The last lecture (9 page)

I
T IS
an accepted cliché in education that the number one goal of teachers should be to help students learn how to learn.

I always saw the value in that, sure. But in my mind, a better number one goal was this: I wanted to help students learn how to judge themselves.

Did they recognize their true abilities? Did they have a sense of their own flaws? Were they realistic about how others viewed them?

In the end, educators best serve students by helping them be more self-reflective. The only way any of us can improve—as Coach Graham taught me—is if we develop a real ability to assess ourselves. If we can’t accurately do that, how can we tell if we’re getting better or worse?

Some old-school types complain these days that higher education too often feels like it is all about customer service. Students and their parents believe they are paying top dollar for a product, and so they want it to be valuable in a measurable way. It’s as if they’ve walked into a department store, and instead of buying five pairs of designer jeans, they’ve purchased a five-subject course-load.

I don’t fully reject the customer-service model, but I think it’s important to use the right industry metaphor. It’s not retail. Instead, I’d compare college tuition to paying for a personal trainer at an athletic club. We professors play the roles of trainers, giving people access to the equipment (books, labs, our expertise) and after that, it is our job to be demanding. We need to make sure that our students are exerting themselves. We need to praise them when they deserve it and to tell them honestly when they have it in them to work harder.

Most importantly, we need to let them know how to judge for themselves how they’re coming along. The great thing about working out at a gym is that if you put in effort, you get very obvious results. The same should be true of college. A professor’s job is to teach students how to see their minds growing in the same way they can see their muscles grow when they look in a mirror.

To that end, I’ve tried hard to come up with mechanical ways to get people to listen to feedback. I was constantly helping my students develop their own feedback loops. It was not easy. Getting people to welcome feedback was the hardest thing I ever had to do as an educator. (It hasn’t been easy in my personal life, either.) It saddens me that so many parents and educators have given up on this. When they talk of building self-esteem, they often resort to empty flattery rather than character-building honesty. I’ve heard so many people talk of a downward spiral in our educational system, and I think one key factor is that there is too much stroking and too little real feedback.

When I taught the “Building Virtual Worlds” class at Carnegie Mellon, we’d do peer feedback every two weeks. This was a completely collaborative class, with the students working in four-person teams on virtual-reality computer projects. They were dependent on each other, and their grades reflected it.

We would take all of the peer feedback and put together a spreadsheet. At the end of the semester, after each student had worked on five projects, with three different teammates on each, everyone would have fifteen data points. That was a pragmatic, statistically valid way to look at themselves.

I would create multicolored bar charts in which a student could see a ranking on simple measures such as:

• 1) Did his peers think he was working hard? Exactly how many hours did his peers think he had devoted to a project?
  
• 2) How creative was his contribution?
  
• 3) Did his peers find it easy or hard to work with him? Was he a team player?
  

As I always pointed out, especially for No. 3, what your peers think is, by definition, an accurate assessment of how easy you are to work with.

The multicolored bar charts were very specific. All the students knew where they stood relative to their forty-nine peers.

The bar charts were coupled with more free-form peer feedback, which was essentially specific suggestions for improvement, such as “Let other people finish their sentences when they’re talking.”

My hope was that more than a few students would see this information and say, “Wow, I’ve got to take it up a notch.” It was hard feedback to ignore, but some still managed.

For one course I taught, I’d had students assess each other in the same way, but only let them know the quartile in which they ranked. I remember a conversation I had with one student whom others found particularly obnoxious. He was smart, but his healthy sense of himself left him clueless about how he was coming off. He saw the data ranking him in the bottom quartile and remained unfazed.

He figured that if he was ranked in the bottom 25 percent, he must have been at the 24 percent or 25 percent level (rather than, say, in the bottom 5 percent). So in his mind, that meant he was almost in the next higher quartile. So he saw himself as “not so far from 50 percent,” which meant peers thought he was just fine.

“I’m so glad we had this chat,” I told him, “because I think it’s important that I give you some specific information. You are not just in the bottom 25 percent. Out of fifty students in the class, your peers ranked you dead last. You are number fifty. You have a serious issue. They say you’re not listening. You’re hard to get along with. It’s not going well.”

The student was shocked. (They’re always shocked.) He had had all of these rationalizations, and now here I was, giving him hard data.

And then I told him the truth about myself.

“I used to be just like you,” I said. “I was in denial. But I had a professor who showed he cared about me by smacking the truth into my head. And here’s what makes me special: I listened.”

This student’s eyes widened. “I admit it,” I told him. “I’m a recovering jerk. And that gives me the moral authority to tell you that you can be a recovering jerk, too.”

For the rest of the semester, this student kept himself in check. He improved. I’d done him a favor, just as Andy van Dam had done for me years before.

I
T’S A
thrill to fulfill your own childhood dreams, but as you get older, you may find that enabling the dreams of others is even more fun.

When I was teaching at the University of Virginia in 1993, a twenty-two-year-old artist-turned-computer-graphics-wiz named Tommy Burnett wanted a job on my research team. After we talked about his life and goals, he suddenly said, “Oh, and I have always had this childhood dream.”

Anyone who uses “childhood” and “dream” in the same sentence usually gets my attention.

“And what is your dream, Tommy?” I asked.

“I want to work on the next
Star Wars
film,” he said.

Remember, this was in 1993. The last
Star Wars
movie had been made in 1983, and there were no concrete plans to make any more. I explained this. “That’s a tough dream to have because it’ll be hard to see it through,” I told him. “Word is that they’re finished making
Star Wars
films.”

“No,” he said, “they’re going to make more, and when they do, I’m going to work on them. That’s my plan.”

Tommy was six years old when the first
Star Wars
came out in 1977. “Other kids wanted to be Han Solo,” he told me. “Not me. I wanted to be the guy who made the special effects—the space ships, the planets, the robots.”

He told me that as a boy, he read the most technical
Star Wars
articles he could find. He had all the books that explained how the models were built, and how the special effects were achieved.

As Tommy spoke, I had a flashback to my childhood visit to Disneyland, and how I had this visceral urge to grow up and create those kinds of rides. I figured Tommy’s big dream would never happen, but it might serve him well somehow. I could use a dreamer like that. I knew from my NFL desires that even if he didn’t achieve his, they could serve him well, so I asked him to join our research team.

Tommy will tell you I was a pretty tough boss. As he now recalls it, I rode him hard and had very high expectations, but he also knew I had his best interests at heart. He compares me to a demanding football coach. (I guess I was channeling Coach Graham.) Tommy also says that he learned not just about virtual reality programming from me, but also about how work colleagues need to be like a family of sorts. He remembers me telling him: “I know you’re smart. But everyone here is smart. Smart isn’t enough. The kind of people I want on my research team are those who will help everyone else feel happy to be here.”

Tommy turned out to be just that kind of team player. After I got tenure, I brought Tommy and others on my research team down to Disney World as a way of saying thanks.

When I moved on to Carnegie Mellon, every member of my team from the University of Virginia came with me—everyone except Tommy. He couldn’t make the move. Why? Because he had been hired by producer/director George Lucas’s company, Industrial Light & Magic. And it’s worth noting that they didn’t hire him for his dream; they hired him for his skills. In his time with our research group, he had become an outstanding programmer in the Python language, which as luck would have it, was the language of choice in their shop. Luck is indeed where preparation meets opportunity.

It’s not hard to guess where this story is going. Three new
Star Wars
films would be made—in 1999, 2002, and 2005—and Tommy would end up working on all of them.

On
Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones,
Tommy was a lead technical director. There was an incredible fifteen-minute battle scene on a rocky red planet, pitting clones against droids, and Tommy was the guy who planned it all out. He and his team used photos of the Utah desert to create a virtual landscape for the battle. Talk about cool jobs. Tommy had one that let him spend each day on another planet.

A few years later, he was gracious enough to welcome me and my students on a visit to Industrial Light & Magic. My colleague Don Marinelli had started an awesome tradition of taking students on a trip out west every year, so they could check out entertainment and high-tech companies that might give them a start in the world of computer graphics. By then, a guy like Tommy was a god to these students. He was living their dreams.

Tommy sat on a panel with three other former students of mine, and my current students asked questions. This particular bunch of current students was still unsure what to make of me. I’d been my usual self—a tough teacher with high expectations and some quirky ways—and they weren’t at the point where they appreciated that. I’m a bit of an acquired taste in that sense, and after only one semester, some were still noticeably wary of me.

The discussion turned to how hard it was to get a first break in the movie business, and someone wanted to know about the role of luck. Tommy volunteered to answer that question. “It does take a lot of luck,” he said. “But all of you are already lucky. Getting to work with Randy and learn from him, that’s some kind of luck right there. I wouldn’t be here if not for Randy.”

I’m a guy who has floated in zero gravity. But I was floating even higher that day. I was incredibly appreciative that Tommy felt I helped enable his dreams. But what made it really special was that he was returning the favor by enabling the dreams of my current students (and helping me in the process). That moment turned out to be a turning point in my relationship with that class. Because Tommy was passing it on.

P
EOPLE WHO
know me say I’m an efficiency freak. Obviously, they have me pegged. I’d always rather be doing two useful things at once, or better yet, three. That’s why, as my teaching career progressed, I started to ponder this question:

If I could help individual students, one on one, as they worked toward achieving their childhood dreams, was there was a way to do it on a larger scale?

I found that larger scale after I arrived at Carnegie Mellon in 1997 as an associate professor of computer science. My specialty was “human-computer interaction,” and I created a course called “Building Virtual Worlds,” or BVW for short.

The premise was not so far removed from the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland idea of “Let’s put on a show,” only it was updated for the age of computer graphics, 3-D animation and the construction of what we called “immersive (helmet-based) interactive virtual reality worlds.”

I opened the course to fifty undergraduates from all different departments of the university. We had actors, English majors and sculptors mixed with engineers, math majors and computer geeks. These were students whose paths might never have had reason to cross, given how autonomous the various disciplines at Carnegie Mellon could be. But we made these kids unlikely partners with each other, forcing them to do together what they couldn’t do alone.

There were four people per team, randomly chosen, and they remained together for projects that lasted two weeks. I’d just tell them: “Build a virtual world.” And so they’d program something, dream up something, show everyone else, and then I’d reshuffle the teams, and they’d get three new playmates and start again.

I had just two rules for their virtual reality worlds: No shooting violence and no pornography. I issued that decree mostly because those things have been done in computer games only about a zillion times, and I was looking for original thinking.

You’d be amazed at how many nineteen-year-old boys are completely out of ideas when you take sex and violence off the table. And yet, when I asked them to think far beyond the obvious, most of them rose to the challenge. In fact, the first year I offered the course, the students presented their initial projects and they just blew me away. Their work was literally beyond my imagination. I was especially impressed because they were programming on weak computers by Hollywood’s virtual reality standards, and they turned out these incredible gems.

I had been a professor for a decade at that point, and when I started BVW, I didn’t know what to expect. I gave the first two-week assignment, and ended up being overwhelmed by the results. I didn’t know what to do next. I was so at sea that I called my mentor, Andy van Dam.

“Andy, I just gave my students a two-week assignment and they came back and did stuff that, had I given them an entire semester to complete it, I would have given them all A’s. What do I do?”

Andy thought for a minute and said: “OK. Here’s what you do. Go back into class tomorrow, look them in the eyes and say, ‘Guys, that was pretty good, but I know you can do better.’”

His answer left me stupefied. But I followed his advice and it turned out to be exactly right. He was telling me I obviously didn’t know how high the bar should be, and I’d only do them a disservice by putting it anywhere.

And the students did keep improving, inspiring me with their creations. Many projects were just brilliant, ranging from you-are-there white-water rafting adventures to romantic gondola trips through Venice to rollerskating ninjas. Some of my students created completely unlikely existential worlds populated by lovable 3-D creatures they first dreamed about as kids.

On show-and-tell days, I’d come to class and in the room would be my fifty students and another fifty people I didn’t recognize—roommates, friends, parents. I’d never had parents come to class before! And it snowballed from there. We ended up having such large crowds on presentation days that we had to move into a large auditorium. It would be standing room only, with more than four hundred people cheering for their favorite virtual-reality presentations. Carnegie Mellon’s president, Jared Cohon, once told me that it felt like an Ohio State pep rally, except it was about academics.

On presentation days, I always knew which projects would be the best. I could tell by the body language. If students in a particular group were standing close together, I knew they had bonded, and that the virtual world they created would be something worth seeing.

What I most loved about all of this was that teamwork was so central to its success. How far could these students go? I had no idea. Could they fulfill their dreams? The only sure answer I had for that one was, “In this course, you can’t do it alone.”

Was there a way to take what we were doing up a notch?

Drama professor Don Marinelli and I, with the university’s blessing, made this thing out of whole cloth that was absolutely insane. It was, and is still, called “The Entertainment Technology Center” (www.etc.cmu.edu), but we liked to think of it as “the dream-fulfillment factory”: a two-year master’s degree program in which artists and technologists came together to work on amusement rides, computer games, animatronics, and anything else they could dream up.

The sane universities never went near this stuff, but Carnegie Mellon gave us explicit license to break the mold.

The two of us personified the mix of arts and technology; right brain/left brain, drama guy/computer guy. Given how different Don and I were, at times we became each other’s brick walls. But we always managed to find a way to make things work. The result was that students often got the best of our divergent approaches (and they
certainly
got role models on how to work with people different from themselves). The mix of freedom and teamwork made the feeling in the building absolutely electric. Companies rapidly found out about us, and were actually offering written three-year commitments to hire our students, which meant they were promising to hire people we hadn’t even admitted yet.

Don did 70 percent of the work on the ETC and deserves more than 70 percent of the credit. He has also created a satellite campus in Australia, with plans for other campuses in Korea and Singapore. Hundreds of students I’ll never know, all over the world, will be able to fulfill their craziest childhood dreams. That feels great.