Learning to Teach or Teaching to Learn?

Guest writer, Anna Hull

"So, Anna, are you a better teacher or student?" asked my friend as we were discussing my latest Spanish class that I attended as a student last Sunday. Hmm. Well, answer the question – are you a better teacher or student? It seemed like a simple enough question to my friend, but I was dumbfounded. I couldn’t answer quickly enough. Of course I wanted to say that I am a better teacher; after all, that is my chosen profession. Within seconds it dawned on me that I cannot claim to be a better teacher than I am a student. The two are too intimately linked; I don’t know if it is truly possible to be a good teacher without also being an excellent student.

Case in point: Do you remember the very first time you had to teach a difficult concept to a class? My memory comes from graduate school: I was leading a discussion group of about twenty students and I was due to teach how the energy in food is converted to another type of energy (ATP) within the cell. I thought my grasp of the concept was sufficiently clear, but as I reviewed the material, I realized that all I had was a "grasp"; I didn’t own the knowledge in a way that would allow me to teach it efficiently. Since then, the story has repeated itself many times; only after I have taught the material in class, or given a seminar, do I have the feeling of actually owning the knowledge and therefore doing a better job the next time I teach it.

Even when I am well prepared and know the concepts that I am planning to teach, I constantly ask myself how the students perceive my words and the points that I am trying to convey. So often, it seems like they are hearing something completely different than what I think I’m saying. How would they try to explain the same concept that I don’t seem to be able to communicate, and how can we as teachers tap into that? How can we utilize the willingness of the students to learn by letting them be the teachers?

I am slowly learning to turn many of the students' "hows' and "whys" into mini-assignments, sometimes worth extra credit. When my students in Molecular Biology asked for a study guide for their midterm exam, I told them how I usually make the guide by going through all my PowerPoint lectures and writing questions to each slide. This is clearly an excellent way for the students to study the content for the exam, so I had them make the study guide and submit it to me for extra credit. It probably helped the students to study, they earned much-needed extra-credit, and it reduced my workload (at least up front; I did read all the submissions and compile a study guide that I shared with the entire class in the end).

I would love to hear what you do in your classroom. What have you tried that works and what doesn’t? And for extra credit: How would you answer the question, "Are you a better teacher or student?"

Learning A Language

Guest Writer, Maribel Charle Poza

My first experience with foreign languages was not a very pleasant one. It was September of 1986 and I had just started sixth grade in my native country of Spain when I got sick and had to stay home from school. Needless to say, I missed what would have been my first ever English lesson. The events of the next day, when I returned to school, have stuck to my memory until today.

Class time arrived and Don Javier, the school’s new English teacher, walked into the classroom, put his books down, and immediately started to ask a series of unintelligible questions to the students. To my surprise, my classmates had no problem understanding and answering his questions in English. As I prayed that Don Javier would not call on me, I looked at my classmates in astonishment. I could not believe that after only a day of class, they were already communicating in another language!

Rather than having a discouraging effect, that first experience instilled in me a deep desire to master the English language. This desire led me to live in three different English-speaking countries, and to become a foreign-language professor in the United States. Today, I have no doubt that learning a language has changed my life in ways that I could never have imagined.

Similarly, I am convinced that language-learning can be life-changing to American students in both their professional careers and their personal lives. Being fluent in another language not only opens doors in a job market that is more competitive than ever before, but also gives students greater insight into their own language and opens their minds to a world that is culturally and linguistically diverse.

In 1996, the National Standards for Foreign Language Learning were published as an answer to a concern from educators and the government about the role of foreign languages in American education. Furthermore, in 2006 the government called for an increase in the number of Americans that are fluent in critical-need languages. Surprisingly, and in spite of the emphasis at the federal level, foreign language study has not received the attention that it deserves in American education. Furthermore, over the past three decades, scholars in the language profession have called attention to the low numbers of African American students in foreign language programs in the United States. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), only 4.1% of the bachelor’s degrees in foreign languages were awarded to African Americans in 2006.

Personally, I believe that we, at Lincoln University, have a unique opportunity to turn this state of affairs around by increasing the percentage of African Americans who are fluent in a foreign language. At the departmental level, we are constantly looking for innovative ways to recruit new students. We emphasize the importance of language study not only in the classroom, but also on the entire campus with events such as Language Day, Language Night, the International Food Festival, and the Study Abroad Convocation. Over the years, we have shaped our curriculum so that it matches the latest research on language-teaching methods, and we have established ourselves as a vibrant, open, and friendly department. However, we cannot do this alone. We need the help of the entire Faculty and Administration to change the NCES gloomy figures. Just like it takes a village to raise a child, it also takes a village to achieve this goal, and only through collaboration will we succeed in this endeavor.

Many in the Faculty have experienced learning another language, either by taking courses, traveling abroad, or talking to immigrants in their communities. For many, English is their second (or third, maybe fourth) language and they use it to conduct their professional life in the United States. I think that it would be very enriching if we all shared our thoughts and experiences about language learning in this blog. I’m very interested in reading your comments to this post. As a final point, I would like to thank Nancy Evans and Linda Stine for making the discussion possible through the creation of this blog.

Academic Excellence

Guest Writer, Zizwe Poe

I would like to begin my comments by thanking you, my colleagues, for allowing me to kick off this week's blog on academic excellence. I want to touch on two aspects and I will attempt to do this in the most succinct way I know how.

Aspect 1: There is no way around it. We need physical space that supports academic excellence. This means the library AND an academic presence in the residential space of the campus. The completion of phase 1 of the library's renovation makes the edifice usable as a library. Reading the meticulous report of the president we should be able to see that phase 2 is not about library functions. Glossy pictures aside I want our students and faculty to benefit from the opportunity of stumbling upon texts that they did not intend to use because of the text's juxtaposition to a targeted text. This is the type of serendipity that can only come by walking through the stacks. Our students are tacitly being prepared to seek answers without knowledge and a degree without collegiate research. Our president's post said that the students and faculty currently have all the library and library services needed to facilitate learning. I hope that this isnot true for if it is we may never have a true library again.

Aspect 2: Lincoln University needs a Pan-African Studies program. Lincoln University has a historic relationship with Africa and the most diverse population of students from African countries than most HBCUs. This is an undervalued niche that we should take advantage of. A Pan-African Studies program would strengthen relations with African countries and Caribbean countries while assisting with connecting African American students with our international populations.

I will begin with these concerns as I expect there will be some feedback on both issues. Again, thanks for allowing me to initiate this week's string.

Intellectual Capital

Guest Writer, Jorge Majfud

In 1970 the General Motors workers’ strike cut the U.S. GDP by 4 percent and is estimated to have been the reason for the poor 2 percent growth that the country experienced in the following years.

Today the decline of all U.S. automotive industries affects just one percentage point. Almost all of the GDP is in services, in the tertiary sector. In this sector, intellectual production resulting from education is growing, not to mention that today almost nothing is produced without the direct intervention of the latest computer inventions from academia, from agricultural production in exporting countries to heavy industry, mostly set in countries known as emerging or developing.

For much of the twentieth century, cities such as Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, flourished as industrial centers. They were rich and dirty cities; such was the legacy of the Industrial Revolution. Today Pittsburgh is a clean city that lives and is known for its universities.

In the past year, the "research corridor" of Michigan (a consortium made up by the University of Michigan and Michigan State University) contributed 14 billion dollars to the state from benefits generated by their inventions, patents and research. These benefits have grown over the last year and still more in proportion in a state that was the home of the big automotive industries of the twentieth century, which are in decline today.

That means that a part of the direct benefits from one year’s production of "intellectual capital" of a university in 27th place and another one in 71st place in the national ranking, equals the total monetary capital of a country like Honduras. This intellectual production factor explains, in large part, why the economy of New York City and its metropolitan area alone is equivalent to the entire economy of India (in nominal international terms, not in domestic purchase power), a country of over a billion inhabitants and a high economic growth due to its industrial production.

Today 90 percent of U.S. GDP is derived from non-manufacturing production. The monetary value of its intellectual capital is 5 trillion dollars, nearly 40 per cent of total GDP, which amounts in itself to all the items together in the dynamic Chinese economy.

If the American empire, like all empires, has incurred and, directly or indirectly has pirated the raw materials from other countries, the fact remains that especially today the emerging countries pirate a large part of the copyrights of American inventions. Not to mention that U.S. trademark counterfeiting alone subtracts from the original products $ 200 billion annually, which exceeds by far the total GDP of countries like Chile.

Looking at this reality, we may predict that the increased risk of emerging countries is to rest the current development in the export of raw materials; the second risk is to trust too much on industrial prosperity. If the emerging countries do not deal with investing heavily in intellectual production, they will confirm, perhaps in a decade or two, the international division of labor that sustained most of the big economic disparities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Now it is fashionable to proclaim in the media around the world that America is finished, broken, three steps far from disintegration into four countries, two steps from final ruin. I get the impression that the methodology of analysis is not entirely accurate because, as revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara himself criticized those who lauded socialist industrial production over capitalist production, it confuses desire with reality. Guevara himself complained that this passion disturbed any objective criticism or prevented us from seeing that the central human goal was not simply to increase the production of things.

When making predictions about the year 2025 or 2050, people used to project the present conditions to the future scenario. That underestimates the radical innovations that even a prolonged status quo can produce along with the inevitable change on any present condition. In the early '70s, analysts and presidents like Richard Nixon himself were convinced that the emergence and ultimate success of the Soviet Union over the United States was inevitable. The '70s were years of recession and political and military defeats for the American empire.

I think that since late last century we all agree that the 21st century will be a century of major international balances. Not necessarily more stable, perhaps the opposite. It will be good for the American people and especially for mankind that this country stops being the arrogant power that has been for much of its history. U.S. has many other merits which engage, as history also shows: a people of professional and amateur inventors, a people of Nobel prizes, an excellent university system and a class of intellectuals that has opened pathways in diverse disciplines, from humanities to the sciences.

The dramatic rise in unemployment in America is its best opportunity to accelerate this conversion. In all international rankings, American universities occupy most of the first fifty posts. This monopoly can not last forever, but right now that is where its principal advantage lies.

Probably we will need to focus on “how” to develop a better understanding of “intellectual property” and its real importance in our global economy, but it is not a bad idea first — or, at least, meanwhile — to think a little about “why”. For instance, why produce too much useless stuff, why consume too much beautiful trash, such as a cheap blind that has to be replaced every semester, because it is cheap and because it does not resist normal use, both in behalf of “keeping the economy moving”. That is, in short, why are wasting, burning and throwing away the new source of wealth? And so on and so forth.

For both questions, universities have one of the most important roles. Traditionally, the “how” is in the hands of technicians. The “why” has traditionally occupied most of the humanists. Scientists used to be between both of them.

Fortunately, there are still a lot of people thinking outside and inside academia. But also there are a lot of people without enough time to do that, too many isolated and hyperconnected individuals, too worried and too busy thinking about how to do the same thing faster, bigger or smaller, and always better, both out of and in academia.

So, some final questions:
1) Do we really live in a bubble or has the academy become “the new real world", that is, “the productive/political world”?
2) Why has thinking “too much” traditionally been considered a waste of time, a “patriotic peril” such as an unproductive “bubble creator”?
3) Do we teach the way we think, the way we see the world, the way power wants us to think?
4) Can we achieve any excellence in teaching just by learning a new and better teaching methodology?
5) Can we be good teachers being clerics of “hows” instead of researchers of “whys"?

Cell Phones and Chatty Students

Guest Writer, Mel Leaman

I’m the pushing sixty guy, who still likes the one-knob tuner in the car radio, a phone conversation that can’t be interrupted by a beep of an in-coming call, and a sidewalk discussion that does not have to compete with digital distractions. It has always been important to me to give a person my undivided attention. In that light, one can deduce that despite my better judgment I still experience sidewalk ‘O, I gotta’ take this”interposes as disrespectful and rude. My head tells me to not be offended and simply accept this scenario as a trend of the times, but my heart feels like a second-hand rose. Now, with a confession like that, how do I handle the use of cell phones and corner conversations in the classroom?

The first day of class I tell the students that this place will be a sanctuary. It will be like a bird sanctuary where each feathered friend can sing its song without fear of danger and with the knowledge that his/her song will be heard. The students will need to partner with one another to maintain the sanctuary experience. A commitment to this partnership will create the kind of positive educational environment that complements someone’s financial investment. Part of the listening process is to, in Buddhist terms, “be where you are.” This means that anything that takes us away from the priority of tuning in to one another must be turned off. This action shows respect. To thwart off temptation I ask them to put all cell phones in their pockets. Pocketbooks must be slung over the chair or put on the floor. I let them know that if I see someone using the cell phone or texting it will be interpreted as a sign that this person does not want to participate in the educational process on that day. I will kindly ask him/her to leave upon the first offense. This will not be done with anger, facial expressions of disgust, or raised voice. I will simply stand beside the individual, make my request, and close with an open invitation to attend the next session. Students were asked to leave on two occasions this semester. I have decided that if a student refuses to leave I will offer him/her the option of staying until the security guards come to usher him/her from the room. The intent is to be kind,but firm and to avoid making a scene out of the situation. A similar process is followed when tangent conversations persist. It has worked, so far. The students seem to accept, if not appreciate the boundaries. The classroom for today, feels like a sanctuary. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.

It is my hunch that some of the readers do not appreciate my strategy or they may have an approach that works better for them. Share it. How do you handle the issue of cell phones and discipline in your classroom?