Volleyball Coaching Life-The Last Match

As I am watching the Stanford Volleyball’s recording of the women’s team celebrating their national championship match win, I am struck by the emotions etched in the faces of the players and coach Kevin Hambly. It was a mix of unadulterated joy for some and for others, particularly Libero Morgan Hentz, it was a look of desperate sadness. In the audio portion almost all the players made some comment about the sadness of seeing their four years end, a sadness that came with the recognition that this was the last time that this team, this particular alchemy of people was ever going to play together. Ever. The finality of the thought is brutal but honest.

However, it is Morgan’s demeanor and her human response to that finality that captured my thoughts about the reasons for coaching, at least the most important reason. The juxtaposition of her tear streaked face to go along with her big broad smile captures the juxtaposition of emotions that had enveloped her. Her absolute honesty and integrity made me think on this moment that is fraught with conflicting thoughts.

This scene plays all over the country at the end of Fall, as high school and college teams end their season. At least half of them will end in defeat, so they don’t experience the euphoria that the Stanford team experienced at that moment in PPG Paint Arena in Pittsburgh, only the very few get to do that. Johns Hopkins in Division III, Cal State-Bernardino in Division II, and Marian in NAIA all get to do the celebratory dance, as do the Junior College champions. No doubt their celebrations are joyous and over the top.

But the sense of sadness, the sense of finality of the last match hit every team without regard to winning or losing, we just get to see Morgan express her loss publicly. No doubt there are heartfelt expressions of love and loss in the locker rooms, both the winning and the losing ones. No doubt there are coaching staff sitting stoically in the seats in the arena, processing the meaning of the last match and the sense of loss which has finally hit them after the adrenaline of the match had worn off. No doubt players, staff, and coaches are feeling the weight of regret for things left unsaid, acts of friendship left unperformed, love unexpressed, hugs unhugged. For those who were lucky enough to win the last match together, it is a mixture of happiness, gratefulness, sadness and regret. For those who lose their last match together it is pangs of goals unmet, and missions unaccomplished mixed with the sadness and regret. The common denominator is the sadness and regret. From the team who did not win a match all season to the team who did not lose a match all season, the common denominator is the team, with all the adjectives which inadequately describe the meaning of the term team.

Coaches try to build teams from day one. They preach about family, they admonish the players about having each other’s back, they cajole them to be vulnerable to each other, and they think up ridiculous exercise to motivate the mélange of players to bond into a team. All to capture that magical alchemy call a cohesive team. Some think that team chemistry is a formula, a recipe. If we gave them an opportunity to do this, or to do that then at the end we will have a team. I am much more romantic than that. Each team is much greater than the sum of its parts, but the parts are important. There are as many disparate personalities, temperaments, cultures, logic, and mindsets as there are players, the job of melding them all into a strong and bonded collective is seemingly next to impossible. The team building tactics, and activities do help in progressing the team to their goals, but there is an element of magic which is unpredictable and undetected in all the interpersonal interactions that happen in a team. That magic must happen serendipitously, there are catalysts but their effects are all also uncertain. There are no ways to replicate the magic year after year, there are no ways to capture it if you don’t have it. You sow the ground the best you can and then you hope for the best. Prepare the ground, make sure it is fecund, and then let it happen. Or not.

 For the coaches, watching the end of a chapter in your team or program is the ultimate test of your coaching philosophy. John Kessel used to always ask beginning coaches what they were coaching. He would play gotcha with them if they answered: volleyball. “NO!” he would bellow, scaring the dickens out of the group, “you don’t coach volleyball, you coach people!” It is because we coach people that we value, actually treasure a true team.

It is because we coach people that we, volleyball coaches, are so touched and moved by the elation and sadness of the scene in PPG Paint Area. We don’t do this to win matches, the extrinsic rewards are obviously fantastic, but we do it for the intrinsic rewards, rewards we enjoy in the privacy of our minds and heart, rewards that are inexpressible to those who have not been where we have been. We do it for so many human and emotional reasons and the real rewards comes from witnessing and experiencing our teams become one and reveling in the presence of one another. You don’t need to win the national championship to experience that euphoria and love.

Stats For Spikes-Variance

I had wanted to do a little bit of explaining about probability and statistics tools. One of them is the concept of variance, so it was with much delight that I saw Coach Jim Stone write the articles below about the observations he made regarding variances.

http://www.acoachingperspective.com/variance-and-lineup/

http://www.acoachingperspective.com/variance-update-and-thoughts-on-post-season-awards/?fbclid=IwAR2CSo3xNkPydQxjDQ4bAHpdpOWdUqvVOpC0ldyaNr6JBbnCrMxgsLGI7O4

Definitions

First some definitions.

The mean is the average of the same performance measurements taken over a long time and sampled at regular intervals. That mean is compared to the expected value of the measurements which is calculated prior to measurement decides the accuracy of the measurement,. In manufacturing or any engineering related activities, the mean of the measurements are compared to what the designer had intended and designed to achieve, that is a reference value, a goal to measure against.  The formula for the mean is just the numerical average of all the measurements of the metric, hitting percentage, conversion percentage, and in the article, the focus was on hitting efficiency.  The article compares the average hitting efficiency of various players from 2018 to their hitting efficiency in 2019.

In Coach Stones articles, his use of the term variance refers to a comparison of the 2018 and 2019 numbers, so he is using the 2018 hitting efficiency number as the reference and comparing the 2019 hitting efficiency number against it. The variance that he talks about is the difference for each player from 2018 to 2019.

In the statistical sciences however, variance is defined as the square of the difference of a measurement from the mean of many measurements. The variance, in statistical language, can be calculated as 

Figure 1 Formula to calculate Variance. (Staff, WikiHow 2019)

Standard deviation is defined as how spread out the measurements are from the mean, or the square root of the variance. The calculation is simple and if you don’t want to do it by hand most spreadsheet programs will have a function. In Excel the mean is: mean=average(x1, x2, …xn)  and standard deviation function  is standard dev=stdev((x1, x2, …xn). You may need to download the statistical function package to make it work but it is very simple to use.

Mean and standard deviations are used by statisticians to decide just how precise and accurate the thing being measured is, whether it is a player or a team.

The standard deviation tells us the precision of the process that we are trying to measure.

An illustration is better at getting that point across. The first illustration shows the Normal or Gaussian probability distribution. The mean of the measurements, as compared to the reference value tells us how inaccurate the measured performances of the process/team/people are, the width of the spread of the normal distribution tells us how spread out the measurements are and it gives us a measurement about how imprecise the performance of the process/team/people are. 

Figure 2: Illustration of the meaning of accuracy of precision. (Medcalc Staff 2019)

Another illustration uses a picture of the bull’s eye to better show the relationships.

Figure 3 Bull's eye explanation of the differences in interpretation of accuracy and precision. (Circuit Globe 2019)

In the world of athletic performance, it is next to impossible to use the accuracy intelligently because people and teams will perform according to their best ability in that time at that place, there are too many extraneous variable to account for and to uphold the hypothetical performance standard. Many coaches on VCT often ask for reference values as a goal to achieve for their teams rather than as a means of assessing where their team performance is as compared to a generic measure. The difference is subtle but important, by using a reference measure as comparison is a normal practice: you want to know what the “average” standard is for a team that is for a certain age and gender. The problem is that each team is unique, each player is unique, the conglomeration of the performances of each unique member of the unique team can be averaged to get a measurable “team average”, but comparing your team to a generic measure is unrealistic and depending on how you use that reference value, the usage can cause more problems than it will solve; there are many complicating factors to make the reference measure meaningful. A better way to measure your team’s performance is to do what Coach Stone did, which is to compare your present performance with your past performance, assuming you have a past performance record.  That comparison, making the comparison relative to the previous performance gives the coach a more concrete measure of the team performance.

It is also good to keep in mind that even though measured performance increases the probability of success for teams and players, they are not the determining factors for success; that is, have a great hitting efficiency percentage tells us that the chances of winning are going to be better but they do not guarantee a win: having good measures is not predictive, in this case correlation definitely does not equal to causality.

The standard deviation or precision is something important for coaches to examine, as Coach Stone has said in his articles. The statistics that we gather on the bench for the players and the team in the game gives us a performance measure of the player and team for that set and that match. The measures during a set or match: hitting percentage, blocks, assists, digs, passing efficiency etc. are all a function of the opponent’s strengths and weaknesses; whether the match is home, neutral or away; the temperature and humidity in the gym etc.  So that when we average the same performance measures across matches played against different opponents, locations, atmospheric conditions, we are making an assumption: that the variations inherent in playing the games under different circumstances can affect the performance measures but we can still get the information we want about our team and players by taking the mean of the performance measure while under different conditions. In fact, taking the average of many performances is the preferred way to isolate the actual team performance because the primary performance characteristics of our players, good or bad, shows itself in the average, more so than in looking at a bunch of data from individual matches. The effect of matches played against different opponents, locations, atmospheric conditions, etc.  are all accounted for in the variances that we see in the performance measures. We take for granted that those variances are a part of the performance capabilities of the team and players. Indeed, by taking the average of the performance measures, we are in effect smoothing out the transient performances for each individual match or allowing the variations from the environment and opponent factors to average itself out and we hope that by allowing averaging to take place, we end up filtering out the extraneous effects and we get the team’s actual capabilities over a designated time span. This is the Law of large numbers, which states that by virtue of taking many measurements or samples, the mean that we calculate of all the measurements will end up being closer to the real mean or the player or team that we are measuring.

In Coach Stone’s article on Variance and Lineup, his measure of volatility is what I assume to be the standard deviation. In his case, the volatility of the player is important because we are assuming that all the extenuating circumstances have been smoothed away uniformly and that the actual volatility or standard deviation reflects the actual ability of the player to execute precisely.

Coach Stone was making the point that when coaches make decisions on starting lineups, that volatility, standard deviation, of a player’s statistic should be considered in conjunction with the mean. I heartily agree, except that I would warn that these are probabilistic descriptions of the performance, they are not deterministic, that is there are randomness and uncertainty embedded in the numbers.

In Coach Stones article, he said that he would trade higher efficiency for less volatility. A prudent decision that reflects his personal preference for stability. In his personal probability he saw that there was safety in lower volatility. There is high probability that his decision is a sound one, and the results may bear out the decision, but it is also probabilistically possible that the decision may work out to the contrary, that the events such as a volleyball match are probabilistic in nature and the players performance may not her personal performance curve. He compares the hitting efficiency of Kathryn Plummer and Jazz Sweet and stated that:

If you look one standard deviation from her average efficiency, you can see that Plummer will hit between .200 and .370 almost 70% of her outings.  This is what the team and coach can generally expect on any given night.  Conversely, one of the more volatile players would be Jazz Sweet from Nebraska.  Her volatility is high (relative to Plummer) so her range of performance will be broader.  One could expect that 70% of the matches Sweet will hit between .000%-.320%. 

While I agree with the sentiment, a better wording is that Plummer’s performance would be somewhere between 0.200 and 0.370 at 70% of the time. The turn of phrase is not merely playing with semantics, it turns the argument to the information that the Normal curve actually demonstrate: rather than saying that Plummer hits between 0.200-0.370 70 % of the time, it says that the probability is 70% that she will hit between 0.200 and 0.370. We are putting the probabilistic thinking into play for the decision maker, the term “probability” gives the decision maker food for thought while introducing the reality that there is a 30% chance that she will hit below 0.200 and above 0.375. Instead of thinking that it is a sure thing, that hitting in the range 70% is a great deal, the thought becomes that there is a 15% chance that she will hit below that range and there is a 15% chance that she can hit above that range.  Thinking in probability terms because we have the data already available to us means that we can contemplate the possibility of potential failure and helps temper our expectations. This is why we play the game out, rather than do simulations on laptops. It is a matter of what your personal probability tells you.

One way to help us refine our decision making is if we had prior data on the performance of the players in exact situations, in that case one would use using Baye’s Theorem to recompute the probabilities.

One other myth regarding mean and standard deviation that I would like to dispel is the following. I had heard an anecdote that a coach would, as a matter of habit, pull a player out of the lineup when their statistics indicate that they were performing much above their season mean for a significant amount of time. The rationale for this move relies on the mistaken belief that since the player is outperforming himself for the season, he was due for a low performance, and that by pulling him out of the lineup at that moment,  the team is able to avoid or bypass the low performance and that the player would resume his high performance in his next start. Statistics doesn’t work that way. While the standard deviation measure says that there should be instances where a lower performance occurs to balance the higher performance, there is nothing in statistics that says that a low performance must necessarily happen in a symmetrical way, or happen immediately after a series of high performances. In fact, the lower performance may come when you least expect it. The thing to remember is that the measures are cumulative over a long period of time. Once again, the law of large numbers tells us that the balancing of the highs and lows comes after a large number of measurements rather than instantaneously. In the world of Statistical Process Control, a series of measures that continuously oscillates above and below the mean is an indication that something is wrong with the process.

Next: Statistical Process Control tools. Six-sigma and its significance and whether we should apply that criteria.

Works Cited

Circuit Globe. 2019. Circuit Globe /Accuracy and Precision. May. Accessed August 17, 2019. https://circuitglobe.com/accuracy-and-precision.html.

Medcalc Staff. 2019. Medcalc.org/Accuracy and Precision. August. Accessed August 20, 2019. https://www.medcalc.org/manual/accuracy_precision.php.

Staff, WikiHow. 2019. WikiHow. October 23. Accessed December 15, 2019. https://www.wikihow.com/Calculate-Variance.

Volleyball Coaching Life-Taking a Ride

As we wind through the NCAA tournament, we see a lot of the personalities of the players and coaches come through. Two stuck out in my mind for a thing that linked them. Many other coaches probably said or expressed the same sentiments, but I didn’t see all the press conferences.

Travis Hudson of Western Kentucky and Dave Shondell of Purdue were addressing the gathered press after losses in the tournament. Both are veteran coaches, and both are high caliber coaches and people. Both talked about the disappointment of getting beat and not moving on in the tournament. Both expressed appreciation for their players, coaching staff, administrators, and institutions. The thing that perked my ears up was when they talked about how their players took them on a long, extended, and joyous ride. Both thanked their players for giving them the gift of experiencing the successes of this season and this year’s tournament.

This stood out in my mind because usually coaches are buried in the details of administering to the team, thinking about the strategy and tactics of the game, boiling the details of the chess match over and over in their heads, and all the million and one details of being the leader of a team, an organization. Many coaches look at the successful season as a goal achieved, that point of view is similar to that of the project manager planning and making sure everything executes according to plan and reacting to each situation when it does not go according to plan, all the while hitting your marks as planned. A significant deviation from that mode of thinking is that a sports team is not a machine or a process, a sports team is a unique aggregation of many moving parts, fueled by passions, resiliency, desire, high level execution, both mentally and physically, and the all-important intangibles.

The intangibles are what makes life interesting, it is the reason that we play the game rather than decide wins and losses by simulation. This is what makes playing sports so exciting and enjoyable, that substantial chunk of uncertainty makes the emotions soar and dip and it makes the adrenaline ebb and flow.

The reason that I loved hearing Travis and Dave talk about being taken for a ride by their players is that they implicitly acknowledge that for every thing that they do, for everything that they had planned and implemented, taught, trained, and refined, the ball is in the hands of the players. It is through the generosity of the players’ spirit; the largess of their commitment to the coaches’ vision; their willingness to be in pain and uncomfortable; and their love of their team, teammates, and coaches, which is exemplified by the sacrifices they make in suppressing their selfish tendencies for the greater good of their team. Indeed, it is an amorphous and ambiguous spirit that can’t be described by mere words that creates the magic, that puts a team on a magic ride to greatness.

It takes experience, maturity, and self-awareness for someone to recognize that no matter how much influence a person has over a large organization such as a volleyball team, they are just along for the ride. While they contribute and affect all parts of what gets the ride going and moving successfully, in the end, the difference between the magical and the mundane is due to the players, the trust, the love, the discipline, the self-sacrifice, and of course, how one deals with the intangibles that turns good seasons into great seasons.

Much respect to Travis and Dave.

Book Review-How Learning Works 7 Research Based Principles for Smart Teaching. Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, and Norman

This book is a part of a series from Jossy-Bass Higher and Adult Education series. I bought it on the recommendation of the learning resources center staff. They presented parts of the material during their new staff orientation.

I had two intentions, one was to have some resources at my disposal for the latest pedagogical theories to help my teaching and I also wanted to learn about these research based principles to help my coaching.

The structure of the book is straightforward, the introduction laid out the seven principles and stated their purpose: to bridge the research and teaching practices. The succeeding seven chapters laid out the seven principles, gave scenarios for the readers to digest and analyze. They discussed the theory and experimental results that supports each argument within the principles. The last section is a conclusion that reiterates the principles to close out the book. They have also included the eight tools that they have cited in the body of the book in the appendices to help the reader learn more about the implementation and pitfalls associated with these tools.

I found the presentations workmanlike, which is as intended. The idea is to present the principles cogently and logically, even though the topics that are covered are anything but coldly rational.

I was personally very interested in how students develop mastery and how they can become self-directed learners. Those two chapters drew me in when I first looked at the table of contents. As I read the book in the sequences presented by the author I was drawn into other principles, specifically, the chapters on how the student’s prior knowledge affected their learning and how they organized their knowledge made them look at the knowledge that they are accruing really made me think about those topics. I knew that those topics affect the students learning but I was not clever enough to see how teachers can incorporate tools to help the students deal with their lack of prior knowledge and how much the knowledge organization affect their learning process. Indeed, I started to think about my own learning process, and how ineffective some of my learning habits are, and yet I continue to persist in pursuing the same methods.  I am changing my ways in response to that lesson.

The chapter on how the practice and the kind of feedback help the student to learn is enlightening because it gives me ideas on how to change my usual teaching tools to make the experience more productive for my students. The feedback topic is an important one and it is here that I received a lot of reassurance that the feedback skills that I have employed in my teaching and coaching are good practices and that my instincts were good ones. I did also profit from gaining more understanding of how feedback can be used.

The chapter on motivation and course climate were difficult ones for me, I took for granted that the motivation for the students are their responsibilities, that they were taking the class or playing on a team for a reason, that they were thusly motivated and I would have something to do with that, but not a lot. I am still a bit skeptical. I feel that motivation should be a personal decision, while I, as the teacher, can help them get more motivated by being a great teacher and being fair in my assessment of their abilities, I didn’t feel that I can make that much difference in how they are motivated. I am still dubious.

On the topic of the course climate, I can see where this chapter would be very useful and very pertinent in a social science class. I am in engineering so that we don’t have too much social discussions. I do see where the social climate of a class can make or break the classroom success of the students by how the class interacts socially and the kind of expectations that they the students and me the teacher would have due to the social constructs, societal norms  and stereotypes that are realities in our society. Those issues really speak to the kind of person the teachers are and how their root beliefs guide them in their daily interaction with the students. Knowing that the effect on the students is an important part of opening the teacher’s eyes to the reality that they face but I m dubious about how they can transform their teaching according to this principle without completely changing their world view.

I will be referring back to this book often as I go forth in continuation of my teaching career. The principles are somewhat commonsensical, which makes it so much more acceptable.  The no-nonsense layout of the arguments and methods are very welcome. The magical thing about the book is that it gives practical advice while also providing the readers with enough untethered hooks to hang onto intellectually so that they are challenged. This gives the readers some degrees of freedom to reflect on the ideas and allows them to progress the principles forward in their own ways.

Thanksgiving-Why It is My Favorite Holiday

People are surprised when I tell them that Thanksgiving is by far my favorite North American holiday, while I cannot truly explain my affinity for the holiday myself, I have a slew of clues from my life which does explain it: Fall is my favorite season, I love the change in weather, the sharp smell of Autumn, the turning of the leaves, the transition from light clothing to sweaters and coats all contribute to my passion for the holiday.

The legacies from this nation’s agrarian legacies which inspired the holiday appeals to the nostalgia, the transition that we go through between harvest and dormancy marks the end of one activity and the beginning of another, seeing the landscape morph from growing season to harvesting, it is a reminder from nature to observe the cyclical nature of our lives. I am drawn to the idea that after a long growing season, it is time to hibernate and rest in order to replenish ourselves as the deep dark of Winter envelopes us. Finally, there is also the tradition of the food, delicious of course but also substantial, comforting, , traditional, sustaining, and most importantly, communal.

While all those reasons are good ones, it still doesn’t explain why I am so enamored with the Thanksgiving season. So much so that I have come to resent the disappearance of Thanksgiving in our annual rituals as the hegemony of Halloween and Christmas encroaches on the Thanksgiving season.

So, I decided to look in my past to see just how Thanksgiving came to be so important in my psyche.

I came to this country as an immigrant bewildered by the American cultural habits and traditions. The strangeness, in my 13-year-old Chinese eyes, of the America of the 1970’s bewildered me and swallowed me up as nothing else has before or since. You would think that my previous experience with massive personal, social, physical, and habitual changes that had rocked my world would prepare me for the move to North America: I had moved from Taiwan, a country that I had known all of my life up until then, having been born there; to Honduras, a small Central American country that was different in just about every single aspect of my existence up to that point. I had to learn two languages: Spanish, because we were in Hispano-America, and English, because I was enrolled in the American School of Tegucigalpa. The school was where I first encountered the idea of Thanksgiving from my teachers, many of the faculty in the elementary school were Peace Corp volunteers from the US and they, being homesick, had made a great impression on us by enthusiastically introducing the traditions of Thanksgiving to us children.

The move from Honduras to Denver Colorado once again exploded my world, after having had it merely rocked a short four years earlier when I left Taiwan. Denver, was a state of mind that is completely alien to my nascent teenage mind. The foreignness of being plucked from the tropics and Hispanic culture of Honduras and being dropped in the wild west ethos of Denver was especially disorienting, especially after having done the same thing just four years earlier.

We moved to a modest ranch house on South Steele Street in the Denver suburb of Littleton. A yellow brick house with a seemingly endlessly large and verdant lawn, which I was responsible for, and two houses down from the back gate to Peabody Elementary school, my playground for the next few years. The turbulence of all the moving was assuaged by the promise of the normality that the suburbia experience engendered, this was where I was able to dampen the turbulence resulting from my two physical moves.

Our first Thanksgiving was spent in the home of my father’s colleague, who was the main reason we moved to Denver in the first place; he had vouched for my father’s skills as an engineer and had guided my family through the process of coming to America. We had stayed in his basement for a few weeks after we had arrived. I don’t remember the meal per se, but I do remember the familial warmth that was in abundance throughout the time spent in that house, that was officially our first Thanksgiving, ever. The profound meaning and resonance of Thanksgiving which would later grow to be my favorite holiday was just germinating at that time.  

A year later, my mom would preside over her own Thanksgiving feast, reciprocating the kindness of our new American friends by hosting newly immigrated Chinese families at our home. I vividly remember my mother endlessly worrying about her lack of experience in cooking the massive turkey that she had bought. She called our friend’s mother-in-law incessantly for two days straight trying to force-feed all the time garnered experience and knowledge from the poor lady through the phonelines. Our friend’s mother-in-law was pretty no-nonsense, but also incredibly patient. In the end, the meal was an unqualified success, a few things I remember was that my mom had substituted Chinese gluttonous rice for the dressing, we are Chinese after all; the lady had taught mom to use bacon slices to cover the joints where the legs and wings are attached to prevent the skin from breaking when it shrank, because I got to eat all that bacon; and the pride and relief on my mother’s face when my dad brought out the platter of turkey to the table as our new Chinese immigrant friends oohed and aahed over the spectacle,  she positively beamed with pride. I also remember that the pumpkin pies were store bought, she wasn’t that adventurous.

As I entered high school, our family became the elder statemen of the immigrant Chinese families, my parents became friendly with many new arrivals, most were younger professionals and we took turns hosting the big Thanksgiving feast. My parent organized the parties, giving each family their assignments on what to bring: tables, chairs, plates, and utensils, as well as the cornucopia of dishes of the feast. While we hewed to the American Thanksgiving tradition: we always had turkey; we always had pumpkin pie, sometimes homemade, sometimes not; we always had some semblance of American dressing along with all the Chinese dishes that made up our potluck meal, new traditions were being born from the ingenuity of our group. It became our own contribution to the traditions of our new home.

My first Thanksgiving away from home came in my freshman year of college. I moved to Champaign-Urbana to matriculate and I met up with a group of men, boy’s back then, that I am proud to still call my friends. I spent that Thanksgiving in the home of my new roommate Scot in Bensenville, a suburb of Chicago. It was just his family and I, but it made me feel whole after having gone through the emotional upheaval of not being able to go home to see my parents. It was a wonderful reminder of what friendship is and what friendship should mean, remember that I have known Scot for all of three months. From a culinary standpoint, I was also introduced to the wonders of pumpkin bread by Scot’s mom.  I remember being really excited that she sent a bunch of the pumpkin bread back to the dorms with us.

The day after the feast at Scot’s home, my gang of cohorts took me out on the town in Chicago, my first taste of the City of Big Shoulders. We visited the Museum of Science and Industry, had Pizza at the original Uno’s, ran around Marshall Fields looking for Santa, and saw the Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Biograph theater, where John Dillinger was shot. Again, I have known these guys for three months, and they decided to dedicate a day to showing me their town, to share their friendship with me, to cultivate a relationship with me. It was the best of times, period.  It was also in Chicago that Thanksgiving where I was introduced to the magical tradition of It’s A Wonderful Life by my friend Marty. This reinforced special quality of the humanity that I have associated with Thanksgiving since then. It is true that movies like that are designed to be emotionally manipulative, but there are times that I willingly submit to emotional manipulations, because it is good to feel wanted. In retrospect I was happily surprised by the comradery coming from these guys that I have known for a scant three months. We have been lifelong friends, and my emotional attachment to them, at least in my mind,  came partially from that Thanksgiving.

Spending time alone on Thanksgiving is de rigueur for gradual students. It is a longish break where we are freed of classes, both taking them and teaching them; it is too short of a time to be homeward bound and it provides a nice respite from the rigors of gradual school. The first Thanksgiving I spent as a master’s student was pretty abysmal, which further reinforced the special place that Thanksgiving held in my mind. It was my first year in Atlanta, I had just been there for less than a year, I was self-funded which meant that I did not have a built in social circle that was centered around graduate assistants, those indentured and traditionally inexpensive workers who have an office, however meager, where they could establish a social network. I had to run furtively between classes, never having a way station to drop off books and to sit and rest, it was socially isolating. Thanksgiving that year was spent alone, sitting in my tiny apartment, a repurposed dentist examination room in a professional building just blocks from the Georgia Tech campus. I spent almost my entire break there, reading and doing my work. My Thanksgiving dinner was at The Varsity, an Atlanta and Georgia Tech dining institution. I do remember having a Frosty Orange and onion rings. I am not sure if I had the hot dog or the hamburger. It was melancholy at best.

The next year however, I had attained the status of a teaching assistant once I became a PhD student, I was happily ensconced in a bullpen office and I was surrounded by people, actual, living, interesting people. What was once my reality, which was akin to living in Plato’s cave, became a reality of a person who had surfaced from the captivity of the cave and was exposed to the reality that was colorful, alive, and three dimensional. It was that year that we all decided that we needed to spend Thanksgiving together. My newly found friend Yogi had become gainfully employed in Washington DC and had offered his luxurious one-bedroom apartment as a flophouse for the bunch of us to use as a way-station on our visit. We planned on a widely anticipated tourist trip to the nation’s capital, hitting all the hotspots. We rented a couple of cars and we happily drove to DC and set to work cooking a meal that was fit for kings. We worked assiduously on our meal, the food tasted scrumptious because it’s flavor was powerfully enhanced by a communal spirit that permeated the gathering, it was appreciated by all. For a historical landmark, we saw the Doug Flutie hail Mary pass that gave Boston College its improbable defeat of Miami.

As time wore on, I spent most of my Thanksgivings in my gradual school toils. Dining alone in less than holiday fashion stopped being so depressing as I got used to the feeling, and I even looked forward to spending alone time away from the maddening crowd, a trait most common amongst the introverts. One year a fellow gradual student and his wife decided that they wanted to have a good old-fashioned Thanksgiving, with many people and celebrate the spirit of friendship, gratitude, and hospitality. They were living in married student housing, a concrete pile optimistically painted in vibrant colors in order to dispel the gloom of the 1970’s architectural excesses. They posted notices all around the compound, invited fellow gradual students from the office who had nowhere else to go and the party was on. My friend and his wife splurged on a turkey and they cooked it, everyone else came with a covered dish. Since this was a gradual student happening, the menu was overwhelmingly non-American. We did have some of the usual Thanksgiving staples, but the tables were groaning under the weight of dishes from Hong King, China, Japan, Korea, India, Lebanon, Egypt, Iceland, France, Germany, Mexico, Venezuela, et. Al. It was a United Nations of food. There was a certain cache of libations as well: Black Death from Iceland, soju from Korea, arak from Lebanon, mao-tai from China, and… well, you get the idea. Kids played, adults laughed and talked about our experiences in America; we tried to explain American football, Detroit Lions, and the Dallas Cowboys to our friends, we threw the football around, or we tried to, as electrical engineering gradual students don’t tend to do that very well, I was surprised that we even had a football. It made our shared experience as scholars that much more pleasant. We made future friends, we helped each other deal with our collective loneliness, we gave each other a small piece of ourselves and our cultures, and we had an exceptional meal.

All the experiences that I have related here, had enforced my personal belief that Thanksgiving is by far my most cherished and favorite holiday, far outdistancing Christmas. The graciousness shown by the lady who taught my mom how to make the turkey; the generosity that my father’s colleague had shown our family by inviting us to his home and table; the bonding of the many in a foreign society; the kindness and friendship that my cohorts in college and grad school had shown me and anyone who participated in those special celebrations; the gratitude that everyone experienced because of the generous nature of strangers who decided to live the spirit of Thanksgiving rather than just spend their days in a tryptophan induced coma while sitting in front of the television watching really bad football. Even the dark days of living alone in a squalid gradual student dump while dining on The Varsity’s fare, served to reinforce and renew my faith in the sanctity of the holiday.

Today, the Thanksgiving holiday is suffering, as I have said previously, from the hegemony of other holidays as well as the criminal and genocidal practices of the people who were at the center of the Thanksgiving mythology. Thanksgiving did not become a holiday until 1863, during Abraham Lincoln’s term. The mythology of the pilgrims and the native Americans which saved their lives was just that, a mythology. Indeed, what the descendants of the pilgrims did to the native American descendants in the name of religion and self-serving interests is absolutely criminal. As a result, there is a call to not observe Thanksgiving, which I think is unfortunate. This would obviate all of the reasons that I have listed as being the driving motivation for my own love of the event, indeed it would also serve the purposes of the commerce minded descendants of the pilgrims and allow Halloween roll straight into Christmas.

In the end, it isn’t the fictional mythology surrounding Thanksgiving or the trite stories of the pilgrims and the native Americans breaking bread together. In the end, it is the people who you choose spend time with: to express gratitude for all that we have, to mark the cycles of life as it flows inexorably onward, to reflect and ruminate upon life, friendship, spirit of the community, and amity, which makes it special.

It wasn’t until much later in my life that I found a piece of writing that profoundly encapsulated the spirit of Thanksgiving in my mind. Ironically it was a Thanksgiving Proclamation written by Governor Wilbur Cross of Connecticut in 1936 which gave the best, most concise, and most profound statement about Thanksgiving for me.

Here it is.

Time out of mind at this turn of the seasons when the hardy oak leaves rustle in the wind and the frost gives a tang to the air and the dusk falls early and the friendly evenings lengthen under the heel of Orion, it has seemed good to our people to join together in praising the Creator and Preserver, who has brought us by a way that we did not know to the end of another year. In observance of this custom, I appoint Thursday, the twenty-sixth of November, as a day of Public Thanksgiving for the blessings that have been our common lot and have placed our beloved State with the favored regions of earth – for all the creature comforts: the yield of the soil that has fed us and the richer yield from labor of every kind that has sustained our lives – and for all those things, as dear as breath to the body, that quicken man’s faith in his manhood, that nourish and strengthen his spirit to do the great work still before him: for the brotherly word and act; for honor held above price; for steadfast courage and zeal in the long, long search after truth; for liberty and for justice freely granted by each to his fellow and so as freely enjoyed; and for the crowning glory and mercy of peace upon our land; – that we may humbly take heart of these blessings as we gather once again with solemn and festive rites to keep our Harvest Home.
Given under my hand and seal of the State at the Capitol, in Hartford, this twelfth day of November, in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and thirty six and of the independence of the United State [sic] the one hundred and sixty-first.
Wilbur L. Cross

I wish you all a most happy, meaningful, and delicious Thanksgiving.

Book Review-Make it Stick

Make It Stick-The Science of Successful Learning

By Peter C. Brown. Henry L. Roediger III, Mark A. McDaniel

A friend recommended that I dive into this book since I was hoping to learn about the latest theories on learning and cognition; one reason for my search is to be a better coach with volleyball athletes, but as it turns out, this book is helping me become a better college professor.

The authors devoted the opening chapter to the myths and sacred cows that we carry in our minds about how we learn and how to best create an environment that is suited for teaching.  They recount the large number of beliefs that many hold dear as the absolutely truth and then give evidence which debunks them one by one.

The central tenet for the book is stated clearly very early in the first chapter:  learning needs memory and the ability to recall from the memory; people will need to continue to learn and remember throughout our lives in order to function; and finally learning is an acquired skill, not a natural skill, one that need to be practiced.

Very early on in this book, the authors laid out their own beliefs. The first is that learning needs to be effortful in order to be effective, that is, we learn better when learning is difficult. They also believe that people tend to be poor judges when it comes to determining how well we learn a subject; we often overestimate our learning prowess. One of their biggest pet myths is that rereading and massed practices - the perennially preferred studying practice of most people - is the worst and least effective practice habit.

What do they believe in? They believe that learning comes from our ability to retrieve knowledge from our memory, and that we need to exercise that memory retrieval constantly in order to makes sure that it is always there for our recall. They believe that the exercise of retrieval and recall needs to be done with built in gaps in timing, i.e. they need to be spaced; they believe in making the repetitions be unpredictable and irregularly spaced in time, i.e. interleaved.  They believe that before being shown how to resolve a problem, the learner needs to wade into the problem without any clue as to how to solve the problem. They believe that searching for and discovering the underlying reasons for a piece of knowledge is much more important that just being able to perform a skill repetitively, although they do acknowledge the importance of being able to repeat a task procedurally.

Although the ideas and methods that is covered in this book is not all completely new to me, the presentation and organization is quite interesting. They can cite a great number of studies in the scientific literature that effectively and sufficiently support their arguments against the stated myths while citing enough studies which also amply support their arguments. The most interesting part of the book came to me after I had read it from cover to cover and was sitting down to review what I had learned. What the authors cleverly did is to use the very desired practices that they are espousing in structuring the book. They spaced the same descriptions of the desired practice repeatedly through the text, they interleaved certain arguments in all the chapters, they gave the reader time and room to discern the underlying principles, and they motivated the reader to elaborate on what they had learned to themselves, at least I did.

I am relatively certain that this was deliberate.  Indeed, I followed the rut that they had called out in their recitation of bad learning habits and strategies as I was reading, rereading, and taking massive amounts of notes in order forcefully lever the ideas into my head. Little did I know that the authors had, by the nature of how the book is structured, created an opportunity for the reader to practice what they had preached.

As I stepped through my memories of the time that I was reading this book, along with a couple of other books on how to best learn, I unintentionally spaced and interleaved my learning from this book because I was switching between books, a practice that I had picked up as a matter of habit as my learning habit throughout my life. The real question is then whether this tactic was successful: did it accomplish the goals in the way that the authors had intended? I can’t speak for the longevity memory retention of the lesson from the book, but I can say that I did spend a lot of time thinking and understanding the underlying principles. I will be able to speak to the longevity of my learning with their preferred methods when someone asks me about the book in a few years, but as of now, I had worked long and hard on learning from this book.

Book Review-Hello World By Hannah Fry

The idea of artificial intelligence, particularly the application of artificial intelligence algorithms in the service of human activities that have always been human based both scare and fascinates us, that idea being a fecund field to harvest for popular literature and films.  We humans, with some of us relying on overdeveloped imaginations, dreams of AI as the solution for everything that ails us. While for other humans, those with an overdramatic sense of pessimism, have nightmares about how human society will be conquered by droids who will eventually destroy us.

The truth I believe, is somewhere in between. One of the problems is that the general layperson has no idea what AI entails and how it works, not how well or how badly it works in real life. The popular media is of no help as they are wont to lean towards the sensational, in both the optimistic and pessimistic directions to enable the selling of papers or website subscriptions.

Fortunately for us, there are people like Hannah Fry, a mathematician, and a hell of a good writer to explain it to us, if not the nuts and bolts of AI, then the results of existing experimental results and how the algorithms are applied to real world problems. To get Prof. Fry’s credentials out of the way, she is an associate professor in mathematics at the University College of London. I am a fan of her writing in the New Yorker, as she has a way of explaining the details and nuances of mathematical topics with great clarity and ease.

The subtitle of the book is: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms. It is both somewhat comforting and a touch menacing at the same time. I took it to be comforting. The title Hello World comes from an example in rudimentary programming classes, the very first program any neophyte programmer writes are programs that outputs: ‘Hello World’ onto the screen. I too, have had the excitement of having those two words present themselves in my computers. So, it is a welcoming sign, it is also a foreshadowing of what is in store for the reader in the succeeding pages.

The book is divided simply into nine total chapters; an Introduction and Conclusion bookends the middle chapters named after seven distinct parts of the human existence as we know it in the 21^st century. They are: Power, Data, Justice, Medicine, Cars, Crime, and Art. While the structure of the book is simple enough, the intent of the book is quite ambitious. Prof. Fry lays out the present and past excursions we humans have made into the realm of using artificial intelligence to alleviate human based computational efforts. Some reasoning which drove us to evolving our decision-making advances along this route involves the perceived and many times a real need for faster and more accurate computations. The faster part is won handily by computers, and most of the time the accuracy part is also won by the computers. What people forget is that first, the computer’s cogitations is only as good as the data and to a much larger degree, the algorithm that it is given.  It is garbage in, and you get garbage out. The parallel effect is that if you have garbage logic cooked into the algorithm, then garbage out as well. The more egregious result then is that garbage analysis and interpretation of the results mean even worse garbage out.

Prof. Fry goes through each of the seven topics and demonstrates where the human propensity for bias creates disastrous errors in inference and in computing the wrong numbers or asking the wrong questions. On the other hand, she also takes great pains to explain why computers are much better suited to not just doing the computations quickly but to also make decisions quickly and at times more accurately. One would think that the main arguments in a book such as this are all along the lines of: it is game over, let the silicon-based lifeform govern our existence, but that is not the case. Prof. Fry explores and negotiates the complex and nonlinear landscape of what we humans have done in experimentation with designing and allowing algorithms to make decisions for us in order to get at the clearest picture yet of what AI can do for and against us.

She tells us stories of how Gary Kasparov, chess master, the very epitome of human decision-making prowess, became seduced by the idea of the AI, after having been beaten by Big Blue. She tells us about how a self-driving car is supposed to navigate our highways and byways, but still can not do so safely. She, most disturbingly, tells us how our government, in their attempts to simplify and creating accurate decision-making processes had wreaked havoc in our society, thereby creating equality issues in how justice is dealt out to us. Indeed, I found the chapters on Data, Justice, Medicine, and Crime the scariest and the most fascinating because those chapters hit the closest to home. The idea that our faceless bureaucracy places their trust on unrealistic, biased, and logically error ridden algorithms to handle our privacy data, decide on long term guilt and innocence of our fellow humans, cure what ails us, and solve problems due to human proclivity to trespass on our fellow beings is decidedly unsettling to say the least.

In every chapter, however, Prof. Fry collects and organizes the stories in easily digestible and logically intuitive chunks, giving us cogent arguments for her opinions.  In the Conclusion, she lays out her case, buttressed by the facts and gave me quite a bit to think about, after of course, educating me on the nuances of the intricate and logically confounding sequence of action, reaction, and unintended consequences, which we are not very able to predict a priori.

My belief is that this is a must read for all cogent human beings who live in todays’ world of technological abundance. We can not live without fully understanding how decisions are made by algorithms, most importantly, we need to understand how those decisions can be wrong. In addition, we must also learn how we can leverage the algorithms so that the computational tools can be used in conjunction with those areas of cogitation where we human have an  advantage and succeed in creating a more perfect society.

Book Review-Practice Perfect 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better

By Doug Lemov, Erica Woolway, and Katie Yezzi

This book was recommended to me by someone who’s opinions I highly respect. He told me that this was a good read if you wanted to look at how to plan, execute, and follow through with the  perfect practices; and the word “practice” imply practicing skill and techniques in general terms. The authors are teachers and their focus are on helping teachers practice their craft on their students as well as with their peers. I was looking for a book for best practices which incorporates lessons learned regarding the latest research in the cognitive sciences. This book sounded intriguing, so I gave it a go.

 

I had dual purpose, I was looking for ways to improve my coaching processes as well as for my teaching processes. One is in junior sports, the other is in collegiate level STEM education. Most of the time,  people feel like teaching is a relative simple task and that we can just teach as we have been taught, that might be true in some specific instances but that is not true if you was aiming to be efficient and effective in their teaching and coaching roles. Indeed, this book incorporates many of the latest results culled from academic researchers on how people learn. The results debunks many myths that we had all taken for granted. The detailed descriptions of the process and the sequence which the teacher needs to practice their craft is also quite enlightening.

The book is divided into seven parts with 42 different “rules” distributed amongst the seven parts. The seven parts are:

·       Rethinking Practice

·       How To Practice

·       Using Modelling

·       Feedback

·       Culture of Practice

·       Post Practice: Making New Skills Stick

·       Conclusion: The Monday Morning Test.

The seven parts neatly encapsulates and help the reader build the process of learning about the practice and how to best plan out and deal with practices. The seven parts easily leads the reader into a logical sequence of concepts and ideas. The first two parts were of the most interest to me, as the the first part is making the argument for reconsidering the standard pedagogy. The third and fourth parts walks the reader through the process by which they can obtain the best results. The fifth part talks about the most difficult part: how to be disciplined and how to develop a culture which will sustain a continuous culture of diligent practice. The last two parts are excellent reminders to the reader about how to successfully implement and execute the rules.

In a many way this is a very rational and attractive structure for the book, as the readers are led easily through the material. The “rules are” discussed in chapter and explained via copious amount of details and examples. Each of the rules ends with a list of individual bullet points to remind the reader of the key salient points of emphasis. The narrative is very well done and the examples, while very much focused on teaching and education, they are explained in relatively broad terms, enabling the reader to easily extrapolate the lessons to other areas.

In some way’s however, in their haste to make the 42 rules into 42 easily digested lessons, I felt that there is some amount of connections that have been sacrificed in the simplicity of the book structure. The authors apparently feel the same way as they are quite cognizant not missing any connecting knowledge, they refer to the succeeding and preceding rules to create a connecting whole, but it is still noticeable.

The best thing of the book is that it is readily understandable, and it is flexible enough to be many things because of its structure. One can use the book as a reminder of a specific list, or it can serve as a very specific outline of the best practices in teaching and coaching.

The authors have put forth a very readable and usable book. The lessons in the book are readily integrated by the reader, practical, and well rooted in the education world, and it was a very enjoyable read.

Volleyball Coaching Life-An Appreciation for Mike Hebert

I had met Mike Hebert a handful of times, had some nice chats with him during the times we would see one another in between sessions at the AVCA convention. He was a hero to me and probably many others. His accomplishments are many and his influence on how we see and play the game of volleyball in the United States is immense. I don’t want to give the wrong impressions: he did not mentor me in my coaching, we did not have deep conversations fueled by adult beverages long into the night, and we did not share any war stories together while out on the long road which dominates the life of a volleyball coach; even though it did feel like he mentored me, it did feel like we had long and deep conversations, it did feel like we had gone through the wars together, all because of his wisdom and his willingness to share. Mainly he communicated: he spoke, he wrote, and he shared. Through those means of communications and through various haphazardous links with those in his coaching tree, I learned about volleyball the Hebert Way.

I was eager to read his first book, Insights & Strategies for Winning Volleyball

 (M. R. Hebert 1995). I was just dipping my toes in the volleyball coaching world, and it helped that he was the head volleyball coach at my alma mater: University of Illinois. He arrived on campus just as I was graduating from my undergraduate studies, so we didn’t overlap at all. I chewed on and digested his chapters piecemeal. I looked to implement his Primary Hitter System to disastrous results, not through his explanations, but through my own poor understanding of the game and my insensitivity towards my player’s needs. The fact that I was coaching 14 and under really did not make the choice sensible or productive, yet I kept on trying to absorb as much as I can from the book, as well as trying to interpret what he is saying within my own context.

When he left Illinois to go to Minnesota, my heart broke a little because of my loyalties, but I understood that changing universities is a part of being a successful coach. I cheered on the Gophers as well as the Illini from that point onward. As I started to attend the AVCA conventions, I made it a point to attend his sessions on any and every topic. In 2011, he gave the Pre-convention seminar with Shelton Collier, who coincidentally was at one time the head coach of my other alma mater, Georgia Tech. The dynamic duo captivated my attention, they gave a brilliant talk about building a gym culture, not just the fact that you needed to build a gym culture but what purpose that gym culture served and how you would go about building that culture. Once again, I took their lessons and implemented on my teams, this time to much greater success than what I had previously experienced.

In that seminar, he told the Hebert original Pakistani chop serve story. I had heard it before, but I enjoyed the story regardless. Those who knew the story had the same Cheshire cat grin as I did, while the others in the seminar were furiously writing down the description of this supposedly lethal and effective serve. Until Mike hit them with the punchline. I was giddy to be in the know as I looked around at the others who knew the story and shared a conspiratorial smile. This was pure Mike, a bit of snark to lead you to the truth.

In the meantime, I had read his personal story in Mike Hebert, The Fire Still Burns (Mike Hebert 1993). I gained more respect for the man, learning of his experiences in the Peace Corp as well as his journey from Santa Barbara to Pittsburgh to Illinois. I was especially interested in his sojourn through the gradual school process and how he had attained his degree, as I had followed the same path. It made me feel a kinship with him knowing that we had gone through the fires of hell that is the doctoral process.

As Minnesota became more successful and more visible in the national collegiate volleyball stage, I always cheered for the Gophers even though I had no connections with the school. I wanted my hero in coaching to win the ultimate prize in collegiate volleyball.

I was, of course, devastated for him when he announced his retirement and revealed his Parkinson’s diagnosis. Yet, the man still managed to surprise. He wrote his final book: Thinking Volleyball (M. Hebert 2013) in 2013. Indeed, I bought the book from the man himself after one of his AVCA sessions. As I was also buying the book for a good friend, I asked Mike to sign them both. I gave him my friend’s name and he stopped and looked at me to ask: “Is this for so-so from XYZ University?” I replied in the affirmative and he happily signed and said: He’s a good friend, tell him I said hi. My friend was just a little pleased to hear that.

The book of course was a much-appreciated upgrade on his Insight & Strategies book. More than that, it was a summary of a lifetime spent working in a profession he loved and in service to a sport that had been an obsession for him since he was very young. You can read the passion in his words and sense the breadth of his intellectual horizon in his incisive analysis. It is still one of the most treasured volleyball books that I own.

One thing that I will remember from my limited interaction with the man is his kindness and his sense of humor. I was at the convention when Shelton Collier introduced me to him. I was fanboying in a major way and as I shook his hand, he introduced himself. I was thinking: Uh yeah, everybody knows who you are. I introduced myself and he said: I know you, I read your comments on Volleyball Coaches and Trainers and on VolleyTalk. The fact that he recognized my name made two things abundantly clear, he reads the postings in fine detail and that my alias on VolleyTalk is worthless.

I can not truly express just how much I learned from the man, through his writing and his talks. The originality of his ideas and the ability that he possessed to communicate his ideas to the audience is remarkable. It was like talking to your favorite college professor, except it was on volleyball, and he realize that the passion that he has for the sport is shared by you.

The volleyball world has lost a great coach and intellectual. We will sorely miss his wisdom.

I wrote this on his Facebook page as a farewell, and I mean it truly.

Thank you for your kindness and generosity with your time and knowledge. You won't know just how much of an impact you had made on the life of this dilettante engineer/volleyball coach, but you have helped me define my philosophy and affected my coaching life profoundly. Your thirst for knowledge and willingness to talk to everyone who loved volleyball is infectious and inspirational.

Rest In Peace @monkeyboy (Coach Hebert’s alias on VolleyTalk)

References

Hebert, Michael R. 1995. Insights & Strategies for Winning Volleyball. Champaign IL: Leisure Press.

Hebert, MIke. 2013. Thinking Volleyball. Champaign IL: Human Kinetics Inc.

Mike Hebert, Dave Johnson. 1993. Mike Hebert the Fire Still Burns. Sagamore Press LLC.

Book Review-Range By David Epstein

This is a long-awaited publication for me. David Epstein wrote one of my favorite books about the nature of sports, The Sports Gene. There had been plenty of publicity regarding his followup, Range. This book takes on the cult of the specialist, as Epstein puts it. He is specifically targeting the societal and cultural domination of the specialist versus the generalist. This discussion seems to be following me around, as I read three books in succession which cites Isaiah Berlin’s essay citing the Greek poet Achilochus when he said that: “The Fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows many things.” Berlin was making the point regarding the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy and whether Tolstoy, and hos War and Peace was writing as a fox or as a hedgehog. One can, and many have, extrapolated the concept to talk about people and their approach to problems and their ability to analyze and solve problems. Epstein comes down squarely on the side of the fox, whereas he sees the world as being predisposed to and is filled with hedgehogs. He does go into a bit of details about how that came to be in the early chapters. The main thrust of the book is to discuss whether the specialist is necessarily the best world view for someone who is operating as a solver of complex problems. Epstein structures the book simply: he lays out the problem and with each chapter he makes his case by telling stories that are collected together thematically in each chapter. The first few chapters lay out the premise of his argument and each succeeding chapter presents a new theme which supports Epstein’s argument. He is meticulous in presenting anecdotes as well as research results. He does an excellent job of presenting the supporting stories with great story telling skills and allows the reader to become absorbed in the narrative. He also delves into other ideas which are quite recent to bolster his point: he goes into enough details about the Daniel Kahneman book Thinking: Fast and Slow, Angela Duckworth’s Grit, as well as Carole Dweck’s Mindset, delving into the gist of those books and using those concepts to argue his own theme. He also takes on the popular but misrepresented 10,000-hour rule popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, in fact he has convinced Gladwell of his own argument. This is a very nice read and causes one to think about each of the chapters separately while never losing track of the overarching theme that Epstein had presented to us. Indeed, this is one of the major reasons that I recommend this book: it never loses track of the main argument, returning to it regularly enough to encourage thought but is never overzealous in reiterating the main theme. The reader feels like they are on a journey through many different topics while also assured that there is a purpose to this journey. It is a very quick read; the writing moves along nicely while it also allows for slower and deeper contemplation of each chapter.

Book Review-The Infidel and the Professor by Dennis C. Rasmussen

I had been curious about David Hume’s life for a long time but had not yet found a biography that appealed to me. I did not know of his relationship with Adam Smith, I had thought of Adam Smith as an intellect who dealt strictly with economic philosophy. This book brought these two great men of intellect in my mind’s eye. It very effectively told the story of two opposites, a gregarious extravert, David Hume with an introvert that wasn’t as engaging on a social front. The book was laid out chronologically, tracing both men’s lives as it evolved from when they first met until Hume’s passing and beyond, detailing every important aspect of their intertwined lives as loyal friends, effective critics, and sounding boards for each other’s philosophical ideas. The story traces the roots of their friendship as diligently as possible since Smith was an infrequent letter writer. The author, Rasmussen, had to piece together the historical narrative with bits of documentation other people’s surviving writing along with writing from their friends and peers, sometimes squeezing out details through tangential correspondences. Hume contributed mightily as he was a prolific letter writer, so his letters to others helped Rasmussen in this regard. It must have taken a tremendous amount of mental gymnastics and conjecturing for Rasmussen to write a compelling of a narrative as he did here. It was especially fascinating to follow the author along as he tried to reconstruct their debates and friendly thrust and parry on their significant works. The depth of the philosophical arguments and the nuances brought forth by the author was impressive. Even as I was trying to read this with a skeptical eye, the author never overreached his narrative and his conjectures as to the original meaning of the authors were well supported and logical in his conclusions. It is fascinating to essentially reconstruct the debates that these men had over their most intimate thoughts and works. The book was not strictly a restatement of their thoughts however, the author did a remarkable job discussing the event of the day and of their lives and how the current events of the day affected their thoughts and their lives. There was a good amount of discussion regarding each of the men’s employment, as tutors to the wealthy and secretaries to politically well-connected diplomats and other government officials. They both eventually settled down to bucolic lives working as professors in their universities, Hume in Edinburgh and Smith in Glasgow. While the discussion of Hume’s famously anti-religious arguments, The Infidel in the book title referred to Hume, versus Smith’s perceived acquiescence to the religious orthodoxy was very revealing in this recounting: the author states that even though Smith was less overt with his questions regarding the religious orthodoxy of the time – it would be difficult to be as overt as Hume in his opposition to the church – he apparently had more points of agreements with Hume than differences, even though he took pains to ameliorated it to avoid being reviled by those other men of letters at the time. Hume had no such compunctions, indeed, he seemed to delight in tweaking the religious in his irreligiosity It cost him dearly as he was denied employment as professor early on. What is fascinating is the description of how they two friends helped each other in sharpening and developing their arguments represented by their written works. The author patiently and painstakingly traced the discussions between the two friends as they composed their philosophical works over their lifetimes. It is a fascinating intellectual history recounted for our sake. The arguments were recreated through citations and expert interpretations, it presented the points of agreements and disagreements closely and in an unadorned fashion. Even though the explanations were sometimes complex, as all philosophical explanations can be, it was never boring. The discussion of Hume’s work wound its way from his less than enthusiastically received A Treatise of Human Nature to the two enquiries: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals through his Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, and to his most famous work, although it was a work of history rather than philosophy: The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688. The narrative of their friendship continued until Hume passed and proceeded beyond that as Smith acted as more or less Hume’s philosophical and literary executor, as he defended his friends’ beliefs after his passing. He did not allow the gossip of the day to distort or misrepresent Hume’s staunch irreligiosity. He made sure that Hume’s brief, but final autobiography, David Hume: My Life, be published posthumously as Hume had wanted. That was a testament to a true friendship, representing a friend as he wanted to be represented. The story presented in this book also did not shortchange Smith. The author took pains to present the entirety of Smith’s works and did not try to sequester his thoughts to his most famous work, The Wealth of Nations, as many others have previously tried to do. The author did well in tracing the thread of Smith’s thought and described how The Theory of Moral Sentiment made The Wealth of Nation possible. Indeed, this book was a revelation to someone like me, a dilettante in philosophy and history, it served as an excellent introduction to the genre and it made my intellectual life so much better.