from the current issue of the Chronicle of Higer Education
A glance at the November issue of "First Things": A professor can only do so much to reach students
During his annual May pilgrimage across the Midwest for the International Congress of Medieval Studies, Gregory Roper, an associate professor of English at the University of Dallas, had an epiphany about teaching. He had been agonizing over a miserable "Intro to Composition" course that had just ended -- one in which almost all students performed poorly and "had become downright surly by the end of the semester." It suddenly occurred to him (somewhere in Illinois) that their failure was simply not his fault. "I had given them the same assignments, the same pep talks, the same advice and instruction that I had given numerous sections of the very same course many times before, and they rejected it."
Up until that drive, Mr. Roper says, he had believed that with enough passion, creativity, and hard work, he could reach every student. "What I discovered," he writes, "was that I thought of my students as innocent and malleable, uncorrupted, unspoiled, and it was only my task to light the fire in their souls." It was a harmful philosophy, he says: "I was exhausting myself, and I was, unaware of it, condescending to my students." In light of his revelation, the author now makes it clear to his students that they are responsible for their own learning. He no longer takes their failures so personally, accepting that "students have free will, and in fact are shot through with original sin."
At one time or another, he explains, "even the best students will become lazy or turn aside from proffered good.""Perhaps we could do a great deal to help teachers and students by instructing teachers in the depredations of this liberal pedagogical theology," he concludes. "Once we give it the boot, we might find happier and healthier teachers, and better educated students."
The article is not online, but information about the journal is available at http://www.firstthings.com
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Anyone experienced a class like the one described? How did you respond to the students' response (or lack of response) to your teaching and the course?
What does it mean, in theory and in practice, for a professor to say that students "are responsible for their own learning?"
Alan
Alan Altany, Professor & Director
Coulter Faculty Center for Teaching & Learning
Western Carolina University
Cullowhee, NC 28723 (U.S.)
Email: altany@email.wcu.edu
FAX: 828.227.7340
Web Site: http://facctr.wcu.edu <http://facctr.wcu.edu/>
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