Well, that could have gone better
Dec. 2nd, 2005 07:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
danalwynThis week was one never-ending stream of disasters, starting on Monday and going straight through to me giving up on being anything remotely approaching productive at about 6:30. I had intended on going home early today. Instead, it's another nine and a half hour day at the office, with optional time at home. At least I can take solace in the fact that it isn't just us, everyone's week has been miserable. I especially feel sorry for Run II Sys people, who are probably sick and tired of dealing with all of our production crap. Today was still the best of all, opening with a complete disk failure on one of the production headnodes, resulting in us frantically transferring data to another disk which was then swapped in. There are days when I really hate this system.
Weather is also starting to get cold. It was 10 F (about -12C) when I went to work in the morning, with a fairly stiff wind. I'm going to have to think about wearing my hat more often.
In a note that's only of interest to two people on my FL, I spoke briefly to Alan Weinstein today. I swear he looks younger than he used to. I went to his LIGO talk a few weeks ago, and he also seems more energetic than he used to be. This confuses me.
So; to amuse you, or infuriate you, or whatever, I'll give you some thoughts that I had on the week before Thanksgiving, on reading some of the articles in Slate's College Week. And even better, it's basically unedited.
Ha ha! I sense big flames headed my way.
It seems that those who practice, and who teach, in the Liberal Arts have yet to realize their complete irrelevance to the real world. This is a subject of some feelings of superiority on behalf of scientists. After all, the liberal arts have been strong academic disciplines for hundreds of years. Science, as we know it, has only been taught for the past fifty years or so, and it only took about thirty of those for us to realize how irrelevant we were. We may both be useless, but at least we remember it.
To those who feel that this comment needs some explanation, and who am I to argue, let me remind you that the Real World is a very strange place, possibly even stranger than the twisted version that sometimes appears on MTV. It's a place where people get jobs doing retail at Wal-Mart or at the local grocery store, or repairing cars and generally go from one incident to another in their life without spending much time pondering about it. They may drive high-tech cars, made from the pinnacle of modern technology, on a nation whose ideals are a distilled version of a thousand years of philosophy and governmental theory, but they don't really care about that.
This is a well recognized fact. No businessman will insist that you perform a Shakespearean soliloquy in your job interview any more than he would insist that you derive the existence of Electromagnetism from first principles. It's ridiculous to think that the knowledge that you have obtained in your degree, from obscure kings of the Salian Franks to orbital states of atomic isotopes, will have any direct bearing on you should you get a job out in the "Real World" (i.e., not a research job). So what exactly do the Liberal Arts, who dominate so much of our curriculum, teach us?
This is where the fighting starts. Part of this is because there is a section of the LA faculty who, perhaps unknowingly and subconsciously, projects an image to the rest of the world that they have a monopoly on what they profess to teach, that is, critical thinking. It is a bygone conclusion that if you ask for a justification of why those particular departments get such a large share of required classes (and hence a large share of the University's teaching budget) what they contribute to the education of a student, the responses will mostly be the same. The purpose of the Liberal Arts is to provide a student with critical thinking skills, advanced communications skills, and a more diverse understanding of conflicting worldviews.
These are all lofty goals, and I agree with all of them. I think they should be pursued, and I only occasionally begrudge them their share of the teaching budget. But what did ring false to me out of all of what I read was a sense that the truth, that the sacred and profane knowledge of critical thinking, was a treasure that lay in trust with the Liberal Arts faculty, to be dispensed at their leisure to the willing and the worthy.
Of course they did not say it. They did not even imply it half the time. But one of the things that seems to bring cross-discipline discussion to a close is this sense that there is a belief that there is only one true way to Enlightenment, and that the Lords of the Liberal Arts are the Gatekeepers, deciding who is and is not worthy of crossing the Threshold. Scientists are, of course, not immune to this method either, and there's as much elitism over here as there is over there. The difference is perhaps that our elitism tends to stay behind closed doors (although I, being on the side I am, am clearly a biased source. Please form your own views on this).
On our side, this claim is clearly ludicrous. Physicists aren't taught physics until they are Juniors at the least-a few of the concepts are whispered, but no actual physics is taught to them. Instead they receive lessons that will, hopefully, teach them how to think, how to solve problems, and how to approach a new project both critically and analytically. Actually, to listen to some of the more biased members of the Science community complain, the problem is the reverse. The students who come to us from the Liberal Arts side of the world lack analytical thinking and problem solving skills. They are unable to define a problem, to list their tools, or even to map out an approach to a subject. Once away from their subject area they are reduced to using their long-winded pomposity to attempt to pass through the most treacherous portions of the course without needing to engage the use of anything that resides between their ears.
This is no more bitter, and no more true, than what I am sure my colleagues in the English department say about our protegees behind closed doors. Regardless, I find it interesting that, when confronted about what skills an undergrad should gain in college, so many of the people in the Liberal Arts should speak about critical thinking and an expanded worldview, and yet so many of them limit the means of obtaining it to their own narrow disciplines.
For one example, I can go all the way back to High School. My brother, who attends the school I attended and has many of the same teachers, has reported that one of them has made the dubious claim about her English class that what they learn there will be important for them forever, while what they learn in math class won't be important once they leave High School. I know her, she's an excellent teacher and she's very gifted at her subject matter. But at the same time I disagree with her, the most important skill I learned in High School was how to approach a problem, the techniques I could use for wrapping my mind around a difficult subject and for assaulting it from multiple angles. And I learned that, not from English class of which I remember little, but rather from Math and Science classes.
To go back to the College Week articles, I found it interesting that one author suggested the old method of teaching logical and critical thinking from the Great Books of western civilization, and that a course consisting of exploring the literary titans of yesteryear should suffice to give a student sufficient logical breadth that they should be able to meet all critical thinking challenges in their future. Another author made a claim of which I am even more skeptical of, that the Great Books are useful because it is nearly impossible for a teacher to teach a Great Book badly.
This is what I believe may lie at the core of my irritation. I think that, no matter how great the book, that there will always be a core of students who will get no more out of it than they would get out of reading TV Guide. No matter how important the author, how good the teaching, there will probably always be a few, like me, who will say to themselves "This is sort of neat, but it doesn't tell me anything about the world, or about myself, that I didn't already know". There is no one curriculum that will reach out and grab everybody-and I think we need to stop pretending that there is even a diverse curriculum that will disperse the knowledge of how to think critically to the student population as a whole.
Professors are, by nature, liars. They claim to be teaching to a wide audience, but really they are trying to teach miniature versions of their own profession-they are trying to teach as they want to be taught. They teach their subject in the way they learned it, in the way that it fascinated them, as if you were like them. It's a basic conceit that we share-all of us humans. We want to believe that everybody is like us, that everybody thinks the way that we do.
And the fact that sometimes we don't acknowledge that is perhaps one of the biggest annoyances we deal with. People of a non-literary bent are especially irritated by those who wish to teach lessons about the nature of life itself through the interpretation of a single, or a set of, books. Too often we've opened famous works of literature, and been told that it is replete with interlocking layers of meaning, only to find it not that interesting-and the insights it provides not terribly profound. But there is always a feeling that, in the Professor's mind, a failure to be stirred by the work in question demonstrates a flaw in the student instead of perhaps a mind that does not take to their favorite book. It becomes almost religious; there is great meaning in this book because I have found it there, and your inability to find the same great meaning reflects your own unwillingness or inability to work. Substitute Moby Dick with the Bible, and the argument stays the same, only the subject matter differs. Which is infuriating to people who just don't think that way-people learn in different ways, and you can't pretend that you are the custodian of the one true path to critical enlightenment.
Not that I'm doing something like proposing a constructive path of action. I'm just defining the problem, in preparation for solving it. That's something I learned in science classes, and I still find it useful today.
Weather is also starting to get cold. It was 10 F (about -12C) when I went to work in the morning, with a fairly stiff wind. I'm going to have to think about wearing my hat more often.
In a note that's only of interest to two people on my FL, I spoke briefly to Alan Weinstein today. I swear he looks younger than he used to. I went to his LIGO talk a few weeks ago, and he also seems more energetic than he used to be. This confuses me.
So; to amuse you, or infuriate you, or whatever, I'll give you some thoughts that I had on the week before Thanksgiving, on reading some of the articles in Slate's College Week. And even better, it's basically unedited.
Ha ha! I sense big flames headed my way.
It seems that those who practice, and who teach, in the Liberal Arts have yet to realize their complete irrelevance to the real world. This is a subject of some feelings of superiority on behalf of scientists. After all, the liberal arts have been strong academic disciplines for hundreds of years. Science, as we know it, has only been taught for the past fifty years or so, and it only took about thirty of those for us to realize how irrelevant we were. We may both be useless, but at least we remember it.
To those who feel that this comment needs some explanation, and who am I to argue, let me remind you that the Real World is a very strange place, possibly even stranger than the twisted version that sometimes appears on MTV. It's a place where people get jobs doing retail at Wal-Mart or at the local grocery store, or repairing cars and generally go from one incident to another in their life without spending much time pondering about it. They may drive high-tech cars, made from the pinnacle of modern technology, on a nation whose ideals are a distilled version of a thousand years of philosophy and governmental theory, but they don't really care about that.
This is a well recognized fact. No businessman will insist that you perform a Shakespearean soliloquy in your job interview any more than he would insist that you derive the existence of Electromagnetism from first principles. It's ridiculous to think that the knowledge that you have obtained in your degree, from obscure kings of the Salian Franks to orbital states of atomic isotopes, will have any direct bearing on you should you get a job out in the "Real World" (i.e., not a research job). So what exactly do the Liberal Arts, who dominate so much of our curriculum, teach us?
This is where the fighting starts. Part of this is because there is a section of the LA faculty who, perhaps unknowingly and subconsciously, projects an image to the rest of the world that they have a monopoly on what they profess to teach, that is, critical thinking. It is a bygone conclusion that if you ask for a justification of why those particular departments get such a large share of required classes (and hence a large share of the University's teaching budget) what they contribute to the education of a student, the responses will mostly be the same. The purpose of the Liberal Arts is to provide a student with critical thinking skills, advanced communications skills, and a more diverse understanding of conflicting worldviews.
These are all lofty goals, and I agree with all of them. I think they should be pursued, and I only occasionally begrudge them their share of the teaching budget. But what did ring false to me out of all of what I read was a sense that the truth, that the sacred and profane knowledge of critical thinking, was a treasure that lay in trust with the Liberal Arts faculty, to be dispensed at their leisure to the willing and the worthy.
Of course they did not say it. They did not even imply it half the time. But one of the things that seems to bring cross-discipline discussion to a close is this sense that there is a belief that there is only one true way to Enlightenment, and that the Lords of the Liberal Arts are the Gatekeepers, deciding who is and is not worthy of crossing the Threshold. Scientists are, of course, not immune to this method either, and there's as much elitism over here as there is over there. The difference is perhaps that our elitism tends to stay behind closed doors (although I, being on the side I am, am clearly a biased source. Please form your own views on this).
On our side, this claim is clearly ludicrous. Physicists aren't taught physics until they are Juniors at the least-a few of the concepts are whispered, but no actual physics is taught to them. Instead they receive lessons that will, hopefully, teach them how to think, how to solve problems, and how to approach a new project both critically and analytically. Actually, to listen to some of the more biased members of the Science community complain, the problem is the reverse. The students who come to us from the Liberal Arts side of the world lack analytical thinking and problem solving skills. They are unable to define a problem, to list their tools, or even to map out an approach to a subject. Once away from their subject area they are reduced to using their long-winded pomposity to attempt to pass through the most treacherous portions of the course without needing to engage the use of anything that resides between their ears.
This is no more bitter, and no more true, than what I am sure my colleagues in the English department say about our protegees behind closed doors. Regardless, I find it interesting that, when confronted about what skills an undergrad should gain in college, so many of the people in the Liberal Arts should speak about critical thinking and an expanded worldview, and yet so many of them limit the means of obtaining it to their own narrow disciplines.
For one example, I can go all the way back to High School. My brother, who attends the school I attended and has many of the same teachers, has reported that one of them has made the dubious claim about her English class that what they learn there will be important for them forever, while what they learn in math class won't be important once they leave High School. I know her, she's an excellent teacher and she's very gifted at her subject matter. But at the same time I disagree with her, the most important skill I learned in High School was how to approach a problem, the techniques I could use for wrapping my mind around a difficult subject and for assaulting it from multiple angles. And I learned that, not from English class of which I remember little, but rather from Math and Science classes.
To go back to the College Week articles, I found it interesting that one author suggested the old method of teaching logical and critical thinking from the Great Books of western civilization, and that a course consisting of exploring the literary titans of yesteryear should suffice to give a student sufficient logical breadth that they should be able to meet all critical thinking challenges in their future. Another author made a claim of which I am even more skeptical of, that the Great Books are useful because it is nearly impossible for a teacher to teach a Great Book badly.
This is what I believe may lie at the core of my irritation. I think that, no matter how great the book, that there will always be a core of students who will get no more out of it than they would get out of reading TV Guide. No matter how important the author, how good the teaching, there will probably always be a few, like me, who will say to themselves "This is sort of neat, but it doesn't tell me anything about the world, or about myself, that I didn't already know". There is no one curriculum that will reach out and grab everybody-and I think we need to stop pretending that there is even a diverse curriculum that will disperse the knowledge of how to think critically to the student population as a whole.
Professors are, by nature, liars. They claim to be teaching to a wide audience, but really they are trying to teach miniature versions of their own profession-they are trying to teach as they want to be taught. They teach their subject in the way they learned it, in the way that it fascinated them, as if you were like them. It's a basic conceit that we share-all of us humans. We want to believe that everybody is like us, that everybody thinks the way that we do.
And the fact that sometimes we don't acknowledge that is perhaps one of the biggest annoyances we deal with. People of a non-literary bent are especially irritated by those who wish to teach lessons about the nature of life itself through the interpretation of a single, or a set of, books. Too often we've opened famous works of literature, and been told that it is replete with interlocking layers of meaning, only to find it not that interesting-and the insights it provides not terribly profound. But there is always a feeling that, in the Professor's mind, a failure to be stirred by the work in question demonstrates a flaw in the student instead of perhaps a mind that does not take to their favorite book. It becomes almost religious; there is great meaning in this book because I have found it there, and your inability to find the same great meaning reflects your own unwillingness or inability to work. Substitute Moby Dick with the Bible, and the argument stays the same, only the subject matter differs. Which is infuriating to people who just don't think that way-people learn in different ways, and you can't pretend that you are the custodian of the one true path to critical enlightenment.
Not that I'm doing something like proposing a constructive path of action. I'm just defining the problem, in preparation for solving it. That's something I learned in science classes, and I still find it useful today.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 04:46 am (UTC)I've learned a damn lot about history and humanity, about what brings us together as people and what drives us apart into cultures. I've learned compassion and beauty on a spectrum that can't be rationalised or broken down into handy, easy-to-use charts. The liberal arts carry on the words, memories, and passions of the past. If that isn't of importance to you, that's for you to reckon with, not for me to explain away. Suffice it to say that I'd rather live in an intelligent, passionate society than an intelligent, impotent one.
Too often we've opened famous works of literature, and been told that it is replete with interlocking layers of meaning, only to find it not that interesting-and the insights it provides not terribly profound. But there is always a feeling that, in the Professor's mind, a failure to be stirred by the work in question demonstrates a flaw in the student instead of perhaps a mind that does not take to their favorite book.
If the professor implies such a thing, he's an arrogant ass who shouldn't be trusted to teach. If the student assumes it, he is a weakling who needs not only a stronger spine, but a healthy dose of self-esteem. There is room for all perspectives in art, so long as the perspective is an honest one. I have enjoyed this in abundance in my Song Lit class, where there were frequent naysayers, informing the class (and professor) that Schubert missed the mark on this one, or Fauré was shallow in that one, every one of us having the gall to assert ourselves as authorities, and every one of us being right.
I'm just defining the problem
I'm afraid I'm not sure what you think 'the problem' is, but again, that's your affair, not mine. I see no problem with people learning things you don't like, or that you don't appreciate. Considering that I'm forced to learn the rudimentary basics of scientific disciplines just to get my music degree (because, as we all know, understanding red shifts and imaginary numbers are terribly important in the real world - why, I couldn't even buy a can of pears without knowing that x=5), I think the playing field is rather even.
But you'll have to excuse me... I've just finished two concerts today, sacrificing more than ten hours in two days to the foolish pursuit of 'entertainment', selling out to appreciative audiences of people who surely aren't so enlightened as the scientific crowd, and I'm a little sleepy. The above may not make sense when viewed while alert. Or sober.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 02:29 pm (UTC)Maybe in a ideal world, but not this one. That happens quite frequently, especially to those who don't know what the correct answer is. Science/math majors find themselves in that position frequently.
Considering that I'm forced to learn the rudimentary basics of scientific disciplines just to get my music degree (because, as we all know, understanding red shifts and imaginary numbers are terribly important in the real world - why, I couldn't even buy a can of pears without knowing that x=5), I think the playing field is rather even.
Again, incorrect. What are you required to take, college algrebra? There have been various studies on this, and the vast majority of colleges have their core curriculum slanted towards the liberal arts. If you want, I'll go find a link.
The liberal arts carry on the words, memories, and passions of the past. If that isn't of importance to you, that's for you to reckon with, not for me to explain away. Suffice it to say that I'd rather live in an intelligent, passionate society than an intelligent, impotent one.
Where did
And are you saying that our liberal-arts based society is particularly intelligent?
(Sorry about that, knee-jerk reaction.)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 05:14 pm (UTC)Please do. I'll start working now on mustering up some pity.
Science/math majors find themselves in that position frequently.
Life's not all rosy from the liberal arts side, either.
So perhaps there's no sense in arguing... we can all walk around, feeling disgruntled with life, and we can justifiably wangst about the 'other camp'.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 06:02 pm (UTC)If I were a faculty member, I would find a great deal of value in arguing this out and figuring out what the purpose was for each discipline before trying to hash out the next rewriting to the Core Curriculum. It would be nice for us to have some description of what we were trying to accomplish before we wrote down how we were planning on accomplishing it.
I wrote an earlier rant some time ago about the weighting toward the Liberal Arts side of the core curriculum. I don't think it's all bad, but I do think that the sciences side should start requiring a higher level of rigor in their own Core classes. But that's a matter for the curriculum committee to figure out.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 04:13 pm (UTC)Calm down for a moment. I never said that they should be taken out of the curriculum. Actually, as I've said before, I think a strong core requirement is key to undergraduate education.
What does bug me is what happens when we start distilling the curriculum. After all, the purpose of a university education is not so much to teach about the peculiarities of Yanomano culture as it is to impart vital life skills to the students. The question we should ask is: which life skills are we trying to teach, which worlds are we trying to open to them, and are those skills and worldviews exclusive to any one discipline?
"If the professor implies such a thing, he's an arrogant ass who shouldn't be trusted to teach. If the student assumes it, he is a weakling who needs not only a stronger spine, but a healthy dose of self-esteem."
The scenario I was thinking of is more common (especially among engineers-who are strange) and goes something like this:
Student reads Great Book, and finds it about as profound as the writing on the back of his morning cereal box. Student goes to class. Professor assigns essay on (for example) how one of the societal themes is developed in the book, along with authorital intent. Student writes essay instead about how the theme is ineffectually developed, and explains reasoning. Professor reads draft and tells the student that said student is missing the point, or is possibly just not expending effort, and asks student to write it again before final draft. Student resolves to come up with some line of bullshit that Professor wishes to hear and feed it to him.
There's a tendency in introductory lit. classes (and other classes) for Professors to ask for essays about facets of the story that may seem profoundly uninteresting or badly handled by the author. In this case, students soon learn that there are a few things that Professors actually want to hear, and they tend to turn them in. There is little honor in failing a class just because you want to stand up for some abstract principles.
My statement would be that, even though the knowledge that feeding people bullshit can result in success is valuable, this is not the path that the Liberal Arts wants to take, nor the lesson they should want students to walk away with.
"Considering that I'm forced to learn the rudimentary basics of scientific disciplines just to get my music degree (because, as we all know, understanding red shifts and imaginary numbers are terribly important in the real world - why, I couldn't even buy a can of pears without knowing that x=5), I think the playing field is rather even."
I have two arguments with that, but one I'll save for another time. It concerns the adjusted level of knowledge in the two fields that a student is required to learn, and it is an argument that takes some time to develop.
My other is that, you've proved a bit of my point. I don't need to know redshift to buy a can of pears. I also don't need to know the techniques of literary criticism, or the principles of music composition. In fact, all I need to know is how to read the label on the can. Both sides of the college curriculum have to know that what they teach is irrelevant in ninety percent of their students lives.
What I'm objecting to is the attitude that there is only one true way to acquire the critical thinking skills that you need later in life, and it has to be done through a specific curriculum. There's a lot of arrogance about this on the scientific side, but there's the same amount on the Liberal Arts side. It's almost like, among college faculty, the thought that the liberal arts is the true path to actual critical thinking skills is so deeply ingrained that it is no longer even questioned-and that's where the trouble starts.
"selling out to appreciative audiences of people who surely aren't so enlightened as the scientific crowd, and I'm a little sleepy."
We like concerts to, although I don't know how tongue-in-cheek your comment about selling out it.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 05:27 pm (UTC)I would be interested in seeing statistics on this, some sort of proof that professors somehow persecute those students with alternate views, because I'm still not buying that this behavior is infiltrating our universities. I've never had a problem opposing a teacher, and it's never damaged my grade. I have a very practiced approach, one which I (ironically) would never have been able to master if I didn't have a liberal arts background. (My husband, a computer technician and programmer, has all the finesse of a sledgehammer. I've met many like him in similar fields - people who don't know how to politely communicate dissent, and who expect that their brutally-delivered 'logic' will simply be the final word. I can't imagine the shitstorm that could follow if they, with all their genitility and grace, attempt to argue with a teacher.)
There's a lot of arrogance about this on the scientific side, but there's the same amount on the Liberal Arts side.
There's an assload of arrogance in the arts. There has to be. The first musician to come out of school as a fragile little butterfly gets smacked on the first passing windshield.
You wanted a response, so I gave you one. :) No harm, no foul.
(By the way, the comment about 'selling out' was a literal one. Two performances, each selling out the hall of 2500 seats, at ten bucks a shot. Not bad for a college concert. Too bad we don't see any of the money.)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 05:58 pm (UTC)I've found that a good way to do that is to answer the question "What did you learn from this" with the answer "Nothing."
More seriously, I seem to be having trouble communicating my point. It's not a matter of proposing an alternate viewpoint, it's a matter of arguing that the entire paradigm you're working in seems irrelevant and to come to the conclusion that the entire exercise has been without value for you. In Music, about the only thing I learned from Arnold Schoenberg was that some people have the amazing ability to be paid for being born naturally in a state the takes illegal hallucinogens for the rest of us to achieve. To be less flippant, I don't think I gained a damn thing out of studying him, but there seems a pressure on students not to write down that the only thing they got out of a class was regret at wasting ten weeks of their life.
It's not so much an opposing academic viewpoint as it is a statement that they believe that what they just went through was useless to them. This is probably why non-majors see the purpose of some literature classes as "To Read Books", where non-majors also see the purpose of math classes as "To Solve Equations". I don't see any cure for that problem; unless the genetics people can actually fix the human genome.
"I've met many like him in similar fields - people who don't know how to politely communicate dissent, and who expect that their brutally-delivered 'logic' will simply be the final word. I can't imagine the shitstorm that could follow if they, with all their genitility and grace, attempt to argue with a teacher."
To which I ask the question, what's wrong with that approach? You point out that there has to be a lot of arrogance in some of the Liberal Arts-surely they're used to blunt criticism by now. It seems a bit odd to have to coach dissent in polite words. What's wrong with a student simply stating that reading James Joyce is a waste of time, and isn't worth the student's time because it's too convoluted for further use? Or because, even though they can see how this would let them inside Joyce's head, they don't see any reason to be there?
I will acknowledge that there are better ways than directly expressing dissent to deal with the matter, but there's nothing wrong with bluntness, especially in a great many places in the real world. There's no good reason why a Professor should not be able to deal with a blunt answer in the same way that they deal with a more elaborate one.
"Too bad we don't see any of the money."
College taking its cut? Or was it for charity?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 06:18 pm (UTC)It's interesting that you had to learn about Schoenberg. We didn't study him until Theory IV, two years into the declared major. He was mentioned in Music History II, but nothing detailed. I absolutely loathe pantonal music for its calculation and sterility. I've never had a problem stating exactly that. All I learned from it was that it exists. It's just history.
To which I ask the question, what's wrong with that approach?
Nothing, if the recipient is as emotionless as the speaker. But the reality is that every human being has emotions, triggers, and reactions, and most people cannot control them. Effective communication with a human has to take all of this into account, and these details are things that are, once again, not so easily charted in scientific ways. This is just one of the important practical uses of the liberal arts. I learned half of my communication skills from literature and the other half from theatre. Some of it might be that I'm just a considerate person, but as we've all seen from GAFF, I can easily set that filter aside. No, it has much more to do with the fact that I've learned how to gauge emotions and use listener response to the best of my ability. That's what interpersonal communication is all about, and it's a skill that you'll use for the rest of your life.
There are indeed times when you simply need to do what the course requires. No, James Joyce may not be all that great. But if a curriculum has a portion dedicated to his book, the professor cannot and will not change it just because someone doesn't like Joyce, just as a math professor wouldn't let me off the hook just because I think sines and cosines are idiotic wastes of time that I, frankly, don't need and never will. I still have to do it, and if I don't, I will fail the course.
If you don't like Joyce, retain that stance as you read the assigned book, and dissect it intelligently from that viewpoint. Such and such a character was vapid, and let me tell you what they did to support that view. This chapter was poorly developed, and while it may have been his intent to craft it as such, let me explain why I think it didn't play as well as it could have. The language of this book was coarse and irritating, and here's why. This is what critical thinking is about, and I can think of a great many professors who would feel honored to have such an honest, intelligent student in their class. If a professor grades such an essay poorly, take it to the dean.
But you can't just throw down your pencil, plant your feet, and say you won't do it because you don't see the point. None of us can do that, no matter what our field of study.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 06:42 pm (UTC)Hopefully it will stay that way. He makes me shudder.
I guess the difference lies in what you are supposed to learn from a class. Math and Science teachers have, years ago, resigned themselves to the fact that most students are only going to learn how to solve certain problems from their class, and that attempting to force students to learn the problem-solving and critical thinking strategies is mostly futile. Clever anti-memorizing questions only work until someone builds a more anal-retentive student and all that.
In the same way, I've met a lot of teachers who are willing to accept that you might not get anything out of the book that you read. As long as you can correctly go through the procedure and examine the work, they don't care for the most part whether you are, as they feel, cheating yourself of some actual meaning. And they shouldn't care, they should encourage students to pick something up from the course, but it's difficult to make it mandatory. And most professors are happy to have someone who thinks for themselves, even if they could do without the conclusion.
Some instructors do seem to get annoyed when you come to the reasoned conclusion that their entire field of study is a waste of time, but that's probably another matter entirely.
What gets under my skin for the most part is when you end up in the Curriculum argument, and you get the same familiar arguments that their classes on the Great Books, or the Great Thoughts, or the Great Compositions, will result in all students gaining a clear understanding of human nature and the world in general, etc., etc., etc. I am of the personal belief that the one-size-fits-all approach to teaching critical thinking skill doesn't really work-and that trying to pretend that it does only gets you into trouble. There seems to be a general intolerance of the fact that some students just might not find this method for teaching them valuable life skills to "click" when it comes time to plan the curricula, and this annoys me.
If the best we can come up with when it comes to teaching university students is a My-Way-Or-The-Highway approach, then it's probably about time to rebuild the university system.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 06:45 pm (UTC)The question of which skills are being taught and who is supposed to teach them continues to occupy a great deal of University planning time.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 06:53 pm (UTC)There were a great many other general ed credits you had to take, but you could choose from a very broad framework of classes... so when I hear you talking about these 'Core Classes', perhaps I haven't a clue what you're really on about. Are there schools that make you take a hefty load of lit courses? Because I've never had to take a single one in college, and I'm in my fifth year of undergrad. (Long story.)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 07:03 pm (UTC)Most universities I'm acquainted with have general introductory courses which are taken by all students (except for the sciences-which operate differently) followed by a handful of advanced courses in various disciplines. Berkeley's requirements for the College of Letters and Sciences is sort of typical, although I think the the University of Chicago is more balanced.
It's been assumed for a while that the purpose of college requirements was twofold, first to teach you basic life skills (critical thinking and whatnot), which is handled by the Core classes approximately equally, and the second is field-specific, handled by the upper division. So every department gets to fight over who gets to teach what, and who actually teaches those critical life skills (which mean big bucks).
It's not that schools are making you take a hefty load of lit courses, it was the reformist air I got out of the Slate essays that started all of this. A lot of them seemed to come to the conclusion that students were lacking in critical thinking skills, and the solution seemed to be that they had to toughen up the Liberal Arts curriculum for Core classes to fix this. My opinion is that if you only shore up one side of a collapsing house, it may be better than nothing, but not a lot better. Of course, they were mostly written by humanities professors, so you can expect a certain amount of native bias. Most of them would probably be astonished to find that I was interpreting their words as being weighted towards the Liberal Arts, which is why I'm accusing the bias of being subconscious.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 06:20 pm (UTC)Yep, and I think most of it went to bills. Stage crew, lighting, rental of the space (even though it's owned by the college, it needs to be 'rented')... fun fun.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 06:25 pm (UTC)The era of big budget cuts isn't my favorite time to be alive.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 05:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 03:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 05:50 am (UTC)I will tell you, for example, why literature is worthwhile, and why it would behoove you to pay more attention to it.
Reading literature is the best way, the most profound way, to understand other people.
Not in a cellular way, not as the subject of odd sociological experiments, but the way people are and the way they think, people from all walks of life, from all places and times.
You may be able to go on some sort of archeological dig in Sumeria, and excavate some pottery, a bone or two, even a lost city. But without leaving my chair I can travel into the very mind of a person living back then, and know how they thought, and what they felt was important. All I have to do is to read Gilgamesh.
Via literature we enter into the very minds of those who have lived before us, and those who live now. We witness their creative process, not just from outside, but from inside. Literature can tell you far more about an author, far more about a society, than the author him/herself or a even a sociologist can. The student of literature, the *true* student of literature, is not just a student of various literary theories, but a student of the human condition.
Either you have not been taught right or you have been very resistant to being taught. No offense, but I would say the latter.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 03:51 pm (UTC)I'll certainly agree with you about the author part, but possibly not about the society. One of the interesting things about sociological studies is that getting into the head of the author does not guarantee that you've gotten into the head of one of the other members of the same society. After all, you're seeing things through a narrow view.
This has actually been an interesting back and forth dialogue between Post-Modern and Standard History, to which no conclusion that I'm aware of has been reached. It's a question of how much you can know about the conditions in which things took place, and how much of what was described really happens, but I appear to be about to distance myself from the actual argument.
The point is, even though what you've said is true, for ninety percent of the students who go through those classes, it's not going to matter. Even for me, the use is marginal. I have a nine page flashy brochure, written by a committee, to outline the purpose and goals of the OSG collaboration. None of the skills I have is sufficient to get it to tell me what they actually want me to do, or give me enough of an insight into them to predict what they are planning next. Most people operate like this, like it or not.
This may be part of the problem. Although it may be neat to study the human condition (and from the history side, I am required by law to say that it's much more rewarding to study their condition through historical study rather than the study of literature-but take that with a grain of salt), I don't think it's for everyone. I agree that it's good to study it, because people may discover that they really like it. What I was trying to say above is that it's bad to assume that everyone will like it, or even see a great advantage in it. It's not that I don't think there are worthy goals; it's just that I believe that they are rewards that not everyone responds to.
To ask from my own viewpoint, the question is not whether I can get inside the mind of James Joyce, the question is, do I want to get inside the mind of James Joyce?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 02:32 pm (UTC)Yes, that's all I can rationally say about your discussion-rant.
---
In a note that's only of interest to two people on my FL, I spoke briefly to Alan Weinstein today. I swear he looks younger than he used to. I went to his LIGO talk a few weeks ago, and he also seems more energetic than he used to be. This confuses me.
He has used his physics knowledge to create a time machine, travelled years in the future, cured his aging and then came back, ready to teach knowledge from the future?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 04:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 06:42 pm (UTC)2. Over here, science students learn facts and parrot them back at their lectures/examiners. Arts students engage their brains. We also specialise from the age of 16, which may have something to do with this (I was a humanities/social sciences student until I got to Uni and realised my Psych course was neuroscience in disguise).
3. Wait, there's no 3.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 06:53 pm (UTC)Over here, I think both sides are pretty much parroting facts back. My cousin and I (he works in Middle Eastern Languages) recently commiserated on this fact, and I've heard some grumbling from the history department as well.
I think what we're seeing is a lot of mediocre students never engaging their brains, and a lot of smart students engaging their brains within their own discipline. After all, I've known some pretty smart European physics students.
Britain may also over-specialize, where in the US the trend runs in the other direction-leading to the opposite problem.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 07:19 pm (UTC)One of my lecturers turned around the other day and announced, "You are not to criticise research papers when you answer exam questions; you personally do not have the data to refute them. You must present both sides of the argument, with the data to back up your points." In other words, go out and read through the reading list, repeat that back at me, and you can have your first (an A grade equivalent).
I quite like the specialisation. It meant I picked the stuff I was good at, and got better grades as a result - like with the Harry Potter kids and their NEWTs, to pick a fandom example. And then I smoked something funny the day I was picking what to do at University. Silly, silly me.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 07:25 pm (UTC)Of course it happens, and probably more often than I would like it. But even though there is some logic in not debating a data point without a similar body of data, that's not much of an excuse.
Complain to the dean.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 07:41 pm (UTC)What? The Chancellor (Dean equivalent) who takes our tuition fees to buy his brand new Jaguar and lets us fend for ourselves when it comes to course materials? That Chancellor?
I would complain, if I cared. And also if I knew it was just that particular lecturer, or just my course, but I live with Genetics students and a med student, and I know this isn't the case. It's just a basic science/arts distinction we have here.
I don't know what to make of my course in comparison to American Psych courses; maybe it's the lack of specialisation, but from what I can see (by accidently ending up on their websites, or the Psych students LJ communities), they seem a lot more simple compared to ours. We seem to study everything to a lot more detail and do a lot more neuroscience. It's interesting, these differences.
And I seriously have lost all the powers of analysis I had when I took my History and Politics A-levels. I used to be totally on the ball, now I'm kinda miles away from the ball. Le sigh.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 07:48 pm (UTC)If you were in America, I would accuse you of having blundered into the realm of the most despised students on campus: pre-meds. This is one of those traditional rivalries, like the one between sociology and history. Actually, it doesn't surprise me that, in a biology course, you might have run into that sort of problem. Biologists tend to teach like that to undergrads, for reasons that are a bit too complicated to discuss without me giving it a great deal of thought. I'm sure I'll step on even more toes there than I do here.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 07:56 pm (UTC)We also endure a lot of research methods and stats. A lot, when the requisite maths-level for entry is GCSE (age 16), in which I got an A, despite being a mathematical moron. *shrugs* Too late for me to be complaining though, I graduate in 7 months.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 11:16 pm (UTC)Although to be honest, I wouldn't know the difference between what they call Cognitive Neuroanatomy and Neutroscience from Psychoneurobiology without actually going to look up how they define things. UCSD however appears not to offer neurobiology as an undergraduate option, preserving it for graduate school, and leaving the neurobiology focus of Cognitive Science as the closest thing I can find.
I can't swear to that though...trying to keep the UCSD catalog straight tends to involve a lot of beating one's head against a wall.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 06:57 pm (UTC)As a music student, the major is declared within the first year. It takes a full four years - five for many (there's a lot of talk about officially making it a five year degree, because four years is often unrealistic) - to get through the required sequences for a performance person. In this way, we music people have some 'advantage', because we start immediately. It also creates a huge burden for us, and there's a reason that music students melt-down before graduation.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 07:11 pm (UTC)They also party harder than anyone else, and this may or may not be linked.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 07:14 pm (UTC)Nobody gets drunk like an Engineer after the last project of the week is due. It isn't even fun drinking. It's "Let's get to that unconscious place as fast as possible" sort of drinking. It's somewhat amusing to watch.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 07:24 pm (UTC)And those are mutually exclusive?
*shakes head*
You have so much to learn.
Strangely enough, the med students are the next biggest binge drinkers after the musos. Then comes law students, economists, psychologists (mostly girls) & engineers (mostly lads) together.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 07:26 pm (UTC)If it takes less than ten minutes to go from sober to unconscious, possibly. The ones who take about half an hour seem to have a lot more fun.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 07:50 pm (UTC)That's just silly. Why, ten minutes isn't enough time to go for a joyride in a stolen shopping trolley, steal all the road signs and traffic cones you can, run away as campus security chases you for being drunk and disorderly, tongue someone of your own sex (if that's not already your sexual preference), play bar games, or talk to strangers!
Not that I've ever done any or all of these things.
No.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 07:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 07:59 pm (UTC)These things are pretty much the staple of most freshers (first years) at Uni.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-03 11:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-07 08:26 am (UTC)I'm a big fan of weighted liberal arts in schools because I think they serve an immensely important purpose. I realize that critical thinking isn't the exclusive property of the liberal arts, but what liberal arts--and only liberal arts--can do is teach you perspective.
I think I heard it called "sociological imagination" once. It essentially means living with an understanding of where one fits in the greater pattern of history. You say science and math taught us we're nothing in the last fifty years? Shit, existentialism has been around long enough to grow a beard. Our nothingness is nothing new.
You think the average Joe shopping at Wal Mart doesn't care about history and philosophy? Perhaps not. But that's a problem to be remedied, not an antiquity to get rid of.
Science and math give us a way to do things; the liberal arts give us a reason to care.
Moreover, the liberal arts provide us with a vital compass to inform our behavior and decisions. I'm going to totally pirate Michael Crichton here, but didn't you ever read Jurassic Park? In it, a mathmetician says, "You all were so concerned with whether you could make a dinosaur that you never stopped to think whether you should do it."
Actually, there's an entire discussion in Jurassic Park that's a pretty good read--about how science is nothing without ethics. Which is another nasty little liberal arts class that some will undoubtedly find boring.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-08 04:09 am (UTC)The point comes out of an argument I've heard a lot that the Liberal Arts are the way to critical thinking, to understanding, and to deeper knowledge, and that without a stronger liberal arts curriculum, students won't pick it up. This goes around in circles a lot; students won't learn valuable life skills unless we strengthen the liberal arts curriculum, the current liberal arts curriculum doesn't teach students life skills because there's not enough of it. It's an argument without logical end; the reason why some students don't learn the valuable life skills in some of the liberal arts Core classes they have to take is assumed to be because they haven't taken enough of those classes.
My counter would be that there is not just one place to learn those life skills, and that the automatic reaction to students lacking those skills should not be to just strengthen one piece of the curriculum that has failed them so far. Perhaps its time for an overhaul, and an increased synchronization between departments in the interest of strengthening the lessons we teach.
Just so as you know, ethics is most commonly taught to scientists by people with a scientific background, primarily because they're the ones who are most likely to understand the particular problems involved. Really, ethics for a particular department should be handled at a departmental level, because they are the people who know firsthand what the effects are, and how best to reach their students. The best ethics courses should give you a foundation for what's already decided, and, for the sciences, an idea about how common ethics are going to change in the next few years.
After all, human cloning is looking more and more plausible, if we can figure out how to just clone certain parts.
" Science and math give us a way to do things; the liberal arts give us a reason to care. "
I've never believed in this particular argument, and I never will, because it boils down to essentially an absurdity. I believe that it's possible to find meaning and purpose in your life or your work in a number of ways, and that it's possible to garner wisdom from all across the map. To make such a cavalier statement that essentially means that you can't care about how the universe acts until you've taken Lit 101 is a bit narrow.
People have been wondering how the universe works, and why, ever since someone discovered that you could drop rocks on the heads of other people. It's just as much part of being human as the urge for artistic expression, and is a pursuit in and of itself.