I notice I’m drawn to the navigation metaphor in this discussion, which again suggests that you are right.

Your formulation makes me think it might actually be a good exercise to have students write successive drafts of a paper on some popular topic based on successively more ‘official’ kinds of sources, from Amazon commentary, popular blogs, academic blogs, proprietary websites; newspapers, popular journals, professional journals, through research monographs; with the final paper a synthesis of what can be learned at the different scales. [In fact, I think now I know how I'm going to teach the senior research seminar in the Fall. Any thoughts about opportunities / pitfalls along these lines?]

I take your point to be about how important involving students in the ethic and the process of the class is to developing their responsibility as educated people? I would agree completely that there has to be a sense of active, productive involvement in the community of knowledge before its categories, codes and facilities start to even matter (except as dead, dreary rules), let alone make sense.

——

From: Herbert Jack Rotfeld

Class is over. Some of you have graduated and moved on. Yet I hope everyone who gets this message will read it.

This is only being sent to a handful of people from the class.

We had a good class this past term. Almost every day, students went beyond my “script” as interesting questions were asked about the situations posed. Many times there were questions I had not encountered before. New approaches to problems were raised as others in the room were helped to develop new insights. And you are being sent this message one of the handful of primary people responsible: the class leaders of discussion; the students whose perspicacious approach to basic course materials increased what everyone else in the room learned on any given day. If you faded out, or seemed to mentally drift away for a day or three, I asked what was wrong or where your mind had traveled, since the difference in class would be felt. As the semester moved on, others in the class would pick up your line, or maybe follow your inspiration to get more involved.

That was where you were the key: you were involved and, by your example, others were, too, though not as often, not as consistent, not as strong.

As students talk to each other, they comment on what might have been learned from various courses or faculty. But the unspoken truth is that the quality of a course is really under the control of the students present. A bunch of quiet, passive note takers who are concentrating on transcribing all of the alleged wisdom from the instructor results in a lesser course than one where a vocally strong handful of people lead, assess and criticize. Without you, I could have trended toward more straight lecture. Without you, I might have trotted out more of those “so 1980s” old videos to fill empty time. Without you, your classmates would have learned less from the course. That is the real reason why larger classes are poorer learning environments, since the class size discourages involvement. And with an involved class, more people do their best work.

This is not about grades, which is irrelevant on what I say here. Nor is it about what you learned, since only you can truly answer that. This is not about what you could or would say to me about the class. And truth be told, this is the first time I have ever written a message like this to any past member of a class.

This message is about what I say to you: thank you.

You helped make it an interesting course.

And I hope that I may have many others like you in the future.

hjr

Kvond: I still sense that you had a distinct, philosophical conception of freedom that you were putting forth, and that the very framework of the acceptable responses enforced this. This philosophical notion perhaps is endemic to the discipline of history (the study of contraints as factors, perhaps), or perhaps it is personal. I just found it interesting that in examples that you offered which were meant to demonstrate the full dynamic range affordable to students, they could only answer if they adopted a particular view of freedom (one I happen to largely endorse, by the way). Perhaps something more than ironic. I’m not really criticizing the paper project, rather, making something implicit, explicit.

Susurro, yes, that’s exactly what they did. One of them even framed the citation as coming from a paper that itself cited authoritative sources! Well alright then! As John says, not a crime but an opportunity to talk further about the credibility of sources.

I think Ira is correct here that we’re working against a lifetime of training, which now includes a culture of microcommentary (Facebook, Amazon, texting, Twitter, bloggery), in which the charisma of the person is the only authority and etiquettes of interaction revolve, as in feudal courts, around personal honor, offendability, and deference. The idea of a more rationally grounded authority is at odds with both this consumerist entitlement and the pop-culture version of the civil rights agenda of enabling everyone’s ‘voice’. Oddly enough, most students understand that mere opinion deserves little respect, but they settle for it because they don’t know how to do or recognize better. Good work for us to do there.