Social power in computing and its affect in early CS education

Reading a NYTimes piece this morning that summarized work on how people tend to dismiss those with less social power in a given situation.  The article is unfortunately titled around money, even though the point of the article is much broader, looking at the implications for public policy if high-power people dismiss those below them.

I'm thinking about the impact of this in education, particularly in my own field of computing.

Much has been written about the nasty or dismissive culture of computing and its role in hampering diversity. Much has been written about how early encouragement was key for many women in the field (citing women simply because I'm familiar with writings on women in CS); this was a key component of last week's NYTimes piece on Women in Science.  The surface-level connection between these themes seems clear, but I've never understood the underlying mechanism that makes computing culture somewhat abrasive.  The social power piece leaves me wondering how we define social power in computing, and how that evolves over the span of a degree program or career.

My sense is that early on, we equate social power with programming ability in some abstract sense: those who can crank out code quickly, know arcane commands, and never need to reference a manual are granted power and status.  The "social" power here comes from these folks being able to act as human manuals (if you can muster the nerve to approach them).  As computing assignments and projects grow richer so that programming is more a mechanism and less the whole picture, new forms of social power emerge.  By then, of course, many of those who struggled with the first definition of social power have dropped out.

CS educators are increasingly thinking about how to broaden the perspective of computing in intro courses: get beyond programming and into applications, requirements, ethics, etc.  This is a great first step.  But if social power theory applies here, then these efforts will only have impact of courses can create a similarly broad social power structure.  Exercises that talk about broader issues but then have students primarily express their ideas in code won't challenge the core problem.  Expanding what we talk about in classes targets an individual's perspective on computing; changing what we visibly value and celebrate in our courses targets the social communities that yield broader groups of computing professionals.

How often do we talk about instructional design for shaping communities rather than individuals?  If anyone has pointers into literature on this for computing, I'd like to hear about it.

Mediating Differences in Computing Skills in the same Classroom

I just came across Ross Penman's post on the problems of computing education.  Ross is a 14-year old web programmer from Scotland.  His description of his school's computing curriculum is depressing, particularly the descriptions of the various ways in which it inadvertantly turns students off from computing.  These ways include the impact of old software and technologies that yield inferior-looking products (in the web-design or video-production spaces) and programming tools with low ceilings (in this case, Scratch), which aren't able to hold the interest of students who grok programming and want to do more with it, faster.

The latter point particularly got to me.  In our drive to providing computing education for most students (a good thing), we can't afford to alienate the students who will actually be good at it.  Many comments on his post are from professional programmers advising him on how to learn on his own.  That's reasonable advice for a student with Ross' abilities to teach himself, but it completely misses the point: what do you do for the students who have similar potential to Ross, but not the confidence, drive, or established interest to do this on their own?  Our curricula need to engage and foster them!

A key part of the problem here is how to gracefully handle the wide variation in both teacher and student abilities in computing: variation in student abilities is wide, the knowledge gap between some students and their computing teachers is also wide.  How do we enable teachers to work with such a wide-ranging class, including students who are more comfortable (or skilled) than the teachers?

Teachers need curricula that they can use on an entire class, but that (a) accommodate a wide range of student abilities, and (b) are sufficiently within the teacher's comfort zone to be usable.  The community seldom talks about (b), but we can't ignore its impact on adoption and effectiveness of computing education.

Our current standard early-programming solutions, such as Scratch and many of the other drag-and-drop tools, are too far skewed to the lower-middle end of (a) while achieving (b).  The problem isn't drag-and-drop per-se, but the limitations of the languages and tools that get created around drag-and-drop.

What if we had a curriculum (with language, software, materials, etc) that provided a simple, beginner-friendly approach to writing basic programs, but that scaled---within the same framework and tools---to more sophisticated programs that exercised more advanced computer science concepts?   Teachers could focus on learning to teach the core framework; most students could learn computing at the level of the basic programs, but students who are doing well could go forward without having to go off entirely on their own (and staying within the realm of what the teacher recognizes, for various benefits).

Program by Design (PbD), which we have worked on for 20 years, was designed for the sort of smooth ramp-up that accommodates learners at all levels.  The world-programming infrastructure within PbD developed the basic framework of programming animations, websites, and other reactive systems using a small set of constructs.  Bootstrap adapts animations programming in world to the needs of middle-schoolers and teachers who are new to computing.  In this ecosystem, a teacher can cover the core world-programming framework with the entire class.  Interested students can get into more advanced computing concepts by creating animations with richer features (multiple similar characters to get into lists, etc).  But these advanced students are still in the tools and approach that the teacher knows, which makes for a smoother curricular experience all around.

Some of our papers describe the underlying model, tools, and curricula.  There are some rough spots to the way we've packaged these curricula in the past, which we are actively working on.  But the fundamental idea and inspiration remains: our challenge as computing educators is to create tools that (a) accommodate a wide range of student abilities, and (b) are sufficiently within the teacher's comfort zone to be usable.  We hope others will join us in trying to meet this challenge.

Zen Sabbaticals

I've just finished reading Natalie Goldberg's 1993 memoir "Long Quiet Highway".  It focuses on her intertwined paths into writing and Zen, exploring the idea of writing as a form of practice (in contrast to traditional seated meditation).  Natalie's writing turns me inward, and perhaps not surprisingly, it brought my attention to sabbatical.

Fundamentally, sabbatical is about focus.  More importantly, the practice of focus.  Throwing oneself into just a single project isn't necessary (though the time to do that is nice).  Sabbatical is a logistical clearing of the clutter: no committee work, meetings, appointments, or grading.  It's a great justification for postponing reviewing work and other forms of service that slice and dice the days and weeks.  Your time becomes your own, and you're expected to do something significant with it.

And it can all go to waste if you see it more as losing others' demands on you without confronting your own time-wasting demands on yourself.  For the moment, I'm thinking mostly of distraction.

A true, internalized embrace of sabbatical would see me deeply exploiting my right to push the world away.  I'd read the university mailing list much less frequently, hugely slow down my response to email, and really reflect on (rather than simply check-off) things I was reading.  Then, the work would start. I'd pay attention, let distracting thoughts bubble up and float away, and look for the deeper insights that lead to great research and learning.  In other words, I'd approach academics as a form of Zen practice.

"Long Quiet Highway" brought this point back home: the real practice is in how you work and live.  If you can't practice focused attention when given the institutional sanction and support, how can you expect to do so once sabbatical is over and the flurry resumes?  Sabbatical is a sesshin (long sitting period) in disguise.  Make the desk a cushion.

Time to close the email.  Gassho, Natalie.

Time to unpack "everybody learn to code"

Two articles crossed my path this morning: (1) a NYTimes editorial on the impact of technology and automation on middle-tier jobs (arguing that middle-tier jobs will need to integrate using automated data with human skills of adaptation and communication); and (2) a Slate piece from a software engineer striking back on the recent "everyone should learn to code" frenzy (roughly: quality coding is hard and people don't need to understand the details of computers to work with them).

These articles help highlight two key problems. First, each of "everybody", "learn", and "code" has wildly different meanings for different contexts and we tend to conflate them when talking about this question in general terms.  Second, the recent surge of activity around programming education for all has fixated on roughly a single answer to this question (lessons in scripting via something like Python), and that answer isn't suitable to address the challenges raised in the NYTimes piece.

The current incarnation of online coding classes can serve a particular interpretation of "everyone" and "code" well: if your job will require you to script some data or an application, knowing basic scripting is a good idea (I'm avoiding the question of instructional design/choices in many of the current tools, many of which give me great cause for concern -- that's another post for another day).  Learning basic scripting will not, however, particularly help those looking to attain jobs that blend working with automated tools and applying human skills.  Yes, those jobs require someone to be able to think about aspects of computation (what is possible, where potential consequences lie, etc), but writing scripts isn't necessarily the right way to get there.  Or, to be more precise, writing scripts for the kinds of general, application-centric activities that seem to be common in online programming classes isn't necessarily the approach to get there.

There's a huge challenge and opportunity here for computing educators to articulate contextualized learning goals for "everyone" who will need to blend their work with computational processes, and then to design instruction that meets those goals.  In being too narrow about how we think of "everybody", "learn", and "code", we're just setting ourselves up to argue without making meaningful headway towards solving a significant problem.

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.

India 2007

December 2007 took us to India again. We hadn't expected to return quite so soon, but one of our closest friends was getting married in Bangalore. The wedding ended up postponed, but we grabbed the opportunity for some new adventures anyway. We spent much of the time in the south-western state of Kerala, prompted in part by an invitation to visit a grad school friend of mine (Venkatesh) who uses Shriram's textbooks. Venkatesh organized a 2-day symposium on computer science education at his university, the Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management Kerala, in Trivandrum. We joined 3 other CS professors in talking about initiatives for developing post-graduate technology education. We also traveled a bit through Kerala just as tourists.

Here we come a Kerala-ing

Kerala has a nontrivial Syrian Christian population, so Christmas has a genuine presence there. My image of Indian Christmas from last year's trip was of skinny gas station attendants in skinnier red santa suits. Kerala broadens the costuming, with a rich array of santa masks available from roadside shops. The first one I saw featured a rough, round ruddy-face with stubble beard, more of an irish fisherman look (the fisherman analogy makes sense for Kerala, but the irish escaped me). Another featured a long triangular beard more than twice the length of the red hat. A third was a simple paper affair that reminded me of old Burger King crowns. I only ever saw the third being worn (by small kids at a park), but suspect these get saved for parties. Our first night, we walked past a private home outside which a small group was singing loudly to energetic drumming; looked to me like caroling of a form, given the santa-costumed ringleader, three others wearing lamps on their heads, and the vague resemblance to the rhythms and tonal patterns of christmas tunes. Whenever sound stands out as noise in India, something unusual must be going on; they were having a jolly time at the least.

Lacking evergreens, Christmas decorations consist mostly of large paper stars strung up everywhere. Churches will hang dozens of them cascading down from rooftops to entry arches, each enclosing a lightbulb. The color schemes are flamboyantly indian: kaleidoscopes of pinks, oranges, purples and greens. One fancy hotel made a bouquet of small stars of silver and gold foil to suggest plant life; otherwise, trees just aren't part of the holiday iconography (despite Kerala being overrun by tropical trees). The endless arrays of stars and masks at stall after stall along the roads gave the holidays a cozy, personal feel in contrast to the mall-scale commercial assault that has become Christmas in the US. That commercial-scale feel re-emerged in Bangalore and Mumbai, where large stores and malls promoted the holiday spirit. The day we left, the local Bangalore paper reported that Christmas-period retail sales had surpassed those of Diwali for the first time. What better evidence of the rise of India's middle class than the firm rooting of a shopping season.

Switz-a-roo?

Our first stop in Kerala was Munnar, a tea-plantation town in the high mountains of Kerala. The plantations are spectacular: driving a couple hours from Cochin along the usual Indian dusty and cracked roads, the plantations suddenly cover the landscape in vivid green bushes. With the spaces between the bushes, the hills look like rough green stone walls cemented with black grouting. The visual textures, both within and between the dense bushes, are fantastic. The air is also fairly clean, making the Munnar plantations a lovely place to walk for an afternoon. Wandering the plantation paths, I was reminded of another December in which we visited the Swiss mountain town of Murren. There, we also walked mountain paths, stared at mountains and breathed deeply (albeit in snow). Initially, I made the connection through the similarity of letters and vowel patterns between "Murren" and "Munnar", but the place still kept saying "Switzerland" to me for some reason. Then Shriram figured it out: our hotel in Munnar had the same interior design as a small hotel we really like in Zurich (the Adler): winding staircase with murals on the landings, a small bench suggesting a garden on the ground floor landing, detail railings, similar carved ceilings, even the same yellow paint around the elevator. No fondue restaurant, but enough to cause mild disorientation everytime we used the main staircase. Anyone have another 6-letter mountain town starting with "M" to recommend?

Monsoon Showers

Much of Kerala is inhabited tropical rainforest. My first real rainforest experience had been last year in Australia, where people and the rainforest more or less keep their respective places. In true indian style, rainforest life looks confrontational: people installed housing and spice farms in hacked-out clearings and the rainforest looks ready to swallow the result: palms tower over small concrete structures, bending over the clearings with anticipation of a sci-fi movie monster who has just spotted lunch. Rain is a key economic player here, typified by the annual monsoon which make the region so fertile (I heartily recommend Frater's "Chasing the Monsoon" for an overview). Everyone and everything is just used to getting very, very wet at times.

Which I presume explains some of the showering facilities we encountered at our hotels. An upper-average arrangement features an overhead showerhead in a corner of the bathroom near a floor drain: no curtain or separator between the bathing floor area and the rest of the bathroom floor. One quickly learns how shower curtains free us from thinking about water dispersal. One homestay (aka bed-and-breakfast) had a more challenging arrangement: a showerhead mounted on the wall directly between the toilet and the bathroom door and no floor drain (just a small drain hole at the side wall base behind the toilet). Using the showerhead coated the entire bathroom with water, with no obvious way (such as a squeegie) to clear it up for subsequent toilet use. One day, I tried just bathing over the small sink to contain the mess, only to find Shriram happy to reproduce the rain effect when I was done. I have to wonder whether living with the monsoon changes one's attitude towards standing water everywhere; perhaps such bathrooms are a form of daily monsoon-prayer ritual. Being used to fully enclosed shower spaces in the west, I used to think that the 3/4 stalls common in European hotels posed water-containment challenges. When we finally got to a hotel with such a shower arrangement, I rejoiced in the reduced-stress bathing experience.

Plane dosa

This trip featured four flights on domestic airlines. On the advice of friends, we tried both Jet Airways and Kingfisher; I now understand the disdain that travelers on good Asian airlines have for US airline services. Bottled drinks served to all before takeoff, menu cards and towelettes distributed before takeoff, the daily newspaper tucked into each seatpocket, and a personal entertainment system (on demand music and movies), even on short flights. And then there's the food: good south indian sambar, idly, uppma, and fresh fruit as a standard meal option (rather than a hard-to-get special meal). No bread-and-slice-of-cheese/meat-snack-if-lucky experience here. One early evening flight was delayed almost two hours, and when we asked where we might find dinner (having planned to eat on the plane), we were directed to the airport restaurant where buffet would be served free of charge to passengers on our delayed flight (and we still got the planned dinner on the delayed flight). And this was regular economy class. To be fair, Continental fed us very well on both of our Mumbai-Newark flights (we were in business class after all--thank you frequent-flier miles!), with a mix of Indian and American options (entrees all Indian for the vegetarians, of course). Even in business class though, bits of the american food came tired and prepackaged: the huge ken's salad dressing, the dead and skinny bagel (which we ate assuming that to be our full breakfast, rather than the pre-omelette round). The multicuisine statements from air travel couldn't have been clearer: americans take less pride in food. I still haven't figured out how Contintental's indian food flying out of India was poorer quality than what we got flying out of the states (which was pretty good) though. And both ways, it was the heavier north indian cuisine, rather than the light south indian fare we got on the domestic flights. Pride in food is something to take away from India. Taking the food would have been even better, but one can't get much sambar through security in 3oz bottles.

Life Cochin'

Traveling for me is less about seeing other places and more about seeing myself: places become vivid when they resonate with or challenge my self-definition. I can take or leave travel in places that let me remain detached. I reacted strongly to India last year because the onslaught of sounds, smells, pollution and general sea of humanity demanded a response. I felt more alive in India last year than I had in a long time, and I was eager to feel that again. A burnt-out shell of a post-sabbatical, post-semester professor boarded the flight to Mumbai, and I realized somewhere over Europe that I needed to figure out who I was again. Recalling the food, the clothes, and the rhythms of Bangalore helped remind me who I felt I had been a year earlier. I began to relax. The proverb on the Times of India masthead that greeted me in Mumbai read "Tension is what you think you should be. Relaxation is what you are". A cold-water centering from the newspaper gods boded well.

A couple of days later, I had started to reassemble myself and was thinking of buying some Indian clothes to externalize my rediscovered self-image. We were in Cochin, staying in the Fort area where the historical buildings were. We headed for a Kathakali dance performance at which it hit me: the room was full of western tourists, most wearing Indian clothes. In that instant, I lost myself again. The very idea of indian clothes suddenly felt like a branding: a tourist who comes to vacation cheaply, experiment with local culture, stay in a gentrified area and sip small doses of local arts before ordering bottled water. In a place that asked me to assert my western-tourist role, I couldn't be comfortable trying to be myself; instead, I started a two-day internal apology for being a foreigner. I saw myself as nothing more than an impact on the local economy: positive in bringing in trade and money, negative in the resource impact tourism is having on Fort Cochin's infrastructure. The idea of buying anything there became replusive: I'd be taken for a price ride because that's what westerner tourists were for, after all. In a place where many westerners would feel more comfortable (since the hotels and restaurants anticipated western needs), I was suffocating.

The choking was self-imposed (the pollution wasn't bad there, for a change) and I knew it. It shouldn't matter how others saw what felt like my own self-expression. The other westerners there could have also been expressing feelings of being at home in India. We could have been a swath of soul-mates who happened to land up there at the same time. The onslaught of auto-rickshaw drivers always offering rides and shop owners calling out invitations to look was too much for me though; I simply didn't know how to behave as a foreigner-trying-to-ignore-that-I'm-a-tourist. In hindsight, it was a bit like Julie Andrews in "Victor/Victoria" (a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman). It left me with deep unresolved questions about what makes one a foreigner: is it about how comfortable we are in a place, whether we speak the language, follow the customs, appreciate the nuances, or share ancestry? And what's wrong with being a foreigner anyway? Why this need for a "non-foreigner" merit badge? Won't any traveler be a foreigner in many places? I've never been troubled being (or feeling like) a foreigner when traveling in Europe; it didn't bother me in Japan. I still don't know why it bothered me so deeply in India. I know it has nothing to do with being married to an Indian. This one is all about me, and I suspect it's fairly fundamental.

Sense Preserve Us

The weather wins in areas as wet at Kerala. Structures look worn; paint jobs need frequent refreshing. Keeping up surface appearances is a losing battle that the locals have learned not to fight. The focus on surface appearance extends beyond weather-soaked buildings though. In Cochin, we visited Mattancherry Palace, which features a room painted in murals of the epic Ramayana. The murals are faded and broken in many parts, but enough detail remains to warrant a close look. Signs throughout the museum warn against taking photographs, and this seemed somewhat enforced: a staffer demanded the camera of a woman who took a picture of her son on a staircase. We'd have liked an image of the murals though and asked about postcards or prints. Not available; commerce doesn't explain the ban. So why can't we take pictures? Because the flash would damage the artifacts. Okay, that was the other expected answer, except ... all of the windows in the room were open and flooding the murals in light. When Shriram asked about that he was told that the murals were the property of the government, not public property, so special permission (which was hard to get, of course) was required to take pictures. Such a contrast from the home, where the murals would be behind glass in very low light conditions and professional photographs available to take home.

I don't yet understand the Indian mindset regarding preservation: obviously, it isn't a priority, but what other instinct inhibits it? A degree of preservation occurs naturally at temples and shrines that require barefoot visits, which suggests stronger preservation of architecture as opposed to artifacts. Even the idea of collecting items for display seems more an ideal imported from the British, however, an observation I noted (and Shriram confirmed) as we walked through a zoo in Trivandrum. Care for old things would seem inconsistent with the endless rubble piles around the streets of India. The crumble of buildings reminds me a bit of Rome, where piles of column fragments near sidewalks isn't uncommon. Yet there is something neat about the Roman piles (not my original thought when visiting Rome, mind you), perhaps because they aren't interlaced with random trash. Perhaps our western obsession with preservation stems from attachment to things, both materially and as a vehicle for understanding culture, whereas cultures richer in stories and gods use other preservation media. Certainly, the Ramayana is not going to be lost as those murals fade. But India of all places has made me appreciate the descriptive limitations of words alone, even those augmented with sound. I wonder if living amongst such sensory richness all the time makes one immune to its diversity; I'd expect one at least takes it for granted. Or perhaps such sensory richness surrounds me here in the US in ways I've learned not to perceive on a daily basis.

Service Return

Books (fiction and non) prepared me not to expect too much by way of "service" in India: queues exist to be stood in, forms to be completed, and counters to divide the person with a particular job from those without it. I went understanding that I should be satisfied when something got done, unsurprised if it did not. No problem. India's increasing interaction with the western economy, however, would seem to require a new breed of service-oriented personnel, and we saw signs of that awareness last year. Young hotel and restaurant staff are clearly being trained for better responsiveness: every request met with a bright, forceful and immediate "yes, sir!". Our electronic key cards have stopped working; "yes, sir!". I can't find the switch to turn off the lights; "yes, sir!". Waiter, there's a metal shard in my dinner; "yes, sir!". Not a single one of these (real, I might add) exchanges went past our initial remark. Not even a "what should I do about it" (which seemed obvious in at least the first two cases). Best we could do was to initiate another volley with a followup request, which too gracefully bounced off the smiling surface of the staffer in question. We did gradually learn to be very direct, rather than expect staff to infer the actual question from our statement of the problem. We had not actually asked for anything, so we got more than perhaps we should have expected; we got an acknowledgment.

In the context of broken key cards, it was all rather funny. In the context of corporate competitiveness, it's cause for concern from India's perspective. For a society that loves to question authority, people seem reluctant to question for information (I've read about Indians' general tendency to make up an answer rather than admit to not knowing something). We saw similar signs among some of the students we met on the trip: reluctance to engage and ask probing questions. I suspect these traits will limit innovativeness and competitiveness in the Indian high tech sector, perhaps sooner rather than later as demand for workers exceeds supply. As a computing professor in the US, we hear a lot about outsourcing and dropping enrollments. It was interesting to see the problem in more detail from the other side, to see what challenges the Indian system is facing with regards to human infrastructure (including serious faculty shortages). I talked to several people about WPI's project curriculum and how it helps students develop some of these skills. Thanks to Venkatesh and his colleagues for the open discussions that deepened my perspective on this issue.

Indo-Japanese signage

Signs with safety warnings are popular throughout India. Bangalore intersections feature the rhythmic "a little care makes accident rare", or the more direct "save head, wear helmet" (more people _carry_ helmets than wear them on their heads). I find these amusing not only for their cadence, but because they actually give justifications rather than just instructions. So much of my experience of Indian culture is someone proclaiming what someone else should do without giving rationale, so these signs are refreshing. Perhaps my favorite sign from this trip though was one I saw all over Trivandrum: "Future spells Linux. Let's Migrate!!!". I was suddenly reminded of Japanese tshirts that bear bizarre, often off-color, phrases in English. The sign stands out as odd precisely because south Indians generally have very good English skills, better than the average Japanese. Future _spells_ linux? I couldn't quite make it make sense, which made it a prime candidate for a tshirt. In general, Japan and India don't have much in common aside from a shared love of things that beep. In particular, the contrast between Japanese and Indian temples is striking. Both have temples around random turns, but Japanese temples inspire stillness while Indian ones just seem more frenetic. In fact, public parks are the only quiet places in Indian cities, set off from the streets by stone walls that magically block out noise and fumes. They are welcome places to migrate in the late afternoon.

Wave goodbye

We finished the trip with an 8-hour layover in Mumbai enroute for home. Plans to meet one of Shriram's friends feel through (the friend flew to and from Bangalore around the same times we flew to and from Mumbai), but his friend sent his driver to take us around for the afternoon, so I got a quick tour of Mumbai. Mumbai is unrelenting: flying over it presents patches of roofs that stretch entire blocks, with little to no space for light to reach the interior homes. Population takes on a whole new meaning when viewed from Mumbai. We drove and drove, and saw the same shop fronts over and over, the same surges of people conducting business, selling fume-kissed vegetables, or scraping together a living along the sidewalks. The numbers of people are staggering, then it hits that this is just one slice through the city; there are hundreds of other slices. There are thousands of boys playing cricket, everywhere boys playing cricket, with dozens of games commanding the same fields but at different angles. It's mayhem. It's Mumbai.

Towards the end of the drive, we came across a seawall where hundreds of folks had lined up to watch the sunset. A sudden rush of people shrieking and running across the street, camera phones in hand. One of the bigger Indian movie stars was waving to crowds from his balcony. He went inside, and they all rushed back in a human ripetide that returned as fast as it had come inland. Waves are the only metaphor I can conjure for Mumbai, massive flows of seas of people,many of whom get pulled under the current. Last year, I felt that India had finally given me a context to undertake a liberal arts education; a living laboratory where economics, urban studies, and sociology would have made more sense than they did coming from suburban New York. Mumbai brought that again to the fore. This country still has a lot to teach me, a lot to get inside my head and through my soul. It's fabulously alive, yet mentally exhausting. The books and thoughts we brought back will simply have to tide me over to our next visit.

All in my head

Blustery weather yesterday after a hectic week propelled me to do something I haven't done in years: read a book start to finish in a single day. I picked up Louann Brizendine's "The Female Brain" some weeks ago, intending to save it for travel reading. My fried brain was drawn to the subject yesterday, however, rewarding me with an eye-opening, unsettling, and thought-provoking afternoon.

Brizendine is a neuropsychiastrist with expertise and clinical practice on interactions between hormones and mood. The book explains the interaction between hormones and brain operation in women, with contrasting references to these interactions in men. Chapters cover the various stages of women's hormonal transitions, from birth, childhood, puberty, early adulthood, parenting, middle adulthood, and menopause. Each chapter explains the hormones and hormonal cycles that are most active within each of theses phases; these are related to brain functionality and how this predisposes women to pay attention to different issues at different phases of life and periods within the hormonal cycle. It's engaging and informative, with extensive citations and reference notes.

Brizendine wants women to understand how hormones influence brain function so they can anticipate and plan behavior accordingly. Knowing that we are hormonally predisposed to being more attuned to the needs of others in the first two weeks of our cycles, for example, may help women evaluate requests to take on additional tasks during this time (is this how I get talked into more committee work?). Understanding how hormone phases reduce our pleasure or anger responses may help us maintain stronger relationships, especially when the contrast to men's hormone and brain functions is clear.

The book was eye-opening because I didn't know about the hormonal phases over a lifetime, or much about how particular hormones predisposed me to certain responses. Looking back over my life for the last several weeks, the info presented in this book could explain a lot. And that's precisely what I found unsettling about it: it was too easy to agree with the findings she reports, too easy to wave a flag of womenhood and proclaim that "my hormones made me do it, and differently than he would have" (for appropriate values of he). Brizendine is well-aware of this potential and emphasizes the complementing role of nurture and our ability to choose how to react to biologically-motivated impulses. Any fault of overeager application of this book would be my fault, not hers.

But on some level, I do want to believe that the findings of these studies are valid. How wonderful to narrow the range of my influence in how I react as I defend my differences from the plethora of males around me. Responsibility is great, in moderation. And it's nice to have a readable reference that my reactions both are and are not "all in my head". I want to jump for relief having read this, yet bounce instead from the (appropriate) brakes of my scientific training. I also wanted a home-hormone test kit, so I could try mapping the results against my own moods and responses over time.

My most thought-provoking moment came in the section on puberty, discussing how girls in this stage become intensely focused on social bonding in contrast to boys who retreat. Against the imagery of girls obsessed with social connection and position, computing and science don't stand a chance as currently presented. If we truly want more women in these fields, we have to question something, whether it's how we expose pre-college students to these subjects or how we get students to stop selecting away from certain topics too early in life. I wonder whether those of us who did make it to college majors in these areas had different hormonal ratios than our female peers. Timing may be more problematic than we, or at least I, thought in thinking about how to make these fields more inviting to young women.

Montravels in Montreal

We're in Montreal for a long weekend. Montreal is a lovely mix of
European and North American city life, full of cafes, ethnic
restaurants, mixed languages, and wanderlust-inspiring parks. Okay,
more European than North American (though we could get the American League Baseball Championships on tv to see how the Red Sox/Indians series wound up). We get up here every few years and
always have a great time. However, there is one aspect of Montreal
which gets me every time: French (the language).

I'm generally adept at languages. Tourist-level language comes
quickly and easily, and I tend to remember basic phrases for a long
time. French, however, has a bizarre opposite effect. I can't recall
basic French phrases. Even worse, when someone speaks French to me, I
lose the ability to speak at all, even in English! This happens all
the time: some addresses me in French and my mind goes totally blank.
Waitstaff will say something (to clarify my badly slaughtered attempt
to order) and I'll just stare at them trying to figure out how to talk
again. Shriram has seen this often enough to believe me, and we are
slowly learning that letting him order for us both spares much family
embarrassment.

From a scientific perspective, I find this fascinating though.
Experience has led me to believe that I have a default "stammering"
language: when in a foreign language situation, my brain defaults to
the current "stammering" language. For a long time, that language was
Chinsese (which I majored in as an undergrad). That's been replaced
by German due to my many conferences there over the years. How is it
then that one language (and only that one language so far) causes me
to lose language ability entirely? Surely there's an interesting
explanation for this -- pointers to any relevant theories?

Fortunately, the language of cycling is nonverbal, so I've been able
to get around quite handily on two wheels this weekend. Montreal is
often hailed as a great city for bicycling. Last time we were here,
we brought our bikes and rode the Lacine canal route, which runs along
the St. Lawrence River. Or so we hear. The day we did the ride was
so foggy that we never saw the water, even though we rode alongside
it, over it, and around it for several hours. Still, the biking
infrastructure seemed good enough that we brought the bikes again for
this trip. We spent yesterday on and around Mt Royal, the main
vantage point over the city.

Today, I ventured along the lines marked as some sort of bicycle route
on the tourist map. Biking lanes here are fairly sophisticated. The
biking lanes run between the sidewalk and parking on the side of the
road, sometimes separated from the cars by short concrete walls.
Biking routes are well-marked, and clear marking indicate when biking
lanes will cross one another. I usually don't like city riding, but
the lanes here are quite enjoyable.

A short spin in the bike lanes highlights, however, that cars and
bikes follow two different road protocols. Cars behave as cars
usually do: traffic lights, signaled turns, and the usual degree of
city aggression. Cyclists, in contrast, follow Indian road culture
(as I described in my earlier Indian travelogue): traffic lights are
suggestions at best, and plowing through perpendicular-moving traffic
is par for the course. Even as a pedestrian, I've felt more at risk
from the cyclists than from the taxi drivers (which I'd heard warnings
about on local cycling pages). The craziest cyclists are invariably
riding helmetless (as are most cyclists here). Casual observation
suggests that helmet wearers are much more likely to be men than
women, and spandex seems reserved for touring cyclists rather than
weekday riders. Quite a change from home, where most cyclists are
exercising rather than commuting and seem aware that they are
violating car-based road protocols, rather than asserting a vehicular
counterculture.

Vegetarian visitors should check out Cafe Lola Rosa, on Milton street
near McGill. We had two delightful meals at this little veggie cafe
on this trip, as well as a fine Tibetian meal at Shambala on
St. Denis. Montreal is very veggie friendly, though with less
elegance than veggie restaurants in France. Dishes here are both
North-American- and French-inspired, but generally fairly light yet
filling. Attempts to locate fine croissant on this trip didn't work
out too well, but that gives a goal for the next time we make it up
this way.

Mental accounting

While paying a stack of bills this morning, I noticed a new online payment option for one of our annual bills. With all the sabbatical travel we did last year, online bill pay and tracking was a lifesaver: I put monthly reminders into my calendar to login and pay our credit cards, billed the utilities directly, and didn't worry at all about missing payments while on the road. I had the checkbook in hand to pay today's annual bill the old-fashioned way, but decided to check out the ebilling option.

To my surprise, I paid the bill the old-fashioned way anyway. Signing up for ebilling meant another account and another password, and I have spent far too much time this week trying to remember various usernames and passwords for rarely-accessed sites. The website design rendered poorly on firefox, so the instructions were hard to read. Worst of all, the signup page stated that once you signed up for ebilling, you would no longer receive paper statements. You could get paper statements again at any time by calling customer service, who would then unenroll you from electronic bill paying. In other words, it appears that you can only pay your bill online if you agree to stop receiving paper statements.

The loss of a paper bill was the final straw for me. For annual bills, a piece of paper on my desk to remind me to make a payment is essential. Monthly bills are routine enough that my mental cycle checks in if I haven't issued a payment recently, but annual bills are hopeless. The volume of email I get mandates the use of email filters, and I sometimes ignore the non-essential filters for days or weeks at a stretch. At core, I simply don't trust my personal information management setup--ie, the combination of my calendar and email--to remind me about critical issues that only happen once a year. Out of sight, out of mind feels like a very real danger where annual bills are concerned. Something is clearly not working quite right when we choose not to use tools that supposedly save time and memory out of a fear that we might not remind ourselves to use them.

Where Rhode signs used to be

Ask a Rhode Islander for directions, and the response will likely include the phrase "where X used to be". In my 7 years living here, I've been told to make turns at landmarks like "where Joe's barber shop used to be" and "where the little place with the really good fried clams used to be". One day, Shriram and I came across a sign on a major street reading "former bus stop" and figured it was there to help people who had been given directions by locals (especially as there was no indication of the current bus stop location).

This weekend, I was reading on the front porch when a trio of women on bicycles pulled up and asked

"Excuse me, can you tell me where the John Howland school used to be?"

Our condo sits on the former site of the school. They were trying to find an old house of personal interest and the school was one landmark they recalled from visiting the area years ago. It was the first time I'd heard anyone turn the phrase back around to be what one sought. But it struck me, if you can get directions to where the place used to be, what difference does it make whether you ever actually knew the original place? All you need is one Rhode Islander to give directions, and another to resolve the level of indirection. Computer science exploits indirection all the time, so surely I can make good use of this. Besides, who knows what interesting place now sits where the place with the really good fried clams used to be ...

What I've Meant by Mentoring

One day in grad school (early 1990s), several of us were talking about the lack of women on the dept faculty. When a male student asked why this was important, one woman remarked that she "wanted someone who looks like me" as a mentor. I pondered that remark for years, not concurring with it but lacking a compelling alternative. Mid-postdoc, I wanted a mentor who talked like me: someone for whom gadgets weren't the ultimate conversation topic and who might admit to frustrations or challenges as a researcher and person. Now as faculty, I seek "someone who relates like me", in relationships with research, colleagues, and career overall.

I blogged earlier about professional friendships, which fall largely under the "talk like me" view. Here, I'm after something more substantial. I've learned that the environment of research matters as much (if not more) to me than the topic of research. I'd gladly choose a research problem based on the people I would get to work with on it, rather than first picking the problem. I'm not sure how to structure a career around this metric though; the search for compatible research colleagues is time and energy consuming for all involved, certainly more so than just picking a problem. As a mentoree, I'm still looking for role models on structuring a career this way.

Reflecting on my role as a mentor (to both students and junior faculty), I think of the standard advice we give to young researchers: "find something you are truly passionate about and work on that". Gosh knows I've said it to others. And after 15 years of trying, I can honestly say that this advice simply hasn't worked for me, because my passion flies within groups working together on problems, not from the problems in and of themselves. I've almost talked myself out of computer science many times on the grounds that lacking passion for any particular problem must mean I'm in the wrong career. And then I turn back because I get short-term consumed by a modeling or programming problem and realize that I do love this work. I just need a different model for structuring those fragments of work into a satisfying long-term career.

Where does this leave me as a mentor, though? Do I pass along the "get passionate about a problem" advice, since it clearly works for many in the self-selected group who become researchers? What advice would I give if I _didn't_ say that? Perhaps mentoring isn't about "giving advice", but about being a sounding board, sharing experiences and asking questions as someone tries to form their own career path. The mentor in me likes that view: it frees me from the responsibility of having the answers. But as a mentoree, I want someone who can give advice, who does have "the answers" and is willing to share them.

I remind myself that the questions I wanted answers to as a student and new professor are different from the ones I'm facing now, and I can suggest views into those earlier questions. Maybe someone who "looked like me" was all I really wanted earlier in my career. But there's this ever-nagging sense that I could make someone else's career path easier if only I could guide them now on the issues that will confront them later, even though I know they may not even see those issues yet. And if they do, I'm just not the right mentor for them. Mentoring is about a fit between people, not an exam for the mentor. Remind me of that next time my mentoree asks a question for which I fail to have an answer.

[Side note: I'm thinking about these questions a lot in the context of reading Christina Robb's recent book "This Changes Everything: The Relational Revolution in Psychology", an account of the relational psychology work by Carol Gilligan, Jean Baker Miller, Judith Lewis Herman, and others, from the late 70s onward. Opens a lot of questions about relationships between people and between people and their work, both of which bear on questions concerning mentoring.]

[This post written for the scientiae-carnival on mentoring.]

Disorganization Lesson 1: know your to-do list

Last weekend, I had an incredibly productive burst of disorganization (so much so that it took a week to get organized enough to post about it). Quite simply, I ignored my two courses and played with a new research idea all weekend. It was simultaneously invigorating and frustrating. Frustrating in that even after two days, I couldn't point to any "solved" piece of the puzzle (the "cross it off the list" mentality), but invigorating because the repeated failures to tie up the loose ends illustrated the subtleties that will make this project interesting and worth doing. I couldn't have asked for a better outcome from a "get disorganized" moment.

This weekend, in contrast, has been solidly organized. The difference lay in the to-do list. While my "get disorganized" crusade is about not being a slave to the list, abolishing the list isn't the right approach. Last weekend, all the list items were about getting ahead for the following week (so I'd have more unstructured creative time). This weekend, the list items reflect hard deadlines for stuff due on Monday. My victory from last week was deciding to grab the creative time at the moment, rather than to work off the list so I could (hopefully) avail of the moment later. That seems a learnable behavior.

In the end, it's about prioritizing unstructured time relative to hard deadlines. If my todo list is about tracking and making priorities, perhaps the unstructured activity should go on the list, especially since I sometimes struggle to "remember" to make that unstructured time. But part of the point of the list is to be able to scratch things off, so that doesn't work so well for an ongoing effort. I do know that ditching the list entirely isn't the answer (as noted in a comment on my original post on this effort). It's about keeping the list in perspective while getting on with the things that are too big to warrant being written down.

Getting unorganized

Every new academic year brings a "new year's resolution" from many faculty: the intent to get "more organized". Even highly prolific colleagues have been quoted as wishing they were more organized, and one of the career mentoring programs I've been to had a nice session centered around the topic. Blogs and books abound to the extent that you could guarantee you got nothing done just by trying to read them all. Who wouldn't benefit from being more organized in our fast-paced world?

Me, for one. I am resolved to get unorganized this year.

Sabbatical felt very productive, but I always sensed that it was for reasons beyond having more time and fewer distractions from not teaching. Now that I am back in the throes of (two) classes and barely afloat, I'm realizing that my being organized is a problem. I have an insanely good memory for to-do lists (including the shopping list, household errand list, course prep list, and the list of lists). Every evening, I write down the tasks that have to get done the next day; every morning, I spent lots of time "getting things done" before realizing that several weren't even on the paper lists. By the list measure, I'm quite productive.

Unfortunately, the victim here is the spontaneous creativity that fosters research. When an idea pops into my head and needs a little cultivating through thought or code experiments, my organized mind immediately relegates it to a position on a carefully prioritized list. By the time I get to it, the snuffed ember that remains doesn't have enough traction to go anywhere. I'd be better off if I could ditch organization and chase the sparks without my internal task management system always reminding me of those blasted lists. In other words, I have to get unorganized.

Clearly, the trick is to find the right balance between organization and disorganization: some organization is essential to run an effective course or career. Most of the writing out there is aimed at those with too little organization though. I haven't yet found a blog aimed at those of us with too much. There are lots of little related pieces of advice: the standard 80/20 rule veteran faculty give to newbies (students rarely notice that last 20% of effort that takes you at least 80% of the time), articles on improving creativity, living a meaningful life, etc. These dance around the real issue: if you are very organized, you have to work hard at overriding that if you want to let yourself do the work that needs less structure. What are the best practices for introducing more chaos into your life? Yes, I know, that's another list ...

Scientific Value

I recently finished reading Peter Kramer's Against Depression. Kramer is the psychiatrist who wrote Listening to Prozac some years ago. In talks on the Prozac book, he frequently got questions about the tension between treating depression and the suppression of artistic temperament ("what if we gave van Gogh Prozac", for example). Against Depression is his discussion of society's view of depression juxtaposed against the reality of what doctors understand of the disease, or in his terms, "what it is" versus "what it is to us".

That phrasing of the contrast grabbed me. The descriptions of modern understanding of depression were fascinating and unnerving (covering issues such as the way depression alters the brain, how we become more susceptible to it after each episode, and how the disease is really about the loss of resiliency). It is his bigger question, however, about the tension between the scientific reality and our perception of the problem, that I keep thinking about. We see this all the time with scientifically-valid evidence: people don't believe or even absorb something just because it is true. Kramer attempts to explain why this is dangerous in the case of depression.

It reminded me of a science education video I saw several years back: middle school children did science lessons on light and the inability to see in completely dark places. One by one, children who had done well on these lessons were put into a completely dark room and asked whether they could see anything. They persisted in believing that their eyes would adjust soon, thus enabling them to see. Experience (of being in fairly dark places) overrode the facts (of being in a completely dark place). The video was demonstrating how educators have to elicit the experiences or prior beliefs that contradict new knowledge in order to help students absorb new knowledge.

Kramer's case seems both easier and harder to make. Easier because he can explain the realities of depression in terms of vivid human stories to which readers can relate; the human stories give a hook on which the reader can hang the new knowledge. Harder, though, because our society has a lot invested (emotionally) in romanticizing depression. Kramer works hard to distinguish medical depression (which has corresponding brain pathology) from variations in temperament. Lay people often miss the distinction, which in turn reinforces existing misconceptions about the disease.

Heading into the academic year, the book gives a good reminder of the role of existing beliefs in learning and the importance of casting ideas in ways that grab people's attention. Even if you aren't an educator, there's a lot to learn from this engaging and well-written book. It's a good reminder that we should ask ourselves what beliefs we hang on to, what value we ascribe to them, and how that value might contradict more compelling evidence.