Singing in the Oasis for Peace benefit concert (see previous post) was good. Charles was excited because he got to play bassoon in one song (Distant Land by John Rutter). The overall performance got better with each concert. There were 140, 165, and 280 people in the audience at the 3 concerts and we raised over $14,000. I’m looking forward to participating again next year.
This semester I’m reteaching my freshman seminar about Vonnegut and the influence of science and technology on society. Although my class is smaller this semester (9 students compared to 15 last semester), we have much more lively discussions. Maybe I am more relaxed or maybe it’s a function of the students having been at the University for a little while… maybe it’s just random.
Today in class, we read the short story “EPICAC” from Welcome to the Monkeyhouse. A pair of students did a presentation about robots and artificial intelligence, and then posed the question, “Where are moral/ethical lines when using computers/robots?” I thought this was a fairly routine question and said that there are obvious lines such as using internet browsers on cell phones to cheat on exams and asked for more nuanced situations. Instead of going deeper on this question, we ended up discussing how everyone is cheating to some extent and that the only reason to attend college was to get through in the most efficient manner so that you could get a decent job. All of the students in my class seemed to agree that the college experience is largely not an intellectual journey but a necessity, a “trade school” if you will. I’m no luddite… I’m as addicted to email and the internet as everyone else but I am mortified to hear that this is where technology has brought us. One of the students in my class went on to say that he wouldn’t even be upset if he saw the student next to him cheating on an exam as long as he/she was doing it in a creative way.
Is this really what we’ve been reduced to? Should I just expect students to be here only because they have to in order to get a decent job? Should expect them all to be cheating or tolerating cheating? What will they really have when they’re done? What does this mean for the intellectual future of the human race?
I don’t consider myself an intellectual but I certainly strive to have intellectual experiences. Why don’t these students expect and value this?
I am disturbed but thankful for this discussion. Maybe the freshman seminar is more for me than them.
Charles and I are singing in 3 choir concerts this weekend. Our friend from Macalester, Jennifer Anderson, is the music director at a local church. Each year, she does a huge benefit concert for a chosen cause. Charles sang last year to benefit a Sudanese relief fund. This year he talked me into singing as well to benefit Oasis for Peace. I’m actually not a very good singer (despite my many efforts as a spotlight-stealing youth) but I feel good participating and I enjoy the challenge. Charles even designed the website for the event at www.GlobalHarmonyChorus.org. If you’re in the Twin Cities, you should come hear us sing.
So, in my last post I mentioned that I was going to use blogs for both of my Fall 2006 classes. With the semester over, I figured I’d summarize the results of my experiments. In my freshman seminar, the blog was OK but not great. The students in my class were required to post once every two weeks but the conversation was pretty mechanical and did not achieve my goal of promoting connection between class meetings. In my graduate level course, however, it worked pretty well. Every week, the grad students had to read one article from a current scientific journal and summarize it on the blog. As the semester went on, their summaries advanced to include suggestions for new experiments and constructive criticism of the published experiments. I will definitely use a blog again for this course.
Also, the websites look so nice. The problems sometimes had trouble figuring out how to start a new post (as opposed to just commenting on a post I started). Also, I had to approve every comment before it would show up - this was nice because I could avoid spam but would definitely be a pain with a bigger class.