Link of the Day

One of the signs, for me, of a really great piece of internet writing (article, blog post, whatever) is that I find myself googling to try and dig it up again weeks or months or years after I first read it.  I just did this, not for the first time, with this article.  So I thought I'd share it with you.  It's by Adam Kotsko, who blogs here.  It's called "A Defense of the Lecture", which was not a title I was (prior to reading it) likely to be sympathetic with.  Now I keep rereading it.

Here's a small bit of it:

A lively discussion of a book by a small, engaged group is an ideal to be aspired to. At the same time, it seems to me that such discussions are pretty rare, even among professional academics (note how often people will express surprise that a conference session had good discussion). Such skills need to be cultivated, and of course you can only learn by doing. Yet there are some base-level confidence issues that need to be addressed as well, and unless we want to cultivate students who believe that their every utterance is intrinsically worthwhile due to their precious snowflake-hood, it would probably be good to get them to a point where their confidence is earned, where it’s based in actual knowledge....

I think that the assumption that students have baseline reading skills is behind the thinking of people who want more or less exclusively discussion-based classes — lectures, they suppose, are just trying to transmit information, which the books can do by themselves. If we assume that the students are reading attentively outside of class, we can use the class time to practice our critical reading with each other. I don’t think it’s at all clear, however, that students typically come to college with the skills necessary to make such a model work. Some will, but it’s much safer to assume that your students need help. And I believe that we should interpret students’ desire for more lectures precisely as a cry for help.

Read the rest.