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As a response to Louis Schimier's post, Jeff
Ricker summarized how teaching experience changed our (and of course students'9
life. I aggree with Ricker that teaching does not bring fame and money to us.
However, I, as a new instructor, have got great satisfaction from teaching
experience.
I am social psychologist (about receiving my
PhD), giving General Psychology and Research Methods courses to the students of
Faculty of Economics and Business Administrations. In my first semester, I
realized that students do not know much about the principles of scientific
psychology but they can talk even hours about parapsychology. They do not know
who Skinner is but they know the short life story of Nostradamus. And almost all
believe that science is not sufficient to explain the world around
us.
At this point I made a decision to change my
course sylabus in order to include critical thinking education. For the first
2-3 weeks, students failed to understand what is going on. When I asked them to
think of their belief system, they showed resistance. We all try to understand
the phenomena behind UFOs, Nostradamus, astrology, alternative medicine,
hypnosis, ...etc and we seek for evidence. I do not want to present every
detail but at the end, students realized that "skepticism" is a very powerful
tool and without this tool, it is hard to get reality. Some of the students said
that:
"Critical thinking is an aim to make us 21.
Century people"
"Now, I do not believe everything I have heard,
without sufficient evidence"
"I realized that critical thinking is extremely
important. Why do we still use the same dogmatic teaching styles in other
lectures?"
.....
As a result, I want to turn back the same issue
cited at the top. "Teaching does not birng us fame and money". Yes it is ture
but there is a question I wonder: "Who can judge the price of
teaching?"
Dogan Kokdemir
Baskent University - IIBF |
