I like your post! As a non-humanities person who has spent a lot of time pondering the value of the humanities and liberal arts, I will offer you another perspective: Let’s say there’s a zombie apocalypse, and the farmers, doctors, and military help us survive. Then our engineers build some things to make life easier and safer. Then what? Then we’re going to want some artists/writers/musicians to entertain us and teach us how to make our own art, and psychologists to help us process our feelings after what was certainly a traumatic series of events, and historians to help us figure out what went wrong to cause the zombie apocalypse in the first place so we can avoid another one! Life, fortunately, is about more than just survival.

Also, it may be helpful to keep in mind that, for those of us who didn’t take many humanities classes beyond high school and a couple of gen-ends, we may be remembering the parts of those classes that made us memorize things and slog through books we hated more than the critical thinking parts of those courses. Learning writing and critical thinking skills are super important to a lot of aspects of our lives. Memorizing Shakespeare…I don’t know…how that is useful to…anyone? I think that’s why the humanities seem so irrelevant to our lives sometimes, at least for me. Of course, that’s where you come in, English Professor, to give our students a better education than what some of us had!

That class sounds awesome! I must admit…I have long been a person who looks down on humanities. But, after this week’s readings, I’ve realized that that’s partly because I took a lot of bad humanities classes that made me read boring texts and answer boring questions (or take exams which seemed to rely mainly on having practically memorized an entire book). Your post has driven this point home for me- if humanities classes are going to actually do what they claim to do (foster independent thinking, etc.), they have to capture people’s interests. This class seems like an excellent example of that! (at least for some people…others may hate science fiction in which case, there should be other courses to match their interests!)

I really like your post and I think it touches on the importance of connecting different fields/professions/ways of thinking. I think that many researchers are very removed from the “real world,” and sometimes, they like it that way. But your experience actually working in horticulture, which is quite a different activity than research, will make you a better researcher because it gives you such great insight into the needs of the industry! One thing I hate about grad school is it’s obsessively field and discipline-focused, but I think if we got more opportunities to explore different anythings (different fields, or practical experiences), it would improve our educations and our skills as professionals.

This is a very interesting post and a great example of history being written by the victors. I agree that it relates to critical pedagogy. I think that with critical pedagogy, instead of just reading the textbook and believing what it says as “true,” students can read a textbook, think about who has written it, how it reflects societal biases, etc., and then also look at different textbooks to compare. A history class on WW2 may for instance have students read one textbook, but a class that is based on critical pedagogy may have students read many textbooks. I think that this type of education will better prepare students for life and improve society overall by encouraging people to challenge what they learn and believe. Maybe that will help us all get closer to what is actually (or closer to) the truth.

I really like your post and it certainly makes me glad I didn’t grow up in the 1830’s! Something I remember noticing when I was in K-12 school was the contradictory messages of “Do all of these things that we tell you to do because we say so” and “Think critically and challenge the world!” In my average-to-pretty-good public school, both of these messages were pretty strong. Of course, many of the things we were “supposed to do” were actually helpful (like not running in the halls and listening in class), but some existed just because they were the “right” or “acceptable” things to do or ways to be, and I always wondered, who was it that got to decide what was “acceptable,” anyway? I think it’s a crucial part of education to encourage students to challenge these social norms, or else they won’t change!

The part of your post that really resonated me was when you discussed how applications of a course can strike curiosity. For me, the ideal conditions are interesting subject matter, USEFUL subject matter, and great professor. I find that I lose interest very quickly when I start thinking “What is the point of this?” So yes, for me, one of the most important things a professor can do is make the subject matter seem not only interesting but also important.

Thank you for sharing your experiences and perspectives! And also thank you for being so caring to your students. Speaking from experience as a woman, it can sometimes be intimidating or uncomfortable to be in an all (or mostly)-male setting and I’m sure that your efforts to make everyone feel included are appreciated by your students! As teachers, it is our job to educate ALL of our students to the best of our ability, and being totally blind to things that may be affecting their learning isn’t helpful.

I agree with you that it is important for professors to develop a welcoming atmosphere for all students, and it’s important for everyone to remember that people have many aspects of their identity that may be very important to them. But, I also think that knowing someone’s preferred pronouns is very different from knowing other aspects of their identity because we actually use a person’s pronouns all the time, so they are directly relevant for us to know. There is a decent chance that over the course of a semester, you and your students will need to or want to refer to each other by pronouns. So, knowing and using the pronouns that person prefers is a matter of courteousness and respect. Now, if the convention in English were to just use gender-neutral pronouns for everyone, then maybe this wouldn’t be an issue, but that is not the case. So, we ask, or give students the opportunity to let us know, and let our students know that we care about their preference.

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Thank you for your honest post and reflections! I, too, was disappointed in the results of the implicit bias test I took, but sadly I wasn’t surprised. Do I think my results mean that I’m a hateful person? No. Do I think that it means I automatically make some associations between certain people and certain things? Yes. In fact, I noticed while I was taking the test thinking “Oh, this part is easier than the last part” precisely because I could tell I was relying on those associations. And can those patterns of thought cause real harm to people? Yes! I think many, many people hold these implicit biases in our heads and I think they have serious implications, even if we’re not trying to be racist/sexist/etc. But I love Yi’s comment on being awake to these issues. Being aware of these biases in our own heads is the only way to start dismantling them!

I really like your ideas here. As an undergrad, I took many sociology classes that discussed privilege a lot, and I don’t think I would have had a thorough understanding of it had I not taken those classes. I think that when someone is in a privileged class/category, it is difficult for us to see our privilege on our own. That’s why education is so important in this area. And I think that if more people understood how privilege (and the lack of privilege) shapes our lives, our society would be better! It would allow us to have more productive and honest conversations about race, gender, etc., and be an important starting point for change.