Meanderings, 15 July 2023

Good morning! Here on the home front we have a Monarch caterpillar in a small terrarium. It is eating away at milkweed leaves. Each day it’s a bit bigger and the holes in the leaves a bit bigger, and we hope this little fella survives the arduous process of becoming a butterfly.

Photo by Erin Minuskin on Unsplash

Arjun Nimmala’s special moment was Sweeny’s special moment:

This was going to be my story, not Arjun Nimmala’s.

First generation, born and raised in the U.S. by parents who came from India and kept Indian traditions and customs alive in their home, while still trying to blend into their American surroundings. Finding a love of baseball and making history as the first Indian-American in the Major Leagues. All of it was going to be me. The American Dream.

If this was 1988 instead of 2023 -- and if my athletic ability was even 1/1,000th of Nimmala’s -- then maybe this would have been my story. But it’s still a story that makes me proud, because even though I’ve never met Arjun, I feel like I know him. His path is my path. His real-life story is my long-ago faded dream.

Nimmala, a 17-year-old shortstop from Strawberry Crest High School in Dover, Fla., and MLB's No. 11 Draft prospect, was selected by the Blue Jays in the first round Sunday night (20th overall). And aside from the continental-sized gap in our athletic ability, Arjun’s story is remarkably similar to my own.

One more time, student evaluations — useless:

In the fall of 2019, while compiling my files for promotion, I spent some time looking over my teaching evaluations from the previous three years. I was a bit shook. One student complained that I came into class wearing a jacket and that, by taking the jacket off in front of the students, it was as if I was undressing in front of them. Other narrative assessments, while less bizarre, were no more on topic. Although I received mostly nines out of 10 for a range of standards, the narrative portions of the evaluations were largely personal, free of any discussion of the course and its materials. Talking this over with my colleagues, I learned that what I was seeing had been much worse for my Black and Asian colleagues, particularly if they were women.

So I raised the matter in a faculty meeting. “How can we ethically, much less legally, use student evaluations as a basis for our merit reviews?” As usual, be careful raising an issue in a faculty meeting: I was asked to come back with research on the matter.

I found almost 80 peer-reviewed papers demonstrating the gender and racial bias afflicting teaching evaluations, going back to 1979. Study after study showed increasingly disturbing statistics: Women were routinely rated lower than men, younger women were evaluated as less professional than their older female or male counterparts, women of color were rated as less effective than white women, and so on.

A few particularly stunned me. In a meta-analysis of 126 data-rich studies, Rebecca Kreitzer and Jennie Sweet-Cushman (2021) was able to find that — surprise! — evaluations were higher for courses with less work, for electives, and for classes where cookies or chocolate were provided to students. Bob Uttl, Carmela A. White, and Daniela Wong Gonzalez (2017) reviewed previous studies and reanalyzed their data to show “no significant correlations between … ratings and learning.” These biased and ineffective tools have been affirmed by professional organizations and highly ranked universities.

In 2019, the American Sociological Association issued a formal recommendation to cease using student evaluations for merit and promotion decisions unless part of a much broader (“holistic”) assessment. In reaching its conclusion, the ASA not only identified bias based on gender and sex, but also on such seemingly innocent factors as the time of day a course was taught.

At least a few colleges have taken steps to mitigate these problems. The University of Southern California no longer includes student evaluations as an element of tenure and promotion. If we assume that other professionals and experts in our respective fields should help articulate the value of our scholarly work, why then defer our teaching evaluations to students who have no training in pedagogy, much less knowledge of what constitutes effective teaching within our chosen areas? The University of Oregon, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and others have already established that student evaluations may be useful but should be combined with other forms of assessment in personnel decisions. If you are considering raising this issue in on your campus, consider that the ASA statement has received nearly two dozen endorsements by professional organizations.

Delay, delay, delay: tweens, teens and smartphones.

Your tween wants a smartphone very badly. So badly that it physically hurts. And they're giving you soooo many reasons why.

They're going to middle school ... they need it to collaborate with peers on school projects ... they need it to tell you where they are ... when they'll be home ... when the school bus is late. It'll help you, dear parent, they vow. Plus, all their friends have one, and they feel left out. Come on! Pleeeeeeze.

Before you click "place order" on that smartphone, pause and consider a few insights from a person who makes a living helping parents and tweens navigate the murky waters of smartphones and social media.

Emily Cherkin spent more than a decade as a middle school teacher during the early aughts. She watched firsthand as the presence of smartphones transformed life for middle schoolers. For the past four years, she's been working as screen-time consultant, coaching parents about digital technology.

Her first piece of advice about when to give a child a smartphone and allow them to access social media was reiterated by other experts over and over again: Delay, delay, delay.

Is baseball too slow? Go back to the Negro League:

This season, the MLB instituted new rules designed to make baseball games shorter and more exciting. According to filmmaker Sam Pollard, some of these changes hearken back to an earlier period in baseball history: The Negro National League.

While sluggers like Babe Ruth dominated MLB, the Negro League, which was founded in 1920, featured a scrappier, hit-and-run, base-stealing style of play. Years later, as the first Black player to play in MLB in the modern era, Jackie Robinson would bring the same energy to a wider audience.

"If you watch footage of Jackie Robinson from the '40s and the early '50s, he had a lot of flash and pizzazz," Pollard says. "You can see it follow up with other players who came along ... people like Maury Wills, Willie Mays, Rickey Henderson. They brought a different kind of style, which was part of that style that was in the Negro Leagues. Energetic, punchier, aggressive — a kind of baseball which Major League Baseball is trying to bring back since they've changed some of the rules."

Pollard's new documentary, The League, tells the story of the Negro League and the way it revolutionized baseball. He describes the league's games as social events that spawned new businesses and attracted celebrity fans like Lionel Hampton, Lena Horne and Count Basie.

"Even though this [was] a horrific period of American apartheid, this was for the people in the Black community an opportunity to really come out and enjoy themselves," Pollard says.

Rube Foster, a former pitcher-turned-businessman was the "father of Negro League baseball," Pollard explains. "[Foster] had a very entrepreneurial spirit and he decided he wanted to put together a league of Negro League baseball teams that would be just like Major League Baseball," Pollard says. "He brought a bunch of different Black owners together in Kansas City, and they created the Negro National League."

Bobonbooks — three kinds of readers, which are you?

I’ve been thinking about the different kinds of readers I encounter and the different ways we read. I suppose I could come up with a dozen types if I tried but I think I’ve got it down to three kinds. I know, if I were really simplifying things, I’d get it down to two–but you know the old saw: there are two kinds of people–those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don’t! At least on this topic I don’t. Curious?

The Easy Chair Reader. These are basically those who are looking for books that are TV in words–the stories just wash over them and rivet their attention. And if they don’t, they put them down. Or fall asleep. Some won’t touch very well-written stories that take some focus–psychological crime fiction for example, or a philosophical argument. I suspect these readers actually buy and borrow quite a few books and account for many of our best sellers. Most booksellers could not survive without them. I always am hopeful for this reader. At least they are reading and that is better than the non-reading population that rarely, if ever, pick up a book. And I wonder if at some point, they will tire of the same fare and branch out and explore books from other parts of the bookstore or library. I hope that someday, there will be questions about our world and our place in it, that will lead them to turn to writers who have probed these matters more deeply.

The Adversarial Reader. I wonder if this is a smaller group that might include literary theorists and critics, some reviewers, and religious zealots. These readers approach books determined to find what is wrong with them, why their ideas are wrong, or badly conveyed. You can tell you are in the presence of such a reader when you ask them what was the last thing they read that they enjoyed, and they just glare at you, wondering how you could ask such a supercilious or heretical question. This approach sometimes falls under the idea of the “hermeneutic of suspicion” that studies any narrative looking for the cleverly or poorly disguised exercise of power over some less fortunate human beings. No question that human beings have a sad record of doing such things, and perhaps we are never completely exempt of such behavior. But it seems pretty bleak. In the case of the zealot, anything written by those not a part of their group is suspect, and maybe even some that is! The difficulty of this kind of reading is that it is never open to meet a book on its own terms, to allow it to challenge the terms by which it is being read.

The Reader as a Discerning Lover. This is the person who practices a kind of golden rule of readers–they treat the author’s work as they would wish to be treated. They appreciate the hard work it takes to write a book and they give the attention they would wish for themselves to understand what the author is trying to do. They take delight when an author does this well–whether it is clarity of expression, development of characters who become real to us, a plot that draws us along, ideas that keep us thinking after we set the book down. They grow in understanding the writerly craft, recognizing allusions, metaphors, plot devices and more. They read discerningly, questioning when they find an argument or a character’s actions implausible. Such readers look neither for flawless perfection nor delight in searching out faults. They recognize that great thinkers have both challenging ideas and mistaken ones, and they may be different from ours! They realize that even great writers don’t always succeed to the same degree–some works of Dickens or Steinbeck or Ann Patchett are better than others–and yet we may enjoy each for what they are.

Monastery-like conditions for college first year students?

Nery Rodriguez just graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a major in economics, but one of the most significant courses she took there had nothing to do with marginal utility or game theory. When she registered last fall for the seminar known around campus as the monk class, she wasn’t sure what to expect.

“You give up technology, and you can’t talk for a month,” Ms. Rodriguez told me. “That’s all I’d heard. I didn’t know why.” What she found was a course that challenges students to rethink the purpose of education, especially at a time when machine learning is getting way more press than the human kind.

On the first day of class — officially called Living Deliberately — Justin McDaniel, a professor of Southeast Asian and religious studies, reviewed the rules. Each week, students would read about a different monastic tradition and adopt some of its practices. Later in the semester, they would observe a one-month vow of silence (except for discussions during Living Deliberately) and fast from technology, handing over their phones to him.

Yes, he knew they had other classes, jobs and extracurriculars; they could make arrangements to do that work silently and without a computer. (Dr. McDaniel offers to talk to any instructors, employers or relatives who have concerns.)

The class eased into the vow of silence, first restricting speech to 100 words a day. Other rules began on Day 1: no jewelry or makeup in class. Men and women sat separately and wore different “habits”: white shirts for the men, women in black. (Nonbinary and transgender students sat with the gender of their choice.)

Dr. McDaniel discouraged them from sharing personal information; they should get to know one another only through ideas. “He gave us new names, based on our birth time and day, using a Thai birth chart,” Sophie Ouyang, who also took the class and just graduated with a major in nursing, said. “We were practicing living a monastic life. We had to wake up at 5 a.m. and journal every 30 minutes.” If you tried to cruise to a C, you missed the point: “I realized the only way for me to get the most out of this class was to experience it all,” she said. (She did get Dr. McDaniel’s permission to break her vow of silence in order to talk to patients during her clinical rotation.)