The Learning Class: The New Socioeconomic Class in America

Upward mobility in the US has been discussed ad nauseum over the past few decades. The drop-off in out earning your parents was steep for those born between 1940 and 1980. Meanwhile, the overall difficulty seems to have flattened out over the past decade or two. Even more interestingly, some places (Midwest urban areas) have had a dramatic drop-off while others (the South) have never been particularly upwardly mobile and remain that way despite an influx of jobs and people. Even more analysis exists, but it’s mostly splitting hairs after a while.

My proposition is simple: If you want to change the rate of upward mobility in the modern US, and possibly more of the developed world, taking advantage of existing and emerging means of learning and applying new information and skills is the way to do it. In a world where we’ve mostly had Upper, Middle (occasionally split into Upper Middle and Lower Middle), Working, and Lower class, we could use a class that is built entirely around mobility regardless of your current place within the established social strata of modern America.

I’m thinking of a few key categories and some subcategories within them for now, such as:

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August 8, 2021 Add Comment

The Rat Race Favors The Rats (And Then They Die)

brown wooden mouse trap with cheese bait on top

In the past month I’ve been dealing with the weirdest feelings of exhaustion and energy bursts that I’ve ever had. The Moderna version of the Covid-19 vaccine had the strangest effect on me. The day I got the first shot, I had to take a nap every 90 minutes or so. My bed is 10 steps from the desk where I work from home and yet I struggled a few times to make it all the way to the bed before being asleep.

I thought it was over after a few days, but it lingered for the entire month until I got the second vaccine shot last week. It had reduced to 1-2 times per day by the end, but I still dealt with an overall feeling of tiredness outside of the first few minutes after I woke up. During this time I had to reduce some of my planned activities and just barely kept up at work while falling way behind on my literature review reading and writing. I was able to jog and workout, but no real progress was made on that front, just maintaining the status quo.

The day after getting the second vaccine shot, I came down with Flu B. That was three days before the majority of Texas, where I live, began dealing with heavy snowfall, historic cold, and the most callous, inept governing I’ve ever seen as an adult in the US. I’m sure you’ve heard or read about the situation that most of the state is in, or even worse you’re dealing with it right now. Thankfully my location in west Texas is not part of the ERCOT system so we’ve had a few minor outages and nobody is freezing to death in their home.

If you’re unfamiliar with just how bad some of this has been, read about Tim Boyd from Colorado City, TX. He’s a small town rich white guy who willingly took a paycheck to be part of the government while also railing against the most basic services that said government should provide for its citizens. He did so, of course, via Facebook as social media allows the worst of us to express their worst attributes without even a moment’s hesitation. In the midst of the ineptness, it’s often easy to miss how many truly horrible people will do anything they can to grasp any status or position they can.

How do we prevent becoming a person like Tim Boyd or Greg Abbott? Here are a few suggestions.

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February 19, 2021 Add Comment

2021 – Academic Plan Redux (ADDIE vs SAM – Planning well to adjust easily)

update lettering text on black background

Just two weeks ago I posted my plan for the academic calendar this spring. Most of the areas have no real need for an update other than various levels of progress on them, but one has had to completely change.

During the fall I refinanced my house, and unfortunately found out how stunningly incompetent nearly everyone who works for Rocket Mortgage is at their jobs. My frustration level was so high that I forgot I had chosen to have the escrow check sent to me instead of rolling into the new mortgage.

I’ve only owned the house for 2 years so there wasn’t much in it. With that said, the amount was enough to cover paying off my Citi card, my new denture, and replace my personal PC (it was 4 years old, the battery was about to die, and the case broke last year). That means I had to figure out brand new semester goals while keeping my yearly goal in place.

While I was doing that, I saw an opportunity to follow a fairly basic design scenario where deciding which framework to use is part of the design process. In academia, the standard design model is ADDIE. If you’re rebuilding a course or program completely, or designing something new from scratch, you’re probably going to use ADDIE at least as a loose guide. On the other hand, if you’re doing a partial redesign, or assessing what you built and updating according to received feedback, you’ll use a more agile method like SAM.

That leads to a few obvious questions: What is ADDIE? What is SAM? How do you determine which one to use now?

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January 18, 2021 Add Comment

2021 – Spring (Academic Calendar) Plan – Deep Reset

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As a reader of many productivity systems, and one who has adopted and modified much of what Cal Newport suggests, I go into 2021 with a plan for the Spring semester (detailed below) instead of a quarterly plan as I’m both a PhD student and an Instructional Designer at a tier 1 research university. My planning is broken into academic semester for larger goals, weekly plans for the most immediate or important work, and daily plans using Cal’s time block planner. My capture is done mainly in the time block planner. I’ve moved configure back to a combo of Evernote and Trello for configure as I found I was more productive with these than with the integrated approach of Notion.

In addition to those, and things like Google Drive and the Microsoft Office suite, I also use a monthly paper calendar and yearly dry erase calendar on my wall for specific items. The paper calendar I’m current using is a desktop calendar that I take down once a month and fill in definite scheduled items (such as my running and workout schedule, church small group meetings, household items like changing filters, and any deadlines for work or school related items). I also write down each book I finish on the day it’s completed. The four lines per box make it easy to control things at a slightly bigger picture while integrating both personal and professional seamlessly.

My yearly calendar is the Jon Acuff Finish Calendar. I chose the dry erase version to adjust more easily as goals/plans change. This gets used primarily to record anything longer term (like the nights I have to stay up late to attend Zoom class with my PhD cohort in Hawaii), large scale fitness goal dates, work projects beyond the current month, car and house care, etc) while also capturing things like the distance ran on my jogging days and books read to give me an overview of what’s been accomplished during the year. I prefer this calendar largely because the months aren’t separated, but they flow into each other so that in 2021 the days of March 31 and April 1 are right next to each other instead of being separated into different month boxes.

I even use a color coding scheme across both calendars to differentiate specific areas.

  • Black = PhD/Hawaii
  • Blue = Books
  • Red = Fitness
  • Green = Personal
  • Pink = Work

Deep Reset – Spring 2021 Objectives & Strategies

As many do, I make plans according to the academic calendar (roughly) instead of quarterly since it’s what almost all of my personal and professional life revolve around. I use the idea of Objectives and Strategies that Cal lays out in Deep Work, where once the objectives are determined then specific strategies to accomplish them are chosen. Over the past year I’ve chosen five key areas to focus on, and developed both annual and semester goals for each, with strategies to accomplish them and metrics to track. For Spring 2021, here are the objectives and strategies I have for Spiritual, Fitness, Writing, Reading, and Finance.

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January 3, 2021 1 Comment

Changes to Higher Education in America

adult blur boss business

Karen Kelsky’s fantastic education blog featured a guest post in August that exemplified a problem in higher education that has been a major source of irritation in my own academic career. While the results of what’s happening at Canisius College are horrible, I feel like there’s a bigger question that needs to be asked.

Why are THESE people in charge?

Canisius decided to get rid of a significant number of professors from their humanities department. The people making those decisions are President John J. Hurley, VP of Academic Affairs Sarah R. Morris, and the Board of Trustees.

President Hurley is a former bankruptcy lawyer with undergrad degrees in English and History. VP Morris is a zoologist with undergrad degrees in Biology and French. The Board features a cast of lawyers, corporate fat cats, and other members who share the same conspicuous absence on their CV that Hurley and Morris have.

Nobody has a degree in Education on any level. The closest I could find was board member Nancy Ware co-founding EduKids with a friend who had a Master’s in Early Childhood Education. That’s it. Not a single person with any formal background in any area of evidence-based educational theory or practice. Much like I said about K-12 education in the US, the entire system has been given over to people who have absolutely zero qualifications to make educational decisions of any kind.

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October 8, 2020 Add Comment

The Relation of Cognitive Load Theory and Deep Work

people holding their phones

Cognitive Load Theory (A Primer)

Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) was given it’s first exposure in 1988 by John Sweller. It built off of a line of research dating back to George Miller’s work detailing the limitations of our working (short term) memory. The simple understanding is that our brains are extremely limited in what they can do in the short term, yet nearly unlimited in what they can store for the long term. As CLT developed, three clear classes of cognitive load were identified that provide great relevance to those of us trying to do deep work or apply deliberate practice to any area of our life. Those classes are:

  1. Intrinsic
  2. Germane
  3. Extraneous
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September 15, 2020 Add Comment

Changes to K-12 Education in the United States – Systemic

black and white blackboard business chalkboard

Following on the heels of suggested changes to the student and teacher elements of K-12 education in the US, this post will focus on the system itself. I’ll cover aspects of the system reaching down from the national set all the way to the individual classroom. With that said, the following are just a jumping off point for fixing the system. They’re not necessarily in any kind of order, but the first is the primary issue that needs to be fixed.

Qualified Leaders

The biggest issue, from what I’ve read and experienced, is fairly easy to identify yet never seems to be directly discussed. Why are the people in charge of education in the US actually there? Since the Carter administration separated the job of Secretary of Education from the areas of Health and Welfare, there have been 11 full time appointees and a handful of interim position holders. Of the list of people of officially held the title of Secretary of Education, you would think there would be a plethora of people with advanced degrees in education and classroom experience, especially at the K-12 level since most of our national endeavors come from this office. The actual number who have both qualifications is comical:

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August 28, 2020 1 Comment

Changes to K-12 Education in the United States – Teachers

girl watching through imac

The teacher training schools in Finland can be compared to university teaching hospitals for medical students. The teacher’s profession is highly respected in Finland. A teacher is an expert, comparable to an engineer, lawyer or a medical doctor.

In Finland, to be a K-12 teacher you have to earn a master’s degree specific to who/what you’re going to teach. In the U.S. you just need to have a college degree in whatever you studied and pass a low level certification test.

In Finland, 90% of applicants to the teaching programs at the university level are rejected. In the U.S. we keep lowering the bar farther and farther to the point that things like Teach for America are necessary.

In Finland, 20 of your credit hours to become a teacher are spent creating lesson plans and teaching under the direction of a guiding teacher. In the U.S. you might, maybe, if we can fit it in the schedule and the budget this year, potentially get some sort of minor amount of lip service towards professional development. Maybe.

In Finland, teachers are paid like they’re doing a job that’s critical to a well functioning society. In the US we have things like the teacher of the year in Oklahoma moving to Texas so he can afford to live.

In Finland, teachers are trained to identify and help students with needs if they can, but then hand them off to more specifically trained professionals for whatever learning or social struggle they’re facing. In the U.S., you better hope you’ve got funding for that, and most states still fund schools based on property taxes of surrounding neighborhoods.

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August 13, 2020 Add Comment

Changes to K-12 Education in the United States – Students

football player pass by over reaching the goal

Living in Texas, I can assure you the feature photo indicates the single greatest item in the decision making process for returning students to school in the midst of a horribly mismanaged pandemic. While that’s horrible, but expected, the real question is what can we do to make the educational experience in the US the best it can be?

I’ve taught at the K-12 level and been instructor for a few undergraduate courses. I have an M.Ed. and currently spend a significant portion of my week writing the literature review for my dissertation to complete my PhD in Learning, Design, and Technology. I’m also someone who barely scraped through high school with a 2.03 GPA and flunked out of college twice before finally finishing my B.S. after 14 years (1993-2007). I feel like I can bring a unique background to the subject while validating much of the research that we ignore in the American education system. I intend to do three posts on this, for now, focusing on students, teachers, and systemic issues in that order. With that said, here are some of my primary thoughts for improving the student experience.

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August 1, 2020 2 Comments

Analog Tools In A Digital World – What I Use (or don’t) And What I’m Interested In

Things I’m Using

I began wet shaving a few months ago. I’m nearly 45 and I’ve been shaving since I was 13. It was something I’ve dreaded for years, with a beard that needed attention every 2 days or less. It often resulted in my growing a beard for months (as many as 9) so that I didn’t have to shave. Electric razors and trimmers didn’t help much, and then I tried something ridiculous. I bought the above kit for $75 from the Wet Shaving Club and began a ritual that works for me. Since then, I’ve only missed shaving a few times, and the closer shave of the safety razor means I can go 2-3 days easily between shaves. Additionally, I’ve added items like an alum block and pre-shave oil, and I can say I genuinely enjoy shaving every few days. The appeal is the precision, control, and overall process. I set aside time in my time-blocked schedule for this.

Two other changes have been refreshing as well. I have a small yard, and I’ve ditched my electric mower and bagger for an old fashioned push reel mower that leaves the clippings on top of the remaining grass. Living in West Texas, there’s nothing like being able to quietly mow early in the morning so that I avoid the obscene July heat (we’re on day 5 of 11 forecast over 100). I’ve also seen my grass come in better this year than it did the two I was using the old mow and bag approach.

The other item is one I’ll say is analog, but also brings in some time of solitude during my normal routine. I’ve been a runner for years now, including finishing the 2015 Honolulu Marathon. This past fall and winter I had issues with my back that required months of physical therapy. As I began running again in March, I decided to try something different. I left the wireless headphones, the smartphone, and the sleeve armband at home and just went outside and ran. I still have my Garmin watch with me, letting me know when each mile is done and signalling the start and finish of my planned run, but that’s it. I don’t track my pace during the run. Instead, I just focus on breathing and form while I observe the world around me. It’s refreshing, and I’m now capable of almost perfectly identifying distance covered and pace during my timed run, with Garmin and Strava confirming a very close relation to what I felt and what was happening.

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July 15, 2020 Add Comment