This is Robert Sapolsky of Stanford - I’m even as I blog watching him talk about writing. Here’s the transcript of his remarks.
And his comment about music reminds SOS of a theory she has about writing: She suspects there’s a link between being musical and writing well. She doesn’t mean being musical and writing poetry — that would seem to be an obvious connection. She means being musical and writing good non-fiction prose. You’ve got some inner sense of rhythm and rhyme going all the time because of your musical activity — because of your musical brain, which is almost always — at least for SOS — generating music… So that as you write there’s this constant - what - lyrical mental revision going on that makes your essay flowing, alliterative, shapely.
If SOS is right, this is good news for young writers who are musical. For those who aren’t — guess they have to find another route… or do things more artificially to get to the same place? Or accept that they’ll never write as well as the musical types?
From the Stanford Daily:
In a recent Bio 43 lecture, the following equation appeared at the bottom of a PowerPoint slide explaining “Offspring Genotype Frequencies”: Q’=1/2*2PQ+2PR+(1/2)Q2+(1/2)2QR=2(P+1/2Q)(R+1/2Q)=2pq. As the professor waved his laser pointer around and explained the slide, filled with variables and other equations, I took a look around to see if other students were as unengaged as I was. A roomful of blank stares, tapping pencils and busy Facebook checkers indicated that very few of us were processing or benefiting from anything the professor was saying. By the time I tuned back into the prof, the next slide was up, this one filled with more charts and equations.
I thought to myself, “It’s cool, the lecture will be posted on Coursework, and I can look through it later.” Upon further reflection, I decided it wasn’t cool at all. What is the point of sitting in Hewlett for an hour when I’ll have to go over it all by myself later? Lecture should be a time of quality explanation of concepts, and out-of-class work should be for re-familiarization of those concepts. Something tells me that, not long ago, this was how things worked at college. But this isn’t how it works anymore, and I think this is largely the fault of professors’ dependency on PowerPoint. So far this year, I have taken the following classes that used PowerPoint as the primary lecture tool: Advanced French Grammar, Chem 31A and B and Bio 43. All of these classes, however, require writing and derivations that simply cannot be presented effectively on a slide. When a prof takes the time to write on a board, students are able to visualize the logic of equations and the structure of sentences. It also forces the class to move at a pace conducive to note taking.
Lectures that don’t depend on PowerPoint are typically more engaging, as well. I hear that Robert Sapolsky just gets up and talks during his Human Behavior Biology class — sans PowerPoint — and that’s supposed to be one of the most interesting classes on campus! In my own class schedule, I have encountered very few professors who either 1) don’t use PowerPoint or 2) use it effectively. Only Econ 50 with Ran Abramitzky gives me hope that some profs can overcome PowerPointlessness. He used a tablet laptop, and his slides contained a title and some x and y axes. Then he filled everything in as he spoke.
My observation is that professors who use PowerPoint tend to load a lot of text and graphs onto their slides, post the slides on Coursework and call that a lecture. I ask you, fellow students, to not settle for such half-ass teaching. There is something you can do, and that is give feedback. Shoot a quick email to your prof or head Teaching Assistant and mention that you would appreciate on-the-board explanations. Mention these issues in your end-of-quarter evaluations. Our professors are certainly capable of teaching in different ways — they just have to know the demand is there. I sent one email to the head Bio 43 TA, and, the next day, the professor mentioned in class, “I know that these equations don’t mean much to you like this on the slide, but go home and practice and you’ll get it.” Obviously that wasn’t the response I was looking for, but it was a start. What if more people sent emails and spoke up? Save Stanford from the infectious PowerPoint trend. Otherwise, you’re being gypped of time, money and respect.
AUX ARMES, CITOYENS!
[And don’t miss the How I Write streaming video: click under Sapolsky’s picture at the left of the screen.]
♥Matt DeSalvo sat in silence at his Yankee Stadium locker before his major league debut on Monday, buried in the written word. It is his most comfortable position.In his hands, he held a small book with gilded edges. It was not a scouting report, and it was not a Bible, either. It was Confucius, DeSalvo said later, and the pages were covered with circled passages and notes he had made in the margins.“It’s just what I’m reading right now,” DeSalvo said. “I like to read different philosophies, just anything, the way I see this world. We spend a whole lifetime trying to figure ourselves out. Like I’ll read a book and try to think, what’s this mean to me? And I’ll apply it to myself.”When he finishes Confucius, DeSalvo will cross another title off his list of the 400 books he wants to read before he dies. He is halfway through the list already, having devoured 17 books during spring training alone. Teammates marvel at this.
“For me to read a 200-page book,” said the reserve catcher Wil Nieves, who caught DeSalvo in the minors, “it would probably take two years.”
When he finishes the list, DeSalvo said, he will write another novel. His first, called “Love’s Travels,” was written three or four years ago and has been seen only by himself and an editor. Its topic, he said, is the way a person’s concept of love changes over time.
“He’s bright, there’s no question about that,” said Mark Newman, who oversees the Yankees’ farm system. “But he’s also exceptionally curious, which I think, for a person’s life, is maybe more significant. I mean, he really wants to know things, and not just the way to throw a changeup.”
…For a while, he was consumed with “The Myth of Sisyphus” by Albert Camus. He found the central fable applicable to his life.
“I took a lot out of it, like the struggle of humanity, how Sisyphus rolls a boulder up a hill and he finally reaches where he wants to be, and the boulder rolls down the hill,” DeSalvo said.
“Most people in that situation, what do they do? They’re like, ‘Aw, man, I got to go get this.’ But what he says is, why not see that boulder as your ultimate goal? It’s almost as if you’re proud to be pushing that boulder, that boulder’s giving you meaning.
“And even though the boulder rolls back down, you dwell on how you succeeded in pushing it up and dwell on life — Hey, I have something to do still. So it’s almost like giving meaning to your life.”…
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♥When people meet Adrian Flygt they usually have one of two polar opposite reactions.
One group is shocked to learn that philosophy students do things beyond reading books.
The other is puzzled that a physically imposing athlete would spend part of his time studying the ethical dilemmas involved with hunting.
For the past two years, Flygt has balanced the intellectual challenges of the academic world with timbersports competitions that involve wood-cutting contests.
For Flygt, who hopes to someday teach high school, the very different challenges are part of his attempt to find balance. “I think the two complement each other well.”
His presence in both worlds helps break down barriers, a process he described as amusing and validating.
“The perception is that people in academia get lost and are too far removed from the world.”
And students in the classes he assists with are surprised he competes as a lumberjack. “(They’re) shocked at the idea of someone who is getting a master’s degree in philosophy doing something aside from reading,” Flygt said.
He joined the CSU logging sports club in 2006; he had never competed in timbersports events before, though he had seen them on TV.
Flygt, who is originally from southern Wisconsin, already had experience chopping wood. “I’d never done it for the sake of competition,” he said. “I had done it for the sake of work.”
These events are not all about brute strength, Flygt said. They require technique. He developed his technique during the past summer after the death of a friend.
The training paid off when Flygt won the STIHL Timbersports Collegiate Series Western Title April 26. It was one of five qualifier events for the national collegiate championships.
On June 27, Flygt will compete in the national championship, and for a chance to compete professionally next year, in Columbus, Ga. Footage from the competition will be aired on ESPNU.
… some of Jerry Springer’s accomplishments, as he prepares to address the law graduates of UD’s alma mater, Northwestern University:
… Northwestern has no problem giving an honorary degree to its law school commencement speaker this year, the disreputable TV host Jerry Springer. In 2000, a guest on Springer’s show was brutally murdered by her ex-husband just hours after a segment aired called “Secret Mistresses Confronted,” featuring the estranged couple…
Setting up just the right circumstances for a catastrophe — The speaker search committee at NU’s law school has the same skill set…
…turns itself into scum central to win games.
How does Indiana University athletic director Rick Greenspan continue to keep his job?… The IU basketball program is in a shambles…. [Greenspan] has become the sour, overbearing, fear-mongering face of IU athletics. Under his tutelage, the school’s signature program hired a known cheater, sold its soul for Eric Gordon, cost the program millions of dollars in legal fees and stood by as several members of the basketball team had academic trouble….
Bob Kravitz at the Indy Star.
…Professor Peacock? Professor Plum? … who devoted his blog to the language emanating from American schools of education. He’s long since closed up shop, but in an earlier incarnation UD linked to his blog. She often thanked him, in the course of quoting from this or that post of his about eduspeak, for being willing to go where UD refused to go, for actually reading the trash…
David Thompson, an impressive blogger, operates in much the same way, only he’s off every day to the art dump.
I thought I’d post a footnote of sorts to yesterday’s item on Professor Caroline Guertin, she of the limpid prose and limitless expertise. Here are a few short extracts from Guertin’s essay, Wanderlust: The Kinesthetic Browser in Cyberfeminist Space, published in 2007 by the Online Journal of Embodiment & Technology.
The shuffling and unfolding of the information of her body in sensory space is enacted across a gap or trajectory of subjecthood that is multiple and present. Subjectivity is the lens and connector through which the spatio-temporal dislocation gets focused and bridged. The gap is outside vision — felt not seen — and always existing on the threshold in between nodes. Like the monster’s subjectivities, all knots in the matrix are linked.
Think about that for a moment. Ponder its majesty.
Nudged into motion, the meandering subject in cyberfeminist space is a comet in orbit around her own story, around her subjective experience of a text that keeps changing, spinning off into an uncharted future. According to Paul Virilio, we are no longer beings who inhabit a temporal plane. Instead, in Open Sky, he argues we have become passive agents who are acted upon like film — exposed, underexposed, overexposed — and are nakedly subject to the effects of light speed.
And,
We inhabit our bodies differently when we are out of phase, oscillating in the turbulence of dynamic space, that space where the textual body is written as contextual knot. The ways of moving in virtual space are directed and mapped by the knots that span spatio-temporal rifts. Without movement, we cannot cross the space-time divide.
Or maybe,
The textual voyage is alive and kinetic, fractal and in flux, birthed as she travels through its fullness.
I suppose one could view the extracts above, and the essay from which they’re taken, as a sort of extended Zen kōan, insofar as they defy rational understanding and all known aesthetic criteria. More sceptical souls may wonder if these passages are in fact the results of some kind of seizure or medical condition, of which we must not speak.
As with Professor Whoever, you won’t catch even SOS going there. Thank goodness Thompson can stand it.
A Penn State student upset with a B- was arrested Tuesday for threatening to put his professor in a wheelchair unless he got a better grade, according to the criminal complaint.[The student] was arraigned Tuesday afternoon on misdemeanor counts of terroristic threats and harassment… He is free on $10,000 unsecured bail.
Police said they were contacted during the weekend by the dean of Penn State’s College of Business about a student who sent a angry and threatening e-mail to Visiting Assistant Professor Lukas Roth.In the complaint filed against Tsirogiannis, Penn State police detailed the contents of the e-mail.
“Lukas I am going to warn you one last chance I am going to ask I want a better than a B-,” the e-mail read. “If I see this on my elion account I swear to god I am going to (expletive) put you in a wheelchair when I see you. You will regret it and I don’t care if they kick me out of school.”
Tsirogiannis goes on to accuse the professor of cheating him on a test and refusing to “get cheated out of a letter grade.
“Don’t (expletive) around you will pay trust me I don’t care if I go to jail as long as I put you in a wheelchair,” the e-mail stated, according to the criminal complaint. Police contacted Tsirogiannis Monday and he admitted to being angry when he sent the e-mail, the complaint states.
“He stated he felt he worked hard to achieve his grade and it should have been better than a B-,” police said.
Centre Daily Times
…[T]here is no good a priori argument against multitasking. The case is at best an empirically-informed hunch about what is the best way to teach. I see some power to a parentalism argument that teachers should ban surfing because it impedes students’ ability to learn.Law students are adults who generally can decide for themselves what is in their best interest — but I still don’t think it would be a good idea to have beer or magazines available in class. As someone who has played way too much Minesweeper in my day, I think some activities are just a bit too tempting.
… The laptop screen is a billboard that is very visible to other students sitting behind the gamer. Surfing and game playing in particular can be very distracting — both visually and in the signal they send to others that you don’t care about class. Multitasking also makes students less present as participants in class discussion. Surfing doesn’t stop students from taking notes, but it degrades the quality of their attention.
Doonesbury has a great strip on just this point. In bouncing back and forth between his notes window, the surfing student is less likely to be following the discussion and to be able to ask or answer a question.
In recent years, I’ve tried to balance student liberty with my negative externality concern by allowing surfing, but only in the back row of class. In the back row, at least, it isn’t a visual distraction. And I view these back-benchers as virtually a step away from non-attendance.
But what’s still missing is basic information on how much surfing is going on. (Levmore claims, “Every teacher underestimates the amount of Internet surfing going on,” in his or her classroom.) The content of the laptop screen is visible to the class, but remains a mystery to the professoriate. I still hear colleagues tell me that surfing is not a problem in their class because they walk around the room.
In a world where alt -tab quickly shifts between windows, it is a fantasy to think that walking around is a sufficient deterrent.
I am tempted to ask students to collect data on how much surfing is actually going on (even when it is banned). I bet some readers will be upset with the idea of such monitoring. There is a growing sense of entitlement not just to surf but to keep your professor in the dark about whether you are surfing or not.
If the admission application simply asked students to check a box if they were willing to forgo classroom surfing, I imagine virtually all applicants would forgo their God-given right to play solitaire.
But even here, students push back that the implicit contract was also that professors would not teach badly. Some students see surfing as a medication to reduce the annoyance of poor pedagogy. Indeed, some clever students have even argued that surfing has a positive externality — Ayres and Levitt and Wolfers will have better incentives to teach well if they have to compete for students’ attention.
… writes Randy Newman in Sail Away. “Won’t have to run through the jungle/ And scuff up your feet.”
When American university students simulate the lives of refugees, “living [without money] on the quad for a week to raise awareness of the plight of refugees around the world,” what they create is a summer rather than a refugee camp.
To add to the realism of their event, the [Birmingham-Southern College] students vowed not to use motor vehicles, money or electricity for a week. Cell phones are allowed, but they can’t be recharged.
Despite these restrictions, things weren’t all bad in BSC’s refugee camp. In between classes, students entertained themselves and each other with guitars, harmonicas and even a didgeridoo.
Kirk Hooten, a senior from Vestavia Hills, said that so far they had received plenty of food. “Dr. Trench even brought us some candy,” said Hooten, referring to psychology professor Lynne Trench. Nevertheless, some students were bracing for any future decline in food supplies - one had constructed a questionable squirrel trap from a small charcoal grill, and another had painted a sign that said “Will sing a song of your choice for food.”
“We cannot actually simulate what refugees actually go through,” [one student] admitted. “We’re going back to normal middle class life after this, and this isn’t that far from normal middle-class life anyway. We have really nice tents and we’re eating Pop-tarts…
UD ain’t scoffing - far from it. It’s an admirable gesture. It’s just hard to be poor in a rich country.
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Update: Might do just as well to read “How the Poor Die.”
“Who doesn’t want to sit in a classroom and watch movie and television clips while reading a novel that has captured the world?” asks an Ohio State University student. She’s beaming about a class which asks her to read only four novels, all of them Harry Potters. Otherwise, it’s sit back and watch tv.
Another student agrees: “You are only in college for four years…. You should take classes that are fun, not that just meet a requirement.”
Of course, you could play this another way. You’re only in college for four years, so why not learn something?
To be sure, the Potter course fulfills a major requirement. UD wonders about the discussion among members of the English department’s curriculum committee in which the decision was made that reading four children’s books satisfies a literature requirement at a university.
The professor’s statement to the newspaper about her course is hard to understand: “I’m hoping for students to look at the books from as many different angles as they wouldn’t have otherwise.”
“It blows my mind that they would [send] out a note like that,” said a Business Week editor about an email two deans at George Washington University business school sent to students a few months ago. The email encouraged students to fill out a survey that the magazine would use in its rankings of business schools.
But part of the message went beyond encouragement:
“The higher The George Washington University School of Business is ranked, the more valuable your degree will be perceived to be,” wrote Susan Phillips, dean of the Business School, and Larry Singleton, associate dean for undergraduate programs, in the e-mail.
“As a member of the Class of 2008, you have an opportunity to affect the way that current and future employers and students will view The George Washington University, our students and our alumni,” the e-mail stated. “We encourage you to complete the survey promptly with that thought in mind.”
In an editorial in the GW newspaper, a certain dissonance was noted:
For a school that prides itself in teaching ethics to the next generation of business leaders, interfering with such a project as this seems out of line. The school’s Web site explains that they strive to highlight the complexities of a business education, citing the need to be “ethical in business.” In the case of a school devoted to teaching students the ethics of business, this situation may provide a first-hand learning experience for students.
A more recent story, out of England, features verbal prompts:
Kingston University staff have been recorded instructing students to inflate their responses in the annual National Student Survey.
“If Kingston comes down the bottom, the bottom line is that nobody is going to want to employ you,” staff warned.
The university says it regrets this “isolated” incident.
The audio recording, published on Live! the student news website of Imperial College, London, reveals members of university staff strongly urging students to falsify their responses in this national survey, in order to create a more positive impression for the university.
…Using an expletive, the member of staff tells students that a poor ranking will make employers think that their degree is without value.
… “Although this is going to sound incredibly biased, you rate these things on a five-point scale, if you think something was a four - a ‘good’ - my encouragement would be give it a five, because that’s what everyone else is doing.”
… Another member of staff instructs students not to use the survey for negative comments if they are unhappy about the modules they have been taught. “All that garbage you’re spewing out about us” should not be included in the National Student Survey…
Fun quotation, but George Will - and the Wall Street Journal - have it wrong.
If you’ve followed life at the University of Colorado Boulder as closely as UD has over the years, you know it’s not the liberal village Will has in mind.
And you know, therefore, that the proposed endowed chair there in Conservative Thought and Policy — essentially an effort to import a high-profile conservative thinker — doesn’t represent an alien imposition on a quiet mountain monoculture.
The main reality of campus life at Boulder is a hard-drinking, right-leaning, anti-intellectual, and politically indifferent basketball and football culture dominated by dumb frat guys and an athletics department so corrupt it generated the largest national university sports scandal of them all not long ago.
You want to study a conservative in Boulder? Talk to a booster in a luxury box.
“[A]cademic life is likely to be formed
out of intense relationships all around. ….
[T]he eros surrounding them injects them
with an ambiguity and intensity that
makes life interesting and urgent.
Studying is exciting; eros is part
of that excitement…”
A writer at The American Scene offers a reality-based approach:
… Viewed purely in terms of economics, Harvard is really a $40 billion tax-free hedge fund with a very large marketing and PR arm called Harvard University that has the job of raising the investment capital and protecting the fund’s preferential tax treatment.
The trick is that this hedge fund can’t remit earnings to investors, and has to keep them in the company’s account, renaming these retained earnings as an “endowment”. So how do the insiders extract value from this business? One way is by giving themselves cushy jobs that pay a ton of dough. Those who manage Harvard’s money are well-paid. The prior investment head, Jack Meyer, left after criticism of a compensation plan that paid some investment management professionals more than $35 million each in a single year. In spite of this, investment professionals often leave the Harvard Management Company because they can make yet more money as partners in private equity groups or hedge funds. Of course, the qualification of running Harvard’s pool of assets can be leveraged to get exactly such jobs – those who do this are called “Crimson Puppies” – while in the meantime enjoying a somewhat more relaxed work-life balance, and not having to do the hard work of actually raising the fund.
The worker bees in the marketing department (i.e., the faculty) are also quite well-paid. The average Harvard professor now has a salary of about $185,000 per year. Professors in the right disciplines, such as business, can reportedly double their salaries through outside consulting and other income sources. In 1980, the salary of a Harvard professor was about 5.5 times the average US per capita income; today, $185,000 is about 7 times the average national per capita income, and can often be leveraged into much higher actual annual compensation.
When tax-advantaged non-profits start to accumulate billions of dollars of cash through investment gains, and the insiders seem to be doing very well, it creates legitimate pressure for some legal changes. There is a broad range of alternatives: capital gains taxes on investment income, directly taxing the endowment, placing limitations on employee compensation, and forcing the distribution of a fixed percentage of the endowment are all obvious choices. Sanctimonious talk about “the mission of the university” is not likely to stop this…
UD thanks Rita, of Nobody Sasses a Girl in Glasses, for the link.
