L'esprit du sentier

I've had occasion to mention L'esprit d'escalier - the wit of the stairs: all the clever things you could have said as you walk downstairs after the interview. I've also learned to be more circumspect in how I address people. Engage brain before opening mouth as my father used to say. For example, when we first bought our farrrm in the Summer of '96, I was often to be found leaning on the gate not working at making the place presentable. I used to pass the time of day with folks who'd walk up the lane. Back then, it was mostly neighbours and locals, taking the air of an evening as a pretext for scoping out the blow-ins. My standard gambit was often "Are you going far?". Word filtered back that I should be more careful because this question had been heard as Where do you think you are going? As if I was questioning their right to walk up the lane as their fathers and foremothers had done since the foundation of the state.

That was in hindsight a rather willful, somewhat racist, misunderstanding of my words and intentions. Since the turn of the 21stC, fewer and fewer local people walk anywhere, let alone up the 1-in-10 slope of the lane, so the people I meet are generally hill-walkers and ramblers from further afield. I still use Are you going far? because it's neutral but slightly more loaded / interesting than "Nice day". Those who fancy a chat, stand and deliver; those who don't, walk on past. Lips are more pursey, and steps more furtive during the lockdown perhaps because hardly any of these walkers live within 5km of the place they parked their car, let alone 2-3km further up the hill. Rules is Rules but outdoor exercise with or without mask sure beats damaging your mental health locked up with your housemates.

Saturday, like Friday and Sunday, was a brilliant sunny Spring day with a hint of breeze to prevent over-heating. Who wouldn't want to walk up our hill to watch the crows a-courting and boost the old vitamin-D? As I crossed the lane to count the sheep's legs [if it's not a multiple of 4, there's something wrong] I saw a party of small people ploughing up hill. As they drew abreast of our gate, I greeted them and, close-up, noticed that as well as three adult women and 4 sub-teen children, they had a dog with them.

Self: That dog should be on a leash
Woman: "That dog" is 16 years old, and lives on a farm
Stunned: You can see where I'm coming from?
Woman:  You can see where I'm coming from!
and turned her back on me with a toss of her head, carrying on up my lane.

 What's with my insistence about dogs on leads? On a city street, perhaps; but on a beach? or out in the country? Where else can Bonzo be free to run? Well nowhere near [our] sheep, for starters. This was explained to me by a fellow sheep farmer 2 years ago. Michael lives on the other side of the mountain up another lane, which also serves as an access route for hill-walkers. He is getting cumulatively aggravated by walkers with dogs, and gets short and sharp if he sees them on his property - including the hillside - without a leash. But he added that, while dogs chasing sheep is obviously a wrong-doing, the smell of strange dogs and the yapping, yipping, barking and greeting of strange dogs gives sheep a frisson of terror - adrenalin, cortisol, elevated BP [that wd be vasopressin], maybe oxytocin - which does their condition no good. And acknowledging that sheep are not all of the brightest, such sounds and smells even from invisible dogs can send the whole flock of them off on a run which can result in broken limbs and other material damage. It is, for example, lambing [oxytocin] season. It's a problem in Kerry [and everywhere] with a suggestion that pandemicitis is driving all sorts of [nice but] ignorant people with their wholly untrained dogs out onto the hills. The rules in Kerry [and everywhere] are "He pointed out that dogs, whether on leads or not, are NEVER allowed on the walks but now, more than ever, given the stress dogs can have on farm animals, people must obey this rule."

After two, partly sleepless, nights my considered L'esprit du sentier response to Mrs Flounce and her old farm dog wavers between:

Self: No I don't know where you're coming from, but if you give me your address I'll visit you and have my sheep graze your lawn.
or
Self: Well have a nice walk; I hope you find your manners up there.

The trumpets shall sound

I went to a lockdown garHaHaHaden party on Saturday arvo. It was pretty weird, of course, trying to maintain a semblance of physical distancing while catching up with the crew I worked with during the 00s. Everyone really needed a hug but nobody was getting one. The ostensible reason for the knees-up was that  we were all moving on. One couple was off the Middle East; someone else was going back to Cambridge MA [code for Harvard]; another was coming out of maternity leave; and another was returning to UCD as a Professor and Senior Fellow; . . . and me of course: I R retire!

Without a great deal of evidence, two of the no-longer-quite-youngsters were saying that I was a great teacher and asking what was the key to that success. I was caught a bit wrong-footed by this tribute, but I fluffed something about supervising several dozen final year research projects over the last seven year. The students involved had a very wide range of abilities from our very best to the walking wounded. But I'd like to think that everybody involved, including notably myself, got something out the process. As the project is allocated a nominal 180 contact hours over the 30 week teaching year, you'd better hope that it wasn't a total busted flush!  The self-starting highly motivated kids didn't need any help: just an occasional nudge to get them back on track. And everyone has an existential crisis at some stage in the developing project: so there will be a bit of judicious buttering and sometimes a metaphorical knee firmly in the base of the spine to get them to stand a bit prouder of what they'd achieved. And the weaker students, some of them quite damaged, some of them bone idle and none of them knowing much? Well they were swept forward with the same philosophy I applied to Dau.I and Dau.II when they were educating themselves at home. And one thing that works is to listen to what the kids have to say; rather than steaming through with my own narrative. It takes dollop of humility to acknowledge that teacher don't know everything and that everyone knows something that you don't and you can always learn. What you learn might be nothing to do with science but might be about courage, resilience and compassion. It was only by giving space on the floor that I encountered someone who had milked a camel.

That talk about getting people to fulfill their potential  . . . and a little bit more, led inevitably to our boss by whom we'd all been mentored and for whom we engineered a national prize for getting the best out of her human resources.

But with l'esprit d'escalier driving home that evening, I expanded on the idea that teacher not knowing everything is a really important part of allowing students to have agency it their own learning. IF you can't be told what the answer is, or you can't work it out from teachers unconscious clues, THEN you have to find out for yourself. It was definitely like this when they asked me to teach second year physics: I knew far less than the students - who had the benefit of passing 1st year physics which I had conspicuously failed to do in high school. But it was the most tremendous fun finding out what the answers were.

As I prepare to leave the stage, I'm convinced that the content of most lectures is the least important part of the process. If think about it, what is the point of telling anyone something that can be found out in 3 minutes on Wikipedia? Coronarama will be an opportunity for many of us to stop lecturing like we're the Oracle and the other people in the room are tasked to take notes. It will be much more rewarding to make everyone in the room think about what the key issues are and use those deliberations to reflect on what we collectively need to discover to address those key issues. What the teacher knows might be part of that; but it's not the whole answer and it's going to be goddamn boring if the teacher is merely chanelling the certainties of their own teachers . . . and so recursively back to . , , Aristotle, Boyle, Charles, Dalton or one of the boys (it was mostly boys) who actually found out what the answer was.

Illusory transparency

Nobody thinks nepotism is a good idea - except the benefitting nephew. You hope and expect that the best qualified candidate gets the job; that only the competent students pass the exam; that the marks in some sense are a predictor of ability. In all the examiners meetings I have attended, the objective truth of the marks has been tempered by common sense (=prejudice and expectation). I can't remember a case when a student was done down unfairly rather than raised up without justification: but my neighbour John described one from Durham U thirty years ago.

In 1st and 2nd year college it doesn't matter what mark the student gets; so long as they achieve a certain minimal standard in the learning outcome department. Of course it can give some students a bit of a boost to morale if they do unexpectedly well, and that is no bad thing. At the end of their course in science, most students will carry out an independent research project. In The Institute, about 25% of the hours allocated to our final year students are devoted to project work and the marks are are equivalent; so the mark matters. A few years ago someone distributed a marking scheme with the implication that everyone would follow it to ensure equity, transparency and an audit trail in case of a dispute:

• 50% Written report:
• Presentation
• Methods
• Results
• Understanding of topic
• References
• 30% Performance in Lab
• Planning and organisation
• Dedication and initiative
• 10% Literature Review
• 10% Public presentation

This damned form really didn't work for me. Like marking weekly lab reports our of 10, nobody is going to get 10/10 or 0/10 for understanding of topic, so the marks tend to normalise at about 65%. Then I found myself sub-consciously deciding on the final mark and massaging the incremental figures so they added up to The Sense of the Meeting. Nevertheless, each year I dutifully filled in a form for each student and sent it in to the Project Liaison Officer. A while ago, this feller, about my age, told me that he never bothered with the official form: "This chap is a solid II.2" he'd think and plunk 55% confidently in the mark book. Could do worse by the students. Each project is double marked but only the supervisor was present for 30% Performance in Lab, so that section is only marked once. If you care enough, you can probably bully the other marker to more of less match your assessment.

I'm reflecting on this [again] because I was asked to mark student presentations at this week's environmental science colloquium meeting using these criteria:

• Slides 30%
• Presentations 30%
• Time keeping 10% deduct 2 marks for every 30 seconds over
• Questions
• Science 20%
• Total 100%

I found my fellow session-marker at the previous coffee break and asked him if he was any sort of  obsessive about the goddamn form. Asked this passive aggressive leading-question way is quite "have you stopped beating your wife?" but the answer was No. In any case we only had one student who was eligible for a [monetary] prize, so after the session we put our heads together and agreed that the talk was pretty good for an early-stage scientist but not stellar. He gave 'them' [pronoun alert] 65% [solid II.1] and I had 'them' at 62%, so it looked less like a stitch up. We then herded unto a quiet room with the other judges where the data for all the talks for all the students had been gathered into a spread-sheet [displayed transparently on the white wall]. The out-going chair of the organising committee announced that Student Z [91%] had won the big prize. Another poor sap had scored 89.5 and got nothing in the Harry Potter Winner Takes All society we live in. The marks of two candidates for the prize for tree-hugging were tied at 87. The out-going chair and the in-coming chair announced that the prize was awarded to the bloke . . . "the fact that the other contender was a final year undergraduate was irrelevant" and the fact that she had XX chromosomes of course didn't enter into the equation. As it happened I'd attended the session where these two talks were given, and I agreed with that assessment - the bloke by a nose. But I would think that because I am The Patriarchy with an unconscious bias for XY up-and-comings. What aggravated me was the charade of making grown people filling in forms to an obsessive level of detail and then throwing them all in the bin when there was a difficult case.

With 20:20 l'esprit d'escalier I would have split the goddamned prize and given half to Mr Harry and half to Miss Potter  . . . partly because we can therefore ♬cue Katie Melua♬. Well, it's not my gig or my community and I won't be going to next year's meeting, so I don't really have locus standi on the high moral ground here.

What it takes to win

Just before Christmas, I met Ronnie Delany, Irish Olympian.  Luckily, I'm not very fleet-of-thought because my l'esprit d'escalier question was "Was Zatopek really as big hearted and kind as we have been led to believe?" which would have implied that Delany was less interesting (and kind) than the great Czech runner.  Anyway watching youtube videos from when I was a child acquired its own momentum.  Delany beat local favorite John Landy for Gold in the 1500m in Melbourne 1956, so it was natural to go back a couple of years to the Summer of 1954, when I was struggling past my twin sister to be born first.

On 6th May 1954 Roger Bannister, after a fairly crap season running mile and 1500m races, turned up at Iffley Road in Oxford after a half day's work at his London day-job (medical doctor), with his pals Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway.  They paced him round the track until he set off for the tape on his own, clocking 3min 59.4sec (huzzah!).  It was (just) the first sub-4-minute mile and, by definition a new world record which stood for . . . six and a half weeks.  On the 21st June John Landy (him again) ran a 3:58 mile in Finland.  On the 7th August 1954, these two champions were head-to-head at the Commonwealth Games in Vancouver and Landy looked back at the wrong moment and was passed out by the Bannister.  This "Miracle Mile" event was commemorated in a life-size bronze sculpture.  Landy shrugged off his loss with a quip "While Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt for looking back, I am probably the only one ever turned into bronze for looking back." If you watch the video (crap production values with cropped heads and poor panning) to the end you can hear Bannister's plummy accent complementing his antipodean rival and vice-versa. What really sticks in the mind, however, is Bannister's persistent cough.  I can find no evidence that Bannister was a smoker but it is well known that Chris Chataway was - he only lived to the age of 83!

Landy achieved immortal sporting fame in 1956, and another sculpture [L] for being sporting.  At the Australian National Championships, which preceded the Melbourne Olympic Games, Ron Clarke and John Landy and a handful of other great runners lined up to race in the 1500m. Just over halfway through the race, Ron Clarke had his heel clipped by another runner and sprawled to the ground immediately in front of Landy, who had to jump over the body or fall himself.  His spikes gashed Clarke's arm and Landy stopped to see if his rival was alright. He stopped for half a second, apologised and then hared off after the pack. Amazingly, despite the deficit and lost time, he went on to win the race! Or as an eyewitness put it "Landy then did the most incredible, stupid, beautiful, foolish, gentlemanly act I have ever seen. He stopped, ran back to the fallen Ron Clarke and helped him to his feet, brushed cinders from knees and, checking his injured shoulder, said 'Sorry'." That should remind you of a parallel Blob story from the NYC women's marathon when Derarta Tulu hung back to help an injured Paula Radcliffe and then cruised off to win the race.  If you watch the movie of Landy's act of courtesy, you'll see that he takes a short-cut off the track immediately after leaving Clarke.  Surely that would result in a disqualification in any world where the letter of the rules over-rides their spirit. Landy didn't have the killer instinct, but we like him all the more for it.

Delany, Bannister, Landy and Clarke are all still alive and kicking; although Bannister, a consultant neurologist, has been diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease.

Another piece in the sport-from-the-sofa series.

Space the final frontier

We are almost at the finish of this year's journey at The Institute. The exams are sat, the exams are marked, the students are happy or disappointed and we're all looking at 10 weeks of Summer. Yesterday I was at two final Faculty meetings, because I teach across such an absurdly broad range of subjects.

Apart from Summer, everyone is looking forward to building and equipping and using a promised new Science Building - which I am determined to have named after local hero Yvonne Barr. The contractors have a damn-fool specific limit to the build footprint of 1063 sq.m. No, not 1065! You can see where it came from: innumerate bureaucrats at the Dept Education approve the new building in principle and pull a price out of the air: we'll give them €1.2million. They then consult the manual of build-costs for schools and colleges from the Institute of Quantity Surveyors and divide €1.2million by €1128 per sq.m . . . et voilà 1063 sq.m.  It's never enough! A shiny new building is an opportunity to play your best game with the best equipment and the best facilities and it's only going to come once in a teaching life-time. But every new feature, every aspiration, every required gender-neutral bathroom eats into that rigidly defined footprint.
At the Health / Sport / Rehab / Athletic / Strength & Conditioning faculty meet there was a long, and generally respectful, fight discussion between the advocates for a Dexa Scanner room and the future users of a Sports Rehab clinic. In the compromises and negotiations, the Rehab clinic had been shaved from a comfortable 100 sq.m. to a cramped 80 sq.m. losing a corner of "their" space to a 20 sq.m. storage room. The Dexa-scanner room was also allocated 20 sq.m. but there was no Dexa-scanner [Above, driven by the symmetrical lady in the white coat] in the budget. Could the Dexa-scanner room double-up in space or in time as a store?  Dexa is really DEXA dual energy X-ray absorptiometry - a radiation source that can measure bone-density. It is an important diagnostic tool for osteoporosis and also for strength and conditioning and elite athletic coaching.  But "X-rays"give administrators and health&safety people the screaming abdabs and one regulation requires the presence of one qualified radiologist for every machine. Quite apart from costing North of €30K. So it may never happen.

And what do they need storage for?  Among other things, for a dozen or so Electrotherapy trolleys [R]. As far as I can tell from Google images, an electrotherapy trolley ETT is exactly the same as a tea-trolley except as regards price. Like a jam-jar costs 3c but a "semen capture and retention receptacle" as used so many times by Berthold Wiesner is in the medical supplies catalogue at £30.  The debate went back-and-forth across the floor-plans until I suggested that all rooms have a 3rd dimension called Up: would it be possible to load up half the ETTs onto a hydraulic shelf such as you see at the back of delivery trucks? These could be lifted up and the rest of the ETT herd corralled underneath. That would effectively half the required storage space allowing that much more elbow room for the Rehab effectives. Other useful suggestions were made for secure storage that didn't require a separate room - 'bicycle' locks and cages - and eventually that agenda item was put to bed.

Where do the ideas come from? With l'esprit d'escalier [prev] as I was driving home from work after the meeting, I recalled that we had been delayed twice on the ferry crossing on our Bank-Holiday road trip because I was driving a little red Yaris. All the smaller cars without roof racks were sent up a ramp to a mezzanine deck and had to wait at disembarkation until the trucks and 4x4s underneath had been unloaded. That was the grit that niggles, which had helped create my pearl of wisdom at a Faculty meeting two weeks later.

The grit that niggles

This is by way l'esprit d'escalier: all those witty and trenchant things you think of as you descend the stairs after the interview. We were invited to a birthday party last weekend. These things are a bit daunting for The Beloved and me, partly because social events happen so rarely that we get out of practice. Birthday Boy is an artist (more conceptual than my father's water colours) with a strong theme of feminism and science about his oeuvre, so you never know whom you might meet at his gigs.

One of the problems with morphing from wrinkly to crumbly is that you get lost in the middle of a sentence and never get it to . . . Part of that is, of course, that conversation is a dialogue and you have to give the other chap some space in the conversation. The Blob is a bit easier that way because a) it's not in real time [it is now 0255hrs as I write] and b) nobody is interrupting.

One of the people I met at the bday seemed to follow what I was saying about databases, servers and the human genome and it turned out that he was Artist in Residence AiR at CONNECT "the world leading Science Foundation Ireland [SFI] Research Centre for Future Networks and Communications". I was intrigued because we have just submitted a grant application to SFI to forment relationships among artists + scientists and + teens in order to promote FITNa. The AiR seemed to be already embedded in that role . . . although I have no idea whether nascent scientists get access to him wearing his AiR hat-of-power. I put forward the idea that Science can be rather magisterial because it is now much more the Age of Science than the Age of Aquarius, The Gods of STEM have brought us cars, mobile-phones, wind-farms and server-farms [just to mention a few of the items of tech kit that had appeared earlier in our dialogue] and it is as if everything worth having is due to science. I suggested that we scientists could have a teeny bit more humility about this because Science is A Way of Knowing [bloboprev] but surely not the only way of generating 'value'. Philosophers, geographers, historians and linguists all add value to the trudge between cradle and grave. Not to mention potters, weavers, painters, poets, singers and sculptors.

Our application was submitted through SFI's Discover programme which promotes inter-disciplinary collaboration. A tiny fraction of the SFI budget [Total = €184m in 2016] goes to that sort of thing. The bulk, I suppose quite properly (There is an Arts Council - [€65m in 2017] after all!), goes to fund those who are hewing at the coal-face of science. The Discover programme could be seen as a crumb that falls from the table: The Gods of Science will allow Art to taste the ambrosia of science.  Oh oh the hubris.

But it does not have to be like that. Bringing outsiders in to scrutinise the work of science can be a positive good. I'm not talking about outsiders as peer-reviewers of scientific manuscripts for publication - they are insiders. Outsiders are AiRs - and others - who get to sit in on our lab meetings and a) force us to analyse what we are saying/thinking in order to get the language intelligible. Visiting seminar speakers will often, as a courtesy, have a session with individual post-grads after their talk: a different world-view, a different experience can often expose an unwarranted assumption. Steven Pinker recommends your old college room-mate who is smart but in a different field. If you can't explain your idea to a 15 y.o., or a visiting professor, or an AiR, then it is is probably too woolly to be correct. The mere act of articulating your thoughts, can help you work them through and give insight.  But it gets better; once you've gotten over the language barrier, the AiR can act as the grit than niggles . . . and forces the development of a pearl: a truly original creative idea.

End of Part One

Yesterday was the last day of the academic year at The Institute.  The Admin Staff are going to work through the summer and so are the technicians but the lectures are Off.  So yesterday was a time to catch breath and catch up with some of my colleagues.  A time also to respond students who have flunked one of my papers - some angry, some annoyed with themselves, nobody particularly happy about the situation.    In the evening a dozen of us went out to a bar for a few bevvies as has been traditional over the last several years.  It's the first time I've had to have anything like a conversation with some of the people there. 

When half the folks had left and only the hard-chaws were left my HoD asked how it had been and I tried to say that one of the interesting aspects had been seeing and dealing with a number of different teaching styles.  Because they were different, they hadn't all been my style but it was useful to see that other styles worked too.  There were manual and and wing-it people.  I had a wide experience of classes since January and so a wide experience of co-workers. Some have a written manual for the whole year, with protocols for each predicted experiment, which is handed out to the students, so everyone is on the same page.  In other cases, I was given a few notes scribbled on a sheet torn from a reporter's note-book with the instructions "You might do this on Thursday, I've ordered the materials from the technician". 

With l'esprit d'escalier I was able to reflect on how these styles had impinged upon me personally.  Some of my colleagues were kind and some were respectful and a few were both.  The kind wanted to know if I was okay with my assignments and if I had any questions, they had a tendency to hold the students' hands as well. The respectful seemed to say that I was an adult and an effective and they weren't going to micro-manage me.  There were tasks to carry out, learning outcomes (LOs) to achieve, and it wasn't for them to tell me how these two should marry.  I'm a silverback, I've been on the planet a while, so I can cope with both styles.  But I suspect that first-timers might prefer the former.

The Social Liaison Officer (SLO), whose childer are a little bit older than some and so has the head-space to organise such matters, had ordered up some chipolata sausages, chicken nuggets and samboes to be delivered from the local hotel after the first couple of rounds.  We had one graduate student in our midst who acted in a gratifyingly hank-marvin manner (not to be confused with the legend) and hoovered up this robust fare, so there was little waste - there's a waste/waist pun there which I'll leave my British readers to elaborate in the comments.   Fado fado in Boston, I was a graduate student, too, so I was still able to bring home my breakfast and lunch wrapped up in some tinfoil and a paper napkin.   And when I left at nearly 11pm with the imprint of the bar-stool etched on the seat of my pants, I thought it was a good way to finish my 165 days of hard graft, when I haven't had much time to actually sit down.