free variable

As an update to my last entry:

I went camping this last weekend and somehow got onto my old saw about lazy students who “couldn’t think like a computer”. Some of the folks I went with were math grads and some were English grads; they helpfully reminded me that this problem is by no means unique to CS education. A few alternate possibilities were floated, and two stuck out for me:

• students are proud of their ignorance, seeing their inability to do certain kinds of work not only as an essential characteristic but also as a distinction, perhaps even something that makes them better than their instructor. (e.g. “perhaps your life is so boring and devoid of zest that you can think like a computer, but I am a soulful individual and thus unable to limit myself to discrete structures and logic! I am an undergraduate, passionate in every activity! I engage in ill-informed emotion-driven political debate, fornicate with anonymous partners, and drink beverages that resemble alcoholic Kool-Aid!”)
• (some) students just don’t get it: they think that people take classes to be rewarded for thinking in ways that they’ve already mastered, or to learn facts that fit in to an intellectual framework that they’re already comfortable in. Such a student, when faced with thinking that she does not know how to do, will assume that she is disabled and needs some sort of concession.

I think I saw a lot of the latter as an undergrad music major at a liberal arts college with a borderline-conservatory music program: there were many talented musicians, but some were good students and some were mediocre students (of course, there was a four-part taxonomy — there were mediocre musicians who were both good and bad students as well). The ones who became excellent musicians worked at learning and — more importantly — at thinking, learning new skills and mental techniques even when they didn’t appear immediately relevant to their ideal vocation. On the other hand, the ones who remained mediocre merely saw college as four years of hazing before they could get paid to do something that they already knew how to do — history, theory, pedagogical methods, composition, analysis, and secondary performing media be damned!

In any case, some students seem to see their abilities, proclivities, and ways of thinking or understanding as essential aspects of their person — whether they feel that these (or their complement) make them into a beautiful snowflake to be celebrated or into a cripple to be accomodated is irrelevant. The problem is that this notion stands in the way of liberal arts education, and really of the goal of the academy at large. How (or “why”) they were able to make it through at least twelve years of formal education without realizing that they are supposed to grow intellectually through schooling, expanding their mental world to include more suburbs of our language and more kinds of life, is sadly beyond me.