When does sabbatical start (and what is it, really)?

I'm bemused by how my thinking about sabbatical has evolved over the last several months.  (I am on sabbatical for the entire upcoming academic year):

• Having front-loaded my entire teaching load to the fall semester last academic year, I gave my last pre-sabbatical lecture in December.  I was conscious of it being my last lecture for over 18 months. Under the "sabbatical-as-concentrated-research-time" view, part me believe sabbatical started as soon as my final grades went in.  That wasn't a great interpretation, as my spring semester was so deadline-driven (proposals, papers, committee/university service, etc) that I got little new research done compared to my teaching-intensive semesters, and I was frustrated.
• The day of my last committee meeting on campus, I went home giddy, convinced that sabbatical had finally started.  This took the "sabbatical as freedom from meetings" view, as well as the "sabbatical-as-freedom-from-commuting-to-campus" view (I live an hour's drive from campus).  These views discounted the wave of "I'm really tired and need some rest before I can usefully think again" that characterized the start of summer.
• July 1st was my official first day of sabbatical, after which I could reasonably tell anyone who asked me to do any university work that I was unavailable (not that anyone did, but I still sensed power in the date).  This was the "sabbatical-as-owning-my-own-time" view.
• Solid progress on new research projects in new areas in the second half of this summer have been personally rewarding.  This is the "sabbatical-as-time-to-do-new-big-stuff" view.
• This weekend, I am conscious that the incoming freshmen are moving in today, classes start on Thursday, and I'm not responsible for a dang thing.  I'm gloating internally at all the university and department emails that I'm not bothering to open.  I've reconnected with the idea that August can actually be a relaxing and enjoyable part of summer; I could get used to that.  This is a "sabbatical-as-freedom-from-death-by-a-thousand-time-cuts" view.

Reflecting from my calm August deck chair, I see how much of my early view of sabbatical has been framed around the idea of "freedom".  That's somewhat sad, as it encouraged me to focus on the aggrevating parts of faculty life (which I do actually enjoy on the whole).  It also had me thinking about the end of sabbatical--the time when I would lose that freedom--from the time it started. Focusing on the looming end of freedom made me a outright basket case for the first several weeks, when I felt a responsibility to make the most of every single minute of freedom I had, like grabbing a precious breadth when coming above water.

Those early weeks of sabbatical actually weren't much fun emotionally.

With a summer of rest and reading behind me, my perspective is healthier.  Sabbatical now feels like the "responsibility-to-push-myself-in-new-intellectual-directions".  Yeah, that's what the official memos on how to apply for sabbatical said, but I didn't feel it in my bones before now.  Finally, in the week when classes are about to resume, I finally feel sufficiently rested and initially rejuvenated mentally to start the real work of sabbatical.  I'm just thankful to have gotten to this point with a full year still to go, and with enough productive work done over the summer that I know what to do in the times that I won't be lecturing, orienting, or otherwise sitting in meetings this week.  There's no more academic baggage to lose, so the true freedom of sabbatical can begin (apologies to Janis Joplin).

Good enough for MOOCs?

As a computer science professor who is interested in learning, it's natural that I've been thinking about and following the whole MOOC-mania.  I'm partly interested from a research/tech perspective (just how much is online learning capable of, given time to develop?), and partly from a job-survival one (what's the likelihood of my line of work disappearing before I retire?).

A friend's blog post lead me to a Forbes article from this week on why online ed is a bubble: summary---students go to college as much as for social/experience reasons as for education, and online can't reproduce the networking and fun aspects of college.  Certainly not a new argument.  Certainly an argument that makes sense for some segments of colleges and of the population.  But I'm not ready to dismiss the MOOC paranoia just yet.

MOOCS aren't going to wipe many colleges off the map in 5 years like an asteroid (though I'm thinking this would make a good 48-hour film project premise).  The college experience is going to wither by a thousand cuts (budget cuts, staffing, time, etc).  A pending case of academic frog-boiling.  College doesn't have to be great--it has to be good enough.  On the educational side, MOOCs just might prove good enough for many students.  What's good enough on the social side?  Could an innovative entity create a social space with a bit of exclusivity (part of the college draw), clout, alumni, and many other things that together create a "good enough" social experience?  Membership driven, like a fitness club?

To claim that colleges will retain their stranglehold on the young-adult social experience bets against innovation.  There will always be a place for elite schools, but they don't serve the majority of students.  It'll take time, but there's a lot colleges could lose and still be "good enough".  Colleges need to innovate to figure out how to lower costs and still be "good enough". Other organizations will figure out how to grow to be "good enough" socially, by which time online education will have matured a lot.

Should we bet against good enough?

Resurrecting a blog, a professor, and a course

I'm now on sabbatical, next due in the office in August 2014.  Been thinking this would be a good excuse/motivation to resurrect the blog (quiet for the last 5 years), but hadn't yet found something I felt like writing about.

So much for leaving the classroom: my inaugural sabbatical post is about class sizes.

The NYTimes has an op-ed on whether class size counts.  The article is about pre-college, not college classes.  Roughly, the piece discusses a proposal under which high performing teachers get additional pay in exchange for taking on larger classes.   The piece doesn't discuss how much larger, but does cite a national survey that asked teachers about taking on 3 additional students in exchange for $10K.  Interestingly, only 42% of teachers wanted this deal, while 47% would turn down the raise in exchange for 3 fewer students.  The piece also discusses the lack of actual research on the effect of class sizes, noting that the effect may be quite different for different kinds of students.

This struck me in part because my department is potentially facing an increase in students interested in taking Computer Science next year.  For the past three years, I've taught the second course in our CS sequence (OO program design and data structures), last year topping out at 235 students across two lecture sessions and 9 lab sections.  And honestly, trying to find ways to give the support associated with smaller classes to that many students burned me out enough that I'm only now really figuring out what I want to do with my sabbatical.

But it has left me thinking a lot about what we associate with "small classes", what parts of that actually matter, and how we can provide it as class sizes outstrip resources.

Access to help is perhaps the biggest issue.  In practice, though, help needs are not directly proportional to class sizes.  How many times have I taught smaller (40ish) person classes and not had a single student come to office hours or request appointments?   Out of my 235 students, I'd estimate that there were roughly 25-30 students who actually came to my office or asked for help with any regularity (I know many more used the teaching assistants).  The point is that a class of 200+ students who don't need help is a very different beast than a class of students who do need help.  The op-ed raises this distinction, but at the college level, we seem to make our allocations more on simple student/staff ratios.

Quality feedback on student work follows close behind.  Good teaching involves showing students who don't think they need help that they still have things to learn.  Unless someone is actually reading student work, we miss those opportunities for deep education.  I still insist on having my staff actually read all the code that gets submitted (rather than just auto-grading against test suites), but we're losing the scale battle there.

Avoiding anonymity is another issue I worry about: even if a student never expects to seek help, large classes feel impersonal.  At a time when students are trying to work out who they are and what they care about, this is problematic.  Not problematic enough, however, to justify additional resources.

I will be spending at least part of my sabbatical better understanding how cognitive tutors and other computer-based learning aids could help with these problems.  I don't want to fully automate my class.   Being honest with myself, I'm looking for ways to mitigate the guilt of not being able to support each and every student in line with my values as a teacher.  Having that support come entirely from a human teacher isn't feasible, nor do I suspect necessary, or even optimal.  There are interesting blended human-computer instructional systems waiting to be built for teaching in large classes (lots of progress exists on the systems side, but the teacher/tool interaction seems less developed).  If I can come off sabbatical more comfortable with the level of support I can provide, and rested enough to hold up my end of the bargain, I'd call it a success.

The music of teaching

Between the end of classes last week and a paper deadline next week, I haven't done much outside of work lately. Last weekend though, I treated myself to a favorite spectator event: a master class in music. In a master class, music students perform for a master (usually renown) musician, who works with the student to improve the performance. The audience gets to watch the whole exchange, which lasts 30-45 minutes per student.

Music master classes thrill me on many levels. As a teacher, I envy the masters: they hear the effects of their teaching in real-time (and the difference is usually dramatic, easily noticeable even to my amateur ear). A student can play the same 30-second excerpt over and over with different voice or emphasis each time. Each time, the piece and the process become more alive. What reward must lie in such interaction. In teaching programming, writing the same code over and over in different styles is tedious; once code is written once, writing the same code again with minor variation doesn't offer insight that's worth the time or trouble.

As one interested in the structure of software systems, I'm intrigued by how the masters move students between thinking high-level and low-level, between thinking compositionally versus decompositionally. The first student played a piece with technical precision but not much emotion. The master helped her find and emphasize local melodic patterns within the overall piece. The second played with incredible emotion and intensity, but without an overarching organization to the emotion to carry the listener through the piece. The master helped him find a story across the piece and to refine his playing to draw that out. These students are experimenting with ways to interpret a finished product (the composed piece). I work more like the composer in trying to create the piece in the first place. When I'm done though, at best most people interact with a small portion of what I've created (the user-interface, not the underlying code). A computing system needs to be fairly complex to give a user a large space in which to interpret the result; music students, in contrast, can work on interpretation even from the smallest pieces. The route to exploration is much shorter for the student.

I'm reminded of the interplay between high-level and low-level thinking this weekend as I bury myself in writing a paper. I love this process: moving ideas and results over and around in search of the story and emphasis that makes an idea come alive for a reader. This part of my job gives me real-time experimentation with organization and presentation (with more chances to get it right than when I lecture). I often wonder if I would enjoy this career without the writing aspect. Coding is similar, but far less forgiving: programming is sensitive to unfinished parts in ways that writing (or music) is not.

Master music classes remind me what interactive teaching can be for both teacher and student. Can we bring that spirit into teaching computing and programming? Does it make sense to do so? I hear more and more that students reject computer science because of the long detailed hours. How do we teach to expose more of the intermediate rewards? What would a master class in computing look like? My best vision right now involves a lot of shell scripting, which could be cool but only applies to a limited range of programming tasks. What about a master class in software modeling? The right notes must be there, if we can figure out how to scale them to computing education.

In the Interest of Time

Earlier this week, I was passing my hour-long car commute in the usual ways: flipping radio stations (all were enamored of Journey this week, challenging the usual Fleetwood Mac dominance), rehearsing my morning lecture, running down the to-do list, and mentally composing emails to send as soon as I got into my office. It was a day full of one-liner emails, the sort that I sometimes imagine capturing with a voice recorder with driving. Or better still, some microphone wired to a laptop that would prepare and send the messages automatically when I got to my office. Oh, the promise of squeezing every drop of efficiency out of the day!!

And then I asked myself what I would do with the extra time if I did have a way to dispatch my email from the car. The answer came instantly: I'd make myself more busy by taking on something else that I'd now have time to do.

How often do I wish for more time just so I wouldn't have to take the responsibility of prioritizing among all the things I find interesting? Or the responsibility of declaring something profoundly uninteresting? Perhaps I wanted the email-in-car device because it separated the interesting part (figuring out what to say) from the uninteresting (typing the darn thing). It was one of those moments when I understood that "more time" is not so much about "getting more done", but about "doing more of the right things".

For my next trick, I'll work on the device that captures these insights directly from my brain and produces the blog post. Which is the interesting part though? Having the idea or developing it? Need to make some time to think that one through ...

Work/life balance

A number of separate incidents left me thinking a lot about work/life balance these last couple of weeks: research deadlines near the start of term had me working a lot on weekends, bouts of sleeplessness had me up at my desk before 5am for several days running, multiple students came by to talk about academic career issues, and I heard yet another discussion on the oft-heard wisdom that older people nearing the end of life are more reflective/proud/wistful/etc of encounters they had with people than with long hours spent at work. It was enough to induce frenzied angst about overwork even in my calmest moments.

Yet, it didn't, and not because I was too stressed to think about it. I'm actually bemused by how calm I've been these last 3 weeks, especially in contrast to how uncalm I was under similar workloads in the fall. When I consider working less, part of me stops and wonders "to replace it with what?" And this just after having one of those moments with a dear friend that I will recall for the rest of my life as one that truly mattered.

Driving to work after a wet snowfall earlier this month, I was struck by how blindingly beautiful the highway was surrounded by bare trees coated with strong clean snow as thick as the branches themselves. Immersed in that powerful image, I suddenly knew that what stays with me over the years are powerful emotional and sensory moments. If I aim to live a life that I won't regret in the end, amassing powerful moments like these seems critical. And some of my most vivid memories of being human and real have come from work. I have both emotional and muscular recall of certain seconds when I saw specific research problems in a new way. I can replay segments of lectures given ages ago that were on song. These remind me that I am human and alive as much as the analogous treasured moments with friends, family, or nature.

Of course, it's often far too easy to get lost in the aspects of work that won't lead to moments like this. There's a lot of seemingly pointless work even in the unfettered academic life. But this insight gives me a metric: if I'm going to spend hours at the desk, do it to work on something hard and interesting enough to create those moments of a lifetime. At that point, it's not work. It's living.

Punching lines: what prevents change?

Quote: "The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity." -- Bill Gates, Harvard University Commencement 2007

I came across Gates' address a couple of days ago and highly recommend it. It's forceful, and this line pulled the main punch. Gates argues that many people are concerned about global issues such as economic inequity, but the problems are so complex that we don't know what to do about it. Cutting through the complexity is one of the objectives of the Gates Foundation.

I'm often moved by a problem, only to stumble in a wave of helplessness and futility that discourages me from even trying to do something. India did this to me many times; the way it commands me to react is one of the things I find most rewarding about traveling there. Educational inequality sometimes hits me the same way: leveling the academic playing field seems daunting because disadvantaged students have to get beyond the system around them that had the same education they are trying to surpass. The latter is arguably easier to solve; I'm still tossing around whether it is any less critical.

Underneath Gates' complexity theory is an assumption that people need to feel they are having an impact, or at least being useful, to participate in a problem. Measuring impact is hard, especially for a single individual facing a global-scale task. Personally, I find micro-finance appealing because it provides some metric of utility to someone; I just have to be careful not to
think too hard about all of the people I'm not helping. Cliches about butterfly wings notwithstanding, we have a hard time believing in the impact of small acts. Most people haven't been trained to think in terms of large systems, but that's what charitable giving or community service often ask us to do.

This seems an educational challenge: we have enough people with some time or money to give to causes (my sense is that there is more of this available now as the middle class grows, but I could be wildly wrong on this). What tools do we learn for understanding and participating in complex problems though? I don't recall formally learning much along these lines aside from the importance of voting. This is a deeply social question to which computing technologies could be applied. What might we do?

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As a side note, the "punching lines" tag reflects a new thread I'm trying for the blog. It'll label posts that respond to a concise quote that socked me in the gut when I first read it. Not lines I understood on re-reading, but ones that made me stop reading then and there and made my mind tingle.