Author: Gary Nave

There’s more to life than what you read in books

Maybe it’s the caffeine or the sunshine, but I don’t know if an article has ever energized me as much as the one I just read.

I started by watching Seth Godin’s TEDx Talk in which he posed the question:

“What is school for?”

Then I read Dan Edelstein’s article, about the purpose and the indirect impacts of education in the humanities.

However, as incredible as those were, it was Parker Palmer’s article that has me so excited. Maybe the first two set the stage for this one. Maybe it’s just the ideas that he mentions or the incredible examples he used.

If higher education is to serve humane purposes, we who educate must insist that knowing is not enough, that we are not fully human until we recognize what we know and take responsibility for it.

Palmer’s article really drove home the point that education is for more than just content knowledge. One of the key topics he discusses is the interaction of an individual with the institutions of which they are a part. I believe that this knowledge of institutional relationships is something a lot of folks struggle with these days. Often the narrative of “I have a problem with this organization. I’ll find something else to do” defeats the harder narrative of “I have a problem with this organization. However, I believe in it and will work to make it better.” Too often we believe that institutions are untouchable.

Palmer gets into a deep discussion of how to navigate our own feelings and let them speak to us in the workplace and in academia, which my commentary cannot do justice. I’ll let him speak for himself here.

So we have precious little experience and even less competence at extracting work-related information from our feelings. […] “So what?” might be a reasonable response to that observation—until we realize that a capacity to translate private feelings into knowledge and then public action, when warranted, has been an engine of every movement for social change.

Palmer is asserting, and I agree, that education is for more than just teaching people the “stuff” they learn in school. It’s more than solving equations and memorizing anatomy. Our educational institutions provide settings that could be used for so much more. So what are some things that I believe school is for? I’ll tell you.

School is for

  • Self-discovery
  • Gaining inspiration from those who have gone before us
  • Learning how to make connections between seemingly unrelated topics
  • Building and making and creating
  • Figuring out how our feelings relate to what we do
  • Learning how to work with other people to accomplish a goal
  • Seeing the value in people different than us
  • Learning how to work hard even when you don’t want to

School is a playground to discover who we are and how we want to interact with the world around us. My good friend Jeff wrote a blog post sharing college advice he had recently given to a high school senior. His first point really stuck with me:

You will learn about your degree in class.  You have the potential to learn about yourself every single moment.

This is the point I want to end with. Too often our educational system downplays this idea, but it should be sung in every classroom:

The most important thing we can learn is who we are.

 

What bullet points would you add to the list? How have you learned who you are through interactions inside or outside the classroom?


Why conversations about diversity are necessary

Diversity is something that has been important to me for a long time. Through so many conversations with friends, my worldview has grown in so many ways and continues to grow daily. My life has been made better because of diversity.

One particular quote from Brian Arao and Kristi Clemens article “From safe spaces to brave spaces” really stuck out to me as I think about diversity.

Was it the activity that had made our students unsafe, or did this sense of danger originate somewhere else?

This sentiment really supports their idea that safe spaces are impossible when talking about diversity of any kind in academic settings or really any setting. The concepts of privilege and inequality are necessarily uncomfortable, and to discuss them and bring some sort of resolution, we will have to make ourselves uncomfortable.

This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes. It is in Dr. King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. It is a letter written to fellow clergymen imploring them to support his movement and when I read it, I feel like it was written to me. There is one part in particular that I find incredibly convicting. Here, he calls out the “white moderate.” I’d like to share it here (emphasis mine):

First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

This letter is incredibly relevant to the issues that remain present today. There exist in this country so many injustices that are hidden under the surface. We need to bring these issues to the surface. They will make us uncomfortable. We will likely feel bad or guilty or hopeless at times. Whether we talk about them or not, they persist.

In the engineering classes I’ve taken and those I hope to teach in the near future, most of the students are heterosexual white males, and therefore ours is the loudest opinion. That means that people of color and women already hear our opinion whether they want to or not. It is absolutely essential to the human experience to be aware of the way that others experience it. Therefore, we, as members of the majority, have to take special care to hear other worldviews.

We cannot discredit another human’s experience because it’s different than ours. When people of color are insisting that there is a race issue in this country, we cannot say that there isn’t one. When females in engineering say that the culture in the classroom is too hostile, we cannot say that they are just being too sensitive. We must learn from others. We must grow as people. That is why diversity matters.


Teaching to the choir

Although much of the reason that I am in graduate school is for an eventual career teaching college students, I have not had many opportunities to teach courses yet. Therefore, for a teaching reflection, I will be reflecting on other opportunities I have had to speak and the one or two opportunities I have had to give a guest lecture.

For the purposes of this blog, I will consider two different experience I’ve had related to teaching: (1) in the fall, when I gave a guest lecture for my advisor in a sophomore-level dynamics course, and (2) yesterday, when I got the opportunity to preach the sermon at my church, Fieldstone UMC. There are actually a surprising amount of similarities between the two experiences. Note: my faith is very important to me, but this is a blog about teaching.

In reflecting on these two experiences, I’ve noticed some things about my teaching style.

Examples are very important to me

Examples help illustrate concepts and help us connect ideas to things we can already wrap our heads around. Maybe its the engineer in me, but I think that examples make incredibly powerful teaching tools.

In the dynamics course, I was teaching about the impulse-momentum equation

J \equiv \int_{t_1}^{t_2} Fdt = mv_2-mv_1

Which says that there’s this thing called the impulse, J, that is equal to the change in momentum. It is a useful formula for studying things like the dynamics of billiards and car accidents. To introduce the topic to my class, though, I didn’t just give them that equation, because equations are scary. I showed a video of a golf ball deforming and talked about how the impulse represents the total effect of that deformation and restoration. Therefore, we don’t have to know the details of that deformation. All we need to know is the change in velocity of the club head in order to determine the velocity that the ball.

In the sermon, I was discussing how small actions can have a profound impact, and I shared a TED talk by Drew Dudley entitled Everyday Leadership. He shares the amazing story about a time that he gave a lollipop to a girl and it utterly changed her life. Thinking about how this moment where he had so profoundly impacted somebody without even remembering it, we can see how we may all be able to impact those around us through small actions.

Examples people something tangible to hold onto when discussions become abstract.

I like to make people move

As we’ve discussed in class, lectures can get boring and people don’t have the attention span. I like to make people move around the room if possible to get the blood flowing and to help them engage.

In the dynamics course, I used a sort of think-pair-share to get the students to try to apply the knowledge in small groups and then discuss with the class in order to make sure that students were engaging with the material rather than just listening to me drone on. In a boring class talking about a derivation, I had the students try it first. Then, they would have something to go from when we talked about the material in class.

During the sermon, I was trying to encourage people to be more conscious of creating a welcoming environment. In the middle of the sermon, I asked everyone to stand up and learn the name of one other person in the room. The room was immediately filled with energy and the rest of the sermon flowed from that energy.

Getting people physically moving during a lecture helps them be involved.

It’s important to keep people engaged

Engagement is hard to describe when giving a presentation of any kind, but it is the most important thing. I think that engagement is just something you can feel. It’s in eye contact and facial expressions, but it’s really just something that you can feel.

I felt it while performing in musicals in high school. I felt it I spent my first couple years of graduate school giving presentations to prospective students and their parents. I felt it yesterday while preaching, and I felt it from some of the students when I taught the dynamics class.

I don’t yet know how to improve that engagement in the classroom. I think that is something that I’ll be working at throughout my career as a teacher.

What do you think? Do you have any fun examples to share? Do you have fun ideas to get people moving in the classroom? Do you know what it feels like when the audience is engaged? Why is it so much harder to be an engaging speaker in a classroom environment?


Ignorance is bliss?

I don’t know anything about Thermodynamics.

It’s true. I got an A- in Thermodynamics, but I don’t know anything about Thermodynamics.

In that class, I had a very personal experience with Alfie Kohn’s assertion:

“Grades create a preference for the easiest possible task”

When I took Thermo, 5% of the course grade was homework. After two weeks of class, I found that I was spending 3-5 hours to do each homework, and they were due 3 times a week. I was getting bogged down in those assignments and I made a choice. I decided that I wasn’t going to do homework for that class. It turned out that I was missing something that would’ve made the homework a lot easier, but I had a preference for the easiest possible task. And I chose to take a 5 point hit on my final grade to spend my time better elsewhere.

I was doing very poorly in the class, but I can test like a pro. I crammed so hard for the final and actually got a 99. The professor curved the class like crazy and now I don’t know anything about Thermo but my undergrad GPA is okay.

And I was so proud of this at the time. Nowadays, I value homework so highly. It is the place where you have to try to wrestle with the material from class and actually learn things. Homework is where you put into practice all of the crazy things your professor talks about during the lecture.

I missed out on learning something because I was thinking about grades. Have you ever done that?


The pendulum swings

I think that Michael Wesch hits the nail on the head in his article Anti-Teaching: Confronting the Crisis of Significance when he states in the first two sentences that,

The most significant problem with education today is the problem of significance itself. Students – our most important critics – are struggling to find meaning and significance in their education.

 

A dominant problem in our educational system is that we lose the student by silencing their voice. We do not make the education relevant to their lives, and therefore they do not engage.

It is my opinion, though, that as we discuss solutions to this, we go too far. We, as people, have a tendency to rebel against one extreme by running to the other. When it’s cold outside, my mother cranks the heat in the car until I’m sweating. When all pop music sounded the same, we ended up with such levels of individuality that some music became hardly musical.

I think this can happen in education too. Today, Christine Ortiz, the Dean of the Graduate School at MIT announced that she is taking a leave to start a new university with “no majors, no lectures, and no classrooms.”

Too often we ignore the input of the student crying “This isn’t relevant to me!” But we need not run so far that we ignore wisdom of the faculty member saying “I know it’s a stretch for you, but this is really important for you to learn.” How do we provide a meaningful and significant experience for the student without losing the direction of their education?

The nice thing about the car heater is that it usually ends up at a comfortable temperature after a little bit of sweating. And thanks to those that have continually pushed the boundaries of music, we’ve ended up with so many original masterpieces.

We need people like Dr. Ortiz to help us push the pendulum in a new direction. I can’t wait to see where we end up.

Why is education significant to you?
What do you think of Dr. Ortiz’s new university?
Where do you think education is headed?