teaching

The Kids Are Not Alright – the Aftermath of COVID Restrictions

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 4 Comments

Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica

This is a hard post for me to write. Why? Because I am an inveterate fan of the age group I teach — 18-24 year olds. I’ve spent my entire career advocating for them, and threw down with our idiot Provost (you can find out who she is if you’re really interested — do note she showed the max salary one could earn with an anthropology degree) but my efforts did not succeed in any meaningful lifting of COVID restrictions during the pandemic.

As we ethereally float through the subsequent years from 2023, when I would consider the pandemic officially “over” (whatever that means) it becomes increasingly obvious that young folks, in critical developmental stages, took major damage to their psychosocial development. The fact that it’s not discussed, other than with the occasional “tsk, tsk” is a societal failure. You cannot fix what you don’t acknowledge, and you can’t acknowledge what one’s flaccid institutional philosophy won’t even recognize. It makes you wonder what all the human development people are doing. So this is my take. Make of it what you will.

For the record, I run a large engineering design program, that fulfills the capstone (last class) requirement for a moderately large undergraduate university mechanical engineering program. My program is profoundly different from most programs, though, in that I seek out sponsored work from corporate elements, with real deliverables. The money allows my students to participate in a real trial run in being a practicing engineer, as well as practice basic business travel skills. Because I’m located in Pullman, WA (the functional ends of the Earth) almost all the clients for the program are somewhere across the state, and occasionally across the nation or the planet. Most kids drive back to the west side of Washington to visit their sponsors, but some get on planes. Almost all stay in hotels (it’s often the first time where they’re completely responsible for reservations, etc.) and they must deal with their client as a real customer. All of this is intentional.

Young people’s brains are relatively soft at 22, but they are on a trajectory to adulthood that for most will occur around 26 years. It’s my job to make sure they are on the right trajectory. Most of my students are young men, though I have a modest percentage of young women as well. There are developmental differences between the two sexes, but it’s not significant in the context of my class. What the students are really working forward to is establishing an independent professional identity as an engineer. The real work, and the real deliverables, buttress this path. Students simply cannot argue with me that the work is somehow irrelevant, or “jumping through hoops.” Someone they might want to work for has given the work to me, and paid for it. And my sponsors are not allowed to exclusively mentor the students. The clients are supposed to act like customers (they have a script.) I’ve educated somewhere north of 3800 students, with over 550 projects. As a friend of mine once said “Chuck — no one has turned more design cycles than you.” I think that’s a bit much, but not by much.

During the pandemic, we carried on as best we could. When students were sent home in March 2020, our remote work practice game was already strong — we live in Pullman, after all, and all the work was completed on time. My clients were amazed, but I was not surprised. And we held up through the isolation of Fall 2020. Projects were still on Zoom, but I had demanded one of our best classrooms for it (it looks like the War Room in Dr. Strangelove) and we did OK. In Spring 2021, I forcefully lobbied for face-to-face classes (many students were already in Pullman, since they had rental agreements) but allowed kids to decide if they wanted to Zoom in or sit in the classroom. About half did. But their faces were masked.

People cannot understand how absolutely destructive masking is in the educational process until you have to teach a roomful of masked kids, that have to collaborate together. A big part of my class is getting kids to form high-performance teams, as well as get to know others in the class. Our situation at WSU is not particularly unique. The students after they graduate will go over to the Puget Sound area and work with each other. It’s a small world. But if you don’t have an opportunity to get to know your alumni peer group, it hurts. On top of that, it also makes it impossible for me to remember individuals in my class. Masks destroy individual identity — that’s the point. And this matters as far as placement goes. Lots of alums count on me for recommendations, and I can’t give them if I don’t know the students.

The downstream result, though, is that instead of having 50 friends, the students mostly ended up with one or two. If there was a pattern, it seemed that students never exceeded a peer group of over four. No cross-group relationships really formed up. So any kind of scaling management of friends at appropriate distances also did not develop.

We were all back in person in Fall 2021, but still masked. The students held up pretty well until November. And then there was kind of a cascading collapse of spirit. Students stopped looking for jobs, we had an increase in predatory hiring from low level companies, and initiative fell through the floor. Spring 2022 was the weirdest vibe (everyone was still in masks for most of the semester) I’ve ever experienced. No one could seem to connect with anyone outside the 3-4 person affinity groups. We all shipped product — one thing that has been interesting is that students’ ability to design things (somewhat a function of individual creativity) did not decline.

But the social scaffolding started falling away. Knowing how to act took a hit. The construction of their social framework, both internally and externally, was not sufficient. And to this day, they still suffer.

But what does that really mean? For a more structured view of deficiencies, we have to go back to our canonical Knowledge Structures. From my experience, students start developing Tribal knowledge around 4 (think birthday parties, Christmas and Santa Claus) and then lean into Authority-driven codes around 6. These continue to be embellished and expand as students get older. Legal behavioral coding (rule following) starts in earnest around 10, and by the time they’re about 20 they learn to trust their own judgment, and focus on goal-based behavior. During their entire youth/young adulthood, though, they continue developing all these modes and structures.

This leads to important social coding development — which directly influences how they will get jobs. People interviewing engineering students are looking for mature actors. Engineering is not like most jobs where decisions are inconsequential. Bad decisions can kill people. And while every engineering firm has a process of check and cross-check on major decisions, most importantly you want your young engineer to recognize they might NOT know something, and backtrack and find a more experienced engineer to help them.

But now, we come to a rub. Students are underdeveloped because of the pandemic in the primary understandings of both authority-driven and legalistic hierarchy. They can sullenly submit to Authority. But they don’t know why, and the false obedience they’ve been beat into them in grade school and high school turns into a liability. They’ve never been conditioned to understand the higher rationality of turning to your elders for knowledge. Older people, already severed from contact for 3+ years, are not viewed as a resource at all.

And young women suffer more than any. All the academy does is teach that men in general, and certainly older men in specific, are predators to be avoided at best. This is deeply problematic in engineering, because most of the people ANYONE deals with are older men. The dynamic became even more exacerbated during the pandemic – a distorted social compounding of alienation. And writing about it is taboo.

In the absence of any formal development, students will compensate, mostly through cultural borrowing. And in the modern university, that cultural borrowing is the ethos of the Longhouse. Everyone’s a victim, or potential victim. Always be nice, regardless of the circumstance. Empathy is sympathy. And who can really empathize when you can’t see someone’s face? You can’t read people. So at best you can struggle through indoctrination of codes about people’s ethnicities.

The lack of ability to follow simple rules really emerged during the pandemic, and continues through to this day. I had a situation this last semester where students from another section were barging into my classroom during lecture. My classroom is somewhat unique in that it has some lab construction space as well as a large set of tables. I also keep that classroom unlocked at all hours so students can congregate.

I finally got tired of the lecture time intrusions. I asked the students why they were in my classroom. “We want to work on our projects.” I said “No — now get out.” But instead of all of them leaving, three scurried out quickly. A large young man and a young woman proceed across the classroom to fetch some of their items, in obvious defiance of my mandate. The young man stood there and glowered at me. I sit on a couch at the front where I lecture from. I didn’t move. At the same time, I was rolling my eyes and thinking “what kind of gangsta shit is this??”

The students were admonished by my co-instructor later. But none came back to apologize for their behavior. Instead, a couple decided to play games with lecture time. And more than a few hung outside the door like feral raccoons, unsure of what to do. Insane. These are college seniors.

Now I’m an old dog — or as I like to refer to myself, an Old Bull Elephant. Most of my students are young men, and it’s the job of the Old Bull Elephant to civilize the younger bulls. It’s simply not a job for the faint of heart, and at 62, it’s about time for me to retire. So I decided to ask the Young Bull Elephants in my own section about what they thought about me throwing the other students out who had come in. They had very mixed, averse feelings. Most were along the lines of “they were just getting their stuff” or some such icks. I took it as an opportunity to explain to them that showing up in a restricted space at work, without permission, is generally a firing offense. You’ll be expected of a safety violation, or potentially industrial espionage. Not a good look. I asked one of the young women in the class, whom I’d had a good relationship with. Her comment? “It was more disruptive to do what you did.” It was obvious where her affinities lay. As well as her understanding of hierarchy and boundaries.

But what I did learn with the dialogue with the students was simple. They were four years behind. They couldn’t understand appropriate boundaries. They really couldn’t understand my position of authority. And they also couldn’t see why you might need rules or protocols to navigate a work environment. The ensemble of all these things turns into what I call social coding – that mix of communicated signals about how things work in an environment so a.) work gets done, and b.) conflict is minimized.

Even with my own sons (26 and 24) I see pandemic deficits. Their social circles are notoriously small. The younger son, a computer science major, went to college during the entire COVID cycle, and to say they were betrayed by the professoriate is an understatement. Most of his professors went back to countries of origin, to deliver lectures online, and often just published online. Billed as convenience for students, the reality is that both sides, students and faculty, played into a near-total collapse of expectations. It’s no surprise that both my sons are professionally successful, but are in a process of rebuilding socially. In the context of my kids, it’s with a large 3rd generation Mexican family who works with the younger boy. When you don’t have the scaffolding, the smart bet is build from the bottom up. I’m grateful. But it’s still a tremendous loss for them of that time.

I happened across a video some may find offensive (you’ve been warned) that completely captures the meta-problem. In the video, a young woman is being asked, in front of her boyfriend, what’s the most guys she ever slept with in one night. She said ‘ten’. He became extremely unhappy, and broke up with her on camera.

Learning lessons the hard way

Her rationalization is self-centered. In her morality, she had not been unfaithful during their relationship, so any actions she had decided to take before simply were irrelevant — to the point where she would disclose this on-camera. There were no real rules save those created in her brain, and the only thing that mattered was the “now”. She doesn’t seem to exhibit any particular neurodivergence or condition. Instead, it is a meta-constructed behavior of the age. And while it might be interesting to speculate on her state of mind, it’s more helpful to understand this, instead of the “kindness matters” solipsistic frame of mind, as a reversion to a more Tribal/Magical mindset of unregulated sex. It is indicative of where we are as a society, and not just in the context of some moral vacuum. As long as you’re nice, you can do what you want. And in true post-modern form, everyone else has to eat the sandwich.

People do ask me how, going forward, they should guide their own children. I tell them all the same thing — socialization is THE most important part of adolescence and post-adolescence. It used to be implicit (if sometimes mocked.) But now it has to become explicit.

And if you’re looking for guidance out of the contemporary academy, I’ve got some bad news. We’re chock-a-block full of neurodivergent individuals, and outright disruptors. They will produce no meaningful research to show that these things are important, and will only grudgingly come to any level of acceptance that we were enormous part of the problem during the pandemic. Trust me — I’m not going to receive any academic award for writing this piece.

But we have to recover. More socialization. More work ethic. More understanding of boundaries. And more fun. It’s the way forward. Because life is short. And our elaborate, complex society offers little time for this generation to start on the trajectory to create their own families.

We already robbed them of four years for our elite paranoia.

Raising the Next Generation of High Agency Engineers -Part 4 – Filling in The Liberal Arts

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Boo Boo at the Dinner Table — Always Polite

One of the things we don’t discuss much, when deciding what courses students should take, is the selection of core university requirements that our students are subjected to. The quality of these courses varies wildly, primarily dependent on their age since inception.

What does that mean? Having spent so much time in the academy (37 years as a professor at WSU) I’ve had more than one chance to witness the cycles of course development. The short version is that new courses roughly follow the demographics of Rogers’ Theory of Innovation. The Pioneers and Early Adopters show up and invent the courses. But, not surprisingly, they move on, becoming bored over time with any repetition in teaching. Early Majority does OK, but it’s not too long until any course, created with the best of intentions, ends up being taught by Late Majority or Laggards, with all the problems you might imagine as far as creativity goes. The worst classes are in the required core, which the Liberal Arts faculty largely have shifted to the contingent workforce, which are literally slaves on the plantation.

I hate to criticize the slaves directly, because some of them are obviously paying for bad karma in a past life they had no control over. And there is nothing more saintly than doing a reasonable job teaching Freshman English Composition. Students aren’t taught really how to write in high school, and they show up needing their papers bled red upon. It’s really a historic problem that’s gotten worse, and is likely to continue to decline. I owe my ability (or at least the trajectory) to write on my first community college professor, who taught the science fiction literature class I took. He had both the grace and temerity to tell me frankly that I sucked. And I am forever in his debt for that. Because I did.

I have far less sympathy for the other courses (various history, sociology and psychology courses) students are forced to take. Many of these are “woke”, and my white male students in particular suffer. They supposedly exist to teach students critical thinking, but it’s of the Cool Hand Luke variety. If the students don’t get their mind right, they are treated harshly until they do. To be fair, I have not gone up to these classes, and sat through them. But the students complain. And the advice I give the students also hasn’t wavered much. Sit tight, it’ll be over soon. Kind of like a root canal.

But it’s deeply problematic, as more and more students show up ungrounded with any sense of engineering outside of assembling a Lego kit. Fair or not, becoming an engineer comes with a pretty heavy set of ethical obligations. Most students have no idea, for example, that they are getting a professional degree, and that they have to take their studies seriously or they could get someone killed.

Getting changes in the core curriculum is also not easy. Major changes have to go to the Faculty Senate, which I used to preside over. In tightening budget circles, I guarantee you that there will be fights over any change in core, because core provides the biggest buck for the bang of all the classes. The contingent slave class of graduate students and clinical professors are paid poorly, but tuition per credit hour is the same. You do the math. And the faculty in those departments wear their victim cards on their sleeves. Outside a handful of them, what they’re doing inside those classrooms is not for polite company.

If we wanted to improve our engineering students, we’d teach two history classes dedicated to the History of Technology. The use of mathematics inside the class itself would be primarily disallowed, with the goal of students understanding the larger narrative structure of the history of science and technology as being the takeaway. I was recently at the Technical University in Munich, and the Germans do a great job with this. The halls of the Metro stop are painted with murals discussing all the greats that contributed to the march of both science and technology. Even as an American, I was inspired by thinking I was walking the same grounds as the German pioneers of engine and aviation science. Our students literally know nothing –even about our space program.

I would also reinstitute the language requirement, with a twist. Most language classes at the university focus heavily on grammar. The result is that students emerge with no knowledge of anything. All classes would be required to focus on conversation, so that students could actually relationally expand outside their limited circle.

All of this would displace the toxic narrative of despair that has replaced any actually critical analysis of history, or useful liberal arts-based skills. As it is, the university system exists primarily to depress our students. It’s got to stop. And the place to start is in the narrative structure of the modern liberal arts, earnestly dedicated as it is to collapse of Western civilization.

P.S. Needless to say, I’d have little problem expanding great books and classics. I refer to the Iliad and Odyssey all the time in my classroom. These classes have to be well-taught to be useful, though. An eye toward providing a foundation of Western moral principles would be key — with the expectation that professors could count on those concepts themselves in later classes. FWIW — I have few students that have even heard of great books. But the few that have actually are affected by them.

Raising the Next Generation of High Agency Engineers -Part 3 – Focus on Who our Students Actually Are

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Braden with a nice Dorado, Ensenada dos Muertos, Baja California Sur, MX

One of the things that is rarely discussed in any meaningful way is the change in the student stream coming into contemporary engineering programs. Historically, when I was an undergraduate (I graduated from Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, OH in 1982) engineering students were a mix of middle-class kids, along with the sons (there were basically no girls) of the unionized class of auto and steel workers whose parents were blue collar and employed in regional factories. There were some outliers. But mostly, my graduating class came from places like the Jersey Shore, or Brookpark, OH. What we had in common was working on cars, building model rockets, and drinking beer. One of our most memorable projects involved pirating the new-tech (for then) satellite TV signal off the Terminal Tower in downtown Cleveland. I was in a functional engineering fraternity, and we assembled a satellite receiver dish from a metal snow saucer, complete with tin can collector, and a 4.2 GHz downconverter. The picture was fuzzy. But it worked.

By the time I had graduated with my Ph.D., though, the picture of the standard engineering student had started to shift. The students that I taught at my first years at Washington State University (WSU) had metamorphosed from those hands-on students that we were, to more professional replacement. Now it was kids that likely had parents who were professionals, but were likely good at math, and were looking for a comfortable career at Boeing. My guess is that I’ve educated at least 500 students who have ended up at Boeing, and likely more. It’s honestly challenging for me to walk into any division over there and not have at least one (usually more) of the engineers being a legacy from my classroom.

Times changed yet again, to the almost-current students we have now. Before it was the “in” thing to focus on recruiting underrepresented minorities into our program, I was hard at work mainstreaming kids whose parents were primarily Mexican, who were farmworkers in the Yakima Valley. We are now approaching something like 33% of our current student population as being from “underrepresented” minorities. Except, by any demographic measure, they are NOT underrepresented. There is still academic cultural pressure to increase these numbers, but it is likely not possible. We have reached some psychosocial thermodynamic efficiency with this percentage (the population of minority students is now overrepresented for their demographic in the state) and any effort to do so will profoundly come at the expense of other students in the program, in a world of diminishing dollars. Compound that with the election of Donald Trump is the lightning-fast dismantling of DEI, we have the current mix from a race/ethnicity perspective that will continue.

And to make matters worse, we are still recovering from the dramatic de-socialization of the COVID years — the true “Long COVID” epidemic — as well as the transformation of all schools to functional prisons because of the ongoing fears of school shootings. To sum it up, the kids I teach now know little to nothing about engineering before they arrive at WSU, they are pathologically obedient, which means they suffer from extreme agency problems, and they simply have no conceptualization of what a functional mentor/mentee relationship might entail. They don’t even hit me until their senior year, which is a mind-blowing experience for them, with my radical expectations for self-motivation and actual production of results. I would love to tell you that kids come to my classroom knowing what to expect in my design clinic. But most, unless they’ve been informed in the pre-class, walk into the clinic program having no idea what the program is, how they might benefit, or even who I am. I’ve worked on all these things — part of my ‘brand’ is my title — Dr. Chuck. But even though I am a functional “institution at the institution”, the students really are oblivious. Forced through infinite cascades of fractalization, and unknowing due to the dismantling of authority in the modern university, they arrive in front of me poorly prepared for their capstone experience, which is supposed to be their transitional experience into the work world. It is a burdensome experience for me emotionally, and a “lift” I find that I do with increasing trepidation. Students have emerged from the Longhouse with some modest expectation of being coddled. Needless to say, that doesn’t happen with me.

And while I don’t coddle them, I often find that I am one of the first people to explain to them the fundamental virtues of a successful career. I do tell them that I am world-class, which initially makes them blanch. And then I tell them I have no intention of teaching students who do not have equivalent aspirations. They have been told for most of their career at WSU that they are second-rate, and even at this land grant university, suffer from a pandemic of low expectations. A range of companies, regional, national and international sponsor my program. I tell them that I will not tolerate them being second-rate — but I also give them the motivational structure on how to be world-class themselves.

Almost all of my students are in the 20-23 year old age group, and the good news is that their neuroplasticity saves most of them. But I have no expectation that the students showing up at my door will improve over time. It’s not a matter of SAT scores. It’s a direct consequence of grounding validity — that internal sense of a reality that comes from making direct stories inside their brain through interaction with their own hands and a problem. And this is a neurobiological evolution. Kids raised in a bubble, whether that bubble is in suburban Redmond, or Toppenish, WA, have little idea how to conceive of a life as an engineer at a factory. Those from poorer parts of the state are obviously far more disadvantaged than students from more wealthy areas. At least those students from middle class neighborhoods can conceive of a potential lifestyle. But you might as well be talking about life on the Moon to many. And for the kids in places like the Yakima Valley, their ambitions are to return back to that same place, whether there’s a job there or not. I have a hard time arguing for the current migratory lifestyle and “making it” with many young people, just FYI. But it’s deeper than that. There are actual different cultural patterns that play a role — virtually all of my male Mexican students are engaged by their senior year. Their fiancees are expecting marriage and children soon. So the “return to Mama” urge, which hits at 5-10 years for my white kids, for them is immediate.

The good news is that, regardless of the roughness of their preparation, most of the students go on to productive careers. The ending of the various DEI mandates will actually help the minority kids the most, as these things provide counterintuitive incentives to many hiring managers. Managers look at ALL new hires as a gamble. But a minority is an especially large gamble, because it will be very difficult, if not impossible to fire them if they don’t work out. My students from minority populations are absolutely not distinct in performance from my majority white/Asian populations. So DEI has created a burden on the minority kids for hiring that is exacerbated by a lack of what I call “social coding” — them not coming from the dominant engineering culture — that will be eliminated.

All this said, what should the future of engineering education look like, considering these generalized student demographics?

  1. I strongly believe in promoting programs like First Robotics in high schools, as well as all sorts of shop classes. None of these programs are controversial, and a class in auto mechanics can offer that brain/hand integration I discuss in this piece on the Neurobiology of Education and Critical Thinking.
  2. Engineering programs will always have a bias toward kids on the autism spectrum, as most early engineering consists of Legalistic/Absolutistic v-Meme rule following. I think that all potential students in high schools should practice more in team-based collaborative environments, with less emphasis on grades and more on production.
  3. Math will remain a weakness, but the way we teach math currently is wildly atrocious. If we would take a socialized approach toward teaching math, we’d likely see far more comprehension. A revolution is required in our pedagogy, based on students co-teaching students.
  4. One of the things that seems to be very difficult for people involved in educational development to understand is that young people lack the ability to engage in cross-paradigmatic and analogic thinking. The real fix for this is more interaction where students are shown manufacturing and engineering environments, as well as meaningful examples of how technology uses the various classical disciplines (math, physics, social sciences) early on.
  5. There should be far more summer camps for engineering and pre-engineering students. There will be no transformation of local educational systems in the near future. Some level of compensation could be achieved with these camps.
  6. Design and problem-solving methodologies should be included in all college levels of engineering. It would amaze people if they knew the proportion of analysis vs. synthesis/design in a contemporary engineering curriculum. We don’t have students build anything except nonsense simulacra of physical principles in most of our lower-level classes. Such a deficit must come to an end.
  7. We are going to have to have some classes on social skills and behaviors. Kids do not know how to manage mentoring relationships, or basic public etiquette. It’s not that they’re running down the block naked. But performance environments very quickly pick up on cues for like-minded individuals, and will exclude those that cannot deliver those cues. We can practice some of this in labs. At the same time, they would also benefit from being directly addressed.

It may surprise some subset of individuals outside the Sausage Factory that these obvious things (they seem obvious to me, at least) are not being done. But they aren’t. And if we have any intention of fixing our technical education pipeline, we are going to have to become student-focused. Right now, we sure aren’t.

Raising the Next Generation of High Agency Engineers (Part 2 of a bunch!)

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

Baby Coho, Windblown, Salmon River outside White Bird, ID

“Manufacturing is insanely difficult. It’s under appreciated in its difficulty.” Elon Musk

One of the things I’ve found to be profoundly curious about the debate regarding fixing our educational systems is how so little discussion occurs around the people delivering the educational content to students. Sure — we’ll argue about topical lists, appropriateness of grade level with material, and such. And then things will then diverge into polemics on the various politics of universities in general (almost always very liberal) or perhaps the politics of individual faculty members.

It’s not that those conversations shouldn’t be occurring — but they will not get at the root cause of the deep problems inside our modern educational systems — especially those in higher education. At some level, we just assume that students are going to get trained, somewhat correctly, with various holes in their knowledge because they did, or did not, take a pedagogy class. FWIW — our Colleges of Education are largely train wrecks, so if you think you’re going to fix the problems in higher education’s pipeline by having everyone take a pedagogy class, I’ve got news for you. My favorite story at my own university happened a while back — there was an “active learning” class — where students were supposed to do exercises themselves, and the classroom would be run by the professor from “the back of the room” (as opposed to the “lecture/sage on the stage” model.)

The class was delivered by lecture.

And I can tell you as well, as the former President/Chair/whatever of the President’s Teaching Academy, no young professor ever called me to ask for advice, nor sit in their classroom. Education is simply an arbitrary venture at the contemporary academy, though I think it’s also fair to say that occasionally, a charismatic individual passes through and makes a temporary difference in how education is structured.

But trust me — nothing sticks. The REASON nothing sticks is that, unless there is a conscious intervention by an individual, Conway’s Law must hold. And universities are inherently rigid hierarchies, with an obsession with titles, and there is a chronic ‘regression to the mean’ phenomenon that goes on in the vast majority of the curriculum. How you lecture can matter, and of course, with the various physical sciences and engineering, you do have labs. But overall, it’s not just the elephant in the living room. That elephant is out roaming on the savannah, eight thousand miles away.

Bottom line — if you want to really change education in general, and engineering education in particular (what this piece is about) you really have to re-think what are the guiding principles that undergird your educational factory. Students are the pieces of work that are being programmed, and at least as much thought has to go into how you are going to create the machines that make those pieces of work as you do arguing about the list of topics. Right now, we don’t do much at all. I find it pathologically fascinating that even at my own university, I have yet to be asked to give a single guest lecture on education, even though I a.) have received university-system-level awards, b.) bring in healthy amounts of money from external sources, and c.) even headed up institutional level organs for improving teaching. My passing is literally a hole in the fossil record.

The problem with even saying that is from an academic perspective, from the primary Authoritarian/Legalistic v-Meme that the academy operates under, even making that statement is some kind of narcissistic sour grapes. I must be butt-hurt over all of this. Honestly, I’m not. What I do in my Industrial Design Clinic, where students work with real sponsors, on real work, with real deliverables, and real expectations, is more rightly called World Creation. The idea is more like a Live Action Role-Playing game (LARP), except the participants (the students) have no real idea that they’re in a LARP. They do know it’s a class, and they do know they have to accomplish real work or they won’t graduate. At least that’s what I tell them. The reality is that I create the motivational environment, buttressed by sufficient and plentiful resources, and a customer/mentor WITH appropriate process that they are cattle-chuted through the game, learning skills and finding appropriate partners, that the statistics of them NOT getting it done are extremely low.

But I got to this very evolved form of education after serious study AND soul-searching after a ton of work. The principal ethos evolved early. But I’ve been doing this for some 29 years — longer than virtually all my students (and some of the younger professors) have been alive.

So what are we doing now? When we hire new faculty, there are really only two primary criteria we apply before we hire. First is that they have “research” prowess and specificity of the area, and secondly, that they stand out from whoever is in the pool that they’re competing with. Occasionally, there might be a nod to some DEI concerns — but honestly, not much. The faculty in my department are mostly foreign born (Chinese/E. Asian, Indian/S. Asian, and from the Middle East) and we really don’t care much at the time of hiring if they have any industrial experience. We hardly bias anything to folks being American-born. We do think about their ability (it is discussed) to bring in research funding, because without money, they will not make tenure. And then we’ll have to start the process all over again. All things considered, I feel like we’ve been pretty lucky. I like our young faculty. But if there’s any illusion that we have anything other than superficial concerns about classes they can teach, when it comes to education, let me disabuse you of that notion.

What that means is we end up with the v-Meme-NA of our own social structure deeply embedded in our activities. How that manifests itself is shown with the basic characteristics of how Legalistic/Absolutistic systems produce knowledge. It’s Completeness uber alles. One of the most obvious is the number of credit hours we require students to take. I think we’re currently at about 131 hours, whereas our accrediting body only requires something around 95. We don’t teach meaningful synthesis/design until the senior year. Teaching early in the curriculum is almost all lectures, and considered a booby prize by all faculty. What that means is excellence in education early on is highly dependent on the instructor and their own independent ethos on how they deal with a classroom, which in the first two years is very likely to be large. A class in Dynamics, which is a very difficult subject for most students, will likely have 200 students in it.

How to sum this up? We really don’t care about the most difficult part of what we do — building and staffing the factory. Especially at the undergraduate level. And because of this, our reject rate (the number of students that do not persist) is phenomenally high — often, in various classes, over 50%. Imagine a factory whose waste was 50% of the raw material brought through the door. The mind reels.

And the research on all this is appalling. One of the things I absolutely do know about student retention is that if students feel like they are connected to the program, then they’ll likely stay and finish. But instead of meaningfully and deliberately constructing environments so that students are connected, we fractionalize ad infinitum. Working together is called cheating. And the various DEI excuses now definitely come to the fore, though the reality of my classroom, where students actually befriend each other and work together, belies this. Stupid research is historically done on team size, for example, where it’s decided that four is the optimal number of members. But if you look at the actual research where that number was generated from, it was from building marshmallow straw towers in the course of an hour, between strangers. It is literally insane (see earlier comment about how educational research is largely garbage.)

If we want to build an environment that actually links industry and the university in a meaningful way, we are going to have to hire with a very different set of expectations than any current Carnegie R1 institution (the categorization for top research institutions in the US) does. In order to run my clinic, I need on any given week the following skills:

  1. Knowledge of a broad range of topics, at a level where I can sort complexity quickly.
  2. The ability to negotiate contracts and conflicts.
  3. Some knowledge of adolescent/post-adolescent psychology, and the ability to identify the symptoms of various mild pathologies so I don’t over-react if someone’s having a bad day.
  4. Actual knowledge of developmental behaviors and goals for a range of both students AND collaborators. Anyone proposing creation of an educational environment that doesn’t understand what partners need, as well as students, cannot create anything that lasts.
  5. Sales ability to continue to recruit outside collaborators into the fold.
  6. Ability to map procedural steps to educational outcomes.

The biggest has to be to think consequentially. What this means is that one must own a large sense of responsibility if students in your LARP don’t advance past a certain level in an appropriate amount of time. It means you’ve built the game poorly, and you have to own it. We’ve constructed education as a very low responsibility endeavor for teachers. If the students don’t learn it, and it’s an accepted part of the curriculum, it’s the students’ problem, and they will be graded/punished appropriately. The beats will continue until morale improves. This is absolutely counter to the high performance environment one MUST establish if you want students to move through the game over the course of a semester. Further, the more fear you use, the less likely students are to come forward quickly with what’s actually wrong with your creation. At round one, it’s your version of reality you’re creating.

If I had to hire a faculty for starting something like Elon’s Texas Institute of Technology and Science (TITS), I’d probably split the percentages of people with industry experience and Ph.Ds about 50/50. I’d teach people how to construct meaningful customer relationships, because everywhere you look in making a true paradigm-shifting institution, your primary job is building and maintaining a large social network that has as its priority transfer of information across all its nodes. I’d train directly to these goals as well — and at least some of this is salesmanship and deal creation on an individual level. If you want to pull something like this off, you must have people who have profound, place-taking empathy. A heavy lift. I also don’t think I’d hire all but a few under the age of 35. Younger people developmentally are simply not at the stage where they could be expected to master some of the more complex social dynamics.

There’s more, of course. And there would be coffee. Because coffee is for closers.

Quickie Post — Raising the Next Generation of High Agency Engineers

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 2 Comments

Road Trip — outside Winnemucca, NV, December 2024

The LA fires are burning, and while I should be writing something about that, I just can’t yet. Yes, it is a memetic shitshow. Yes, DEI is a problem (though only for a mix of reasons that most people are unaware of) and yes, I think most of it could have been avoided.

But I feel like a little positive writing today. And hey — you get what you pay for!

One of the more positive snippets of news in the last couple of weeks is Elon Musk’s interest in starting the Texas Institute of Technology and Science (TITS). He was prompted to discuss this (seems like it was before the latest rape ring scandal in Great Britain) before excrement hit the ventilator. The protagonist was one of Marc Andreessen’s (of a16z fame) General Partners, Katherine Boyle, who daylighted the topic. I proposed myself (still will) to be the founding President of the institution, and if Elon had seen any of my comments, my phone would be ringing. People fundamentally miscast the problem with engineering education and our young people by assuming somehow we have DEI problems, and if we would just double down on higher SAT scores, with maybe a little industrial experience thrown in, we’d fix what ails us. As an engineering educator for nigh on 41 years, eh, not so much.

It’s not that excellence in technical education isn’t needed. It absolutely is. It’s just a classic “and” problem. We need that. We just also need a list of other “ands”. Some of these include exposure to industry practice, including participation in industry throughout their education. No engineering school can reproduce a real factory floor for a lab. Which is why I directly partner with companies like Schweitzer Engineering Labs here in Pullman, running mass collaborations with their factory floor, through the generosity and assistance of plant managers there. I am lucky. Those connections come naturally in my world because many of these individuals are my former students. It helps to have an actor at the VP level when someone will open up their facility for a morning just to have students confront actual problems folks on the manufacturing floor are having. And I’m very clear with the messaging to my students about their obligation to return value to the sponsors. If it costs the company $70K to shut the floor down for a morning so the students can participate, they better deliver somewhere north of that $70K with the completion of their projects in value for the company’s trouble.

What is also important, though, are what people in the education business call the “soft skills” lessons. This is a stupid term, because these skills, such as high agency, data-driven decision making, merging opinions from successful collaborations, and on and on, are far more than just an isolated list of skills. They’re actually the function of psychosocial development and maturity, which needs to be just as deliberate as teaching someone vector calculus. The problem, though, is that these types of skills cannot be taught with a PowerPoint presentation. You have to create experiences that are profoundly disinter mediated (you, the professor, are not in the middle) so that students can act within the confines of their own brains. As my mom used to say “Son, the life will teach you.” Absolutely.

But these spaces and lessons need to at least 80% be intentional out of the environment and situation. That means, just like a really great video game, someone has to know what they are doing. The magic just doesn’t happen. An important tool I use is what I call “meaning matching” — understanding how the different ages — both students and sponsors — find meaning. And then you, as the environment designer, create the interaction scenarios so that both sides remain enfranchised around particular goals, and both develop and get work done. For example, 22 year olds want to demonstrate performance and mastery of engineering, whereas 35 year olds are looking for community. Weaving both these developmental goals around a common objective is the ticket, and is your best ticket to success.

One of the principles which absolutely scares academics is that I will only permit REAL work in our exercises. I want students to solve real problems that people are having. No make-believe. And while these are often more complicated than just canned exercises (I like to make fun of the various competitions we have, like mousetrap cars) they also are vastly more rich from an information richness perspective. The boundaries are fuzzy. And that encourages both exploration — going out and finding things one didn’t know — as well as metacognition — the realization that you’re not going to know everything about a space, but you still have to solve a problem.

Someone’s inherent capacity for this is NOT something any standardized test measures. Nor is likely to do so in the future. That doesn’t mean one should throw all standardized tests into the garbage. It’s not a “but” kind of problem. But one must be open to the broader space if you actually intend to revolutionize engineering education.

Another big one that is chronically neglected is peer-level collaboration with students. We are very comfortable with mentor/mentee relationships, and prioritizing them. And these are very important. Complex behaviors in this environment are often directly passed through emulation (think mimicking) of more sophisticated actors. But that does not teach students one of the most important lessons they must also learn — how to assess their colleagues, as well as their efficacy and veracity of their work. You gotta know who you can trust.

The end product that everyone wants is almost meta-the same — a mature, aware, independent individual that can act in the context of group benefit, while also working alone when need be. The term for that is agency, and as I’ve written elsewhere on this blog, agency is self-empathy — being connected on multiple levels with oneself. Which then manifests as actual connections with others, in a high-coherence information transfer mode. Short version — you’re being honest and reflective with yourself, as well as assessing what others told you. That’s how you make complex systems with millions of parts fit together and actually work.

The problem with education like this is that this has basically nothing to do with the current psychosocial DNA of our current university system. Students aren’t just told how to think. They are told how to relate to others (the whole DEI scam) and are hobbled in having productive experiences where they discover stuff on their own. Students now are more obedient than they have ever been. But the end result of such obedience is that students only trade their agency for a lack of responsibility. It’s the natural bargain. And you end up with entire institutions of compromised young folks. And the ones with natural victim/psychopathic tendencies? They float to the top, ready to be waved as flags of dysfunction by those that want our young people to fail. Most young people really are not the problem one sees in the press. But we, as a larger set of institutions, have failed in understanding the challenges involved in raising responsible young people. Instead, we’ve devolved to leading with fatuous efforts about declaring one’s pronouns.

Getting to people wanting to shatter the paradigm (like Elon) is also challenging. Outside-the-box thinkers like me really don’t have any meaningful access to reform-minded individuals, who are largely trapped inside a box of people who are status-driven. No one really wants to change the order of the status line-up, while at the same time, people expect these leaders to be the best. They aren’t — they’re a function of their v-Meme NA more than anyone. So it’s a self-reinforcing trap. It is very frustrating to listen to these people, trapped in their high-status bubble, wondering out loud on social media about problems that they believe haven’t been confronted, largely because the elites haven’t confronted them. Just a word, both Kathryn and Elon — we ain’t many. But there are a handful of us that have been thinking outside the box — and have a success portfolio to prove it works.

Which brings me to developing agency in young people. My X pal, A.J. Kay, just last week, proposed pondering the two categories of Discipline and Control, as a way of doing a self-reflection on one’s growth as a person. I thought this was great. The definition of level of Discipline is the ability to force one to do an activity that is prosocial/beneficial, even when you don’t want to. And Control is just the direct opposite — your ability to not execute behaviors that your brain wants to do for self-satisfaction. I had the students make the two columns and list theirs, then share with the group of students at their table (usually 4-5).

There is only good news here — the students almost uniformly tagged their eating, exercise, sleep and screen time as things they needed to practice. Things like “getting to bed on time” and “not sleeping in” figured prominently, as well as “cooking at home four times a week” (kinda scary when you think about it.) Exercise was almost included at a particular tempo (many students said 4-5 times a week) and certainly justified the expense we’ve put into recreational facilities for fitness. There was a little more advanced behavior as far as assignment completion as well. Overall, I left a little more hopeful. We didn’t quite get to eliminating sugary drinks. But I’ll take it.

The class I performed this exercise in was our introductory design class, where we will cover things like empathy interviews with customers as well as structured problem solving design processes (we are a big LEAN shop.) If you ask how this fits into engineering education, I myself believe in a bildung approach to education. We cannot expect our engineering students to be high performance individuals, while at the same time to act ethically without appropriate internal development. I plan on doing this exact exercise at the end of the semester to see how their personal goals evolve.

Stay tuned!

P.S. For those interested in a deeper dive on how the brain actually learns and retains complex information, read this piece.