Posted on 10/18/2011 9:35:29 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Sarah Benson last encountered college mathematics 20 years ago in an undergraduate algebra class. Her sole experience teaching math came in the second grade, when the first graders needed help with their minuses.
And yet Ms. Benson, with a Ph.D. in art history and a master's degree in comparative literature, stood at the chalkboard drawing parallelograms, constructing angles and otherwise dismembering Euclid's Proposition 32 the way a biology professor might treat a water frog. Her students cared little about her inexperience. As for her employers, they did not mind, either: they had asked her to teach formal geometry expressly because it was a subject about which she knew very little.
It was just another day here at St. John's College, whose distinctiveness goes far beyond its curriculum of great works: Aeschylus and Aristotle, Bacon and Bach. As much of academia fractures into ever more specific disciplines, this tiny college still expects -- in fact, requires -- its professors to teach almost every subject, leveraging ignorance as much as expertise.
"There's a little bit of impostor syndrome," said Ms. Benson, who will teach Lavoisier's "Elements of Chemistry" next semester. "But here, it's O.K. that I don't know something. I can figure it out, and my job is to help the students do the same thing. It's very collaborative."
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
...”There is a high likelihood that every student in the class knows the material better than the teacher”...
Wasn’t this Mao Zedong’s philosophy of education when he fomented his Marxist revolution in China? Was it not the best way to break down what was and to replace it with his own power? Any nation which does not require self-discipline and exercise of will power from it’s youth will NOT survive..Others who have those traits will take over. We are a lazy, unproductive, ignorant, self-indulgent, uncaring, “blame the other guy/gal,” pleasure-seeking, irresponsible, drug-infested, lot in America and the very few who are not those things cannot hold up under the minions who are. This article says it all..Our educational system is much worse than I thought. Without an act of God, we are doomed.
I agree with you. St. John's is to be commended for holding the line on the classic liberal arts curriculum. It makes no pretence of being a vocational training/credentialling mill. Its graduates will have a solid grounding in history, philisophy, and the great works of western civilization. They will be able to write competently and think independently; they can pick up the job training later.
No dummies need apply. St. John's doesn't water anything down so that the semi-trainable can pretend to get a college education.
IMHO, this is still a good model for the academic elite for whom "the life of the mind" is not a Beavis and Butthead joke. For most colleges, that ideal is a distant memory at the undergraduate level.
The colleges, unfortunately, have been pricing the liberal arts out of the market even for students who would profit by them. High costs and heavy debt loads tend to push students towards a quicker ROI, which leads to the vo-tech and credentialing approach to not-so-higher-ed. But kudos to St. John's for holding the line.
Sounds good to me. A (good) teacher who is struggling to learn the subject matter is usually a better teacher then the “expert” who knows the subject too well to actually teach it.
You really can not be a good physicist if you are divorced from the arts. Dr. Richard Feynman is a perfect example.
I’m afraid I only know what I read many long ages ago, when I, myself, was considering where to study. That was back in the late paleolithic.
I was unaware that they only have sixteen courses; where did you get that figure? It’s a little difficult to imagine.
strangelets in the night
exchanging glances
we were leptons at first sight...
It’s in the article.....
“His first year included teaching Ptolemy’s “Almagest,” a treatise on planetary movements, and atomic theory. He since has taught 15 of the school’s 16 courses, the exception being sophomore music.”
“Still, not even the most rabid reformer has suggested that biology be taught by social theorists, or Marx by mathematicians”
With a little bit of preparation, the typical math professor is far more competent to teach Marx than the typical Marxist professor is to teach college-level mathematics. This statement illustrates just how revered Marx is among NYT writers.
Note that I wrote “college-level mathematics”. It should be unremarkable that an art history PhD is capable of teaching Euclid’s geometry, which is high-school level mathematics.. Mastery of Euclid’s geometry has been a prerequisite of higher education since, well, the beginning of higher education. Plato (427-347 BC), the philosopher most esteemed by the Greeks, had inscribed above the entrance to his famous school, “Let none ignorant of geometry enter here.” It used to be rigorously taught to college bound 10th graders. One wonders why a college would be teaching high school level material. Or not ...
Strange.
Difficult to imagine a college that has only sixteen courses; I wonder if that means sixteen SCIENCE courses, or if the writer got it plain wrong.
Oh, well - whatever.
Medieval universities had a total of 7.
First the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric). When the student mastered those, he moved on to the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy).
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