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 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)