# 11 Jul 2018, 12:12PM: Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges:
Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy by Tressie McMillan Cottom (2017, The New Press) is simply excellent. Here's an excerpt, here's Dr. McMillan Cottom's page about the book, here's her Twitter.
It's a book that makes scholarship accessible to a non-academic reader. It's a book that uses the author's experiences -- as a student, as an admissions sales rep, as a teacher, as a researcher, as a black woman, as a friend and daughter -- to vividly illustrate and bring the reader into theoretical understandings of systems, policy, and economic forces. It's sociology, it's investigative journalism, it's memoir, it's a lens on something I see every day (those subway/bus ads for education). It's witty and no-nonsense.
I thought I already knew that a lot of for-profit colleges were pretty bad. McMillan Cottom shows why they exist, why they are as they are, and what it'd take to change those forces. I understand the labor market better and I am now even more against mandatory degree requirements for job candidates. I understand the US student debt crisis better and understand why it's connected to the same forces that are making healthcare and retirement worse and worse in the US. Just to quote from the first few chapters (I captured many quotes because she makes so many great points):
As it turns out, there is such a thing as "bad" education. It is an educational option that, by design, cannot increase students' odds of beating the circumstances of their birth....
...the way we work shapes what kind of credentials we produce. If we have a shitty credentialing system, in the case of for-profit colleges, then it is likely because we have a shitty labor market. To be more precise, we have a labor market where the social contract between workers and the work on which college has previously relied has fundamentally changed and makes workers vulnerable.
While there is a lot of academic debate about the extent of that change and whether it signals progress or decline, there is substantial evidence that suggests all of those changes shift new risks to workers....
Whether you are a kindergarten teacher, an admissions counselor, or a college professor, working in education is a lot like being a priest. You shepherd people's collective faith in themselves and their trust in social institutions....
Despite our shift to understanding higher education as a personal good, we have held on to the narrative of all education being inherently good and moral. Economists E. Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson call this the education gospel: our faith in education as moral, personally edifying, collectively beneficial, and a worthwhile investment no matter the cost, either individual or societal....The contradiction is that we don't like to talk about higher education in terms of jobs, but rather in terms of citizenship and the public good, even when that isn't the basis of our faith....
I particularly want to recommend this book to people starting, running, working for, or affiliated with for-profit educational institutions, and yes, beyond code schools and programming bootcamps, I include the Recurse Center and other similar experiments. You may not think of yourself as an educational institution, and you may even try really hard to brand yourself without the word "educate" or any of its derivatives showing up in what you say about yourself. But you ought to know the landscape you're in, and the reasons for the credentialism you may pooh-pooh, and how your choices around accreditation, tuition, participant debt, credentialing, and vocational focus may differently affect participants of different classes and races.
I read this book in February and it's still on track to be the best book I read this year.
# 18 Jul 2018, 11:42AM: Fear And Motion:
The other day I went on a little bike ride in my neighborhood, for exercise and to check mail at my post office box. I walked part of the way because sometimes I just didn't feel safe biking on the road, especially when construction blocks the bike lane and forces bicyclists to merge into the main traffic lane.
Some thoughts I had along the way:
- It just doesn't feel safe to share the road with cars. I wish it were legal for adults to ride on the sidewalk when it's safe to do so (when it won't cause danger to pedestrians, or to cars coming in and out of driveways).*
- Just as we Americans, when travelling abroad, plaintively wish that others would distinguish between America-the-government and Americans-the-people (as in, I myself am not representative of what my government does and please don't paint us all with the same broad brush), I imagine a bunch of Russians in the US right now deserve better than they're getting. I myself have said "Russians" or "the Russians" when I mean "the government of Russia" and should stop doing that.
- It's bitterly funny how I carry proof of my US citizenship with me when I leave my apartment, as though it were an amulet of protection, as though I will be able to force racists to honor my store coupon.
Today I feel better. I biked again today and tried a different street -- usually it's a busier thoroughfare, but today it had fewer cars, and (at my current stage of biking skill) I prefer the clarity of stoplights to the uncertainty of two-way-stop intersections. And - joy! - I biked home in the shade, which made me feel safer, because the sun in a motorist's eyes makes it harder for them to see me (the one time a car hit my bike, the sun was in the driver's eyes). I was able to bike the whole way to my destination and back.
After I came home, I reread a little more of Pat Barker's Regeneration, my current comfort reading. A main character, an anthropologist and psychologist, is counseling British veterans of trench warfare during World War I. He sees how their helplessness and immobility in the face of constant onslaught traumatizes them. I remembered a thing Mel Chua has taught in her "educational psychology for free-range learners" talk, about the factors affecting self-efficacy -- when you feel stuck and helpless while trying to learn something, it can help to get up, to stretch, to walk around, to remind yourself that you are in control of your own body. And I thought about what activities I genuinely find rejuvenating, taking me out of my worries and into the sensations and experience of the present moment and changing my experience of time. pidge once wrote, about motorcycling:
I ride because it makes me sane. It clears my head. It allows me to feel a sense of freedom. It's my 900cc therapy. When you are heading down I-5 at a speed that certainly isn’t legal, all of the bullshit that is in your head, all of your distractions, it gets the hell out or you turn into a wet smear on the asphalt. You are focused on nothing but the next quarter mile that will pass you buy at 9 seconds or so.
Over and over I find inertia drawing me to a sedentary life, and then over and over I inhabit my body and surprise myself with how much I love strenuously using it, how nourishing and joyful it is to power new journeys with my muscles. I hope I remember a little better this time.
* I looked up New York State traffic rules and New York City traffic rules to confirm; yup, as an adult, I am not allowed to ride my bike on the sidewalk. Side note: both the NYS Vehicle and Traffic laws and New York City Department of Transportation traffic rules have specific rules pertaining to horses, but neither of them defines "horse". In one case the NYC traffic rules refer to a "horse or other beast of burden" in case you want to use that while obscurely complaining to your housemate about carrying groceries.
# 18 Jul 2018, 06:58PM: Libraries.io and the Infrastructure of Hospitality:
So many times in my life in open source tools and platforms, I've run into the following problem:
We want to make a breaking change/prioritize work/get feedback.
Let's check with our downstreams.
How do we find and communicate with them?
Uhhhh.
We have stopgaps inside the application (like in-app and in-API messaging, Wikipedia banners) and outside (like creating users and announce mailing lists, publicizing social media broadcast venues, searching the web/GitHub for projects and people that mention/import our tool and pinging them personally).
Now, Libraries.io makes it way easier to be hospitable to my downstreams.
I co-maintain Twine, a utility that many developers use to upload packages to PyPI. We released 1.11.0 in March. The Libraries.io page about Twine shows me who's using it (see the screenshot on the left), and I can dive deeper to check who's pinned to an old version so I can ping them to check what's up. (Sometimes that conversation tells me about a problem in our upstream dependencies that I didn't know about.) If I want to survey some users to find out whether a particular breaking change would hurt them, this makes it way easier to find some representative users to ask, not just the power users and enthusiasts who take the initiative to reach out to me.
Libraries.io has an API so I could even automate some of this. And libraries.io covers npm, CRAN, PyPI, RubyGems, Maven, and a bunch more package managers across different languages and frameworks, so I'll see downstreams that aren't just in Python.
And the code is open source in case I want to understand how they rank projects in search results or add tox.ini support in their dependency checker.
I started drafting this post in March, and in the interim, I did a little paid work for Tidelift, the company that stewards libraries.io. So, disclaimer, I'm a bit biased now. But I thought libraries.io was supercool before Tidelift and I ever thought of working together. I'm glad the Ford and Sloan Foundations funded the initial version of this tool and I'm glad Tidelift is funding and using it now; it's already very useful, and I see it as part of the infrastructure that lets maintainers and users understand each other's needs.
# 29 Jul 2018, 03:02PM: "Python Grab Bag: A Set of Short Plays" Accepted for PyGotham 2018:
Fresh from the waitlist onto the schedule: Jason Owen and I will be performing "Python Grab Bag: A Set of Short Plays" at PyGotham in early October. If you want to come see us perform, you should probably register soon. I don't yet know whether we'll perform on Friday, Oct. 5 or Saturday, Oct. 6.
(The format will be similar to the format I used in "Lessons, Myths, and Lenses: What I Wish I'd Known in 1998" (video, partial notes), but some plays will be more elaborate and theatrical -- much more like our inspiration "The Infinite Wrench".)
To quote the session description:
A frenetic combination of educational and entertaining segments, as chosen by the audience! In between segments, audience members will shout out numbers from a menu, and we'll perform the selected segment. It may be a short monologue, it may be a play, it may be a physical demo, or it may be a tiny traditional conference talk.
Audience members should walk away with some additional understanding of the history of Python, knowledge of some tools and libraries available in the Python ecosystem, and some Python-related amusement.
So now Jason and I just have to find a director, write and memorize and rehearse and block probably 15-20 Python-related plays/songs?/dances?/presentations, acquire and set up some number of props, figure out lights and sound and visuals, possibly recruit volunteers to join us for a few bits, run some preview performances to see whether the lessons and jokes land, and perform our opening (also closing) performance. In 68 days.
(Simultaneously: I have three clients, and want to do my bit before the midterm elections, and work on a fairly major apartment-related project with Leonard, and and and and.)
Jason, thank you for the way your eyes lit up on the way back from PyCon when I mentioned this PyGotham session idea -- I think your enthusiasm will energize me when I'm feeling overwhelmed by the ambition of this project, and I predict I'll reciprocate the favor! PyGotham program committee & voters, thank you for your vote of confidence. Leonard, thanks in advance for your patience with me bouncing out of bed to write down a new idea, and probably running many painfully bad concepts past you. Future Sumana, it's gonna be ok. It will, possibly, be great. You're going to give that audience an experience they've never had before.
[Main] You can hire me through Changeset Consulting.
This work by Sumana Harihareswara is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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