Failure is an option

I had the privilege, at one point in my life, of being part of a team of individuals who managed all of the faculty evaluations for the nearly 1200 professors at a particular university in the area. We had a psychometrician who crafted the surveys each year to answer, not only how the courses were performing, and what students thought about the material, but also how changes in the curriculum were affecting an individual professor's performance. Our educational demographer could pinpoint which faculty needed extra support. I fed the ongoing data into a performance model to help individual faculty make a strong case for tenure.

The one thing we never asked was how students felt about their professors.

Reading student course evaluations is one of the most disheartening things a professor can do. Even when a class goes particularly well, there is at least one curmudgeon who can't resist calling you "boring," or saying that this area of study is, "stupid." In most terms, there are one or two students who will rate a professor at the bottom in every category as a means of expressing their anger or angst. If there are one or two such evaluations, you throw them out as outlying non-significant data; if there are several, it is time to intervene with that professor.

For good or for ill, the course evaluation process at the art institute is about as poorly put together as it possibly could be. I became aware of this early on: like the good little sociologist I am, I spent an afternoon in the summer of 06 in the advising office making them pull piles of evaluations from sculpture, painting, and art and tech. There is really only one god part of the evaluation – it asks clearly if there was a syllabus to the class (typically, no), how much you spent on materials (varies from about $20 to $1,000), and a few other clear measurables. Then, the second half of the evaluation makes it clear that you are engaged in a popularity contest, and asks question after question about why you liked your professor, or, in most cases, why not.

I say in most cases because, if a professor is doing much teaching, they are trying to push students into becoming something more than they could on their own. And if you are really happy with a person who has pushed you into doing something that you wouldn't otherwise be inclined to do, then you have a degree of moral flexibility that I, personally, find uncomfortable.

By stark contrast however, there are individuals who, no matter how many ways you try to help, they cannot be helped. No matter what you put in their path, they stay precisely where they are. Oh, and not infrequently, they don't show up to class, or complete their work on time, or participate clearly in discussion, or reflect on their own performance.

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle claimed that virtue is habitual. That is, " the condition of being virtuous is in the formation and keeping of virtuous habits, not in the individual acts themselves." Professional success is the result more of your daily habits than any single accomplishment.

Chuck Close said it a little more clearly, " Amateurs worry about inspiration. The rest of us show up and get to work."

In the conditioning necessary to practice Japanese sword fighting, one starts by repeating the same 10,000 sword cuts every morning for a year in precisely the same manner as every other swordsperson. The muscles have to learn that that odd turn which you are leaving in you’re ankle will exhaust you just a little more quickly – not so you can fight for longer (the average samurai duel lasts less than three seconds), but rather because that odd position makes you 10% weaker, and probably means that your shoulder is 10% exposed. And by the time you realize that, you are dead.

Morihei Ueshiba O'Sensei said that such a failure is not an error, it is the universe showing us all the way. We work, we train, and hopefully we even teach, with the humility to recognize that such death, while immanent, reveals our destiny, it does not control it.

We do not "finish" our documentation for fear of dropping dead at the drawing table, we do so to reveal to the universe that we have the means to practice. This is the real difference between an architecture that is pessimistic, and one that is optimistic – a pessimist worries and is afraid, an optimist practices, and in so doing, reveals.

And as long as we do so, it is hard to imagine conditions under which we might fail. But then again, failure is always an option.

Karl Hakken
MArch Candidate
May 2, 2008