College Students Critique Lectures

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College is not for everybody.  Some colleges aren't any good for anybody.  No college is good for everybody.  When lots of kids are railroaded to college, this is what happens.  Kids end up wanting to be entertained in college.  They think their professors should be Jerry Seinfeld, or whatever funny guy or gal the kids watch these days.

I was incited to write this post by this article that appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, which referred to a video on YouTube.

Meanwhile, Rick Santorum and Mit Romney ridicule President Obama for suggesting that most students should go into higher education (even if not traditional college).  Their point was that we must dignify all occupations, so that students who take on jobs that are currently considered undesirable will not feel looked down upon.  It seems to me that this would only happen if all jobs provide the same pay.  Conservatives, of course, are the last ones to look favorably on such a situation.

Nor would a conservative be happy paying big money to people such as, to take a random example, a store clerk, who has little higher education.  (These days many store clerks would have at least a bachelor's degree.)  Why?  because that would result in higher prices for consumer goods.

[It is right that society rediscovers the dignity of labor.  But it seems unfair to doom some citizens to low-income or low-satisfaction jobs based on their limited education.  This condemns both the worker and the job, because the job comes to be associated with people of low intelligence or low scholastic achievement, at the very least.  It seems more reasonable to me that people be given incentives to take on (presently) unpopular jobs on a part-time basis, or during a period of community service.  No job should be so terrible that it cannot be done for a brief stint.]

But what about this business about college professors not being sufficiently entertaining?

There seem to be two schools of thinking about this.

The Archimedes school of thinking goes as follows.  You're in college to educate yourself.  College is a place in which you can learn things, but no one is going to stuff your head with education while you relax and are entertained.  You've got to stuff your own head with the information.  What is the professor paid to do?  She is there to arrange for you to know what information is out there, to help connect the information and the reasoning together.  But not to do it for you.  So why should you pay big money for someone who is not going to do the learning for you?  I don't have an answer.  Society wants you to be educated, and so society should pay for it.  I don't think education is a consumer item.

The other school of thought is that it is indeed the professor's job to make the subject interesting.  If the professor can't do that, he should give up the profession, and allow someone more entertaining to take his or her place.  Unfortunately, the expectation of students tends to escalate, and there's no satisfying a student who has had a sequence of entertaining professors in the past.  You've gotta come on like Crazy Eddie, or junior is going to be bored.  I, even I have been accused of being too entertaining.  But I draw the line at a certain level of entertainment.  I make a joke or two, intersperse a set of difficult example with a little levity, but we grind on.  I get the students to go to the blackboard to work out examples, so that the class doesn't go to sleep.  I do make everyone move to the front of the class (so that all the empty seats are at the rear).  But that's about all I do.  I seldom or never use PowerPoint, unless there's an image or a diagram that I want the class to see.

Having said that ...
I have to confess that really terrible instructors --who are more likely to be teaching in institutions that have great difficulty in finding staff-- can use PowerPoint presentations as a crutch.

Even given the fact that faculty by and large reject the notion that it is their responsibility that the students should learn the material, faculty do feel that it is their duty to their subject to persuade the interested student of the value and the fascination of the topic that is being presented.  A professor of literature is either in that occupation because he or she loves literature, or because they're unable to find anything better to do.  It is an unfortunate school indeed that is the home for the latter.  But it is just a little unrealistic to expect that, if you put a mass of text on a slide and put it up on the screen, that the material will speak for itself.  Occasionally, it will.  Usually, it will not.

Often a professor will merely show a famous person explaining a topic on YouTube.  It seems somewhat crass, however, to expect that your entire series of lectures should be a sequence of YouTube clips.  The temptation in the social sciences is great, to outsource your entire course to YouTube, or a series of video clips from any source.  Many institutions, such as MIT, have put entire lecture series on the Web, and it is possible for the interested student to learn from these videos.  But then, what you have is distance learning.  The jury on distance-learning for undergraduates is still out.  However, some experts advocate using what is called blended learning, which is a combination of web-based or video-based learning, with face-to-face teaching.

A colleague of mine uses PowerPoint heavily.  But his slides have many blanks, which the students must fill in.  He hands out his slides, with the blanks, and as they go through the lesson, the students fill them in.  This keeps them minimally engaged, and provides opportunities for questions.  Questions form a great nucleus for real learning.

However, PowerPoint is most useful for pictorial or graphical information.  If your point requires a pictorial reinforcement, it is criminal not to present it!  So there are things that you should not do in PowerPoint (or equivalent presentation software, such as OpenOffice), and there are things that make great sense to do in that way.

So, I guess I'm saying that entertainment in class is not an entitlement.  Professors are allowed to be boring to anyone who has no business being in their class.  Sometimes a topic is just over your head, and you won't find the topic fascinating.  If you're held in thrall despite your unpreparedness, it is only delaying the inevitable moment when you should depart.  Sometimes a topic is too simple for a student, and boredom is unavoidable.  I don't know how to deal with that situation; evidently someone has decided you have to be bored in that class, and there's no help for it.

But some people are bored no matter where they go.  As a society, we should give these people an income, and keep them out of our hair.  Or there's always the Army, though they probably don't like wet blankets there, either!

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Gawrsh!

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11180 people have looked at this blog.  I don't know that many people!!!  I'd better be careful ...

"College At Risk", says Andrew Delbanco

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The Chronicle of Higher Education is one of the most widely-read journals for college professors.  Recently Andrew Delbanco (a professor at Columbia, according to the Chronicle,) wrote an articulate and insightful article, in which he describes many of the issues facing American citizens and the American education system.

First of all (he points out), both President Bush and President Obama have said that education is an important aspect of getting the country ready to compete in the future. The products and inventions and new industries of the future will be in countries with the best education. Delbanco quotes Obama as having said in 2009: "Countries that outteach us today will outcompete us tomorrow."

In what follows I will describe some of the points that caught my attention, but you should read the article for yourself.

Education has various functions. Elementary education provides one with the skills absolutely necessary for day to day existence. Secondary education provides a basis for the skills required by someone who works in a clerical occupation, anything that requires moderate mathematical and literary skills: a mechanic, a grocery store clerk, a low-level worker in an office. In the past, a secondary education was enough to teach, be a nurse, do all sorts of things that today requires a college education. More young people complete high school today, but not all of them have learned as much as high school graduates in the early 20th century. Education has declined simply because today, more than in the past, people of more varied skill levels remain in school, and today's teachers must cope with far less motivated and capable kids. But we want all these kids to learn a great deal, because life today is more complicated than it was 80 years ago. To a minor extent, we succeed in educating all our kids.

In ancient Europe, where higher education was first provided to the elite, it was intended to promote the kind of thinking and reflection that is very far from the utilitarian product obtained in most American colleges. Delbanco reports that the President of a well-known for-profit college said: "I'm happy that there are places in the world where people sit down and think. We need that. But that's very expensive. And not everybody can do that." This encapsulates perfectly the attitude that just thinking is a waste of time; what most students (and their parents) want is for the students to be efficiently filled with information and skills that will enable them to get a job.

It is hard to convince someone who has never been blessed with a liberal education of the value of one. (Even those who have had a liberal education are not convinced about its value; a large proportion of those who have been through even a good college, leave their alma mater baffled by the whole experience. College should never have been inflicted on them. But of course telling them so is hardly a kindness.)

The increasing cost of college education results in increasing class sizes, and students in such environments are less likely to get the benefit of the carefully orchestrated discussions, and the one-to-one interaction with adults with various intellectual gifts and specializations, and the experience with teaching young people. The young people hardly have the opportunity to get to know their classmates, and, as the author explains, these lateral interactions are at least as important as the interaction between the instructor and the pupil.

The author proceeds to describe how new technology might help to give means of salvaging some of the benefits of college given the problems of the present time.  But I'm more fascinated with the description of the problem: the author is eloquent in describing the benefits of higher education, and just as insightful in seeing how these benefits cannot be understood by present-day students and their parents. Modern society makes it impossible to obtain a good education, and even if one is put through the education machine, to appreciate what one has experienced, and to capitalize on it.

What follows are my own thoughts.

What is frustrating about the life we lead today is the boredom we feel all the time, on the one hand, and the lack of time for doing anything interesting on the other.

How can this be? Doesn't boredom imply that we have time on our hands? If we don't have time to do anything interesting, how can we be bored? But ask any kid, and they will tell you that they are both exhausted and bored.

One of our primary challenges in this millennium, is to plan for ourselves, and for our society, how to increase the amount of leisure each citizen enjoys, and to provide each member of society as far as possible the wherewithal to use that leisure time wisely. If great things are to come from anyone in the next several centuries, I predict it will come from our leisure time, and not from work. We must separate the drudgery that pays the bills from the work that we do that creates new and useful and wonderful things. Education must equip us for this leisure time activity.

More importantly, I think education in the new century must be a leisure time activity. I don't think it is practical to force all our education into a few desperate years in which we have to learn it all, and then expect us to lead forty years of pure work. Our learning will be just as useless as the years of education were desperate, and our years of labor will be hardly worth living; we may as well kill ourselves, and get it over with. We must find ways of making the years of our maturity satisfying and productive, and that means less work, and more play.

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The Musical Motifs of Wagner's Ring Cycle

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In the post about Star Wars, I referred in passing to Wagner's great Ring cycle, and have blogged about it before:  Der Ring des Nibelungen.  The most detailed —and accessible, I must add— analysis of the musical themes of the opera cycle is by Deryck Cooke, who has not only written a respected book on the subject, but made a double-CD set containing all the musical examples.  I recommend Sir Georg Solti's complete opera sets for the operas, and the companion Deryck Cooke analysis.  (Do please first try to get your small hometown bookstore to order the items for you, before you add your mite to Amazon's profits!!  Amazon will doubtless agree with my plea.)

I have just discovered, a few seconds ago, that Cooke had begun a book on the subject, but died before it was completed:  I Saw the World End.  More appropriately, it should have been called "I heard the world end!"

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The Musical Themes of Star Wars

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When John Williams —already a greatly admired composer— was asked to write the music for Star Wars (subsequently called Star Wars Episode 1: A New Hope), and, by implication, for the sequels and the prequels, he approached the job seriously.

His great model for this undertaking was Richard Wagner, who had conceived and created a great cycle of 4 three-hour operas, a total of 12 hours of almost continuous music, and had thought long and hard about the compositional problem it presented.  The bottom line —for any extended piece of music, really— is that you just can't throw new tunes at the listener all the time.  Later in the musical work, you have to repeat musical material you've used earlier in the piece, if not as is, at least in a modified form.

In addition, a composer for a dramatic work (which Wagner was) had to use the music to underscore the plot.  One way, of course, was to have the Hero's Theme every time the hero rode in, such as one did in the Lone Ranger movies.  But a more subtle technique was possible: you could remind the audience of broken promises, or past events that foreshadowed what was going on on stage, or earlier events that caused what was transpiring on stage, or characters offstage whose existence was critical to the dynamics of what was happening.

So Wagner invented the idea of the Leitmotif, or leading motif, which was essentially a melodic fragment, terse and memorable, that the listener would quickly catch at its first introduction, and associate with something to do with that occasion.  Subsequently, when the leitmotif was reintroduced, the listener could not help but recall the earlier occasion when that very tunelet was heard.  You could slightly alter the melodic fragment, to represent distortions of ideas.  You could re-orchestrate it, to reflect the same idea being carried by a different character, for instance.

In the original album sleeve of the Star Wars movie (1977) soundtrack album, John Williams explained in detail what each track represented.  For various reasons (that might be obvious to other people, but not to me at this moment), each track really consisted of a continuous piece of music that used multiple motifs, but generally just a few.

In addition, it did not make sense to place individual motifs in a soundtrack album.  Each track had to be a complete piece of music, while a motif was a mere musical idea, a tune fragment.  The tunes John Williams used as themes were extended, memorable pieces of music, out of which he could extract a unique phrase which he could use as a motif.  Many of these tunes are well known to us.

First of all, of course, there is the Star Wars Theme itself, usually called the Main Title theme:

 


Note: after the main tune ends, there is some busy music that has to do with mood music and the Rebel ship that is conveying Princess Leia.  It is running the blockade of some planet, possibly Tatooine, and we hear the little fanfare that is really a second theme, the Rebel's Blockade Running Theme.

The Rebel's Blockade Running Theme is a jaunty tune which you invariably hear when the Rebel Alliance (or one of its ships) is trying to outrun the evil Empire ships, as happens repeatedly in Empire Strikes Back (Episode V, 1981).  It is a true motif, because it so short, not an extended piece of music.  (You can easily see how hard it was to make an extended track of this little tune.)  It comes in at around 0:09 in the clip below.  After its initial announcement, it is repeated with different instrumentation, interspersed with busy "Let's go!" type music.

One of the most important themes is The Force theme.  It starts out rather a nostalgic tune, recalling past things almost with regret, but it gathers itself after a few bars, and sounds determined and hopeful:

Every movie must have a love theme, of course.  A more unlikely pair of lovers was never seen than Han Solo and Leia Organa.  Their Han and Leia Love Theme, though is utterly romantic:

Those are the themes that approach the importance of motifs.  There are lots of other pieces used in the movie that perform important functions, such as the music in the Mos Eisley bar, for instance, and the closing scene, which has a great march, which John Williams admitted was inspired by Elgar's Pomp and Circumstances march (or perhaps Walton's Crown Imperial; I forget!)

There is a theme for Princess Leia:



(It is awfully difficult to keep a straight face listening to this theme!  It must have been written long before John Williams got to see Princess Leia, because the theme is soft and wistful, whereas a badder heroine that Leia was hard to imagine.  She was irascible, impatient and demanding, but of course we Star Wars fans see her through rose-tinted contacts, and we imagine her to be the very personification of femininity.  Well, a model of The New Woman, at the very least.)  But because of the wistful mood of the theme, you could not imagine it sounding in the background when Leia was out gunning down an adversary, or chasing someone on a "speeder", as they called the motor-bike - like personal vehicles that figured prominently in all the movies, most notably in The Return of the Jedi (Episode 6).  So this is not a very important theme in the development (John Williams did not use very sophisticated development most of the time.)

When Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back was released in ... wait a minute; let me look it up ... 1980, there were at least two really important new themes that hit the audiences: the first of these was the fabulous Darth Vader theme / Imperial March.  This is interesting; in Star Wars 4 (New Hope, 1977), Darth Vader was essentially the face of the Empire, a minor character.  In the next episode, we are given an inkling that he will emerge as an important protagonist, when he claims that Luke is his son.

The second of these is Yoda's Theme:

I must confess that I never associated this theme specifically with Yoda, but with Luke's successes in training, especially the jaunty high phrase in the winds, harmonized in sixths, with pizzicato strings and harp.  This kind of instrumentation is conventionally associated with fairy folk and magic, a sort of instrumental "Bippity boppity boo!"  Perhaps it was intended to remind us of the playful aspects of the force.

By the way, "OST" is evidently an abbreviation for 'original sound track.'  Young people who contribute videoclips to YouTube are far too busy to spell things out, and rely on acronyms for a quarter of all that they write.  TIA, ttyl.




[To be continued.]

Note:  See here for an article comparing Star Wars and Wagner's Ring cycle.

Sitting, apparently, is killing you.

I don't have direct evidence for this, but I'm fairly certain that interrupting your sitting time with 2-minute spells of walking around should make significant reductions in the detrimental effects.  (The observation about cessation of electrical activity in the legs is very plausible, and worrisome.)

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Ice Cream!

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I recently decided to make what we called a fruit salad ice cream in our house when we were growing up.  It’s really simple; here’s the recipe:

•    ripe mangoes (1 or 2).  Remove the skin with an apple-peeler (or a paring knife).  Slice off the two cheeks, then down the two remaining sides, and cube the pieces into half-inch cubes and set aside.
•    a ripe papaya.  Half a big papaya will do.  Cut in half, remove the seeds (it’s not easy, but keep at it, even if you feel sorry to see the guts of the fruit get removed), scoop out the flesh carefully, and cube into half-inch pieces;
•    a barely ripe tomato.  Cube into pieces of about the same size as the other fruits.
•    a handful of seedless grapes.  Cut each grape in half.
•    5 strawberries, just ripe.  Cut lengthwise into quarters, removing the green stem and end.
•    a ripe kiwi or two.  Clean off the hard stem and core, and slice.
•    A pint of softened vanilla ice cream.

A fruit salad salsa, similar in inspiration to mine.

Mix it all together just before serving.  You can vary the amount of ice cream; a little is good, but too much ice cream obscures the fruit flavor.

I’m embarrassed to admit that if the ice cream has just a tiny bit of salt in it, it will taste more buttery and creamy.  If you add your own salt, you’ll probably add too much.  If the ice cream is too sweet, it ruins the taste.

As you can see, just the perfect ice cream is important to have for this recipe.  First of all, it mustn't be too sweet.  Most people I know don't like ice cream that is too sweet, though they like ice cream too much to not eat it just because of excessive sweetness.

Secondly, the ice cream must have just the right degree of salt, to make it taste right.  Many recipes have too much salt, and that's not good.  Some folks just leave out the salt as a matter of principle either for reasons of health, or because they don't like the salt.  I don't want to get into a huge controversy about the matter; I figure if a tiny bit of salt improves the taste, that overrides the health consideration.

I have to avoid sugar for health reasons, so for my own recipe, I'm going to use an artificial sweetener.  Many purists would rather die than do this, and all I can say is, do what you think is best for you.

Well, I've been going through recipes for ice cream on the Internet, and I've been appalled.  I figured that home-made ice cream should be healthier and tastier than store-bought ice cream.  The best-tasting commercial ice cream I have eaten so far is Wegman's Vanilla Ice Cream.  Less sugar per serving [7 grams, I believe] ---actually 16 grams (corrected 2012/2/23) than another brand we often buy, but a little more fat.  But to my horror, I'm reading recipes that call for pudding mix and other means of making the mix creamier.

Commercial ice creams contain a certain amount of thickener, that is gelatine-like additives made of sea-weed and plant matter called cellulose gum and so on.  I recently read on the Internet some indignant questions about why the FDA allows these derivatives of cellulose (which is often derived from wood, actually) in common foods.

The traditional recipes for ice cream often contain things like egg yolks and so on, which, though perfectly natural, have been known to raise cholesterol levels.  I suppose it is a matter of personal taste, but I like to eat my eggs face to face, and not hidden away in ice cream, for heaven's sake.  I mean, how would you feel if processed bacon bits was a part of your ice cream recipe, say?  What a terrible waste of some perfectly good bacon, right?  So, in a nutshell, if cellulose gum makes my ice cream creamy and less full of cholesterol, I'm all for it.  Yes, you heard right.  Now where can I find some cellulose gum?

I have also recently discovered lactose-free milk.  The first time I had some lactose-free milk with my morning coffee, I though I remembered that it didn't taste right.  But I like it so much now that I don't think I'll go back to regular milk.  So I'm wondering: can I find an ice-cream recipe that uses lactose-free milk?

So don't fear; if like me, you too crave vanilla ice cream that's not too sweet, has no pudding in the mix, no eggs, but does have lactose-free milk and cellulose thickeners in it, and a tiny bit of salt, I'm on the job.  I shall find a recipe.

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