Musings on Teaching and Learning

A friend of mine in his first year of college periodically writes to get my opinion on things he hears and talks about at college.  He sent me a recent email questioning some statements from one of his courses.  His points are in blue; the quoted material in black is apparently taken from class notes or paraphrased from a discussion.  My responses are in red.

Here are some of the aphorisms I specifically wanted to hear your opinions about:

 “Your professors can make you a good engineer, a good historian, or a good reader of ancient Greek; they can’t make you a good person. Some will try. They will fail because there is no necessary connection between mental and moral strength. ”

 -Can any teacher make you good at anything?  And is there really no necessary connection between mental and moral strength? What even would you say morality is, anyway?

 Interestingly, I just mentioned this idea in an application for an “innovative classroom” for next year.  I think you can only be “taught” things that are essentially algorithmic.  Other things have to be learned more independently, and for those sorts of things, a good teacher is more a mentor than anything else.  Sometimes, there are things that can be modeled without our understanding them at a detailed level (think basketball lay-up shot, for instance).  While that might not normally be considered algorithmic in the same way a free throw is, nonetheless, someone who does it really well can show you how to do it, and do it repeatedly well in the same manner.  After enough practice, you can (potentially, at least) do so as well.  Repeating the same process over and over makes it algorithmic in my mind, even if the performer can’t explicitly state what the steps are since s/he *can* demonstrate them in a nearly identical fashion over and over.

I think there is no necessary condition between mental and moral strength in the sense that many people who are mentally strong are certainly not morally so. Those people tend to be showcased on the pages of the newspapers nearly every day.

 I think there is a reverse connection, however.  I don’t think you can be morally strong without being mentally strong because no matter what you think for yourself, if you can’t act on your morals, you might as well not have them.  Of course “mentally strong” in a university setting tends to be equated with “getting good grades with ease,” and I don’t think there’s a correlation between that kind of mental strength and morality.

 “Be a joiner. College is about belonging to communities. Join things. If your school doesn’t have a club for the activity you want to celebrate, create one, and watch them join in droves.”

-am not sure what to make of this. Seems okay, but perhaps one of the most meaningful compliments (or at least I took it as such) I have ever received was when you told me, after  not being elected to SAC second semester junior year (LOL), that “Amigo, you’re not a joiner.”

There’s a very popular adage these days–almost a mantra in high schools.  “All the important things are done by people in groups” is how it often gets phrased to encourage teachers to encourage student collaboration.  To a point, it’s correct.  Five good people working together can accomplish more or more difficult things than one good person.  But the effect is certainly not linear (though it is, occasionally, synergistic), and it definitely depends on who the group is and what perspectives people bring to it.

And being able to motivate people to work with you to accomplish a goal you can’t accomplish yourself is a very useful life skill

 “Attend to actions, not people. What we do is who we are. There’s no such thing as a “good person” or a “bad person”; there are “good actions” and “bad actions,” and anyone is capable of either. You will set yourself up to be proven a fool the moment you think you know what someone will do because you think you know who someone is. We aren’t anything; we just do.”

-Thoughts? To me seems to echo your metaphor about character as the area under the curve of our actions…but IMO misses the mark by seemingly denying the existence of a character/self.

Yes, I agree with you that to say “we aren’t anything” is extremely reductionistic and simplistic–and hence, almost undoubtedly, not correct.  I do agree with the part about “what we do is who we are” in a social setting.  I only agree with the idea that there’s no such thing as a “good person” or a “bad person” in the sense that no-one always acts well or always acts badly.  “There is some good in the worst of us and some bad in the best of us” is an old saying that is, I think, correct.

In practice, we tend to judge people by the sum of their actions over time.  If you usually screw me over, you’re a bad person to me and I need to exercise great caution in dealing with you.  Note, however, that actions don’t take place in a vacuum.  Killers are often talked about as having been “such a quiet person, never caused anyone in the neighborhood any trouble” when neighbors are interviewed, for instance.  We are faceted individuals, and the facets aren’t symmetric.  Who you are to me isn’t, probably, who you are to your family or lover (although there’s probably a significant overlap).

I remember a student’s telling me once that I was completely predictable. I was offended by the comment because I thought he meant I was shallow.  His explanation, when I called him on the comment, though, was that I was predictable because I was so principled: once he figured out my principles, he said, he could predict my actions in new situations because I so rarely deviated from them.  Put that way, it sounds better LOL

 On another note, he put as the course thesis that “rhetoric, understood as the study of modes of interpretation and persuasion, is a prerequisite for the successful pursuit of knowledge.” Then in class he asked if I disagreed. I put out that Newton, who often wasn’t in the habit of telling people about his work(i.e. did not need “persuasion”), is still considered by most to have “successfully pursued knowledge.” My TF got annoyed and said that he thought that if one discovers something of value, one is obligated to share it, and then another kid chimed in to say that one can only pursue knowledge by communication because each person has their own individual truths. Perhaps I am carping over details, but much as I agree that sharing knowledge is highly important, I do not think that pursuing knowledge requires sharing it, and thus feel that my challenge to his thesis (which he asked for!) is still valid. I don’t think pursuing this conversation with him would be beneficial for my long-term performance in this class, but I was wondering if you could share any insight?

I agree almost completely with you.  I disagree that one is obligated to share knowledge, though some of my colleagues at least partly agree.  I remember once I had a senior who said he had never, in three years of high school, gotten anything out of class discussions in English.  So, I called him in after class one day and said he didn’t have to come to class anymore if it was truly pointless for him but that since I didn’t want him to use his statement as an excuse not to work, he had to read every day during English while the rest of the class was stuck in class discussing.  So, while we were discussing Catch-22, he was reading The Trial, and when the kids wrote a paper on Catch-22, his paper had to combine both Catch-22 and The Trial.  After he turned in the paper, he told me that he wanted to come back to class because when he heard his friends discussing topics for their papers in senior country, he realized he had in fact missed a lot of stuff.

The colleague with whom I taught at the time was not pleased with the action because she thought that a classroom is a social setting and that people in the class have the obligation to share insights with their classmates in order to help with their mutual education.  Phrased that way, I see her point, but I see the sharing as an advantage rather than an obligation.

 I’m pretty sure the deal I made with that student would not be allowed now, but since I was US Head at the time, I allowed it LOL.

There are several points to the story.  One of them is that sharing knowledge is a way to generate insights.  To that extent, your quote above is correct.  But the student was indeed pursuing knowledge on his own, and he got knowledge without sharing it with his classmates.  So, the mere pursuit of knowledge does not, in my opinion, require communication (unless you considering talking out loud or thinking to yourself to be communication, in which case it probably does–there are few things we can learn without words except, perhaps for basic physical actions).

 Finally, in a section called aphorisms on the humanities, he basically asserted that all knowledge depends on the trivium/humanities, and even railed against our modern focus on stem. Much as I agree that we ultimately only study our human experience (as that’s ultimately all we know), is it not fair to say that the scientific method, in some way or another, is the basis of human knowledge, making a STEM-based education system pretty logical?

 To me, the validity of your conclusion depends on what you mean by “the scientific method.”   If you mean gathering data, formulating a hypothesis about how the world works, and then testing the validity of your hypothesis by your actions, then repeating that set of actions in a process of step-wise refinement, then I pretty much agree with you.

 If you consider “logical thinking” to be a part of the scientific method, then I would say no.  As Pascal said, “the heart has its reasons which reason does not know.”  (Only he said it in French, of course, but I’m not going to be pretentious and quote the French to you since I don’t think you read French.)  Learning from experience is certainly a necessary part of learning, but sometimes in math, science, and engineering, people minimize the importance of things they can’t explain with a universally applicable natural law or formal system.  When such is the case, then STEM does indeed fall short.

 Moreover, he asserts that “If we define a text as “something created,” an author as “someone who creates,” and interpretation as “explanation of an author’s creation of a text,” then the Humanities are the only form of academic inquiry that interprets things.”

 With such a broad definition, scientists are authors because they interpret experiments others create as well as, in your point below, interpreting things created by nature or God.  Is your speaker unaware that science was originally called “natural philosophy” and was simply the application of philosophy to the natural world?  In a broad sense, I think that’s still true.

 However, if one just tweeks author to “something that creates,” couldn’t you just consider science the interpretation of how natural laws have created our natural world?

Yes, of course.  See above.

In class during a discussion of this (he was asking if a tree was a text) I put out that botany could just be defined as the “interpretation of plants” as it analyzes how their structure fits their goal (to live and reproduce). I’m not sure if I’m just totally missing the mark, but I was wondering if you had any insight on both my thought and his?

I think I’ve already answered this, but unless a text has to be “human created,” your point is valid.  And given genetic engineering, more and more formerly “natural things” are being modified by people.  When does the modification become significant enough to merit being called a “new creation”?  

And if he were to argue that all these things started with something found in nature, you could riposte that all texts are, in some sense, reworking of the same “basic texts” made by other authors.  If on a winter’s night a traveler supports that idea pretty well….

P.S. Here is his full aphorisms on humanities below to put my last two questions in context:

“Ancient Greek and Roman universities were organized around what was called the liberal arts, the seven fields of knowledge a student needed for a life of learning: logic, grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy.”

Notice that all of these, with the possible exception of parts of rhetoric and music, are now considered sciences, which seems to me to weaken his point about how “purely humanities” they are 

“In medieval European universities, the liberal arts were categorized into the trivium and the quadrivium. The trivium included logic, grammar, and rhetoric. The quadrivium included arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. Students would proceed sequentially through these fields, starting with the trivium and then proceeding to the quadrivium, because the fields dealt with in the trivium were (and still are) seen as a necessary foundation for success in the fields that constitute the quadrivium. That is, the skills developed in the trivium – the skills of thinking, reading, writing, and speaking – allow a student to deal with other kinds of specialized knowledge, namely those of the quadrivium.”

Yeah, so the only way I agree with the medieval viewpoint is from a functional one.  Understanding anything abstract requires language (I think).  Math is a language, so in that sense, you need to know the “logic, grammar, and rhetoric” of math to understand arithmetic and geometry.   But the “logic, grammar, and rhetoric” of math are not necessarily those used in human language or in systems more complex or more poorly defined than math.

Using the terms of the trivium, I would say that, essentially, proof is the rhetoric of math.  And while all math is supported by logic (probably), that (Boolean) logic isn’t necessarily the same logic that applies to our interactions with the natural world or with other people.

“Modern American universities face a unique educational challenge in the context of the tradition of the liberal arts. American society has elevated careers (and therefore skills) stemming from the quadrivium above those stemming from the trivium. Consequently, American education has decreased attention on skills stemming from the trivium.”

Simply not true in many ways.  First, the challenge is not unique either in time or space. He should remember as well that rhetoric and logic were extolled by Cicero (for instance) mostly as means to win arguments in legal cases, which to many in contemporary American society would seem to make “careers (and therefore skills)”  the driving force even of the trivium in some cases.

“This push has been led, we must say, by President Obama and his “race to the top” educational policy, which really means “race to the top of STEM fields”: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. This very moniker, “STEM,” attempts to replace the trivium with the STEM fields as the foundation or “stem” from which knowledge is built or grows. It is explicitly not knowledge, however, and even less so something like happiness, but “economic prosperity” that, according to the STEM Education Coalition, is our goal, a position epitomized in the Obama administration’s decision to use graduates’ starting salaries as one matrix in a college and university rating system.”

The “race to the top” may well emphasize STEM fields, but the idea was dominant in the early 60’s as well (well before Obama’s time)  right after the Soviets launched Sputnik, so Obama certainly did not lead the push.  He may agree with the push and have supported funding it in this incarnation, though.

I think your writer is reading a fair amount into the acronym.  It starts with “science and technology” because that’s where the concerns originally were, and if you start with ST, there aren’t too many more combinations that make catch-words in English. When he says that STEM is explicitly not “knowledge,” I’m pretty sure that even in the humanities, it’s now considered to be more important to think about things rather than simply acquire knowledge.  Prioritizing “knowledge” is more a function of a time period (pre-ubiquitous internet) than of discipline.  When knowledge was the limiting quantity, then having a lot of it was an advantage.  Nowadays, knowledge is important in the sense that without some basic knowledge it’s hard to make informed judgments about other knowledge that can so easily be sought out.

I agree with his point that comparing graduates’ starting salaries is a poor way to rank colleges–but so are SAT scores, traditionally a very common metric.  And in defence of the position (even tough I don’t agree with it) are two significant points.  One is that many other people in the general population *do* in fact agree that monetary success is an important metric of success (and even happiness).  And starting salaries are much more objective than surveys of “happiness” or “feelings of success.”  A second point is that with many universities’ charging amounts of money out of the reach of “average” families, it is important for people to be able to get a cost/benefit analysis of their education since it costs so frickin’ much.  Also, many for-profit schools, where the federal govt pays up to 90% of their tuition costs, are basically money-making scams intent on bringing in tuition, keeping costs low, and have little other interest in their students.  So in the sense of “where does my tax money go and why,” it’s useful to know the starting salaries (or even whether they can get a job in their field of training) of graduates.

“Economic prosperity” is an easily quantifiable metric, which makes it desirable in areas of public policy.  Why else do we use IQ scores, for instance?  And, honestly, a lot of people want economic prosperity more than other things that a college education is supposed, traditionally, to provide.

“In other words, the trivium that was traditionally treated as a foundation for the quadrivium – not as grade school stuff, nor as a frivolity or an added bonus to be gained if there is enough time after dealing with the important stuff, but as a necessary prerequisite for success –  has been devalued at precisely the time when it is most needed.”

See earlier points.  The trivium is indeed alive and well, simply not in the specifics as known to those living in the European Middle Ages  (except perhaps in law schools)..  Far from being devalued, logical thought is alive and well in STEM.  Communication (a modern aspect of rhetoric) is incredibly important in terms of getting papers published in science, which is close to the be-all and end-all of getting tenure in those fields.  Grammar is simply the rules by which a language works, and as so it’s alive and well as a set of formal rules for constructing proofs in mathematics.  Insofar as “natural laws” (which are the desired goal of generalizing from data sets in science) are concerned, then grammar is alive and well in science as well–to physicists, it’s essentially *the* most important aspect of their work.

“In modern academic parlance, the field of “rhetoric” and the disciplines collected under the banner of “the humanities” have acquired the significance of what was classically called “the trivium.” That is, “the humanities,” and especially “rhetoric,” is the name we use to study the arts of language pertaining to the human individual (i.e., our subjective experience in the world) in contrast to the sciences that study the arts of quantity pertaining to matter (i.e., the objective reality of the world).”

His ignorance is amazing.  “Rhetoric” is the use of language with the goal of persuading others, *not* with the goal of studying “our subjective experience in the world.”

And the sciences study much more than “the arts of quantity”–while the amount of something matters, so does its essential makeup.  No matter the size of the quantity of granite you have, for instance, you don’t have the capacity to transmit electricity found in the smallest piece of copper.

” Institutionally speaking, the humanities is an umbrella term that refers to a set of academic disciplines usually including (more or less) Classics, History, Philosophy, Religion, Law, Literature, Linguistics, the Visual Arts (such as Painting, Photography, and Film) and the Performing Arts (such as Music, Theatre, and Dance).

“Conceptually speaking, the humanities are based in the notion of textuality – that is, in the idea that the world is full of texts, or things we humans have created (whether those things are material objects like a poem or immaterial events like a war), and that we can interpret those “texts” in the same ways that we interpret “texts” more traditionally understood (as in works of literature).”

It’s an interesting way to define the humanities , and not one I’ve thought of before.

“If textuality is the condition of having been made by humans, it is no throwaway platitude to say that the world is full of poetry, from the Greek word poiesis, “making.” The world is full of things that we’ve made for this reason or that. The textuality of the world around us means that we must acknowledge the interpretability of well nigh everything, at least everything that we humans have made. You might love, hate, or fear the idea of poetry, but all you need to study “poetry” – understood as the making of things – is an intense curiosity about the way humans make things to get what we want.”

Without disagreeing about his point, I’ll just say that defined in such a broad manner, the idea applies to all of engineering and most of the fields of math and science as well.  Nearly everything STEM promotes, for instance, is an engineering approach rather than a “pure” approach.  And engineering is quintessentially concerned with  poiesis.  The original point of science, as indeed of religion, was to learn how to predict and control (to the extent possible) the natural world in order to make human life better/easier.  Which is pretty much what many people think is the purpose of studying philosophy or literature–to make their lives better.

“The notion that we can study what we have made is the basis of humanism as an intellectual tradition and the humanities as an academic discipline: both study what, how, and why humans create things, leaving the many aspects of existence that humans did not create to other modes of inquiry, such as the natural sciences. Indeed, not everything was or is created by humans, and not everything is available to the humanities for interpretation: humans did not create the rocks and the stars, so the humanities have nothing to say about such things, though the humanities certainly do have something to say about the interpretations and discourses we humans create in response to those naturally occurring objects.”

The second part of the paragraph is something which which I agree, but whoever wrote these aphorisms does not understand mathematics or science except in a very superficial way; and he definitely doesn’t even know what engineering is (and certainly has never seen a good STEM program at work) .

“As such, the paradox of the humanities is that it studies the most important, but not the most basic, feature of existence. Human experience is the most important feature of existence for the simple reason that existence is meaningless and irrelevant unless we humans are alive and kickin’ to experience it.”

As they say, to be in the game, you have to show up.  Science and engineering make it more likely that more people will survive (consider advances in medicine and agriculture) and so more likely to have the time (and leisure) to experience the pleasure of the humanities.

“But human experience is not the most basic feature of existence. The most basic feature of existence is matter (protons, neurons, electrons, and so forth) – in other words, the things that are studied by the natural sciences and disciplines such as physics. Because matter is more basic, it seems to have acquired the status of being more important, but it is experience in the world, not the reality of the world, that matters most for human being.”

I get this point and even agree that understanding people is in some senses more important than understanding group theory (for instance).  But he doesn’t seem to know that as natural philosophy, science originally started out wanting to understand the world as way to help define and control our place in it.  And that today, studying human “experience in the world” is the goal of a fair amount of science and some math.  It’s just that humans are so complex that the methods pioneered by “science” are only now beginning to be able to grapple with problems so complex.

“The problem with too scientific an approach to existence is that no one will ever meet and shake hands with a proton or electron; yet we deal with human beings all the time. Human being is the event that necessarily mediates – that is, stands in the middle of – existence and any experience of existence that may occur.”

True almost by definition, but it scarcely means that “human being” is not amenable to study by formal processes.

” If we define a text as “something created,” an author as “someone who creates,” and interpretation as “explanation of an author’s creation of a text,” then the Humanities are the only form of academic inquiry that interprets things. The Humanities study the things humans have made, from art and literature to language and culture. When we study such things in the Humanities, we are serving as messengers conveying the meaning of the authors who created those things. To be sure, other academic fields perform invaluable kinds of analysis and inquiry. Interpretation is not the only game in town, but interpretation belongs to the Humanities. Interpretation is what we do. For us in the humanities, it is our responsibility as well as our justification.”

Some mathematicians see themselves as creating mathematical ideas rather than discovering them.  And, to be sure, in some ways they are more like humanities majors, especially in graduate work, than scientists and engineers.

Also, while linguistics may have started as a humanity and still be classified that way in universities, its methods are much more those of science than is interpreting a poem, for instance.  

 So, again, a pretty over-simplified view.