Shibboleths Renewed

I never went in for the pablum teachers give, "I learn as much from my students as they learn from me." But perhaps the equation is more balanced than I thought. First, I wonder how much they actually learn from me, which may be little or nothing at all. Second, I actually learned something from my Salem State Students, something that perhaps I knew but had forgotten.

A bit of background:
For the first three weeks of this semester student teams have been considering various arguments for why we study World History. The idea of spending so much time on this question while my colleagues are teaching the diet of the Middle Ages came to me when my chair lamented his students' lack of interest in a Holocaust film. "They were more interested in the commercials," he said. My response at the time, out loud foolishly enough, was that if they were interested in the commercials I would make the commercials the text, the subject of inquiry and study.

Most students are incurious when it comes to World History, the response to which is typically for the teacher to somehow entice them: entertaining lecture, plea for the holiness of the subject, what have you. But my students were curious about one thing. They came to class the first day, many of them, with one question in mind: "Why the hell do I have to take this course." And so that is where we began. They read Bill Bennett, they read the State Curriculum Framework for the subject, and they read a Marxist interpretation, and they watched the Governor speak on the subject. In the process they had to find out what Marxism is, what nationalism is, what the humanities are, etc. Then they had to present their own plea for the subject.

Some sucked wind, but one class in particular has 5 solid presentations, and in that one class I learned something. The students took on the now current notion that education depends on good teachers more than money or parents' educational attainment or race or anything else. The idea is seductive for legislators (no need to spend more money) for liberals (we don't have to deal with race or class) and for teachers (higher pay and recognition for the job we do). But the students think it might be wrong. Their idea is simple: one student's good teacher is another's nightmare. They may be wrong at one level; there are certainly better and worse teachers in absolute terms. But they are right at a deeper level.

Human beings don't come in standard models. The more we try to say that they do, the more children we label as pathological, learning disabled and the like. From grading to the MCAS maybe we have the wrong idea. I think that team deserves and "A."

Team Based Learning

Well, it's been a while. It's a bit tough to get excited about teaching when the department chair is telling me he'd like to hire me but he's afraid they're going to have to eliminate all the 1-year contracts in favor of the much cheaper adjunct model. This in the face of a massive budget cut from the governor following on from the Governor's inspiring speech about the importance of education. So much for Obama's new America -- and that's even before watching the Dow plummet to the soundtrack of the new Treasury Secretary mincing his words and talking out of both sides of his mouth.

Still, we're all about Team Based Learning this semester, putting the students in teams and making them do the learning for themselves, and that's been fun. They've now had a chance to look at why everyone else thinks they should be taking World History and come up with their own explanations as to why they should be taking World History (or alternatively why they should not). It's taken us this long to get to the point where Friday the teams will present their ideas, but that's the nature of learning here. They're actually learning something useful, but I have to do it in such a small way that any pretense of "coverage" is out the window.

Meanwhile, Transportation History is going smoothly, alternating between a lecture and a discussion a week. Today it was about how the RR in America were about liquidating nature (Cronon) and how they were different than the British model. Mostly they wanted to hear abou the bogie, that set of 4 wheels that sits at either end of the rail car and is an innovation peculiar to American RR because the Americans had lower capitalized lines and therefore needed to make tighter curves. Still, they seem to be all aboard. We'll find out Friday.