Posted on 06/23/2021 7:12:23 AM PDT by karpov
COVID-19 has revolutionized how we think about online college teaching.
Until last spring, two perspectives predominated. One argued that massively enrolled online classes presented by impressive teachers or prestigious universities would increase efficiency while preserving quality. The other worried about the quality of online classes, and that the gap between those able to afford in-person classes at elite universities and those who can’t, would widen.
We now have a year of experimentation with entirely online classes. What have we learned? My sense is that among faculty, at least, the question has changed from whether online education is a good or bad thing, to how and when it can be used effectively.
As he did before in his classic What the Best College Teachers Do, professor Ken Bain, the founder of centers for teaching excellence at Northwestern, Vanderbilt, and New York University, invites us to think about this question by looking at successful models.
Bain’s latest book, Super Courses: The Future of Teaching and Learning, takes as a given that we can no longer rely on the charisma or body language of in-person lectures to pull students in, and asks what we should rely on instead. As the title indicates, he examines a selection of famous college courses to see what makes them tick and how they might be replicated.
At the end of a whirlwind tour of courses ranging from physics to Russian literature to interdisciplinary studies, Bain leaves the reader with a common denominator. Because curiosity drives humans to learn, the burning question of course design should be how to best provoke and feed students’ natural curiosity.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
A: Lay off the politics.
Easy.
Get rid of the ‘professors’..................
I think this is a huge topic. I don't think anything gets better until we find a way to fix this -- and I don't see it getting fixed any time soon.
I believe Psychology -- in theory -- is a good and important field that can help individuals and also benefit society. However -- in practice -- Psychology today seems to focus on Men are Bad, Women are Good, Heterosexuals are Weird, Homosexuals are Normal, and Transsexuals are best of all.
Psychology has been taken over by destructive forces. And, no coincidence, we see mental health problems proliferate.
I agree! Let's get back to Freudian basics where all issues are rooting in unhealthy sexual attractions to their mothers, fathers, and poo!
Then you’ve got people like Jordan Peterson who many young people have flocked to on youtube. He’s a good speaker and makes solid common sense points most of the time. I saw one comment on one of his lectures that he put on youtube that said; “Pornhub can wait.” Gotta be a pretty effective teacher for your college lecture on psychology to trump porn.
Dumb proposition.
Children learn to want to learn before kindergarten ...
If a college kid no longer wants to learn, or never did ... it began in the early years of the same government indoctrination system
Peterson is an excellent example of how Psychology actually knows some stuff, it’s useful stuff, and people are quite eager for it.
But he’s “the Red Skull” and “worse than Hitler” and very “fringe” because he’s a “youtube phenomenon”.
Instead, the mainstream Powers That Be seems to think that forcing everyone to declare transsexuals as normal is where we ought to focus.
“The gap between those able to afford in-person classes at elite universities and those who can’t”
Now online will be for the po’ folks.
It’s only partly the job of teachers to inspire.
Students need to be interested in the subjects they choose for their education, or at least be motivated by a desire for a successful career resulting from the subjects they choose.
The intellectual caponization college students evince long preceded high school graduation. The names of authors in the tradition of Deliberate Dumbing Down are Rudolph Flesch (Why Johnny Can’t Read), Samuel Blumenfeld (Crimes of the Educators), John Taylor Gatto (Underground History of American Education), Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt (The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America) and now John Klyczek (School World Order: The Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education).
The issue of deliberate dumbing down, of extensive scope, is that prior to the railroads (1840), America was an outpost of personal independence from a highly stratified class system in Europe, in which, for instance, it was illegal in the 19th century to teach what Mr. Gatto termed “the active literacies” (writing and public speaking, William Cobbett was a lower class intellectual who criticized William Wilberforce for anti-slavery hypocrisy). Americans of the Colonial-Revolutionary period had a literacy rate in the high 90 percentile, were able to understand and debate Thos. Payne, the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers at level unknown even to today’s Poli-Sci graduate students. They attained their literacy in 40 hours and numeracy in 42 hours of study, after which 13 year olds were expected to be pursuing self-employment and could pursue their own education with the limited resources available to them, largely the Bible, Shakespeare and Plutarch’s Lives. There are numerous anecdotes about adult acting 13 year olds like Thos Edison (Grand Trunk Railroad Gazette, best Civil War news), David Farragut (commanded captured British prize ship at 12) and John Quincy Adams (the only member of the U.S. diplomatic mission to the court of Saint Petersburg who spoke Russian, active in diplomatic negotiations, at 14). Names today of self-employment communities are the Amish and the Basque Mondragon Commune.
Mr. Gatto related how by 1880, the titans of Wall St., Morgan, Carnegie and Rockefeller, regarded the tradition of auto-didactic, small farmers, mechanic/engineers and entrepreneurs, as a lethal threat to the accumulation of investments. They had the history of a Prussian philosopher Johann Fichte who had written Addresses to the German Nation 1808-1818 to the Prussian King laying fault for the Prussian defeat to Napoleon’s motto “every corporal with a field marshall’s baton in his rucksack” (a.k.a., countermand orders from elite officer corps when local situations change), “that’s why we lost”. Mr. Gatto charmingly terms the gist, “we have to crush children’s imagination” in universal, compulsory schooling. Failed Indiana New Harmony commune leader Robert Owen had proposed deliberate dumb down to the Prussian king around 1830.
Horace Mann had 3 years to try deliberate dumbing down on the children of Boston in the late 1840s, with whole-word/look-say vs phonics, but a general uproar ensued and it was temporarily halted. It went to Washington D.C. and NY, from 1880-1920 it became the law, with police enforcement. In 1907 there were riots in New York City against the curriculum. John Dewey was funded for his experimental Lincoln School by John D. Rockefeller II, attended by his 4 younger sons Nelson, Lauarance, David and Winthrop, some of the most powerful men in history, from which they emerged with dyslexia. Dyslexia expert Dr. Samuel Orton informed university psychology department educationists in 1931 that whole-word/look-see causes deleterious brain changes in Kindergarten-Grade 3.
Prof. Anthony Esolen has contrasting sets of textbooks between 1920-1930. The Christian acceptance of the classics of Western Civilization had been the norm, going back into the 1 room school institution where elder students instructed younger ones. By 1930, it had been purged in exchange for “See Dick Run” Dick and Jane, whole-word/look-see. Dr. Seuss was recruited with a list of 238 words for children to visually memorize without phonic deciphering ability, explicitly on the model of Chinese ideograms. Their usual comment when confronted with a new word is “I can’t read that, I’ve never seen it before”.
Mr. Gatto noted that the military tested recruits in WW2 at mid-90 percentile literacy rates, low-80 in Korea, high-60 percentile in Viet Nam, now the military has difficulty getting volunteers who can read a basic newspaper article.
Mr. Gatto notes how the structure of schooling is designed to handicap children: bells, location controls, switching from 1 disconnected subject to another while not allowing project completion or drawing higher associations between subject areas, continual invasion of privacy and lack of personal time (extended by t.v. prior to the internet on cell-phones with the result that kids are cynical, cruel and disconnected from communities), arbitrary judgment and punishment-reward system for making students dependent on teachers for what to think, now how to think on the Trivium model. Students are taught to fear and envy the upper elites and despise the lower dumb kids (in the Prussian system spread by late 19th century psychology dept. chairmen, 1 in 200 students, the Alphas, were taught to regulate the others through 6 in 200 students destined to become Beta administrators).
John Klyczek (School World Order: The Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education), a community college adjunct professor, takes this system using Cromebooks into the period 1960-2021 with much background from Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt (The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VdkDAP8sd0
Chromebooks are used as the vehicle for the conditioning methodology of B.F. Skinner, only to give students the bare minimum of training for them to occupy employment positions in jobs they are assigned from early K-12. The system is designed to produce legions of mindless consumers and compliant employees in gigantic corporations.
Teach something relevant and make it interesting.
They seem to have more subscribers than the dudes.
Is there a lesson there?
Also, the best managers have a strength called individualization.
By the time they get to college, it’s too late. They either have intellectual curiosity or have had it beaten out of them by 12 years of K-12 maleducation. As a TA, I found that at best 10% of my students were interested in the subject and there to learn. The rest were there to tick off 3 credits on their transcripts so they could get their degrees and get out, and thought my classes looked like easy electives. When they found that their professors actually cared and wanted them to learn something, they dropped.
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