The bar charts were coupled with more free-form peer feedback, which was essentially specific suggestions for improvement, such as “Let other people finish their sentences when they’re talking.”
My hope was that more than a few students would see this information and say, “Wow, I’ve got to take it up a notch.” It was hard feedback to ignore, but some still managed.
For one course I taught, I’d had students assess each other in the same way, but only let them know the quartile in which they ranked. I remember a conversation I had with one student whom others found particularly obnoxious. He was smart, but his healthy sense of himself left him clueless about how he was coming off. He saw the data ranking him in the bottom quartile and remained unfazed.
He figured that if he was ranked in the bottom 25 percent, he must have been at the 24 percent or 25 percent level (rather than, say, in the bottom 5 percent). So in his mind, that meant he was almost in the next higher quartile. So he saw himself as “not so far from 50 percent,” which meant peers thought he was just fine.
“I’m so glad we had this chat,” I told him, “because I think it’s important that I give you some specific information. You are not just in the bottom 25 percent. Out of fifty students in the class, your peers ranked you dead last. You are number fifty. You have a serious issue. They say you’re not listening. You’re hard to get along with. It’s not going well.”
The student was shocked. (They’re always shocked.) He had had all of these rationalizations, and now here I was, giving him hard data.
And then I told him the truth about myself.
“I used to be just like you,” I said. “I was in denial. But I had a professor who showed he cared about me by smacking the truth into my head. And here’s what makes me special: I listened.”
This student’s eyes widened. “I admit it,” I told him. “I’m a recovering jerk. And that gives me the moral authority to tell you that you can be a recovering jerk, too.”
For the rest of the semester, this student kept himself in check. He improved. I’d done him a favor, just as Andy van Dam had done for me years before.
25
Training a Jedi
I T’S A thrill to fulfill your own childhood dreams, but as you get older, you may find that enabling the dreams of others is even more fun.
When I was teaching at the University of Virginia in 1993, a twenty-two-year-old artist-turned-computer-graphics-wiz named Tommy Burnett wanted a job on my research team. After we talked about his life and goals, he suddenly said, “Oh, and I have always had this childhood dream.”
Anyone who uses “childhood” and “dream” in the same sentence usually gets my attention.
“And what is your dream, Tommy?” I asked.
“I want to work on the next Star Wars film,” he said.
Remember, this was in 1993. The last Star Wars movie had been made in 1983, and there were no concrete plans to make any more. I explained this. “That’s a tough dream to have because it’ll be hard to see it through,” I told him. “Word is that they’re finished making Star Wars films.”
“No,” he said, “they’re going to make more, and when they do, I’m going to work on them. That’s my plan.”
Tommy was six years old when the first Star Wars came out in 1977. “Other kids wanted to be Han Solo,” he told me. “Not me. I wanted to be the guy who made the special effects—the space ships, the planets, the robots.”
He told me that as a boy, he read the most technical Star Wars articles he could find. He had all the books that explained how the models were built, and how the special effects were achieved.
As Tommy spoke, I had a flashback to my childhood visit to Disneyland, and how I had this visceral urge to grow up and create those kinds of rides. I figured Tommy’s big dream would never happen, but it might serve him well somehow. I could use a dreamer like that. I knew from my NFL desires that even if he didn’t achieve his, they could serve him well, so I asked him to join our research team.
Tommy will tell you I was a pretty tough boss. As he now recalls it, I rode him hard and had very high expectations, but he also knew I had his best interests at heart. He compares me to a demanding football coach. (I guess I was channeling Coach Graham.) Tommy also says that he learned not just about virtual reality programming from me, but also about how work colleagues need to be like a family of sorts. He remembers me telling him: “I know you’re smart. But everyone here is smart. Smart isn’t enough. The kind of people I want on my res