It is time we had an interdisciplinary world. It is time we created a society where all levels of thinking and society can work together – so the individual psychologies can live together in a more
integrated society. Interdisciplinary thinking tries to promote environmentalism, capitalism, religion, heroic
individualism, and families simultaneously. Beauty, truth, and ethics are united.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Kelly Jolley
Kelly Jolley a philosophy professor at Auburn, espouses the very teaching philosophy I espouse. Good for him for 1) getting a job at all with that teaching philosophy, and 2) sticking ti it when everyone was telling him to tone it down.
What a great article. It's nice to see a scholar who actually cares about teaching yet puts his discipline first. I've seen one unfortunate case in which a discipline-oriented prof was too inflexible and hard on students, driving many of them away from an interesting subject, but I need both hands to count the number of times I've seen a more"student centered" prof present a half-assed syllabus, show up for class unprepared, and allow irrelevant, frivolous and tangential discussions to run on indefinitely because s/he was either too "sensitive" to hurt students' feelings or too lazy to run a tighter ship.
Maybe if more people in the arts and humanities thought and taught like Mr. Jolley, the public would stop regarding their collective disciplines merely as leisure for the idle children of a moneyed elite, or, at best, as a minor stopping point on the way to law school.
NO kidding. I tried to teach my classes this way, and I got "It's not that we want you to dumb down your course, but . . . " and "The best and brightest will just have to be bored." In the meantime the best and brightest all thought I was the best things since sliced bread, as evidenced here.
2 comments:
What a great article. It's nice to see a scholar who actually cares about teaching yet puts his discipline first. I've seen one unfortunate case in which a discipline-oriented prof was too inflexible and hard on students, driving many of them away from an interesting subject, but I need both hands to count the number of times I've seen a more"student centered" prof present a half-assed syllabus, show up for class unprepared, and allow irrelevant, frivolous and tangential discussions to run on indefinitely because s/he was either too "sensitive" to hurt students' feelings or too lazy to run a tighter ship.
Maybe if more people in the arts and humanities thought and taught like Mr. Jolley, the public would stop regarding their collective disciplines merely as leisure for the idle children of a moneyed elite, or, at best, as a minor stopping point on the way to law school.
NO kidding. I tried to teach my classes this way, and I got "It's not that we want you to dumb down your course, but . . . " and "The best and brightest will just have to be bored." In the meantime the best and brightest all thought I was the best things since sliced bread, as evidenced here.
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