[lit-ideas] Re: Potlach etc.



David Ritchie wrote:
I was about to write that we don't disagree, reasonable being the key word here, but I'm no longer sure that's entirely true. Maybe we can settle on "mostly true." I believe students need to read and to write and without prescribed amounts of work colleges turn into diploma mills. The only quibble I have concerns the balance between "required" and "suggested" reading. I err now very much more on the side of "suggested." I am in the privileged position of being free to teach what I want, how I want.
That is a very nice position to be in. I've been amazed over the years how many of my colleagues elsewhere aren't in it. And it isn't just at Reed where I've had this freedom; I've had it starting with my first teaching job at Indiana University: no required texts, even when teaching a course divided into sections each taught by a different person. In an beginning logic class I used no text at all (does it show?) although I cribbed some elementary valid forms and equivalances from a standard text.
I wanted to repeat a story I've already told some of you about course readings. In the Fall of 2006, my colleague Mark Hinchliff and I taught a course on Wittgenstein. We met for three hours once a week and did a close--nearly line-by-line--reading of the Tractatus, and a large part of the Investigations. At the beginning of the term we emphasized that there were no assigned or even recommended secondary sources: our view was that these would only come between the students and the original texts and that evaluating X's reading of Wittgenstein would simply lead us off into a swamp of 'X says, but Y says...' and away from what Wittgenstein said. At the end of term, after our grades were in, we got our student evaluations. One of the questions was something like, 'Were you satisfied with the readings for the course?' On a five-point scale, I got something like a 3.5. It could be that they had been expecting to read Wittgenstein in German. Who knows? I wonder if a course in which only Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics was read (in a course on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics) would have left some equally unsatisfied.
My seminars now take the form of an archeological dig. I stake out some territory and explain why I think it's worth digging here.
This is a nice trope. I wonder if the dig is helped or hindered by something like a six degrees of separation relevance rule, whereby from any starting place (Isadora Duncan's work) one can in not that many jumps arrive at (here, via scarves) the Oxford-Cambridge boat race. 



We all read some things together to develop
something of a common vocabulary. And then we dig, which is to say that students follow their own curiosity into the reading list, or propose alternatives, and then report back to the group on what they find. Thus we all learn. At the end of the semester the question is, "What did you learn?"
I wonder if that's quite the right question, if the answer is phrased in terms of learning that so-and-so, as if the model were learning Boyle's Law.
PNCA's president is currently pressing me to develop a proposal for a bachelors degree based on this model of teaching. I'll do so, but it will take some reflection. I think it works very well with upper division students who know that education is expensive and who want to make the most of their experience. That's who I teach currently. I'll propose something a little different for freshpersons. 

Class size matters, I think.

Robert Paul
The Reed Institute
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