RWL #199
children left behind, voice hearing, AI, and Designing your Life
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! It’s snowing! The pic above is of my wife’s kayak covered with a dusting of snow this morning. I just ordered a neoprene hat and gloves to go with my wetsuit - I am hoping to paddle next week.
We shut down campus in 20 days. The UNH president’s goal was to make it to Thanksgiving. It looks like we will. Then it’s all online for the rest of the semester. I’ve been live-streaming my 8 o'clock finance class this semester. This past Thursday I had 6 students in the classroom with me (of 38 in the class - most were watching from Zoom). Now that we have been through the first round of exams, I know a little more about their finance abilities. Unsurprisingly, the average score of the sample of students sitting in the room with me on Thursday was probably about a 95 (the class average was an 83) since at least three of the students in the room had perfect scores on the exam. There’s something to be said for putting yourself in the right mindset for the task. Coming to class if you physically can is a good example.
A long time ago I read an article written by an English Lit prof who said his colleagues were complaining that their students didn’t take their classes seriously. He noted that they came to class in jeans and sneakers, looking much like students themselves. He made a point of wearing a tie to every class to demonstrate to the students (and himself) that they had entered a special space - a place of learning. I decided when I started teaching at UNH that on the days I taught I would wear a suit and tie. Some of my colleagues thought that was a bit over the top, especially since hospital administrators don’t dress like that anymore. But that wasn’t (isn’t) the point. I dress like that to draw a line between the ordinary, casual life, and the special time for learning. We don’t afford education the status it deserves. It’s about as close to magic as humans get. To go from not being able to do something to being able to do something is literally a transformation - it deserves to be treated as sacred. There are many things that I feel like we cheapen in life by not giving them the respect they deserve. Of course education is the one I spend most of my time thinking about, but I think it’s important to appreciate the sacred in life.
Speaking of the sacred and profane, happy Halloween! Stay well and stay safe!
Read
What: The New Yorker, The Students Left Behind by Remote Learning
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/05/the-students-left-behind-by-remote-learning
Why: My wife understood instinctively that children need stability and consistency in order to thrive. It is up to the family to provide a stable, predictable environment for children. I was the one who would let the kids stay up too late or eat cake for breakfast. But she was right - a consistent bedtime with a bedtime ritual was good for the kids. You paid the price if you let too much chaos leak in - after a little wahoo! with “fun dad” (i.e., the lazy, undisciplined dad), the kids would be tired, cranky, uncooperative. When I read stories like this one, I feel for all the kids who live in chaotic environments and don’t have someone like my wife to provide them a safe space. Poverty makes it much harder to sustain a stable environment, and when you add a global pandemic to the mix, it’s hard to fathom. Even my friends who are financially stable have struggled to maintain a semblance of order if they have small children. School for many of these children is the only order they have in their lives, and with the pandemic closing schools, they no longer even have that. This is a tragedy that is still playing out. I was talking with a friend who works with high risk high school aged kids who are in these sorts of disordered situations and tries to help them graduate. She was telling me in September she had driven around her city dropping off laptops for students in her program who were living in homeless shelters. Can you imagine trying to do remote learning from a homeless shelter? This is a public health crisis that will have lasting effects as these children are not able to get the meager learning and attention that school offers in their otherwise disordered lives.
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What: The Atlantic, The Running Conversation in Your Head
Why: Eric was one of my close friends in high school, especially senior year, and then on into our college years, though we only saw each other on breaks then. Eric and I were both going to be poets, and we were quite pretentious about it. Such are the things young men imagine. Eric was (is) one of the smartest people I knew. He was perceptive and fast. I lost track of Eric for about 20 years. I reconnected with him through Facebook about 10 years ago. Long story short, Eric developed paranoid schizophrenia. He has been struggling with the disease for about 20 years. I share this because he wrote a book about his experiences, Hearing Voices, so I am not talking out of turn or revealing something he would prefer to keep private. If you would like a harrowing telling of what it is like to live through a psychotic break, this is the book for you. I tell you this so you can know why I was interested in the Atlantic interview I am linking to. As I was reading it, I was thinking about Eric’s experience with interior narrative. Of course, his is a debilitating experience. There is a section of the interview where they discuss voice hearing and mental illness. This reflects quite clearly Eric’s experience:
The basic story is quite a simple one. Hearing voices is a frequently very distressing experience. It's usually associated with severe mental illness, with a lot of different psychiatric diagnoses. It’s not particularly specific to schizophrenia. And it also happens to a lot of people who don’t have mental illness. A lot of regular people will have relatively fleeting or one-off experiences of hearing a voice at some point in their lives.
It can be very very distressing. It can also be rather neutral and it can even be positive, uplifting, and guiding in certain cases. The idea is that when somebody hears a voice, what's happening is that they’re actually producing some inner speech but for some reason they don’t recognize that speech as having been produced by themselves. It’s experienced as something that doesn’t belong to the self, that comes from outside.
There's also a lot of problems with that idea. Many people who hear voices reject the idea that it’s just their inner speech. They can be quite distressed by the idea that what they’re hearing is just themselves speaking, often because what is said is so unpleasant. And also other factors must be involved, memory seems to play a huge part in this. Hearing voices is strongly associated with traumatic events. Somehow those traumatic events seem to be breaking back in to consciousness in a transformed way. So any account of hearing voices has to bring memory into it in some way. We propose that there may be different kinds of hearing voices, I think it’s likely that it’s not just one thing.
The whole thing is worth reading. I talk to myself all the time. My wife and kids make fun of me for it. Thankfully, unlike Eric, my interior voice is clearly mine - it does not feel like a 2nd or 3rd party has taken up residence in my head. Check out the article. And if you can, purchase Eric’s book and read it. It’s fascinating, and it will help him out.
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Watch
What: TEDxYYC, Preparing for a future with Artificial Intelligence (17 min)
Why: Robin Winsor gives a compelling talk about the pending impacts of artificial intelligence. I am at once fascinated and terrified by this technology (hello, Skynet). Windsor focuses more on the banal aspects of AI - it will eliminate most repetitive human occupations (which is the vast majority of what humanity does), and so he makes a claim for universal basic income (UBI). I think there will be a period of painful adjustment, much like as we went through with the steam engine. AI will permeate everything much like electricity does today. What really fascinated me was his telling of the AlphaGo and AlphaGo Zero story - AI learning from AI, rather than learning from humans, and when they learn independent of us, being even smarter by not having us teach them bad habits to begin with. That’s fascinating, and kind of super scary.
Listen
What: Stepping In Podcast, Designing Your Life (40 min)
https://www.newventureswest.com/episode-19-designing-your-life/
Why: I reconnected recently with my friend Sue D, who has recently partially retired from her position at a nearby hospital as their director of organizational development. Sue helped me get involved with the NH Physician Leadership program, which ironically is run here at UNH, but it took me leaving campus to get connected to it. That’s the very stove-piped world of academia for you. So Sue has shifted her practice to mostly executive coaching and we linked up to talk about my interest in exploring that function as a possible addition to my practice, post-tenure. Sue did her training through New Ventures West, the sponsor of the Stepping Out Podcast, which is how I found this episode. So that’s a long introduction - but I continue to be interested in exploring this avenue as a way for me to continue to expand my personal mission of helping people self-actualize. I really liked this episode with Bill Burnett. Bill talks about how he applied Design Thinking (which I have talked about before in this newsletter - e.g., the IDEO shopping cart). Bill talks about how advice like “pursue your passion” is hurtful, the importance of grit, setting a low bar when you are making self improvement goals, and the nature of luck as openness. The bit about luck was particularly interesting because it resonated with my study of Austrian Economics, and in particular Kerznarian Entrepreneurship, which is primarily about alertness to opportunity - sometimes there really are $100 bills lying on the ground. I’ve ordered Bill’s book - I am thinking it will be useful for my work with undergraduates. I’m still thinking about the coaching certification - I’ll definitely be waiting until after the tenure decision, but I think it’s something I want to do.
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
If you’re looking for a searchable archive, you can see my draft folder here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jwGLdjsb1WKtgH_2C-_3VvrYCtqLplFO?usp=sharing
Finally, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://tinyletter.com/markbonica
See you next Friday!
Mark
Mark J. Bonica, Ph.D., MBA, MS
Assistant Professor
Department of Health Management and Policy
University of New Hampshire
(603) 862-0598
mark.bonica@unh.edu
Health Leader Forge Podcast: http://healthleaderforge.org
'It is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk, that keep the darkness at bay. Simple acts of kindness and love.' - Gandalf (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey)