Seth’s blog

At Tsinghua University, students are said to spend more on bike locks than on  bikes. A friend of mine, a senior, is on her fourth bike. I met a faculty member who went to get her bike just as it was being stolen. She saw how it was done: The thief had a large number of keys. She shouted at the thief to stop, a crowd gathered, and he gave the bike back. Later she encountered him while buying pork: He was the butcher.

From James McGregor’s fascinating One Billion Customers (2005):

The Chinese were befuddled and worried by the five-hundred-page contract that McDonnell Douglas lawyers drafted to seal the $1 million deal. The Shanghai director looked forlornly at Chang [a McDonnell Douglas employee] as he signed it. “I am signing this because I trust you,” he said.

Yeah. I read this the day after I signed a five-page employment contract with Tsinghua University — the hard part was coming up with a Chinese name — that I couldn’t read a word of. I signed it because I trusted them.

Today I went to a special building, only a 10-minute drive from my office, to get a physical exam needed for a special visa. The administrative assistant of the Psychology Department accompanied me. We set off about 8 am. He mentioned a vision exam so I went back to my apartment to get another contact lens. (I wear just one, so that I have good vision both near and far.) Then we tried to get a taxi. We found one but, stuck in traffic, it went nowhere. After 10 minutes or so, we got out. We decided to go in the administrative assistant’s car (he prefered to take a taxi because he didn’t know where the building was.) It’s now 9:10 am. We set off. We reach the building around 9:20. Oops — I forgot my passport. We get a taxi to take us back to campus so I can get it. The driver tries to cheat us by taking a long route. On the way back — on a reasonable route — we get stuck in traffic again. We get out of the taxi. We’d like to go back to the exam building, pick up the administrative assistant’s car, and take a different route back, but that would require crossing six lanes of busy highway to get a taxi going in the right direction. That’s too scary so eventually we get a taxi that goes back to campus via another route. Now it’s too late to do the exam. We’ll try again early tomorrow. For some reason — exhaust fumes? too much sitting in a car? — my head hurts.

More What a difference a day makes. I went back the next morning and there were no problems at all. We found a taxi easily, the trip was fast and smooth, the exam didn’t take long, and the trip back was fast and smooth. We passed a man trying to start his car in the middle of a big street.

A friend writes:

[My girlfriend, who is 5′ 5″ and started the diet at 174 pounds] has lost 12 pounds [over 2 months], no longer feels constantly hungry since starting the diet.  We’ve been putting the flaxseed oil on toasted sourdough rolls (from Trader Joe‘s) because the oil doesn’t seep through as easily. I like the way flaxseed oil tastes on toast but in this circumstance we’re nose-clipping so we don’t taste it.  The toast makes us feel less queasy afterwards than taking the oil straight.  We do two tablespoons/day instead of three because we’re including the calories in the toast which we also don’t taste.  The TJ’s honey whole wheat bread is denser and holds the oil a little better than the sourdough stuff she likes.  Either way there’s usually oil left on the plate that  came through the holes in the bread.  I said, since you can’t taste it why not use the whole wheat?  The texture, she says, but I think it’s really because her mother made her eat whole wheat bread growing up which she never liked and still doesn’t even though under these circumstances she can’t taste it.  Bad associations, maybe?  Good old Pavlov, it’s like he’s still around.  The effect on my back pain [it made his back pain go away] has become even more noticeable.  If I skip the oil for a couple of days I start feeling it again. [emphasis added].  I  haven’t been consistent enough with it to lose weight, and now that [my girlfriend] has gotten a little skinnier she’s starting to make comments to me about how I might want to lose a few pounds.

I have tried flaxseed oil on toast, eaten nose-clipped, and it is my favorite way to consume the flaxseed oil. It tastes like hot buttered toast. It’s not so easy here in China where I don’t have a toaster. You can’t do it with untoasted bread — the water repells the oil, so it doesn’t soak in.

Let’s say I’m a record producer. A 20-year-old tells me he wants to be a record producer, and I say, okay, I’ll teach you. Do I write a syllabus? Set up class meetings? Give lectures, homework assignments, tests, grades? Of course not. None of that. Not necessary. I just say: Hang out with me. And he does, and both of us benefit. He learns what a record producer does, I have someone to whom I can pontificate (one of the pleasures of blogging) and who will do menial tasks. And having an assistant makes me look and perhaps even feel more important. The same thing could be done with almost any job. That’s real teaching. It’s as natural and easy as breathing or eating.

Contrast this with (a) undergraduate teaching in any American research university, such as Berkeley and (b) the situation described in an email to alumni I got today from Colin Diver, the President of Reed College. President Diver taught a seminar at Reed and described his experiences. Does he say the students were “fun to teach” as a Tsinghua University professor told me? Not at all. Quite the opposite. His main observations:

Courses at Reed must be very carefully planned. . . . Leading a successful Reed conference [= seminar] takes considerable finesse. . . . Tamara [his co-teacher] and I spent hours planning and debriefing [= discussing afterwards] classes. . . As an instructor, you can never be too well prepared. . .  Both student enthusiasm and modern information technology conspire to extend the class hour virtually around the clock. . . . Teaching at Reed means giving (and getting!) lots of feedback. . Teaching at Reed is both exhausting and exhilarating! [Details of exhilaration not given.]

This is a fund-raising letter! A friend of mine got a teaching job at Reed and quit to take a lower-status job because the teaching was exhausting, as President Diver so clearly explains. But, as I said about Berkeley faculty, President Diver has been in darkness so long he can no longer see light — in this case, he cannot see how unpleasant he makes teaching sound, at least for the professor. He fails to grasp he is describing sickness not health.

President Diver seems to have faintly discerned that there might be something wrong with the picture he had painted so he added:

Despite the long hours and hard work, the experience of teaching helped me understand why faculty find the experience of teaching at Reed so satisfying. . . .Nathalia King, professor of English and humanities, once said to me: “When you put teachers who genuinely love to teach together with students who genuinely want to learn, magic happens.”

Magic, huh? Black or white? The end of Diver’s letter is all about a new program that will allow Reed professors to teach less. “The new program will, to be sure, slightly reduce the amount of time faculty spend in the classroom over their careers.” Actions speak louder than words.