I Teach Students How To Be Human!

Jejak PandaHello.. Selamat Datang Kembali Di Blog Kesayangan Anda
bandar judi cemeWe had a department meeting today, and one of the topics of discussion was the new rules put in place regarding travel. The details of these new rules aren’t important, but in discussing them our conversation touched upon how much more corporate the university has become. I suppose this is true everywhere. There’s so much paperwork to complete on every discrete aspect of our profession that we run the risk of losing sight of our obligations to teach students and produce research, scholarship, and art. Or maybe we keep those obligations in sight but we find our ability to meet them compromised by layers of bureaucracy and oversight.

The evening before, I was at Bulkeley High School. I have been invited to be a Higher Education Partner on the Partnerships and Co-curricular Programming Subcommittee for the new Hartford Humanities Studies School (this is not the exact name, as they have not yet officially named the school), part of the reorganization process for Hartford Public Schools. Sounds boring at face value, but I found our discussion really interesting. The idea is to have a school with a focus on the Humanities, with courses on Art and Culture, Foreign Language, History and Social Studies, and Literature and Language Arts. These categories follow those established by EDSITEment, which is an online resource for teachers, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The other committee members and I have the privilege of helping to name the school and shape the mission statement, including goals and objectives, and thus to influence curriculum design. I’m pretty excited about the venture and glad to have the opportunity to work with so many other professors, teachers from the school, community members, student representatives, people from the Urban League, and folks from private foundations like the Mark Twain House and Museum, the Hill-Stead Museum, and the Connecticut Historical Society.

I did find, however, that as we worked on the mission statement, some people began to focus on things like student discipline, which consumed a fair amount of discussion. Now I know student discipline is important, and if we were to frame it in terms of citizenship it might find a place in the document, but on the whole I found myself thinking that discipline and several other worthwhile subjects were just getting too far afield. Suddenly our discussion had less to do with a humanities education as it did with broader issues of running a school. Suddenly we found ourselves talking about bureaucratic procedures and ways to police the students. A few of us had to politely redirect the conversation onto the subject of what we wanted the students to study and learn in a humanities institute that would differ from a traditional high school or from one of the other new Academies. (At the high school level alone there are academies dedicated to Teacher Preparation, Culinary Arts, Insurance and Finance, Engineering and Green Technology, Law and Government, Nursing, Journalism and Media). And I thought to myself, how easily we all fall into this trap. It’s not that discipline policies are unimportant, but when we focus on those or make other bureaucratic issues our primary focus, we lose sight of larger issues.

I may have written about this before because I like the story so much, but I had a funny experience with a colleague from my department a couple years ago when we were invited to a luncheon hosted by two graduate students from the School of Education. The students were conducting some sort of study in which they were trying to gather data on higher education perceptions of secondary education. Basically, they wanted to know what we thought students lacked when they arrived at UConn so the School of Education would be better able to prepare its students to prepare their eventual high school students for college. Once again, a perfectly worthwhile aim, but the discussion began to focus more on assessment, standards, goals and objectives and the like, and less on the students and the content of their classes. Coincidentally, the other English faculty member at this luncheon is the only other professor besides me in our department of 68 (yes, 68, and that doesn’t include adjuncts or grad students) with significant secondary teaching experience. I think that’s relevant here. Anyway, I could see him getting increasingly frustrated by the direction of the discussion, and finally he could take it no more. He blurted out, “None of this is relevant! I teach English. English is a humanities field, and they call it the humanities for a reason. I teach students how to be human!”

So that was more or less what I wrote on my first line of my draft of a mission statement for this new school: “The mission of the humanities studies school is to teach students how to be human.” I liked that. I doubt if it will make it into the simpulan draft, however. It’s too idealistic, or more likely it is too difficult to measure a student’s humanity with any sort of standardized assessment. Oh well.

Some of you may wonder why I did not write this week about the murder that took place on campus this past Saturday. I certainly thought about doing so. I mean, how can you ignore something like that? But I really didn’t know what to say about something so tragic. The following day I walked right by the site with my six-year-old son after seeing Harold and the Purple Crayon at Jorgensen, on our way to the Co-op to buy a book with a gift card from his birthday. Then I thought of something E. B. White once said when he was criticized during World War II for not writing often enough about the war. I am paraphrasing from memory here, but White said something to the effect of, “I write about life as it should be so that when war ends people will remember how life is supposed to be lived.”