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> Rebel Palm wrote:
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>> ... By the time they reach graduate school, these students have had a career of being able to get away with throwing other people's (some expert's) ideas at a paper, writing it once (no revisions), with very little effort spent on original thought. Some of them come to me perplexed at a prof's demand for your "own ideas." They say, "no one's ever told me I get to have my own ideas." And this is grad school!
About teaching 'own ideas'
One thing I learned from an undergrad writing course (I swore I'd never forget that teacher's name, and I want to give her credit, but I just can't right now; Mary something) was to keep a notebook on my thinking. She had us finish each class by writing down three questions related to the lesson. These could not be questions that could be answered by any equivalent of googling them (well, that didn't exist then, but you know what I mean). At the end of the week we had 9 questions each, and our weekend assignment was to choose the most interesting one, and write a one page exploration of it. Not an 'answer', an exploration.
She would collect these on Mondays and give them back on Tuesdays, so she was skimming them to be sure that we were asking real questions and exploring them honestly. Sometimes there was a little checkmark, and sometimes a short comment about this or that aspect, but she wasn't putting a lot of time into them.
I think she may have used them as well to get inspiration for exam questions... at least, several questions closely related to some of mine ended up on our mid-term and final (and hey, I'd already thought about them, so that was lucky for me). Maybe she didn't do that consciously, because in later classes the same thing happened, and those instructors never knew about the notebooks.
This system worked so well for my thinking processes that after that semester I did it in all my classes... and right through grad school, though by then I would jot questions into the notebook whenever they crossed my mind, rather than at a set time. I only taught undergrads two years, but I taught them this as a survival skill -- sometimes groups had to create the questions based their favourite class, sometimes on my class. Nearly all of them liked it.
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