Seth’s blog

In the 1920s a young woman moved to an isolated North Carolina town in part to oversee construction of a church. When she suggested that it be built out of stones from a nearby river, the locals laughed. It wasn’t possible to build buildings out of stone, they said. Their ancestors had done so (in Europe); they had forgotten. Jane Jacobs tells this story in Cities and the Wealth of Nations.

Unsophisticated villagers, huh? Yesterday I went to a high school graduation. A private high school in Los Angeles. There were six speakers: two adults, the school’s headmaster and a history teacher, and four students. Here’s what was so strange: No one told any stories. (One of the students told the beginning of a story.) The headmaster speaks at every graduation. The history teacher has given hundreds of lectures. Neither of them, apparently, knew to tell a few stories in that situation. No wonder the students didn’t know. Long ago, before cheap books, I’m sure everyone knew this basic point about public speaking. Now it’s as if no one knows it. What a vast forgetting!

I was surprised, but maybe I shouldn’t have been. Made to Stick sort of says the same thing. One of the authors, a Stanford professor, asked his students to rate a bunch of short talks. Their ratings had no correlation with how memorable the talks were. In other words, the students had no idea what made a talk memorable. They thought a good talk meant you told a joke. What actually made talks memorable were stories, the research showed.

Even Edward Tufte, a presentation expert, seems to not understand this. In his complaints about PowerPoint, he doesn’t tell any stories, doesn’t say anything about PowerPoint’s lack of encouragement of stories, and doesn’t say that students should be taught to tell stories (preferably by example).

I’m giving a talk next week. It’s going to be one story after another, which is not what I would have said before that graduation.

In the Freakonomics blog, Ian Ayres, a Yale law professor, described a Law Revue skit at his school:

A group of students [were] sitting at desks, facing the audience, listening to a professor drone on. All of the students were looking at laptops except for one, who had a deck of cards and was playing solitaire. The professor was outraged and demanded that the student explain why she was playing cards. . . . She answered, “My laptop is broken.”

Not bad. The professors in the audience were stunned.

The skit was “several years ago.” I wondered how Ayres would manage to connect revelation of a timeless truth about higher education (see For Whom Do Colleges Exist?) with something new. Here’s how:

Saul Levmore, the dean at the University of Chicago Law School, has recently announced an end to classroom surfing.

The big truth behind the little joke was . . . hard to see. Or at least hard for professors to see. The big truth is that law schools, like most institutions of higher education, are run in dozens of ways that benefit professors at the expense of students. Boring lectures are one example. In response to a small revelation of this big truth, Dean Levmore — presumably after consultation with many other law school professors — created another example of how law schools are run for professors rather than students.

Difficulty with basic concepts at Duke and UC Berkeley.

More. I suppose solitaire is still okay at the University of Chicago since it doesn’t involve surfing.

At a press conference about endangered salmon, I met Heather Hardcastle, who works at Taku River Reds, a fishing company in Juneau, Alaska. She went to graduate school at Duke in 2002 where she studied marine conservation biology. “Everyone thought fishermen were bad,” she told me. “I’d grown up in a fishing family, so to them I was a bad person. Most of the students thought of themselves as environmentalists — as if I wasn’t.”

What a failure of education. Surely people who make their living fishing would suffer the most if fish runs out; and surely people who have spent a lifetime fishing might know something useful to fish preservationists. Somehow this escaped the majority of the Duke students and, apparently, their professors. At the end of The Shangri-La Diet, I mention this problem: the idea that business is the enemy. In the case of obesity, of course, lots of people think that big food companies are the enemy. Well, yes, it’s pretty clear that big food companies are responsible for the obesity epidemic — but maybe that means they should be more involved in the solution, not less?

Stephen Dubner interviewed me in my office to write about me in the Freakonomics column. I mentioned a discussion I’d had with a friend about the Enola Gay controversy at the Smithsonian; my friend and I thought it was unfortunate, I told Dubner, that neither of us knew someone on the other side of the argument. Dubner said that a lot of reporters at the New York Times wrote about military stuff, but hardly anyone at the Times that he knew had even visited West Point, which was less than 60 miles away.

On Monday I visited a cooking/gardening class at Willard Middle School in Berkeley. One student told me it was his favorite class. “Why?” I asked. “Because you can talk,” he said. He and two friends were standing by a stove. They were making grits and waiting for the water to boil. Out in the vegetable garden — the students are divided into three groups, and one groups spends the class period in the garden — another student told me it was his favorite class, too. “Why?” I asked. “Because you can move around,” he said. I was very impressed. Two different students say the class is their favorite — for two different simple non-obvious reasons. The cooking and gardening program at Willard is run by Matt Tsang, who has been at Willard ten years.

Later that day I saw a slide show of architecture theses. One slide showed a page of a thesis that said: “Work with nature, not against it.”

Maybe middle school students have strong desires to talk and move around. Maybe “work with nature” means, in that context, teaching in such a way that students can talk and move around. Maybe classes can be set up so that the existence of those desires makes learning easier rather than more difficult. Like swimming with the current rather than against it. In the typical Willard class students can’t talk and move around. And teaching at Willard is hard; the average teacher lasts only five years.

The existence of the slide in the slide show showed that work with nature, not against it needs to be learned; it wasn’t obvious. Nothing like that is taught in schools of education, I’m pretty sure.

Waiting for a BART train I met Krishna Kashyap, a San Diego businessman, who teaches classes on Indian philosophy by conference call. He was born in India and studied philosophy there before he came to America.

There are many such classes. About 15 years ago, a Berkeley student named Mani Varadarajan started a listserv called bhaktilist, which allowed people who were interested in Vaishnava Vedanta to contact each other and exchange ideas. This is how the conference-call classes began. Bhaktilist no longer exists, but many lists came from it, including srirangasri@yahoogroups.com and oppiliappan@yahoogroups.com. There are several thousand people on these lists.

Kashyap himself recently stopped teaching classes so that he would have more time to learn. He is now taking classes with a teacher named K. S. Varadachar. He dials his number in India at a particular time. Other people can dial in as well. They listen and ask questions. “I got isolated from my community when I came to this country 20 years ago,” Kashya said. “Reading books is not enough. There wasn’t any other way to communicate [besides the conference calls]. When I wanted to learn I had to get teachers from India.”

Now there are 4 or 5 classes simultaneously; they meet by phone once/week, using freeconferencecall.com. The Indian lecturers don’t get paid or at least such is the convention. They are given an end-of-term “gift,” called sambhavana, that is $200-$1000.

A vast amount about Indian philosophies is here.

How different from American higher education! People learn easily, without coercion, without threats, without punishments, without external rewards, if they see their teacher as a guru. The American term for guru, of course, is motivational speaker.