David Rose first spoke about his product, Vitality. Vitality’s main product is GlowCaps — light-up, wirelessly communicating pill bottles that help patients with medication adherence. It uses the feedback methods of financial incentives, reporting to your doctor, letting a social network know, and coordinating pharmaceutical refills (all of these are options for the user to opt into.)

He shared a clip about Vitality from the Colbert Report (that David didn’t know was going to air when he first saw it…) and then talked about his current research: figuring out how to identify what motivations will work for which people. He presented a graphic of a four-quadrant model of motivations, breaking down rewards to internal vs. external motivations on one axis and contextualized vs. context-independent on the other.

He also has a survey he’s interested in the QS community taking as a further exploration of understanding one’s own personal motivational style: here’s a link if you’re interested.

Mike Sheeley talked about the widely-downloaded app, RunKeeper, which cleverly uses GPS to track users’ runs. They’re currently approaching 2.5 million users, and he discussed the problems of how to balance sharing information with users’ desire for privacy. (Interestingly, other users often want to know where nearby runners are, not to meet up and run together, but just to learn where the good local routes are.)

Adrian Gropper presented his company MedCommons‘ product, HealthURL. HealthURL is a universal health record for use by physician or patient, and its first use is as an online storehouse of radiology imaging. As someone who’s taken care to get make sure I get my X-rays from the hospital, on DVD, onto my computer, and to the next doctor, I appreciated the thinking behind this. Adrian’s motivating spirit is to make health utilities which put patients and physicians on the same playing field (he did expect the vast majority of his initial audience would be physicians.)

Eric Zwick rounded out our presentations. He currently studies behavioral economics at Harvard, and talked about a three-self model of reward and habit-forming: the current self who has a promise they want to keep, the self who has to act that promise out until the future goal, and the future self who gets to reap the benefits. (He used the example of saving a piece of pie for one’s girlfriend: the future self will reap the rewards if the intermittent one can put up with the temptation…)

Eric’s discussion prompted a discussion amongst the crowd about behavioral economics: the sentiment of there being a 1000 books and 1000 tricks out their about habit formation: which are really relevant? I reflected afterwards that the satisfaction of watching presenters who do tracking themselves — rather than tool-making — may be that their stories naturally reflect the things that help people experiment, track, and make and break habits.

—

The next Boston Quantified Self meetup is slated for July 28th at the MIT Media Lab … see you there!

We had about 25 people come, and excitingly, 8 speakers. This was quite a surprise to me — I started organizing the quantified self in Boston because while I am deeply interested in the QS approach as a way of getting empowered about health, I didn’t know anyone who did it. It was really a pleasant surprise to end up with a full roster of speakers for our first event! It was a fantastic way for me to get a very engaging introduction to the movement.

Our first meetup attempted to follow the guidelines posted on the QS blog: 5 or so minutes for the talk, and 5 or 7 minutes for q&a afterwards. We ended up having talks that went much longer — around 20 minutes on average — and as this pacing felt good — we’ll move towards this direction, with less talks, next meetup, and see how that goes.

On to a recap of the meetup …

—

Talk #1 featured Mac Cowell of DIYBio presenting his and his friend Jason Bobe’s project, BioWeatherMap. The project is very new. It allows a participant to send away a dollar bill to get the genome sequence of the bacteria population present on the bill. The project aims to answer questions about the diversity and impact of microbial life around us, and to spark a new form of genetic awareness through a collaborative research approach.

The second talk was by Ben Rubin, CTO of Zeo — the well-known sleep tracking device. He gave an overview of how it works, and talked about his own observations with it — sharing how his sleep quality (as indicated by Zeo’s ZQ score) changed with altitude. This was neatly followed up by the third talk — given by Daniel Rinehart — about his experience using the Zeo for six months. He’d made his own visualizations of the different stages of sleep, and had been exploring the whys and hows he got different amounts of the various sleep stages on different nights.

The fourth talk was by Marko Anderson of Futureful — his project, still in an early stage, was to scour people’s information trails from social media, and attempt to predict things about their future … what things they would like, activities they would enjoy, and so on.

We took a break here for about 10 minutes, and then came back for our fifth talk, by Matthew Killingsworth, a PhD Student of Daniel Gilbert’s Lab who wrote the iPhone app “Track Your Happiness.” He contextualized the smartphone as the newest technology to conduct experience sampling — what had originally started with pen and paper and beeper systems. Interesting pieces from his talk include noting that wishing you were doing something else appeared to be a significant indicator of being unhappy, and that when people were imagining themselves to be doing something else, usually it was something they perceived worse than what they were actually doing. Unless they were having sex — in which case they were usually imagining something more positive…

Our sixth talk was given by Rana El Kaliouby of a local startup, Affectiva. This has come out of work at the MIT Media Lab, and used facial recognition software and a galvanic skin response arm band to measure emotion. The possibilities suggested here of measuring and tracking emotions, be it to enhance communication or to better understand one’s emotions, were really quite intriguing. Technologies like Affectiva’s seem to be in particular opening up new possibilities of what we can explore through measurement and tracking.

The next talk was given by Elliot Hedman of the MIT Media Lab (in Rosalind Picard’s Affective Computing group.) He also used galvanic skin response sensors to work with children in occupational therapy in order to help them get better in touch with their emotional response. He showed us a video of children in therapy wearing the sensor and a tim-graph of the child’s GSR response. In one striking video, a child’s GSR response visibly dropped once he was able to do seated work while seated on a giant exercise ball … making a compelling case for the child being much calmer once he was free to move around.

Our last talk was given by a graduate student at UMass Amherst, Jin-Young Kim on “Developing a Platform for Self-tracking.” His research comes out of his personal experience of doing comprehensive tracking in his own life across many variables — including subjective accounts of how his day and relationships could have gone better. His central interest was in seeing if a underlying framework could help trackers find the important patterns or investigations within their mass of data.

—

That’s all for this time … the next Boston Quantified Self will be in the first week of June, likely at the Zeo headquarters in Newton … hope to see you there!

From the outset of the year, she comes up with twelve “Personal Commandments” , and one of them, “Act the way I want to feel” she comes back to again and again. One of the things I liked about Rubin’s writing is her candidness: you can feel it as tries this commandment on. It’s not natural for her, and the whole idea is clearly a little preposterous … so when she employs it in times of family strife or general crankiness — by thinking and setting her attention accordingly — you can feel her marvel in genuine surprise at the positive effect.

Later on, she describes spending a month focused on spirituality, and describes how she has no interest in meditating or in including it in her happiness project (to the surprise and what sounds like offense to some of her meditating friends.) This intrigued me, as I’m personally interested in what people do for happiness and to understand themselves better, and for myself, meditation has been the chief tool in this regard for the past few years.

Then something dawned on me — her commandment, “Act how I want to feel” was really quite reminiscent of the insight / Vipassana meditation practice of “labeling.” Looking at a description from an article in the Shambala Sun:

17. How should you note mental objects?

Mental objects seem to present a bewildering diversity, but actually they fall into just a few clear categories, such as “thinking,” “imagining,” “remembering,” “planning” and “visualizing.”

18. What is the purpose of labeling?

In using the labeling technique, your goal is not to gain verbal skills. Labeling helps us to perceive clearly the actual qualities of our experience, without getting immersed in the content. It develops mental power and focus.

and I thought — hey! That’s what Gretchen Rubin does all throughout her book. Through constantly reminding herself of her resolutions and commandments, when an appropriate situation comes up, she is able to clearly label it. And then, often to her surprise, when employing an “Act how I want to feel” in an emotionally unpleasant situation — in a sense identifying and noting the negative situation at hand — the charge of the scene dissipates. This made me wonder if this commandment worked not because of “positive thinking” (it wasn’t because she was thinking positive thoughts that she then felt good) as much as it was gaining enough space from the thinking and associated emotions to let them dissipate.

I believe it’s also in the chapter on spirituality that Rubin identifies a Western approach to happiness — cultivate and indulge one’s passions — as a counterpoint to what she typifies as an Eastern one — identify and detach from all possible attachments. I wonder if in this idea of carefully selecting and cultivating habits of mind, as Rubin does in her book, one isn’t doing the same thing espoused by Vipassana teachers — to note your thinking and notice it as fundamentally “empty.”

Our heads are forward so we have headrests that support our heads stuck forward which perpetuate the problem of our heads being stuck forward.”

and using that — knowing the size of the squares (four inches on a side) to measure and track the curvature in his back. He’s going to work through Esther Gokhale’s 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back, and we’ll see where it goes.

Using a data-driven investigation to perform experiments like this excites me a lot. There seems to be a bit of a culture for tracking one’s nutrition, exercise, sleep, or mood, but nothing I’ve found for tracking one’s musculoskeletal system (be that tracking pain or tracking posture.)

I’ve long felt there are a lot of tools out there for working with musculoskeletal problems … if one looks long and hard enough. At the same time, in Aaron’s case — when he’s had his hunchback since his teens, (he’s now in his early 30’s) — I also don’t know what is changable, and then on what time-scale those changes would happen. It’s much more comfortable to suggest Esther Gokhale’s work as an experiment along a path, rather than the path itself.

I’m also struck by how some things jump out in photos that are hard to see in day to day life: in the picture of Aaron, it is quite noticable that his hips are forward relative to his feet — creating an angle in his legs (his legs angle towards the front, rather than going straight up and down.) Something that isn’t at all apparent in person, but leaps out in a photo …

onward!

—-

In rehabilitating my neck, I spent a good, grand, very pleasurable three weeks with Esther Gokhale in her studio in Palo Alto, CA. Periodically in her classes, she would talk a little bit about the Alexander Technique — how its founder, F.M. Alexander — a stage actor who has losing his voice immediately before going on stage — solved his own medical problem through self-observation. Specifically, he put up lots of mirrors and watched himself talk and use his body, and found that he had unconscious muscular tension which, among other things, prevented him from physically producing sound before performing. This key idea of unconscious muscular use became the central idea of the Alexander Technique.

I wondered a little bit about why Esther mentioned this story periodically, but I figured it just made sense in the context of her work – which also focuses on healthy use of the body. It wasn’t until I talked to her on the phone last December, nine months after working with her, that I got it.

The two months after working with her, last April and May, I read up a storm. The neck pain used to be quite severe when reading (I unconsciousally pulled my head forward for books or computers, aggravating the strain), and so being free of neck pain, and able to read again, I sincerely indulged. However that summer, I started developing lots of facial pain around the eyes — what I figured was eyestrain.

I talked to Esther briefly in December, and mentioned this to her, and in her reply she mentioned the story about Alexander. About how he used mirrors to observe himself and figure out his own medical mystery. In this context, the suggestion was that  maybe I simply have some unknown habits when reading or using the computer – be they of muscular use or otherwise – that used to manifest as neck strain, and now manifest as pain around the eyes.

What excited me about this was to remember Alexander’s narrative of self-care through meticulous observation. And that in hearing this narrative, the idea somehow becomes accessible to engage with: it becomes something I can think about and consider for myself. This conversation pointed out to me that the value of this narrative – of sorting one’s body out through meticulous observation — is one that I don’t hear culturally as far as ways to take care of your body go. If you’ve got a body problem, you may hear that you should exercise more, eat right (however you interpret that), quit smoking and drinking, sleep more, or see the doctor. But there aren’t many other general wellness strategies I know of culturally and certainly none around self-observation, as powerful as it can be.

A real live blog post! Amazing!

Before I dive in…

1. I feel really good physically. Better than I have in 3 years by far. My last post on diyHealth gives rough overview of my trip to Palo Alto, but I am blown away by how I feel. The latest iteration of how good I feel is watching myself order books like crazy. I used to really resist books because reading was so painful, and lately I’ve been ordering tons. I’ve begun to integrate reading back into my life again! It’s only been a week where reading has been fluid, so I haven’t fully grasped what a big deal this is, but after 3 years of reading being intensely painful, it is such a relief. My god!

2. I’ve toyed with the idea of writing up thinking about sprout that I want to share with our group (see sproutward.org, !) as blog posts — as a way to simultaneously document and share new ideas. I don’t know how to post to sprout’s blog, not quite being settled back into the computer world, and so I thought I’d post this here (and I have no idea what merits a sprout blog post anyhow. This is just a straightforward half-edited jumble of thinking.)

With that appetizing introduction, let’s move on to sprout!

Sprout, from when I last left off, has morphed into a community science center / open science studio / radical science space. Meaning we want to …

1.make science personal. (have people answer questions which are personally meaningful to them, whether or not they fall traditionally into the domain of science.)

2.make science accessible. (help anyone who’s game turn their problems into questions and questions into answers, whether or not they identify as a scientist.)

It may be a stretch, but I think in those two ideas, we have the finer grain points we want to hit:

In terms of science being personal

* to investigate most problems deeply, you have to throw away traditional boundaries of science – of chemistry and physics and biology and so on. Most problems call on some huge mixture of all kinds of knowledge and methods of inquiry, be they labeled as scientific or not.

* you also completely open up what’s fit to be called science – the qualifier is that it’s personally important to you, not that it’s already established as something that merits investigation by the scientific establishment. This means you can investigate small things, beautiful things, practical things, huge things, household things, city-wide things… and so on.

And in terms of making that personal science accessible

* inspiring anyone to do science: we want to end the idea that experiences in your schooling get to determine if you do science or not in your day to day life. The criteria here isn’t credentials or grades – it’s having a problem you wish you knew more about. That inspiration will start a dazzling event; a class, an interactive workshop, a stunning lecture, or just a friendly introductory tour.

* Allowing anyone to do science: to this end, we want a place where someone can come whose never used computers before comfortably and help them find the path to becoming a programmer. This involves creating a very approachable space – one that doesn’t reek of machine shop ego and white male sweat – and creating the pathways for people to learn a skill that someone not only doesn’t know, but could also be quite intimidated by. Pathways could include documentation of tools, providing mentors and apprenticeships, having classes, and so on: ways for people to get started.

* Making new open-source tools (and opening up old ones) for science: we want ultimately, for science and curiousity to be a lifestyle, something that’s a part of your everyday life. Doing this means taking the tools and processes we find powerful and opening them up to the public, for mass use and mass feedback.

So we’ve got our two big goals. A question that we’ve been stuck on is: you could view sprout as having a mission of research: changing how and what science is done on. And then a mission of outreach: getting each and every person to want to do science, and then doing science! The conundrum was – where’s the connection? One could easily see a space that just does either piece, and that being plenty. Instinctively though, both feel right in order to truly propagate the idea of “science as an everyday lifestyle”: it needs both a new look at what scientific inquiry could be, and a way to get that out to everyone (bringing it into the streets!) Either on it’s own seemed isolated.

I wanted to write this post to flesh out an idea that’s been growing in me. Alec recently hit on the idea of describing sprout as a “Constructionist research lab.” It’s an exciting phrase, because it marries the learning philosophy that seems to truly work (learning by being an active creator of what you’re learning) and was the foundation for camp with our goal of an adult-geared science space. To my knowledge, Constructionism hasn’t been taken into the adult world yet (though I haven’t looked much into it.)

I’ve been thinking about well, really, what does that phrase mean? It’s flashy and exciting … but how would I explain it. I decided to start with the traditional “what is constructionism?” approach, to remind myself of how this thing I get so intuitively excited about is defined.

In looking, I hit on the following definition:

“Constructionism, a theory pioneered by Seymour Papert of the MIT Media Lab, holds that children learn best when they are in the active roles of designer and constructor, like the kids building the sand castle on the beach. But the theory goes a step further. Constructionism, Papert says, adds “the idea that this happens especially felicitously in a context in which the learner is consciously engaged in constructing a public entity, whether it’s a sand castle on the beach or a theory of the universe.”

I don’t know if the definition is obvious, but a simple example is that a child learning about electricity they will do best when able to use this knowledge in an exploratory way, say by building something out of batteries, lights, and motors. The process of building guides the child through the various ideas of a circuit being a loop, of different electronics parts needing so much voltage and current, and so on. The natural environment provides its own feedback: the child is able to actively create her own models about how electricity works and what could be happening and keep trying them out until – ! – it works! Or something unexpected happens – and there’s a whole new set of theories to explore and mental models to create and experiment with.

Coming into sprout, what excites me is to take the language usually applied to constructing children’s materials and apply it to a research lab. What I wanted to explore in writing was the claim that we can marry the ideas of making science personal and science accessible by saying that a member of sprout is someone who values both working on what’s personally meaningful to them and sharing it.

What’s interesting here is the formal idea that doing outreach is deeply integrated into the research process, not separate from it. Sharing doesn’t serve the end of an auxiliary outreach goal, but is acknowledged as the best way to learn – make models of what you’re working on and share them.

Going from the definition of sprout being made of people who see sharing as integral to research, I see a lot of ideas that this ties up:

* the organization needs to support sharing: If sharing is how you are understanding your work, then the facilities need to be as designed to share as they are to work. Its just as important to g
et good science equipment as it is to get the word out and welcome visitors.

* work needs to be documented and open: Sharing work isn’t for the sake of an auxiliary goal – to disseminate your findings – but also incorporated into how you research. You ask a question, you figure some things out, you share, you get new ideas, and you keep going. Documenting your work isn’t something done out of a higher standard that feels abstract and annoying when you’re in the middle of your research: it’s part of how you research.

* sharing can mean teaching: So far, classes have seem like something added on to satisfy our outreach demands. But taking a body of knowledge and distilling into a class is both a way to disseminate knowledge, and also a widely acknowledged way to understand it more deeply (“you don’t really know something ’til you teach it…”)

* and sharing can mean apprentices or other new relationships: I’m extremely eager to forge new and revive old ways for people to work together at sprout. Sharing could just as well be in the form of taking on apprenticeships or bartering time in general. A one-on-one relationship is yet another mode to share in; personal relationships can be the basis for sharing one’s work and thus furthering it.

This formulation of the members of sprout recognizing sharing as a part of doing science seems like one way to pull a lot of what we want sprout to be doing together: documenting, reaching out, teaching, and creating new informal ways of learning. It doesn’t quite feel solid yet, but it’s an idea I wanted to explore.

I’ve been documenting my process at http://blogs.sproutward.org/project_diyhealth/ . It doesn’t have the last month of info, in which I am making rapid, exciting, incredibly relieving progress. As I grow more and more comfortable with the computer again, I will fill that in.

I just wanted to update!

It’s exciting! I am sure I will be writing a lot about it. It’s marks a shift in my work from empowerment of people ages 6 – 12 to empowerment of people.

I’ve been working on it intensely for the past few weeks and have been quite satisfied doing so. There’s nothing huge to report yet — the majority of things has been figuring out how to set up a self-governed space and trying to think broadly about what it is that separates someone from having a wonderful idea to making that wonderful thing happen.

Part of this process has been reflection on helping others feel empowered. One interesting story is my father’s over the past two years. I initially started writing this up for my friend Alec, who I’m working with on Sprout, but I thought it would be good blog material as well.

——

A little more than two years ago, my dad was living in Rhode Island. He’d been recuperating from a heart attack he’d had a year and a half prior, and seemed to really feel like he’d hit the end of the road, mentally and physically. I had a hard time going down to visit him: I wanted to see him because I knew he liked spending time with me, but the trip was always rough on me. To keep it succinct, it felt lonely to see him more or less alone.

His situation was something that stayed with me for a few years. Two years ago, I had just moved into a new apartment with a friend and we’d had trouble finding roommates for the other rooms (it was a 4 room apartment.) We ended up renting the rooms out on a 1-month basis to buy time to search for a good roommate for the remainder of the year. Around October (the lease began in Sept.), I had the idea that I should invite Dad up to come live with us. I kept the idea for about a month — it would be a big shift to be living with my father.

The biggest thing would be that my father rambles. Specifically about the years of his life he’d lived in Europe, usually about London (something like the late ’60s – ‘84, but I don’t know if anyone really knows.) My brother and his then-girlfriend had taken to comparing it to the band camp line from American Pie: “This one time, in London … ” The rambling had gotten much more severe in isolation — it was like all of the thinking and words that one naturally shares were damming up, flooding out upon any listener and usually overwhelming them in the process.

After thinking about for a month and running it by my friend, I figured it was worth a shot and asked my dad about it. The idea would be to somehow connect him to MIT. My dad’s a very competent engineer — well-versed in lots of engineering disciplines and a talented machinist — and I surmised that there had to be something at MIT for him. MIT was his dream university (I think it’s a bigger deal to him that I went to MIT than for me) and I knew it’d be the kind of environment he’d thrive in. So that was my pitch — come up to Boston, and we’ll find something at MIT for you to do.

On the phone he said “Hmmmm, I’ll think about it,” and then called me back the next day, happily eager to give it a try. We moved his stuff up in December, and adjusted to living together. He was full of an excited, hyper, blissfully unaware of social dynamics energy. I still remember how he completely (completely!) rearranged our kitchen, based off of some manufacturing engineering principle of automation or effeciency, and then would respond to my questions like “So where’re the trash bags now?” in a “you-teenager-who-never-cleans-up!” tone of voice, of course you don’t know! It came off as equal parts of gratitude and completely bizarre.

Of course, the bound up “let me repay my thanks by rearranging all your stuff!” and the “let me tell you all the stories I have!” energy settled. There was a vision seminar at MIT that I encouraged him to go to. I remember having to verbally push him to go — I hit a wall which I hadn’t expected, which was his confidence. I was surprised by it, but also deeply confident in his talents at an engineer, and so didn’t mind convincing him that he ought to go (his fear could be summarized I think as any MIT student’s fear: I don’t belong here, everyone is so smart/talented, what I could possibly contribute to this community?, etc.) He would be nervous or not want to go and I would tell him it was nonsense and stick to my unwavering opinion that he needed to get out of the apartment and go do stuff at MIT and something would work out, and soon enough he would.

He visited a few programs at MIT before becoming a mentor at Amy Smith’s Development Lab (D-Lab). D-Lab is one of the coolest engineering groups I’ve ever seen. They work with developing communities to engineer solutions for problems they’re having, and do this by working with the community. This feedback ensures both the efficacy of the tool (it meets real needs and can be repaired/modified by the community using it) and, as I understand it, creates a perspective of empowerment, rather than charity. Smith founded the lab in part to show students an alternative career to engineering — using engineering for social change — and it’s the thing that is perfect for my dad.

He grew to learn how to help, to feel his way around the community, and to slowly shake off his fears of people with degrees and doctorates from MIT. My dad became incredibly, undeniably happy during this first year there (he would say frequently, and with such genuineness “Maybe I have died, and I’ve gone to heaven! I’m not sure!”) The profound transformation that the shift had — from being in Rhode Island to being in MIT working with D-Lab — has always amazed me. Things that read like intrinsic parts of a personality (no matter how aware you are), like how much Dad rambled, only talked about the past and never the present, or simply how much attention he paid to the person he talked to, all changed to things that felt much more accessible (in being excited by his own, present day life, he seemed much more excited about everyone else’s too, and his signature rambling began to stem. I should of course make no claim that the rambling has ceased! That would be the work of majik and demons.)

Since then, my dad has become employed (in a marginal sense — employed enough to pay the bills, but not enough to get in the way of my father happily spending all of his free time at D-Lab, which, paradoxically, it would) to take care of the shop, which is perfect for him. It’s really an amazing transformation to me; I’m always happy about it whenever I reflect on it.

There’s a few things I’ve taken away from this:

* changing someone’s environment can be transformative: the big, fundamental difference in my father’s life before and after D-Lab is how happy he is. He is productive, is making a meaningful contribution to an organization he finds meaningful, and he’s much more content with his day-to-day life.

I don’t think any amount of talking alone could have brought this shift about. I’m sure I’d talked to him before about getting back into engineering, or using his skills, or who knows what beforehand, and I’m sure that that sounded simultaneously appealing and empty (it’d be great to be making things again … but how?) It is one
thing to construct the environment you need, and another to find it.

* When to push, when not to push: I don’t know if there are any words to describe this beyond the intuition one develops from a human relationship, but I found that with my father, there were
some things I could make happen through pushing him on verbally, and some that I simply had to enact myself. Convincing him to come to Boston, or thinking of clever ways to articulate that 35 years of engineering experience were just as valid as an academic career were all things I could do verbally. He’d have his doubts, I’d have my counterargument (ideally wrapped up in a sentence or two maxim that sounded good and was easy to remember) and he’d agree mentally and give whatever it was I was advocating a try.

Getting him to ask for funding for D-Lab was, however, something I got nowhere with verbally. His first year at D-Lab I helped support him financially, and by the end of the year I had wanted him to ask for funding (for the sake of my own independence and his sustianability.) There were no words, high or low or in the sky, that I could have gotten my father to do this. My father finds money to be a confusing thing, something that gets in the way of getting things done, and I think he also felt too scared to be rejected by this lab that he’d fallen in love with: the possibility that he might ask, they could say no, and we would find another source of funding never seemed to register — the act of asking with the potential of rejection was, I think, just too much for him. At some point, I asked a friend to ask the head of the lab on his behalf, and everything worked out from there. He was extremely grateful, and I began to realize that just as my father had frustrated me by not acting, I had been frustrating myself by simply not finding another way to ask on his behalf.

* What one can change has its limits: my father isn’t in the best of health, and his few semesters at MIT would thoroughly overwork his body, trying to keep pace with the overworked and frenzied students, dashing to finish their work. Any conversations I had with him to the effect of “you know, you don’t have to take finals as seriously as the students do” would just be met with looks of utter amazement. It’s finals time — you have to finish! I have to help the student’s finish! That’s what you do!

At first, seeing the unhealthy patterns that finals creates seep over to my dad frustrated me, but I began to realize that this was beyond my influence. I could explain things as I saw them, but that finals time was needlessly stressful and ought to be taken with a grain of salt was not something that I could simply convince my father of. Over his two years, he’s come to prioritize his own body more, and has balanced taking care of himself a bit more with helping students (particularly as he’s learned it can take a week or so to feel recovered from such times.) Overall though, it became clear to me that while I could help in broad matters of my father’s situation, simple things like these were beyond me. I couldn’t just make my father have the perspectives I value and want him to have about academia.

—–

I’m eager to hear what other stories people know of like this one, and what other commonalities or lessons there are to be unearthed from them.

After coming back to MIT from Germany, I felt completely unwilling to participate in the educational system. My overall feeling was that the whole system could be run so much better and had so little thought put into it, and yet it didn’t particularly bother anyone. I had an amazing resistance to taking classes where I felt like the instructor wasn’t trying or caring much and consequently dropped nearly all of the classes I signed up for my first term back.

I took 4 classes my last two terms at MIT, and dropped my former plans of becoming a mathematician mid-way through applying for a Ph.D. My interest in math fell apart as I realized that there were many more important things to work on, especially in the worlds of learning and education. Of the four classes I took, was being a teaching assistant (TA) for 18.02 — multivariable calculus. It satisfied my last graduation requirement and with my rising interest in education it would be a neat thing to do.

For background, 18.02 is a required course at MIT — all students must take it to graduate. It’s the second math class in the introductory one-year calculus sequence. At many universities, this is a two-year sequence. The class itself was about 200-300 students, and I taught a 1-hour recitation twice a week with 20 students and also graded their homework.

1. My own growing perspective on education

I’d started reading John Holt’s How Children Fail and How Children Learn that semester, which were really shaping how I thought about teachers, learners, and educational systems. Those books began to give me an articulation for the intuitions I’d developed in Germany, and made me look at grades as unnecessary and something that simply got in the way of people’s learning processes. Instead of giving students the message “You haven’t fully mastered this concept yet,” grades gave students the message “You haven’t fully mastered this concept yet and now you’re being punished for it.” I began to become aware of how grading cuts into someone’s natural feedback process when learning — changing an intuition like “Man! I wish I understood lift better, it’s so mysterious and interesting” to “Man, there’s no way I can get an A in this class now.” Thinking about Holt in terms of my experiences in Germany made me understand how toxic grades and similar judgements are and how one can thrive when rid of them.

I also saw how liberating it was to be free of notions like “I need to work harder” and “I’m not working hard enough” in Germany. I began to recognize that kind of thinking as symptomatic of a poor educational system — putting the student in a place where despite their natural curiousity, they felt both overwhelmed (I can’t get everything done) and unsatisfied (I need to be doing something differently…) Since students fundamentally can’t change their learning environment — they don’t have control over their own learning process — the only place they have to turn is inward. This leads to the very common spiral of plaguing, nagging thoughts of self doubt: “Maybe if I worked harder, I wouldn’t be behind,” or “Maybe if I slept enough, I wouldn’t be so tired,” etc. My experience in Germany, suddenly free of my own self-doubt once I was happily learning all day, has led me to view claims like these, or similar ones like “I’m just not good at this” or “I just haven’t tried enough” as signs that the system isn’t working, not the student.

2. The first exam

The first few weeks of TAing were pretty ordinary. Myself and my students got used to the rhythm of the class, I got used to balancing presenting material and taking questions in recitation, and so on. The first exam we had was the first event that began making me suspicious of the class.

The test grades were what you’d expect — some students did well, some did ok, and a few failed. TAs were asked to email any student who failed, letting them know how they could make up a test. I remember looking at one student’s failed exam and his related homework and seeing clearly that of the three weeks of material covered, he’d understood the first two weeks fine and not the third week. As far as using the test as objective feedback goes, this meant he had a week’s more of learning to do for the course.

As far as the metric used by the class though, this meant he’d failed his first test: a deeply demoralizing event. On top of that, he’d have the spectre of that failure for the next two and a half months: there was no way from him to makeup that failed grade and get a high mark in the class now — his average would be too weighed down. So while the message ought to have been “Ah! You haven’t understood cross products yet — you have these ideas to catch up on!”, it becomes a stigmatizing failure that lasts for the whole term: “You could pass this class if you work extra hard.”

I emailed my student asking him to meet. I was eager to show him that there were just 2 big ideas he was missing and then he’d be on par with the rest of the course: the looming feeling that not only did you fail a test, but most everyone else in your class didn’t makes the event that much more defeating and confusing: why can’t I do this but most everyone else can? It took a bit of pushing to get him to meet with me — I think he politely declined the email, and then after recitation one day I got his attention in the hallway and asked him if he had time to go over the material right then. He did, and a half hour later he was really relieved I’d pulled him aside. As I suspected, he’d viewed the failed test as a sign that he was really far behind, and by the end of our session he was much more relaxed.

The rest of the semester went fine for him and he remained very grateful for that intervention. It’s a nice story because it wraps up cleanly, but of course it’s not the norm. It got me thinking: why was it such a big deal for him to learn how to handle cross products right here, right now? Beyond the test — the artificial environment — he had no need for them. When we’d met, he explained that he’d been busy with his other classes, having had several exams that week, and just hadn’t gotten to calculus yet. This seemed reasonable enough to me: he was doing his work as best as he could, and the idea that he hadn’t learned how to do cross products by an arbitrary date causing so much stress just seemed preposterous to me. What was the point?

3. Copying

About midway through the term, I began to notice that a lot of the problem sets handed in were duplicates of other problem sets. From my point of a view as a grader, it would be amusing to see the changes people would put in their problem set — like substituting a “y” instead of an “x” throughout a problem to attempt to mask an otherwise 6 pages of calculus that was line-for-line identical. On one of the weeks almost half of the work was copied. Some of those may have been the originals, but it was still a lot! Another undergrad TA had noticed the same thing; graduate TAs didn’t grade their own section’s homework, so it was only a few staff that noticed this trend.

I set out to look at copying objectively — past the usual moral claim that it’s a wrong thing to do and to discern what it meant about the class. It first occurred to me that copying was a literal waste of time: instead of spending an hour or two trying
to understand the material at hand, one spends it transcribing equations line for line for pages. Beyond that, there’s the mental space that someone is in when they’re copying. By copying, someone is acknowledging that they can not or do the requested homework or that they don’t want to, yet they still feel obliged to appear to have done so. It’s like saying “I can’t or don’t want to do this, but I have to.”

The point of homework is to give the student practice with the skills covered in a course, and to give the instructors feedback as to what the students are understanding. What’s happening here is that a student who is copying feels that the practice offered is either not doable (the student does not understand, feels too exhausted, or both) or not useful (the practice does not seem worthwhile or the material does not seem worthwhile.) If the material isn’t doable, that feedback is of critical importance to the instructor. Whether it’s because the student is too exhausted to learn, as is often the case at MIT, or is just lost in the class, the student would benefit from the class slowing down and addressing this.

It’s also valuable feedback if the student sees no point in the exercises. Learning German was effortless because there was a natural context for the skill — communicating in German. Likewise, when there is no natural context for a skill, learning is a struggle. If you don’t see a reason to learn a skill, why would you learn it? Again, this is huge feedback for an instructor to have.

In either of these cases, instead of this feedback going to the instructor through a simple conversation or email, the student feels there is no use in being honest about how they feel, so much so that they spend an hour or two doing something pointless in order to appear as if they did indeed do the homework. This feedback gets masked because to give that feedback honestly — to have a conversation instead of handing in a copied problem set — would likely be poorly received, and worse, one would be graded harshly for it if the conversation didn’t go well.

4. Bibles

Taking this view and applying it to 18.02, where at its peak half or so of the problem sets were copied shows a pretty bleak picture — almost half of the students are pretending to do the homework and feel bound to do so. And yet this is no quirk particular to this class. I remembering touring fraternities as a freshmen, and one of their perks was their collection of “bibles”: collection of all the notes, homework, and tests from previous years. This idea of copying problem sets is such a normal one that it’s well established in MIT’s residential culture. The idea that a class isn’t working for you in some way and yet there’s no way to change that is an accepted one.

I came to realize that part of why students’ bibles work is because professors also have bibles. The course my professor was teaching was handed to him by the previous professor. It was the complement to the student’s bible: the lectures, problem sets, and exams were all in the course package. It felt on one hand ridiculous (the professor hands out problems he hasn’t thought about, and the students hand in answers pretending to have thought about them) and on the other offensive. The class was on a rigid track: there were so many set lectures, homeworks, and exams. There was no room for deviating if the class was stuck on one idea, understood another quicker than expected, or if there was an insight as to where the class should go instead. The class was like a train — steady and immovable. Knowing how much effort students put into accomodating a class’ assignments, it bothered me to realize that it was already pre-determined that the class wouldn’t respond to the student’s needs.

This begins to make sense of common student questions and concerns like “Why do we have to do this problem when we haven’t covered it in class yet?” or “I’m not sure what’s going to be on the exam since on the last exam there was material we had only just started…” If a class’ homework/test structure is predetermined, it’s easy for a lecturer to be out of sync with the questions he’s assigning because he simply hasn’t read them over or thought them through. While I can’t tell you how common this in courses at MIT, I would expect it to be the case in the majority of introductory classes.

Another post-doc in the math dept. — one of my favorite teachers at MIT, Emma Carberry — told me as she was applying for professorships that she felt quite frustrated with the high-pressure academic system. She was applying to liberal arts colleges to teach at because she wanted to be in an environment where she was rewarded, or at least acknowledged, for putting a lot of time into her teaching. She said that at MIT and in this tier of academia, the only metric was how well your research was going, and so putting time into teaching well was something that you were implicitly punished for professionally. This anecdote still amazes me; I often wonder why MIT bothers having classes when they don’t value them.

Students often have a few great classes at MIT. With an instructor who carefully thinks about the interaction between all of the course’s components: homework, tests, lectures, and so on,
and integrates feedback as it comes, a lecturer can create a good learning environment for a student at MIT. These professors are unfortunately rare because MIT’s professional system selects against this, as was the case with Emma Carberry. The professor I was working for told me that he wanted to be teaching grad students in his field of research, but was assigned the introductory class and could do nothing about it. I thought the professor was doing a decent job too (he did lots of things well — taking feedback from TAs, worked to create good materials for recitations) and yet at the end of the day, it was clear that this was not a project the professor was interested in. The lack of choice the professor had (“I don’t want to teach this class, but I have to”) led to the automatic production of the class from the bible, which in turn led to most of the students having the same reaction (“I don’t want to take this class, but I have to.”)

5. Tests

Midway through the semester, as I began to notice all of the copying, I began to really see the class for more of a charade: both the professor and majority of students were there because it was a required class, not because they thought it was worthwhile. Exam grading only furthered this along.

The professors and the TAs graded the exams, and each staff member got a question to grade for 3 hours or so with a partner. It was a pretty mind-numbing experience, grading 150 or so of the same exam question again and again. On this exam, the question that I graded was one where 2/3rds or so of the students made the same mistake. I remember thinking that I wished I had a stamp for how many times I wrote down “can’t used Green’s theorem when the line integral isn’t closed!” It began to dawn on me as I did this over and over again, that this was a clear sign the class did not understand the concept in any intuitive way. This was great feedback (the course pace should slow down and go over this again, ideally approaching it in a way that develops more intuition), but feedback that had no place in a predetermined class. The results of the tests got turned into numbers, the numbers into a distribution, and that was the feedback that the course received. The details of which concepts had been mastered by the group and which concepts hadn’t been understood at all — the feedback that mattered — was left behind in the wake of lots and lots of exam scores.

This exam just added on to the feeling that the class was a big, stressful game of pretend. The students didn’t know how to do the problem, and the mistake stemmed from trying to match patterns: there are 4 big ideas being tested, 6 questions on the test, and if you match them up right the test will turn ou
t fine. The feedback from the test that students didn’t understand Green’s Theorem didn’t fit into the course’s structure and so was ignored. The staff gave tests because they had to, the students took tests because they had to, and the course went on, staying on track.

6. Context

There were about three weeks left of the class at this point, which covered material like Stokes’ theorem. Stokes’ theorem is something that everyone at MIT recognizes — having had to take 18.02 — and hardly anyone knows, including math majors. I myself never had a strong intuition for why Stokes theorem was important, and tried to find a good context to present the theorem in.

I came across Schey’s Div, Grad, Curl and all that , which explained vector calculus and the material we were covering oin the context of electricity and magnetism. The book was great — it was very simple and answered my own personal questions about why this material was valuable.

It didn’t help for presenting it well though. I tried once, and realized that I was trying to elucidate one abstract concept — vector calculus — by putting in context of another abstract concept — electricity and magnetism (E&M). This was particularly weak because many of these students were taking E&M at the same time as 18.02 — there was no guarantee that E&M was something these students had any familiarity with, and furthermore, any intuition for.

I then asked the simple question — how many of these would actually use this material, based on their declared major? I surmised that of the 20-some majors at MIT, the ones that would use 18.02 extensively (something more than just adding a week’s worth of a material to a course to explain a needed mathematical tool) were mathematicians, physicists, and anyone who studied flow (so mechanical and civil engineers,) I was willing to bet another two majors used the material in ways I couldn’t think of, but that for the rest of them, beyond those six, their disciplines were not reliant on this material in any way. That quick estimate puts the number of students who would use 18.02 later on to be somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of the student body. Yet everyone was taking it!

I also thought about my friends who were physicists — who in E&M used vector calculus all the time. Most of them told me that the way they’d learned vector calculus was by learning E&M. This made sense to me too: you learn something by using the knowledge, not by preparing to use it. It made perfect sense to me: needing to use vector calculus and would create a much more powerful context for understanding and remembering the material than the artificial one of 18.02. Only 1/4 or 1/3 of the students who actually learned this material, and it seemed clear that they were better off learning it in the context of their discipline anyway. What was the point?

6. Feedback

One of the things that was so powerful in Germany was having complete control over my learning environment: being able to fold in the feedback from each thing I did into my daily process. One of the reasons that 18.02 felt like such an ineffective class to me was that the feedback loop was too large to change quickly and too fragmented to understand what it should change.

I already discussed the example of homework: where students hide their honest feedback in bowing to the system. And the example of testing: where the staff, prioritizing grading, ignores the real feedback generated. Beyond this was just the hierarchical mess of having 1 person responsible for 300 people’s learning.

I remember one example where a problem set contained an unusually difficult problem. The TAs had trouble doing it and couldn’t figure out how to do it. Some TAs unwittingly gave out false solutions in office hours, not realizing they didn’t know how to do it correctly. There were tons of questions that week about the problem, and their was nothing illuminating about solving it. It was supposed to be practice for a calculus idea, but it was really an exasperatingly long geometry problem.

This problem easily added on at least 2 hours of work to each student’s problem set or furthered the “I can’t do this so I better copy it” mindset. It would’ve taken the professor or the course admin maybe two hours to do the problem set, find that problem, and throw it out. But, since they were just handing out problem sets handed to them, this problem was kept in and a group of students wastes a good 300 – 600 hours.

Letting one person control 300 people’s time is the core structure of this and other lecture-based course. It’s pretty tough to give a good hour-long presentation, let alone three on a week on something you don’t particularly care about, as was this professor’s lot. There’s virtually no room for feedback: most students, when confused or stuck, hold in their questions because it’s quite difficult to have a conversation in a 300-on-1 environment, proceed to forget their questions, and struggle to follow the rest of the lecture.

There are good lecturers at MIT. However, it seems to be akin to being a good performer: lecturing, or performing, well is a rare skill and one that takes work. Giving a good lecture means having a good command of your voice, your blackboard, and having an intuition for how to present your material in a way that is engaging and not confusing. Looking at feedback from the lecturer’s point of view, it is harder to get feedback the larger your class is. A lecture to a 300-person audience has to be one where the instructor is already familiar with most of the pitfalls and confusions. It takes a lot of work to become experienced and knowledgable enough to be a good lecturer. It can be done, but given MIT’s stance of prioritizing research in an academic’s career, a good lecturer is going to be the outlier and not the norm.

Despite this, the lecture is regarded as the most important part of the course. In my term in 18.02, students attendance was highest in lecture, second highest in recitation (a 1 on 20 environment, where at least one or two questions per student could be fielded), and lowest in office hours (a 1 on 3 conversational environment.) I was fascinated by this; my students knew they could come to my office hours for anything, even a recap of the lectures that they’d decided not to go to. Very few did, despite it being the most active us of their time, the environment where they could ask the most questions and address their own confusions. The worst opportunity in this sense — lecture, where they had no way to engage but to passively listen and hope they didn’t get lost too quickly — was the best attended. It seemed to me that by putting students, in an environment that prioritizes the lecturer above all, they will unwittingly waste their time trying to make use of the lecture, absorbing 15 – 20 minutes of material for the hour they spend there.

7. Demoralizing students

Midway through the class, one or two female students told me, independently “I used to think I was good at math until I came to MIT.” It made me crazy to hear — I wanted to explain to them, as succinctly as they told me their self-doubts, all of the systemic things I’d been noticing and explain that they should by no means take this class and its grades personally. The impact of struggling in a class is huge — the take home message is not “I have not understood as much vector calculus as some other people in this class.” It’s “I’m not good at math.” I always wondered if it was just coincedence that the students who told me this were female, or if it was the result of carrying the weight of the stereotype “woman aren’t as good at math as men” around, and finally they had an experience which confirmed it.

I remember wondering one weekend why we (the 18.02 staff) were stressing people out so much about things like finding the
volumes of arbitrary shapes. I got to a point where the whole class seemed preposterous, and eventually even repulsive. For the final, one student told me that his plan was to get no sleep the night before the test because if he studied, and then slept, he’d forget all the equations he’d just learned at wouldn’t be able to use them on the test. Another final came back stained in Pepto-Bismol because the student had brought it with him to the exam, trying to calm his stomach down from pre-test anxiety and vomiting. What was the point of all this? To help people learn how to calculate flows and volumes?

I came to see the course as something that the students didn’t need and not designed in their interests. It was taught and it was taken because it was required of both parties. It’s main result wasn’t to get people excited by these ideas, or even to understand them, but mostly to pretend that they knew what was going on and wait for the class to stop. In the meanwhile, it was a thoroughly demoralizing experience for them, one with repercussions — making math seem impossible — that go exactly against the point of having the class in the first place.

As I finish writing this, my great hope is that this analysis will help someone understand, a little more closely, what is happening to them in their own struggles in college. I think that this kind of system is incredibly difficult to see when you are inside of it, and I hope that my different perspective from being a TA, and from thinking about education non-traditionally, are of use. I am really happy to talk more about this if it strikes anyone — just leave a comment or send me an email.