Andreas – All’s well that…

Just That

Back in the days of listservs, before blogs took their place, I came across an anecdote that’s almost certainly wrong (at least I cannot find any confirmation for it) and that I like very much. It contains a lot of truth, in my book, even if it may lack historical truth. And maybe I just imagine the whole thing. That’s just as well.

The anecdote goes like this: The pianist Artur Schnabel, famous for his fast and daring interpretations of Beethoven sonatas as well as playing a few wrong notes along the way, and for his, ahem, lovingly abrasive character, had just recorded one such sonata, again with some wrong notes. His producer said, “You could have played this better.” Schnabel responded: “That’s right, but then I wouldn’t have played it just that well.”

As I said, I believe that I read this somewhere, but I cannot find a source, and, like Laurence Sterne’s Susannah, I am a leaky vessel, and thus the story probably never happened, or was told about another pianist, or about another artist, or not at all and I made it all up. I do not remember. But I like it nevertheless and think it is true, musically and in other respects.

And much recorded music is usually perfect in the sense that all errors and imperfections are sliced out or autotuned away. The result is dazzling but I find that it often goes against the real musical experience of the music in the moment. I do not just mean that perfection can diminish the authenticity of the individual, personal performance of a musician (it can, even though I find authenticity in art to be overrated), or that imperfections make music interesting (they can). What I mean is that music is experienced in a fleeting moment, and that moment is always different. This is true even with recorded music that can be reproduced perfectly: the situation in which we hear it, the side and background noises, the tinnitus in our ears, our attention, the thoughts that float through our minds as we listen, and so on, make each experience unique. If there were a perfect performance, wouldn’t it have to transcend the moment, and thus cease to be music?

I am not sure this is a rhetorical question. The answer may be “no.” Maybe there is a perfect performance in a perfect moment, where everything comes together in a fleeting, perfect experience. And maybe it wouldn’t be perfect if it had not vanished in a moment. My intuition is that this is not the case. But it may be. And I am losing my train of thought.

There’s also truth in Schnabel’s apocryphal (well, invented) quip that goes beyond music: We live in a society that values optimization, the constant improvement of everything. There are long-running roots for this: Think Plato’s absolute good, think Christianity’s perfect God — the idea that there is something absolutely perfect has been with us for a long time, though always with the additional thought that life as we know and experience it is imperfect (shadows on the cave wall, valley of tears and such). So that idea of perfection is not modern. But what, I think, is modern is the idea that we can constantly improve and better things, and as a result, even if we do not achieve perfection, we approximate it, just like a mathematical limit, in the here and now. By now, we’ve adopted this type of thinking in all areas of our life: technical progress, self-improvement, AI gods, you name it. And that may not be that good.

Am I simply restating, at tiresome length, the old adage that the perfect is the enemy of the good? Not sure: I’ve always understood that adage to mean that by pursuing perfection we lose what is good, for example by never finishing a project in our quest to make it perfect. (Every PhD candidate has experienced that risk at some point: the best dissertation is the one that get’s done.) I do not mean that the good but imperfect is preferable because the perfect will never happen. What I am saying is that the perfect, even if it happens or exists, is worse that the thing that is just that good.

The performance that is just that good even though I’ve heard better.
The meal that is just that good even though I’ve eaten better.
The conversation that is just that good even though some of the arguments have flaws.
The day that is just that good even though I’ve seen better days.
The list can go on.

Obergefell and Ontology

Sometimes there are interesting though somewhat random cross-references that one comes across. Re-reading Obergefell for class, I was reminded of substance and bundle theories in ontology; I had come across them in Grossmann’s Phenomenology and Existentialism, a discarded book I had picked up outside a colleague’s office years ago and that I had started reading. (I had never taken any philosophy classes, and that’s part of me catching up, I guess.) In a way, Kennedy’s majority opinion views marriage as a bundle of characteristics that can be changed over time by adding or removing some, thereby increasing justice (removing coverture, adding interracial relationships, etc.). Roberts appears to take a substance view — for him, the inter-gender nature of marriage is what makes it marriage, while coverture etc. etc. are just accidental properties that can be taken away, it seems. Kennedy, instead of talking about the essential nature of marriage lists four “principles and traditions” that, he argues, justify that marriage is a fundamental constitutional right — and that are equally applicable to same-sex and opposite-sex relationships.

I hope that people have moved on from the same-sex marriage debate by now and accept that same-sex marriages simply exist. I fear that I am not right. Sigh. In any case, I find the deeper contrast between the two positions — the (debatable) broader characteristics and purposes of marriage vs. the (debatable) narrow essential substance of it — enlightening as to the liberal and conservative ways of thinking here.

Importing Quizzes Into Canvas Without Respondus

After taking a break from Team-Based Learning for a few years, I’ve decided to use a TBL structure again for my spring class on the U.S. Judiciary. While I liked the looser structure of my classes in the last years, I suspect that regular iRATs and tRATs (aka reading quizzes), the persistent in-class groups, and the more explicit focus on structured activities will help prevent the widespread absenteeism of the post-COVID (well, make that “post”-COVID) years. (One exception: my honors class last semester. Their attendance was amazing!)

One of the problems, now that I am working fully on a Mac, is that there is no obvious way to import quizzes into Canvas, the LMS we use. At least the way that Canvas suggests to import quizzes — first, import a quiz into Respondus (not the browser but the exam-creation app), then export it as a QTI zip file, then import that file into Canvas — works only in a Windows environment. (I mean, really? In 2024?)

Luckily, there’s a Python app for that. It’s called text2qti and was created by Geoffrey Poore, a physics prof at Union University. You write your quiz in markdown (and if you don’t know markdown, you simply write it as a text file, using the format shown on the text2qti page), and text2qti turns it into a QTI files. You’ll have to install python, if you have not yet done so, and then text2qti (rant: my annoying autocorrect always turns “qti” into “qit” — WHY?), but the project web page has links to howto instructions that aren’t hard to follow. I was expecting LaTeX-style snags with formatting etc. etc., but everything worked like a charm, including quiz instructions that seamlessly imported into Canvas. Nice!

Something something masculinity

I am not sure how I should title this post. I’ve worked on it for a few weeks, and I haven’t gotten it into a coherent piece. It’s thoughts in progress, a bit rough. But this is a blog afterall. So lemme just punk this out:

I appreciate Christine Emba’s article, from a few months ago, in the Washington Post about men and masculinity. I think it’s an important conversation to be had — men* are not doing well, in the sense that many lead unhealthy and unfulfilling lives and don’t do well for society and their relationships. Of course, this paints with a broad brush, and exceptions confirm the rule. I put an asterisk behind “men” because Emba and her interviewees, despite hemming and hawing, nodding and handwaving in all directions, really talk about straight cis men, not men more generally. That’s fine with me, as this is a group of men that tends to experience (and create) the problems noted above. I am part of them and thus am (I think) poised to join the conversation, and there is a need for conversation and (self-)reflection — and discernment. Also, I think it’s important to recognize that women, gay men, people with nonbinary and trans gender identities are not doing well either, and that they are usually still worse off in a patriarchal, modern, industrialized society. It’s just that men have to liberate, or at least modernize, themselves as well if society is to move forward in a productive, (excuse the buzzword) sustainable, and (gender-) equitable way.

I don’t think I can offer a coherent essay at this point, so here are only a few disjointed thoughts.

Roll in my sweet baby’s arms

This was a nice surprise. A classic song that Nelson had recorded before, this time with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, in the early 2000s. I don’t like Nelson’s voice too much, but here, at around age 70, he sounds gritty and cracked, weathered, relaxed. What makes this recording special to me is how perfectly easy and off-beat Nelson and the band make the song sound. The instruments are stressing the twos and fours, and as a result, Nelson seems to be off the beat as well, off balance, dazed out, floating over the accompaniment. He’s not going to work for the railroad, but the mail train is always present, rolling through his dream of rolling in said baby’s arms, who, sweet as she (he?) may be, doesn’t want to pay Willie’s bail.

On Apple Music

On Spotify

Why the genAI?

Maybe I simply need more time to learn the ins and outs of generative AI, but every time I try to ChatGPT, Google Bard, or the fancy new Bing, it I find a waste of time. Trying to write prompts that generate something close to the output that I need takes more time than just doing the search or writing whatever I need to write. Maybe I have to explore further uses — outlines, lesson plans, or the like — but so far I am underwhelmed. Are these tools essentially for people who are illiterate? And, at the danger of sounding like an old fart complaining about the decline of civilization, have we come to the point where people are so inarticulate in their writing, have so little ease in communicating, that they prefer to spend hours with slick but bullshitty computer tools instead of just saying, in writing, what they mean to say? (If so, we, as teachers, have ourselves to blame, don’t we?)

Learning incivility?

In my small honors U.S. Government class, during the first two weeks, I lead the whole group of students through a series of discussions and decision-making processes that helps them co-create things like learning goals and objectives, topics to be discussed, activities and assignments to be used, class agreements to be (hopefully) upheld, and the like. I maintain what I’d call substantive editorial review of the outcomes, and interestingly the overall structure of the course, the activities used and so on, tends to be pretty much the same, though with slightly different emphases and foci each year. And students have a bit more of a stake in the class.

Yesterday, one of the topics was learning goals. Using Fink’s categorization of goals, I asked small groups of about 5 students each to generate 3-5 learning goals covering different areas of learning (foundational knowledge, integration, application, learning about oneself and others, and so on). One of the goals, as usual, was “being able to hold civil conversations with others who hold different viewpoints.” I liked that — I sure hope that students will become better at civil conversations. But even more so, I said, I hope that students also learn how to have uncivil conversations when necessary. While civil conversations should be the norm in politics, and we have to little of them across political differences, there are situations when incivility is warranted. I hope that students will learn how to discern the comparatively rare situations when incivility is the right response, and how to do it well and productively. And when they are the target of an uncivil message, to respond in a way that is curious and focused on learning from the situation, not just to push back.

This is more easily said than done, and it is risky. I have not yet completely wrapped my head around how to approach this without hurting or harming student participants. Maybe including and practicing elements of Nonviolent Communication, which encourage responding to uncivil outbreaks with questions that explore the reasons for the emotional response and that express empathy. But the evidence for NVC seems to be decidedly mixed. In the end, I suspect that the most we can get is for students to become more aware of different ways people respond to hurtful or conflictual interactions and to approach those with empathy and caution.

Busyness, blegh

A quick morning rant, unfiltered and unpolished:

One of the big problems in academia is the culture of overwork, which in fact is a culture of busyness. People get angry or annoyed at others who do not constantly work. And the problem is that this is not just busy work, it’s also stupid work. A well-run organization thinks hard about where to expend its energies instead of chasing the latest urgency or just churning out stuff.

Do we know whether academic overwork works? We know the downsides. But what are the successes? We measure them in students graduating FAST (again, by working many hours, supposedly), by publications and patents, grant dollars. We do not know how many social problems we’ve actually solved, how many people’s lives we have saved or at least have made easier, whether the world became more livable, kinder.

And I don’t know if what we are doing can be done better, or how we should actually measure whether what we do is successful. I do think that practices and rituals that are not optimized towards the right outcome are important and worthwhile, so practices that assess badly are not necessarily bad practices. But what we do in academia is that we optimize busyness, and that’s definitely not the right outcome and not a healthy ritual either. And our assessments do not measure impact but simply how busy we were and whether the products of our busyness were appreciated by the academic circle jerk.

ChatGPT and the value of authenticity

This last semester, I had a number of student essays that I suspected were written by ChatGPT or some other AI text machine, and one that was confirmed as such — it included hallucinated content. It’s hard to prove the use of ChatGPT or similar, so I let it go, except for the instance with fictive facts. AI checkers are notoriously spotty, and I don’t want to police student writing, and I definitely don’t want to accuse students of cheating on the basis of false positive AI checker results.

I am not satisfied by this state of affairs. I don’t mind if AI machines are used as tools, for example to correct student writing, or to provide references on a topic, or such. What worries me (and what let me to suspect AI use) is the production of generic but correct, bland text. Students don’t do the work that (I am convinced) would help them learn something, they forgo the opportunity to think about a topic, and they produce generic ticker-tape of an essay that is easy to read but that nobody really wants to read.

I believe that one of the tasks for us in this age of AI is to find ways for us humans to be authentic, and to be so in a way that cannot be imitated by a machine. For students, this means to be authentically imperfect and to accept those imperfections, until they have found their own voice that allows them to be authentically perfect if they choose so. (I don’t know if I want my writing to be perfect, authentically or not.) I suspect there has to be some punk in our writing.

Good Enough!

Years ago, my landlord had a plumber come in to fix our toilet, a guy who went to the church where my landlord’s wife was a pastor. The dude removed the old leaky tank and installed a new one; in the process, some of the unpainted wall behind the old tank was exposed, with wallpaper hanging off the wall. This was a pity: Our landlord, a colleague and friend of ours, had done a nice job painting the bathroom just before we moved in. As the plumber left, grabbing the old tank, he looked at the messed-up wall, looked at me, nodded, and in a gruff voice said “Good enough!”

We all have a growth mindset now, right? There’s evidence that it’s good for us (or at least better than some, fixed, alternatives), and as long as our minds grow and not, say, our noses and earlobes, fine, good by me. Mostly. Because on occasion I really need the plumber’s “Good enough!” mindset. Or the “Fuck it, this is done!” mindset. Or the “Ice cream is a complete meal!” and the “Napping is work, too!” mindsets.

Growth is good. But not always good enough.

I completely dropped off the #100DaysToOffload track, so I’ll start counting again: This is the first post of my second #100DaysToOffload attempt. Wish me luck!