This is the first week of the new academic semester for me, and I'm just teaching at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. The two classes that I have, both of which are very focused on practical philosophy, taking philosophical ideas and applying them within the scope of one's life, both of them are online courses. classes, which is kind of nice.
I do like being in the classroom and engaging with students that way. But I think that online education, if it's done well, can be just as effective as face to face. And I've been doing it now for a while. This will be my 13th year teaching online. So you get pretty good at it after a while.
In the first week of class in the contemporary educational setting in American academia, what you end up getting - and this is part of what I'm going to be talking about today, and trying to take a fairly non-complaining, non-criticizing, positive attitude towards, but also one that you might say holds the line where it has to - is what we can call student accommodations.
Now, if you're not familiar with that, the general idea is that different students are better or worse equipped for studying at the college level. And a good bit of this may, in fact, stem from various disadvantages that they'vehad or learning disabilities or psychological problems that they're struggling with.
And I think it's actually a good thing that we try as best as we can these days to understand students' situations and not to just say, “well, sink or swim, kid”, but try to make things more fair in certain ways, even out the field, give certain people the compensations and advantages that they need in order to do well, that we support them, that we make them feel welcome in the class.
But it can also go a bit too far, and that's what I'm going to talk about today. So what ends up happening, and it's kind of done in a heavy handed cookie-cutter way, is whatever school I'm teaching at, there will be some sort of office of student support. It'll be called a million different things at different places. But their function is to take students who may be struggling and figure out what they need help with what sort of accommodations might be useful for them so that they can do well in classes, and then to send out what are called accommodation letters.
And accommodation letters will say, this person has a verified issue or problem or challenge, and here are the various accommodations that are needed in order for them to have a chance at succeeding in their classes.
And it's interesting, as a side note, when you read through all these different accommodations that are being expected. Sometimes there are things like the student needs instructions for assignments to be given to them in written form, or they need to be allowed to leave the classroom if they're suffering from anxiety or perhaps some physical health issue.
Or they need, in some cases, for example, I had a blind student, they need all of the video things to be given proper transcripts so that they can use those to help them out. There's lots and lots of different things, but a lot of them, you read it and you're like, well, who isn't doing this in their classes?
I mean, do you actually have assignments that you're giving to your students and you're not writing down somewhere in the course website what the requirements for the assignments are? I mean, that's just common sense good practices, and it makes life a lot easier for you as an instructor. Same thing with using grading rubrics or... matters along those lines.
And if a student wants to leave the classroom, are you really going to say, where's your hall pass or something like that? This isn't elementary or high school. This is college. So it makes you wonder what is actually going on with a lot of the fellow instructors that they need to be told this.
The students are also generally told that, and so they email me, they need to try to arrange a meeting with me to discuss their accommodations and how they are going to be implemented into the class and how they can succeed. And when I get that email, I almost always write them back and I say, we can have a meeting if you want to, but it's basically going to be me ticking down the list of the accommodations for the class and saying, I've already set up my class in such a way to accommodate this.
So, for example, a student may need extensions on their assignments, which means that they get extra time to complete them. And I'll say, I don't give extensions. You know why? Because I already have a super generous late work policy. I take work from students all the way to the end of the semester, and I won't even take points off if you have some reasonable excuse for why you're turning in work late. I just want you to get the work done.
And so in general, almost every accommodation that somebody needs, I've already met it in the way that my classes are designed and conducted. There are some, however, that really can't work, at least not for a philosophy class, and I suspect also for a lot of other classes in the humanities.
So I had two students recently who are saying that they have a difficult time with reading texts. And I think, you know, if you know anything about philosophy, immediately your antenna are going to go up and say, well, wait a second. That's what you do in studying philosophy.
You can't really learn about Plato without reading Plato's dialogues. And it's not something that you can replace by watching videos or listening to podcasts or reading Sparknotes summaries or any of those sorts of things. At some point, you actually are going to have to read the text and the text aren't going to get any easier than they already are.
I mean, we can try to find translations that are more contemporary English. We can break the text into chunks. But if you're going to read Plato's Apology, you really do need to read and probably reread the whole thing. There's no way around this
So I had two students who emailed me about their accommodations, and both of them were saying listen I've got a learning disability. I have a difficult time reading these sorts of texts one of them was actually asking for the text not to be large blocks of text but rather to be put in bullet points.
And when I get requests like this, I do push back against it and say, listen, the class has been set up in such a way as to support your learning in a lot of different manners. You know, there are lecture videos and podcasts and lesson pages and links to outside resources and handouts on the materials. But you cannot not read the class text. You must read the text. All of these resources are there to help you do that.
And so, you know, I don't throw students into the deep end and just say, well, hope you swim. I give them all sorts of resources, but I'm also telling them there is a line here that we can't go past. You cannot substitute these resources for actually engaging with the text, and you'd be shortchanging yourself to do that as a human being.
And I suspect that when it comes down to it, all of these students are really capable of reading the text. It's less a matter of an on-off switch of capacity or incapacity, and it's more like a dimmer switch. It may be more difficult for them, but Plato is difficult for everybody. We all struggle with reading him, or Nietzsche, or Mary Wollstonecraft, or Simone de Beauvoir. That's the nature of intellectual writing done by people who really have a lot on the ball and are worth studying.
And so I pushed back and with both of these students and said, listen, you're being supported, but there is no way that I am going to take these texts and put them into bullet point form for you. And even if I did, you wouldn't be reading the text.
Now, there is a student support services.(And I may be getting the name wrong because all of these various offices are called by different things in different schools.) And if they want to take the text from the class, this is actually what I wrote the student who is asking for this. If they want to take those texts and put them into bullet point form, well, more power to them. They can certainly do that work. I don't have the time to do that. And I think it would be bad pedagogy to, in fact, just substitute that for really reading an original text.
Plus, there's already resources out there, I think, doing that sort of thing. Back in n my day, when I was a student, we obviously didn't have a very well-developed internet, but what we did have were these books that you could buy at bookstores anywhere called Cliff Notes. And when I was in middle school and high school, and even in college, a lot of my fellow students would do that. Instead of actually reading a play by Shakespeare, they'd get the Cliff Notes. And the Cliff Notes would have all of these nice broken down sections, essentially bullet pointing things for them.
Now we have Spark notes and all sorts of other places that you can go online if that's the sort of thing that you're looking for. But of course, if you do that, you're not really getting much of an education. It would be as if you decided just to read Wikipedia articles about Aristotle rather than actually reading Aristotle. Or instead of taking the chance that it might be difficult for you to read Seneca and Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and Musonius Rufus and other Stoic authors, you decided to read Stoicism for Dummies or some sort of substitute like that.
You certainly can do that. And it's better than not doing anything. And some learning will take place, but it's below the threshold of what it is that we're trying to promote and produce in a real philosophy class.
So, you know, I don't want to sound like a curmudgeon here who's saying, oh, these kids these days are so lazy or any nonsense like that, because I don't believe that. I think that there are a lot of students in every generation who are kind of lazy and want to cut corners. And there's a lot of them who are dedicated and motivated and really interested. And there's quite a few in between. And I don't think that it changes from generation to generation.
I do my best to provide as much possible support for the students in a variety of different modalities, let's say, video, podcast, writing, meeting with them, all these sorts of things. I do as much as I can of that because I want them to succeed.
But I also want them to succeed at what it is that we're trying to do in the class, which is to read and think about and discuss and apply and actual primary texts of philosophical literature so those are my reflections on this process i thought i would give you a little bit of insight into what contemporary academia looks like again. I'm not saying that this is something radically new and these kids these days or anything like that
But I do think that there can be kind of a culture which is fostered by these various essentially educational bureaucrats who want to understandably make things easier for the students so that they can learn things.
But in the process, they're going too far and demanding that things be, and I'll just use the word, dumbed down, watered down, made far easier than they should be. And it's not about whether it's easy or hard. It's really about whether you're getting the real thing that you're paying for, which is a genuine education, reading primary texts and being able to get something out of that experience.
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