Every computer science student has had to program HelloWorld, TowersOfHanoi, and Nim. They are canonical problems that most students are likely to encounter and study in the classroom. Similarly, most math students will study the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. And most English students are likely to encounter Shakespeare in their education. 

But those problems don’t really exist in the wild for computer scientists. And ask yourself how many students could answer the following questions:

If every locker was completely packed with Jell-O, how long would it take an average human to consume every morsel of this delicious locker Jell-O?​

How many trees are necessary to create a linoleum floor at any given Walmart?

For how long and at what rate would it have to snow at FLCC so that, when melted, the water would fill the volume of Canandaigua Lake?

Imagine you wanted to leave a trail of french fries (end-to-end) from the FLCC campus in Canandaigua to the one in Victor. How many potatoes would be needed for this venture, and how many swimming pools could you fill up with used vegetable oil?

How much human hair has been on this planet since January 1, 1970?

In a Jurassic Park inspired move, scientists have cloned William Shakespeare. What is the elevator pitch for his first hit Netflix series?​

These are known as messy problems; problems that diverge from contained, constrained, well-defined problems. They require some discomfort and a brave departure from classic classroom problem solving. The solution for any one of these problems requires an examination of assumptions. How big is an average potato? Do they shrink when fried? What route am I taking from Canandaigua to Victor? How many fries can I even get from one potato – and won’t some of the fries be shorter and some longer?

Assessing solutions to these problems is not easy either; there most likely is not any clear, definitive answer to any of these problems. There are probably multiple solutions that are right but produce wildly different results – so which solution is the best one? Is there even a best solution?
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Handstedt goes a step beyond messy problems and posits wicked problems. These are problems that are so complex, the problem itself might not even be easily defined. There are multiple systems competing for resources, conflicting ethos, and moving targets. Students who can work with these vague constraints and can contribute to solutions are wicked students. 

In the interview, Handstedt provides this example:

So the best example, and it’s a horrible example, but everyone will understand it immediately, is COVID. COVID is the perfect, horrible, wicked problem. The dynamics have been changing constantly. Even now, we’re still waiting to get around the bend and say, “Oh, okay now we’ve arrived.”If it were purely a science problem we’d be in great shape because we would have been done early this summer. But there’s politics in play, there’s economics in play, there’s culture in play, there’s religion in play. There’s messaging and communication and images and memes and social media and technology. All of these things are creating a dynamic quality to COVID that makes resolving it very, very difficult. And, of course, we must resolve it. So that’s a wicked problem. 

Similarly, climate change is a wicked problem. And the healthcare system. And sustainability. They’re all organic, evolving things that make defining the problem difficult.

And these are problems that are not existential – they create a clear and present danger to our survival. And they demand knowledge that extends well outside of declarative knowledge. These are the problems that our students will be solving some day.

Challenging students with messy and wicked problems can give them an edge. Learning to pull threads, iterate on ideas, and considering alternative solutions are healthy. And this doesn’t reside solely in STEM disciplines. Paul gave a number of other examples in his interview:

I can, in a literature class, give students a poem and say, “We’ve been studying the Romantic poets, which one of the Romantic poets wrote this poem?” The fact that they’ve never seen the poem isn’t the point. Actually, I might choose to include a poem from a poet they’ve never read. In fact, I might include a poem from a poet who’s not even a Romantic. Thing is, can they analyze? Can they think? Can they explore? Are they being deliberate about their exploration? And what I’m grading them on is not their ability to get to the answer, it’s their ability to travel to make that journey.

He also provided some great ways to encourage broadening the scope of problem solving in a semester-long class (for instance, scaffolding the problems). The second edition of his book, Creating Wicked Students: Designing Courses for a Complex World will be out soon.

In the meantime, you can listen to his interview on the Tea for Teaching podcast.

Rubiks Cube image CC-0 by Karla Hernandez via Unsplash

Haven’t you heard? Audio is in​! It’s the hottest form of content delivery – perhaps you’ve heard about the Clubhouse app (a delicate balance of call-in radio shows, conference calls, and social media)? Or maybe you’re still waiting for the next series of the hit podcast Serial to drop (arguably one of the most popular podcasts ever produced and credited with making podcasts mainstream)?

If you haven’t played around with podcasts, now is a great time to get your toes (ears?) wet. Like DVR for the ears, podcasts deliver a near limitless library of audio to you. Form factors include interviews, monologues, conversations, true-crime, investigative reporting, scripted fiction, and more. Topics run the gamut – you can pick from comedy to food to sports to news to almost anything that scratches your itches. 

And the best part? They are free (despite the term “subscribe” prominently visible in most podcast apps). The podcast business has been booming – Amazon, Google, Spotify, and Apple have spent a lot of money in this space (Amazon just acquired Wondery for $300M, Spotify acquired Gimlet for $230M as well as a $100M exclusive with Joe Rogan’s podcast and $150M to acquire Anchor).

Business aside, if you haven’t listened to podcasts before, you might want to check some out. If you have an iPhone, use the Podcasts app to discover podcasts and subscribe. You can also use other apps (Spotify and Stitcher are popular ones, but Pocket Casts is one of the best around). Android users can use Spotify, Stitcher, and Pocket Casts as well. While there are podcasts that cover every topic imaginable, here is a list of podcasts related to education (note that you should be able to discover these podcasts in your podcast app, but websites are provided for each podcast because there is often more information about the podcast on their website).

Honestly, these are great podcasts to listen to for education. But even if you don’t subscribe to them, you should check out other podcasts that suit your interests. There is something for everyone and the podcast space is producing amazingly high-quality content.

Photo by Will Francis on Unsplash

Can you picture that feeling of joy you get when a meeting gets canceled and you suddenly find yourself with a little bit of ‘extra’ time? I know I can. Just yesterday a colleague said (upon canceling a meeting), “Found time is always a gift!” It’s like time stands still for just a moment and the possibilities are endless. As that moment hangs in the air it shifts fairly quickly to what do you do with that time? Do you spend the time scrolling through Insta-Facea-Snapa-Chata-gram? Do you move ahead on that one project that is always falling to the bottom of the pile? Grading? Eating lunch (at 3pm!)? What do you do?

Parallel to this excitement due to cancelation, do you just feel SO busy? While scrolling through my own Insta-Facea-Snapa-Chata-gram feeds, ironically during some of my own ‘Found Time’, I saw a post from another colleague lamenting how every day at that time they look at their calendar for the next day, hoping to see a few blocks of open time, and every day they are disappointed. I could TOTALLY relate to this, and I wasn’t sure I was happy about it.

My commute to campus affords me the luxury of an hour-long podcast-fest, another effort to maximize my use of time during the day. Lately I’ve been LOVING the Happiness Lab and today’s was no exception. I’m not saying it’s always all puppies and cupcakes to learn about the science of happiness and examine our lives as humans but it gave me some time to ask some important questions. Specifically, is it right that I get so much joy from a canceled meeting, and is it okay to be so busy? In addition to the self-reflection I was also really amused at the host’s, Dr. Laurie Santos, own admissions of struggling with this same issue.

Here’s what I took away and wanted to share with you, my dear colleagues, about whom I honestly care so much. Dr. Santos talked about the risks of ‘Time Famine’ and the havoc it can wreak upon our health and relationships with others. She described an experiment where three groups were told to give a sermon that day. One was told they were already late, one was told they had to leave right then and the last group was told that they had the afternoon to prepare. As these subjects rushed off to prepare or give their sermons (ironically about the Good Samaritan), an actor laid in the hallway impersonating an injured student. Can you guess what happened? The people in the biggest rush were least likely to stop and help. The people who had more time were more likely to stop. Still though, not 100% of them stopped. So, science tells us that when we are starved for time we stop being Good Samaritans for the people we love and instead actually become crappier people. When we pack our schedules to the brim, we cannot help the people we care about. We have to ask what kind of people we might become as a result of being so busy all the time. Most importantly, professionally, what does this mean for how we serve our students?

The good news is, there are some remedies. It turns out that idleness, yes I’m talking about doing nothing, is actually necessary for us. Doing nothing could look like taking an actual lunch break and having meaningful conversation with other humans, taking a hike without checking email, gazing out the window, take the scenic route to work and not listening to podcasts, or cuddling with a puppy. In addition to making room for idleness, it also turns out that we should use our ‘Time Windfalls’ or ‘Found Time’ to invest in ourselves as humans such as: sending a note of gratitude, calling someone you love, taking a walk, doing a brief meditation, surprising someone in their office hour and telling them your best joke. In fact, perhaps we should all have a list of how we might spend our ‘Time Windfalls.’

So in anticipation of finding yourself in ‘Time Affluence’ after a big ‘Time Windfall’, draft yourself a list of ways to use that time for you as a human. This is actually a tough pill to swallow, but one that will certainly pay dividends for our students, our colleagues and our friends and loved ones.

Want to hear the full podcast? It’s here: Season 2, Episode 5 of the Happiness Lab: For Whom the Alarm Clock Tolls. Brief aside – totally LOVE this podcast and am forever grateful for Lori V’s recommending it in a previous CTL Blog.

Image by Nattanan Kanchanaprat from Pixabay

I have been teaching in higher education for 25 years this year. During that time, I have worked with students who increasingly report anxieties about life that feel overwhelming and insurmountable. During that same time frame, I have gently teased my own children and students in my classes about their rising anxieties, assuring them that nothing bad has ever really happened to them. And while this was technically true considering the last 30 years from the frame of all of human history, I have now been proven very wrong.

During the last two semesters, I have had the opportunity to eat my words and to wrestle with my own concerns about the future while also holding the learning opportunities of students in balance with their legitimate anxieties and concerns. Thank goodness Jennie Erdle prepared me for this! A couple of years ago, well before we thought we’d need it, Jennie sent out a link to an episode of a podcast called “On Purpose.” The episode featured an interview with cognitive scientist Laurie Santos. I have been following Santos’ work ever since.

Santos now has her own podcast – “Happiness Lab” – and in the introduction, she gets to the heart of what I find most useful about her work in terms of maintaining balance for myself and encouraging learning for the students in my classes. Our minds lie to us. When we are in stressful situations, the default ways our brains work often make it more difficult to thrive, and yet exploring this human reality is one pathway out of the problem. The explorations Santos offers come from disciplines across the curriculum: philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and more. The work even ventures occasionally into spiritual and religious traditions. Each discipline and tradition, though, coalesces around a similar idea. The starting point is recognition of where we actually are and getting curious about how we might respond. 

As we struggle through a series of colliding crises that most of us have not been well-prepared for, I recommend the work of Laurie Santos to you as a set of tools for offering students a way into the uncomfortable experience of learning precisely when we are all trying so hard to find anything that feels comfortable and stable. And if you are interested in discussing Santos’ work, please reach out! We can meet on Webex and start our conversation by marveling at the fact that we are meeting on Webex. Then we can get curious together about where we might go next.

Photo by Sasha Freemind on Unsplash