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Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Scathing Online Schoolmarm

A biology professor complains in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the fragmented, quickly forgotten, nature of college learning, comparing students' intellectual behavior - scoring a grade in one course, quickly forgetting its content, scoring a grade in another course - to that of athletes trained simply to win one game and then another.

It's a reasonable enough thing to worry about, but his essay doesn't worry about it properly, and so has the feel of a futile gesture -- about as futile as taking one course after another and not learning anything. Scathing Online Schoolmarm examines a few paragraphs:


From an educational standpoint, rather than an economic one, college is a waste of time for most students, and teaching is a waste of effort for most professors. It is a waste of national resources on a colossal and increasing scale. [The problem with vast, vast statements like these is their vastness. Over-generalizing, as all Intro Comp students learn, is a mistake, because of a well-known paradox in writing: The more you inflate your rhetoric, the likelier that sucker is to burst right into shreds. Less is more, especially when, like this guy, you write guy-style -- see this earlier post -- and as a result cannot lend your Spenglerian doom the heavy breathing it demands. Note, for instance, the pairing of the words "colossal" and "increasing." The word that comes after colossal should be bigger than colossal. Increasing's a puny little thing. ]

The students flooding into most state universities are increasingly [repeating this word so soon makes the writing boring] being subsidized by tax revenues. In my state of Florida, the great majority of students get a free ride through the Bright Futures Scholarship Program. They have to pay for room and board, but they would have to do that whether or not they were in college. All they have to do to keep the free ride going is to win enough matches (pass enough exams) to place (receive a sufficient grade) at the end of the season (semester). [Not a bad paragraph, though instead of the rather cliched "flooding," he might have come up with a sports-related metaphor -- rushing? racing? For "great majority," just write "most." And there's something clunky - something that jams the flow of his prose - about the way the writer duly appends a little parenthesis after each of of his sports metaphors, translating them for us into the terms of his argument. We don't need this translation, having understood the sports analogy, and so feel we have a bit of a pedant on our hands.]


What is to be done? To begin with, don't expect me, a hard-working professor in the trenches [cliche], to be able to work miracles [cliche]. I insist on more long-term learning [cliche] and more integration across subjects than my students face in most of their other courses. But I am only one person [cliche] fighting a social phenomenon that is national in scope and many years in the making.

However, there are steps that universities could take to begin changing students' learning metaphors. One is to recognize that the lecture format evolved to serve students who are highly motivated to learn; it is excellent for them, but the average student gets little out of lectures. What could economically replace them in the auditoriums at large state universities is not clear. But whatever it is, it needs to engage students as active participants, or they will not learn.

A second step is to replace multiple-choice exams, now used by almost every professor, with essays. Sure, it takes much more work to grade essays, let alone to give constructive feedback on them, but that is one of the few ways to find out what students really know. It is also an important way to improve their writing, which often is truly pitiful. [I like this bit about essays. UD is a major essay-giver.]

A third is to increase the integration of the curriculum. Each course should reinforce, at a higher level, the foundation that students ought to have acquired earlier and should demonstrate how the material from previous courses is relevant in the new context. [Again, the problem here is that he's absolutely right, but that the tossed-off feel of his generalities seems somehow not to acknowledge the reality of just how intricate and conflictual a business authentic curricular integration is.] The Romans had a saying that rings true [cliche]: Repetition is the mother of learning.

... Truly educating our students would require serious reforms and a great deal of coherent effort by a lot of people. But in the interests of duty and self-respect, we had better get to work. [See how this final burst of rhetoric in the context of a pretty limp essay is kind of pathetic? It's empty language; and, worse, it's empty emphatic language. Hell, even worse, it's empty commanding language: Get to work! I don't see many readers rolling up their sleeves.]

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