![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
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.
no subject
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
The era of big budget cuts isn't my favorite time to be alive.