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Well, that could have gone better
This 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.
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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.
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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.
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Yes, that's all I can rationally say about your discussion-rant.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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