Pressing the Wigger Patwol

Who would have guessed that pressure makes humans perform less well? Certainly not the Wigger Patwol



The Morning News Tribune (Tacoma WA) on 30 July 2009 ran an item from the Los Angeles Times: "Care less, do better, study says" (p. A7). A study published in the oxymoronically entitled Psychological Science showed that the promise of great rewards often led subjects to perform less well. It seems that the more that rode on performance, the likelier performers were to choke. [In sports-speak, "to choke" means to underperform due to stress or anxiety.]



Raise this item with a member of the Wigger Patwol and watch for hilarity.

Remember that the Wigger Patwol need not include every colleague who brags about how hard he is or how demanding she is. Colleagues who brag about their hardness are, of course, compensating from their shortness. [And some of them are not very tall, either.] Colleagues who tell us how demanding they are usually do not add how little assistance they provide students. To belong to the Wigger Patwol, teachers must 1) tout themselves for being hard and demanding; 2) exhort colleagues to teach as "the Few, the Proud, the Hard and Demanding" do; and 3) police colleagues who seem soft or reasonable. Only colleagues who surveil and criticize others, especially vulnerable others, achieve the distinctive vice of the Wigger Patwol -- to be so busy averring and testifying to rigor than one has no time left in which to practice rigor. To belong to the Wigger Patwol, one's rigor must be far more apparent than real.

In "Rump Parliament" I have often documented how members of the Wigger Patwol preach rigor more often than they practice rigor. If you want to find the worst hand-holders, for instance, start with those who denounce hand-holding most vociferously. Because compensation, projection, and hypocrisy range beyond the Wigger Patwol, I do not use any of those psychological features to define the Wigger Patwol. One who joins the Wigger Patwol likely will develop compensatory, projective, and/or hypocritical rationalizations to boldly go where no rational academic would go. Many who compensate, project, or pretend to virtues they do not practice, however, will not deteriorate into membership in the Wigger Patwol.

Having identified a candidate for the Wigger Patwol, send said candidate the study or the newspaper report. Be prepared with smelling salts. Then ask how faculty should incorporate this finding into the design of their courses.

Professor Javert of the Wigger Patwol will croak, "I rely on daunting, exhausting finals worth 50% of the course-grade to compel students to synthesize the materials of the course!" Watch Professor Javert's head implode when you point out that making the course cogent and coherent is probably the job of the instructor in the course and certainly the product of thought over weeks rather than torture over hours.

If Wigger Patwolmen and Patwolwomen elect due dates very late in the semester for tests and papers worth a majority of the course grade, you are expected to believe this is to foment rigor. It could never be that avatars of atavism are

• making things easier on themselves during the semester OR

• saving grading for when comments will do students no good and therefore may be dispensed with OR

• encouraging students to believe that they are sailing through a course before students evaluate the course, then lowering the course grade drastically with harsh grading of the semester project or a final.

Expect Dr. Gerard of the Wigger Patwol to argue that, as an undergraduate at Nairherdovit University, he aced five-hour examinations while being waterboarded. Once you are certain that Dr. Gerard is unarmed, ask how therapists have progressed over the last quarter-century in reversing the effects of those exams.

Attend informal confabs on pedagogy and, after the wine has been served, supply colleagues copies of the study. Probe for criticisms of methods, samples, measures, presumptions, and other barriers to new information. However well veterans of the Wigger Patwol allege they stood up to undergraduate or graduate torments, they will neither countenance nor condone any arguments or evidence contrary to the claim that "You cannot have too much rigor." They will break under the strain:

• Colleague Queeg will reel from whimpering to wailing about strawberries that are too mushy

• Colleague Ratched will ask whether the principal investigator had enough rigor in his courses and fiber in his diet to be taken seriously.

• Ivy-Leaguers Tor and Kay Motta will ask whether they draw salaries at a liberal-arts college or an encounter group.

A cacophony will then swell, decrying handholding, dumbing down, and other shibboleths that were hyphenated in less permissive times.

The one predictable outcome is that no members of the Wigger Patwol will revamp their courses to create more assignments worth less each to diffuse some pressures and to secure better work. After all, time the Wigger Patwol devote to creating more and better opportunities for learning cannot be devoted to assailing colleagues, mangling curricula, and telling all who will listen about the virtues of pedagogy that never materializes and publications that never appear.