… of Tufts University’s award-winning computer science professor Ben Hescott.

He is writing. His very own writing he is writing on a blackboard! What happened to his bullet points??

Q. Did you experience an “aha’’ teaching moment?

A. My first time teaching, I was using PowerPoint slides. One student kept saying, “I don’t see it.’’ So I turned off the computer, grabbed a piece of chalk, and went through the material slowly on the blackboard, without notes. Afterward, the kid said, “You’re a really good teacher when you’re not using PowerPoint.’’ That changed everything.

Q. And now?

A. I let material tell its own story. It’s like an improv show where the actors know they have a few plot elements to get out, but who cares how the rest gets filled in?

Let us slowly – and, since I’ve said it a hundred times – redundantly review the main ideas.

BULLET POINT NUMBER ONE: When you plop all the answers down on dead screens in front of students, they don’t see it. What does this mean?

BULLET POINT NUMBER TWO: It means that teachers exist to animate thought processes, to improvisationally, humanly, walk students through how you get to certain ideas, hypotheses, answers, argumentative positions, points of view. If students could see it just by looking at a list of points and a final point, you wouldn’t need human teachers. (And of course the growing ranks of lucky all-distance-ed students get to enjoy the lack of human teachers for the rest of their lives.)

BULLET POINT NUMBER THREE: When you teach humanly, loosely, improvisationally, you exhibit an intellectual ethos that has to do with autonomy, flexibility, humor, unexpectedness, and above all the implicit promise that, like their teacher, students have the capacity to assume a creator’s – a shaper’s – attitude toward knowledge. Knowledge in the university – the real university – is a richness with which all fortunate enough to enter the campus generatively, intensely, play. This is why we refer to the play of ideas. Ben Hescott is talking about the play of ideas.

Pity the PowerPointed.

*************************
UD thanks Andre.

… is just the sort of weird convoluted title you’d expect from a literature type with the freedom to blog. I apologize for my inability to resist using it for this story.

I thought of KIDS TODAY, but that one’s too easy.

I also thought of IVY LEAGUE, but I don’t think kudzu is a form of ivy.

*********************

Cross-country runners are tripping and falling over Davidson College’s kudzu. Davidson has tried hacking it away, but it pops back in minutes.

*********************

The goats they’ve brought to campus promise to eat 12-18 pounds of kudzu every day for two months. I guess they eat down to the roots or something.

*********************

Won’t the runners now slide and fall on goat berries?

If you add up all the violations, it doesn’t really amount to much by the standards of big-time American university football.

But it might not be the best strategy.

… entangled in many corruption scandals, has killed himself.

The school’s webpage.

… low.

Way, way, low.

********************

(Further thoughts from Philip N. Baker, dean of medicine, University of Alberta.)

********************

UD thanks Ian.

********************

Update: Alberta lets its hair hang even lower:

Students have now been asked to not comment publicly as the school tries to limit the fallout of what was supposed to be a celebration.

Uh, let me say a couple of things about this growing-by-the-second story:

1. It’s totally scandalous that a cynical medical school dean would palm off someone else’s words on his students. The contempt it expresses for the students is immense.

2. The behavior totally plays into the already ethically-challenged realm of academic writing in medicine, with its guest authors and ghost authors and all the rest. Great message to send to your graduates – Go out there and download other people’s work.

3. Not comment publicly? Exsqueeze me? I mean, they’ve graduated anyway – they can do what they like, having been sent out into the world by Dean Download. And even if they were still students — What sort of university tries to keep its students from speaking?

4. Answer: An embarrassed university. Fine, yes, it’s embarrassing. The response is not to hush it up but to admit that it happened, that you’re embarrassed, and that you’re looking into sanctions. At the very least it seems obvious to UD that a person who can’t write and deliver a short graduation address should not be a dean. Let’s not even talk about the moral sleaze here.

**********************************

Calls for his resignation have begun. This seems to me a very good idea.

***************************

All together now:

One attendee said his brother located the speech on The New Yorker website and was following along on his iPhone as Baker was reciting it.

Talk about the gotcha media! Plagiarist Alert: Soon your audience will be reciting your speech along with you in real time, reading it off their phones.

And the university promptly responded to his request: Fork over $40,000 – no – make that $100,000 – and they’re yours.

It’s hard for us to access our records! And since you’ve been so indecorous as to appeal to Hawaii state open records laws in response to our initial outright refusal of your request (“[T]he agency that oversees Hawaii’s open records law issued an advisory opinion saying the invoices must be released.”), it’s only right that we punish you.

Bad boy. Bother us again and we’ll charge you fourteen million and shoot off your kneecaps.

All over the country, professors teach with it.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Either you dislike it (most people dislike it) or you really love it.

This is from Josephine Hart, 1942 – 2011.

You don’t want to make a practice of inviting financial criminals among your graduates to give commencement speeches on their way to jail.

For some schools – Wharton comes to mind – this would guarantee nothing but criminals for graduation speakers into the foreseeable future.

New York University, grasping the problem, said no to its own Charles Wilk, just convicted of “conspiracy to defraud the government and aiding in the filing of a false tax return.”

Or rather NYU said no to Wilk’s judge, who made the speech part of his sentence.

Wilk’s comrade in crime, Jeffrey Greenstein, did indeed address his alma mater, the University of Washington, on the joys and sorrows of massive tax evasion schemes.

… by your record of embarrassing or illegal activities, read this and relax.

In the aftermath of Stephen Gey’s death – he was a law professor at Florida State – one of his students pays homage to the strength of his character as well as to his intellect.

This article, a few years back, captures Gey’s passion, and his students’ reciprocal feelings.

This is the best – the very best – of the university, that free and ordered space, as Bartlett Giamatti called it – a space as removed from the tawdry cyberspace of distance ed as possible – where human beings and their passions meet human beings and their passions.

[Ben] Gibson and about 40 other students gathered for Gey’s First Amendment class Monday. They couldn’t see Gey, who was calling from his house of hard, steep angles. They could only hear his voice over three speakers. But they could picture him in those ironed jeans, sitting ramrod straight.

He called to say goodbye.

He said he could no longer teach, even by phone. He said he had wanted more than anything to finish the term, but was too sick. “I’m sorry I have to do this,” he said.

The class fell silent.

“This is Ben,” Gibson called out. “I want to thank you for the semester. I want to thank you for everything you’ve done.”

The class was again silent. So were the phone speakers.

Finally, they heard Gey sign off. “Thank you,” they heard him say. His voice was choked.

“Thank you for allowing me to fulfill my life’s passion.”

***************************

The man in action.

Whoops! Plus I own the company that makes the stuff!

Labrie’s take on this is great: “The one that is the first author has got the responsibility.”

It’s great because, you know, quite a few medical journal papers have like five to twenty authors, with only the first author (maybe – maybe a drug company got the whole thing ghostwritten) actually having any involvement in experimenting and writing and shit like that which you might associate with experimenting and writing…

So put quotations marks, in that last sentence, around each use of the word author and you begin to see Labrie’s point.

Some of those not-first writers, let’s speculate, had little to do with the article; their names were plastered on it like some cheesy face cream because people know who they are, and that adds prestige. Why in hell – since their only involvement is to be informed of when the article comes out and instruct their secretaries to add its title to their list of publications – should they bother listing conflicts of interest?

While experts contacted by Reuters Health say that none of the anti-aging creams available to consumers has been proven to work better than a simple moisturizer, some products still run well over $100.

One way to justify those exorbitant price tags is to tout “clinically proven” …

(Why isn’t Suze Orman talking to women about one hundred dollar moisturizers?)

Journals, concludes one editor, are “the marketing arm of the pharma industry.”

… cornucopia.

It’s an American catastrophe that has been dubbed pharmageddon, though it rarely pierces the public consciousness. Occasionally a celebrity overdose will attract attention – Anna Nicole Smith, Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson – but they are specks in a growing mountain of human mortality.

This list reminds me that I have meant to list some university students – or recent university graduates – who have in the last few months died of pain-killer overdoses.

Austin Box, University of Oklahoma.

Robert Mueller, Wake Forest.

Wilson Forrester, University of Arizona.

Hope Reichbach, New York University.

Michael Israel, University of Buffalo.