Michael Sylvester wrote:
> On Fri, 25 Jun 1999, Diana Kyle wrote:
>
> > ...... My concern is that his ideas are transmitted to students.
>
> Why the concern?
> One aspect of critical thinking skills is to consider alternative
> explanations.
(please take this constructively...)
But equally important to critical thinking is choosing appropriate
("fruitful", "reasonable", etc.) alternatives to consider. Perhaps it
doesn't look this way from your point of view, but from the other side (as a
TIPS subscriber), it looks as though you simply post whatever pops into your
head. There's an obvious difference between alternative explanations such as
"perhaps parental influence on adult personality is bound to the home
context" (Judith Rich-Harris' very fruitful "alternative explanation") and
"perhaps my student moved twice this semester because he is in touch with
the collective unconscious of his Arabic nomadic heritage" (one of your
"alternative explanations").
Now, a lot of unreasonable notions pop into my head as well (you'd be
frightened if you could see 'em...). I'm well aware that they don't
necessarily SEEM unreasonable from the first moment they occur to me. But I
try to think through my notions for a while before making them public - I
don't run to the keyboard and send them to a mailing list (I used to be
worse with this - I think I've learned quite a bit over the years).
I do think that TIPS is a good place to put out ideas before presenting
them to students. And I personally am not bothered at all by your posts -
except inasmuch as I'm concerned that you're NOT using TIPS as a way to
filter out unreasonable ideas, but simply repeating those ideas in class as
well.
That's not teaching critical thinking - it's explicitly teaching students
NOT to think critically.
I think that's why a lot of us are concerned about your posts - you seem to
be trying to do exactly the opposite of what we're trying to do in the
classroom. I want students to evaluate beliefs and explanations. You seem to
simply want alternative explanations to occur to students. It doesn't take
too much time on the internet or listening to talk radio to see that we have
far too much of that kind of thinking already.
> My discussions always include comparing and contrasting and I encourage
> students to process info at a deeper level than necessary.
Can you step back and look at what you post here, and see why some of us
find that very hard to believe (the "process info at a deeper level" part)?
Whether fairly or not, our guess at what you do in the classroom is going to
be based entirely on what you do on the mailing list. If you were to start
looking beyond the surface at the issues on the list, and showing some deep
processing of your own here, it'd be a lot easier to believe that you were
encouraging students to do so as well.
Paul ("I swore I wasn't going to get involved..") Smith
Alverno College
Milwaukee
