At the Heterodox Academy, Rebekah Wanic and Nina Powell stare down the face of student happiness and success by saying the obvious but unsayable.
Student-centered learning is intended to promote a more inclusive environment and to democratize the classroom. It is a broad philosophy, but its fundamental principle is the belief that education should involve a partnership between student and educator. Further, it advocates that education should be personalized to meet students where they are, with curricula design and course structure based on their individualized learning preferences.
Warm, fuzzy, exactly what many who believe in unicorns prancing on rainbows want to hear. Everyone can be special, if we just teach them in their own, special way.
Such an approach is increasingly hailed as the gold standard in higher education and is ostensibly well-meaning. It embodies the idea that education, as a route to social mobility and desirable careers, should be accessible to as many people as possible.
Accessible? Of course. Everyone should have the opportunity to be the best person they can be. But that’s where the ideals begin, not end.
Many will contend that technology and online learning offer a solution to the personalization issue, giving students the ability to self-pace using asynchronous content or dynamic tests that adjust to prior mistakes. However, such hopes are often belied by the messy reality of how students actually engage with such content. As for the issue of education goals, universities have in essence given up trying to tell students what is good for them. Fueled by the shift towards student-centered learning, student satisfaction is widely accepted as the primary indicator of educational success.
There are, of course, a litany of new fixes for old problems that their promoters swear, and will argue to their last breath, are the magic bullet that will make all these hopes and dreams come true. The problem is that these end up used in the real world where passionate, if usually vague, rhetoric doesn’t change the hard, cold fact that there is no magic that allows every student to blossom.
Take assessment, for example. Students find exams stressful, so we are told to reduce the number of exams. Neither do students like to read, so we are told to assign easier and shorter readings. Students find it hard to concentrate, so we are told to break down lectures into small chunks and intersperse activities in between. Students enjoy media content and are happy to engage with YouTube and social media, so we are told to incorporate more videos and make course material and assessments more creative and interactive. Some students don’t like to speak in class, so we are told to make sure there are myriad ways students can participate without having to actually speak.
If the point hasn’t yet become clear, it’s that there is an excuse for every student who fails and a concomitant demand that education be reinvented to suit every student’s idiosyncratic needs and peccadilloes. And this demand on profs, and expectations by students, that they are owed a world that caters to their needs, their wants, their feelings, and with such a world, they will succeed because why wouldn’t they, won’t fix reality.
For a time, I fooled myself into thinking that I could be a part of that world. And I did work hard, reading lots of papers, trying to get a handle on the extent of the field, attempting to learn its controversies and extant problems. But my limits were always staring me in the face. I had never taken calculus, and though I had learned to grind through math as an undergraduate, it was never intuitive for me. I had used a handful of premade programs to do some of the analysis I was interested in, but it was clear that I had to learn to code myself. I dutifully bought a book on Python and followed along with some online courses. And, over time, I had an experience I’ve had several times before and since: I learned my limits. After countless hours banging my head into my desk, trying to get the code to work, one drunken night I found acceptance. I would never be a computational linguist or similar. I worked my tail off, and yet my coding skills remained meager at best; I studied and studied, and yet inevitably found myself staring at algorithms I simply couldn’t understand. I did publish a study, but it was ultimately a simple correlational analysis, a bit of academic ambulance-chasing. My efforts at learning had taught me something, just not what I had hoped to learn—they had taught me that I would never be good at this.
For quite a while now, the insipid have advised young people to “follow their dream,” advice that has caused many to feel the agony of defeat. Dream all you want, but that doesn’t mean you have the competencies to succeed. And no, it cannot be chalked up to skin, genitalia, missing daddy or peeling paint on the ceiling of your elementary school. It’s just that you, like everyone else, have limits. You may be good at some things but not others. You may not be good at much of anything. Or you are. But whatever it is, it is, and no reinventing the machinations of education is going to turn you into a math savant.
There is truth that we can, and should, do a lot better with educating students and recognizing that different people learn differently, as long as they learn. But not every student can manage organic chemistry. Or law. Or whatever. And it had nothing to do with following our dreams, but recognizing what Freddie deBoer learned, we have limits.
My professors were all smart, supportive, and kind, but the field simply didn’t respect the pedagogical work that I saw as core to its mission. No one wanted to write dissertations on the boring topic of how better to teach students to write research papers, and our journals and conferences were filled with esoterica that had no interest to me—high “theory” in the French style, pop culture analysis, research on podcasting and website-building. I liked my professors and my peers and generally enjoyed grad school, but I despaired at my inability to find a place for myself in the field.
Sometimes, the answer is that there is no place for you in a field, no matter how hard you dreamed. You need to find another field.
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Early in my career, I was working for investment banks and decided to pursue a real career in investment banking. It was, I was told, not math intensive. So off to MBA school I went, majoring in finance.
I did well in econ and marketing.
Then, I had my first finance class. And soon I was no longer a finance major. I am happier. And no doubt any clients I might have had are also happier.
When I left high school, I wanted to be a timpanist. It was my dream. But as my conductor gently informed me, it was not my future. And so I’m a lawyer.
Ok, but get their student loans first. This market is an even better racket than timeshares and medicalizing gender, even if they can get them coming and going. Wait, maybe there’s an opportunity to commodify educational detransitioning too. We’ll look into that after we tackle selling corporate naming rights for universities. These administrator budgets are insatiable.
Orthogonal to your very valid point, but something struck me about the litany of excuses about tests, reading, studying, etc., and that’s that it’s presupposed that “difficult for students” is a bad thing. That seems like a foolish, and probably dangerous, assumption.
It’s one thing, and a valid thing, to say we shouldn’t make it unnecessarily difficult on students. Math would have been much more difficult for me if the textbooks were in Hindi, and since I was an American in American schools there’s no reason they should have been (had I been in school in India it would have been a different story). But learning anything of substance is going to involve some irreducible difficulty–more for some students than for others, naturally, but it’s always going to take work. Pretending this isn’t the case is going to lead to dumb(er) students.
If I understand the theory correctly, the foundational assumption is that every student has the ability to succeed at every academic course of study if only given the “right” support, and that no student fails for lack of aptitude, but only lack of proper support.
If that is the theory (and while I’m not familiar with it, I don’t doubt your summary is correct), it’s manifestly and obviously at odds with reality. I suspect most students could do better in any given subject with properly-tailored instruction (though what exactly that would entail is far from clear, and it would surely greatly increase the cost of education by requiring much more individualized instruction–hmmm, maybe that’s the point), but to deny that there are limits is just plain dumb.
I was made to be an engineer. In my younger years I could do complicated math in my head. And I’m generally quiet and awkward in social situations. I’m like a prototype.
I did that and it worked out. Good thing my mother didn’t care about having a son who was a doctor because I hated biology and sucked at it. Nice to know after all this time it wasn’t my fault.
The truth well written.
Oh, now, there’s a place in every field for everyone
Just read an article on the Internet, and zamma, zamma, you’re an expert. If only I could have foreseen this when I foolishly spent money on law school.
Those who can, write Books For Dummies; those who can’t, write Books For Dummies For Dummies.
I reviewed that book.
I know a much better one.
Good times.
I agree that everyone has their limits. When I was teaching college math classes, I gave students one extra credit point on the homework for indicating how long they had worked on the assignment. This was valuable feedback for me on whether the assignments were too long, too difficult, too easy, etc. But my grades didn’t reflect either effort or intelligence, but mastery of the material.
What I noticed after doing this for several years was that B and C students usually spent more time on assignments than the A students did, presumably natural talent making the difference – i.e. A students found math came easily to them while B and C students struggled to incorporate the concepts into their brains. Students that failed either spent far less time or way more time on homework than the others.
Some failed because the didn’t do the work, but some failed students worked really really hard, frequently coming to see me in my office and lavishing many hours on their homework. They weren’t dumb, in fact they were quite intelligent and they worked hard at learning, but they just didn’t get math.
Is there a generic “smart” and “dumb,” or do people tend to be “smart” in some areas but not others? And yes, there are smart and dumb people as well, but the point is that it would be a mistake to assume someone who struggles with math to be dumb, but rather just lacks a head for math.
I agree that it would be a mistake to assume that very thing. However, with a paradigm out there that everyone is born a blank slate (and equal abilities) and also the prevalence of “participation trophies”, it’s fairly obvious that when people start failing what are complicated subjects some (much like other areas of discussion) start blaming the subject itself or the teacher and that it needs to be dumbed down. Not everyone is meant to be a physicist or programmer etc no matter what flowery principle they start with. There is too much affect through early education, cultural and family situations alone to deal with.
In addition, one of the worst assumptions politicians can also make is assume that you just need more training and all of a sudden everyone can go from more manual work to programming computers (or similar)
Chess Grand Masters are said to memorize thousands of chess positions. Most of us can’t do that, and that’s a reason we’re not Grand Masters. Academic success requires memory, some disciplines more than others. At any level beyond college, math requires good memory.
There are other mental skills, such as perceiving patterns in information, for which there is no common word, about which similar things could be said.