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 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.