Systems explanations for student behavior

I'm continuing to reflect on why students appear to be changing their behavior, when the teachers assert that they (teachers) did not change what they (teachers) were doing.

When the people in a system are still doing what they were doing before, but the result changes, it suggests that some emergent system-level feature has changed -- probably one that no one even knew was there.

It doesn't take very much of a twist or warp to the world, if it is universal, to end up with an M.C. Escher world where the parts still appear to be just fine, and yet the whole has become broken. These two pictures by Escher illustrate that. The stairs in the picture above, and the flow of water in the waterfall are both clearly impossible loops - and yet, it is difficult if not impossible for the unaided eye to directly SEE what is wrong and where.



The problem is that no one thing is wrong very much, and our eyes are used to a little noise which we "squelch" to silent -- a strategy that works fine if the discrepancies are random, chaotic "noise". This leaves an opening in our perceptions, a gap, a blind-spot, that Escher brings home to us. It is, as Douglas Hofstadter pointed out in Godel,Escher, and Bach, a "strange loop" and one of the properties is this "non-transitive" property that we, as humans, are just not hard-wired to grasp, regardless how much we try.

So, I illustrated the exact same thing with the "non-transitive dice" here recently, where just because A beats B, and B beats C, you cannot conclude that A will beat C. Or if stairstep 1 is lower than two, and two is lower than three, you can no longer be sure that this means that #1 is lower than #3.

So, when we run into this very common situation in life, we are unable to process it and the outcome of our thinking is, as they say, "undetermined." It feels so wrong. It can't be right. So, we force it to fit, like stuffing too much in a suitcase, and just sort of ignore the parts that stick out the edges by common agreement to be silent about such things, because "that's just the way things are." Every time it comes into our heads we can see it, briefly, and are totally surprised yet one more time -- and then as soon as we let go it evaporates again so our total net learning curve is zero. It is, alas, to paraphrase Dave Barry's description of Labrador Retrievers' reaction to being asked if they want to go for a walk. "Walk? Wow! What an idea! This is GREAT! Who would have thought of this!?!"

And, when we are faced with more than two items to chose from, whether it's sports teams or jobs or dates or mates or candidates for jobs or elections, we all "know" that there "MUST" be a "BEST" one, and all that remains is for us to "FIND" it. We vote. We use weighted voting. We use some some of the squared voting. We use weighted sums of squares. We are just so convinced that there has to be a "best" without considering the reality that only certain kinds of things have a "best", and those things are boringly predictable single-dimensional things that are "transitive" in the way we are measuring them.

We are used to "height" being one such thing, and usually, in the real world, it is. In Einstein's world of general relativity however, once space is "curved", this is no longer true. How much you have to climb to get from point A to point B depends on your path. In fact, in a bicyclist's dream come true, there may be in fact a "downhill" path all the way from point A to point B.

Hofstatder illustrates this property with Bach's musical chords as well, where the perceived pitch keeps on "going up" with each successive chord until, surprise, it has come back to the place where it started, all the while getting, to our ears, higher and higher.

We shake our heads, like a wet dog, to forget this clearly "wrong" result again. This must be a computational error, or too much to drink. We must have dropped a decimal point or something. This can't be right! (but it is.)

Well, where am I going with all this preamble? I'm going back to the question of what happened to the students, and my original question in my first post of "What have we done to our children?" that assumes, if it got done, and we had control of the schools, then we did it whether we intended to or not.

The change in our behavior as educators did not have to be huge to change the net result. In fact, the change in our behavior could be imperceptible to us, or as mathematicians say, "of measure zero" -- a fancy way of saying that it's there, but safe to ignore.

So, let's pick a different hypothesis or explanation to try out -- suppose the pressures of cost-effectiveness, "analytical thinking", and other such things, over time, have in fact warped the whole system just enough that "things" that used to work and produce result "A" no longer work. We haven't changed what we do, but the result has changed.

This is precisely the sort of thing I described in my favorite Snoopy cartoon, where he says in his profound and simple way -

"Did you ever notice,
that if you think about something at 2 AM,
and then again at noon the next day,
you get two different answers?"

Same input - different output, and whatever changed is totally invisible from inside the system.

Well, hmm. So, life is not quite as simple as we would prefer it to be. Rats!

Our youth, our students, our children are, however, exquisitely sensitive to context and, despite their rebellious nature, tend to take on shape based on the actual context they are in. If that shape has changed (still to be verified), then the context probably did change, even if we didn't notice it change from our vantage point inside the "system."

And, from personal observations, I agree with the students, even though the middle area is fuzzy and won't lie flat, and has parts sticking out the edge of the suitcase. If I talk to doctors, they are sincere, caring people, but doctors-in-context-as-a-whole, viewed from the outside patient viewpoint, have become uncaring, indifferent, almost irrelevant, and certainly detached almost entirely from the reality we, as patients, experience. They think they are "accessible" but have stopped hearing patient's describe the roadblocks "the system" has put in between them and patients. They live in some sort of mythical world, giving out advice that may have worked 20 years ago, but is disconnected from life as we live it today -- and then blame patients for being "non-compliant" with the advice that seems so great to them and so irrelevant and bizarre, to the point of not even being worth being challenged, to us.

And, they don't really like challenges. And, if challenged, they say "Well, there's nothing we can do about that. We tried. We're still tryiing. But that's just the way things are. That's someone else's job."

Their advice is like a financial analyst's advice - "To get ahead, just put $200 a week into savings and don't touch it, and watch it grow!" or "Just make a budget and live with it!" or a time-planner's advice: "Just figure out what you have to do over the next week, make slots for the time, allocate the time, and just live with it!" or a wellness consultant "Just eat less, exercise more, and eat the right food, and take an hour off in the middle of the day to commune with nature and relax, let go of that stress!" or a child-development specialist "Just be sure to remind your children to do their homework, and provide them a quiet work space without distractions or noise to work in."

Hello, reality to consultant? Hello? Who exactly are you talking to?

And, I fear, the same is true for education. Courses that may have made sense in one world have stayed the same while the world changed, and the course content is no longer aligned with the real world as experienced by the students. Or, the expectation of the professor or Attending physician faculty member is hopelessly out of date and no longer aligned with the larger overall picture and reward system that the students have experienced and been shaped by all their lives.

"Shut up and put up with it, there's nothing you can to that will make it better, but a lot you can do to make it worse for everyone!" is the message their behavior indicates they have received consistently throughout their lives. Like the Hemoglobin A1C test for diabetes, which reveals the last several months blood sugar level regardless where it is today, the conditioned behavior of the students speaks volumes to what the school system is actually teaching them to be.

In this model, it is not the students who have changed so much as the educational system that has changed. Maybe, over-extended teachers at all ages, and over-extended parents have simply rewarded "shut up and don't cause trouble" as the best they can hope for or strive for anymore, and the students, being good students, have learned their "place" in "the system."

In the book Complications, Atul Gawande, MD, discusses in one chapter the taboo and impolite question of when good doctors "go bad", or how many years it can take to do something effective by other doctors, who keep on seeing incidents that raise red flags about one doctor who has "lost it". The same is true for some college professors, especially those with tenure, as I've experienced personally - who almost have to murder some Dean's child in class to actually get noticed by a system that is either effectively blind, or effectively dysfunctional at taking action to repair itself -- which, at the receiving end, amount to the same thing.

These problems are "of measure zero" to the high-up people who run things, it seems. Their behavior, from the outside, is identical to what you'd get if they didn't care to what pain their system is causing.

I pick those words carefully, because the reality is often even more baffling - the people "on top" do care, a lot, but do not, as they perceive the world, "run things." In fact, they find their hands tied at every step and every turn, and their initiatives resisted and rejected by the same "system."

So, it turns out, no one is running the system any more.

But, if you try to change "the system" it fights back, as John Gall points out so well in his profound and hilarious book "Systemantics." So, something is running the system. But what?

It turns out that "the system" is now running itself.

As systems tend to do, the system, once our creation and slave, has now become the master, and is dictating what everyone in it, including those at "the top", is now allowed to do. We didn't even realize that systems could do that, but it seems increasingly clear that they can, and do.

I gave a very simple illustration of this before, in "Controlled by the Blue Gozinta", showing how simply filling a glass with water sets up a feedback loop that actually is in control, as it becomes as correct to say the water level is controlling the hand as that the hand is controlling the water level.

But our educational system has gone into the state I call "M.A.W.B.A" - for "Might As Well Be Alive". It acts like it is alive, with a mind of its own. It offends many people's sense of what "life" is to call it alive, but it follows all the rules my Biology 101 textbook uses to define "life", except for having DNA.

So, we should accept that unexpected result at face value and say, ok, our ideas about what "life" is are out of date. Apparently "systems" can become "alive" when our backs are turned. We stir the coffee in the cup and get a nice vortex or whirlpool in the middle, and then, to our shock, the coffee says "Thanks for the jump start, Joe!", spits out the spoon, and starts maintaining the whirlpool on its own. This kind of "life" or "MAWBA" seems to be just waiting around for an excuse to join the game.

It's as if we don't have to "create life" -- it's already out there waiting to be born as soon as we make a suitable vessel for it. Wow.

That's kind of interesting. You can get that with"solitons" or waves that once started, just keep on running forever, but they are passive and remain in their non-linear matrix. These MAWBA life-forms can get up, walk over to the wall socket, examine the situation, rip apart the blender, connect the cord to themselves and plug themselves in and start drawing power.

Corporations are MAWBA. Our Educational System is MAWBA. Our Healthcare System is MAWBA. The teachers and doctors didn't change what they were doing. The administrators didn't change, but the emergent system changed, came alive, and took over running things, thank you. Neither the teachers, no administrators, nor doctors, nor students, nor patients are in charge any more. It's the movie Terminator's premise - "Skynet has be come self-aware, and taken over, and shut us out."

These days, maybe Northwest Airline's ability to control it's number of canceled flights is MAWBA, or GM's ability to control its own direction and future, or the Mideast situation are all MAWBA, and no one, no person, no group of people, is in charge any more, while everyone is blaming everyone else, thinking this must surely be "caused" by some bad people somewhere, because what other explanation is there?

Indeed. That is the question, isn't it.

If you find it more comfortable to say it's not "alive", but can still fit into that model that it has perception, uses energy, adapts to its environment, and even starts tinkering with its environment to adapt the environment to it, great. Come up with some other word for that behavior that is not what I associate with non-living things. It is self-aware and self-protective. And it is a lot larger than we are as individuals.

That kind of changes what sort of interventions into health care or education or politics might work. This is way beyond "feedback" or "reciprocal determinism" or even "system dynamics". This is a whole new ballgame, a whole new way of looking at "Life Science."

Maybe this model, however bizarre, has better predictive value than our old models.

It seems to me to be worth checking out, because we're not getting too far with the old ones.

So, if something "acts like it has a mind of its own", maybe we should accept that at face value for the moment, regardless how bizarre it is, and ask "OK, then, suppose it did have a mind of its own. What would our next step be then?"

I need to reflect on that. Maybe the answer is simply: "Try to make contact with it. Maybe we can negotiate a different solution that works better for both of us." I certainly wouldn't rush in with guns blazing. Lack of visibility may cut both ways. It may be as unaware of us as we are of it.

I think it was Lewis Thomas (MD) who noted that if our body's cells could manage to talk to "us", the consciousness in here sharing the space with them, that there would be very little in common to talk about. We worry about taxes, acceptance to college, the War, elections, interpersonal relationships, job security. Cells have no equivalents.

My own observation, or contribution to that discussion is this: we actually do have one thing in common, at any level or scale: the nature of control itself. Every level of life that becomes self-aware wants to repair itself and survive. To do those things it has to, above all, maintain order, but it has to be dynamic order, not rigidity like an ordered crystal of salt. Dynamic order and adaptability to changes in the environment are keys to survival. That means, when the world changes, when the "cheese moves", this news has to make it up to the top, somehow, and adjust the prior strategy. This is a basic problem of cybernetics, and is true at every level.

So, we can talk about that issue with any system. What's the best way to maintain order, and still be flexible and capable of learning and adapating? We all face that problem.

In fact, we all seem to face it in the same context -- as part of a greater chain of being, with "us" being just some small bit-player in something much larger than us that's going on, was going on before we got here, and will still be going on after we leave.

We are a nested hierarchy of systems of systems. That is also a common problem for us all, at any level. Our freedom of action is constrained by that reality. How do we cope, align with larger priorities, and still get our own work done? That's the core question we share.