Category: From the dean

If you teach at a community college, please take a moment to read this open letter to a composition teacher by Elaine Maimon, president of Governors State University.

Now let’s talk. This past Monday, I taught Plato’s Republic VII for the Free Minds Program. If you aren’t familiar with it, VII is where Plato gives us one of the most famous moments in all of Western philosophy, the Allegory of the Cave. As expected, I helped my students navigate technical issues, like what the various elements in “the story” correspond to, allegory-wise. But there was a moment in that exploration in which students started to see Plato’s point: Education is not about filling an empty but otherwise receptive container, but about “turning around,” the transformation of the student. The icing on the cake, so to speak, was when I wrote the word education on the board, and broke down the etymology: both “to train or mold” and “to lead out.”

Continue reading “Education in the Shadows”

When I was training as a psychotherapist, my supervisor (an M.D. psychoanalyst) told me an interesting tale: Researchers had a group of psychoanalysts and psychiatrists review histories and perform diagnostic interviews for every member of the first-year class at a famous medical school. They rendered a diagnosis, where appropriate, and noted the prognosis. Researchers followed these students for 15 or 20 years, to see how accurate the evaluations had been. The result? Guess!

The prognoses were uniformly pessimistic. The students were better adjusted than expected, both as a group (meaning, the percentage of correct diagnoses and prognoses was lower than assessed) but also individually (meaning, severity of dysfunction was generally lower). In other words, both the group and the individual people turned out better than expected, over all.

Continue reading “Expectations: a moral tale”

Have you even wondered what deans do on Easter Weekend? Wonder no more.

Yesterday, Tom Nevill (of ADM fame) joined me at Christ Lutheran Church to make music for Easter worship services. You may not know this, but Tom is an ace timpanist — his DMA is in percussion. So, Tom joined me on Christ Lutheran’s new custom German Baroque organ, built Ken Mowell (who put up with my obsessive attention to details like which Krumhorn we should include on the Positiv, the absolute need for both north and south German baroque principals in 8′ and 4′, and how the speakers for the reeds should be installed in the chamber. That’s all organist-speak, incidentally.)

We hit the ground — joined by JayNee Nutting at the piano — with a nifty (and majestic) setting of Thine is the Glory, which you may know from a hymnal. Or if you’re a Handel freak, you’d recognize it from his oratorio, Judas Maccabeus.

From there, we did what any musicians would do for Easter, the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah. (Yes, it was a big day, but we knew we could handle it. That’s handle it—get it?)

As the postlude, Tom and I turned away from Handel and did the Fanfares from Mouret’s suite in D major. You might know that Mouret tune from Masterpiece Theater — it was the theme music.

Except that I played the string and trumpet parts on the organ, and Tom played the timpani part on the timpani. We decided that would be easier than playing the trumpet part on the timpani, mainly because the organ doesn’t sound like drums.

So, now you know. That’s the sort of thing deans get up to when you turn them loose on Easter.

Thanks, Tom — that was a blast!

In the Florentine Codex, the Mexica refer to the highest level of heaven as Ōmeyōcān, which I translate as “locus of duality.” (In case you’re wondering, this is residue from my sabbatical years ago, in which I studied the poetry and philosophy of the Mexica, whom we call the Aztecs. I get this translation from ōme = two + yō = a substantive-maker (sort of like the German -heit) and cān = location or place.) This highest heavenly level — the thirteenth, to be exact — was so far beyond our imagination that we cannot conceive of it, yet it is the source of the being of the cosmos.

That explains a lot about dual credit.

Continue reading “The duality of dual credit”

An important public announcement for followers of the Dean’s Blog

You know how we have a Surgeon General whose job it is to ensure that members of the public are informed about practices that are either conducive or detrimental to good physical health? Well, I’ve realized this morning, reading Inside Higher Ed that we need an analogous role for our intellectual health. As in, the front half of mens sana in corpore sano.

Finding no suitable candidates available nearby, I have named myself Philosopher General. I will periodically issue guidelines and warnings that will help you safeguard your intellectual health. Like this:

Philosopher General’s Warning: Reading this post has been shown to cause reflection in test subjects.

Continue reading “CC BS: the sound and the fury”

Or: The deadly sins of marketable skills

You probably know that the state of Texas expects institutions of higher education to define and assess the marketable skills that students can reasonably expect to acquire in a course of study. In many programs, this is a no-brainer. There are, for instance, a fairly specific list of skills that an RN or surveyor should have on graduation that would make him or her “marketable.” This exhortation from the state is pretty vacuous when it comes to technical skills, mainly because we’re doing that anyway.

Technical skills aren’t the challenge; the challenge is what to do about so-called “soft skills.” I detest this term: If those skills were so soft, more people would have them in abundance, employers wouldn’t have to keep asking for them, and higher ed leaders wouldn’t be wringing their hands trying to figure out how to “teach” them. Just about everyone needs skills like how to communicate clearly, how to cooperate with colleagues, how to set logical priorities, etc. The challenge is to determine what those skills are and how to inculcate them in our students.

Each discipline has its special challenges here, but my focus is marketable skills in the liberal arts. You don’t have to take my word for this — after all, my degrees are in things like music, history, and philosophy. Employers themselves are telling us that they value liberal arts students as employees. And moreover, there is growing evidence to support the claim that the study of the liberal arts prepares people for career progression and growth in ways that narrower technical specialization doesn’t. But. . . .

In our zeal to help our students prepare for the future (and to satisfy the state), there are two main things that frequently go wrong.

Continue reading “Marketable Skills in the Liberal Arts”

I was in Miami last week for an Adobe conference. This is my “take-away,” as they say in the conference biz.

I’m not prone to idle praise or superlatives, but even I have to say that this conference was fantastic. It confirmed a trajectory that I’ve already been on for years: You shouldn’t have to give up a traditionalist’s commitment to scholarship to achieve digital fluency. In the past, this wasn’t easily achievable: the tools and technologies were so cumbersome that you had to take time out of your commitment to scholarship to get good enough to do anything anyone might care about. Not so today.

Continue reading “Spark some joy”

If you’re expecting the usual lamentations about student behavior, you may be disappointed. Instead of disparaging “students today,” etc., etc., I invite you to join me in third grade.

My teacher was Mrs. Wooley. I’m not making this up: her name actually was Mrs. Wooley, which I viewed as a gift from the gods of comedy. When I found out a couple of weeks before school started, I longed for the moment that some classmate would complain about her, so I could say, “Yep. She’s a woolly booger.”

In fairness, Mrs. Wooley was a great teacher: She told us the truth when we didn’t know what we were doing, and she was not especially kind, but she was committed to doing whatever it took to equip us to meet her expectations. And that commitment included keeping me in relative solitary confinement, in my own desk at the front of the room, right next to hers.

Also, Mrs. Wooley gave a lot of quizzes.

Continue reading “Cheating: another pathway to success”

In the first installment of “How I learned to love HB2223,” I talked about finding love through contextualized learning, which led me to propose a couple of ideas for pairing that might seem, well, nuts. That led to an observation: There are a lot of questions about CoReq-ing, some of which even involve data.

Consider this little data snapshot from last year, courtesy of Sam Echevarria-Cruz:

Continue reading “HILTL HB2223: Talk data to me”