A Commonplace Book on Teaching and Learning
Reflections on learning processes, teaching methods, and their effects on scientific literacy
by
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"A university is "Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other."
President James Garfield
Ideally, a class should be something like a conversation: Socrates talking to an acquaintance, Mark Hopkins, to a student. Talking to students results in learning most effectively when it involves two-way conversations, and that model of learning is best suited to very small groups. When anything but very small groups is involved, mere "presentation" may not be effective.
Of course, traditionally, one-way communications have been effective in teaching. Consider how cultural material has always been communicated. The presentation usually starts with something like:
"Sing, Goddess, of the wrath of Peleus' son Achilles..."
or
"Coyote was going there."
Unlike conversations that require back and forth interactions, stories merely require that the audience have some familiarity with the material. In the first example, the storyteller is telling the audience that his tale about the war with Troy is being mediated by his muse, a goddess, so what they are about to hear is due to her, not to him. In such a case the audience knows that the story will be important, as well as entertaining. The second example, from the Hopi tradition, involves an elder starting a tale that has moral implications for the young members of the tribe. Each example starts by introducing the context of the story: a divinely inspired tale or an important moral lesson. In each case the audience is familiar enough with the context that the teller of the tale can continue fruitfully.
Now consider a typical classroom environment today and ask yourself if the audience will be as rapt as those who are listening to a storyteller. Then consider the reasons for the difference between the traditional and the academic ways of teaching. Even when cultural information is being transmitted today (say a class on the U.S. Constitution), the emphasis is on facts to be learned, not on moral lessons. Students tend to be more concerned with passing the next test than on internalizing the material for a lifetime.
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Book Details
About the Book
The format of the book is a little unusual because I decided to use the structure of a commonplace book, in which commonplace items that one comes across in one's life are jotted down for future reference in a journal. The idea is to let the quotations set up discussions about various aspects of learning. My intent was to end up with a loosely coupled but reasonably coherent set of ideas within each chapter. This goal was pursued by seeing to it that a substantial number of quotations within a chapter are at least somewhat related. One advantage of this format is that the reader can open the book nearly anywhere and find an idea that can be considered independently of other parts of the book. The intent is to provide on every page stepping stones that allow the reader to go a bit further by mulling over an idea
About the Author
Pascal de Caprariis has spent most of his life trying to decide what to do when he grew up. Along the way, he progressed through the army, college, graduate school, working for a government contractor, more graduate school, teaching at a high school, and then at a university. All of those stages in his life prepared him for his current retirement activities that involve (with his wife) operating a yarn shop and a sheep farm.