I am excited about having participated in a wonderful STEAMplant project headed up by Art and Design Education graduate student Ana Codorean. The project focused on how to get local public school students thinking about interdependence and the ways in which natural dyes can be used in creative work. Encompassing an impressive breadth of scientific topics, the project got students thinking about sustainability, chemistry, and coding. My main role was to think about how to teach students about interdependence, which led to the creation of this fun video:

After watching this video and doing some background reading, the students visited the garden in October, and were asked to identify parts of the flowers growing in the garden, linking them to what they had learned about the interdependence between plants and their pollinators.

In addition to making and recording their observations, students also got a chance to experiment with a bundle-dyeing technique, creating yarn with dye patterns unique to their selection and arrangement of different plant species.

As a person who started his teaching career in the New York City public schools, it was really fun for me to get to work with local students again. There’s so much important work to be done in the primary and secondary schools around sustainability education, and Ana’s STEAMplant project was an amazing transdisciplinary way of engaging students.

Want to learn more about the project and its pedagogical trajectory? Ana put together a great summary, which you can access here.

Update: You can check out an article about this project on Pratt News.

This is a great overview of the promise and perils associated with post-coronavirus climate action.

For me, the greatest potential for turning this terrible global health crisis into a catalyst for global climate action is to tie economic recovery efforts to sustainability. The “Green New Deal” concept makes even more sense now because:

1. People need work. There will be support for any effort that creates jobs.
2. We need to put people to work doing something productive. Here’s our chance to tie together remedies for social problems (such as building affordable housing) with remedies for climate change (such as building out an extensive renewable-energy system).
3. A lot of the industries that we have relied on to fuel economic activity — and which are big contributors to climate change — are going to be knocked down (if not out) by this economic crisis; now is our chance to replace these industries with more sustainable alternatives, alternatives that provide the same economic drive benefits without all the climate damage.

Jeremy’s STEAMplant project focused on the creation of a short “hike-play” which required the audience to take a walk in the woods before seeing the actual performance.

This short video, created by Jess Lazar, does a nice job of capturing the essence of the performance that Jeremy designed:

I am so proud to announce the publication of “The Art of Designing a Curriculum Optimized for Learning Transfer” in Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning. This is the first article published by Pratt’s interdisciplinary Transfer of Learning Faculty Learning Community (aka the “Transfer FLC”). I got to spend the last three years working with Brian Brooks, Keena Suh, Chris Wynter (@chriswynterart), and Allegra Marino Shumulevsky on the problem of how to enable our students to better transfer what they have learned throughout their Pratt education and then into their post-Pratt careers. We didn’t just get to learn about the kinds of learning that each of us provide to our students: we also got to engage over thirty of our colleagues in a series of “Transfer Sessions” that allowed faculty to share their teaching approaches with colleagues from other disciplines. This article describes the Transfer Sessions Project and some of the early insights that emerged from our efforts. Beyond being excited to see our work get out into the world, I am just so honored to have a publication with Chris, Keena, Allegra, and Brian as co-authors. Our warm and loving team is forever enshrined in the academic literature! Special thanks are due to Heather Lewis (who advocated for us tirelessly as our FLC coordinator), Vice Provost Donna Heiland (who supported our FLC generously), and Change Editor David Paris (who was invaluable in bringing our manuscript into final form).

This is a really great article that highlights how powerful evolutionary biologists align themselves with wealthy capitalists. In the case of Jeffrey Epstein, their interpretations of Darwinian theory provided intellectual cover for abusive behavior.

I am proud to have been named one of five inaugural Center for Teaching and Learning Fellows at Pratt Institute. I join Film and Video Professor Kara Hearn, Architecture Professor Jonathan Scelsa, Communications Design Professor Nida Abdullah, and Industrial Design Professor Matthew Hoey in the first cohort of Fellows working on pedagogical research projects supported by Pratt’s relatively-new Center for Teaching and Learning. Each of us will be working on a separate set of research questions, but we will also be leaning on each other for feedback, support, and ideas.

My project will seek to make connections between how the natural sciences are currently taught at Pratt, what our students need from their natural science education, and existing research on best practices for fostering natural science learning. Part of my research will involve diving more deeply into the pedagogical research on natural science teaching, something that I have wanted to do for years. But the other part of my research is highly social; I plan to conduct a series of interviews with faculty in my own Math & Science Department as well a few of the design majors, with students, and with the academic advisors.

I am hoping that the interviews will allow me to better see where our department can make stronger connections with our students and what they are studying in their majors. I also plan to mine the interviews for best teaching practices that are consistent with the pedagogical literature. The findings of these interviews will be shared through both an academic paper and a series of audio podcasts.

The final phase of the project will seek to implement some of the findings. I plan to collaborate with at least three of my fellow Math & Science faculty to develop new activities to be implemented in our classrooms.

I am lucky to be supported on this Fellowship by a single course release. Teaching two rather than the usual three courses in the Fall will give me adequate time to conduct my interviews.

This semester I taught one section of my Evolution course. Of my fifteen students in this course section, fourteen completed the evaluation, marking a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 4 (strongly agree) for a series of criteria. My overall rating for this section of this course was 3.48; at about 87% of the maximum score, this is just a bit below my career average. Here are the results for each of the numerically-scored portions of the evaluation form:

To make it easier to analyze these results, I have highlighted ratings that are greater than or equal to 3.75 in blue and ratings that are less than or equal to 3.25 in red. The sections in grey are those where students have evaluated their own performance in the course.

Starting out with the positive, you can see that the ratings in blue tend to relate to the general manner in which the course was run. Most of these are what I call ‘structural elements’: planning, preparation, and execution of the course. These are not surprising ratings, as I know that I am generally a pretty organized professor.

Looking at the more negative ratings, in red, a few major messages emerge. Students think the course is too difficult, asks too much work of them, and is graded unfairly. There’s some question as to how much I managed to stimulate student’s interest. Students feel that some skills (communication, cooperation) and awarenesses (sustainability) are not being taught all that well in the course. And, perhaps most hard to hear: students are not particularly inclined to recommend either the course or me as an instructor to another student.

There were two sections of my Ecology, Environment, & the Anthropocene course this semester. Section 01 was comprised of twelve students, nine of whom completed the evaluation form; the overall average rating in this section was 3.30. Section 02 was comprised of fifteen students, fourteen of whom completed the evaluation form; the overall average rating in this section was 3.15. Both of these scores — at 82.5% and 78.8% of the maximum rating — are well below my career average. Here are the results for each of the numerically-scored portions of the evaluation form:

As above, higher scores are in blue, lower scores are in red, and student self-assessments are in grey.

There are still some positives here, but for these two sections of this course, they are a lot fewer and further between. My preparation and knowledge were consistently appreciated, but that’s about all the two sections agreed on. Looking at the remaining positive ratings from Section 01, it becomes clear that there is pretty substantial disagreement between the two sections.

There are a lot of low ratings for both of these sections. Again, we see that students think that the course is too difficult and too demanding. Disturbingly, a large number of students (six of twenty-three respondents) thought that the course was worse compared to other courses they have taken. Students did not feel that I gave valuable feedback, and they did not feel fairly graded. As with my other course this semester, the students in this course did not feel that the course fostered general education skills such as problem-solving, communication, and collaboration. And, painfully, students are relatively unlikely to recommend either the course or me as an instructor. Ouch.

Are my courses too rigorous?

Trying to figure out what this all means, I tend to gravitate to the negative. It feels good to get good ratings for some criteria, but these are criteria that I know I have a handle on. The lower ratings cause me a lot more distress.

One thing that seems clear to me is that students feel that my course is too rigorous. This can be seen in the ratings for the “difficulty”, “quantity of assigned work”, and “fair grading” criteria. This impression is reinforced in the comments that students make on the evaluations. Here is a sampling of these sorts of comments:

• Chris is a very harsh grader, a lot of strict guidelines to follow that feel a little rigid and if you don’t say exactly what he wants you to say you will get points off.

• This course was a lot of work, I’ve spent more time in my Evolution class than I did with two of my studio classes and will probably still receive a lower grade in this class despite that.

• This class was too difficult. The amount of work asked was way too much. And the expectations on art students in a science class was way too high, followed then by harsh grades. The instructor was very severe in terms of grade and also attendance in class, even though we are heal or have a reason to not be present, he will be the one in charge to chose if it’s either way a good reason or not and if not he will give us a F for our absence. I felt like I was in middle school for such rules. The amount of work was really too much, I was sometimes working more for this required science class than my major. When a student don’t have a science background, that makes the student already struggling, but we still want to do good so we work twice more than it should be.

• The work load is ridiculous and unacceptable for a three credit elective. There is too much weekly homework along with big submissions and minor assignment… The grading is harsh and also not appropriate. Students do not have time for such work given their major requirements and since every single activity is graded, even a slight drop in performance for small class activities and weekly homework affects the grade.

• But it felt like this course does not understand the workload art students have. It’s way too much for an elective and its very hard to deal with the requirements while trying to do the actual projects of our majors. Not only the workload is high, the assessment of them are also harsh. It’s really hard to get a good grade unless you work like this class is not an elective but as if it is your actual major which is very inconvenient for the students of an art school who are taking a science class because its mandatory mostly.

• The workload is sometimes a bit overwhelm for students that are in some more intense majors, especially the grading is a little strict.

• Less assignments per week, and not have exactly everything graded.

• This course is too intense. It has a lot of assignments that need to be completed on deadlines that are too rigid. It is an elective class and sometimes it has more work left than major classes, which at many points in the semester become very overwhelming.

• Some of the assignments are graded very harshly even though I try my best I still get a bad grade when I don’t fully understand something.

• Too much reading assignments! I have a lot of work from my major but I still have to complete the reading assignments on time. It was painful. I know this is a required writing intensive course, but I really need more time for completing my major’s project! I cannot produce quality work for my major’s project if too much time is taken by ecology. And also, I wish reading questions are short and quick response questions (like multiple choice questions), but they are actually short-essay questions that requires me to describe every single point from the reading. Annoyed.

• Chris is a very harsh grader, a lot of strict guidelines to follow that feel a little rigid and if you don’t say exactly what he wants you to say you will get points off.

• Too much work, it’s too demanding for art students.

• Too much work. Very high standards.

• … a lot of homework, on top of our majors.

• … there is too much work for a [sic] art student.

• Lessen the reading questions. The subject matter is very rigid. let the students breathe a little and please please please give importance to the majors that students belong to.

• Ecology is not our major. Let students make use of this subject as a forum that not adds up to their stress level due to their other work.

• We have other classes and assignments to do! The teacher needs to understand that his course is not our only class.
• Chris is a very knowledgeable professor but at times I feel as though he gives too many assignments and expects a level of dedication that is hard to achieve.

Reading these comments, it is very clear what my students want: an easier class, both in terms of the amount of work that I assign and the quality of work that I expect in order to earn a high grade. There’s also palpable stress among the students about allocating too much time to this course, which they feel is preventing them from devoting as much time as they think they should be devoting to courses in their major.

It is a bit difficult to know what to do with this feedback. It is not the only negative feedback, but it is the only consistent and abundant negative feedback. Students don’t like how much they are being asked to read. They don’t like how much they are being asked to write. And they don’t like my expectations of their performance on these tasks. But does that mean that my course is too rigorous? It is not an uncommon wish of students — or humans in general for that matter — that their life was easier… so how do I know if I am asking too much of my students?

One way would be to look at the number of hours that my course occupies in their school work week. According to their reporting — which is admittedly pretty approximate because I have to extrapolate based on the broad categories of 0-5 hours and 5-10 hours — students are spending an average of 6.4 hours per week on activities outside of my course. If that number is correct, that means that they are spending under ten hours a week doing work for my course. That sounds about right given federal guidelines, which state that a credit hour “reasonably approximates not less than one hour of class and two hours of out-of-class student work per week“. At three credits each, my courses should require three hours in class and about six hours out of class. What my students report they are working is just above that minimum.

If my students report that they are working just above the minimum, why are they complaining? What’s clear from their comments is that it is the work I ask from them relative to the amount of time they need to devote to their majors that is too challenging. And I get that. At minimum, Pratt students are taking 15 credits. Many are taking 18 credits, and sometimes more. With the manner in which studio contact hours are credited, that would mean spending at least 50-60 hours weekly if every class required this federal minimum. That’s a manageable amount of work for a full-time residential student who doesn’t have to work or have any other responsibilities, but it is also pretty intense. And here’s the likely problem: many of the majors courses — especially studio courses — likely require a lot more time than the federal minimum (although note that some students suggest that they spend more time on my class). As you look at the comments above, you can feel the tension: in the environment of an art and design school, a class like mine feels like a lot.

The other factor driving my course to make students feel overloaded is the way that we have designed the new General Education (GenEd) program at Pratt. My courses are CORE science courses, which require that I provide a fair amount of scientific content. On top of that, my courses are writing intensive, which adds to what I have to cram into the course. Because Pratt students are required to take only one math and science course, we are really challenging our first-year and sophomore students. To some extent, for students to perceive my courses as in line with their workload expectations, the structure of our GenEd would have to change.

I also have to admit that there is a part of me that is proud that I am considered a tough grader with high expectations. I don’t want my students to struggle or to be overly stressed, but I also know that many students make great strides when pushed to do better work. Would I be doing my students a disservice, depriving them of educational opportunities, if I let up on my expectations?

Contradictory messages are par for the course

We tend to put a lot of emphasis on numbers because they are easy to digest; I led with the numerical ratings because they quickly capture the overall impressions of the students in my courses. But as some of my selections above reveal, the real explanation comes in the comments that students take the time to write out. Unfortunately, sometimes these comments leave my head spinning.

Here’s one example. For almost every class there are activities that involve collaboration and interaction between small groups of students. Should I continue this practice? Well, as this selection of student comments reveals, it depends on which student you ask:

• I would suggest that the professor not only stick to group activities, but maybe even incorporate games where based on a chapter the next class there is a question game or something and students have to test their knowledge and it helps the students participate more. Perhaps the prize is an extra allowance day or something. I think the professor is a very fun and genuine person and creating scientific games would not only help students participate more, he could see what areas people still don’t understand from the readings.

• .. I don’t really enjoy the computer lab where we have to mind map with others, because I feel like it’s an awkward and forced interaction.

• Less group work would make this class less like a highschool class.

• There is too much group work with worksheets to the point where I feel like I’m back in middle school science class.

• … too much team assignment…

Again I find myself in a dilemma. Are the students who don’t like group work on to something about the poor design of my courses, or does their discomfort reflect a need to be put in group collaborative situations more often?

Students also don’t agree on the structural components of the course:

• I think the LMS is structured in a cumbersome way. It feels like I have to go through like three different web-pages to get to the information that I actually need to complete the assignment. And even then, there’s just so much information on the class LMS page that it gets hard to navigate at times.

• It was extremely helpful to have the whole semester planned out by the professor because I knew when everything was due and I could plan ahead.

I realize that these two comments are not exactly counter to each other, but they point out a dilemma I face. By creating a structure that one student appreciates I am overwhelming another student. What works for one person does not necessarily work for another. If there is no one-size-fits-all course, one can expect that a certain fraction of students will be unhappy with how the course is run.

A lot of the comments above point to my course being too “childish”, like a high school or middle school course. But then you get comments like this:

• … reliance on the LMS and the amount of work that made me feel like I was in a graduate course…

Every student has their own take on what environment and level of rigor feels right for them.

And although the overwhelming majority of students seem to feel that I don’t adequately respect their need to focus on their majors, I still get comments like these:

• I honestly appreciate that he doesn’t treat his class as if it’s the only existing class at this school, because a lot of professors have the tendency to disregard other classes and claim that their own is the most important.

• As well as creating an abundance of extra credit opportunities, it makes the students feel like the professor cares about the fact that we are artists at an art school with heavy studio course loads.

What to do about all these contradictory messages?

Let’s not lose the bigger picture

I take my course evaluations seriously, and it pains me that they have been going down over the years. As my analysis above suggests, I have some work to figure out how to make students feel more engaged, have more faith in the work required by the course, and ultimately to make myself and my courses worthy of recommendation. With all the seemingly-negative messages coming from so many of my students, it is easy to lose faith. So below is a collection of some of the more positive messages coming out of my course evaluations:

• Engaging professor who guides you. Clear and direct constructive criticism he gives in feedback to your rough drafts/work so that for the good copy or later work you clearly know what you can fix.

• Chris really wants you to succeed and gives you ample room to get things wrong and figure the right answer out for yourself. His lectures are engaging and he makes participating in class easy.

• Professor is very lively and keeps the class engaged in teachings.

• Professor is lively and passionate about the subject matter.

• Chris is extremely knowledgeable about evolution and biology and really helped me to understand things.

• Christopher Jensen is a great instructor and manages to work well even with students that have no interest/are only taking the course to fulfill a requirement.

• The instructor was very thorough and helpful. I feel like I really learned from this course, I normally do not like science or understand it very well.

• The instructor is very careful and responsible in teaching and very helpful in explaining knowledge.

• Chris knows how to captivate interest in class.

• Overall it was an interesting course and I think the fact that Chris teaches with a lot of enthusiasm made the class a lot more interesting.

• The one of the best features of this course are that, though the subject itself can be complex to understand, Jensen teaches it in palatable stages. Science has never personally been one of my best subjects, but I feel that in this class I have learned some valuable information, about concepts such as the need for environmental sustainability, that I can take with me and apply to my art, and daily life. Unlike many professors, Jensen understands that we are not science majors, and takes that into account as he is teaching. He tries to simplify more complex concepts by breaking them down into analogies and smaller concepts, and tries to apply scientific ideas and facts to the art world.

• Professor Jensen was always on the ball with every graded assignment. He always gave extremely thorough feedback on our projects and responses way before the next class (it amazes me how he managed to do this so quickly) and was always open to answering questions. His feedback provided new insight, posed new questions to think about and pushed me to explaining myself more clearly and concisely. He was quite energetic and made the topic interesting and relevant and encouraged class participation. Professor Jensen also spoke well and sensitively about controversial topics (gender, sex, race, etc.) and was always conscious not to even unintentionally cross any lines.

• Keep doing what you’re doing Chris!

What’s clear from these comments is that some fraction of my students really value my work. The question, then, is how to increase that fraction.

Where do we go from here?

Every semester I try to take a few of the overall messages delivered by course evaluations and work on making tweaks to my classes that improve student experiences and perceptions. This has gone really well for me in the past. For example, when many students complained about rigid deadlines, I introduced ten “allowance days”, which students can use to extend deadlines throughout the semester. Although I still get comments about the deadlines being too rigid or poorly placed, the intensity of these comments definitely decreased since I instituted allowance days.

For the coming Fall semester I want to work on the group activities that I use in Ecology, Environment, & the Anthropocene. To the degree that they feel too “secondary school”, I want to improve these activities. Unfortunately I think that the course where this is most likely to be a problem is Evolution, and I won’t teach that course next semester. But there’s always room for improvement in how students experience the activities in each of my classes. Students consistently report that the class does not help them learn how to work well with others, and this is something I want to improve. The opportunities to work together are there, but perhaps I need to consider how to model cooperative behaviors that lead to better group outcomes. We often put our students in the position to learn something, but do we actually teach them? When it comes to collaboration, I could stand to design more direct instruction into my activities.

I also think that I could stand to play with rigor a bit in Ecology, Environment, & the Anthropocene. I can see what students are saying: there is a lot packed into this course, and I need to consider where it could be streamlined. If there is a way to allow students to read a little bit less, I might lower the reading load. Evolution has a pretty good reading load, but it is mostly from a single textbook, and for some reason that makes students at least perceive that the reading expectations are more reasonable.

I want to be a professor who teaches courses that students recommend, but clearly I am far from this goal. This is not new: even in years where I get higher overall ratings, the “would recommend” criteria always lead to lower ratings. This is very hard for me to figure out. Students seem to think that I run a pretty organized course and deliver course materials in a clear manner. But they are not that interested by what I deliver, and feel that I am too tough on them. Can I make my class more worthy of recommendation without compromising the learning I deliver to my students?

Last semester I got serious about my time budget. Although I had been tracking my time for years to assure that I was “working enough”, I had spent too many of those years “just doing what seemed like it needed to be done”, a practice that had led me to pay some serious opportunity costs: those things that were demanding my time most loudly were displacing the “quieter” pursuits that I actually wanted to be spending my time on. My first pass at time budgeting was an attempt at both determining real costs and at cost containment. Not surprisingly, coming to grips with the real costs was achievable in this first semester of this practice; containing costs was not quite so achievable. Armed with the knowledge that collecting this data had produced, I moved enthusiastically forward into the Spring 2019 semester, hoping to get a little better at living within my temporal means. 

A time budget for the semester, version 1.1

Part of learning from my first attempt at time budgeting was to update the allocations of time in my budget. In some cases, that meant adding or subtracting hours allocated to particular activities. For example, in the Fall of 2018 I spent a bit more time on “course delivery” than I had budgeted for, so for Spring 2019 I upped my estimate for the time I would spend on that activity. I also had to add new categories. Some of these categories emerged from new roles at work; most prominently, I became the chair of our Curriculum Review and Assessment Committee (CRAC) this semester, a major new role. Other new categories emerged from the realization that I have been doing work-related things that were not accurately accounted for in my budget. Believe it or not, I had not accounted for the fact that I periodically need to spend time getting myself organized… ironic given that this sort of scheduling/organizing is at the heart of this time-budgeting endeavor.

And so I came at the new semester with updated intentions. Here is how those intentions and my real effort compared:

A big issue for me has been going over or under time budget on the activities I do each semester. As I consider the over-budget activities to be the guilty parties, I have highlighted all the categories and activities that exceeded my time budget in blue.

What can we glean from these results?

The great thing about time budgeting and tracking is that it lays bare what the problems are. And if you look at the table above, these problems are really apparent. Starting with the major categories, you can see that my effort for Teaching is just a bit short of what I expected, a slight difference that was compensated for by the fact that activities in the Other category went slightly above time budget. But the real tradeoff can be seen in the comparing Service and Scholarship: once again, my effort towards Scholarship was cut short by excessive allocation of time to Service. Even though my allocation of time to Service was rather generous — actually far more than I would like to allocate, as I would like to get Service and Scholarship to about 20% each —  my various forms of service still consumed more than I wanted them to. This is a constant problem for faculty, and now that I am tracking my time I can see just how much of a problem this is.

Why did Service go the most over budget of any category? Interestingly, it was not because the number of service commitments that I have is too great (although obviously doing fewer things on campus would lower my overall time budget allocation to Service). For most forms of service, I ended up spending less time than I had anticipated. This is good, because a few forms of service ended up being incredibly hungry for my time. The move from one to two meetings per semester for the Bias Education Response Taskforce doubled the time spent on this activity, but this was a relatively small increase in the use of my time. The need to attend a large number of talks and other events related to the search for a new Dean in our school also ate up a lot more of my time devoted to the institute as a whole. But by far the biggest consumer of time was our departmental Curriculum Review and Assessment Committee (aka CRAC).

What’s going on with the CRAC? How did I end up spending over 13% of my time on CRAC activities when I intended to spend less than 4%? The answer to that question is two-fold. First, I certainly under-estimated the time that it would take to perform the basic CRAC chairperson duties. Chief among these duties are shepherding course proposals through the review process and setting up our department’s yearly assessment activity. Course proposals are hard to budget for because it is not easy to know how many proposals will be submitted or how much attention each proposal will require, but I certainly should have allocated more time for this activity. Assessment is a somewhat predictable activity and one that also should have been allocated more time. The second issue was that I (voluntarily) chose to help spearhead a departmental effort at re-envisioning our curriculum. I could have chosen not to get involved in this project, so in some sense I chose to reallocate part of my time mid-semester. To some degree I am at peace with that decision, and the time tracking allows me to see the consequences of this change in plans.

What was lost when I over-did it on Service? Not just Scholarship in general, but particular forms of Scholarship. My intentions for Scholarship during the Spring 2019 semester were rather unambitious, but I still managed to fall short of the low bar I set. I actually spent more than twice the amount of time I wanted to on the two STEAMplant projects that I was involved with, which left two other scholarly activities neglected. The first was my work on research emerging from the Faculty Learning Community (FLC) that I have been involved in for the past three academic years. This was a minor shortcoming, and perhaps okay given how much time overall I have devoted to FLC activity over the past three years. The real tragedy was that I spent so little time on reading to keep up with my field. This is a form of scholarship that’s crucial to maintaining my continued viability and vitality as an academic, so this is a time budget shortfall that can’t be repeated in future semesters. It’s good to know what a problem this is, even as it is frustrating that I can’t seem to protect time allocated for this activity.

On a positive note, it seems as though I have gotten to the point where my Teaching time allocations are pretty spot on. A few categories went slightly over and a few categories were slightly under budget, but overall I was pretty close. This is heartening, because it means that I know how much time it takes to be an effective teacher and can therefore be realistic about “what’s left” for other activities. Getting those other activities into balance — both in terms of the relative amount of time I allocate to each of them and in terms of getting Service to “behave” — is my remaining challenge.

Actually hitting my goal for work hours spent

As I mentioned in my analysis of last semester’s time tracking exercise, one issue I experienced was over-estimating the total number of work hours that could actually put in over the course of the semester. Being too optimistic about how many work hours you can put in is a problem for a couple of reasons:

• If you over-estimate the number of hours that you can work, you set yourself up to neglect some activities that you intend to spend time on; and
• It is demoralizing to set overly-ambitious goals and then consistently fail to meet those goals. If the whole purpose of time budgeting is to set intentions and then be at peace with following those intentions, over-estimating just sets you up to not honor your intentions, creating stress rather than clarity around what can actually be accomplished.

For the Spring 2019 semester I set an overall work hours goal that was consistent with the actual effort that I was able to put in for Fall 2018. And, lo and behold, I was actually able to exceed my expected work hours by a little bit. It is so much better to have a little more — rather than a little less — time to work with, both from a practical and emotional perspective. Obviously my ability to put in work hours is going to change slightly from semester to semester, depending on what my home responsibilities are (and how much time I am willing to surrender to work), but it is good to know what an achievable work hours goal looks like at this particular moment in my life. Hitting that overall goal feels great, promoting a sense that I did what I could do.

Concluding thoughts on the value of time tracking

The more I do time tracking and budgeting, the bigger devotee I am of the practice. Although it remains impossible to accurately estimate how much time various activities will take and budgeting certainly does not prevent some activities from robbing time from other activities, I can feel and see that just the act of setting intentions is getting me a lot closer to my goals. I feel that I am now being honest with myself about what I can actually accomplish in a way that’s unprecedented in my many careers. A lot of that honesty involves truly confronting how limited I am, and the resulting finite nature of what I can accomplish. But by ending the practice of over-promising and under-delivering — to both myself and to others — I am getting a little closer to manifesting aspirations in my actions. Being on a time budget also relieves a lot anxiety that used to occupy the uncertain space between what I wanted to get done and what I was actually capable of accomplishing.

One of the activities that I regularly have my students complete in my Evolution course is called “Future Evolution“. The activity sends students on what most evolutionary biologists consider a fool’s errand: to try to predict the future evolution of some particular trait in some particular species. Making such predictions is really difficult for these basic reasons:

• So much of evolutionary change relies on random mutations, and predicting where or how new mutations might arise is nearly impossible;
• All future genetic changes will occur in the context of the existing genetic architecture of each organism, and although we are getting better at understanding this architecture we are a long ways off from being able to predict what’s possible to change in traits by making genetic changes; and
• Although there are some very clear environmental changes occurring now — most of them caused by human activities — it is difficult to know if these changes will be sustained for long enough to lead to changes in the traits of particular species.

Why send students off to make predictions when most evolutionary biologists would be loathe to make such predictions themselves? Well, as a thought exercise making these predictions is actually really valuable.

A skill that I try to teach to all of my students is to “tell an evolutionary story”. I want students to be able to explain what kinds of changes to existing traits would be required for a new trait to evolve, how the resulting trait variant might provide advantage in a particular environment and therefore increase in prevalence due to some form of selection, and explain how that overall evolutionary process would produce this new trait as an adaptation of a particular species. When we look retrospectively at traits that have already evolved, the goal is to verbalize a reasonable scenario under which this trait evolved. When we make predictions about the evolution of novel traits, the goal is to predict the evolution of a trait in a particular species that feasibly might occur given what we know about recent changes to some aspect of that species’ environment. The prediction doesn’t necessarily have to be likely to come true — even most reasonable evolutionary predictions are still low-probability outcomes — it just has to be feasible. Making these feasible predictions requires a strong understanding of how evolution works, which is why we do this exercise in our final class session.

Every semester I get some really fun, interesting, provocative, and off-the-wall predictions. Below are some highlights from one section of this semester’s class…

Prediction: Human hands will evolve a shape that better allows us to use our phones

Ah, the power of cell phone technology! We often overestimate the evolutionary impact of the here and now, and no prediction better illustrates this than various “cell phone prophecies” that seem to always come up during this exercise. The first problem with this prediction is that our devices are themselves evolving way too fast to be a sustained force of natural selection. Human generation time is about twenty years; in that time, cell phone designs have completely changed. It’s impossible for long-lived and slow-developing humans to evolve genetically in response to such a rapidly-moving cultural environment. And then there’s the question of reproductive advantage: exactly what would be the reproductive fitness benefit of being able to better use a cell phone? Do we think that the most evolutionarily-successful humans are the ones who send texts the fastest? (And by the way, if you still send texts with your hands, you are behind the times). Although not perfect, cell phones are also designed with the existing (ages old) evolved shape of the human hand in mind, suggesting that there might not be much selection for modifying this anatomy.

Prediction: Humans will lose their hearing due to listening to loud music on their headphones

Wow, how Lamarckian! Lucky for our offspring that not all the unhealthy things that we do to our bodies actually get passed on. You can’t damage the genes you have that allow for the development of hearing by listening to your headphones (no matter how loud), so your offspring will be fine… even if you can’t hear what they are saying.

Prediction: Human body size will decrease in response to limited resources, decreased space, and cultural norms/sexual selection

It’s tempting to think about overcrowding in human populations and to imagine that the smaller among us might be more likely to survive. After all, this is what seems to have happened to both certain populations of humans as well as populations of other species such as elephants. But the issue here is whether the factors that may have caused the evolution of smaller stature would be present in the future. The idea that we are “running out of space and resources” is not really valid in this context; despite increasing population densities, we enjoy unprecedented access to resources.

The question of cultural norms and sexual selection is an interesting one. Unless there is some advantage in choosing a shorter mate, it is hard to be confident that shorter stature will be the sexually-selected trait of the future. There’s even some evidence that there is sexual selection for average height!

Prediction: Humans will gradually evolve to have less body hair due to a combination of rising temperatures and hair removal in response to cultural norms

This prediction is a double-whammy of evolutionary misconceptions. The first misconception is that we are not already pretty well evolved to dissipate heat. We are essentially still a tropical ape, notwithstanding some variation in how hirsute each of us may be. Even the hairiest among us retains the fundamental adaptations of our Savanna-dwelling African ancestors: a body with minimal hair and the ability to efficiently remove excess body heat via perspiration. This is not to say that the health risks of rising temperatures are not real: I am just skeptical that minor variations in amount of body hair are going to determine who does and not survive the climate change heat waves of the future. Plus, in most of the world we currently rely on clothing to maintain optimal body temperature; most of the population will be able to just take off a layer of clothing as temperatures warm.

And what about the hair removal dues to cultural norms? Well obviously we are not talking about genetic evolution if hair removal is a cultural norm. And can we count on cultural norms staying the same for long periods of time? History suggests not… beauty standards oscillate pretty wildly across periods of evolutionary time.

Prediction: Humans will evolve to lose their pinky toe due to continued bipedalism

This is just silly. Have you ever injured your pinkie toe? If you have, you know it helps maintain your balance as you walk. And we have been bipedal for a long, long time… why would the pinkie toe suddenly become a disadvantage?

A lot of these evolutionary predictions are kind of on the border. Maybe they could be
feasible, but we just don’t know enough to accurately assess their feasibility.
Below are some examples of these “marginal” predictions.

Prediction: Humans will evolve the ability to tolerate more small particle air pollution and be less susceptible to the health problems caused by these particulates

The appeal of this prediction is pretty obvious: the air quality is really bad in many places across the globe, with levels of particulate matter (PM) pollution causing premature death and other health problems. This would make one think that any person with a mutation that lowered their sensitivity to PM would be more evolutionarily successful. Whether or not that is true really depends on when the impacts of PM set in and how severe they are. One interesting — and depressing — aspect of PM is that it can increase rates of asthma in young children. If these health effects really prevent a sizeable fraction of young people from reaching adulthood, they could select for tolerance of PM.

The other unknown in this prediction has to do with the prevalence and persistance of the environment that could foster these genetic changes. While a lot of people are exposed to PM pollution, we don’t know if that number will increase or decrease in the future. If enough countries reduce PM pollution, there won’t be sufficient selection for this prediction to come true… which would certainly be better for overall human quality of life (usually, the conditions that cause selection for genetic changes in human are pretty unpleasant).

Prediction: Domesticated cows will become larger and meatier due to genetic modification by humans

We can, but will we? That seems like the major unanswered question lurking behind this question. Our powers of artificial selection have been augmented by the ability to directly edit the genome of the organisms we have domesticated, making this prediction seem more “when” than “if” in terms of feasibility. So the real question is not one of capability, but one of motivation: is there any reason why humans would need larger and meatier cows? Perhaps we are actually heading, culturally/technologically-speaking, towards synthetic meat. If the technologies for producing protein-rich meat without raising live cows can progress far enough, perhaps we will abandon our mutualism with cows (at least at the industrial scale). The unpredictability of human cultural technologies and preferences makes this prediction a bit hard to assess.

Prediction: Raccoons will evolve an increased capacity to use tools in human-dominated environments

Whether this prediction will come true depends on a lot of factors that are not easy to ascertain. But it is premised on an idea that at least has merit: increasingly, at least some populations of raccoons are highly dependent on gathering food from human-created environments. We also tend to prefer that raccoons are not hanging around our homes, so we are locked in a coevolutionary battle with the raccoons: we invent new cultural technologies to prevent them from raiding our garbage and other sources of food, and they are either learning or perhaps even genetically evolving to become better at obtaining the food we try to hide away. And it is that last concept that’s critical to this prediction: if raccoons are going to genetically evolve, they have to not just learn how to defeat human cultural technologies, they actually have to evolve to be better learners and inventors of technology. Whether this actually happens is partially a matter of chance (Will some raccoons accumulate mutations that change the way they learn?) but also an ecological question (Is getting food in human settlements really so challenging that tool use would be an advantage?).

Looking at all the “wrong” and “marginal” predictions above, you would think that it is
pretty hard to make a feasible evolutionary prediction. And it is, but below
are a few feasible predictions created by this semester’s class.

Prediction: Polar bears will lose some density of their fur and fat-layer insulation due to a warming climate

This seems like a reasonable and rather obvious prediction given how extreme climate changes are in the Arctic. I suppose the only question is whether this would actually require a genetic change, potentially leading to actual evolution. Like many mammals, polar bears already maintain the ability to respond to their environment, which leads to the question Would changes in polar bear fur and fat be in response to the environment or an actual evolved change in the genetic basis of this trait? Perhaps given the food limitations polar bears now face, it might be the case the individuals that are less genetically-predisposed to put on insulative fat would fare better. Such a change would represent a shift in the response of polar bears to their environment; such genetic set-points are likely to evolve in response to changes in climate.

Prediction: The ability of humans to “self-navigate” from place to place will decline

This is an interesting prediction because humans are not like many migratory birds: we are not born with the biological capacity to navigate. The only genetically-mediated capacity we have to navigate through our environment is our ability to learn, and over the course of recent human history we must have learned a big variety of strategies for navigating. In recent time, that learning has to do with how we employ tools — maps, compasses, sextants, and of course now GPS-enabled devices — to get from one place to another. So I don’t think that this prediction, if feasible, is about genetic evolution. The only way that it could be a prediction about genetic evolution would be if we actually have a particular genetic capacity to learn how to navigate… which seems pretty unlikely. I guess if there were differences in the genetic potential of different people to learn navigation, one could argue that our current devices “release” us from that selection. But it is also not clear for how long we might have already been released from that sort of selection.

What’s more likely in this scenario is that this prediction would be true for our cultural evolution. There are still many people across the globe whose cultural traditions include strategies for navigating across the landscape using only environmental cues (such as the movement of the sun and the position of landmarks). But the number of people who are passing on those traditions may be in decline as more and more of the human population gains access to technologies that require a different kind of learning (how to navigate a cell phone, how to search for a desired location). Like a lot of other cultural innovations, the ability to use these new technologies will supercede the use of older navigational practices so long as our environment is one that contains GPS devices and GPS satellites. It’s interesting to ponder how dependent we all are on these large-scale social technologies, but this dependence would only be maladaptive if somehow our large-scale civilizations collapse (in other words, if you like navigating using GPS, make sure that we don’t destroy large-scale civilization by allowing climate change and other large-scale environmental impacts to get too out of hand).

I am very excited to be a participant in the American Museum of Natural History‘s Network of Conservation Educators and Practitioners (NCEP) program’s 2019 Teaching and Learning Studio. This year’s theme is “Effective Teaching by Design”, which describes a lot of the scholarship that I have been doing over the years and especially so in recent years. I can’t wait to learn more about the best practices developed by NCEP and my fellow participants. And it won’t be bad to spend three days at the AMNH!

As I have posted before, I am lucky to be involved in a new STEAMplant project entitled “To the Core of Me: A Hike-Play“. I have begun my collaboration with Sirovich Family Resident Jeremy Pickard (@jeremy_pickard) and my Pratt colleague, anthropologist Jennifer Telesca, and we are excited to announce the first outward-facing step of the project.

On Sunday, March 24th from 12:00 pm to 5:30 pm, we are hosting an “Eco-Performance Lab” open to members of both the Pratt community and the general public. Jeremy is expert at running these interdisciplinary workshops, which combine a presentation from a scientific expert with a collaborative response to that science generated through performances designed by all participants. We are lucky to have Dr. Nicole Davi (@dendrodavi) of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and William Paterson University as our scientific presenter. Dr. Davi will help us understand how the history of climate change can be read in the rings of a tree, providing a potent source of both scientific data and metaphor as we respond to climate change crises.

The event is part of Pratt’s Green Week celebration and takes place on the Brooklyn Campus in Engineering Room 113.

If you are interested in attending, please RSVP to info@superheroclubhouse.org, or check out the Facebook event page.

I have been very fortunate to be a collaborator on a number of Pratt STEAMplant (@prattsteamplant) projects. The latest is called “To the Core of Me: A Hike Play” and supports Sirovich Family Resident Jeremy Pickard (@jeremy_pickard). My Pratt colleague, anthropologist Jennifer Telesca, is also a collaborator on the project.

Core of Me will be a “hike-play”, an outdoor experience that combines the joys of hiking with an interactive performance. We are still working out what that will mean, but one thing that we do know is that dendrochronology will be a source of both information and metaphor for the project. I know very little about dendrochronology: upon encountering this recently-removed tree in Astoria Park, I was able to estimate an approximate age (94 years!) and see that growth varied quite a bit from year-to-year, but that is about all I got when it comes to tree rings. So I am excited that we will also be collaborating with Dr. Nicole Davi (@dendrodavi) of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who will help us understand how the history of climate change can be read in the rings of a tree.

I am very excited that my interview with painter and draftswoman Ardis DeFreece has been published in SciArtMagazine. You can read the interview, “Ardis DeFreece: Curiosity at the Intersection Between Art and Science“, for free.

I met Ardis at the 2017 Ecological Society of America meeting in Portland, Oregon and became interested in how she has used multiple artist residencies within scientific institutions to create artwork. She graciously accepted my invitation to do an email interview, and then was incredibly patient while I took way too long to finish the interview and find it a place to be published. Thanks for your patience Ardis! And thanks to SciArtMagazine editor Julia Buntaine for including the interview in this great publication.

After my first year of being a tenure-track professor, I knew that I had a problem: I wasn’t being mindful of how I spent my time. This had been a problem for me in graduate school, but once I got on the tenure track, the stakes became a lot higher. I knew that if I wasn’t careful, there was the possibility that I wouldn’t work enough — or on the right things — to earn tenure. Beginning a process of tracking the time I worked was a matter of professional survival.

And it worked. I am now a tenured professor, suggesting that I did indeed spend enough time on the right things during those first six years of my professorial career. How did I do it? Most of it was just about keeping myself accountable. I set goals for how many hours I would work and then created a spreadsheet that would allow me to keep track of all my work and see how “on target” I was with my goals. When I was falling off and not working as much as I had committed to, I knew it. And, in large part because of this feedback system I created for myself, I worked a lot in those early years.

While my previous practice of tracking my work time was very effective at assuring that I was working enough, it wasn’t capable of really telling me if I was using my time well. I was actually collecting data — what I was doing for various intervals of time — that would have allowed me to make some assessment of how well I was spending my time, but I hadn’t designed my time tracking spreadsheet to give me this feedback. Why? Well, maybe I didn’t really want to know how I was spending my time, because doing so was going to challenge some of my work habits and personal tendencies. Making sure that I was working enough was the first challenge of tracking my work time, and a comparably easier challenge. The next frontier was to really look at how I spend my time.

Creating a time budget and tracking my actual use of time

I am finally exploring this frontier. This past Fall 2018 semester I re-vamped my time tracking spreadsheet to allow me to accurately track up-to-the-moment time allocation to a variety of different work tasks. And I set intentions, both of how many hours I wanted to work per week and how I wanted to allocate my time.

Why did I want to know how I was spending my time? Well, as the years have gone on, things have changed. The biggest change that I have experienced in the last five years — those since I earned tenure — is a decrease in the total number of hours that I can work. Concurrently, I also find myself feeling more tired and overwhelmed than I have ever felt before at any job. Wait, you say, how can I be working less and feeling more overwhelmed? The answer, my friends, is simple: small children. While I have been a parent for my entire professorial career, the birth of my last two children ushered in an era of dramatically-increased parenting and household duties. Being a parent has constrained the number of hours I can work, and that has made work time more precious. Whereas before I might just work a whole lot more to accommodate a project that I am less-than-enthusiastic about, now “wasting time” comes with serious opportunity costs. Keeping track of how I spend my time is an attempt to minimize those opportunity costs, or at least to know more clearly when I am paying them.

There’s also an aspect of this more specific time tracking that seems particularly in line with being a tenured professor. To some degree when you are seeking to earn tenure, you just need to do “enough”. Like many people trying to get to the tenured promised land, I didn’t concern myself too much with whether I enjoyed doing what it took to get tenure: I did what seemed like it would lead to job security. Now that my job is secure, I am more free to ask how do I really want to spend this precious time I have as a professor? I still have substantial teaching obligations and I need to make sure that I do my part as a member of my campus community, but fulfilling these obligations should — if I have proper boundaries — allow plenty of time to pursue other activities.

Of course it is those boundaries that are the hardest to enforce. I will never stop wanting to be a better teacher, so it is always tempting to keep throwing work hours at my students. But what I really want to do is to use my hours devoted to my students effectively, and to a great degree that requires that I don’t just allow myself to spend more time on teaching. Similarly, one could always be a better member of the campus community by signing on to be involved in more committees and to oversee more initiatives. But again, what is the boundary on this sort of activity?

A lot is made of how professors change when they get tenure. The general implication is often that tenure allows professors to work less, or to spend less of their time on serving their institution. Certainly there are those tenured professors who work a lot less, but I have not found this to be the norm at all. What’s reasonable is for a tenured professor to take more control of their time budget, particularly when it comes to how time is spent on scholarly activities. My experience is that it isn’t just the professor who changes when the university awards them tenure: the stance of the university towards the professor also changes. Tenure is a lot like a marriage in that it comes with security but also a lot of expectation, and it seems to me that the university often feels quite entitled to a rather large share of professorial time once the wedding is over. I want to be a good partner to my institution, but that institution needs to also understand that it can’t have all my time.

Alright, enough introduction, let’s get to the fun stuff: the data. How do I spend my time?

How do I actually spend my time?

Well, before I give you the data, let me say just a little more about my process. I started this effort by thinking about the major categories of my work. For a professor, the super-categories are easy to define, because they are also the near-universal criteria by which tenure eligibility is determined: teaching, service, and scholarship (which includes research). But within each of these super-categories, what are reasonable categories to define? Obviously this is a classic “lumping versus splitting” problem, and I tried to come up with categories that would help me to better understand my work habits without creating a logistical nightmare in logging dozens and dozens of different kinds of work activities.

Once I had my categories in place, I started to think about how many hours I wanted to work each week (an over-arching work intention) and how many hours I expected to and/or wanted to spend on each of my different activities (particular intentions). For some kinds of work activity, there wasn’t a whole lot to decide: “course delivery” happens for three hours per class per week, making this a seemingly-easy “intention” to set. Other activities — most notably all my scholarly work — fall to the other extreme: although clearly I couldn’t spend all my time on these activities, exactly how much I spend (including the possibility of spending zero time on some activities) was somewhat arbitrary. The vast majority of activities fall into the (confusing and difficult) middle: they involve some degree of set, already-obligated time, but also could soak up more time if I so desired. Setting this time budget was an incredibly valuable process, because it was the first time that my intentions and my reality really sat across the table from each other and had an earnest conversation.

That conversation was not easy to listen to. What I heard was that I really didn’t have a lot of discretionary time on my hands, especially if I wanted to be a good teacher. And that meant that I had to be really mindful of how I spent my time, how productive I was during that time, and how I often I said “no” to new projects that threatened to encroach on my time.

A big change that I hoped to institute with this new time budgeting and tracking system was to increase the amount of time that I spent on various forms of scholarship. Look, I know where I am a professor, which is at a teaching-focused institution within a department that doesn’t even have majors. I know that with my teaching load I need to temper my expectations when it comes to my scholarship. But lately it has felt like I am at risk of doing nearly no scholarship: even the basic task of keeping up with reading in my various fields has become a challenge. I wanted to reclaim a bit more time for my own scholarly process, because of late that time feels like it has been eaten up by teaching and service. Time tracking would allow me to see what has been keeping me from being the scholar that I intend to be.

Once I had a time budget on my hands, that intention was entered into my spreadsheet so I could compare what I wanted to happen with what was actually happening. To try to optimize the chances of intention and reality aligning, I also entered into my work calendar regular slots of time for each of the activities in my time budget. If I was able to follow this calendar, I would both meet my overall work effort goal and honor my intentions on how to spend that time.

And here is how that all worked out:

What can we glean from these results?

The first thing is to note that my intentions and my reality are still misaligned, and that misalignment is not particularly surprising: institutional service is stealing a lot of time from my scholarship. I knew scholarship was suffering, but I wasn’t sure whether I was borrowing from scholarship time in order to pay teaching or in order to pay service. The answer is clear, at least for the Fall 2018 semester. Service to the institution was eating away at far too much of my time!

Digging a bit deeper into this reality, you can see that not all forms of service are the problem. In some cases, I actually anticipated putting in more time that I did (which is always scary, because it suggests that maybe next semester those now-dormant committees will once again wake up and consume even more time!). But a few categories of service were way hungrier for my time than I anticipated. The most obvious one is my department: the amount of time I budgeted for communication within my department was less than half of what I actually spent. This is not particularly surprising. Every time I am in my office there is the possibility that someone will drop by for an impromptu meeting, many of which are important. But within my department it is most difficult to have boundaries and keep communication time within reasonable limits.

The other big over-consumer of my time is the larger institution itself. Here is where my categories likely need refining: because I did not have a clear category for the various things the institution asks me to do (often spontaneously!), it all got lumped in with answering institutional emails. Reading and responding to institutional emails did take up a lot of time, but the overbudget on time expenditure was also caused by special events that I did not plan for in my initial time budget.

Interestingly, my intentions totally ignored a need that I clearly have: miscellaneous organizing and email time. And the amount of time that I spent on this “other” category is significant (just short of 5% of my time!). One danger in time budgeting is not properly anticipating a need, and it is clear that I need a lot of time just to get organized (and to a lesser degree to deal with emails that come from outside the institution).

How much damage did the disproportionate time appetite of service do to my scholarship? Well, as a quick look at my results shows, it depends on what forms of scholarship we are talking about. Some forms of scholarship were actually on target with my intentions: I spent a bit more time than I had intended on my Faculty Learning Community research work. But two major categories were dramatically under-honored. The first, “reading to keep up with my field”, was a major driver for my time tracking project, and as I expected I am not spending as much time on this scholarly activity as I intend… even after setting clear intentions! The second is perhaps most tragic, as it is clear that I have not been able to honor my Breeders, Propagators, & Creators book project as much as I want to. These shortcomings in my scholarly effort, laid bare by the time tracking process, are a wake-up call.

Perhaps my teaching looks to be in the best shape, as my overall goal effort (59.8% of my time) was very close to the time I actually spent (60.3%). I am happy with this alignment, but it is a bit misleading. As you look more closely at the actual numbers, you see time budget over-runs and time budget under-runs. Some of these misalignments are actually informative: I am learning that I probably need to budget a bit more time for coursework grading and course delivery and a bit less time for review of writing-intensive student projects and answering student emails. But other misalignments are a bit more troubling. For example, it looks like I need to allocate a lot less time for reviewing non-writing intensive courses, but this is an aberration. This semester my one non-writing intensive course was massively underenrolled (by semester’s end down to nine students for twenty-two seats!) and that greatly reduced the amount of work I had to do for that class. Such a windfall cannot be expected every semester.

One thing you will notice is that I have only listed percentages, not hours. This is, of course, intentional. While I realize that many of you who have taken the time to read this would like a more concrete estimate of how many hours I work, I have decided not to include this information for a variety of reasons. One reason is probably rather obvious: by being completely transparent with the number of hours that I work, I make myself vulnerable. I don’t want to be subjected to the judgment of others — particularly those who wield administrative power over me — based on what they consider the “right” amount of work that I should be doing. Being transparent in this way would be particularly dangerous in an environment where there is no benchmark data on how much my colleagues work; if no one else is tracking their time in such a detailed manner and publishing the results, how can we know if I am working enough? Compounding this problem is something that anyone who tracks their time knows all too well (but people who don’t track their time have no clue about): the time we think we spend working is almost always a lot greater than the time we actually spend working. The initial impulse to track my time was to be more honest with myself about how much I work, but there’s nothing in it for me to be subjected to comparison by colleagues who think they work a lot but don’t actually have any evidence to support their impressions.

Showing only percentages is, of course, less informative: percentages don’t really tell you whether my shortcomings in particular categories arise from spending too much of my time on particular activities or simply working fewer hours than I intended on those activities. Without sharing the actual hours I worked this semester, I can say that the problem was a little bit of both. The number of overall hours that I thought that I could work was about five hours more per week than I actually worked. Although this may seem like a small difference, it adds up, and in large part explains many of my under-allocations of time. But it is also true that many of the activities that I spent too much time on actually exceeded even my overly-ambitious overall time budget.

It is really exciting when one’s professional society stands up for an important issue, and this issue is near and dear to both my teaching interests and my heart. The idea that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) — an agency charged with providing support to all of our citizens — would try to define both sex and gender in such narrow and unscientific terms is disturbing. This is just another example of the current administration trying to substitute a fantastical culturally-constructed idea of how the world works for the actual scientific reality.

Thanks SSE for standing strong on this issue!

But culture ratchets forward, and Nicky Case‘s The Evolution of Trust game definitely takes IPD simulators to the next level.

What I really like about this game interface is that it creates an educational narrative. While it allows for plenty of opportunity to experiment with different game conditions, it does so in a progressive manner that scaffolds the user to deeper and deeper understanding of the properties of these games. And it does so in a way that’s fun and funny. Very nice work!

If I ever revive my Evolution of Cooperation course, this interface will figure prominently!

Thanks to my student Cloud Ortiz Ortega for pointing this game out to me!

This is a really well-written article that explains why it hasn’t been easy for mathematicians to contribute to a definition of Gerrymandering… and how using an old mathematical approach to attack the problem could provide clear benchmarks for defining a Gerrymander.

I love when math and science can be brought as objective arbiters of social problems. If we claim to be against Gerrymandering and math can tell us how likely that a redistricting plan is to be an outlier, there’s no reason that Gerrymandering can’t be eliminated once and for all.

For those of us who have been aware of the quickly-emerging fields studying microplastic pollution, these results are far from surprising. I am in fact more surprised that this rather limited pilot study was the first of its kind. While the concentration of plastics discovered is not that high, what’s more concerning is how little we know about the ultimate health effects of all this plastic passing through our guts.

Given where microplastics are mostly found — in the ocean — it is easy to assume that consumption of marine foods is the culprit. But as this article points out, there have to be additional sources of microplastic consumption because even those who don’t eat seafood have plastic in their guts. So the next frontier is clearly understanding what the sources of exposure are, and in what relative magnitudes. As a vegan I am curious whether eating low on the food chain protects me from exposure to microplastic pollution. Or is my drinking water a significant enough source of microplastics to make my diet less relevant? These are the questions at the frontier of this research.

So get ready to donate your stool for science… we really need to know the extent to which microplastics are making it into our digestive systems.

I teach about sex and gender in a lot of my courses. For some courses, such as Evolution or The Evolution of Sex, these are basic concepts that need to be established in order to study reproductive behaviors. For other courses, such as Breeders, Propagators, & Creators, a nuanced understanding of sex and gender makes it possible to unravel the complexities of the human species’ dual inheritance systems and their influence on how we behave. And getting sex and gender right is not just important academically: some fraction of our students are going to be transgendered, and we need to make sure that the way we talk about sex and gender is both scientifically accurate and culturally sensitive.

I have been working on making sure that my teaching on sex and gender is solid, but after I found the above article and its accompanying graphic, I realize that there has been a bit of a hole in my teaching. It’s fine to talk about gender and its distinction from sex, but a failure to define sex as not just “male” and “female” but also “intersex” risks getting the biology wrong… and, more importantly, failing to validate the experience of some of our students.

Please check out the graphic on the Scientific American page. It highlights the many pathways by which people can be develop intersex characteristics. The presence of each of these pathways may not be all that common in the population, but students should be aware of them. Talking about intersex development is also a great way to highlight how complex a process sex determination is, and to prompt students to consider that being born with a 46XX or 46XY chromosome configuration is no guarantee of developing a narrow range of “one side of the binary or the other” characteristics. And these intersex developmental patterns — all of which disrupt some element of the developmental pathways that lead to male and female characteristics — are just the more obvious and detectable deviations from the biological sex binary. Their existence should make us all question what other more subtle variations in development might create broader variation in what it means to be “male” or “female”.

This is not a popular position in some circles, but I think that our biology plays a role in our gender presentation. The fact that we acknowledge that people are sometimes “born identifying” with a particular gender should allow us to see that most people realize that gender presentation is not just something you learn culturally. The fact that sex determination is so complex adds a wrinkle to this story: it suggests ways that variations in sex determination might lead to a larger spectrum of male and female traits than we might otherwise acknowledge by assuming too strong a sex binary. Sure, I think that the culture that one develops within ultimately determines what gender presentations are considered “normal” and how free a person is to express their gender identity. But some really glorious and variable interaction between genes and the environment produces the developmental processes that lead to the individual behaviors we then assign to gender. Sex and gender are all mixed up with each other, even if they are separate concepts.

Wow, this is super cool. We often think of humans as exclusively cultural, but it is only the extent to which we rely on culture that makes us unique. That doesn’t mean that culture’s not crucial to the learning of other animals, whose survival can depend on both learning and social transmission of what is learned. Interruptions to these cultural exchanges have profound conservation implications.