An open letter to my past and future students

As most of my readers know, I teach Public Health graduate students and the University of Massachusetts, sometimes on campus, and sometimes online. This is an open letter to all of my past and future students. 

First, I want to thank everyone in my June course who took the time to complete the evaluation -- the feedback is very helpful to me. I also want to thank the whole class (and all my previous and future classes) for the privilege of learning together with you. Looking at this and previous rounds of evaluations made me realize that I need to make a public statement that all students contemplating taking my courses can read before they commit.

My evaluations tend to be bimodal -- a peak around "love", a (smaller, thankfully) peak around "hate", and mostly a trough in between. Oddly, the reasons for the love and the hate are the same: not too much structure, not too much interim formal performance evaluations, a lot of opportunities for discussions and questions. Everyone seems to appreciate my effort to make the material interesting and relevant, but a substantial number do not seem to like it.

I am actually fascinated by the convergence of the reasons for liking and disliking. By way of inference, I am going to suggest that where you fall out on the teaching should tell you more about your learning style than how I teach. To clarify, let me spell out my philosophy of teaching.

Whether I teach on campus or online, I limit my classes to graduate students. The reason for this is not that I do not think that undergrads cannot handle the material. Rather it is because I believe nothing replaces time with a topic to develop a depth of understanding and discussion about it. So, I view my classes as incubators of ideas. I do not see myself as the oracle delivering answers. My role is to get you excited about the questions. Furthermore, it is not my questions that should excite you, but the questions that you come to at the limits of your knowledge seen through the prism of the class material and discussions.

To be sure, I realize that this not a comfortable place for many. Most of us glide through an educational system that convinces us that there is a single correct answer, and, after teaching us to parrot it compliantly, punishes us if we stray. So, swimming in the sea of questions, seemingly answering them only to realize that the answers lead to further questions is disquieting. Yet it is at this edge that we gain access to the next level of understanding of our universe. Here, the feedback is not about an arbitrary letter, but about the exuberance of ideas, discussion generated and the richness of asking the questions.

I cannot tell you how much I love the learning environment that we create together. I gain something from each and every one of you, and I hope that each of you walks away with at least one idea that is new. What I suggest to you if you are a potential student considering taking a course with me in the future is to contemplate the boundaries of your own comfort zones in learning. If you like the feeling of vertigo that you get when old dogmatic answers are shattered and uncertainty reigns, take my classes. If you are worried about how it might feel, but curious to try, I will meet you where you are and help you weave a net to cradle your fall. But if you know that uncertainty cripples you, that you would rather have a map for every step of the way, my classes may be the wrong stop along your educational path at this time. But perhaps sometime in the future?

Again, thanks to everyone for enriching my learning. I miss you and look forward to future opportunities for exchanging ideas.                    

Tinkering and innovation: You can't have one without the other

Last week I blogged about the empty black box of evidence in medicine. Afterwards I got to thinking about black boxes in other parts of our lives in the 21st century -- seems to me they are everywhere and getting more and more prevalent.

To appreciate their proliferation, we must travel back in time to around the middle of the 19th century. I know, it is a bit anxiety-provoking, what no blogging, no tweeting, no iPhones... And yet, let's persist. The landscape is still dominated by small rural communities with farming as the major industry. Around these farming villages some small local businesses are making a successful run: furniture makers, dress makers, healthcare providers. Schools are also local and classrooms are multi-age and co-ed. School day follows the agrarian cycle, allowing the kids to maximize their farm time in every season. Most goods and services are created locally, if not in the home itself. When a shovel breaks, it is fixed. When socks rip, they are darned. When a child is having trouble with homework, she is helped by her parents and siblings. Evening entertainment is provided in the home by family members' stories and the stars in the sky. OK so far?

In comes industrialization. Furniture and dress making are automated, farmers begin to move into cities and schools become more regionalized and no longer need to observe the constraints of the agrarian lifestyle. The second half of the 20th century ushers in unprecedented advances in technology. Instead of fixing our broken shovels, we chuck them and buy new ones. Ditto for socks, cars, computers, couches. We used to be able to look under the hood of our 1967 Dodge Dart and fix the strange rattling noise. We used to bring our shoes to a shoe repair shop to re-sole when necessary. Today we discard the old and buy the new model.

I know what you are thinking: there she goes again railing against consumerism! Well, yes, but that is not where I am going with this. A byproduct of our rampant consumerism is the loss of the art of tinkering. Tinkering is our legacy. What were Thomas Edison and Ben Franklin if not tinkerers? How about Steve Jobs and Michael Dell? How many of us can build or fix a transistor radio? What about next generation life-altering technologies we cannot even conceive of yet?

Along with this loss of tinkering came the ceding of expertise. What I mean is that, since everything today seems infinitely more complicated, the public defers to the expert class, built around the black boxes clearly inaccessible to mere mortals. And guess what is the biggest black box... If you guessed our educational system itself, you are correct. Reading, math and social studies have been taught in the home, then in small school houses, for centuries. (And if you think that farmers did not learn math, think again: you cannot get around a farm without being facile with things mathematical.) Parents used to know how to help their children learn. Now, we defer our children's education to "experts" behind closed doors, who are likely to recommend pharmacologic solutions where individualized approach is needed. And what has this gigantic black box yielded? If you read award-winning secondary school teacher John Taylor Gatto's angry diatribe against our educations system, "Weapons of Mass Instruction", aside from a big headache, you will walk away with the understanding that we are now, as a nation, more cynical and dumber than we were 80, 50, and even 30 years ago. Thanks to experts.

So, we in effect have given away transparency and control over most of our daily lives. Distant industrial farms provide what passes for our food, distant manufacturing plants in China deliver our clothes, furniture, computers. Locked down institutions beyond our inquiry and constructive criticism have a hold on our children for 8 hours each day, and wish to prolong this hold by contracting vacation time to do what? Produce even more pervasive boredom, cynicism and ignorance? Even our entertainment has passed into the black box realm: distant producers selling their advertisers' wares by creating inane and irrelevant "entertainment" for the masses.

People, we are no better informed than our ancestors banging their drums to ward off solar eclipse. Our fancy gadgets separating us from what's under the hood of reality give us a false sense of complacency. If we want true innovation, we need to get back to our tinkering roots. Learn to darn your socks, help your child to read and teach her to tinker, so that she can stay curious. Question "experts": most of the time the mountains of complexity behind their concepts are useless or unnecessary, or created for the purpose of exclusion by obfuscation. Throw open these black boxes and shine a light in them. Play with stuff. Play with ideas. Tinker!