Comments on: Historians: we’re great, but what the hell is wrong with you?

By: J. Otto Pohl

J. Otto Pohl — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 10:30:22 +0000

Lack of preparation for many students especially in writing ability is quite evident where I work. Around 50% of the country’s general population is illiterate. But, of the 50% that can read and write many of them can not perform these tasks well. My colleagues from the Caribbean lament that many of the students they teach here would never have been admitted to university in Trinidad or Jamaica. The administration lets in a huge number of students every year because it wants the tuition money and it views the university as a profit making enterprise. But, realistically a lot of the 17,000 students admitted every year probably should not have been let in if the criteria is adequate preparation for a university education of the standard that exists in the US and Canada. Getting even 400 level students to read 70 pages a week is difficult. Getting my 200 level students to do 30 pages of reading a week is extraordinarily difficult. The idea of reading whole books and writing formal essays on them still remains foreign to many students here. Poor preparation before university is a major contributor to this mind set.

By: Canuck Down South

Canuck Down South — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 06:37:18 +0000

Indyanna’s comment about pre-requisite courses raises a related question that I’ve started thinking about, which is whether the lack of pre-reqs (often a proxy for perceived rigor), is part of the problem facing the humanities in this country, in terms of student perception–that is, I wonder whether a perceived lack of rigor leads today’s American students to think the humanities not worth their time. In both the institutions I’m familiar with in Canada, the English majors, for example, had strict pre-req requirements and a requirement for a B+ average to even get into the major program, yet they had line-ups out the door of prospective students. Whereas in the US, both were I am and from what I’ve heard of other institutions, humanities majors have few pre-reqs or other requirements, and the students rate the perceived difficulty of those majors much lower than pre-req-heavy science programs and therefore not worth their time.

Or in other words, maybe if we want our students to take the education we offer seriously, we need to demonstrate, in a curricular language that our students understand, that we take it seriously as well.

By: Indyanna

Indyanna — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 04:26:05 +0000

Well, I’m going to push back at least a little on the question of department-level curricular coherence. Because–leaving aside the libertarian question of what happens or should happen when the classroom door is closed–there are typically substantially and perfectly legitimate different visions about fundamental goals and objectives within disciplines, departments, or programs. Whether these proceed from generational divisions between silverbacks and neo-rads, or between techno-utopians and techno-skeptics, or agnostics and true believers, they are deeply held and in some ways determinative at the practice level. Sending a “team” of twenty instructors down the hallways to implement a set of decisions, however loose, that have emerged from a 13-7 vote, or reaching consensus around desired skills and orientations by muting specifics and softening things around the edges, isn’t necessarily likely to produce good what-they-like-to-call “outcomes” at the end of whatever time unit you measure these things by.

Most of what I learned in college was the byproduct of discovering that the faculty was an elbow-patched version of that old Supreme Court metaphor about “nine little law firms,” and I think that was to the good. Of course, as I like to tell colleagues (who don’t believe it) I majored in history without having actually been a history major–or at least for very long. By the time the registrar tracked me down and broke the news to me that I couldn’t register for courses the next term until I declared a major I had already taken almost enough courses, willy nilly. So I just “declared” the thing and mopped up over the ensuing ten weeks. In the process I managed to avoid or elide most of the essentialisms that apparently passed for curricularity back in that day. I recognize that everyone who got into college then probably had more hours of close schooling in the fundamentals than many students will by the time that we graduate them now, so don’t try this on your test track. But I’ve never run into anything in actual life (outside of the office) that looked like a curriculum, much less a syllabus, or an extension, a make-up exam, or a note from the health center, so I’ve always appreciated the residues of the chaos theory that was the liberal arts when I stumbled through them.

I do like the idea of returning to prerequisites; so students don’t end up taking “Intro to [Your Discipline Here]” just so they can graduate, in the summer after junior year, probably on-line, from another institution.

By: Perpetua

Perpetua — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 22:31:09 +0000

@Susan – that sounds very smart. @MattL – exactly. And what’s worse is that educrats are now imposing superficial versions of these objective in our classes in the form of core competencies or whatever they call them in their eduspeak. I hate all that garbage, but I think they’ve identified our problem and are working to fix it. When *we* don’t fix things ourselves, administrators do it, and it’s a disaster.

By: Matt_L

Matt_L — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 19:51:22 +0000

Perpetua, you have identified the big problem at my institution and in my department. Intellectual Freedom is interpreted as the right to do as you please when the classroom door is closed. As a result we don’t really have any coordination between classes or an actual curriculum. Well, according to the requirements for the major in the course catalog we have a curriculum, but its pretty clear that we don’t have one in practice.

I appreciate the right to select my own books, create my own assignments, and organize the material as I see fit. I know my other colleagues do as well. But we really ought to create some common objectives and try to reach them in our classes. These things are not mutually incompatible.

By: Susan

Susan — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 15:49:13 +0000

At my campus, we’re working on getting some consistency into assignments. So that we say, at the lower division level, people will give at least one assignment analyzing a primary source, or some such. We’ve also agreed that we require FOOTNOTES, not in text citations. Amazing how hard it is for students to do that.

By: Perpetua

Perpetua — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 14:40:27 +0000

(to clarify, I don’t know what to think about my students’ comments because when I talk to other faculty they all say, yes, I do that! So I can’t always gauge how accurate the students are at reporting.)

By: Perpetua

Perpetua — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 14:39:18 +0000

@Contingent Cassandra, I agree with you here about teaching the skills the students need, and that has always been my priority. One of the problems I have with history departments (I’ve taught in several) is the generalized resistance to any kind of curricular coherence. Nobody wants to “tell someone what to do”. It’s almost a pathology. So what happens is the curriculum doesn’t make sense, nobody wants to talk about uniform standards of any kind. The difficulty then is that everyone laments the students’ lack of skills, but there is no consistency in trying to teach them. Students need to practice those skills – let’s say, writing an essay based on analysis of a primary source – not just in one class, but in many classes, and not just in one writing assignment, but at least two. I do this and my students often say, “I’ve never done this before!” I don’t know what to think. My most recent institution takes its teaching pretty seriously, but I don’t have any idea of what their assignment structure is like. I’m not saying we should police each other’s syllabi, but it would make sense to have departmental consensus about the kinds of assignments in a general sense that should be taught, especially in lower level classes. (And wouldn’t it be nice to go back to the world of prereqs, where the curriculum included actual stepping-stones for students.) And that’s the issue at my current university, where frankly teaching evals don’t matter much. At my partner’s school, merit raises are tied completely to teaching evaluations and the department has sunk into a kind of rat race to lower the bar (which is what it takes to get across the board 5 star ratings from students). As the assignments get simpler and simpler, less and less is expected of students. They are just being taught less.

By: Z

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 05:53:07 +0000

The curriculum is going backward. It seems that very many courses resemble those Sorbonne classes Historiann described in a recent post. That is why my classes seem odder and odder to the students — fewer and fewer people are using something other than canned lectures and Scantron. That is at least what it seems to be looking like this semester.

By: Comradde PhysioProffe

Comradde PhysioProffe — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 03:06:20 +0000

The area of greatest frustration was students, with 69.2 percent of the respondents expressing dissatisfaction with their undergraduates, and 67.3 percent reporting dissatisfaction with graduate students.

Thatte’s totally fucken hilarious.

In a recent survey of dentists, the area of greatest frustration was teeth, with 69.2 percent of the respondents expressing dissatisfaction with molars, and 67.3 percent reporting dissatisfaction with incisors.