Category: Education

More Advice from a College Professor’s Spouse

Two years ago my sister’s oldest child went off to college. As a marker for that occasion I wrote up some thoughts on what I think college student’s should know. In a little while my sister’s youngest child is headed off to college as well; so I decided it’s time to write part two.

Since my wife is a college professor, and I’m framing my understanding as being her husband, I need to be clear: these are my thoughts. They are not hers. They are not those of her colleagues, or any of our other friends who are college professors. Yes, my ideas are influenced by being friends with those folks, and I hope they agree with me. But in the end, this advice is mine. If you want advice from a college professor — well college students have easy access to those and should politely ask them directly.

Also, for some strange reason it turns out that older child actually reads this blog (despite complaints that the posts about work are boring — love you too bud, they get the most traffic). So, Ben, open invitation to write a rebuttal or addendum to support your sibling and any other college students who stumble in here.

Read the Syllabus

While most of this post covers new ground, this point deserves repeating. It was top of mind two years ago, and is top of mind now. When professors talk about things their students do wrong this is what they talk about the most. Yes, the syllabus is boring — trust me I know, I’ve edited plenty of them. Yes they are often oddly long. But they are critical to success, and contain important information like what books to buy, when to read them, and what your deadlines are. So suck it up, and read them! There do exist courses and professors where you can get away without doing this, but it will never hurt you, costs you 15 minutes a course at most, and could save your tail.

Take a Variety of Things

Use college as a time to explore new ideas and different fields of study. When I think about the courses I took in college, it’s hard to know how I would have predicted which were going to be valuable to me still 20 years on.

I took a course of censorship taught by a Russian language professor. That course forced me to think about ideas of self-expression, our laws, and forms of protest. It also gave me ongoing interest in the impact of the work of Robert Maplethorpe and other controversial American artists. And that interest has left me space for my understanding to grow and change over time.

Ceramics helped me learn to think critically about my own work. It’s a class I cite frequently when working with less experienced developers to help them improve their work.

Non-required CS courses taught me skills I use almost every day at work; more than most of the required courses.

Religious Studies courses forced me to write in a formal way about creative ideas; a skill that serves me well on a regular basis.

I wouldn’t have told you any of that was the important take away when I registered for those classes. I took other classes expecting great things, but that failed to deliver for me. So if the class looks vaguely interesting, consider taking it, even if you don’t expect it’ll help you later.

Pay Attention to Courses You Can’t Take Later

There are a few things I didn’t take, like English Comp., because they were only open to first and second year students. I wanted to take some of those classes late in my time at Hamilton, but was locked out. It was totally my fault because I didn’t plan ahead. Plan ahead!

Don’t Use All Your Accommodations

This is probably my most controversial piece of advice: Don’t use all your learning accommodations.

I want to be clear, I support forcing colleges to provide needed accommodations. Learning accommodations are critically important to the success of many students, and colleges should make everything available to all students who are entitled to have them. But that’s the college’s side of the relationship. While college’s should provide them, students should think critically about which they leverage.

  • Some accommodations are absolutely critical to all who need them.
  • Some accommodations are critical to some students in some courses.
  • Some accommodations are offered because we don’t teach kids good learning techniques when they struggle.

If your accommodation is in the second group reflect on whether or not accommodations in the courses you’re taking will support deep learning. When your accommodation is in that last set, seek out better ways to overcome the challenges. You can tell the difference, in part, by asking yourself how the accommodation actually helps you learn better, not just complete an assessment better or feel like you’re learning faster. Use the support you need not the support that makes learning feel easy or comfortable. Learning should be hard. A little friction in the learning process helps you learn better.

Understand that when you finish your BA the number of accommodations available to you will drop significantly. Typical work places are held to a very different standard than educational institutions. Again I believe they should meet their legal obligations, but deadline extensions or “extended time” may come with consequences for just asking. And graduate programs rarely offer any for non-physical disabilities (just because the law says they should, doesn’t mean they do so without consequences).

To thrive after college you will need to find tools of your own to overcome many of the challenges that lead to adjustments being offered in a classroom setting. You might as well start looking for those now.

Learn How to Learn

The most important thing to learn in college is how to learn!

The exact facts and figures you learn in college aren’t really the point the exercise. They are interesting, and can provide you important insights, but the details won’t last. If you go on in a field you’ll deepen your knowledge, and likely replace large portions as the field advances. If you don’t go on in a field you aren’t likely to use exact facts, figures, and formulas. The take aways longer term come in the form of general concepts and stories to help you, hopefully, remember deeper truths.

We live in a world of constantly advancing knowledge. You will need to learn some of that new information after you graduate. You will need to learn some it without the benefit of formal instruction. Make sure you know how to learn independently, without support of professors or formal direction.

You also need to know how to sort good information from bad information. In college your professor will do a lot of this for you. Later it’ll be your job. Good information doesn’t always agree with you, good information sometimes reveals truths that deviate from your world view. Sometimes what’s true forces us to rethink how we act, think, and vote. Be sure you know how to sort the good from the junk.

Say “Yes” to Things

When in doubt, say yes to offered experiences. Try things you’re unsure about, go places you worry will be boring, listen respectfully to speakers who offend you, go to concerts of artists you’ve never heard of, and generally take advantage of opportunities that present themselves.

One of the most memorable talks I attended in college was by Oliver North. No one made me go (that Russian professor made me go see Stanley Fish, which I’m also glad I did even though he was painfully boring and I disagreed with his pro-censorship argument), it just seemed like I should attend. Listening to him try to justify his crimes was insightful for me. Not because he convinced me of his views, but because it helped me understand the signs of failure; 20 years after his disgrace it was all he talked about. He had supporters in the room, but that was all they were interested in too. It was a night focused on a disgraced past.

The same was true, although to a lessor extent, of F.W. de Klerk who I got to listen to as he justify his role in apartheid before he became a reformer. Desmond Tutu‘s talk was a stark contrast as he focused on his then-recent work and how to build on it, not the work that had earned him a Nobel Prize — that was old news to him. Jimmy Carter‘s talk was fascinating (and somehow also almost as boring as Fish), and like Tutu looked forward not back. Hearing all those talks gave me insights I wouldn’t have had if I’d just heard Tutu and Carter (the ones I agreed with) speak. All North had to cling to was defense of his past, trying to repaint his image. And because it lacked the semi-redemption of de Klerk, his failures rang out all the louder from his defense.

So go try things you don’t know if you’ll like. You might discover new interests, enlarge your world view, and generally make your life richer.

That’s my advice in this moment

Take it or leave it, that’s up to you.

Good luck with college. Go, have fun, and learn great things. The world needs more people who are ready to learn what’s coming next.

Salesforce Nonprofit and Education Scratch Orgs

During the recent Open Source Commons sprint in Chicago, I tried to create scratch orgs for nonprofit and education clouds. Despite having some of the best people in the market in the room, including two Salesforce Solution Engineers, two levels of their bosses, and of course Google, I couldn’t figure it out.

As a follow up to a conversation there, Larry Fontillas sent me links to the help docs that contain what I consider partial answers. While I’ve sent feedback to help improve those articles, I am posting my current solution to this challenge.

My Example Scratch Config

On Github I created a repo that contains two scratch org configuration files:

Each is my attempt to create a definition that works for the named cloud. If are new to scratch orgs, I suggest you start with the Trailhead Salesforce DX Quick Start. With a Devhub setup, and connected to your sf cli, you can easily create these scratch orgs from my settings with one of the two following commands:

sf org create scratch -d -f config/nonprofit-cloud.json -a npc-org
sf org create scratch -d -f config/education-cloud.json -a edu-org

Industry Org Scratch Config Breakdown

The two new clouds leve re-usable components Salesforce built, licenses, and deploys across different markets. Salesforce does not currently provide one master switch you must use. Instead you need to know what features to include and tell the Devhub which collection to enable.

That is done in two major parts of the configuration file. In my Nonprofit cloud config file there are several sections, but two are critical: features and settings → IndustriesSettings. The features list includes Salesforce components to enable. In this case I included the nonprofit specific Fundraising, Program Management, and Grantmaking modules, but also OminiStudio, Accounting Subledger, and more because they included with NP Cloud by default. Under Industries Settings you’ll also see I enable Grantmaking and support for Program Management.

The Education Cloud config file has even more detail. That’s because Salesforce as made more available for Education Cloud. The Industries settings section includes more flags as well for the same reason. As I Followed the setup guide for Education Cloud, I further adjusted some of the base-line object permissions.

Here are the features I know you need to include for each cloud:

FeatureNP CloudEdu CloudNotes
AccountingSubledgerGrowthEditionOptionalOptionalStarter Edition is also available
AccountSubledgerUserOptionalOptional
AnalyticsQueryServiceYesOptionalThis is listed in the docs under Fundraising, but I have not yet found a direct description.
AssessmentsYesYes
EducationCloudNoYes (requires a quantity parameter)Main Education Cloud objects, but only a sliver of the features.
EnableSetPasswordInApiYesYesAllows the cli to set the password, you always want this.
FundraisingYesOptional
GrantmakingYesOptional (Rare)
IndustriesActionPlanNoYes
IndustriesSalesExcellenceAddOnYesYesThis is listed in the docs under Fundraising, but I have not yet found a direct description.
IndustriesServiceExcellenceAddOnYesYesThis is listed in the docs under Fundraising, but I have not yet found a direct description.
LightningSchedulerNoYesLightning Scheduler gives you tools to simplify appointment scheduling in Salesforce.
LightningServiceConsoleOptionalYesAllows the Lightning Service Console and access features that help manage cases faster.
MarketingUserYesOptionalProvides access to the Campaigns object.
OmniStudioDesignerYesYesListed in lots of samples, but I have not yet found a direct description. But clearly needed for OmniStudio.
OmniStudioRuntimeYesYesMore for OmniStudio.
OutcomeManagementYesNo
PersonAccountsYesYesWe all love Person Accounts now! Technically this is optional, although the assumption is it your default.
ProgramManagementYesNoEnables the NPC Program and Case management features.
PublicSectorAccessNoYesNot entirely sure about this one, but some of the features for Education Cloud seem to leverage these objects and settings.

Feedback Please!

I have tested these configurations to the degree of seeing that they work as a basic level. But I have not, yet, used them for a serious project. I am confident other people will find details that are missing, or just wrong. Please file an issue on Github or leave me a comment here with suggested changes.

Take Good Notes

A good set of notes is how we build a memory of what happened.

Good note taking is important in nearly any white collar job, particularly consulting. If we have a long conversation with a client and have to re-ask them about all the details, they will rightly be annoyed. They may demand to know what they paid for the first time we talked.

Why we take notes

In school we are taught to take notes. Teachers expect students to remember information to pass tests, write papers, and other evaluations of learning. Too often teachers will try to convince students to take notes in specific way. They may make note taking into an assignment and assessment of its own. My wife sees college students who decide that they don’t need to take notes because she does not grade them. These students do not do well. These students missed the point of taking notes. The form of the notes is not important, but the existence of them is.

When we leave school notes serve two main purposes:

  1. Record events of a meeting so there is a shared record later.
  2. Help us remember what happened so we can do our work.

Every important meeting should have someone charged with creating the first of those. How you do that task assignment is work place and team specific, but it needs to happen. Doing this well is an important skill, and every team, board, religious community, and so on needs people who do this well. But the second type of notes are often more important for day to day work; they are an important how the participants remember what needs to happen.

This second category of notes is why there is nearly always a notepad near me when I’m working. I scribble down thoughts, tasks, key points, and anything else I need to remember later. The notes I take are messy, disorganized, and useless to anyone but myself. None of that matters as long as I remember what I need to know.

Why take notes yourself

Lots of people hate to take their own notes. I have colleagues who treat note taking as a task to be avoided. Heck, I dislike being the official note taker when it’s my turn. People often fall back on the “official” notes of meetings instead of keeping their own. I have heard people go so far as to declare additional notes are just a waste of effort. I have had colleagues claim this “wasted” effort is somehow costing the client money (not true, they were in the meeting anyway).

Writing notes encourages us to engage with the content. There are no shortage of studies on the impact of note taking and memory formation. The research clear indicates that if you engage actively with information you will retain it better. Any form of note taking that encourages you to engage is a good start. That engagement can be exhausting, but that does not justify avoiding the work.

Even when in a meeting with an official note taker, our clients are best served by everyone on our team taking notes. That helps us all learn about the client needs, to contribute to the project work, as well as offer edits to official notes after a meeting wraps up.

Can an AI note taker do just as well?

The recent public emergence of generative AI has captured a great deal of attention. We are thinking of all the places that a machine can take over tasks we thought required a human – particularly those we dislike. There are already services like Otter.AI which will attend virtual meetings and generate notes for you.

My experience suggests that, right now, they are pretty terrible at their main job. The automated transcripts they require are adequate at best; their note taking ability is worse. The samples I’ve seen from meetings I was in were basically useless. Worse yet, AI tools will lie (or more accurately they generate believable, but false, information), which is getting people into trouble. After all those issues, you will need to deal with the privacy and security implications of allowing a system listen into your meetings.

One day these systems will likely be pretty good for official meeting notes, but that’s not today. Even at that point, those AI’s will not help you engage with, or retain, the information.

Do yourself a favor, no matter who or what else is taking notes, take your own.

What makes good personal notes

Fundamentally what makes good personal notes is whatever you can use to accurately recall what happened. If you are able to recall the details when you need them, your notes were good enough. If you cannot not, your notes aren’t good enough. That’s true during your education (unless a teacher is grading your notes, then play along with their instructions), that’s true in the work place.

There are several formal patterns for note taking to help you structure the information. If you are struggling to take useful notes, I recommend trying one or two to see if they work for you. Those patterns do not work well for me, and I have bad memories of being made to outline lectures, and other patterns as the “one true” solution for taking notes.

Later in my education I picked up the metric I use now: do they work. I found I retain information best when I am summarizing bits and pieces to trigger my memory. My own notes are often just a few words to draw my brain back to key points. I will write out a major decision, pronouncement, or useful quote from time to time – that extra detail emphasizes to me later that I thought was a major point at the time.

Find your own style of note taking, but do not pretend you do not need them.

Real Life Sorting

Sorting is a basic part of any computer science program. My sister and I are currently engaged in helping my parents move. As part of that effort I am spending sorting things, which has reminded me of another place where it can be useful to apply things you learn in one field to another.

Bucket and Radix sorts are basic sorting approaches taught in any good algorithms class. The process involves sorting like items into buckets, and then resorting items, either within those buckets (bucket sort), or by their next property (radix sort).

Piles of coin mid-sort
Coins mid-sort, with like piles gathered, and quarters being sorted for uniqueness and rolling.

In practice, as a developer I nearly never implement my own sorting algorithms; a language library is almost certainly going to be better optimized than what I would write, and it already exists. What’s more these two sorting processes are rarely the best in practice for most datasets. But in real life, we need to sort stuff all the time, and where these don’t make sense in many computing settings they are often the best way to sort physical stuff.

I spent my evening applying this theory to sorting the coins my father has collected over time (he’s actually a few feet away sorting more coins right now). I took the embedded picture mid-process this evening between having gathered coins by type, and was pulling out Quarters for collecting vs rolling — other denominations will come later. My sister and I have been helping prepare for the move with a similar process on a larger scale of gathering like-items together to help review and pack them as we progress. There is even science behind the concept that this is the most efficient way to sort things.

Unlike that article, my point is not just to help you sort things faster, but to support for my general argument that having well rounded education is the best form of education for life-long engagement. When I first read the article saying that radix sort was the fastest way to sort socks it made total sense to me – I already sorted socks that way because I’d realized it helped break the problem down. I took the idea from the same place the author did, my computer science training.

Generally I make this argument in the reverse; non-CS courses made me better as a developer. But it’s just as true that my CS courses taught me things that make my day-to-day life better.

No one field has all the answers to our problems as individuals or as a society.

My Ongoing Liberal Arts Education

I consider listening to good podcasts to be part of my ongoing liberal arts education. We all can benefit from being conversant on many topics, understanding their interplay, conflicts, and mutual inspiration. That broad understand allows us to be more informed voters and more flexible contributors at work. It also just makes me happier.

I make a point of mostly listening to things outside my field of work. I study my work 40+ hours a week already. In my spare time I like to learn other things. Right now my rotation includes shows like Hidden Brain, People I Mostly Admire, Freakonomics, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, and more.

I tend to listen to things in fits and starts and then suddenly in waves. If I walk the dogs alone I’ll listen to parts of an episode. While mowing the lawn I’ll squeeze in a couple things. But it’s really the long drives that let me pack in a lot of information. For example, at the end of June I had to do a 12 hour drive on my own, twice. So I got caught up on some episodes that had been building up on my phone.

One of the things I like about listening to these shows is different perspectives on different topics. They provide me a chance to hear overlapping ideas that inspire new ideas related to my work or life. Sometimes those overlaps build on each other, other times conflicts in ideas push me to think deeper about both sides.

This I listened to a People I (Mostly) Admire interview with Philosopher Will MacAskill. They talked about extreme long-term view of morality, effective altruism, and the limits of growth economics.

Currently, economic growth is like 2 percent, 3 percent per year. What happens if that continues for just 10,000 more years? Well, 2 percent compounded over such a long time gets to a very large number indeed where it would mean that for every atom within 10,000 light years — so, every accessible atom within that time would have to produce the economic output of some enormously large number. I think it’s something like 10 to the power of 60. But just think trillions times trillions times trillions of amounts of output as the entire world economy today. And now, I’m not claiming I’m certain that’s impossible. The world today is magical and fantastic and would be judged as such from the perspective of people 1,000 years ago. But it seems really unlikely that every single atom is able to produce many trillion times the economic output of the world today.

Will MacAskill

It was a compelling enough argument to get a Chicago Economist to question his assumption that economic growth is a given.

But it’s funny because, as an economist, I’ve been so indoctrinated into this idea that economic growth is natural, it’s good, it’s part of life, that just something should have been totally obvious to me, but wasn’t because of my indoctrination, all it took was a few lucid arguments from you.

Steve Levitt

During the drives in June, I wandered through several hours of Hidden Brian. The episode that stuck with me was, Do Less featuring Leidy Klotz talking about the power of subtraction from designs. But it’s not just the singular interviews that I find useful. Listening to large amounts of divergent information causes ideas to cross pollinate. The Klotz interview connected in my head with an episode of People I (Mostly) Admire featuring Dan Gilbert, Turning Work into Play, which included the advice to do less, better.

Well, I’m loath to give advice because I’m telling you what worked for me. And that doesn’t necessarily mean it works for anybody else. But I do suspect that many, many people would be much happier if they did less, better.

Dan Gilbert

That whole line of thinking has me trying to re-frame how I talk about building tools as part of my job. How can I make my work better by removing tasks? I even started to write a response piece in my head, which may come together some day.

As a Salesforce Developer (and a Web Developer before that, and a Nonprofit Communications staff person before that), I get encouraged to listen to a very small set of information. People assume I listen to Salesforce Podcasts and not much more. Many of us are encouraged to spend our personal time learning about our work – usually narrowly about the sub-field we’re in.

My point isn’t that they are always right, nor that I’ve picked shows presented by people I always agree with. The guests and hosts in the podcasts often express interesting ideas, but also have view points I disagree with or ideas that conflict. For example, I find that Steve Levitt (who I mostly admire) has an overly simplistic view on gun violence. Shankar Vedantam often has guests on Hidden Brain whose ideas conflict with other guests. My point is that listening to these ideas, letting them challenge my thinking, and building on them my life better.

Life is big and complicated, and involves a lot of not-work. Go find some things worth learning about that aren’t part of your regular activities. See where it takes you.

Solve Interesting Problems

During a recent department event my wife introduced me to the sister of one of her students. The event was an award ceremony for some of the history and political science majors – the student’s sister was along to support her brother (and as a smart college student get a free meal outside the dinning hall).

As a CS major, this student is trying to understand her options for what kind of programming she might be interested in. As a good professor my wife introduced us so the CS major wouldn’t have to pretend to be as excited about history as everyone else present. Listening to me talk about what I’ve done in my work she commented that maybe she should be a web developer – my reply was that she should do the work with problems she finds interesting.

Dodge the Gate Keepers

Like many people who are going through a CS education she has been surrounded by people who are confused about the difference between IT and CS. She talked about going to a conference and running into a bunch of guys who belittled her because she wasn’t into computer hardware. Apparently one even criticized her for misstating the directionality of a Lightning adapter (I can’t remember the last time I cared about cable directionality in a digital connector). My suggestion that was old, familiar, and involved one finger. I also pointed out the guy was probably just wrong.

That kind of adolescent gate keeping out of other college students isn’t surprising, but it is annoying. I work in a field that’s short handed, and we need smart people interesting creating great systems. We were short handed before the whole U.S. economy started to run short on workers.

From a short conversation I could tell she was smart, capable, and friendly – exactly the kind of person any employer will be lucky to have some day soon. But she also felt discouraged, as if she was weak in some important part of the field. Assembling her own PC hadn’t been fun for her (I have no shame in admitting that I’ve never built a PC from scratch); fussing with hardware just doesn’t excite her like coding does right now.

I really love having a good IT team to support my work. And having great hardware at my disposal is critical to good work. But I have minimal interest in working on that part of the technology stack myself. Sure, I’ve done my time installing RAM chips onto mother boards, and re-seating PCI cards, but I never really wanted to care about the details of those components.

I always wants to create tools that solved interested problems.

What Problems are Interesting

We are all attracted to ideas and projects that sound exciting. This student became interested in the kind of work I do because I can talk about it with excitement and confidence. I enjoy the problems I get to solve on a day-to-day basis and that shows. I have no idea if she’d enjoy them. Being a Salesforce or web developer might bore her to tears.

A problem is not intrinsically interesting. We find problems interesting for our own reasons. That interest makes us intrinsically motivated to solve them.

I like writing middle-ware and creating related tools. Filling gaps left between other tools is interesting to me. I know people who love to create great UIs because it makes people love the product. Other friends love to work on security problems because it keeps systems secure (and gives them excuses to break into systems they should access). Some of my friends work on creating software to advance science. Still others love to create high performance solutions to handle big data problems. And others who help create games. I could go on, byt you get the picture.

My point is all the problems are interesting – to someone. None of the problems are interesting to all of us.

If you want to have or want a career creating software, look for jobs that solve problems you think are interesting. It doesn’t matter if I think your work is exciting. If you are excited about it, I’ll be excited to hear what you’re doing.

SC DUG February 2020

Suggestions for learning the skills we all need to advance.

This month for SC DUG I gave a talk on the importance of self-directed learning for professional development as a developer — or really any other modern career. It was an extension and revision of my December blog post on the same topic. The presentation runs a hair over 30 minutes, and parts of the discussion are included as well.

We frequently use these presentations to practice new presentations, try out heavily revised versions, and test out new ideas with a friendly audience. If you want to see a polished version checkout our group members’ talks at camps and cons. So if some of the content of these videos seems a bit rough please understand we are all learning all the time and we are open to constructive feedback.

If you would like to join us please check out our up coming events on MeetUp for meeting times, locations, and remote connection information.

In Praise of B Students

There is nothing wrong with just being good at something.

When I was in school I was a solid B student. I thought of myself as a B student and I worked hard to make sure I was always working at least a B average. I worked hard, but not too hard. Likely I could have been an A student if I’d worked harder, but I would not have been as happy. I didn’t feel the drive to be the best all the time, just good enough to keep up with what I was learning. Most people brag about being A students, but that wasn’t me and it has worked out pretty well in the long run.

For me a B student is someone who not only gets actually Bs most of the time in school but also knows how to work hard to get the grade they want, and how to relax so they recover and enjoy their lives along the way. If they fall a little short at some point they are perfectly capable of working a little harder to make up the ground. Life is not a sprint, it’s a marathon, we all have to save a bit for later. If you are used to running full out all the time, you do not always have the ability to step it up a little extra when needed nor how to relax and recover without stopping. In a world where we seem to be moving from helicopter parents to snowplow parents, there are still people that have fallen short from time to time, so they know how to pick themselves up and push forward.

There has been plenty written and said about the flaws of perfectionism so you don’t need to trust me, and I’m not going to waste time making the case that there are problems with pushing kids and college students to be a perfect A student all the time. And there are problems when companies only want to hire people who have those backgrounds.

In our current test-driven education culture there is a lot of push for kids to be the best. And the highly competitive nature of admissions for some top colleges can make it seem like a kid has to be perfect to succeed in life. But life isn’t Top Gun there actually are points for second place, and really more or less all the others (well paychecks and some level of happiness anyway). More importantly people who are used to a bit of failure can excel when faced with tough jobs that require a lot of on the job learning and trial and error work. That describes pretty much every modern office job, and lots of others – watch a plumber work on an old house and you’ll see plenty of trial and error being required to solve even basic problems.

Failure is a part of life. We all need to know how to acknowledge we made mistakes, how to recover, and how to ensure we don’t make the same mistake again in the future. People who earned a lot of B’s in school are familiar with all those things. We sometimes got lazy and ended up with a C instead of B – to stay a B student we then worked harder and got ourselves enough A’s to offset our missteps and bring our averages back up. Sometimes we really didn’t understand something and had to struggle through to make sure we stayed on pace.

B students also often know the difference between learning and getting the right answer on an assessment (a skill I would have told you I had but did not need anymore until I starting having to pass professional certification exams on a regular basis). We learned how to pass the test without knowing all the information, but knowing enough to get the grade we wanted. Getting a perfect score on an assessment is only useful if the assessment is perfect – most college professors and anyone who has taken a certification exam can tell you there are no perfect assessments. I had to pass tests in college, and I need to complete and maintain certifications now, but I don’t need to have every piece of information crammed into my brain all the time – that’s what Google is for. Once I pass, I’ve passed – it feels better to get more right answers, but as long as I get enough to pass I’m certified.

When I was in the 6th grade we had a whole day dedicated to studies skills taught by a guy named Mr. Gallagher. He wasn’t a regular teacher at my school, and I have no idea where they found him or what happened to him later, but some of what he taught us that day has stuck with me both in terms of skills and philosophy. He emphasized the need to understand how a test was written, both in terms of following directions so you didn’t give up silly points and so you know where to focus your time (hint: time goes first into the places you are likely to earn the most points), and when to guess and when to work through an answer carefully (again be greedy about points not the number of right answers).

Mr. Gallagher was the first person to put the idea into my head that the point of going to school is to get good grades instead of learning. I can still remember our teachers pushing back on that argument the next day, and I eventually arrived at the conclusion that they were both right: the purpose of school is to learn, but the purpose of tests is to get good enough grades so you can move forward in school. The thought exercise itself helped me see that learning material and passing a test weren’t actually always related. I had a teacher later who helped me further abstract this concept when he pointed out that he could easily write tests we all passed or all failed, so the purpose of the test writing was to find a measure of what he thought we should be able to do (that teacher and his wife were recently on Marketplace – thanks Bill that simple lesson was super useful in college and beyond). If pass and fail are at the whim of the test author, and they aren’t actually playing against me personally but really tracking a group of people, then I can play it as a game where I need to get myself into the top 80%. If I learn to play at that level reliably I’m going to do pretty well and I don’t have to stress being perfect all the time.

Yes, there are things in life that you cannot do unless you are one of the best. Not to mention the fact that the playing field isn’t level, which means some people have to work a whole lot harder than others to earn the same B and a report card full of Bs doesn’t get read the same for everyone. But we cannot all be the best, and pretending that’s not true doesn’t level the social playing fields.

And of course there are plenty of moments we need to strive to be as close to perfect as we are capable. But we also have to hit deadlines and get things done even if we know the work will be less-than perfect. Anyone who works in software development has to deal with this on a regular basis. As much as we may want to be perfect, shifting project requirements, project timelines, platform weakness, and our own mistakes all get in the way. We do the best we can with the skills, time, teams, and the tools we have. We need to know how to accept that we cannot fix every flaw and still get things done well enough to ensure the project is successful.

So when you are hiring people consider looking for people who already know how to be second best. People who know how to do really good work, but also know how to take risks, try something new, and in the process fail. People who know how to get things done well enough to be successful, even if it’s not perfect. We aren’t perfect, our work isn’t perfect, our world isn’t perfect, so don’t pretend your team has to be perfect.

Authors Note: Last month I failed to post to this blog for the first time. If you look back over the record you will see at least one post each month from the time the blog starts through August 2019 – then I missed September. Oops. I could make all kinds of excuses (I really did get sick right at the end of the month so my planned post was delayed a week), but the truth is I had time and material, I just didn’t get anything done. So now to make up for it I am trying to post every weekend this month.  I missed a goal by a little, so now I compensate to make up for it – then I’ll hopefully go back to my nice reliable routine. What can I say? I’m okay with a B.

Postcards for children

Update (Oct 2017):

In the weeks and months that followed this posting, thanks those who read and shared it and our related message on Facebook, my sister-in-law received most than 500 postcards and letters from across the country welcoming her students, some sent gifts and donations. The messages came from people of all walks of life, including other immigrant children. Many of the messages were read to the entire class and she sent postcards home for their families to enjoy.  These simply gestures were a light in a very dark place for these new and often frightened Americans.

But there are still children, and adults, around the country that live in the same fear these kids do. If you know people in your community who immigrated to the U.S. please try to make an effort to be kind and welcoming to them. Show them the best that America can be, especially when the news shows so much of our worst.

Original Post (Nov 2016):

My sister-in-law is an ESOL teacher in Maryland. Yesterday she found herself trying comfort her class of terrified 6-8 year olds who wanted to know why America hates them. Many of her students are war refugees who have seen bombings, gunfire, and family members killed. Many of them are muslims, and even at young ages are aware of what has been said during the election about them and their families. Coming to America was supposed to mean safety and a government that would protect them, and now they fear that is gone.

Right now we can’t fix the Supreme Court, and we can’t undo all of the damage that has been done to our nation this year, but we can help these children.

We are trying to get as many people as we can from as many places as possible to send them postcards.

Tell them you’re happy they are in America.
Tell them you don’t hate Muslims.
Tell them that you love them.
Tell them whatever is in your heart.

Postcards can be sent to:

Ms. M’s Class
Templeton Elementary School
6001 Carters Lane

Riverdale, MD 20737

Why I think pushing only STEM is a problem

Over the course of this week I needed to be conversant in PHP, MySQL, Linux, Drupal, search tools, herbal remedies, online education tools and strategy, women’s health, men’s health, canine health, dental health, health insurance, public media outlet fundraising, online advertising, email, open source technology, open source movements, cyber security, physical security, national security, state and national politics, disaster response planning, disaster response fundraising, coffee, vegetarian ethics, economics, retirement planning, videography and photography, child rearing, fiber arts, baking, and a few other topics.

Last week I talked a bit about the things I got from my liberal arts education that made me a better developer. There I focused mostly on the positive side of the argument: why non-stem course work is important. Now I want to flip the coin and talk about why our constant push to have more people graduating with STEM degrees is bad for the country and the economy.

No, I didn’t learn about all the topics in the opening in college – in fact much of the information I gathered in college on many of those topics (particularly things related to technology) is now at least partially out of date. But I spent four years learning how to learn and developed a base of skills in several disciplines that makes it easier for me to adapt to change and new areas of interest.

In 2016 the path to most high paying jobs runs through college. And the majority of people who go to college earn more than they would have if they hadn’t gone to college. But if we talk about college as being all about our work and pay we miss the main point of a good education and we ignore the fact that our education system should help mold engaged citizens not just good workers.

The push to graduate students to be “workplace ready” in engineering and technology (people calling for STEM education rarely care about science that can’t be applied to engineering new technologies and pretty much never mention math) is short-term thinking. That kind of educational model frees companies from having to train new employees while weakening their long-term workforce and our democracy. Our education system, high school and college in particular, needs to be helping kids become productive members of a society none of us can fully predict. To thrive in current and – more importantly – future America we all have to adapt to constant technical and social change. You cannot teach kids in school how to actually handle the situations that don’t exist yet, so we need to be teaching them how to learn so they develop skills as they need them.

Companies go looking for the employees of tomorrow, but not of next year, or of five years from now. They complain that younger workers don’t want to put in time at low-level jobs while refusing to provide training to help those new workers advance. What we get all too often are people who are good-enough to do the work of today and tomorrow, but never get better.

When I first wrote code for work, I was terrible. I got better because I was allowed to fail and learn from my mistakes. If you’d judged my college program on that first project, you’d call Hamilton a fraud. If you judge them by my ability to adapt, change, and improve, you’d rank Hamilton a top school as most rankings do.

College should be part of an education meant to prepare people for a life that will be unpredictable and varied. It should part of an education built around showing kids as much diversity of thought as we can:

  • Kids need art courses because art helps us all see the world fully and because developers need artists on our teams to make our projects successful.
  • Kids need to learn history because history matters – when our society repeats mistakes because we don’t understand our own past we all lose.
  • Kids need to learn math and science because we need them to understand how the universe works and that facts are not something that change when it is politically convenient.
  • Kids need to learn to challenge ideas they are taught because even the best teachers will be wrong sometimes.
  • And kids need to play because it’s good for their bodies, minds, and souls.

I work for a company that develops software every day of the week. There are ten of us whose primary job is to write code, so we need great developers. But there are 30 people at the company which leaves twenty of us who do things other than write code – we need great designers, writers, account managers, and more. Yes, they need to understand the internet and the tools we use at some level, but more importantly they need to understand how do their part in helping our clients be successful so that our company can succeed.

And at the end of the day all thirty of us live in a democracy, and in November all of us should be casting informed votes up and down the ballot for people we think will do the best job. The artists will need to understand the tax policies, and the developers will need to understand the impact of social program proposals. We don’t have to agree, but we all need to be prepared.

If you want a deeper argument about the importance to the world of people with a broader understanding of many topics check out Former Bennington College President Liz Coleman’s Ted Talk.