Research and Innovation, a lot of Hard Work

I had the opportunity to teach at two different universities. In one of them, I taught Strategic Planning, Creativity (Innovation), and Business Fundamentals; where I got a Bachelors degree in Business Administration. In the second one, I taught Marketing in order to help the students developing their ideas into feasible market products.

There was however a big difference in these two universities.

Years ago, in the first university, some engineering students used to belittle the business students. In other words, and according to some, Business students were “lazy”, “stupid”, and the ones who could not enter other undergraduate programs, and who didn’t have the necessary intelligence to deal with higher level Mathematics.

To some extent, it was true, but there were other business students who wanted to excel and some others who where the children of successful entrepreneurs and business executives who wanted to have the best education possible and contribute to the society.

As controversial as it was, the business and engineering faculties got the same high standards for Mathematics. The idea came from the students.

When I was a freshman in the Faculty of Business, I attended the Students’ Assemblies where we as students got a chance to be heard. What we discussed was usually the same: The long lines on the copying machines and the lack of space in the parking lot. Once in a while, other topics were discussed but they were given little attention. Whining, complaining, and shouting. You can imagine.

Active business students who believed that when “you are not part of the solution, you might be part of the problem”; pushed Mathematics to be raised. As a result, more and more students were involved, finally the long lines and parking topics were solved; and the more we participated in finding the solutions, the more we loved our University. A dynamic University with the capacity to listen, and learn.

In the second University, it amazed me the level of dissatisfaction of the students. I was there to teach Marketing and found in the position to listen to their complaints.

In the Business Formation I was given, I was taught that in business you listen to everyone, you take the customers’ complaints, collect them, analyze them, get ideas, and implement them.

So this is what we did.

In a three-hour class students sat down and wrote all the complaints they had: locations, supplies, teachers, programs, etc, etc… Everything!

I went home, put them all together in writing, and gave a copy to each student. I remember the list having more than 50 different complaints.

Students sat down again by pairs, but this time, they had to go and find out if what they were saying was true. Time for research and make presentations about their findings. The list, of course, went down.

Then, for each problem, they had to find at least five solutions. Hard work!

At the end, we pulled the solutions together and then we thought of a solution that involved them all. The result?

Communication. Clear, direct, honest communication derived from research.

While some people are just whining –not pointing out problems—without thinking of solutions; other people are working hard to find the solutions.

- My Core Beliefs as a Teacher

◦ Every student is unique and deserves to be engaged in activities that promote learning through his/her strengths.

◦ Discipline, Responsibility, Hard work and Fun are not mutually exclusive.

◦ A dynamic class does not guarantee learning but a boring class is ineffective.

◦ The support given by parents and teachers is crucial to the students’ academic success.

◦ Students come to school to learn socially and every action that fosters social skills contributes to a positive learning environment and rewarding results.

ON TEACHING: Ms. Lightson and the Homework Contest

The school where Ms. Eleanor Lightson was working as an ESOL teacher had the policy of reviewing and grading the students’ homework each day from the previous day. The classrooms she served had between 30 and 45 students per class.
As the classes went on, one day she realized that a student had given ‘weird’ answers to the vocabulary she had assigned. It was something like this:

Cat: Perro
Ostrich: Gato
Bird: Avestruz
Raccoon: Pájaro
Etc, etc, etc.

When Ms. Lightson asked the student if she had cheated, the student gave a negative.
“May I see your dictionary please?” she asked the student.
The student replied it was left at home.
“You cheated,” the teacher told her in a more displaying than accusatory tone. The student insisted this was not true.
“Yes, you did,” the teacher insisted in a soft and caring voice, the voice of comprehension.
This teacher didn’t label students as liars. She knew that when students lie or cheat there is a lot of fear behind it, and it is usually of teachers and parents or being ridicule by their peers.
“I know for sure that you cheated. Do you want me to tell you how I discovered you did?” Ms. Lightson said with the eyes of a friend who was revealing a secret.
The student smiled and agreed looking again at the homework. After revealing the secret and telling that there was a very scarce possibility of finding the answers the student had given Ms. Lighton told the student, “Look, Joy, if you are going to cheat, it is better not to do the homework. What for? There is no purpose in doing it unless you learn and face your own difficulties.”

The story doesn’t end here. One of the strategies Ms. Lightson had implemented since the beginning of the year was to grade the homework cumulatively.

“Look, if one day you forget or you didn’t have time to do it, that’s okay with me. But if you, on a regular basis are not doing your homework, that is a real problem, for you mostly. So, I am going to ask for notebooks from one of you each day and you have to have all the homework dated up to the current date. There will not be previous notice, this is the notice.”

However, the question of how meaningful doing homework was for them kept nagging Ms. Lightson. Were they learning through homework? Was it helping them in learning?

Instead of reviewing 45 homework assignments to know who did it or not, Ms. Lightson introduced German words in one day’s vocabulary that were similar to English but that did not appear in the English dictionary and which were not easily deduced.

“Do you have any questions or difficulties about yesterday’s vocabulary?” Ms. Lightson asked them.
Twenty students raised their hands. Okay, those were the ones who did the homework consciously.

Still Ms. Lightson kept very concerned about the ones who were not learning, about the ones who for whatever reason they had were not doing their homework. She needed to find other ways.

“Well, tomorrow we will have a homework contest. The best three works will be the only ones that will be graded. The rest will have no grade” Ms. Lightson said after considering that it might or might not work.
Next day, Ms. Lightson’s students were standing at the classroom door eager to be evaluated. Once they went inside, they kept coming to her desk happily to show what they had done the day before. It looked like they had put on a lot of work. It was October and the vocabulary was related to Halloween.
“Teacher, I did the homework!” several students said enthusiastically, “Look!”
There were even 3D models and plasticine works of Art.

WOW! WOW! WOW!
Only one student didn’t do the homework and the rest of them were graded. All of them were excellent. WOW!

Contrary to common belief, students DO like to do homework. It is not a simple matter of the whats but the HOWs it is proposed. How to Wow!
What would it happen if we just graded our students for how much their eyes shone and how frequently they smiled?

POEMS: Brevettes

*****

Love

Drains

Pains

*****

Truth

Brings

Springs

*****

Passion

Drives

Lives

*****

POEM: A Rainbow Class

Be a star in the life of your students and let them shine too…

Their light won’t cloud you, your light won’t cloud them…

Make a difference! No matter how small!

All children forward…

As you approach for the first class in the morning, you’ll see how the classroom turns lighter and lighter…

And suddenly you’ll see everyone flying and dancing over the cloud when you thought it was going to rain…

But no…

The rain is over…

The rainbow is what lasts!!!

ON WRITING: Self - Editing, a Little Trick

So, are you ready to edit your work after the hundreds or probably thousands of pages with ideas, characters, plots, sentences, and the creation of different worlds?
Do you need a break from the insanity of Creativity?

Okay. That word, that typo. Look at it carefully before you change it.
What does it say? What does it say about you as a Writer? As a Human Being?

I guess keeping journals since my childhood makes me a journalist, doesn't it? Many of them burned with the flames due to storage issues. Fiction, non-fiction, and poetry; doodles and cartoons; clippings; you know, all those things. This is something many of us writers do.

While we face the chaos of Creativity and the wonderings and wanderings of our imaginations, Focus is probably one of our biggest challenges. So, in order to cope with it, I have the Discipline of writing every day in a journal.

And if you are also a journalist, probably you’d may found out drowning in papers, hyperlinks, and the sort.

This is what I do:
- I number each notebook (a composition book) with a multi-label sticker.
- I number each notebooks’ pages.
Some notebooks come with 98, others with 102, 104… and lately I found that the last 3 composition notebooks I have bought have 106 pages. Have you checked yours? How many pages? Yes! Three consecutive notebooks with 106 pages. That company gave me, as a customer, more than it promised, more than I expected. I looked at the brand.
Keep searching! There are plenty of things out there like that in Life. Not only in Business.
This company, I think, is buying my loyalty and who knows, probably the store too. Next time I go to the Office Supply Store, I’ll search for that brand.
Is this company doing this intentionally or unintentionally?
The unconscious of this company is telling me that they want to give customers more than they expect. If they keep going like that, you know what I am going to do?, I’m gonna tell my friends to go over there.
They probably could go in their advertising campaigns with something like this “More pages for the same price”.
…
Sorry, I got a little carried away but if your mind has a similar way of working between the left and right sides of the brain; you probably know what happened up there.

So, back to the topic.
- The last page of each notebook contains equations of my “mistakes”; the hidden and encoded secrets and messages the unconscious tell me about myself, as a human being while I write.

Don’t erase that typo that quickly. Hold on a second.
Understanding the nature of our mistakes help us to become clearer in the messages we try to convey.
It is more than writing on the pages. While we write and edit our work, we edit ourselves as Human Beings and our conditions.

Keep journaling!

SHORT STORY: An Unusual Visit

The Professor had clearly instructed his students to write an essay, a critical essay on Gaston Bachelard’s Notion of Epistemological Obstacle. There was no place for opinion. He defended Science over anything else in his life. Science had been placed in a pedestal that dismissed Art and Psychological studies and female intelligence for which he made his subtle remarks. His discourse was clear and concise. In talking to his students he was a serpents’ charmer. The class was taking place in Spanish, a language that differentiates between male and female nouns. “La Ciencia” was a woman, a terrifying being, so unpredictable, and unexpected.
When reviewing all the collected essays, he didn’t know what to say. He thought about grading it with a zero, assigning a failing grade; and suggesting the Faculty’s Dean about the removal of this student.

And this is what he found...

The Appointment

It is not easy to schedule an appointment with Science. This is probably something a good psychoanalyst knows. However, the one who does it obeys to the great destiny required in their moralization process.

The world’s suffering had evaporated, and then, condensed in the clouds; it got released in an impetuous current. Drops of ignorance were pouring and tickling her umbrella while Science walked through the stormy rain wearing a fur coat and camping boots on the streets of an intellectual city.

She walked and walked and her pace was rushed. She was a little late for the appointment settled over the phone. Science knew it was mandatory for her to mutate if she wanted to give the world a different destiny. But mutation was not her problem because she belonged to a mutant species.

How could she ask better to gain more self-knowledge?

Undoubtedly, it would be through a process of rational interpretation in order to locate the facts in its historical plot and exact place; and through that symbiosis produced in the experience-reason axis –maximum source of risk but also of success—.

Trascending was her desire. She would trascend through the works of her mind and the limits of common experience. She could be liberated from the bondages of what has been historically demonstrated as the Truth. She would also perform an intellectual-affective cleansing: Specifying, rectifying, and diversifying.

The anchylosed state of her self-knowledge was something she certainly could not afford. That inner system that tended –as any other system—to close itself and become static. Then, she felt annoyed by the itching in her chest.
Lately, she had been somatizing the effects that cause close mindedness or any other defense mechanism such as avoidance or denial. This was the main reason why she agreed on the appointment. She knocked on the door. And before the door was opened, she suffered a temporal paralysis in her right lobule.
Paralyzed she was. Yes. Could it be some sort of hysteria?

Afterwards, and like every scheduled appointment in the Palace located in the Saint James Plaza, she entered the room at 12:00 sharp. She took her fur coat off, closed the umbrella and cleaned her boots taking away the street mud traces. She lay on the divan staring at the ceiling, at the popcorn details that illustrated diverse shapes.

The free-association method was a good beginning, Ideas were taken from the facts crossing her mind, spinning one concept with each other as if they were silk threads.
Which thinking system would keep the inserts of all those ideas? There was silence for some brief minutes and then she continued.

“How can I think well and properly?”

La Mujer del Divan - Pedro Lira

“How could I get rid off the interfering sensibilities, needs and instincts as lower forms of the psyche? How to get rid off the impure set of basic intuitions?

“How to avoid the conformism produced by clear and useful ideas, the answers given without asking, the familiarity of some ideas fully loaded of analogies, images and metaphors?
“How could I avoid the conservative spirit that impedes inquiring and questioning in order to keep the accepted answers?
“How would I put aside the avidity for unity and certitude?
“How to desincrustate everything that has been encrusted by the passage of time and that ultimately hinders progress and development?
“Which words to use? Which words could be used that were not designative or explicative or limitative in the narration of the historical facts?
“How was it feasible to avoid the temptation of staying in basic observations and the dilapidation of images in a picturesque, concrete, natural, and easy way?
“Is it conceivable to comprehend incomprehension?
“Is it possible to suppose that an experimental culture must be acquired?
“I am Science and I am not empty. I am old, I have experience, and the age of my prejudices. If I access myself, I can rejuvenate spiritually.
“Is it possible to accept an abrupt mutation even though it can contradict a past and what it has told? “I should recover my formative spirit. Yes, I should do that. I want to keep searching.
“Which inner obstacles obstruct Knowledge? That handsome man. Which pieces of knowledge have I acquired wrongly, imprecisely or incorrectly? What does block Spiritualization? How to change my experimental culture?
“Soy Ciencia, ¿Tengo inconsciencia?... I am Science, do I have unconsciousness?
“I have erred many times and because of it, I know that the bipolarity and dialectics of my mistakes, born in the polemic attitude of my thinking, hinder my understanding. How to place mistakes in a hierarchy? And if the nature of my mistakes and epistemological cysts is confuse and polymorph; what would happen if arranging a surgical procedure to remove them once and for all, the removed mistakes would take with them some vital organs from my own vital essence? How can order be established to describe thinking disorders? How to avoid the rupture between observation and experimentation? How to avoid mathematical thinking being in the middle of the way of the moral quality of thinking?
“Again, how is it possible to avoid the rupture between observation and experimentation? How to avoid mathematical thinking being in the middle of the way of the moral quality of thinking?
“Why does mathematical thinking interposes and interferes, if considering its intermittency it does not know periods of mistakes? …”

***

There was a longer silence than the previous ones and the appointment was almost over, but before waking up from the divan, she asked for the first time:

“Who Am I?”

That afternoon, Science went out looking for the nature of the irreflection and error psychology, taking glances at pedestrians and window shopping in museums and libraries and fashion stores. The fur coat was folded on her right arm and the closed umbrella was hanging from her wrist.
Now , she was not walking that fast, there was no need to hurry up because she had finally realized that the sun had been unclouded and that it was brightly shining.