Category: Teaching

And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.

Workload, timelines, advisors, funding, pressure

A very good blog post on what to expect from a PhD program (and especially what the university itself won’t tell you): So You Want To Go To Grad School (in the Academic Humanities)?

Two paragraphs which are especially informative for people who don’t have recent personal experience in a PhD program:

The most important person in the process is your advisor, who is generally a senior member of the faculty in your department who shares your specialization. I struggle to find words to communicate how important this person will be during your graduate experience.. Graduate study at this level is effectively an apprenticeship system; the advisor is the master and the graduate student is the apprentice and so in theory at least the advisor is going to help guide the student through each stage of this process. To give a sense of the importance of this relationship, it is fairly common to talk about other academics’ advisors as forming a sort of ‘family tree’ (sometimes over multiple ‘generations’). Indeed, the German term for an advisor is a doktorvater, your ‘doctor-father’ (or doktormutter, of course) and this is in common use among English-language academics as well and the notion it suggests, that your advisor is a sort of third parent, isn’t so far from the truth.

If you are considering graduate school with an eye towards continuing in academia who you choose as your advisor will be very important: academia is a snooty, prestige conscious place and your advisor’s name and prestige will travel with you. But there’s more than that: your advisor, because they need to check off on every step of your journey and you will need their effusive letter of recommendation to pursue any kind of academic job has tremendous power over you as a graduate student. You, by contrast, have functionally no power in that relationship; you are reliant on the good graces of your advisor.

Related:

Elite overproduction and the superfluous man

My friends Patrick and Margot gave me a paperback of Mikhail Lermontov’s 1840 novel A Hero of Our Time, translated by Paul Foote.

Reading the introduction, I was struck by the similarity between the idea of the protagonists of Russian novels from this period as “superfluous men” “set apart by their superior talents from the mediocre society in which they were born, but doomed to waste their lives, partly through lack of opportunity to fulfil themselves, though also, in most cases, because they themselves lacked any real sense of purpose or strength of will” and the notion of “elite overproduction” recently discussed in The Economist and elsewhere.

The introduction quotes the Russian literary critic Belinsky explaining how the Byronic protagonists of the novels of this period must be “characterized either by decisive inaction, or else by futile activity.”

Defining their term, The Economist says:

Elite overproduction can also help explain the malaise gripping the rich world of late. It has become extraordinarily difficult for a young person to achieve elite status, even if she works hard and goes to the best university. House prices are so high that only inheritors stand a chance of emulating the living conditions of their parents. The power of a few “superstar” firms means that there are few genuinely prestigious jobs around. Mr Turchin reckons that each year America produces some 25,000 “surplus” lawyers. Over 30% of British graduates are “overeducated” relative to their jobs.

These two related concepts seem to illustrate some of the pathologies of our partly-meritocratic but also increasingly oligarchic society, where one-time educational status markers are being eroded through a race for credentials which democratizes participation but leaves everyone who succeeds with less distinction. People who generations ago would have ended their educational careers bored out of their brains and doing the absolute minimum in high school now seem to frequently add on four more years of the same in college, hoping for but less and less in a position to expect social status and economic security as a result.

Related:

Mental health and PhD programs

Even without a pandemic-driven lockdown and absence of in-person social life, grad school involves a lot of psychological and mental health challenges. It’s extremely hard to work on a gigantic solo project for years on end and to structure your time with no day-to-day management or supervision. It’s also hard when most people in your life have at least a somewhat distorted sense of what a PhD involves. One well-meaning response which I find frustrating is when people assert extreme confidence in my abilities and probability of success when they have no information about how the program is actually going. Confidence without evidence is wearying rather than heartening for me.

Anyhow, I just came across a paper in Research Policy which looks into some of these dynamics:

Results based on 12 mental health symptoms (GHQ-12) showed that 32% of PhD students are at risk of having or developing a common psychiatric disorder, especially depression. This estimate was significantly higher than those obtained in the comparison groups. Organizational policies were significantly associated with the prevalence of mental health problems. Especially work-family interface, job demands and job control, the supervisor’s leadership style, team decision-making culture, and perception of a career outside academia are linked to mental health problems.

I’m having trouble finding it now, but I remember an earlier article about how PhD students are pretty much by definition those who experienced a lot of academic success earlier in their lives, in the much more structured conditions of undergraduate and perhaps master’s programs. Going from that to a situation where there are far fewer opportunities for incremental successes (working toward getting the whole dissertation done and defended), poor program completion rates, and an extremely challenging (it’s fair to say hopeless for most) academic job market definitely creates mental strain.

When people ask me now about the wisdom of starting a PhD, I give them two warnings. First, I tell them that it’s only worth doing if you enjoy being in school so much that you are willing to sacrifice considerable lifetime earnings and financial security in retirement, since almost all employers would prefer job experience to a PhD and the process of getting through one is expensive and debt-inducing. Second, I warn them that all PhD programs carry a risk that you will not finish because of factors that have nothing to do with your competence or determination. There is always a real chance that the time you have put in to it will amount to nothing in terms of credentials because factors outside your control force you to stop. Indeed, feeling powerless and not in control of your own fate is probably a central reason why PhDs are so stressful, why comparatively few people finish, and why the grad school environment encourages mental health problems.

Related:

Presentation software

PowerPoint is the scourge of critical thinking. It encourages fragmented logic by the briefer and passivity in the listener. Only a verbal narrative that logically connects a succinct problem statement using rational thinking can develop sound solutions. PowerPoint is excellent for displaying data; but it makes us stupid when applied to critical thinking.

Mattis, Jim and West, Bing. Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead. 2019. p. 182

Books and the Marine Corps

Reading is an honor and a gift from a warrior or historian who—a decade or a thousand decades ago—set aside time to write. He distilled a lifetime of campaigning in order to have a “conversation” with you. We have been fighting on this planet for ten thousand years; it would be idiotic and unethical to not take advantage of such accumulated experiences. If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you. Any commander who claims he is “too busy to read” is going to fill body bags with his troops as he learns the hard way. The consequences of incompetence in battle are final. History teaches that we face nothing new under the sun. The Commandant of the Marine Corps maintains a list of required reading for every rank. All Marines read a common set; in addition, sergeants read some books, and colonels read others. Even generals are assigned a new set of books that they must consume. At no rank is a Marine excused from studying. When I talked to any group of Marines, I knew from their ranks what books they had read. During planning and before going into battle, I could cite specific examples of how others had solved similar challenges. This provided my lads with a mental model as we adapted to our specific mission.

Mattis, Jim and West, Bing. Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead. 2019. p. 42

30 papers left

If the plan to finish the PhD by the end of August holds — along with the pattern of never getting a summer TA position — this batch of second year political science papers will be the last undergraduate essay grading I ever do.

That would be most welcome. While there is a nurturing sort of grader who focuses on finding something to approve of in each submission, my approach is to hold firm sets of criteria in mind for each range of grades and then work to fairly assign each paper to the right one based on the ways in which it is insufficient according to the criteria for a higher one.

Actually teaching people how to improve their writing would require a lot more one-on-one interaction than U of T provides. When students want to meet about their papers I set aside an hour for each one, which rapidly becomes unpaid since I am not assigned anywhere near that many hours for student contact. Still, it is worthwhile because it shows how students at every level of skill can benefit from detailed engagement with exactly what is expected in a university paper: whether that is finding a few scattered pieces of an argument that could have been presented in a convincing and well-supported way, or adding more nuance and consideration of counterarguments to a paper than is already very strong.

My tutorial objectives

  1. Make students feel their time has been used well
  2. Give them an opportunity to comment on an important topic
  3. Deepen their understanding of concepts necessary for success in their papers and exams
  4. Point them to ideas beyond the scope of the course, but which they can look into on their own
  5. Make everyone feel respected