Category: Teaching

Using Film in the Classroom, Air Crash Investigation: Cleared for Disaster

On By southwerkIn Teaching
English: Figure 3 of the NTSB report on the US...

Image via Wikipedia

This particular episode is very interesting and, in particular, very useful for classroom discussion. We have an apparent case of air traffic controller incompetence leading to a runway collision. But is it as simple as that?

Once the program establishes that the controller made a mistake, it discusses understaffing, poor procedures, difficulty viewing the runway and a tempermental ground radar system that wasn’t working at the time.

This is a perfect film to show when discussing where does personal responsibility begin and end.

I recommend it for that purpose. I would be using it in business law but it is a good film to use when discussing ethics.

James Pilant

Here is an article about the crash. It’s a little technical but I recommend you go to the web site and read the whole thing. My thanks to AirDisaster.com!

AirDisaster.Com: Special Report: USAir Flight 1493

As the Skywest Metro awaited its takeoff clearance, USAir 1493 touched down near the threshold of runway 24L and shortly thereafter slammed into 5569. Both aircraft skidded down the runway, the Metro crushed beneath the 737’s fuselage. The wreckage came to rest on the far side of the taxiway against an empty building. All 12 in the Skywest aircraft were killed as were 21 people in the USAir 737, including the Captain.

AirDisaster.Com: Special Report: USAir Flight 1493

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I Showed the Documentary, Gasland, Today

On By southwerkIn Teaching

Films receive a wide variety of responses in the college classroom. The response to Gasland was excellent. The class paid careful attention, had good questions and comments. I knew of the film but did not intend to use it in class. My Tuesday-Thursday class actually asked to see it. So, I read up on it, and it struck me as useful. I’ve shown it in three classes now with the same positive results in each class.

Josh Fox

This is a Josh Fox film. The first time you see it, you are shocked by his story of unregulated drilling of natural gas known as fracking. But is only the second time, you realize the skill of our documentarian. The film never sags. It always keeps the audience engaged. The film is well paced and its plotline beautifully constructed. I’ll be watching for any of his films in the future. It may well be that his work will grow in skill as time goes by.

It is troubling to consider that for most of us, Josh Fox is our only defense against the practice of fracking. Only a handful of states regulate it, and the response of most of officialdom to complaints is basically to drop dead.

You see, an act of Congress relieved the giant energy companies of the need to comply with federal environmental laws. Federal agencies aren’t even allowed to study what the companies are doing. We only have partial knowledge of the chemicals being used, and the very fact that these companies essentially placed themselves outside the law through a compliant Congress raises suspicions of their motives.

I think until strong regulation is enacted to deal with the fracking problem, I will be using the film in class.

Below is a link to the web address for Josh Fox’s film, Gasland.

Gasland

And here is the link for the trailer.

Gasland

Here is the link to buy it on Amazon.com.

Gasland

I recommend it for classroom use at the college level.

James Pilant

Tapwater that ignites.
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For My Students – Alternative Browsers

On By southwerkIn Teaching

These are alternative browsers to Internet Explorer. Changing to one of these will go a long way toward protecting your computer.

 

http://www.flock.com/

Flock claims to be the fastest browser on the web. I’ve never seen anything that would suggest otherwise. I’ve used it for several years. It is, however, no longer supported.

http://www.opera.com/

Opera is considered one of the easiest to operate.

http://www.seamonkey-project.org/

Seamonkey is full featured.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/upgrade.html

Firefox is the second most popular browser. It has a huge set of add-ons. I’ve got a typing tutor and an Arabic language translator.

http://www.google.com/chrome

Chrome has a bunch of features. It’s overly complicated but a lot of people like it.

http://getsongbird.com/

This is a browser purely for music downloading. It has every kind of feature for playing music.

 

James Pilant

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Some You Tube Video’s You May Find Interesting in the Context of Business Law

On By southwerkIn Teaching

This first selection is a documentary telling the story of how General Motors bought out the public transit systems particularly cable cars and replaced them with bus lines. It’s an older documentary but it’s a good one. You should watch it if only for the scene of the cable cars being put to the torch.

Documentary Film Video General Motors History = Taken for a Ride.flv

This documentary discusses whether faults in the design played a major role in the loss of the ship.

Titanic’s Achilles Heel (2007) History Channel

This one is about an unusual fire in a high rise building in Hong Kong. If you are interested in fire investigation, this one is fascinating.

Blueprint For Disaster – S02E05 – Hong Kong Inferno

Try these three on for size. Remember the rules on tort liability from your business law class and see if you can tell which ones apply.

James Pilant

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ethics (via prof write @ usc)

On By southwerkIn Teaching1 Comment

This is a post in an ongoing class about teaching writing. The ethical problems discussed here are not too far from the problems of teaching business ethics. I know I have more than a few college students reading my posts. I think those students will take particular pleasure in this essay.

How do you teach ethics? If I have any advice to offer, it would be this: never teach ethics as if choices were a matter of point of view – teach ethics as if the choices were a matter of validity. If you teach ethics while mentioning different philosophies, students tend to take away the idea that morality is a matter of opinion.  I recommend ( and do) teach ethics as to which moral system is most appropriate while discussing the moral reasoning behind that ethical code. The idea is that a student will take from the class the idea that different ethical choices are based on human reason.

If morals are a matter of opinion, money ranks as a rationale with God, honor and country. If morals are a matter of validity or a matter of reason, rationales are weighed and considered.

James Pilant

After reading Katz and Ornatowski, and after our discussion in class on Tuesday, I’ve been struggling to figure out what it means to teach ethics—in writing classes in general and in professional writing classes in particular. Flipping through Locker’s textbook, I see the hard-core instrumentalist approach (basically, don’t lie on your resume or CV). “Ethics” doesn’t even appear in the index. I’m still waiting on my copy of Peeples, so I haven’ … Read More

via prof write @ usc

Pa. teacher strikes nerve with ‘lazy whiners’ blog (via Yahoo News)

On By southwerkIn Teaching3 Comments

From Yahoo News –

A high school English teacher in suburban Philadelphia who was suspended for a profanity-laced blog in which she called her young charges “disengaged, lazy whiners” is driving a sensation by daring to ask: Why are today’s students unmotivated — and what’s wrong with calling them out?

As she fights to keep her job at Central Bucks East High School, 30-year-old Natalie Munroe says she had no interest in becoming any sort of educational icon. The blog has been taken down, but its contents can still be found easily online.

Her comments and her suspension by the middle-class school district have clearly touched a nerve, with scores of online commenters applauding her for taking a tough love approach or excoriating her for verbal abuse. Media attention has rained down, and backers have started a Facebook group.

“My students are out of control,” Munroe, who has taught 10th, 11th and 12th grades, wrote in one post. “They are rude, disengaged, lazy whiners. They curse, discuss drugs, talk back, argue for grades, complain about everything, fancy themselves entitled to whatever they desire, and are just generally annoying.”

She should not have been suspended.

She should be immediately fired.

I have read some of her obscenity laden contempt for her students. I am not impressed. These are the immature rants we would expect of the least educated among us.

It is perfectly okay to criticize and severely criticize students for their attitudes and other problems. Her rants are not so much criticism as some form of primal scream therapy.

I teach as well. If a teacher doesn’t have any idea what she was up against, she wasn’t listening in all those teacher training classes.

If she has this level of contempt for her students, she should find a more attractive field.

My students deserve my best efforts and my respect. They live in a difficult world and are about to be sent into a devastating job market. I may not like some of the things they do. I may not approve of some of their beliefs and attitudes. But I can write or talk about it without descending into talk that would be a disgrace for the least of my students.

We have a right to expect more of someone claiming an education.

James Pilant

In Defense of Our Legacy. (via Vox Populi, Vox Nēminis)

On By southwerkIn Teaching

I was delighted to read this posting about the importance of the study of history. Our gallant author here is confronted with a problem I have faced many times: “I’m just here to study business. I’ll never use any of this other stuff.” There are many students who have that belief, the idea that anything not directly related to working is a waste of time.

A human with a job skill can work at a job. A human with an education can serve as a citizen and fully operating human being able to understand the forces surrounding him. Those forces being the historical, the literary, the other arts, and the beliefs that lay beneath our veneer of civilization. Work is important but it is only one factor is a life well lived.

This author writes a good essay. I recommend you visit the blog and see what else is said there.

James Pilant

The busy halls buzzed with activity, and hummed with the pressing weight of so many voices. I stood across from a new friend, a young man I met in one of my classes. “So, why do you dislike history so much?” I asked. My friend grimaced, and made a slightly exasperated sigh. “For the same reason I dislike Calculus so much. I’m just going in to business, I don’t need it. I will never use it in the real world. “That is ridiculous,” I said. “you will … Read More

via Vox Populi, Vox Nēminis

One-Third of Students Don’t Learn Much in College!! (Part 3-Our Society, Business and the Liberal Arts)

On By southwerkIn Teaching4 Comments

Part 3 of my series on American Higher Education. (Part 1 is here.) (Part 2 is here.)

For those of you who are new to these postings, I include the brief recap below.

From CBS Money Watch –

A new study suggests more than one third of parents aren’t necessarily getting a great return on their investment in their kids’ college education. Two college professors tracked more than 2,300 college students at 24 colleges and universities from their freshman year in 2005 through senior year, testing them along the way to gauge their critical and analytical thinking. According to the authors of a new book based on the study, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, 36 percent of college students did not learn much in the way of those cognitive skills.

But at least that was an improvement over the learning curve through sophomore year: In the first two years of school, 45 percent of college students had no significant improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing.

Part 3 –

We live in a time where thinking “from the gut” is popular. Where the President of the United States (President Bush) can brag about his low grades and get laughs rather than looks of disapproval. This is a country where a likely presidential candidate’s favored means of communicating with her followers are twitter postings seldom more than one sentence long. Does this encourage students to believe that there success is based on the skills acquired in college? Or does it clearly indicate to them that success is based on personality and a fast quip?

There is no more obvious place to find the American contempt for education than the field of science. We live in an era where the government has been censoring scientific data and findings from public web sites and official documents. What’s the message here? If you are learned and you say the wrong things, your writings disappear. What message does that sent to young people entering college? Don’t disagree. Don’t think.

If you want to be on the front lines of the culture wars, indicate a belief in global warming or evolution.  One of the most disgusting public spectacles I have to endure is some person telling another “Look at all the global warming.” whenever it gets cold. If there is anything more indicative of sloppy mindless thinking, there it is. By the time, you can feel global warming in the temperate zones, most of human life has perished. If the most plebian mundane mindless joke preempts years of careful research, does that inspire students to rigorous study?

But the business world wants critical thinkers, don’t they?

Don’t be silly. They want people with a “practical” education. That means business school. Business schools have several functions as far as the business world is concerned. The first is an education in the philosophical doctrines friendly to business operations and profit. The second is what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior in the world of financial endeavor. The third is critical thinking into carefully designated zones: markets, government regulations, banking practices etc.

And we’re not talking about a lot of critical thinking. This is critical thinking in specified areas. Businesses do not encourage thinking outside these areas. It is troublesome to them.

Let me give you an example. I teach business ethics. I was given a variety of business ethics text books to examine for possible use in my class. I went through them, tossed them and wrote my own class. Why? The books offered a pathway to ethical thinking carefully designed to limit choices. There was only a very limited discussion of ethical systems. By avoiding this, the textbooks avoided giving the students ethical choices outside of a few limited ones acceptable to the business world. My introduction of Christian and other moral systems as subjects of discussion in the realm of business ethics was almost revolutionary but long needed.

How do you get critical thinking?

We know how. It’s been embedded in Western culture for six hundred years. It is the kind of education that the founding fathers had. It is the kind of education that has inspired and ennobled human development. It is the kind of education that is the basis of the idea that humans are not limited in station to that of their fathers and that kings do not rule based on authority given by God.

That type of education is called the liberal arts.

There are seven liberal arts, the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy and the trivium: grammar, logic and rhetoric.

Over time, these have evolved into the study of a separate subjects, philosophy, literature, art, music, English, etc.

These “impractical” subjects are the basis of learning critical thinking skills and living life as a whole human being capable of fulfilling the duties of citizen.

My son’s school gives students money awards for success in early college classes just as long as the classes are in practical subjects not the liberal arts.

I think that illustration sums up business thinking about education in the United States.

So there you have it. Critical thinking. Society despises it. Businesses don’t want it save in small inoffensive pieces and we are no longer interested in teaching the subjects that develop it.

This society wants uneducated, highly emotional bloviators to dominate television commentary. This society wants science as long as it is producing an amusing new game. Once science says something about the beginnings of humanity or the dangers of our country’s addiction to fossil fuels, the Attorney General of Virginia is talking law suit. Business want smooth operations unhindered by dissent and are willing to finance college success only in areas not inclined toward critical thinking.

And what are many of those commenting on these findings saying, “These students are lazy.”

We live in a time and place of such blatant hypocrisy the we can blame the students for the failures of No Child Left Behind, the way undergraduates are taught in universities and colleges, the business community’s preference for vocational teaching and our society’s disdain for learning.

James Pilant

One-Third of Students Don’t Learn Much in College!! (Part 2-The Colleges and Universities)

On By southwerkIn Teaching6 Comments

Part 2 of my series on American Higher Education. (Part 1 is here.)

For those of you who are new to these postings, I include the brief recap below.

From CBS Money Watch –

A new study suggests more than one third of parents aren’t necessarily getting a great return on their investment in their kids’ college education. Two college professors tracked more than 2,300 college students at 24 colleges and universities from their freshman year in 2005 through senior year, testing them along the way to gauge their critical and analytical thinking. According to the authors of a new book based on the study, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, 36 percent of college students did not learn much in the way of those cognitive skills.

But at least that was an improvement over the learning curve through sophomore year: In the first two years of school, 45 percent of college students had no significant improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing.

Let us continue our search for answers. In part one we discussed why students have little experience in critical thinking. Now we take up the question of the colleges and universities.

A simple questions – How can we expect students to learn critical thinking skills in an environment where teaching undergraduates is often little more than an annoyance?

The contempt that universities have for undergraduates is legendary.

For universities, undergraduate students are unimportant. They are cash cows to be milked until due to lack of advisement or any other concern they flunk out or just get bored with being treated like a semi-useful farm animal. The comedic touch of repeatedly telling these students that they pay only a proportion of their college cost is one I particularly enjoy, that university administrators can say it with a straight face suggests thespian training.

To have a brilliant career in a university setting, a professor must evade teaching if at all possible. The university expects research, publications and grants. The professor gives the students who fall into his area of concern to his grad students, masters degree students who in almost all cases have no training in teaching whatever. There are many fine grad student teachers. I have done it myself. But some grad students are not that good.

I have sat with other professors while we exchanged our stories of worst grad student teachers. The stories usually revolved around those grad students inability to speak English, understand their subject or to act normally. The stories always ended the same way. We discuss what they said, how bad the grades were and how many complaints were made. Then the straight man of the group says, “What happened to the grad student after that teaching fiasco?” The story teller pauses for effect and then says, “He was back teaching the next semester.”

But if a professor should teach, industrial techniques are applied. If you can watch the spectacle of one professor teaching an auditorium of 600 to 1,000 students and then believe for one moment that the university has any concern for the teaching of undergraduates, you have a faith that I do not.  Do I have to bring up the cattle analogy?

Then we have the colleges. Intent on maximizing profit, colleges have embarked on out sourcing teaching away from full time instructors to part timers. This is very similar to the use of grad students and once again there are many, many fine adjunct instructors but the statistics are clear, full time professors do a better job of teaching.  (Confession – I am an adjunct instructor.)  This is another piece of evidence that teaching is not considered to be important.

And then there is online teaching. This kind of teaching is a blessing for those who cannot attend regular classes but there is a powerful temptation to use it instead of regular teaching. Why? No classroom, no facilities use, etc., it saves bundles of money. You almost don’t have to have a college.

What are the standards by which a class is determined to be necessary to be taught online? Obviously if you advertise that as many distance learning colleges do, you should expect online teaching. But where is the line when a class is being taught out of a facility with classrooms and facilities? When does online teaching move from necessity to cash cow? Once again, you have to wonder where the importance of teaching is in the calculations.

Universities insist on removing the best of their faculty from teaching. Colleges substitute part time instructors instead of full time. Online teaching is used not out of necessity but to save money. Everyone of these phenomenon makes student learning more problematic. It makes learning the skills of critical thinking and writing more difficult.

If teaching is not important in universities and is done only as much as necessary in colleges, it is inevitable that our students will not do as well as they might.

Next in Part 3: I will explain why our society is uninterested in critical thinking.

James Pilant

One-Third of Students Don’t Learn Much in College!! Brand New National Crisis!! (Part 1-The Students)

On By southwerkIn Teaching7 Comments

It’s time for another shocking report on higher education.

Students are lazy.

Colleges and universities are failing in their jobs.

That nation is in a serious crisis which we mush absolutely, positively do something about right now.

Tell me, did I hit all the high spots?

Let’s have a look at our newest national educational crisis.

From CBS Money Watch –

A new study suggests more than one third of parents aren’t necessarily getting a great return on their investment in their kids’ college education. Two college professors tracked more than 2,300 college students at 24 colleges and universities from their freshman year in 2005 through senior year, testing them along the way to gauge their critical and analytical thinking. According to the authors of a new book based on the study, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, 36 percent of college students did not learn much in the way of those cognitive skills.

But at least that was an improvement over the learning curve through sophomore year: In the first two years of school, 45 percent of college students had no significant improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing.

Now, let me rattle you.

There isn’t any crisis. Are the results discouraging? Yes, absolutely. But as a college teacher, there is nothing there that is even remotely surprising.

This is how it is supposed to be. There is no accident that these scores are the way they are. This is the results that were intended.

Let me explain.

Let’s begin with the students. They have been trained now for about one decade under an interesting program called No Child Left Behind. This took a complex multifaceted  phenomenon  namely our first twelve years of education and decided we could measure its success or failure based entirely on testing.

These students now entering our colleges and universities are superbly trained beyond any possible expectations … in testing. These guys are test takers par excellence. It’s incredible, amazing. When I am teaching, I can at any point say the word, test and every head in the room comes up. In some students you can see an adrenaline rush as the fight or flight reaction kicks in.

As a nation we can be proud of our test takers but there are a few hiccups here and there.  For one thing, anytime I ask a student their opinion, they become confused. No one has ever asked them that before. Why would I want to know their opinion? It’s not a test question.

Sometimes, I ask them to write five sentences giving me their opinion on a single subject during class. I have had students come to my desk and tell they were unable to think of more than three. These were not dumb students. They could write a hundred sentences if I asked them to recite facts. They could write thousands of sentences, if I sent them to the library to accumulate some facts and on a good day, somebody else’s opinion.

But by God, they can take tests. We made them that way. They have no opinions of their own but they can remember mine just in case it’s on the test. They can’t write or think with understanding but they know when confronted with three multiple choice questions to mark off the obviously wrong one and guess between the other two.

Why should they do well on measures of critical thinking? We never asked about that.

Their school system does not get one thin dime from whether or not they can appreciate a symphony, avoid a business scam, live like patriots or obey the law. They get money for high test scores. So, that’s what we get, students highly skilled at taking tests.

Why should you expect American college students to do well in critical thinking when it has been of little or no importance during all the years of their previous education?

James Pilant

(For Part 2, go here.)