made note of some forty-six poems composed between 1855 and 1858, goes on to say:

The sign that he was a born writer, however, is not to be found in them, but in a remark in Aus Meinem Leben [From My Life], where describing his earliest efforts in verse, he says, ‘In any event, it was always my design to write a little book and read it myself’–a childish expression of the narcissism of the true artist, who works because he wants to admire what he has done.

There is one rather mundane way in which one reads what one writes: the infuriatingly necessary re-readings of one’s writings in an effort to get them ‘just right.’ This results–as I have experienced in the closing stages of getting a book manuscript to the publisher–in a peculiar sort of nausea at the sight of one’s ‘beloved.’ At that moment, weary and exhausted by the endless redrafting, polishing and proof-reading, I want only to be done with the damn thing. It’s not as if I’ve considered the ‘product’ then to be complete; rather, it is that I cannot summon up the energy for another painfully close and exacting edit. (Months later, when I look at the submitted version, I’m astonished by how much dross I let get by me.)

Then, there is the ‘narcissistic’ way: going back to read what one has written, perchance to admire and self-congratulate. It doesn’t always quite work out that way: all too often, our reaction to what we have written in the past is horror at the juvenile confusion on display. (I suspect this is by far the most common reaction that most writers have.) The internet, of course, has added a wrinkle to this: what we have written in the past is preserved seemingly forever, for others to search, track down and deploy against us. (I shudder to think of the trail of unmitigated nonsense I have left behind me in my perambulations through internet fora.)

But there are times when we do admire what we have written. And this is productive of a pair of peculiar sensations related to each other. One, I think, is a kind of mystification: Did I really write that? The second, is an acute anxiety: Will I ever be able to repeat that? The sense of wonder, of puzzlement, about the source of the sentence(s) we see before us reminds us that we are often not quite sure of the provenance of a desirable turn of phrase, from whence it came, what prompted it. The worry about our capacity to pull off a repeat is an acknowledgment of the same conundrum: If I don’t quite know how I pulled it off the first time, how am I ever to encore? The endless theorizing about the ‘process’ of writing, the ‘writers’ tips,’ indeed, the entire arsenal of writing instruction, often seems a tacit acknowledgment of this simple fact of writing: we are never quite in control of it all.

Incubating Corporate Wrongdoers: Catch ’em Young

Luigi Zingales asks, ‘Do Business Schools Incubate Criminals?,’ in response to news that continues the depressing ticker-tape of scandal emanating from our financial and business communities, wonders how so many business executives show little ethical sensibility given that business schools offer instruction in ethics, suggests the classes offered are flawed, and eventually prescribes that:

[E]thics should become an integral part of the so- called core classes — such as accounting, corporate finance, macroeconomics and microeconomics — that tend to be taught by the most respected professors. These teachers should make their students aware of the reputational (and often legal) costs of violating ethical norms in real business settings, as well as the broader social downsides of acting solely in one’s individual best interest.

Zingales’ critique and diagnosis is largely fair. There is a larger problem though, one that is not so easily amenable to solutions such as offering instruction in ethics in core business school classes: these lessons might arrive too late. The indoctrination of students–our fellow citizens–into the idea that business is a morality-free zone begins early; it is a notion that permeates our culture quite  comprehensively, leading to a student populace that is more often than not, puzzled by the idea that ethics and morality have anything to do with the business of making money. The shading of activities then, that, while not illegal, might be immoral or at least not the most socially responsible, into actions that are clearly criminal, takes place quite smoothly in such a context.

Here is the most common response I get–in various classes I have taught over the years where the question of corporate or business ethics has come up–when attempting to mount a morally-inflected critique of a corporation’s actions–on any ground–privacy violations, monopolistic behavior for instance–that are not clearly criminal:

 I don’t get it. It’s a business; it’s supposed to make money. What do you want them to do? Go out of business?

The rough argument goes like this: A corporation’s raison d’être is to make money for its shareholders.  That, and that alone, is what its managers and employees should be concerned with. Anything else is a distraction, an abdication of the responsibility that they bear to the shareholders–folks that float the business’ boat. If the market indicates–by whatever signal it chooses–to the corporation that its practices are counterproductive to that end, then the corporation may adjust its behavior. But the idea that an action should be taken because its primary end is to meet some vaguely defined individual or social goal is deeply inimical to a business and indeed, may even be counterproductive to the ethical or social end desired. Better then, to let the market speak. Roughly.

The problem with this view, as all too many have pointed out, is that it is a remarkably impoverished portrait of the relationship of a business to society: it is acutely non-ecological. (This lack of an ecological perspective is what Zingales is trying to address in his prescription above.) Because there is so much reliance on the oracular pronouncements of The Market[tm]–‘It will let you know when something is wrong’–it makes all too easy, the utter refusal to even try to cock an ear and listen to anything else.

An average business student, by the time he arrives at business school, has already been subjected to far too many years of a discourse opposed to Zingales’ prescription. This is not to say that the idea is wrong-headed; it is just that–to fool around with clichés for a bit–the horse has bolted, the bird has flown the coop.

Colm Tóibín on the ‘Real’ and the ‘Imagined’

Colm Tóibín writes of the intimate relationship between facts and fiction (‘What Is Real Is Imagined’, New York Times, July 14 2012), about how the story-teller’s primary responsibility is to the story, about how the novelist may, in creating fiction, embroider the facts, embellishing and enhancing, for being stuck just with the facts is not a good place to be:

If I had to stick to the facts, the bare truth of things, that would be no use….It would be thin and strange, as yesterday seems thin and strange, or indeed today.

But the facts that the writer dresses up and ‘alters’ should only be those that he knows intimately:

If I tried to write about a lighthouse and used one that I had never seen and did not know, it would show in the sentences. Nothing would work; it would have no resonance for me, or for anyone else.

No man can give that which is not his, I suppose.

So the writer may draw freely and creatively upon the ‘known real,’ while not being too fastidious about offending the living:

I feel that I have only rights, and that my sole responsibility is to the reader, and is to make things work for someone I will never meet. I feel just fine about ignoring or bypassing the rights of people I have known and loved to be rendered faithfully, or to be left in peace, and out of novels. It is odd that the right these people have to be left alone, not transformed, seems so ludicrous.

These are all good observations on the art and ethics of writing fiction.

But Tóibín starts off by trying to make a distinction that should have struck him as untenable:

The world that fiction comes from is fragile. It melts into insignificance against the universe of what is clear and visible and known. It persists because it is based on the power of cadence and rhythm in language and these are mysterious and hard to defeat and keep in their place. The difference between fact and fiction is like the difference between land and water.

Tóibín imagines here the distinction to be a clear one, between the hardness of land and the ‘softness’ of water, between the tangible, graspable solidity of land, and the quicksilver, through-your-fingers elusiveness of water. But the ‘universe of what is clear and visible and known’ is a universe infected with the ‘fictions’ of our theories about it. What is ‘clear and visible and known’ springs sharply into focus because of those fictions. And land? Land is shot through and through with water. Dig a little, you hit water. Pick up a handful of dirt – it’ll have moisture. From these admittedly crude imaginings one can arrive at the recognition that ‘fact’ is suffused with ‘fiction,’ just as the bare, solid, visible land is, that what we imagine solid is all to easily revealed to be  squishy and permeable.

The ‘bare truth of things’ that Tóibín speaks of is visible to us because of the stories we have told ourselves about it.  He knows this, surely. Why else would he say that ‘what is real is imagined’?

Readin’ and Ridin’: The Subway Car as Reading Room

Like many New Yorkers, I do a lot of reading on the subway, standing or sitting. (It is a depressing fact, of course, that too many of us now seem fixated by smartphones, playing video games, or texting endlessly.) Sometimes I walk into  a car with a book already open, sometimes I seat myself, open up my backpack and settle in to continue the read. And sometimes I have to stand and read. Whatever option may present itself, I read whenever I ride. (Unless I have company, in which case, of course, I do my best to engage in conversation with my companion(s).) I don’t necessarily do this to be anti-social; it’s just that I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I didn’t have something to read. (In desperate times, when finding myself riding a train without reading material,  I have even descended to reading The New York Post; yes, that is how out of sorts I can feel with nothing to read at hand.)

My reading on the subway these days is limited, of course, because I do not commute to work by subway. I walk to work, so my riding the subway tends to be limited to short rides to my gym, and the usual traveling around the city to meet friends or partake of its other pleasures. In days gone by, when epic commutes took me to work, I read more, and moved through my bookshelves’ store of unread material a little more expeditiously. In 1995, I commuted from Little Italy to the Bronx for work, riding the D train from Lafayette-Broadway to Fordham Road; in 1999, I traveled to Queens College to teach my morning classes, catching the F train from 2nd Avenue and taking it out to Kew Gardens before transferring to a bus; in 2002, I rode the 2 train from 125th Street in Harlem to Flatbush Avenue-Brooklyn College–the end of the line. In each case, I was fortunate enough to not be stuck standing for too long, if ever, and enjoyed uninterrupted access to whichever book I happened to be reading at the time.

It has been said that New Yorkers read on the subway so that they don’t have to make eye contact, so that they can remain ensconced in their private reveries, untouched by those around them. I think there is something to that theory, but I think part of the reason is that our hectic lives leave little time for the leisurely read, and the subway commute can provide a moment or two of unhurried reflection. This is not to suggest that the subway car is a perfect reading lounge: too many people talk too loudly on their cellphones (in trains riding above ground) and sometimes to their friends or families; kids will be kids; headphone volumes are often set at eleven; rush-hour cars can be impossibly crowded and will not permit the standing read; panhandlers and buskers can raise a din. But in general, a not-too-crowded, not-too-frigid subway car and an entertaining read still remain one of the city’s enduring pleasures.

Skinny Puppy’s ‘Nature’s Revenge’ and Tracing a Sample’s Provenance

As should be clear from the contents of this blog, I fly my nerd flag proudly. One way in which this nerdiness manifests itself is absurd pleasure in etymology lessons. (For instance, I’ve just discovered the Civil War-era origins of  ‘shoddy‘ and ‘sideburn‘ and feel curiously gratified as a result.) This morning, I’ve chanced upon another instance of my nerdiness. Some twenty years after first listening to Skinny Puppy‘s ‘Nature Revenge,’ I’ve finally found the source to that grim track’s memorable sampling of a mysterious, haunting, conversation that goes like this:

Woman’s voice: You’re scared? You really are?

Man’s voice: I’m not scared.

Woman’s voice: Well, what are you?

To me it had always seemed this conversation took place over a telephone, imagining the setting as follows: the man calls his female friend,  scared, frightened, looking for help; his friend tries to calm him, perhaps trying to locate him–for I had heard the ‘what are you’ as ‘where are you’ –as the chaos swirls outside.  The reason for this interpretation is not hard to find. The song’s lyrics conjure up a bleak vision of man adrift:

Weather turning towards a storm
Broken down road continue on coexistence
Imitating paradise unlike any seen moist
Has been dancing crazy overcast ash grey

I imagined the protagonist wandering through this strange, benighted landscape, lost, scared, looking for succor, calling for help. I remained intrigued; the sample seemed to have been drawn from a movie; which one was it?

Today, thanks to YouTube, some twenty years after first hearing it, I’ve discovered the sample’s source, from the movie Communion, the cinematic rendering of the book by the same name, which tells the story of Whitley Streiber‘s alleged encounter’s with extraterrestrial aliens; the speakers are Lindsay Crouse and Christopher Walken. (Apologies to all and any that have known about this forever.)

The interpretations we force on lyrics often, or almost always, have a great deal to do with our particular obsessions at that point in time. Early in 1992, I was contemplating dumping a boring, pointless job and returning to graduate school. I drove thirty miles to work each way, south on New Jersey’s Garden State Parkway against the traffic, on largely empty roads, unenthusiastically heading for yet another rendezvous with interminable meetings, pompous, incompetent managers, and paperwork. The office building I worked in was a perfect instance of the soul-destroying industrial workplace: a large parking lot, a nondescript exterior, windowless offices for the vast majority. In the evenings, as I drove back, I could see further evidence of futility: the backed-up traffic in the southward direction, filled with frustrated commuters, as an empty highway stretched out in front of me. A constant companion for me then, in the CD player in my pick-up truck, was Skinny Puppy’s Too Dark Park.  While ‘Rash Reflection,’  and ‘Spasmolytic‘ got plenty of air-time and were quite evocative of the sense of desolation I felt at the time, nothing did it quite as well as ‘Nature’s Revenge’ did.

Later that spring, I drove to Montreal to apply for a multiple-entry visa so that I could take a vacation to India without being worried about reentry to the US. In five years, I had spent three weeks with my family back ‘home;’ I was desperately homesick; I worried about whether I would be denied a visa, whether I would return empty-handed. (I would, thanks to some remarkably idiotic Consular personnel in Montreal.) That night, as I plunged on into the darkness on the New York State Thruway, heading for crash space in Montreal, I was playing Too Dark Park again, and again being mesmerized by ‘Nature’s Revenge,’ held in the grip of it’s relentlessly desolate vision, one that mirrored quite well, or so it seemed, the state of my mind then.

My Father’s Aviator Sunglasses

As a young boy I loved and admired many things about my father. Foremost among them was the fact that he was an Air Force pilot, a decorated one, one who had fought in two wars, capable of feats of valor and skill that boggled my juvenile mind. He seemed impossibly charismatic. How could he not, when he could pull off tricks like telling me one bright morning as he headed for work, ‘Watch the sky to the right of the house at 5PM; I’ll be in the second jet that comes over’, and then sure enough, showing up, as promised, at the right time, in the right place, in a screaming jet. (The Hawker Hunter appeared first like a wraith on the horizon, silent and lithe, over a grove of eucalyptus trees, and then suddenly, impossibly quick, it was flying past our house as I heard its Rolls-Royce engine ear-shatteringly announce its awesome presence.)

And an important part of the package, his mystique, his aura, were his sunglasses. Movie and rock stars may come and go, chiseled six-pack-packing models might continue to intimidate me,  but the iconic handsome, strong man will always remain, for me, my father in a pair of sweat-soaked flying overalls, his crewcut visible, wearing a pair of aviator sunglasses. That combination, so well-known, and so well-enshrined in the imagery associated with aviation, was one ever-present in my childhood, and it ensured an orientation of my aesthetic compass in a particular direction.

My father wore Ray-Bans, naturally. I still do not know how he procured them. But he must have spent a fair amount of his modest salary on his beloved pair, and he guarded them, like he guarded his long-playing record collection, with an intensity and attention to detail that was awe-inspiring. The constant cleaning with a soft cloth, the careful handling and placing back in their case, the refusal to let my brother and I ‘just try them on.’ (God forbid we ever disobeyed and sneaked in an illicit wearing session; I think we were meant to understand that they, like the wings he had pinned to his uniform, had to be earned.) They protected him from the three S’s he said, sun, sand and smoke; they protected the pilot’s most important aids; they deserved all the care and affection he showered on them.

As a teenager, I could scarcely wait to emulate my father’s look. I would only grow my hair out long, down past my shoulders, once I had finished my first graduate degree and started work. Till then, off and on, I experimented with getting the crewcut and sunglasses combination right. (This desperation was particularly manifest in my undergraduate days.) Somehow, it never worked. The haircut went awry; the glasses weren’t the right shape; I was too thin; I was too overweight. At some point, I gave up trying to wear aviator sunglasses. I switched to more conventional models, sporty types, Euro-trash styles, and then finally, sadly, to a pair of prescription sunglasses that do double duty now for mild myopia correction and shading my eyes from, yes, the three S’s. (I still try to sport military crew-cuts though I cannot find a barber who does them just right.)

The biggest problem, of course, with these attempts at paternal emulation, was that I wasn’t a pilot and I wasn’t my father. No matter how much I strutted and preened, I knew I was only a pale imitation of a man who could actually fly through the skies, all the while sitting on a top of a controlled explosion, a man who had felt the thunderous kick of a high-performance jet engine propel him down a runway and off into the air. That’s the missing piece, the one I was never able to place in the puzzle to acquire that look I sought when I peered into the nearest mirror.

Staying Together, Fighting Together, Dying Together

In his one-volume history of the American Civil War, Battle Cry of Freedom (Ballantine Books, New York, 1988), James McPherson notes how the protagonists mobilized for war:

In the North as in the South, volunteer regiments retained close ties to their states. Enlisted men elected many of their officers and governors appointed the rest. Companies and even whole regiments often consisted of recruits from a single township, city or county. Companies from neighboring towns combined to form a regiment which received a numerical designation in chronological order of organization: [e.g., the 15th Massachusetts Infantry]…Ethnic affinity also formed the basis of some companies and regiments….Sometimes brothers, cousins, or fathers and sons belonged to the same company or regiment. Localities and ethnic groups retained a strong sense of ‘identity’ with ‘their’ regiments. This helped to boost morale on both the home and the fighting fronts, but it could mean sudden calamity for family or neighborhood if a regiment suffered 50 per cent or more casualties in a battle, as many did.

As I read this, I thought it sounded grimly familiar. I was correct, for in The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo & The Somme (Vintage Books, New York, 1977), the magisterial John Keegan, writing on those elements of Kitchener’s Army that were to fight at the Somme, informs us that:

Perhaps no story of the First World War is as poignant as that of the Pals….[The] the Earl of Derby…called in late August 1914 on the young men of Liverpool’s business offices to raise a battalion for the New Army, promising that he had Kitchener’s guarantee that those who ‘joined together should serve together’. The numbers for the battalion were found at the first recruiting rally, and the overflow provided two others. The clerks of the White Star shipping company formed up as one platoon, those of Cunard as another…the Pals idea at once caught hold of the imagination of communities much smaller, less self-confident, less commercially dominant than Liverpool. Accrington, the little East Lancashire cotton town, and Grimsby, the North Sea fishing port, shortly produced their Pals, Llandudno and Blaenaw Festiniog, the Welsh holiday resorts another, the London slum boroughs of Shoreditch, Islington, West Ham and Bermondsey theirs….

The promise of tragedy which loomed about these bands of uniformed innocents was further heightened by reason of their narrowly territorial recruitment; what had been a consolation for the pangs of parting from home – that they were all Pals or Chums together from the same close network of little city terraces or steep-stacked rows of miners’ cottages -threatened home with a catastrophe of heartbreak the closer they neared a real encounter with the enemy. Grave enough in the case of the 30th, with its three Liverpool or Manchester brigades, the threat bore even more heavily on the 34th, containing not only the so-called Tyneside Irish and Tyneside Scottish Brigades – 8,000 young men all domiciled in or around Newcastle-on-Tyne -but also a Pioneer battalion, the 18th Northumberland Fusiliers, raised by the Newcastle and Gateshead Chamber of Commerce from the shop assistants of the city: the notion of a regiment of Kippses and Mr Pollys fine-tunes the poignancy of the Pals idea.

Prospect Park Glories

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This is a test of my new camera, smartphone, and WordPress blogging app.

Added later: I haven’t quite ironed out all the kinks yet, and there are some frustrations with the editing phase, but this might be good enough to post photos with brief annotations.