Guest post: Interpretive dance to demonstrate knowledge of mitosis
From a comment by iknklast on How to threaten power.
There is a battle between faculty and administration right now, both of whom claim to support high standards, but who identify that differently. High standards to the faculty means that you actually educate the students in what they came to learn; high standards to the administration means they are happy. They are doing battle right now with English and Math because they are trying to remove basic competencies in reading and mathematics that we currently require for graduation; the administration says that held up several students from getting their degree on time. Yeah. It’s more important that they graduate than that they learn anything.
They’ve also made it possible for students to get their degree without ever taking a science class. They added Psych 101 to the science curriculum; it is full to overflowing every semester while hard science classes are slipping in numbers. They used to put students in my Environmental Science course for the “easy” science…until it became obvious that it is not, in fact, easy, at least not if it’s taught correctly. I do not hold hands and sing Kum Bay Yah with my students, and we don’t sit around all semester learning about recycling for the 2000th time. They get the science of how the environment works, and why you shouldn’t try to get all chemicals out of the environment, and so forth. No New Age silliness in my class, just science.
So the administration did what any self respecting educator would do…they multiplied awards by giving them some sort of certificate for almost anything. A certificate for this class, a diploma for a couple more classes, and then a degree at the end. A student could probably come out with a dozen or two “awards” for doing nothing more than taking classes.
Meanwhile I’m sitting through harrowing ‘training’ sessions that tell me we should not give students deadlines; it’s too much pressure. Yeah, right. So next Sunday A.D. is fine if that’s when they want to turn in the paper? After they’ve been graduated for twelve years, because we don’t want to hold up anyone’s graduation just because they can’t read or do basic arithmetic? And we should let the student select how they are assessed. The example they give is to allow a student to do interpretive dance to demonstrate their knowledge of mitosis. So the fuzzy subjective feel good nonsense from elsewhere will begin to pervade the sciences, and we no longer have anything that can live up to the name of education.
Please tell me you’re kidding.
I’ve always found that interpretive dance requires a narrator to explain the relationship between the dance and the story.Wouldn’t it just be more sensical to explain mitosis?
This is the model that UK universities have been gleefully adopting for the last few years. Thanks, America! You know we just copy everything you do, can’t you stop pulling shit like this?
Everyone said this is exactly what would happen if we went down that route and sure enough it’s happening here, too. If anything, we’re pulling ahead.
I wish I was. So far, our science department has resisted, but they’re getting to the point that we are about to be told how to teach, how to assess, and have that made mandatory.
I plan to retire in two years.
Dancer: Performs a lovely ballet solo en pointe
Judge: I’m not sure how this relates to the subject matter, could you explain?
Dancer: I’m dancing on my toeses.
I would legitimately like to see an interpretive dance that conveys how the process of mitosis works. This would be more difficult to pull off than merely explaining the process with words and/or images for 99% of students … which is why we, of course, won’t see it happening any time soon.
Since I teach chemistry, I’ll add:
I bet that you could get a group of students to do a decent demonstration of the behavior of ideal gases and how they react to volume and temperature change through the medium of dance. You’d really need quite a few students to work together to make something effective, though.
Be honest. If a student were able to pull herself apart into two smaller but identical students, you would totally give her an A.
ARC, I think an interpretive dance on mitosis would be quite beautiful. I just don’t think it belongs in the science classroom. If I were teaching dancing, I definitely would encourage the student to try. Since I can’t dance without falling down, I’m not sure I’m qualified to grade something like that, anyway.
As someone who would like to see the arts and sciences working together like they used to before the Enlightenment split them, I still think it needs to be appropriate. Not this sort of thing…and not allowing students to choose their own method of assessment. (I can give you a hint how it would go: Student: I am demonstrating osmosis. drinks a glass of water The water was outside of me and now is inside.) The idea is that the students know themselves better than anyone else. I doubt that. There is a lot about ourselves that we don’t know, and we learn it from other people’s reaction. “Gee, you mean I smell bad? I can’t smell it.” “What did I say? Why are you all looking so horrified?”
I can uncategorically state that I did not know when I was a freshman in college what was the best way to teach me or test me. I probably could come up with some good ideas now, but I am 60 years old and have spent nearly half my life in some sort of class or other. I have figured out a lot of what works with me. And the high schools have been doing this crap, and students show up in my classes without a clue about things that should be common knowledge. I would never have thought it was possible, but a 20 year old student of mine a couple of years ago learned that when the leaves fall off the trees in the winter, the trees are not dead, they will put on new leaves in the summer. Huh? How can you go through 20 years of life and not know that? And she put that on an assignment about Hurricane Camille. I’m not exactly sure how she learned that from writing a paragraph about Hurricane Camille, but since she never even mentioned any hurricane in her paper, I’m guessing she didn’t learn it from researching Hurricane Camille.