Twin Cities Patterns

Unexpected Origins

A week or so ago, Taggert over at A Random Walk discussed the ironic origins of the minimum wage bill.

Here's a quote from the article he references:

Progressives, including Richard Ely, Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, the Webbs in England etc., were interested not in protecting women but in protecting men and the race. Their goal was to get women back into the home, where they belonged, instead of abandoning their eugenic duties and competing with men for work.

As it turns out, so-called Family Friendly policies seem to be following a somewhat similar pattern. I just re-read The Baby Boon by Burkett. In it, she points out one of the ironies of current Corporate work-life or family-friendly policies. In the mid-1900s, feminists decryed what was known as the "family wage". This was essentially a justification for paying men with wives and children higher wages not based on merit, but but on perceived need. It worked to the disfavor of working women, most of whom were single at that time. It also disadvantaged working mothers at the time, most of whom were minorities.

Ironically, Burkett argues that family-friendly policies do exactly the same thing, except now, they favor working mothers. Instead of paying people based on merit or productivity, wage and benefit subsidies in the form of work-life balance policies are heavily weighted toward those with kids.

Where Do You Stand?

Or, I should say, lean. . .

Check out this nuanced political compass.

If you're wondering, you won't be surprised to find that my coordinates are (-5,-7).

Keyword: Student Whining. REALLY

Received moments ago, exactly 9:17 p.m., two workdays AFTER the first deadline of the paper, and just hours PRIOR to the absolute deadline. Bold mine.

Dear Professor Pushover --
I really don't want to be a pain but I'm not sure if I'll be able to finish the [paper] by tonight. I've honestly been trying all day. The hardest thing for me are the graphs and I just don't feel like I can do them. I know that I did poorly on my previous [paper] and I really cannot afford to get a bad grade on this one. I am really afraid and stressed out about this. I know that I shouldn't have waited until the deadline to try and finish and I'm sorry. However, I would REALLY appreciate it if I could come to your office and have you help me with it and I could turn it in by tomorrow. I know that I am not any more special than any other student but I know that everyone just needs help once in a while. If you could please email me by tonight that would be greatly appreciatedor I'll call you office tomorrow morning. Thank you so much and I'm really sorry. If you have any questions my number is [###-###-###].

Really super sincerely,
Student X

Is Economic Rationality Unethical?

In today's New York Times Magazine column "Why Vote?", Freakonomics authors Dubner and Levitt argue that it is not rational to vote.

Basically, because the act of voting exacts a cost on the citizen, and because their is virtually no observed benefit in terms of affecting the outcome of the election [they cite research in which mroe htan 40,000 elections were examined, comprising nearly 1 billion votes, with only 7 elections being decided by a single vote] one can discern that the costs outweigh the benefits.

Research by Patricia Funk on voting behavior in Switzerland finds that when voting became virtually costless (mail-in votes) people actually participated less. The author speculates that people voted only due to the percevied social gains: social esteem, benefits from being perceived as a cooperator or just he avoidance of informal sanctions.

Clearly this has implications for the possibility of internet voting.

I wonder what these conclusions imply for ethical behavior more generally. A friend of mine once said that her ethics were based on the question "what would happen if EVERYONE made the choice to do X?" If she could conclude that everyone doing X was a good thing, then she would go ahead and do it. If not, she would avoid the behavior. One obvious example is the defenestration of ciggy butts. If everyone did this, our streets would look like ash trays. So, even though your marginal contribution is negligible, by these ethics, you should still not throw it out the window.

Economic rationality, on the other hand, would argue that the marginal cost to society is smaller than the marginal gain to the individual (in terms of decreased cost of personal clean up).

No wonder they call it the dismal science.

Lost Tooth No. 2

Finally, Something About Which the Democrats and the Republicans Can Agree

The following graph was created based on data from this Washington Post poll.

Iraq Body Count

Here is a website that attempts to maintain a count of the number of Iraqi casualties of the war.

What's In A Name?

Lately, a few people have asked me what Itsy's last name will be.

It's weird because the question, for me, comes out of left field, whereas for those asking, it is completely logical.

It's weird on one hand because such a question continues along the lines of treating kid #2 differently than kid #1 just because I wasn't around when kid #1 was born (see this for an explanation). As an example, just today, a colleague of mine was asking about BioMom and I's respective time off once Itsy comes out (we're very lucky, I have six weeks off which we'll enjoy together, followed by BioMom being off until May-ish, after which I'll take the summer and fall off). When I said that I'd be back at school in the spring she pondered for a moment and followed up with something to the effect of 'I suspect that you'll fall in love with this baby and not want to leave it!' I dunno why that bothers me so. Of course I'll fall in love with Itsy (I think I have already and all I've seen so far are its Alien-like punches through BioMom's belly and a bi-monthly heatbeat!), but it feels somehow that I will be less willing to leave Itsy than the FYO.

Its weird on the other hand because I am simply not attached to the idea of ownership generally, and particularly over the brood. Just to be clear, if you're wondering, it will be "Itsy [BioMom & FYO's Last Name]." In fact, I have to say that I sort of LIKE the fact that I have a different last name. It clarifies, in my mind, that they are separate people. Independent.

I am not opposed to changing my own name, or even hyphenating it. When I express this, I often get a nod of approval from these curious friends, which also strikes me as odd. Or the suggestion that we all hyphenate our names.

Ultimately, I wonder why? Why change at all? Why hyphenate and add to the already challenging minutia of the day-to-day?

I could argue that as a lesbian family, taking the traditional route is a countercultural act. I have friends that share each other's names and I think it is a wonderful act of committment.

I suspect, too, that it makes life easier in some ways to just have the same name.

What I really wonder about though, is all of the social baggage that people put on a name. So much so, that they feel like they can comment on our personal choices.

Fascinating.

Note To Self

Don't ask a classroom full of 19 year olds an open-ended question like this:

Can you think of any good that is NOT characteristed by the law of diminishing marginal utility.

Or. . . DO!

And You Can Be My Cowgirl

Pizza

I was reading a section from Minnesota Monthly to BioMom the other day when the FYO overheard (I didn't know she was listening).

Me: Hey [BioMom], listen to this! '[S-E-X] is like pizza. When it's good, it's really good. When it's bad, it's still pretty good. Unless anchovies are involved.'

The FYO from some distant room: That's not true!

Me: How do YOU know?

FYO: I've TRIED it!

Me: You BETTER NOT have!

Bellies

All Roads Lead to Dick

From the Washington Post:

Fitzgerald has looked closely not only at the possible crimes, but also the context in which they would have been committed. This search, say lawyers in the case, has provided him a rare, glimpse into the White House effort to justify the Iraq war and rebut its critics.

The trail has often led to Cheney's office, which officials describe as ground zero in the effort to promote, execute and defend the Iraq war and the campaign to convince Americans and the world that Saddam Hussein had amassed a stockpile of the most dangerous kinds of weapons. According to the report in yesterday's Times, the investigation also led to Cheney himself.

Blink and Teaching

We recently had to go through our annual process of assigning "merit" to the faculty members of our department.

In the category of teaching, I got second to last in our department.

This should, really, be interpreted as last as one guy refuses to even fill out the form.

So, last it is.

This is a tedious process in which we all fill out a form that details all of our research, teaching, and service activities for the previous year. The research and service parts are simple for different reasons. For research, you get a high score if you've published an article (preferably after having gone through a double-blind peer-reviewed process toward publication in a high-ranking journal in the field as opposed to a book chapter). For service, we all basically do too much, so the default is usually the maximum score. For unusual service (meaning something that we don't see regularly), one needs to document what they have done and how it has benefited the department, college, university, community or profession.

Documenting our teaching efforts is an altogether different ballgame. How, for example, does one demonstrate effective teaching? There is no analogous peer-reviewed process that one goes through to demonstrate techniques, efforts, attempts, new ideas, effectiveness, etc. At our university, each professor has students fill out student evaluation forms that differ across departments. While such information can be informative at identifying trends, on its own, it is highly problematic and a quite extensive literature has grown out of identifying the strengths and weaknesses of using such a measure to evaluate teaching effectiveness.

Our department, thanks to two colleagues' efforts in particular, has evolved into using a tripartite system of teaching evaluation: student reviews, peer reviews and self-review.

This is great in theory.

The biggest positive consequence of this method is that it gets us away from relying on one single method of evaluation which is usually gets boiled down to some relatively capricious and one-dimensional number gathered from the student evaluations.

The problem is that the relatively small committee that assigns merit (which, by the way translates into salary increases that literally cannot even justify the amount of time that four Ph.D.s spend reviewing the files each year, let alone the effort required to fill out the paperwork) assigns different weights on each of the three teaching categories. So, for example, one individual might wholly believe in the ability of students to correctly evaluate their professor's effectiveness and, therefore, place 80% of his/her weight on that measure.

At the other extreme, one's assessment of oneself can be overly weighted by a member of the committee. An individual could spend an inordinate amount of time and effort gathering and interpreting data on assessing his/her teaching and its effect on students. This is, mind you, on top of regular assignments and exams that are meant to evaluate student learning. Furthermore, the merit process not only encourages professors to do this during the year, it also encourages extensive documentation during the merit process.

I have always been suspicious of this sort of activity. It reeks of Shakespearean protesting a bit too much. But now, after reading the book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcom Gladwell, I have evidence that not only is such documentation is over-the-top, it also may not necessarily contribute to teaching effectiveness.

According to Gladwell, [a]llowing people to operate without having to explain themselves constantly . . . enables rapid cognition.

And paraphrasing from Blink:

Here is a simple example of this. Picture in your mind the face of the waitress or waiter who served you the last time you ate at a restaurant. Or the person who sat next to you on the bus today. Any stranger whom you've seen recently will do.

Now, could you recognize this person in a police lineup? I suspect you could. Recognizing someone's face is a classic example of unconscious cognition. We don't have to think about it. Faces just pop into our minds.

But suppose I were to ask you to take a pen and paper and write down in as much detail as you can what your person looks like. Describe her face. What color was her hair? What was she wearing? Was she wearing any jewelry? You won't believe this, but after attempting to describe the face, you'll have difficulty doing the same task you did before: recognizing that person in a police lineup.

This is because the act of describing the face has the effect of impairing your otherwise effortless ability to subsequently recognize that face.

The psychologist Jonathan W. Schooler who pioneered research on this effect calls it "verbal overshadowing." (See also, this paper). Your brain has a part, the left hemisphere, that thinks in words and a part, the right hemisphere, that thinks in pictures. And what happened when you described the face in words, was that your actual visual memory was displaced.

Thinking bumped your memory from the right to the left hemisphere. When it comes to describing the face, you relied on the memory of what you said you saw, not what you remember you saw.

The problem is that with faces, we're better at visual than verbal description.

If I showed you a picture of Marylyn Monroe or Albert Einstein you'd recognize it instantly. But could you accurately describe the picture? If you wrote a paragraph describing how Marilyn Monroe or Albert Einstein looked, would I even know what you were talking about?

We all have an instinctive memory for faces but by forcing you to verbalize that memory, to explain yourself, I separate you from those instincts.

Schooler has shown that the implications of verbal overshadowing carry over to how we solve broader problems. For example, look at the following "insight puzzle": A giant inverted steel pyramid is perfectly balanced on its point. Any movement of the pyramid will topple it over. Under the pyramid's tip is a $1000 bill. How do you remove the bill without disturbing the pyramid?

This is an example of an insight puzzle. The only way to get answer is if it comes to you suddenly, like in the blink of an eye.

One study found that people who were asked to explain themselves in the process of finding solutions to other insight puzzled solved 30% fewer problems than people who were not asked to explain themselves.

In short, when you right down your thoughts, your chances of having the flashes of insight you need, in order to come up with a solution, are significantly impaired. Just like the act describing the face of the waitress made you unable to pick her out of a police lineup.

In the cases of logic problems, explaining yourself will not have the same effect. Explaining yourself may even help solve the problem or others like it.

Problems that require a flash of insight operate by different rules. "It's the same kind of paralysis through analysis you find in sports contexts," Schooler said. When you start becoming reflective about the process, it undermines the ability. You lose the flow. There are certain kinds of fluid, intuitive, nonverbal kinds of experience that are vulnerable to this process. As human beings, we are capable of extraordinary leaps of insight and instinct. We can hold a face in memory, we can solve a puzzle in the blink of an eye. All these abilities are incredibly fragile. Insight is not a light bulb that goes off in our heads. It's a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.

For me, teaching is an activity that requires this "flash of insight." Last year I was involved in a project on campus called the "Lesson Study Project" or LSP for short. In the project a group of us chose one particular idea that seemed to be problematic for our introductory students. We then attempted to dissect the lesson to find out what, exactly, we wanted students to glean from it and then we, as a group, created a pedagogical strategy to get at this problem in the lesson. The LSP requirements included assessment, so we collected pre and post tests from the students in treatment and control groups to see if our unique intervention had any real learning consequences.

Last year we chose a lesson on international trade. A recent article (See William Poole's speech here) claimed that the notion of free trade was problematic because it simultaneously garnered nearly full acceptance on the behalf of professional economists (a rarity among followers of the dismal science) and less than a majority of support among the general public. We suspected that students, while appreciative of the increased consumption benefits associated with trade, were nonplussed about the subject when it comes to production efficiency aspects, and even anti-trade when they realize that their dad may have lost his job due to outsourcing.

Using a combination of a class experiment and case studies, our goal was to get students to see the grey areas. To recognize that such a policy could generate winners and losers and that there were short-run and long-run effects to be discerned.

Part of the process is to have yourself videotaped and to have another LSP member come to your class and take notes on the pedagogical strategy. After having seen my course, in addition to many very helpful constructive comments, all three of the other LSP members were very impressed by the questions that I posed to the class and the instinctive changes I made to augment the trade experiment.

Their first suggestion along these lines? Write it down! Document it! Be more formal about it!

In all honesty, I believe that were I to actually write some of those comments down, and attempt to replicate the same situation in next semester's class, that the spark will have died a slow death. With a script, I'd be lost in the classroom and I'm sure the students would be bored to tears. It would be like Taylorism for teachers.

It is one thing to encourage professors to try new things and to try to see if the new things worked. Its another to sit down and write about it. Document it. One of the main problems we had in last year's LSP is that the instruments we used to measure the effects of the technique were relatively anachronistic. How can you measure the learning consequences of a new technique using old questions? Now we're down a road that I am simply unqualified to drive; developing not only new pedagogical techniques, but also corresponding assessment tools. And let's just say that I refuse to grade interpretive dance.

That is not to say that all documentation is bad documentation. I have journaled after classes and found it to be helpful. But the most successful classroom experiences I have had are when I trust myself, my knowledge, my experience, and my intuition.

Of course, this is scary for a university. There are some teachers that can't be trusted, I suppose. And one way to get at them is to have them document their classroom like an obsessed archivist. To document each and every change and measure their effects.

The problem, identified I think correctly by Gadwell, is twofold. First, just because you measure something, doesn't mean its accurate or even that it was correctly measured for that matter. Second, the act of measuring and documenting itself squashes out the flashes of instinct, which would be the last thing you want to happen in the classroom.

So, when it comes to taking the time to fill out the merit form next year and document all of the tweaks I made to my classes this year, I will hopefully have the guts to do what I believe would better serve my students: read the newspaper instead.

Gunflint Patterns

Big Sister Class

Tonight we took the FYO to a little class at the hospital where she could see where BioMom will be, and where she could learn a little about how to care for a baby. There were about 15 other families there, mainly with two-year-olds. The pregnant women were all about as far along as BioMom and it felt like I was in a room full of Weeble-Wobbles.

I'd Give Up a Seat For You Anytime, Rosa

Rosa Parks Dies At 92.

Happy Birthday Quinn!!

Making Itsy

I just heard about the film "Making Grace" about a lesbian couple in their attempts at fertilization. Think it'll come to the Lagoon?