Teaching Blog at Baruch College

Did you see “Disadvantages of an Elite Education” (American Scholar, 2008) in which former Yale professor William Deresiewicz contrasts the education at Yale and Cleveland State, an inner-city university much like Baruch? The article was unexpectedly thought provoking. For example, consider this:

“[S]tudents at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances. Not so at places like Cleveland State. My friend once got a D in a class in which she’d been running an A because she was coming off a waitressing shift and had to hand in her term paper an hour late.

“That may be an extreme example, but it is unthinkable at an elite school. Just as unthinkably, she had no one to appeal to. Students at places like Cleveland State, unlike those at places like Yale, don’t have a platoon of advisers and tutors and deans to write out excuses for late work, give them extra help when they need it, pick them up when they fall down. They get their education wholesale, from an indifferent bureaucracy.”

It’s not that I agree with all the arguments in the essay, but Deresiewicz asks an important question: where do you fall on the spectrum of “indifferent” to “pampering”? The essay also gives one newfound appreciation for our students.

There was another recent attack on the elite colleges—Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Chris Hedges’ 9-Dec-2008 essay “The Best and the Brightest Have Led America Off a Cliff“—but skip it if you are looking for uplifting news.

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(with apologies to Hal Moore and Joe Galloway, authors of We Were Soldiers Once…and Young)

Many of us (I suspect most of us) were nerds when we were young students, or we at least shaded well into the fringes of nerdiness. We studied, we memorized, we solved quadratic equations in our heads while waiting for buses, or recited as much Shakespeare as we could recall. We got excited by the sheer arcaneness of things. We were on the road to a life in academia long before we even grew aware of the track beneath our feet. And the folks who were most willing to put up with us were probably nerds as well. That is, most of us spent much of our time in those days in the company of people who were busy imagining their Nobel addresses or memorizing the score of Parsifal. These were students who read for fun, who remembered what they read, and who were eager to talk about it.

Why do I summon up this remote and vaguely uncomfortable history? Because I find myself bemused when I hear colleagues talking about what it was like back when they were students. “Well, when I was in college, we….” Or, “When we were students, we were so much more….” You’ve heard these raps, I’m sure. They’re like all stories of a vanished golden age, when life was so much tougher and as a consequence everyone was imbued with so much more virtue. Today’s students, unlike those of generations past, we’re told, don’t do the reading, don’t want to discuss, aren’t interested in the ideas, etc., ad nauseam.

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I’m sure many have seen “At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard?” by Sara Rimer in the 13-Jan-09 New York Times (p. A12); it’s worth sharing again here. Here’s an excerpt.

“The physics department has replaced the traditional large introductory lecture with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning. Last fall, after years of experimentation and debate and resistance from students, who initially petitioned against it, the department made the change permanent. Already, attendance is up and the failure rate has dropped by more than 50 percent.”

Such a change was hastened by a $10M donation. Food for thought.

In the early 80s, I lived in Brooklyn and taught MSC 1003 at 8:00 a.m. (at least three-versions-of-the-grid ago). One fall morning, as I was walking down President Street towards the F train station, I passed a three-man Sanitation truck performing its semi-weekly pick-up. One of the workers was standing in front of a brownstone, looking in the gated front yard filled with piles of magazines and old wooden planks. The fellow was furious. “What the hell kind of bleep is this?” He yelled at his buddies as he gestured with outstretched arms in the direction of the junk, “Who does this guy think he is putting out his bleeping garbage like that? I ain’t gonna pick this bleep up unless he ties it into neat bleeping bundles!” I passed the worker and muttered through my clenched smile, “Dude, you’re a garbage man. This is garbage. It’s your job to pick it up twice a week. If there were no garbage, you’d be unemployed.” I thought this all very humorous. I then descended into the subway.

About 10 minutes later, while straphanging and staring beyond the passing tunnel lights, I began to meditate on my few semesters teaching multiple sections of MSC 1003. Most of my students were first-year students with paltry skills and little college preparation. Many were foreign born. I couldn’t figure out why every semester, in every section, I found myself reciting the same endless stream of facts and admonitions, “Rhythm is the flow of music in time,” “Remember: The word ‘rhythm’ has two Hs,” “Write this as a complete sentence,” and all the other things I found myself repeating semester after semester. Would these kids ever get it? How many times did I have to bleeping tell them the simplest things?

It then occurred to me that my job is education–exposing people to something that they don’t know, getting adolescents to think in new ways, introducing students to the beginnings of a college-style of learning–in effect, making my semi-annual pick-up. If there were not this continuous flow of fresh, 18-year-old high school grads who needed to be taught those same lessons, I’d be out of a job.

It’s therefore incumbent upon us instructors never to lose patience but instead to dole out the familiar facts and stale admonitions in new ways–as if it’s the very first time we’re stating them–because for the students it is the very first time we’re stating them. Without negating the importance of content, we must always be thinking about our classroom techniques. I think it’s good to remind young faculty that, although the teacher might learn a few tricks over the years and get smarter, the students never seem to.