Higher Education's Marketing Army Launches Counterattack

I knew it couldn't be long before the higher education marketing army started to counterattack the media's recent, powerful excoriations of colleges for the horrendously low value they provide.

Higher education's first major salvo is a study reported in the New York Times, authored by Anthony Carnevale (pictured right,) one of higher education's long-standing insiders and apologists. He argues, deceptively, for higher education's value while skirting inconvenient truths about the hundreds of thousands of weak students admitted to so-called four-year colleges.

As I've reported previously (probably ad nauseam at this point--here's a link to an NPR interview and article,) most such students don't graduate even if they're given eight years. And because of the elitist, real-world-irrelevant arcana so heavily taught in higher education, even many students who graduate grow nearly not at all in reading, writing, critical thinking, mathematical reasoning, etc., nor become employed in a job they wouldn't be qualified for without college. And of course, there's the opportunity costs: what the students could have been doing if they hadn't been spending the enormous sums of money, time, and assaults to their self-esteem in college, for example, in an apprenticeship program or learning entrepreneurship at the elbow of a successful and ethical entrepreneur.

As I've also written previously, the federal government should mandate that all colleges prominently post an externally audited report card on themselves disclosing key information that prospective students can use to decide whether a college, indeed any college, is--given their high school record--the wisest post-high-school choice. And of course, colleges' being forced to report their shockingly bad product would pressure them to improve and perhaps become the national treasure that the higher education marketing machine has led us to believe it is.

My Ten Worries About America and How I'd Address Each

Here is the latest iteration of my plan to reinvigorate America. It addresses job creation, health care,k-16 education, U.S. involvement in the Middle East, our electoral system, the national debt, taxation, ethnocentrism, ethics, political correctness, even an ethical approach to improving the gene pool.

Regular readers of this blog will find most of the ideas familiar. Indeed, it is a revision of an earlier post but hopefully it's better thought-through and presented. And this is video; the previous version was audio.

The video below is 12 minutes long. To read the transcript, click HERE.

Simplism: A New Alternative to Capitalism and Socialism

Both the capitalist and socialist systems are deeply flawed:

Capitalism results in too great a gap between a small wealthy class and a large and ever growing poor. Also, capitalism thrives on ever growing materialism, which promotes shallow values and environmental degradation.

Socialism doesn't work because it rewards the lazy and incompetent while punishing the hard-working and capable.

Of course, many countries use a hybrid of the two but I believe there's a need for a new approach. Here's my proposal for one. I call it simplism. It requires educating the public about three things:

1. the wisdom of our buying personal services rather than non-essential products. Our lives benefit more from such services as a tutor for our kids, assistant for ourselves, or a companion for our elders than from buying jewelry, new cars every few years, expensive vacations, big houses, etc.

Of course, if the public were to be less materialistic, many jobs creating and distributing those material goods would be lost, disproportionately to low-skill/low motivation workers. So for Simplism to work, I believe the government would need to create taxpayer-funded jobs for those unable to hold a private sector job. These jobs might include, under supervision, building housing, assisting in classrooms, cleaning up blighted neighborhoods, etc.

2. by reducing our spending to the truly important, we'd gain greater benefits than what our purchases would generate: we'd gain the freedom to do the sorts of work we want, the time to pursue our desired non-remunerative pursuits, and the peace of mind that comes from the absence of big unpaid bills.

3. the importance of learning to be an entrepreneur, to run your own business. That:

• avoids your needing to be a wage slave, paid as little as the employer can get away with.
• provides greater job security than if employed by others.
  
• brings to the public better, faster, or less expensive products and services, thereby improving all of our lives.
  
• creates new jobs.
  

The skill of entrepreneurship may be as important as the 3 Rs. Therefore, I believe it should be taught k-16 as well as through entrepreneurship bootcamps that are available to all.

I welcome your reactions.

Reinventions: K-12 Education

Here's a video of my six-point plan for reinventing K-12 education.

The six points, without the helpful explanation in the video, are listed below.

My six-point plan for reinventing K-12 education:

1. Naturally gifted teachers could get a teaching license merely by teaching a demo lesson before a master teacher---no boring teaching education program required. Other candidates would complete a teacher training program provided by a school district's master teachers, not by university professors who have never been master K-12 teachers.

2. Classes should be grouped by ability. Efforts should be made to ensure that racism is not a factor in selection, and that students are moved up and down as appropriate.

3. The fact-larded curriculum should be delarded, replaced with big projects--for example, developing a model city, building a rocket, creating an online student newspaper, etc.

4. The teacher's unions must be reined in. They've insisted that the best and worst teachers are paid the same--there's no better formula for ensuring that quality people don't enter the profession. In addition, they have forced school districts to, after just two or three years, give teachers tenure for life. To get rid of a teacher after getting tenure requires a long, expensive, painful undue process. Most principals decide it's just not worth the massive documentation and a dog fight with the union lawyers.

5. Use dream-team-taught courses, especially for difficult-to-teach courses such as algebra. These would be developed by a team of nation's best instructors under the U.S. Office of Education's auspices and distributed free on the Net to all school districts. A local teaching assistant would be in the actual classroom to provide the human touch. Using dream-team-taught classes would enable all students, rich and poor, to receive world-class instruction. Nothing would more improve the quality of education, but again, the unions would balk.

6. The school year should be lengthened. Currently it consists only of five hours a day for 175 days.

Reinventions: Undergraduate Education

Here's a video of my six-point plan for reinventing undergraduate education.

For those who'd rather just read the transcript of the video, it appears below.

REINVENTIONS
Undergraduate Education
by Marty Nemko
(transcript of the above video)

In this video, I present my proposal for how to reinvent higher education. From Time to the New York Times, higher education is finally being called to task for its ever worsening value added. Students and families spend fortunes and so many don't graduate. A major study out of the University of Chicago, Academically Adrift, found that almost half of those who graduate grow so little in writing, reading, critical thinking and so on. So many of those students are able to only find a job they could have gotten without college. But these criticisms of higher ed ar e usually accompanied by only the vaguest or palliative of suggestions for improvement. Here, I present a six-point plan for higher education's reinvention:

1. Colleges should be required to post a Report Card on itself. If each car tire is required to mold its treadline, temperature, and traction rates into its sidewall, should not colleges, one of our largest and most important purchases be required to post their graduation rates and learning growth amounts, broken down by student high school record? Shouldn't colleges be required to report the percentage of graduates within each major who are professionallly employed within a year of graduation? A substantive college report card prominent posted would enable students, counselors and families not only to pick the right college but to decide, if for that student, a wiser path might be a community college, an apprenticeship, a military, or on-the-job training, for example, learning how to run your own business at the elbow of a successful and ethical entrepreneur. After all, according to the U.S. Dept of Education, of the 200,000 students that so-called four year colleges admit each year, fewer than 1 in four graduate even if given 8 1/2 years. And of those who graduate, most do so with a very low GPA in a major unlikely to excite many employers, for example, sociology, physical education, or art rather than computer science, accounting, or engineering. A College Report Card is the least we can do--ensure informed consent for the consumer.

2. There should be two categories of professors: teaching professors and research professors. Universities find it more economical to have their professors do both, but the skills and interests required to teach the typical undergraduate are orthogonal to, the opposite of what's required to do publishable research. Teaching faculty should be selected and promoted on how well they can be transformative, inspirational instructors of undergraduates , not how well they can write a research proposal on the arcana that gets funded, of interest mainly to a few dozen other theoretically oriented PhDs.

3. All existing teaching faculty should be required to successfully complete a teaching bootcamp, consisting in part of master instructors videoing each participant teaching and providing individualized feedback. Any teaching faculty member who subsequently has a year of average student evaluations below a 4 on a 5 point scale should be required to successfully complete a remedial teaching bootcamp.

4 General education courses are the 10 to 15 courses that most colleges require to help ensure a well-rounded education, but which most students view as "courses to get out of the way." While it's true that life should be informed by the wisdom embeddeed in typical general educartion courses such as philosophy and literature, in fact, most young people simply cannot be convinced of that, so poor attendance, cheating, inattention, and minimal learning is more the norm than the exception. Rather than going through the motions, realism dictates that we revise the general education curriculum to focus more on issues of more immediate concern to the vast majority of undergraduates: public speaking, financial literacy, practical problem solving, entrepreneurship, practical ethics, interpersonal communication, career-finding and job-landing, etc.

5. Use Dream-Team-Taught courses. Especially for widely taught and difficult courses such as calculus and organic chemstry, the U.S. Dept of Education should fund development of highly-interactive, immersive courses team-taught on video, disseminated online by a dream team of the nation's finest instructors. The courses would be made available free to all colleges. This would save the colleges money, enabling them, hopefully, to lower tuition, and more important would ensure that all students from the most poorly funded college to Harvard would receive world-class instructor. A university could elect to provide a professor or teaching assistant on site to provide the personal touch or allow students to complete the dream-team-taught courses at home, thereby saving the need for classroom buildings and/or allowing colleges to serve more students with minimal additional expense.

6. the notion of the traditional country-club-like campus is obsolte. Not only does it contribute to enormous cost, it is to the green values espoused on most universities. I believe that most campuses could be shrunk by 80% with little or no loss in quality of experience, perhaps even a gain. In addition to the aforementioned dream-team-taught courses, which students could complete at home, in-person classes could be taught in professors' homes that sit vacant while professors trek to campus, try to find parking spots on campus, etc. Instead of building expensive swimming pools, big, expensive shrub-filled campuses, utlize pools at with local community centers, hotels, and so on. Campuses could be quite compact, consisting of just a streamlined administration building to accommodate a streamlined administration, a student activities building for student club meetings, concerts, and so on, and a reduced number of classroom buildings.

To summarize, the six points in my plan to reinvent higher education are: 1. Require all colleges to prominently post a College Report Card. 2. Have separate faculty for teaching and for research. 3. Require all faculty to successfully complete a teaching bootcamp. 4. Revise general education courses to reflect the content that most undergraduates are open to learning. 5. Use Dream-team-taught courses: Courses taught on interactive video, disseminated online by a dream-team of the nation's finest instructors, with an in-person teaching assistant locally to provide the human touch. 5. Streamline the enormously costly country-club campuses, which would enable colleges to cut student costs of attending dramatically. That's my reinvention of higher education. Thanks for watching. I'm Marty Nemko.

The Case that We're Headed for Economic Collapse

The scariest case I've yet read for why we're headed for economic collapse.

Reinventions: Political Campaign Reform

Here's a video of my proposed reinvention of our political campaign system.

On Black Racism

America's New Racists
by Walter E. Williams

The late South African economist William Hutt, in his 1964 book, The Economics of the Colour Bar, said that one of the supreme tragedies of the human condition is that those who have been the victims of injustices and oppression "can often be observed to be inflicting not dissimilar injustices upon other races."

Born in 1936, I've lived through some of our openly racist history, which has included racist insults, beatings and lynchings. Tuskegee Institute records show that between the years 1880 and 1951, 3,437 blacks and 1,293 whites were lynched. I recall my cousin's and my being chased out of Fishtown and Grays Ferry, two predominantly Irish Philadelphia neighborhoods, in the 1940s, not stopping until we reached a predominantly black North or South Philly neighborhood.

Today all that has changed. Most racist assaults are committed by blacks. What's worse is there're blacks, still alive, who lived through the times of lynching, Jim Crow laws and open racism who remain silent in the face of it.
Last year, four black Skidmore College students yelled racial slurs while they beat up a white man because he was dining with a black man. Skidmore College's first response was to offer counseling to one of the black students charged with the crime. In 2009, a black Columbia University professor assaulted a white woman during a heated argument about race relations. According to interviews and court records obtained and reported by Denver's ABC affiliate (12/4/2009), black gangs roamed downtown Denver verbally venting their hatred for white victims before assaulting and robbing them during a four-month crime wave. Earlier this year, four black girls beat a white girl at a McDonald's, and the victim suffered a seizure. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel ordered an emergency shutdown of the beaches in Chicago because mobs of blacks were terrorizing families. According to the NBC affiliate there (6/8/2011), a gang of black teens stormed a city bus, attacked white victims and ran off with their belongings.

Racist black attacks are not only against whites but also against Asians. In San Francisco, five blacks beat an 83-year-old Chinese man to death. They threw a 57-year-old woman off a train platform. Two black Oakland teenagers assaulted a 59-year-old Chinese man; the punching knocked him to the ground, killing him. At Philly's South Philadelphia High School, Asian students report that black students routinely pelt them with food and beat, punch and kick them in school hallways and bathrooms as they hurl racial epithets such as "Hey, Chinese!" and "Yo, Dragon Ball!" The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund charged the School District of Philadelphia with "deliberate indifference" toward black victimization of Asian students.

In many of these brutal attacks, the news media make no mention of the race of the perpetrators. If it were white racist gangs randomly attacking blacks, the mainstream media would have no hesitation reporting the race of the perps. Editors for the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune admitted to deliberately censoring information about black crime for political reasons. Chicago Tribune Editor Gerould Kern recently said that the paper's reason for censorship was to "guard against subjecting an entire group of people to suspicion."

These racist attacks can, at least in part, be attributed to the black elite, who have a vested interest in racial paranoia. And that includes a president who has spent years aligned with people who have promoted racial grievance and polarization and appointed an attorney general who's accused us of being "a nation of cowards" on matters of race and has refused to prosecute black thugs who gathered at a Philadelphia voting site in blatant violation of federal voter intimidation laws. Tragically, black youngsters – who are seething with resentments, refusing to accept educational and other opportunities unknown to blacks yesteryear – will turn out to be the larger victims in the long run.
Black silence in the face of black racism has to be one of the biggest betrayals of the civil rights struggle that included black and white Americans.

Walter E. Williams is the John M. Olin distinguished professor of economics at George Mason University, and a nationally syndicated columnist.

Reinventions: Climate Change

I've decided to make YouTube videos describing some of the reinventions I plan to include in my book, Reinventions: Fresh Ideas on the Big Issues. Here's the first of those videos. If you'd rather just read the text, the transcript appears below:

REINVENTIONS
Climate Change
by Marty Nemko
(transcript of the video above)

I'm Marty Nemko and this is the first of my reinventions. I want to reinvent our approach to climate change from one of nearly religious zeal to one of dispassionate agnosticism. Here's why.

The science is NOT yet clear enough to justify the enormous cost and severe restrictions on our freedoms--for example the gridlock we'll ever more be forced to sit in because environmentalists are blocking freeway building. And then there are the opportunity costs: what the money and efforts could otherwise be devoted to, for example, figuring out how to cure cancer, or improve education.

You might ask, "How can you say the science justifying making major efforts to try to cool the globe is unclear? The UN's International Panel on Climate Change, consisting of 1,200 scientists say it's true."

Fact is, of those 1,200 scientists, only a few have power and those few are a politically stacked group--scientists ideologically predisposed, data or not, to want to be "strongly green."

When one looks dispassionately at the data on climate change, it's clear that more and better data are needed. Remember, to justify the huge costs, all of five things must be true:

1. Climate change must be occurring.

2. The climate change must be significantly manmade. The most recent study by the prestigious European agency, CERN, calls that into serious question.

3. The climate change must be a net negative. (In fact, global warming will make much of the world's cold climates more livable and arable.)

4. The plan to cool the planet must actually work.

5. There must be substantial worldwide compliance with the greatly increased costs and severe incursions of freedom that the effort to cool the planet would require. Even more problematic, that worldwide compliance would need to remain in place for the 50 to 100 years until technology advances enough to make such costs unnecessary.

The odds of all five of those things occurring are tiny--and that assumes that the computer prediction models are valid. And no less than top scientists MIT's Richard Lindzen, Harvard's Willie Wei-Hock Soon, and Princeton's Freeman Dyson (arguably the world's most eminent living physicist,) and many less well-known but credible scientists are convinced that the computer models are based on very dubious assumptions. That too is the upshot of Climate Change Reconsidered, a 430-page, September 2011 report written by 11 scientists and sponsored by three climate-change-related nonprofits. (It should be stressed that their questioning the wisdom of making massive efforts to cool the planet remains only a dissent from the dominant position held by the IPCC, Al Gore, etc.)

Certainly, bang-for-the-buck efforts to reduce our carbon footprint should be implemented, for example, raising gas-mileage standards. That minimally impedes freedom yet saves a fortune, reduces pollutants, and increases energy independence.

The reinvention I ask for is for scientists, the media, and all of us to recognize that there are responsible narratives other than "The world is doomed unless we spend, virtually without limits, to attempt to cool the planet." We need to replace the censorship of the dissenting view I outline here with a careful consideration of it. It's time for research and for debate, not massive spending. There are too many surer ways to spend money and effort to improve humankind: immunizing children in developing countries, better funding research on sudden heart attack, improving the quality of education everywhere so it lives up to its yet unrealized promise as a magic pill.

Reinventions: Bolder Approaches to the Big Issues

Reinventions

Bolder approaches to job creation, health care, education, religion, our election system, our economic system, psychotherapy, the gender wars, climate change, the gene pool, the meaning of life, and 30 other pillars of society.

a book proposal

by Marty Nemko

Many Americans believe the U.S. is in permanent decline. A just-released New York Times/CBS News poll finds that 39 percent of respondents believe “the current economic downturn is part of a long-term permanent decline.” That on the top of a June, 2011 CNN poll that found that 48 percent of Americans believe another Great Depression is very or somewhat likely.

And Americans aren't confident that the proposed solutions will help much. A just-released Time poll finds that 62 percent of Americans think the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction. Perhaps that's not surprising in light of the failure of the most recent round of remedies: Despite massive corporate bailouts, government stimulus spending, and two rounds of quantitative easing (QE1 and QE2) the un- and underemployment rate is higher than before. And education, the supposed magic pill, has turned out to be less than magical. For decades now, the U.S. has ranked #1 or 2 in per-capita education spending yet continues to lag in the most recent international comparison, tied for 23rd with Poland, while Shanghai, China, which entered the comparisons this year for the first time and spends far less than the U.S. per capita on education, ranked #1.

Such solutions are inadequate in part, ironically, because of our democratic process. Policies are adopted only after a diverse array of experts, the public, legislators, and political leaders have all embraced it. While that ensures broad buy-in, it tends to create tepid recommendations--that on which nearly everyone can agree, often a lowest common denominator.

There is need for bolder solutions. Unfettered by having to obtain consensus, in the proposed Work, I propose a bolder solution for each of 40 keys to the thriving society. Perhaps like many authors, my goal is no less than to trigger a national conversation that examines--forgive the cliche--out-of-the-box approaches to stemming what appears to be America's permanent decline, especially versus China and India.

I envision a slim volume: Each of the 40 reinventions will be presented in just enough detail to explain the concept, its benefits, and to counter likely objections.

Content

These blog posts provide a sense of my writing style and the content I'll present in the book:

A Blueprint for Permanently Creating U.S. Jobs: http://martynemko.blogspot.com/2010/04/blueprint-for-permanently-solving-us.html

Elections Reinvented: http://martynemko.blogspot.com/2011/02/reinvented-election-system.html.

The College Report Card: http://martynemko.blogspot.com/2010/11/college-report-card-key-to-higher-ed.html

Religion Reinvented: http://martynemko.blogspot.com/2008/08/spiritual-atheism.html

Do What You Love and Starve? http://www.martynemko.com/articles/do-what-you-love-and-starve_id1380

Education Reinvented: http://www.martynemko.com/articles/blueprint-for-reinventing-education_id1595

Higher Education Reinvented: http://martynemko.blogspot.com/2011/06/reinventions-undergraduate-education.html

Simplism: A new alternative to capitalism and socialism: http://martynemko.blogspot.com/2011/06/simplism-new-alternative-to-capitalism.html

Are We So Sure Democracy is the Best Policy? http://martynemko.blogspot.com/2011/02/are-we-so-sure-democracy-is-best-way.html

Health care: http://martynemko.blogspot.com/2010/11/nemkocare-how-id-do-health-care-reform.html

New Israel: A solution to the Palestinian-Israeli problem: http://martynemko.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-israel-solution-to-palestinian.html

The Un-MBA: http://martynemko.blogspot.com/2011/04/while-i-am-critical-of-many-aspects-of.html

Family is Overrated: http://martynemko.blogspot.com/2008/09/family-is-overrated.html

Taxation Reinvented: http://martynemko.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-id-reinvent-taxation.html

My Plan for Closing the Achievement Gap: http://martynemko.blogspot.com/2009/07/my-plan-to-close-achievement-gap.html

The One-Week Job Search: http://www.martynemko.com/articles/one-week-job-search_id1374

A Better Way to Gain Willpower: http://martynemko.blogspot.com/2009/02/top-10-ways-to-gain-willpower.html

General Education Reinvented: http://www.martynemko.com/articles/generaledorg-reinvented-online-general-education-program_id1597

Career Counseling Reinvented: http://martynemko.blogspot.com/2010/07/career-counseling-reinvented.html

Climate Change: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=nemko+%22Climate+change%22

In Defense of Men: http://martynemko.blogspot.com/2010/06/beginning-of-men.html

The Meaning of Life Reinvented: http://martynemko.blogspot.com/2011/05/toward-life-well-led-meter.html

My Top Ten Ways to Improve the World:

http://martynemko.blogspot.com/2010/12/my-top-ten-ways-to-improve-world.html

Other Reinventions to be included in the book:

Parenting

Housing

A proposal for safer, less expensive nuclear energy.

The case for and plan for transforming our product-based to a service-based economy.

A better alternative to mass transit: the shared-ownership auto-piloted hydrogen/solar-powered sky car.

Next-generation desalinization as the solution to our water problems.

Social networking reinvented--toward building real connection.

Genetically enhancing human potential...ethically.

Ending the gender wars ...to both sexes' advantage

Psychotherapy reinvented

5 to 10 more, to be determined.

Author credentials

Marty Nemko holds a Ph.D. specializing in the evaluation of innovative programs from the University of California, Berkeley and subsequently taught in Berkeley's graduate school. He has been a consultant to Consumer Reports, 15 college presidents, and dozens of top for- and nonprofit executives. His previous five books have sold 250,000 copies.

Author platform

He's in his 24th year as host of a weekly hour-long show on KALW-FM (NPR-San Francisco.) He has been a repeat guest on such major shows as Talk of the Nation and The Today Show. He's written for and been quoted in publications ranging from Time to the New York Times to the Los Angeles Times. His blog and site attract a half million visitors a year. Toastmasters International names one non-member its Northern California Speaker of the Year. Marty Nemko was a recent winner.

Marketing plan

With Nemko's ability as a speaker (see above) a media tour and live speaking tour, for example, on college campuses would seem to be cost-effective. The tour might be made additionally effective by the discussions of the Reinventions be debates with local public intellectuals, for example, the president of the colleges at which I'd be speaking.

Nemko will make a YouTube video of each Reinvention, and roll them out (in video and text versions) one per week on appropriate places on the Internet, noting that it is an excerpt from the book, Reinventions. For example, the proposal for reinventing undergraduate education will be posted as a letter to the editor on leading websites for higher educators and for students. Of course, each Reinvention video and its transcript will be submitted to major media outlets: with particular follow-up with producers of shows on which Nemko has previously appeared: Talk of the Nation, The Today Show, 20-20, CNN, etc. Each video will also be sent to major print, TV, and online outlets. Plus, each Reinvention will be posted on Nemko's Facebook, Twitter, Quora, blog, and website, which attracts a half million visitors a year, as well presented one per week on his National Public Radio-San Francisco show.

Timed to occur during the weeks preceding the 2012 presidential election, Nemko will disseminate as above, a special video; My Nine Worries and Their Solutions: The Stump Speech I'd Give if I Were Running for President: http://www.martynemko.com/articles/my-nine-worries-stump-speech-id-give-if-i-were-running-for-president_id1603

He will conduct press conferences on a few of the most newsworthy reinventions:

A bolder plan to create jobs

A bolder plan for reinventing health care

A bolder plan for reinventing education.

A series of contests would be held in which the public is challenged to come up with a better reinvention of, for example, education. Prizes could simply be books from the publisher's catalog. Worst case, the contests would be publicized only on Nemko's radio show, blog, etc, but an attempt would be made to get a major media outlet (e.g., Economist.com, USNews.com, where Nemko is Contributing Editor, etc, to co-sponsor the contests and host them on their site.

Hot Careers and Overhyped Careers

In preparation for my radio show tomorrow, I've written an article, "Hot Careers and Overhyped Careers." HERE is the link.

As usual, comments are welcome.

The World's Shortest Acting Course

A friend of mine, psychotherapist, Dr. Michael Edelstein, wanted to make a video of his unique three minute therapy.

He knows that I'm an amateur actor so he asked if I'd play the role of a depressed person who came to him for therapy.

Before I turned the camera on, I just reminded myself, "You're not acting; you're being that person." I banished all thoughts about what to look or sound like. I reminded myself, "It's of no consequence that the camera is on. I'm just being a depressed person." Here's the video: