March 25, 2021 4:18 PM

Teaching Yourself the Material

A common complaint from students is that the professor makes them teach themselves then material.

From In Defense of Teaching Yourself the Material:

Higher education institutions must orient themselves toward teaching students how to teach themselves, or risk becoming irrelevant. I'll add to the above that self-teaching (and self-regulation) are also valuable job skills. During my time at Steelcase, I learned that what the company wanted was not so much a recent college graduate with straight A's, but someone who could learn quickly and get up to speed without having to pull someone else off their job to teach them. So self-teaching is not only the ultimate goal of higher education and the main instantiation of lifelong learning, it's also what gives graduates a competitive advantage on the job market and sets them up not to be stuck in a loop for their careers. I want my students to be able to say truthfully in an interview, when asked why they should be hired: I know how to learn things, and learn fast, without a lot of hand-holding. That is music to the employer's ears. The word will get out about which colleges equip students well in this area. Similarly for those that don't.

Talbert has more to say about the value of students' being able to teach themselves. One of our jobs as instructors is to provide the scaffolding that students need to learn how to do this effectively in our discipline, and then slowing dismantle the scaffold and let students take over.


Posted by Eugene Wallingford | Permalink | Categories: Teaching and Learning

March 04, 2021 2:34 PM

I Didn't See The Checkered Flag

A couple of months ago, I missed a major anniversary and almost didn't notice. Not so today, on an even more important personal landmark.

Ten years ago today, I ran for the last time.

According to my running log, it was an ordinary March morning, cold, damp, but no ice on the ground. I ran one of my favorite routes, and 8.25-mile loop I had been running for fifteen years. It was the first route longer than 5.5 miles I ever designed and ran, beginning an ending at the first house we owned in town. It passed only a few hundred feet from the house we moved to in 2008, so I adapted it and kept running. It consisted of small neighborhood streets, some urban trail, and a 2/3-mile passage through a wooded area near our new house. I ran this route on lots of Wednesdays in marathon training and lots of Fridays in the off-season when I was running purely for fun. March 4, 2011, was such a day.

There was nothing remarkable about my run that day. I had been coming down with a cold, so my time was unremarkable, too. I recorded my time when I got home and figured I'd run twelve miles on Sunday, as I usually did at this time of year.

Unfortunately, the cold turned worse, and suddenly I was as sick as I had been in a long time. I can't remember if I ever went to the doctor, but this one knocked me down hard for a week and a half. Just as I was ready to start running again, I felt a twinge in my right knee heading out for a walk with my wife. I became a runner, interrupted. I didn't know at the time, but I would not be running again.

Running had become a big part of my life over the previous 10 or 15 years, and it was a bit of a shock not to be able to enjoy the highs and lows of miles on the road. But we humans are resilient creatures, and I eventually adjusted to the new normal. I occasionally still dream about running, which is, to be honest, glorious. But mostly I get by walking with my wife, riding my bike, and trying to stay fit with other kinds of workout. Nothing feels like running, though, and nothing has ever made me as fit. As much as I like to bike and walk, I have never thought of myself as a walker or a cyclist. Maybe one day I will.

I think, though, that I will always think of myself as a runner. However, my right knee no longer agrees with me, and I am rational enough to weigh benefits and costs and make the right choice. So I don't run.

Ten years on, that still feels a little odd. As with so many things in life, no one waved a checkered flag at the end of my last run. I didn't know it was my last run until six weeks later, so I ended up grieving a loss that had, in a way, already happened.

I realize that, in the grand scheme of things, this is a minor loss. I've been fortunate my entire life, and if not running is the worst thing that ever happens to me, I will have lived an insanely fortunate life. Still I miss it and probably always will.


Posted by Eugene Wallingford | Permalink | Categories: Personal, Running