Teaching and the Butterfly Effect

Long before I began teaching full time, I was required in a graduate course to write a statement of my teaching philosophy. In my statement, I worked in a plethora of passionately idealistic sentiments and several very insightful (I thought) references to fortune cookies, the butterfly effect, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and received an A.

Now, six years later as an assistant professor of psychology, I’ve been asked to provide a statement of my teaching philosophy once again, this time as part of a midtenure review. Suddenly I find myself daunted by an assignment I once completed with such ease and enthusiasm.

I still believe much of what I wrote in that early paper, but I can no longer bring myself to be quite so unabashedly idealistic. The truth is that there are times when I think my primary guiding principle in the classroom would be more appropriately labeled a philosophy of survival than a philosophy of teaching.

There are days when success means getting up in the morning and getting through all my classes. There are other days when success means not giving up on students who seem convinced that although buying the books is compulsory, reading them is optional. It is absolutely success if students leave my class at the end of the term at least as interested in the subject matter as they were when they registered for the course -- and even that doesn’t always happen.

Despite the beating that my pedagogical idealism regularly endures, however, one notion from my early teaching philosophy has clearly survived. I still believe in a teaching equivalent of the “butterfly effect,” even though that concept has now become something of a cliché.

I’m a psychologist, not a physicist, but as I understand it, the butterfly effect is a metaphor for life in a chaotic universe. Once upon a time it seemed reasonable to believe that big influences had big effects and little influences had little effects; that was the basis for Newtonian science. Chaos theory, however, changed that. Here was a theory built around the premise that little things, like a butterfly flapping its wings over Hong Kong today, can have big effects, like causing a hurricane in Florida a week from now.

As a teacher, the butterfly effect gives me hope and keeps me working, even on the days that I seem to be having no impact at all.

Perhaps you’ve had days like that too? For a psychology professor, they are the days when a student who “should” know better writes on an exam that opium is a neurotransmitter, or that multiple personality disorder is just another name for schizophrenia. They are the days when I walk into class and a student greets me with, “Dr. Haas, can we get out early today?”

Why do I put up with those days? Because at some level I still believe in the butterfly effect. I spend every day hoping that the events that transpire in those 60-minute class periods will somehow change someone, for the better, for a lifetime. I want students who leave my classes to do well on the GRE subject test, but I also want them to read different books and read books differently. I want them to watch television differently. I want them to read the newspaper differently. I want them to think about the world differently.

I don’t yet know how to get that to happen for most students, most of the time, on demand, and in a single “hurricane moment,” but that’s the Holy Grail that motivates me to continue the quest. My belief in the butterfly effect sustains my idealism, even in the face of the occasional less-than-optimal pedagogical experience.

In the meantime, however, I have to live within the confines of a more Newtonian-limited educational system, one in which I can only hope that my small efforts have at least small effects. So in my day-to-day teaching, I try to make sure students learn the little things, the basics, so they will be ready to be inspired when the moment comes. I keep after them about how correlation does not prove causation, how they shouldn’t reinforce behaviors if they don’t want them to continue, and how multiple personality disorder is not, in fact, another name for schizophrenia.

It would be more fun if I could measure my effectiveness as a teacher in terms of students’ reports of the “hurricane moments” they experienced that were inspired by something that happened in my class. But I’m willing to fight for psychological literacy one fact at a time. To that end, I spend whole class periods tossing Starbursts and describing basic behavioral contingencies like positive reinforcement. To that end, we talk about studies that allegedly report that “your parents don’t matter” and that “child sexual abuse doesn’t matter.” To that end, we talk about Eco-Challenge, Survivor, and the psychology of reality TV shows.

At first glance, this form of teaching doesn’t seem to be the least bit life-altering, and some of the questions on the multiple-choice portions of my exams would probably seem to belie my professed belief that education, at its best, can fundamentally change the way students see the world.

But over the course of a semester, I see occasional hints that small, incremental advances in student understanding matter, too. Sometimes the evidence comes in the form of high test scores, although I know that my tests measure memory of the material better than engagement with it.

Because I have found no better measure, I find myself at the mercy of my students’ spontaneous (and probably unwitting) expressions of engagement. I never cease to be excited when my students stop by my office to bring me cartoons they’ve clipped from the newspaper that remind them of things we have discussed in class.

I’m energized by e-mail messages that say things like: “Dr. Haas, I just read an article in Yahoo news about the brain. I got so much more out of that article than I would have six weeks ago! Thanks for teaching me stuff!”

I’m probably disproportionately pleased when my freshmen pound their desks and say, jokingly but correctly, “It’s an empirical question!”

So far, success in the classroom has not come in a multitude of “hurricane moments,” but rather in correctly named neurotransmitters, cartoons in my mailbox, and “movies you should see” suggestions in my e-mail.

As a quantitative researcher and an educator in an age of assessment, I have been taught to value truths that can be expressed in percentages and p-values, but I’ve often wondered if my cartoon count for the semester isn’t as least as valid an index of student engagement as my course evaluations. Certainly it is in those moments, when students bring psychology to me, that I think I feel at least a little breeze from butterfly wings.

This business of writing a statement of teaching philosophy reminds me of a story I once heard about a writer who was asked, “Do you love writing?” The answer, reportedly, was “No, but I love having written.” That is my world. Do I love teaching? Not always, but I sure love it when those cartoons start coming in. It may not be a hurricane, but it’s a start.