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Math Deficits, AI, and Other Current Conundrums

One of the advantages of this time of year for me as an educator is the ease in workload as the academic calendar makes the turn from first semester to second semester.  Exams are done; final grades calculated; coursework caught up; and for a brief window of time, there is nothing needing any kind of assessing (i.e. I’m done grading for a while!).  It means I can get caught up on news and research in the world of education that are not immediately critical to my specific everyday needs and to reflect on what insights this information might have for the larger mission of teaching and learning.

Two such items to catch my attention this time around involve math and AI.  The first, a report issued this past September, chronicles the severity of the academic decline in math skills of our youngest learners.  The latest research is indicating that the children who were pre-K or kindergarten during the most severe restrictions of the pandemic not only lost a critical learning window when it comes to math; they are, in fact, not catching up to pre-pandemic levels the way their older elementary age peers are.  Worse, many of them are actually falling further behind, and what makes this fact so highly problematic is that there is a limited window during brain development for mastering such skills effectively.  Hence, the long term impact of a failure to do so can have devastating economic consequences—for both the individual and our society—and that means that this “math gap” that a portion of an entire generation is facing is not inconsequential.

Moreover, that may be even more true for those of us entering the later stages of our lives.  As Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop report out, “in a survey by Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation of more than 4,000 members of Gen Z, 49 percent of respondents said they did not feel prepared for the future. [In addition,] employers complain that young hires lack initiative, communication skills, problem-solving abilities and resilience.”  Hence, we already have individuals entering the workforce self-identifying as ill-prepared; just imagine what today’s second graders are going to be like as the long-term caretakers of late Boomers (such as myself) and every single Gen Xer and early Millennial! It is difficult not to shudder.

Nor is AI going to be the answer to this “math gap” problem.  The other report to catch my attention came from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania who studied the impact of using AI as an aid to learning math.  1,000 high school students were divided into three groups:  a third had full access to ChatGPT while completing practice problems; a third had limited access to a tutorial version that would give hints but not divulge any answers; and a third did their work the traditional way.  The results were very clear:  while the first group solved 48% more practice problems correctly and the second group solved an incredible 127% more problems correctly, the first group earned 17% lower grades than the control on the final test and the tutorial group scored the same as the control.  In other words, good old-fashioned “grind it out” for the win.

Of course, when analyzing the data more deeply, the researchers found that part of what they were observing were flaws in the bot itself.  Its computations were sometimes wrong (8%) and “its step-by-step approach for how to solve a problem was wrong 42% of the time.”  However:

the researchers believe the [biggest] problem is that students are using the chatbot as a “crutch.” When they analyzed the questions that students typed into ChatGPT, students often simply asked for the answer. Students were not building the skills that come from solving the problems themselves.

Again, score one for basic grit; something we’re going to need to aid our current 2nd graders in learning if they are to bridge their “math gap” successfully.

What is more, this general capacity for doggedness is something we are all going to need to reacquire if we’re going to meet the massive challenges facing our world today.  While ruminating about these math and AI stories from September, the more recent world was also impinging on my awareness, and as often happens in those circumstances, a kind of Gestalt emerged with an insight I had glimpsed before but never fully fleshed out.  I was listening to Brittany Luse interview former Missouri congresswoman, Cori Bush, on the NPR show, “It’s Been a Minute,” and Ms. Luse kept trying to get Ms. Bush to address how a progressive political agenda could survive in the face of the recent election to which Ms. Bush kept responding that change takes time—an answer Ms. Luse just didn’t seem to want to hear—and as I listened to this repetitious back and forth, the proverbial “light bulb” went on:  change does take time, but that’s an answer nearly no one in today’s world can psychologically hear anymore.

It was like a syllogistic moment out of one of those scenes in The Queen’s Gambit where the main character manipulates the chess pieces in her mind while staring at the ceiling.  Premise 1: Digital technologies have all but destroyed any capacity for delayed gratification in enormous swathes of the human population; the creation of AI has simply been the pinnacle of these efforts, offering instant essays, instant math solutions…instant chimeras of any manner of complex thought.  Yet (premise 2) ALL real, authentic, lasting change is NEVER instantaneous, and so (conclusion) we find ourselves today living in a society in desperate need of change with almost no capacity for the patience to achieve it.  Instead, when the needed change doesn’t happen right away, too many of us now either give up and disengage in fatalistic disgust or succumb to the Siren’s song of fallible simplistic-ness (if I may coin a word).

And the outcome of the recent election is a classic example.  While a six-year study of the prices of 96 items at a Walmart in Georgia revealed that the overall price increase between 2024 and 2023 was a mere 0.7% inflation, that same study points out that the price increase between 2024 and 2019 was 25%.  Given, I’ll suggest, that five years to an adult memory is probably the equivalent of the 15 minutes in the famed Stanford Marshmallow Experiment and you had most of society declare in early November that they wanted their “one marshmallow” now! and be damned the “two marshmallows” they could receive from patience with a (documented!) growing economy.  Hence, the guy touting instant access to the single “marshmallow” won because it was the simplistic solution to a perceived “immediate” need.

Moreover, the fact that the solution offered was a materialistic one was key to the public’s response.  In a society obsessed with stuff, entire populations of this country were prepared to ignore all the other bellicose threats Trump promoted—no matter how potentially detrimental to their own immediate lives and communities—and such is the power of this collective obsession that today, we are willingly standing by as a nation as corporate leaders such as Mark Zuckerberg openly prepare to sacrifice truth itself to maintain their profits against any legal onslaughts from the incoming administration about fact-checking (and God help you if you have the temerity to try to call out this greed in a nation-wide publication!)

So where does all this leave me as an educator? First, I’ve got children who can’t do basic math.  Second, I’ve got AI that can’t solve the problem and actually threatens to exacerbate its difficulties.  Third, I’ve got a society too incapable of delayed gratification to deal with either of these first two problems (let alone the enormous ones such as climate change and environmental degradation), and I’ve got a simpleton to lead them getting sworn into the Oval Office.  Kind of a grim outlook for a grim winter.

However, there was one other story during this down time that came to my attention that reminded me that there is a solution to these problems (or any other), and that is: patient, steady, determined resolve.  Granted, the story itself is really kind of trivial, namely that my alma mater officially rebranded itself as “WashU.”  But you need to have the insider view of the story that underlies this story to know why it uplifted my spirits, and so please bear with me as I fill in some of the “behind-the-scenes.”

It starts in 1982 in the Public Relations Department of a university recognized regionally for its excellence, who has recently hired a new director who has made a small name for himself at some other midwestern schools for raising the profiles of those institutions.  Washington University in St. Louis wants to stop being known as “the Harvard of the Midwest” and start being said in the same breath as Harvard instead.  It wants to be “Washington.”  The only problem is that there are at least 20 other institutions in this country that have “Washington” in their name, and all the locals and students know this school by its folksy title, “WashU.”

Enter the new director, Fred Volkmann—who has as one of his employees, a sophomore work-study student, hired to run the mimeograph machine and mail out press releases to the local and regional media outlets.  Fred recognizes that there is authentic marketing power in the folksy, “WashU,” and he has a plan, a plan he generously shares the broad strokes of with his young work-study student (helping with the grunt work of the first rebranding campaign) who impudently wonders aloud why we can’t just make the switch immediately to “WashU?” Said student is given a quick but firm lesson in the intricacies of PR, and he goes back to mailing press releases.

By now, of course, any reader has filled in the blanks, and as an alum (and that former employee), I have watched Fred’s plan unfold from afar for over 40 years.  I have watched my alma mater achieve the national recognition it aspired to all those years ago.  I have watched its brand change from “Washington University in St. Louis” to “Washington University” to “Washington”—all stages in Fred’s original plan.  But when he retired about eight years ago, there was as yet no “WashU,” and I wondered if “Washington” might be the end of things.  That is until this past fall, when I learned through my alumni magazine that Fred’s grand dream from the early 1980s had finally come to fruition and that, henceforth, the official branding of my alma mater would be and is “WashU.”

Like I said, a rather trivial story—especially in a world where Palestinians are enduring threatened genocide and Los Angeles, California is basically burning to the ground.  Yet, I think it is also a story full of potency and import because it is the story of the fundamental power of patient, steady, determined resolve to change the world.  Like Fred, all any of us can do is plant seeds and quietly tend them, keeping faith that the crop will eventually bear fruit, and like Fred, there is a lot of anonymity to that task (most people reading this will never have heard of him).  Therefore, when I think back to my earlier question in this essay, “where does all this leave me an educator?” it leaves me as it always does (and always will!):  planting the seeds of knowledge, critical thinking, and wisdom in my students, doing so one day, one lesson, one moment at a time—something no AI or material “stuff” is ever going to be able to do. 

It is not an easy task. Nor is the patient, steady, determined resolve needed to accomplish it a comforting reality.  But it is the task at hand, and as I have oft quoted Luther, those of us committed to this profession “kann nicht anders.”  Our world and its future are literally depending on it.

References

Anderson, J. & Winthrop, R. (Jan. 2, 2025) Giving Kids Some Autonomy Has Surprising Results. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/opinion/children-choices-goal-setting.html.

Barshay, J. (Sept. 2, 2024) Kids Who Use ChatGPT as a Study Assistant Do Worse on Tests: Researchers Compare Math Progress of Almost 1,000 High School Students. The Hechinger Report.  https://hechingerreport.org/kids-chatgpt-worse-on-tests/.

Camera, L. (Sept. 20, 2024) In the Rush to COVID Recovery, Did We Forget About Our Youngest Learners? The 74.  https://www.the74million.org/article/in-the-rush-to-covid-recovery-did-we-forget-about-our-youngest-learners/?utm_source=The+74+Million+Newsletter&utm_campaign=6dcaab7edb-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2022_07_27_07_47_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_077b986842-6dcaab7edb-176301373.

Isaac, M. & Schleifer, T. (Jan. 9, 2025) Meta Says It Will End Its Fact-Checking Program on Social Media Posts.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/07/business/meta-fact-checking.

Luse, B., et al. (Jan. 8, 2025) Is The Squad Dead? Cori Bush on the Future of Progressive Politics.  NPR It’s Been a Minute.  https://www.npr.org/2025/01/07/1263511078/future-of-progressive-politics.

Mischel, W. & Ebbesen, E. B. (1970) Attention in Delay of Gratification.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 16 (2), pp. 329–337.

Selyukh, A. & Adolphe, J. (Jan. 14, 2025) NPR Shopped for 96 Items at Walmart to Track How Prices are Really Changing.  NPR Morning Edition.  https://www.npr.org/2025/01/14/nx-s1-5241014/walmart-prices-npr-shopping-cart-2024.

“It Takes a (Moral) Village…”

By oneself is wrong done,
By oneself is one defiled.
By oneself wrong is not done,
By oneself, surely, is one cleansed.
One cannot purify another;
Purity and impurity are in oneself.
—The Dhammapada

On July 15, 1979, then President Jimmy Carter gave a televised address to the nation that history would come to call the “Crisis of Confidence” speech.  In it, President Carter laid out the case that our society was suffering from a malaise of self-indulgence where “too many of us now worship consumption” and “human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.”  He argued that as a country, we had adopted the mistaken understanding of freedom as “the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others,” and he astutely observed that “that path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.”

Well, here we are, nearly 50 years later, and as Ron Lieber of the New York Times recently pointed out, we are well on our way to that failure.  He is worth quoting extensively here:

Consider how our children feel after we’re mostly done raising and educating them. The Cooperative Institutional Research Program at the University of California, Los Angeles, surveys first-year college students every year. The percentage who named being “very well off financially” as an important goal doubled from 1967 to 2019. Those who wanted to develop a “meaningful philosophy of life” decreased by nearly half…

Research by Tim Kasser and Jean Twenge showed that materialism among 12th graders increased over time, peaking in the late 1980s and early 1990s with Generation X, and then stayed at those historically high levels among millennials.  “There was a trend underway at the time Carter was making this speech, and it basically just amplifies in the next 10 years rather than being suppressed,” said Mr. Kasser, an emeritus professor of psychology at Knox College, [who] watched these developments with a sense of foreboding, because his research has shown that higher levels of materialism are associated with societal instability…

And finally:

We will be tested again. Next time it may be a climate-related catastrophe, driven in part by the very patterns of consumption that Mr. Carter warned against in his speech. He called for turning down the thermostat in the winter and for 20 percent of the nation’s energy to come from solar power by 2000 — all these years later, we’ve done neither.

Which turns out to be truer than even I would have thought when I recently learned from a story in the local press of a couple paying nearly $900 for their heating bill this past month.  This for a row house in the urban heat island that is the city even in winter.  This for a place less exposed than my own three walls (I’m a duplex) and with fewer square feet.  $900.  What temperature, I thought, do you keep your house at??? For perspective, my largest heating bill ever was a little over $200.

However, putting my (self-righteous?) indignation aside, as we prepare to eulogize and bury President Carter this month, what strikes me most about his words all those years ago and the world we’ve created since is that the “village” has clearly been falling down on the job of “raising its children.”  I may agree with the words attributed to the Buddha at the start of this essay that each of us is solely accountable for our individual moral character.  Yet as I read these same words again, they remind me, too, that our moral nature is also a social construct.  There truly is no such thing as a “oneself” in utter and absolute isolation; it takes indeed a “village” to make a self.  What is more, it takes that same “village” to hold that same self individually morally accountable, and the paradox of this great truth is what our culture stumbles so badly over.

Take my discipline, for example.  Everyone is rightly concerned about the declines in language and math skills seen since (and attributable to) the pandemic. But the interventions have focused almost exclusively on tutoring and other individualist efforts when the larger cause—absenteeism—has received proportionally little attention.  “Chronic absenteeism [however] is not just bad for kids; it is bad for society. Learning is first and foremost a social endeavor, and kids learn to be part of a cohesive community by going to one every day” (Anderson & Winthrop).  In other words, unless one is an integral part of the “village,” neither “village” nor “child” can thrive.

Which is the power of ex-President Carter’s example to us following his loss to Ronald Reagn in 1980. He chose to remain part of the “village” to the day of his death, holding both himself and others accountable for their choices and their actions and the impact of these on the larger world.  With his hands, heart, and mind, he built literal villages as well as metaphorical ones, and those in turn helped raise tens of thousands out of poverty and into more participatory lives in their communities.  He fundamentally embraced the paradox of the moral character of the relationship between “village” and “child,” and the lives he touched both directly and indirectly remain the better for that. His was very much a life worthy of modelling.

Would that the same could be said of all the political leaders in our lives.

References

Anderson, J. & Winthrop, R. (Jan. 2, 2025) Giving Kids Some Autonomy Has Surprising Results. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/opinion/children-choices-goal-setting.html.

Carter, J. (July 15, 1979) Crisis of Confidence.  PBS American Experience. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/carter-crisis/.

Lieber, R. (Dec. 29, 2024) Jimmy Carter Was Right About Materialism But, Alas, Wrong About Us.  The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/29/your-money/jimmy-carter-legacy-materialism.html.

Prudente, T. & Gardner, H. (Jan. 5, 2025) Think Your BGE Bill is High? Rates are Rising.  The Baltimore Banner.  https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/community/local-news/bge-rates-maryland-utility-winter-storm-ZT4JQLC3OZCCTMHPWNAVVS2LHY/.

The Death of Science?

There was a beginning to it.
There are lots of societies that don’t have it.
It takes very special conditions to support it.
Those social conditions are now getting harder to find.
Of course, it could end.
—Thomas Kuhn

They who are aware do not die;
They who are unaware are as dead.
—The Dhammapada

If you are a member of Jonathan Rauch’s “reality-based community,” this past month has been a rough one.  First, the re-election of the premier anti-intellectual in this country to the office of the President of the United States (and most depressing of all by an actual majority of voters this time around).  Second, said President-elect’s announcements of his nominees for his Cabinet—including an anti-vaxxer for the Department of Health and Human Services!  Third, the CEO of ExxonMobil all but imploring our President-elect to keep the U. S. in the Paris climate accords—and this coming from a company that currently depends for nearly 100% its profits on climate change’s very cause. And fourth, but so subtle that I suspect it flew beneath every radar except NPR’s, the threat of a second Trump presidency to the H-1B visas program.

“The H-1B what?” a reader might ask.  Why on earth should a threat to H-1B visas generate despondency in the reality-based community? Simple answer: because the loss of this specific visa program will actually endanger the reality-based community in this country.  H-1B visas are how universities, corporations, and engineering firms hire all the highly skilled workers they need (think PhD) to fill all the research positions needed to remain economically viable and competitive.  “Foreign-born workers account for about half of the doctoral-level scientists and engineers working in the U.S.” reports NPR, and the reason for this fact is simple:  there are simply not enough American-born individuals entering the educational pipeline for these kinds of degrees and scientific fields. 

Which means our society’s anti-intellectual streak risks undermining not only our health and physical well-being; it risks damaging the very source of our economic power and standing in the world.  If a pissed-off electorate that voted for Donal Trump thinks the price of eggs and rent are too high now, I can only imagine their reaction when major companies close because they don’t have the intellectual capital to compete in the world’s marketplace anymore.  As Raymundo Báez-Mendoza of the Leibniz Institute for Primate Research in Göttingen, Germany points out, “a lot of countries in Europe benefited from Brexit, in the sense of capturing really amazing scientists that were working in Britain [because in the world of science] top talent is very mobile.”

Of course, it should not come as that much of a surprise that our country cannot adequately supply its own need for highly skilled workers.  Not when we idolize celebrity over the painstaking work of solving an equation.  Not when we would rather doomscroll on our phones than read a book that might challenge an assumption.  And perhaps most telling of all, not when the brain science clearly shows that the first five years of development are the most critical for wiring a brain that can produce such a worker and yet we pay those responsible for teaching this age SO poorly that 12.3% of them live below the poverty line here in a state with the second highest household income in the country.  And where more than a third of Maryland households in this state with an early childhood teacher in them must use at least one (and frequently more!) of the social safety net programs such as Medicaid and SNAP.  It is cliché that you get what you pay for, and we as a society simply do not pay to produce the kinds of brains needed to produce highly skilled workers.

Therefore, here I sit, then, a trained biologist, thinking: the CDC is reporting that only around a third of all adults in the U.S. have taken this year’s flu shot and less than 18% have received  the latest COVID booster; the childhood disease, measles—one of the most deadly and declared eliminated here in the U.S. more than two decades ago—has already had 16 outbreaks so far this year; and human life expectancy—at least in this country—has actually declined for the first time in centuries.  All because, as Dr. Gregory Poland of Atria Academy of Science and Medicine puts it, “as a society right now, we’re in a phase of rejecting expertise, of mistrust of any expert, whether it’s science, meteorology, medicine, government – whatever it is.”

And that causes me to contemplate what I once thought impossible:  that Thomas Kuhn may have been right when he suggested that science as a method of studying and understanding the world could actually disappear—perhaps forever.

Science, of course, is the “it” in my epigram from Kuhn as the start of this essay, and the famed historian of science is reported to have said these words in an interview with Scientific American towards the end of his life in the winter of 1991.  As the author of one of the single most influential books of the 20th Century, he comes across in the interview as weary of what he perceives as all the misunderstandings people have had about his ideas, and when pushed, he basically states flatly that science as an intellectual endeavor is just as much a social construct as any other such endeavor and, therefore, like any social construct, it can die.

Now I have recognized for some time that any shared sense of truth in this country was—at best—on life support.  The firehose of dis- and misinformation modern digital technologies have made possible have all but ensured truth’s demise.  But the idea that the one remaining arbiter of truth could be in trouble, that the one arrow left in our collective epistemological quiver could disappear…naively, that thought had never occurred to me before encountering Kuhn’s words amidst the events of the past month.  Suddenly, I had gained a small, existential insight into the voices of the many African American women interviewed following the election: “Damn! Please don’t tell me I have to keep fighting yet again a battle that I should not keep losing.”

But for those of us in the sciences, fight we must.  We must become the resistance to every effort of the in-coming administration to dismantle the scientific infrastructure in this country.  Furthermore, we must do so anywhere and everywhere we can.  In labs and research centers.  In classrooms and homes.  In legislatures and city halls.  In movies and museums.  Even in the kitchen!1  Put bluntly, all of us in the “reality-based community” must join like-minded individuals such as Hank Green of the Vlogbrothers and Scishow and do everything in our power “to make the truth go viral.”2  It won’t be an easy fight, and I openly confess that I, too, am growing weary of the constant need to battle ignorance and stupidity.  But I could never look the generations of children who have come through my classroom in the eye if I didn’t say I tried. How they will judge me only time will see.

Coda

During my morning run today, I was reminded yet again of how spectacularly and especially beautiful this fall has been here in the State of Maryland.  Seldom have I seen such rich colors that have lasted for as long, and there is even this one oak on my walk to school where the rays of the rising sun hit it in such a way that I can only shake my head in awe at the metaphor for God chosen by the authors of Exodus—burning bush indeed! 

However, this same beauty has made me recall the opening lines from James Stokesbury’s history of World War I which I reread this past August:

The summer of 1914 was the fairest in living memory.  Grass had never been greener, nor skies bluer.  Europe lay rich and ripening under the warming sun, and from the Ural Mountains to the wave-beaten west coast of Ireland the cows fattened, the newborn animals played in rich fields, and lovers strolled in the country lanes….So beautiful was that summer that those who survived it invested it with a golden haze; it assumed a retrospective poignancy, as if before it, all had been beautiful, and after it, nothing ever was again.  It became the summer that the world ended, and it was somehow fitting that it should therefore be the most glorious summer ever (p. 11).

For a whole lot of people—many of whom don’t yet realize it just as many didn’t in 1914—the world as they knew it ended on Nov. 5.  Even science itself in this country may have ended, and what keeps me up at night about the looming battle is that while I am not yet truly elderly, I am also clearly no longer young, leaving me with a fraught and fretful question:

Who’s going to take up the mantle when I’m gone?

1For more on science in the kitchen, check out J. Kenji López-Alt’s The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015).

2To learn more about Hank Green and his on-line efforts to debunk falsehoods of all kinds, listen to the Nov. 22 episode of NPR’s On the Media.

References

Center for Disease Control (Nov. 22, 2024; latest update) Measles Cases and Outbreaks.  https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html#:~:text=Why%20is%20there%20more%20measles,returning%20to%20the%20United%20States.

Elliott, R. F. (Nov. 12, 2024) Exxon Chief to Trump: Don’t Withdraw From Paris Climate Deal.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/12/business/energy-environment/exxon-mobil-baku-climate-cop29.html.

Hamilton, J. (Nov. 21, 2024) Foreign Nationals Propel U.S. Science.  Visa Limits Under Trump Could Change That.  NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2024/11/21/nx-s1-5187926/u-s-science-could-suffer-if-trump-limits-h-1b-visas-again.

Horgan, J. (May 23, 2012) What Thomas Kuhn Really Thought about Scientific “Truth.” Scientific American.  https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/cross-check/what-thomas-kuhn-really-thought-about-scientific-truth/.

Johnson, S. (2021) Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer (New York: Riverhead Books).

Kuhn, T. (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed.  Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Lora, M. (Nov. 11, 2024) Just How Underpaid Are Maryland’s Day Care and Pre-K Teachers? The Baltimore Banner.  https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/education/early-childhood/maryland-early-childhood-wages-MAJNPXPOFJGHPJOFZRJ3JJ7TBY/.

Rauch, J. (2021) The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.

Stein, R. & Schmitz, R. (Nov. 27, 2024) As the Respiratory Virus Season Approaches, Where Does the Vaccination Rate Stand? NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/27/nx-s1-5199731/as-the-respiratory-virus-season-approaches-where-does-the-vaccination-rate-stand.

Stokesbury, J. (1981) A Short History of World War I.  New York:  William and Morrow Company, Inc.

Stolberg, S. G. (Nov. 14, 2024) Trump Picks R.F.K. Jr. to Be Head of Health and Human Services Dept.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/14/us/politics/rfk-jr-trump-hhs.html.

Science & Safetyism

Wrong opinions and practices
gradually yield to fact and argument:
but facts and arguments,
to produce any effect on the mind,
must be brought before it.
—John Stuart Mill

As an educator, one of the challenges of the safetyism I discussed last time is the reality that my students today are not as adept at critical thinking as my students earlier in my career.  They are simply less able to connect their claims to reliable evidence properly, and no, that is not just “old fogey-ism” on my part.  I can document the extra supports and other interventions that I have needed to steadily and increasingly add over the decades to help my current students achieve what their “elders” before them once achieved semi-autonomously (because a good teacher meets their students where they’re at; not where the teacher might wish they were). 

Digital technology, of course, has played an enormous role in this new reality for me as a teacher, but in exploring Lukianoff’s and Haidt’s concept of safetyism, I have begun to realize how much my students are arriving in my classroom having never really confronted the disagreeable ideas and opinions so necessary to the development of critical thinking as an intellectual skill.  In some instances, they have never even encountered them at all! Hence, I now see that the rise of safetyism in our society has been impeding the development of my students’ critical thinking as much as their lives as digital natives has.  In both instances, they have been able to systematically avoid cognitive unpleasantries such as boredom, dissonance, and inconvenient truths and so avoid learning how to deal with such things.

How, then, do I address this reality, and why—as I implied at the end of my last posting—do I think my particular discipline has some built in advantages for doing so?  I have written before about the kind of general pedagogy I believe can promote and improve critical thinking skills (it is a major focus of this project). But today I want to address why I think that my teaching science specifically—rather than other possible academic disciplines—gives me an extra edge when it comes to defeating the educational challenges of safetyism.

 And I want to do so by turning first to someone who I am starting to think of as an intellectual kindred spirit, Jonathan Rauch.  I visited his concept of “liberal science” earlier in my writing when exploring his “constitution of knowledge.” But in reading some of his other work recently, I found that he has gotten me to “thinking about science as a set of rules for social behavior, rules for settling conflict” (p. 30) rather than simply a way of understanding the world.  He reminded me that disagreements are practically baked into a social species such as ours and that methods for resolving those conflicts inherently involve evoking claims about the truth in a particular situation.  Yet while anyone can make “three new [claims] every day before breakfast, the trouble is, they will almost always be bad [claims].  The hard part is figuring out who has a good [one]” (p. 64, original emphasis).  Hence, as Rauch reminded me, one of the most fundamental problems any society must cope with to survive is the epistemic one: the nature and limits of human knowledge.  Or as he puts it, “when is it legitimate for me to say ‘I’m right and you’re wrong!’ and to act accordingly?” (p. 35).

His own answer, of course, is only if such a claim has survived the crucible of liberal science.  Any proposition must endure repeated testing against the empirical realities of life and must have persisted repeatedly before said potential error can make any claim to a degree of truth.  For Rauch, that is the innovation and genius of the scientific process of truth determination:  not in doing away with human bias and ignorance but in channeling them.  As he argues, “the point of liberal science is not to be unprejudiced (which is impossible); the point is to recognize that your own bias might be wrong and to submit it to public checking by people who believe differently” (p. 67).  Science in Rauch’s outlook is the intellectual equivalent of natural selection, “[mimicking] the greatest liberal system of them all, the evolution of life” (p. 57).

And it is that last metaphor that has caused me to ponder whether the discipline I teach has some built-in advantages when it comes to resisting safetyism.  Because in learning science, a student in my class is inherently in conflict.  Conflict with preconceived notions.  Conflict with what the data you just collected tells you.  Conflict with the required skepticism that you could always be wrong…. 

I could go on, but the bottom line is that you cannot learn science and somehow evade the very thing safetyism seeks to prevent and avoid—conflict.  It’s not that other disciplines can’t have conflict built into them, too (and responsible, thoughtful teachers of those disciplines deliberately do so).  But having taught history, I know that one can offer a version of it where the conflict has been white washed from it, and I can imagine an English or Foreign Language class where what is read is very safe and unchallenging.  Science, however, literally cannot be taught without disrupting how a child looks at and experiences their world.

Not that science doesn’t still lose some of the battles.  As I was outlining this essay, a student was removed from one of my classes by a family upset with the demands of the course, declaring that my teaching was making their child feel emotionally uncomfortable and overwhelmed.  Ironically, this course is an elective; so the student had chosen to enroll, and I am extremely candid and forthright at the beginning of the year—with both students and parents alike—that a fundamental goal of this particular class is to create learning situation where children will intellectually fall down and that with my help, they will learn how to stand back up in the similar situations that they will encounter next year in college.  The metaphor I sometimes use is that of an academic drill sergeant but one who loves and cares, and the rationale I provide is summed up so nicely by Rauch that I may use his very words next fall:

The social system does not and never can exist which allows no harm to come to anybody.  Conflict of impulse and desire is an inescapable fact of human existence, and where there is conflict there will always be losers and wounds…The chore of a social regime is not to obliterate conflict but to manage it, so as to put it to good use while causing a minimum of hurt and abuse (p. 122).

I want all of my students prepared for adulthood and the necessary adulting that comes with that, and I know that if you never fall down, you can never learn to get back up.  My sadness for my now former student is that she was allowed to remain on the ground.

References

Lukianoff, G. & Haidt, J. (2018) The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.  New York: Penguin Books.

Rauch, J. (2013) Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought (Expanded Edition).  Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

The Dangers of Safetyism

Education should not be intended
to make people comfortable;
it is meant to make them think.
—Hanna Holborn Gray

In the early 1980s, a Canadian historian, James Stokesbury, wrote two, one-volume histories of World War I and World War II.  They remain, in my opinion, among the best abbreviated examinations of these calamitous events, and I revisit my copies of both books when I am feeling the need for some perspective about the world they helped create and in which I have grown up and lived.  Each time I do, I find myself discovering some new theme which I had not seen on previous reads, and when I recently revisited them this past month, what struck me this time was the almost rabid isolationism of the United States at the start of both wars and its impact on their outcomes.  I was reminded yet again that we are a highly reactionary society, not an anticipatory one, and that what that can cost can literally be tens of millions of human lives.

I share this bit of personal background because in my other recent readings I have found what I think is a new form of isolationism, and I believe we may be looking at a new reactionary response rather than an anticipatory one.  And no, I do not mean the isolationism within the MAGA movement and their cult leader, Donald Trump, which are impacting the current election.  This is an isolationism at a larger scale, one that is permeating our entire society, and it is something which First Amendment attorney, Greg Lukianoff, and social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, call “safetyism.”

What is “safetyism?” Lukianoff and Haidt define it as “a culture that allows the concept of ‘safety’ to creep so far that it equates emotional discomfort with physical danger” and does so to such a degeree that it “encourages people to systematically protect one another from the very experiences embedded in daily life that they need in order to become strong and healthy” (Coddling, p. 29).  Examples include:

  • helicopter-parenting that schedules every minute of a child’s day to ensure that said child is never without some form of adult supervision;   
  • school districts such as the one my niece and nephew attended where district policy would not allow them to enter their elementary school unless dropped off by car—even though said school was a five-minute walk from their house;
  • “the head teacher of an elementary school in East London [issuing] a rule that children must not even touch recently fallen snow, because touching could lead to snowballs” (Coddling, p. 236; original emphasis)
  • universities cancelling controversial speakers simply because some members of the campus might find them disagreeable;

Hence, at its extreme, safetyism is the notion that even ideas are physically dangerous and must therefore be regulated to prevent exposure to them.  In other words, we must find a way to isolate each and every one of us from anything that might cause pain.

Sounds crazy right? Yet Lukianoff and Haidt point out that to some degree it makes a certain twisted logic because as “we adapt to our new and improved circumstances, [we] then lower the bar for what we count as intolerable levels of discomfort and risk” (Coddling, pp. 13-14).  Modern industrial society with its medicine, abundance of food, sanitation systems, etc. has so removed us from the environment we evolved in that “coddled” isn’t even an adequate word to describe our lives today.  Yet that same modern industrial society bombards our paleolithic brains with news of inflation, school shootings, and climate change, and so our heightened feelings of fear for our safety can drive us to the crazy isolation of safetyism.

Creating some very unintended and negative consequences in the process.  As the subtitle to Coddling suggests, we have now raised an entire generation incapable of adulting; put the production of new knowledge at risk—since “to advance knowledge, we must sometimes suffer” (Kindly, p. 19); and even endangered our form of governing because “citizens of a democracy don’t suddenly develop this art on their eighteenth birthday” without many preceding years of free play and self-negotiated conflict (Coddling, p. 191).  Just as the isolationism of the 1910s and 1930s did, safetyism has put us at grave risk as a nation, and I think it is worth quoting Lukianoff and Haidt at length here:

After all, if focusing on big threats [car seats, reducing exposure to second hand smoke, etc.] produces such dividends, why not go further and make childhood as close to perfectly safe as possible? A problem with this kind of thinking is that when we attempt to produce perfectly safe systems, we almost inevitably create new and unforeseen problems.  For example, efforts to prevent financial instability by bailing out companies can lead to larger and more destructive crashes later on; efforts to protect forests by putting out small fires can allow dead wood to build up, eventually leading to catastrophic fires far worse than the sum of the smaller fires that were prevented.  Safety rules and programs—like most efforts to change complex systems—often have unintended consequences.  Sometimes these consequences are so bad that the intended beneficiaries are worse off than if nothing had been done at all…efforts to protect kids from risk by preventing them from gaining experience—such as walking to school, climbing a tree, or using sharp scissors—are different.  Such protections come with costs, as kids miss out on opportunities to learn skills, independence, and risk assessment (Coddling, p. 169).

How, though, did we get here? What has allowed safetyism to arise and to thrive? One answer Lukianoff and Haidt provide is what they call the three great “Untruths” that have taken hold in our society:  the Untruth of Fragility (“what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker”), the Untruth of Emotional Reasoning (“always trust your feelings”), and the Untruth of Us vs. Them (“life is a battle between Good people and Evil people”).  Together, Lukianoff and Haidt argue (and document), these three ideas have permeated much of the modern parenting literature, school policies pre-K thru PhD, and social media, and the consequence are large numbers of children and young adults who are not resilient, who are experiencing poor mental health, and who are permanently trapped in their own biases.

Added to that, Jonathan Rauch argues (and also documents), has been the rise over the past thirty years of what he calls the fundamentalist and humanitarian threats to research institutions of all manner.  Namely (from the first) that all knowledge of any kind is absolutely relative and therefore equal in truth value and (from the second) that since “one person’s knowledge is another’s repression” (Kindly, p. 116), we must “set up authorities empowered to weed out hurtful ideas and speech (Kindly, p. 131).  Objective truth withers and dies; new knowledge becomes impossible; and thoughtful, critically reflective individuals who might be able to challenge Lukianoff’s and Haidt’s three great Untruths become a thing of the past.

There is, of course, also the reality of the rise of social media and the consequent tribalism it has empowered that generates affirmation for the belief in the need to be safe against the “Other.”  As Lukianoff and Haidt point out:

The bottom line is that the human mind is prepared for tribalism.  Human evolution is not just the story of individuals competing with other individuals within each group; it’s also the story of groups competing with other groups—sometimes violently.  We are all descended from people who belong to groups that were consistently better at winning that competition.  Tribalism is our evolutionary endowment for banding together to prepare for intergroup conflict (Coddling, p. 58).

And when social media simultaneously provides both the intragroup identity and the intergroup conflict, you have the perfect recipe for safetyism.  In fact, Lukianoff and Haidt go so far in recognizing this reality that they actually have a term for the subgroup of Gen Z where we see this the most: iGen, the group who grew up after Steve Jobs unleashed the iPhone on the world.

So now what? This group of individuals bathed in safetyism since birth has only grown larger over time, and a strong case could be made that the whole reason for the general tenor of the last decade of election cycles is that we are losing the number of actual adults in the room.  As political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daneil Ziblatt have written, “[political] parties [have] come to view each other not as legitimate rivals but as dangerous enemies.  Losing ceases to be an accepted part of the political process and instead becomes a catastrophe” that must be protected against at all costs (Codling, p. 131).

However, there are still a few of us around adulting our way through life, and a large number of us work in education, where the task has been, remains, and will always be—as the old folk wisdom puts it—preparing the child for the road, not the road for the child.  Not that schools shouldn’t be places of safety, but as former University of Chicago president, Hanna Holborn Gray reminds us in the epigram at the start of this essay—and ALL the brain research affirms—a certain degree of discomfort is necessary for learning to take place.  Critical thinking is simply the ability to connect one’s claims to reliable evidence properly, but developing the capacity to do it involves falling and skinning one’s mental knees over and over again until you can skate logic’s constraints with ease.  Learning hurts, and there will never be any way around that.

And while it is true that we can pave a bit of a child’s road for them, it has always been utterly self-defeating to think any of us could do more than that.  Food, clothing, shelter…love, caring, empathy…medicine, education, athletics…generational wealth…we can smooth some of a child’s road for them.  But we cannot prepare them for that call in the night that a loved one has died or the diagnosis of cancer or the failure of a marriage.  Each person’s road is unique, and so we can only truly help prepare them to travel it.

What’s more, if “it [has been] foolish to think one could clear the road for one’s child [in the past], before the internet, now it’s delusional” (Codling, p. 237).  As I commented in Chapter 9, I have confronted the paradox these past 15+ years that even as my digital native students have arrived in my classroom more and more unprepared for critical thinking, I have been steadily more successful at enabling them to do so.  That I can do so, I think, is because of the subject I teach, and the how and why of that is what I will explore next time.

References

Lukianoff, G. & Haidt, J. (2018) The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.  New York: Penguin Books.

Rauch, J. (2013) Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought (Expanded Edition).  Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Stokesbury, J. (1981) A Short History of World War I.  New York:  William and Morrow Company, Inc.

Stokesbury, J. (1980) A Short History of World War II.  New York:  William and Morrow Company, Inc.

Updates

Regular readers know that I have three areas of interest that frequently occupy my attention: the impact of the pandemic on education, the ever evolving role of AI and technology on teaching and learning, and the strong current of anti-intellectualism in our society.  Well, this summer has been a busy one for all three of these topics; so it’s time for some updates.  We’ll start with the pandemic.

Early on, when COVID was actively disrupting all of our lives, I made some sober predictions about the cost of this disease to our children, and it saddens me to report that it turns out that things are even worse than I had prognosticated.  Teachers are now reporting that many of our littlest ones are arriving at school barely able to speak, that they are unable to remain still for brief periods, and that some do not even to know how to play with others.  Rudimentary pre-school skills such as how to hold a pencil or identify simple shapes (think circle, triangle, etc.) are missing, and caregivers of all kinds are reporting symptoms of anxiety and depression in children as young as four or five.

However, the situation appears even grimmer in our older children.  The gap in national test scores between recent and pre-pandemic scores has actually grown wider than anticipated, and “the gaps are so large that the average eighth-grade would need about nine months of additional schooling to catch up to pre-covid levels in math and about the same extra time to catch up in reading.”  The realities of human development simply do not allow for nine extra months, and so we are confronting an entire cohort of children who will be put at some degree of permanent disadvantage moving forward.  At least the little ones “only” need “2.2 more months of school to make up the reading gaps and 1.3 months for math.”

On the AI and technology front, the status of things is a little less “doom & gloom,” with interesting research about why paper remains better than screens.  The data about the advantages of handwriting versus typing when notetaking has been known for some time, but it turns out that even the simple act of reading something that is on paper versus reading the exact same thing on a screen produces better brain engagement and comprehension.  Scientists around the world have been analyzing the brains of early elementary age children with EEG and fMRI, and it turns out that “when children read on paper, there was more power in the high-frequency brainwaves” associated with higher-order cognitive function.  Why the brain acts differently between paper and screens remains a mystery, but that it does is now documented by multiple studies.

Of course, the creep factor of AI remains, with a company in China now offering to make avatars of dead loved-ones so that you can continue to “communicate” with the deceased.  But that’s a different issue for another day.  For now, “pencil & paper” are clearly winning, and those of us working with children simply need to pay attention accordingly.

Finally, it demoralizes me to have to report that the ACT has now made the science section of their exam optional and have even reduced their core exam by 44 questions, with shorter reading passages.  While I am not a fan of standardized tests, with their well-documented biases and other problematic features, I am also not a fan of dumbing things down even further in our general society than we already have.  The ACT rationalizes their decision by arguing that with this new flexibility—students can now sign up for four different varients of the exam (two of which do still include science)—that students can focus on their strengths and showcase their abilities in the best possible light while avoiding the fatigue of the longer, original exam.  But I am confident that the proverbial “bottom line” (pun intended) is simply that fewer students were signing up for the test, and that this was the organization’s way of trying to keep the dollars flowing—all at the expense of actually demanding that our children actually know something.

Well, that’s it for now.  For those of us in the classroom, important reminders of the challenges facing us as we adapt to the children in front of us (not the ones we might wish were in front of us), and for those not in the classroom, important reminders of matters impacting the society in which we all live.

Until next time.

References

Archie, A. (July 19, 2024) The Science Section of the ACT Exam Will Now Be Optional.  NPR.  https://www.npr.org/2024/07/19/nx-s1-5045587/act-exam-test-science-optional.

Barshay, J. (June 24, 2024) This Is Your Brain.  This is Your Brain on Screens.  The Hechinger Report.  https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-neuroscience-paper-v-screens-reading/.

Feng, E. (July 11, 2024) Chinese Companies Offer to “Resurrect” Dead Loved Ones.  It Raises Questions.  NPR Morning Edition.  https://www.npr.org/2024/06/17/nx-s1-5001751/chinese-companies-offer-to-resurrect-dead-loved-ones-it-raises-questions.

Meckler, L. & Lumpkin, L. (July 23, 2024)  Four Years After COVID, Many Students Still Losing Ground.  The Washington Post.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/07/23/covid-test-scores-learning-loss-absenteeism/.

Miller, C.C. & Mervosh, S. (July 1, 2024) The Youngest Pandemic Children Are Now in School, and Struggling.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/07/01/upshot/pandemic-children-school-performance.html.

“Prognostic Myopia”

Corporate executives are under immense pressure
to deliver quarterly earnings,
not to save science, democracy, or the planet.
—Jennifer Jacquet

Evolution is still deciding what to make
of the human capacity for causal reasoning.
—Justin Gregg

For most of my career, when I have taught my unit on the brain to my advanced biology courses, I have challenged my students to recognize that the “evolutionary jury” of natural selection is still out when it comes to the value of our large prefrontal cortex.  I point out that every other species of the genus Homo has gone extinct (and in the case of our closest cousins, neanderthalensis, directly because of we sapiens), and that, therefore, the ultimate survival value of our proportionally bigger brains amongst the animals is still very much up for grabs.

Recently, though, I came across a book by animal behaviorist, Justin Gregg, that systematically makes the case that the uniquely human cognitive capacities that set our brains apart from those of the other animals actually puts us at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to the process of natural selection.  Gregg does not mince words when he challenges that the human mind puts us at greater risk of extinction as a species, and as he puts it, “what if we acknowledge that sometimes our so-called human achievements are actually rather shitty solutions evolutionarily speaking?” (p. 16).

The case he makes is quite compelling, and he starts with the relative value of our capacity for causal thinking.  As he puts it, we are “ ‘why?’ specialists,” who can determine how the world works in ways no other animal can, and yet the world is full of animals making successful decisions all the time without needing to know the “why?” of things.  Moreover, the paleontological data shows that for the first roughly 200,000 of our quarter of a million year heritage, we got by just find as well without answering questions of cause and effect.  Hence, causal thinking doesn’t seem to add much survival value for animals in general (including us), and in fact, a strong argument can be made that as we humans have employed this unique capacity of ours more and more in the past 50,000 years, we have steadily decimated the environments in which we live because “with an understanding of how the world has been built comes the knowledge to break it” (p. 15).

Compounding our brain’s ability to do deliberate damage and harm, Gregg argues, is the fact that the human mind has taken the animal capacity for deception to whole new levels.  “Lying” is nothing new in the animal kingdom; from unintentional mimicry to deliberately “playing dead” to the tactical deceptions of male mourning cuttlefish (check it out!), animals of all kinds engage in generating a variety of falsehoods for purposes of survival and reproduction.  However, as Gregg puts it, “our species has taken it to absurd lengths” (p. 59) because of our capacity for language and the theory of mind.  We can lie about any thought we have, and we don’t just lie to protect ourselves; we lie to try and change other people’s thoughts and beliefs.  Furthermore, because we are a social species, we are hard-wired for credulity—to believe what other people tell us to maintain our bonds—and therefore, “we cannot remove the human capacity to both produce and believe lies anymore than we can remove our capacity for walking upright.  It’s who we are” (p. 88).

Yet in a world of social media, 24/7 news cycles, and the world-wide web, the scale of human lying now has the capacity to threaten our very survival.  Misinformation, disinformation, propaganda…we live emersed in lies, and we can employ all of it to justify whatever harm our causal thinking has enabled us to do—from climate change to genocide.  What’s more, our capacity for lying has started to attack the very tools we use to generate actual truth—science, scholarship, public institutions—and therefore, as Gregg puts it, “the question is: can we save us from ourselves before the firehose of falsehoods washes our species from the planet?” (p. 89).

Interestingly enough, I think Gregg’s response to his own rhetorical question would be a qualified “maybe.”  He is not a cynic; he simply takes a non-blindered approach to examining our uniquely human cognitive capacities through the lens of evolution and finds no grounds at all for our self-declared exceptionalism as a species within the animal kingdom. 

Moreover, where he finds this delusion of exceptionalism most problematic is our cognitive tendancy for what he calls “prognostic myopia.”  Basically, he argues that “because our minds evolved primarily to deal with immediate—not future—outcomes, we rarely experience or even understand the consequences of these long-term decisions [i.e. burning fossil fuels, modern food production methods, etc.].  It is the most dangerous flaw in human thinking” (p. 195), and it is compounded by the reality revealed through modern neuroscience that we make nearly all our daily decisions at the subconscious level.  Those parts of our brains involved in this process, he points out, evolved over hundreds of millions of years to deal with the needs of the immediate present for survival; there is no “future” for these mental elements.  Therefore, “our capacity to understand the future and even envision ourselves in it is competing with decision-making systems whose component parts do not truly understand what they are being asked to do” (p. 207).

Or to put it another way:

urgent survival needs mean that we still engage in impulsive behaviors.  And those behaviors, which once promoted our survival and reproductive success, are now suboptimal because we live in an environment in which long-term contingencies play an increasingly important part in our lives (p. 212).

Basically, our brains did not evolve to live in the world those same brains have now created, and Gregg’s ultimate point is that “depending on where we go from here, human intelligence may just be the stupidest thing that has ever happened” (p. 256) from an evolutionary perspective. 

And an excellent “case study” of this potential truth is the behavior of modern corporations.  In another book to cross my path recently, New York University professor, Jennifer Jacquet, has written a scathing satire in the vein of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal in which she “advises” corporate leaders on how to prevent costly safety and product regulations to maximize profits by attacking the researchers and science that support these regulations.  Some highlights of her “advice” to corporations include:

  • There are few communication products that money cannot buy.  Does the Corporation need a scientific journal sympathetic to its research? Fund an editor.  Does the proper journal not exist? Create it.  Establish a popular magazine.  Build a website.  Host a scientific gathering. Put together a group of people who appear to be grassroots activists.  The digital media landscape in particular offers limitless options for shaping public perception (p. 71).
  • Another way to make the problem go away is to change the language.  The tobacco industry referred to ‘cancer’ as ‘biological activity.’ A consultant to the fossil fuel industry found that ‘climate change’ sounded less frightening to a focus group than ‘global warming’ and recommended the switch in 2002 (and the switch succeeded).  The chemical manufacturers insisted on the term ‘biosolids’ instead of ‘toxic sludge’ (p. 96).
  • The policy might not just hurt people, it could kill them, or already has.  Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, which generated hysteria that led to the banning of DDT, and as a result millions have died of malaria.  In addition, many of the world’s poor died of hunger because the benefits of pesticides were not realized (ignore the unsavory problem of unequal food distribution) (p. 144).
  • We cannot fix a problem because we’re not hardwired to fix the problem.  (Never mind that we were also not hardwired to read or to scuba dive or to drink milk) (p. 153).

There is much more like this in Jacquet’s book, but as an example of Gregg’s “prognostic myopia,” I can think of nothing better than the headlong pursuit for immediate corporate profit at the expense of the long-term consequences of corporate actions.  And at the scale of corporations, this use of human intelligence is not only stupid, but I would argue that it is stupidity at its worst because in normalizes and even rewards being shortsighted at a societal scale.  As Jacquet concludes in her appendix to her book:

in the same way that a casino can affect the character of a town, corporate-funded scientific denial has contributed to the erosion of scientific authority and mistrust in the government.  In this casino, however, we are gambling with our health, the planet, and our most reliable way of knowing the world.  The stakes could not get higher (p. 174).

Of course, not only are the stakes as high as Jacquet states them, they are as high as Gregg states them: the potential extinction of our species.  And the problem for all of us is that we are all, in fact, trapped in our own “prognostic myopia.”  My entire retirement portfolio, for example, depends on corporate profits; Gregg writes about raising his daughter and taking her to school each day, knowing that “even though that’s what awaits my family in the future [i.e. ecological collapse from climate change], here I am, driving my Subaru around like everything is fine” (p. 220).  We have no choice but to live in the now, even when that “now” may be preventing “someday” from being possible

Which brings me to teaching, to what I do for a living and whether it is even possible to have any positive impact in the classroom anymore.  Because what actually triggered all this epistolary activity and my reflecting on Gregg’s and Jacquet’s work was some recent stories in the news.

The first, heard on NPR, was about how love songs are in trouble and what this tells us about how younger generations are viewing relationships.  Apparently, the top term searched for in music by Gen Z listeners is the word “sad,” and BYU researcher McKell Jorgensen-Wells has found that 86% of love songs in the recent Billboard Top 100 profess an insecure attachment style, have replaced emotional longing with overt sexuality, and leave the listener assuming that their romantic relationships are supposed to be toxic.  As one of the people being interviewed put it, “one of the songs in the top 100 right now is from a tremendously gifted and talented and beautiful artist named SZA, and she has a song called ‘Saturn.’ In the first verse, she says, I hate this place.”

And if people raised on toxic love songs aren’t bad enough, the other story that caught my attention in the NYT was about a group of middle schoolers in Pennsylvania using TikTok to create an organized and systematic on-line attack of their teachers, creating fake accounts in the teachers’ names and then posting ugly falsehoods about those same teachers as if the teachers had generated the content themselves.  I knew it was only a matter of time before something like this happened, but what disturbed me the most was the fact that when caught and confronted with the evidence, the overwhelming response of the students was that their teachers couldn’t take a joke—as if accusations of pedophilia and spousal infidelity are somehow “joking” matters. 

Taken together—the prognostic myopia of our species, the corporate greed that takes that myopia to world destroying levels, media of all types that empower dysfunctional and destructive relating—it has me pondering if we’ve reached the point as a society where what we do as educators in the classroom is irrelevant.  And what disturbs me most about that thought is that I know I have had a positive impact for most of my career.  I have been blessed to mentor former students into the profession, to attend their dissertation defenses and weddings, and to hold their children in my arms.  I know the good I have helped send out into the world. 

But between my own struggles this past year with my 9th graders, reading Gregg and Jacquet, and seeing many of my concerns about social media come to pass over the last few months, I find myself compelled to ask whether any of us in education, myself included, can still do that anymore.  Can teachers still have a positive impact? Or are the children now arriving in our classrooms already too damaged by the world we’ve created for them? Right now, I do not have an answer.  I wish I did, but I don’t.

However, what I do know is that I have is an almost congenital compulsion to try, and that itself may have to be my only answer for now.

References

Gregg, J. (2022) If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity.  New York:  Little, Brown and Company.

Jacquet, J. (2022) The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World.  New York: Penguin Books.

Martin, M. (July 3, 2024) Love Songs Are Changing.  What Today’s Love Songs Say About Us.  NPR Morning Edition.  https://www.npr.org/2024/07/03/nx-s1-4983933/love-songs-are-changing-what-todays-love-songs-say-about-us.

Singer, N. (July 6, 2024) Students Target Teachers in Group TikTok Attack, Shaking Their School.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/06/technology/tiktok-fake-teachers-pennsylvania.html?unlocked_article_code=1.5U0.kN8_.kvXU-e-H7SD-&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare.

Catechism and AI Revisited

This is the nature of the razor-thin path of scientific reality:
there are a limited number of ways to be right,
but an infinite number of ways to be wrong.
Stay on it, and you see the world for what it is.
Step off, and all kinds of unreality become equally plausible.
—Phil Plait

Two stories about artificial intelligence recently caught my attention.  The first, out of the University of California, Irvine’s Digital Learning Lab, examined how successful ChatGPT could be at grading English and history essays when compared to an actual teacher.  The second, an editorial about the AI revolution in general, exposited on the very practical and financial boundaries all AI technologies are rapidly finding themselves running up against.  Together, I found these stories causing me to revisit some themes from my very first posting about AI, and as I reflected more on all of these items, some shared threads between the two stories rapidly became apparent that I want to discuss here today.

But first, a quick synopsis of each article.

In the story about grading, researcher Tamara Tate and her team sought to compare ChatGPT’s ability to score 1,800 middle school and high school English and history essays against the ability of human writing experts to do so.  Their motive was to see if ChatGPT could help improve writing instruction by allowing teachers to assign more of it without increasing their own cognitive load.  If, for example, teachers could use AI “to grade any essay instantly with minimal expense and effort,” then more drafts could be assigned, thereby enabling the quality of student writing skills to improve. 

What they found was a lot of variability, with ChatGPT’s scores matching the human scores between 76% and 89% of the time, which Tate summarized as meaning that ChatGPT was “roughly speaking, probably as good as an average busy teacher [and] certainly as good as an overburdened below-average teacher. [But that] ChatGPT isn’t yet accurate enough to be used on a high-stakes test or on an essay that would affect a final grade in a class.”  Furthermore, she cautioned that “writing instruction could ultimately suffer if teachers delegate too much grading to ChatGPT [because] seeing students’ incremental progress and common mistakes remain important for deciding what to teach next.” Bottom line, as the title of the article states, the idea “needs more work.”

In the editorial about the AI revolution, technology columnist, Christopher Mims makes the strong case that the pace of AI development is hitting three walls: a rapidly slowing pace of development, mounting prohibitive costs, and what I will call the productivity boundary.  In terms of development, Mims points out that AI works:

by digesting huge volumes of [data], and it’s undeniable that up to now, simply adding more has led to better capabilities. But a major barrier to continuing down this path is that companies have already trained their AIs on more or less the entire internet, and are running out of additional data to hoover up. There aren’t 10 more internets’ worth of human-generated content for today’s AIs to inhale.

As for costs, training expenses are in the tens of billions of dollars while revenues from AI are, at best, in the billions of dollars—not a sustainable economic model.  Finally, the evidence is mounting that AI does not quite boost productivity the way its evangelists have touted because “while these systems can help some people do their jobs, they can’t actually replace them.”  Someone still has to check for AI hallucinations, and “this means they are unlikely to help companies save on payroll.”  Or to put it another way, “self-driving trucks have been slow to arrive, in part because it turns out that driving a truck is just one part of a truck driver’s job.”

Which brings me back to why I think these two articles share common threads of thought and what made me revisit my original posting about AI.  Both articles obviously point to AI’s limitations, and the grading one is simply a specific example of the “productivity boundary” Mims discusses.  Both articles have a cautionary tone about AI being the be-all-end-all solution to “all life’s problems” the way its many proselytizers want to claim it can be, and the grading one even brings up the economics of AI as it warns about schools jumping on the proverbial bandwagon and purchasing AI grading systems too quickly.

But it was the analogy of the truck driver that caused all the metaphorical gears in my head to click into place.  English and history teachers don’t just teach writing, and when they grade the writing, it is not just the quality of the writing they are grading.  They are not “just driving the truck.”  I am confident that ChatGPT could be a marvelous tool for catching run-on and incoherent sentences or for catching disorganized paragraphs and poor thesis statements, and if using it for that would enable an already overburdened teacher the chance to get a few additional drafts for an essay accomplished in their class, I’m on board.  The only way you get better at writing is to write.

However, what ChatGPT cannot catch (and here is where I suspect at least some of those discrepancies in the percentages found in the grading research come from) is the quality, the originality! of thought and ideas that a given piece of writing expresses.  Only the human teacher can do that because only the human teacher has actual intelligence as defined by biology:  the capacity to use existing knowledge to solve an original, unique, and novel problem.  No AI can solve a problem it hasn’t already seen—which is part of what Mims hints at with his remark about “10 more internets;” only a human mind could create them—and that is why we will still need the human teacher to do the final grading.

Which brings me back to some of the themes I first addressed in Catechism and AI.  In looking back at that essay (where I first wrote about this misuse of the word “intelligence” in computer science), I realized that what the technological breakthroughs since then have made possible is the deepening of the illusion of intelligence.  Once something like ChatGPT could be trained on the entire internet, pretty much every prior human answer to a problem was now part of the algorithm, and so when you present it with a problem that is novel to you, it appears like it can solve it on its own.  It appears intelligent.  And since problems truly novel to everyone who has ever lived grow exponentially fewer each day, AI can appear intelligent quite a bit of the time.

However, present it with a problem that is novel to both you and the AI and suddenly you get one of those hallucinations Mims points out you need an actual human to fix.  That remains the limitation of AI:  it cannot handle the truly novel, the genuinely unique.  Nor can it create it.  As I’ve written before, AI may be capable of producing a mimic of a Taylor Swift song, but it cannot produce an actual Taylor Swift song.  The challenge is in remembering that the mimic isn’t really Taylor Swift.

Again, here is where the technological breakthroughs since I first wrote about AI have deepened the illusion.  The content generated by AIs such as ChatGPT may look novel because that particular arrangement of words, images, etc. happens to look novel to you.  But somewhere, at some time, some human mind already put those same words, images, etc. together; some human mind created.  And you are just now on the receiving end of a tool that we can now train on what every human mind has created to date for the past 10,000 years. The ultimate catechism! And a lot of prior human creativity with which to fool someone.  We see a parallel in the development of the performance of magic shows:  one hundred years ago, we only had the technology to create the illusion of a woman sawn in half; forty years ago, David Copperfield has the tools to make the Statue of Liberty appear to disappear.  None of it is any less illusory; it just gets harder to tell.

And where that fact may grow increasingly problematic is in the realm of another theme from my earlier writing:  interpersonal relationships.  When I first wrote about AI five years ago, Her was only a movie; now it’s a reality.  For a monthly subscription, I can have the AI companion of my choice (romantic, platonic, and/or therapeutic), and have “someone” in my life who will never push back on me.  Add DoorDash, Amazon, and Netflix, and I could spend the rest of my life once I retire (or get a work-from-home internet job) in my own solipsistic bubble without any need for any direct human contact ever again.  Not gonna happen as they say, but the fact that I can write those words should be sobering (and shuddering) to anyone reading them. Because if we are ultimately successful at reducing our most basic humanity to an illusion, climate change and the next pandemic are going to be the least of our concerns.

Yet if Christopher Mims is correct, then AI may rapidly be approaching its illusory limits, and if Tate and her crew are correct, then watchful use of AI may help teachers give their students more practice improving their writing skills—and therefore their thinking skills—while not adding to their grading loads. So perhaps there is cause for optimism.  The key, I think, is always to remember that the “I” in AI is—at least for now—a biological falsehood, and what I now realize was missing from my earlier work on AI is the necessary emphasis on novelty being at the core, the essence of what it means to be intelligent.  That doesn’t mean the CS folks may not eventually pull off an algorithm that truly can create.  But for now, we do not live in that world, and we just need to keep reminding ourselves regularly of the reality of that fact.

References

Barshay, J. (May 20, 2024) AI Essay Grading Could Help Overburdened Teachers, But Researchers Say It Needs More Work.  KQED/Mind Shift  https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/63809/ai-essay-grading-could-help-overburdened-teachers-but-researchers-say-it-needs-more-work.

Mims, C. (May 31, 2024) The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam.  The Wall Street Journal.  https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-ai-revolution-is-already-losing-steam-a93478b1?mod=wsjhp_columnists_pos1.

The (Hand)Written Word

Every time you invent a technology,
you also invent a responsibility.
—Aza Raskin, Co-founder
Earth Species Project

As someone who does a lot of thinking, values thinking, and does quite a bit of thinking about thinking, it can be hard sometimes to look at the general state of thinking in our society and not become demoralized.  When 20% of voters believe President Biden is responsible for ending the constitutional right to abortion in this country, it can look like the conspiracy theorists have won.  When a third of those aged 18-29 are getting 100% of their “news” from TikTok, it is little wonder that half the nation remains convinced that the unemployment rate is the highest it has been in 50 years (despite being at a near record low).  And when we have people forming intimate relationships with AI companions rather than fellow human beings (at great risk to your national security it turns out), it can simply feel like it is time to toss hands in the air and start researching survivalist bunkers on-line.

Furthermore, adding fuel to all this has been one of my classes this academic year in which I have observed almost no collective intellectual growth from last September to today—something I have never witnessed in my now 35-year career.  And lest I be accused of subjective bias, I am not alone in this empirical observation; the grade-level dean and others at my school are concerned by what we have failed to see happen over the past 9 months in so many of these students’ courses.

With one exception: math.  Math classes have all seen growth—sometimes simply COVID recovery—but growth nonetheless and across the board at all levels.

Why?

My hypothesis is based on an observation.  There were, of course, individual exceptions in my class in terms of growth over the year, and when identifying what both the act of learning math and these individual growth exceptions have in common, it is one thing:  writing by hand.  My students in my biology class that grew intellectually over the year completed all their work by hand—just as they would have had no choice but to do in their math courses; you can’t readily manipulate equations on a screen.

The science behind my hypothesis is pretty solid and grows with each new study.  We have known since 2014 from research done at Princeton University that students who take notes by hand do demonstrably better on tests than student who only type their notes on a laptop.  But recently, using fMRI to perform brain scans, we are discovering what is actually different in the brain between handwriting and typing and why writing by hand is so central to better learning outcomes.  For starters, handwriting produces significantly higher levels of electrical activity across many more interconnected brain regions than typing does—perhaps most significantly in the motor cortex.  While typing and handwriting both employ movements in your hands and fingers to generate words, writing by hand demands significantly more communication between the motor cortex and visual cortex, engaging the brain more deeply as it must constantly align each finger’s position with the mental models of the letters and words being written.  Put simply, as neuropsychologist Audrey van der Meer says, “when you are typing, the same simple movement of your fingers is involved in producing every letter, whereas when you’re writing by hand, you immediately feel that the bodily feeling of producing an A is entirely different from producing a B.” 

The implications for younger children are profound.  Those, for example, who learn to trace out the alphabet by hand have significantly better and longer-lasting recognition and understanding of words, which when combined with the improvement in memory and recall handwriting produces, leads to better reading skills—the very foundation of all education.  As van der Meer puts it, “if young children are not receiving any handwriting training, which is very good brain stimulation, then their brains simply won’t reach their full potential”—with all the scary possible long-term consequences that can come from that.  It is, perhaps, why several states are passing laws to require handwriting lessons again in elementary schools and why California is going so far as to require training in cursive once more.

But it is not just the youngest who benefit from writing by hand.  Having laid a foundation of literacy through the handwritten word, older children and adults who continue this practice have a better understanding of whatever material they are studying because the act of writing by hand causes the brain to engage with said material more intensely (their brains are literally working harder at the task).  Thus, note taking with pencil, pen, or stylus (it is the physical motion that counts) leads to significantly richer, deeper learning as well as better memory formation and recall, and it is why, though I compose using a keyboard, I still always outline my thoughts for these essays by hand:

It is the only way I can assure that I am presenting my best thinking.

Which brings me back to my class that doesn’t seem to have demonstrated any collective growth this year and a world in which good thinking seems in short supply.  I have watched for over a decade now as many individuals—and especially my students—have increasingly off-loaded cognitive tasks to their digital devices (taking a picture of something, for example, rather than trying to remember it), and I am left wondering if we have not reached a critical tipping point in that process.  Yadurshana Sivashankar of the University of Waterloo in Ontario reminds us that “if we’re not actively using these areas (those involved in these cognitive tasks), then they are going to deteriorate over time, whether it’s memory or motor skills,” and my ah-ha moment with this particular class came when I recently had them correct a quiz in my presence rather than as homework.  Instead of looking back at their notes to work out what they had done wrong, nearly all of them simply googled their questions and wrote down verbatim what appeared on their screens.  It was not about learning from mistakes (or learning at all, for that matter); it was about completing a task and checking off a “to-do” box.

Well, that is something I can try to change as an educator.  Starting next year, no more off-loading.  Just a really, really big supply of paper, pencils, and pens, and a lot of higher quality thinking.  Together, we’ll all write by hand.

References

Campbell, R.M. (Dec. 2023) “AI Chatbots Could Weaken National Security.” Scientific American, pp. 73-74.

Glueck, K. & Corasaniti, N. (May 28, 2024) Eyeing Trump, but on the Fence: How Tuned-Out Voters Could Decide 2024.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/us/politics/trump-biden-voters.html.

Hu, C. (May 2024)  Hand-on: Writing by Hand Comes with Learning Benefits.  Scientific American, p. 13.

Lambert, J. (May 11, 2024) Why Writing by Hand Beats Typing for Thinking and Learning. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/11/1250529661/handwriting-cursive-typing-schools-learning-brain.

Mueller, P. & Oppenheimer, D.  (April 23, 2014) The Pen is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking.  Psychological Science.  https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797614524581.

Plait, P. (Dec. 2023) “Conspiracy Theories Then and Now” Scientific American, pp. 80-81.

A Letter to the Class of 2024

We are not educated for darkness.
—Constance Fitzgerald

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery,
but a savage and beautiful country lies in between.
—Diane Ackerman

Winners play hurt.
—Vince Lombardi

Dear Members of the Class of 2024,

When essayist and author, Robert Fulghum, was once asked why all his books were so similar, he replied that he returned again and again to just a few common themes because only these were central to his thinking.  Hence, he went on to say:

If you notice phrases, ideas, and anecdotes that closely resemble those that appear elsewhere in my writing, it is not a matter of sloppy editing.  I’m repeating myself.  I’m reshuffling words in the hope that just once I might say something exactly right.  And I’m wrestling with dilemmas that are not easily resolved or easily dismissed.  I run at them again and again because I’m not finished with them.  And may never be.  Work-in-progress on a life-in-progress is what my writing is about.  And some progress in the work is enough to keep it going on (p. 30).

I share these words because I find myself once again authoring this annual letter to all of you, knowing that I still do not yet have it quite right.  And while there are only so many ways for those of us who have loved and cared for you to send you on to the next chapter in your narrative—and usually clichéd ways at that!—I, like Fulghum, feel compelled to try. 

So here goes: one final set of lessons from the heart for the soul.

To begin with, like Fulghum, I too have found certain common themes arising regularly as I have written this epistle each year, and an especially big, “elephant-in-the-living-room” one is the fact that the world your elders and I are leaving you is one hot mess—both literally and figuratively.  I do not need to itemize the details of the disasters; you get enough of that from your daily feeds.  However, it can be quite challenging not to give in to despair in the face of such dysfunction, and “too often we either submit and surrender our souls to the social consensus [that originates it], or withdraw in passive narcissism” (Radical, p. 34).  Worse, “the temptation in hard times is to become the inferno” and burn it all down in one great Götterdämmerung (Garden, p. 21; my emphasis).  Hence, in a world where—as Billy Joel once wrote—“we didn’t start the fire,” how do you find the resilience and inner resources to become an effective agent for positive change?

It starts by attending to, deeply listening to, and embracing the Stranger (what in neuroscience terms is the prefrontal cortex encountering the totally new).  Only interaction with the unfamiliar can challenge us to grow and to change, and more importantly, only interaction with the Stranger enables us to realize that “other people are not required to perform roles in one’s internal play, no matter how wise, good, or reasonable the script may seem” (Garden, p. 18).  When you gain this perspective, you realize that each of us is caught up in our own narrative and can only revise that narrative when we allow another’s narrative to enter into our own.  When that happens, suddenly the “jerk” cutting you off at the traffic light could be the parent frantically heading to the hospital with a seriously injured child, or the distant and seemingly dismissive waiter could be struggling to manage chronic pain that is in no way their fault. 

Is the “jerk” at the light probably still actually a jerk? Of course.  But once you’ve embraced the Stranger—and there will be lots of opportunities as you leave the familiar for the unknown in the coming years—you can no longer judge another with the righteous certainty you once did.  You have a more expansive, compassionate narrative guiding your life, making you a more effective agent in this world.  What’s more, since this is a graduation moment and clichés are mandatory, the cliché for this lesson is:  learn to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes; it will make you a better walker.

Granted, all this learning can be discomfiting—especially in the alien and uncharted waters where you are all next headed. As Mary Rose O’Reilley puts it, “to be stretched almost beyond where you can go is acutely painful.  One often fails and failure brings pain.  One must court doubt and despair in the process of learning anything at all” because as a neuroscientist might put it, “if your brain isn’t uncomfortable, you aren’t learning anything” (Garden, p. xii).  Or to put it another way, if you are not heavily invested in the change you wish to see, there will be no change—in you, in others, or in the world.  Hence, in a very real way, to learn is to love enough to let whatever you are loving fundamentally alter your narrative, alter who you are.

Ah! But any act of love—even the smallest—leaves us vulnerable to being wounded, opening up the possibility for darkness in our lives, and that brings me to a second theme I have found myself returning to again and again over the years:  the reality of Constance Fitzgerald’s words at the start of this letter.  Too often, we do not teach about the character of darkness, that is has a purpose and a value in our lives.  Instead, we tend to revile it or try to pretend it’s not there because confronting it can be so difficult. Yet, the simple truth is that “darkness interrogates us at the places where our knowledge of reality is most deficient, our illusions most entrenched” (Garden, pp. 70-71).  It is what “comes along to tell us we’re worshipping an inadequate object…to loosen us from the bondage of a devotion we’ve offered to an unworthy object, a false god” (Garden, p. 21).  Thus, it is only through our encounters with moments of darkness that we truly stretch who we are as a person, truly grow, and I can share from firsthand experience that it is the only path to wisdom.

However, occassionally a time of darkness will take on a life of its own, and that is when you must discover the power of wintering.  We all do it at some point in our lives, and no matter how it arrives, it is usually unexpected, isolating, and emotionally raw.  Yet, as author Katherine May puts it so eloquently:

It’s also inevitable.  We like to imagine that it’s possible for life to be one eternal summer and that we have uniquely failed to achieve that for ourselves.  We dream of an equatorial habitat, forever close to the sun, an endless unvarying high season.  But life’s not like that…Even if by some extraordinary stroke of self-control and good luck we are able to keep control of our own health and happiness for an entire lifetime, we still couldn’t avoid the winter.  Our parents would age and die; our friends would undertake minor acts of betrayal; the machinations of the world would eventually weigh against us.  Somewhere along the line…[winter will come] (p. 11).

And when it does, you must remember that it is actually the crucible for life, not its ending.  There can be no spring without the rejuvenating and healing power of winter, and “since [its] pain will come to us anyway, why not figure out how to deal with it.  It’s hard to grasp the connection between suffering and spiritual growth if we think of [living] only as a way to gain peace and tranquility” (Garden, pp. 74-75).  The proverbial bottom line is that you have to engage the world as you are at any given moment, and sometimes that means you will “play hurt.”  It is not one of the “fun” lessons of adulthood, but it is one of its more vital ones.

What’s more, as you “play”—both hurt and healthy—I hope you will begin to learn the lesson which all of you, my students, have taught me over these many years.  Experiencing both aching and healing, alienation and grace, sin and salvation throughout the coming years, you may start to notice the paradox that you actually need all of these to become fully human and that it is only out of that full humanity that you can affect the change you wish to see in the world.  The yin and yang of life is like breathing, and it is what you do with the life which this breathing makes possible that matters. Therefore, learn to breathe well and then choose what to do with the life that results in a thoughtful and self-reflective manner.

And, yes, while modern neuroscience may have demonstrated that the agency to do this choosing may simply be a cognitive illusion generated by the brain, that doesn’t mean that the character of the illusion isn’t important. As Mary Rose O’Reilley argues, “it matters what metaphors we use to describe ourselves to ourselves” (pp. 26-27), and as Norman Vincent Peale once wrote, “change your thoughts and you change your world.” Hence, as you now journey forth, I pray for each of you that you choose your individual metaphors and thoughts well. They will define you (however illusory that may be) and, consequently, they will define your impact on this world.

Finally, always remember that “somewhere there is a great mystery that wants to come live in your house and change everything” (Radical, p. 48).  Be open to it when it arrives; welcome it.  It will have much to teach you; you will have much to learn. Reject it at your peril (spoken from hard-won experience) and always remember that the obvious and predictable are not always the safest road to travel: you can get just as disoriented and lost in the familiar as you can in the unknown. Therefore, consider the road less traveled as you let your next great mystery into your life, and remember that Frost was right when it wrote all those years ago about how it can make all the difference.

Congratulations, then, and may the coming celebrations be joyous ones!

References

Fulghum, R. (1991) Uh-Oh: Some Observations from Both Side of the Refrigerator Door.  New York:  Villard Books.

May, K. (2020) Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.  New York: Riverhead Books.

O’Reilley, M. R. (2005) The Garden at Night: Burnout & Breakdown in the Teaching Life.  Portsmouth, NH:  Heinemann.

O’Reilley, M. R. (1998) Radical Presence: Teaching as Contemplative Practice.  Portsmouth, NH:  Heinemann.