However, in the not-very-distant past, I did allow my Critical Thinking students to hand in a term paper for extra credit. The guidelines were simple: choose a paranormal phenomenon or a pseudoscientific topic, discuss it with me for approval, then present the arguments for and against the phenomenon and come to a conclusion.
One particular hopeless student really didn't get the whole idea of the course and what she was supposed to learn from it. She called me to arrange the details of her paper. The phone call was pretty brief and went something like this:
Hopeless Case: "Angry Professor, I want to discuss the topic of my term paper with you and make sure it's okay."
Angry Professor: "OK, go ahead."
Hopeless Case: "I want to write my paper on dinosaurs."
Angry Professor: "Uh... but what is it about dinosaurs that is paranormal or pseudoscientific?"
Hopeless Case: "Well, I don't believe in them."
Angry Professor: "You don't believe in them? But what about all those big old bones?"
Hopeless Case: "I don't know anything about that. I only know that there's no room for them in the Bible."
At this point, Angry Professor has a coughing fit that prevents her from responding immediately.
After taking a few minutes to compose myself, and to think about this extraordinary statement, I decided in fact that this would be a good topic for her term paper. Assuming that she did it well, she would be forced to confront the wackiest ideas of the Young Earth Creationists and critique them. Unfortunately for her, even the Young Earth Creationists concede that there really were dinosaurs.
I gave Hopeless Case my blessing, emphasized again that both sides of the issue of whether or not dinosaurs actually existed would have to be presented in her paper, and hung up. Then I cursed myself, realizing that I didn't ask her about whether or not she believed in toasters, automobiles, airplanes, toilets, or professional football, seeing as the Lord had not seen fit to include them in the Bible either.
This story would have a great ending if Hopeless Case had followed through on this paper but she didn't. She never handed one in. And I was so looking forward to grading it, too...
13 comments:
My sympathies, Angry P. I work in a medical school, and you would be utterly apalled at how often I see the exact same mentality -- from the people that I am supposed to entrust with my life in the not-too-distant future. Flunk them all, that's my strategy.
You're downstream from me... a lot of my students are premed. Unfortunately, our present budgeting model (indirectly) bases my salary and my research resources on my enrollments, which means I must treat my students like customers . I need lots of happy customers.
Sad, isn't it?
That's not sad, it's tragic.
But surely your customers aren't the students, but whoever lends them money to pay tuition fees, etc? And how do they feel about devaluing educational qualifications so that they can't tell who is worth employing and who is not?
Edit: Not that I'm suggesting thet you're letting your standards fall, just that that's where the logic of treating students as customers tends towards. "Everyone must have prizes!"
When I was a History TA in the early 90's I had several horrifying run-ins with the consumer mentality among students.
After returning graded essays in the first class I taught, one of the students stormed into my office and literally waved the paper in my face, crying "this is completely unsatisfactory! I'm not going to get into law school on grades like these!" Though I completely agreed with both statements, I trouble following him to the conclusion that this was somehow my fault.
Oh...dear.
John, that reminds me of the one about the second-grade boy who goes up to his teacher and says, "Mrs. Snodgrass, I don't mean to threaten anyone, but my daddy said if my grades don't improve, somebody's gonna get a whippin'."
I feel sorry for your student. I'm afraid for many people there is no external reality. Reality is what authority figures say it is. These people's minds aren't organized along the lines of making sense of the world; they are organized along the lines of making authority happy. Although their professors have authority, parents and ministers often have more. These people need help to learn how to look at something and then think about it, rather than merely react to it the way they think they are supposed to. I guess school would be a good place to teach people about thinking, but it doesn't seem to happen very often.
When I was in school I was asked to write an essay on Evolution versus Creationism. I worked very hard on it and pointed out how ridiculous creationist claims were. I received a grade of four out of twenty. When I asked my science teacher why I did so poorly, he replied, "I hated it."
I should point out that this was in a Christian school. I imagine that many of your students come from similar schools, or even worse situations, for here in Australia religion isn't taken as seriously as in the U.S. And our school wasn't fanatically Christian. We had one Muslim teacher.
When I read what various biologists and scientists write about creationism, I can see their arguments going right over the heads of most creationists. When I was living in Japan I met a Canadian woman who could not see that Buddhism in Japan was not a religion like her own. She couldn’t see that, compared to her, the Japanese were mostly nonreligious. She interpreted every traditional dance or festival as a religious ceremony. In a similar way, many creationists cannot see science as not being a rival religion. Just as the Canadian woman tried to convert the Japanese by showing how strong her faith was, the creationists try to do the same with scientists, and the result is the two groups push each other further apart.
I’m not really qualified to give advice, but asking a creationist if they believe in television because it isn’t mentioned in the bible is just going to make them extremely defensive. It might go down well in a debate, but in a one on one situation it will be perceived as a personal attack, and many creationists are well primed to respond to perceived attacks. However, what many creationists are not prepared for is kindness. I think a constructive approach is to calmly hold up some fingers and gently ask them how many they can see. If you can agree on the number, then you can go on to calmly explain how you try to make sense out of the world based upon what you can see. If you are successful in explaining this, you can build from there.
Ohio is having some issues with this. David Horowitz's "Academic Bill of Rights for Higher Education" has been proposed in the Ohio Senate, and pressure is being applied to our universities to apply this abomination administratively if they can't do it legislatively. If you're not familiar with it, this misnamed "bill of rights" is a proposal to allow students to sue a professor for "'persistently' discussing controversial issues in class." Are dinosaurs controversial? The student gets to decide that, not you.
I used to be a Physics T.A. at The Ohio State University, and this sort of nonsense enrages me. To be competitive, Ohio schools and universities need to be able to teach sound science, without the far right wing having veto power over curricula.
I decided to stop freeting about it and start doing something. I'm running for Ohio State Representative for the 22nd district, to help restore integrity and intellectual honesty to Ohio's higher education. Please take a look at the campaign web site, and join me in this fight. If we stand silent, they will win.
Jimmy Stewart
Good for you, Jimmy Stewart, and congratulations on the clarity of language at your website.
Of course that name of yours isn't going to hurt you none with the voters either....
You have my vote, Jimmy.
Jimmy, thanks for fighting the good fight. We're also dealing with this issue in Florida, where the Horowitz bill (sponsored by the same legislator who brought us the Terri Schiavo legislation) passed the Florida House, though it is apparently dead in the state senate. This year. The public support for this bill, even among my academic colleagues, is pretty frightening, as is the fact that the bill is predicated on beliefs for which little to no evidence exists (e.g., the bill's sponsor brought a student forward to testify that her community college professor persuaded her classmates to spit on her while she was wearing her Marine uniform. Right. Oh, and I'm forgetting all the letters from abused students the guy has in his possession, letters which cannot be shared publicly because to do so would be to submit those letter writers to still more abuse. Bleah.)
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Angry Professor,
I read an article on a similar situation. A Biological Anthropology professor,i.e. evolution professor, had a creationist in his class and he had to deal with the Adam/Eve/Rib issue. The article is "Darwin's Rib" by Robert S. Root-Bernstein and you may find his solution interesting.
~SJ
p.s. Please let me know if commenting on old posts is obnoxious. I have just found your blog and I find it wicked nifty and worth commenting on.
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