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.
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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.