The Curmudgeonly Professor

Things That are Disappearing: Cursive Writing

When I started first grade in 1938, my sister had already taught me how to read since she started school a year earlier than I did.  I was in a class of 55 students.  Since I was bored with coloring and listening to other students learn how to read, I practiced the Parker Penmanship scroll that went across the room above the blackboard.  To this day, whenever I see a note from my lifetime dear friend Dolores, I can hardly tell her writing from mine since we both did the same thing.  We learned cursive writing.

Cursive writing stood me in good stead throughout my life.  By being able to write clearly and quickly, I was able to fill my graduate school bluebook exams with endless prose, prompting one professor to urge me to develop a "more laconic style of writing."  I wrote countless letters to my parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, my girlfriend.  I could sign my name clearly and distinctly.  I never particularly thought of how much of an advantage clear cursive writing had been throughout my life until the current hoorah over whether teaching cursive writing is just a waste of time.  Pupils, in the judgment of the learned and wise, could better spend their time learning something else.  But what?  Isn't clear writing an attribute of an educated and civil society?  Apparently not.

Now, everyone from the age of two writes with their thumbs and prints letters on paper.  Attempts at cursive writing are primitive and sloppy in many cases.  Now, it seems, we are going back to the middle ages when people wrote "X" to sign their names and have no idea how to write cursive penmanship.  More is the pity.  Our society is poorer for the inability to read and write cursive language.  Thumb twiddling coded messages on smart phones is a mediocre substitute for a handwritten note.   Since some education gurus are so fascinated by the idea that students could learn something more important than cursive writing, the process of serious thought translated into worthy prose in pen and ink is a loss to be regretted.  A text message or a computer email will always be a poor and inferior substitute to a heartfelt written card or note.  And thus the Curmudgeonly Professor has put in his two cents in support of actually learning how to write complete words, complete sentences, and produce pieces of paper that become keepsakes in cedar chests, words that will not vanish into cyberspace with the delete key.

 

The End of the World Will Occur When We Can No Longer Buy Batteries

The world runs on batteries.  Batteries control almost every aspect of our lives.  We cannot exist without batteries.  The inventors and manufacturers of batteries should, by rights, be the richest creatures on earth, subject to a 1% rise in taxes from the Obama administration.

The thought of a global battery brownout occurred to me in a momen't inspiration a few minutes ago when my Kindle belched rudely to announce that I only had 15% battery life left.  How rude.  What am I to do while this marvel of human invention gets itself recharged?  When will someone invent a battery with perpetual life?

Just think about it.  Some of the things I depend on for batteries include my blood pressure monitor.  The other day while checking my blood pressure for the umpteenth time before I see my mean cardiologist this week my pressure shot up to 200.  "I'm a goner," I yelled to my wife.  But then I noticed that the dead battery signal was on.  So in went 4 new double A batteries and my pressure was 120/72.  Miraculous.  Crisis averted.  

I have several clocks that depend on batteries.  Usually when a battery dies, the clock stops.  Imagine.  Then I have to actually look at my watch to see what time it is until I get inspired, some times months later, to put a new battery in.  Putting the battery in isn't such a difficult thing, but twirling the teensy little wheel that resets the clock is a real pain, taking up to 15 seconds of my valuable time.  My electric toothbrush dies when the battery dies, so then I have to push the thing around manually.

Every time one of our dozen TV remotes doesn't work it usually takes a day or two before we wake up and realize the batteries have become deceased.  Why is that?  TV remotes are among the most crucial elements of modern life, without which we cannot watch NBA, NFL, Matlock, and my wife cannot watch All My Children, the abominable soap.  Computers die if not plugged in and are dependent on a battery.  I can't take photos on any of my cameras unless I have brains enough to check to see if any battery life remains. I used to have a self-winding Seiko watch which I had worn for 35 years and gave to my son who is still wearing it and it is still running without a battery.  I bought a new Seiko with a bright blue dial and stylish hands.  One day the thing stopped.  "My watch is broken," I yelled to my wife.  "I'll have to buy a new one."  "Check the battery," she said.  So I went to the watch battery store and paid 12 bucks to keep my watch going.  Cheaper than a new Seiko but meanwhile my son is still wearing my other watch, and it is still running, free of charge.  Where is justice in that? I had no idea I had purchased a battery operated Seiko.

In the days when we had kids at home, everything we bought them required 12 Double A batteries, which usually lasted a day or so.  Fortunately we are past that problem.  I no sooner put my hearing aids in when I get "beep beep beep", and then a bit later, more insistently, and rudely, "beep, beep, beep, beep, etc."  Usually at the start of a TV show or in the middle of church or at a restaurant.  Loosely speaking, as our restaurant life is typically limited to places like Carls' Junior.  What does that name mean?  I used to know but can't remember.  Then I have to take those little bitty things out and use my big fumble fingers to put a teensy little battery in and then stick the thing back in my ear again.  For something costing thousands of $$$ you'd think they could invent something better than that, wouldn't you?  Of course, they used to have to adjust them with a screwdriver and not on a computer, so I guess that is some improvement.

Do pacemakers run on batteries?  I wouldn't be surprised.  Every so often we have to make a special trip to Costco just to buy a whole new shopping cart full of batteries.  Then the garage door opener died and turns out that took a little teensy battery.  And the smoke detectors keep yapping at you until the 9V batteries are replaced at $100 apiece, usually placed 20 feet up in the air.  Then, rudely, my Toyota key no longer worked to open the doors or the trunk after lasting for 10 years.  I didn't know the key pusher thing had a battery in it and I had to hunt all over town until I looked behind me at the FreshMarket Pharmacy desk and behold, there it was, 9 bucks.

I'm sure I have only touched the surface on this battery business, but you get the point.  Our lives are useless, meaningless without batteries.  Without batteries, we cannot text while driving, thus endangering our lives and the lives of others, talk on our cell phones, often meaningless chatter, run our iPads, iPods, Kindles, Nooks, and all the other necessities of life.  Some politicians want to take us back 80 years to simpler days.  I say have at it.  Then I won't have to worry about buying so dang many batteries and replacing them or recharging them every five minutes.  After all, those folks 80 years ago got by without so many batteries, so why couldn't we?  Have a nice day.

The Main Mistakes Beginning Econ Students Made That Led to Poor Grades:

Here is a list of the main topics and terms that beginning economics students often failed to grasp, learn, recite, explain, in Econ 110:

• Supply.  A real toughie.  That's how much stuff you supply.  The more you get paid for it, the more you're willing to supply, right?  So which way does the supply curve slope?
• Demand.  How much stuff you want to buy.  Surprise.  The cheaper stuff is, the more you want to buy.  So if price is on the vertical axis and quantity demanded on the horizontal axis, which way does the demand curve slope?
• The intersection of supply and demand curves.  This is really advanced.  What happens at this point?  Quantity supplied equals quantity demanded!  Wow!
• Price elasticity.  Now students zone out here because the term seems too, too complicated.  Think rubber band.  If price goes up a bunch and you buy the same amount as before, stuff is inelastic.  Think insulin.  If price goes up a bunch and every body bails out and buys other cheaper stuff, think elastic.  Now was that so tough?
• Total spending in the economy.  C + I + G + NX.  Wow!  an Equation!  I don't do equations, you say.  C is consumption, the biggest chunk of Gross Domestic Product, I is investment, small % but mighty, G is government spending, and NX is net exports.  The sum of all this spending is Gross Domestic Product.  Was that so hard?  And yes, kiddies, a dollar spent on government spending has just as big an impact on the economy as a $ spent on a hamburger.  $1 = $1.  Politics don't matter.  A dollar is a dollar.  But try to convince the general population to whom $1 of G is $1 down the drain.  Oh my.
• Principle of Diminishing Marginal Utility.  Utility is satisfaction.  Diminishing is getting smaller.  If utility is diminishing, lo and behold, you get less satisfaction.  Or, for my slower students, just remember if you eat too many bananas, eventually you will barf.  I get this recited back to me by students who took my class 30 years ago.  They all watch the number of bananas they eat at once.

That covers our first month of econ 110, and you have mastered it in less than 5 minutes.  Yes, you do need to know this stuff for the exam.  Yes, you do need to know how to draw a supply and a demand curve.  Even on the same graph.  Yes, you do need to know that you should add C+I+G+NX to get GDP.  No, you cannot be excused from the exam to go deer hunting, get married, go home to take your laundry, play video games, go skiing, take a nap, or anything else.  If you have an appendectomy that day and you can prove you didn't fake it, you'll be excused.  If you left your textbook in Pocatello Idaho where you went for the weekend, tough.  If you think economics is just a bunch of hot air and not relevant to your blossoming career sorting debits and credits, your big mistake.  If your dad and your mom both took my class 20 years ago, just time enough for you to be born and get old enough to be a freshman, and they both told you econ was really, really tough and the worst class they ever took in college, more's the pity.  The general electorate hasn't shown a whole lot of promise in having a clue about basic economics.  If the lovebirds in the back row want to keep fooling around, please go out in the foyer.  For the rest of you, we will have a quiz tomorrow so if you spend your night playing intramural football and get 10 stitches in your head as a result, I expect to see you here bright and early at 8:00 a.m.  I promise to have a new joke to tell you then.  And no, you won't get a course evaluation form to fill out until the end of the semester.

Instructions to Students for the Curmudgeonly Professor's Economics Class

Good morning class, and welcome to Economics 110, Introductory Economics.  Before we begin the study of economics, there are a few matters that must be brought to your attention, as follows:

• Do not Twitter during class.
• Do not Tweet during class.
• Do not Text during class.
• Remove ear buds from your ears and do not listen to IPods or MP3s during class.
• Turn off all cell phones.  We do not want to hear the latest moronic ring tones all through class.
• Do not Facebook during class.
• Do not surf the internet during class.
• Do not blog during class.
• Do not read the student newspaper durng class.

These preliminary instructions will be augmented in our next lecture.  Violations of these rules will require that you take the class over again next semester.  Thank you.

The Teacher's Course Evaluation: Curse or Valid Indicator?

A few days ago I reviewed the book titled "Sway:  The Irresistable Pull of Irrational Behavior," which is an eloquent essay with enlightening examples of situations and characteristics that cause us to make irrational decisions.  Beginning on page 144, the authors (Brafman and Brafman) illustrate how our "pleasure center" can "hijack the altruism center."  The authors use the example of Community High in Ann Arbor, MI, a school "rich with opportunities for intellectual and creative freedom."  In the faculty's search to gain more independence from state regulations, they started a pilot program designed to improve class attendance and student performance.  So, on a random day during the last week of school, teachers whose classes had at least an 80% attendance level would be rewarded with a salary bonus that "equaled roughly 12 percent of their annual salary."

Now, the moral to the story kicks in.  Did the program work?  Actually, the attendance rate remained constant although the course completion rate rose.  But, and here's the real result:  The average GPA dropped from 2.71 to 2.18.  What happened?  Researchers found (p. 146) that the teachers shifted their focus to enticing students to come to class so they could get the salary reward.  The authors state that "Not only does our response to a monetary reward resemble our response to a drug like cocaine, but so does our drive to attain the reward."

While reading this discussion, my long-standing aversion to the application and evalution of teacher course evaluations kicked in.  Although other factors are brought into consideration, I have seen the course evaluation results carry enormous weight in salary and rank considerations.  I have also seen other faculty deliberately try all kinds of artificial schemes to hike their course evaluations.  I watched some teachers dole out all A's and B's, while some of us continued to remember the remaining letters of the grading alphabet: C's, D's, and F's.  Some teachers brought treats like Krispy Kremes on course evaluation day.  Some allowed students, in defiance of University policy, to skip the final exam.  Some were eminently willing to raise grades when students whined about them even though they probably had already received a grade higher than they deserved. 

Some students are objective in their evaluation of teachers and courses.  Some students become so pathologically angry that they write vicious diatribes on the course evaluation and then send a letter to the dean.  I found that at least 3 or 4% of my class members in large classes of 400 or more would write absolutely despicable comments on the course evaluation.  Of course, the evaluation is designed to protect the student's anonymity so that grades are not affected.  Moreover, teachers are not (supposedly) allowed to see the course evaluation results until the grades are submitted to the University.

Rank, salary, and tenure considerations are life-and-death matters for individual faculty members and for the University at large.  After spending any where from eight to ten or more years preparing to teach college, one would think that any one who survives that unforgiving gauntlet of torture in acquiring a Ph.D. would be ready to teach.  Some, sadly, are not. Unless a new Ph.D. has experience as a lecturing Teaching Assistant with critical evaluations of their performance, new Ph.D. hires are mostly "pot luck" when turning them loose in the classroom.  Some should never have sought a teaching career.  However, publishing high-quality research in refereed journals has saved many a mediocre or below-average teacher, since the University's research and scholarly reputation may be deemed more critical to survival and the awarding of grants and distinction than teaching awards. But mediocre course evaluations and the absence of published refereed research combined are often the kiss of death for an academic career.  The sometimes uncivil war between teaching and research has continued as long as the debate over whether Adam or Eve was at fault.

Looking back over my eight-plus years of college, we did not have the now-ubiquitous course evaluation in those days.  I doubt some of my very best and most valuable teachers would have scored tremendously high in communication and organization skills.  What they lacked in these departments, they excelled in brilliant and creative thought and in rigor of analysis and presentation.  A popular teacher may very well also be an outstanding teacher with high scores on course evaluations and, indeed, in many cases such teachers rise to the top of the academic echelons.  And students, however perverse they may appear at times, are not stupid.  They can see quickly through false fronts and marginal abilities.  But I have also seen a few teachers become absolutely demoralized and demolished by the course evaluation when, in my own estimation, they were doing a decent job in a very tough and unpopular subject.  The quest for money and academic survival may, indeed, sway academic behavior in the ways discussed by the authors of "Sway."  Moreover, the entire battle and issue of "teaching to the exam" in the No Child Left Behind presents infinite possibilities for analyzing distortions of the results of a reward system and its effects on learning and teaching performance.

What I Hate About Being Retired from Teaching Economics

Here is this miserable, disastrous economic and financial disaster haunting the U.S. and the world, and I can't be in the classroom with 400 eager, excited, entranced college students expounding, discussing, and arguing with them about what is going on today.  One thing about it, once college students start recognizing that they may have a tough time finding a job when they graduate, economics finally gets their attention. Fortunately, we didn't yet have those atrocious classroom annoyances like texting and Facebook when I quit teaching, so at least I didn't have to deal with that distraction.

If you are a math teacher, the procedure for calculating a derivative in calculus is probably not going to change from something that happened in the morning news.  Or if you are a history teacher, there are likely to be no new generals discovered in the Civil War over the weekend, even though research and scholarship continually provide new perspectives and ideas about how history evolved and who did what.  But economics is another matter, especially macroeconomics, economic policy, and money and banking.  And you had better show up in class informed about what is going on that very day if you want to be credible.

 I always required my students to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal and bring it to class each day.  I spent one entire class period at the beginning of the semester going through the Journal section by section, and showing them how to read the financial pages.  Of course, I warned them about the editorial pages where the left-hand editorial columns were always consistently strongly biased, but encouraging them to read all of the op-ed pieces which were nicely balanced among all economic and political perspectives.  We could usually find something in the paper that dealt with wherever we were in the course at the time.  Students often told me that they thought this little exercise was one of the most important things they learned in college, and that this exercise made their other classes easier and more understandable.

I started my teaching career long ago teaching, you will be amazed, courses in agricultural economics, including farm management and land economics.  I couldn't manage a farm if my life depended on it, but farm management was all about microeconomics, or economics of an individual entity like a farm or a business.  I then gravitated toward general economics, where I taught at least a dozen and a half different courses over the years.  I liked teaching transportation economics until the deregulation era and then about two-thirds of the material was extinct when you couldn't spend two weeks on the Interstate Commerce Commission or on airline and waterway regulation.  I also taught courses in public finance, state and local finance, natural resource economics, consumer economics, and research methodology.

My favorite courses, though, were economics principles courses to large sections of beginning students as well as macroeconomics and money and banking to upper level students and MBA students.  My all time favorite course, though was a readings course for MBA students where we worked through 12 books in a semester.  Many students told me that, although they didn't have time to study anything else that semester, they learned more of value about the real world of business and management than they did in their other, more clinical and analytical, courses because they had to think for themselves about why decisions were made and how people could have been so brain dead and stupid.

Most of all, I miss the students.  It has taken me a few years to miss the miserable, argumentative ones, and the ones who complained so much at home that their mommy and daddy showed up in my office to tell me I had prevented Junior from playing football, going into accounting, becoming a medical doctor, graduating, or one hundred and one other things.  Parents, increasingly, were becoming obstructionists in the teaching and learning process.  Students, increasingly, were becoming confrontational, believing firmly they were entitled to a higher grade.  Grading was continually being "dumbed down" with everyone seemingly having the right to be uniformly excellent. No more "good, better, and best" like the old Monkey Ward Catalogue.  But teaching is still the best profession in the world.  No where else is there quite the same opportunity to experience the exhilaration that comes from learning and opening one's mind to the world and what is in it.

How important is a College Education?

When I was very young, I never questioned the idea that I would somehow get a college education. I graduated from high school at 16, then left for the University of Wyoming a few months later with $75, no place to stay, no job, and not another cent from home for eight years of college. Yet I never thought finding jobs and places to stay were other than minor projects and I never doubted that I would be able to figure out how to finish college. Finishing three more graduate degrees was made possible by my wife working another four years while we accumulated four of our five children.

As I worked with thousands of college students over many years, some students faced what seemed like insurmountable odds to stay in college and finish their degrees. LDS students leaving for two-year missions just as their college program barely got underway often made focusing on college difficult while being concerned about where they would be sent and what they could expect. Some students, of course, never became converted to college and thought that college was just a waste of time. Particularly during the dot-com bubble years, and even after, precocious students who became skilled on all phases of computers were often tempted away for high-paying jobs before finishing their degrees.

I have written before about the shift in college attendance of married couples over the past several decades. When I was in school and students got married, wives quit school and "put their husbands through." Now, in my last years of teaching, married couples would trade baby carriers between classes and share baby tending and part-time job responsibilities so both could graduate.

My wife was a "put husband through" wife. She worked for four years while I pursued graduate school. When we were at Montana State working on my master's degree in agricultural economics, I came home after class to baby sit Russell while my wife went to her part-time job. We used her coat to cover him with at night, since we did not have an extra baby blanket. When we went to Michigan, we took our oldest son Russell and our three-week old son Ronald. We had virtually no money, and we had to scrounge for several weeks to find a place to live. And so it went. After eight years of college and four years of graduate school, we owed not one penny. We got not one penny of help from family or anyone else. We had no student loans, except for two or three very small loans at the University of Wyoming.

And then my wife decided she wanted a college degree. For years, she took classes at the University of Wyoming, Brigham Young University, Penn State, and Colorado State. She cleaned house and cooked and took care of five kids and a big house and worked part time and stayed up half the night doing her homework. At the age of 35, she received her degree in elementary education from the University of Wyoming.

I am probably recycling some of this information from earlier blogs, but no matter. My mother graduated from the University of Wyoming at age 57 after many, many years of correspondence courses, summer school, extension classes, and on-campus classes at UW. My wife's uncle Billy, long-time newspaperman with the Honolulu Advertiser and the Sacramento Bee, graduated from the University of Wyoming at age 74. A student at Colorado State asked me to help him one summer finish the last class he needed to graduate. I went to the infirmary to work with him. He graduated at the end of the summer and died a week later. His goal was to graduate.

I could write forever about students who overcame insurmountable obstacles, including brain tumors, dyslexia, cancer, recurring surgeries, pregnancies, and virtually every other obstacle and physical disability, and never gave up until they received their degree. I tutored a blind student in statistics at the University of Michigan who finished his Ph.D. and went on to a distinguished career.

Too often, we equate getting a degree with how much money we can make. It is easy to reason that if we can make a big income without graduating from college, we shouldn't waste our time in college. Some temptation remains to feel sorry for those still in college while some entrepreneurs are making huge sums of money. In general, higher incomes are positively correlated with college.

But here's the secret: We may want and need to to go college to make a better living, to become a teacher, an engineer, a lawyer, a doctor, or any one of thousands of other jobs. But if we go to college mainly to get rich, we are on the wrong boat. We go to college because we need to learn how to think, how to evaluate evidence, how to tear arguments apart, how to sort scientific information and figure out what we still need to know. We go to college because we need to focus outward from ourselves and think about how we can help others, in the classroom, on the athletic field, in the hospital room, in the counseling center, in the repair shop, on the police force, in the retail store, or wherever we end up working. Until we can use our knowledge for the betterment of our families, our communities, and our country, we have failed the educational test. We ultimately go to college to push the boundaries of what we know and how we can do things outward, upward, and in myriad new directions for the benefit of all mankind.

So many opportunities exist today for college educations. Home study and extension classes have grown meteorically. Computers and online classes make it possible to study anything anywhere in the world, within limits. One of my continuing education students called me from a drilling rig in the North Sea when he was stuck on one of my lessons. Learning is the most exciting activity of life. And the goal of a college degree should never be shunted aside with any excuse. Our family is now awaiting our daughter-in-law's completion of her college degree after being out of school for an untold number of years. She may graduate with her second-oldest daughter next spring. We keep asking her where she is going to work. She says she has no intention of working. She just couldn't feel right about things until she finished her degree.

Anyone can finish a college degree. If you are blind, you can learn. If you are 91, you can get a degree as a local Salt Lake lady achieved this year. If you have post-traumatic stress disorder, as one of my recent students had, you can get a degree. If you are poor, you can get a degree. If you are married and have a whole covey of kids, you can get a degree. If your life expectancy isn't all that generous, you can get a degree. If you don't understand English, you can learn English and get a degree. If you have any one of a dozen disabilities, you can get a degree. You can find tutors. You can find sympathetic supporters. As you embark on your learning odyssey, perhaps after many years' absence from school, perhaps with only a ninth grade high school education, perhaps while you are in drug rehab, perhaps after you have been told you are too slow, too dumb, too incapable of getting a degree, your life will change forever and the lives of those around you will change forever. Opening new doors, understanding things you have always wanted and yearned to understand, seeing where old ideas you have clung to may need to be overhauled, seeing where you, in turn, can reach out to others--seeking a college degree can be the beacon light that will save your life, restore your life, and provide a light that will shine on you for the rest of your life. Go to it.

Monday Morning and Class is Now in Session: We Finally Tell You How to Stop Being So Narrow Minded

Monday morning has arrived. Sunday was yesterday. Saturday was the day before. Please pay attention so we can begin. I know you are all ticked off, except for a few people who claim they don't like sports. In fact, the Curmudgeonly Professor is downright grouchy and irritated that the Utah Jazz got beat by the so-so New Jersey Nets, who looked like world champions beating the Jazz on a last second shot Saturday night.
And, imagine, that loss came one night after knocking off the league-leading and sensational Boston Celtics by eighteen points the night before. Go figure. Then the BYU Cougars, with the best winning record in their team history, and with all kinds of records for team and individual scoring, lost the Mountain West Tournament in Las Vegas to the University of Nevada Las-Vegas for the second year in a row. Everyone was careful not to point out too strenuously afterward that UNLV plays on their home court with throngs of screaming fans in the stands with only a relative few BYU fans to cheer for the Cougars. Or that BYU holds the national record in consecutive home court wins and that the outcome may have been different in Provo. Worse than losing was the melee after the game when Vegas fans stormed the floor, fights broke out, fans were taunted, someone ended up with a bloody face, and the outcome of a game in which UNLV played an exceptional second half remained tainted by the ignorance and bad primitive behavior of some of their fans. The Las Vegas media scarcely mentioned the whole mess, apparently believing that it never happened.

I realize that we must now get back on schedule and make up about three weeks of delays that have occurred because the Curmudgeonly Professor has found it necessary to provide ancillary information on topics relevant to your university education. Trying to think back, I believe we were discussing how we can continue to be as narrow minded tomorrow as we are today. And this topic arose, as we all remember, because we were discussing the role of repetition and habits in our lives, pointing out that it's o.k. to repeat habits that are good for us but that we might think about improving our lives by fixing up some of the attributes and actions that we persist in continuing, such as being narrow minded.

The first rule for continuing to be narrow minded is to suspend thinking. Do not think about an issue or a situation at all, or you will cloud your mind with pros and cons and you will end up befuddled thinking that, just possibly, you could have been wrong.

Second, never, never, ask yourself if there is another point of view on this subject. And, if someone offers another point of view, do not listen to them since your mind is already made up because you KNOW and you do not wish to come down from your lofty knowing perch and admit that someone else may just have some common sense that could affect your thinking on a given matter.

Third, read and listen to only information by people that you know ahead of time you will agree with because that will merely reinforce your views on how wrong everyone else is.

Fourth, never ask what information is missing here. No matter how objective presenters try to be, everyone has a point of view and they are likely to emphasize their own predilections, methods of analysis, and conclusions, without making enough allowance for considering missing information. And, no matter how hard we try, some information is likely to be missing, not by deliberate oversight, but because we just don't know enough about a subject to begin with. The same with reading books. Always keep in the back of your mind the question, "What is the author overlooking here?". And, "What information is omitted from this story or analysis?"

Fifth, when analyzing data, please do not look at data on all sides of an issue; just pick and choose the data that already support your preconceived conclusion. As my professor at Michigan used to say, "People use data like a drunk uses a lamppost, for support, but not for illumination."

Sixth, never look at the full range of consequences of a particular action, including consequences or results that may go against your conclusions on why or why not a given action may support your own biases and wishes. Journalists and newspaper headlines sometimes make this task difficult for us when they say that "such and such causes such and such," and we say, "See there, I told you so," when, in fact, such and such could also cause an overlooked result that gave credibility to the opposite side of an issue.

The heart of the matter, dear pupils, is that finding information we can rely on and base our decisions on is a difficult, complex, and challenging task that remains a lifetime quest for each of us. But always searching for missing information, alternative points of view, the validity of data, and alternative and overlooked conclusions can go a long way to helping us on the search for reliable knowledge about the world. And that is why we go to college, why we read widely on the entire spectrum of thought and opinion, why we think, why we continually search for new understanding, and why we need to consider whether we really are missing what we need to know if we truly want to continue being as narrow minded tomorrow as we are today. Class dismissed.

The Curmudgeonly Professor Considers Questions Students Ask Just Before An Exam

The first two or three weeks of a new class are usually quite pleasant. Students laugh quite easily at my jokes, smile a lot, and actually act interested, momentarily at least. And then comes the announcement, "Remember the exam next Monday. Remember, no makeups are allowed except for exceptional and unavoidable emergencies." No matter. In the fall, a popular question in Utah is "Can I be excused for the deer hunt?" Families in Utah some times make a religious phenomenon out of the deer hunt. Entire extended families go to some cold, miserable place in the mountains, set up tents, cooking fires, arm everyone from age 12 on up with high-powered hunting rifles, and chase the poor little deer up and down the ravines and across the valleys. Families often stake out the same campsite year after year. Deer hunting is more important than church to the true believers; it's more important, by far, than an economics exam; and, to hear people talk about it, is the absolute, most thrilling, most wonderful time of year to go up and freeze in the ice and snow for three our four days or a week to haul home some deer carcass that no one wants to eat anyway.

I always warn students on the first day of class: "If you find your true love this semester, kindly schedule your wedding ceremony on some day other than exam day." When true love takes over, exam day concerns go out the window. So I would usually get two or three of these excuses every term in a large class.

When I was at Penn State, three students came in one morning and said, "We missed your exam because we went to Philly and got drunk and couldn't get back to State College because no one could drive and we didn't want to get killed. We thought you would think that was a wise decision and appreciate our total honesty and excuse us from the exam we missed." The Curmudgeonly Professor was not that easily bamboozled. The wisdom of Solomon is required in assessing student excuses for missing exams.

One Student's Formula For Success

I once had a student who consistently scored near perfection on his exams. Many students continually asked me when I was teaching, "How can I improve my grade?" I was so impressed with my successful student that I asked him, "How do you do it?" His answer was concise: "I came to class, took notes, read the book, and learned the material." There you have it, struggling students who are forever looking for a magic short-cut to academic success. Come to class. Listen and take careful notes. Read the textbook. And, in the process, learn the material. There are no short-cuts. There are no magic paths. There are no quick learning pills you can take. There are no substitutes for the hours of discipline and effort required to learn the material. The sad thing is, so few students really follow these rules and then must continually ask me how they can overcome their low test scores.

COMMENTS

The curmudgeonly student would spend all Sunday morning in bed with lots of pillows, strong coffee and the 2-300 hundred pages she had to plow through for the week. Then she would stand at her easel for the 8 hours each studio class outside of school, required for homework. (9 credits of painting, 24hrs a week in class, 24hrs a week outside. This is undergraduate.) That was years ago, when I became deaf to Med students complaints. Higher education takes a bite from the old schedule.

Posted by: molly | March 17, 2008 at 04:21 PM

The Curmudgeonly Professor Reveals Further Favorite Questions That Students Ask

As a followup to discussing earlier favorite questions of students, the Curmudgeonly Professor wishes to consider today a popular variant of earlier questions such as "Will it be on the test?", and "Do we have to know that?" When all else fails, and students have been told that they do, indeed, need to take a few moments off from playing video games, courting, making lime jello with shredded carrots, texting, Face Booking, My Spacing, cell phone calling, daydreaming, watching American Idol, watching the Utah Jazz or whatever team is in your area, worrying about their grades, calling home for more money, and other important activities occupying the time and concerns of today's finest academic youth, then they come up with this whopper: "How well do we need to know that?". Then, "Do we have to know how to work the formula and do the math?". Followed by, "Are you going to make us draw the graphs?" Or, perhaps, "Do we need to know just a little about this topic, or a lot?", which you recognize as a variant on the first question. Or, "If we know what the general principle or theory of this topic is, will that be enough for the exam? And that is just the beginning.

Make a mistake in providing inferences, shaded suggestions, incomplete instructions, sympathetic gestures to the overworked and over stressed, and you, the unfortunate instructor, will be bombarded with whines and complaints after the exam. "But you told us, Professor Curmudgeon, that we didn't really have to know how do the long division as long as we knew how to add and subtract and I can't do long division past two numbers."
Followed by, "I have it in my notes that you said you weren't going to stress this on the test as long as we had a basic understanding of this principle, and I have a basic understanding of it, and know the basic information far more thoroughly than you explained in class, and your test question was so, so unfair and misleading and ambiguous and unclear and tricky and deceptive." Or, "How can you expect us to know how to draw these graphs?" "I really, really knew the material and I worked much harder than Ebenezer who got an A and I even had to explain half the material to him before the exam."

Dear aspiring instructor and potential professor, no one explains this stuff in graduate school. All you do in graduate school is cram what would normally take five to ten years to learn into two or three years, take a series of exams to prove that you have memorized all of it and can regurgitate it back in a scholarly fashion, and then you are turned loose on a crop of new and smiling, cheerful, excited college students just waiting for you to make a blunder before they pounce. Oh yes, they look so innocent, but they are wise to your ways and to the pitfalls of the beginning professor, or even the professor who has taught for 30 years and should have retired 20 years ago. But remember, most of them are anxious to learn something so don't let the antics and shenanigans of the agitators and troublemakers sidetrack you from teaching what you spent 10 or 12 years of college learning. You have to just ignore the sideshows that some students like to display, which they undoubtedly became experts at in kindergarten and have honed their skills ever since.

The Curmudgeonly Professor Further Reviews Favorite Questions That Students Ask

While the subject is warm, the Curmudgeonly Professor wishes to offer further wisdom and insights about the questions that students ask. On the first response posted below yesterday's discourse on this topic, my brother-in-law, who is an English professor at Utah Valley State, and who, therefore, is exceptionally qualified by experience and academic credentials to expand the list of student questions, indicated that students who have lost sleep and stay home to have a little nappie then ask if they missed anything. What the learned English professor omitted in his observation, however, is the next question "Could you just go over with me what I missed if I come to your office?"

The latter question pops up quite often after students extend their vacation beyond the two or three days allowed at Thanksgiving, for instance, to a week or ten days. Since most schools cancel classes the Wednesday afternoon before Thanksgiving, students generally reason this way: I only have two classes Monday, one on Tuesday, and one on Wednesday (why is Wenzday spelled wed-nez-day?"), then, logically thinking backward, they realize that, gee whiz, they only have two classes on Friday, so why not skip town Thursday afternoon and extend the vacation through two weekends, or for ten or eleven days, at least? Then the little darlings show up in class the following Monday after a week at the beach or on the ski slopes and show up, all tanned and rested. They pop up cheerfully after class with a smile, and ask, "Dr. Blood, (students only call me Doctor when they know they are in the soup and are trying to make points, so to speak) did I miss anything?" And then, the fatal mistake, "Could you just go over with me what I missed if I come to your office?" "Certainly, Junior or Marybelle, I would be thrilled to take a half hour or an hour out of my limited time between classes to give you a private tutorial session since I know that you needed the rest and your tired little minds were already overstrained with a superfluous quantity of trivial knowledge which you never intend to remember beyond the final exam anyway. Just come on up. I'll serve punch and cookies. And give your parents my best regards for raising such devoted and able scholars." Stuff like that.

One of my favorite post-Thanksgiving student consultations came from a charming young lady who told me on Monday after the holiday, "I just got engaged over the weekend, will you please sign my course drop slip. I'm just so happy that I don't need to take the final, which I know I couldn't pass anyway." Oh dear young lady. You may actually, we hope not, encounter far more problems and miseries than you ever would have if you would have continued to come to this nice comfortable class room and try to learn something. But good luck and congratulations. I don't actually say all that, of course; but I'd like to some times.

And then the further comment, from my niece, Laura, who is a fourth grade teacher, reminds us that students learn young to whine and complain as they ask her, "Do I have to do that?" Mother always had an answer to that question, and it was never the answer we really wanted to hear. So why bother asking it?

The learning process is indeed a troublesome one, at times, but for those who want to learn, are motivated to learn, or who can be motivated to learn, it works extremely well. The rest of them just plan to go to work on Wall Street anyway, buy a BMW or a Jaguar, and spend several years learning what they wish they would have paid attention to in college. Oh well.

The Curmudgeonly Professor Reviews Favorite Questions That Students Ask

As an elder statesman, the Curmudgeonly Professor will review today the favorite questions that students ask so that you will be prepared to cope with them the first day you stand before a section of 400 eager, aspiring, yakking, inattentive, bored, and, in some cases, combative, students. Remember at the start that these young men and women are the future of our country no matter how they may appear today and no matter what questions they may ask.

The most popular all-time question students like to ask is, "Will it be on the test?" This question usually pops up from people like Molly in the back row in the middle of a detailed hour-long exposition on why marginal costs must equal marginal revenues if the firm is to maximize profits or minimize losses. After displaying my professorial skills with multi-colored overhead transparencies and numerous graphs, a hand goes up in the back row, probably Molly. Question: "Will this be on the test?" I try to collect my wits and keep my patience for the 3,289th time after hearing this very same question in all of it's permutations and combinations. What I would like to say is, "Well, maybe it will be and maybe it won't be. You have read three chapters in a 2,000 page textbook on this topic, and I have spent two lecture hours explaining it just because we needed some way to kill time. I obviously was just kidding you when I said in my ten-page syllabus, in which I thought I had made every necessary threat and really, really, laid down the law and the class rules, that you would be held accountable for all lecture material and all assigned readings. But I didn't really mean it. I don't want to torture your still-maturing brains with such pedantic and difficult-to-understand material as theories and charts and graphs."

But, if I did so, I know I would run the risk of increasing the number of students who would write on their course evaluation that "The Curmudgeonly Professor does not speak respectfully to students. He talks nasty to us and makes us feel bad. He is undoubtedly the worst teacher I have ever had since kindergarten. Besides that I hate economics to begin with and there is no reason I should have to take it. I have always gotten straight A's until you gave me a D minus on the midterm which was unfair, unfair, unfair. I am going to write a letter to the President of the University and the Dean and you'll see what will happen to you. Besides that my daddy just made a major financial contribution to the athletic department."

Well, that information is just for starters. After we disposed with the first question about what will be on the test, another hand goes up in the back row: "Do we have to know that?" As the astute reader will have noticed, this question is variant (A) of the first question which has many variations, all meant to exasperate the Professor and get him to give a stupid answer like, "Of course not, dear boy, you don't have to know anything; in fact you can graduate from here with a degree and not remember 10% of what was crammed down your throat in the six years it took you to graduate." But if I succumbed to the temptation to be sarcastic, then I would have a riot on my hands because every student would line up outside my door yelling at me "You said we didn't have to know that, and then you put it on the test."

This tutorial on student questions is obviously just a beginning installment on that topic, as this post has already exceeded its intended length. We will continue down the road at some future time. If you have any questions, please don't ask them. I've heard them all before. And my answer will still be the same: "Yes".

Comment:
--------
Dwight, I have to add the next most irritating comment when a student
has missed the class to catch up on their sleep, and they ask "Did I
miss anything?" or one level up, "Did we do anything important
yesterday?"
You are right on. I have been there and done that.
pt

Comment:
--------
I suppose I should be comforted to know that students are consistent,
from 9 to 19. I think that I get those same questions from my fourth
graders on a regular basis, along with the simplified version, "Do we
have to do that?"

Commenter name: Laura Tanner

Ascending the Learning Curve

JANUARY 04, 2008

What I Did Learn and What I Should Have Learned in High School

My first memorable class in high school was freshman algebra. The first teacher was unique because he could aim a wad of chewing tobacco a significant distance and hit a can he kept by the radiator. He retired in the middle of the year and we got, instead, a very competent and stern Norwegian replacement. I took to him instantly and became an expert student in freshman algebra, thanks in part to my inspiration in seeking to impress the aforementioned girl across the aisle from me.

My second memorable class was sophomore English. We had a brand new teacher just out of college who was lively and energetic and not much older than some of the students. She started us reading Shakespeare and memorizing lines from some of the plays. We had a class contest to see who could memorize the most lines from The Merchant of Venice which I set forth to win, and eventually did. My love of Shakespeare began in that class. A few years ago, I assigned The Merchant of Venice in my MBA readings class at Brigham Young University. The women students loved it. If you don't know why women students would have reacted favorably to the play, you need to read it and reach your own conclusion. So, freshman algebra plus Shakespeare make two memorable classes. About three years ago, I was delighted to see my tenth grade English teacher at our annual high school class reunion for the first time in over fifty years, still sprightly and energetic in her late seventies.

We had a bright and energetic tenth grade history teacher, but I seemed to annoy her, some of which I admit with shame that I did on purpose. I did, however, develop a love for history which has stayed with me for life. During my junior year, my vocational agriculture teacher began coaching me for the FFA public speaking contest, in which I placed second or third in the Wyoming state contest my first attempt, and then won in my senior year. I have rarely experienced the tremendous advantages I had in learning from the dozens and dozens of hours my teacher spent working with me on my speeches, hauling me around to present it at every civic and social group imaginable. During my senior year, my speech was on the economic problems of the American farmer in the post World War II era in 1949. This experience influenced me ultimately to obtain my bachelor's and master's degree in agricultural economics.

My sophomore, junior, and senior learning progress in classes was clouded by my time commitments for being overly involved in extracurricular activities. After being sophomore class president, I was paper editor and then annual editor, local and Wyoming State FFA president, in the band, and in whatever other organization I could sign up for. I graduated at age 16, started college before I turned 17. I was not very grown up and had little idea of the future penalties of not having a stronger academic background in high school, particularly in mathematics. I did manage to end high school with the highest grade point average for the boys, but I still feel guilty about that because my average was largely a fraud due to getting straight A's in band and vocational agriculture for four years. At least I received a four-year honor scholarship to pay my tuition at the University of Wyoming. During my senior year, I was terrible in chemistry and geometry, and ultimately paid a price for this lack of attention.

The speaker at our high school commencement was Dr. Gale McGee, history professor at the University of Wyoming. I thought Professor McGee was the best speaker I had ever heard, and ultimately took four history classes from him at the University of Wyoming. McGee ultimately went on to become a U.S. Senator and Ambassador to the Organization of American States. After nearly eight years of college, he remained one of the half dozen or so most outstanding teachers I ever had. If only I could have figured out a way to make a living teaching history instead of economics, I might have had a more productive academic life since my lack of mathematics prowess always held me back in my progress as an economist.

So thus I was turned loose on the world. I was competent in English and social sciences, and incompetent in mathematics and science. I had no foreign language, a deficiency I would pay dearly for when I was completing my doctorate a few years later. But I did appreciate the teachers that I had and the education that I did gain, recognizing that my deficiencies were largely my own fault. I would ultimately struggle a bit to succeed in college and graduate school by competing with students with superior early training in mathematics.

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DECEMBER 27, 2007

The Beginnings of Learning

As I reflect on the next nine years of school until I graduated from high school, I have a hard time identifying specific learning experiences. Our fourth grade teacher read Heidi to us, which endeared her to us forever. I missed three and a half months of the fifth grade from a mysterious illness, during which time my mother supervised my lessons sent home from school with my sisters. Sixth grade meant I was moved to the desk immediately in front of the teacher so I would no longer bother the girl sitting in front of me. My main learning memory of the sixth grade is that I remember that we drew and colored a map of France. Seventh and eighth grade were a blur. I was informed that I would not be admitted to the National Junior Honor Society because I had a bad attitude. I was not informed of this egregious behavior at any time before my omission was announced, or I might have tried to do something about it. I had no idea that I had a bad attitude. In seventh grade science, Mrs. Strong tried to teach us whether the sun revolved around the earth, or the earth around the sun, a phenomenon which, like medieval doubters, I still have difficulty comprehending because I was not listening. Which is it? I remember that our music teacher told me that I certainly could not sing, which I believed all of my life and therefore rarely tried to sing except while milking the cows or driving the tractor on endless summer days while still at home or when I could annoy my four sisters.

In grade school, one of my teachers branded me for life with the statement that "Dwight starts lots of things, but never finishes anything." I guess that gave me a permanent excuse since I knew from an early age that I could never finish anything, so why bother?

By ninth grade, I was assigned a seat across the aisle in freshman algebra from a new and very pretty dark-haired and dark-eyed girl who had just moved to town. New kids in school were somewhat rare in our small rural school, so this event was one of exceptional interest. I promptly developed a huge crush on her, which facilitated my brilliant study of math and my ability to earn straight A's. My huge crush and her lack of interest in me both never wavered all through high school, so I concluded I had wasted my time trying to figure out how to divide symbols by each other and make them equal.

My sister and I had discovered school band in the eighth grade, an activity which we both followed through high school graduation. I started out on the baritone and switched to the tuba, an instrument I dearly loved. But mainly in high school I discovered extra curricular activities. Boy did I love extra curricular activities, and the more the better. I basically majored in FFA, class officers, student council, student newspaper, senior annual, and any other activity that came along. I got excused from lots of classes to take stuff downtown to the local newspaper, some times negligently stopping off at Funk's pool hall for a quick round of slop or eight ball. I ended up editing both the school paper and the senior annual, much to the chagrin of others who might have done a better job than I did. Future Farmers of America was a great substitute for class work since we got to travel to national and state conventions, judging contests, and, during the post WWII era, occasionally be excused to go and pile dry beans or pick spuds or top sugar beets in the labor shortage that prevailed during that time. I still have a scar on my little finger caused by the jerk behind me in the row of beets who was fooling around with his lethal beet topping knife and slashed my finger, necessitating a trip to the doctor's office for stitches. I wound up Wyoming state FFA president and won the state FFA public speaking contest, placing third in the western regional contest. I serenaded the cows at home with my classic tuba solo Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep for which I received a high rating at the district music festival if not appreciation from the cows.

I did, however, learn a few things in high school, and will try to remember what those things were in our next installment.

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DECEMBER 13, 2007

The Early Beginnings of Learning

My mother had been an elementary school teacher when she married my dad, so we children were destined to be the beneficiaries of her schoolmarm skills and instincts. I was born in 1932 in rural Penrose, Wyoming, a community of small farms midway between the towns of Powell and Lovell. We lived in a two-room little brown house which, by today's standards, would likely be called a shack. The house was uninsulated. We had no running water, no indoor bathroom, no telephone, and no electricity. In 1939, electricity finally was brought to our little valley by the Rural Electrification Administration. My dad was gone during most of the first nine years of my life to find work, taking the little Model A roadster with him, leaving Mom without a car. Mail was slow, and my dad was a tardy letter writer, and Mom waited anxiously each day for the rural mailman to see if he would stop by our mailbox or just drive on by. My older sister Louise was born a year before me, and my younger sister, Liz, was born soon after. A few years later, three other children were added to our family.

My mother coped during those difficult years with blizzards, cold weather, summer heat, and loneliness. She tried to keep the little house warm by burning a little coal and a lot of green cottonwood chunks. She was faced with worries about croupy kids, tummy aches, and all of the other uncertainties of life. She had no money and rarely had a ride to town to buy a few absolute necessities. We mostly subsisted on what she raised in her garden and canned for the winter. She claimed, as she wrote later about the Great Depression, that "We made it through the Great Depression, and it wasn't all that bad." My grandparents did live less than a mile away, but my independent mother liked to take care of things herself.

During these early years, Mother often read to us from her treasured volume of Children's Literature which had been her college textbook and which was one of the few children's books we had access to in our home. Mom ordered boxes of books to be mailed to us from the Park County Library in Cody. She had kept various issues of The Instructor magazine from her school-teaching days which I and my sisters frequently perused. In those days before childrens' imaginations were taken away from them, we depended on our imaginations and improvisations to entertain ourselves. One of our favorite pastimes was to play school, lining up two chairs for two of us while the third was the "teacher." We cut, we pasted, we colored, we traced on the window panes. We invented make-believe families of characters that we kept expanding and improving on as the years went by. It was probably no coincidence that Louise, Liz, and I all became teachers.

My sister Louise started school a year before I did, leaving me and Liz to fend for ourselves until Louise arrived home from school late after a long and bumpy school-bus ride, since we lived twelve miles from town and the school bus route was many miles longer. What Louise did when she came home from school was to teach me what she had learned that day. Thus, I learned how to read before I started first grade. First grade was exceptionally boring. I was in a class of about fifty two first-graders, long before school administrators started worrying about pupil-teacher ratios of twenty to one, or so. I already knew how to read, how to color inside the lines, how to cut and paste, and other skills necessary to succeed in the first grade. I sat impatiently while others stumbled over words and struggled with numbers. I was the only one from my first grade who was allowed to have a library card so I could check out books from the Park County Branch Library a block or so away from my school. I still remember what the first book I checked out looked like even if I can't remember the title. I was not really that smart; I simply had been the beneficiary of my sister's precocious school teacher abilities.

My journey in ascending the learning curve had begun. I lasted only six weeks in the second grade. My teacher was Miss Black, a stern and no-nonsense mentor of second graders. Every Monday morning, we were supposed to stand up and give a spiel on "What I did over Saturday and Sunday." Our routine in isolated Penrose was never different from week to week. Thus, I and the girl across the row from me began improvising more adventurous stories. Miss Black did not find this creativity amusing. One day, she told me to follow her up the back stairs of the red brick Eastside Grade School and deposited me unceremoniously in Miss Joneson's third grade class. I was now about a full head shorter and one to two years younger than my classmates. The main difference between the second and third grade was that Miss Joneson encouraged make believe and fantasy. Each row in class was expected to prepare an original play, rehearse it outside during recess by the red brick boiler room behind the school, and present it to their eager third-grade classmates once each week. Other than that, arithmetic involved double columns of numbers which meant carrying and adding the second column. After that, there was more coloring, more interesting workbooks, and more boredom. I was placed in my sister Louise's third grade room, which I am not sure was a wise strategic decision by the teachers since Louise had no forewarning and my inglorious promotion was a shock to her. I remained with her through the last ten years of school and we graduated together in 1949. But I was relieved that it was o.k. to make up stuff in the third grade without stern admonitions from my second-grade teacher. That one development and the recognition by our perceptive teacher that fantasy was important in the lives of young children seemed like a monumental incremental shift up the learning curve.

Mom, Liz kneeling, Louise, and me, about age 6

href="http://dmblood.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/12/14/dwights_3d_grade_class.jpg">
My third grade picture. I am the shortest one in the back row.
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DECEMBER 10, 2007

Notes on Learning and Teaching

My purpose in writing this blog is to share teaching and learning experiences gained during my nearly sixty years spent in classrooms from 1938 when I entered first grade at Eastside Grade School in Powell, Wyoming when I was six years old until I retired at age seventy from Brigham Young University. Except for two years that I worked for the Wyoming State Legislature and a scant year I spent working at the Treasury Department in Washington, D. C., I was either a student or a teacher or an academic researcher, usually all three at once, during the remainder of all those years.

By the time I retired, I reached two conclusions: (1) I was finally starting to get the hang of what I had been trying to do for many years, and (2) I would never really learn how to touch the hearts and minds of my students in the way that I would really like to have done. Both teaching and learning are humbling experiences. Both teach us how much we need to learn, how hard it is sometimes to learn it, and how difficult it can be to retain and apply what we have so laboriously learned.

I know of no more rewarding way to spend a long career than in a classroom full of students. I do not miss the exams and the arguing over grades and the treadmill that starts on the first day of the semester and ends after the last exam is graded and the grades are submitted. But I do miss the students. I lived in a world of young people all of my life. It was my privilege to share their trials, their hopes, and their dreams. Being a college student is a period fraught both with tremendous opportunities, and with monumental anxieties. Trying to mature out of adolescence at the same time that they must chart a course for their majors, their future careers, choose their spouses, figure out how to finance their way through school, study for exam after exam, write paper after paper, get a little sleep here and there, and try to have a good time--the juxtaposition of these and other problems and tasks are enough to cause anyone tremendous anxieties.

Now I spend 24/7 with my wife, who I think grows tired of my incessant attempts to tease and entertain her. She is a very pleasant person, and suffers most of my annoyances without serious complaint. However, I miss the knocks on the door, the "got a minute?" requests, the interchange in the classroom, the writing of letters of recommendation for law school, medical school, MBA school, graduate schools of all kinds, or for employment.
I miss having young people bring by their prospective or recent spouses and honor me by introducing them to me. I miss students who have been out of school for a few years who stop back by my office to see me, sometimes bringing their wife and children. I even miss the students who perennially thought the exams were too hard or that I didn't grade leniently enough. I miss students who tell me years after that they always remembered one thing, in particular, that I told them that influenced them in their lives. I miss the exuberance of youth, of young people for whom the future may hold great uncertainty, but a future for which they approach with great courage and determination in seeking to achieve their goals.

Beginning at Penn State, then at the University of Wyoming and Colorado State University, and, finally, spending the last twenty plus years of my career at Brigham Young University, I was privileged to have somewhere around twenty thousand students pass through my classrooms. I shudder to think whether I wasted their time or whether I made any lasting impression, since my subject was economics and students often listed this class as one of their most dreaded subjects.

So I will begin the story of my own teaching and learning odyssey. I hope that others may be willing to share with me uplifting stories of their own teaching experiences. And I hope that some of my stories will provide a source of inspiration to others at whatever stage they are on their own learning curve.

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