An Open Letter on College Teaching and Learning
Dear Liz,
Please consider this to be an open letter of concern - not directed at you personally, but at all of us at B.C. I am immersed currently (by the chance that I was doing 3 electives in an 'intensive writing' department this past semester) in assisting as best I can in teaching nearly 100 students how to write what we used to take as SOP -- a term paper. I can't give a firm statistic at this point -- as approximately half of these papers have not yet reached me -- as to how many of our students:
1) have previously learned how to do a critical research paper,
2) have learned the wrong way to do a paper (e.g. copying stuff from here and there strung together without sources indicated or straight purchase or theft of stuff),
3) have not much clue as never taught to do such papers either in secondary schools or at Brooklyn College!
However, I would guestimate that about 10-20% are in category #1, 5-10% are in category #2 (we discuss such things in my classes so I probably have less of a problem than most with cheating), the remainder are not taught at all and need to be. Almost all of my students indicate that they have cheated in the past -- mainly on conventional types of exams where cheating is easy and the norm. A majority, including graduating seniors, have NEVER been taught how to do a term paper.
I am sure that we are not really preparing most of our students for the real world of research and writing now. One of my student papers was instructive -- I noticed that some stuff did not correlate with the listed sources and so checked and discovered that there were paragraphs, etc. from an unlisted source in the student's bibliography. I called and asked her what was up and she explained that she had had an experienced friend working as a paralegal find her research materials. Obviously the friend had been sloppy in indicating sources and this student is now at work clearing up what is hers and what comes from all sources. This will not be too easy for her to do.
BEWARE LIBRARIANS!!! Future research will increasingly be done on the web. The Dormitory Authority needlessly spent $79 (?) million redoing our Brooklyn College library. As the librarians report, it is less and less used. They don't even bother to keep it open for evening students (i.e. past 9 p.m.) as so few wonder in. Why should they. They can get what they need sitting at home at their computers. Expand our Computer Cafe!!!
BEWARE PUBLISHERS AND BARNES AND NOBLE!!! We don't need your over priced textbooks a la Murdoch any more either. Texts are increasingly available on the web. And most of the news outlets are there, too -- about 24 hours ahead of the best newspapers and most of the understaffed/underfunded TV news media as well. I have a list on Israel/Palestine to which I have thus far added 21 links on peace matters there:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Israel_Palestine
Obviously such will be one of our teaching tools in the future for our courses.
BEWARE OUT-OF-DATE ADMINISTRATORS!!!
Sitting alone in one's lonely faculty office may not be the proper place for a teacher to interact with his/her students. I also have a Yahoo group for my students to which I can post current stuff. This allows great flexibility in moving the course along and also is a way to fill in students who have had to missed classes on what we are doing: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns
Such tools take about 5 minutes to set up and they are free. I had hoped that students would dialogue on this list, but this is a shy generation (just as mine was the "silent" one). So instead I have daily exchanges with at least several students by private email. They are free to call my home if they want to talk about something important to which they need detailed responses. This is not exactly on-line teaching, but it is teaching supplemented by the newest technological tools. I am dubious about the stuff used in the classroom that I have observed as an alternative to writing on the board. It is okay, but tends to rigidify one's presentations and discussions. I prefer greater freedom both to expand in a particular class and also to redirect my syllabus as appropriate along the way. Thus, I violate the rigidities sometimes suggested by our administrators for syllabi -- which I see sometimes stifling learning. I always have in mind an A.N. Whitehead quote that got to me as an undergraduate one semester when I was writing 6 term papers with Whitehead in the titles: "It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true." I am not as good at keeping my classes interesting as I once was -- now half blind and deaf -- but I try.
As a sample of things that can be done with students at a distance, I will end with an assignment that came my way on short notice a few days ago. One of my students MUST finish her studies by the end of the first summer session. She asked our chair if I could do a special studies project to satisfy a major requirement. I was not planning to be at the college for the summer, but I thought about it and realized that I need not hunt for a text or spend daily sessions with her face to face. I sent her the following independent studies assignment which pretty well provides basics that one should know about theoretical ethics -- past and dominant in the Anglo American tradition. Mine is an Oxford tutorial approach wherever possible -- one should get students deeply into things rather than offering them superficial surveys of topics such as too many American courses do. The upshot of the latter is superficial understanding mainly forgotten within a year or two.
Here is the assignment sent by email:
OK. I suggest that you do two 10 page papers. The first should be a comparison of Plato and Aristotle on the concept of justice. Plato's Republic would be one of the readings and Book V of Aristotle's Nichomachaen Ethics would be the other. These are both on line:
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.5.v.html
The second paper should compare Kant's duty ethic with the utilitarian teleological (consequentialist) one presented most clearly in John Stuart Mill's "Utilitarianism." Here is a site for the Kant's Introduction to the Metaphysic of Morals:
http://philosophy.eserver.org/kant/intro-to-metaphys-of-morals.txt
and for Mill:
http://www.utilitarianism.com/mill1.htm
Kant tends to be a bit obscure, but his Categorical Imperative is the bottom line. You can Google around for help, but cite any sources you use for the paper.
You can ask questions by email or phone. Best, Ed Kent
P.S. I find that blogging has widened my sphere of teaching beyond my Brooklyn College students. I get queries from all over on a wide variety of topics to which Google must have attached my name -- particularly fun are grammar and high school ones. Start a blog. They are a fun outlet, too. There are collections of bloggers that do various and sundry things. And one can sign up for Google notifications on a wide variety of things that come in daily. I open new Yahoo groups to meet needs and interests (See signature listing below.).
P.P.S. My characterizations here apply to American college students generally so far as I can determine -- not just ours at B.C. I should add that among my recent students are a Rhodes Scholar, a Beinecke (3rd in a row for the college), and a Truman Fellowship award winner. Only about 20 of each are awarded nationally. We are also the best!
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Israel_Palestine
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net
Please consider this to be an open letter of concern - not directed at you personally, but at all of us at B.C. I am immersed currently (by the chance that I was doing 3 electives in an 'intensive writing' department this past semester) in assisting as best I can in teaching nearly 100 students how to write what we used to take as SOP -- a term paper. I can't give a firm statistic at this point -- as approximately half of these papers have not yet reached me -- as to how many of our students:
1) have previously learned how to do a critical research paper,
2) have learned the wrong way to do a paper (e.g. copying stuff from here and there strung together without sources indicated or straight purchase or theft of stuff),
3) have not much clue as never taught to do such papers either in secondary schools or at Brooklyn College!
However, I would guestimate that about 10-20% are in category #1, 5-10% are in category #2 (we discuss such things in my classes so I probably have less of a problem than most with cheating), the remainder are not taught at all and need to be. Almost all of my students indicate that they have cheated in the past -- mainly on conventional types of exams where cheating is easy and the norm. A majority, including graduating seniors, have NEVER been taught how to do a term paper.
I am sure that we are not really preparing most of our students for the real world of research and writing now. One of my student papers was instructive -- I noticed that some stuff did not correlate with the listed sources and so checked and discovered that there were paragraphs, etc. from an unlisted source in the student's bibliography. I called and asked her what was up and she explained that she had had an experienced friend working as a paralegal find her research materials. Obviously the friend had been sloppy in indicating sources and this student is now at work clearing up what is hers and what comes from all sources. This will not be too easy for her to do.
BEWARE LIBRARIANS!!! Future research will increasingly be done on the web. The Dormitory Authority needlessly spent $79 (?) million redoing our Brooklyn College library. As the librarians report, it is less and less used. They don't even bother to keep it open for evening students (i.e. past 9 p.m.) as so few wonder in. Why should they. They can get what they need sitting at home at their computers. Expand our Computer Cafe!!!
BEWARE PUBLISHERS AND BARNES AND NOBLE!!! We don't need your over priced textbooks a la Murdoch any more either. Texts are increasingly available on the web. And most of the news outlets are there, too -- about 24 hours ahead of the best newspapers and most of the understaffed/underfunded TV news media as well. I have a list on Israel/Palestine to which I have thus far added 21 links on peace matters there:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Israel_Palestine
Obviously such will be one of our teaching tools in the future for our courses.
BEWARE OUT-OF-DATE ADMINISTRATORS!!!
Sitting alone in one's lonely faculty office may not be the proper place for a teacher to interact with his/her students. I also have a Yahoo group for my students to which I can post current stuff. This allows great flexibility in moving the course along and also is a way to fill in students who have had to missed classes on what we are doing: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns
Such tools take about 5 minutes to set up and they are free. I had hoped that students would dialogue on this list, but this is a shy generation (just as mine was the "silent" one). So instead I have daily exchanges with at least several students by private email. They are free to call my home if they want to talk about something important to which they need detailed responses. This is not exactly on-line teaching, but it is teaching supplemented by the newest technological tools. I am dubious about the stuff used in the classroom that I have observed as an alternative to writing on the board. It is okay, but tends to rigidify one's presentations and discussions. I prefer greater freedom both to expand in a particular class and also to redirect my syllabus as appropriate along the way. Thus, I violate the rigidities sometimes suggested by our administrators for syllabi -- which I see sometimes stifling learning. I always have in mind an A.N. Whitehead quote that got to me as an undergraduate one semester when I was writing 6 term papers with Whitehead in the titles: "It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true." I am not as good at keeping my classes interesting as I once was -- now half blind and deaf -- but I try.
As a sample of things that can be done with students at a distance, I will end with an assignment that came my way on short notice a few days ago. One of my students MUST finish her studies by the end of the first summer session. She asked our chair if I could do a special studies project to satisfy a major requirement. I was not planning to be at the college for the summer, but I thought about it and realized that I need not hunt for a text or spend daily sessions with her face to face. I sent her the following independent studies assignment which pretty well provides basics that one should know about theoretical ethics -- past and dominant in the Anglo American tradition. Mine is an Oxford tutorial approach wherever possible -- one should get students deeply into things rather than offering them superficial surveys of topics such as too many American courses do. The upshot of the latter is superficial understanding mainly forgotten within a year or two.
Here is the assignment sent by email:
OK. I suggest that you do two 10 page papers. The first should be a comparison of Plato and Aristotle on the concept of justice. Plato's Republic would be one of the readings and Book V of Aristotle's Nichomachaen Ethics would be the other. These are both on line:
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.5.v.html
The second paper should compare Kant's duty ethic with the utilitarian teleological (consequentialist) one presented most clearly in John Stuart Mill's "Utilitarianism." Here is a site for the Kant's Introduction to the Metaphysic of Morals:
http://philosophy.eserver.org/kant/intro-to-metaphys-of-morals.txt
and for Mill:
http://www.utilitarianism.com/mill1.htm
Kant tends to be a bit obscure, but his Categorical Imperative is the bottom line. You can Google around for help, but cite any sources you use for the paper.
You can ask questions by email or phone. Best, Ed Kent
P.S. I find that blogging has widened my sphere of teaching beyond my Brooklyn College students. I get queries from all over on a wide variety of topics to which Google must have attached my name -- particularly fun are grammar and high school ones. Start a blog. They are a fun outlet, too. There are collections of bloggers that do various and sundry things. And one can sign up for Google notifications on a wide variety of things that come in daily. I open new Yahoo groups to meet needs and interests (See signature listing below.).
P.P.S. My characterizations here apply to American college students generally so far as I can determine -- not just ours at B.C. I should add that among my recent students are a Rhodes Scholar, a Beinecke (3rd in a row for the college), and a Truman Fellowship award winner. Only about 20 of each are awarded nationally. We are also the best!
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Israel_Palestine
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net
posted by Ed Kent at 10:49 AM
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