Without reading your affiliation data, I can guarantee that a) you are not an
adjunct instructor or b) you have no wife and children to support.
Paul Okami
----- Original Message -----
From: Steven Specht
To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)
Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2007 11:21 AM
Subject: [tips] Fwd: study guide
I just had one of my favorite classes of the semester this morning. We have
an exam on Friday. I walk in as say "Who wants a study guide for the exam?".
Invariably many of the students perk-up and say "Yeah, I do"! I tell them that
I don't have one and that we're going to put one together as a class. To which
they look puzzled. I say "Any teacher who gives you a study guide is an enabler
and is insulting your intelligence" (I'll get in trouble for that one of these
days... but I don't care about that). I remind them that they are not in
college to accumulate a bunch of factual information only (the "canon of
facts"). I remind them in no uncertain terms that they are suppose to be
accumulating SKILLS! (especially if their primary goal is to "get a job". "I
can't wait to get out of college and start making MONEY!!!" Hell, we were never
in that much of a hurry to leave college... at least I wasn't ;-)
So anyway, I go on to inform them that one of the most important skills
that they can develop is the skill of looking at a volume of information (e.g.,
their notes from class) and trying to decide what is the most important
information and what is likely to be on an exam to test whether they "know the
material". I also tell them that going through a bunch of information and
trying to distill it IS AN INTEGRAL PART OF STUDYING, and a SKILL they should
be developing and something that they are capable of doing (that should be a
compliment to them). If the teacher does that for you, he/she is robbing you
not only of that important component of studying, but of developing that
specific SKILL! And to what end? Students are happier because they don't have
to work as hard; teachers are happy because they are "heros" (and their
evaluations go up) and the kids do better on the regurgitation tests. But
here's the dirty little secret... YOU pay $80K to get a piece of paper that
represents a "game" rather than an accumulation of skills (and long-term
knowledge).
So then we (me and my students) create a "study guide" as a class. WE
COLLECTIVELY create a study guide that would be EXACTLY like one I would create
FOR THEM. The difference is that I hope to have empowered them. If they "get
it", they feel empowered and realize, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz
(Oswego!), that they had the power to do it all along. "There's no place like
home, There's no place like home... I can create a study guide for any class I
want, I can create a study guide for any class I want".
And so, I may have empowered one or two of my students. And I may have
gotten one or two or three of them to think about what they should be getting
out of their time "in college". And that's what I'M here for. $80K is way to
expensive to simply play a game.
"What skills do you have in your wallet"?
========================================================
Steven M. Specht, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Psychology
Utica College
Utica, NY 13502
(315) 792-3171
"Mice may be called large or small, and so may elephants, and it is quite
understandable when someone says it was a large mouse that ran up the trunk of
a small elephant" (S. S. Stevens, 1958)
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