Skills and teaching

[I found this little mini-essay lying around. It's thematic with some of the older posts I had stuck here, so I thought I'd save it here too. Plus it's vaguely related to some of my current thinking about skill learning in cognitive training.]

A link took me to this post on a college teacher who's fed up with teaching and going to quit. I think it actually reflects a fairly common "teaching mid-life crisis" that hits a lot of professors in their 40's. But I jotted down some of my thoughts following his rant.
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/10/31/smith

My sense is that JS's core problem is that he's become too entrenched in the minutia of teaching -- grading students for following the rules, turning things in on time, following the social norms he tries to lay out in class.

As a teacher, I think you need to periodically re-ask yourself, "what should the students be learning in class?"

Lately, I've become quite curious about the increasing amount of high-quality information you can get through Wikipedia or Google on the internet. If you can look up any fact nearly instantaneously via your phone, what facts do you need to memorize in college? Maybe just things that gain value by being recalled faster than you can type the search word into Google (things like jargon in the field you hope to work in -- you can't really have a conversation when you have to look up a lot of vocabulary terms).

So what else do students learn in college? Skills is one thing. How to think critically, evaluate evidence, come up with alternate hypothesis, creative solutions. Also how to communicate and present ideas convincingly. I don't think you can look up skills on Google.

I also think students also learn a bit more about the world, who they are and how they're going to live their lives afterwards. And I think the social networking probably has a bigger practical impact on everything that happens afterwards in life than anything (or everything) they actually learn from classes. I'm not sure I can affect social-networking much in typical classes, but it awareness of it's value makes my less critical of the consequences of socializing (e.g., if a student produces a lame assignment because socializing interfered with effort, it's not entirely clear to me that they have always made a bad decision).

So I try to teach skills and a few facts and I try to be reasonably entertaining. I have another pet idea that at a basic level, information = entertainment. I think if you're really learning something, it's going to generally be entertaining (somehow the 'entertainment' element arises from integrating acquired knowledge into existing knowledge -- I think). The students are paying a lot to be here and even though a lot of what they're paying for is the environment around the classes (self-discovery, social networking), it seems like making the classes enjoyable makes it more fun for all of us.

I don't really care about the entitled attitudes that lead them to negotiate constantly for higher grades. I never give in, but only to avoid penalizing the students who don't argue. Although, you could probably make a case that arguing on your own behalf is one of the more important skills to learn in college. I do echo JS's "I don't give grades, you earn them" idea. I point out their goal is to learn and I try to assess the quality of their learning via the exams & papers. If the assessment is fair, the assessment is fair. In the end, though, I don't really care that much about grades. They are mostly an effort indicator -- if you are willing to work hard, you can have your A. And if they all work hard, I think that's ok.

I suppose if there are students who are intellectually incapable of mastering the material even when they work hard, I'm supposed to mark them as such with lower grades to warn off professional schools and employers. It appears to correlate with effort most of the time, though.

OTOH, I don't teach as much as JS probably does. And I happen to teach only small classes (10-30). Teaching skills in a class of 300 is probably hard.