Category Archives: Academia

Student choice, employment skills, and grade inflation

October 7, 2011 By in Academia Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

Edward Tenner’s Atlantic post asks, “Should We Blame the Colleges for High Unemployment?” and mostly doesn’t answer the question, instead focusing on employer hiring behavior. But I’m interested in the title question and would note that the original story says, “Fundamentally, students aren’t learning [in college] what they need to compete for the jobs that do exist.”

That may be true. But colleges and universities, whatever their rhetoric, aren’t bastions of pure idealistic knowledge; they’re also businesses, and they respond to customer demand. In other words, student demand. Students choose their own major, and it isn’t exactly news that engineers, computer scientists, mathematicians, and the like tend to make much more money than other majors, or that people in those disciplines are much more likely to find jobs. Students, however, by and large don’t choose them: they choose business, communications (“comm” for the university set), and sociology—all majors that, in most forms in most places, aren’t terribly demanding. I’ve yet to hear an electrical engineering major say that comm was just too hard, so she switched to engineering instead. As Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa show in Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, those majors aren’t, on average, very hard either, and they don’t impart much improvement in verbal or math skills. So what gives?

The easiest answer seems like the most right one: students aren’t going to universities primarily to get job skills. They’re going for other reasons: signaling; credentialing; a four-year party; to have fun; choose your reason here. And universities, eager for tuition dollars, will cater to those students—and to students who demand intellectual rigor. The former get business degrees and comm, while the latter get the harder parts of the humanities (like philosophy), the social sciences (like econ), or the hard sciences. It’s much easier to bash universities, with the implication of elaborately educated dons letting their product being watered down or failing, than it is to realize that universities are reacting to incentives, just as it’s much easier to bash weak politicians than it is to acknowledge that politicians give voters what they want—and voters want higher services and lower taxes, without wanting to pay for them. Then people paying attention to universities or politics notice, write articles and posts pointing out the contradiction, but fail to realize the contradiction exists.

You may also notice that most people don’t appear to choose schools based on academics. They choose schools based on proximity, or because their sports teams are popular. Indeed, another Atlantic blogger points out that “Teenagers [. . .] are apt to assemble lists of favored colleges through highly non-scientific methods involving innuendo, the results of televised football games, and what their friend’s older brother’s girlfriend said that one time at the mall.” Murray Sperber especially emphasizes sports in his book Beer and Circus: How Big-Time Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education.

By the way, this does bother me at least somewhat, and I’d like to imagine that universities are going to nobly hold the line against grade and credential inflation, against the desires of the people attending them. But I can also recognize the gap between my ideal world and the real world. I’m especially cognizant of the issue because student demand for English literature courses has held constant for decades, as Louis Menand says in The Marketplace of Ideas:

In 1970–71, English departments awarded 64,342 bachelor’s degrees; that represented 7.6 percent of all bachelor’s degrees, including those awarded in non-liberal arts fields, such as business. The only liberal arts category that awarded more degrees than English was history and social science, a category that combines several disciplines. Thirty years later, in 2000–01, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in all fields was 50 percent higher than in 1970–71, but the number of degrees in English was down both in absolute numbers—from 64,342 to 51,419—and as a percentage of all bachelor’s degrees, from 7.6 percent to around 4 percent.

Damn. Students, for whatever reason, don’t want English degrees as much as they once did. As a person engaged in English Literature grad school, this might make me unhappy, and I might argue for the importance of English lit. Still, I can’t deny that more people apparently want business degrees than English degrees, even if Academically Adrift demonstrates that humanities degrees actually impart critical thinking and other kinds of skills. I could blame “colleges” for this, as Tenner does; or I could acknowledge that colleges are reflecting demand, and the real issue isn’t with colleges—it’s with the students themselves.

Are teachers underpaid? It depends.

July 10, 2011 By in Academia, Teaching Tags: , , , , , , , 15 Comments

There’s a meme going around that teachers are “underpaid;” you can read one manifestation of it in this Hacker News comment, but I’m sure you’ll run across lots of other examples if you read the news. Here’s the poster’s main point about teaching: “It’s way harder than you think, and unless you’re a tenured professor at a university, teachers make shit.” I’ve never taught high school, but I’m a grad student and teach freshmen, so I have some experience standing in front of people for long periods of time and trying to be both interesting and informative at the same time. A few observations:

1) The first time you teach a class, it’s incredibly hard and time consuming, but the difficulty drops like a logarithm to a relatively low plateau after you’ve done it a few times. This appears to be reflected in data. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data, the average teacher works slightly less than 40 hours per week. If you have better data, I’d like to see it. Note too that people getting teaching degrees at the graduate level get substantially lower GRE scores than those in almost all other disciplines. This will come up later.

2) At one point I thought about teaching high school English. Seattle Public Schools paid about $36K / yr with a Masters or $30K / yr without, and those numbers topped at around $70K and $55K after 30 years (IIRC, Bellevue Public School teachers made something like ~10K more). You can verify that as of July 2011 through the 2010 – 2011 salary schedule (it’s actually a little higher than I remembered, or raises have been substantial). That doesn’t count retirement; teaching is unusual because a lot of the benefits are backloaded in the form of retirement pay. One woman in my grad program taught English for 26 years in Michigan and took an early retirement offer; I think she gets 70% of her last year’s salary for life. Granted, those deals are going away because of the budget crisis, but a lot of the retirement stuff is still baked in.

3) You can multiply those numbers by 1.2 or so because teachers only have mandatory work for nine months of the year. People in most professions gets two weeks to a month off.

4) After two to three years, you effectively can’t be fired because of union rules (unless you sleep with a student and get caught in a flagrant manner, don’t show up, etc.). See this post for lots of citations on that, as well as a lot of the information that’s going into this comment. Not being able to be fired has value. Paul Graham figured this out a while ago, and wrote in an essay that “Economic statistics are misleading because they ignore the value of safe jobs. An easy job from which one can’t be fired is worth money; exchanging the two is one of the commonest forms of corruption. A sinecure is, in effect, an annuity.”

Note: there are major downsides to teaching. You have to like working with relatively undeveloped people (if you’re teaching high school) or children (if you’re teaching elementary school). In teaching, it’s very hard to make substantially more money if you really want to; whether you’re a good or bad teacher isn’t likely to make you more money. Still, you’ll hit the median household income neighborhood of $40,000 pretty quickly. My big impression is that teaching isn’t going to make you rich, but you’re also unlikely to ever be poor. To say that “teachers make shit” isn’t really true. It is to true to say that teachers have back-loaded compensation packages that tend to be high in benefits (e.g. good health care, retirement) and low in upfront salary.

Given this, we’re still left with the question of whether this is “too much” or “too little.” Some teachers are probably “underpaid” and some “overpaid,” depending on the demand for their field. To understand why, look at Payscale.com’s salary data for college majors. Humanities and social science majors are on the low end of the starting salary scale—not far from education majors, who start at $35K and have a mid-career median at $55K. This isn’t far from the pay at Seattle Public Schools, although Seattle probably has a higher cost of living than most places in the country. Salaries also vary by district; there’s been a lot of fury over, for example, New Jersey teacher salaries, since they’re relatively high, especially when one factors in health care. Arizona, by contrast, does not appear to suffer from that problem. The “underpaid” kind are experiencing major shortages—math, science, computer science, and so forth, which start in the vicinity of $50K and have a mid-career median in the $100K range. Those fields start close to where teachers can expect to be after 15 years. If you’re teaching computer science instead of taking a job that starts at $100K from Microsoft, Google, or Facebook, you’re underpaid. That’s why it’s so hard to districts to find really good math or science teachers.

There’s also the issue of student quality. In Seattle, there’s a strong north-south divide, with most of the southern schools being really tough and much more dangerous than the northern schools (the breakdown occurs along racial lines, as discussed in this 2006 Wall Street Journal article). If the pay is the same—and in Seattle, it is—most teachers will prefer the easier schools.

In the U.S., pay is in part proportionate to risk. Bill Gates isn’t just rich because he’s smart and hardworking; he also spent long hours in a company he created that could’ve easily netted him nothing. To some extent, teachers have collectively traded firing risk for lower salaries. Among other things, educational reformers are trying to sever this link, since getting great performance out of people who have no incentive for great performance save the goodness of their own hearts is problematic. Most people who experienced public schools—which is to say, most people—are probably aware of this on some level. There’s a movement afoot to make teachers more accountable, and I think it’s going to succeed. This should drive more money to great teachers, less to lousy ones, and more to people in technical fields. If teachers as a whole want more money, they better be ready to take more risk and be prepared to have their performance evaluated—like it is in virtually every other white-collar profession.

EDIT: A countervailing view that observes U.S. teachers don’t appear to be as productive as teachers from other countries, perhaps because of pay problems. Still, I wonder what alternate professional opportunities are like in other countries relative to the U.S.

Summary Judgement: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of An Accidental Academic — Professor X

June 10, 2011 By in Academia, Books, Briefly Noted, Nonfiction Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

In the Basement of the Ivory Tower is fun, filled with anecdotes, and describes many of the feelings I’ve had in the higher education sausage mill, but you’re better off reading the eponymous Atlantic article from which it sprang. You’ll get 80% of the content with 20% of the time. Still, I especially like this bit from the book because nearly the same thing happened to me four weeks ago:

On the first night, I ask a few questions. How many of you took this class because of an abiding love of literature? No hands go up, ever—they are honest, I will give them that. How many of you are taking this class only because you have to? Now all hands shoot up, to the accompaniment of some self-conscious laughter.

I taught a technical writing course to a room full of public health, nutritional science, and engineering majors and asked how many were in the class because they want to learn more about the great and mysterious power of the English language. No hands. How many were taking it because they had to? All the hands. More of my students could write coherent sentences than Professor X’s students, probably because they’re juniors and seniors who’ve been through a fair number of classes, but “more” is not the same as “all.” Few of them cared. I want to imagine that I imparted real skills through longer and more difficult writing assignments than most of them had faced, but I’m not sure I did. It’s not easy to interest people in a topic when they lack intrinsic interest and don’t see it as valuable to their careers.

Professor X is a good writer (note too that his name is a pseudonym, and he isn’t, to my knowledge, claiming to the leader of the X-Men); he says, for instance, that his students “lack rudimentary study skills; in some cases, they are not even functionally literate. Many of them are so dispossessed of context that every bit of new information simply raises more questions.” Notice that phrase, “dispossessed of context,” which I’ve never thought of in that way before, and yet it fits: the Oxford American Dictionary says that dispossessed means to “deprive (someone) of something that they own, typically land or property,” and one gets the sense that educational system have failed Professor X’s students as much as they have failed the systems (note that there is plenty of blame to go around, and I don’t wish to sling it in this post). There are many moments like this, when unexpected artistry arrives.

This sense of the unexpected extends to Professor X’s grasp of the larger institutional and societal forces at work; he notes that college is supposed to be for everyone even when we’re supposed to have high standards. These two ideals seldom leave unbloodied when they meet in the real world. But he doesn’t have a lot of answers to problems, which is okay because a) large, complex problems often don’t have answers and b) he’s trying to tell his own story, not write a polemic. If you know someone of questionable literacy attempting to go to college and frustrated by the experience, you should recommend this book to them. They probably won’t read it, but if they did, they’d know more. I get the sense that Professor X is working more at the individual than societal level. That might also be what makes his book fun.

Some of the responses to his Atlantic article are bizarre, written by people who seem to have no idea what’s happening on the ground. Some of the later material drags. I like the book but would only recommend it to specialists; I read it because I’m working on my own academic work related to university novels. If it weren’t for that, I don’t think I would’ve gotten enough from it, beyond the Atlantic article, to justify reading.

What Ever Happened to Modernism? — Gabriel Josipovici

June 7, 2011 By in Academia, Books, Briefly Noted Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

I’ve been meaning to write about What Ever Happened to Modernism? for a while, but this This New York Review of Books essay by Eliot Weinberger hits the major points I’d like to make better than I would’ve. It also describes the major issue I have with What Ever Happened to Modernism?: we never really find out what, if anything, happened to Modernism—or who, in Josipovici’s eyes, we should admire. Weinberger notes that “There are some unkind words about Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and Julian Barnes (“this petty-bourgeois uptightness, this terror of not being in control, this schoolboy desire to boast and to shock”) [. . .]” and that “Regardless of whether a climate can see—and Josipovici’s condescension that laureled mediocrities can’t help being what they are—the argument is undermined by the fact that he declines to name a single living author who should be praised.” Both are true. Polemics work best when we have positive and negative examples. Josipovici mostly gives us the negative.

The other thing I notice in What Ever Happened to Modernism? is the slipperiness of definition, which leads to the larger problem of Modernism and Postmodernism in general: we can get point to some works that we think embody some values of either movement, but we find deriving general principles from those specific works hard, if not impossible. Now, the real question to anyone who says anything about Modernism or Postmodernism is, “What do you mean by those words or artistic movements?” Even the phrase “artistic movements” might be wrong, since some have argued for the political value of them, and to the extent art and politics are separate one should note the binary.

How do we decide on what Modernism is? We can’t, really, as Weinberger notes:

Every general consideration of Modernism quickly crashes on the rocks of categorization: Which Modernism? Is it Rilke or Tristan Tzara? Matisse or Duchamp? Thomas Mann or Gertrude Stein? Arnold Schoenberg or Duke Ellington? Nearly anything that can be said about the one can’t be said about the other. Josipovici attempts to navigate these waters by simultaneously broadening the definition of Modernism itself, while greatly limiting the range of its concerns, its varying contexts, and its enormous cast of twentieth-century characters.

The more specific the definition, the more it leaves out; the more general, the harder the whole idea is to discuss. That doesn’t stop writers of polemics, of course, and as I read What Ever Happened to Modernism? I did think. . . something. I’m just not real sure what exactly I thought or why. I’m flipping through my much-marked copy, looking for a characteristic passage or turn of phrase, but you’d be better off reading Weinberger on Josipovici.

I suspect I’m not the only person with such a hazy reaction. Lately, I’ve been rereading novels I really admire as I start another novel of my own. Those I admire include Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Tom Perrotta’s Election, and Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind. After reading them, I almost always have a better sense of what I should be doing as a writer and what a particular book should do. This feeling isn’t limited to fiction: I get the same sense from James Wood’s How Fiction Works, or John Barth’s essays in The Friday Book. They’re all enmeshed in individuality.

Josipovici is aware of his narrativizing tendency and some of the dangers of definition; he says:

Naturally I think the story I have just finished telling is the true one. At the same time I recognise that there are many stories and that there is no such thing as the true story, only more or less plausible explanations, stories that take more or less account of the facts. I am aware too that these stories are sites of contestation; more is at stake than how we view the past.

There are many stories, and I don’t fully buy his.

Speaking of Barth, I find myself most drawn to his formulation in The Friday Book, which is cruelly out of print:

I happen to believe that just as an excellent teacher is likely to teach well no matter what pedagogical theory he suffers from, so a gifted writer is likely to rise above what he takes to be his aesthetic principles, not to mention what others take to be his aesthetic principles. Indeed, I believe that a truly splendid specimen in whatever aesthetic mode will pull critical ideology along behind it, like an ocean liner trailing seagulls. Actual artists, actual texts, are seldom more than more or less modernist, postmodernist, formalist, symbolist, realist, surrealist, politically committed, aesthetically ‘pure,’ ‘experimental,’ regionalist, internationalist, what have you. The particular work ought always to take primacy over contexts and categories.

Notice how Barth conveys his view of generality in a single word: “suffers,” as if literary categorization is a disease. In the wrong person, it is one. Discussing generalities is not much fun unless you have a lot of specifics to back them up, and I have no way to paraphrase or add to Barth’s last sentence from that quote: “The particular work ought always to take primacy over contexts and categories.” Martin Amis’ Money, regardless of how you categorize it, still stands out to me as being a) unique and b) good, which very few novels of any sort achieve. To lambast Amis in general, as Josipovici does, is to miss all those particularities that make him stand out. Of course, I’m committing the same sin here because I’m not citing specifics in Money. But I also sometimes rise to the level of the work being discussed, so perhaps that sin can be excused.

Beware the novel – IT LIVES!

May 16, 2011 By in Academia, Life Tags: , , , Leave a comment

“The novel should be known as the undead genre: its history is filled with moments in which it could have, would have, perhaps even should have vanished but did not.

There are two reasons why this is so. First, the novel has proved a durable universal donor. Second, it thrives on its negative capability—its unwillingness, even its inability, to provide definitive answers to the questions it poses. The novel has soldiered on as a set of questions, of open-ended experiments, rather than definitive results. Novels, like viruses, have all the appearances of a set of plausible answers—all the appearances, that is, but the answers themselves. Novels are questions posed as if they were answers. They clarify exactly how hard such judgment can be, and how contingent and provisional our explanations of past events and predictions for future ones will always be, no matter how certain we are about the abstract rules that guide our lives. On the one hand, then, novels live on by giving a push to other artworks. On the other, they survive because they are in themselves incomplete, a set of suggestive vectors and plausible outcomes rather than a sealed solution. Although there often seems to be a good deal of ‘actionable intelligence’ in a novel, it is rarely clear what that action should be.”

That’s from John Plotz’s essay “No Future?“, the rare academic article that might be of interest to people who aren’t academics—like writers producing novels.

Grade Inflation? What Grade Inflation?

April 2, 2011 By in Academia, Teaching Tags: , , , , , 3 Comments

A friend sent me “Should I feel guilty for failing my students? As an adjunct English professor, I know I shouldn’t inflate grades — but I feel like I’m ruining people’s lives,” an excerpt from “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower,” which began life as a frighteningly accurate Atlantic article.

I agree with a lot of the “Should I feel guilty for failing my students” excerpt, but I don’t think this is correct: “First of all, twenty-first-century American culture makes it more difficult to fail people.” The biggest reason it’s hard for professors to fail students, as economists like to remind us, involves incentives.

I’m a grad student in English lit, and when I go to the job market in the near future, I’m highly unlikely to be judged at all on my grade distribution; as far as I know, the University of Arizona doesn’t even send that information out. I may or may not be seriously judged on my teaching evaluations, depending on the kind of university I try to go to. I probably won’t, or won’t very much, but the easiest way to improve evals is to give higher grades (see “Judgment Day” for one popular explanation). Perhaps not surprisingly, students give better evals to profs who get higher grades. So professors, in the absence of any institutional or professional incentives not to give higher grades, do—at least on average, even if any single prof denies doing so (I have yet to hear anyone in a public forum announce, “I inflate grades.” I do not inflate grades).

To recap: we might be looked at poorly for having bad teaching evals, which are linked to student grades, and there’s no pressure on student grades. The big thing I will be judged on is academic publishing. The more I do that, the better off I am professionally. When you give students bad grades, not only are they likely to take it out on evals, but they’re more likely to complain to your teaching advisor, show up in office hours to fight about grades, be unhappy in class, and generally take more of time, which you can’t spend writing the academic articles that will get you a job and tenure.

Combined, these two forces encourage you to give higher grades and maximize academic publishing. This force is probably strongest in softer subjects, like the humanities, business, comm, and the like (students want to argue papers all day long) and weakest in math and the sciences (if you didn’t get the right answer, your instructor will demonstrate why you’re objectively wrong). Fields like nursing probably don’t see a huge amount of grade inflation because students who don’t understand the material will kill someone if they don’t, which is a big problem for lots of people. Same in engineering—if your bridge collapses, you can’t complain that there is no such thing as a “good” bridge, or that bridge design is so “subjective.”

All this stuff might contribute to how little students are actually learning, as discussed extensively in Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. The book shows that most college students, through most measures, don’t acquire much real knowledge over the course of their four or more years in school. Part of Academically Adrift details the evidence used to reach this conclusion, the other big part describes how this might have happened and be happening, and the last (weakest) part discusses solutions.

How could one solve this incentive problem? Probably by plotting eval scores against grades. If you’re giving an average GPA of 3.0 and getting a 4.0 on your eval, and Suzie down the hall is giving an average GPA of 2.9 and getting a 4.3 on her evals, then Suzie is probably doing better. I don’t know why colleges aren’t moving toward systems like this, aside from inertia and the complete lack of incentive to do so. Which, I guess, means that I do know why. This wouldn’t be a perfect solution, but it would at least be a step in the right direction. A few schools are apparently doing something about the issue.

Professors don’t want to champion better evals, however, because it distracts them from the research for which they’re rewarded. Administrators don’t want to because they want tuition and grant money, not rocking the boat. High school seniors have not shown a great swell of interest in attending schools with rigorous professor evaluations; they have shown a great swell of interest in beer and circus, however, so that’s what they mostly get. Grad students want to claw their way up the academic ladder and/or finish their damn dissertations. Parents want their offspring to pass. Employers are too diffuse and don’t get much of a say. So where does the coalition for improvement come from? Some individuals, but we’ll see if they get very far.

Questioning the academic enterprise. . .

February 1, 2011 By in Academia, Culture, Life Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

Here’s Robertson Davies from an interview in Conversations with Robertson Davies:

There are a lot of things in that book [by Elspeth Buitenhuis; the work in question is not named, though it discusses Davies] that I never said and don’t agree with but she must say what she thinks. There’s a lady at McGill who teaches Fifth Business in a course on Canadian literature and she says that the stone which Ramsay carried all his life and which Boy Staunton had in his mouth when he died is the stone of judgment out of the Talmud. I have never read the Talmud. I don’t know anything about the stone of judgment, but when you fall into the hands of academics you’re a gone goose. They will interpret and say what they think and there’s nothing you can do about it. It doesn’t really very much matter unless we take it too seriously.

Sometimes I’ve wanted to pull the stunt Woody Allen does in Annie Hall:

If what literary academics are doing “doesn’t really very much matter,” the question becomes, what then are we doing?

Why we need the third way: “What Are You Going to Do With That” and the need for imagination

January 18, 2011 By in Academia, Essays, Personal Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

In “What Are You Going to Do With That?,” William Deresiewicz tells the freshmen class at Stanford:

In the journey toward the success that you all hope to achieve, you have completed, by getting into Stanford, only the first of many legs. Three more years of college, three or four or five years of law school or medical school or a Ph.D. program, then residencies or postdocs or years as a junior associate. In short, an ever-narrowing funnel of specialization. You go from being a political-science major to being a lawyer to being a corporate attorney to being a corporate attorney focusing on taxation issues in the consumer-products industry. You go from being a biochemistry major to being a doctor to being a cardiologist to being a cardiac surgeon who performs heart-valve replacements.

But he goes on to point out why and how these kinds of defined professional paths—the ones high school and college students students are so often told constitute “success”—might not be optimal, for either the person on the path or society in general. If you “simply go with the flow,” you can end up merely being defined by what someone else has laid out. Perhaps not surprisingly, Deresiewicz goes on to say, “There is an alternative.” He calls it “moral imagination” and defines it this way: “Moral imagination means the capacity to envision new ways to live your life.” I would call it something else: the “third way.”

Deresiewicz’s essay shows why we need more talk about the third way: there are more options out there than further advanced schooling. Stanford in particular is a good place to be reminded of this. Obviously, Deresiewicz doesn’t say you must choose grad school or the professions, but the absence of any acknowledgement about starting your own company implies that those are the two primary choices.

I’ve had similar talk. In my interview with him, Tucker Max describes the primary speech he gives at colleges:

[. . . W]hen you’re an undergrad, generally you think you can do two things. You’re gonna have to get a job after you graduate or you gotta go do more school. Because everyone who’s giving you advice or telling you how to live your life are people who’ve done one of those two things.

He describes a “third way,” with his two normal paths defined a lot like Deresiewicz’s, but in a lower register:

You don’t generally have anyone in your life who has gone out on their own and done something entrepreneurial or done something artistic or truly risky or truly taken the path less traveled, because those people [. . .] don’t work in academics. And don’t become cubicle monkeys. So what I try and explain in my speeches is that there’s a third way. Because a lot of people—I think most people—want to do something besides those two things.

A lot of people want to do something else, but that something else is, in some ways, harder to do than the normal path. Yet the people who go the third way often talk about it as being more satisfying, and the people who go the “two paths” often speak wistfully of the third—despite the difficulty one is likely to encounter. A friend wrote this to me: “I know for a fact that I’d hate [Tucker] Max’s writing, but he’s dead right about how few students are aware that they can do something artistic or creative or entrepreneurial.” Too few students are aware of this—and too few people in general are. You can consider this post a very small step in the direction of increasing awareness.

So far I’ve noted two examples. Paul Graham talks about the problem of standard paths too, in “A Student’s Guide to Startups:” “Till recently graduating seniors had two choices: get a job or go to grad school. I think there will increasingly be a third option: to start your own startup.” His answer is more defined than Deresiewicz’s or Max’s, but the very language he uses is similar. But he’s also got a way of generating the “third way” by funding startups. Instead of merely telling people to find one, he’s creating a third way for people to flow, which might be the most valuable contribution of all, at least for the technically inclined.

I think all three of these disparate writers—Deresiewicz, Max, and Graham—are pointing to a more fundamental need for the imagination necessary to exit the obvious paths that so often end up going nowhere. Of the three, Graham has done the most to institutionalize this process and make it available for others by starting Y Combinator. Max has probably done the most to be a living embodiment of an unusual third way. Deresiewicz is pointing to the possibility from within the way of a well-defined path (and the same one I’m one) from undergrad to graduate school to being a professor. Taken together, they diagnose and offer treatment for the same malady that can’t quite be identified yet comes from so many sources and has so many symptoms: Dilbert, cubicles, malaise, ennui, florescent lights, midlife crises, 20-somethings with advanced degrees working as baristas, waiters, or bartenders, essay writers.

Artistic or creative activities don’t usually come prepackaged in convenient jobs that get handed to college graduates. They get created by people who are artistic and creative, who find a way to turn what they want to do, or their inchoate ideas, into something greater than the idea itself. The “inchoate idea” is important: I suspect most people don’t entirely know what they’re doing when they find a third way. Steven Berlin Johnson has a term for this in his book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation: the slow hunch. This happens when something that you’ve been gnawing on slowly develops over time. Johnson describes it much more fully, of course, but a lot of my ideas in writing novels or academic work comes from slow hunches. Writing fiction isn’t an activity that really comes packaged in convenient job form: it is made by each practitioner individually. People who succeed as writers sometimes do so not through conventional publishing, but through alternate ways—as Max did with his website, or as J.A. Konrath apparently does with his blog, “A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.”

Like Deresiewicz and Max, I don’t really have a solution to the problem other than to encourage you to think imaginatively. But who’s against thinking imaginatively? Partners are probably telling their third-year associates the same thing, even as the associates put in soul-killing seventy hours weeks under those menacing florescent lights. The other part of my solution is to be aware of the problem. I’ll also channel Graham in “What You’ll Wish You’d Known” and encourage you to stay upwind:

In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that you don’t commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.

It’s not so important what you work on, so long as you’re not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you’ll take.

Suppose you’re a college freshman deciding whether to major in math or economics. Well, math will give you more options: you can go into almost any field from math. If you major in math it will be easy to get into grad school in economics, but if you major in economics it will be hard to get into grad school in math.

Flying a glider is a good metaphor here. Because a glider doesn’t have an engine, you can’t fly into the wind without losing a lot of altitude. If you let yourself get far downwind of good places to land, your options narrow uncomfortably. As a rule you want to stay upwind.

“Work on things that interest you and increase your options:” the target of Graham’s essay is nominally high school students, but it’s applicable to a much broader swath of people. Maybe you’re one. If so, however, you’ll probably read this and then go back to filling out those TPS reports. Or maybe you’ll be one of the very rare people who realize there is no speed limit and react appropriately. At least you can’t say that no one told you. At least three people have: Deresiewicz, Max, and Graham. Four if you count me, writing a meta essay.

Why we need the third way: "What Are You Going to Do With That" and the need for imagination

January 18, 2011 By in Academia, Essays, Personal Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

In “What Are You Going to Do With That?,” William Deresiewicz tells the freshmen class at Stanford:

In the journey toward the success that you all hope to achieve, you have completed, by getting into Stanford, only the first of many legs. Three more years of college, three or four or five years of law school or medical school or a Ph.D. program, then residencies or postdocs or years as a junior associate. In short, an ever-narrowing funnel of specialization. You go from being a political-science major to being a lawyer to being a corporate attorney to being a corporate attorney focusing on taxation issues in the consumer-products industry. You go from being a biochemistry major to being a doctor to being a cardiologist to being a cardiac surgeon who performs heart-valve replacements.

But he goes on to point out why and how these kinds of defined professional paths—the ones high school and college students students are so often told constitute “success”—might not be optimal, for either the person on the path or society in general. If you “simply go with the flow,” you can end up merely being defined by what someone else has laid out. Perhaps not surprisingly, Deresiewicz goes on to say, “There is an alternative.” He calls it “moral imagination” and defines it this way: “Moral imagination means the capacity to envision new ways to live your life.” I would call it something else: the “third way.”

Deresiewicz’s essay shows why we need more talk about the third way: there are more options out there than further advanced schooling. Stanford in particular is a good place to be reminded of this. Obviously, Deresiewicz doesn’t say you must choose grad school or the professions, but the absence of any acknowledgement about starting your own company implies that those are the two primary choices.

I’ve similar talk. In my interview with him, Tucker Max describes the primary speech he gives at colleges:

[. . . W]hen you’re an undergrad, generally you think you can do two things. You’re gonna have to get a job after you graduate or you gotta go do more school. Because everyone who’s giving you advice or telling you how to live your life are people who’ve done one of those two things.

He describes a “third way,” with his two normal paths defined a lot like Deresiewicz’s, but in a lower register:

You don’t generally have anyone in your life who has gone out on their own and done something entrepreneurial or done something artistic or truly risky or truly taken the path less traveled, because those people [. . .] don’t work in academics. And don’t become cubicle monkeys. So what I try and explain in my speeches is that there’s a third way. Because a lot of people—I think most people—want to do something besides those two things.

A lot of people want to do something else, but that something else is, in some ways, harder to do than the normal path. Yet the people who go the third way often talk about it as being more satisfying, and the people who go the “two paths” often speak wistfully of the third—despite the difficulty one is likely to encounter. A friend wrote this to me: “I know for a fact that I’d hate [Tucker] Max’s writing, but he’s dead right about how few students are aware that they can do something artistic or creative or entrepreneurial.” Too few students are aware of this—and too few people in general are. You can consider this post a very small step in the direction of increasing awareness.

So far I’ve noted two examples. Paul Graham talks about the problem of standard paths too, in “A Student’s Guide to Startups:” “Till recently graduating seniors had two choices: get a job or go to grad school. I think there will increasingly be a third option: to start your own startup.” His answer is more defined than Deresiewicz’s or Max’s, but the very language he uses is similar. But he’s also got a way of generating the “third way” by funding startups. Instead of merely telling people to find one, he’s creating a third way for people to flow, which might be the most valuable contribution of all, at least for the technically inclined.

I think all three of these disparate writers—Deresiewicz, Max, and Graham—are pointing to a more fundamental need for the imagination necessary to exit the obvious paths that so often end up going nowhere. Of the three, Graham has done the most to institutionalize this process and make it available for others by starting Y Combinator. Max has probably done the most to be a living embodiment of an unusual third way. Deresiewicz is pointing to the possibility from within the way of a well-defined path (and the same one I’m one) from undergrad to graduate school to being a professor. Taken together, they diagnose and offer treatment for the same malady that can’t quite be identified yet comes from so many sources and has so many symptoms: Dilbert, cubicles, malaise, ennui, florescent lights, midlife crises, 20-somethings with advanced degrees working as baristas, waiters, or bartenders, essay writers.

Artistic or creative activities don’t usually come prepackaged in convenient jobs that get handed to college graduates. They get created by people who are artistic and creative, who find a way to turn what they want to do, or their inchoate ideas, into something greater than the idea itself. The “inchoate idea” is important: I suspect most people don’t entirely know what they’re doing when they find a third way. Steven Berlin Johnson has a term for this in his book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation: the slow hunch. This happens when something that you’ve been gnawing on slowly develops over time. Johnson describes it much more fully, of course, but a lot of my ideas in writing novels or academic work comes from slow hunches. Writing fiction isn’t an activity that really comes packaged in convenient job form: it is made by each practitioner individually. People who succeed as writers sometimes do so not through conventional publishing, but through alternate ways—as Max did with his website, or as J.A. Konrath apparently does with his blog, “A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.”

Like Deresiewicz and Max, I don’t really have a solution to the problem other than to encourage you to think imaginatively. But who’s against thinking imaginatively? Partners are probably telling their third-year associates the same thing, even as the associates put in soul-killing seventy hours weeks under those menacing florescent lights. The other part of my solution is to be aware of the problem. I’ll also channel Graham in “What You’ll Wish You’d Known” and encourage you to stay upwind:

In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that you don’t commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.

It’s not so important what you work on, so long as you’re not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you’ll take.

Suppose you’re a college freshman deciding whether to major in math or economics. Well, math will give you more options: you can go into almost any field from math. If you major in math it will be easy to get into grad school in economics, but if you major in economics it will be hard to get into grad school in math.

Flying a glider is a good metaphor here. Because a glider doesn’t have an engine, you can’t fly into the wind without losing a lot of altitude. If you let yourself get far downwind of good places to land, your options narrow uncomfortably. As a rule you want to stay upwind.

“Work on things that interest you and increase your options:” the target of Graham’s essay is nominally high school students, but it’s applicable to a much broader swath of people. Maybe you’re one. If so, however, you’ll probably read this and then go back to filling out those TPS reports. Or maybe you’ll be one of the very rare people who realize there is no speed limit and react appropriately. At least you can’t say that no one told you. At least three people have: Deresiewicz, Max, and Graham. Four if you count me, writing a meta essay.

How to get coaching, mentoring, and attention

October 2, 2010 By in Academia, Essays Tags: , , , , , 23 Comments

Introduction

Students regularly say that professors, teachers, coaches, mentors, and others don’t care about them or don’t offer real help and advice. In a recent discussion on the forum Hacker News, someone wrote, “[…] coaching/mentorship is probably found a lot more in a grad program than undergrad, where it’s pretty much nonexistent.” That commenter is somewhat right, but the deeper issue is that professors (and others with knowledge and competence) are most inclined to help people who won’t waste their time.

The challenge is to figure out who is going to waste time and who isn’t. Professors accomplish this through implicit tests. The challenge for you, the student who wants help, is to demonstrate that you’re worth the investment. I’m going to describe the incentives acting on both professors (or people with expertise) and students (or people seeking to develop expertise) and explain how to show that you’re better than the average student.

“How to get your Professors’ Attention” is biased towards universities because I’m a grad student in one and therefore more attuned to universities and the peculiar people who inhabit them. But this advice can be generalized to other situations where someone is knowledgeable and someone else is trying to seek knowledge or mentorship.

This essay is also biased toward English, which is my field. But if you’re working in computer science, for example, you’ll probably get more and better help if you walk into a professor’s office and say something like, “I’m having a problem with this program, which I suspect is related to X, but I’m not sure. I’ve tried sources Y and Z, which might be related, but I can’t figure out what’s going on. Am I missing something?” This will almost always go over better than saying, “Explain binary search trees to me” or “I don’t get this class,” which will probably yield a pointer to the relevant section of the book, with the instruction that you come back once you’ve read it and explain more explicitly where you’ve gotten lost.

Background

I majored in English and went to Clark University, where I think I got a lot of mentorship and connected with my professors. That might be because I took a lot of time to seek them out or because Clark is a small liberal arts school where professors are expected to interact with students. Even there, however, most, though not all, professors offered real mentorship/guidance to the extent the students seek it. When I was an undergrad, I was doing many of the things described in this essay, albeit unconsciously.

What do you care about?

The idea that professors don’t care about their students is a pernicious half-truth. Most professors do care about their students (otherwise they wouldn’t be professing), but professors know that many students don’t care about the subject or about learning—they care about grades. Professors don’t care about grades, and they often care about their students to the extent that their students care about learning.

If a student really wants to learn, the professor will usually help, but most students don’t—so the professor builds a wall between herself and her students to make sure that the only students who breach the wall are the ones who do care about learning. Professors do this through the tests described in the next section. Students often perceive this wall as indifference or callousness, when it’s really just a practical means of separating out the students whose primary goal is to get an A from the students whose primary goal is to understand why Ulysses was a major break from the tradition of the novel and why it became an emblematic text of modernism…

And so on. Life is complex and simple questions often have complex answers. Those complex answers are often found in the form of text, since good writing is far more idea-dense than speech can hope to be, which leads to my next point.

Books

Now I’m a grad student at the University of Arizona and tell my students the same thing: if they want to go beyond whatever is required in class, they should start by showing up in their professors’ office hours, ideally with somewhat smart or at least well-considered questions or comments. Most professors respond well to this and will often give recommendations on books to read and/or projects to work on. A few days ago I taught Paul Graham’s essay “What You’ll Wish You’d Known,” and students glommed onto this paragraph:

A key ingredient in many projects, almost a project on its own, is to find good books. Most books are bad. Nearly all textbooks are bad. So don’t assume a subject is to be learned from whatever book on it happens to be closest. You have to search actively for the tiny number of good books.

Professors are a good place to find good books because they’ve read so many. If you follow their recommendations and talk to them afterwards, coaching and mentorship relationships will be much more likely form. Demonstrate interest in their subject if you want their attention.

Obviously, there are exceptions, but this principle usually works reasonably well. If you show up in office hours and say “mentor me!” you’re probably not going to get much. But if you show up and ask questions x, y, and z, then read whatever the prof recommends, then come back, you’ll probably have a much better shot at their attention.

Another person on the Hacker News discussion said, “I get the impression that some undergraduates at some colleges do get good coaching and mentorship, and I would like to hear from other HN participants if they know of examples of that.” They’re right: some undergraduates do get good coaching and mentorship, but I suspect that depends less on the college or university and more on the undergraduate—and the undergraduate realizing how things work from her professors’ perspectives.

Reading

Professors tell you to read more or read particular books / essays for two reasons. The primary one is that reading is simply more information dense than talking, as mentioned earlier. Try this sometime: copy a half hour of TV news verbatim. You’ll find that it comes to maybe a page of text. To have a reasonable conversation, it often makes sense to read something related to the topic first, then talk about where to go from there. To learn more, read more. To learn faster, read more.

Secondarily, your professor will often recommend reading to test your seriousness. If she says, “Go read X and Y,” and you do, you’ve demonstrated that you’re not wasting the professor’s time and are genuinely interested in the topic. If you go away and don’t come back, you’ve demonstrated that you would’ve wasted her time had she spent an extra hour talking to you outside of class and office hours.

In English and related fields, a deep interest in reading is a pre-condition to doing other interesting things, like knowing about the world. It’s necessary but not sufficient. You don’t need to have read obsessively since you were 12 to catch my attention—but it does help if you say something like, “Oh, yeah, I read Heart of Darkness last summer and noticed the narrative structure, with Marlow telling the story to a random guy on the deck of the boat…” If you tell your computer science professors, “I’m working on a system to save and organize the comments I leave on blogs and read about this association algorithm…” they’re probably going to be more impressed than if you say that you’re ranked on the StarCraft II Battle.net ladder.

There are a handful of people who for whatever reason can’t get around to reading. But all of us make time for what’s important to us. If you can’t make time to read whatever your professor suggests, that indicates the topic isn’t of great importance to you—and therefore your professor shouldn’t waste time doing something that’s not important.

Once I had a student who said in class that he didn’t like to read fiction. Fair enough; not everyone does and it doesn’t offend me when others don’t share my vices. A week or two later, however, he wanted me to edit his 43 pages of Starcraft fan fiction; when I said that it isn’t possible to be a good writer without being a good reader, he didn’t believe me. Nonetheless I told him that if he read How Fiction Works and discussed it with me, I would read his Starcraft fan fiction. And I would have. He didn’t, of course, and acted like I I had kicked his puppy when I suggested that he prove himself.

To summarize: reading teaches you faster than talking can, and it efficiently sorts people who are willing to put in some time investment from those who aren’t. It’s necessary if you’re going to do interesting work.

Doing

People know I’m a wannabe “novelist” (as Curtis Sittenfeld said of her success with Prep in “The Perils of Literary Success,” “I was excited by the thought of no longer having to use air quotes when referring to myself as a ‘writer’ working on a ‘novel’ ”) with many rejection letters and near acceptances to prove how much of a wannabe I am. Sometimes friends and others say things like, “I want to be a novelist,” or “I want to write a novel.” I usually say, “Okay: start today.” Then I tell them: write Chapter One by date X (usually two or three days out) and send it to me.

I’ve probably made this offer to between one and two dozen people over the last couple years. One person has taken me up; she sent me Chapter One, I sent her some comments, and I didn’t hear back (we’re still friends; she says she’s writing other things). When people say they want to be better writers, I tell them what I told my Starcraft fan fiction writer: read James Wood’s How Fiction Works and Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer. The rare ones who read show me they’re serious.

By now, I’ve been trained to assume that most people who say things like “I want to write a novel” a) have no idea how hard it is to write a novel, b) how much harder it is to write a novel someone else might actually want to read, and c) the fact that, based on experience, most people who say, “I want to write a novel” are full of shit.

Almost everyone in the United States who wants a computer has one. If you have a working computer and two or three hours a day, you can write a novel. Nothing is stopping you: you don’t need a $10,000 piano. You don’t need a mass spectrometer.[1] You don’t need permission. You don’t need to pass a test. You don’t need to be told you’re special.

All you need to do is sit down and write every day for a couple of hours. Eventually, you’ll have a novel, or at least a very large pile of words. Few people really want to.[2]

Most people who say they do, don’t, just like most people who say they want to lose weight don’t read Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food and then stop eating simple carbohydrates and highly processes meats. They say they want to lose weight and keep buying Coke. Comparing statements to actions reduces to, “I want to write a novel / lose weight, but not as much as I want to watch TV / drink soda.”

The funny thing is that both novel writing and losing weight are actually fields where relatively minor changes, accumulated over time, can lead to relatively large changes: try writing for one hour a day. Then two. Then three (maybe only on the weekends). Try to drink nothing but water (most drinks are just easily removed empty calories). Take most forms of bread out of your diet; eat fruit instead of candy. Go for a walk at the end of the day. You’ll eventually have a largish pile of words or drop some pounds. A large enough number of people do both to prove they’re possible—if you want them.

Your professors are asking themselves: “Does this student want it? Really want it?” The value of “it” varies by discipline, but the idea remains the same.

A lot of students say or imply they’re not ready or incapable to do a real project, or that they don’t have the time to do so. The former excuses about readiness might be true, but students should still start doing something. I wasn’t capable of writing a novel anyone wanted to read when I was 19—or even finishing one. It took me three tries to get a coherent, complete narrative together, which was still unpublishable. But I wouldn’t have the skills I have now if I hadn’t started trying then. Here’s Curtis Sittenfeld again, this time in an interview with The Atlantic: “I don’t think that you can learn to write a book except by writing a book.”

This isn’t just true of writing books. I didn’t start or stop my work based on what classes I was in or whether I was somehow authorized or trained to do what I was doing. In effect, I mostly trained myself, which I wouldn’t have done without all those early hours writing unpublishable crap. Most novelists tell the same story: lots of early crap and rejection that they ultimately overcome.

If you have a choice between building or making something and not building or making something, always choose “building or making something,” which will be more impressive than not trying even if you fail. Plus, if you look for it, you’ll see people in almost every field saying the same thing: the only way to learn is via the work itself. Here’s Patrick Allitt in I’m the Teacher, You’re the Student:

[. . .] but the way to improve as a teacher is by actually teaching; hypothetical situations or abstract discussions are too different from the real thing. The best you can hope for, short of actually getting down to the job, is to learn a handful of principles, on the one hand, and a handful of useful techniques, on the other.

You can learn those principles and techniques, but you still have to—above all—do. And your professors, like coaches and mentors, are looking for the people who will do whatever it takes. A lot of students say, “I’m just a student, and the president of club X, and I have homework to do, and I want to have sex with my boyfriend / girlfriend / neighbor / person-from-the-party-whose-name-I-forget, and my parents are breathing down my neck…” That might all be true, and all of those are fine things to do or worry about. I have to worry about many of them myself.

But you’ll only have more work over time, and the work done in college is nothing compared to the real work people do to support themselves. From what friends have told me, college schoolwork and life is nothing like the work of having a baby and being responsible for feeding and keeping alive a small, helpless, somewhat boring human. So in your professors’ minds, saying that you have so many responsibilities often reduces to an excuse not to start now. A base excuse. The best time to start anything is now. Today.

People who really want to do something… do it. Or they make changes so they can; you might notice that most people are not too busy to find time to date and/or have sex with the person of their dreams. But most people say they want to do something and then they don’t (I’ve repeated this a couple of times in the hopes that it sticks). Over time, others notice this (like me), and they start to assume that most people who say they want to do or know something are full of shit, in part because experts can’t distinguish at first glance who’s full of shit and who is genuine and thus worth investing in.

So experts assume that someone is full of shit until they prove otherwise. In the case of someone who wants to write a novel, I assume they’re no longer full of shit if they’ve written a complete first novel and started on a second one (the first one is almost certainly no good, although there might be useful lessons to draw from it. That was true for me). In the case of someone who wants to lose weight, I assume they’re full of shit until they start carrying around a Nalgene bottle and a bag of peanuts instead of a Coke and a Snickers. Your professors will start to think you’re not full of shit when you read the books they recommend, ask for more recommendations, read those, and come back for more.

In addition, if you do enough stuff, you’ll have something to bring to the table. A random person with no skills is less appealing than a random person who can say, “I’ll get your blog up and running” or “I’ll write the first draft of the boring NIH proposal for you” or even “I’m obsessed with coffee and will make you a single-original brew in a Chemex.” People who develop skills tend to develop the meta-skill of developing skills, and they’re more appealing because of the skills they already have.

Caveats

This basic advice won’t always work: some professors won’t pay any attention to you no matter what you do. They might be more interested in their own research than teaching, or they might be having personal problems, or they might be off in their own world, or they might be burned out. Some professors will go out of their way to try and inflict mentoring on students who don’t particularly want it, although I don’t think there are very many of these professors, especially in big public schools; most professors who try this approach will also probably encounter enough apathy to scale it back once they’re rebuffed enough times.

There are probably also variations by field: enough people have reported that professors in technical fields are less inclined to work with undergrads to make me wonder if there is some truth to this stereotype. I suspect that science professors just have a different mode of mentoring, which goes something like: “Come to the lab, we’ll see if you can do anything there.”[3] Most professors, however, will fall somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, and those are the professors who can most be reached via this guide. It would be very unusual to find a school where following the basic outline presented here will result in nothing.

A story…

I had a student who I’ll call “Joe.” He habitually wanted to hang out and chat after class. This is good: at first I interpreted it as meaning that he was intellectually curious and driven.

But as the semester went on, I got progressively more annoyed because he’d ask questions that couldn’t be reduced to sound bites. I kept telling him to drop by office hours if he wanted to really talk, but he never showed up. I’d suggest he read X, and when I asked him about it a week later, he’d say he’d been busy, but he was never too busy to waste ten or fifteen minutes of my time in class. We were reading Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and he said something about her place in literary history that was… unlikely, let us say, so I told him to read a few of the essays in the back of the Norton critical edition. I don’t think he did.

Before their first papers are due, I usually meet with my freshmen individually to go over their work. I close read, edit, talk to them about ideas, catch disastrously bad papers so they can be rewritten, and so on. Joe didn’t show up to his conference; he didn’t come to my office hours; and when I finally did read his paper, it had incredible howlers in terms of both fact and interpretation, my favorite being his assertion that the Toyota Prius is in some way like a perpetual motion machine, which demonstrated that he didn’t know anything about physics or perpetual motion machines or even general knowledge.

Joe got back a paper that was charitably graded, given its quality, and he dropped the class. Joe is an extreme example of a time waster: I think he would’ve been more than happy to chat for an hour after class each day, shooting the breeze while I had pressing concerns. I get at least one Joe every year. I separate Joe from students who want to learn by a) telling them to read something and b) seeing if they do it. The ones who do, I spend as much time talking to outside of class as they want—because I know they’re not wasting time. I love chatting with students who are engaged by the material and by life, and I’ll spend a lot of time with them, as long as they’re not bogus.

Criticism

Most of us don’t like being criticized: we’d prefer to imagine that we’re good at everything, that we don’t need the help of others, and that whatever we’re working on is perfect. Don’t change a thing! We get prickly when people try to help us and often denigrate the person giving us advice, assuming that person doesn’t understand our genius or is too hard a grader or has malice in their heart.

Grades are a form of criticism and a form of ranking you against other people: they’re a statement from your professor to you about how well the professor thinks you’ve mastered the material. Even in an era of rampant grade inflation, grades can still sting, and few students achieve a 4.0. A small but noisy minority of students will come back after every semester to fight about their grades, which is one of the least pleasant aspects of teaching.

Most people who are nominally looking for help in truth want to have their current ideas or beliefs gratified and validated. If professors offer real, constructive criticism, it’s often viewed as a personal attack. The student on the receiving end is then hostile to the critic; that hostility turns into negative responses on the end-of-semester evaluations, awkward moments when the professor and student run into each other on campus or at a bar, and so on.

Still, some fields are culturally disposed towards rapid, yes/no assessment. One friend who read this essay mention that his vector calculus professor often says things like, “No, you’re doing it wrong—here’s how it should be done.” My friend said it took him aback at first, and he realized that the professor’s honesty could be mistaken for cruelty and indifference. But the professor’s demeanor is actually about efficiency: he wants his students to get the right answer as fast as possible. Most of us aren’t used to being told we’re wrong on a regular basis, so we interpret this as hostility when it’s not.

“Don’t shoot the messenger” is a cliché because few people are capable of listening dispassionately to criticism, evaluating it, and ignoring it if they think it invalid and accepting it if they think it’s valid. Most of us suffer from some level of confirmation bias, which is a term psychologists use to describe what Wikipedia calls “a tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses regardless of whether the information is true.”[4] We all want to believe we are smart and capable. But we often aren’t, and we don’t like to accept it when people tell us this or imply it. When students do attempt something, fail, and accept credit, it’s almost as impressive as if they get it on the first try.

From the professor’s perspective, it’s easier to avoid giving the real criticism necessary for improvement. If you’re a student who wants to learn, you’ll need to demonstrate that you’re capable of taking criticism, that your ego is not overly inflated, and that you’re willing to accept that you don’t know everything and that you could be wrong. Some people never learn how to do this. Others do only after a great struggle. Professors will assume that you can’t take criticism until you show you can. This problem inhibits your professors from forming real bonds and sharing real knowledge with you, especially if that knowledge contradicts what you already believe to be true. If a professor gives you real commentary, use it to improve.

That doesn’t mean you have to believe your professor or take all the advice anyone gives you, but you should at least not be hostile to it. If the professor is right, modify your behavior; if the professor is wrong, pity them for their ignorance or incorrect interpretation. But don’t get angry because someone is trying to help you, however imperfectly.

Professors, and most people who do good or interesting work, need to have a peculiar temperament: they need an open mind (Paul Graham in “What You Can’t Say:” “To do good work you need a brain that can go anywhere”) but also the rigor not to become too infatuated with or attached to particular ideas. Few people achieve this balance, and very few people have the kind of openness that I associate with great intelligence, which manifests itself in a willingness to take in new ideas and be wrong when necessary. When I see these kinds of traits in anyone, they arrest my attention. This is doubly true for students, because so few students have or manifest them.

Real education

In “Who Are You and What Are You Doing Here?“, Mark Edmundson writes:

If you want to get a real education in America you’re going to have to fight—and I don’t mean just fight against the drugs and the violence and against the slime-based culture that is still going to surround you. I mean something a little more disturbing. To get an education, you’re probably going to have to fight against the institution that you find yourself in—no matter how prestigious it may be. (In fact, the more prestigious the school, the more you’ll probably have to push.) You can get a terrific education in America now—there are astonishing opportunities at almost every college—but the education will not be presented to you wrapped and bowed. To get it, you’ll need to struggle and strive, to be strong, and occasionally even to piss off some admirable people.

This guide is basically teaching you how “to fight,” because the regular education that you get solely from sitting in classes won’t be real impressive. You won’t learn as much from formal, explicit education as you will from informal, tacit education. Both have their place, but you have to go beyond the given to get the tacit education. That’s where the “struggle and strive” come from. If you’re perceptive and attending a big American school, you’ve probably noticed that you’re not getting much out of a 500- or 1,000-person lecture class.

Of course you aren’t—those classes are designed to balance the university’s budget, since they cost only marginally more to run than ten-person seminars, yet the university charges you, the student, the same amount per credit hour as it does to the ten seminarians. If you’re not perceptive or you just want to party and get laid, it probably doesn’t matter. But if you are that student who really wants to get something more than a particular kind of fun from the college experience, you need to know how to “get a terrific education,” which “will not be presented to you wrapped and bowed.” You have to take it for yourself—you have to prove yourself. In movies about sports, you may notice that the team or individual doesn’t get to the championship match or fight the first time it hits the field or enters the ring.

You won’t either. You have to prove to your professors and to others that you have what it takes. That you have tenacity, grit, strength. That you want the education, not merely the piece of paper at the end that says you’ve sat through four years of stultifying classes and managed not to fail out. Depending on your major, it’s shockingly hard to fail, as Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa show in Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.

It’s important to learn how to cultivate teachers. In A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter, William Deresiewicz writes:

The need for teachers: there is something in the modern spirit that bridles at the notion. It seems inegalitarian, undemocratic. It injures our self-esteem, the idea of having to confess our incompleteness and submerge our ego beneath another person. It outrages our Romantic temper, which feels that the self is autonomous and the self is supreme. [ . . .] But Austen accepted it, even celebrated it. Nearly all of her heroines have teachers of one kind or another, and in her own life, we know, her mentors were many crucial.

Most teachers are not very good, despite our need for them. But we need to learn how much we need them, if we’re really going to do the things we want to do in our lives. We might be “autonomous,” but we also need to have someone else’s perspective and experience.

Conclusion

Many professors will help you, but you need to know how to make them want to help you. You need to learn how to signal a willingness to learn, which you can do mostly by formulating good questions and doing the reading or projects your professor suggests. As stated earlier, some professors won’t help you no matter what. They’re not very common, since if they didn’t have a strong desire to teach, they’d have gone into a more lucrative field, since there are few fields less lucrative than teaching at the university level (adjusted for education and opportunity costs). Many, however, will have been burned by students who are dilettantes and time wasters. You need to prove you’re not one of them and learn how to breach their defenses. This is a guide to doing so, but reading the guide is the easy part. The hard part is doing the reading and finishing the projects. That is up to you.

Thanks to Bess Stillman, Derek Huang, and Andrew Melton for reading this essay. For further reading, consider Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. Leading a meaningful life is not easily accomplished, and for evidence of that assertion I’d submit the tragically small number of people who seem to do so.

[1] But really, who doesn’t want one?

[2] Maybe they are afraid of ending up with that very large pile of words.

[3] They want to know: Are you competent? Can you do math? Will you break the $10,000 PCR machine? Okay, go play with chemicals, read this paper, get back to me in a week.

[4] Learning about confirmation bias is one of the first steps toward combating it, which Steve Joordens discusses in his lecture “You Can Lead Students to Knowledge, But How Do You Make Them Think?” The lecture is about critical thinking, but it’s really about how to think and why.