Its not as easy as it looks

There are some jobs that are typically recognized as difficult. Most people, for example, probably don’t think that they could walk into an operating room and be a successful surgeon. Others, however, are often assumed to be easy. Teaching, for example, is something that many people assume they could be successful at. I’ve also seen musicians criticize those who make electronic music because they are “just pushing buttons.” As with teachers and electronic music artists, assuming that somebody has an easy job devalues the work that they do.  Once in a while, though, people have the opportunity to try something that others make look easy, discovering that it is, in fact, rather difficult.

Enter Super Mario Maker.

Super Mario Maker is a videogame for Nintendo’s Wii U game console. In the game, players are able to create their own Super Mario Bros. levels, share those levels, and play levels created by others. In reviewing the game, Sean Buckley of Engadget summed up his experience nicely, stating:

It didn’t make any sense. I’d dreamed about making Nintendo games since I was 6 years old, but when the company gave me the chance to prove a game design genius lived under my skin, I flopped. It was then that a shocking and heartbreaking realization washed over me: I hate making video games.

My ego didn’t take this realization well. As both a hobbyist gamer and a journalist that covers games, I’ve always humored the little voice in the back of my head that said, “I could do this if I wanted. I could make games.” No, Super Mario Maker has shown me, I can’t — not really. Yes, technically I can construct a stage from set pieces I’ve seen in other Mario games, but I’m not really creating anything. My by-the-numbers Mario levels (a few power-ups to start, some pipes to leap over, maybe a Hammer brother or two and a flagpole at the end) feel more like light plagiarism than original content. Why do I suck at this so much?

Michael Thomsen at the Washington Post focused on how bad others are at creating Super Mario levels, arguing:

“Super Mario Maker” is a bad comedy. Released in coordination with the 30-year anniversary of “Super Mario Bros.,” it indulges players in the fantasy that they’d be good at making video game levels. This sort of self-deception has become common in the age of digital consumption, and while there’s something utopian in “Super Mario Maker’s” appeals to community participation and sharing, the game quickly collapses into a scratch sheet of horrible ideas and levels you’ll regret having played. It’s a tool for the mass production of cultural refuse, single-use distractions that fail to replicate the spirit of the original.

So it turns out that the people who have been making the Super Mario Bros. games all these years actually had talents and skills that most of us don’t have. I think this is great! I wish that we could have other opportunities to try what people do in a simplified manner. Imagine Super Teacher Maker where surgeons are given seven hours in a room with 25 eight year olds and asked to teach them math, or Super EDM Maker where a guitar player (or, better yet, a singer!) is given a computer and asked to create music. Maybe then we would start to recognize that everybody has hard jobs, even if our jobs are hard in different ways.

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Volkswagen’s cheating lessons

In 2015, three teachers in Atlanta were convicted of changing student answers on standardized tests and sentenced to seven three years in prison, Volkswagen admitted to programming engines to run differently during emissions tests than in daily use and set aside billions of dollars to deal with the situation, and countless students across the country cheated on exams. Although the scope and consequences of these actions vary widely, James Lang’s 2013 book Cheating Lessons suggests that they have similar origins. On page 35, Lang lists the “four features of a learning or competing environment that may pressure individuals into cheating,” including:

1. An emphasis on performance
2. High stakes riding on the outcome
3. An extrinsic motivation for success
4. A low expectation of success

In Volkswagen’s case, their diesel engines since 2009 have emitted between 10 and 40 times the nitrous oxide allowed by law when being used normally. These cheats date back to 2007, when VW’s CEO set the goal of surpassing Toyota as the world’s largest automaker, pressuring employees to produce the larger, more powerful cars that Americans like while also increasing fuel economy to meet more stringent standards. VW has also maintained that executives did not know about the cheating, blaming it on the individual actions (however unlikely) of engineers.

For college students, Lang distinguishes between “mastery” and “performance” orientations. In VW’s case, there was intense pressure to meet the CEO’s goals (compared, perhaps, to improving engine technology for its own sake). This pressure also involved high stakes. Engineers who could not produce the products promised by the CEO may have found their jobs in danger. This was also an extrinsic motivation that must have, in the eyes of the engineers, seemed impossible to achieve (better fuel economy is typically associated with smaller, less powerful cars, which is why European countries with higher gas prices are often offered a wider range of lower-powered engines than Americans can choose from when shopping for a car). The same factors were at play in Atlanta, where an emphasis on performance (increasing test scores) combined with high stakes (job loss and/or school restructuring), extrinsic motivation, and a low expectation of success that led educators to change test answers. (Michelle Rhee’s time as Chancellor of Washington D.C.’s schools is similarly associated with extremely high stakes and accusations of cheating.)

Most college professors cannot do anything about VW or high school cheating scandals (even if we would like to reduce the reliance on standardized tests!) but we can work to prevent these factors from prevailing in our classrooms. James argues that by emphasizing mastery rather than performance, providing a wide range of exams and assignments rather than just a few heavily-weighted course requirements, reducing external pressure on students from parents, and communicating our belief that students can succeed we can create environments that will reduce cheating more than simply offering multiple exam forms or using assigned seating arrangements.

Some of these are easier than others, but I think that the examination of the context in which college learning and assessment takes place is really important in discussions of academic dishonesty.

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An online class about online classes

A recent campus e-mail asked for interested faculty to contact the administration about developing a MOOC, or massive open online course. Rather than traditional online courses at, say, the University of Phoenix, MOOCs are provided to (potentially thousands of) interested students free of charge and bear no college credit. Brad Koch’s* recent argument was similar to that of some of my colleagues. Koch states:

The difference between MOOC’s and liberal arts colleges is like the difference between televangelism and an old-timey tent revival; the message is essentially the same, but the experiences are worlds apart.

When institutions like Georgia College uncritically float along with the shifting tides of higher ed, they misallocate resources and dilute their brand. We cannot–and should not–compete with MOOC’s. We should instead own the value of our unique identity and fill our niche.

Serendipitously, an article by Will Oremus at Slate this week describes the failure of a MOOC on how to successfully plan and carry out online courses. Oremus quotes pupil Jill Barshay’s account of the course, who stated:

Within hours, things were going awry. Neither the “Getting Started” tab nor the “syllabus” tab offered much direction on how to begin the class. I wasted an hour taking surveys on my personal learning style. (One said I was a visual learner. The other said I wasn’t).

The biggest problem was breaking our class of more than 41,000 students into discussion groups. Dr. Wirth asked us to sign up using a Google spreadsheet. The only problem was Google’s own support pages clearly state that only 50 people can edit and view a document simultaneously. I was one of the thousands who kept clicking, but was locked out. When I finally got in, it was a mess. Classmates had erased names, substituted their own and added oodles of blank spaces. …

In the meantime, the video lectures were mind-numbing laundry lists of PowerPoint bullet points. A survey of educational philosophies left me no more enlightened than before I watched it. The readings were a bit better. One of my favorites, Teaching with Technology: Tools and Strategies to Improve Student Learning, linked to a hilarious PowerPoint comedy sketch about the stupidity of reading PowerPoint bullet points. …

Maybe this MOOC should have focused on irony! (Real irony, not the commonly misused meaning of “a strange coincidence.“) For more on MOOCs, Koch provides helpful links to some posts at Orgtheory available here, here, and here, and an article about why the campus experience still matters here.

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What job will this get me?

A recent article in the Chronicle by Nannerl O. Keohane tackles the age-old question of why a liberal arts education is valuable. Keohane mentions a number of good reasons, but I don’t know how many of them would resonate with my students or their parents. Although I work at a private liberal arts institution, most of my students don’t want an invitation “to a community of scholars, both professional and amateur, spanning the ages.” They want jobs.

Because students and their parents want reassurance that $120,000 of their money will not be wasted by spending four years in college, there is increasing pressure on institutions like mine to offer more applied majors with direct connections to jobs. I see this in my intro students when they tell me that they love sociology but that they don’t want to major in it because they don’t want to be social workers and even in my advisees when they come to ask me what kind of job their sociology degree will get them after graduation.

Maybe majors at schools like Duke and Wellesley, where Keohane has worked, have a direct pipeline from the liberal arts to careers and graduate degrees, but the experiences of my own students (and most of my friends) have been very different. Ask a few non-academic friends what they majored in in college and compare their responses to their current jobs. I’m guessing that most of them aren’t employed doing anything remotely close to what they thought they would do when signing their major.

While schools like mine are facing pressure to offer more applied majors, the reality of the job market for most people is that those who are best off are those who have a broad knowledge base and can use that knowledge to reason, solve problems, and clearly communicate with others. There seems to be a huge disconnect between what students think they will get out of college and where they actually end up. If we can get people to realize that linear paths from high school to college majors to careers are the exception, the importance of the liberal arts should be self evident.

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Best use of bible verses

I’ve had a few conversations with a student friend lately about her experiences at a Christian High School. She criticized aspects of the curriculum that included paper assignments like “Discuss why Islam is wrong. Use bible verses.” As she pointed out, using one religion’s sacred text to disparage another religion is problematic, but what I found most interesting about an assignment like that is that it requires students to: 1) know something about Islam, and 2) support an argument with evidence. Some public school students probably make their way through high school without either of these things. Subsequently, this student won the made-up award (what award isn’t made up?) for “best use of bible verses” in a paper exploring religiosity and attitudes toward medicine.

As an aside, biblegateway.com is apparently a good place to find bible verses, though it is apparently easier if you already know something about the bible – my searches for things like “procrastination” turn up nothing but a more experienced person can find things like this:

But about going further [than the words given by one Shepherd], my son, be warned. Of making many books there is no end [so do not believe everything you read], and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

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Greedy teachers

While looking for a class example recently I came across the graph above comparing Michigan K-12 school revenues with health care expenditures.  In class, I displayed the graph and asked my students what they hear people blame for the rise of health care costs.  They mentioned insurance companies and the uninsured.  Then I asked them what they hear people blame for the rise of education costs.  The first thing they mentioned was teacher pay.  These reasons are given despite the fact that in the past 15-20 years teacher pay has barely outpaced inflation while physician’s salaries have increased a good deal more.

The rhetoric surrounding both of these increases is fascinating because of how clearly it illustrates the low value we place on teachers and the work they do.  I have heard similar claims about faculty salaries in the face of rising tuition (and decreased state support for public colleges and universities).  While I am somewhat insulated from these claims by virtue of being at a private institution, the eroding value of teaching at all levels will undoubtedly affect all of us in the future.

Finally, the poor job market for teachers and professors likely exacerbates these problems, since for every teacher or tenure track professor complaining about declines in benefits and take-home pay there are three claiming that they would be happy to work for even lower wages in exchange for stable employment.

Image Via: Michigan Parents for Schools

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Mario goes to college

People who want to be accountants, chemists, and sociologists aren’t the only ones who go to college.  College Humor has dug up the college schedules of video game stars Mario, Link, and Fox McCloud.  I am glad that the course on “Woman Studies: Vulnerability and Frequency of Capture” includes an attempt at prevention, though this seems to be a prime example of blaming the victim.

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Fixing the education system

On Saturday, Kevin Huffman, a Washington Post opinion writer, discussed the “keys for success” in our education system, arguing that they go beyond “funding and families” (the former is a topic I have mentioned before).  The article opens with the story of two Teach for America educators who started a series of charter schools in the Rio Grande Valley.  They argue that the success of their students – the first class graduated this year and 100% of them are going to college – was based on:

“the thinking around the problem. I have no control over what goes in on in the kids’ Colonia. But we can create a culture. Kids here feel part of a family, part of a team, part of something special.”

This is in line with the argument that some sociologists (and non-sociologists such as Jonathan Kozol) have made.

Strangely, I expected Huffman to argue that they keys to success were related to creating this type of culture in poor areas, even in schools without high levels of funding.  Instead, he argues that we need to focus on “people, policies, and parents.”  (It is interesting that we can control “parents” but not “families.”)  In fact, none of his keys focus on creating a nurturing school culture.  I agree that we need to get to work on the issue of education, but it would help if we could recognize that giving incentives to good teachers in poor districts will not change the cultures of these schools.

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Abstinence-Only Lunch Programs

From the Onion:

WASHINGTON—According to the findings of a recent Department of Health and Human Services study, school lunch programs that teach children to avoid all contact with food may not be an effective method of reducing teen obesity rates.

Despite the popularity of abstinence-only meal programs in schools across the country, the study found that children who were provided with no food at lunch and cautioned against eating at an early age were no less likely to become overweight than those who were provided with a well-rounded nutritional education.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the findings could adversely affect federal funding for all programs that tell kids “lunch is worth waiting for.”

“There’s no evidence to suggest that instructing teens not to chew, swallow, or even think about food is actually going to stop them from eating,” Sebelius told reporters. “Let’s face it: Kids are already eating. And not only during lunchtime. They’re eating after school, at the mall, in their parents’ basements. Pretending like it’s not happening isn’t going to make it go away.”

“After all, they’re teenagers,” Sebelius continued. “Eating is practically the only thing on their minds.”

The whole story is worth reading.  Be sure to read the last paragraph.

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All I really need to know about sociology I learned from Comte

I have spent the past 10 years of my life learning about sociology (three years as an undergraduate major and seven years in grad school).  Imagine my surprise, then, when I read this and realized that if I had wanted to know about sociology all I had to do was read a few things by Comte.  This essay (diatribe?  rant?) argues (and by “argues,” I mean “states,” like a less inflammatory Ann Coulter) that the goal of (presumably modern) sociology was stated by Comte over 150 years ago as “the entire systematisation of human life on the basis of the preponderance of the heart over the intellect.”

She goes on to explain:

That’s it! That is basis for the whole sociological dictatorship. Suggest problems for emotional involvement and demand the intellect devise social solutions. It can turn any personal problem into a social problem, a social problem into a national problem, and a national problem into an international problem belonging to all humanity. Social science treats life as a series of problems for ‘society’ or united ‘Humanity’ to solve. When all the problems the social scientists can concoct from any part of the world become social problems for the WORld Management System (WORMS) to solve, the sociological dictatorship will be complete.

I’m sure that you can also imagine my surprise at discovering after 10 years that I am supposed to be working toward the completion of a sociological dictatorship!  If we are to be successful in this pursuit we need to do a better job of letting grad students know.  After all,

Sociology and other “social sciences” are required courses for many careers so students who become community organizers, reporters, politicos, lawyers, teachers, etc., etc., are thoroughly indoctrinated before they begin work.

We’ve been controlling all of these people without even knowing it, so imagine how much more effective we will be when we actually put our minds to it!

I recommend reading the entire thing If you’re ever in need of a good laugh.

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