Whispers of the small, still voice
My dreams are always active, colorful and vivid. I often dream of being enroute to airports, trying to get home and encountering obstacle after obstacle. Other nights I dream about ideas I am wrestling with at the university, ideas I am trying to explain to my students or understand for myself. And I find that the ideas sometimes seem to order themselves into systematic presentations in my dreams. Indeed, some nights I awake from very intense dreams where the system is laying itself out over and over. Those nights I frequently awake with solutions to the problems which accompanied me to bed. I often leap to my computer to write them down. Some of them I develop into lesson plans and presentations.
I explain this phenomenon with an anology to the snow blocks so popular with children. All day long I am furiously shaking those blocks, wrestling with these ideas and emotions, represented by the glitter snow in the liquid inside the snow block flying all around. At night, the snow - and thus the ideas - settles back into order, into a comprehensible pattern. My mind needs the downtime for the unconscious to do its work. I have an active unconscious mind and I do tend to listen to what it is trying to tell me, perhaps a result of my largely right brain reliance.
Sometimes when I awake, a small, still voice is whispering in my ear. What I hear there I tend to consider wisdom rather than ordered, systematic understandings. Recently, I awoke to these words:
G-d is and all that is exists in G-d.
We recognize G_d when we see the image of G-d in the other and respect their human dignity.
The divine speaks to us in the universal languages – music, art – and we weep because our hearts and souls identify with that which is conveyed. Deep calls out to deep, as the psalmist said.
I am not quite sure what to make of that, but it certainly does sum up some of the wrestlings of my soul of late.
Sometimes the whispers come in broad daylight.
On a recent trip back to the rural Sumter County of my youth, enroute to visiting my father, I took one of my favorite backroads. As kids we called it Fortune Teller Road because the aunt and grandmother of one of my classmates lived there and made a small fortune as psychics telling fortunes on weekends for her largely black clientele, some of whom drove from as far away as south Florida. The fortune tellers are long gone. But the majestic, moss draped live oaks still line the two lane road bordering rolling pastures where beef cattle are still raised.
As I crested the slight rise in the middle of this stretch, the setting sun filtered through tree branches and Spanish moss. The dust in the air caught the light providing a glorious vision of bucolic country life. It took my breath away. I suddenly remembered what I had loved about living in the woods. I slowed the car to a stop and just gazed at what was clearly a gift from a generous G-d. And in that very moment, I heard the small, still voice whispering in my ears:
You are a part of all that is and all that ever will be. When you die, the very elements of your body will return to the earth from which it came and will live again in the trees, the animals and other human beings. Matter is never created or destroyed, it simply changes form. And your legacy will be the way in which you have touched other lives.
The whispering left me strangely filled with the same glow of the sunset I was witnessing as well as disquieted. Does that mean that there is no afterlife, just one's legacy, which is why it's important to focus on the people in one's life and let go of the rest of our concerns about success and attainment? Does the fact I feel so much at peace this moment mean that I have accepted that reality?
I have always wanted to believe in life after death. And I have had some experiences which have led me to believe that such actually exists and that the spirits of the deceased sometimes are experienced by those who survive them, not the least of which was my experience with the psychics in Cassadega and California. Most of all, since my mother's death, I have deeply yearned to see her again, to have the chance to talk with her and to tell her how very much I love her. I sense her presence around me all the time.
I don't know how much of that is in my head. Freud could be right, it could be little more than wish fulfillment. But I am clear that the rational, empiricist worldview he held has often proven inadequate in explaining the world in which we live and the lives of those who occupy it. An approach which has no willingness to admit to mystery is an impoverished understanding from the beginning. And I'm hoping he was wrong on this. Life after death is not terribly supportable on Freud's terms. But, being the screaming iNtuitive that I am, I have to wonder if there's simply not more to the story.
The United Church of Canada's affirmation of faith says it well: And I believe that I may hope for a life with God that is not terminated by death. I'd say that's pretty much what I believe - and hope for - these days.
Sometimes the small, still voice picks much more mundane settings to speak. The current goal of my life is to distribute into my yard the two huge piles of mulch brought to me by Kevin's Tree Service. Kevin brought me two huge piles of ground up tree measuring 10 x 10 and up to five feet high. We have been unable to get our cars into the driveway for a couple of weeks now and the physical labor of loading the mulch by shovel into wheelbarrows and then distributing it into flower beds reminds me that I am no longer a kid. Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it.
As I was unloading a wheelbarrow full of mulch into one of the beds where I have recently transplanted some gardenias from the yard of my childhood home in Bushnell, suddenly the small still voice blazes out the following:
If it's not the G-d of all creation, by definition it is the gods of our own construction.
Well, that stopped me cold. The mulch had to wait a couple of minutes while I sorted that one out. Of course, it does reflect my own theology of universalism and my growing concerns with the almost inevitable idolatry of socially constructed religions. But I'd never had it so succinctly summed up before. And running the risk of shameless self-affirmation, I'd add that there is a reason that I see these little bursts of insight from the unconscious as wisdom.
As I walked to one of my final exams yesterday with a student in the class, she told me that she is writing a book, much of it based upon her dreams. She keeps a journal by her bed to capture those dreams while they are fresh and only later spins them into comprehensible narrative. I told her that her unconscious was rewarding her for recognizing and honoring it, much the same way my small, still voice speaks to me. I also told her I'd like to read the book when it is finished.
I'm sure Freud would have a field day with such advice though his own colleague Jung - not to mention the writer of the accounts of Elijah's encounter with the divine - would readily understand it. But, obviously, I am not alone in these experiences. If nothing else, it tells me that this kind of craziness is more common than folks like Freud might like to believe.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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, April 30, 2009
Sunday, April 05, 2009
The Passion of the Christ Arrives Early
The news is grim this weekend before Holy Week. No time for palm frond processions. An orgy of gunfire has engulfed our nation producing the following:
WEEK OF SHOOTINGS (as compiled and observed only by BBC)
Like the fearful Judean populace, languishing under Roman imperial rule, America is held hostage by its own fears. Arming itself to the teeth, more than one of every two Americans brandishes weapons, trying to convince themselves that their weapons will save them. But they don't. And now who saves us from these armed fearful people?
Must we continue crucifying Jesus in our brothers and sisters (when you do it unto the least of them, you do it unto me)? Will there be no repentance, no turning around? Will the crucifying never end? Will there be no resurrection?
Jesus said:
I am sending you prophets and wise men and scribes; some you will slaughter and crucify, some you will scourge in your synagogues and hunt from town to town;
35 and so you will draw down on yourselves the blood of every upright person that has been shed on earth, from the blood of Abel the holy to the blood of Zechariah son of Barachiah whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar.
36 In truth I tell you, it will all recoil on this generation.
37 'Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you that kill the prophets and stone those who are sent to you! How often have I longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you refused!
38 Look! Your house will be deserted...
A thought this Holy Week for we oh-so-very-holy Americans - 74% of whom call ourselves Christians - who live in this self-proclaimed Christian nation with the temerity to demand "God Bless America!" - Have we killed enough people yet to admit we have a problem?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The news is grim this weekend before Holy Week. No time for palm frond processions. An orgy of gunfire has engulfed our nation producing the following:
WEEK OF SHOOTINGS (as compiled and observed only by BBC)
Sat 4 April: Gunman kills three policemen in Pittsburgh before being wounded and captured- Fri 3 April: Gunman kills 13 people at an immigration centre in Binghamton, New York state, then apparently shoots himself
Sun 29 March: Gunman kills seven elderly residents and a nurse at a nursing home in Carthage, North Carolina, then is shot and wounded himself
Sun 29 March: Man kills five relatives and himself in Santa Clara, California
The details are filled with sadness, loss and mindless violence:
- Binghamton shooting victims came from 8 nations BINGHAMTON, N.Y. (AP) — People from eight countries have been identified as the victims of a deadly rampage at an immigrant community center in Binghamton, N.Y. Police said Sunday that four of the victims were from China and two were from the United States. Two more were from Vietnam, including the gunman. Two were from Haiti. The remaining four were from Pakistan, the Philippines, Iraq and Brazil.
Police say 41-year-old Jiverly Wong burst into the American Civic Association on Friday morning and opened fire with two handguns. He then took his own life. Four people remain hospitalized and are expected to recover.
- Three officers die in US shooting Three police officers have been killed by a gunman in Pittsburgh - the second mass shooting in the US in 24 hours.
The officers were responding to an emergency call from the house of the gunman, named as Richard Poplawski, 23. Police said he was waiting, armed with rifles and a bulletproof vest. He shot two officers as they entered the house, and a third who tried to help them.
He then traded gunfire with police for four hours before being injured and giving himself up.
His friends said he had recently lost his job, and was worried that US President Barack Obama was about to ban guns. The shooting comes a day after a gunman killed 13 people in New York state.
Another man who said he was a friend of Mr Poplawski, Aaron Vire, told the newspaper: "He said he'll be ready if there's ever an invasion of the United States and that he had stockpiled foods and guns for that eventuality."
The carnage continues today.....
- Police: Washington father killed 5 children, self because wife said she was leaving him 4:21 PM EDT, April 5, 2009
GRAHAM, Wash. (AP) — Investigators believe a man fatally shot his five children in their home and killed himself after he found out his wife was leaving him for another man, a sheriff's spokesman said Sunday.
Teen shot to death following talent show in Lauderdale Lakes
Robbery and shooting happened in front of Boyd Anderson High 9:26 PM EDT, April 4, 2009 LAUDERDALE LAKES - Gregory Smith, 16, had just finished rapping at a Friday night talent show and was waiting for a ride home with friends outside Boyd Anderson High School.A hard-top Ford Mustang, dark green or dark blue, pulled up in front of Smith and his three friends at 1 a.m. Saturday, according to the Broward Sheriff's Office.The men demanded money from the group standing on the sidewalk on the 4100 block of Northwest 29th Avenue. Smith and his friends cooperated, officials said.Then Smith was shot and killed.
It was the first official day of spring break.
Like the fearful Judean populace, languishing under Roman imperial rule, America is held hostage by its own fears. Arming itself to the teeth, more than one of every two Americans brandishes weapons, trying to convince themselves that their weapons will save them. But they don't. And now who saves us from these armed fearful people?
Must we continue crucifying Jesus in our brothers and sisters (when you do it unto the least of them, you do it unto me)? Will there be no repentance, no turning around? Will the crucifying never end? Will there be no resurrection?
Jesus said:
I am sending you prophets and wise men and scribes; some you will slaughter and crucify, some you will scourge in your synagogues and hunt from town to town;
35 and so you will draw down on yourselves the blood of every upright person that has been shed on earth, from the blood of Abel the holy to the blood of Zechariah son of Barachiah whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar.
36 In truth I tell you, it will all recoil on this generation.
37 'Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you that kill the prophets and stone those who are sent to you! How often have I longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you refused!
38 Look! Your house will be deserted...
A thought this Holy Week for we oh-so-very-holy Americans - 74% of whom call ourselves Christians - who live in this self-proclaimed Christian nation with the temerity to demand "God Bless America!" - Have we killed enough people yet to admit we have a problem?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Sunday, March 01, 2009
That Uncomfortable Video
It didn’t win any awards at the academy last week. But Kansas State professor Michael Wesch is to be commended for his creativity in collecting and creatively presenting the thoughts of his undergraduate students about the lives of American college students today. The video is provocative, to say the least. And it is in response to that provocation that these comments from a fellow teacher of undergraduate students halfway across the country are offered.
Wesch’s students are hardly reluctant to critique the process in which they seek to become educated citizens. Early into the video, a handwritten note on the white board declares “The information is up here.” At some level, that is true in perhaps more places in academia than not. In what Brazilian educator Paolo Freire calls “the banking method” of teaching, much college education is marked by information posited by supposed experts at the head of a classroom (or, in this case, the auditorium representing the mass production factory approach many state universities use).Presumed blank slate students in need of such expertise are expected to inscribe the information and then deposit it in their minds only to regurgitate it upon command at test time as a means of demonstrating their “learning.”
Wesch’s students readily reflect the problems with this information driven factory approach to college education. One student notes that the average class size is 115 followed by another who observes that only 18% of her teachers actually know her name. While standardized tests, designed to demonstrate how much memorized information has been retained, have long been used in higher education, the best means of assessing learning is always to observe student behavior. Such is unlikely in auditoriums packed with young faces without names that more resemble Henry Ford’s auto assembly line than Plato’s Academy.
Wesch’s students have this one right - this is a particularly poor way to teach or to attempt to become educated. What a difference small classes where students were known by name and expected to produce written and verbal responses to assigned readings would make! Freire ably lays out the many problems with the banking method in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed. But the fundamental problem here is the limited value of information-driven pedagogy.
In Post-Intellectualism and the Decline of Democracy, The Failure of Reason and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century, author and retired professor Donald Wood describes a progression of understanding that takes this form:
1. When I graduate I will have a job that probably doesn’t exist today.
2. I did not create the problems but they are my problems.
Let’s begin with the first. This is an incredibly important insight for any college student today. Many students have approached their college educations as potential worker drones seeking training, work credentials and the resulting security for their place in the professional middle class. How many instructors have had to put up with the response of “This isn’t my major” when confronting a student on their less than stellar performance as if this assertion somehow self-evidently explains why the student is entitled to blow off this class in which they are enrolled?
One hears this same theme in the student’s assertion in the video that “Only 26% (of the assigned readings of which students admit to reading only 49% to begin with) are relevant to my life.” There is an old Yiddish proverb that goes “If you want to make G-d laugh, tell G-d your plans.” How could an 18 year old possibly know what kind of life they will lead? Correspondingly, upon what basis would such a person lacking information about their future life make an assessment of relevancy of assigned readings to that life? Indeed, isn’t that precisely why they have hired instructors to make such assessments based upon their educations and life experience?
Clearly pursuit of a major is a valuable means of focusing one’s education in upper division studies. But the notion that there is nothing valuable to learn outside that major is both incredibly short-sighted and ultimately self-defeating in the very job market Wesch’s students fear. As I often say to my students, “You can live as limited a life as you choose.” Focusing on one’s major to the exclusion of any other learning experience suggests a bottom liner approach that is destined for failure for two reasons.
First, if the student’s observation that the jobs s/he will hold in the future do not yet exist is accurate – and this is a fairly common observation within the academy today - a vocational, major-driven approach to college education can provide only limited valuable skills with very short shelf lives to that future worker. Ironically, it is precisely the very liberal arts lower division education that bottom lining students are blowing off as unimportant that will probably determine how well they fare in that future job market.
A good liberal arts education does not simply supply information or job skills with a limited shelf life. Liberal arts curricula are designed to teach students how to think critically, creatively, synthetically. They are designed to prompt students to become aware of their presumptions and to recognize the limitations of their own cultural backgrounds in an increasingly global work world. Liberal arts curricula are designed to teach students how to express themselves verbally, through writing and art, using technologies. They are designed to teach students how to take positions and support them with evidence and reasoned argument. They are designed to teach basic understandings of math and the sciences. They require transcending one’s own cultural limitations through learning foreign languages and a wide range of cultures immediately and increasingly around them in their own country. In short, a liberal arts curriculum is designed to help students become more aware of the universe, hence the reason many pursue such learning at a place called a university. How well one develops that awareness probably will determine much of their success or failure in the rapidly evolving and largely unpredictable job market the student in the video describes.
And that leads to the second key point above: I did not create these problems but they are my problems.
At some level, this is a true statement. Today’s college students were born into a cultural context of technology as a way of life and consumerism as the primary lens through which Americans view and thus construct their lives. The closing scene from Wesch’s students’ video includes a quote that “Some have suggested that technology alone can save us.” It is immediately followed by two confessions that reveal the problem with this belief: “I facebook through most of my classes…I bring my laptop but I am not working on class stuff.” Clearly, the world of technology into which our current students were born has not proved to be our – or their - salvation. But just as clearly, the actions of these same students reveal that they are a part of the very problems they lament.
You see, college students who by their own admission spend only three hours studying each day are also admitting they are failing to live into their part of the college bargain. Study after study shows that an average of two hours preparation outside each hour spent in class is necessary to successfully learn that which the classes seek to teach. Even if three hours are spent each day of the week, that only adds up to 21 reading/study/preparation hours weekly. Given the 2 hours prep/1 hour class formula, that’s not even equivalent to a full time load of 12 hours. And when the students in the video add up all their various daily activities including spending more time each day online than studying, their total comes to 26.5 hours. That not only suggests very poor time management skills, it also suggests some rather misplaced priorities. Both of those are plainly within the realm of student responsibility.
The “problems” also include paying for classes never attended, paying $100 for textbooks never opened. It includes conscious decisions to spend time reading webpages (2300) and facebook profiles (1281) rather than books (8). It includes the choice to spend time writing voluminous amounts of email (over 500 pages) at the same time only 42 pages are written for classes. None of these conscious choices about time and energy expenditure suggest any sense of responsibility as students much less maturity as young adults. Indeed, the implication from the comments is that these students are somehow victims of the world into which they’ve been thrust and simply play their parts.
And yet, none of this just happens. Time expenditures are always the result of choices. Priorities evidence decisions about the use of time. Which is why the assertion that “I am a multitasker…I have to be” is rather ludicrous. Multitasking generally translates to doing a number of things in a mediocre at best fashion because insufficient attention is being paid to any one of them. If a student feels driven to multitasking, perhaps it is because they have so cluttered their lives with constant distractions from cell phones to facebook to gameboys that they have little time left for their responsibilities as students. One wonders what is so horrible about the self-confessed privileged lives of young people that they must be constantly distracted from conscious presence in them.
At some level, much of the commentary in the video Michael Wesch’s students produced comes across as uncritical in its reasoning, immature in its inordinate and unsupported sense of entitlement, consumerist in its expectations and morally irresponsible in the way the students assess their situation and who is responsible for it. As a college instructor of now 23 years, I find the video troubling even as I recognize the consistency in these comments with those I hear from my own students. At some level, we are all in Michael Wesch’s debt for providing a means for these understandings to be articulated. But confronting the problems it raises will take a lot more than a collaborative video production.
If there is a ray of light in this production, it was the recognition by these students of their own privilege. While one student whines about leaving college with $20,000 debt, as if this investment in his own future was somehow not worth $20,000, the very next student confesses “I am one of the lucky ones” followed by the student who recognizes “One billion people live on less than $1.00 a day.”
What makes me hopeful in this recognition of privilege is the possible insight that the educational process of which clearly few of these students are actually taking full advantage comes with responsibilities to something larger than their own immediate self-interests – a very needy world around them. Perhaps that recognition will spur some students to take their educational process a bit more seriously, to accept responsibility for their participation in that process and the time management it requires, out of the recognition that there is something at stake a little larger than technology and consumerism.
This is the hopeful side of the Generation Y students we are teaching today. It is the side that makes it possible to deal with the myopic tendencies Michael Wesch’s video lays out so well. I thank Professor Wesch for a provocative look at the minds of college students today and I wish him and his students well. Thanks to them, we have fairly well defined many of the problems in higher education and its students today. The question that remains is what will be our - and their - response.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
It didn’t win any awards at the academy last week. But Kansas State professor Michael Wesch is to be commended for his creativity in collecting and creatively presenting the thoughts of his undergraduate students about the lives of American college students today. The video is provocative, to say the least. And it is in response to that provocation that these comments from a fellow teacher of undergraduate students halfway across the country are offered.
Wesch’s students are hardly reluctant to critique the process in which they seek to become educated citizens. Early into the video, a handwritten note on the white board declares “The information is up here.” At some level, that is true in perhaps more places in academia than not. In what Brazilian educator Paolo Freire calls “the banking method” of teaching, much college education is marked by information posited by supposed experts at the head of a classroom (or, in this case, the auditorium representing the mass production factory approach many state universities use).Presumed blank slate students in need of such expertise are expected to inscribe the information and then deposit it in their minds only to regurgitate it upon command at test time as a means of demonstrating their “learning.”
Wesch’s students readily reflect the problems with this information driven factory approach to college education. One student notes that the average class size is 115 followed by another who observes that only 18% of her teachers actually know her name. While standardized tests, designed to demonstrate how much memorized information has been retained, have long been used in higher education, the best means of assessing learning is always to observe student behavior. Such is unlikely in auditoriums packed with young faces without names that more resemble Henry Ford’s auto assembly line than Plato’s Academy.
Wesch’s students have this one right - this is a particularly poor way to teach or to attempt to become educated. What a difference small classes where students were known by name and expected to produce written and verbal responses to assigned readings would make! Freire ably lays out the many problems with the banking method in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed. But the fundamental problem here is the limited value of information-driven pedagogy.
In Post-Intellectualism and the Decline of Democracy, The Failure of Reason and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century, author and retired professor Donald Wood describes a progression of understanding that takes this form:
Data – (raw bits of thought) ->
Information - (data assembled into comprehensible form) ->
Knowledge – (Information critically assessed, evaluated) ->
Wisdom (Knowledge reflected upon in light of life experience, other perspectives)
It may well be true that “The information is up here.” Any instructor will employ a modicum of effort to make raw data comprehensible. Moreover, the presumption that an instructor will actually have information worth hearing about is certainly reasonable given the qualifications most colleges and universities require of their instructors. And in a standardized test driven world of educational bottom lines, for many students, memorization of that information and the regurgitation of that same information upon command like Pavlov’s dog is all that will be required of them. But there is little possibility of knowledge resulting from mass produced processes which focus primarily on gathering information. And even less wisdom. Little wonder Wesch’s students are cynical about the factory.
The two most striking lines in the entire video are as follows:1. When I graduate I will have a job that probably doesn’t exist today.
2. I did not create the problems but they are my problems.
Let’s begin with the first. This is an incredibly important insight for any college student today. Many students have approached their college educations as potential worker drones seeking training, work credentials and the resulting security for their place in the professional middle class. How many instructors have had to put up with the response of “This isn’t my major” when confronting a student on their less than stellar performance as if this assertion somehow self-evidently explains why the student is entitled to blow off this class in which they are enrolled?
One hears this same theme in the student’s assertion in the video that “Only 26% (of the assigned readings of which students admit to reading only 49% to begin with) are relevant to my life.” There is an old Yiddish proverb that goes “If you want to make G-d laugh, tell G-d your plans.” How could an 18 year old possibly know what kind of life they will lead? Correspondingly, upon what basis would such a person lacking information about their future life make an assessment of relevancy of assigned readings to that life? Indeed, isn’t that precisely why they have hired instructors to make such assessments based upon their educations and life experience?
Clearly pursuit of a major is a valuable means of focusing one’s education in upper division studies. But the notion that there is nothing valuable to learn outside that major is both incredibly short-sighted and ultimately self-defeating in the very job market Wesch’s students fear. As I often say to my students, “You can live as limited a life as you choose.” Focusing on one’s major to the exclusion of any other learning experience suggests a bottom liner approach that is destined for failure for two reasons.
First, if the student’s observation that the jobs s/he will hold in the future do not yet exist is accurate – and this is a fairly common observation within the academy today - a vocational, major-driven approach to college education can provide only limited valuable skills with very short shelf lives to that future worker. Ironically, it is precisely the very liberal arts lower division education that bottom lining students are blowing off as unimportant that will probably determine how well they fare in that future job market.
A good liberal arts education does not simply supply information or job skills with a limited shelf life. Liberal arts curricula are designed to teach students how to think critically, creatively, synthetically. They are designed to prompt students to become aware of their presumptions and to recognize the limitations of their own cultural backgrounds in an increasingly global work world. Liberal arts curricula are designed to teach students how to express themselves verbally, through writing and art, using technologies. They are designed to teach students how to take positions and support them with evidence and reasoned argument. They are designed to teach basic understandings of math and the sciences. They require transcending one’s own cultural limitations through learning foreign languages and a wide range of cultures immediately and increasingly around them in their own country. In short, a liberal arts curriculum is designed to help students become more aware of the universe, hence the reason many pursue such learning at a place called a university. How well one develops that awareness probably will determine much of their success or failure in the rapidly evolving and largely unpredictable job market the student in the video describes.
And that leads to the second key point above: I did not create these problems but they are my problems.
At some level, this is a true statement. Today’s college students were born into a cultural context of technology as a way of life and consumerism as the primary lens through which Americans view and thus construct their lives. The closing scene from Wesch’s students’ video includes a quote that “Some have suggested that technology alone can save us.” It is immediately followed by two confessions that reveal the problem with this belief: “I facebook through most of my classes…I bring my laptop but I am not working on class stuff.” Clearly, the world of technology into which our current students were born has not proved to be our – or their - salvation. But just as clearly, the actions of these same students reveal that they are a part of the very problems they lament.
You see, college students who by their own admission spend only three hours studying each day are also admitting they are failing to live into their part of the college bargain. Study after study shows that an average of two hours preparation outside each hour spent in class is necessary to successfully learn that which the classes seek to teach. Even if three hours are spent each day of the week, that only adds up to 21 reading/study/preparation hours weekly. Given the 2 hours prep/1 hour class formula, that’s not even equivalent to a full time load of 12 hours. And when the students in the video add up all their various daily activities including spending more time each day online than studying, their total comes to 26.5 hours. That not only suggests very poor time management skills, it also suggests some rather misplaced priorities. Both of those are plainly within the realm of student responsibility.
The “problems” also include paying for classes never attended, paying $100 for textbooks never opened. It includes conscious decisions to spend time reading webpages (2300) and facebook profiles (1281) rather than books (8). It includes the choice to spend time writing voluminous amounts of email (over 500 pages) at the same time only 42 pages are written for classes. None of these conscious choices about time and energy expenditure suggest any sense of responsibility as students much less maturity as young adults. Indeed, the implication from the comments is that these students are somehow victims of the world into which they’ve been thrust and simply play their parts.
And yet, none of this just happens. Time expenditures are always the result of choices. Priorities evidence decisions about the use of time. Which is why the assertion that “I am a multitasker…I have to be” is rather ludicrous. Multitasking generally translates to doing a number of things in a mediocre at best fashion because insufficient attention is being paid to any one of them. If a student feels driven to multitasking, perhaps it is because they have so cluttered their lives with constant distractions from cell phones to facebook to gameboys that they have little time left for their responsibilities as students. One wonders what is so horrible about the self-confessed privileged lives of young people that they must be constantly distracted from conscious presence in them.
At some level, much of the commentary in the video Michael Wesch’s students produced comes across as uncritical in its reasoning, immature in its inordinate and unsupported sense of entitlement, consumerist in its expectations and morally irresponsible in the way the students assess their situation and who is responsible for it. As a college instructor of now 23 years, I find the video troubling even as I recognize the consistency in these comments with those I hear from my own students. At some level, we are all in Michael Wesch’s debt for providing a means for these understandings to be articulated. But confronting the problems it raises will take a lot more than a collaborative video production.
If there is a ray of light in this production, it was the recognition by these students of their own privilege. While one student whines about leaving college with $20,000 debt, as if this investment in his own future was somehow not worth $20,000, the very next student confesses “I am one of the lucky ones” followed by the student who recognizes “One billion people live on less than $1.00 a day.”
What makes me hopeful in this recognition of privilege is the possible insight that the educational process of which clearly few of these students are actually taking full advantage comes with responsibilities to something larger than their own immediate self-interests – a very needy world around them. Perhaps that recognition will spur some students to take their educational process a bit more seriously, to accept responsibility for their participation in that process and the time management it requires, out of the recognition that there is something at stake a little larger than technology and consumerism.
This is the hopeful side of the Generation Y students we are teaching today. It is the side that makes it possible to deal with the myopic tendencies Michael Wesch’s video lays out so well. I thank Professor Wesch for a provocative look at the minds of college students today and I wish him and his students well. Thanks to them, we have fairly well defined many of the problems in higher education and its students today. The question that remains is what will be our - and their - response.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dear (?) Rush......
RE: Rush Limbaugh calls on conservatives to take back nation
[CNN headline, March 1, 2009]
Ahem.
Dear Rush,
1. It doesn’t belong to you. You can't "take back" something that never belonged to you in the first place.
2. Conservatives have already done their best at screwing it up over the past three decades. Recess is over.
3. Rush, why don't you find a new line of work? Clearly your current one isn't working out so well. (see election results, 2008) There is a limited market for witty but vaccuous and sometimes toxic commentary, you know.
Sincerely,
The Nation
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
RE: Rush Limbaugh calls on conservatives to take back nation
[CNN headline, March 1, 2009]
Ahem.
Dear Rush,
1. It doesn’t belong to you. You can't "take back" something that never belonged to you in the first place.
2. Conservatives have already done their best at screwing it up over the past three decades. Recess is over.
3. Rush, why don't you find a new line of work? Clearly your current one isn't working out so well. (see election results, 2008) There is a limited market for witty but vaccuous and sometimes toxic commentary, you know.
Sincerely,
The Nation
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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
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-Ã -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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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-Ã -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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
To Grow or Not to Grow
In the current edition of Evangelicals for Social Action online, a Masters of Theological Studies student at Palmer Theological Seminary in Wynnewood, PA poses the question: To Pray or Not to Pray, That is the Question. She goes on to compare the worldly concerns that president-elect Obama will face with the tempest in a teapot brewing over megachurch pastor Rick Warren’s invitation to pray at Obama’s inauguration. She rightly notes that Warren has been criticized by religious conservatives for praying for a President who favors abortion and some limited gay rights (though hardly full equality) as well as by LBGT people who rightly object to Warren’s homophobic statements and his support of Proposition 8 in California.
Sadly, the writer concludes her otherwise fairly balanced column by focusing on the conservative concerns: whether prayers must be addressed to G-d in the name of Jesus (or they don’t work) and whether one should pray for people who don’t hold one’s own religio-political agenda. I drafted the following response and sent it to the site’s contact link. I am not holding my breath it will be published online but I do think it deserves to be considered. Here are my thoughts on the subject:
Lori Baynard asks “What do you think?” about Rick Warren offering a prayer in president-elect Obama’s inauguration. She focuses on what I sense are non-issues – praying in the name of Jesus, praying for a president who doesn’t share a conservative evangelical agenda. In doing so, I believe she misses the point.
As an openly Christian gay man, I have defended Mr. Obama’s choice of Rick Warren even though I found his behavior in California surrounding Proposition 8 shameful to the Christian faith of which I am an ordained minister and deeply hurtful as an individual. What I sense is that Pastor Warren’s invitation and the resulting controversy has provided him a wonderful opportunity to grow a little more into the divine likeness of the G-d who created – and loves - all living beings. He has been given a chance to see that defaulting to a faith practiced as an abstract legalistic construct has consequences – human consequences. He has been given an opportunity to see that beliefs often impact human beings bearing the image of G-d, sometimes destructively. Finally, he has the been given a means to come to actually understand those he would judge from a distance – to share a tiny fraction of the pain and hardship that beliefs translated into political power can have by becoming the target of those believers himself.
Rick Warren has been given a rare opportunity to recognize his own myopia, a myopia that proves destructive to the lives of many children of G-d and plays out in many ways. The question is not whether he should offer the prayer at the inaugural, it’s whether he will learn from this rare calling by G-d to grow.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
In the current edition of Evangelicals for Social Action online, a Masters of Theological Studies student at Palmer Theological Seminary in Wynnewood, PA poses the question: To Pray or Not to Pray, That is the Question. She goes on to compare the worldly concerns that president-elect Obama will face with the tempest in a teapot brewing over megachurch pastor Rick Warren’s invitation to pray at Obama’s inauguration. She rightly notes that Warren has been criticized by religious conservatives for praying for a President who favors abortion and some limited gay rights (though hardly full equality) as well as by LBGT people who rightly object to Warren’s homophobic statements and his support of Proposition 8 in California.
Sadly, the writer concludes her otherwise fairly balanced column by focusing on the conservative concerns: whether prayers must be addressed to G-d in the name of Jesus (or they don’t work) and whether one should pray for people who don’t hold one’s own religio-political agenda. I drafted the following response and sent it to the site’s contact link. I am not holding my breath it will be published online but I do think it deserves to be considered. Here are my thoughts on the subject:
Lori Baynard asks “What do you think?” about Rick Warren offering a prayer in president-elect Obama’s inauguration. She focuses on what I sense are non-issues – praying in the name of Jesus, praying for a president who doesn’t share a conservative evangelical agenda. In doing so, I believe she misses the point.
As an openly Christian gay man, I have defended Mr. Obama’s choice of Rick Warren even though I found his behavior in California surrounding Proposition 8 shameful to the Christian faith of which I am an ordained minister and deeply hurtful as an individual. What I sense is that Pastor Warren’s invitation and the resulting controversy has provided him a wonderful opportunity to grow a little more into the divine likeness of the G-d who created – and loves - all living beings. He has been given a chance to see that defaulting to a faith practiced as an abstract legalistic construct has consequences – human consequences. He has been given an opportunity to see that beliefs often impact human beings bearing the image of G-d, sometimes destructively. Finally, he has the been given a means to come to actually understand those he would judge from a distance – to share a tiny fraction of the pain and hardship that beliefs translated into political power can have by becoming the target of those believers himself.
Rick Warren has been given a rare opportunity to recognize his own myopia, a myopia that proves destructive to the lives of many children of G-d and plays out in many ways. The question is not whether he should offer the prayer at the inaugural, it’s whether he will learn from this rare calling by G-d to grow.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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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