Star Wars meets Monty Python
From wired.com.
Yes, I have better things to do with my time.
27.6.06
26.6.06
Technical terms
At a meeting I attended recently, someone joking referred to a multimedia presentation that someone else had made to show to undergraduate students as "information delivery for the ADD generation." There were chuckles all around.
I, on the other hand, did not chuckle; I tried to intervene but the conversation moved on and I didn't feel like being obnoxious and forcibly returning us to the issue. Plus, I like and respect the speaker; I am pretty sure that my colleague was simply making a joke, and didn't mean anything malicious by the comment. But the comment was worrisome to me in two respects:
1) the casual use of technical terms out of context always bothers me. "ADD" (and "ADHD") are medical diagnoses, and come complete with therapeutic regimens that sometimes include medication. Using the terms casually sounds, to my ears, like a bit of armchair quarterbacking, as though anyone (and not just trained medical professionals following reasonably clear and precise protocols) could look at someone and declare them "ADD." And this is silly at best and disastrous at worst: silly because it usurps the entire contemporary practice of medicine in favor of a lay opinion, and disastrous when it comes (as such lay diagnoses often do) with a set of idiosyncratic and bizarre "home remedies." As if just sitting an ADD child down in a chair for several hours a day, or removing the television, or forcing them to read aloud, or whatever, will somehow affect their ability to concentrate.
To my mind, one should reserve technical vocabulary for its precise usage, and one should be sure that the term used is both accurate and comes complete with its associated therapies and interventions and the rest of the conceptual and technical apparatus that professionals are supposedly trained to recognize and deploy. Otherwise one is not really saying anything, not in the correct sense.
I think I'm rather sensitive to this because of my autistic son. When my son runs around the room endlessly singing "Life Is A Highway" and reciting the opening sequence of his new favorite movie Cars, it's not because we're not disciplining him enough or because he wants to be annoying; it's because of his neurology and his own individual way of dealing with sensory inputs. As parents of an autistic child, my wife and I have learned to speak the technical vocabulary, and can offer informed lay diagnoses, but we'd never dream of trying to actually formally diagnose someone. We certainly have a bag of tricks that might be of use when dealing with someone who is autistic (or who has autism spectrum-like traits -- autism is a hard case here, because it's a spectrum of traits and issues; the NIMH website has a pretty decent breakdown, as does Autism Speaks), but that's a far cry from claiming to be a medical professional.
Calling someone or something "autistic" without knowing what the hell you are talking about -- or calling them "clinically depressed," or "bipolar," or "ADD" -- is just ridiculous. Either use the apparatus correctly, or leave it aside.
2) referring to a whole generation as "ADD," even casually or off-handedly, is a not-too-subtle form of dismissing them and their learning styles as somehow deficient or in need of therapeutic intervention. That's deeply offensive. "You just aren't learning right" is a tremendously reactionary way to confront any educational situation, I think; besides the fact that it puts the blame on the audience rather than on the communicator, it echoes the traditional complaint every older generation has about those who come after it: they aren't like us, they don't do things like we do, they have it so easy, they don't know about hard work. And there's the biggest problem, I think. The current media-savvy, media-saturated generation of undergraduate students (to say nothing of their younger siblings still in elementary school at the moment) experiences the world differently, and inhabits a different world than, their predecessors; this is not a unique claim, because every generation experiences and inhabits a different world than their parents and grandparents did. And this generation is used to jump cuts, multi-sensory inputs, and computers that are more like furniture than pieces of technology in that they are simply taken for granted.
This is what these students are used to; this is where they live. It is up to us, the educational professionals, to meet them where they live and help to facilitate genuine learning -- which is to say, genuine exploration of options and identities by the students themselves, and the production of learning communities in which that kind of educational work can take place. It is not up to us to make them suffer as we suffered, or experience as we experienced. We are not supposed to be cloning ourselves here -- we are supposed to be helping them learn. Offhandedly diagnosing them as in need of medical intervention (intervention that will in theory make them more like us) strikes me as something of an evasion of our responsibility as educators.
Yes, I suppose I may be overreacting to an off-hand comment, a joke. But the issues that the comment implies seem to me to be very serious indeed, and to cut right to the heart of the teaching vocation.
I, on the other hand, did not chuckle; I tried to intervene but the conversation moved on and I didn't feel like being obnoxious and forcibly returning us to the issue. Plus, I like and respect the speaker; I am pretty sure that my colleague was simply making a joke, and didn't mean anything malicious by the comment. But the comment was worrisome to me in two respects:
1) the casual use of technical terms out of context always bothers me. "ADD" (and "ADHD") are medical diagnoses, and come complete with therapeutic regimens that sometimes include medication. Using the terms casually sounds, to my ears, like a bit of armchair quarterbacking, as though anyone (and not just trained medical professionals following reasonably clear and precise protocols) could look at someone and declare them "ADD." And this is silly at best and disastrous at worst: silly because it usurps the entire contemporary practice of medicine in favor of a lay opinion, and disastrous when it comes (as such lay diagnoses often do) with a set of idiosyncratic and bizarre "home remedies." As if just sitting an ADD child down in a chair for several hours a day, or removing the television, or forcing them to read aloud, or whatever, will somehow affect their ability to concentrate.
To my mind, one should reserve technical vocabulary for its precise usage, and one should be sure that the term used is both accurate and comes complete with its associated therapies and interventions and the rest of the conceptual and technical apparatus that professionals are supposedly trained to recognize and deploy. Otherwise one is not really saying anything, not in the correct sense.
I think I'm rather sensitive to this because of my autistic son. When my son runs around the room endlessly singing "Life Is A Highway" and reciting the opening sequence of his new favorite movie Cars, it's not because we're not disciplining him enough or because he wants to be annoying; it's because of his neurology and his own individual way of dealing with sensory inputs. As parents of an autistic child, my wife and I have learned to speak the technical vocabulary, and can offer informed lay diagnoses, but we'd never dream of trying to actually formally diagnose someone. We certainly have a bag of tricks that might be of use when dealing with someone who is autistic (or who has autism spectrum-like traits -- autism is a hard case here, because it's a spectrum of traits and issues; the NIMH website has a pretty decent breakdown, as does Autism Speaks), but that's a far cry from claiming to be a medical professional.
Calling someone or something "autistic" without knowing what the hell you are talking about -- or calling them "clinically depressed," or "bipolar," or "ADD" -- is just ridiculous. Either use the apparatus correctly, or leave it aside.
2) referring to a whole generation as "ADD," even casually or off-handedly, is a not-too-subtle form of dismissing them and their learning styles as somehow deficient or in need of therapeutic intervention. That's deeply offensive. "You just aren't learning right" is a tremendously reactionary way to confront any educational situation, I think; besides the fact that it puts the blame on the audience rather than on the communicator, it echoes the traditional complaint every older generation has about those who come after it: they aren't like us, they don't do things like we do, they have it so easy, they don't know about hard work. And there's the biggest problem, I think. The current media-savvy, media-saturated generation of undergraduate students (to say nothing of their younger siblings still in elementary school at the moment) experiences the world differently, and inhabits a different world than, their predecessors; this is not a unique claim, because every generation experiences and inhabits a different world than their parents and grandparents did. And this generation is used to jump cuts, multi-sensory inputs, and computers that are more like furniture than pieces of technology in that they are simply taken for granted.
This is what these students are used to; this is where they live. It is up to us, the educational professionals, to meet them where they live and help to facilitate genuine learning -- which is to say, genuine exploration of options and identities by the students themselves, and the production of learning communities in which that kind of educational work can take place. It is not up to us to make them suffer as we suffered, or experience as we experienced. We are not supposed to be cloning ourselves here -- we are supposed to be helping them learn. Offhandedly diagnosing them as in need of medical intervention (intervention that will in theory make them more like us) strikes me as something of an evasion of our responsibility as educators.
Yes, I suppose I may be overreacting to an off-hand comment, a joke. But the issues that the comment implies seem to me to be very serious indeed, and to cut right to the heart of the teaching vocation.
19.6.06
Two bad pitches
This is going to be an "inside baseball" discussion. Apologies in advance.
The Yankees were in town this weekend, playing the Nationals in the verdammt interleague portion of the regular-season schedule. I can't stand interleague play, myself, although it pales as a travesty next to the other two great blights on contemporary regular-season Major League baseball: the wild card playoff system, and the general imbalance to schedules created by having thirty teams divided into six divisions. I dislike all three of these "innovations" because they increase the random factor in the game, and detract from the ability of a grueling regular season to separate the best teams from the rest of the teams. The wild card increases the likelihood that a team that couldn't even win its own division might win the World Series (although this does not appear to be statistically likely, given the data from eleven years of playoffs with a wild card participant; see the analytical details here and here; the point is that before the wild card was created it was impossible to get to the World Series without winning your division); imbalanced schedules mean that it is no longer the case that everyone plays everyone else in their league the same number of times, and the same number of times at home and away, so some teams (randomly) end up with easier schedules than others; and interleague play means both that pitchers and hitters are facing unfamiliar opponents without the ability to adjust and improve over the course of the season and that teams designed for a particular strategic situation (with and without a designated hitter) are being placed in unfamiliar territory.
All of this conspires to make baseball more like football, where any team can win on any given day. And to my mind there's not as much fun in that; why not just bet on random coin flips and save yourself a lot of money and hassle? Regular-season baseball is a machine that is supposed to filter out randomness. It still does this better than any other professional sport that I can think of, blemishes and absurdities aside.
But enough of that rant. I actually wanted to make a very different observation here, which is that although the win-loss record for this weekend shows simply that the Yankees won one game and lost two, the actual story is quite different. And it's a story of contingency -- the kind of controlled happenstance that baseball at its best produces. Things broke against the Yankees this weekend, but they could have just as easily broken the other way.
First, the Saturday game, that I was fortunate enough to see in person. After the first half of the fifth inning, when the Yankees were leading 9-2, it kind of looked like the game was just going to be a slaughter; Chacon was shaky pitching for the Yankees, but at least he wasn't giving up grand slams to Johnny Damon the way that Ramon Ortiz was. But the Nationals chipped away and the Yankee bullpen was ineffective, until the score was 9-8 in the bottom of the eighth inning. Scott Proctor walks Alfonso Soriano, but then gets Vidro to fly out. Action in the Yankees bullpen, and all of a sudden there's Mariano Rivera walking out to the mound, and all of the Yankees fans in the stadium (and there were a lot of them!) start going crazy. Here comes Mo, game over. And statistically, this is the definitely the case; in his career he has 392 saves against only 39 losses -- and even better, a career WHIP of 1.05, 8.04 K/9, and an ERA of 2.33. But he does blow saves sometimes, and this was one of those times -- and it was a narrow thing indeed.
Daryle Ward at the plate. Left-handed batter, never faced Mo. Soriano obviously running; he steals second fair and square. The count gets to (I believe) 2-1, and Soriano takes off for third on the pitch. It's a ball, Posada's throw is wide, and it goes past A-Rod into the outfield; Soriano scores on the error (and because the official scorer works for the Nationals, Soriano got credited with a second stolen base -- but I was there, and I think that if Posada's throw had been better then Soriano would have been out at third, and in my book that's not a stolen base but an E-2). Mo, obviously a bit annoyed, tosses the next pitch high, and walks Ward. That's the bad pitch. After that, Guillen triples and Ward -- Daryle Ward, who lumbers rather than runs around the bases -- scores pretty easily. Zimmerman gets a single, Guillen scores, and then Mo induces a double-play ball and the inning ends.
The 3-1 pitch to Ward is the bad pitch in the inning, especially coming on the heels of Posada's bad throw as it did. If Posada throws Soriano out at third, and then Mo works with the bases empty and gets Ward to do what lefties usually do against Mo -- break their bats hitting weak grounders to the right side of the infield -- then the Yankees are out of the inning with the lead intact. Even if Posada doesn't throw out Soriano, and Guillen still gets his hit to tie the score, there are two outs and the Yankees can play Zimmerman differently, maybe getting a force at second or something, and escape the inning with a tie score. But walking Ward did the damage. Clearly it wouldn't have been as damaging if the Yankee bullpen had done their job and kept the Nationals off the board for the previous three innings, but there you go: a single moment of contingency, and the whole character of the game changed.
Sunday was even more obviously a case of a single bad pitch, although like Saturday, the conditions for that single bad pitch were produced earlier on in the contest. With a tired bullpen, the Yankees needed Wang to pitch for a while, and he did -- but he was shaky in the eighth, and I expected Torre to pull him for the ninth or at last to have someone warming up in case Wang allowed anyone to reach base. Wang did, Torre didn't, and Zimmerman got a sinkerball that didn't sink which rapidly turned into a game-winning walk-off home run. Yankees lose again. But it was close, very close -- another bad pitch, another contingency that just didn't break the Yankees' way.
My point here is not that what happens in baseball is random; clearly it isn't completely random, despite the best efforts of the Powers That Be to introduce more randomness into the game through scheduling mishaps. But individual baseball games are about contingent events concatenating to produce outcomes, and that's what happened the last two days. It proves nothing about "which team is better" or anything of the sort, obnoxious and uneducated Nationals fans jeering on the way out of the stadium to the contrary; it was just two rolls of the dice that went poorly for the Yankees. From my comfortable second-guessing desk chair I can say that Torre shouldn't have left Wang go back out for the ninth yesterday, but I understand his reasoning. And given Mo's track record, I wouldn't rather have had anyone else on the mound in that situation on Saturday, because over the long term Mo shuts the opposition down in precisely those situations. But the long term -- which as a concept only makes sense in a relatively closed system like the regular season of Major League baseball -- doesn't translate into individual instances very comfortably.
But losing still stinks.
The Yankees were in town this weekend, playing the Nationals in the verdammt interleague portion of the regular-season schedule. I can't stand interleague play, myself, although it pales as a travesty next to the other two great blights on contemporary regular-season Major League baseball: the wild card playoff system, and the general imbalance to schedules created by having thirty teams divided into six divisions. I dislike all three of these "innovations" because they increase the random factor in the game, and detract from the ability of a grueling regular season to separate the best teams from the rest of the teams. The wild card increases the likelihood that a team that couldn't even win its own division might win the World Series (although this does not appear to be statistically likely, given the data from eleven years of playoffs with a wild card participant; see the analytical details here and here; the point is that before the wild card was created it was impossible to get to the World Series without winning your division); imbalanced schedules mean that it is no longer the case that everyone plays everyone else in their league the same number of times, and the same number of times at home and away, so some teams (randomly) end up with easier schedules than others; and interleague play means both that pitchers and hitters are facing unfamiliar opponents without the ability to adjust and improve over the course of the season and that teams designed for a particular strategic situation (with and without a designated hitter) are being placed in unfamiliar territory.
All of this conspires to make baseball more like football, where any team can win on any given day. And to my mind there's not as much fun in that; why not just bet on random coin flips and save yourself a lot of money and hassle? Regular-season baseball is a machine that is supposed to filter out randomness. It still does this better than any other professional sport that I can think of, blemishes and absurdities aside.
But enough of that rant. I actually wanted to make a very different observation here, which is that although the win-loss record for this weekend shows simply that the Yankees won one game and lost two, the actual story is quite different. And it's a story of contingency -- the kind of controlled happenstance that baseball at its best produces. Things broke against the Yankees this weekend, but they could have just as easily broken the other way.
First, the Saturday game, that I was fortunate enough to see in person. After the first half of the fifth inning, when the Yankees were leading 9-2, it kind of looked like the game was just going to be a slaughter; Chacon was shaky pitching for the Yankees, but at least he wasn't giving up grand slams to Johnny Damon the way that Ramon Ortiz was. But the Nationals chipped away and the Yankee bullpen was ineffective, until the score was 9-8 in the bottom of the eighth inning. Scott Proctor walks Alfonso Soriano, but then gets Vidro to fly out. Action in the Yankees bullpen, and all of a sudden there's Mariano Rivera walking out to the mound, and all of the Yankees fans in the stadium (and there were a lot of them!) start going crazy. Here comes Mo, game over. And statistically, this is the definitely the case; in his career he has 392 saves against only 39 losses -- and even better, a career WHIP of 1.05, 8.04 K/9, and an ERA of 2.33. But he does blow saves sometimes, and this was one of those times -- and it was a narrow thing indeed.
Daryle Ward at the plate. Left-handed batter, never faced Mo. Soriano obviously running; he steals second fair and square. The count gets to (I believe) 2-1, and Soriano takes off for third on the pitch. It's a ball, Posada's throw is wide, and it goes past A-Rod into the outfield; Soriano scores on the error (and because the official scorer works for the Nationals, Soriano got credited with a second stolen base -- but I was there, and I think that if Posada's throw had been better then Soriano would have been out at third, and in my book that's not a stolen base but an E-2). Mo, obviously a bit annoyed, tosses the next pitch high, and walks Ward. That's the bad pitch. After that, Guillen triples and Ward -- Daryle Ward, who lumbers rather than runs around the bases -- scores pretty easily. Zimmerman gets a single, Guillen scores, and then Mo induces a double-play ball and the inning ends.
The 3-1 pitch to Ward is the bad pitch in the inning, especially coming on the heels of Posada's bad throw as it did. If Posada throws Soriano out at third, and then Mo works with the bases empty and gets Ward to do what lefties usually do against Mo -- break their bats hitting weak grounders to the right side of the infield -- then the Yankees are out of the inning with the lead intact. Even if Posada doesn't throw out Soriano, and Guillen still gets his hit to tie the score, there are two outs and the Yankees can play Zimmerman differently, maybe getting a force at second or something, and escape the inning with a tie score. But walking Ward did the damage. Clearly it wouldn't have been as damaging if the Yankee bullpen had done their job and kept the Nationals off the board for the previous three innings, but there you go: a single moment of contingency, and the whole character of the game changed.
Sunday was even more obviously a case of a single bad pitch, although like Saturday, the conditions for that single bad pitch were produced earlier on in the contest. With a tired bullpen, the Yankees needed Wang to pitch for a while, and he did -- but he was shaky in the eighth, and I expected Torre to pull him for the ninth or at last to have someone warming up in case Wang allowed anyone to reach base. Wang did, Torre didn't, and Zimmerman got a sinkerball that didn't sink which rapidly turned into a game-winning walk-off home run. Yankees lose again. But it was close, very close -- another bad pitch, another contingency that just didn't break the Yankees' way.
My point here is not that what happens in baseball is random; clearly it isn't completely random, despite the best efforts of the Powers That Be to introduce more randomness into the game through scheduling mishaps. But individual baseball games are about contingent events concatenating to produce outcomes, and that's what happened the last two days. It proves nothing about "which team is better" or anything of the sort, obnoxious and uneducated Nationals fans jeering on the way out of the stadium to the contrary; it was just two rolls of the dice that went poorly for the Yankees. From my comfortable second-guessing desk chair I can say that Torre shouldn't have left Wang go back out for the ninth yesterday, but I understand his reasoning. And given Mo's track record, I wouldn't rather have had anyone else on the mound in that situation on Saturday, because over the long term Mo shuts the opposition down in precisely those situations. But the long term -- which as a concept only makes sense in a relatively closed system like the regular season of Major League baseball -- doesn't translate into individual instances very comfortably.
But losing still stinks.
16.6.06
Half a brain
Imagine waking up one morning and discovering that you only had one of your legs, or one of your ears. You'd remember that you used to have other capacities, other abilities, other things that you could do -- but for some reason you suddenly can't do them. You'd look for the missing limb or missing piece of sensory input, but be unable to locate it.
Oh, and to that, add the fact that you wake up thinking it's a month ago, and having absolutely no memory of what transpired during the month that has apparently elapsed since your last memory was recorded.
I'm very glad that my Little Digital Companion -- my trusty PowerBook "Akasha" -- isn't a sentient being (as far as I know), because I suspect that it would be terrified and frustrated at the moment. Tuesday evening my hard drive developed symptoms of an immanent total failure: clicking sounds and v-e-r-y slow access times. I took immediate steps: connected an external drive and grabbed the most important files. In order: this semester's folder (containing grades, lectures, papers, etc.); next semester's folder (with provisional syllabi and the like); locally archived e-mail; recently purchased music. The copy got about a third of the way through the e-mail before the drive totally conked out, and I mean "totally" -- it couldn't be mounted when the machine was booted from the system disc, and when I took it to the hospital, er, the Apple Store, even they couldn't get access to it with the Serious Deep Mojo known as "Open Firmware." Basically, it's a dead duck.
The machine is under warranty so they are replacing the hard drive free of charge, but no one is optimistic about being able to recover my data. Fortunately I had a bootable backup, which is what I am presently using to run the emergency machine (a three-year-old G4 tower) that I was able to secure from the university's stock of old computers. Unfortunately, that backup is about four weeks old, which creates a little bit of dislocation -- I remember doing things, moving stuff around on the hard drive, and all of a sudden none of it has been done. And, of course, a bunch of stuff is missing, particularly e-mail correspondence. I'm just glad that I didn't write anything new in the past few weeks, because that would be irrecoverably gone as well.
It's not as bad as it could have been; all of my e-mail passes through an online server and I can get back most messages. But for the moment I am running on an old backup, trying to piece the last four weeks of my working life back together.
Oh, and the computer I am running on has no 'Net access. I am borrowing my wife's machine in order to post this, and will probably borrow it again in order to check e-mail and the like on and off for the next week. It's extremely odd working on a machine in my office the contents of which look very familiar -- but the capacities of which are sharply limited. I can't click over to check baseball scores, or follow a reference online, or even read e-mail; doing all of these things now requires a lot of additional effort, and another myiscla machine entirely.
Yes, it could have been worse. But it's not fun in any event.
Oh, and to that, add the fact that you wake up thinking it's a month ago, and having absolutely no memory of what transpired during the month that has apparently elapsed since your last memory was recorded.
I'm very glad that my Little Digital Companion -- my trusty PowerBook "Akasha" -- isn't a sentient being (as far as I know), because I suspect that it would be terrified and frustrated at the moment. Tuesday evening my hard drive developed symptoms of an immanent total failure: clicking sounds and v-e-r-y slow access times. I took immediate steps: connected an external drive and grabbed the most important files. In order: this semester's folder (containing grades, lectures, papers, etc.); next semester's folder (with provisional syllabi and the like); locally archived e-mail; recently purchased music. The copy got about a third of the way through the e-mail before the drive totally conked out, and I mean "totally" -- it couldn't be mounted when the machine was booted from the system disc, and when I took it to the hospital, er, the Apple Store, even they couldn't get access to it with the Serious Deep Mojo known as "Open Firmware." Basically, it's a dead duck.
The machine is under warranty so they are replacing the hard drive free of charge, but no one is optimistic about being able to recover my data. Fortunately I had a bootable backup, which is what I am presently using to run the emergency machine (a three-year-old G4 tower) that I was able to secure from the university's stock of old computers. Unfortunately, that backup is about four weeks old, which creates a little bit of dislocation -- I remember doing things, moving stuff around on the hard drive, and all of a sudden none of it has been done. And, of course, a bunch of stuff is missing, particularly e-mail correspondence. I'm just glad that I didn't write anything new in the past few weeks, because that would be irrecoverably gone as well.
It's not as bad as it could have been; all of my e-mail passes through an online server and I can get back most messages. But for the moment I am running on an old backup, trying to piece the last four weeks of my working life back together.
Oh, and the computer I am running on has no 'Net access. I am borrowing my wife's machine in order to post this, and will probably borrow it again in order to check e-mail and the like on and off for the next week. It's extremely odd working on a machine in my office the contents of which look very familiar -- but the capacities of which are sharply limited. I can't click over to check baseball scores, or follow a reference online, or even read e-mail; doing all of these things now requires a lot of additional effort, and another myiscla machine entirely.
Yes, it could have been worse. But it's not fun in any event.
30.5.06
Work in progress
The course that I am teaching this summer session -- "Introduction to International Relations Research" -- has a special place in my teaching repertoire. It was the first course I got to design and execute by myself as a professional academic. Oh, I'd taught courses before that, but in the minor leagues, so to speak: I was in the farm system for both New York University and Columbia University, playing AAA ball as an adjunct instructor (at NYU) and a preceptor (at Columbia). In both cases I was supervised, to some extent, and partly constrained as to what I could teach by the need to gain the approval of some other faculty-member.
When I first came down here, I negotiated the opportunity to teach summer classes; otherwise I wouldn't have been paid until September, which would have made paying my mortgage somewhat difficult. They gave me two courses: "World Politics," for which I was mandated to use a textbook about which I had some serious reservations (and about which I still have serious reservations, but because I have tenure now I am simply not going to use it in the future -- what are they going to do, fire me? Well, they can't, because of a little thing called "academic freedom"), and "Introduction to International Relations Research." Since then I've taught this course more than any other; this is my eleventh time doing so.
My first real major-league game, so to speak: there were existing syllabi for the course, but I basically ripped them all up and went in a different direction. I remember sketching the initial course outline on a napkin one day at lunch with a fellow minor-leaguer at Columbia; we'd both just gotten called up to the majors for the fall, and both were faced with the prospect of teaching courses that we'd never taught. So I quickly drew a diagram contrasting different styles of social science research, and that was the foundation of the syllabus that I produced a few weeks later. The point of the course, then as now, was that there are a number of different approaches to producing valid empirical research in the social sciences; I wanted a course that would introduce students to several of them, and drive home the point about methodological diversity. Not a bad debut in the majors, I thought.
206 is an odd course for me because -- to continue with the somewhat strained baseball metaphor that I like to use when thinking about these things -- as a player-manager [academia is like old-fashioned baseball in that players can manage, something that you never see any more except in odd circumstances such as the day when Joe Torre handed Roger Clemens the line-up card and let him manage the Yankees game during what was supposed to be his last professional season a couple of years ago] I pencilled myself into the line-up as both a pitcher and a hitter. Pitcher: I would lecture sometimes, both because there was no single source that could cover all of these methodologies adequately and because I wanted to communicate a series of points myself. Hitter: we'd also have workshops in which my role was to critique, to question, to raise possible objections and thus to help people improve their projects by giving them something to react to. And sometimes we might even have full-blown discussions. Most of my courses, then as now, had purer hitting roles for me, so this was something of a change. It remains so, because I still don't do a lot of pitching in the classroom if I can help it.
I've taught the course eleven times, but it's never been quite the same course. This year is the biggest change in a while, both because I've completely gone to assigning articles (no books at all -- no books to purchase) and because I've moved some material around so that what used to be a three-part division between statistical, interpretive, and relational research is now a four-part division along two philosophical axes (monism vs. dualism, and descriptive vs. causal). It means that I have to remake a lot of slide presentations, but I think that the new arrangement works well. I doubt it will be the last arrangement, but for the moment it's the best one I can think of and the one that seems to make the most sense. But check with me in a decade and I'll bet that I'm still tinkering with it -- that's the nature of the game, after all.
When I first came down here, I negotiated the opportunity to teach summer classes; otherwise I wouldn't have been paid until September, which would have made paying my mortgage somewhat difficult. They gave me two courses: "World Politics," for which I was mandated to use a textbook about which I had some serious reservations (and about which I still have serious reservations, but because I have tenure now I am simply not going to use it in the future -- what are they going to do, fire me? Well, they can't, because of a little thing called "academic freedom"), and "Introduction to International Relations Research." Since then I've taught this course more than any other; this is my eleventh time doing so.
My first real major-league game, so to speak: there were existing syllabi for the course, but I basically ripped them all up and went in a different direction. I remember sketching the initial course outline on a napkin one day at lunch with a fellow minor-leaguer at Columbia; we'd both just gotten called up to the majors for the fall, and both were faced with the prospect of teaching courses that we'd never taught. So I quickly drew a diagram contrasting different styles of social science research, and that was the foundation of the syllabus that I produced a few weeks later. The point of the course, then as now, was that there are a number of different approaches to producing valid empirical research in the social sciences; I wanted a course that would introduce students to several of them, and drive home the point about methodological diversity. Not a bad debut in the majors, I thought.
206 is an odd course for me because -- to continue with the somewhat strained baseball metaphor that I like to use when thinking about these things -- as a player-manager [academia is like old-fashioned baseball in that players can manage, something that you never see any more except in odd circumstances such as the day when Joe Torre handed Roger Clemens the line-up card and let him manage the Yankees game during what was supposed to be his last professional season a couple of years ago] I pencilled myself into the line-up as both a pitcher and a hitter. Pitcher: I would lecture sometimes, both because there was no single source that could cover all of these methodologies adequately and because I wanted to communicate a series of points myself. Hitter: we'd also have workshops in which my role was to critique, to question, to raise possible objections and thus to help people improve their projects by giving them something to react to. And sometimes we might even have full-blown discussions. Most of my courses, then as now, had purer hitting roles for me, so this was something of a change. It remains so, because I still don't do a lot of pitching in the classroom if I can help it.
I've taught the course eleven times, but it's never been quite the same course. This year is the biggest change in a while, both because I've completely gone to assigning articles (no books at all -- no books to purchase) and because I've moved some material around so that what used to be a three-part division between statistical, interpretive, and relational research is now a four-part division along two philosophical axes (monism vs. dualism, and descriptive vs. causal). It means that I have to remake a lot of slide presentations, but I think that the new arrangement works well. I doubt it will be the last arrangement, but for the moment it's the best one I can think of and the one that seems to make the most sense. But check with me in a decade and I'll bet that I'm still tinkering with it -- that's the nature of the game, after all.
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