The Art of Scaring

In my previous blog post, I discussed the lack of information students receive  regarding the risks and rewards that come with a collegiate partnership. In Dr. McCoy’s response to my post, she asked a very intriguing question: “how might colleges and universities communicate the risks and rewards without scaring folks or making them tune out (like folks do often when asked to read the fine print in contracts and the like)?”

I never stopped to wonder if I truly wanted to know the risks of the job market and shortcomings of a college experience. However, after much consideration,  I confirmed that I do want to know exactly what I’m getting into. Furthermore, I think it’s only fair that all other students know too. To address the issue of uninformed consent however, I believe growth in the area lies in the manner that it’s stated.

Ian Chipman’s article, “The Power of Realistic Expectations”, describes a movement on Stanford’s college campus to alter the tone of their letters alerting students know they are on academic probation. In making the letter more focused on the resources available to struggling students rather than a harsh assertion of the problem, students were more willing to put the work in and get their grades up. Those who received the first, almost shameful letter were more likely to drop out of college, and in doing so end their academic partnership. Although the tone of the original letter fulfilled the college’s duty by alerting the student of their academic status, they now do so in a way that’s much less “scary.” In short, the institution says, “hey, things aren’t going great in your classes right now, but we’re here for you and here’s how we’ll help you fix it.” They even provide encouraging narratives from students who were in their position and made it out of probation into good standing. Continue reading “The Art of Scaring”

Being a subject of knowledge

In class on Monday, we were faced with the question of whether we are objects or subjects of knowledge in our life as college students. In my experience, while it is possible to get by as an object of knowledge, it is beneficial to make the effort to be a subject of knowledge in order to excel. I have experienced this myself in my physics classes. Last year, I self-studied for the calculus-based AP Physics Electricity & Magnetism Exam. I did not start studying early enough and, having run out of time to learn the material, figured I would be okay because they give us a substantial formula sheet on the exam. I planned to be an object of the knowledge on the formula sheet, and did not bring enough of my own knowledge to the table. This did not work well for me. The knowledge given, the formula sheet, was a helpful starting point, but that was all it was. I was not able to figure out most of the problems on the exam. I managed to get a passing grade, but only barely. This year, in Analytical Physics II, we are covering the same material that was on that exam. We had an exam on much of that material before break that went significantly better than the AP exam last year. A large part of that is because I am not trying to learn the material from a review book and have a good instructor (thanks, Dr. Freeman!), but it is also because this year, I am making the effort to make sure I understand the concepts involved and making sure I learn things well enough that I can bring sufficient knowledge of my own to the exam and not just rely on the knowledge that is provided on the formula sheet. Making this leap between being an object of knowledge to being a subject of knowledge has helped me not just pass my physics classes, but excel in them.

Cogito Ergo Sum

In part four of his Discourse on Method, René Descartes presents us with a powerful maxim: “I think, therefore I am.” While searching for absolute truth Descartes discerned that thinking, or generating knowledge, is intrinsically linked to being. To be the object of knowledge is to miss the truth. Still, many communities would disagree with Descartes’s dismissal of received knowledge. In class, Mikaela keenly argued that within the academy it is necessary to be both the object and subject of knowledge. Considering the variety of assignments and course structures, this duality is crucial to academic success. Continue reading “Cogito Ergo Sum”

They Say/ I Say

At first glance of the Bloodchild essay prompt, I was unclear of how to relate Octavia Butler’s story to the main focus of my INTD class, which was risks and rewards of academic partnership. My first instinct was to go through the story and highlight all of the examples of academic partnership in the book. From there I did exactly what I did in high school- threw it all together on a page, read through it for grammatical errors and called it an essay. Continue reading “They Say/ I Say”

Plagiarism

A few weeks ago, I attended a plagiarism workshop as extra credit for my Behavioral Research Methods class. While I’m willing to bet that most people there went for extra credit or mandatory credit for a class; I actually learned very important aspects of plagiarism I was unaware of. The presentation began with sharing that one of the main reasons that students plagiarize is that they don’t truly understand what plagiarism is. Everyone knows that if you literally copy and paste an article from a website and then hand it into your teacher claiming you wrote it, then that’s plagiarism. However, what was emphasized in this presentation was “stealing ideas.” Plagiarism isn’t only copying and pasting; it can also be using findings from someone else’s research or using someone else’s idea. You don’t even have to claim it is your own; if you fail to cite where you got the information or idea from then that’s plagiarism. The presentation also greatly emphasized “Switch Plagiarism.” This is when one basically copies a sentence or paragraph; however, to make it different students switch the order of the words or use synonyms for certain words and the new sentence is similarly structured to the old one.

Dr. McCoy often stresses giving credit where credit is due, and this presentation reinforced that. It was a little out of the ordinary when on the first day of class Dr. McCoy made us all memories each other’s names. No other teacher I’ve had has made the students know each other’s names, and many don’t even know the names of their students. Learning the names of my fellow classmates not only creates a more comfortable atmosphere for class discussions; it also allows us to give each other credit for ideas. Last semester I had a teacher who called one student in the class “surfer dude” because he had long blonde hair. It wasn’t even a large lecture class. I can understand that professors have many students; however, if he didn’t even respect that student enough to simply ask for his name how could he ask for respect in return?

Crediting other people is a responsibility we all have in order to respect them. The plagiarism presentation suggested that one way to overcome plagiarism is: instead of looking at the passage while you try to summarize it; read the passage you’re referring to, put the passage away and then write about the main idea in your own words.  Part 1 of They Say I Say stresses the “They Say” part of writing; it specifically explains the “art of summarizing” another person’s work.  It claims that “a good summary requires balancing what the original author is saying with the writer’s own focus.” In other words, one needs to ensure that they have enough of their own voice while still presenting another’s argument. This connects to plagiarism because we need to remember that the goal of using quotes and another’s work is to enhance one’s own writing, rather than using those as a substitute.

Our Dependence on Technology!

As I walk across the SUNY Geneseo campus daily, I notice many students focused on their phones. Many students walk across campus with headphones in, or their attention focused on their phones. I so am also guilty of being consumed in my phone while walking across campus and not paying attention to what is right in front of me. With the advanced technologies of computers and phones today are limiting our interaction with the ‌world. People are choosing to live through  their phones rather than in the moment. Google being an important part of a day to day live having access to information at the click of a button. Ellen DeGeneres describes our access to technology in the video “Google it.”

Growing up my father has always had a flip phone. My siblings and I make fun of him for not texting and wanting an iPhone. He prefers to be simple and says “I rather talk on the phone, or face to face.” He believes communication is important and you miss out; not having a face to face or verbal conversation over the phone.

Our generation is constantly on their phones. Checking Instagram, Twitter, and any other social media accounts they have. You hear a buzz, or ding from a phone in a class and look around and everyone checks their phones to see if it is them. This reaction to our phones is becoming second nature; due to our dependence on technology. We lose out on social interaction because our attention is focused on our phones and electronic devices. Instead of having a conversation with others, we have grown accustomed to spending the majority of our time on our phones and other electronic devices.

Cell phones are the most vital form of technology consuming college students life. Generations before could not look up a word instantly on a phone or computer. Today’s society has unlimited access to information at their fingertips. Before the internet age, people would have to open a dictionary and flip through the pages to find a definition and read books to find information. Although, the speed at which we can find information is advancing, we lack appreciation for the technology that allows us to find info relatively quick. Also, we have no understanding of the value of the information we have access to. Today, we “Google it”. We can search our professors, fellow classmate, and even ourselves. Who knows what you might find by “googling it”?

We need to be conscious of how we want to spend our time. Students lose the critical social interaction due to their extenuating use of technology. As conscious students we need to  adapt a balance between face to face social interaction and our use of technology.

The “rules” of writing essays

Many higher education students might agree with me that most perspectives set in high schools are considerably different to those set in colleges and universities. This applies to many aspects, varying from academic standards to social life. As many schools, SUNY Geneseo’s GLOBE (Geneseo Learning Outcomes for Baccalaureate Education) states: Geneseo’s mission underscores an institutional commitment to transformational learning experiences’ and ‘a rich co-curricular life’. In the academic standards of colleges like Geneseo, writing sticks out as a very distinct and growing process that sometimes triggers the mind of the students.
 
In high school, we mainly write essays to fulfill our assignments, to pass the English Regents exams in New York, or to get a good grade in the writing part of the SAT/ACT or AP exams. All of these have some set of rules that we must follow in order to reach full credit. In my high school, for example, my English teachers would use a strategy to make the students remember the steps to take towards academic writing. It was called TEEL, which stands for Topic sentence, Explanation, Evidence, and Link. That was how they taught us to remember how we were supposed to write our essays. We had to follow that structure all the time; write the topic sentence in the last sentence of the introduction, find all the evidence we were asked for and explain it each time, and at the end link back to your topic sentence in the conclusion. If the directions said that we have to choose a side in an argument, it did not matter which side we would choose, as long as we used all the TEEL steps correctly. We were never required to give our full honest opinion about the topic we were asked to write about. We were only writing to fulfill the needs of New York State standards and to show them that high school students are capable of writing the way they want them to, not that they are capable of thinking and actually standing up to an argument that they might feel strong opinions about.
 
The essays and papers we have to write in college are significantly different from the ones in high school in many senses. In college, we are asked to write our honest thoughts about the topic in hand, and our papers might sometimes require to be longer, making them more thoughtful for us. This all depends in the class you are in and the‌ professor you have because here the teachers do not have to follow such a strictly made curriculum like high school teachers do. That is why each professor in college has a syllabus that they make specifically for the class they are teaching and it is something that the college students do have to follow if they want to pass their class. However, it varies from class to class and they are allowed more liberty than in high school. Since in high school we were not allowed to use “I.” It is quite a shock to some students that in college we might be allowed to use “I” depending on the assignment and the professors.
 
This semester I have INTD 203, a class for education students, and the writings that I have to do in this class vary from easy to hard. I have to do two response papers throughout the course of the semester and these papers according to my professor, Dr. David Granger: “should be your own thoughtful, personal response to some idea, issue, or person addressed either in the class readings and/or class discussions. The topic should be something that interests you in some way; and I want to know what you honestly think about it, not what you imagine I want you to say about it.” After I read this on the syllabus for the class, I realized just how different college’s standards of writing are from high school’s. Even though this assignment is supposed to be only two to three pages, it makes the students really focus on the argument they want to state in their paper since it is something we choose, giving us more freedom to express our emotions towards something we are really passionate about. In this same class I have to do another assignment that is weighed more in my overall grade and requires twenty to thirty pages of work. It is a research paper of an elementary, middle, or high school of our choice focusing on a diversity and equity issue the school we choose went through in the past or is currently going through. This paper will be a challenge for me since I have never done such a big research in an important and relevant issue today. This is something that colleges want their students to leave with, knowing that it was something that they accomplished while they were there. SUNY Geneseo is no exception; my school signals this point in its integrative inquiry of its Learning Outcomes for Baccalaureate Education when it says that students will have: “to ask meaningful questions connecting personal experiences to academic study and co-curricular life; to synthesize multiple bodies of knowledge to address real-world problems and issues.” Not only my INTD 203 class, but my INTD 105 class with Dr. McCoy lets its students truly connect with the class and the topics we decide to write about, like this post that I am writing right now.
 
Coming to college and seeing all the liberty we have in academic writing and realizing that there are no such “rules” to writing essays might make many students uncomfortable because they have been accustomed their whole lives to write based on those sets of rules they were taught while they were younger. But, if we work hard and every time we write we remember to write from our hearts and consider what our honest opinion about the topic in hand is, the process will become easier. GLOBE also explains this in its learning outcomes on Critical Thinking: “Students will demonstrate to formulate questions or frame issues in ways that permit examination or investigation; to explicate and evaluate the assumptions underlying the claims of self and others; to establish and pursue systematic and valid methods for collecting and evaluating relevant evidence; to draw soundly reasoned and appropriately limited conclusions on the basis of evidence; to relate conclusions to a larger body of knowledge.” College’s and university’s goals for students is to get them thinking about what is right and wrong in the society we live in today and to not be afraid to stand up to what they think is right, despite everybody else’s opinions.

The Tortoise or the Hare

The other day in class we discussed Discourse on the Method, specifically one point Descartes made about patience. Descartes argued that “those who go very slowly but always on the right path can make much greater progress than those who sprint and go astray.” Like the old story of the tortoise and the hare, Descartes is arguing that slow and steady wins the race. Descartes claims that often when people go to fast they often miss something or make too many mistakes. He urges the need for patience and taking the time to think through problems and situations. Our class discussion connected this to timed essays in high school and time management in college. Often people in high school rush through essays because they do not want to be doing them. There is also often a time limit, which enforces rushing through rather than thinking through. While time management is a necessary tool for students to learn in college and later on, this rushing through and limited time decreased creativity and the ability of students to think through the material.

This reminded me of my study habits for my Human Biology class. In Biology, every class we cover a single chapter, and I try to read the chapter before class so it’s easier to understand during class. I am not a big fan of reading the Biology textbook, so I just want to read it as quickly as possible to get the reading over with. However, I am constantly conflicted between reading fast, copying the textbook word for word, and getting it done as soon as I can, with reading slow, absorbing the material, takin more effective notes and ensuring that I understand the material. The first one might be less effective in the long run, but I am still reading the material and getting it done quicker. The second might seem like an obvious better option, but it also takes up much more time, time that I need to spend doing the online homework for biology or attending to other class homework. Weighing the benefits and negatives (or risks and rewards) of each, I know that in the long run the latter would be the better choice.

In any class, we often risk rushing through an assignment to get it done quickly but less efficiency. Students can look at the risks and rewards of each alternative and contemplate whether saving some time could be worth the lower grade or going through material and taking your time might be worth it for the higher grade. Descartes argues that the need for patience and perseverance, rather than rushing and not giving your best. Similarly, They Say I Say shares that many students “have trouble entering some of the high-powered conversations that take place in college because they do not know enough about the topic at hand.” It further argues that when given the chance to study the material in depth those same students become more confident about their own ideas and contribute more, and that good arguments are based on “everyday knowledge that can be isolated, identified and used by almost anyone.” While this doesn’t exactly connect to Descartes argument about patience, it does connect to his argument because it shares the importance of going in depth about material and taking time to gradually absorb information. Going in depth about a subject is more worth it than brushing the surface because it allows for a deeper understanding that is better in the long run.

A Whole New View

In  December of 2016, my senior year, I was invited to Conference Allstate, to sing among 500 best high school vocalists in New York State. Coming from a high school choir where students rarely sang in key, couldn’t comprehend rhythm, and didn’t care what they sounded like, this was whole new experience for me. I was surrounded by people who had the same passion as me, with so much more talent than what I was used to. Returning to my mediocre high school chorus after that moving experience was somewhat sad.

While scrolling through our optional extra credit assignments, one in particular caught my eye. It happened to be Dr. Ysaye Maria Barnwell’s “Community Sing”. After months of regret for leaving music behind as part of my high school career, the word sing practically jumped of the page. But after reading the description I was a little more than skeptical. How would this director manage to get a group of strangers, many inexperienced, to sing in unison? I felt like attending this may be close to being stuck in high school chorus all over again. But, I dragged my skeptical self to the presentation anyways, and I’m very thankful that I did. Dr. Barnwell taught me a new kind of music and gave me a whole new perspective on the world. She began by teaching us spiritual songs like “Kumbaya” ,which means “come by here.” She added easy harmonies, nothing too challenging. Then she moved to slave songs, like “Wade in Water” and “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” During these songs she painted the picture of slaves wading through the water, far enough out that dogs could not pick up their scent, and they could escape to freedom.

This moment was when I realized that she did not gather the community together to teach us perfect technique, or make sure we were singing the correct harmony. She joined us together simply to share her love and passion for soulful music, to teach us where the beautiful songs came from, and why they are still sung today. She was not expecting anything complex, she was just hoping to join us all together in song, and I was truly moved by that. I was never expecting such a beautiful song to come out of a group of strangers.

 

Conduct Code or Moral Code?

I’ll never forget how Dr Leonard Sancilio (Dean of Students) summed up Geneseo students. He said that what sets a Geneseo student apart is they will almost always hold the door open for you. I was surprised to learn that this is actually a breach in security. Dr Beth McCoy recognized Geneseo’s reputation for holding the door open, but also pointed out that in the faculty training, they were told not to do this.

Continue reading “Conduct Code or Moral Code?”