Dear Professors,

Students will sink as low as you let them. If we turn in a steamy pile, or if we put in a subpar effort, please call us on it. We won't get any better unless you do.

One of the things I love about sports is that if you mail in your effort, you will get crushed. In basketball, if you lose focus for a split second, you or one of your teammates will get scored on. Sports demand accountability. I haven't seen this so much in the academic sphere. The higher expectations you hold of your students, the more we will do.

I was thinking today about how much students whine, and how we would all benefit with more hours in a day. Are we really so near the limits of human endurance that we have legitimate reason to complain? No. Undergraduates especially have a light workload, and all students could learn to work, read and write faster than they do now. Unfortunately as Cyril Parkinson pointed out, the amount of work we have expands to fill the time we have to do it. We could all benefit from stricter time limits.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

Per the suggestions in The 4-Hour Work Week I am checking my email twice a day only and avoiding all news and RSS. When I was at Penn I used to read the newspaper every day, and my friend would always ask me "what's going on in the world today?" Which is smart, because he gets the news and I get to feel better, but somehow despite having read the paper right in front of me I never really knew what to say. Timothy Ferriss could use a new haircut.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

Hope you have a good one!

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

"The most riveting sections of the book describe the desperate efforts of HBS students to land jobs with the most elite hedge funds and private-equity firms—the very firms suffering today from the credit meltdown.

It’s amazing, really. The 900 students in Broughton’s class could do just about anything—and yet most of them, for reasons they can’t really explain, are all desperate to do the same thing. A student named Cedric described it this way: “We have so many choices, and yet so few people seem happy about that. It just makes them anxious. And then they make terrible decisions about their lives.”

More here.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

When you're teaching something, you want to get every learner involved, maximize repetitions of whatever you're trying to learn, and provide instant feedback. I'm amazed how many teachers don't understand these principles.

Imagine if you were a basketball player, and practice consisted of your coach demonstrating every drill while you sat in the bleachers. Then the coach left and you were on your own for practice. Sure, this may help you become a better player, but with no supervision your team-mates might decide to leave, and you would have little idea of whether or not you were doing the drill correctly. Maybe the coach videotapes your practice session and gives you feedback three or four days later. This team would be awful.

Basketball is competitive - if you're not teaching the drills well someone else is and they're winning games, so there's constant incentiveto become a better at teaching. Most coaches demonstrate the right way to do the drill one time, have the team practice the drill and then provide instant feedback - praise for players who improve and criticism for students who are not trying hard. The best basketball practices I've seen use one basketball for every player, a hoop for every two players and every drill involves everyone all the time. Everyone gets involved, the players are maximizing repetitions and the coach can provide instant feedback.

Few classes are taught in this fashion. Instead, the "teacher" uses all of his interaction time with students to lecture to them. Then the students go off on their own to practice everything in the lecture. They turn in their work two days later and get feedback on it four days after that.

Some teachers give examples and then solve them on the board with help from the class. All of the students know the teacher knows what he's doing, and invariably, the people who volunteer to "help him out" are the top two or three students in the class. Many times I think teachers assume students are slow, when in fact we don't want to tell you an answer you already know. Why doesn't he ask everyone in the class to work on the problem and then go from person to person giving feedback? Then someone can solve it quickly in front of everyone. This way everyone gets involved, the students are thinking, and the teacher gets instant feedback from everyone about how well they understand the concept, not just the do-gooder students.

Even better would be to ask students to read/watch the lecture before class starts. This way all of the in-class time can be spent on getting everyone involved and providing instant feedback.

A simple change in course design can make a huge difference in comprehension and learning rates.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

McCain isn't getting any traction with his attacks on Obama if the Cnn ticker is a guide. If I'm a McCain adviser I'm screaming at him to lay off the attacks. Unfortunately you can't call time-out during the debate. I wish the candidates could get more specific about positive things. I feel like the only times they're getting specific are when they attack each other over overhead projectors or number of votes for some evil bill. Why are specifics and facts so effective for attacks but generalizations so much better for policy?

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

"The Searcher" has drawn a bunch of cool political graphic novel-style cartoons and posted them on Flickr. I won't steal his thunder by posting any, but they're worth taking a look, here.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

From Ben Casnocha from a friend:

You should say something in a group meeting only when (a) you are pretty sure you are right, (b) you have something to say that is different than what everyone else is saying (that doesn't mean you necessarily disagree - it could be additive), (c) what you have to say is important to the discussion.

Not terribly insightful but worth repeating. Unfortunately you can't assign property rights to silence. Although it would be interesting to give everyone in the class a chess timer and set the total amount of time to equal the length of the class period. I would add that in roundtable discussion you should have to summarize the views of the person before you before you can speak. Discussions don't work if the speakers aren't addressing each other.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

A number of my fellow students are annoyed that their clothes are hardly ever dry after one cycle in the dryer. The problem though relates more to their expectations than the dryer's ability. The minimum dryer cycle is not long enough to dry most loads. The dryer's minimum time should be set longer, or at the very least there should be a suggestion of the best amount of time to dry your laundry.

The lint screen is almost always full. Empty your lint screen for better results. Or design the dryer so the lint screen pops out when you open the door.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

Check out this article from Benjamin Applebaum at the Washington Post, talking about how smaller banks are doing fine in the crisis and are not starved for capital. Hat tip to Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.