My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 4, #39, May 3, 1999

CONNECTING THE DOTS

At my university, and from what I hear, at a whole lot of other universities, we've been complaining about what an unusually unmotivated lot this year's crop of students seems to be. Here we are, teaching our hearts out, and the students just sit there, bored, sullen, resistant.

They ask us why they need to know this stuff, when all they want to learn is accounting, or computer science, or business, or whatever they've decided is going to get them a good job. Don't bother us, they say, with poetry and philosophy and foreign languages.

We blame some of this on the uncertainties of the job market--many of these young ones have seen fathers and mothers laid off or downsized, and have seen the family income plunge, so they are distrustful and wary, interested only in learning skills that will give them some sort of guarantee in the job market.

We blame it on consumer culture, too. It's one thing to force feed history and literature into students against their will when they're in high school--they're required to attend it, after all, and it's free. But college is different. They're PAYING for it, and don't understand why they should pay for courses they didn't want in the first place, that will waste their time and slow them down on the way to their careers.

Surely both of these factors explain some students' unwillingness to learn what we teach in college.

But we also look at our students' blank, incurious faces, and decide they are defective. We make nasty remarks about dolts and goof-offs and dull normals.

And there, I think, we make a fundamental error. Because hardly any student is really a dull normal. When they are doing what they love, learning about what they care about, their passion and enthusiasm make them almost unrecognizable to us. Students who groan at the thought of researching a five page paper on Walt Whitman cheerfully do extensive research on the things that matter to them, reading books and magazines and scouring the internet to find out everything about their family history, or the Negro Leagues, or the proper period costume for the play they're staging.

The jock who can't get the hang of math may be able to calculate an earned run average in his head without any trouble at all, and his consistent perfect bank shot indicates an understanding of the kind of geometry that matters to him. The student who falls asleep as soon as the professor starts showing slides on Renaissance perspective may still apply the principle perfectly in her own paintings.

It seems to me that it may not be the students who are at fault here, but us. Somehow, we have not connected with our students, have not found what they care about and shown them how the things we teach can enrich their understanding of it. Our own passion for our subjects has not been joyous enough to persuade students to share it.

Perhaps professors have not tried hard enough because higher education has for so long had a captive audience that didn't question the university's right to determine what students must learn. The universities spread the wealth of required courses around, and professors could be confident that students would take them, and even though grumbling a bit, learn from them in spite of themselves.

And what a smorgasbord we have required them to select from: some history here, some science there, a few great writers, a smidgen of philosophy, and a bit of psychology or sociology or government.

And we act as if none of these had anything to do with each other. We give them Shakespeare in a vacuum, not Shakespeare as a man who lived through the Spanish Armada, not Shakespeare as a man whose medium, the evolving English language, had only 16,000 available words.

We give them philosophy and political history as if Plato and Machiavelli did not talk about some of the same subjects, Voltaire and Rousseau and the American revolution as if they had nothing to do with each other. We teach Beethoven's Eroica without Napoleon, Darwin without social Darwinism, Hitler without Wagner and Nietzsche, Huckleberry Finn without the history of slavery.

This is very much like throwing random puzzle pieces in front of students, without telling them that they might fit together, without giving them a picture of what it might look like when finished, without even giving them flat-edged pieces that are clearly part of the frame.

Is it any wonder that they look on this blankly and say, "Why do I gotta learn this stuff?"

Now any of us, if we accumulate enough facts over time, can eventually start making connections in our minds. In fact, I think that is what accounts for some of the wondrous flowering of children's minds in early adolescence-- they've learned the mechanics of playing an instrument, and now they can start making music; they've learned the mechanics of language, and now they're ready to start writing; they've learned bits and pieces of art and science and history, and every now and again they have one of those great "Aha!" moments when these things they know start connecting in their minds.

But wouldn't it be easier for them if we helped them connect the dots, showed them that each discipline is just another perspective, another way in which blind men try to figure out what the elephant is?

We could teach our courses in tandem, following the same theme through different disciplines. Or we could teach together, historians side by side with geologists and ethicists and musicians, showing our students that those timelines of historical events don't just exist side by side with events in religion, science, philosphy and literature, but interact with them. We can show them how ideas CAUSE history.

We could do more to connect the things we want to teach them with the world they're struggling with right now. For instance, we could use our shared nervousness about the coming millennium to teach about the apocrypha, and millennial cults of the past, or about the "fin de siecle" decadence of the 1890's.

Best of all, we could find out what our students care about, and help them make the connection between those passions and our subject matter.

There IS value to those liberal arts we teach--they give a flexibility to the mind, like so many intellectual track and field events. A well-stocked mind trained in these different rules and methods is a mind that can adapt more readily to changing circumstances. It's a mind that can use the differing perspectives to remove the blinders and see the elephant whole.

But we'd be better at convincing them, I think, if we began with finding out which elephant our students wanted to see.

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

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