A Move to Hyde Park?

This is just a thought. There are no plans to move to Hyde Park. I visited Hyde Park and the University of Chicago yesterday. I was giving a tour to my friend Jose, whom I met ten years ago in the Marine Corps. He has become very interested in computer science, mathematics, and artificial intelligence, and his occupation as a computer engineer verifies that he has the mental chops to deal with these things intelligently. Anyway, that is a different story.

It has been many months since I visited Hyde Park last. Every time I am there, I am inspired by the tranquility of the Quad, and the single-minded purpose that the entire environment seems to be designed for. I felt in awe, and I felt that I wanted to be closer to this place on a daily basis.

My life is changing, and I think for the better. I lived in Hyde Park four years ago, for the duration of one year. I was filled with anxiety at the time, as this was a new place and I was getting accustomed to a new level of education. Frankly, I was not prepared for it. By the end of that year, shocked by the size of my debt, I was not certain if I had made the right decision. And for years afterward, I wondered if the track I was on would lead to anything of fruition. It was the most difficult time of my life, I believe.

Things have changed for the better. I am now a fairly successful adjunct professor of philosophy, and it seems that a full time position will be secured for the Spring. But my long term goals are not to simply settle in to this position and continue to think at the same level that I have been thinking, simply because it is adequate for the current job. No, that is not my goal. Rather, I seek to improve my dedication and knowledge of philosophy to ever higher levels. In many ways, I am behind my peers. That is, in those things that are proper to the study of philosophy, I know far less, and my ideas are far less sophisticated than those individuals who have never left the school. In other things, I am far ahead: I have spent years of my life outside academia, and it has taught me the more real lessons of life in a way that is irreplacable.

The advantage and disadvantage is largely obvious: I am advantaged because every reading I do in philosophy is considered from more perspectives than my peers. I am disadvantaged because my conceptual sophistication does not allow me to dig as far as my peers within a single perspective. Both are important to philosophy, but unfortunately, the latter is probably more important for the sake of peer review. This is not to say that it should be that way: it is simply the condition of contemporary academic philosophy.

How do I remediate my disadavantage? I spend more time studying technical material, and being hard on myself when the ideas that sit in my mind are fuzzy. I surround myself with those people who are most likely to have intelligent criticisms of my views. I put myself in an environment that encourages contemplation and academic pursuit.

My current home is very pleasant. I sit in a small apartment in “Boystown,” on the eastern edge of Lakeview in Chicago. I have three grocery stores within a ten minute walk. Public transportation whisks me to my school in thirty minutes.  I have never felt the least bit afraid, and crime is a relatively rare thing here. I am close to my friends and my favorite drinking establishments. I can get on my bike and explore the city to no end. This is excellent, and I have enjoyed my three years in Lakeview. But when my lease is up next June, and I have a full-time job as a philosophy professor, do I want to continue living this life? Or is it time to arrange certain aspects that are more harmonious with my long term goals?

The answer seems obvious, but it is not without difficulty. This will mean a greater distance from my friends, and likely more loneliness. I have never quite fit in with the Hyde Park community, and I cannot say what the prospects are for doing so in a future attempt. Grocery stores are more distant, my commute time increases, and I will leave the home that I have become accustomed to.

I will have to think on this, and perhaps repeated trips to the University of Chicago are in order this year.

The Habit of Listening to Music

Music is pleasurable to listen to.  My desire to listen to music is nearly addictive. It is unpleasant to sit in a room without music going on in the background.

But it does require some degree of attention. Although the bulk of my attention may be going to another project, such as reading a book, part of my attention always seems to be dabbling with the music.

In many cases, this is not a problem. Many tasks do not require my full attention. However, in some cases, such as reading or writing philosophy, my mind is perceptibly distracted.

At this point in my life, however, I am sufficiently accustomed to the music that being in a room without music is even more distracting than being in a room with music.

This is a problem: I am not operating at my peak efficiency when listening to music, but it is currently better than the opposite.

But the cause of the disturbance while I am not listening to music is the fact that I am in the current habit of listening to music. Breaking a habit is difficult and causes a sensation of anxiety. In this case, not great anxiety, but it is still there. The habit can be changed merely by following a different mode of activity.

Therefore, I will resolve to work this morning without the use of music. Specifically, today I aim to brush up on my symbolic logic. As I am trying to teach it to myself without the pressure of class assignments and grades, I must exercise more discipline. I anticipate this to be a difficult project, because I am a man of weak will.

Thought requires conflict. Give me conflict.

Getting back to the text

When trying to maintain a conversation in class that is both stimulating and relevant, it is necessary to promote student enthusiasm on the subject. This is difficult, because the student is not always enthused about the subject or reading. The reasons for this can be various. First, simply to accept the fact that a book is famous does not mean that the student will see the value in it. Without seeing the value, legitimate enthusiasm is not created. False enthusiasm is sometimes created by the student in order to appear engaged, but this at best leads to a starting point in a discussion. It does not allow for a deep discussion.

To handle this problem, I generally allow students to go off on tangents to some degree, even if it is just to build sufficient authentic enthusiasm for an interesting discussion to occur. But sometimes these tangents go too far afield. As discussion navigator, I sometimes cannot see how to tie the tangent back in to the intended topic. Sometimes I do see how to do this, and these are the best moments: I allow the student to go where they wish, and then I build from what they construct to show how it tells us something about the topic. But this is not always possible.

The starting point is key. What is the first question we will try to answer? The first problem we will try to solve? The first concept we contemplate? The first passage we read? The first 10 minutes of the class are often the most important. I am setting the course, which will need to be adjusted over the period of the class, but those first ten minutes can spell destruction if I get off on the wrong foot.

Over the last couple of days, I have employed the strategy of writing on the board one critical statement found near the end of the essay in question. If the essay we are reading is genuinely profound, the statement will be something that is counter-intuitive and the result of a long argument. If the student had done their reading, they have seen the argument and touched on the concepts, but they generally do not know all the nooks and crannies of the argument yet. The bulk of the essay probably looked like some nebulous cloud of ideas with a basic idea. But the depth was unseen. 

By starting the discussion by introducing the end of the text, the student is prompted to ask how this statement could be true, while utilizing whatever ideas they reaped from their first encounter with the text while reading on their own. It is a puzzle. If I picked the quote well, then with a little bit of discussion, the student will be curious and feel that figuring it out is important. Their curiosity is piqued. They want to know, and want to figure it out. Therein lies genuine education.  

For example, over the past two days, we have been discussing Plato’s Apology. Near the end of the text, there is a statement:

“Nothing can harm a good man, either in life or death.”

and, more famously:

“an unexamined life is no life for a human being to live.”

(Both quotes have been rendered in different ways. ie., The unexamined life is not worth living.)

We start with the first statement. The second sits on the board, inducing (I hope) temptation. But discussion starts with the first: do you believe it? Isn’t it a ridiculous statement looked at matter-of-factly? After prodding around a little bit, we see some students rendering ridiculously optimistic answers: bad things don’t happen to good people. Then we prod and prod, and someone eventually asks, “I don’t mean any offense, Mr. Swanson, but don’t we need to know what “good” is first?” Yes, and not only that, but “harm” and what a person is too. All three factors need to be puzzled. So hypotheses are given and examined, some rejected and others left. Then I ask, how is this related to the unexamined life quote?

At this point, we are in a position to delve into Plato’s metaphysics, questions of how the immortal soul affects one’s current ethical beliefs, the value of the mind, and whether or not the body is distinct from the mind. Conversation blooms, and at the end of the class I feel that every hope I had for that one hour fifteen minute period have been met.

Small Steps

For some reason, I am having a hard time writing anything of substance for this blog as of yet. I am going to start by making small posts to get back into the habit. The aim is not writing worthwhile things, but on posting something.

We are almost done with the second week of classes. I feel that my mind is still warming up after a month of inactivity, but today was an excellent mark of progress. I’m not the happiest camper right now for personal reasons. But I can say that a day like today is what makes my life worth living. The classes were stimulating, and I think everyone learned a lot about Socrates, ethics, and philosophy today through active learning.  I had fun, and felt fulfilled at the end of the day. I am optimistic that these classes are going to turn out pretty well.

I need to get back to this blog. Now that summer is over and I am back in school, I may feel motivated to write soon.

Fun, Summer Syllabus Writing

Since the end of the semester, I’ve been having a lot of fun. And I haven’t been thinking very much. Or a better way of putting it is that I haven’t been thinking anything that I felt worth recording, or I haven’t been motivated to record what I have been thinking. Anyway, fun is the death of philosophy. Except that doing philosophy in itself is fun. So, philosophy cannot grow from fun– fun, however, often results from philosophy. Start with fun, and philosophy will not continue. Start with a lack of fun, and through philosophy, fun may be experienced.

Anyway, I’m slowly getting back to work. Today, I’m writing the syllabi for the summer. They are classes that I have taught before (Ethics and Introduction to Philosophy), so much will be the same. However, I always go back over the teaching objectives and classroom policies to see how it can be improved. I consider the experiments I made in my recent syllabi and consider how it changed the class, and if the changes were positive, I apply those changes to more than one syllabus. 

In the official syllabus on which instructors must model their own syllabus, their is an official plagiarism policy. I am required to include this in my syllabus, and I have done so in the past. However, as I think about plagiarism, particularly in the context of a class that focuses on argumentative writing and displaying the reasons for which the writer believes something to be true, I believe there is more to be said about plagiarism than simply the ‘rules’ that one ought not to break. Therefore, one thing that I will be working on today is a special commentary on plagiarism that I will attach to the official statement.

Second,  I am going to revise my learning objectives. Again, we are given some required learning objectives, but are allowed to include more. The learning objectives/outcomes that I created for last semester worked well, and perhaps I will not change them much. However, a recent peer review (well, the reviewer was a much more experienced professor) stated that while my objectives were overall excellent, they could be improved by using a few more active verbs. Honestly, writing is not my strong point, at least in relation to my peers, so I accept that this criticism is worth considering, even if I do not see it at this point and may ultimately disagree. Here are the learning objectives that I currently have listed on my syllabus:

1. Students will enhance their critical reading skills. Philosophy is inherently argumentative. This means, first, that the student will enhance their ability to distinguish sentences that express chief points, subordinate points, evidence, rationale, illustrations, and non-essential parts of an essay.

 

2. Students will enhance their critical writing skills. The writing assignments in this class are all argumentative and require that the student makes effective use of support (evidence and rationale) to prove subordinate points, and use subordinate points to support a clear, specific thesis (chief claim). Second, the student will learn how to organize these elements chiefly in order to make the argument appealing and easy to understand for the audience.

 

3. Students will enhance their critical discussion skills. This involves constructing different types of questions about the text, and then facilitating a conversation by critically responding to responses. Students will all be required to lead discussions throughout the semester.

 

4. Ultimately, students will enhance their critical thinking skills. The distinction here is somewhat arbitrary, because the previous objectives all involve critical thinking in specific forms. However, there are areas of critical thinking that are not covered in the previous categories. For the purposes of this class, critical thinking is involved in (1) finding error and (2) deducing which extra, unjustified beliefs were involved in producing that error. This attempt can be found in reading, writing, and discussion.

 Any thoughts? 

I’m not sure if the readers of this blog are aware of it, but I do have a bit of tracking software on this blog. It can’t track who is reading, but there are certainly consistent patterns that suggest there are a couple of individuals who check up on this blog regularly. You should feel welcome to post commentary Anonymous feedback is quite alright.

New Link/About this Blog

To the right, under the heading “Pages,” I have added a link titled “About this Blog.” It is taken from a post written a few months ago that describes the function of this blog. There are a few new readers so I thought it would be important to put this in an easily recognized place.  This blog would probably seem strange without knowing its function.

Habits in Writing the Last Essays of a Semester

As a teacher, something that I noticed is that at the beginning of the semester, I was highly engaged, pro-active, and went beyond what I needed in terms of reading and preparation. As the semester moved on, and papers-to-grade became my life’s primary burden activity, I did not have the mental freedom to devote the time I did before on unrelated research, and lecture preparation became more hurried. 

As I am grading the final essays, I notice that the essays are more mature than they were at the beginning of the semester. The ideas are richer in places. However, they also seem hurried. The students who had been doing well have more grammar mistakes. The students who had highly organized and focused essays for the second paper are looser now. I imagine it is probably a similar mental burden that I faced. As the semester moves on, and as some students become confident, some do not try as hard.

There is also the added challenge that, whereas my other essay assignments are staggered so that they miss the weeks that are usually reserved for mid-term exams, the final essay was probably due on the same day as final exams. I tried to avoid this, but I gave them extensions to give them more time…I think in general, I basically gave them more rope to hang themselves. 

Solutions? Next semester, I will be extra viligant in keeping the due date earlier than the last week. Also, I did not give as much guidance for the last paper as I did for the first two, thinking that I was simply going to be repetitive. Well, that guidance may have provided important reminders to some. 

I do not want to project, and perhaps this is speaking to my own habits more than my students. And certainly this does not apply to all students.

Time for the final push of the semester. Time to face a big test. Time for a joust with life. Time for a war.