Pretending I'm talking to Max Braverman is helping. I try very hard to be kind and compassionate to my students, even the sometimes difficult ones, and if pretending I'm talking to a fictional character helps with that, I'll go with that. _
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01:17:48 PM, Tuesday 19 March 2013

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Although I spent 1 year post-bacc and 9 years in grad school at traditional schools, I still see a vast canyon between my students and me because of the huge difference between our undergraduate experience. A colleague compares our students to baby birds, patiently (or not) waiting to be fed little bits of information that they can gobble up. Many of them are very good at gobbling and to some extent even analyzing and synthesizing what they have gobbled. Others struggle even with the baby bird approach, acting as though they are being force-fed with a fire hose rather than my intention that they are slowly ingesting little tasty nuggets. I don't even know how to relate this metaphor to St. John's--The mama bird hands the babies a big stack of food, some undigestible, and then forces them to digest it anyway and share the digested bits around the table?

I try to find ways to get around the baby bird metaphor and the role it puts me in, to get them to at least read the textbook and occasionally other things, to get them to not be afraid to search for and provide their own answers to questions I ask, to show them that it is okay, even great, when those answers are different from the one I expected, as long as they have a reason for giving that answer. And, for that matter, I try to get them to ask questions I don't know the answer to, not merely factual questions but questions that will launch us on a voyage of scientific discovery (or at least give us something to do in lab for a couple weeks) or a theoretical discussion about evolution.

And I always, as I hear their questions about "why do I have to take ecology?" or "why do you want me to be able to explain what the word 'protist' is and why it's a particularly useless word?", I can't help but remember my own questions and doubts about "why did I go to all that trouble to learn Ancient Greek?" and "Should I have tried harder to actually understand what Kant was saying?" and of course that great question of all "What on earth am I doing here supposedly 'professing' something when there are large portions of the enterprise about which I have grave doubts?"

In the end, this is what I try to tell them, and I actually believe it's a pretty good one: We are in the business of trying to understand the world and how it works. The way that we're doing that in our particular case is using the scientific method, but there are other ways. I think that what we're doing today, and this semester, and in these four years is a process that helps you better understand how the world works, but there are other processes. Not all of this one will be fun, and maybe not all of it will be rewarding, and maybe some of it will seem to take you further from the goal. When you have completed your degree, you will not understand the world and how it works. But you will understand some things, and you will have some tools to work with in your future understanding; some of those tools are facts you memorized, and some are theories, and some are skills. Along the way in your life, you or someone else will almost definitely show some of those facts to be untrue and some of those theories to be unsupportable, and you will replace some of those skills with better ones. And that's part of the process, too.

But a lot of them just want a job. And I can't really argue with that. _
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