It is in a cruel situation I'm put most nights. Let me start off saying that I find it so maddening that my most interesting thoughts come to me as I drift off to sleep. They rise to the surface and pass before my closed eyes. Suddenly, it becomes a struggle of mind versus body. What a cruel state of affairs. Should I continue to lie on the bed, letting myself slip deeper into unconsciousness, or should I rouse myself and write down what seems like a gem? Most often, I choose the former. How sad. How cruel, and how sad.
Anyway, I am fortunate enough to remember some semblance of my last waking thought from yesterday night. I was trying to decide what to write for this week's post. "Effectiveness. Eliminating major requirements. Effectiveness. Eliminating major requirements..." The two thoughts bounced back and forth in some weird courtship dance until (finally!) mutual consent, conception, birth of an idea. So here it is, what you've all been waiting for: my first ever post in November.
Drucker discusses effectiveness in chapters 13-15 of The Complete Drucker. The individual must be effective, and he or she may accomplish this through contribution and knowing his or her strengths and weaknesses. An individual is NOT effective if he or she does NOTHING. You can have the best ideas, but if you fail to act, you fail to be effective. You can analyze the right problems, know the right choices, but if you do not provide or contribute toward a solution you are not very valuable at all.
Now, classes in our majors and minors are supposed to help us figure out more of what we need to know to be effective in our careers. These classes, I propose, are effective if they accomplish this. Then these classes are not effective if they fail to contribute to our eduction as engineers, teachers, writers, accountants, etc. Classes have strengths and weaknesses. They cover certain topics and neglect others so that, I think, we become more effective ourselves. All this is to say that I think I can, instead of looking at the individual and effectiveness, look at the major or minor course requirement and its effectiveness. And that's exactly what I plan to do, right here, right now.
The mathematics major is very effective. The beginning classes, like calculus and basic proof-writing, are absolutely necessary, and students are given plenty of choice among the more advanced courses, which I feel are challenging and worthwhile. The courses build upon one another. One can see the progression from one course to the next and connections among the courses. I think someone who is serious about math and has the desire to major in it at the U of I will emerge ready to effective in whatever field of mathematics he or she chooses to pursue. That is why I am not giving the math major much attention in this post; it is a well constructed, effective major.
Get ready to rumble, Mathematics Secondary Teaching concentration!
There are so many courses in the secondary education minor that need either serious work or serious scrapping. The core courses, a four-course curriculum and instruction sequence in mathematics (CI 401-404), are wonderful, and I have learned a great deal from them, but many of the others need serious help. The main problems with these other courses is that they are neither challenging nor convincing.
Take for example the course EOL 440, aka Educational Organization and Leadership 440: Professional Issues for Teachers. This is a one credit hour course, which is the first sign that it is not very important. One hour a week? It makes it seem right away like I won't be investing much in this material. The professor reads through PowerPoint slides having to do with all the many ways a teacher interacts with the law. The main thing I remember from this class is that the instructor at one time was going to become a priest. He also at one time was a superintendent. (I found out this semester from another professor that he is no longer a superintendent because of, in short, his not following some reporting procedures as he should have.) Nothing else stuck with me.
Nothing else stuck probably because the class was set up in a way that you could get an 'A' without any effort or interest whatsoever. Our homework consisted of some "quick writes" in class and journal entries outside of class. These required no reading. Tests were entirely multiple choice (multiple guess, as my high school Physics teacher liked to call them), and some questions were repeated multiple times within the same test! If you create a class where students do not have to do any studying at all, you've created an ineffective class. I "glided" through EOL 440. I'm not proud that I didn't have to do anything, but I am somewhat impressed that the University is able to create these classes that end up just being a completion checkmark. "Good job, Joe! You sat in lecture 15 times and made it to the final! You have completed your professional issues requirement." This course, and others like it, are not effective because they contribute virtually nothing to our education. EOL 440 never convinced me that I should invest my time into it. I didn't buy into it.
Existence doesn't assert meaningfulness. In chapter 14 of Drucker, he criticizes managers who justify their work by saying "I have [some number] of people working under me." Big deal! If you don't contribute to the greater good, you aren't very important. This goes for classes. Just because a class exists doesn't mean it says anything. I think that it's probably very important that teachers learn about professional issues, but that's just a feeling I get. EOL 440 didn't convince me of this. The professor, classroom, and journal entries were a clever attempt to make it seem worthwhile, but it didn't work.
I could analyze the class' strengths and weaknesses to attempt to make it effective, but that would take a while, and that's really not going to get us anywhere. The University, the College of Education, whoever is in charge of developing the sequence of courses that education majors must take needs to look over the curriculum again. Why is a class where no thought is required, well, required? Why is CI 473, Literacy in Mathematics, taught by someone who knows plenty about literacy but nothing about mathematics? Why are my two special education classes crammed into fifteen 3-hour sessions in one semester?
Some classes, like CI 401-404, are effective. They contribute to my education. The choices of what should be covered in those classes have been made well. If only the other classes were as effective, maybe more students like me would buy into them. As it stands, we leave them on the shelves.
3 comments:
I know none of the specific courses you mentioned so can't comment at all about the reputation of those courses. But as a general matter it would be interesting to learn whether your observations are shared by other students taking those courses and likewise whether they are shared by the offering departments. In other words, is the issue primarily a lack of awareness or a lack of diligence in pursuit of excellence? The remedies would be quite different depending on which is the better explanation.
The one or two credit course issue is its own matter. I know a little bit about this from observing the developments with BUS 101. It is very hard to add a new course to the curriculum without subtracting an old course and doing the latter is a political football. So you look for a compromise and that is what you get. That, in itself, doesn't doom the offering unit in my eyes.
Hey Joe,
In your first paragraph noting Drucker, you actually reminded me of how I thought about Gawande.
"Drucker discusses effectiveness in chapters 13-15 of The Complete Drucker. The individual must be effective, and he or she may accomplish this through contribution and knowing his or her strengths and weaknesses. An individual is NOT effective if he or she does NOTHING. You can have the best ideas, but if you fail to act, you fail to be effective. You can analyze the right problems, know the right choices, but if you do not provide or contribute toward a solution you are not very valuable at all."
Gawande noted persistence and diligence is the first step in any major change - would you say this idea can relate to effectiveness? I am a little confused on how you got this idea from Drucker. No worries though, I like Gawande much better. ;)
-Alessandra
Prof Arvan: I really don't know if the department is just unaware of how awful EOL 440 is. It very well could be if students don't care enough about its lack of meaningful content to say something on ICES forms. Maybe we're just content to have an easy hour and go home.
Alessandra: I got the idea from chapters 13 and 14. Drucker mentions how we need to choose the right things to do to be effective, and then he talks about how we need to contribute to be effective. One must be persistent and diligent to get anything done. Change isn't usually going to occur right away. I think we can relate both Gawande and Drucker, and probably the other texts to effectiveness. I saw this post connecting more with Drucker, maybe because it's our most recent reading.
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