I have a love/hate relationship with Malcolm Gladwell.
As an educator, I love that his work is approachable for casual readers who want to learn a little more about the human condition. As a researcher, I struggle with the aspects of his work that contain sweeping generalizations and bolds leaps between academic findings and practical conclusions. But I get it: It's hard to make science glossy and exciting, and it's equally hard to make pop culture methodical and precise. It's a delicate balance.
In my own work, I struggle with the same problem. I vacillate between having to be painstakingly technical and easily digestible. I conduct data analysis and write tedious manuscripts for publication in academic journals, but I also teach high school students who intake information 140 characters at a time. The real world doesn't wait on fully processed thoughts to percolate out like slow drip coffee - but academia demands it.
What I'm saying is, the struggle is real. It's even realer when you have an introverted, cow stomach of brain. Which is to say that I process information like ruminant cattle, who pass their food back and forth between multiple stomachs as they chew, digest and redigest the same food over and over until it's been broken down in so many different ways - mechanically, enzymatically, microbiotically - that they've extracted every critical nutrient.
So, on top of the Malcolm Gladwell tug-of-war between pithy and precise, I'm constantly processing and reprocessing the same information, looking at it with different lenses, from different sides and from the perspectives of my very different audiences. Did you know that the word ruminate comes from the Latin ruminare, which means "to chew over again"? That's how my brain works.
Often, I have to remind myself of the mantra I rehearse with my students when we're starting a lab and they're hedging on hypotheses that are too general to be disproven: Right is good and wrong is better! At its best, science is about putting a stake in the ground and leaving a paper trail of what you learned about it. At our best, scientists are all doing this together, unwedded from conclusions, using our mistakes to probe the boundaries of our next moves.
Brief aside: My sophomore year in high school, while working with a good friend to produce a life-sized replica of the Guatemalan flag for Spanish class, I was sketching out the coat of arms, layering line over line to decide where we might follow up with permanent marker. In a moment of (loving) frustration, he grabbed the pencil out of my hand and said, "You artists, always sketching these lines, but you won't ever decide. Make a commitment, Elaina!" He probably doesn't remember saying that, but I think about it all the time.
Writing is the same for me, so writing publicly is just asking for trouble. Sketch, sketch, sketch. Is it truthful? Is it useful? Is it kind? Edit, edit, edit.
But here, I'll be committing thoughts to paper. I'll be ferrying back and forth between research and practice, staking a claim and leaving a trail. I'll write about research. I'll write about teaching. I'll write about race, gender, community development, social entrepreneurship, education and psychology. My thoughts will change; my missteps will probe the boundaries of my next moves.
Sounds like Malcolm Gladwell, I know. So I'll try to be punchy, I'll try to be precise - and I'll try hardest to be both at the same time.