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  • Spinach

    By Dean Dad March 1, 2009 8:41 pm

     

     

    Dr. Crazy has a nice discussion over at her place about battles over curriculum. As she details it, her department has basically broken into two camps: the "eat your spinach" camp and the "let them take what they want" camp. I'm quite taken with the metaphor.

    Basically, the "eat your spinach" camp assumes that students won't take anything non-sexy unless coerced, but that the non-sexy stuff they skip is inherently worthwhile. So to get the students to take the worthwhile stuff requires coercion. The "well-rounded meal" camp assumes that most people, when offered a comprehensive menu of choices, will naturally take stuff from across the board. Dr. Crazy sides pretty cleanly with the second camp, though she makes a real effort -- to her credit -- to understand the first camp.

    I'm not as sure which side I'm on.

    I've been on both sides of this one at various times, and I say that without apology. It depends on the case. (This is true as a parent, as well.)

    Certain disciplines are naturally sequential. I don't want a pharmacist who doesn't understand how to calculate dosages, and I don't want an architect who doesn't understand geometry. (Back at PU, I once had an engineering student ask me why he had to take math. I told him it comes with the gig.) From a cc perspective, there's also the reality of what our destination schools accept in transfer, so many requirements are effectively hand-me-downs.

    Outside of the fairly obvious cases, though, there's the question of whether we should assume that students already know everything they need to know when they get here. If the answer is no -- and it is -- then it's not absurd to think that maybe they need to be exposed to some things. Course requirements are a time-honored way (not the only way, but a pretty clean one) to ensure that some exposure happens. Intro classes, survey classes, and prerequisite classes can introduce students to ways of thinking, or bodies of inquiry, that they simply don't know existed (or at least, not in the forms they do). Without a push, many students would unwittingly cut down the future to the size of the present. In my Proprietary U days, I was constantly barraged with students asking why they had to take anything non-technical. (They had less charitable terms for it.) I took it as a personal triumph when I won them over by the end of the semester, but I wouldn't have had the chance had they not been required to be there.

    Of course, taking that position requires being able and willing to explain, in some reasonably thoughtful way, why students need this class but not that one. That's not easy.

    And it's certainly true, too, that conversations about required courses often quickly become conversations about turf, and about jobs. If we decided to make freshman composition optional, what do you think would happen to its enrollments? Consequently, what would happen to the resources available to the English department? This shouldn't be a driver, but it is.

    That granted, of course, it's possible to be right for the wrong reasons. I'm quick to smell self-interest behind Principled Positions, but the principled positions can still be valid anyway.

    In defense of laissez-faire, any experienced instructor can tell you that interested students make better students. A class full of students who have to be there is a tougher row to hoe than a class full of enthusiasts. That's one reason why pass rates are usually higher in upper-level classes, even though they're 'harder.' And it's certainly true that not every requirement makes sense for every student. The usual pragmatic compromise is a Chinese menu, in which students take two from column A, one from column B, and so forth -- build choices into each category. It works about as well as most pragmatic compromises do. Invariably, over time, some departments find relatively fluffy ways for uninterested students to fill distribution requirements ("rocks for jocks"), though the social utility of that strategy is certainly questionable.

    The food metaphor can work in either direction, too. American eating habits don't generally comport with the “leave them alone and they'll naturally pick well-balanced meals” ideal. This is, after all, the home of the whopper. A quick glance at, say, television viewing habits should put to rest any idea that people will naturally balance the edifying with the, uh, let's say 'less edifying.' A few will, but the vast majority won't, and rules are – and must be -- written for the vast majority.

    This post is wishy-washier than I usually like to be, but I think it's an accurate reflection of the issue. Pushed hard enough, I'd probably land somewhere in the 'distribution requirement' – that is, Chinese menu – realm, mostly by default. Yes, all requirements are somewhat arbitrary, and some of them are pretty silly. But I'd hate to abandon students to what they know fresh out of high school. We owe them more than that, even if they don't always agree.

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Comments on Spinach

  • Quality of spinach
  • Posted by Pamela A. Maack, Ph.D. , Anthropology at San Jacinto College Central on March 2, 2009 at 10:00am EST

  • I teach Anthropology--one of those strange disciplines no one can quite figure out what to do with--at a Community College and have for 18 years now. I have taken three changes through our curriculum process and each has been an incredible, draining battle for turf. What has always perplexed me is how we faculty and administrators conflate subject matter with academic rigor or even academic rigor with quality of learning experience. In the over-tortured metaphor we are using, is this canned spinach? fresh and organically grown? or possibly spinach with some chili peppers and ground peanuts for protein? (Try that latter one they do it in Tanazania--yummy). Anyway, perhaps we should sort out those issues and concentrate less on subject. When I went through graduate school at Northwestern they had writing intensive first-year seminars in a variety of subjects. It wasn't the subject that was the focus, it was about teaching writing, and researching, and an in-depth involvement with content.

  • Spinach as an acquired taste
  • Posted by Steve Leonard , Political Science at UNC-Chapel Hill on March 2, 2009 at 11:45am EST

  • I happen to like a (not too rigidly defined) 'eat your spinach' approach. Most of us on this side of the debate want to appeal to experience, in defense of which Mark Twain's quip about his 'ignorant' father is always worth deploying when addressing the inexperienced (or those inclined toward letting every taste have its due), viz: "When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."

    The unimaginative old coots among us are likely to interpret this in rather more authoritarian ways: to experience, defer. But I like a more liberal and broad-minded interpretation: from experience, learn how rich and wonderful life can be.

    We can all think of many examples of people -- some of whom may even be our colleagues -- who come to be excited about all sorts of seemingly odd and even arcane things (like the intellectual labors of folks now long dead?). Why? Because they were made to eat their spinach, and actually found out that they liked it! Or perhaps they found out they didn't like it, but they learned how to argue and defend the tastes they had. Either way, they learned how to appreciate things they didn't even know existed -- and maybe they even learned how to appreciate the things they already liked before they had to eat their spinach.

    This sort of more generous reading of why we should make students 'eat spinach' was for me clearly articulated by a colleague with whom I served on the Faculty Athletics Committee, which serves an important policy development and advisory function here at UNC. Like many institutions, we worry about students' alcohol and drug use, and in this particular instance we were discussing how we might encourage (or coerce?) potential student-athlete recruits visiting campus to stay clear of illicit behavior. At one point this colleague, a well-respected, somewhat staid, but usually good-humored and witty character, leaned over to me and whispered, "This is so sad. We have so much here, and we have to worry about kids destroying their opportunities because they don't know how to have fun."

    Now I am quite certain that my idea of fun and this colleague's idea of fun probably differ, but we can also both appreciate, and maybe even enjoy (if sometimes only vicariously) each others' 'fun' because we 'ate our spinach' somewhere along the way to getting where we are now. Or to paraphrase Twain, when I was 18, this man was surely the most boring person in the world. Now that I am 54, I am amazed at how much he has learned about what real fun is.

  • why we pay tuition
  • Posted by random thoughts on March 2, 2009 at 12:30pm EST

  • The whole point of studying under experienced teachers is that they know things you don't. It isn't just that they know more calculus than you (or French, or Geology, or Accounting). And it's not just that they need to be "exposed" to other topics.

    I'm reminded of a student preparing for a career in ministry who complained about the group project in a course: "I could have done a better job in less time by myself." He didn't have a clue -- about either what the work of ministry entails or what he should have learned from this assignment.

    Of course, people in the academy can lose touch with what practitioners in various professions actually do and need to know (like engineers, nurses, etc.), but that's an argument for dialog between the professions and the schools. It's still the case that students don't know as much as they need to know about what they need to know.

  • The Fault Lies In Ourselves
  • Posted by Philogenes on March 2, 2009 at 1:15pm EST

  • A wise dean for whom I worked some years back often reminded faculty "You have to sell your discipline. You have to sell your course. You have to sell each day's lesson." Students have a strong sense of what is and isn't useful. Some colleagues stress creative titles, creative introductions, and lots of adjectives and adverbs in their freshman composition courses, yet none of this features is expected in professional writing, inside or outside of the academy. To deal with these requirements, though, the students sometimes lose sight of clarity, accuracy, adequacy, and organization that characterize good writing everywhere.
    I am convinced that students will take and strive to do well in any course for which they see use. Faculty need to stay in touch with students' needs and adjust content to make their courses useful.

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