Jose Reyes, Ryan Braun, Ted Williams and Campbell's Law

What if yesterday's National League Batting Title is metaphorical of how our obsession with numerical data and statistics is corrupting our love for baseball and learning?

Yesterday, September 28, was the last day of Major League Baseball's regular season. The pennant races proved to be full of barn-burning action, but to be honest, that's not what I found most interesting.

Today, I want to talk about Ted Williams, Jose Reyes and Ryan Braun.

First, some history.

Seventy years ago yesterday, Ted Williams went into the last day of the 1941 regular season with an epic batting average of .39955 which would have been rounded up to .400. When faced with the opportunity to not play on the last day of the season, thus ensuring his record-book average, Williams chose to play in a double-header against the Philadelphia Athletics.

Williams ended up going 6 for 8 that day and raised his average to an impressive .406. Later, Williams explained that had he not played, he would not have deserved the title. At the time, this was Williams first of six batting titles, and today, he is the only player since 1925 to finish the regular season with a .400 batting average.

Going into yesterday's final day of the regular season, the 2011 National League Batting Title was a two horse race between New York's Jose Reyes who had a small lead over Milwaukee's Ryan Braun.

Reyes, however, chose a very different strategy than Ted Williams.

After laying down a first inning bunt single, Jose Reyes promptly pulled himself from the game. This strategy allowed Reyes to preserve his league leading average while simultaneously forcing Ryan Braun into a position where he would need to go 3 for 4, in order to have a chance at the title. Unfortunately for Braun, he went 0 for 4.

But here's the difference, while Reyes chose to quit before the first inning was even over, Braun chose to play the entire game. Reyes collects accolades while Braun goes home empty handed. Reyes gets remembered. Braun forgotten.

Are you as disgusted as I am?

This story epitomizes the cancerous effects of our mania for reducing the things we love, like baseball and learning, to numbers. When an obsession with our batting average actually convinces us to quit playing or a fetish for our grade-point average persuades us to quit learning, I think it's time to pause and reflect on how our use of data is sabotaging our ultimate goals.

If the point is to succeed and/or conquer others rather than to stretch one's thinking or discover new ideas and abilities, then it is completely logical and rational for Jose Reyes and students to want to do whatever is easiest. To do what ever is easiest, which sometimes includes quitting like Jose Reyes, can maximize the chances of success or minimize the odds of failure.

To be clear, this isn't a Jose Reyes or little Johnny problem. This is a systemic problem that is the result of our mania for reducing something as magnificently messy as baseball and learning to statistics and grades. Campbell's Law tells us that the more any one indicator (such as test scores or batting averages) are used for decision making, the more that indicator will suffer from corruption, therefore, bastardizing the very processes it was meant to monitor.

There is no substitute for what a teacher can see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears when observing and interacting with students while they are still learning. Because the children are always watching us, I fear they will learn the same dangerous lesson from Jose Reyes that they learn from grading; that real learning and strategically conquering others are the same thing.

Learning Purists

Youngme Moon writes about baseball in her book Different:

One of the bestselling books of 2003 was Micheal Lewis's Moneyball, which made the charged case that the right way to think about baseball was through the lens of extreme empiricism. The book was a slap in the face to baseball purists, because the implication was that the collective wisdom of a whole crew of baseball traditionalists - scouts, general managers, and so on - couldn't hold a candle to a statistician with a laptop.

In the polemic that followed the book's publication what became clear was that there was two ways of capturing reality - by the things that are measurable, and by the things that are not - and because the two don't overlap very much, it is easy for proponents of either to diminish the significance of the other.

And yet this is precisely why it can be such a fascinating experience to sit down and watch a really important baseball game - say, the seventh game of the World Series - with a hard-core baseball fan. The hard-core baseball fan is a walking repository of a vast amount of statistical data. She can tick off batting percentages, on-base percentages, runs batted in, and walk-to-strikeout ratios. She can tell you whether a pitch was an outside cut fastball or an inside curve, and what the odds are that this hitter will be able to get on base against the pitcher, in this given situation.

At the same time, the insight that the hard-core baseball fan can bring to a game can go far beyond that which can be expressed in purely statistical terms. When it comes to a big game like the seventh game of the World Series, the hard-core fan understands the journey that each team has traveled to arrive at this place, at this time. She knows the personalities of each  and every player, and is aware of the individual obstacles each has had to overcome to be in this coveted position. For the hardcore fan, the drama is not just in what is happening in the moment, it is in the collision of the present against all that has taken place in the past. Statistics count for something, certainly, but so do a lot of other things. Like context. Chemistry. Momentum. History. The beauty of the game. Which means that for the hard-core fan, to reduce the game to that which can be measured is to lose a lot.

I realize that I risk repeating myself here, but I draw this analogy as a way of illustrating the observational myopia that an over-reliance on empirics can create. As bussinesspeople, we can't afford to disregard the data that market research presents us with; we need to gather it, sift through it, and try to make sense of it as best we can. However, once we have done so, we can't assume that our work is done.

Much better that we approach our craft in the same way that a baseball purist approaches the game. Wherin we respect that statistics matter, but we also respect the fact that to reduce the game to numbers alone is to divest it of its soul.

If we only pay attention to things that we can measure, we will only pay attention to the things that are easily measurable. And in the process, we will miss a lot.

When we reduce education to things that are simply easy to measure, we miss a lot. To focus too much on the testing that typically occurs at the end of the year is to ignore the journey of the entire "regular season".

Like baseball purists, learning purists understand that to reduce learning to numbers in an obsessive effort to quantify quality in a strictly emprical manner risks losing the spirit of learning.

Nuke LaLouche meets Cormac McCarthy

I want to show how a scene from Bull Durham, the best baseball movie ever, and an exerpt from Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road can help us to rethink teaching. Watch the clip and then read the excerpt. Just a heads up, there are a couple F-bombs in this clip:



Ok, we'll come back to this clip.

Now take a look at an excerpt from Cormac McCarthey's Pullitzer Prize winning novel The Road:

That night they camped in a ravine and built a fire against a small stone bluff and ate their last tin of food. He'd put it by because it was the boy's favorite, pork and beans. They watched it bubble slowly in the coals and he retrieved the tin with the pliers and they ate in silence. He rinsed the empty tin with water and gave it to the child to drink and that was that. I should have been more careful, he said,


The boy didn't answer.


You have to talk to me.


Okay.


You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?


Yes.


He sat there cowled in the blanket. After a while he looked up. Are we still the good guys? he said.


Yes. We're still the good guys.


And we always will be.


Yes. We always will be.


Okay.

Could you understand what was going on in this excerpt?

Did you notice anything unconventional with the writing?

In case you didn't notice, there were no quotations marks to identify the dialogue. The reader is left to sort out the dialogue and the narration on his own. If you're like most people, the excerpt still made sense.

In the Bull Durham clip, Nuke LaLouche is young and naive, but despite his five cent head, he has been blessed with a million dollar arm, and so, as his mentor catcher, Crash Davis has been assigned to mold him into a big leaguer.

The point to be made here is that while Nuke is still in the minors, a nobody, the rule is he shouldn't have fungus on his shower shoes; however, as Crash points out, that little rule can go away if only Nuke can make it to the big leagues - become famous and rewrite the rules in his own image - become colourful.

Unfortunately for Nuke LaLouche, he's not in Cormac McCarthey's league.

There's a double standard here.

When Cormac McCarthy submits his story to the world, he is met with a Pulitzer Prize and a movie deal, but when my grade 6 language arts students forget to use quotation marks with their dialogue on their Provincial Achievement Test, they are docked marks. Punished.

And Nuke is a slob.

At some point in time, Cormac McCarthy was in grade 6 - the minor leagues, grinding it out with the other minor league authors. If Cormac McCarthy does as he's told and complies with the rules of writing, he continues to use quotation marks, and The Road either never gets written or drowns in mediocrity and obscurity because it is standardized. Of course the omission of quotation marks does not define The Road's greatness, but I think you get the bigger message here.

So when does Cormac McCarthy ever learn to be different. If we don't provide him with the opportunity to be wrong - to be unique and creative - we can only hope that he will defy the rules at his own peril.

When school is more about reproducing the teacher's knowledge rather than the student producing their own, we run the risk of extinguishing their creativity. We teach it out of them. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say we school it out of them.

If we can appreciate how Cormac McCarthy bends the rules to create something new and creative, then we have to provide students with a learning environment where they can grow their own creativity and find themselves.

In his book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, Sir Ken Robinson points out that one size does not fit all:

Some of the most brilliant, creative people I know did not do well at school. Many of them didn't really discover what they could do - and who they really were - until they'd left school and recovered from their education...


These approaches to education are also stifling some of the most important capacities that young people now need to make their way in the increasingly demanding world of the twenty-first century - the powers of creative thinking. Our systems of educaiton put a high premium on knowing the single right answer to a question. In fact, with programs like No Child Left Behind (a federal program that seeks to improve the performance of American public schools by making schools more accountable for meeting mandated performance levels) and its insistence that all children from every part of the country hew to the same standards, we're putting a greater emphasis than ever before on conformity and finding the 'right' answers.

Artistry and creativity that becomes standardized ceases to be art and loses much of its creativity.
For every Cormac McCarthy out there who defies the rules and finds his own style, there are a thousand Nuke LaLouche's who are made to feel guilty for the fungus on their shower shoes.

So they comply and never become colourful.