If you don’t know the meaning of the term “yak shaving”, you should:

• Seth Godin’s explanation
• Wiktionary’s definition

(For me, writing this post is not an exercise in yak shaving; it’s outright procrastination.)

Maybe that’s what it feels like to be a high school teacher?

Last January, I moved from Massachusetts to North Carolina, and started a new job as a Physics professor. Spring was largely transition, teaching one light course here and making several long trips back north to keep the research project there going. Then came the summer, with a greater-than-usual blitz of travel and urgent work.

This fall, I started here for real. Now I’m really teaching! (And quite a lot of work it is, too.)

I’ve taught before, sort of: lots of labs and discussion sections as a TA, an outdoor leadership program for high school students, short and long teacher professional development programs… but that’s not the same has having responsibility for a full-scale university “lecture” course with ~60 students and 3 contact hours per week.

This fall, I’ve been teaching Conceptual Physics, a general education course with 55-ish students, drawing from all four class years (most heavily from freshmen and seniors) and almost every major on campus except Physics. I have, of course, been using a classroom response system (CRS, a.k.a. “clickers”). I cannot imagine teaching a course even a third this size without it; it would be like teaching without a whiteboard or a data projector. It would like becoming deaf in the classroom.

It has been interesting to see how all the pedagogical theory that I and my colleagues have been developing has fared. It isn’t easy! I’m encountering many of the same difficulties that the high school teachers in our project have voiced — problems I’ve tried to help them resolve with all kinds of sage advice.

I am finding, of course, that it isn’t quite as easy as I’d thought. (I’m envisioning many of our teachers nodding with a small smile of vindication, and thinking “See?” Touché.) It’s not so much that I’ve been wrong, as that I’m seeing new dimensions and nuances to the problems and the solutions. In fact, having to go through many of the same CRS learning issues as my teachers is really quite instructional.

I’ll try to document some of those insights in forthcoming blog posts. One question that I’m wrestling with, however, is this: just how much should I “let it all hang out” in a public forum that my students might quite possibly discover?

Maybe I shouldn’t worry about that. I find that my faith in my basic pedagogical principles and outlook are being strengthened, not weakened, by the experience. If anything, I’m entertaining even more radical thoughts about how we can re-envision the educational enterprise. (That might scare some of you who know me well.)

Anyway, the next post will focus on my latest insight about what makes creating good CRS questions difficult, at least for me. Hint: It’s not actually about the questions, though it initially appears that way.

My team — the UMass Physics Education Research Group (UMPERG) — is moving! The University of North Carolina at Greensboro wants to build a robust, interdisciplinary, inter-departmental effort in science and math education research, outreach, and teacher preparation, and they’re serious enough to put some resources behind it.

To kick things off, they’ve hired my mentor and my group’s senior member, Bill Gerace, to fill the newly-created post of Helena Gabriel Houston Distinguished Professor of Science Education (a chair generously endowed by the C. D. Spangler Foundation — thanks, folks). He retired from UMass and began at UNCG this past summer. I’m moving in January, and my other colleague, Bill Leonard, starts at UNCG next summer. Whee!

(For those of you not fully up-to-date on UMPERG’s status, Jose Mestre moved to UIUC a few years ago, and Bob Dufresne has been primarily occupied with his Reading Recovery publishing business for a while.)

We’ve got the ambition and the mandate to do some big things at UNCG, such as building an inter-departmental “center” for science and mathematics education research and outreach, and creating a graduate degree program in Physics Education Research and/or Science Education Research. So, if you’re a potential graduate student, sabbatical visitor, collaborator, or faculty hire — or if you’re just curious — stay tuned.

The inevitable disruption is a partial explanation for my relative silence on this blog of late. 2008 has been a very, very tumultuous year, in both good and bad ways, for many reasons. My list of ideas for blog topics is getting longer, though…

1. Read a book on the subject, cover to cover, to get my head around the “big picture”;

2. Try one or two little toy projects as a “proof of concept”, just to make sure I have all the pieces to at least get started; and

3. Throw myself into an ambitious, real project that is well beyond my skill level, and figure things out on the fly by frequently going to the text and other relevant documentation as needed.

I find that wrestling with the big project provides the motivation and the context to help me bring it all together.

This contrasts with the way that most academic subjects at most educational levels in most parts of the world are taught: leading students along a carefully-engineered path to understanding, one step at a time. My gut and my personal learning experiences tell me that we’d be better off “throwing students into the deep end”, as I argued in _Travel, Teaching, and Intellectual Saturation_. The problem is that I don’t have a clear idea of what this would look like in practice, and I don’t have any _evidence_ that it would actually work. (Perhaps students would be too frustrated to persevere?)

Well, at a meeting today with several high school teachers participating in my current research project, one teacher gave me a glimpse of how it might be implemented, along with reason to believe that it can work.

Darcy (not her real name) is teaching 9th grade algebra, with heterogeneous (mixed achievement level) classes. Largely as a result of our project, she has been experimenting with her teaching style. Today she reported that with one class in particular, she’s been developing a class dynamic where she gives the students a problem to figure out, and then lets them spend perhaps 3/4 of the 90-minute class working together on it. The whole class works cooperatively, with small-group side conversations splitting off and rejoining the main discussion. Sometimes students go to the board to draw something, and sometimes another student will go to another board to disagree. When students look to Darcy for input, she puts on her best poker face and ignores them.

Remarkably, all but one or two students engage. I asked whether a few know-it-all students dominate the discussion, and she said no, all students’ contributions seem to be valued.

Eventually, when the class has reached a solution, Darcy will retake the helm, explore their solution, and often suggest alternative ways that they could have reached it.

Here’s the kicker: I asked Darcy whether she had trouble covering material at a sufficient pace when devoting so much time to student-directed discussion (cf. _the myth of coverage_). She said that quite the opposite happened: this class was ahead of every other 9th grade algebra class in the school. When my eyes widened, she explained that she’d rearranged the curriculum, starting off with the “hard topics” that were usually saved for later in the year. These provided the problems that students collaboratively wrestled with as described above. Then, later on in the course, she’d bring in the “easy” material that she’d skipped earlier, and the students could chew through that at a high rate — perhaps four sections per day.

Yes, it’s anecdotal evidence, but the story does illustrate one way of teaching by “throwing students into the deep end”. And it supports the rather counterintuitive idea that students learn faster when we put the hard stuff first.

I suspect that in addition, the _learning_ skills they develop are more useful in the “real world”…

Ask an educational researcher for his “teaching philosophy” and you’re likely to get a puzzled look and a long pause. These can be interpreted as “How do I condense years of research, literature reading, and theoretical development into a short answer?”

grounding

My philosophy of teaching draws from several research and philosophical traditions, as well as from the teaching experiences of myself and my colleagues. First and foremost, I am a constructivist (von Glasersfeld, 2007; Peschl, 2006). That term means many things to many people, but to me it means simply that knowledge and understanding cannot be “transmitted” between people; it must be constructed over time by each individual. In other words, learning is a deliberate process of sense-making that inevitably includes times of confusion, struggle, and reconciliation of difficulties. This relatively simple recognition has deep implications for instruction.

One implication is that communication cannot be taken for granted. All communication involves the sending of symbols that have no inherent meaning; meaning is intended by the sender and inferred by the recipient, and what meaning the recipient infers depends on his or her pre-existing expectations, assumptions, model of the sender, knowledge, and so on. As a teacher, that means I cannot presume that my spectacularly clear explanations communicate to the students what I intend them to. I need to model their interpretations as they model my intentions, and I need to “close the loop”, asking them to communicate back to me what they think they understood.

Another implication is that I do not “teach” so much as engineer a productive environment and set of stimuli for students to learn within, and provide coaching as they do so. (Note that this does not mean that lecture, or direct explanation, is always bad. Sometimes it is the appropriate stimuli to provide; nevertheless, I must remember that such lectures or direct explanations are not simply absorbed, understood, and immediately ready for future use.) Vygotsky’s notion of the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978) — that productive learning occurs within the space of challenges that students can succeed at with scaffolding, but not alone — suggests that I must continually tune the learning environment to students’ evolving capacities.

A third implication of constructivism is that students do not enter my classroom as blank slates; pre-existing knowledge, perceptions, perspectives, and experiences shape the understandings they construct in response to the environment and stimuli I provide. Thus, attempting to model their initial state, and track its subsequent evolution, is as important a component of my teaching job as designing my instruction.

Out of this perspective has grown the conceptual change tradition of educational research (Scott, Asoki & Leach, 2007), which studies the mechanisms by which students’ understanding of concepts evolves, the role of “misconceptions” in learning, and the like. More recent research, in what might be termed the knowledge in pieces tradition (Scherr, 2007), suggests that attending to what knowledge elements students have access to, and what contextual elements help to activate them, is more productive than considering what knowledge (or misconceptions) they “possess” (Redish, 2003; Hammer, Elby, Scherr & Redish, 2004; Dufresne, Thaden-Koch, Gerace & Leonard, 2005).

I am not just a constructivist, but a social constructivist informed by the sociocultural tradition of educational research (Carlsen, 2007; Mortimer & Scott, 2003). I see social interaction as essential to the internal knowledge-construction process, including student-to-student interactions as well as instructor-to-student ones. As Vygotsky observed (1987), the tools students use for internal cogitation are appropriated from social interactions. This implies that the classroom should be a place for exhibiting and exploring modes of thinking and argument, where students can see the process of “thinking science” modeled and where they can try it out themselves. Also, as Bakhtin observed (summarized in Wertsch, 1991, pp. 93-118), learning science largely means learning the social language of science (including conventions for thought and argument as well as vocabulary and grammar), and students must practice speaking a language to develop fluency. Thus, the classroom should be a place for students to practice “talking science”, with enough scaffolding from me to help them along, but not so much that I do the talking instead of them. In the very act of struggling to articulate their fuzzy thinking, students clarify their understanding of what they know, identify what they don’t, and often reach insights.

This has strong implications for what should occur in my classrooms. I do not see the classroom as a place for the dissemination of declarative content knowledge or the exhibition of proofs; those are more efficiently done through textbooks, multimedia, or other online resources. My classroom should be a place for dialogue and interaction, for exploration and confrontation and resolution. (In a large lecture hall, this is greatly facilitated by use of a classroom response system.)

My outlook is also shaped by the literature on student motivation and self-regulation (Koballa & Glynn, 2007; Wilson, 2006), and on the significance of students’ epistemological framing of the learning activities they engage in (Hammer, 1996; Hammer & Elby, 2003). Students are not black boxes, to whom instructional stimuli are applied and learning results; how they engage in learning activities matters tremendously, and as an instructor I must probe, model, monitor, and seek to influence that.

principles

Over time, I have distilled the practical implications for these (and other) pedagogical positions and educational research findings into four principles to guide instruction. These principles form the core of the “technology-enhanced formative assessment” (TEFA) pedagogy that my colleagues and I promote through in-service teacher professional development, and I would adhere to them in my own teaching.

The first principle is “Motivate and focus student learning with question-driven instruction.” This means posing tough, rich, meaty, often messy questions to students in order to contextualize and motivate subsequent learning, and often in order to catalyze or precipitate learning. It is grounded in the conceptual change tradition. It is motivated by an understanding that students perceive, process, and store information differently in response to a need, and that they “get” ideas by wrestling with the application of those ideas (Bransford et al., 1999, p. 139).

The second principle is “Develop students’ understanding and scientific fluency with dialogical discourse.” This means engaging students in discussion in which multiple ideas and ways of thinking are explored and contrasted, and in which students articulate and explore their own thinking. It is grounded in the sociocultural tradition.

The third principle is “Optimize teaching and students’ learning with formative assessment.” This means making students’ knowledge and thinking visible in order to adjust and optimize subsequent learning and teaching. It is motivated by an understanding that effective instruction requires detailed and current information about the specific students being taught, and that effective learning requires accurate self-knowledge (Wiliam, 2007). According to a seminal literature review by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam (1998), “innovations” involving formative assessment produce learning gains that are among the largest ever found for educational interventions.

The fourth principle is “Help students cooperate in the learning process and develop metacognitive skills with meta-level communication.” This means communicating about communication, about cognition, about learning, and about the purposes of instructional experiences. It is grounded in literature on student motivation and self-regulation. It is motivated by an understanding that learning works better when students frame their participation appropriately and understand what they are supposed to be paying attention to.

I do not consider these four principles to be independent and arbitrary beliefs; they interlock and reinforce each other in a highly synergistic way. This can be seen in the way they are enacted in the TEFA “question cycle” — one specific way out of many of realizing the principles — which has been described elsewhere (Dufresne et al., 1996; Beatty, Leonard, Gerace & Dufresne, 2006).

references

Beatty, I. D., Leonard, W. J., Gerace, W. J., and Dufresne, R. J. (2006). Question driven instruction: Teaching science (well) with an audience response system. In Banks, D. A., editor, Audience Response Systems in Higher Education: Applications and Cases. Idea Group Inc., Hershey, PA.

Black, P. and Wiliam, D. (1998). Assessment and classroom learning. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 5(1):7-74.

Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., and Cocking, R. R. (1999). How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. National Academy Press, Washington, D.C.

Carlsen, W. S. (2007). Language and science learning. In Abell, S. K. and Lederman, N. G., editors, Handbook of Research on Science Education, chapter 3, pages 57-74. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ.

Dufresne, R. J., Gerace, W. J., Leonard, W. J., Mestre, J. P., and Wenk, L. (1996). Classtalk: A classroom communication system for active learning. Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 7:3-47.

Dufresne, R. J., Thaden-Koch, T., Gerace, W. J., and Leonard, W. J. (2005). Knowledge representation and coordination in the transfer process. In Mestre, J. P., editor, Transfer of Learning from a Modern Multidisciplinary Perspective, chapter 5, pages 89-119. Information Age Publishing.

Hammer, D. (1996). More than misconceptions: Multiple perspectives on student knowledge and reasoning, and an appropriate role for education research. American Journal of Physics, 64:1316-1325.

Hammer, D. and Elby, A. (2003). Tapping epistemological resources for learning physics. Journal of Learning Sciences, 12:53-90.

Hammer, D., Elby, A., Scherr, R. E., and Redish, E. F. (2004). Resources, framing, and transfer. In Mestre, J. P., editor, Transfer of Learning: Research and Perspective. Information Age Publishing, Greenwich, CT.

Koballa, T. R. and Glynn, S. M. (2007). Attitudinal and motivational constructs in science learning. In Abell, S. K. and Lederman, N. G., editors, Handbook of Research on Science Education, chapter 4, pages 75-102. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ.

Mortimer, E. F. and Scott, P. H. (2003). Meaning Making in Secondary Science Classrooms. Open University Press.

Peschl, M. F. (2006). Modes of knowing and modes of coming to know: Knowledge creation and co-construction as socio-epistemological engineering in educational processes. Constructivist Foundations, 1(3):111-123.

Redish, E. F. (2003). A theoretical framework for physics education research: Modeling student thinking. In Vicentinni, M. and Redish, E. F., editors, Proceedings of the Varenna Summer School, “Enrico Fermi” Course CLVI. IOS Press, Amsterdam.

Scherr, R. E. (2007). Modeling student thinking: An example from special relativity. American Journal of Physics, 75(3):272-280.

Scott, P., Asoki, H., and Leach, J. (2007). Student conceptions and conceptual learning in science. In Abell, S. K. and Lederman, N. G., editors, Handbook of Research on Science Education, chapter 2, pages 31-56. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ.

von Glasersfeld, E. (2007). Key Works in Radical Constructivism. Sense Publisherss.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). Thinking and speech. In Rieber, R. W. and Carton, A. S., editors, The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky. Plenum Press.

Wertsch, J. V. (1991). Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action. Harvard University Press.

Wiliam, D. (2007). Keeping learning on track: Classroom assessment and the regulation of learning. In Lester, F. K., editor, Second Handbook of Mathematics Teaching and Learning, pages 1051-1098. Information Age Publishing, Greenwich, CT.

Wilson, T. D. (2006). The power of social psychological interventions. Science, 313:1251-1252.

I think that’s one of the reasons I like travel, especially adventurous travel to exotic places and cultures and conditions. Drop me into a totally unfamiliar environment, and I’m happy as a bug trying to figure out how to function. It also might explain why I’ve gone through a whole string of hobbies and enthusiasms and sports and professional interests: once the terrain gets too well mapped, so to speak, the appeal fades. Some people like exercising skill and expertise; I like acquiring it.

I may be somewhat extreme in this regard, but I doubt that I’m wired completely differently from most of the human race. I suspect that we learn most efficiently, and are most captivated by the learning, when we’re tossed into the deep end and have to figure out in a hurry which end is up.

In my experiences as a student, a teacher, an educational researcher, and a teacher of teachers, one of the things I’ve noticed is how reluctant most teachers (myself included) are to leave students behind. We conceptualize instruction as leading students along a carefully-engineered path to understanding, one step at a time; any student who stumbles, strays, or straggles and gets left behind will be lost. Thus, being conscientious of our responsibility to all students, we put great effort into ensuring that every one (or at least every one who tries) is with us for the whole journey.

And this, I think, has disastrous consequences. To prevent any from being left behind, we must keep all together in a tight cluster that moves more slowly than most need. Which means that we are nowhere near saturating most students’ capacity to absorb new ideas. Which means that many students get bored, and turn their excess capacity towards “off-topic” matters, such as side conversations, crossword puzzles, daydreaming, or social posturing. And which also means that few students learn as much or as rapidly as they are capable. Perhaps more insidiously, it means that few students have the opportunity to develop the intellectual skills essential to sense-making in a fast-and-furious environment.

At the root of all this is a fundamental misconception about pedagogy. Above, I said:

We conceptualize instruction as leading students along a carefully-engineered path to understanding, one step at a time;

As soon as we think this way, we’ve lost. That’s the “transmissionist” view of instruction, the idea that we transmit knowledge to students. That idea has been pretty thoroughly discredited in educational research circles, in favor of the constructivist view that students must construct their understanding through a sustained and effortful sense-making process. Knowledge isn’t a set or sequence of facts that can be presented in a logically optimal order; it’s a messy, complex, massively interlinked network of ideas and connections and perspectives and ways of thinking that can only be fully appreciated through extensive and repeated revisiting and re-contemplation. It’s not linear. As Jay Lemke observes (Lemke 1990, p.17),

In fact, it can be difficult or impossible to teach a thematic pattern one piece at a time because it often takes a mastery of the whole pattern before any of its parts seem to make sense. It is not just in science that we find concepts that can only be fully understood in terms of one another: Each piece of the puzzle makes sense only if you already have all the other pieces. This is one of the fundamental problems of science teaching, and indeed of teaching and communication generally…

What is the alternative? Throw students into the deep end. Engineer a rich, thorny, messy, meaty problem or question for them to wrestle with, dump on some ideas and tools that they haven’t yet mastered, and then let them struggle. Scaffold and coach, yes, but don’t try to lead them through. And definitely don’t try to force all students to follow the same path to comprehension. (This is, in essence, what my colleagues and I at UMPERG call Question-Driven Instruction.)

And maybe, if we can bring ourselves to do this, our students will thrive on school the way that I thrive on travel.

References

Lemke, Jay L. (1990). Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values. Ablex Publishing, Westport CT. ISBN 0-89391-566-1. (Amazon)

Apocalypse 69% Dr. Doom 63% Dark Phoenix 56% Venom 49% Magneto 48% The Joker 46% Juggernaut 45% Lex Luthor 43% Mr. Freeze 42% Riddler 40% Mystique 37% Green Goblin 37% Poison Ivy 31% Kingpin 26% Catwoman 24% Two-Face 21%

You believe in survival of the fittest and you believe that you are the fittest.

Click here to take the Super Villain Personality Test

Superman 70% Spider-Man 60% Iron Man 55% Green Lantern 50% Robin 47% The Flash 45% Hulk 45% Supergirl 40% Wonder Woman 35% Catwoman 30% Batman 30%

You are mild-mannered, good, strong and you love to help others.

Click here to take the “Which Superhero are you?” quiz…

(Go on, it’s not that long.)

For the record, I’m Catholic and very serious about it. I’m also a trained and practicing scientist with a Ph.D. in Physics. I was raised atheist, and converted while in graduate school because Catholicism made too damn much sense not to agree with. This was no sudden Road to Damascus conversion, but a long, careful, suspicious, examined, intellectual decision. (To mimic the star of one of Dawkins’ anecdotes, “I was wrong for 26 years.”) And I find no irreconcilable disagreements between modern science and Catholic theology; they talk about different things. Apparent incompatibilities usually arise from a flawed understanding of one or both.

I apply the same rigorous standards to knowledge of both the material and spiritual worlds, because they’re two sides of the same coin, and they’re both just dimensions of “what is”. The primary difference is that one can build a decent model of the material world by looking only outwards, but must look into the human psyche (one’s own and others’) for evidence about the spiritual.

Science is just “best practice” thinking. It should be applied to everything that’s worth knowing, because thinking is the only way anything is ever known. You get the evidence, the clues, wherever you can find them.

That means I subject beliefs — my own and other people’s — to challenge and scrutiny. It also means I have the humility to admit that finite minds will never completely understand the natural or supernatural worlds. All understanding is just a “working model”.

Contrary to Dawkins’ characterization, “faith” does not mean closing one’s ears to evidence or argument. That’s “denial”. Faith is having the guts to bet something you care about on the partial understanding you’ve got, even though you don’t have all the answers. And faith means accepting challenges to your beliefs with confidence that those beliefs will either be strengthened or corrected.

It is regrettably true that a great many religious believers refuse to examine their beliefs analytically and impartially. It is also regrettably true that a great many unbelievers make the same mistake.

(David Weinberger pretty much pegs Dawkins.)

I’m an educational researcher by profession. I tend to believe that I know a lot about how to teach well, especially physics. I’ve read the literature, attended the conferences, conducted research, engaged in countless discussions about teaching and learning, and published some papers. Yes, I’ve even designed and taught physics courses, though not much since finishing my Ph.D. (I’m on a research position, not a teaching one. Unfortunately.)

Which is why the following anecdote is acutely embarrassing.

This past July, my colleague, group leader, and travel buddy Bill Gerace and I spent two unexpectedly hot, humid weeks in Vitznau, Switzerland. We went to teach physics to hospitality management students (as we did in Singapore the previous summer). Does that seem bizarre? UMass has partnered with hospitality management schools in Singapore and Vitznau to offer a UMass baccalaureate. Students must fulfill regular UMass degree requirements, including “distribution” criteria of so many literature classes, so many science classes, etc. The partner schools used to ship their students over to UMass for a year or so to take all those courses, but someone figured out that it’s cheaper to send UMass faculty over to teach two-week intensive courses in various subjects. So, UMass asks its faculty for volunteers.

Knowing a good thing when he sees it, Bill jumped on the opportunity. He used the stipend to pay my travel expenses, so we both went more or less for free, inveterate travel junkies that we are. Bill taught, I helped out with computer tasks and improvised experiment/demo equipment, and I telecommuted to fulfill the duties of my “real” job. (Lest you think I’m a slacker, know that we committed to this trip before the big research grant providing my real job had been awarded.)

Back to the humility thing. A few days into the course, we reached the topic of “conservation of energy.” I have a way of explaining the concept that I think makes a whole lot of intuitive sense and should be brilliantly clear to students, so I asked Bill if I could teach that segment. He agreed, and I did. I tried to, anyway.

So I started, and introduced my analogy between conservation of energy and financial accounting, making the point that money is never created or destroyed, but moved from one account to another, to cash in your pocket, to credit (or less debt) on your credit account, etc. This is is just like energy: it gets shifted around from one form to another, one “place” to another, but the total amount remains the same. (Nobody asked about governments that print money.) This should be really accessible to students also taking management classes, right?

As it goes on, I get increasingly uncomfortable. Eyes are glazing over. A crunch on classroom space has pushed us into the computer lab for this class, and more than a little key-pecking and monitor-glancing is happening. I ask questions and get very little response; the answers I do get are tentative and unsure, more like guesses than opinions.

And then it hits me. I’m doing it: the classic IRE triadic pattern of classroom discourse, in which the instructor “initiates” with a question, the students “respond” with an answer, and the instructor “evaluates” the correctness of the response. No “uptake” or chaining of responses to responses, no true dialogic discourse or exploration of points of view. This is quizzing, not discussion. I’ve just read an entire damn book about patterns of discourse, nodding in agreement as the authors expounded upon the futility of IRE-based teaching, and here I am torturing perfectly nice foreigners with it.

It’s not that I don’t really understand the theory or the arguments against IRE. I very much do, to the point that it seems self-evident. Rather, IRE-style teaching is so deeply ingrained in me from 20-odd years of being a student (not counting preschool or the interminable stretch of my dissertation work) that I fell into it without even thinking.

So I bailed. I tag-teamed off to Bill almost mid-sentence. No one can improv physics like Bill, so he picked up smoothly and continued the lesson (with significantly less IRE and eye-glazing).

Licking my wounds later and reflecting on the experience, I realized I had been doomed from the very moment I first desired to teach that lesson. I began by thinking about what was inside my head — the cool analogy I was going to make — rather than about what was inside the students’ heads. Rule #1 of teaching:

It doesn’t matter what comes out of your mouth (or shows up on your PowerPoint slides). All that matters is what happens in the students’ minds, so find out what that is and interact with it.

The myth of coverage is a corollary of this.

The morals of this story?

1. There’s a huge gap between knowing and doing. We generally do what we’re patterned on, not what we would choose if we thought about it. Especially under stress or on the spot.
2. If we really want to impact the way science (or anything else) is taught, we must change the formative learning experiences of our future teachers. It’s a bootstrapping problem.
3. Don’t lose sight of the goal for even a moment: in this case, developing students’ understanding. Teaching cleverly is not synonymous with making learning happen.
4. Self-monitoring and reflection are very powerful learning tools. I learned more from that one experience than from dozens of learned papers and discussions. (Bill likes to say that “All learning is through trauma.” He’s using learning in a narrow, strong sense and trauma in a general, cognitive one.)

I travel a lot. (This comes as something of a surprise to me, since I never associated globetrotting with physics, educational research, teaching, or being a computer geek. My world-wandering fantasy career was National Geographic Photographer, with Indiana Jones overtones.) Most of my travel is between continents, so jet lag is something I’ve had to deal with a lot. And at this point, I’ve pretty much got it beat. Here’s my recipe:

1. Build up a backlog of far too many things that must be done before you depart (or, for return flights, before the end of your trip). That allows you to:
2. Spend your last several days before the flight in a frenzy of stressed multitasking and sleep deprivation, skipping indulgences like workouts, downtime, and social activity. This will insure that you will:
3. Be completely exhausted when you board the plane, able to sleep regardless of the time of day in your accustomed time zone. You are now in a position to:
4. Stay awake (using any requisite force, but not caffeine) during whatever portion of your flight aligns with daytime at your destination, and:
5. Determinedly sleep (faking it as much as necessary) through whatever portion of your flight aligns with night at your destination. As a result:
6. When you arrive, you have already begun adjusting to the new time zone. It is now crucial that you:
7. Don’t blow it! Absolutely refuse to give in to the temptation to nap or go to bed abnormally early, for several days. Forcibly adhere to a reasonable local sleep schedule.

Some helpful aids:

• Pack an inflatable neck pillow, blindfold, and squishy foam earplugs to make the world go away if the airlines’ idea of a desirable sleep schedule, or your fellow travellers’, doesn’t match yours.
• If you’re a laptop-lugging road warrior, an extra battery and a set of plug adapters (for charging up during layovers in various airports) does wonders for making the don’t-sleep time period pass quickly. Some of my best writing has been done in-flight. (Well, at least it seemed like my best at the time…)

That’s it! I find when I adhere to this plan, I have only a weak jet lag effect when I arrive, one I can easily push through — whether I’m traveling east, west, or south, a few time zones or twelve. However, the times I’ve succumbed to a brief nap in the first few days, it has set me back the better part of a week. Big, big mistake.

Here’s my theoretical analysis of why the approach works: stress, frentic activity, exhaustion, and sleep deprivation leading up to the trip put me in a state where my body is reeling, confused, and disoriented. It’s lost its bearings. In the insulated environment of the airplane, it is then willing to shrug and accept whatever schedule I forcibly impose on it. It’s too confused and wounded to object. After arrival, however, a nap at the wrong time undermines all this, reinforces the subdued but not destroyed pull of the old time zone, and invites biorhythmic war within your skin.

Extending the “biorhythmic war” metaphor, I guess I could call this the “shock and awe” jet lag strategy.

My most scarce commodity, by far, is time. Given my goals, resources, and lifestyle, I’m neither cash-limited nor opportunity-limited nor knowledge-limited. I’m time-limited. There just isn’t enough time to do a quarter of the things I’d like to do. And so I maximize efficiency, trying to make every minute count. Call it temporal frugality, if you will.

I really, really hate wasting time. If I’ve got a ten minute wait before my ride home is leaving, I’ll find something productive to do. (“Productive” can be defined fairly broadly; poking about the web counts, if I’m informing myself about something I’d like to know more about.) I arrive 30 seconds to three minutes late for almost every meeting and appointment, since I aim to arrive exactly on time and I usually overlook some speed bump or another; arriving early would mean (gasp) waiting. And even my recreational outings and vacations are planned and executed with brutal efficiency, for optimal satisfaction per unit time.

I may be a little more hyper this way than most of my associates — okay, significantly more hyper — but in my social context, a concern with temporal frugality seems rather normal. Most of my friends and colleagues are similarly time-limited. Even the retired ones are busy with all kinds of travels and entertainments and worthy projects. Heck, I’ve seen people get busier when they retire.

So when I travel about southern Africa, as I am this semester, I am truly nonplussed by the multitude of people I see waiting. Just waiting. Sitting by the road, or under a tree, or on the step of a shop. Some are waiting for a bus. Some are waiting for a friend. Some are waiting for a random passer-by to stop and buy a mango. Some, such as security guards, are getting paid to just be there. And some, as far as I can determine, are just killing time. (Ouch.) I’m pretty sure that many of these waiters are in it for the long haul… hours, probably.

It would absolutely rend me to wait like that. I’d probably need trauma counseling. So how do people here stand a life so full of waiting, of doing nothing? As I suggested in my last post: for them, it’s just normal.

And I wonder what my pace of life would look like to them. Equally intolerable, perhaps?

Saying South Africa has a crime problem is a bit of an understatement. The World’s Most Dangerous Places (5th edition, 2003) gives SA a danger rating of three stars out of five for having the highest per capita crime rate in the world. Murder, rape, mugging, and car-jacking are rampant. Leaving something in plain sight in your car or yard here is pretty much equivalent to placing it by the road with a big “help yourself” sign, or so I’ve been told.

I’m not a sociologist, but the general causes of this crime epidemic seem obvious enough.

1. Start with years of apartheid, resulting in two distinct but symbiotic societies: one affluent and first-world, the other deeply impoverished and third-world. The underclass has been systematically brutalized, marginalized, relocated, and disenfranchised.
2. Suddenly change the political system, give political power to the underclass, and dissolve long-standing economic sanctions and boycotts. This results in an explosion of economic growth and consumerism and a new middle class, but with high unemployment and a still-impoverished underclass.
3. Open the borders to even more impoverished, desperate people from the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. Then try to shut down the massive inflow, mostly unsuccessfully, resulting in hordes of impoverished, desperate, and now illegal people.
4. Mix in an HIV/AIDS epidemic that devastates family structures and creates entire subcultures of orphans raising orphans.

Is it any wonder the social contract breaks down?

(If you read this, Mom, remember that I’m spending most of my time in a small town in the boondocks. Crime, especially the violent types, is much less prevalent here than in the cities. Jo’burg and Cape Town vie for the title of murder capital of the world, and little Alice isn’t even close. However, what what I’m about to say applies here as well.)

One consequence of rampant crime is a proliferation of locks, keys, gates, fences, razor wire, alarms, unfriendly dogs, private guards, and signs that say “24 hour armed response” (usually with a silhouette of a gun, just to make sure you get the point even if you don’t read English so well). I wouldn’t be surprised if a secondary consequence is lower back pain and a tertiary one is boom times for chiropractors, since most people carry around several tangled gobs of keys big enough to anchor an offshore oil rig. The locks in doors and gates tend to be the old-fashioned type (with keyholes that go all the way through, with that stereotypical “keyhole” shape), meaning that many of keys are long, thick, and heavy.

What both amuses and disturbs me is that most doors and gates lock from both sides. A key is required to enter or to exit. Most locks are kept locked all of the time. As a visitor, even a long-term one, I have few keys. (Probably a good thing, from an orthopedic perspective.) All of which, taken together, means that my ability to get out of any building I find myself in is questionable.

The only way out of the university building in which I have my temporary office is to travel the length of a hallway, up a flight of stairs, down a flight, along a short hallway, dog-leg left, along a much longer hallway, through a gate into a kind of entrance hall, and through a final set of doors and gates to the great outdoors. There are several closer doors I could exit through, except that all are locked full-time. From both sides, of course. The closest door to my office is never locked, but the security gate over it is actually welded shut.

I’ve been told this cuts down on theft. I believe it: I couldn’t carry a computer that far, much less do it without being noticed.

The first-floor windows are all barred. My only way out is locked at some unspecified and unpredictable time during the evening, so if I work late, I must telephone the main guard office and request release. And if a fire starts somewhere between my office and that gate, well… Let’s not go there.

So what is “normal”? In the US, it is normal to have egress from any place, any time, unless you’ve had the misfortune to end up on the wrong end of the justice system. In South Africa, it is normal to massively restrict movement to minimize theft. We optimize on convenience and fire safety, they optimize on physical and material security. Each is rational in its context.

More interesting, perhaps, is my reaction to finding my sense of normalcy violated. When I want to exit someplace and am thwarted by a locked door, indignation surges. How dare it! Somewhere, deep in the freedom-loving recesses of a brain raised on the Bill of Rights and the unbridled pursuit of personal convenience, I feel I have an inalienable right to go outside. (Sounds more dignified to call it “freedom of movement”, eh?) Rational or not, it boggles my mind that people voluntarily live like this. The difference between a fortress and a prison, as has oft been observed, is mighty slim.

How many other unconscious expectations, not shared by others on this planet, do I hold? How do people’s unspoken and conflicting models of “the normal” impede communication and understanding? It’s easy for me to learn how someone lives differently than I do, but it’s a whole lot harder to learn how they think differently. You know that old saw about “walking a mile in someone’s shoes”? I may learn a lot about their shoes, but it’s still me doing the walking. How do I walk a mile with someone else’s feet?

I’ve met people who live in conditions of poverty and deprivation that I would find absolutely unbearable. If I were forced to live that way permanently, without hope of escape, I suspect I’d be depressed and bitter until the day I died. And yet these people are not only not depressed, but often quite upbeat. Why?

For them, it’s just normal.

The world of educational research has long since figured out that although information can be transmitted and memorized, knowledge must be constructed by each individual. Learning (in the knowledge sense) is an ongoing process of sense-making as new ideas are integrated into the individual’s existing mental models of the world. And — here’s the kicker — how a person goes about that process, how she interprets new information and evidence, and even what she pays attention to in the first place are governed by the models she already holds. In other words, what you think you know largely determines what you see and what you will learn from it. (This perspective is called constructivism.)

In fact, humans are flat-out incapable of knowing “the truth”. From before birth we observe, model, observe more (filtered by the model), interpret (from the perspective of the model), and, when backed into a corner, revise the model. Our cerebral machinery processes and reprocesses the data of our limited senses before even the most rudimentary awareness intrudes on our conscious mind. We have no direct access to the raw stuff of reality. The best we can hope for is a collection of mental constructs that are not too fragmented, not to inconsistent, and close enough to “reality” that we can function without doing anything too stupid. If you talk to a physicist who is careful with his language, he won’t tell you about nature. He’ll tell you about models that explain, as completely and economically as possible, the observations we can make about nature.

(Are you religious? If you object to the previous paragraph on the grounds that it contradicts the notion of “divinely revealed truth”, please reconsider. Do you really believe the infinite deity and the wonders beyond this mortal coil can be perfectly, accurately, completely captured by any finite human mental constructs? We’ve been told as much about the divine as we need and can handle, no more or less.)

So it’s no wonder that people who feel President Bush is the devil incarnate can find copious evidence to strengthen their opinion, whereas those who believe he is protecting us against fanatical enemies from without and moral decay from within see many reasons to fortify theirs. We all filter, we all interpret, and our models are all self-reinforcing. We can’t help it. That’s just human nature.

Hmm… Sounds like a problem, eh? Aside from wallowing in existential angst, what can we do about this damnably inconvenient limitation?

Well, that’s why I named this blog Think Twice.

• Everybody’s world view makes sense to them, and very very few people are deliberately evil. If someone’s thinking seems obviously flawed or ill-intentioned, it’s a safe bet I don’t really understand it. And until I do, it behooves me to be very, very cautious about criticizing it. So when someone says something I disagree with and I’m inclined to condemn or ignore it, I should think twice.
• Alas, I am just as human as the rest of you (despite what my fourth college roommate said about physics majors). People I passionately disagree with are just as sure of themselves as I am of myself. Annoyingly, many of them are just as bright, well-educated, and well-informed as I. Perhaps more so. It would be hubris to think that my confidence is better founded than theirs simply because I’m me. I filter and interpret, too. So, when I think I’m right about something, I’d better think twice.
• What we know is merely an approximation of what really is, and reality is infinitely richer and more subtle than we’ll ever appreciate. When I think I understand something, I’d be wise to think twice.
• The most powerful tool we have for pushing back the limitations of the mind is awareness of those limitations. So I think, and then think about my thinking. People who like big words call this metacognition. (Once in a while, just to be careful, I think about how I think about my thinking.) Think twice! (Or three times, or…)

That’s the primary reason I named this blog as I did, but not the only one. I’m an oddball. People who get to know me in a limited context and try to place me in a convenient box — liberal, conservative, religious, rationalist, hyper-intellectual, impulsive, compulsively organized German, moody Celt, whatever — are invariably wrong. Or rather, they’re 10% right and 90% wrong. For that reason I very much dislike labels. Even labels that are technically correct, because I fit the strict definition, tend to be so encrusted with inaccurate connotations and assumptions that they rankle. So if you think you’ve got me pegged, think twice.

I wonder how many of us really do fit into nice neat boxes. Next time I stick a label on someone, perhaps I should heed my own advice. The problem is, labels are so darned convenient…