24 A Recovering Jerk A Recovering jerk I13 able way. It's as if they've walked into a department store, and instead of buying five pairs of designer jeans, they've pur- chased a five-subject course-load. I don't fully reject the customer-service model, but I think it's important to use the right industry metaphor. It's not re- tail. Instead, I'd compare college tuition to paying for a per- sonal trainer at an athletic club. We professors play the roles of trainers, giving people access to the equipment (books, labs, our expertise) and dur that, it is our job to be demand- ing. We need to make sure that our students are exertsng \ -r 1s an accepted dicht in education that the number one themselves. We need to praise them when they deserve it and Igod of t'eachers should be to help students learn how to to tell them honestly when they have it in them to work learn. I I always saw the value in that, sure. But in my*'hndy a bet- Most importantly, we need to let them know how to judge ter number one pal was this: 1 wanted to help students 1- for themselves how they're coming along. The great-.thing how to judge themselves. hut working out at a gym is that if you put in effort, you Did they recognize their me abilities? Did they have a get very obvious results. The same should be true of college. of their own flaws? Were they realistic about how others A professor's job is to teach students how to see their minds mg in the same way they cam see their mush grow I ever had to do as an educator. (It hasn't been easy in fw#plbdua, &so&ey want it to be valuable in a 'Y ITHE LAST LECTURE rather than character-building honesty. I've heard so 4 people talk of a downward spiral in our educational systeq and I think one key factor is that there is too much strokid and too little real feedback. When I taught the "Building Virtual Worlds" class,.l Carnegie Mellon, we'd do peer feedback every two week 1 This was a completely collaborative class, with the studed workmg in four-person teams on virtual-realicy compi projects. They were dependent on each ather, and thi$ grades reflected it. 'I R We would take all of the peer feedback and put togethetfk spreadsheet. At the end of the semester, after each studea had worked on five projects, with three different teammare on each, everyone would have Meen data points. That was ; pragmatic, statistically valid way to look at themselves. . :< I would create multicolored bar charts in which a studei could see a ranking on simple measures such as: I) Did his peers think he was working hard? Exactly hq many hours did his peers think he had devoted t~i project? . . - , . . .: I ..; 2) How creative was his contribution? 1, Y 3) Did his peers find it easy orhard to work wi& him , .. Was he a team player? ,, ... ,'I 1 . . I . . .., .,. 6!il As I always pointed. out, especially for )No. 3, what, yoti peers -think is, by definition, ag accurate assessment of hot 'easy you are to work with. .(, ' ;- :: !rlr The bar charts were coupled with more fr'ee40rm-peer feedback, which was essentially specifct suggestions for im- provement, such as "Let other people finish their sentences , . My hope was that more than a few students would see this information and say, "Wow, I've got to take it up a notch." It was hard feedback toignore, but some still managed. , FOP one course I -taught, I'd had students assess each other in the same way, but only let them know the qde in which Bhey ranked. I .remember a conversatbn,I had with one stu- dent whom others found, parsiculaply obnorious., He .was smart, but his healthy sense af himsdf Left him clueless about how he was coming off. He saw the data ranking him in the . .Training a Jedi 116 THE LAST LECTURE He figured that if he was ranked in the bottom 25 percent, he must have been at the 24 percent or 25 percent level (rathe than, say, in the bottom 5 percent). So in his mind, th meant he was almost in the next higher quartile. SO he s himself as so far from 50 percent," which me thought he was just fine. ((I'm so glad we had this chat," I told him, "becaus think iis imponant that 1 give you some specific inf0mIati you are not just in the bottom 25 percent. Out of fifty dents in the class, your peers ranked YOU dead last. You number fifty. You have a serious issue. They say you're no ~'s A thrill to fulfill your own childhood dreams, but ajyou tening. You're hard to get along with. It's not going well- Iget older you may find that enabling the dreams of The student was shocked. (They're always shocked. had had all of these rationalizations, and now here 1 was When I was teaching at the University of Virginia in 1993, ing him hard data. a ~en~-~o-year-old arti~t-t~rned-com~~~~~-~~~~hi~~-~i~ hd then I told him the truth about myself. named Tommy Burnett wanted a job on my research team. "1 used to be just like you," 1 said. "I was in denial. After we talked about his life and goals, he suddenly said, had a professor who showed he cared about me by sma Oh, and 1 have always had this childhood dream." the tru& into my head. And here's what makes me spe Anyone who US~S "childhood" and "dream" in the same listened." sentence usually gets my attention. This student's eyes "I admit it," I told him : "And what is your dream, Tommy?" 1 asked. a recovering jerk. And that gives me the moral autho "I want to work on the next Stir Wars film," he said, tell you that you can be a recovering jerk, too." Remember, this was in 1993. The last Star Warr movie had For the rest of the semester, this student kept hi en made in 1983, and there were no concrete plans to make check. He improved. I'd done him a favor, just as Ymore. I explained this. "That's a tough dream to have be- Dam had done for me years before. cause it'll be hard to see it through," I told him. "Word is that they're finished making Star