Asperger's Conversations

Trail Running, Decisions.

I'm "in recovery" from running the brutal Megatransect mountain marathon this past weekend in Lock Haven, PA and wondering about lessons learned.  It was an all day affair for most of us who finished on average in about 9 hours....clamoring up and down steep grades, hand over hand on boulder fields that seemed to go on forever, passing fellow trail runners injured or just tired out along the way.  I was lucky in that I didn't fall, twist an ankle, blow out a knee, like quite a number of my fellow trail nuts.  A few scrapes and cuts, total exhaustion, dehyration....but some great local beer and barbecue at the finish line!

What's real interesting to me are the conversations that take place along the course.  You meet real interesting people at the aid stations along the way or on the trail...encouraging each other, making funny remarks, sharing a little philosophy.  My big insight that I shared with others: In trail running "every step is a decision."  And those decisions are important.  Unlike marathon or ultra marathon races on roads, trail runners have to watch their feet at every step, working to stay on soft ground as much as possible (easier on the knees and joints), avoiding roots, rocks (or not if you decide that one rock or root might help propel you more efficiently).  So in road running you just keep running, while in trail running you look and decide, look and decide for hours and hours...and, of course, you don't stop.  

In real life we all make many decisions each day: What should I eat for breakfast? What should I wear? How should I start today's class I am teaching? Should I call that friend I've been meaning to contact? Should I start a new relationship or end an old one?  We are constantly making decisions, some good and some not-so-good.  But it's important to be mindful of how important those decisions may be! I've never met a trail runner who hasn't make a bad decision (resulting in a "face plant," twisted ankle, or worse).  The key is awareness.  Each of us is a continual decision maker, and those decisions....matter.

When we are in conflict with others it is often about decisions that have been made that we don't agree with or which are counter to our own agendas.  Before we sit in judgement of decisions made by others it may be helpful to reflect on the nature of these decisions including situational and personal factors and the simple fact that none of us can always get it right.  After 5 or 6 months of training and surviving the Mega...I'll just consider myself lucky.

Old Man Take a Look...Whiffle Ball Season Never Dies

The end of summer means the end of another New Hampshire-Vermont clash on the whiffle ball field.  We squeeked by this year, but Mick "the Quick" and Joe "the Toe" will surely be back next year:

Speaks Silences Stars In KBL Finale Guilford,VT(AP) MVP Mitch "Big Daddy" Speaks carried the day with his bat and arm leading Mitch's Diads to a 4-2, 5-3 doubleheader sweep of the hometown Keets Brook All Stars on a breezy, rainswept late summer afternoon at Bowie Wragtail Field.   In the opener Speaks belted a two run homer and a solo shot. Keets Brook's Mick "The Quick" Durante, in the twilight of a brilliant career, answered with a home run and sacrifice fly, but it was not enough. In the finale, Big Daddy continued his assault by launching a towering grand slam in the first inning to overcome a 3-0 deficit. He then closed out the game with two scoreless innings of relief. After witnessing Big Daddy's performance one anonymous player commented "Mitch is the bomb! It's easy to see why the guy is banned from playing wiffleball in 27 countries and 35 sates!" Top defensive play was a diving, tumbling catch of a line drive by Dan "Hangman" Lynch. PGA star "Bopping" Bob Cullinane averted serious injury after slipping on the wet grass while in gallant pursuit of a fly ball. Cullinane waved off paramedics and demonstrated his golf swing before being carried off the field. In pregame festivities The National Kazoo Band played a flawless national anthem and Pope Francis threw out the first ball.

 

MOOC Land

Having taught the first MOOC (massive open source course) in the state of New Hampshire (ok no big deal we are a small state but we do have a state university system with multiple campuses and a number of private colleges, including an Ivy) I have become a sort of point guy for talking about this type of teaching (perhaps “target” might be a better term).

I’ve touched upon faculty fears in at least one previous post and I continue to wonder about animosity toward this type of larger scale approach to education.  My colleagues are understandably concerned about possible erosion of face-to-face education which they value and which, for the most part, they are good at doing.  They see MOOCs with their big enrollments as the beginning of the end of what they do.  And, to some extent, they may be right.  But it’s not the MOOC that is the primary driver of this, but instead the unwieldy cost of both undergraduate and graduate education in the U.S.  So many of my students at the College are literally drowning in debt before they even set their sights on graduate education.  Just yesterday I talked with a bright young student who will graduate from our state college with over $50,000 in debt and now hopes to enter a professional doctoral program (Psy.D. in Psychology) in which she’ll accrue an additional $120,000 or more in debt.  And of course the critical question that confronts faculty: Can we in good faith encourage students to even consider graduate school knowing they’ll emerge with such crushing debt?

While many politicians and others rail against Colleges and Universities for becoming so expensive, the truth is that support for higher education has been slashed, especially here in New Hampshire which ranks dead last in the U.S. for monies for colleges.  When we professors look back at our own graduate education we remember free tuition or big tuition breaks, teaching assistantships, government support and Ph.D.’s with little or no debt.  We could set about our lives in reasonable fashion, knowing that we could buy homes, raise families, have a life.  Not so for the young people we corral through the system.

And while MOOC Land holds out the possibility for, among other things, a lower cost route to a degree, we all fear a two-tier system: Online education for the “have littles” and Middlebury College or Princeton for the “have a lots.”  Until we can stem the tide of this growing inequity we will continue to march toward MOOC Land, whether my colleagues like it or not.