Friday Fragments

On Tuesday, my “election brain” was so bad that I misread emails, lost keys and was just generally discombobulated for the better part of the day. That night I couldn’t even focus long enough to write a blog post.

The major local headline, as far as I’m concerned, is that The Girl voted for the first time. That represents a 33 percent increase in our family’s voting bloc. I expect us to be courted assiduously in 2024.

The major national story that should receive more attention, I think, is that the 18- to 30-year-old group showed up in force. That’s unusual, especially for a midterm election. And among white voters, the 18-to-30 group is dramatically more progressive than their parents. Contrary to stereotype, that wasn’t always true. My cohort came of age during the Reagan years; back then, among middle-class whites, being anything left of center was considered downright strange. (Suzanne Vega’s song “Left of Center” captured it: “in the outskirts, in the fringes, in the corner …”) That’s not true anymore, at least in suburban and urban areas.

The Dobbs decision was probably an immediate catalyst for youth turnout, for obvious reasons. But I suspect the reasons for their higher participation go beyond that.

Here’s hoping they keep showing up. The antidote to extremism is broad participation.

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I got a kick out of the Inside Higher Ed story about simple interventions to prevent cheating. It reminded me of my favorite trick, which I adapted from some professors I’d had as an undergraduate. This was for in-class, timed exams.

The week before an exam, I’d give the students five essay questions. I told them (correctly) that three of the questions would appear on the exam, and they’d have to answer two. They could bring one index card to the exam, no more than four by six inches, on which they could handwrite whatever they wanted. They had the week to figure out how best to fill out the index card.

The savvier students would figure out pretty quickly that they could safely ignore one of the five questions, so they’d prepare for the other four. Some of them couldn’t believe their luck, gobsmacked that I was such a sap as to give them permission to bring a cheat sheet. The smarter ones figured out that preparing the cheat sheet for maximum effectiveness involved studying. I remember a student later laughing and accusing me of tricking him into studying. I was guilty as charged.

The handwritten part of the requirement was key. I didn’t want them just printing and pasting. They had to make choices about what to include. And it quickly became clear which students actually understood what they were writing and which were just trying to knit together fragments somebody else handed them.

I liked that approach because it acknowledged gamesmanship and turned it toward learning. The students who spent hours preparing the perfect index card were studying, even if they didn’t think of it that way. They learned despite themselves.

Asking students to be improbably pure is unlikely to work. But if incentives can be aligned, so their short-term self-interest coincides with the goals of the course, that can work.

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen other ways of harnessing that sense of gamesmanship to align incentives?

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Per usual, Tim Burke has a thoughtful piece up this week. This time it’s about faculty who decide to move into administration and how they differ from those who decide not to. It’s worth the read.

I’ll just add that much of the faculty/administration divide is a side effect of what social psychologists call the fundamental attribution error. That’s the mistake of explaining others’ actions as reflections of their deep selves as opposed to their constraints. Many professors became disappointed with former colleagues who move into administration in part because some administrative decisions they didn’t like were a function of those constraints and the newbies couldn’t just make those constraints go away.

It isn’t just faculty members who do that, of course. Everyone does at one time or another. But overlooking it means getting things basically wrong. You see the driver in front of you who stops abruptly; you don’t see the small child who darted into the road in front of that driver. Some faculty I’ve known who have dodged administrative work did so precisely because they knew about the constraints and they didn’t want to be blamed for doing what they would have to do. I couldn’t argue.

Fixing those constraints involves, among other things, voting. We’re doing our part!