I might add to what David says, in my own view wisely, that the notion
that twenty-year-old brains are not mature results not just from observing
teen-age behavior (isn't it the old shepherd in The Winter's Tale who
suggests burying boys when still children and digging them up again when
they are twenty-one? Something like that) but from MRIs and so forth.
Their brain wiring is *literally* not finished. Some related research
about twenty or thirty years ago, I recall from my days of reading "The
English Journal" on high-school English teaching, showed that very few
people younger than twenty or so use sentences with embedded independent
clauses--one sentence embedded in another in effect. That is how I usually
sense that something is awry--not only the accuracy of the prose but the
way the author knows how to "writhe" words around, as Nashe said Harvey
couldn't do, into complex structures. Some of my seniors can do this, but
more graduate students are able to do it. I think at Barnard the chief
problem is the intense pressure to excel mixed with anxiety about
performance, particularly when the topic is so alien as Renaissance
literature. I agree that most students would prefer me not to be lax,
which is why I've resolved to involve the (kindly, as it happens) dean
more often.
To repeat something I said earlier: in-class exams are fine, but it
was in one of them that I met a paragraph, and a very nice paragraph
too, from Harry Berger. When I was visiting my much more
electronically savvy new sister-in-law yesterday I googled
"Arichimago" and "Berger" on her hand-held device (I forget the name)
and there it was. Our problem is going to be, if we continue to have
essay questions--or identifications or pretty much anything--on exams
to police (for want of a less ugly word) the use of these new
marvelous toys that get you on the web when you just look as though
you were thinking as you stare at your feet, hands in lap, fingers
moving just a bit, behind the kid scribbling in front of you. Anne.
> I'm afraid my point wasn't clearly expressed, though Dorothy intuited
> what I meant. It's not that 22 year olds fail to grasp the concept "no
> fair!" nor that they don't understand plagiarism--though I have in fact
> met one or two whose ignorance on that score was genuine.
>
> I meant, as Dorothy explained more clearly, that students in their
> early twenties often don't yet reason clearly about the implications and
> consquences of behavior. I also meant that they don't always have a
> very sophisticated sense of their own relationship to institutions and
> social processes. And at least some of this really is developmental:
> there's brain science on it, if you care to check.
>
> The reason I brought this up is that we sometimes speak as if kids that
> age are adults, and in fact they aren't, quite. Our job is in part to
> teach them how to think, and we do that best if we have a sense of their
> cognitive development. Literary study in particular involves a great
> deal of ethical reasoning, which is one reason it's especially valuable
> for post-teens of the typical college age. And as teachers, of course,
> we convey ethical thinking to our students not only in the content of
> our instruction but also, by implication, in all the ways we treat them,
> consciously or unconsciously.
>
> We won't all handle that in the same ways, but we should probably all
> at least try to imagine ways our teaching can not only instruct students
> about what is or isn't ethical, but also elicit and strengthen in them
> the desire for ethics. Tacitly encouraging the self-justifying cynicism
> of the slacker doesn't strike me as a promising way to do that, I
> guess.
>
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