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.
