Apocalypse: Retail Grocery Version

You will never look at a supermarket in the same way, after reading Benjamin Lorr’s The Secret Life of Groceries. Lorr gives you a glimpse behind the curtain – that’s what an apocalypse means – not of the ugly future of retail grocery, but of the present. You will be shocked, horrified, and throw up your hands in despair wishing for the good old days before such beasts existed, unless of course they’ve always existed for you. 

 

Having grown up in what was then known as a third-world country in the tropics, my experience with supermarkets was limited. I was more familiar with two types of markets for fresh produce. The morning “wet” market, so-called because the floors were always wet with the constant washing off of blood and dirt, brought many traders under the same permanent roof. They had running water. The night markets roved around town, different locations on different nights. No running water and so meat and fish came in smaller chunks or whole, but the butcher could further slice and dice, and the fishmonger would descale if needed.

 

In my early years, for the many women who were housewives and didn’t drive, and who were not close to a market, there were little produce trucks that conveniently brought a selection of fruit, vegetables, meat, and fish, to your doorstep. Loud honking noises announced their arrival on your street. Then, small grocery stores started to pop up in each neighborhood. By small, I mean the size of a convenience store. In fact, that’s literally what they were – convenient places for you to get some limited items, along with snacks, bread, flour, eggs, and the daily newspaper.

 

Lorr reminded me of my childhood with his interesting discussion of convenience stores and 7-Eleven. When the first 7-Eleven opened not too far away, my friends and I cycled over to see what the hubbub was all about. It was still the size of a convenience store, but we spent a long time looking at packaged foods and enjoying the air-conditioning. I shared a Big Gulp once with several other friends. When the first nearby supermarket opened, it was the size of three convenience stores, tiny by today’s standards here in the U.S. It was not air-conditioned; it was stuffy and the shelves in the back were packed with lots of canned goods. There was a larger more expensive air-conditioned much further away. It catered to expats. I almost never went in.

 

When I came to the U.S. for college, my first walk into a Safeway was bewildering. The size, the scope, the variety of choice, was staggering to my little mind. I was also cold, jet-lagged, and miserably unadjusted to my new surroundings. Several months later, I was used to it, and was pleased by one-stop-shopping and that the shelves were always stocked. What a revelation! Then I found larger stores that provided even lower prices. A bargain for a student on a budget. I now had a taste of the American dream of convenience and plenty. I never really thought about what goes into such an operation.

 

The Secret Life of Groceries is not for the faint of heart. But I’ve now come away with a better understanding of the complexities of the operation and how ruthless ‘world is flat’ globalization trends have led to the gargantuan system we have – not just in the U.S. but all over the world. Huge hypermarkets are the norm now, even in my hometown. As consumers we only see the front-end, all-smiles. The back-end is eye-opening, even in this day and age where we’ve exposed to the stories of the terrible conditions of the meat-industry, industrial-chicken-farming, the cut-throat world of growing rice or wheat or whatever your staple produce might be. Lorr picks some choice examples in his book, even as he highlights the lives of people caught in this system. The stories are heartbreaking.

 

The best and most interesting chapter is the first one, “Salad Days at Trader Joe’s”. The story of its founding, its founder, its philosophy, and its market-niche focus, is a fascinating tale. I found myself thinking about my own industry: Is there an equivalent niche, the Trader Joe’s of higher education? I don’t know, but I was amazed to learn the amount of work and thought and laser-focus that Joe Coulombe put into creating his own market, side-stepping head-to-head competition with bigger and leaner operations. And then he was bought out by one of them. I think there are lessons to be learned from this story, but I’m still mulling them over in my mind.

 

Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of the supply chain. Yet again, I found myself thinking about parallels (and distinct differences) from higher education. There’s an equivalent to adjunctification of faculty, except it is much worse in retail – something I’ve also learned through the stories of my students who work part-time off-campus. There’s an equivalent to the hustle of selling your brand and reeling in customers (ahem, I mean clients, no I mean students) while fending off the competition, except much worse in retail. There’s an equivalent to the explosion of audits, certifications, regulations, assessments, paperwork, except that in retail… well, you know what I’m going to say. Trust is in short supply these days. It will only get worse.

 

Like education, there’s also a similar Iron Triangle dilemma in retail. Reformers (usually NGOs) talk about balancing people, profits, and the planet. But let’s be honest. Profit is king in retail. And if you’re trying to also improve your image or branding through how your outfit is better for the planet than your competitors, something is going to get the short end of the stick. Actually someone. Many people. All those on the back-end. It’s a wicked problem indeed. Lorr doesn’t provide any easy answers, and it’s a testament to his reflective acknowledgment of the complexity. What did he learn?

 

Here’s my quote of the conclusion: “… the great lesson of my time with groceries is that we have got the food system we deserve. The adage is all wrong: it’s not that we are what we eat, it’s that we eat the way we are. Retail grocery is a reflection. What people call the supply chain is a long, interconnected network of human beings working on other humans’ behalf. It responds to our actions, not our pieties; and in its current form it demands convenience and efficiency… The result is both incredible beyond words – abundance, wish fulfillment, and low price – and as cruel and demeaning as…” You can complete the sentence with any nauseating example from his book.

 

I recommend The Secret Life of Groceries. Lorr is both an engaging writer, knowing how to turn a phrase, and also a reflective one. But it is a depressing book, and one I will only read once, unlike The Idea Factory, which provides an interesting contrast as I think about innovation in Bell Labs versus Trader Joe’s. Still, it might change how you fundamentally view the apocalypse that is consumerism, and if this spurs you to action, maybe the book will have done some good in this world.

The Idea Factory

How do you create and sustain truly life-changing innovation? Jon Gertner’s book, The Idea Factory, on the rise and fall of Bell Labs tells the story of one approach. I read Gertner’s book back when I was involved in starting a new college and fresh with enthusiasm eight years ago. I hadn’t started blogging then, otherwise I would have surely mused in writing about some of the ideas I gleaned. I just finished reading it for the second time this past week, and perhaps time and experience has led me to a more measured perspective. 

 

Bell Labs was unique. Fostered in AT&T’s monopolistic telecom industry, it had resources to sustain long-term industrial-scale cutting-edge basic research, and a huge team of engineers on the payroll to turn seemingly idealistic technological dreams into reality. Gertner focuses on the famous individual personalities of Bell Labs lore, from the eccentric pursue-what’s-interesting mathematician Shannon, to the brilliant egotist Shockley who ended his career in infamy. While Gertner finds ways to pay tribute to the thousands of unnamed engineers, his narrative may not have been as engaging – and by focusing on the narrative arc of select lives, he keeps the reader engaged. (This says something more about twenty-first century readers than it does about writers.)

 

There’s no doubt there were some brilliant minds and able hands in the research teams at Bell Labs. Visionary management and some very savvy and capable leaders also helped. The design of research spaces and opportunities to interact also enter the story, and are perhaps the most visible part that “innovative” companies (by their own assessment) have tried to replicate. Think about open office plans. Or designing hallways, spaces, locations, cafeterias, to “catalyze collaborations” among experts with different expertise. Think different. Think Apple Park and Googleplex. Or maybe this is not so different after all. The vision of Bell Labs reborn.

 

Has throwing all that money at people and buildings given us what is truly innovative? Bell Labs provides a number of positive examples, well highlighted in The Idea Factory. The hiring of very smart and capable people seems to be as important, if not more so, than providing the infrastructure. Have those that followed a similar path shown the same kind of creativity and innovation? Arguably so, arguably not, and the old is often found lurking between the new and shiny. Dreams of software, cloud applications, and leveraging lightning-fast connectivity, don’t come without hardware and painstaking materials development. Bell Labs was a single shop. Today’s architecture is both more complex and diffuse.

 

The rules of the game have also changed. Gertner’s most insightful contributions are his reflections on the politics and economics, particularly focusing on the interacting roles of government, industry, academia, and the market. If I would summarize the narrative arc of the book and my take-away message, I would say this: The dictum that any truly innovative technology will sow the seeds of its own downfall is one that I’m still trying to grasp. I’ve nibbled at thinking how I might innovate myself into obsolescence. 

 

I was hoping that re-reading The Idea Factory would give me fresh energy as I imagine education in a post-Covid19 world, but one that now knows that pandemics are here to stay and likely to get more intense over time. I think it highly likely we will see another pandemic within the next ten years, given present trends. The question is whether we will be better prepared to respond. There is no easy reversal. Like climate change, there are no easy solutions. Nor is there agreement how to respond. Global food inequality is still a problem whether you listen to the wizards or the prophets. We’ll certainly need to generate better ideas, like folks did at Bell Labs in its heyday. But will that be enough?

Quantum Astrologer

Albert Einstein thought quantum mechanics was spooky.

 

Or maybe we should call it quantum non-mechanics, as suggested by David Bohm, because “everything we have learned says there is no physical mechanism to be found within the theory.” The stories behind this, and more, can be found in a unique and delightful book, The Quantum Astrologer’s Handbook by Michael Brooks. 

 

Famous historical figures of quantum mechanics make their appearance in the book, as do contemporary ones. More importantly, Brooks deftly describes the strangeness of the quantum world through its foundational concepts. Feynman thought that no one really understands quantum mechanics. Brooks would agree with him, but still thinks it’s worth trying to explain the key points using the best analogies he can provide, without equations while still leveraging mathematics. If you think that’s an impossible feat, I dare you to read Handbook. In my opinion, of such books I’ve read aimed at a general audience, it’s the best one thus far.

 

Here’s one example that jumped out at me. After introducing the wavefunction, imaginary numbers, and the concept of a ‘phase’ (you’ll know what these mean when you read the excellent analogies in his book), Brooks clarifies the importance of de Broglie’s insight into the particle-wave conundrum. I had a murky idea of this before being illuminated by Brooks. If you’ve taken G-Chem 1, you’ve come across the famous de Broglie equation (or relation). But there’s a problem: “de Broglie’s electron waves travelled too fast: their speed exceeded the speed of light… To get round this, de Broglie reasoned that there must be a component of these waves that represents something outside the physical universe ruled by Einstein’s speed limit… de Broglie’s genius was to make phase into something physical, a quality in its own right, and locate it outside of our normal physical reality. An electron has a mass and a velocity, say, and it has a phase.”

 

Ugh, that’s too science-y, you might be thinking. But here’s where the book shines. I can’t describe it more succinctly than the two-liner on its back-cover: “The Quantum Astrologer’s Handbook is a science book with the panache of a novel. It is a work of and about genius.” There is a time-bending science-history-detective novel embedded throughout its pages. The protagonist of the story is one Jerome Cardano of Italian Renaissance fame. Having done his painstaking homework, Brooks traces the ups and downs of Cardano’s life story by imagining how this astrologer and medieval scientist laid the foundations leading to the strangeness of the quantum world and its extra dimensions. Cardano calls it the aevum. Contemporary string theory calls it the holographic principle.

 

I wish I had Brooks’ facility with words and phrases to describe the Handbook. All I can say is that this strange genre-crossing fifth-wall-breaking approach embedded in the book seems appropriate given the subject matter. It was a page-turner. I had trouble putting it down!

 

Today, Astrology (and its chemical cousin Alchemy) are often relegated to the pseudoscience of the medieval world. For good reason. Much of it is mumbo-jumbo and charlatanry. But we shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. Brooks brings out hints of astrological thinking in contemporary conceptions of the quantum world. These are the things that seem ‘outside’ of our physical reality. Not that they’re unreal or unphysical in all dimensions, perhaps just the ones we can access through experiment and fit to our mechanics modeling mind-set. Perhaps we should seriously consider non-mechanics, as Bohm suggested.

 

One reason why I found Handbook compelling, and the de Broglie story illuminating, is because I’ve been struggling through similarly murky ideas in the theory of complex systems. How do we distinguish between life, a seemingly complex system, with non-life?

 

And is a type of complexity one facet of this distinction? I’ve read around the edges of complexity theory, much of it murky to me and with too many mathematical equations I didn’t understand. I’ve alluded to a definition of complexity in a previous blog post, distinguishing it from the complicated. Then I stumbled across a paper by Donald Mikulecky, and I realize where my ideas came from.

 

The short article (title, abstract, and citation shown above) is published in an obscure journal. I’d never heard of Computers and Chemistry, and I’m a computational chemist. And the article isn’t about computational chemistry per se. In fact there’s little specific mention of chemistry in its pages, although its presence is certainly implied. However, there is a very clear definition of complexity, and how one distinguishes complex systems from non-complex ones. In a nutshell, Mikulecky thinks that the Newtonian paradigm of mechanics (both static and dynamic) has led us to merge mental models with reality. We, in the ‘hard’ sciences, have often obscured the distinction between epistemology and ontology. Complexity needles and pokes us at the edges of our paradigm, seemingly elusive, but hinting that something is wrong with our framework.

 

Mikulecky asks three questions: “Why is the whole more than the sum of its parts? Why cannot function be ‘assembled’ from our knowledge of structure? Why are complex systems different from simple mechanisms?”

 

His answer: “The complex system possesses something that the machine or the simple mechanism does not. It is the truth or falseness of that assertion that is at the heart of complexity. If there is no ‘something’ then complexity becomes a synonym for complicated and we have nothing more to say… The essence of the ontology of complexity is in the existence of something that is lost as the system is reduced to its parts. Otherwise, the whole is merely the sum of its parts, but the whole may be a more complicated arrangement of the parts…”

 

Does this sound astrological to you? Spooky, maybe? The ghost in a machine? Perhaps “a quality in its own right located outside of our normal physical reality” (to use Brooks’ discussion of de Broglie)? I must confess that I’m still stumbling around the edges, like the blind men figuring out the shape of a strange beast – perhaps an elephant, maybe a hippo, or Leviathan?

 

There isn’t a good conclusion to this story. Yet. Maybe because we’re like the prisoners of Plato’s cave confined to our mechanics framework, both classical and quantum. Instead of confronting the difficult unknown, it’s easier to substitute it with something easier to think about.

 

And so my three simple thoughts are to:

1. Consider assigning Handbook as reading for my Quantum Chemistry course.

2. Design and wear a T-shirt that says “Quantum Astrologer” instead of “Quantum Mechanic”.

3. Write The Handbook of Atomic Alchemy and perhaps become rich and famous. Or be shunned as a pseudoscientist by future generations.

Limits of Productive Failure

It’s been a few years since I followed-up on the pedagogical approach known as Productive Failure, much of the work by Kapur and co-workers, and summarized in a 2016 article I’ve blogged about. The overall idea is that students first participate in what seems like an open-ended “problem-solving” phase. The problem is challenging, and the students are expected to generate a range of solutions, but not be able to “get the right answer” on their own. The second phase involves “direct instruction” where students learn the solution, building upon the seeming failure of the first phase. Results from a number of these “experiments”, mostly involving grade-school level students tackling math-based problems, suggest that Productive Failure yields better results in a post-assessment compared to switching the two phases (direct or explicit instruction first, followed by problem solving).

 

“When failure fails to be productive” is the provocative title of an article published just last month in Instructional Science (DOI: 10.1007/s11251-020-09525-2). The authors review recent literature involving Productive Failure approaches applied to non-STEM domains, and they also conduct two quasi-experiments with tenth graders. They find that students who went through Productive Failure did not perform better than students who had direct instruction in the first phase. Before probing why, we need to know why having a problem-solving phase first might be beneficial. The principles are articulated clearly in a 2017 paper by Loibl et al. (Educ. Psychol. Rev. vol. 29, pp. 693-715) based on a meta-study of previous work contrasting the two approaches.

 

First, it is hypothesized that having students generate solutions to a problem before direct instruction, allows them to “activate prior knowledge”, i.e., they have to call on what they know (erroneous or not) to aid them in coming up with a solution. This may also involve being creative and inventive, depending on the scope of the problem. Second, in transitioning to the direct instruction phase, students are made aware of their gaps in knowledge. If you don’t know what you don’t know, how are you going to correct and learn? And finally, it was suggested that this process helps students “identify, explain, and organize deep features of the target knowledge”. We don’t want shallow-learning. We’re trying to move students from novice to expert, so we’d like them to see this deeper structure. 

 

There’s a nice Figure in the Loibl paper that encapsulates the principles of Productive Failure. Note in Mechanism 2 the importance of using either (erroneous) student solutions or contrasting cases to highlight the gap between the wrong or limited answers with the correct or canonical solution. If this isn’t done carefully, they found that students did not recognize the deeper structure. Noted in the 2017 paper is that the majority of previous studies supporting Productive Failure’s superior results were in narrow math-based learning. In the 2020 study, the authors discuss a key difference between STEM and non-STEM domains, namely that the former allows a “level of control of the conditions under which knowledge can be gathered” that is not available in the latter. In STEM cases, where things can be quantified, and variables can be more easily controlled, the scope of the problem is more constrained. More importantly, there is a canonical solution in the STEM problems introduced in such experiments.

 

Another meta-study published in 2020 by Chen and Kalyuga (Eur. J. Psych. Educ. vol. 35, pp. 607-624) examines the issues with a different lens. Their starting point is Cognitive Load Theory; to investigate when Productive Failure might do better than first-phase explicit instruction. The categories in their meta-analysis look at (1) whether the type of knowledge to be learned is conceptual or procedural, (2) whether the materials show high-element interactivity, and (3) prior expertise level. They conclude that Productive Failure shows gains for conceptual knowledge while explicit-instruction first does better for procedural knowledge, but this is complicated by different types of knowledge, and a balance between element interactivity and expertise that are not independent of each other.

 

What is one to conclude from all of this? It’s hard to say. And I say this as someone who’s read hundreds of such papers but as a non-expert, i.e., I don’t do this type of research myself. I’m merely a dilettante. All these studies have limitations and particularities. While the meta-studies do seem to show that under some conditions, Productive Failure approaches do seem to yield possibly superior learning outcomes, there are always confounding exceptions that are hard to explain. For example, the Glogger-Frey et al. paper from 2015 (Learning and Instruction, vol. 39, pp. 72-87) is often cited as a contradictory case; it’s an interesting and cleverly designed study in my opinion but this isn’t the space for me to delve into its details.

 

For me, the point of reading these articles is to keep learning about the art and science of teaching and learning. I’ve taught long enough to know which parts of the subject material students stumble over, and I’ve come up with some effective strategies to help students over the hump. They don’t work for all students all of the time – at least not what I cover in class and through assignments. Office hours allows me to address particular issues with particular students, but often it’s not the ones who need the most help who come by. Teaching is an ever-changing endeavor, and my students today are different in many ways from those I taught twenty years ago. There are no sure-fire pedagogical approaches, and I choose different methods based on the topic I’m teaching for the day and my perception of student background knowledge and readiness. All approaches have their limitations. Reading the literature reminds me not just of this fact, but to be wary of the pronouncements of educational punditry.

Upstream and Growth

Ah, the good old days! Life used to be simple. Now everything seems more complicated.

 

2020 has been an awakening to the interlocking intricacies of systems. Climate Change; Systemic Racism. Trade Wars. and Global Supply Chains. Pandemics. None of these are new. But they’ve become salient this year, especially here in the U.S., with raging fires on the West Coast, George Floyd, worldwide economic ping-pong, and of course Covid-19. What seemed small has blown up into gargantuan proportions. A single falling domino has triggered the dropping of hundreds, thousands, millions more.

 

We’ve become more aware of how tightly things are interconnected. The whole is not just the sum of its parts. A complicated system might be reducible to the sum of its parts. A complex system, on the other hand, cannot be so simply reduced. New unforeseen, dynamic, non-linear, interactions arise in complex systems. If you’re in it, and we’re all embedded in various overlapping systems, it can be very difficult to extricate yourself. You might not want to. Like it or not, we’re all stuck in systems, especially technological ones.

 

In higher education, where the liberal arts have come under assault, one response has been to argue that the deep and wide (or T-shaped) liberal arts curriculum best prepares students for an increasingly complex world. Whether or not that’s true is a subject full of punditry. But there is a recognition that complexity has increased over time, and that we should learn how to deal with it. But how do you approach complex systemic problems? How will you solve them? That’s where the money is now that the low-hanging fruit has been picked clean.

 

Well, perhaps not all the low-hanging fruit. There’s still room for business-world-type self-help books to sell well. I have no doubt that Dan Heath’s Upstream, subtitled “the quest to solve problems before they happen”, will sell well in 2020 and perhaps for a few years hence. Here are some excerpts from the book jacket: “So often in life, we get stuck in a cycle of responses. We put out fires. We deal with emergencies. We stay downstream, handling one problem after another, but we never make our way upstream to fix the systems that caused the problems… Upstream delivers practical solutions for preventing problems rather than reacting to them… drawing on insights from hundreds of interviews with unconventional problem solvers.”

 

If you’ve read a book by the Heath brothers, you know it will be easy to read, with a clear narrative, memorable examples, and a distillation of core principles into practical and easy-to-remember self-help steps. (They use the principles in their first book Made to Stick in an effective tried-and-true formula.) Upstream has an iconic one-page summary you can print out and stick by your desk, so you can recognize barriers and ask yourself the right questions while moving upstream to solve a problem you or your organization might be facing. I suspect most readers will enjoy reading the book, feel like they have learned something, and possibly feel motivated to go make a difference in their world.

 

And yes, even an ivory tower academic like me who is suspicious of business fads and the consulting world, enjoyed reading the book. It’s light, quick, breezy, and feel-good. The part that resonated with me the most (as a former administrator solving thorny complex problems) was Heath’s articulating why people prefer to be downstream. It’s not just that the downstream problem seems simpler at first glance, if you don’t worry about what’s happening upstream, but there’s a feeling of accomplishment one gets from fire-fighting. You can easily list the problems you’ve solved. You can make simple elevator-pitch stories out of them. They’re visible to others, and therefore kudos to you for solving the problem.

 

On the other hand, upstream problems are by nature more complex and less visible. My motto as an administrator was that if folks downstream didn’t notice what I was doing, then I was doing my job well. Having been thrust into a whole range of firefights (visible problems where people are clamoring for a solution), my goal has been to get ahead of such situations. Prevention rather than cure. You don’t get kudos for prevention, especially if hardly anyone noticed a potential problem in the first place. Your boss might not even think there was one, and why are you wasting your time on it when there are so many other fires to fight. Heath’s book recognizes and articulates this challenge, and I hope bosses who read this will recognize their employees who work hard on less visible, but I would argue, more important systemic issues.

 

The trouble, though, with slick self-help books containing feel-good anecdotal stories, is that they turn a complex problem into a complicated problem. (If you’ve forgotten the difference, go back up several paragraphs.) There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but you should recognize this when it happens. Which is All The Time. My research is in complex chemical systems; and as a professor of chemistry who’s thought carefully about pedagogy, it’s a subject that’s not simple. Chemistry is inherently both complicated and complex. What do we do? We simplify things so they are a little easier to digest. We remove or ignore the complexity, and then reduce the complicated to the simple. That’s how we tell our chemistry stories, be it in the classroom or in a research seminar.

 

So you might read a memorable anecdote from Upstream, use the principle for a plan-of-attack and apply it to a problem at hand. It might work. It might partially work. It might partially fail. It might fail completely. You might be puzzled by this. But that’s the nature of complex systems, and until you really delve into its complexity (and hopefully don’t feel overwhelmed), you may not actually understand the intricacies of the system. That doesn’t mean you should stop and give up. Heath provides some examples of why progress might be very slow indeed. But his anecdotal stories will only highlight one or two aspects of a problem, reduced in complexity ahead of time.

 

Where does complexity arise? It’s inherent in growth of systems. This is the broad topic of Vaclav Smil’s tome, Growth. It’s over 500 pages of dense reading accompanied by many graphs. There are a hundred pages of footnotes and references. It’s the opposite of Upstream. Smil examines growth in a hierarchy of contexts, from microscopic bacteria to global interconnected human society. They’re all complex systems. But their growth, in both size and complexity, is fueled by how well they can capture Energy. As a chemist who studies the origin-of-life, I’d say that the transition from simple to complex is driven by energy transduction. There should be a strong correlation between energy cycling and growth, and one sees this across many systemic examples in Growth.

 

The challenge is that Energy is difficult to define. A very slippery concept it is. As Feynman said, you might not be able to figure out what it is exactly, but it can be quantified. You can count and keep track of energy, even as it shapeshifts elusively from one form to another. Smil uses a variety of proxies to track energy. Once again this helps reduce the complexity of the system, so as to allow the reader a fleeting glimpse at one or two aspects of the complex system. But Smil is careful when it comes to drawing conclusions or elucidating principles. This may infuriate the reader of Growth, but I think it’s because Smil recognizes the thorns of complex systems.

 

There’s a lot to learn from Growth. It’s a magisterial work that spans biology, history, philosophy, sociology, statistics, and technology. I appreciated the early discussion of how to interpret growth curves, how such curves are fitted, and how they are used or misused in predicting the future. The next time I teach P-Chem 2, I’ll be paying more attention to the various curve fitting procedures that we employ. I also appreciated the intertwining of history and technology related to energy use and terraforming of our planet, which was data-driven and without over-simplifying the issues. Smil does not provide any simple solutions to climate change and mankind’s continued energy-guzzling ways. He also discusses why upcoming pandemics might be global; Growth was published last year before the world knew of Covid-19, but he’s remarkably prescient.

 

This morning I attended a webinar on “Systems Thinking in Chemical Education” sponsored by the American Chemical Society. It was about preparing all our students, to see chemistry in a systemic context – an aid to learning the material, but maybe more importantly because we are all citizens of a global interconnected world-system. I think the words system and systemic are going to be used with increasing frequency thanks to 2020. Life used to be simple. Now everything is complex.

Revisiting The Hobbit

It’s been over three years since I bought a boardgame (as I’m trying to reduce my collection). That last boardgame was The Battle of Five Armies. It has sat unplayed, and it was time to remedy the situation. Learning a new immersive boardgame, with many rules, and that has a playing time of 2-3 hours, takes patience. I punched out the pieces, unwrapped the cards, and immersed myself in the rulebook. Having played Battles of the Third Age, I knew what to expect. 

 

But I needed a bit of extra motivation. Learning this sort of game requires several play-throughs because you’re going to make mistakes the first few times, and you’ll run into ambiguous situations where you’ll need to consult sources beyond the rulebook. (The internet has made this much easier compared to the old days when you had to snail-mail questions to the game company.) This meant devoting another 10-15 hours before I would be satisfied with having learned the game properly. To motivate myself I decided to re-watch Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movie trilogy.

 

I could be classified as a Tolkien nerd, at least in my younger days. I discovered The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings at age twelve. For many years, I would re-read Lord of the Rings, appendices and all, every year. (The Hobbit would be revisited less often.) As bits of Middle Earth lore became available be it through The Silmarillion, the Book of Lost Tales and Unfinished Tales, I devoured it. I learned the runes. I pored over maps and histories. I might no longer be a nerd because I haven’t kept up the last twenty years or so, but I do still re-read the books once every 3-5 years. I thought Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movie trilogy was overall good (although I had some quibbles), and my sister gifted me with a boxed set of the extended version. I’ve re-watched these on occasion.

 

In contrast, I was disappointed with Jackson’s Hobbit movie trilogy. I dutifully watched each movie in the cinema when it was released, hoping for improvement. Nope. All manner of side-stories were added to what seemed like a bloated spectacle aimed at making money. The Tolkien nerd in me was unimpressed. And now, dear reader, you’re thinking why on earth would I want to watch the movies again and how indeed might it motivate me? For one thing, the boardgame focuses on one tiny sliver of Tolkien’s story, the battle of five armies. (It takes up less than 5% of the book, but rages on for half of the third movie).

 

The truth is that I was in two minds about whether to watch the movies, and to help make the decision I decided to read some movie reviews. That’s how I stumbled upon the Smithsonian’s excellent piece: The Tolkien Nerd’s Guide to “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies”. (I also recommend their guides to the first two parts, linked in the article.) I now had a glimpse of Jackson’s vision in situating the Hobbit movies in the larger context of the twilight of the Third Age of Middle Earth. That’s why the Ring plays a larger role, and there are those extra scenes involving Dol Guldur and the Necromancer. Jackson doesn’t quite follow the “true” story or its timeline. Everything is movie-dramatized to pack as much of a punch so the action and drama are amped up several notches.

 

While I still don’t like numerous parts of the movies (anything involving Legolas, the over-sizing of Smaug and his hoard, and some Laketown scenes), I now have a better appreciation for other deviations in the movie. Tauriel’s multi-faceted role now becomes more interesting in examining the politics of Middle Earth. Dol Guldur scenes are no longer annoying. The overplaying of dragon-sickness and the effect of the Arkenstone hark to the seven Dwarf rings and the Silmarils of the First Age. I also enjoyed noticing the different personalities of the Dwarves in the movies which are not found in Tolkien’s books. I’m pleased that Bombur gets some excellent scenes. And I enjoyed how the song “what Bilbo Baggins hates” was rendered in a memorable and clever way. I was also able to sit back and enjoy the over-the-top action (except when Legolas was involved) and even accepted Azog as prime antagonist. (In the books, Azog was killed years back; Bolg gets a tiny mention for the battle.) I also didn’t mind the Dune-ish tunnel-making worms when they showed up. Overall, I enjoyed the movies more this second time around, because I watched them with a different mindset.

 

I’m also enjoying the boardgame. It’s more streamlined than Battles of the Third Age, with a clearer rule-set, a shorter fate track with faster progress, and with improved game-play elements. As a stand-alone game, I am now more likely to pull it out and teach someone who’s interested compared to its predecessors. A little of the narrative richness is lost with a shorter and less fiddly game (i.e., without a bunch of extra rules for special cases), but it’s likely to get more play time instead of sitting on the shelf. I’ve played four games with each side winning two apiece. The game seems relatively well-balanced provided the Shadow player is aggressive from the get-go. (I learned this the hard way in Battles of the Third Age.) A Shadow player who sits back while building up forces has little chance in winning. A quick strike is required before armies are fully mustered but it requires risky play. This forces the Free Peoples also to take risks and makes the games much more interesting.

 

Above is a picture after Turn 3 in my fourth game. The Free Peoples rolled particularly badly in this game allowing the Shadow to easily take the Eastern Spur and the ruins of Dale, before wiping out Dain Ironfoot’s army at the Camp before the gates of Erebor. Bolg is approaching the front gate while Thorin is still on the Fate Track. The northern goblins have crossed the mountain pass and are following behind Bolg, as are several other Shadow armies. While the Elves have mustered in the south hoping that there is still time, Bolg in the next turn broke through the Front Gate into Erebor thus winning the game. (In the previous game, Bolg’s armies failed to break through at a later point, and Beorn showed up decimating them.)

 

It’s been fun revisiting the Hobbit. I re-read parts of the book after watching the three movies back-to-back over Thanksgiving weekend. I also re-read the Durin’s Folk appendix. And the last movie gave me the oomph needed to thoroughly enjoy the battles in the boardgame!

Remote Teaching Roundup

I grumbled in mid-August when our semester began three weeks earlier than usual. But as Thanksgiving approached signaling the end to our semester, I felt much better. I made it through my first semester of fully remote teaching, not having to pivot last spring because I was on sabbatical. Overall things went better than I expected, although there were ups and downs.

 

Before providing my lookback, here’s a timeline of prior blog posts as I moved through the process over the last six months.

·      1.5 months prior: Procrastination, as it wasn’t clear we’d be remote.

·      2 weeks prior: Knee-deep in remote preparation.

·      1 week prior: Feeling unprepared listening to others’ experiences.

·      First Day: Went okay.

·      Third Week: Experiencing some Zoom fatigue.

·      Fifth Week: Got grumpy as I increased my expectations.

I got over my grumpiness in the seventh week and things went fine all the way to the end!

 

My upper division origins-of-life class was little affected by the shift to remote. The students mostly knew each other, and I knew half the group from previous classes. Since the class was entirely discussing the primary literature, my mini-white board was sufficient when I needed to draw a chemical structure. Actual discussion was robust because I posted reading guides and discussion questions ahead of time and all the students came prepared. Asynchronous outside-of-class discussion did not work as well and I abandoned the online discussion board requirement. The student blogs were mixed. Some were very thoughtful and exactly what I had hoped; others were cursory with much less effort. The final group presentations were overall good even through Zoom – smooth delivery, no glitches, and students seemed comfortable overall presenting. The final papers were weaker than I had anticipated, but I blame myself for not forcing students to turn in an earlier draft, having assumed they knew how to do this from a prior Research Methods class that has a similar final project.

 

In my honors first-semester G-Chem class, I’ve already discussed my grumpiness with Zoom limitations but I think I managed well overall. I had cut course content by about ten percent compared to previous years, essentially leaving out optional topics. I gave more first-five-minute quizzes. Assigned online homework was a tad less than previous years, and I cut one problem set. On the other hand, there were four rather than three take-home midterms thereby allowing the students to “test themselves” on all the material before the final exam. The final exam scores were a tad lower than the previous group, but the overall average performance across the course was similar to other honors G-Chem courses. No one performed poorly, and some did quite well.

 

Because all my G-Chem students were also new first-year students, I made an additional effort to build class community through the online discussion board. I think this worked well for about two thirds of the class who participated very regularly. I had fewer Breakout room sessions in Zoom, but there was plenty of back-and-forth interaction in Zoom both verbally and sometimes through the chat when I posed a question. Interestingly I had more students in office hours for the first five to six weeks, at which point slightly less than half the class moved on-campus and student visits to my office hours declined. This is not surprising because the students (living together) found it more convenient to ask each other for help in-person, and work together on homework, problem sets, and annotating their midterm exams. Nevertheless, I still think there were more Swiss cheese holes in student knowledge as I was not able to have the students engage the material as richly as we would do so in-person.

 

I received my student evaluations of their educational experience yesterday. They were very positive, but participation was significantly lower. While 80% of my origin-of-life class students filled them in, only 60% did so for my G-Chem class. This was my first time doing on-line evaluations; I chose not to set aside class time but to remind students multiple times but clearly this doesn’t work as well. When done in-class I get over 90% participation. In the Likert ratings, my scores were all high (and higher than usual) in terms of student perception of the quality of the class and my ability as an instructor. (They were very high in G-Chem.) In terms of workload for origins-of-life about half the students thought it was about right and half thought it was slightly heavy. For G-Chem, three-quarters thought it about right and a quarter thought it slightly heavy. The written comments were also exceedingly positive, more so than usual.

 

That being said, I don’t think that this semester’s evaluations are as representative, not just because of the lower participation rate (less-than-happy students might have opted out), but because both my classes were smaller in size and to some extent specialized. (Also I wasn’t teaching P-Chem.) Only students who were interested in my origins-of-life class took it as their chemistry elective, so they were all motivated. The class had no exams and was all reading-and-discussion-based. Many of the students also took the class because they enjoyed being in my G-Chem class two to three years ago so they already had a positive impression of me as an instructor. In my G-Chem class, many of the students said my class was better than many (possibly any) of their previous remote classes. For one, I didn’t have to pivot. And I’m highly organized – which is perhaps even more crucial in a remote environment. I actually think my quality of instruction was a little worse remotely than in-person, but perhaps I made up for it by being relatively better than what they had experienced thus far.

 

I’m starting prep early for next semester. No procrastinating this time since I’m very sure we’ll be starting remote given the present bleak U.S. Covid situation. I have learned a few things from this semester about things that work and things that don’t work. I have one larger class next semester, so that will be a new challenge. But I’m less anxious than I was because I know I can teach remotely without being a complete failure. The more important question is whether I can do it better the second time around. I certainly hope so.