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'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.