Opinion

Why do we insist on teaching developmental classes as if they carried credit?

It's the most arduous time of the year--academic job market season. If you're a grad student actively seeking academic employment now, you will need to secure those ever-important letters of recommendation in the next few weeks. For some folks, this is a terrifying prospect. It often feels like an imposition, a distraction or a drag on the time of a very busy, very important person.

Let’s say that you have spent almost 20 years of your life learning and reading and writing and now it is about time to finally be on your own, outside the university gates. Your parents are proud of you, your neighbors and friends are envious of your achievements, even though you might have no idea what you want to say in your Ph.D. paper and know even less about how the Ph.D. graduate succeeds at buying his or her clothing and daily food. On various occasions, I am asked what the medical domain is that I am covering as long as I am a doctor. Then, I should answer embarrassed that I am not ‘that kind of doctor’ and that my doctoral knowledge won’t save any life at all.

Does it seem to you that every edtech vendor and educational software provider is pitching some new social tool? Yes, learning is social. We get it. But does your educational platform really need to be social as well?

What do Mary-Kate Olsen (Ashley too), Albert Einstein, Socrates, Abraham Lincoln and I have in common? We're all introverts as classified by the Myers Briggs personality type indicator (MBTI). According to the MBTI, introversion is a psychological preference that focuses on how an individual both expends and recharges their energy. Often mislabeled as being related to "shyness or reclusiveness," introversion doesn't necessarily dictate social behavior. There are shy extroverts and uber-social introverts. The major difference between extroverts and introverts is that extroverts tend to recharge during social situations while introverts do not. Introverts generally recharge by themselves and tend to be seen as being "reflective or reserved."

Although less common than in the past, I sometimes still run into students who are convinced they cannot learn math. Some of these students are women old enough to be my mother, who grew up in the days when it was assumed that math was for men and not for women. I recall one woman sitting in my office almost in tears, telling me that she had never been able to do math. I pointed out that she had six children, including a specials need son, and told her that any woman who could raise six children most definitely knew how to do math. I do know, however, that my own image of myself as a non-athlete is similar to her view of herself as not mathematical, and have to conclude that our perceptions of our skills in such subjects are in many ways dependent on the time in which we grew up. I was lucky enough to have a teacher in second grade that saw that I was good in math, but never lucky enough to have a mentor who encouraged me to be athletic. My daughter is lucky to have people who do.

David Vine sees many lessons from an unlikely source to make sense of the recent controversy at American University.