MIDterm MESS

The midterm is a fiasco. Part of the problem is that they haven't spent the time they're supposed to outside of class doing work. Many would have bombed a multiple choice midterm or even a T/F midterm.

But I'm to blame for a good part of the fiasco. I tried to make the midterm that would make them think. In retrospect, the midterm should just test that they have memorized some stuff and then use the other assessments for the thinking. I've not done midterms in ages -- I hate them, but since they're part of the course here I need to go back to basics and next semester make the midterm an opportunity to force them to know some stuff, some basic stuff. That will be easier to grade if nothing else. And more to the point it will be predictable for them and they'll therefore be happy.

"Just tell me what to understand and I'll understand it."

That's from a student who is always in class and wants to do well. She's come for extra help and has really tried her best as far as I can see. Yet she's still looking for me to tell her what to think, and that's the problem. Some people call it the 13th grade problem, that they don't understand the difference between high school and college. But near as I can figure, many of their classes are 13th grade, asking them to memorize terms so that they can then recite them. If History 101 were a prelude to something, to further study in history and they had some agreed upon body of knowledge that they had to have, some set of facts and figures, they needed, or some theoretical concepts that they needed then we might usefully spend our time with those -- like learning the elements in preparation for chemistry. But it's only a prelude to further college study and in that the goal was supposed to be critical thinking. We can't MAKE them understand. We can make them know, we can store information in their heads, but where does the understanding come from?

Am I aiming over their heads? Perhaps 50 multiple choice questions would be easiest on everyone.

My students all want multiple choice for the midterm on Friday. "Then you got a 1 in 4 chance one said. Another told me he had just taken a 50-question multiple choice test for his ethics class. Ethics. Isn't that unethical?

So, they'll do some ids, they'll write some essays for me. They'll hate it and I'll hate grading it and none of us will be any the wiser for it. Maybe next term will be a multiple choice test. I'm thinking I might abandon the text book and only use Wikipedia for our class. I'm thinking they might read that or at least be happy that they haven't had to buy a textbook. Of course I've got several who haven't bought the textbook in any case.

"All our courses are the same," a student offered, "We read things and discuss or listen to stuff." Hmmm.... that's what I've been trying to avoid, but what else is there? Education is reading, writing, listening, talking. Some of this is "doing", that is to say some of this is precisely what academics do and so to argue a historical point or to learn new information by reading or hearing it is experiential. But these are not scholars in training. They are would-be graduates of the state's safety net, the system for improving the workforce and ensuring a citizenry less apt to slope off toward tyranny of the mob or tyrant than they would otherwise be.

Yet it's not the scholarship as much as the thinking that I'd like to get them toward, the careful consideration with an open mind of a splattering of data points filtered, ideally through a set of understandings that rationalize, make more efficient, the thinking process. They should know enough that they are not reinventing the wheel when considering every social, economic, practical, technical, or cultural problem they confront. We're not really set up to do that as effectively as we might, and that is because the school serves many masters, but that's what I'm in for.