What does it take to be an expert?

Someone somewhere came up with the idea that it took 10,000 hours of “practice” to become an expert.  However this is in part a quite silly idea.  TPP could devote 10,000 hours practicing the violin, and at the end of that time, he would not be a violinist of any sort although maybe turkey in the straw would not be out of reach. A certain amount of talent and aptitude are also required at the starting point, meaning that if you have already shown that you are pretty proficient and capable as a violinist, then it takes maybe 10,000 hours of practice and time spent with able teachers to elevate yourself to the entry level of what could be considered an expert. 10,000 hours is a lot of time. That’s 2000 hours a year for 5 years, the amount of time it took TPP to earn masters and PhD degrees. So TPP entered into that 5 year period with a reasonable aptitude and ability to learn science and an undergrad knowledge of biology.  And if you continue with the math, you can get to 2000 a year with 40 weeks of work at 50 hours per week.  This is not an unreasonable number for being a half time student, a half time scientist-in-training, and a half time teacher (yes, that is one and a half.).  So, yes, after 10,000 hours of “practice” TPP had reached the expert level of botany at least in his field therein. Now it really doesn’t stop there, and the “practice” has continued ever since, and yes, sadly, 50 hour weeks are not all that unusual for active biological faculty. And undergraduate students wonder, or can’t figure out, how it is that faculty know so much. It’s because students with only a few exceptions haven’t put their foot on the first rung of the ladder of expertise as yet. And don’t get TPP started about those “master gardeners” who think their modest educational efforts elevate them out of the amateur status into experts.

Science itself has many laws, but it doesn’t give a damn about ours.

This postings title is a quote from Phil Plait's column over at Slate. This in response to yet another GnOPe (the G is silent in case you didn't know) controlled state, Wyoming, trying to legislate the content of science. With the "we'd rather be ignorant than right" party in control in so many places, science is taking a drubbing once again, and again at the level of grade school and high school students. In a classic LA LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU move the state legislature passed a measure to prevent the state board of education from even reviewing anything that might lead to curricular changes, and specifically aimed at keeping troublesome ideas out of the classroom (evolution, climate change, inconvenient historical facts, etc.). You know the GnOPe is beginning to act more like the Ministry of Truth in 1984 all the time. Is this a road the USA wants to travel?  People are going to have to make up their minds, are we going to be mushrooms (kept in the dark and fed horse manure) or not? 

Lone Star Science

Well, it don't surprise me none that all of the candidates for Lt. Gov. of Texas wants to teach creationism in schools.  This is a special brand of ignorance that doesn't see any difference between what science knows and what they believe, and no matter what, they want their beliefs to be taught as truth  in public schools even though this is only one of many religious truths.  This means that in teaching creationism the state becomes a de facto promoter of the Christian religion, a constitutional no-no.  And no matter what they really think, none of these politicians want to chance any nuanced position no matter how many times creationism has been ruled a purely religious idea. It's not that creationism or its offspring intelligent design are wrong, it's that they are useless.  You can't use them to do science, which also reflects how badly science is being taught, and this is the all important criterion of science: theories must be useful. As my colleague notes: "Evolution isn’t politics, it’s science. And science is a reflection of our attempts to understand how the Universe works. Evolution isn’t a guess, or a cynical move to promote atheism, or whatever feverishly imagined bugaboo flies around in the heads of these four men." Unfortunately such ignorance far from being a deal breaker, this is how you get elected in Texas, and in a number of other states too. It's no wonder that "red states" are leading education in the USA into further decline.

Horrible, terrible, no-good, very bad semester start

Today is a Monday morning in August of 2013.  Your printer announces that it is out of toner as soon as you turn it on, this being as inconvenient a time as can be imagined.  TPP is not looking and feeling his finest because of the lingering effects of a stomach flu.  And it's the first day of a semester which always borders on chaos even under the best of circumstances.  No amount of coffee can make this better, and you want to set a good tone for the whole semester.  Cancelling your first class would not be the way to do that, but a lack-luster introduction may even be worse.  Revision of health prognosis - lingering is too positive; GI tract turmoil is unrelenting.  However when you are up in the middle of the night visiting your toilet with the excellent garden view, you do get to see the raccoons foraging through your garbage.  Even from inside the 2nd floor window, they make the felines nervous.  TPP will not even consider trying to figure out the online software used for our courses because that requires a much more positive attitude than can be mustered at present.  Generally TPP likes new semesters, the new beginnings, the quickly fading eagerness to learn when it turns out to involve work.  Oh, dear, see how this is going?  Abort!  Abort!     

No idle hands around here!

Part of TPP's job is to keep students from being idle.  Students learn about science and how to do it, how to become a biologist, by basically apprenticing with masters, the faculty.  Fortunately, my research is rather non-technical in the sense of instrumentation and techniques, so there are lots of questions and jobs for students to pursue.  Let's see what they're up to.
Oh, this is really almost unfair, but you never know.  A hort/botany student is working with environmental parameters and plant hormones to see if he can get a particularly stubborn seed to germinate on cue so to speak.  This problem is keeping us from doing several experiments.
A student is interning in the herbarium to learn the basics of curation.  This is not something very many students get interested in, so at times you worry where the next generation of curators is going to come from.  Joining this student are about a dozen mostly retirees who have become master naturalists and are embarking on project to conduct a floristic inventory of local conservation areas, a quite worthy task.  A group of students are doing a live plant growth assay of soil fertility collected from different areas of a prairie dominated by different plants.  Another pair are setting up an experiment to determine if an invasive plant chemically inhibits the growth of other plants. TPP has students interning at a science museum, a zoo, and a nature center.  Now if only there were more of me to go around.  Oh, and then we have people, especially legislators, who think we are only teaching when we are in the classroom and that research plays no educational role.  One does get weary of clueless critics.  

Rick wants my vote!

Rick Sanctimonious wants me to vote for him. This is known because he called me on the phone and left me a message to that effect. The Phactor is quite sorry he missed the opportunity to chat with Rick, but he was gardening, and on the whole, accomplishing more than talking to a politician. But still so there are no bad feelings, let me leave Rick a message in response.



Dear Rick, I’ve spent a great portion of my life getting educated and then doing my best to educate others and get them excited about really learning about things, actually thinking and sounding articulate and, well, educated. So it is with profound sadness to learn that you think my efforts, those of a self-professed liberal elitist, actually harms our country. Rick you need to understand that nothing that takes place in my classes or labs even remotely qualifies as indoctrination. As a professional the Phactor is quite careful about not presenting his own opinions, although he does admit to being a devil’s advocate frequently to provoke thought. So unlike what you seem to believe, students are not told what to think, but taught how to think. And apparently that, and that alone, generates the harm you perceive. But Rick you want to be President of the most powerful country on Earth, at this time, and yet you think higher education something harmful? Quite a number of statements have been attributed to you Rick, and they don’t sound like the sort of ideas that come of a well-educated person, yet you are. Apparently Rick, you made your way through higher education without learning anything that you didn’t already believe true. Rick, how can somebody so proud of their ignorance, so incapable of learning, think they can run something as complex as this country? You don’t think science knows anything, upon what are you going to base policy? It makes me wonder what kind of country you wish us to be, and apparently you would prefer a highly religious country to a highly educated country, a highly moral country where neither the government nor affluent citizens give a crap about others, about public welfare, public education, social security, and other things that watch out for people. But you may still get my vote Rick, and this is the reason, you may represent the easiest candidate for Obama to beat, even easier than the millionaire weather vane, and that’s the reason you found my name on GnOPe voter rolls; voting for a spoiler to game the system often seems like a good idea. So glad you called; wish we could have actually talked, but my guess is that it would have only reinforced your opinion about us educated elites.  Best regards, TPP.

Cultivating Education

In the recent issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Caitlin Flanagan, in an article entitled Cultivating Failure criticizes school gardens because she had a bad dining experience at Chez Panisse. Wow! Get over it Caitlin. Or at least do some research to find out what educational value schools find in gardening. You run into so many school kids that don’t know if a tomato grows on a vine, bush, or tree, or that you need flowers to get fruit, or even how bean seeds grow, gardening has to be educational. Apart from the fruits and veggies, gardening teaches many important lessons in life: a good work ethic pays off, so does being responsible, planning is important, working together is a good thing, patience is necessary, this is where food comes from, and sometimes even your best efforts end up in failure, but next year you try again.
Gardening is a real experience, and as such can be used to as a basis for many important lessons. One of them is that you can often learn more from doing something real that’s sort of fun than you can from studying for standardized exams. What a dreary nose-to-the-grindstone view of education ol’ Caitlin has. Wonder if she learned to write by diagramming sentences? The Phactor very much doubts it. Caitlin went shopping in the hood, but she should have picked up a hoe and planted some beans. And typical enough of people who don’t garden, they just don’t get it, and isn’t that always the way when it comes to such criticism, it is almost always based on utter ignorance. So we can only hope and wish that the Caitlins of the world try to grown themselves a garden, with the help of 4th graders, and then try to tell me gardening is not a worthwhile educational activity.
Treehugger has posted a very nice response pointing out the fallacies portrayed in Cultivating Failure.
The Phactor hopes gardeners out there share his rage, grab a pitchfork, and turn some mulch, but do not fail to let Caitlin and the Atlantic Monthly know they are spreading manure.

Job training versus learning

Boys and girls, allow me a bit of personal reflection about why education is important.

My childhood educational years were spent near Rochester, New York. During the 1950s, 60s, and 70s it was a thriving city with bountiful job opportunities at such impressive companies as Kodak, Xerox, and General Motors to name the biggies. Jobs at places like these meant that people with high school educations could afford nice houses, new cars, and vacations, the pure American dream.

Many people got great paying jobs after graduating from high school, and some were openly condescending about people who wasted their time going to college. “What kind of job are you going to get studying biology?” At the time your correspondent had to admit he didn’t know the answer. Having worked at GM during summers to pay for college (yes, the pay was good enough that 3 months of work covered the bills), this type of job had no appeal. So the gamble was on learning about something interesting, intellectually engaging, and trusting that it would work out OK. Oh yes, a college draft deferment during the Vietnam war era was also important.

Well, what a difference 30 to 40 years makes. All those jobs are gone; they barely lasted one working career. That worked out mostly OK for people my age, many of whom were near retirement anyways when they lost their jobs, but all those who signed on since then are just out of work and out of luck. One of the oft advertised great career opportunities during my college years was IBM key punch operators, basically typists who entered programs and data on punch cards, which was how you interfaced with computers in those days, with great big decks of cards carrying your programs and data. That great job training opportunity didn’t even last 10 years, and that’s what really specialized training gets you, a dead end.

The really important thing about education is learning how to learn. The Phactor is still doing botany in his 4th decade at the institution of my employment because it’s the only thing he does half well, but being an active biologist forces you to stay a student, to continue learning, and to do new things. Once you learn how to learn and get a job where that is important, you have a job that isn’t going to go away, even if your institution becomes private after state support totally evaporates (In 1970 the tuition $$ to state support ratio was 1:4.6, now it’s 1:0.6.). Learning to learn lets you adapt as new developments dictate. Carburetors and film have just about gone extinct, my dissertation typewriter is a museum piece, and no one could have ever foreseen such changes from the perspective of the 1960s.

This is why a real education is important, and very, very different from training. But a lot of people do not get it. Officially, my job at a great public institution of higher learning in the Land of Lincoln is to “train students for the work force of Lincolnland”. The Phactor has steadfastly ignored this dictate and done his best to educate students anyways. The work force can do its own key-punch training.

In biological terms, education that leads to life-long learning is the adaptive response. Training only leads to short term success at best. One last thing to mention least someone think the Phactor is on too high a horse about college educations. My point is not actually about the importance of college; it’s about the importance of learning to learn. It’s just that you don’t get very much of that in high school, and at times, precious little enough in college. Skilled tradesmen (and women) are well educated in the skills of their particular field, and they must continue to learn because tools and technology change. Adapt or go extinct, but who knew how fast things would evolve?

Moments of educational gratification

There are times when I wonder why I am in the business of education. These mostly occur when dealing with the bureaucracy, including the silly and wasteful efforts of my employer to make certain that I am not unethical and am working my full 37.5 hrs a week, the utterly absurd curricular process, and most people from our college of education. I certainly am not in this business for the money because even after 3 decades and considerable academic success my salary is laughably low. A member of our foundation board asked if my salary was under $100K. I told him you could almost hire a new faculty member with the difference, and at least he was shocked.

What keeps me going are those occasions when you have one of those breakthrough moments. One of those times that you finally realize something really important or fascinatingly interesting about your research or when you finally see students catch the spark and get really interested in the subject or gain some fundamentally new insight.

Yesterday in a very mundane laboratory on cereal grains was one of those times. The planets must have been in a very special alignment because several students figured out some very fundamental concepts about some very common things. Mostly these labs are about connecting the commonplace to the science of botany. Realizing that there is perhaps a scientific and botanical basis for many of the things people do. And it is these little moments when you know you are actually succeeding as a teacher, as an educator, as a mentor, that keep me going.

Of course, students can bring you down quickly. People who think 30 is ancient cannot even begin to understand what you can know and remember when twice that age, especially when those additional 30 years have been spent as a professional student. So they will have to figure out why Quaker puffed oats were "the cereal that's shot from guns." That marketing phrase was introduced in 1904, way before my time, but line was still being used in ads when I was a kid. This will be real ancient history to people who have never used a typewriter, a rotary dial telephone, or gotten up to change a TV channel. Each of these moments gives me another gray hair.

Oh, you're curious about puffed rice and guns. Well, look it up. Here's a hint. The cereal was introduced at the World's Fair.

The real meaning of Baccalaureate

As part of a totally bizarre rant about masonic conspiracy and the control of higher education by the occult elite, David Flynn demonstrates a level of scholarship and understanding that makes the rest of his conclusions more understandable. In other words he’s so wrong about these simple things that you can readily understand how he made a hash out of more complex issues.

“This accomplishment [completion of a bachelor’s degree] earns the student a Bacchus laurel, for this is really what “bachelor” means. Bacchus is the Roman version of Dionysus, Greek god of wine revelry and facades, lies, and drunkenness.”

Correcting this in reverse order the baccalaureate degree was nicknamed the “bachelor’s degree” because at that time virtually all university students were unmarried men, bachelors, and of course, many people still think the B in B.A. or B.S. stands for bachelor’s, but of course, b stands for baccalaureate, the fruit of the laurel. Some college catalogues even make this mistake, all the more shameful for a scholarly institution. It was the custom in ancient Greece to crown champions with wreaths of laurel leaves, the noble laurel, Laurus nobilis, which is also found in your cupboard as bay leaves. And this custom gave rise to titles such as poet laureate. So you receive a degree as the fruits of your academic labors, and the fruit of the laurel, unlike the fruit of the grape, has no connection Dionysus. But then this author was intent on taking something traditional and noble and casting it as tawdry, but in the process Flynn reveals himself to be either a poor scholar and/or one who deliberately misleads. Me, a member of the occult educational elite, I’m betting on the combination of the two.