Great post – I agree. I think there is also something to be said for gaining self confidence in your abilities through the “connect the dots” approach. It’s easy to doubt your own knowledge when it is all built on memorization, but knowing, as a student, that you have the ability to think through problems and reach your own solutions can be empowering.

Great post. I definitely share your concern. It’s so ironic when I look back that many of the things that I see my friends who went from undergraduate to the working world doing are the exact opposite of what was emphasized in our education. Writing was downplayed and neglected as part of my bachelor’s education and of course it’s a huge part of what I do in grad school, but it’s also a huge part of what my friends who went into consulting do. I gave incredibly few presentations as part of my undergraduate and it’s been a huge challenge for me to become more comfortable speaking in front of a group in grad school and I know some of my consulting friends had similar struggles. I’m sure those problems are largely related to the fact that I studied engineering, but I would imagine the problem is more widespread than that.

Great post. I have had a similar experience with graduate school where I realized when I started that I was really incapable of generating my own creative unique thoughts. It felt totally bizarre and really scary. How did I get here and go through all that education without being able to think for myself? I agree, moving away from “cookie-cutter” education needs to start at a much younger age.

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Thinking of having 291 tabs open makes me so anxious! My analog to that is probably the hundreds and hundreds of papers I’ve downloaded into my Mendeley account that I have not and will probably never read.

Great points about all of the misinformation available. It pains me to see some of the things my friends and family members post on social media that seem to me to be obviously unreliable. If you are new to technology, it seems like a huge task to learn how to critically assess the validity of information.

As a graduate student, while I know I could get away with being away from technology for 24 hours or more, I’m not sure I want to. While my advisor would never reprimand me or any student for taking 24 hours off from email during the weekend, I don’t necessarily want to be away for that long. I really love my research and being fully immersed in it is pretty awesome, though I certainly take breaks. If my advisor is going to be reading a draft of my paper over the weekend and has a quick question that she emails me about, I want to be able to answer her ASAP so that she can help me make progress. If another student has a question in the lab about a procedure that they can’t move forward with until they get an answer, I’d like to be able to help them with that too. I think putting work on the shelf for a day or two over the weekend to relax is totally ok, but if you are working with other people, it’s probably not realistic or considerate or maybe even acceptable to disconnect yourself from them.

Engineering Ethics with Dr. Edwards was life changing for me. It’s a little hard to describe what makes it so different from other ethics classes but I think the main thing is the passion the instructors have and how fully immersed in the issues you are.

Having also attended the talk Sheldon and Param gave, one of the really surprising things that happened was that afterward people attending the talk were really bothered by the fact that there were students in this study who hadn’t received the ethics training and that this in itself was unethical! Their argument was that they had offered ethics training to more of the students than would have otherwise received it so it was still a step in the right direction, which I completely agree with.

Great post! Your list of pointers is great. The first one really hits the nail on the head. Learning to give up power is so against conventional teaching approaches that I think it’s a huge challenge and something we have to be constantly mindful of.

Really good points. I agree that it might not be realistic to ditch the banking system altogether. Some things really do have to be memorized to be useful – anatomy, or other medical topics, for example. I don’t want my doctor to just be able to remember what a certain muscle/bone/etc. is called by referring to a book. In other topics, the memorization just has to precede the problem proposing education. How can you apply biology or physics concepts if you don’t thoroughly know the basics? There needs to be a balance of both in the classroom.

I like akin’s comment about auto drive. It seems so easy for teachers to make assumptions with the idea that they are helping students to learn things like discipline, but those endeavors can’t be at the expense of inclusion or equality. Great post – thanks for sharing.

Great post – the three points are a really great summation. Your points offer great guidance regarding how to be intentional in the way we treat our students. It’s uncomfortable to recognize our own capacity for bias but it feels more manageable with these simple guidelines for addressing our biases.