Studenting, Expatly – The Bittesuite

What Makes for Great Education?

I just finished the third of my master program’s four semesters. Even more specifically, I just finished the final exams of my third of four semesters. More excitingly, I only have three more courses and a thesis to write before I graduate from the program. Ecstatic, I tell you.

Anyway.

At this point, a whole lot of education has happened to me, and I’ve been thinking about what’s made certain classes particularly useful. In a word, it’s challenge. But that word is incredibly lame and vague.

More precisely, what makes an amazing class amazing is a combo of two things:

According to the instructor, their role is making students better at things and making students understand things. Their role is not making students know things.
Courses are fora in which we practice skills and ponder ideas. This means we take some responsibility for the getting better at things and the understanding things.

An example from each of my universities has run through my head repeatedly over the past few weeks, so I’m putting them on the Internet so that they live forever. To posterity!

The University of Texas at Austin

Digital Media was a class that hurt brains and egos.

In my undergraduate advertising program, the purest example of this optimal teacher/course combination was Digital Media as taught by Gene Kincaid. In addition to being our lecturer, he also ran his own web consultancy in Austin (my TUM example shares this trait, so I think there’s really something to it). At the beginning of each week, we would find articles in the class’s cloud–new media profiles, buzzword salads written by industry bloggers, ad tech developments, ad standards developments, legal developments, on and on.

Each class was a discussion of the articles initiated by Mr. Kincaid and then dominated by the students. He would ask the class for an opinion on an issue (are reach and frequency still valid ad metrics?). We would vomit our gut reactions at him. He would ask why. We’d break to listen to the cricket symphony while our gears spun into action.

Classes were headaches, and Mr. Kincaid was an intellectual task master. One of my favorite memories was a class day, at the beginning of which he wanted to start a discussion on augmented reality’s use cases (this was 2007-08). Nobody had an answer. He asked “who here read through the suggested articles before class?” Nobody raised their hand. “Okay, everyone out. Class is over.” Nothing feels more like failure than feeling directly responsible for a missed learning opportunity.

Technische Universität München

"The Power of Free" is a magical cognitive bias. — “The Power of Free” is a magical cognitive bias.

The ideal combo in my master program, so far, is definitely Behavioral Pricing as taught by Dr. Florian Bauer. Like Mr. Kincaid, he also runs his own consultancy, but in the Munich area. I really think this has something to do with the effectiveness of his teaching style.

Anyway, Dr. Bauer’s course was a seminar that took place all day on four days during the semester. On the first day, he told us to pair up and draw numbers from a box. The number told us which topic in behavioral pricing we would be teaching the class two months later. Half of the class were assigned topics in behavioral pricing theory (behavioral economics, cognitive bias…), while the other half were assigned pricing research tools (Van Westendorp PSM, BPTO, pricing experiments…).

He then gave us goals. Of course, one was understanding our topic (my partner and I had Gabor-Granger and the Van Westendorp PSM). What was our tool designed to accomplish? How does it work? How well does it do what it says it can do? Could it do anything else?

We on the tools side also had to link our tools to the other tools and the theories discussed by the other half of the class. Finally, we had to consider the tool from the “behavioral pricing” perspective, which meant understanding how the research tool itself might bias its own results.

That’s a lot of critical thinking.

The following three days of class (two months after the first) were days full of student-led lectures interspersed with Dr. Bauer’s commentary, corrections and anecdotes from his work as a pricing consultant. When other students presented, we were reminded of our own research that linked our topic to theirs. When we presented, we knew when to call out prior presentations and foreshadow future presentations. In between presentations, we had Dr. Bauer there to elaborate and make our presentations more real by relating his own experiences. If repeated exposure guarantees learning, then this is one of the most risk-free courses I’ve ever taken.

How Education is Different in a Master’s Program Taught by Scientists

My Bachelor was a dual-study in Business Administration and Advertising. Along with Engineering and Journalism, they’re probably two of the most practical academic programs on the planet. That is, they teach you things like these:

1. A fast 80% is often better than a slow 100%

2. Data analysis only needs to inform a decision, not yield The Truth

3. The best idea is the one you can get people behind

Arguably, those insights are really good fuel for success in business. Those programs were exactly what I’d hoped they would be.

After Bachelor, I went to work in Marketing for a large tech company. Those three insights above and a host of others resurfaced again and again on the job. My teachers seem to have known what they were talking about.

My Master’s program is more scientific (put your torches down, natural scientists–I just said “more scientific”). This time around, we’re learning how to beat a dead data horse into the ground in order to conclude exactly how right we can claim we are at the end of a sociological study. You’re only 80% sure that your study didn’t yield a false-positive result? Get back to your political polling, noob. It’s exactly what I’d hoped it would be.

I can stop there, for now. The point of this post is obvious–a Master’s program taught by scientists is a lot different than a Bachelor’s program taught by industry veterans. Here’s how:

1. “How right?” vs. “Not obviously wrong”

In the sciences, your audiences will usually be wondering how right you are–how comfortably they can consider your results an insightful description of something real. The quantitative side of this is obvious–which test did you run, and how significant are its results? There’s a number there. That’s pretty much the end of the story.

There’s a qualitative side, too. “Which model did you assume?” is one qualitative question. If you assume a linear relationship between a set of explanatory variables and an outcome variable, but the scientific community really thinks the relationship should be exponential, then your study’s a bust. It won’t get published, and your results will never enter conventional wisdom. Theoretically, the correct answer to “how right?” is “100%.” However, I don’t think any scientist will expect that any results are 100% correct, even if the data suggest that they are. Instead, you want to be 90-100% correct. Unless you’re into theory generation, in which case you’re a salesperson.

In school, this means that a successful project results in your thorough understanding of what’s already known. For instance, I’m taking a class called “Value Chain Economics.” It’s microeconomic theory applied to optimizing an industrial chain from start to finish–from raw materials gathering to finished good shipping. Our capstone project is exactly what you’d expect–analyze a value chain, identify its problems, and recommend a solution to one of them. In a business or ad program, we would be expected to gather as much insight as possible and then craft an original solution. Inductive logic usually feeds original solutions, so we’d be applauded for reasonable leaps in logic. In this program, however, one of the questions our graders are going to have is “how can you be sure this will work?” (contrast with a business professor’s “Why do you think this will work?”). This makes looking for case studies that document a solution to the problem a viable strategy.

“How right” rarely seems to matter in business, though. “Not obviously wrong” is what matters. You come up with a theory, get your colleagues behind it, run a program, and then determine and document how well the program performed. That’s where good business knowledge comes from. Plan, execute, evaluate, optimize–that’s the stuff, and it involves a lot of celebrated failure. It works, because it’s fast and, online at least, cheap. If your aim is making people aware that your product can fly, and your marketing plan involves a bunch of networking events and keynote presentations, then your plan might fail the “not obviously wrong” test.

2. A Master’s Student is Not a Student–They’re an Intern

I don’t know if it’s just because we’re not learning the basics anymore, or if it’s because scientist/professors are selfish, but I’m extremely suspicious that most of our projects are meant to help our professors do their jobs as researchers. If they teach us something as well, then hooray for two birds.

In “Conflict Resolution,” we’re supposed to identify a natural resource conflict, analyze it and propose a strategy for alleviating it. Sounds great, right? I still think it does. However, our professor is paying WAY more attention to those of us who chose mining-related conflicts than those who didn’t. And wouldn’t you know it, that’s the subject of her research. What a coincidence! Those poor “whaling conflict” groups.

This may be because the scientist/professor’s career is still active and tied to the university. In my business and ad programs, the professors had to be enticed away from industry jobs to finish out their working days teaching the next batch of young thems. In their case, teaching was their core function, and presumably that’s why our projects back then were extremely educational, but likely had very little use outside of our final classroom presentations (unless the subject companies were looking for ideas).

3. 80%? Are You Kidding Me?

Remember the “Fast 80” insight with which I opened this post? My worldview is informed by that insight to a large degree after Bachelor and those three years at the tech company. It makes an awful lot of sense–you’d be surprised how often you’ve done what you need to do by the time you hit the 80%-of-perfection point. In any case, I think its real value is in reminding us that it’s usually time to wrap up a project before we consider it truly perfect.

This difference is funny, because it affects the way we classmates interact with one another.

Our program probably contains equal numbers of what we’ll call “academics” and “industrials.” Industrials like me plan to continue in the business world after graduating. Academics want to keep doing research and get published. 80% is simply not enough for an academic, and trying to pitch them on the idea will drive them crazy.

An example of an industrial-academic conflict is this: some research says that plastic takes an average of 450 years to degrade naturally when thrown away. Other research says it takes 1,000 years. The industrial thinks “it takes a long time,” and just includes 450 years in their presentation to err on the conservative side. “It takes a long time” is really what the audience needs to know. The academic, on the other hand, needs to know which one is correct, or how it’s possible that both are correct. In a team’s context, as soon as the industrial settles on 450, the academic has a panic attack as visions of a declining final grade flash before their eyes, even if the decline envisioned is a 96% to a 93%.

I’m finding that this dynamic fosters extremely effective teamwork, however. In business school, everyone’s obviously an industrial. On the worst of teams, that leads to a lot of fudging–“eh, it’s close enough” adds up enough times to drive the final result so far away from insightful that the project ends up being a lazy, useless buzzword salad (startup company elevator pitches?).

Presumably, then, the worst of teams full of academics will have the opposite problem. They will have real, specific knowledge to share. They’ll have tons of it, in fact–so much that they have a hard time justifying cutting any of it out of their presentation. Collecting that knowledge took a lot of time and hard work, man! On presentation day, they give 250% of a presentation to a sleeping audience who already heard the industrials’ presentation a month ago.

You see where I’m going with this: the mixed industrial/academic team is really beneficial to both types.

So, there’s a taste of the differences I’ve experienced transitioning from a practical study program to a theoretical one, from business to science, from Bachelor to Master. Do you have similar or different experiences? Light up that comment section.

Everybody’s Hilarious in a Foreign Language Course

All of us, from everywhere, sound hilarious when we try to learn a foreign language. It would seem that we from the US, at our worst, are the most hilarious*, but I promise you can find something funny about the way everyone speaks.

What’s interesting, though, is how each of us sounds hilarious. Over the course of my 4 German courses to date, our teachers have corrected the way we speak about 1 million times each. Especially Valentin, though because he’s a boss. I really wish I could get a picture of Valentin looking especially teacherly (a bit hunched in his seat, hands clasped in front of his face, looking at a student sideways through squinted eyes, on the edge of his seat, waiting to see if the student’s answer is correct). But, I can’t take don’t-worry-about-me-bro-I’m-just-texting-someone photos with my dedicated digital camera.

Anyway, I’m noticing patterns among Valentin’s and other teachers’ corrections, specifically when it comes to pronunciation. Since Monday’s the greatest day of the week, here are some smile-worthy observations.

Different Nationalities and their Problems with German Pronunciation

American: Yeah, I’ll do us, first. Our major problem (this one actually comes straight from Valentin) is how we pronounce “u” and “ü.” He rags on me for this maybe 100 million times per class, assuring me that “yes, you all [Americans] have problems with that.” “U” sounds like “oo” in America-speak, while we don’t have a “ü” sound. You have to move your bottom jaw forward, pull your tongue back and purse your lips when you say it. If mouths had professions, Germany’s would be a circus acrobat.
Spanish/Latin American: They add syllables to the beginnings of words–especially the ones that begin with “S.” They also add a syllable before an “s,” when the “s” follows another hard consonant. “Strasse” becomes “eh-strasse,” for example.
Italian: They add syllables to the ends of words that end in consonant sounds. “Mein,” becomes “Mein-eh,” for example. This one gets funny, because many German feminine words end in the “-eh” sound, so the teacher often corrects their grammar instead of their pronunciation. Then, the student corrects the teacher’s correction.
Japanese: They just add syllables. A Japanese girl in my last class told me that it may be because Japanese words usually have the speaker bouncing from consonant to vowel very smoothly, while German tends to connect many syllables with back-to-back consonant sounds. Think of the name “Hideki.” Every vowel sound touches a consonant sound, and vice versa. Now, think of “Krankenwagen.” Going from “n” to “k,” and from “n” to “w,” might be uncomfortable for a Japanese native at first. They would say something close to “Kran-o-ken-o-wagen.” Of all the wrong ways to pronounce a language’s words, they definitely have the coolest.
Slavic/Uralic Languages: So far, I’ve been classmates with Bulgarians, Russians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Croatians, Belorussians, and Hungarians, so they’re the groups from whom I’m getting this pattern. Especially in two-syllable nouns, they accent the second syllable, while Germans often accent the first one. Germans say “BAHN-hof,” while a member of this group really wants to say “bahn-HOF.” Valentin rags on these of my classmates for this almost as often as he rags on me for “ü.”

And there you have it–those are the patterns that have come to light so far. I find this kind of thing is hilariously interesting (a single activity from the points of view of different nationalities), so I had to write about it. I hope you find this either hilarious or interesting, too.

If not: ohgodforgivemeryan@gmail.com.

* I’ve had this “people speak funny” conversation in real life with people from other countries. In each one, they bring up how funny Americans usually sound when they try to speak another language. When they explain what they mean, they always imitate us with “r”-heavy sentences. Come to think of it, we do have an unusual “r.” Everyone else seems to have either silent Rs, or super-mouth-backflip-roll Rs. So maybe that’s why we sound so funny.

German Class, Die Deutsche Grammatik, and Obamacare

Before I begin, I should probably put out there that a few of the ideas in this post come dangerously close to being political opinions. If you’re allergic to them, then I advise you to evacuate this blog as soon as you can. Alternatively, you can express any dissatisfaction you experience to ohgodforgivemeryan@gmail.com. My people are working on a vaccine against opinions and might be able to help.

Remember when I said that level A German doesn’t prepare a person to speak about politics? Well, week 1 of level B does. Chapter 28 of our book is entitled “die Geschichte,” which literally means “History” and roughly means “holy shit it’s about to get all UN up in here.” So this is probably the best chapter in all of Deutsch lernen.

First, I need to describe my new German teacher.

He’s old in the absolute best way possible. He arrives in his chair at exactly 9am, immediately closing the door behind him to maximize the awkwardness of late arrivals. When you do arrive late, he ignores your tardiness for about 3-4 minutes while he continues with the early exercises he planned for us. At the 3-4 minute mark, he suddenly stops the lesson and peers at you over his glasses, across the table, through your eyes and into the brain of your soul. Then, he says something like “one should always be punctual. When one arrives late, it disrupts the flow of the lesson, and your classmates cannot learn. I cannot say more–you are in Germany, the land of punctuality.” That’s what he actually said the first time someone was late. Well, he said it in German, so it’s very nearly what he actually said.

He is literally tied with one other person for “the greatest teacher I have ever had.” I enrolled in all three of the other guy’s classes in college.

Additionally, I wouldn’t call what he does “teaching.” Rather, he forces knowledge directly into your brain. Looking over the top of his glasses, he starts with a seemingly innocent question. Seemingly. In reality, he carefully crafted it using as many as possible of the parts of grammar we’ve learned so far.

“Ryan, ask Carolina what she discusses with her friends when she meets with them.”

Then I have to make a question out of that. “Carolina, what do you discuss with your friends when you meet with them?” That particular question is actually insane when all you know is A-level German.

And then “Fernando, what did Ryan just ask Carolina?”

Fernando then has to say “Ryan asked Carolina, ‘What do you discuss with your friends when you meet with them?'” And that sentence just destroyed Fernando’s brain, because it requires a very non-intuitive change to the “What do you discuss…” part.

And then “Stephano, say what Fernando just said in the past tense.”

And it proceeds until we’ve exhausted every tense and every construction of that original sentence we know.

His name’s Valentin, and he’s come to teach you some goddam Deutsch.

So here’s the part about Obamacare.

We’ve hit some heavy subjects in the “Geschichte” chapter. We’ve celebrated the fall of the Berlin wall and the reunification of Germany about a billion times (Der Tag der Deutschen Einheit was yesterday, as a matter of fact). We’ve admired George senior for flying a plane against the Nazis in WWII, and we’ve even discussed the motivation behind Hitler’s “final solution” (“nobody really knows” is among the million or so theories we discussed for that last one).

Today’s discussion falls in the middle of the intellectual-weight continuum described above, closer to “Berlin Wall” than to “Final Solution.”

During a listening exercise, we were supposed to select from a long list of key phrases the ones discussed during a set of interviews. One phrase was “eigene Kultur” (“unique culture”). The interview that brought it up did so in order to say that Europe’s culture is amazing; it’s just kind of a shame that so much has been Americanized over the recent years.

Afterward, Valentin took a break to open up a discussion. He said that the statement in the interview, while just for educational purposes, did have some interesting relevance to it. He said that American movies and music, especially, seem to be preferred in public settings over their European counterparts. Since entertainment is a vehicle for culture, it makes sense that a trend like that would inject American culture into Europe. He said that some countries are even taking steps to ward it off. France, for example, requires that 50% of music played on the radio is of European (possibly even just French?) origin. I don’t know if that’s law or just social, or if it’s even all of France–he didn’t go into too much detail about it.

Next, he expressed a little disappointment that entertainment might inspire Europeans to emulate Americans, when that would be a fallacy in judgment. Europe is not America, after all. He then put an idea in our heads for us to consider–perhaps Europe shouldn’t look to America as a role model in light of the congressional impasse that disabled government spending on Tuesday. “Does anyone know about that?” he asked. “Ryan?”

“Yeah, the government isn’t working since Tuesday.” (Ja. Die Regierung funktioniert seit Dienstag nicht.).

“Yes! That’s it. And the center of it all is Obamacare, yes? Democrats want to fund it and Republicans do not.”

“Yeah, that’s right.” (Genau).

His eyes began ascending the lenses of his glasses. Soon, they were out in the open and pointed directly at the innards of my soul. “And what do you think about Obamacare? Is it necessary? Good or bad?” He was smiling. I should really mention that, because he’s incredibly good-natured for all his sternness.

All 22 other faces in the class pointed themselves at mine.

!Political opinion requested! Here, discussions of politics and religion are mostly no big deal at all–every teacher I’ve had has brought them up, and they come up at dinner quite often as well. The American in me had a pulse of about a million beats per minute, though. Ok, Ryan, here goes. Just say something. Opinions don’t always start screaming matches and fist fights, here.

“Well, that’s a really difficult question,” I said. I wasn’t even being a non-committal wimp about that–I was dead serious. “For me, what’s important isn’t whether or not the government should provide healthcare to its citizens. What’s important to me is what the opportunity cost of Obamacare is. If the government funds healthcare (and maybe the medical industry infrastructure to support more patients?), then what can’t it do as a result? Knowing that is how I would decide whether or not it’s ‘good.'”

“Ah, yes, I understand what you mean” replied Valentin. “But the government should be able to provide for its citizens, no?” “What do the other students think?” (Worth noting is that Valentin is native to a country that found a way to enact a 40%+ income tax without a single government building burning down).

The next 2 or so minutes were a calamity of agreeable mumbling, head shaking, and short bursts of contrary opinion. Most of our Japanese-Italian-Bulgarian-Spanish-Argentinian-American-Ukrainian class straight-up said “healthcare should absolutely be public,” while a few were in the pragmatic camp.

If you have a bunch of American Facebook friends and you read your feed the week of September 30, 2013, then you know exactly what the room sounded like.

Deutsch Lernen: What You Can Do After 4 Months

Ja, ich Kann! — Graduating level A gives you an unparalleled sense of pride.

About a week ago, my class and I graduated from A-level German. We’ve just started B1, then. The way I see it, this is a good time to reflect on what A-level German lets a person do in Germany. Or, more practically speaking, this is about what a person can do with German after 4 months of studying it in its native environment. Awwwww yeah.

First, let’s refresh over the European language system–all of that A/B/C stuff. The system is divided into three levels–A, B and C–which are themselves each divided into two sub-levels. You start in A, and you progress through C. You need to finish B before you look for a job that requires skill in German to perform–most jobs that don’t belong to Texas Instruments, Amazon, Intel, Microsoft and the like. C, I’ve been told, is meant to give students an academic grasp of German. My teachers have told me that C1 could be beneficial to those who want to be sophisticated, but C2 is almost completely pointless.

So, now I’m at the beginning of B1–the beginning of the level that transforms people from residents into professionals.

Come to think of it, “resident” is a really good word for describing what level A (4 months of training) has done for me. After 4 months, I can speak German at people, rather than with them. I can listen to simple requests and advice and respond in either really simple or really broken manners. For example, I can do these things:

Order at a restaurant
Pay for things
Ask for directions to places
Introduce myself
Tell people why I’m here (see my first post)
Look for a job (but not interview for one)
Discuss politics just a little bit (who’s running, party platforms, tell someone I can’t vote because I’m not a citizen)
Navigate public transportation (which train? when does it get here? oh God, it’s late? do I need to transfer? are there taxis?)
Tell people what I do for a living
Tell people about my plans to go back to school
Ask what a word means
Request that the speaker slow down or simplify their words

I can maybe do some other things as well, but those are the things that I have to do a lot.

Also, it’s good to keep in mind I can’t exactly call the contexts in which I employ those abilities “conversations.” Rather, it’s an exchange of simple sentences that both of us understand. I don’t call them “conversations,” because at least one of us is always thinking “that’s probably not exactly what they mean, but it’s close enough to inform my next action.”

A is designed to bring a person to functioning order within German society, then. It serves to ward off foreigner-terror (that’s terror of being a foreigner, not a terror of foreigners) and help one convey that they’re trying to learn the language.

I expect B to make me a conversationalist. I’ve looked ahead in the lessons, and I’m seeing crucial pieces to the conversation puzzle that were missing in A. Namely, I’m seeing complex sentences–main clause plus subordinate clause. Command of subordinate clauses is a huge difference between a speaker who appears “conversational,” and one who does not. With that ability, I can vary up my sentence structures, which will make me look confident.

Oh boy, is that going to be fun.