I have been teaching Plato to my children this summer for an hour each weekday. All of of have enjoyed it. They’re learning an immense amount, with zero homework or tests. I myself am learning an immense amount, with zero prep, and getting all kind of insights into current events— covid-19, the Woke Attack, Black Lives Matters riots, academic intrigues, writing style, translation… (Well, these last aren’t current events, or, rather, they are recurring, always current, events.) The only downside is my natural laziness, the Mephistophelean desire to do nothing at all, which I’ve overcome fairly easily in this case, and the difficulty of coordinating the four of us when Faith has online cello lessons, Ben works at Five Guys, Lily has frequent but erratically scheduled meetings with friends, and I have online seminars and various fires to fight. Today I arose only reluctantly at 9:55 am for our 10:00 session, having stayed up till 1:45 reading Day of the Jackal. Yesterday I arose less tired but equally reluctantly at 9:30, having stayed up till 6:45 putting together notes on the fraudulent nature of the Bostock legal pleadings. But both days, even I enjoyed our sessions as we talked of Music vs. Gymnastics, Constaninople vs. Byzantium vs. Istanbul, selection effects and causality in how jocks behave, Oedipus v. Elektra, Greek manuscripts, and how author, editor, Indian typesetter, and printer some to together to create typos in finished books.
I am at the blessed age of 61 where I have read and thought enough that I can dispense wisdom without preparation. I now see why being a professor in the humanities is such a great job, and how overpaid they are. My salary is $198,170. History professor Rebecca Spang’s is $115,350. (Note: At UCLA Gordon Klein is paid about $200,000 as an accounting lecturer and Dean Antonio Bernardo was about about $500,000 as a finance professor– maybe tops in the country— before he was dean.) I think we’re both pretty good in research; though I don’t know academic history reputations, I admire what I see of her thoughts on French Revolution government bonds, the history of restaurants, and odd forms of currency. (I know her from following her on Twitter and from her being Head Honcho of the local academic senate when I was on it. Don’t trust her judgement on political issues, by the way; she’s no better than the typical professor.) Professor Spang is overpaid. She gets to teach history, and I expect she gets to teach graduate classes sometimes. I am in the business school and I have to teach economics to undergraduates and MBA students. Economics is actually a pretty good subject to teach, but not as fun as history, and it is a problem-set subject. The teacher has to use a lot of graphs and numbers, and that takes prep and care even if you’ve taught the class many times. You’re constantly confusing numbers and drawing lines that don’t meet in the right place unless you’re on your toes. The students all think it ought to be easier than it is, and you’re trying to teach logic at the same time as regulatory economics or supply-and-demand. You have to take care, too, to not ride roughshod over their religious and political beliefs, or to be too biased yourself. This is not because of political correctness, though of course I’ve gotten in trouble for that. It is because as a good teacher you want to teach students what is fact, what is true theory, and what is opinion, conjecture, and preference. Economics is about the hardest subject for untangling that, because we have lots of all five of those things even at the undergrad level. Teaching climate science or social psychology would be equally difficult. Moreover, while it is still possible to learn a lot while teaching, since basic ideas like supply and demand are profound enough to occupy a lifetime, the students are too ignorant to see the profundity, unlike when you ask them whether Music and Gymnastics are both important to growing up to be a good citizen. So if we’re talking fairness, the humanities people have it backwards; I should be paid much more than twice what a history professor is paid.
I used to think the market shows this. The conventional wisdom is that it’s easy to get a job as an economics professor, but desperately hard to get a job as a history professors. The economist’s explanation is that economics professors are underpaid and history professors are overpaid. A potential economics professor like me could be in consulting instead, and earn $1,000,000 instead of $200,000. (My college roommate, academically a tad weaker, is partner at a law firm where the average compensation is way above that.) Returning to our point here, the economics professor in a business school has to teach economics to undergrads and MBAs. I think few history professors would be willing to switch places. I don’t know about economics professors wanting to switch to teaching history. I would switch, except the History Department faculty would probably all resign rather than accept someone who thinks like an economist, much less this particular economist, however good at history research I might be. One thing about economics, too, is that a dissident with unusual political views has in the past had no problem getting tenure so long as he publishes lots of papers in good journals. The Dean might have objected, and people elsewhere on campus would, but they don’t know the guy’s personal politics until it’s too late. And the economist’s colleagues just want talent. They don’t care about personal politics, and while being obnoxious is a negative, it’s such a small negative that it would only take maybe 10% more publications to outweight being the most obnoxious person in the profession (I won’t name him, but he writes for the New York Times and consulted for Enron). Of course, the Woke Attack of 2020 is showing that this is probably no longer true, but it was true in, at least, 2005.
I have digressed. That’s another reason I like teaching Plato. Digressions are often better than the main material, and excursions to side topics should be part of every teacher’s journey through it. My old teacher Paul Samuelson was famous for it. I think someone in one of his classes once counted five layers of digression within digression, all coming back to the scheduled topic at the end. But in my university classes, I feel I must cover the material I put on the syllabus, and I feel I must base my tests and grades on that material rather than the digressions, even if hte digressions are more important. This cramps my style. And, of course, writing problem sets and tests and paper assignments and grading them is a chore. With home schooling, I skip all that.
And my home schooling students are my children, who make a great class. We homeschooled Ben and Lily for their 7th and 5th grades, and I’d forgotten how well that worked. I taught math, theology, and programming; my wife taught the other subjects. Having pretty widely differing ages is very helpful, as I should haven known from what my father told me about when he was in one-room school with his cousins in rural Illinois growing up. Ben (18) knows lots more about everything, but especially history and vocabulary, and likes to bring up troublesome objections and be contrary, in a polite way. (My wife says, “Oh, no— he’s just like Grandpa and you.”) Lily (16) is perceptive and has the best reading voice as they take parts reading through The Republic, which is a dialog of Socrates in conversation with the young men Glaucon and Adeimantus. Faith (14) can’t be expected to know as much, so I usually start with asking her the question of what “Hagia Sophia” means or what year the Roman Empire fell or what she knows about the Armenian genocide, before working up the ladder to first Lily and then Ben. And Faith helps by having the most happy enthusiasm when she detects a point.
I could say a lot more, but I ought to be getting back to thinking about ostracism in rural Japan.
So I’ll just add some quick notes on a new project. It is to teach “Writing, Talking, and Listening Revised” to people. A few days ago a young man who’s a friend of mine phoned and said he had a somewhat strange request. I asked what it was, and he said, “To give me lessons”. I said, “In what?”, and he replied “Anything”. After saying some things about me which I won’t repeat here, since you, gentle readers, already know great I am, he said he wondered if I might just come up with something I’d like to teach. He has studied Chinese, and he has the right idea: find a sensei, and let him decide what you need to learn, because the whole reason you need a sensei is you don’t know what you need to know. This is an advance over Socrates, who merely knew he didn’t know— but Socrates, I think, knew the questions he didn’t know the answers to, at least–or claimed to. And this is how PhD students learn after they finish their second year and their formal class requirements. They get an adviser, who tells them they need to read Strunk and White on writing, or learn the Python “Pandas” library, or read Tirole’s industrial organization book cover to cover.
And, of course, the sensei needs to set up the course, though the good sensei takes all the help he can get from his students. (Doing Plato outside on the deck was student suggestion, and students made the fancy laminated bookmarks, and they decide each day who is to read which character.) The main reason I started writing this blogpost was that I know I have to get the ball rolling, or I’ll never get to it. So what shall I do?
Here are some thoughts. I’ll come back to this in a few days.
1. Have a weekly 1-hour session at a rigid time– say, 4-5pm.
2. Do it on my deck, rain or shine (buy a covering), but zoom it. Do not record it, though, and restrict entry so as to avoid the gestapo recording it.
3. Go through my old (2003?) “Aphorisms on Writing, Talking, and Listening” line by line. Have students read them. Interrupt, discuss, and add. I’d have my laptop open.
4. Maybe I would do it like Fischer Black’s famous Questions PhD finance course. We were six in the class: 3 well-informed finance PhD students who were scared of him and 3 more ignorant econ PhD students who weren’t, and excellent combination. Fischer Black, a math PhD who moved to finance and the Perfect Nerd, would stand in front in his three-piece suit and read the day’s question. We students would then discuss it. He’d stand there silent, scribbling notes on a piece of paper. When the discussion wound down, he’d say something. THen we’d move on to the next question. THere were no assigned readings, just a huge list of readings which included what were probably the entire Collected Works of Fischer Black, including his investment newsletters from the early 1970’s. I forget how he graded; I was just an auditor. (I should ask Steve Zeldes, a fellow-student in the class.)
5. I would use this to revise and update my Aphorisms, which I’d publish online for free and as an E-book and bound book for whatever a publisher found profit-maximizing conditional on there being a free online edition.
6. I would get round to writing up my Tips on Online Seminars and we’d look at them first, since there is urgent need to get them circulated and implemented.
7. I would start with just local people in-person, letting that build as convenient. Then I’d invite outsiders to register to view on zoom, with text questions and themsevles on video but not on sound. Mabye I’d start with just the one young man who asked, so as to get moving quickly.
8. I’d write up the problem of giving and taking advicd as part of this. Include the story fo the girl who was offended by her boss givign her Strunk and White.
9. Decoupling college discussion would be part of this too. And Ron Unz is interested in having me (and others) write onteh future of colleges. This experiment would help inform us.