Northwestern University - Syllabus Yearbook (Evanston, IL)

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Allison Burnett Professor of Biology ones who are paying the money. These are the professors that should be carefully chosen for the task. Other professors that are more specialized or, in gener- al, poor teachers — and there are poor teachers — can still work with advanced students in smaller groups, and teach very specific and technical things. It ' s a big paradox, and we just have to come to the real- ization that a person can be a good teacher, can run a fine course, and still be very good at research. That combina- tion is not paradoxical. There ' s no conflict there, but the part that is a paradox is that a person who does give all his time to teaching, and becomes a superb teacher, is not rewarded. He ' s not promoted. He has to give the production the University wants — a published piece under the person ' s name. That ' s what they look at as pro- ductivitity. I don ' t see the point of having a major at all. Because when you want to go into your specialty in graduate school, you should be able to choose then. I find that the undergraduates ask much more basic questions. It ' s rather easy to teach graduate students because their questions are always very technical and very pinpointed. I don ' t think a person should have to start choosing what he ' s going to be doing the rest of his life in his freshman year. He may find in his junior year that some things become very excit- ing for him, but he can ' t catch up on the hours that he needs in that particular year. 27

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The whole purpose of education is not the acquisition of knowledge. A student should be given a chance to re- examine every value that he ' s had in his life before him. So half of education to me is de-learning rather than learning. To start fresh and start pure and then go through and look at your values, where you came from, what you have been taught and then to re-examine those in terms of some of the great comrades that you can find through literature, art, philosophy and science. Fact is nothing to a student. It ' s like walking through the woods and if a bird makes a noise then the student says, ' What ' s that? ' and you say, ' a hairy-chested back- scratcher, ' and they say ' Oh fine, ' and then keep on walking. That doesn ' t mean anything. It doesn ' t tell them about the bird, or what it ' s doing, or anything else. You have to look at it by not just giving a term — because that ' s just a symbol: it doesn ' t mean anything by itself. It ' s like a boy says ' Why is grass green? ' and you say ' Because there ' s chlorophyll in it; ' that doesn ' t mean anything to him but he gets the word ' chlorophyll ' in his mind, so it has to be explained in different terms. That ' s why I call my course Introduction to Experimental Biol- ogy: because it ' s how people actually solve problems and the difficulties they go through. The question of how much time should be devoted to teaching is to me a very difficult one — look through every department, or at least the departments I ' ve been associated with in universities. You will usually find four or five good teachers. These are the ones that should be aimed at the undergraduate level, because they are the

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Robert Church Professor of Eduction and History One of the reasons I became a teacher is the fact that I like doing historical research. I really enjoy the process of ordering disparate materials, taking a bunch of notecards, old journals, reading through them, and trying to say something that ' s interesting and provocative about them. It ' s a fascinating process that I love to do. Historys always afforded me that opportunity. But I ' ve carried it one step fur- ther in becoming a professor of education because I find that I am much less bound by disciplinary limits on teaching styles: I am much freer to be my own man. I ' m not sure that I can define an ideal teaching model for myself. The man who so influenced me in my junior year would sort of point at you with his eyes and his finger. He ' d ask, What is the answer to that? and you ' d answer or you ' d look stupid. He had classes and discussions worked out so that he always ended where he wanted to be with his conclusions. In a sense he was saying his piece, and it was clearly more stimulating than a lecture. I ' m really caught at the moment with the non-directive method which philosophically I don ' t believe in — I ' m not a Carl Rogers fan. I like to think of myself as tough-minded and yet I find that the non-directive approach proves to work best in awakening students to the possibility of what could be done with the material before them and how they can relate what they ' re doing in history to what they ' re doing in the real world. I haven ' t found the proper balance. I can really see no way of using a large lecture course except for obtaining factural information and for interpretation. In a sense, a lecture is a book that hasn ' t been written yet, and presumably lectures ought to be better than books — more advanced. But I don ' t see any real way to magically engage two hundred students in a give and take, or any kind of effective branching process where they can advance at their own pace, or think about things the way they want to. In a large lecture class, there ' s no way to get somebody ' s reac- tions to what you ' re saying. Teaching time does not need to dwell on the conveyance of information. This is where I think television, video tapes, or something like that could be used. It really doesn ' t make sense to take the time to give the same set of lectures every year. That time could be spent in taping the notes and maybe revising the tape every year to keep up with new information. The extra time could be spent in small groups. I ' m very much attracted to the idea of college as a time of opting out of pressures and of getting ahead in the world. I see college as a time to stretch your mind and try on a series of intellectual styles and personal styles without getting hurt — without losing the chance of promotion to this or that career. You get the chance to try different ways of thought and of experiencing either directly or through books different styles. In a sense I see college as just as important in giving you a chance to learn