Why is my teaching an "alternative" style? It is all about thinking!

For a couple of years now, I have made sure to emphasize to students my view that this is a world that is vastly different from even a decade ago.  From even five years ago.  I mean this in the context of teaching and learning.  What s that difference?

Students can access all the information they could possibly ever want without coming to the classroom.  Enrolling in a university or coming to the classroom after registering for classes is not about gaining access to information and facts, but is to make sense of them.  To understand their meaning.  To be able to then ask questions, many of which, hopefully, will be troubling questions.

If they don't trust me on this ... wait, that too is an advice I give them: don't trust me.  Well, don't merely trust me, but verify too.

Anyway, I can now supplement that with observations from George Dyson--yes, the son of Freeman Dyson.

We now live in a world where information is potentially unlimited. Information is cheap, but meaning is expensive. Where is the meaning? Only human beings can tell you where it is.

I tell students that this is where the power of Google (or any such tool) comes in--once we are able to craft questions that help us understand an aspect of this highly complex world, then getting information related to that is immensely less complex than ever before in history.  Again, Dyson:

Finding answers is easy. The hard part is creating the map that matches specific answers to the right question. That’s what Google did: They used the power of computing – which is cheap and really does not have any limits – to crawl the entire internet and collected and index all the answers. And then,by letting human beings spend their precious time asking the right questions, they created a map between the two. That is a clever way of approaching a problem that would otherwise be incomprehensibly difficult.

The net result is that my teaching and testing comes across as unconventional and as an alternative style.  In my classes, I engage students with questions.  When it comes to tests, it is not their ability to recall information that I am interested in; I am, instead, far more interested in providing them opportunities where students can demonstrate their thinking skills.  Which is why I remark to students that I feel like puking when I see tests in which questions are true/false or multiple-choice.  These do nothing to develop in students the ability to make sense of the fuzziness that surrounds us.

Even worse is to simply tell students that the course will require essays on topics of their choice.  Why?  Because most students have no clue how to ask questions.  Writing papers require that ability to formulate a question and then going after the supporting evidence when answering the question.  Higher education is then about understanding concepts enough to be able to ask questions.  In the format that most of higher education is, students rarely are taught how to ask questions.  And if they never figure this out after four years of university education, then all the access that Google provides will be of zero value.

One final comment from Dyson:

The danger is not that machines are advancing. The danger is that we are losing our intelligence if we rely on computers instead of our own minds. On a fundamental level, we have to ask ourselves: Do we need human intelligence? And what happens if we fail to exercise it?

But then, it is not the students I am worried about: I am disappointed with faculty--not merely at my university--who think that their role is to be that cliched "sage on the stage."  I feel like puking--yes, my favorite phrase!--when I walk by classrooms and see nothing but text-filled PowerPoint slides.  And even that "information" is often incorrect.  Once, I paused outside a classroom where a full professor of criminal justice was lecturing about the US Supreme Court.  It was depressing to see the slide listing the justices because the information was old--no Sotomayor or Alito, but the names of retired justices!  The guy hadn't even bothered to update this basic information.  When a google search would provide the accurate information. 

A bonus for you, dear reader, if you read until here: a while ago, the Atlantic had a fantastic essay about Freeman Dyson's climate change oddities, and in that context also discussed the father/son relationship.