Adam G Beaver » teaching

Bad News about Teaching

Adam — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 18:38:14 +0000

Following on my last post about Good News on Teaching, a bit of bad news: Tuesday’s New York Times included an article (now one of the “most emailed”) about the impact of current students’ sense of entitlement on their professors’ ability to give them honest grades pegged to something more than basic compliance with course norms. Among the most depressing findings is the discovery that “a third of students [in a recent University of California Irvine study] said that they expected B‚Äôs just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading.” The problem is neatly summed up by one of the students quoted in the article:

If someone goes to every class and reads every chapter in the book and does everything the teacher asks of them and more, then they should be getting an A like their effort deserves. If your maximum effort can only be average in a teacher‚Äôs mind, then something is wrong.

Indeed, something is wrong, though not in the way that the student means it. While I’m all for rewarding effort, and I try to recognize improvement as well as raw performance in my grading, ultimately grades are meant to account for something more complex than enthusiastic compliance with course expectations. They should reflect a student’s mastery of material; those who have learned both the skills and the content that the instructor attempts to impart should earn higher marks than the students who have not. Learning is not simply about following a recipe, completing tasks, or ticking boxes; it’s about reflection, struggle, false starts, and‚Äîeventually, hopefully‚Äîmastery. Merely “doing” the reading isn’t the same as processing it.

Perhaps the most alarming thing about this article, however, is not its documentation of students’ increasing sense of entitlement or decreasing sympathy with the goals of education. Anyone on the front lines of college teaching must surely have noticed that already. What bothers me more is the fact that faculty seem so happy to go along with it. How else can we explain the fact that A’s and A‚Äì’s make up fully half of Harvard grades? It’s been suggested that the answer may lie in the steadily-increasing quality of our student body. The more harrowing the admissions statistics, the better the quality of student work, one supposes. That may in fact be true‚Äîperhaps our current students are better at completing the kinds of assignments we tend to give them‚Äîbut isn’t it a failure of higher education if we respond to that trend by simply giving all of our students A’s?

Good News on Teaching

Adam — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:04:13 +0000

As someone with a strong interest in applying recent scholarship on teaching and learning in the classroom, I was heartened by this article from today’s New York Times. Note the appearance of Eric Mazur, a Harvard physicist who has collaborated with Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, where I’ve also worked as a teaching consultant.

Fall Term Office Hours

Adam — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 10:18:14 +0000

As the Asst. Director of Undergraduate Studies in the History Department, I’m always happy to meet with students interested in studying history at Harvard‚Äîwhether to answer questions about policy or their intellectual interests. I typically hold four office hours per week, though I routinely spend at least a few additional hours meeting with students unable to attend my regular appointments.

To make an appointment, please visit the Office Hours page of the History Department’s undergraduate resources website (Harvard only).

Jumping for Hoopes

Adam — Fri, 16 May 2008 00:27:51 +0000

One of the best parts of my job as the Asst. Director of Undergraduate Studies in the History Department here at Harvard is the opportunity it gives me to work closely with our Senior Thesis writers. One would be hard-pressed to find a brighter or more thoughtful group of students, and their individual projects‚Äîwhich took them from the college library to Manchuria‚Äîwould, in many cases, compare favorably with graduate theses. It has been a pleasure this year to teach all thirty-two of them in our department’s Senior Thesis seminar.

Today the Secretary of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences announced the 83 winners of this year’s Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize, which recognizes outstanding undergraduate research projects. (The majority of Hoopes Prizes go, as one might imagine, to Senior Theses.) I’m thrilled to report that nine of our thirty-two thesis writers have won! I congratulate all of them.

For a complete list of Hoopes Prize recipients, click here (PDF).

A Teaching Conference

Adam — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 19:07:48 +0000

In addition to the two research papers I’ll be presenting this month (see “Two October Conferences,” below), in November I’ll also be heading out to Worcester, MA to participate in the New England Faculty Development Consortium (NEFDC)’s fall Teaching Conference. I’ll be joining forces with Cassandra Volpe Horii from Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning (where I used to be a Lead Teaching Fellow) to lead a “Case Discussion on Video-based Faculty/TA Consultations: Handling the Challenges.” (You can read the abstract on p. 6 of the conference program.)

For anyone in the Greater Boston/New England area and interested in teaching, I highly recommend registering and attending the conference!

Current reading…

Adam — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 22:39:57 +0000

One of the pleasures of my new job as Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies is that I now have a good excuse for reading widely beyond my own field–since most of our undergraduates specialize in modern American and international history, I have good reason to explore those fields and make sure that I’m current with their interests. And since two of my primary duties are (1) to advise new students on course selection, and (2) to connect the senior thesis writers in my seminar with individual advisers, I can also call it my “job” to read books by our faculty. I’ve recently read Maya Jasanoff’s Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East 1750‚Äì1850,¹ and I’m now working through (only six years after the rest of the world!) Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club.² (Alright, so Menand doesn’t technically belong to our department–but he often teaches our students!) One of the most surprising aspects of my job is how frequently I meet undergraduates who simply aren’t aware of the kinds of research and writing that we do here in our department, and I’m embarrassed to say that I’m probably guilty of the same–but no longer!

Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East 1750‚Äì1850 (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2005).
Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).