I am, in the mind of Dr. Dan Butin, a poor excuse for a teacher. But in the aftermath of my less-than-kind dismissal of his entire profession (he’s dean of a school of education somewhere lovely), his ire is understandable. I’m sure he’s a delightful man despite his vocation, and I suppose I can see why my comparison of my students to rocky or loamy soil arouses his indignation. (It’s taking a biblical metaphor a bit far, I suppose.)
Someday, I will write a post on why it is that I regard the creation of a separate Deparment of Education as the single most lamentable decision of Jimmy Carter’s otherwise underrated presidency.
But that will have to wait for another day. I have promises to keep and chinchilla poops to sweep and and dust baths to give before I sleep.
Given your essay I assume you learned by traditional means… and that those means worked for you. They worked for me as well. In fact, they worked for everyone I know.
I don’t deny that there could be other means.
But using means that worked for *generations* of people doesn’t make one bad, does it? Or is it just bashing-of-tradition that is helping the good Dr vent? I’m not even sure, from his reply, if he recognises that you used a Biblical image.
Coincidentally we talked about that parable at Sunday School this weekend. We came to the conclusion that the Parable wasn’t about what kind of dirt I might be but about the preacher - the sower of the word. He sows all the time. No matter what soil is available.
Keep going, Hugo!
Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. Those who can’t teach, teach teachers.
The first two sentences were largely tongue in cheek. The third was not.
Best Robert Frost paraphrase evah!
Compare and contrast:
Dan W. Butin
EDUCATION
9/96 - 1/02 UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA Charlottesville, VA PhD in SOCIAL FOUNDATIONS of EDUCATION Concentration in Sociology of Education
9/91 - 6/93 ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE Santa Fe, NM MA in LIBERAL EDUCATION Concentration in History of Western Thought
9/86 - 6/90 MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY Cambridge, MA BS in MANAGEMENT SCIENCE Concentration in Behavioral Science and Philosophy
Numerous scholarly publications
Hugo
Ph.D. UCLA, concentration in medieval European history (I’d reference your CV but you don’t post it at the PCC website)
Scholarly publications: None
So then, on the one hand we have an emotional op-ed about the topic of education that was written by a women’s studies professor with no scholarly publications to his name, whose formal training is in history, and who teaches at a small-time community college. On the other hand, we have a person with a masters and doctorate in education responding to and refuting responding said emotional op-ed (complete with citations to scholarly sources).
You decide who is better qualified to speak to the issue, but I think I’ll go with the person who has advanced training and publications in the relevant field.
To Huw: Using your logic we should stick to time-honored gender roles and norms, right?
Scholarly publications aside, I’m really not one for attacking one’s teaching ability when I’ve never witnessed his classroom. I probably wouldn’t agree with every idea he passes along to his students, but I am fairly certain he cares about all of them very much.
Mr. Bad, I hope this means you will turn your attention to Dr. Butin’s blog and leave mine in peace?
I’m delighted to learn that Dr. Butin went to UVA. Perhaps he and I would be on more solid ground discussing the early success of the Cavs football team this season.
Followed Huw here from his blog. Mr. Bad makes the modern typical mistake of assuming that if I believe in “traditional” methods in some areas it must mean that I agree with everything labeled “traditional.” Huw said that those methods worked with him and with many others. His argument (like mine) is that there are measurable results of the older methods that are better than the measurable results of the more modern methods.
It is a measured and published fact that since the advent of the “new” methods, the SAT and ACT scores have gone down. The only blip upwards in those scores was after the return to more “traditional” methods of measuring progress. It’s real easy, either Johnny can read or he cannot. Either Jane knows geography or she is from South Carolina (err I mean she does not). That is measurable. The continuing claim that the “new” methods are better is a faith-based claim (by secularists) that has no measurable proof behind it. Meanwhile, those horrid little home schoolers, as a group (no I did not home school my kids), regularly outscore by almost every measurable statistic those taught under the post-modernist methods. Maybe they are not so horrid, eh?
Conclusion: It does not matter where you have studied if you cannot back it up with measurable results. The current educational establishment opposes any measurement of their results, which is not surprising given the lack of them.
The Chronicle of Higher Education had a series of articles about lecturing/effective teaching — Beyond Lecturing, James Lang (Sep 06) and Mike O’Connell, Sage for the Ages (Apr 07) to cite two.
Dr. Butin mentions briefly, but does not elaborate more on when lectures are useful - “Research has shown it to be useful in specific situations (not many, but there are some)” What situations are appropriate? Is one of those examples the case of one hundred or more students taking a general/core survey course with no TA in a limited technology classroom? It’s great to use multiple approaches when you have small seminars, multimedia enhanced classrooms, “quiz the audience” instant feedback technology, and narrower topic areas for greater exploration.
As O’Connell wrote,
“In an age of alleged attention deficits, we say we don’t think our students are best served by the old-fashioned college lecture. But the deficiency here may be more in us than in them. We cannot all be Mark Twain or Ralph Waldo Emerson, but how many of us have the wherewithal to deliver knockout lectures day after day for the duration of a semester? If we did, both we and our students would be loath to abandon the format.
If Will Rogers or Robert Frost or Margaret Atwood came to your campus as a guest speaker, how would you and your students feel if, after five minutes of introductory remarks, one of them said, “Now let’s all divide up into small groups for further discussion”?”
Amen, amen, amen, Col Steve.
I’ve posted on this before:
http://hugoschwyzer.net/2005/03/08/a-short-post-wherein-hugo-reveals-his-luddite-tendencies/
To quote from that post:
One thing that would improve college teaching immensely would be mandatory drama and speech classes for all new faculty. Forget the expensive technology. Teach them how to use their voices, how to modulate their tones, how to string together an exciting narrative without notes. Teach them to make the passion that is surely inside them manifest in their words and in their movements. Teach them the forgotten art of the genuinely engaging lecture. Twelve years of college teaching (and over 120 classes taught in that time), as well as thousands of student evaluations, have made it clear to me that students really prefer a professor who is willing to bring his passion and energy into the classroom.
Col Steve, I agree with your premise, however, not your conclusions. You seem to be saying that any teacher can deliver a “knockout” lecture at the drop of a hat once they’ve practiced sufficiently. I posit that there are as many learning styles as there are teaching styles and therefore we should diversify teaching styles in order to accommodate those students who may not learn as well using the classic “lecture” model; what might be a “knockout lecture” to you might be boring melodramatic waste of time to me. And further, some folks, no matter how hard they try, they still can’t deliver an engaging, let alone informative, lecture so it behooves us all to explore various alternative measures.
Now, we all might think we’re the greatest lecturer/presenter/speaker since Will Rogers, Robert Frost and/or Margaret Atwood - or even Hugo (if we believe his self-assessments) - but the fact is that absent good solid material and a delivery style that is effective (which means engaging but not overly-dramatic), very few of us could educate our students no matter how many speech and (especially) drama courses we took. In fact, I believe that teachers who are overly-concerned with their delivery probably distract from learning because they are more concerned with how they appear to their students than if their students are ‘getting it’ vis-a-vis the material. In other words, they’re more worried about the performance than they are the learning. The students’ education should come before self-serving dramatic performances because IMHO it’s more important to impart knowledge than it is to convince the kids that we’re ‘cool.’
The difficulty with the idea that “all generations before have learned thus” is that it is a false premise. Ironically, the traditional lecture, platonic discussion or socratic method where all exclusively male styles in a male dominated society. Does the assumption that therefore they are universally good for GENDER studies not seem a bit like the multiple centuries of doctors who viewed women as just “little men” (a bit dimmer and with more emotions).
Not everyone learns the same way. Hugo, as he often recounts, grew up in an environment of people who taught at university, and thus thought and spoke in that fashion. Indeed, our little Hugo was trained from an early age that “this” (the parental model) was the way information was best exchanged and ideas learned. And, surprise! Hugo did very, well in the lecture university environment.
However, to move across the pond to the UK, as little as two decades ago, the “pure lecture” method (where you don’t even get to ask questions) was centuries old. It also resulted in over 90% of people starting Ph.D.’s to never finish them. It also resulted in a society where very few people got education at all (since even today opt out at 14 is quite acceptable).
Now, if you wish to preselect a small percentage of generational learners who have the advantage of years of training to learn in that style (in certain countries it is called “class”, in others “elite”), then hey ho and away to the Victorian period we go. Except, oops, it is the 21st century and we have learned that people who have not been trained to the lecture style can learn as well or better in other styles. And that since currently the majority of younger people are expected to have higher education; isn’t it best to find the ways in which they can be taught (all analogies to being Christ and spreading the word of God aside - really, the “Sower?”)
We need to keep asking questions, to keep learning, to keep our minds open to the manifold possibilities the universe reveals to us.