The burden of canons & the freedom of philistines: Undoing Eurocentric civilization

"Go out upon the street; choose ten white men and ten colored men. Which can carry on and preserve American civilization?"
The whites.
"Well, then."
You evidently consider that a compliment.
-- W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: Toward An Autobiography of a Race Concept, p. 146.  

I am teaching two sections of Intro to Philosophy this semester. I recently sat and figured out that half of the days I am teaching material written by women and/or philosophers of color. I was kinda proud of myself. But, you know, it is not like white men make up anything close to 50 percent of the global population, nor have they produced half of the world's philosophy. The only way one could feel proud of producing a syllabus with 50% non-white men is by adopting the worse standards of what should be included. That is to say, the standards of including what everyone else includes, which got us here in the first place. And yet, I will admit, it was kinda hard to get to even 50%. I feel constrained by what I feel I should be teaching my students, and feeling like everyone expects them to have read things that other people will recognize as important texts in intro. I feel sometimes like I would be letting down my students if they left my class, and couldn't at least talk about some of the stuff everyone would expect them to have read. They should be able to have at least something in common with everyone else in philosophy. At least a few things--a little Plato and a little Descartes, spiced with Nietzsche.

As a matter of fact, it becomes really hard to imagine a course that reduces white men (and white people in general, and men in general) to something resembling demographics of the world. Or perhaps harder still, it is hard to imagine the sort of person who would design such a course. What person could get rid of all the beautiful texts that inform the culture around us?

* * *

I have increasing become interested in what could be called negative conceptual personas. These are ways of understanding the world that consist of figures and attitudes that have normally been abjected; seen as beings who must be repressed, resisted, and preferably destroyed. To cite at least a few examples there is the clown of Adorno, the idiot of Deleuze and Guattari and furthered in Isabelle Stengers, the concept of stupidity in Avital Ronell and furthered in Jacques Derrida. These are figures that can serve to slow everything down, that can ask questions whose answers everyone knows and that goes without saying. The idiot, for example, might be resistant to the urgent syllogism of the national security state. You know the one, "Something must be done. This is something. Therefore this must be done."  But there is more that such negative conceptual personas might allow.

Often, when I am telling colleagues that we need to include less eurocentric work in our introduction to philosophy classes, and undergraduate classes in general, I am often told things like, "No one here knows how to teach outside of the Western tradition." Or I am told things like, "It is great that you are bringing in all of those different traditions, but I am not trained in that." They say it like it is destiny, like a law of nature. They say these excuses like there is no way to change. I am not asking them to do scholarship in those areas (though, it would be nice), or to provide graduate courses on these areas (though, again). All I am saying is to incorporate diverse thinkers and texts in your undergraduate courses. But I realize that for many of these people, what they are afraid of is transforming from the sage on the stage into the fool on the hill. That is, they are not just saying they don't really think those areas and thinkers matter, and that they are unwilling to spend even a little bit of extra time to make a more pluralistic syllabus. They are also deeply afraid of appearing stupid in front of their students. Sometimes things don't change without a bit of a stupidity and an army of fools.

One of the works that I have been obsessed with since it came out, is Malcolm Bull's Anti-Nietzsche. This is a book in which the main protagonists are all negative conceptual personas. The heroes of the book are the losers. Indeed, Bull challenges us to read like losers. He explains, "In order to read like a loser, you have to accept the argument, but to turn its consequences against yourself. So, rather than thinking of ourselves as dynamite, or questioning Nietzsche’s extravagant claim, we will immediately think (as we might if someone said this to us in real life) that there may be an explosion; that we might get hurt; that we are too close to someone who could harm us. Reading like losers will make us feel powerless and vulnerable" (p. 36). Another hero of Bull's book is the philistine. As Bull reminds us, the anarchist and atheist were originally created by others as terms to attack their enemies. Originally, no one self-styled themselves anarchists or atheists. "In the sixteenth century, therefore, atheism, like philistinism today, was everywhere condemned but nowhere to be found. Yet by denouncing atheism, theologians mapped out an intellectual position for their phantom adversaries that was eventually filled by people who actually espoused the arguments the theologians had given them" (p. 8). The philistine, for those of you who remember your Nietzsche, "is the antithesis of a son of the muses, of the artist, of the man of genuine culture" (Untimely Meditations).   But I want to follow up the question that Bull asks later (though our answers will be different from his), "Could something as inherently unpromising as philistinism be an opening to anything at all? And if so, where are philistinism's new seas?" (p. 26).

* * *

Back in February (I know in blogging time that is the dark ages), Jon Cogburn at NewApps asked for reading suggestions for trying to get analytically trained philosophers to understand some of the stakes of what is going on in continental philosophy. Here is the original thread, and here is the follow-up thread.  A somewhat sad and predictable pattern occurs at first, with almost exclusively male and white names being suggested for being read. However, this changes as Robin James, Peter Gratton, Ed Kazarian, and whole host of excellent anonymous commentators suggest a variety of readings, and make a strong case for prioritizing diversity in readings, rather than reducing the analytic and continental divide as the only one in philosophy, and a debate that is principally between white dudes. Jon Cogburn explains that he is "Let me reiterate that in the extended sense of 'pluralist' I think that a pluralist reading group would not be nearly as helpful. Since we're all busy, we don't have time to study everything under the sun. Given these strong constraints it makes sense to read books that will help analytics best understand the maximum number of talks at SPEP that they would otherwise not understand given their poor training in so many important areas of philosophy. Philosophy of race, Africana philosophy, American Pragmatism, feminism, or the new pluralist philosophy of mind (all things suggested above) in general would be poor subject matters with a group with this as an end-goal. German Idealism and Phenomenology are very good subject matters for this end-goal." I know, right? But, at the same time, I recognize here the very same arguments that constrain my own syllabus designs. The desire to create philosophical commons, the belief that teaching too much stuff outside of the canon is to do a disservice to your students (or colleagues). It is to open up your students to ridicule for not really understanding the stakes of most philosophical discussions. This is why I wanted to include a discussion of the very possibility of syllabuses for Ferguson.

There were many smart responses to this, and I suggest reading the comments. However, here is part of one of my comments from those threads: "This goes back to the post here on New APPS about citation practices, as well. The names that we immediately think of, and think of as important, are bound up with a whole history that ignores why we cite some names instead of others. I agree with Robin James, sometimes we got to knock 'em down and rebuild. [...] And maybe Fanon or Arendt or whomever are not as canonical (maybe?), but how cool would it be if your reading group just pretended they were? What if one of the analytic folks were talking to a SPEPer one day and said, "Well, I haven't really read Husserl, but I read this great book on Fanon, and I was wondering...", or "you mention Derrida on play and difference, and I haven't read him, but Maria Lugones argues..." that would be a better philosophical world. And if the SPEPer hadn't read seriously Fanon or Lugones as important intellectual figures, it would be a great kick in the rear." It is a bit of a utopian impulse, but it is also one that requires a type of philistinism. It requires someone who honestly does not understand what the culture is suppose to be, what is normally counted as great, or foundational, or enduring. In the mixed up world of the philistine, the ephemeral becomes the lasting and the marginal becomes the central. The philistine designing her syllabus is not interested in preserving and carrying on the civilization around. Perhaps because she knows that is not a compliment.

How to teach intro to philosophy

A better title might be how I teach intro to philosophy. In general, I see the intro to philosophy course as a way of teaching students how to engage primary sources of philosophy in reading, writing, and talking. As such, I don't see the principle purpose of the course is to introduce students to the various subfields within philosophy. So, in terms of syllabus design, I usually pair a reading from the canonical tradition with a text that is usually at least a little outside of the canonical tradition. This has two important consequences: (1) It really helps to get the students in the work of comparing and contrasting works we read. In an intro class, that sort of work could be something that needs scaffolding, and starting with the syllabus really helps. (2) It gives the students a large breadth in philosophy. So they see that philosophy can be produced outside of the 1.5 million or so square miles that usually comprise the production of most texts read in intro classes. So, if I was to teach an intro class tomorrow, it would probably look something like this (excluding departmental demands):

Block One:
Plato's Crito and Apology. These are both fairly classical texts in intro to philosophy.
We move from the Apology of Plato's Socrates, to the apology, the closing statements, of the Russian punk feminist band Pussy Riot (their closing statements can be found here). These statements, which are explicitly philosophical, also help contemporize Plato's own work. From Nadezhda Tolokonnikova's closing statement: "We were searching for real sincerity and simplicity, and we found these qualities in the yurodstvo [the holy foolishness] of punk."
We move from Pussy Riot, to Henry Oruka "Sage Philosophy" and "Philosophical Sagacity in African Philosophy" (h/t to Peter Gratton for the Oruka suggestion). Oruka's work on Sage Philosophy is obviously contrasted to the the punk sensibilities of Plato's Socrates and Pussy Riot.

Block Two:
We read Plato's The Symposium. Again, a traditional reading in intro to philosophy classes.
We move from that text to John Cameron Mitchell's film Hedwig and the Angry Inch. The film obviously references Aristophanes' talk in "The Origin of Love", and in general you can read the film as commentary on The Symposium.
However, both of those texts focus on gay male or heterosexual love. So we move to Maria Lugones' essay "Playfulness, "World"-Traveling, and Loving Perception". While not an necessarily a contrast with the previous texts, Lugones provides us with another iteration, in a different direction, on the thematic of love.

Block Three:
We start with Descartes' Mediations, again a traditional text in intro to philo courses.
(Depending on the time, we might watch The Matrix).
We then pair Descartes with Shankara's The Crest-Jewel of Discrimination (h/t to Jason Wirth for this suggestion). Shankara is a nondualist Indian philosopher, and his views of reality and nondualism contrast with Descartes. His views of students and teachers is also a good place to revisit the question of the practice of being a philosopher that we had explored in block one, this time adding the ideas of Descartes' methodologies and Shankara's notions of discipleship.

Block Four
These three texts probably get taught equally in intro classes, but they work so well together.
(1) Nietzsche's The Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life.
(2) Simone de Beauvoir's introduction and conclusion to The Second Sex.
(3) William James' The Will to Believe.

So, a few questions for you, dear readers. (1) How do you approach your intro to philo courses? (2) What texts do you find pair well? Are there obvious pairing that I am missing? (3) Any major criticisms here?

Inappropriate environments is bad for female students (The no duh edition)

One of the links I posted yesterday was to an excellent post by Samir Chopra. There was a comment on that post, that she has responded to today here. I suggest reading them all in full, but I just wanted to add an additional point.

The original comment suggested:

Since that time, I’ve considered ANY interaction with a female student as a potential minefield to be avoided if possible. I certainly kept my office door open during consultation and only met with female students during office hours. I was a little more casual with male students, sometimes meeting them at a campus coffee shop if, for example, they had class during my office hours. Ironically, then, I suspect that ‘male anxiety’ does not foster more equality, but is more likely to result in preferential treatment of male students by male professors. I still consider my policy a prudent one, but it’s unfortunate that female students had less access to my time than did male students. Sadly, however, the practical effect of male anxiety might be that female students don’t get the best out of male professors which may contribute to an already existing problem: the dearth of women in the discipline.

Okay, let's give all of that the benefit of the doubt (I plan to come back to it shortly). Let's add another point. Say there is a male professor who is known to engage in inappropriate 'banter' in the classroom (maybe often repeating the same middle school jokes about manicures). Say there is a male professor who is known to hit on students at parties, or has been known to have sex with female students. Would a female student feel more or less comfortable having these out of classroom experiences with such a professor? I don't want to generalize this, but I have known female students were downright afraid of going to open-door office hours with a professor because he had a reputation for sleeping with other students in the department. I have known female students who had a male professor crack an inappropriate 'joke' while making a point about her paper. That student froze, never went to see the professor for help again, and was worried she seemed unintelligent to the professor after freezing. I am sure that I can give other examples. Even if things are as bad as the original commentator suggests, having male students enjoy extra coffee shop time with the professor just is not as bad as female students being unable to access the professor during office hours. This is a really simple and obvious point, but inappropriate environments are far worse for the outcomes of female students than the world where you have a slightly more informal relationship with your male students. This is where the arguments made by Louise Anthony and Samir Chopra are completely on point, such objections are just ways of re-centering male anxiety.

Now, none of this to say things have to be as bad as the original commentator suggested.  I think being conscious of the ways we treat male and female students differently is a really good start. Then, the next step, is try to figure out how to confront those realizations in ways that promote and produce a good environment for all of your students.

Interdisciplinary Teaching and the Job Market

This is a question mostly for those of you who have been on hiring committees, or are fairly familiar with thought processes of people on hiring committees. Any discipline or type of university welcomed to respond (though please let me know your background if I don't already).

What is the reigning thought on interdisciplinary teaching? To be a bit more specific, if you have a candidate with a home discipline, but has done extensive teaching in all sorts of different disciplines, how do you weigh that? What are the factors that go into examining such a background? Does it help or hurt if this is seen as a larger aspect of interdisciplinary publishing, conference attending, and education?

If anyone feels more comfortable with just shooting me an email, feel free. Or if anyone wants to post anonymous, go ahead, just give us some idea what discipline you are talking from, and the type of university (SLAC, Research, etc.) that you are coming from.

All my biases confirmed: Education Issue

I'm sure all of you have heard about the new book, Academically Adrift. Using a large longitudinal study, 45% of students made no gains on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) during their first two years in college, and 36% made no gains over four years. That basically means colleges are not reaching a little over a third of our students (the ones who don't drop out) at all. But the study also points out exactly whom we are not reaching:

After controlling for demographics, parental education, SAT scores, and myriad other factors, students who were assigned more books to read and more papers to write learned more. Students who spent more hours studying alone learned more. Students taught by approachable faculty who enforced high expectations learned more. "What students do in higher education matters," the authors note. "But what faculty members do matters too." The study also found significant differences by field of study. Students majoring in the humanities, social sciences, hard sciences, and math—again, controlling for their background—did relatively well. Students majoring in business, education, and social work did not. Our future teachers aren't learning much in college, apparently, which goes a long way toward explaining why students arrive in college unprepared in the first place. Financial aid also matters. The study found that students whose financial aid came primarily in the form of grants learned more than those who were paying mostly with loans. Debt burdens can be psychological and temporal as well as financial, with students substituting work for education in order to manage their future obligations. Learning was also negatively correlated with­—surprise—time spent in fraternities and sororities.

Well, glad to know there is now hard data to back up all my biases. I am also with Tom, we need to stop cutting programs that teach critical thinking.

As far as the suggestions for federal government mandating loan money to schools that do well on the CLA, such as Kevin Carey (the first link) seem to be suggesting. From what I can tell from discussion with colleagues at schools that have implemented internal CLA testing in the past, the stats are pretty easy to juke. For example, you can open the initial assessment to the general population, but only test your students enrolled in your honors program in the senior year. You can require the test, offer no incentives (positive or negative) the first time, which will frequently produce students hurrying to get through it. And give strong incentives for the taking it the last time, creating a climate where students will take it more seriously. You can teach classes to the test. Indeed, you can make it common that professors provide in-class evaluations that are somewhat similar to the methodology of the test itself (questions in which students exam in-class pieces of evidence, and are able to explain and evaluate the arguments of those pieces of evidence). I'm not saying that the CLA is a bad metric. It can be, but as first blush, the way it was used here seems to have been honest and up-front. I am saying that the CLA is a bad metric for figuring out which schools should get money. Unless I am wrong (and I could be, I would love to hear from some readers with experience dealing with the CLA), it seems that it is pretty easily manipulable if schools have a strong financial incentive.

The Monopoly of Monopoly

The title sounds better than the actual post will be. Yesterday was the start of classes, which is always exciting. I am teaching an Intro to Philo class (in the Philosophy department), and Argumentation (in the Communication Studies department). Every year I pass out notecards and get basic information from the students, but and every time I also add in one random, silly question. Like, What is your favorite arctic animal?, What is your least favorite place to visit?, etc. This year, inspired by philosophy monopoly I linked to before, I asked them for their favorite board game.

Monopoly won, hands down. Many students admitted to picking the game randomly, as it was one of the few games that came to them. In second place was Scrabble, followed in third by Apples to Apples. Those were the only games to reach double digits. I don't really have a profound point to make with all this, just sharing.


Also, isn't it great how students work very hard to make unfunny professors seem rather witty? I am always surprised at the things students are willing to laugh at. I think it is rather nice of them to take such pity on me.

Some More Thoughts On Cheating

I assume most of you have seen this CHE story (h/t Joey) written by someone who writes custom papers for students who pay for it (and they pay a lot). It's interesting, if not terribly noteworthy (except for how much he and the company he worked for gets paid. Particularly the company, which seems to be extracting close to a 100% profit). However, certain responses to the story are worth noting. Take this one, for example (h/t Craig). There seems to be a general argument from both the author of the CHE story and the author of the blog post that rampant cheating is somehow the fault of the faculty. But I don't care about that, here is what I care about: That in a desire to better police cheating, many educators seem willing to decrease the effectiveness or excitement of their pedagogical assignments. I have before taken a stance for anti-cheating measures, but only because they allowed me to become less of a cop and more of an educator. However, many educators admit to going to only in-class writing assignments or in-class tests in order to deal with such for-hire plagiarism services. Other educators admit to moving toward smaller and more narrow focused assignments in order to thwart such cheating.
Now, there are surely many appropriate times and places for tests, in class writing assignments, and certainly for narrow focused assignments. However, it seems many professors are moving to these assignments, and almost exclusively toward these assignments, not because of any pedagogical demand, but because of a policing demand. I am tempted, at this point, to write something cliche, like: If you assign this the cheaters have already won!
What really galls me from the CHE article is how the author seems oblivious to how his work and his stated goals are at cross-purposes. It is exactly the sort of assignments that the CHE author claims he supports, open-ended assignments that allow for the maximum creative and academic freedom, that are the most vulnerable to the sorts of services he provides. Most professors do not read the CHE article and feel that an effective response is to provide more academic freedom to students. I don't think anyone here believes that students are willing to pay $2000 (!) for an assignment simply because they felt it was too restrictive.
Anyway, if I am ever going to have to choose between being an educator or a cop, I am going to choose educator every single damn time.

On using plagiarism detection services

Recently Dr. J and Joshua Miller had a insightful and vigorous conversation on the use of plagiarism detection services (the most famous being turnitin). Please see the conversations here, here, here, and here (and make sure you read comments).

I use to hold almost identically the same views of Dr. J (and I should add I've never used turnitin or any of its variants). However, I found Miller's arguments surprisingly convincing (and generally fit in with my current views of plagiarism). But before I go any further, let me say for the present conversation that I am bracketing the question of honor, and if honor codes exist in tension with services like turnitin (I think Dr. J may be right on this last point). Now, I am not bracketing this conversation because I don't think it is unimportant, but rather that not all of us work at institutions with honor codes or the same honor codes (for example, when I was at Oglethorpe, I had no proactive obligation to turn in other people). So, I think the question of honor codes might require a separate conversation, and one that can be held to the specific nature of those codes.

I have had two basic objections to services like turnitin: (1) The first is that I feel it violates the student's control over her own intellectual work product. In other words, it allows a corporation to extract surplus value from the student's work, without her being able to control that at all. And, (2) that is makes me into a cop, and one of those people who come to view all students with suspicion, etc. On the first point, I am still wary. This is not a fear that my students are legally having their intellectual property taken advantage of, but rather one of extracting surplus value to support a corporation rather they want to or not. On the other hand, there are any number of assignments that I think would be fine that would still force students into these issues. Any assignment that required them to post videos on youtube, or maintain a blog, or any number of other assignments about interacting with websites that use advertising and participation to extract value from the students' work. In other words, I think this is still a problem from turnitin, and I think we need to broadly be more concerned about the ways certain assignments force students to support corporations, but as long as we all agree assignments on youtube are legit, I think there is no reason to uniquely condemn turnitin. This brings us to the second point, which is the major one from Dr. J.

I'm not a cop, and I am never a fan of the way there seems a desire to turn educators into police. For a while I thought I would teach high school, but I have seen increasingly the pressure put on high school teachers to spend more time exercising disciplinary power than educating. Or, indeed, that education seems utterly interchangeable with disciplinary power. Foucault got it right, "Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?"(D&P, p. 228). Now, what is so compelling from Miller's account is that plagiarism disappeared. Not, that plagiarists (whatever that being is) got caught, punished, given their just desserts. Rather, he stopped having to deal with plagiarism. If we agree that plagiarism is a problem, that is makes our jobs harder and hurts the student education. In other words, if we agree that plagiarism is something that we would have to confront if we discovered it (and I think we all agree with this), turnitin means I have to be less of a cop. I have to wield less juridical power. In this sense, turnitin becomes something like spell check, something that fixes a problem and comes to be an aid to students. I think this turns back Dr. J's arguments about universal belief in everyone cheating. I don't think everyone is cheating, but I always believe that there is a chance that a student could accidentally not cite something correctly through error, laziness, or ignorance. I no longer have to figure out if I am dealing with cheating or mistakes. It is a service that helps the students know what they need to cite, and it helps me not to have to punish students.
Now, Dr. J admits in comments of some of the posts that she thinks that the service that allows students to make changes before submitting reports to the professors are not as problematic. But, she feels that this isn't the primary function of turnitin and other services. I can't speak to that. I can say that professors looking to catch students and punish them, are obviously people who enjoy their position of power. I think that is clearly problematic, and pretty anti-educational. However, I don't see how using the plagiarism detection services in the way Miller describes is anything but a net gain (again, except for times with an explicit honor code, where I am less clear on the situation).

Is there some flaw in my thoughts here? As I said, this is a recent change in my outlook. And moreover, I have never used these services so there might be something obvious I am overlooking here.

More on Intro to Philosophy

After talking to several people and thinking about it, here are the texts I believe I am going to teach (ordered here by alpha, if you want to suggest the order feel free). There will probably still be some changes, and so anyone who wants to get their 0.02 in still have time. I also want to give a special thanks to Peter Gratton, Jason Wirth, and the people who posted suggestions in the last post (namely Izak, Simon, Captain Furious, and Craig). Feel free to argue for a text you already suggested if you think it is important and silly I left it off.

Aristotle, De Anima
Deleuze, "Letter to a Harsh Critic"
Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (film)
Holder (editor/translator), Early Buddhist Discourses
Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals
Lugones, selected essays (aka, not entirely selected yet. Almost certainly "Playfulness, World-Traveling, and Loving Perception").
Oruka, Sage Philosophy: Indigenous Thinkers and Modern Debate on African Philosophy
Plato, The Apology
Plato, The Symposium
Shankara, Crest-Jewel of Discrimination

Informal Logic

Any suggestions on excellent and very affordable books on informal logic to teach to undergrads? I have knowledge of a few, but again am hoping for some crowdsourcing, and seeing if there are any that people would particularly suggest.

Intro to Philosophy

In the spring it looks like I will be able to teach Intro to Philosophy. I am pretty excited about it, and have several ideas about what to put in the course (particularly expanding it outside of its traditional Western comportment). However, I was curious if anyone had suggestions. If anyone wanted to send me their syllabus, suggest preferred texts and textbooks, particularly awesome or smart assignments. I think Adam once said he didn't know why we didn't spend more time talking about teaching on these things, and I agree with him. Crowdsourcing classes makes a lot of sense, so please, would love any suggestions.

Oh, I am also probably going to be teaching argumentation in the spring. Most of you probably have never taught or taken that course, but any suggestions on that front would also be appreciated.

Go crowdsourcing, go crowdsourcing, go!

One last hurrah on TAing.

Peter has a response up on the issue of TAing. If you are too lazy or too loyal to click the link (though both would be weird outlooks on life), here is the single most important thing he had to say in that post, perhaps ever on his blog.

[A]nd just try not to make the jokes so corny that your significant other mocks you when you think you’re repeating a great laugh you had in class.

What can we do to better support TAs?

Peter Gratton has a response up to my post on the CHE articles (he also should be winning an award for best use of my name).
He is absolutely right that for the most part that one learns by doing, especially with teaching. But, as he admits, there are things we can do to also better support our teachers, especially the TAs. I'm just thinking out loud here about some things I think that would be relatively cheap for the university and important for new teachers.

(1) A guide for navigating the institutional resources that your university has on hand. For example, you have a student you expect of a learning disability, what do you do? What tutoring is available, both for students with LD and other students? What different kinds of tutoring exists? You need to a reserve a classroom for some reason, how do you do this? You need a piece of equipment not in the room you are using, where do you go? There is a scheduling error with your course, who do you contact? And etc. (these were all chosen from personal experience, most of them occurring for the first time in the first semester of teaching).

(2) Assign mentors. Most pre-collegiate schools assign mentors to new teachers. A similar system would be very helpful for new TAs. The way I answered most of the questions above, is the first course I taught I had taken over from a grad student who was still around, and so I just asked him. Now, sometimes he didn't give me perfect advise, but I cannot imagine the nightmare if he hadn't been around. So, assign an older more experienced TA to mentor new TAs, one hopes the mentor even taught or is still teaching the course the new TA is teaching. Also assign a faculty mentor. Now, most new TAs will devise these systems themselves, informally. I cannot tell you how many discussions at the bar I have had with other grad students about teaching issues. But it strikes me that a formal system is probably helpful, as well.

(3) Formal evaluations and help. It is true that one learns to teach by doing, but like most of those practices, coaching helps (I should remind people that I probably have a more significant background in coaching, than I do in educating). There was a scene in the CHE series where a professor evaluates the author's teaching. She writes a scathing letter, and when she calls him in to talk about it, he basically just shrugs. Now, obviously both behaviors are absurd. If a professor calls you in, and you are having problems, rather than shrug, maybe try to turn that into a productive conservation about what you should be doing. But also, if you see a new TA failing, reach out and help. Evaluations should include discussions about what was effective, what was not effective, how to implement things in the future.


Anyway, nothing we do will prepare new teachers, of course not. But the current situation for most TAs at most universities seem inexcusable. I didn't have a horrible time teaching (well, my first semester was a nightmare, but that had to deal with a lot of issues, it being my first semester teaching not even being in the top five), but I also think there are fairly practical steps we could take to make the new TAs life slightly more bearable.

How things have changed since the mid-90s

I just took advantage of this one day sale from Indiana UPress (hurry, and some of you may be able to, as well). Well, I picked up a copy of Reinventiong Biology, which is an edited collection dealing with experimental biology and animals published in 1995. When looking at the Amazon.com description of the book, the closing lines of the review caught me eye:

A welcome addition to the literature critiquing science and an excellent resource for courses on the conceptual framework of science or objectivity in science.

What is worth noting here is that a book that is primarily about the intersection of science and animals (with some about plants and other non-human beings), is being sold for courses about science rather than courses about science and/or animals. I have no real proof of this, but I have trouble believing such a description would be written about the book if it were being published today. I think in general the idea that we have courses on animals or something called critical animal studies or animal studies or whatever exists.
Just a random throwaway thought before I get back to work.

What philosophers do you teach to high schoolers

Say you teach an advanced group of seniors a course on the humanities, in general. Throughout this course, while you do art, literature, music, and history, you want to include philosophy. You have a limited about of time throughout the year (let's say about 16 contact hours) in which to introduce your students (who have zero background in philosophy) to the most important broad ideas of philosophers and/or philosophical movements.

What philosophers and/or movements do you teach?

Thanks.

What would you teach?

Technically this post still falls under the rule of vacation, which for me will not end (as this blog is concerned) until January ends. So, today I had reason to go hang out at the campus of my undergrad (Oglethorpe University in Atlanta). A lot has changed (for example, the dorm I lived in was abolished, not a single member of the philosophy department is the same, and the entire library staff has changed), but whenever I think about Oglethorpe, I think about what it would be like to teach there. As some of you know, Oglethorpe has a thorough core program that all students take that is somewhat like a great books program. All professors are expected to teach a section of one of the cores, and I always thought I would teach the sophomore core, "Human Nature and the Social Order." Now, each semester has certain texts a professor is expected to cover to some degree, and then each professors add or change them within that framework. The reality is, the course has all the pleasures and problems of canon. Books strung together in a certain preformed idea of how works relate, minority voices either ignored or tokenized (So, in the first year core, Narratives of the Self, after a whole year of reading european men, they throw in Toni Morrison's Beloved at the end. Now of course, that is a great book. But one of the things I will always remember is talking with a friend of mine about how we wish we could read Alice Walker in core. Some professor, overhearing this conversation, stated, "You know you read Toni Morrison, right?" And of course, that is one of the great problems of tokenization. A refusal to engage a writer on his or her own terms, but rather demands that the writer speak for all of his or her social identity. All of them, the other. In the whitewash of faux multiculturalism Toni Morrison becomes Alice Walker, and the rod of the canon just keeps beating us over the head). So you can all play the same mental game as I, I will tell you what books you are expected to cover with a sophomore (remember that) class of students from all disciplines. What would you add? Throw in as many minority voices as possible? A few and hope to avoid tokenization? Just go with the canon? Well, tell me what you would teach (and remember, you can do just selections of all of these texts, so feel free to be as specific or general as you want).

Human Nature and the Social Order I: Aristotle's Politics, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Aquinas from On Law, Morality, and Politics, and lastly Locke's Second Treatise.

Human Nature and the Social Order II: Smith's Wealth of Nations, Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto, Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and Durkheim's Suicide.

OK, go.