Practical Things

We went to see Temple Grandin last week.

Now, that might sound like we've gone off the rez---we drove an hour, each way, to see a woman speak about how she designs slaughterhouses. But I'll point out that two friends went with us, AND the auditorium was packed with hundreds and hundreds of people, AND several other friends made time to catch her earlier talk. So if it is off the rez, there're a lot of others out there with us!

Temple gave a great talk, mostly about animal handling, and how the goal should always be to keep them calm, not to find ways to calm them down again after they've been upset. It was a great talk all together, and left me with several ideas that I don't want to forget. So you get to read them here...

The first was about how McDonalds (since Fast Food Nation, Omnivore's Dilemma and a host of other scathing books reminiscent of Sinclair's The Jungle came out...can it be ten years ago already?!) has stepped in to demand improvements in the handling of animals at the slaughterhouses it buys from. That alone is staggering. McDonalds is important in the food industry in the same way the Mormon Church is important in Utah. If they throw their weight around, everyone else gets sucked along in the draft, whether they wanted to go that way or not.

Temple helped McDonalds design their criteria. And in her autistic way, she focused in on the real, actual problem. Rather than specify what slaughterhouses should DO (put in x number of lights, lay y type of non-skid flooring, install z type of cattle chute), she specified very specific, easily measured, animal by animal checklists that indicate wellbeing. Did the cow moo? Did the cow fall? Did the cow run at any time?

And these criteria have dramatically improved the handling of these animals. By focusing on outcomes, and making them very, very specific, Temple allowed the people 'on the ground' to solve problems, innovate, find a system that worked for them. Of course, this was frustratingly abused at times. And of course, once they installed remote monitoring via videocamera, they found that many people only met the standard while they were being watched. Still, things have been improving by measurable leaps and bounds.

Which leads me to the next nifty thing. Someone asked how she gets management on board, because management has to buy in to the program, otherwise it will never be followed. And she said, "We fire them." If management can't produce the measurable outcomes, and won't buy in, McDonalds swoops in and insists that someone else be put in charge. Who knew? Management can be fired!

Another kid stood up and asked about the moral dilemma of using animals for our own purposes, blah-blah-blah. You've heard it before. And Temple had such a good answer. It came in several parts, but two things particularly caught my attention. The first was that she explained that she's about practical solutions to actual problems (not, as Taylor Mali says "what I would wish for in an ideal world") She asked the kid if he'd ever done anything practical. And he must have blinked at her, because she followed up immediately with "what's your major?" Religious studies. So then she really scolded him for not ever having done anything practical. And I think her point was that when you build a fence, fix a car, cook a meal, put up food for winter, plant a tree, hang a gate, build a shed...move in the world, you begin to realize that it's not made up in your head. That there are real things outside of you that have real limitations, and you can't just make things up and then nail them together and expect them to last the winter, unless you take the actual real world into account. And that resonated for me. Because these days, I'm all about practical. Which is funny. For an astrophysicist.

The second thing was about the horses. We used to slaughter horses in the U.S.---for dog food, among other things. And then a law was enacted that made it so we don't do that anymore. Victory, right? All the pretty horses, not getting killed anymore, right? Sadly, no. Now they just get shipped to Mexico to be slaughtered. And as you can imagine, Mexican slaughterhouses are nothing like ours. It's a tragedy and a MESS. And the horses suffer so much more now. It's an unintended consequence of saying, "I won't be a part of it." But the activists never wondered what would happen to the surplus animals. It's a literal fact of nature that there will always be surplus animals. If you aren't willing to adopt a PMU mare and put her on your front lawn, what do you propose to do with her she comes off the line? You have to look at the WHOLE problem. Not just the piece that makes you upset.

And so Temple's point was this---people eat meat. We are not likely to become a nation of vegetarians anytime soon (there was a funny aside here about how scallops would be a much better thing to grow in a vat than beef) And meat has some advantages. If you eat meat, you can grow food in places that won't sustain grain. Rangeland can not be farmed, in the traditional crop-farming sense. It's just too poor, too dry, too hot. But you can still grow ruminants on it---cows, goats, sheep. And when it's done right, these herds actually improve the rangeland. So she looks at the system, and asks, "how can I make this the best system for the animals that it can possibly be?" And then she works on that. She's practical. And keeps her eyes wide open to see the whole problem.

So. Why am I thinking about all this and not wanting to forget?

On Saturday, I was at an outreach event for high schoolers. More than one of them could not subtract 9 from 17. More than one of them asked for a calculator to divide by ten. On Monday, in class, I discovered that at least one of my physics students is a "magical thinker", and believes there is no objective reality. I kicked my butt last year to run programs that drew 45,000 people, but when I wandered around some of these programs, watching the kids, I realized that the vast majority weren't getting ANYTHING out of it. They wandered into a Science Olympiad event with a pouty face and a sour attitude, and wandered out again, even more sour, because they didn't know anything about the event, and did poorly, despite having almost a whole year to prepare. The winners went off to Nationals, and came in dead last...again. Science Fair posters are perennially terrible, with the omnipresent volcano, and the teeth soaked in soda. For twenty years, I've been doing outreach of various kinds, and suddenly find myself wondering why. So, in MY autistic way, I went looking for data. Actual cold hard data on the effect of these outreach programs on kids. As far as I could determine, the last study on Science Fair was in the 50's. And it found that it worked kind of well for the kids who WERE INTO SCIENCE ANYWAY. I could find no assessment data about Science Olympiad. And drop-in programs and field trips and so on have only the crudest possible data about efficacy.

But that totally makes sense. Because even I, who could be considered an expert in actually doing this stuff, have not sat down and made a list of desired measurable outcomes. "A positive experience" with science is not a measurable outcome. "Did the child have a smile on his/her face" IS a measurable outcome. But even better are outcomes that emphasize what we want students to do. "Did the 11th grader successfully subtract 9 from 17" may seem like a low bar. But it appears to be where we are.

Frighteningly, I begin to worry that I'm actually part of the problem---that all these programs are actually sending the kids to Mexican slaughterhouses. By emphasizing positive experiences that might be fun, but are shallow, unfulfilling, impractical, and above all, FAKE, I'm helping these kids to grow up believing that science might be fun, but is shallow, unfulfilling, impractical, and above all, FAKE. That it has no place in the actual world. That it's fluff. That they can't use it, like a screwdriver or a hammer, to solve actual real-world problems around them every day. I had already made this jump in my classes, with courses like Physics@Home, Environmental Physics, and even my introductory survey course being chock-full of everyday examples about water levels, microwaves, cell phones, etc. But now it's beginning to be apparent to me that I also need to re-think the whole outreach thing. It's a practical problem. With a practical solution. Maybe. But I won't know if I don't get out from under all these things that I suspect aren't doing any good, so I can step back and actually see what the point is.

So that's a thing I'm working on. And I have to keep it in the front of my mind, because it would be so easy to just keep doing what I already do, and eventually start defending it as sacred, because I have a queasy feeling it's not all it's cracked up to be, but I can't actually admit that, because I've been doing it so long. It would be so much easier to just go along with the things that are already being done. And it's only now that I begin to understand that this is what "No" is all about for me---building some space around myself so I have room to figure out what we should be trying to accomplish, and then figure out how to measure it, and then figure out how to get it done. I can't do that if I'm constantly distracted by chasing after event coordinators, fixing student time sheets and being yelled at by accounting. Just, you know, as examples...