Study guides & student entitlement

This editorial from the U. Minn. Daily student newspaper really shows the state of student entitlement.  Do professors "owe" students a study guide for exams?  This was pretty much a pet peeve when TPP was teaching large lecture, introductory courses. You announce an exam already scheduled on the syllabus, and one of the questions you always got was, "Will you give us a study guide?" Sure.  Then the syllabus' lecture outline was copied, an outline TPP was always followed unless noted otherwise, added in the major topics covered in each heading, and sometimes added reminders of illustrative examples provided. Then one astute fellow notices the similarity to the syllabus, and says, "This study guide just copies the syllabus."  Right!  That's the material that's covered on this exam.  Now any competent student should have been able to do the same with their lecture notes, but the problem is that this was not the "study guide" they wanted. Read the editorial yourself. Maddie actually wants her professors to specifically note the material that will NOT be covered on the exam. Now TPP understands that exams cannot be fully comprehensive, but he tried to make his exams representative of the material covered, in depth and breadth, and never, ever, once has he ever said after covering some topic, "But you won't have to know this." WTF? Why would any teacher ever say that? Out of a universe of material on the subject of biology, your knowledgeable professor has winnowed out a minute amount of material that is both essential and necessary to the content of the course at this level, and now students want that professor to winnow out that subset and provide them with the sub-subset that they don't have to learn!  Amazing. This is what happens when education becomes primarily about about grades & credits, and not about learning. TPP doesn't think very many professors are going to be very sympathetic, but obviously Maddie has gotten study guides from some of us somewhere or she wouldn't be so entitled. Isn't it obvious that if a professor spends 30 mins explaining something it'll be on the exam. If it was 2 mins. maybe not so much. We can only hope life will provide Maddie with a study guide so she can put her valuable time to good use making sure she doesn't learn too much. HT to Angry by Choice.

What? No strobili! That's OK, it goes with no observations

Plants can be so uncooperative.  The Equisetum (3 species) in our glasshouse was most untimely and no strobili were available (other than pickled) for lab.  Probably that was OK because my way too many of my students were in an uncooperative, non-observational mood.  They broke all the "make observations" rules.  Clicking pictures of things they didn't study is the worst, especially when the fossils are too small to see anything.  You might as well turn in an image of green water in a test tube and label it "Chlamydomonas"; it's been done, and it pretty well demonstrates that the student in question didn't observe a damned thing.  This is the down side of digital.  It promotes a superficial, fast and easy approach, a non-learning approach.  The don't pay attention attitude was so bad that at the end of class TPP had to re-sort all of the microscope slides because students didn't pay enough attention, read the labels, and match them with the correct slide trays.  Pure sloppiness.  Now of course this was not universal; the gap just widens between the attentive and the inattentive.  It makes it easy to sort the sheep from the goats, which is part of my job, but you wish you had enough time to promote better study habits.   

This is education?

As if our job could get any harder, the state of Misery is trying hard to stop education altogether.  Let's see what this legislation allows or requires. 
"students may express their beliefs about religion in written and oral assignments free from discrimination based on the religious content of their work; that no student shall be compelled to perform or participate in academic assignments or educational presentations that violate his or her religious beliefs".
What a crock! Yes, folks, in certain parts of these United States, you will never have to confront or deal with any uncomfortable ideas or information conflicting with your beliefs. This is truly remarkable. Imagine that, you never, ever have to hear anything, or learn anything, of deal with anything that doesn’t fit into your particular belief system! If you ever wonder what is wrong with higher education, what will finally be the death of higher education, this is the kind of complete crap that will do it.  No one has to learn anything they don't want to.  Oh, does someone believe in a flat Earth?  How about tooth fairies?  How about a medical student who thinks a witch's curse is the actual problem? 
Now the Phactor has been explaining evolution to students for quite a few decades now. But he’s never required that anybody believe anything. However it is required that you demonstrate that you understand what was explained to you. So this is total anti-educational BS. You don’t have to learn anything. You can write an essay about the garden of Eden, which according to Mormon theology might be in Misery, instead of organic evolution, and what then do professors do with such stuff?  So what would such legislative crap allow or disallow?  It boggles the mind.  What are your thoughts?

Another fine semester shot to hell

As they say about flying, any landing you can walk away from was successful, so this was a successful semester. There will still be a few loose ends: a senior who wants to use all too familiar excuses in lieu of accomplishments. The day or two following a semester can be eerie on a college campus; the quiet, the emptiness. A quad that was bustling with people just a day ago is totally deserted, and if you don’t have some gizmo stuck in your ear or buzzing in your pocket, the quiet provides you with an opportunity for reflective thought, a dying art in an era of short attention spans, mobile distractions, and jingoism discourse. Where are thoughtful young people going to come from? Even in the university thought seems at a premium, and so my thoughts turned to a student commentator who opined that student evaluations of “teachers” were a sham because no matter how “bad” the evaluation the faculty never got fired. Indeed, what of student evaluations in this day and age? Speaking from a great deal of experience, you learn a lot about what students like and don’t like, but very little about what was effective teaching. After all, what do students know of teaching or learning? Do we ask students what was effective some 5 or 10 years post graduation? No, let’s get an opinion right now while those labor-intensive assignments are still fresh in their minds and they have yet to see what success in the real world is all about. And if you are one of those reviled professors, was it because you made them think, and it was hard, like really, really hard? Many moons ago my fate was intertwined with a senior colleague in a team-taught course, and his pandering, his lite-weight coverage of the subject, and his easy exams were shocking , and his teaching evaluations were sky high while mine languished at merely average. And he taught what seemed to be the behavior of baby zoo animals while genetics and evolution were left for me. Cute vs. dihybrid crosses, easy vs. hard, fluff vs. basic biology; clearly a no win situation when the scale is based on student likes and dislikes. In subsequent years, when partnered with another member of the faculty, my teaching evaluations instantly jumped over 1.5 points on a 5 point scale without changing a thing except the basis for comparison. So what do really high teaching evaluations tell you? And thus my expectations for teaching accolades are modest, and the grand thing is that they do not matter at all at this time of year when quiet reigns.

Job training versus learning

Boys and girls, allow me a bit of personal reflection about why education is important.

My childhood educational years were spent near Rochester, New York. During the 1950s, 60s, and 70s it was a thriving city with bountiful job opportunities at such impressive companies as Kodak, Xerox, and General Motors to name the biggies. Jobs at places like these meant that people with high school educations could afford nice houses, new cars, and vacations, the pure American dream.

Many people got great paying jobs after graduating from high school, and some were openly condescending about people who wasted their time going to college. “What kind of job are you going to get studying biology?” At the time your correspondent had to admit he didn’t know the answer. Having worked at GM during summers to pay for college (yes, the pay was good enough that 3 months of work covered the bills), this type of job had no appeal. So the gamble was on learning about something interesting, intellectually engaging, and trusting that it would work out OK. Oh yes, a college draft deferment during the Vietnam war era was also important.

Well, what a difference 30 to 40 years makes. All those jobs are gone; they barely lasted one working career. That worked out mostly OK for people my age, many of whom were near retirement anyways when they lost their jobs, but all those who signed on since then are just out of work and out of luck. One of the oft advertised great career opportunities during my college years was IBM key punch operators, basically typists who entered programs and data on punch cards, which was how you interfaced with computers in those days, with great big decks of cards carrying your programs and data. That great job training opportunity didn’t even last 10 years, and that’s what really specialized training gets you, a dead end.

The really important thing about education is learning how to learn. The Phactor is still doing botany in his 4th decade at the institution of my employment because it’s the only thing he does half well, but being an active biologist forces you to stay a student, to continue learning, and to do new things. Once you learn how to learn and get a job where that is important, you have a job that isn’t going to go away, even if your institution becomes private after state support totally evaporates (In 1970 the tuition $$ to state support ratio was 1:4.6, now it’s 1:0.6.). Learning to learn lets you adapt as new developments dictate. Carburetors and film have just about gone extinct, my dissertation typewriter is a museum piece, and no one could have ever foreseen such changes from the perspective of the 1960s.

This is why a real education is important, and very, very different from training. But a lot of people do not get it. Officially, my job at a great public institution of higher learning in the Land of Lincoln is to “train students for the work force of Lincolnland”. The Phactor has steadfastly ignored this dictate and done his best to educate students anyways. The work force can do its own key-punch training.

In biological terms, education that leads to life-long learning is the adaptive response. Training only leads to short term success at best. One last thing to mention least someone think the Phactor is on too high a horse about college educations. My point is not actually about the importance of college; it’s about the importance of learning to learn. It’s just that you don’t get very much of that in high school, and at times, precious little enough in college. Skilled tradesmen (and women) are well educated in the skills of their particular field, and they must continue to learn because tools and technology change. Adapt or go extinct, but who knew how fast things would evolve?

Another fine semester shot to heck

You would think the Phactor would get used to semesters ending in a fading whimper, but it's still depressing even when your successes have greatly outnumbered your failures. You realize that once again heads are not empty vessels to be filled, but garbage cans filled with junk that must be emptied if any new knowledge is to be added and how stubbornly some heads hang onto that garbage, or is it just an inability to deal with all those nasty little details that make a difference, like confusing coca with cocoa, because among present day students a vowel here or there makes no never mind and things like grammar and spelling betray an old fashioned fussiness over trivialities, and you want to ask, "What then is the measure of being educated if you still write and speak improperly?" And yet a few seem to have caught the biology bug, that nagging curiosity that drives us to try and figure out little bits of life, and that love of accomplishment, that feeling of having been the first one to actually know something new. So to close in a more upbeat mode, this semester will end with an evening of Costa Rican food and a sharing of pictures from the rain forest field trip, and a most excellent award ceremony for distinctions and outstanding achievements. Who wouldn't want to be this year's Monsoon mud monkey (dirtiest in the field)?