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Joined: Jun 2002
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Jun 2002
Posts: 1,624 |
Hmmm. Mostly I taught IT subjects - data modelling and database design. But since I was doing a thesis in business ethics, I also got to teach ethics, a required course. Lucky me. A natural target for a group project for final overall marks. Ethics are as ethics do. Students typically have a rather laissez-faire approach to ethics in most situations. Except for when the proposition, whatever it is, directly affects them. So I made that part of the group project, too. I got them to tell me (rather than me telling them) that not to pull your weight in a project and then to claim that you had earned the group mark was rather unethical. Fine, I said. If it's unethical to claim marks for something you hadn't done, what about the ethicality of protecting a lazy student within a project group? Ethics, they told me, is a two way street. Great, I said. Then what about whistleblowing? Should you tell me, the lecturer, if one of your group is not pulling his or her weight? Oooooh, I don't really know about that, they said, almost to a person. Whistleblowing is ... well, it's like telling tales. Uh, huh, I encouraged them. Is telling tales then ethical or unethical? Much squirming, both real and metaphorical. Well, that depends, they rather thought. Maybe it depends on how serious the "crime" is? So, I pushed, there are degrees of ethicality, then? Well, no, they allowed. It's either ethical or unethical. Okay, I said. Then we have something of a dichotomy, don't we? You're telling me that it's unethical not to expose a non-performing colleague, but that it's also unethical to tell anyone. Write a 1500-word essay for credit on how this dilemma should be resolved for next week. Did I say that although I was usually respected, I wasn't really liked very much? 
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Joined: Jan 2002
Posts: 1,526
veteran
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veteran
Joined: Jan 2002
Posts: 1,526 |
In this case, I did blab on the other students, primarily to make my case for going it alone on the next project. I suppose I agree with your students' original view about other people cheating - I don't care so long as it doesn't affect me. I was there to learn. What anyone else wants to get is up to them. When I went back to school after a hiatus, I was there to learn and get an A (Grades really didn't matter to me first time around). I consider it nearly insulting to have to report on other students. My view is it's their problem and not mine. (My daughter holds a different view here. She's already reported blatant cheating by 4 other students in one class.)
I came to school to learn a particular thing. (In fact it was a realtime internet course specifically so I could focus on learning the material and not on the other crap.) It's my only concern. If I feel a need to babysit kids, I'll take that up as a profession. Just give me what I came for and leave me be. I'd be happy enough if there were no grades at all to worry about. I'd like a brutally honest assessment at the end of the course. (I also don't think degrees should be used as proxies for licensing.)
Of course I know that the cheating of others does have an indirect affect on me. What good is a diploma with all As when everyone gets straight As? Part of the problem is the way we use college diplomas as proxies for other things.
I also disagree with the class about degrees of ethicality - or perhaps not. One might agree that ethics is binary (which I don't) and yet believe that the consequences of transgression are not equally disagreeable.
At this point we have digressed so far from the original thread that I don't recall how it started. Something about nerdliness I infer from the subject line. What I have always told my girls is this: "Nerd is what intellectually lazy people call people who study or enjoy learning. When people call you a nerd what they are really saying is 'I'm afraid of you because I think you're smarter than me.' What you have to do is not assume that you are, despite their best efforts to convince you of it."
Not that nerd can't be a term of endearment, but I'll assume that when it's spoken with a poisonous tone that it's not meant to be endearing. It seems obvious to me that these sorts of names are meant to exclude people from whatever group is making the accusation. "You can't hang out with us. You're different than we are." This at a time when children are just beginning to ask questions about who they are. "Well, I don't know who I am, but I guess I'm not one of them." Of course I've also taught them that you can't force someone to be your friend - nor can you expect everyone to like you. But you can get people to respect you if you stick to your guns - even if they don't like you.
k
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I just reviewed the thread - wow, this is an older thread!
"(One of the biggest crocks of nonsense in high school and college is the need for group projects - and particularly the utterly stupid way it's implemented in most cases.)"
I just looked back and realized this is what I wrote previously. So that's probably what started this side thread - my irritable bit of hyperbole. I do think it's implemented badly in most cases, but I don't think that group projects are necessarily a "crock of nonsense."
k
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Joined: Jun 2002
Posts: 1,624
Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Jun 2002
Posts: 1,624 |
FF, point taken about nerds. But what about people who would like to be nerds but are more-or-less average? Not everybody who wants to learn is actually mentally equipped to be a wiggin-wonder.
Typically my students were adults on a "second-chance" educational jag. Most of them fell into the unqualified labourer/housewife-since-school category. Also, typically, the educational system had failed them in some important way during their first time around the block and they came into our courses with little or low self-esteem and belief in their ability to succeed. Many of them started out only marginally literate and numerate. We had some extremely well-taught summer holiday courses for these people which taught them enough for them to get by during the first semester. Often enough, the reason they were there was that they were forced by the social welfare system to "retrain" if they wanted to keep their welfare payments. IT appealed to a lot of them simply because working in IT was moderately well-paid and (this was important) carried a reasonable amount of status.
"Bring me your redundant ditch diggers and I will transform them into computer techies!" was the Poly's (very much paraphrased and extrapolated) slogan.
And I loved it.
But on the other side of the coin, we also had a leavening of people who had taken "useless" qualifications at some point in the past. Undergraduate degrees in the phenomenology of religion and its ilk are not exactly career-enhancing major choices. One woman of about fifty, who is now a friend, had a PhD in music. The degree and 50p were getting her a can of Coke. Another student who comes to mind was an RN psychiatric nurse. A disillusioned social worker. We had several retired policemen. One priest. We also had "kids" who had come straight from an academic degree in business or nursing or physiotherapy or whatever, who also wanted a qualification in IT. Most of these people were well-educated and articulate and were "nerds" in the gentle sense of the word. They wanted to learn, could learn and enjoyed the process, especially the give and take in the classroom.
By the third year of the degree programme, they had all, to some extent, learned to get along with each other. The first year was dynamite. The bright people raced ahead; the second-timers floundered. The first year of our degree was, like most degrees, full of received wisdom, with little room for individuality. Rote learning, memorisation. Given that our academic year ran for 32 weeks as opposed to the university's 26 weeks, they effectively got a year and a quarter's tuition, and the course was intensive. No wandering along to lectures once or twice a day if you felt like it; miss a class on our course and you might well miss the whole point of that module. I once arrived in a lecture theatre towards the end of the academic year to find that the lights were dimmed and a copy of that Hodgson cartoon "Please may I leave the room, my brain's full" on the overhead projector.
As lecturers with consciences, we had to find ways of bootstrapping the second-timers who were, of course, failing miserably, despite extra tuition from us and lots and lots and lots of formal tutorials. We tried all sorts of devices with varying degrees of success. But then we hit on the idea of study groups. Put two of the second-timers with two of the others and let's see what happens. These weren't project groups, you understand. They weren't forced to join them and no one could make them stay. Initially everyone was reluctant. The better-educated students felt that working with the second-timers would hold them back. The second-timers felt that it was all a bit demeaning, because we made no bones about why we thought the groups were a good idea. But they tried them and I still remember the thrill I got when I saw the results. One of the second-timer students who had arrived at the poly fairly evenly-balanced (with a chip on each shoulder) suddenly turned himself right around. From failing everything abjectly as a matter of course, he began to get comfortable passes. No cheating, no prompting, these were straight tests. Improvements by other students were perhaps less dramatic, but were both very substantial. From a 33% failure rate at the end of the second year the previous year, we went to a 10% failure rate. Instead of many of the second-timers dropping out or being booted out, we suddenly found that we had to increase the resourcing for the third years courses, because we had nearly twice the projected number of Year 3 students.
The next year, they organised their own study groups. Which study group they were in actually began to matter to them. They began to "bribe" the bright sparks to join their groups. Obviously, some groups did better than others. Just because you know the material doesn't mean you can pass it on. But nearly all of the second-timers improved. It worked, and that's all that really mattered.
Incidentally, the guy I mentioned above who did really well because of the study group is now a highly-paid IT manager ...
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