End of 2020 Thoughts

 

The year is winding down. Classes have ended. Grades have been submitted. Looking back on 2020 with less than 20-20 hindsight, I become dizzy. So much has happened. After more than 25,000 lies and more than 3.000 deaths in the USA from COVID-19, it is time to catch one’s breath, exhale a sigh of relief that relief from the lies and the deaths is in sight … if only that could happen sooner. The disruptions have been many and varied, occurring at nearly every level. My hindsight leaves me with mixed feelings about my work. My university has been very accommodating and understanding of students during the pandemic and during multiple crises involving minorities. UNT fully embraces the black lives matter movement and is engaging in a strong and ongoing campaign to promote diversity and inclusion. That is on the positive side of the ledger. However, the rate of change at UNT for things that involve faculty and staff seems to have been increasing during the pandemic. Administrators are generating changes in many systems causing more work and stress for many faculty and staff even though those changes seem warranted if considered in isolation from all else that is happening. So I am seeing faculty and staff colleagues somewhat stressed due to the increasing rate of changes generated by administrators in these troubled times. All is not well, even at this well-intentioned and well-led institution. IMLTHO. Yes … that is a word … actually it represents a phrase … in my less than humble opinion. I stumbled upon that word when it was made evident to me some years ago that I actually knew much less than I claimed to know. I find frequent reminders of that message highly useful.

In the midst of this pandemic, when UNT was doing so many things that were so positive, the Canvas system crashed the first week of the Fall semester and some courses had to be restored from a prior version, including my course which was not close to the prior version … the resulting confusion lasted most of the semester as bit by bit the restored course was transformed into what had been planned. Students complained – understandably. I was trying to keep things simple and constrained to just the weekly discussion forums which I brought back to the intended state. But students were looking at other things and getting confused. The best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley – look it up … you may find something interesting by Robert Burns.

Anyway, students complained and resisted my approach to instruction. Of course they had their own pressures during COVID-19 and wanted to see a course laid out like other courses with modules and separate pages for each activity and assignment, unlike my attempt to put everything in one place .. and they expected to see specific grading rubrics and being told exactly what to do for each assignment, unlike my inclination to give rather open-ended assignments with minimal initial guidance and feedback along the way as part of a developmental strategy.

The experience reminded me of my using the Strategy Dynamics Beefeater Restaurants game in educational technology seminars in Sweden and Norway only to discover that of 75 student attempts to succeed in the game, only one managed to do so and that person could not repeat his winning strategy to stay in business 10 years. Later, I had the chance to talk to the game inventors at the London Business School – John Morecroft and Kim Warren. I told them about my experience using Beefeater Restaurants and asked them how they expected learners to learn anything from that game. Their quick answer was they didn’t expect players to succeed. Rather, they used players’ failure to get those highly gifted students to realize they knew less than they thought they knew … their failure put them in a position to learn. That approach to learning appealed to me and has stayed with me ever since. The doctoral students we have in our program at UNT are highly knowledgeable and highly experienced and inclined to believe they know and understand much more than many of their instructors. They are often mistaken, but getting them to become aware of that is a challenge. And, I have to admit I am not doing very well at meeting that challenge.

The challenge is simple. To learn X, one must first admit to not knowing or understanding X. One then must be willing to commit time and effort in investigating X, preferably from multiple perspectives and with different assumptions guiding the investigations. Learning is not simple and often not easy. So, I view my task as a teacher not to feed knowledge or answers or formulaic responses to students. Rather, I see my task as getting students to HAVE questions – to admit to not knowing or understanding, to commit time and effort to finding answers, to explore alternative possibilities, to question assumptions, to go where they might not have gone before. But I rarely succeed in such efforts.

I hate ending the year on such a down note. I could pretend things were other than they are. Some politician do that so well. I could never be a politician. I did once serve as the campaign manager for a politician in El Paso – Pat O’Rouke – yes, he was Beto’s father. Pat lost that election for the EPCC Board and I got fired from El Paso Community College for supporting him. The year away from El Paso allowed me to finish my PhD at UT-Austin, and Pat filed a lawsuit on my behalf through the National Education Association that got me re-instated at EPCC. Life is sometimes just too weird, even for me.