Category: Week 14 – Teaching for the 21st Century

Swimming against the current: how great innovators are born

In my subconscious, I always felt that to really become good at you are doing, sometime or another, you had to stand up to the establishment. Take the example of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Galilei championed the heliocentric model (the Earth revolving around the Sun), he went against the most powerful establishment at that time, the Catholic church, went to trial and was found heretical. He spent the remainder of his life under house arrest.

On top of being an astronomer, a physicist, an engineer and mathematician, Galilei was also a philosopher. I believe that he represented both sides of the coin: the scientific side and the artistic side, which allowed him to really test the limits of his time.

Let’s come back to the 20th century and the life of Steve Jobs. Needless to mention, he is considered as one of the greatest minds of this century. The success of Apple came from his genius brain but also from his artistic and sensitive soul. He dropped out of college and traveled to India to study Zen Buddhism.

I could give many more examples of how true pioneers and innovators are in touch with their artistic side. We should go back to the examples in history and be certain that humanities compliment, or rather, are one of the essential blocks of our education. That is, if we want to produce thinkers and really good swimmers who can take on the greatest currents and never deviate from the right path.

The future of teaching

We can easily come up with different ways to improve higher education since nowadays it has numerous flaws in the way it operates. Starting with the fact that most students can’t pay for higher education, therefore it would be almost impossible for them to get a job that will bring them the money needed to get more education. At some point higher education most be free or at least that student can paid for it in other ways, such as by working for the same university or even working for the state that is offering free higher education.

Taking aside the obvious fact that we should be allow to have free or cheaper education, one of the main things that should be improve is related to the Professors that are chosen to “impart wisdom and knowledge” to the students.  The Professors way of teaching should not be as the one where they want every student to do the “critical thinking” but based in their own believes and ideas. In the case of Virginia Tech, I came here in January 2015, therefore I don’t have that much to say about it, but so far it has been a great experience where Professors allow us to express our way of thinking and put into practice.

I recently read a document published by the American Public Media, where a Physics Professor at Harvard University was interviewed (http://americanradioworks. publicradio.org/features/tomorrows-college/lectures/rethinking-teaching.html). The purpose was to see how Professor teaches nowadays in the University and he explained that he is doing the usual but he does not understand why student are failing or they don’t seem to enjoy the class. He explained that he’s way of teaching changed when one day he notice that after explaining something with a lot of details, only 50% of the class understood what he meant and they answered right. Thats when he decided to allow students to talk to each other and share their point of view. He discovered that even though he has years of experience and knows the topic not perfectly but a lot better than all the students, he saw that after the group activity was done more than 50% of the class understood what he was explaining. He asked himself how is it possible that with all my experience they didn’t understand but when a student explain to each other they understand perfectly or at least had the notion of whats going? thats when he realized that since he already knows the topic, is hard for him to understand what kind of difficulties can a student have, therefore between students they can clarify their own problems in a more quicker way.

With this example, is more than clear that the connection in terms of understanding between student and professor should be more clear. Professor needs to understand that  their way of teaching should be updated because at some point student doesn’t need them due to the fact that we are becoming connected learners.

The Joy of Discovery

“It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.”

–1921, Albert Einstein on Thomas Edison’s opinion that a college education is useless; quoted in Frank, Einstein: His Life and Times, p. 185.

What is School for? I enjoyed watching Seth Godin’s talk about the purpose of schools. It is a simple question and it seems everybody knows the answer. But why most students hate going to school and college every day? Actually, almost all students feel happy when summer comes and nobody will be upset about breaks. Why is this considering that students were not forced to go to college.

As it is mentioned by Albert Einstein, we come to college to learn something that we cannot learn from textbooks. College should prepare students for real life. However, how many of our courses are beyond of the textbooks? How many of instructors care about the purpose of education not evaluations at the end of the semester?
I passed my two requirement courses with an instructor who was the only person offering these courses here in Virginia Tech. He had some slides copied from the textbook and read through them every single session. In those days, I always thought why I am here when I can read the textbook and learn better and quicker. Students should try very hard to get a grade less than A- in his courses because the exams are so easy and straightforward! I guess the instructor get great evaluation grades from students every semester because students feel happy when they get an A. I saw one of my friends recommended this course to others and he said you do not even need to go to the classes and you will get an A :).

Why students forget their goals from coming to college? As it is discussed by Doan Winkel (watch below), many of instructors deprive students the joy of discovery and present the answers to students before even students know and think about the problem. Actually, the procedure is reversed classes and I think that is exactly why most students hate classes.

 

When our education system cares only to final outcome, why should I do my project before the deadline?

One of my friend has posted this TED talk recently on her Facebook page. I enjoyed a lot by watching this talk. The procedure is the same as what I have  been doing during my education from as early as primary school till today! It seems, almost all of us, if we don’t learn anything from education system, we are master and proficient in “procrastination.” There is a joke that says, we have no PhD graduates and  no tenured professors without deadlines! God don’t get deadlines from us!

But the question is, why all of us, are used to procrastinate our tasks up to the last minutes? My question is how much of this behavior results because of the system?

Part of this behavior, I believe, can be explained by our education system. The education system cares only to outcome and not to procedure. The procedure does not matter for the system and the system does not reward people based on the procedure but it only praise them based on their outcome. I understand that there is a problem in most cases to identify the procedure, however, there are various conditions that the process can also be measured and rewarded.  For instance, in primary education, students tend to attend in lecture based classes and they mostly evaluate based on test scores (midterms and finals). Students know this fact that their final grades depend only on their test scores and the learning process does not matter for teachers. In this situation, a rational behavior will be procrastinate your learning process for the tests’ nights. But what if the learning process is also matter? If instead of only tests scores, the students’ grades depend on the learning process, such as class participation, class activities, and projects that they have to do during a semester with weekly reports, then, we may expect students put efforts and times for their course not only at exams’ nights. Using online platforms such as class forum also can help students learn do their jobs on time instead of procrastinating them for last minutes. During higher education (college education and graduate school), instructors have more freedom to give more weights on learning process rather than sticking to test scores. However, I think the exercise should be started from the beginning of someone’s education. Paying attention to learning procedure just when a person enter to college is too late for changing in his/her behavior. I am aware of the fact that most of us, regardless of our education system, tend to procrastinate our duties based on “Parkinson’s Law.” This law simply said that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” however, I think with correct system that rewards the process rather than the outcome, we can alleviate the procrastination behavior. If we have a system that teaches us that life is a marathon not a sprint ( as Professor Duckworth told in her ted talk), then we learn to do our duties in a precise schedule rather than doing it at the 11:45 pm of the due date! I am not expertise in education policy but I believed we need to think about redesigning the current education system. In this current world, procrastination does not work and work has been done in last minutes does not have enough quality to solve our complicated problems. We need to learn to change our views and learn to be motivated and passion for our long term goals. This paradigm shift needs an educational system that teaches kids to be gritty and passion, to look at the whole life as a long procedure rather than district moments, and to do their exercises every day like a marathon runner!

“What Do You Do with a B.A. in English?”

I believe I have said here or elsewhere something about the importance of the relationship between the humanities and the physical sciences: While the arts need the sciences for the sake of utility in the “real world,” the arts provide for the sciences a conscience. The sciences teach us how to experiment and examine the world as an outside observer; the arts teach us how to examine the world from within ourselves. Scientists work with their heads and their hands; an artist’s work comes from the head and the heart. While these examples are gross over-simplifications of these disciplines, they do illustrate the symbiotic relationship between the hard and the human sciences, a sort of codependency that is demanded of the individual who is studying them. And yet…

There remains a constant need to justify the equality of these fields, particularly from the humanities side. As an English major at a STEM-heavy university, sometimes it feels as though there is a perpetual chip on my shoulder, as if I must always remind everyone else about the relevance of my skills and my discipline. The pressure is not only pervasive in academia. Every family visit results in someone asking “So, what exactly are you going to do with your degree?” as if I am some dewey-eyed hippie, whose only future path is to live on a commune with huts made of tires, spending my days reading and writing poetry, telling stories, and living a frivolous life of frolicking through tulips, smoking a peace pipe, and generally being a disappointment to my ancestors. My response (somewhere in the ballpark of “Um…teach, hopefully…” “Well, if you do what you love, you never work a day in your life” and “Excuse me while I go nail my eyelids to the front deck in order to avoid having this conversation again…”) is never satisfactory. Besides, and perhaps most importantly, what role would I have in the event of a zombie apocalypse? While others with more practical skills would be building shelter, tracking weather patterns for safe travel, building farms, and finding a cure for the accursed zombie virus, what would I be doing? Soothing the undead to sleep with the sultry sounds of my silver-tongued recitations of Wallace Stevens’ “The Emperor of Ice Cream”? Fighting off a flesh-eating horde with my hardcover copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Unabridged, wiping bone matter and pieces of half-rotten corpse off of the dust jacket every few minutes? I was beginning to feel like the character in that Avenue Q song:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=T4f-4CajQyg%20frameborder=0%20allowfullscreen

But of course, all of this is ridiculous. Even though the market seems to value certain career paths over others, that’s not to say someone couldn’t live a perfectly satisfying life working in a humanities field. After all, there are some universally practicable skills that aren’t learned in the science classroom, such as reading comprehension, public speaking, clear and effective writing skills, visual literacy, crafting a well-reasoned argument, etc., etc. Part of the reason why I feel so strongly about interdisciplinary practices is due to my liberal arts background, where each field is appreciated for its particular contributions in creating a well-rounded classroom full of jacks-of-all-trades. This ruined me. Now I can’t favor one discipline over another without feeling a twinge of guilt as though I have failed in academia by not being some sort of mutant renaissance man. I do not have strong math skills, and though much of it eludes me like so much effluvium drifting above my head just out of reach, I am still fascinated with mathematics as a field, to the point that I feel compelled every so often to brush up on some of the concepts which I had previously forgotten. I say this not to brag–only to illustrate the state of mind that I’m in regarding academia, and, really, life in general. If we live in a world where we are able to not only appreciate other disciplines, but to utilize their skills for our own work, we will be expanding our potential–exploring and discovering nuances in our own disciplines which had previously remained elusive.

And, should the need arise, we will be much better equipped to kill zombies, which should make us all sleep a little sounder at night.

Why I decided to attend Virginia Tech

This week’s articles were difficult for me to comment on, because I agreed with them so thoroughly. Of course the humanities are important, and, as much as the media bags on literature professors, they do contribute something exceedingly valuable to the scientific community. Unfortunately, “Well Duh” is not an appropriate response far a blog post, but it feels pretty apt when all of these articles are acting like this is some great discovery. However, because I would like to contribute to the conversation in a way that doesn’t involve retyping the articles in all caps, I thought I would share with you the reason I decided not to attend a liberal arts university.

I could have attended a Graduate program that would have catered to a liberal arts background and turned out liberal arts undergraduates, but I specifically chose not to. Don’t get me wrong, I love literature and philosophy, I’ve dedicated a large portion of my life to it, but liberal arts graduates are not those who need the humanities. When I teach people who are invested in the ethical good that literature can provide it often leaves me feeling like I’ve just spent my time in a coffee shop with friends; we’ve had fun, we’ve discovered something new, but a majority of the learning could have happened with or without each other. We knew where we were going, but we wanted to go together. We were just passing time and introducing one another to new topics. Preaching to the choir doesn’t do anyone any good. I love teaching thinking, writing, and philosophy at a STEM heavy college because when I do, I can see the change that it makes in people. I teach writing and rhetoric to an engineer and all of the sudden they realize that all of their professors are taking them more seriously. I read Those Who Walk Away from Omleas with a physician and he begins to think about why he does what he does for a living. It’s not bringing them into a coffee shop with me, its opening the door to their fallout shelter and allowing them to see daylight for a little bit. When they return to the fallout shelter afterwards they remember why they are working inside it to begin with, and who they originally built it for.

This stepping out works both ways. Often time’s debates within the humanities will end on a difference of unprovable opinion. The world, it would appear is a constant bed of reconstruction that we simply allow ourselves to attempt to make sense of. I hate this notion. Not because it is necessarily untrue, All accounts prove otherwise, but because it is so defeatist. It’s a way for the humanities to throw their hands in the air and live in a state of agnosticism. In all honesty, I find it cowardly. I admire STEM for its certainty. Its ability to say, “The world is something we can figure out, just give us a little more time.” This is optimism at its core and it’s a good counterweight to the issues that we in the arts suffer from.

I know that I have probably said too much, and I don’t want anyone thinking that I have betrayed my field. I do think that, at the current moment, the humanities need to be heavily championed so that they continue to provide the services that society so desperately requires. If I can leave you with one belief it is this. The humanities are not a cure all. They are a vitamin. Without them society will transgress into a place that it doesn’t want to be, but I wouldn’t depend on them to cure cancer. We shouldn’t have research colleges and liberal arts colleges, we should have universities where individuals are taught to be uncertain so that they can attempt to work toward certainty.

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