After being completely consumed with various and sundry crises completely outside the normal crises that are part of the professor’s job description, I’ve finally begun to catch up on reading various things I had to put aside for later. I’m sorry to say, one of the first things I read was Mark Edmundson’s “Geek Lessons” in the New York Times Magazine (September 19, 2008).
Edmundson, a professor of English at my alma mater (the University of Virginia), has been beating the “computers are bad for education” drum for years. Whether in Harper’s Magazine, in book form, or in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Edmundson has been lobbing bombs at what he sees as the doom of education, learning, and teaching–the growing use of information technology by college instructors.
And, to be fair, he’s not entirely wrong. It is true, as he asserts in his essay in the Chronicle that many faculty members around the country feel pressured by administrators to incorporate information technology in their classes (or only have access to teaching improvement grants if they do). As I too have written, it’s bad administrative policy to pursue a technology-for-technology’s-sake approach to teaching improvement.
But when it comes to Edmundson’s real objections to what is happening in America’s college classrooms–at least as he expresses them in the Times–it seems that what distresses him the most is what he sees as attempts by some college faculty to be hip, be cool, and be loved by their students. These hipster wannabees, it seems, see technology as the key to fame and student adoration.
Just to be clear, it seems that (according to Edmundson) by letting my students use laptops in class, I’m pandering. By incorporating technology in my courses in ways that enhance certain aspects of the course, I’m trying to be cool. By creating websites for students and encouraging teachers to use those websites I’m hoping that at least one of my students will think I’m hip.
I guess the last 10 years of my career have been a tragically deluded attempt on my part to recapture my youth by sucking up to undergraduates. Wow. I sure feel like a dope.
So, having been shown the error of my ways, it’s time to get back on the true path. I want to be a good teacher, not a suck up, so let’s see what Edmundson suggests I do. I turns out I need to be much geekier:
“Why are good teachers strange, uncool, offbeat? Because really good teaching is about not seeing the world the way that everyone else does…The good teacher is sometimes willing to be a little ridiculous: he wears red or green socks so a kid will always have an excuse to start a conversation with him; she bumbles with her purse to make her more maladroit kids feel at ease.”
I can hardly believe it! All these years of studying student learning, assessing the impact of individual assignments on student work product, interviewing students about what does and doesn’t work for them when it comes to teaching and learning, and all the rest — and what I really should have been doing was wearing mismatched socks!
Think of the time I could have saved…
I’ll admit to a certain amount of incredulity when I realize that the Times actually published a piece that in the end suggests that rather than pandering to students by using technology, professors ought to pander to them by wearing odd socks.
But after thinking it all over, I’m even more incredulous that Mark Edmundson has a Facebook page…
Thanks for reviewing this. Having reported on clickers for CNDLS last semester, I was particularly appalled with Edmundson’s description of “hand-held wireless gizmos”– that they “look like TV remotes” is, clearly, “not a good sign.” And that he “understands” that they look this way is almost more distressing. This caricature of clickers/PRS tools is indicative of the sort of misguided associative thinking that makes it easy to dismiss creativity and innovation when it “looks like” decadence. But what about the individuals, institutions, and teams bringing distinguished histories of pedagogical expertise to the development of these tools? The strata of research and assessment underlying the adoption and enriching the practice of PRS tools can be rigorous– and has been, with Project Kaleidoscope supporting GW and GU research on “pedagogies of engagement” as a local example– and I’d suggest that Edmundson investigate the intelligent work behind the tool rather than its button count.
Edmundson’s description of clickers bugged me, too. He wrote, “Good teachers matter because they can surprise you out of your complacency and into new views of yourself and the world.” Clickers can be used very effectively to do just that.
Imagine a humanities professor who has students respond to a multiple-choice, critical-thinking clicker question. Students submit their answers, perhaps thinking that the question has a single right answer. When the professor leads a class discussion that makes clear that the text being discussed provides evidence in favor of several of the answers, the students start to appreciate the complexities of a subject they once thought black-and-white.
Clickers play a few important roles in this process. They provide a way for the professor to ask all students to respond to the question at hand, not just those who might be fast enough or bold enough to raise their answers and share responses verbally with the class. Also, students are asked to think about the question and commit to answers independently, before hearing what their peers think. Furthermore, sharing the results of the clicker question, assuming that more than one answer choice was chosen by significant numbers of students, can help students see that there are multiple valid perspectives on a question.
A classroom response system can be a great tool for helping students develop new views of the world. Edmundson’s claim that such systems are just used by faculty to seem cool to their students reflects a very limited understanding of these systems.