Somehow I’ve managed to spend the last year or so putting off writing this blog. I wish I could say that I have been too wrapped up fighting the good fight, but the truth is, life just got the better of me for awhile. Now that it seems the ducks are finally sober enough to line up, the Ts are hanging properly, the Is well-dotted (no, I will abuse no apostrophe purposefully), and the excrement now lying in a single, manageable pile, I think it’s time to write again. I warn you, I am out of practice. Please bear with me (yeah, that will get you wanting to read on!).
Some updates: Yes, I am still teaching. I am, I guess one could say, the unofficial chair for the unofficial English department. I am working with another instructor to build and maintain our Writing Center. I am constantly being offered sweeter positions--Chair of Developmental Studies, Director of Remediation and Retention, Chair of General Education, Director of Communication Studies, etc. I am convinced that these will happen just as well if I don't think about the chance that they could. I do like what I do, though it can get a bit monotonous at times. To break that cycle, I am helping still another instructor develop a Speech program. I have also quit smoking. I am on a diet. I will surely still die, eventually.
This fall, as rumor would have it, I will be entering an Ed. D. program at UMKC in Education Administration with and Emphasis in Higher Education in Urban Universities. I think I'm in, but the official word comes at the end of the month. Needless to say, I will be busy. Oh, and my daughter will likely move in with us in July.
Wow, even I am bored right now. On to better things.
Today’s Topic: Teaching Thinking, Teaching Writing, Teaching the Already Taught.
"The most important skill one can develop is the ability to learn how to learn" - Thomas Friedman.
We have a new Dean of Curriculum at my University who is, as most new Deans will, trying to shake things up a bit. I think that this can only be a good thing for a college that is less than two years removed from being a correspondence school. Anyway, her first order of business with me was to ask me to design a writing survey for the beginning and ending of the Composition 101 course. She wanted to track how much students learned through the course.
"Sure," I told her. "No problem." Then I went on to explain exactly the kind of information she would be getting from me. "You need to realize," I explained, "these are only eight-week classes. No one will really be able to learn to write in only eight weeks." She seemed shocked that I would have the nerve to say that the course that I designed, one of the classes that they had spent so much money asking me to create, would bear so few results. But then, that is the nature of English--a field where the typical student spends the majority of their formative years studying.
I suppose the question is, if we're not really able to teach writing, what exactly are we doing here? Why is what we do considered to be so important to the education process? My argument? We're not here to teach individuals to write; we're teaching them to think--to interact with academic ideas in productive ways--to learn the academic "rules of engagement." We teach expression, the need for clairity, and the way ideas are accepted or turned away. We teach the power of logic, the need for ethics, and the undeniable reality the we are emotional beasts. In an English class, engagement in ideas is crucial--we teach the ways to entertain those ideas without blindly accepting them. Like I said, we teach thinking.
This, of course, brings up another question: how do we teach thinking? Is there some formula? Some tried and true method for convincing our students to dig a little deeper into the things they encounter on a daily basis; and, if a student doesn't know how to think, how can we get them to think enough about thinking to really understand the myriad of thoughts that encapsulate a single strain of thinking enough to lead to a single, definable thought?
We don't.
The end.
Thanks for playing.
On the radio this morning, the DJs we discussing interesting ways to cheat in school (yeah, must have been a dry news day). Callers would join in the conversation talking about how they bought or sold the answers to tests, printed the answers on their water-bottle label, or caused some kind of distraction. It was all very interesting, but I couldn't help but to think of how little we must think of our students' ability to learn if we force them to use their creativity to cheat instead of to think.
I mention this because I am rambling; I justify this because I want to illustrate a simple point--our students will think no matter what we say to them, assign to them, or do to them (save Electrocution Therapy, perhaps). As educators, we have to ask ourselve if it really matters that our students store the events of the War of the Roses in their recallable memory, or if our students would be better served if we emphasized how to find the information and how to know what to do with it. Do we want to raise encyclopedias or researchers? Can we help our students reach their potential better though assorted facts, or through asking them to interact in creative ways with their environment?
What do you think?
