the words decay and fall

[freckles_and_doubt]

Interesting article in the M&G this week, nicked from The Guardian: last week Susan Greenfield gave an address to the House of Lords, questioning the effect of media society on learning patterns and brain activity. (She's a neurobiologist). The paragraph that really caught my attention:

[Greenfield] begins by analysing the process of traditional book-reading, which involves following an author through a series of interconnected steps in a logical fashion. We read other narratives and compare them, and so "build up a conceptual framework that enables us to evaluate further journeys... One might argue that this is the basis of education ... It is the building up of a personalised conceptual framework, where we can relate incoming information to what we know already. We can place an isolated fact in a context that gives it significance." Traditional education, she says, enables us to "turn information into knowledge."

This hits home, because I've spent a lot of the weekend marking second-year essays, and have had my nose forcibly re-rubbed in the perennial and increasing problem that undergrads have no idea how to structure an argument, to relate concepts logically. They don't read, and therefore text, particularly in large, literate quantities, is monstrously alienating to them. Increasingly, year after year, their essays are cobbled-together Frankenstein's monsters of quotes, details and plot descriptions, lurching around in circles with no underlying coherence at all.

We all know how this ends. Torches and pitchforks, and those of us who represent the last bastion of literacy (and a slew of really low essay marks) looking on apprehensively as the mob swarms up the hill.

Comments

[ex-wytchfyn.livejournal.com]

I like your theory. I have the idea that the process can be artificially sped up, though: specifically, my own writing style took a seven-league stride forward about a minute after I marked my first bad essay. Can the info-into-knowledge-machine be reduced to a blueprint and transmitted? Can you observe the perilous droop of your neighbor's roof and resolve to build yours more sturdily?

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

I suppose there's a bit of that, and I'm certainly more alert to really stupid errors than I ever was before I started teaching. Really, though, the rules were inbuilt when I got there, to the point where it's often a total bitch to work out precisely how and why a particular essay is not working, in the sense that its ideas are not properly shaped. Marking experience has mostly taught me to articulate the problems.

[ex-wytchfyn.livejournal.com]

I'm speaking more about that whole 'create an analytic framework and just generally have a plan about what you're writing' thing. Undergrads rarely get it (even the brilliant ones) and its hard to explain to them what they're lacking (especially the brilliant ones).

For me, it was only after I had to struggle through someone else's flawed attempts at essay writing that I began to really understand what markers had been on about. And after that it was so simple. After I started marking H105 tuts in the first year of Hons, my average essay grades shot up 15% and stayed at their new level. Cue lightbulb, 'ding' sound, and all that.

Maybe the experience is a 'social sciences' one? Might one say, madame, that your own rarified and stratospheric discipline was wispier and less prone to such grubby, pedestrian, experiential learning? After all, you do walk the petal-strewn closes of literature while we poor serfs cut sod without. ;-)

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Nicely put, as usual. I don't seem to have ever had a problem with the analytic framework thing, at least after my first year or so at varsity; I seem to think within broad conceptual limits more or less naturally. My flaws lie elsewhere ;>. I have to admit, marking undergrad essays has rubbed my nose forcibly in other intellectual short-cuts to which I am prone, namely sweepingly invoking concepts with which I am only superficially familiar. I'm generally more cunning about concealing the fact than my students are, though.

[mcmayhem.livejournal.com]

So what's the solution?
I'm unsure it's about them not reading, either; when I was an undergrad, I was pushed to include as many citations as possible in my papers. "Do you have evidence? Back up that claim," they said. That's all well and good, because for a cogent argument you want to use extant research as support- but I felt it was going a bit overboard. At the same time, I recognized that my advisor was trying to mold my writing into that accepted by the scientific community. So is it a matter of students not knowing how to write...or simply that they're being told by the system that a "good" paper is essentially a lit review, devoid of original thoughts?

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

That's certainly a problem, in that many students are over-anxious about critical quotes and hence over-use them. But it's really a separate problem, overlaid on the far more profound problem that they really have no idea how to select and arrange the quotes they use in order to make sense, let alone construct an argument. I've noticed this over, ooh, about thirteen years of teaching now: across the years there has been a significant decline not in intelligence or insight, but in the ability to express them.

The article to which I linked follows up on Greenfield's idea of construction by connection by commenting, "The flickering up and flashing away again of multimedia images do not allow those connections, and therefore the context, to build up. Instant yuk or wow factors take over." If there's a single factor I've noticed in student essays over time, it's fragmentation.

Not just in litracha

[starmadeshadow.livejournal.com]

Over the 5 years that I taught physics and maths I also noticed a steady decline in students' ability to apply knowledge in a logical way to construct a coherent solution to a problem. The problem was generally exacerbated when the question was stated in words rather than as a diagram, as students found it difficult to extract the necessary information from sentences and form a clear idea of what was being asked. I came to the conclusion that as well as teaching logical thought progression reading teaches mental discipline and focus, since it is the reader's responsibility to make sense of the story, rather than having the story explained to them. I found that before I could even talk to them about logic I had to teach them to concentrate on one thing for more than a few seconds.

[herne-kzn.livejournal.com]

Curiously, I was having this conversation in Pick & Pay yesterday evening. The meataphor used by Zoey was that their intelligence is like shards of glass, some brilliant individual pieces but with no coherence, so they can be quite impressive until you talk to them for more than 5 minutes.
Am getting stuck into marking 1st year essays at the moment, 45 phil-101s by friday, another 25 by monday, then onto the Myth-201s which will hopefully be less distressing.
The interesting thing was that Zoey was looking at this specifically from her dept (Media Studies, though she's secretly a Lit person) and saying that interdisciplinary fields are particularly problematic from this perspective. Deep disciplinary study is (we think) better at building that framework, but they seem less and less keen to do that.

Youth of today....

Dog in the manger

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

Um, I can't say that this is anything I've noticed. It is certainly fashionable among the greybeards in the maths department to go on about how terrible the students of today are in comparison with yesteryear, but I haven't noticed. I've been teaching first year maths for 8 years now, and they've always been incoherent. They cannot string a mathematical argument together, they wouldn't know a full sentence if it met them in the street, and they don't understand logic. Of course, there are always a few exceptions, and they have been in every class from 1998 till now.

Yes, my current students can be a bit frustrating in their inability to put together mathematical statements and arguments, but they always have been. I am perfectly willing to believe that the trend over the last couple of decades has been away from reading, towards TV and the dreaded cell phones, and therefore their English and writing capabilities have suffered, but it's not discernable in any of the maths courses I have taught.

One thing, though: Every year I use the word "grok" when I talk about limits, so I always ask who's read SiaSL, and few, if any have. I also mention Larry Niven, in connection with integrals because of his (perhaps obscure, and certainly strange) book The Integral Trees. This year, for the first year, no one had read SiaSL, nor any LN. I am confident however, that is is not a trend, just an anomaly, and that readers will return next year. Several students did come to me after that lecture to write down the names of the authors so they could go away and read them. Positive, yes?

The not reading thing

[(Anonymous)]

It is bad in humanities, is is spectacularly bad in commerce. I firmly believe that a major part of the reason that they don't write well is that they don't read for fun. The students who get the best marks in all my classes are always the ones who read, but the majority of them get upset if I suggest they read the newspaper.

But it's not just reading, is seems that my current bunch of undergrads don't really watch movies either. I used to be able to relate ideas discussed in class to movies (gave up on books a long time ago) but not anymore, they haven't seen a tenth of the films I have. They watch TV instead. Their narratives are broken down into hour or half hour chunks with add breaks every ten minutes or so. They never have to concentrate for more than 15mins at a time. No wonder they can't write a bloody essay. Sigh.

Lara

Re: The not reading thing

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

I remain glad I teach maths and not a humanities (or commerce!) subject. Your problem is that once you had students who *could* read and write. I've never had students (barring those occasional cases, but they're statistical outliers) who could string a maths argument together, and, quite frankly, nor could I in 1st year. You've been spoiled, that's all :) I never learned to have any optimism in that line.

Re: The not reading thing

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Actually, despite my whinging, some of them can read and write at least as well as they ever could. I've given a couple of firsts in this batch of essays, one of them a high first, so it can be done. It's the undistinguished middle clumpers who are slipping inexorably down the scale, and the bottom feeders have fallen off it completely. Bright kids who can write are still bright kids who can write :>.

Sentenced to hard time

[(Anonymous)]

My job -- and there are not many like me left -- is to intervene in a comprehensive way in the appalling, sloppy and fractured copy written by professional journalists who have supposedly been trained. But for one or two rare exceptions (both coming from the Rhodes journalism course), they cannot connect information in a logical sequence or write a sentence more complex than the simple declarative. A ghastly method has been evolved to expand these by creating unreadable trains of adjectives from words that never had a clue they were at all adjectival. They call this "active" writing. But it is a quagmire. How are they going to compile a coherent narrative from this jumble? Let's just forget about good writing, that doesn't come into it. And what happens when rewrite/splash subs like me die out?

DavetheF