Month February 2015

Let’s name names

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Let’s name names

I have long been fascinated with memory. Thirty years ago (or was it longer than that?) I wrote a piece about forgetfulness, foreshadowing my current disability by decades. Maybe, it was all those knocks to the head I suffered as a young tomboy with more energy than grace, when I repeatedly fell off my bike, or ran into walls, or slipped on the ice, or got knocked out in some touch football game with boys twice my size. I did know enough algebra and physics to understand that other bodies carried more mass and volume than I did and that a two hundred and fifty pound boy could easily fling a 105 lb. girl into the trees with a simple wave of a big paddle-shaped hand. In any case, this memory loss falls hard upon me as I take my place at the top of the pyramid, not the class pyramid. No, just the little hierarchy and pecking order in my job and in my family. There is no one left to take charge but me. My job as a professor puts me right in the crosshairs of the slings and arrows of the young and the impatient.

As a college professor, I am in the classroom with seventy or more new students each semester. Research shows that this is important that you remember their students’ names as soon as possible even they still don’t know yours at the end of the year. So, I pledge to myself that I will learn their names as soon as I can. Not only for courtesy’s sake, but so that I can call on them even when they don’t want to be called on. Maybe, as they are in the middle of imagining eating a nice juicy burger for lunch or thinking about taking a nap or just about to grab their smart phone to distract them from what’s going on in the classroom. So, names are important to me, as well. It is embarrassing to refer to them by other descriptors like, “You there. Yes, you—the young woman who’s paying attention to me. Yes, nod your head. Good. Please, poke the student next to you and ask her to climb back into the classroom. That’s right! Thanks.”

Last week, two weeks into the term, I called on two students using wrong names. The class thought this was very funny. Not like joke-funny, more like, “we are so embarrassed for YOU” funny. Like roll-your-eyes-funny. I quickly recovered and pulled their correct names out of memory. (I called Kristin “Karen” and Katie “Kristin”—I didn’t think that so bad. Bad would have been calling Kristen “Kenneth” and calling Katie “Kim Kardashian.”) My brain was at least in the correct mnemonic space. There are semesters when I have had three young men in my class—all named Kyle, all about 5’ 10”, all wearing campus gear, all dark haired with a little beard, all in the back row. How to keep them separate in my mind?

More challenging is another case. I have a girl (Madison) in my introductory sociology class who wants to be called Steve because another girl named Mariah wants to be called Monica. She was explaining to another student that Mariah is her slave name; she wanted me to accommodate her request, which led to a series of similar requests by other students. Give them an inch on issues like this and pretty soon, they all want to be called Harry Potter, and then you really can’t figure out who deserves which grades because Harry has earned A’s, B’s, C’s and F’s on his exam.

So, to address this problem with learning student names, I am thinking perhaps, that I should ditch their given names and tag these students myself using my own assessment of their qualities and my own creative spin on their characters. What is nice about this scheme is that these names can be used each semester since from one semester to the next, there’s quite a bit of consistency in their behaviors and appearance.

For that student who keeps looking out the window,

windowatcher  ‘the boy who turns to the light,’

 

 

For the boy who wears flip flops in the winter,

sandals‘the boy whose feet don’t freeze,’

 

 

For the girl who complains each time I give an assignment, ‘the girl who whines without rest,’

For the boy whose baseball cap is way too big, ‘the boy with hat like a tent,’

For the third boy who is named Kyle in my class (see the discussion above) ‘the one who is named like the other two,’

For the boy who is always late, ‘he who arrives on the tortoise,

For the boy who nods off in class, ‘the  one for whom sleeps comes during lectures’

sleepingstudent

For the girl who never reads the material and seems satisfied to pretend she has by making up answers that are wrong, ‘the storyteller with the false tongue,’

 

For the girl who brings neither book, nor paper nor pen to class, ‘she who bets on hope,’

clueless_girl__open__by_shiraikimizuno-d4x9bbm

For the boy with longish hair and big dimples, who seems always to be in the company of

lazyguythree beautiful young girls who seem to do all his work in class,

‘the coed whisperer,’

 

For the young woman in the first row who keeps texting during class despite my warnings and harsh looks ‘she who raises my blood pressure’

And for the male athletes who are too big for the classroom furniture, ‘the boys whose knees climb the desks,’

little chair

Also in class are

‘yawning boy,’ ‘the girl with jewels in her nose,’ and ‘shiny blue nails.’

And, because of divine intervention and good luck, each semester, in my classroom, I find my favorite student, ‘the girl who smiles at the wit of her elders.’

 

 

 

 

The canary in the classroom

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The canary in the classroom

Every January, at the start of the spring semester on college campuses, faculty members receive advance notice of impending doom. There will be flu; there will be colds; there will be outbreaks of strep throat; there may be plagues. One year, there was even a panic about swine or bird flu, I think it was. And, there was also the SARS scare, which pushed some campuses to bar students from Asia from their summer programs. At one point, there was a proposal circulating that we should not meet with those germy students at all and, if we did, we were not to accept any assignments from them in person. Don’t handle anything that they have handled, the administration suggested. I shrugged my shoulders. I have long figured out that with over fifteen years of teaching under my belt, that I most likely have the immune response of the well-traveled doctors from Medicine Sans Frontiers. Perhaps, I am too careless. Heck, I don’t even completely disinfect all my students by spraying them with a steady mist of Lysol; nor do I pass around a bottle of Purell before class, asking that students “disinfect into” my classes. I just let things lie where do they and hope for the best.

Given all that, however, I do take some precautions. I cling to the front of the classroom, walking along a tight line there as if I am perched on the edge of a skyscraper. I don’t hug any students until graduation in May. I don’t meet with students individually in my office; I hold meetings across campus on a bench where students are downwind from me. I arrange these meetings when the weather forecast calls for a strong ocean-driven wind behind me.

However, despite our best efforts, there are dangers that faculty members face no matter how careful we are. There seems to be an ineffable law of Murphys’ that predicts that students with the lowest immunity levels will sit in the front row. There are the sneezing, coughing, and sleeping students wthho a few days into the semester present you with a note that they have mononucleosis, which they inform you, as if you’ve never encountered it before, is very contagious. They follow that with a big achy swallow and a giant cough. They are eager to shake hands and bid you farewell. Sometimes, they tell you they don’t when they will ever be able to return to class. Can you email them to let them know if they miss anything in class?

By the time the class next meets, the students who were sitting near the first sick students are sending emails. They have fallen to the disease or something like it. Their best writing of the semester is contained in these detailed emails where I learn all about their symptoms and what their mother thinks they have and what they should do. I do believe these emails sparked the movement to electronic medical records. That day in class I am noticing that so many students are sneezing and coughing from all areas of the classroom that it sounds like a syncopated session of allergy-prone bullfrogs on a warm summer night. The noise is so distracting that my thoughts move from my lecture to thinking about how I should really apply to the CDC for a research grant. I am thinking of an investigational grant titled “Tracking the velocity, vectors and distancecanary-1 traveled by coughs, sneezes and other respiratory effluvia expelled by students in the direction of professors in confined spaces during high-threat conditions” Actually, that sounds like a pretty fundable proposal.

On my more cynical days, I think that perhaps, the administration is already conducting research to see how faculty members survive conditions of constant exposure to germ-bearing studentshttps://professorenos.wordpress.com/wp-admin/media-upload.php?post_id=66&type=image&TB_iframe=1. They may already be collecting data. It seems that we are the ideal sentinel cases. Google should be monitoring our emails to see what doctors’ notes and emails we are getting reveal about student absences (as if they are not already). These are wonderful experimental conditions—millions of students getting little sleep, drinking to excess (some not all), cavorting with uncounted others, traveling here and there, vaccinated and not—really, this could be a perfect storm. How perfectly innocent victims like faculty members survive in these settings must be a matter of the most serious public health concerns.

 

Are you there, Fitbit? It’s Me, Sandra

I don’t mark my birthdays, even the big ones, with any élan or flash but I do note other occasions like anniversaries of when I met my partner or when I joined VISTA or when my parents passed away. One event that I have recently celebrated was the first anniversary with my Fitbit. We have been together for one year; it has been a wonderful relationship—a little one-sided but I think I speak for both of us when I come to this conclusion.

simple.b-cssdisabled-png.h4eb3e8d9303ef6871a4973b19fa8ad11.packI have the Zip model which tracks your steps like a pedometer, translates those into miles and keeps a calorie count which has nothing to do with how much you eat just whether another day has dawned on the planet so every day my calorie count is about the same whether I have feasted on an oversize Thanksgiving meal or have fasted to protest the colonialist travesty which is Thanksgiving.

More sophisticated tools can do all of this, of course, but I worry that the insurance companies are capturing all this information and my lazy napping days are being recorded in some big file and when I claim to be an active senior citizen, the Fitbit may betray me. Maybe, I am just a bit paranoid. Last week, the NSA came to my house to ask me I was walking by that house on Broad Street where someone who was binge watching Homeland the week before. Did I suspect anything? I guess some patterns of TV watching are significantly suspicious to those paid to be worrying on our behalf.

The Fitbit is truly interested in our welfare, I suppose. It imposes a ruthless regimen; it wants you to take10, 000 steps a day. It doesn’t care if you do this at one mile per hour or twelve. It doesn’t matter if you do this in a meditative trance or if you are breaking a world record for power walking. 10,000 steps is 10;000 steps to the Fitbit. You can imagine my surprise when I received my annual report and found I had walked over two and a half million steps or 1100 miles.   If I had been more strategic, all these steps could have taken me from my home in Rhode Island to St. John’s, New Brunswick in Canada (where I have a friend actually) instead of just around my block and across campus to teach over and over again. Now that I see all those steps taken in such a small space, I feel I lack ambition and big thinking.

The Fitbit also reported that my most active day of the year was in mid-March (I think I was on vacation or doing a stress test at the doctors) and the least active day was at the end of January when I hospitalized. I feel that I owe the Fitbit an explanation about my activity levels: I don’t want it to be unnecessarily worrying or thinking that somehow the Fitbit is at fault. I do worry that if I walk 10,000 steps every day that eventually the Fitbit will want more from me and I am afraid to disappoint it. At age 65, I am wondering how to calculate how far I have walked all my life without the Fitbit calculating my steps and thinking about some serious sitting down for a while, except that the Fitbit has other plans for me.

Like so many of us, the Fitbit can be distracted and restless. I come back after a hard run on the treadmill and it chirps, just 3,000 steps to go to reach your target. At 11:00 p.m. undressing for bed, it reminds me, just 2603 steps to go. Seriously? Can you tell that I have my pajamas on, Fitbit? Where the heck I am going to walk in the next hour, around my bed, like a dog spinning in circles before he lies down? Are even if that is the best possible strategy to log on steps, do we really want to encourage that sort of behavior?

I mean I understand the technology and I understand the principles of behavior management here as well. I am all for it. I like to be reminded but I don’t like to be nagged. This is the reason why we ask Fitbit to keep track of our steps and not our spouses. With the success of Fitbit, I have thought of several other possible applications. In this “innovate or die” culture, I want to be at the cutting edge. So, here are my suggestions for the next generation of Fitbit-like devices.

 

Fit-to-be-with-bit

This little device would indicate to the wearer that they are such a bad mood that they ought to stay in their room. Maybe meditate or medicate (depending on one’s treatment philosophy.)

th-2

This could be done with a little jolt or vibration or maybe a whining noise that would grow louder as the wearer nears others. Better yet, it would wail if the provoker of that bad mood comes into the room, asking what’s for dinner. It is the sort of gift you want to give others actually but that would need to be done carefully.

 

Throw-a-fit-bit (or more commonly known, as Snit-bit)

There is a school of thought that proposes we are spending entirely too much time on our screens. This app directly addresses this issue. Throw-a-fit bit allows us to take the little device and when we are mad enough to toss it wherever you’d like. Of course, as we’d tell our children, don’t hurl this in the direction of innocent others.

th-3This app will measure the length and force of your throw and mark the where the device lands when you toss it so you can find it and throw it again, if you would like. Thanks to a sophisticated algorithm, the app reports how angry you are based on projectile velocity and force and calculates how this compares to your records last week when your partner was such a jerk about the holidays. It also manages chance encounters with other toss throw-a-fits so that you and another user don’t fight over whose device belongs to whom.

 Nitwit-bit

Designed especially for those of us who are susceptible to whacky ideas and get-rich-quick or reversing-aging scams, this app is the perfect complement to late night TV watching or to spending time with your sketchy in-laws.  idiots-motivational-posterFor this to work successfully, all you have to do is send those emails and phone calls you get from Nigerian princes, Ukrainian marriage brokers, penis enlargers, your brother-in-law and other questionable sources to this site, and the app will separate out the wheat from the scams. If, however, there is a great idea among the charlatan proposed offer, Nitwit-bit will take a small percentage of the killing you will make. The app does not work with proposals made by politicians, which brings to the next app, Mittbit.

Mittbit

For every one of us on the planet, we reach a point where our civic responsibility to be an informed citizen eventually drives us to drink and worse. Here is where MittBit comes in. Based on your TV viewing habits, your age and gender, whether you have stickers on your car bumper, your voting record, your GI (gullibility index), your AFATT score (All Fox All The Time news watching)

th-1which measures how welcome you are to new ideas, the MittBit blocks all messages that it knows you will ignore because you have heard them for a million times, because the message is so patently a lie or because there is no way that this message will do anything to advance world peace. In other words, the Mittbit assures that you won’t change your conviction the world is made up of givers and takers and that you are in the first group and detest the second.

Sitbit

Sitbit is perhaps the perfect app for the meditation set. A few times a day, this app would remind you that you haven’t given an iota of thought or sliver of attention to the cosmic truths of the universe, to the wonder that is you. Once you activate Sitbit, it will start breathing deeply. It will keep this up, growing louder and louder until you join in. If you begin to masitbitimageke your way quickly to Starbucks for a three shots of espresso and a RedBull, it will stop you dead (not exactly dead) in your tracks by sending out a little digital shock. Sitbit wants you to relax, to calm down, not speed up. It wants you to do less, not more. Other features of the Sitbit include the Stress Manager which shuts down all your other apps and communications and erases contacts and emails that seem to be troubling to you. Sitbit can also be placed in trance mode inducing hypnotic tones, new age music and a simulated scent of those gauzy Indian shops wherever thing smells like the shop owners are trying to mask the smell of marijuana.

 Quitbit

Most of us have habits we want to dump (cigarettes, nail biting, singing out loud when we don’t mean to, swearing in front of our saintly grandmother.) Many of us have partners we need to leave (discretion leaves this point undeveloped.) Quitbit is the perfect app. It tells us when things should end by carefully listening to our conversations on the phone, scanning our photos, reviewing our texts and considering our Facebook postings and friends. And, not only does it understand when the end should be near, its helps hasten that end. It quitimageposts things for you, like announcing the end of a relationship. It will clean up your language and make it impossible for you to pay for another bottle of vodka with your credit or debit card. It will play the least popular song on iTunes at full volume if it finds you lighting up, even if you are in a non-smoking area.

As the app becomes more popular, it will identify for you, people in your circle of friends and contacts who are dying to dump you as well. It will also find people who will pay you to quit your lousy habits. A note of caution: It offers no help at all when you find yourself in a situation like the lovers in Broke Back Mountain, when Jack said. “I wish I knew how to quit you, Ennis.” The Quit Bit is clearly outmatched here.

Nitpickbit

For several years, human resource departments have offered a half-day workshop called something like, “Dealing with Difficult People.” It was quite a daring offering. Suppose the most difficult person in the company showed up for this workshop along with all of his hapless victims? You can also imagine that this person, let’s call him Ernest, found everyone else in the office immeasurably dull-witted and thin-skinned. He found this as difficult as other people found him. A situation like this leads to my final idea.

nitwitNitpickbit reminds that we are constantly driving other people (most likely our partners and other family members) crazy by our need to make things perfectly clear and orderly. Those of us who have a bit more power over others are especially prone to this behavior, as are older siblings. The Nitpickbit can be adjusted for several occasions and multiple relationships. For example, you may notice that you have brought to husband’s attention that his favorite shirt is missing two buttons and has stained underarms for about 100 times. Or you may have corrected your adult child’s use of ‘irregardless’ on many occasions in speech and writing. (Irregardless is not really a word, the Oxford dictionary says so; no matter how often George Bush says it in a speech and no matter if that child has an MFA from a fine university.)

Or you may grow frustrated at hearing the same tedious story from your best friend about the challenges of filling a prescription over the phone from someone she swears is a deaf Pakistani robot. Every time she tells this story, you remind her that she has already related this remarkable tale. After years of this careful guidance on your part, you finally reach the apt conclusion that none of this nagging does any good. Your husband has put that old shirt in his private safety deposit box to keep your hands off it. Your child refuses to speak with you except in monosyllabic phases. Even news about your grandchildren arrives in an Instagram message with an inscrutable text. And, your best friend accuses you of trying to put her in an Alzheimer’s unit with all your harping about her memory.

Nitpickbit addresses all of these issues. It disables your brain’s auto-correct function; it lets things be. It puts a smile on your face, no matter how untidy, unkempt, unswept, or uninformed your family and friends are. It makes you, in many respects, a much more pleasant person to be around, although somewhat of a dimwit. Like the Fit-to-be-with-bit, you may want to think carefully about gifting this app to others.

All the apps that fit-bit

In the new economy, we are all supposed to be our own creative geniuses. We are supposed to be buddying up with personal coaches and developing a life plan. We are urged to self-publish, grow our own food, be our own person, be hypnotized by our own mantra. So, I see clearly that I cannot in good conscience just suggest these as good ideas without developing them myself. I need to do some market research, code and test these apps, sell them on the App store and see how much money I can make.  I need to find an App to help me with all that.

Are you there, Fitbit? It’s Me, Sandra

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Walk like a woman, teach like a man

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Walk like a woman, teach like a man

By some accounts, college professors are among the most respected professionals. Compared to lawyers, we do pretty well; compared to hedge managers, we are closer to the saints. That is all to the good. With decades of training and not much glamor, unless you are an academic superstar celebrity, the college teaching profession is an honorable way to change lives and make a relatively decent living (unless you are an adjunct professor.) Teaching, as many report, is an art and a science. Any of us who teach know that there are moments that zing in the classroom and others that moan. But what many of us don’t understand is that the students in the classroom have huge influence on the teaching and learning that is done. Although an audience of dolts doesn’t influence whether the film that is being shone is brilliant or inane, a classroom full of half-tuned in disengaged students can make all the difference in the world in the tone and content of what goes in the classroom setting. In other words, what students bring to the classroom in terms of attitudes, beliefs and expectations matter a great deal.

In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell reports on an experiment conducted in 1993 by psychologists Ambady & Rosenthal on the impact of first impressions of college professors on student evaluations at the end of the semester. The students were shown a ten second clip of a professor teaching a class and asked to evaluate their effectiveness. The sound was muted. Those ratings correlated highly with the end of the semester rankings of students who had actually had the professor in class. Even when the clips were shortened to five seconds, the correlations between the immediate impressions of the professor and those earned after an entire semester of exposure to the professor were unexpectedly high.

This suggests that after the first five seconds of interaction, the battle is over. Either we are effective or we should sit the semester out, perhaps conceding the class time to other activities.

As a professor, I often think about crafting each lecture, with points carefully drawn to enhance learning objectives, to align my work with that of the mission of the university, and to advance the progress not only of Western civilization but of all the other cultures and communities we now have incorporated into our curriculum. So, imagining that a lot Enos_Oct07_12 revof that work done during the fourteen-week semester may be for naught makes me truly reconsider my career. Unless, of course, I can make those first five seconds especially charming and, well, effective. Watching the Grammies may help or maybe appropriating an attention grabber from the halftime the Super Bowl or better yet, Shark Tank when those earnest entrepreneurs make their pitch to their potential backers.

In any case, a recent article in the New York Times brings additional light to this subject. Benjamin Schmidt, professor of history at Northwestern University, examined fourteen million student reviews of professor on Rate My Professor. On this site, students write descriptive comments on professors. These are by no means a scientifically designed sample. It could be argued that students who go to the trouble of filing reports on the site are either very happy with their professors or quite the opposite. Because students can write whatever they want, “Professor Brown reminds me of a jellyfish—bland but dangerous when poked” or “Like lemonade on a hot summer’s day, Professor West is a brilliant and satisfying answer to what could have been an awful course.” And because students can use whatever descriptors they want, a resourceful researcher can try to make sense of these comments to discern interesting patterns. Once you have fourteen million responses, something interesting is certain to surface.

Schmidt has not only published his research, he has created an interactive chart displaying how these descriptors break down by department and gender. The level of detail is amazingly disorienting. For instance, you can enter “funny” and see not only which disciplines are rated by students as most funny but also whether students are more likely to label men or women with that value. Across all disciplines, men are more likely than women to be described as brilliant. Women are more likely to be described as bossy, disorganized, annoying and nice than as men. The descriptors for men focus more on skills; those assigned to women aim at personality.

Playing with the interactive chart yields some interesting results. As shown the Times’ article, searching for genius display music at the top with criminal justice at the bottom with men far out distancing women on this measure. My own discipline of sociology is close to the bottom on the genius scale. On the other hand, searching for funny finds psychology at the top followed closely by languages with sociology among the top five. Still here, men are far out front. The least funny professors are the engineers, the computer scientists and the accountants. Sociology and psychology are the top disciplines when the term “interesting” is used with very small differences between men and women. Math and chemistry are at the bottom of this list. Like the overall finding, women professors are more likely to be described as moody. The fine arts (the tortured woman artist?), music and communication studies top the moody list while the political scientists, philosophers (really?) and physicists are at the bottom of the list.

Although not widely reported, men are much more likely to be described as goofy with music and science professors heading the top of this list. Men are reported to be a lot goofier than are women by the students. At the bottom of the goofy hierarchy are the professors of criminal justice, business and accounting. I am not certain if “goofy” is a term of endearment. Maybe, the students mean pleasantly disorganized, forgetful and spaced out which in men is charming and in women is seen as annoying and disorganized. The goofy professor teamed with the right faculty wife may be quite the prize.

So, armed with the information about the importance of first five seconds of the semester and the findings from the Rate My Professor analysis, I will swear to move into new semester by introducing myself this way.

 Good morning, class. My name is Professor Enos. (Enter the marching band and the cheerleaders.) This sociology class will be unlike any other class you have taken (Beyoncé’s If You Like It, Put a Ring on It video displayed on every wall of the classroom.) Although I appear to be a woman, I will be teaching like a man—brilliant, commanding, funny, goofy. Questions? Comments?

 That should do it.

References used

Ambady, Nalini and Robert Rosenthal. 1993. Half a Minute: Predicting Teacher Evaluations from Thin Slices of Nonverbal Behavior and Physical Attractiveness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64(3): 431-441.

Gladwell, Malcolm. 2005. Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking. New York. Little, Brown.

Miller, Claire Cain. Is the Professor Bossy or Brilliant? Much Depends on Gender. New York Times, February 6, 2015

http://nyti.ms/1EN9iFA

Link to Benjamin Schmidt’s interactive chart

http://benschmidt.org/profGender/