With a Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford University, Dr. Glass has been working in the cognitive neuroscience of learning field, with a focus on the science of instruction. Recently, his focus has been on the effects technology has on the learning process and ability of college students.
In a fascinating discussion, Raymond and Dr. Glass explore the impacts technology has on students, comparing his findings from the classroom 15 years ago to now, and how detrimental multitasking has become in college lectures.
Read the full episode transcript below:
Raymond Hawkins: Welcome to another edition of Not Your Father’s Data Center. I am Raymond Hawkins, Compass’s chief revenue officer in Dallas, Texas, and we are joined by Dr. Arnold Glass, professor extraordinaire at Rutgers University. Dr. Glass, welcome.
Arnold Glass: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I greatly appreciate it.
Raymond Hawkins: So Dr. Glass and I have talked a little bit, and we are going to cover a wide range of subjects today. But before we get into football and learning styles and tools to help you learn, we’re going to let Dr. Glass give us a little bit of background. Dr. Glass, we’d love to hear where you grew up, where you’re from, where you went to school, and how you landed at Rutgers.
Arnold Glass: Born in New Jersey, where I spent the first eight years of my life. Then family moved to New York City. So I’m primarily the product of a New York City public school education. I lived in walking distance of the 1964-65 World’s Fair, which I loved. So in 1967, when there was going to have a World’s Fair in Montreal, I had to find a way to get there. I discovered that a school near the World’s Fair on the New York side of the border, State University of New York at Potsdam, had a summer programme for high school students. If you were in the programme, two weekends, they would take you to the World’s Fair, and you’d see it there. So that was my one way to get there.
So applied for the programme. I got into the programme, I went up to Potsdam, and they gave you a choice of what college courses you wanted to take. I put down, I think like almost everyone did, English and physics, and there were too many people who put down English, so they had to give me something else. They gave me psychology, which was a surprise to me, because I had never really intended in my entire life to take a single psychology course. But actually, in the course, it was taught by a Skinnerian, and it was remarkable to see how rapidly you could train up a little white rat to do things and how actually there were principles of mental life that were discoverable and replicable and everything. I was very taken with that.
After that, I didn’t entirely give up my desire to be a chemist then. But then I became very interested in psychology, and I eventually ended up a psychology professor. I realised it met my skillset, and I really enjoyed doing it. The determining factor about whether you should become a professor and whether you’re going to like it is do you view being a professor as the whole rest of your life, you will be paid for doing your hobby? Because the only reason to be a professor is there’s one thing you find interesting enough that except for family, you’re pretty much interested in doing it 24/7, because there’s nothing more interesting. So if in fact someone’s going to pay you to do that the rest of your life, then you should grab at that opportunity. But if there’s nothing you really feel that entranced by, then you definitely shouldn’t become a professor. So I understood that, and I had found my calling. So I became a professor. Yeah.
Raymond Hawkins: The World’s Fair produces another career psychologist. That’s a pretty cool route. So how Rutgers? What paved the way to Rutgers?
Arnold Glass: I got my PhD, and I was applying for a job. Actually, I did have several offers, to be honest. Also, since I was born in New Jersey and most of my family lived in the New York metropolitan area, which contained both New York City and New Jersey, they were obviously pulling for me to select Rutgers. But there are other schools in the area. But if I’m going to be completely honest, then the decisive reason why I selected Rutgers was it had Division 1 college football and college basketball, and I had been active in sports and a huge sports fan my entire life. So that was a good reason for me to select Rutgers as my career choice.
Raymond Hawkins: All right. So you’ve already led us into our first rabbit trail. I know we’re going to talk about psychology. We’re going to talk about the impact of technology in the classroom. But since you started us down the Rutgers College forest path, let’s take two minutes. The next season in … Well, 2023, so the following season, 2024, the college football playoff is expanding. We’d love to hear from a longtime Rutgers fan and a longtime college football fan your thoughts on the growing college football postseason and the growing playoffs from 4 teams to 12.
Arnold Glass: Well, on the one hand, I’m not opposed to change, and I’ll watch every game and enjoy it. So I don’t have any bitter feelings that they’ve expanded it. But I also understand that it was in order to make more money, and colleges and universities should try and be profitable, because they have heavy expenses. The world of college football was fine, frankly, as anyone’s lived through it, before you had any playoffs. It really didn’t matter on January 2nd if there was no definite game to decide who won. Everyone was happy. If your team went to a bowl game and you went with them, you felt great. You had a good time, and that’s really all you cared about. So even though I am perfectly happy to have the new system, I didn’t look forward to the day when we had a playoff, and I don’t expect it’s going to be any more fun than it was before, because really, if your team isn’t in it, the only thing that still really matters to you is where your team’s going for the bowl game and having a good time there.
Raymond Hawkins: Hear, hear. Well, I’ll say as, like you, a longtime college football fan, and me from the Deep South, so call it SEC football, I do agree with the argument that the playoff is going to change the impact of the regular season, because for most of my developmental years, if you lost a game, you were out of it from a conference champion or national champion and definitely once you lost your second game. So every week had an incredible intensity around, “We’ve got to win this week,” because we have this vision of ending up playing in a New Year’s Six bowl or a New Year’s Day bowl or any of those kinds of concepts. Now the playoff I think is going to make that one loss or two loss team not nearly as anxious as it used to be. So I think it will take some of the edge off the regular season, which I will miss. That would be my one comment. But I’m with you. My team’s in the playoff or in a bowl, I’m happy, and it extends football for three or four more weeks, which I enjoy.
All right. So let’s get to the real subject at hand. We’ll probably take one more football detour, but the next one we’ll probably do on the NFL. So let’s get on to your work and the research you’ve done around how people learn. For us, as a data centre podcast and as data centre developers, we feel like we’re enabling a lot of the digitization of our planet and helping people be more effective and more efficient and better access to information. You can have food delivered to your house, and you can book your plane ticket on your phone and all these cool things that technology enables. Certainly, I think a lot of people view the internet as a great source of information, that we’ve made information accessible to anyone who can get connected. But that impacts how we learn, and would love to hear your thoughts on how that’s impacted the way we learn, Dr. Glass.
Arnold Glass: Thank you for the opportunity. Let me begin by saying that the world we live in today, I can remember in the last century dreaming of this world, because there were various laboratory kinds of things to improve learning, which were technically unfeasible in the classroom then. When I started, the highest level of technology you had in the classroom was maybe if you brought in a 16-millimetre projector, and the second highest level of technology was a blackboard and chalk. Really, that was it, as people old enough for me to remember. There wasn’t anything, and it was clear that there was a lot more that we could do when there were new technologies. At the end of the last century, you had course management platforms, and you could give quizzes online. In the classroom, you had personal response systems, so you could have much more interaction with larger classes than you had before.
I had planned for years exactly the kind of learning methodologies and structural methodologies I was going to implement on these systems. So I went right to it, and I had a lot of success. If you look at my work from between 2005 to 2010, when I implemented something called distributed questioning as an instructional methodology, every year, the performance of my students were going up, up, up. I had no doubt I was going to reach my goal as I perfected how to use it. I was going to reach the goal that 90% of my students were going to end up getting 90% correct. Then everyone in college, everyone would just get As, because the technology was in place to make sure everyone learned everything.
Then what happened was 2010, 2011, for no reason that I could imagine, there’s no increase in performance, and then performance every year starts declining, getting worse and worse, even though I’m doing the same things. So that led me to my supplemental line of research, which is how access to the internet and social media and all these wonderful tools we have impacts actual instruction and learning in the classroom. It’s not been a good story.
One side of the decline is that previously, when students came to my class, they had two options before the new technology. They could either pay attention to me or sleep, and when they slept, they hurt themselves, but they didn’t really bother anyone else. There’s still students who sleep, and that’s not really the problem. But what I noticed once I saw the decline in performance and looked out around me is that students were now approaching class entirely different. Their primary interest was looking at their phone or their laptop or tablet, and then they would look up at me occasionally to keep up with whatever I was talking about, but I no longer had their primary attention. In fact, I clearly was the secondary task that they were doing in the classroom.
Now, I already knew from laboratory studies that the main effect this was going to have on their performance was on long-term retention. That is, people do two things at once all day long, and they know they can do it. So they say, “What’s the problem with it?” The answer is that if you’re not trying to remember what you’re doing in every detail, there’s no problem. Now, you don’t want to remember exactly what you ordered or did all day long. However, if while you’re multitasking the entire purpose of one of those tasks is to remember what’s going on or remember content … Whether it’s content or skill, it doesn’t matter. Then this is completely self-defeating, because you complete both tasks adequately, and you certainly remember the same day, right then everything you’ve done. There’s no effect of it later. Even 24 hours, you remember everything that happened the previous day. So you think there was no cost to the multitasking.
But in fact, there’s been a very large cost. If you measure what people remember of the experience a week later, now they remember much less if they were multitasking versus just doing one thing. You move out beyond two weeks, and it’s like they never did it. Okay? There’s no memory left from either task, really, if they’ve been multitasking. So if your entire purpose was actually to remember one of those things, you’ve defeated it, because you’ve put your brain in a situation where it’s going to devote its resources to other things than maintaining a long-term representation of what’s happening. There won’t be one, and you won’t remember it.
So I did an experiment in my class. This was real students being in class. I taught two sections back to back, absolutely identically. Tuesdays, one section was proctored, and they couldn’t do anything except pay attention to me. On Thursday, the other class was proctored and couldn’t do anything but pay attention to me. Sure enough, if you looked at how well they did on the exam for material on which they could only pay attention to me, they remembered considerably more of it, significantly more of it, than the material on which they were allowed to do what they want. It was something between half a letter grade and a letter grade difference. So instead of getting an A, you’d get a B-plus or a B, which I knew for most students was a big enough difference that they would care about it.
I also got another effect, which I wouldn’t have even tested for, except someone else, actually at West Point, had previously published a paper getting this effect. It showed that if you allow students in the class to do what they want, not only the students who are multitasking do more poorly, but a student sitting next to that student, who’s not multitasking, also does more poorly. Apparently, these are attractive nuisances when some people are not paying attention. Humans are the most social creatures, and it somehow spreads through the class. So everyone is doing more poorly. So that is even, for me, a stronger reason why I really shouldn’t permit it.
So since then, I don’t permit students in my lecture classes to multitask. They have to put their phones and their other devices away. They don’t like it. They give me poor evaluations specifically mentioning this on my course evaluation form. But yeah, I’ve had tenure for so long, there’s nothing anyone can do about it. The only effect it has is it prevents any other professor for ever adopting what I do. After congratulating me for being so caring about my students’ actual performance, they all say that they don’t want to get bad evaluations at the end of the semester. It’d affect their ego, so they’re not going to do what I do.
So that’s how that happened. But that didn’t explain the whole effect. So I went and I looked, and one of the reasons what I do is so effective, students do a lot of online homework assignments. Before each lecture and after each lecture, they have an assignment which involves multiple choice questions. I looked at the data, and I discovered something that I found amazing, which was that if you looked at performance on online quiz scores versus in-class exams, there was a subset of students who the very first time they got the question as part of an online quiz … This is before they probably even studied it. They’re just seeing this question for the very first time. Then they would do very well on that question. Between 90, 95% of the students would get that question correct in this group, where in the past, the other students, maybe 70% would get it correct, because they’re learning it for the first time.
However, those students who the very first time they saw that question, they got 90% correct, after they then had another version of that question in class and another version of that question online as a homework question, when they finally got to the exam, what happened was they were only doing 80% correct in that question. They were actually doing worse after getting three previous versions of that question. This homework wasn’t helping them improve their performance whatsoever.
Raymond Hawkins: Dr. Glass, hold on one second. I want to make sure I understand. So you’ve got students. You’re sending them homework at home.
Arnold Glass: Yes.
Raymond Hawkins: Let’s say the homework is-
Arnold Glass: It’s all online.
Raymond Hawkins: Yeah. So they’re reading and taking a quiz online, and let’s say the Civil War was … The armies wore blue and grey. The first time they take it, they get it right. It’s blue and grey. Then option B was blue and green. Option C was red and green, right?
Arnold Glass: Yeah.
Raymond Hawkins: What you’re telling me is by the third time they get asked the question, if they’re studying online, the performance has dropped as a result of the online setting.
Arnold Glass: Yeah. Right. By the fourth time. By the fourth time, when they’re actually taking the exam, and it actually counts the most for them, their performance has dropped and dropped by a significant amount.
Raymond Hawkins: Okay. So getting exposed to that via the internet instead of a class or a lecture actually caused them to perform more poorly over time than had they just seen it one time.
Arnold Glass: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.
Raymond Hawkins: That’s fascinating. Wow. Okay. I just want to make sure I understood what you were saying.
Arnold Glass: Yeah. Okay. So yeah, look, that was a very surprising result. No one had gotten that result since the first memory experiment had ever been done by Ebbinghaus that practise made you worse. So I investigated it systematically, and I have a paper about it. What happened is that the students who were doing so well the first time doing so well because they were finding the answer on the internet. There are a variety of ways you can do that. You can Google it. You can go to these websites, where students report answers from questions they’ve taken. Students work together and crowdsource. So one person comes up with the answer, and everyone else copies it is another common thing. It really doesn’t matter. The students reported it. This wasn’t a secret. Students reported they weren’t generating the answers for themselves. So therefore, they weren’t remembering them long-term.
That was bad enough, but if you look at my paper, you go back to the first year that I collected this data, around 2006 or so, only about 15% of the students are falling into this category where they are doing poorly on the exam, well online, because online, they’re obviously finding the answers. However, you go to the last year of the study, around 2019, I think, by that time, half the class is already now in this category where they’re all doing significantly worse on exams than their classmates or the whole class did 10 years earlier, because now this has become the norm. In order to do good on your exams, you find the answers, and you write them down. No one thinks they’re even cheating anymore.
But the fact is that what they do not appreciate, because this effect is totally insidious, is that by doing it this way, they are guaranteeing they’re going to do poorer on their exams. They don’t want to do poor on the exams. So I try and alert them to this effect, and it’s even worse than that. Now they’re doing poor on their exams, but in terms of very long retention, what they’re going to come away from the course three months, six months afterwards, and the rest of their lives, it’s going to be much less, all because of this test-taking strategy they have online.
Raymond Hawkins: Yeah. So Dr. Glass, I went to school a little bit before the internet came out, so I graduated from college in the ’80s. Want to make sure I understand what college kids are doing today. What I think I hear you saying is as preparation, as study prep, because they know a quiz or a test is coming, they’ll go figure out Dr. Glass Psychology 207, his first semester test on the ABC subjects. They’ll go find a source for what your questions might be, and they’ll go study what the answers are without studying the background material to learn the answer. They’re just studying what the responses need to be and that that leads to no retention whatsoever, because they haven’t read some material and gleaned the answer out of it, or they haven’t studied anything or attended a lecture. They’ve just remembered a list of questions. Is that what you’re telling me?
Arnold Glass: Yeah, yeah, though I think that many of the students, they’re not well enough organised to do this in advance. They do this online on the fly, finding material.
Raymond Hawkins: Oh, I gotcha.
Arnold Glass: But it’s the same thing. They find the answer. They copy it down. They get all these things correct. They’re very skilled at doing this. They know all the sources. But as a consequence, what they’re doing is they’re defeating the entire purpose of the instructional methodology, because what I actually implemented, there’s something known for 100 years called the testing effect, where it was discovered originally, you have two conditions. In one condition, the student is given an essay to read, and they can study it as much as they want. Okay? When they think they’ve learned it through studying, studying, studying, you wait a time, and then you give them your test. The other condition, the student is given a limited amount of time to read through it once, and then they’re asked a question about what they just read. So now they have to generate for themselves what the answer is. Okay?
The students who have to actually answer a question about what they read end up with much better retention once you get beyond one or two weeks than the students who did not have to answer a question, and no amount of telling them to study the document ever makes up for the difference. You only learn it when you’ve generated a response for yourself. There are many versions of this. My advisor at Stanford, he did one of the seminal experiments. You have two Stanford students, the generator and the yoke control. They go through with pairs of words. Every time the generator sees a pair of words, they have to come up with a linking sentence for the pair of words, because it was well known that if you came up for a linking sentence for a pair of words, then afterwards you’re very likely to remember the pair, because people remembered the sentences.
The controls, yoke controls, every time one student made up the sentence, the other student saw the sentence for the same period of time, had the same amount of time to use it to remember the pair. Yet at the end, when you look at retention, retention was 33% higher for the students who actually generated the linking sentences for themselves than for the students that simply received the linking sentence from the person who actually had to do the task. So it’s very well established that there’s no shortcut. You have to engage the material, generate answers for yourself, or you’re not going to get it.
In fact, a good friend of mine, Bob and Elizabeth Bjork have shown, among others, that even if you generate wrong answers some of the time, you’re still more likely to remember the correct answer eventually than if you never generate anything at all, because you’ve created a permanent memory of at least the task and the experience in the brain, which you can eventually correct and hang the correct answer on.
So there’s just no way of getting around the fact that you have to engage material and that the internet allows us to avoid that in completing tasks. It’s leading to emptying our memories. By the way, this has been established. Even though I’m very concerned about the negative effects in academics, which I think are devastating, this effect has been shown outside of academics. It’s been shown that the more pictures people take of a museum with their cell phone, the less they remember the experience of what they’ve actually seen. Of course, GPS is emptying people’s brains of how to find their way around or where everything in their neighbourhood actually is.
Raymond Hawkins: On that one, I want to stick a pin on for that one I like. So I try to explain to folks in my business a lot about knowing things and about understanding things.
Arnold Glass: Yes.
Raymond Hawkins: I tell them, I say, “You can know something.” I said, “Knowing, I can give you a phone or a map and tell you how to get somewhere, and you can know how to get there, because you have a GPS or you have a map.” Understanding is if I came to you and asked how to get around Rutgers’ campus. You’ve been going to work there for years. You truly understand. If you gave me a map, I would know, but you would understand how to get around campus, right?
Arnold Glass: Yeah, yeah.
Raymond Hawkins: If a road was blocked and there had been a spill and it needed to be cleaned up, your understanding would get you there. Me with a map, I’d have to wait, because this is the only way I know. There’s truly a difference between knowing and understanding, and I’m with you. The idea that kids don’t know what a map does, and I don’t want to make this a generational thing, but the loss of reading a map as a skill, the loss of understanding your neighbourhood, the loss of understanding how to get around, where you’re just getting told by a phone what to do, I think has long-term effects for sure.
Arnold Glass: Yeah, no, I’m sure that’s true. At some level, we know that’s true, and we know that people get better from playing these very entertaining, high-level video games more and more. But if you never read a map, then you’re not going to develop the sense of the world that that gives you, and you have it exactly right. There’s a big distinction between information and knowledge. It’s not quite the same thing. People have gotten this wrong for a long time. So when the SAT was much more heavily into vocabulary, I don’t know if they do it anymore, you had lots of students, particularly students from low socioeconomic levels, who were trying to get better. They would carry around flashcards, which had a rare word on one side and then the definition on the other, and they’d spent a long period of time studying those flashcards.
It was sad, because it’d been well established that that doesn’t increase your vocabulary at all. Okay? It was fruitless, all the hours they were spending to try and get an SAT score. However, if you’re reading anything and you’re understanding it and you come across a word you don’t know … A friend of mine actually did this experiment for the first time, and you can tell what it means from the context, which you almost always can. The context doesn’t give you an exact meaning versus a class meeting. Then the probability that you’ll remember that word and remember what it means for the rest of your life is close to one. Okay? There’s almost no forgetting of words which are seen in context and figured out for the first time. That’s so fundamental. We just remember them forever.
So when they started measuring the size of vocabulary back in my generation, your generation for the SAT, they found that people knew 50,000 words, including rare words, which meant that every single day of their lives pretty much between the ages of 6 and 18, they were actually acquiring something like five to ten new words every single day, which meant they only had to read it once if they were building this vocabulary, and you know that they weren’t getting those words in conversation. Therefore, reading with understanding was a huge driving force in educating people all around the world.
Raymond Hawkins: They certainly weren’t getting them off of flashcards. That’s for sure.
Arnold Glass: No, no.
Raymond Hawkins: I’m going to tell you a funny story, Dr. Glass. So when I first got passionate about reading towards the end of my high school career, I would read a book, and if I couldn’t understand a word in context, I would go to the back of the book, I would write the word, and then I’d go look it up. Then I’d write the definition next to it in the back of the book. Some of those books are still in my library, and it’s fun to go back and go, “What did I not know the word meant 30 years ago? What words stood out to me 30 years ago when I read this book?,” because they’re written in the back. When I didn’t know them, I’d write them down. To your point, once I’d read it, written it down in the back, and looked at the definition, it’s been in my vocabulary forever.
Arnold Glass: Right. Absolutely. Yeah, no, no, that’s very good. Again, because we only had books here, people used to read, but now that so much material is available on the internet, I fear, though I haven’t actually studied this, that students don’t read anymore, they skim, and that that’s having devastating effects.
I did another experiment about this. So depressing. I knew that no one would ever cite it, and no one ever has. Okay? But on one of my final exams, students took the final exam twice in a row. The first time, it was the usual closed book final exam, where they got all the questions and answered. The second time through, they were the exact same questions, but preceding each question was a paragraph that contained the answer to the question. So it was now a simple, short reading comprehension test. Read the paragraph, and then select the correct answer. Okay? When you looked at the scores from the closed book exam versus the open book reading comprehension exam, the scores were identical. Okay?
Raymond Hawkins: Oh my goodness.
Arnold Glass: Giving them the answers in the paragraph didn’t help them at all. Now, it took me three additional experiments to get a handle on this, because I knew the students weren’t stupid. They were in a good college. They knew how to read. They could comprehend it if they had to. What could I do to show that by forcing them to comprehend? I finally did an experiment that was identical to the one I just described on the final exam, the two versions. But this time, on the reading comprehension task, where you had to select the right answer, in addition to selecting the right answer, you had to underline in the paragraph the exact words, which actually provided the answer. When I forced the students to do that also, now they did better on reading comprehension than they did on memory, because I’d actually forced them to comprehend the material, rather than just skim it for a few key words.
Raymond Hawkins: Wow, that’s incredible. I’m just blown away by the fact that with the answers right there, reading it didn’t produce any material change in score. Just shocking to me. All right. So I’ve got two more questions for you. One is in all your research about how we learn and how we study and how technology’s changing what we do, if you had one mission to give … I think you’ll probably have more parents in my audience than students. If you had one message to give to those parents that have upcoming students, what would it be about integrating technology into their children’s learning? Then we’ll ask one more football question.
Arnold Glass: Okay. In terms of looking up answers on the internet, there actually is, it’s sad, a very straightforward fix to this. In fact, someone else, Saskia Giebl, has recently published papers demonstrating this is all you need to do. That is if you’re planning to go look up the answer, before you look it up, you have to first generate the answer for yourself. Take it seriously. Put it into the spot on the quiz or whatever you’re doing, and after you’ve generated what you think is most likely the answer, then look it up. If in fact it’s different, go ahead and change it. If you just do that, then you’ve restored the generative process, which is the first part, and now you no longer will have it all wash out of your brain in a few days.
So anyone in the audience wants to give advice to their student, to their kids, try and see if you can encourage them to do this one simple thing. You’re not taking anything away from them. You’re not causing to get worse grades when they just take the time to generate an answer themselves. They could even find it fun how often they guess right or not, and tell them it just even works even if they’re guessing. Okay? Just as if they just could completely ignore and they just type nonsense then. But as long as they make a good faith effort, even if it’s a guess, this is all it’ll take to greatly improve for them the long-term effect of doing homework or studying on retention. So they really should try that, absolutely.
Raymond Hawkins: Excellent. All right. Well, we appreciate that counsel and that experience and all of your experimentation that’s led you there. All right. We’ve got to do one more football conversation. So you’re one of the few folks I’ve talked to that remember that the Jets weren’t always called the J-E-T-S, Jets, Jets, Jets, that they were the Titans many years ago, back in the ’50s. ’59 I think, was their first season. So give us, from a lifetime of being a Jets fan, one high and one low that sticks with you to this day.
Arnold Glass: Well, look, obviously, the high is Super Bowl III. It has to be for any Jet who ever lived through that. There was decades of lows when the team really didn’t perform. It just wasn’t fun to watch, because you knew you weren’t going to do very well.
Raymond Hawkins: Hard to forget Broadway Joe and Super Bowl III. That’s got to be a high. Yeah, for sure.
Arnold Glass: Oh, yeah, sure. It wasn’t just that they won unexpectedly, but if you go back and you lived through that time, there was a whole sense of drama about that, a whole sense of story about that, which people who lived through that remembered. People remembered that Namath said before the game, “The Jets are going to win. I guarantee it,” when they were huge underdogs. But it wasn’t clear until afterwards that there was more to bravado, him saying that. He talked about it. He said, “Well, we’d gone through the films, and we saw the mistakes they’d made. We saw what we could do.”
The next layer to this, which people now forget, is that two years before then, the Jet head coach had been the Baltimore Colt head coach, and he knew that team very well. Don Shula had not at that point completely instituted a new offence, and he took through the Jets point by point on how you would attack that offence, which he knew very well, and how you would attack that defence, he knew very well. That probably was, I think you can make the most convincing case, the difference in the game. So there’s lots of stories about it. It also looms large. Funny thing. You have time for one more personal story?
Raymond Hawkins: Yep, absolutely. For sure we do.
Arnold Glass: Okay, okay, okay. Years go by. Okay? I’m a young man now. I meet the girl of my dreams, and we’re going to get married. I go home, meet her family, and she’s from Baltimore. Her father has had season tickets for the Baltimore Colts since before they were in the NFL. People don’t remember. Once there was originally an All-American Conference. They started then, and then they went. So he had tickets since there was that team, and he didn’t have any sons. So from her earliest age, his daughter went with him and his wife to all the Colt games. She had been to Colt games since she was an infant. I had been lifelong a Jet fan, and she also vividly remembered Super Bowl III, but with an entirely different emotional resonance to what that meant. But we were able to get past that. But when I went home and met the family and people heard I was New York and then they checked out that I had actually been a Jet fan, the men told me, “Well, there’s one thing we’ll never talk about,” and we never have.
Raymond Hawkins: “We’re not talking football with you.”
Arnold Glass: No, no. They’d talk football, but they weren’t going to relive Super Bowl III.
Raymond Hawkins: Super Bowl III.
Arnold Glass: Yeah, and weren’t going to discuss the Jets. So we put that behind us, and we moved on. But yeah, as you know, that’s how these events can be very, very important events in your life. Did you ever see the movie Diner?
Raymond Hawkins: Yeah.
Arnold Glass: Okay. Well, if you remember, in it, almost everything in that movie with one or two exceptions was real, and people knew who it was based on, including the bit where in order for a young woman to get her fiance to commit to marriage, to actually walk down the aisle, she had to actually get at least an 80 on an exam about Baltimore Colt football history. Okay? They’re very intense fans down there also, which actually, in a way, allowed me to fit in very well, since I was an intense fan also. Yeah.
Raymond Hawkins: Well, Dr. Glass, we enjoy hearing how things have gone in your career and in your classroom and the impacts of technology in the classroom. Wise words from what you’ve researched and studied. We are grateful to have you on, and it was so much fun. We may talk you into coming on again, just so we can talk about libraries, books, Broadway, and some other fun stuff. So it was great to have you.
Arnold Glass: You have only to ask me, and I’ll come anytime. I greatly appreciate this invitation. You really helped me. Ever since I got these results, I felt that it’s now my personal responsibility to get them out to the world, because it’s something I know that can make a real difference in people’s lives. It’s fairly easy to just do what it takes to make the problem go away. So thank you again for giving me this opportunity.
Raymond Hawkins: We enjoyed it. Thank you, Dr. Glass.
