Marta's Mathoms

This is so damn true, it physically hurts. A bit sad that this is my last semester grading student papers, but that doesn't mean I won't be won't be happy to see this set done.

( Read more... )

http://mlajobs.tumblr.com/

Some of my favorites:

"University of Virginia seeks Professor of English with specialty in “educational” technology for setting up MOOCs. Position will be responsible for attracting national attention with bombastic, unproven claims about the future of education; ideal candidate will be heavily read in David Brooks. Teaching load is ∞."

"The City College of New York seeks Assistant Prof to teach whatever is the current fad and then to go quietly when enrollment shifts. Interests should include all the classic literature as well as a firm grounding in current scholarly trends, combined with the flexibility to anticipate the whims of the administration."

"The Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison seeks an energetic and visionary scholar of Victorian poetry. Tenure evaluations have recently been sped up thanks to our ability to subpoena your email and phone conversations. Promotion decisions have also been made swifter through the elimination of union agitators. The University of Wisconsin-Madison is an Equal Opportunity Employer."

I'm honestly not sure how funny these are to people outside academia, but they made me chuckle!  

I stumbled across an interesting quote today:

The purpose of education is not to make men and women into doctors, lawyers and engineers; the purpose of education is to make doctors, lawyers and engineers into men and women.

--- W.E.B. DuBois

I'm curious whether people agree with this quote. Why or why not?

It's also probably worth asking what you think counts as education. Are there things you'd get out of taking my freshman philosophy course you wouldn't get by reading Plato and Aristotle on your own? (The cost of the books is truly dwarfed by tuition even at a state school.) What does this have to do with what we mean by education? Is the instructor crucial? Working alongside fellow students? The discussion and exercises, the feedback, the evaluation - what is it that makes a certain set of experiences an education?

Yesterday Missouri approved a state constitutional amendment as part of their primary election. News commentators and bloggers have been called the Right to Pray amendment. Here's the text Missourians actually saw on the ballot:

Shall the Missouri Constitution be amended to ensure:

1. That the right of Missouri citizens to express their religious beliefs shall not be infringed;
2. That school children have the right to pray and acknowledge God voluntarily in their schools; and
3. That all public schools shall display the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution.

Put that way, it basically looks like Missouri is re-affirming the U.S. Constitution's protections for religious (or areligious) freedom. A lot of people opposing it point to the redundancy, the cost of defending it in court - some even called it a jobs bill for lawyers. If I was voting in Missouri's primaries for the first time, I'd have voted against it because I think it implies religious people's liberties are under attack in Missouri, and because in a state as overwhelmingly Christian as Missouri is (around 80%, last I heard), I'd be nervous about ostracizing minorities. Particularly in the wake of a hate crime against a minority religion's house of worship in nearby Madison, WI, just a few days ago.

But even with that, the ballot text strikes me as something that would be very hard to vote against. You might as well add on number four, forbidding the torture of small kittens just for the heck of it.

The actual amendment text isn't nearly as vanilla. The usual warnings that I'm not a lawyer apply, of course, but here's how I read it. The usual (federal) constitutional prohibition against establishing one religion is given "to secure a citizen's right to acknowledge Almighty God according to the dictates of his or her own conscience," which definitely shows a preference to theism and I argue to Christianity (or at least Judaism + Christianity) over other religions that name God differently. There's a whole long list of similar statements; you have an idea most Americans familiar with, but they're twisted just enough that their original meaning seems warped.

Others more familiar with legal principles in general and this law in particular can analyze all of that. But it also deals with religious rights in a public school setting. Here's the whole section of the law that deals with education:

Shall the Missouri Constitution be amended to ensure: [...] that students may express their beliefs about religion in written and oral assignments free from discrimination based on the religious content of their work; that no student shall be compelled to perform or participate in academic assignments or educational presentations that violate his or her religious beliefs; that the state shall ensure public school students their rights to free exercise of religious expression without interference, as long as such prayer or other expression is private and voluntary, whether individually or corporately, and in a manner that is not disruptive and as long as such prayers or expressions abide within the same parameters placed upon any other free speech under similar circumstances.

Personally, even the second part scares me. We're in a bit of an epidemic with gay high school kids killing themselves; the last thing we need is to enshrine it in the constitution that their religious classmates have a right to bully them under the shroud of religion. Obviously those students already have certain rights to religious free expression, but making such a big, political deal could embolden students and make principals more timid about enforcing just policies until everyone decides just what the law means. I also think that in school, making anyone feel like an outsider fights against setting up a safe, productive learning environment. In a state with an overwhelming majority of Christians, imagine how Jews and Muslims and atheists and other non-Christian a/religious groups would feel trying to eat lunch with a group of Christians praying ostentatiously over in the corner. Focusing on the things that divide us like that is, well, divisive.

But that's not even my real concern. I included those clauses mainly to be thorough. What really concerns me are the bits I've put in bold. If I'm reading this right - and any lawyers reading this, please feel free to correct me! - it looks like if your religion is against some belief then you can be excused from learning about it. That's always been the case with sex-ed classes here (parents could always opt out, and in some cases had to actually opt in), and the kid could go do homework in the library for the hour. I was never crazy about this, frankly. But in my school, it was also on the assumption that the kid would be educated somewhere else - either by parents or by a church youth group. The point was that in theory the kids weren't getting excused from the subject, just having it presented in a different context. That didn't work so well in practice, of course. But this bill isn't even going that far. As I'm reading it, if you don't believe evolution is true, you no longer have to learn what it is; you just have to know that your religion rejects it.  

Thing is, there's a difference between knowing what something is and deciding whether you believe it's true. Let me give you an example from my own work. I teach at a Jesuit university, but I teach the course more or less like I would at a state school. In the ethics class I just finished, I had at least two options on our papers that might have run afoul of this law. In the first paper some students explained (among other things) the Prisoner's Dilemma and applied it to the problem of climate change, specifically the problem of how to motivate countries to actually get involved rather than wait on other people to fix the mess. In the second paper one of the options was to develop + evaluate an Aristotelian position on abortion. In both cases these were only one option of two or three different topics, but that's because of the way I ordered the class this time. (I did Plato/Rand and then Mill, then backtracked through Kant to Aristotle, rather than doing Aristotle directly after Plato.) I could easily see a paper set where two of the three, maybe even all of the options involved the kind of thing a conservative Christian might object to. 

In my philosophy classes, I'm less concerned with a student's conclusion than how s/he gets there. Take the abortion paper. This is actually a compare/contrast paper, and many of my students use as their second source someone arguing for the Catholic/Christian position that humanity begins at conception, usually using John Noonan's essay. So the students have to first present Aristotle's function argument and then someone else (like Noonan) arguing for a different position, and then give a philosophical defense of the position they think is correct. At the beginning of the course I make quite clear what I mean by that: it's the kind of thing that, once you understand the argument, it would be irrational not to accept it. As committed as I am personally to my religion, if a student gave me a paper saying "The Bible says abortion is always murder so Aristotle must be wrong," I'd call them in for a conference and a rewrite. Not because I disagree with the conclusion (I do, incidentally, both theologically and philosophically) but because they relied on authority rather than argument. They're simply not doing philosophy.

A student could of course choose a different topic, or s/he could choose to make a philosophical defense of Noonan's position. (There are some such arguments available, at least at the student's level.) But if I was teaching this topic in Missouri next fall, I'd think twice about assigning the essay. And I'd definitely think twice about forcing a student to rewrite an essay that relied on a religious text's authority, even though by not having that conversation I'd be remiss in my professional obligations. It's one thing to insist every student agree that Aristotle was right in an exam or paper situation, but I've never done that and I've never met another philosophy instructor who did. Sure, we'll insist that you give an adequate explanation, that you understand it. Just as I would expect any student in my class to be able to explain why Hume rejects the Design Argument for God - even if they were a theist who thought this particular argument worked. Evaluation is good and fine, but understanding must come first.

Ditto for evolution. Ditto for global warming. Ditto for any economic model other than laissez capitalism. You can't explain what's wrong if you can't explain what it is. And frankly, I find it a shocking misuse of taxpayer money to educate someone and allow them to check out on being exposed to the major scientific (and social scientific, and philosophical, and ...) theories that shape our world. This bill is just all around not cool.

As an aside, I apologize in advance to the proud citizens of Missouri who voted against this bill, and former Missourians who would have done the same. I remember after North Carolina's vote on Amendment One, how hard it was to be the butt of every joke I heard online. It stunk, and if the same things happen to your state now, I know it can be a hard and lonely stretch of time until the next outrage comes along. Just remember that the internet has a short attention span. Just keep calm and carry on. ;-)        

This has been my life the last month - getting these handouts ready, walking through them with my students, meeting one on one to work out what they didn't understand in class, then rushing home to start the cycle all over again. It's all done now except for the grading, but I still thought some of you might enjoy seeing my handiwork.

(As a heads-up: these were the starting point of my class's discussion. If you know philosophy and my discussion seems simplistic or flat-out wrong, that's because I probably used this as a jumping-off point to get to a better way of approaching the issues. I'm mainly sharing this because several people asked just what I've been so busy with.)

Day #1: What's this course all about, anyway?

• Hour #1: Syllabus
• Hour #2: Introduction to Logic
• Hour #3: Overview of Different Ethics Systems

Day #2: Can we be Good without God?

• Hour #1: How to Structure a Philosophy Paper
• Hour #2: Divine Command Theory and the Euthyphro Dilemma
• Hour #3: Do our moral intuitions make sense, without an afterlife? (our reading)

Day #3: Does our society decide what counts as moral?

• Hour #1: Student presentations
• Hour #2: Cultural Relativism (our reading)
• Hour #3: Logical Positivism and Moral Language

Day #4: Morality and the Law

• Hour #1: Logical Fallacies + Writing with Sources
• Hour #2: Justice as a Social Contract (our reading)
• Hour #3: Why should we obey the law? (our reading)

Day #5: Can we really act against our best interests?

• Hour #1: Student presentations
• Hour #2: Psychological Egoism (our reading)
• Hour #3: Ethical Egoism Critiqued (our reading)

Day #6: Do we have a duty to help others?

• Hour #1: Student presentations
• Hour #2: Singer on Famine Relief (our reading)
• Hour #3: Mill's Greatest Happiness Principle

Day #7: Utilitarianism vs. Libertarianism

• Hour #1: Symposium #1
• Hour #2: Criticisms of Utilitarianism
• Hour #3: Philosophical Libertarianism

Day #8: Is true equality even possible?

• Hour #1: Student presentations
• Hour #2: Rawls on equality
• Hour #3: Are we responsible for bad luck? (our reading)

Day #9: Does motive matter?

• Hour #1: Value Pluralism
• Hour #2: Mill vs. Kant on Criminal Justice (our reading)
• Hour #3: Kant on the Good Will

Day #10: Kant on Choosing Rightly

• Hour #1: Student presentations
• Hour #2: The First Formulation of the Categorical Imperative
• Hour #3: The Second Formulation of the Categorical Imperative (+ Application to Animal Rights) (our reading)

Day #11: Criticisms of Kant's Ethics

• Hour #1: Is love morally significant?
• Hour #2: Sympathy (our reading)
• Hour #3: The Doctrine of Double Effect (our reading)

Day #12: What counts as a human, anyway?

• Hour #1: Student presentations
• Hour #2: Aristotle's Account of Happiness + the Human Function
• Hour #3: (Human) Life Begins with Conception (our reading)

Day #13: How do we become good?

• Hour #1: Symposium #2
• Hour #2: Aristotle's Doctrine of the Mean
• Hour #3: The Importance of Friendship (our reading)

Day #14: Does our society decide what counts as moral?

• Hour #1: Aristotle on Justice
• Hour #2: Do We Have Special Duties to Our Community?
• Hour #3: Feminist Ethics

Things I Learned

1. Aristotle and Kant require more time to show why they're relevant and convincing.
2. Kant in particular needs more focus. To say nothing of more understanding on my part. Next time I'm finding time, somehow, to do Kant's kingdom of ends and maybe a little out of the Religion book. Really.
3. Even though these students all have had an introductory philosophy course, I can't expect them to be exposed to the things I teach my students in that first course. In particular, I can't expect them to know the problem of free will. Since Aristotle really ties in to those same problems, I need to find at least an hour to introduce that problem.
4. The things that I think need refuting before we can get on with the business of philosophical ethics. Cultural relativism is much less a part of my student's mindset than it ever was with mind, as is the whole idea that religion and ethics are tightly bound. The bigger problem is to show why you can't just pick and choose pieces from different approaches.
5. Having a class willing to think and talk makes all the difference. My group rocked.

I hesitate to use the word because I have done real programming (if C++ qualifies!) before, and I know people who do real programming now, such as aranel_took. Mucking around in basic HTML seems like baby programming, if that. But I am out of practice, and five hours off and on has me worn out.

I've been setting up a blog for my human nature course next semester, which I can also tweak for my ethics course this upcoming summer. It's run off of Wordpress and is for the most part fairly basic - blog section for class announcements, a page describing the assignment guidelines, probably a policies page and maybe a separate page for course documents (how/to files, class handouts, etc.) Those actually aren't so bad.

What's given me a first-class headache is the library page. This is philosophical resources plus some popular press stuff (like Richard Dawkins' discussion of why intelligent design isn't a science in The Guardian, or the recent NY Times article on why being an atheist doesn't do away with notions of right and wrong). It's mainly on online index to the various PDFs and links I've been collecting and use when preparing lectures or email out to my students as class readings. But since WYSIWYG editors (what you see is what you get - those buttons you click to bold text rather than using HTML tags) are buggy, I decided to use HTML mode rather than the WYSIWYG option. So for the last 3-4 hours I have been swimming in hyperlink links, formatting tags for italics and bold, <li> and <ol> and all the rest. You have not lived until you have tried to set up a bulleted list with several levels using raw HTML, and then added to various points of the list over a period of time and tried to keep the different levels straight.

Swimming is the right word, because that's what my head is doing at the moment. *weary grin*

I think I'm going to run down the street for some supper, then come back and watch an old episode of The Closer. Maybe crawl back into Augustine tonight (I did a chapter of "On Free Will" this morning, but it was only about four pages, and I really should attempt more...)

Btw, in case anyone's interested, here's the link:

http://laytons12.wordpress.com/

I have a student working with Kant's ethics for my human nature class. I don't teach the topic in this course because it is bloody difficult, but it grew quite naturally out of some work we did on the analytic/synthetic divide and the need for certainty.

Upshot: I just spent a half-hour discussing the source of the moral law, with a student who seems to enjoy these things. I'm not a Kantian by any stretch of the imagination, but contemplating this topic can be an almost spiritual experience; and teaching it, even moreso.

So, in honor of him, have a soul-lifting song.

( Read more... )

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within. (from The Critique of Pure Reason)

This entry was originally posted at http://fidesquaerens.dreamwidth.org/9152.html. Please comment there using OpenID.