Of Darwin, Understanding and Human Limitations
I often tell my students that the fact they do not understand something does not mean it cannot be understood or, worse yet, that there is nothing to understand. I have had to learn that lesson myself the hard way, over time.
When I encounter an article, like that I have just skimmed by Joseph Carroll, professor of English at University of Missouri/St. Louis, entitled “From Evolution Comes Literature,” I recognize my limits as a thinker and, ultimately, as a human being. Carroll talks about the “co-evolution of genes and culture,” an idea I simultaneously find fascinating and yet difficult to follow in the argument he offers. I sometimes assuage my bruised ego by reassuring myself that with enough time and work, I could probably make sense of the article. And in this particular case, that’s probably true. But I also know that there are many disciplines of thought ranging from the physical sciences to linguistics in which my best efforts would yield, at the very best, a rudimentary understanding if an understanding at all.
Recognizing that one does not understand something is an admission of one’s limits. It’s also the teachable moment in some cases. Such admission becomes more difficult with the amount of education one has undertaken with the corresponding expectations others anticipate from those little letters and periods one adds to the end of his/her name. The Florida Humanities Council employs people like me to go to events ranging from a public discussion of religion, science and sexuality to a reading program for working class families bearing the title “scholar.” As I often say, it inevitably makes me nervous to be so described since, as I jokingly say, “People will expect me to actually know something.” In truth, what I mean is that some people will expect a “scholar” to know everything, i.e., to have all the answers. I have never even momentarily indulged myself with such a fantasy concerning my own capacities.
The story I often tell my classes is of my work study job at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, a nine seminary consortium combined with several religious studies institutes (e.g., The Institute of Religion and Economic Policy) and the famed Planet Bezerkeley University of California campus just a block to the south. I worked in the library at GTU which also gave me occasional reason to go over to the main library at Cal. It was a wonderful job for a book lover. It also provided me an important lesson about human limitations.
My job was to reshelve books. My habit was to identify certain books I wanted to read, take them down the street to the Krishna Copy Center where for 2.5 cents a page I could copy them, bind the copies and thus take home a copy to read at some identified later date. It was a great job and a great way to become exposed to the wide range of literature in world religions. One day I noticed that the pile of books I had reserved to copy was greater than the pile I was to reshelve. And suddenly the realization came crashing down on me that if I did nothing more than sit on the floor of that beautiful library for the rest of my natural life reading the books I would select to read, I would never finish reading the books on the shelves that day. Moreover, I would never read anything that was published thereafter. I was limited. I had experienced what Buddhists call a sudden kensho, a flash of momentary enlightenment into reality, which brought into painful focus my own limitations, limitations I would have to learn to live with, ending my self-delusions regarding my own capacities. It was a painful lesson but an enormously important one.
Human beings are not meant to know everything. That we desire to know everything can speak to a healthy sense of curiosity. It can also suggest some darker motivations such as security issues informing a drive to control one’s lifeworld. One way such drives play out is the denial of anything which contradicts one’s own existing set of understandings and the absolute avoidance of change. A rather hackneyed criticism of the western church asserts “It’s not hard to have all the answers when one never allows any questions.”
As difficult as it is for people with average intellects and educations to deal with information they find incomprehensible, difficulties that often end in dismissal if not anti-intellectualism (think Spiro Agnew’s “pointed headed liberals,” an unwitting reference to the dunce caps named after misunderstood scholar John Duns Scotus), it is at least that difficult for well educated people. Perhaps it is our hubris that tells us that we are smart, that we are well educated, and that if we think a given way, it stands a much better chance of being correct that what others think. Of course, that reasoning has some merit. But it also readily serves as rationalization for avoidance, denial and dismissal of ideas which run headlong into understandings we hold deemed settled if not sacred.
The article that spurred this reflection comes from a series of articles that Forbes magazine is running on the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his Origins of the Species. It is well worth your time to investigate. Having recently watched the very fine Nova program, Intelligent Design on Trial, on PBS, I have become increasingly intrigued with the ongoing controversy about evolution which I find somewhat incomprehensible. Of course, the fact I don’t get the concerns of the sworn enemies of Darwin doesn’t mean they don’t exist or that they are insignificant, particularly to their holders.
There are many issues that seem to leap from the pages of the Forbes articles and from the Nova program. Perhaps the primary issues are the avoidance of the ongoing change and development that evolutionary theory recognizes and the loss of a sense of specialness of both individuals bearing the image of G-d and human beings as the apex of the chain of being resulting from creation. The former is a security issue. Recognition that human beings do not totally understand their universe, much less control it, is both a blow to our egos as well as destabilizing of our sense of security. The realization that human beings are the outgrowth of a process that necessarily places us among rather than atop if not outside all other life forms strikes at both our egocentrism as individuals and our anthropocentrism as a species. It’s little wonder that human beings seeking existential security and affirmation in the arms of mother church would find Darwin’s contribution to our self-understanding troubling if not threatening.
Admittedly it takes a modicum of self-assurance to be able to say, “I don’t understand this but that doesn’t mean it cannot be understood or that there is nothing to understand.” In my own case, 17 years of higher education has provided some assurance for me even as I recognize that my life history is somewhat of an anomaly – if not a lesson in privilege – vis-à-vis most human beings. But what those years of education in disparate disciplines - ranging from education to law to theology to the social sciences – has taught me is the realization that crystallized for me that day on the floor of the GTU library in Berkeley – how much there is to know, how little of it I actually know and how little of it I could come to know prior to my death- was absolutely true. It is a lesson in humility though hardly humiliation. And if I doubted the truth of that lesson learned in Berkeley in 1994, the last 11 years of teaching interdisciplinary humanities covering understandings taken from the arts to philosophy, from critical theory to architecture and from literature to cognitive science have certainly provided many examples of the limitations briefly glimpsed on that library floor so many years ago.
One last thought on this. That I find something incomprehensible and offer the maker of an argument the benefit of the doubt does not somehow mean that all arguments are, in the end, compelling. An example on point here: it is difficult to take seriously the arguments of organizations like the Discovery Institute or my former instructor at the GTU, Dr. Phillip Johnson from the UC Boalt Hall Law School, that the world is but 6000 years old, give or take a few years, and that the first (of two) accounts of creation found in the Hebrew Scripture’s Genesis are somehow reportorial in nature reflecting actual events. One has to jump through too many presuppositional hoops to get there. At some level, this is both bad theology and bad science. And it’s particularly bad thinking for any number of reasons beyond the scope of this entry. Humility of thought requires neither a blind relativism nor an uncritical search for understanding. For those who would be mindful, figuring out which is which becomes our life work.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
The Kansas State Video: Some Preliminary Thoughts
There is an interesting youtube video making the rounds of the internet. It purports to be the work of a Kansas State University professor, Michael Wesch. According to the video, his students were encouraged to share their experience of higher education online and the contents of that survey ultimately became the substance for the video filming. It is provocative in a number of ways. Before reading my comments here, watch the video at this URL:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o&feature=email
The video begins with an odd use of a quote by Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan: "Today’s child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns subjects, and schedules”. The producers then provide a series of students holding various handwritten or computer generated messages which supposedly spell out the experience of today’s college student. Their comments are well worth considering even as I sense that they fail to make the case for the quote with which they begin.
As an opening consideration, I would like to defend structure in college classrooms. Clearly, all means should further the ultimate end they are designed to serve and all of us have been in situations where rules and procedures became ends in themselves for anal retentive taskmasters. And yet, in one segment of this video, students add up the time they spend working, listening to music, watching videos and television and, oh yeah, studying (3 hours/day) and the total comes up to 26.5 hours/day. In short, our students today, much like we students of yesterday, have a difficult time with time management. Clearly, structure is a needed value in higher education today, not simply an antiquated relic of yesterday.
In years past, I began my college classes with the expectable statement that “You are all adults and you can choose whether you want to come to class if you want to.” It was the early 1980s. With the rigid, bell-driven scheduling of high school still in mind with its priority for sports-related events and its imperative of keeping students busy – and thus out of trouble – at all times, I felt I would not fall into the same traps into which my own teachers had fallen. I was generous with grading, allowing students to turn in assignments the class after they were due with a minimum number of late points taken.
Since then, I have taught at three community colleges, one private university and two state universities in a career of college level pedagogy that stretches back 23 years now. For the last seven years I have taught at the University of Central Florida. About five years ago, I began to notice some problems in my laissez-faire approach to teaching.
First, I began to notice that some of my students rarely came to class. Under my “you’re an adult” approach, that signaled to me that they had agreed to absorb the hit to their grade that decision would require. What I began to notice was that it was often precisely the students who were frequently absent that were most likely to challenge their grades at the end of the term. It was also these same students who frequently gave their group members a hellacious time any time a group presentation was due, often leaving to the responsible students all of the work and then demanding to share in the group grade. Clearly, my policy on attendance was not working.
I had also adopted the attitude that if students didn’t want to do the reading, so be it. I simply assigned it, expected students to come to class prepared to discuss the materials and conducted my class with those who were prepared.
About five years ago I began to notice that I was conducting soliloquies or limited dialogues with two or three students more often than not. Calling on students who were not participating often failed to elicit any coherent comments. One encounter in particular stands out in my mind. I called on a young man, a generally polite and bright honors student who would later leave school to do his obligatory Mormon mission work, only to receive a response that indicated he had not read the rather minimal reading prior to class. When I asked him if he had actually read the material, he responded, “What would be your point?”
It was thereafter that I adopted a series of new approaches to teaching. I began to take roll each class, giving .5 points participation score per class and allowing for a two day absence grace period to allow for the inevitable sickness, death in the family or the perennial grandparent needing a ride to the airport at exam or paper time. After two absences, I began to deduct .5 points each absence and counted the final attendance grade toward participation.
In my Intro to the Humanities classes, I instituted a series of online content quizzes which closed prior to class time requiring students to read the text and take the quizzes before coming to class. Originally I gave students two chances on the quizzes thinking it was better to use this “stick” sparingly and hopefully make it a learning experience. I quickly found that my students were simply opening the quiz to find the questions, going to the text to find the answers, and then taking the second quiz. In response, I now split the 10 questions into two different quizzes and take the higher of the two scores, again requiring students to read the text if they wish to gain a decent score on the quizzes.
To grade my group activities, I began to require students to grade their own efforts and those of their group mates using a criteria that didn’t provide a passing score until the student had come to class with the assignment completed, prepared to discuss it. I also began to grade their evaluations themselves, looking for the slackers who simply gave themselves and everyone in the group 10/10 with cursory comments like “Good job!” and little else.
I often say that my students have trained me well. They have taught me many tricks on how to get around assignments and how to avoid the responsibilities students by definition assume when they become a part of any learning community. But the most important lesson they have taught me is simply that my presumptions about their adulthood were, in many cases, at best premature.
At some level, our students are a reflection of the values they have been taught. Noel James Entwistle has provided an interesting assessment of approaches to learning which students take. His research found that a few students used a deep approach to learning in which the intention to understand material learned, to interact vigorously with the content, to apply it to one’s lifeworld all marking an intrinsic value of learning. More students were likely to take a strategic approach which features a focus on grades, organization of time and effort for the greatest effect with the least effort, use previous exam papers to predict questions and are alert to cues about marking schemes. Then there are the bottom liners who use the surface approach, relying on rote memorization and regurgitation of data they believe instructors are seeking, tend to stick closely to course bare minimum requirements and are generally motivated by a fear of failure. As I often say to my bottom liners, “The problem with bottom lining is that it requires perfection. The only thing below the bottom line is failure.”
Clearly there are potential problems with the deep approach to learning. Do students necessarily have time to deeply reflect upon every single idea posed in their college careers? Could this not become a means of avoidance, by focusing on a limited set of ideas deeply while neglecting others? But, truth be told, most instructors cherish the deep learners who come to them seeking not just to know what’s on the test but its significance, why it was assigned in the first place. Sadly, I believe the entire class-driven, factory approach to most higher education today both engenders the surface and strategic approaches as well as evidences the values that students perceive they should hold regarding higher education.
Strategic learning focused on the highest grades for the least amount of effort readily reveals itself as egocentrism at work. The perception that “It’s all about me” is charming in 8 year olds. It is less so in 18 year olds. Moreover, the notion that one simply has to learn a set of skills taken out of a bag of tricks as a means of entry into the “real world,” which inevitably means the work world lurks around in the background of this approach. One might ask themselves why the work world should be seen as any more real than any other aspect of our socially constructed world, What is any less “real” about education, a valued part of every culture known to human beings?
The darker implications of the surface approach speak to the role that class plays in the United States, that dirty secret we Americans avoid acknowledging at all costs. A surface learner is driven by fear of failure. But, for the most part, many of these students didn’t want to be in college in the first place, at least not at this point in their lives. Parental fear of falling drives many low motivated middle class kids into colleges as Barbara Ehrenreich’s research readily demonstrates. Then there are the students who don’t know what they want to do with their lives who simply go with the flow of classmates into college, many for lack of any other perceivable alternatives. In both cases, these are students who make good arguments for mandatory national service programs right out of high school followed by life-experienced adults thereafter attending college on a GI Bill type scholarship.
Strategic approaches to learning can readily produce certifiably degreed workers. My university stamps them out by the thousands each year. But do such approaches produce educated human beings? One of the students in Wesch’s video accurately notes that “When I graduate I will have a job that probably doesn’t exist today.” It’s a critical observation of today’s work market. It’s also a striking indictment of strategic, vocation skills-driven approaches to college educations.
Job skills learned in colleges today have remarkably short shelf lives. What the worker who will survive and adapt in this work market requires cannot be taught, it can only be developed. That includes the ability to communicate clearly in writing and verbally using standardized (and thus comprehensible to all) language skills; the ability to concentrate long enough to read, digest and critically reflect upon material; the ability to apply ideas to factual scenarios posed; the ability to creatively develop new ideas based upon that which is already known; and the ability to work with other human beings in small and large groups. And it requires a student who actively engages their own learning process, not a consumer with an enormous sense of entitlement to be entertained while memorizing enough data to be regurgitated on command like Pavlov’s dog on a test to achieve a passing score. In short, it requires becoming the educated human being that liberal arts curricula have always promoted.
I find it odd that in my middle age I have developed what some might readily call conservative values regarding pedagogy, particularly given my generally radical approaches to the other areas of interest in my life – law, religion and society. I suppose that as a fifth generation educator and third generation college educator, I have always had some tendencies toward being establishment in my thinking about education. But more and more I find myself looking back on my own college experience which stretched over 17 years in total and asking myself what worked and what did not. What I find is that it was from the classes in which much was demanded of me, small enough classes that teachers knew my name and missed my face when I was absent, classes which required me to bring work to class with me to discuss intelligently and in an informed manner - thus insuring my preparation for class - that I learned the most. And it was precisely the classes where a laissez-faire “you’re an adult, you can choose whether to come or not” approach was used that I floundered. In retrospect, I think I interpreted those messages as simply “I don’t care about you or your learning.” And I sense my students today hear those messages the same way.
I have much more to say about Wesch’s provocative video. Stay tuned.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
There is an interesting youtube video making the rounds of the internet. It purports to be the work of a Kansas State University professor, Michael Wesch. According to the video, his students were encouraged to share their experience of higher education online and the contents of that survey ultimately became the substance for the video filming. It is provocative in a number of ways. Before reading my comments here, watch the video at this URL:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o&feature=email
The video begins with an odd use of a quote by Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan: "Today’s child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns subjects, and schedules”. The producers then provide a series of students holding various handwritten or computer generated messages which supposedly spell out the experience of today’s college student. Their comments are well worth considering even as I sense that they fail to make the case for the quote with which they begin.
As an opening consideration, I would like to defend structure in college classrooms. Clearly, all means should further the ultimate end they are designed to serve and all of us have been in situations where rules and procedures became ends in themselves for anal retentive taskmasters. And yet, in one segment of this video, students add up the time they spend working, listening to music, watching videos and television and, oh yeah, studying (3 hours/day) and the total comes up to 26.5 hours/day. In short, our students today, much like we students of yesterday, have a difficult time with time management. Clearly, structure is a needed value in higher education today, not simply an antiquated relic of yesterday.
In years past, I began my college classes with the expectable statement that “You are all adults and you can choose whether you want to come to class if you want to.” It was the early 1980s. With the rigid, bell-driven scheduling of high school still in mind with its priority for sports-related events and its imperative of keeping students busy – and thus out of trouble – at all times, I felt I would not fall into the same traps into which my own teachers had fallen. I was generous with grading, allowing students to turn in assignments the class after they were due with a minimum number of late points taken.
Since then, I have taught at three community colleges, one private university and two state universities in a career of college level pedagogy that stretches back 23 years now. For the last seven years I have taught at the University of Central Florida. About five years ago, I began to notice some problems in my laissez-faire approach to teaching.
First, I began to notice that some of my students rarely came to class. Under my “you’re an adult” approach, that signaled to me that they had agreed to absorb the hit to their grade that decision would require. What I began to notice was that it was often precisely the students who were frequently absent that were most likely to challenge their grades at the end of the term. It was also these same students who frequently gave their group members a hellacious time any time a group presentation was due, often leaving to the responsible students all of the work and then demanding to share in the group grade. Clearly, my policy on attendance was not working.
I had also adopted the attitude that if students didn’t want to do the reading, so be it. I simply assigned it, expected students to come to class prepared to discuss the materials and conducted my class with those who were prepared.
About five years ago I began to notice that I was conducting soliloquies or limited dialogues with two or three students more often than not. Calling on students who were not participating often failed to elicit any coherent comments. One encounter in particular stands out in my mind. I called on a young man, a generally polite and bright honors student who would later leave school to do his obligatory Mormon mission work, only to receive a response that indicated he had not read the rather minimal reading prior to class. When I asked him if he had actually read the material, he responded, “What would be your point?”
It was thereafter that I adopted a series of new approaches to teaching. I began to take roll each class, giving .5 points participation score per class and allowing for a two day absence grace period to allow for the inevitable sickness, death in the family or the perennial grandparent needing a ride to the airport at exam or paper time. After two absences, I began to deduct .5 points each absence and counted the final attendance grade toward participation.
In my Intro to the Humanities classes, I instituted a series of online content quizzes which closed prior to class time requiring students to read the text and take the quizzes before coming to class. Originally I gave students two chances on the quizzes thinking it was better to use this “stick” sparingly and hopefully make it a learning experience. I quickly found that my students were simply opening the quiz to find the questions, going to the text to find the answers, and then taking the second quiz. In response, I now split the 10 questions into two different quizzes and take the higher of the two scores, again requiring students to read the text if they wish to gain a decent score on the quizzes.
To grade my group activities, I began to require students to grade their own efforts and those of their group mates using a criteria that didn’t provide a passing score until the student had come to class with the assignment completed, prepared to discuss it. I also began to grade their evaluations themselves, looking for the slackers who simply gave themselves and everyone in the group 10/10 with cursory comments like “Good job!” and little else.
I often say that my students have trained me well. They have taught me many tricks on how to get around assignments and how to avoid the responsibilities students by definition assume when they become a part of any learning community. But the most important lesson they have taught me is simply that my presumptions about their adulthood were, in many cases, at best premature.
At some level, our students are a reflection of the values they have been taught. Noel James Entwistle has provided an interesting assessment of approaches to learning which students take. His research found that a few students used a deep approach to learning in which the intention to understand material learned, to interact vigorously with the content, to apply it to one’s lifeworld all marking an intrinsic value of learning. More students were likely to take a strategic approach which features a focus on grades, organization of time and effort for the greatest effect with the least effort, use previous exam papers to predict questions and are alert to cues about marking schemes. Then there are the bottom liners who use the surface approach, relying on rote memorization and regurgitation of data they believe instructors are seeking, tend to stick closely to course bare minimum requirements and are generally motivated by a fear of failure. As I often say to my bottom liners, “The problem with bottom lining is that it requires perfection. The only thing below the bottom line is failure.”
Clearly there are potential problems with the deep approach to learning. Do students necessarily have time to deeply reflect upon every single idea posed in their college careers? Could this not become a means of avoidance, by focusing on a limited set of ideas deeply while neglecting others? But, truth be told, most instructors cherish the deep learners who come to them seeking not just to know what’s on the test but its significance, why it was assigned in the first place. Sadly, I believe the entire class-driven, factory approach to most higher education today both engenders the surface and strategic approaches as well as evidences the values that students perceive they should hold regarding higher education.
Strategic learning focused on the highest grades for the least amount of effort readily reveals itself as egocentrism at work. The perception that “It’s all about me” is charming in 8 year olds. It is less so in 18 year olds. Moreover, the notion that one simply has to learn a set of skills taken out of a bag of tricks as a means of entry into the “real world,” which inevitably means the work world lurks around in the background of this approach. One might ask themselves why the work world should be seen as any more real than any other aspect of our socially constructed world, What is any less “real” about education, a valued part of every culture known to human beings?
The darker implications of the surface approach speak to the role that class plays in the United States, that dirty secret we Americans avoid acknowledging at all costs. A surface learner is driven by fear of failure. But, for the most part, many of these students didn’t want to be in college in the first place, at least not at this point in their lives. Parental fear of falling drives many low motivated middle class kids into colleges as Barbara Ehrenreich’s research readily demonstrates. Then there are the students who don’t know what they want to do with their lives who simply go with the flow of classmates into college, many for lack of any other perceivable alternatives. In both cases, these are students who make good arguments for mandatory national service programs right out of high school followed by life-experienced adults thereafter attending college on a GI Bill type scholarship.
Strategic approaches to learning can readily produce certifiably degreed workers. My university stamps them out by the thousands each year. But do such approaches produce educated human beings? One of the students in Wesch’s video accurately notes that “When I graduate I will have a job that probably doesn’t exist today.” It’s a critical observation of today’s work market. It’s also a striking indictment of strategic, vocation skills-driven approaches to college educations.
Job skills learned in colleges today have remarkably short shelf lives. What the worker who will survive and adapt in this work market requires cannot be taught, it can only be developed. That includes the ability to communicate clearly in writing and verbally using standardized (and thus comprehensible to all) language skills; the ability to concentrate long enough to read, digest and critically reflect upon material; the ability to apply ideas to factual scenarios posed; the ability to creatively develop new ideas based upon that which is already known; and the ability to work with other human beings in small and large groups. And it requires a student who actively engages their own learning process, not a consumer with an enormous sense of entitlement to be entertained while memorizing enough data to be regurgitated on command like Pavlov’s dog on a test to achieve a passing score. In short, it requires becoming the educated human being that liberal arts curricula have always promoted.
I find it odd that in my middle age I have developed what some might readily call conservative values regarding pedagogy, particularly given my generally radical approaches to the other areas of interest in my life – law, religion and society. I suppose that as a fifth generation educator and third generation college educator, I have always had some tendencies toward being establishment in my thinking about education. But more and more I find myself looking back on my own college experience which stretched over 17 years in total and asking myself what worked and what did not. What I find is that it was from the classes in which much was demanded of me, small enough classes that teachers knew my name and missed my face when I was absent, classes which required me to bring work to class with me to discuss intelligently and in an informed manner - thus insuring my preparation for class - that I learned the most. And it was precisely the classes where a laissez-faire “you’re an adult, you can choose whether to come or not” approach was used that I floundered. In retrospect, I think I interpreted those messages as simply “I don’t care about you or your learning.” And I sense my students today hear those messages the same way.
I have much more to say about Wesch’s provocative video. Stay tuned.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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