Regardless of whether a student agrees with my worldview, I want them to be biased at the end of their research process. I want them to have strong opinions about a subject and to be skeptical of uninformed pronouncements about it. Think about it: if you’ve been researching a subject for eight or ten weeks, using academic resources and doing primary research – that is, research out in the field – on a subject, shouldn’t you have a strong, informed opinion?
Read MoreAs I hit “publish”, I hear Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s voice in my head, saying “You understand, of course, that everything I say is horseshit.”
Read MoreMy students, when they arrive, think they have mastered writing. They confidently hand in a paper with five paragraphs on it, and act confused when I tell them to change it. These students might as well have shown me five trees of the same kind planted in a perfectly ordered row on a lawn cleared of everything but those trees and the grass, and ask me to evaluate their forest.
Read MoreI tend to think of this – perhaps grandiosely, perhaps unnecessarily – as a kind of libidinal architecture: creating a structure that encourages those moving through it to move towards a certain set of goals and away from a general set of lose conditions.
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