“A’s” All Around
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Category Archives: Teaching and Education Reform
How To Be More Social and Vulnerable
A student of mine, in his final paper:
“Being social and vulnerable were two things that I didn’t have much experience in until I got my job at a car dealership and spending a generous amount of time in Professor Byrnes’ class.”
Put A Fork In It
The semester is a wrap. My parting words to my students.
“The very end of my first class as a brand new professor at Guilford College in Greensboro, NC ended in a humorous manner. I spoke for about ten minutes, doing my best to tie together all the course’s loose ends. I was pulling out my egghead professor vocab and thought everyone was listening closely. After I finished, Josh raised his hand. ‘Oh great,’ I thought, ‘Josh is going to thank me for the brilliant summary and the course more generally.’ Instead, he said, ‘Dude, you have a pierced ear!’ Then the discussion devolved into why I had never came to class with an earring. Lesson learned, keep the end-of-semester spiel very, very brief.
Price writes that ‘the more we train ourselves to notice delights—the everyday beauties and kindnesses and amusing absurdities, the things that make us laugh or that we feel grateful for—we will feel more positive.’ She goes on to suggest we say ‘delight’ out loud whenever we experience anything that sparks joy. I’m trying to adapt this practice. This morning, on my drive in through the Nisqually Delta, I saw a huge flock of birds flying in ‘V’ formation. I said ‘delight’ to myself. Then I immediately thought of this class and what I wanted to say to you now that we’re at the finishing line.
And here it is. Delight.
It’s been a complete and total delight to get to know each of you individually and collectively. I hope the rest of Year 1 goes well and that we cross paths again sometime in the future.”
Ron
The Calm Before The Storm
Wednesday, 11:30a.m., National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day. More specifically, the week before I’m buried under final papers. Ensconced in my home office, alternating between reading, writing, and watching the Salish Sea flow northward thanks to a southern wind.
All while grooving to a folk/acoustic/electronic vibe compliments of Sylvan Esso, Becky and the Birds (Wondering), the Cowboy Junkies (Sweet Jane), and Helado Negro (Lotta Love).
On the interweb I see a Stephen Marche prediction that artificial intelligence is going to “Kill the Student Essay“. That hits close to home.
“Essay generation is neither theoretical nor futuristic at this point. In May, a student in New Zealand confessed to using AI to write their papers, justifying it as a tool like Grammarly or spell-check: “I have the knowledge, I have the lived experience, I’m a good student, I go to all the tutorials and I go to all the lectures and I read everything we have to read but I kind of felt I was being penalised because I don’t write eloquently and I didn’t feel that was right,” they told a student paper in Christchurch. They don’t feel like they’re cheating, because the student guidelines at their university state only that you’re not allowed to get somebody else to do your work for you. GPT-3 isn’t “somebody else”—it’s a program.”
Marche adds, “It still takes a little initiative for a kid to find a text generator, but not for long.”
Please tell me there’s no way for ChatGPT to replicate my charming personality.
“Kevin Bryan, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, tweeted in astonishment about OpenAI’s new chatbot last week: ‘You can no longer give take-home exams/homework … Even on specific questions that involve combining knowledge across domains, the OpenAI chat is frankly better than the average MBA at this point. It is frankly amazing.’ Neither the engineers building the linguistic tech nor the educators who will encounter the resulting language are prepared for the fallout.”
I resemble that! I’ve been wrongly assuming that my Multicultural Education take-home final exam was text generator proof.
Going forward, I guess I’ll have to require students to pass through a metal detector and write it in-person.
The Academically Disengaged
We need more Bill Waltons, the former college and professional basketball legend whose playing days were cut short by numerous injuries and related surgeries.
“My injuries piled up,” Walton explains. “Bad back, broken bones, ankle and foot problems, broken hands and wrists, knee injuries, and broken noses.” By his count, Walton had 38 orthopedic surgeries to mend his various injuries.
Currently, Walton is a wonderfully idiosyncratic basketball analyst whose “glass of life” is constantly overflowing. The list of things he appreciates is exceedingly long. His positivity is contagious. His commentary is 45% basketball and 45% philosophical, interdisciplinary ramblings. The remaining 10% of the time he’s busting his partner’s chops. Their faux exasperation with each other can’t hide their chemistry and mutual affection. It just works.
Midway through yesterday’s UCLA-Oregon game (Bruins off the Duck schneid), Walton said something that instantly clarified my thinking about my teaching this fall. He said, “You can’t learn what you don’t want to know.” Turns out, after a little sleuthing, he was quoting Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, who in one of their songs wrote, “You ain’t gonna learn what you don’t wanna to know.” Shame on Walton, one of the greatest passing bigs of all time, for not crediting Garcia.
Much is being written about the growing academic achievement gender gap. Here is my Reader’s Digest point of view on it based upon my “on the ground” experience. A third of my students are male. At least half of them are excellent, by which I mean they think deeply about what they read, participate actively in class discussions, and write better and better over the course of the semester as a result of working at it. They’re sensitive, caring, and socially conscious. A privilege to work with.
The other subset doesn’t read, participates sporadically in ways that do not deepen our discussions, and pay little to no attention to their peers. They’re way more interested in their phones than what we’re reading and thinking through.
“Well Ron,” the K-12 teachers are probably saying, “your job is to get them interested.” I don’t want to ever become some of my colleagues whose answer to this dilemma is for the Admissions Office to just admit “better” students. My K-12 friends are right, but so is Walton, I mean Garcia, no matter how much magic my engaged students and I can muster, “You ain’t gonna learn what you don’t wanna to know.”
Compared to my female students, a disproportionate number of my male students don’t like to read and lack curiosity about themselves and others. While still a minority of males, this disengaged subset seems most interested in two things. A diploma and a job. Rightly or wrongly convinced of the need for a diploma for improved job prospects, they are resigned to playing the game of school for four years. At a large cost.
These students would benefit immensely from a gap year or two. Especially if we had a respected National Service program that they could opt into.
Absent that, some of the apathetic will do just enough to graduate relatively unchanged. And for many others, their apathy will get the best of them, and all they will have to show for their limited effort is years of debt.
Thinking Slow Together
That’s how an excellent colleague of mine describes her teaching philosophy. It perfectly encapsulates what I strive to do with my students as well.
The phrase “thinking slow together” echoed in my mind while reading David Sims’s review of Dave Chappelle’s SNL appearance.
When watching Chappelle, I vacillated from unconsciously laughing at many of his punch lines to consciously questioning how he set up a few others. A singular talent, I thought he was very funny, but I also experienced some uneasiness and couldn’t give completely in to him.
I didn’t understand why until thinking slowly about it with Sims’s help. And there is the power of the printed word. In a world where faster is always seen as better, writing and reading force us to take time to ponder things, to consider others’ viewpoints, to formulate tentative ideas, and to clearly communicate them.
And as in the case of Sims’s review, that slowing down results in more profound, longer lasting insights than live audio or television generate by themselves.
Graphic To Ponder
The Pandemic prognosticators got a lot wrong. They told us we would work entirely from home now, and large cities, like New York City, were dead. They also said we’d receive medical treatment on-line.
Meanwhile, they overlooked profound changes like declining school attendance.
I Am Now An Expert On All Things Hawaiian
Clickbait title, because after teaching a lot of Hawaiian students over the last 5-7 years, I’m still scratching the surface of understanding our most distinctive state.
Mainlanders who think they “know Hawaii” after spending a week or two at a resort are deluded.
Somewhere around 2015, someone at PLU decided to recruit the islands hard. And it continues.
Some observations in the form of gross generalizations.
On average, academically, they’re behind their mainland peers. Why is that? I don’t know.
On average, because Hawaii is a mosaic of different cultures, they’ve attended much more diverse K-12 schools.
Often, when you talk to them about multicultural education, their eyes glaze over. They are more inclined to embrace “colorblindness”, and as a result, dislike talking about race, class, and gender. Like Norway, they think their islands are free of cross cultural conflict, and yet, I hear and read stories about haole surfers getting beat up by native Hawaiian ones. There has to be more to the story doesn’t there?
I feel for them at this exact time of the year when the sun takes leave and the Pacific Northwest weather turns much cooler and wetter. How do they avoid being SAD I wonder?
Last, but not least, why haven’t any of them invited me to visit? Is it because they’re afraid I might out surf them?
Teaching My Ass Off
Just because I’m oldy and moldy, some might think I should call it a career. But the passion for the classroom still burns bright. I woke up at 2:30a.m. with these thoughts rattling around. Don’t call it a lecture, that’s demeaning. It was more of a homily/sermon.
- all we’re doing is practicing “thoughtful inquiry”and learning to have “true fun” with ideas— playfulness, connection, flow
- the cutting and pasting of ideas/approaches to life from other especially thoughtful people
- social infrastructure . . . we are products of our environments, you are the company you keep
- how closely have you read the key content, how closely have you listened to your classmates’ ideas, how much time/energy have you invested in examining your inner life?
- epiphany—a usually sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something; an illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure
How closely has the student-writer read the key content?
- there are no references to any of the author’s key concepts . . . the paper could’ve been written completely independent of the reading—35%
- the student-writer briefly touches upon the author’s key concepts—55%
- there are repeated, thoughtful references to the author’s main idea(s), the student-writer’s thinking is changed— a little or a lot—as a result of their careful consideration of the author’s main ideas; the student-writer’s ideas are nuanced and demonstrate an appreciation for complexity—10%
My Students Evaluate Their Parent(s’) Parenting
In response to a chapter on the downsides of “hyper-intensive parenting” in Ruth Whippman’s America the Anxious.
I’ve just started chipping away at the behemoth pile of essays, so this may be coincidental, but a theme of tough-minded, strict disciplinarian parents is emerging. The 18 and 19 year old students are mostly appreciative of their hard ass parent(s).
Except for one little thing, as a student who moved to the Pacific Northwest from Mexico at age 8 explained. She wrote eloquently about being afraid of her mom and emotionally stunted because she never had anyone to discuss her feelings with. A lot of the time she’s not sure what she feels, and when she has some modicum sense of them, she doesn’t know what to do with them. And she concedes, she’s wholly incapable of asking for help.
I used “little” above facetiously because emotional intelligence is THE BIG THING. They think their future success hinges on picking the exact right academic major or getting good grades. But their relationship success, professionally, but especially personally, will hinge in large part on their ability to calmly and constructively discuss their’s and other people’s feelings.
What say you, should I tell them or just let them discover that on their own through inevitable trials and tribulations?
Pressing Pause 