End of term

One more class to go and I'm assessing what we've accomplished and what we haven't. I'd like to think we've accomplished a fair bit and, in keeping with my philosophy, that has little to do with the fact that they've now heard of Hammurabi's code.

It's always fun to ask questions like, "What does E=MC2 mean?" Most are blank, others have a vague notion that Einstein had this equation and that it's important, but have no idea why. That's where Hammurabi's code will be inside of 6 months.

But we have done a few things and some of it will stick: we've learned how to look for the argument in an article, we've learned how to look things up on a serious database, we've learned how to write a precis that is concise and to the point. Of course many of us haven't learned that and even those who have can more properly be described as being introduced to a set of skills, practiced them a bit, and then moved on.

Here's two scary things that happened in the last two weeks: I had a student reading aloud in class and it sounded for all the world like my 8 year old reading a passage a bit above her grade level, stilted and missing pronunciations, certainly missing meanings, and when I mentioned this to a colleague he said, yeah, the textbook is written at a 10th grade level and the students come in some of them at an 8th grade level so they cannot read the textbook, god forbid they should see a long sentence like this one; second, I looked at a student's homework for Intro to Political Science and saw it was about what I'd consider 9th grade material.

Now maybe I'm being unfair, but here's the way it went: the student was given a table with three categories, American, Indian, and Chinese political systems. They had to fill in the boxes with words describing the types of systems, eg. two party, parliamentary, one party. They then had a page-long assignment sheet that told them how to write their paper based on the table they'd filled out with paragraph by paragraph instructions for most of it. And in talking to the student, I realized that I'm trying to get them to look beyond the dominant public discourse, beyond the pop interpretation of events to a deeper, more interesting, more useful, and more accurate understanding of the world, and I'd not realized that they were not even aware of the dominant pop discourse. So they are learning that the Republicans were conservative and the Democrats are liberal and that's a start. In my class I would ask them why the supposedly conservative party is so eager to nationalize the banks. I would tell them, as we told our students at Michigan, that all of the shades of gray in mainstream American politics are liberal in a historical sense. So, I'm still missing the strike zone, but I'll try again next term with a wonderful thing called "learning communities."