This Is Not News

It’s been a crazy week – midterm wek for my students, which means I’ve been putting review material together and getting tests ready. Way back in the 90s, when I had to walk five miles to class in the snow uphill both ways, this was the time that students would flood professors’ office hours to try and figure out that which confounded them. This week, only one student has stopped by office to ask a question. (Since I don’t have an office at one of the schools where I teach, this is probably a good thing.) Instead, every night I’ve been answering e-mails and holding instant messenger sessions with students who want to go over material.

Now, especially since I’m an adjunct, this is a great help for my students and for me. I spend a lot of the working day running around from one campus to another, so I don’t have as much time as I’d like to make sure that I can be avilable to students at the different times that their schedules allow. (If you have a class during the window I’m able to schedule office hours at a particular campus, you’re pretty much out of luck.) But this way, I’m actually available at the time when, let’s be honest, many students are actually realizing “Holy crap, I don’t get this and the test is tomorrow!”

It really is amazing how much technology has changed education in just ten years. When I started writing this post, I tried to remember if any of my professors had e-mail, and I don’t believe they did. Most of the campuses I teach at have built new classroom space over the years that include built-in audio-video systems with DVD players, PCs, and high-resolution projectors – a far cry from the VCRs-on-a-cart of days gone by. And I love all the new toys, don’t get me wrong – I get a kick out of showing scenes from Monty Python on a big screen and calling it work. The one thing that it does make me wonder about is, the more technology we build into the educational experience, the more expensive education becomes. And given the issues we have in this country with education affordability, that does give me some pause.

I’ve added an education category to the site. Given how much time I’m spending on the topic, I figure it’s about time. There will continue to be some crossover with philosophy, but this section will be more about the nuts and bolts of teaching.

I did a brief “microlesson” presentation in one of my education classes tonight – about 30 minutes on Descartes and the hyperbolic doubt thought experiment. Just as I got rolling my time ran out. One of the other students felt like I had left the class on a cliffhanger – setting up the experiment, but not having time to actually talk about Descartes’ findings. Leave ’em wanting more, I suppose.

But it got me to thinking about something that’s been occupying my thoughts a lot lately – there seems to be a real tension between the Deweyan approach I say that I want to take, and the way I actually teach. I try to initiate class discussion a lot, and I think I’m reasonably successful there. (Although I can get better.) But in order to to try and give the students a shot at understanding some of the admittedly cryptic texts we read, I spend a lot of time doing lecture and boardwork. I’m starting to wonder if I should try and be less text-centered, to push the students to develop their own approaches. But that might mean giving up on exposing them to some really thought-provoking material. I dunno. I’m still muddling through this.