A colleague came up to me a couple of days ago and said something that startled me. It shouldn't have because deep down I knew it. In fact, I had been saying something like it for years. And yet, I had never put the idea into quite the right words where the force of the statement was so dramatic. You know the feeling when you look at something familiar in a new light, like the childhood optical illusion of the beautiful maiden that suddenly looks like an old witch!
We were chatting together before a case study workshop that we run in Buffalo each summer. These workshops draw people from many disciplines and many places around the world. Understandably, I am shamelessly partisan about these affairs. At a moment's notice I will wax enthusiastic about how case teaching connects students to the real world, how cases put learning into context, and although they may not be a panacea to all educational problems, their use in the science classroom will bring joy to students' hearts. Etc. I think you get the picture.
But after a few moment's agreement, my colleague said, "You know, it took me about four years to get over my undergraduate education."
I stopped cold. I asked her to repeat what she had said. She did and went on. "All those lectures. All of that memorization. We never really used any of it except to answer test questions. We learned the same thing over and over each semester and never remembered much between one semester and the next, because we never used it."
"Are you saying that the undergraduate experience was disabling--debilitating?"
"Yes, undergraduate teaching isn't just neutral--it's hurtful."
Of course, she was right. I had had the same experience, but not her insight. It wasn't until graduate school that I really began to think my way through problems that weren't strictly academic paper-and-pencil exercises. I had to do this in order to design experiments and write a dissertation, of course. This ability was a long time coming. And as it began to happen, I assumed that this was just a normal stage of development in my maturity; it would take a long time to be able to think on my own. My colleague seemed to be suggesting that this wasn't the case--that the college process was defective and perhaps even responsible for my ineptness.
What if she was right?
The first year I started teaching I was particularly struck by my inadequacies in taking textbook knowledge and putting it to work in real-life situations. I had finished my Ph.D., done postdoc research, published a bevy of papers (for that is the way to academic nirvana if not world enlightenment), then found myself in my first teaching position. I was lecturing away in a class in animal physiology. I think I was talking about temperature regulation (how appropriate, for my first teaching job was at the University of Alaska). I was ticking off the adaptations for low temperature survival when suddenly an older student, crew cut, tall and in a flannel shirt, interrupted.
"I wonder if that is how the rock rabbits survive the Alaskan winters?"
I asked him what he meant. He proceeded to take all of the esoteric abstract points that I had just enumerated and relate them to his observations in the wild. I was floored. This student had just done something that I had never done--leave the world of the classroom and academic tomes and connect the concepts to his own first-hand experiences. In a flash. This was truly a humbling experience for me.
As the years rolled by, I got better. I also began to wonder how I could encourage students to make these connections sooner than I had. I started sprinkling my lectures with more and more examples and stories. It wasn't enough. They still thought of the material in the class in an isolated way: stuff to be memorized for the teacher, for the exams, and nothing more.
Years passed and I pushed these bits of anxiety into the background as I received high teaching evaluations, awards, and kudos. That was nice. I appreciated it. But as is probably true for most teachers, I didn't really feel successful. There were simply too many "Ds" and "Fs" in my classes for me to feel complacent. Surely, these students couldn't bear all of the blame. In fact, the Swiss developmental psychologist, Piaget, put his finger on it when he said something like this, "Every teacher should have been an animal trainer some time in his career, because when the animal doesn't do the trick, you don't blame the animal!"
Surely, we teachers bear some of the fault.
It was when I came upon case study teaching that the connections between the textbook and the real world really dropped into place. Here it was obvious that you have to put your learning to use in order to analyze the situation, decide what the problem is, figure out what you need to know to solve it, and if it is a dilemma case, decide what the hero should do.
So, even though I had been using case studies for years and extolling their virtues, it had never struck me until this conversation that the undergraduate experience with its lectures and labs where you are told what to do and what to learn was--there is no other way to say it--crippling.
Good Lord, what an awful thought.
Let's look at it this way. Question: What does our current teaching method produce? Answer: A cadre of students who if they remember anything about science it is facts, facts and more facts that can be used to answer questions on "Jeopardy," "The Wheel of Fortune," and "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" We produce people who can't see any reason to understand mitosis or the Second Law of Thermodynamics because they know deep in their hearts they will never need to know this. What good is this information? We clearly fail to convince them. It's not that they try to forget this information, it just never gets into their long-term memory banks. The lecture method just isn't up to the job.
We never seem to teach students how to solve real-world problems, or analyze data, or read a newspaper critically, or be a skeptic when they hear people claim to have paranormal powers, or demand sensible answers of politicians. We have to teach topics like pH and mitosis over and over again because the students just don't get it. It isn't connected to anything.
We faculty just don't get it. Even though we passed through the same mind-numbing process ourselves and have "learned" the same things and forgotten them just as fast, we seem to think that everyone has to pass through the same hazing process we did. After all, we survived. Someday in graduate school or beyond we might finally figure out how to use the "book learning." But perhaps not. It will never dawn on most of us that there must be a better way.
What a pity.
This article originally appeared in the October 2001 (volume XXXI, number 2) issue of the Journal of College Science Teaching (pp.87-88). It is reprinted here with permission from NSTA Publications, Journal of College Science Teaching, 1840 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, VA 22201.
