I started cold calling after a student (a CT reader and commenter, who remembers this because I remind her of it [1]), many years ago, having sat silently throughout my senior-level class in political philosophy, explained why she wanted to attend Law School. “I’ve heard that in Law School they cold-call, so that all the students have done the reading, and everyone is engaged. I want to be in classes like that.” She reminded me of the old TV show, The Paper Chase, in which John Houseman, one of those American actors with an inexplicable English accent, would seemingly bully his Law students by constantly trying to catch them out.
Going to Law School solely in order to get cold called seemed a bit eccentric. But I got the point. She’d missed out on a lot of learning – the learning you do when you articulate your thoughts out-loud, sometimes discovering that they aren’t thoughts at all, and other times discovering that they are more interesting and/or more complex than you had realized. My job was to make sure she did that learning – the learning that other, louder, more aggressive students already did – and I had let her down.
At first it was difficult. It is socially awkward to ask a stranger what their thoughts are, especially when both you and they are completely unused to it. What makes it worse is that students enter the classroom expecting the standard norms of the campus to apply – that they can take a back seat and listen (or, more accurately, look as if they are listening), talking only when they feel like it. I wasn’t skilled at cold-calling at all, and for the first couple of years I would often lose my nerve after a few classes, and retreat to my usual, deficient, practices.
I discovered it was easier for me to call on students if I knew all their names. And it was easier to learn all their names quickly if I called on them to talk (who would have thought that it is easier to get to know people by talking with them than by talking at them?). And it got even easier when I realized that the average quality of the talking is higher if the people who always volunteer talk less, because shyer and more reserved students often have valuable things to say. And I discovered that cold calling elicits more diverse perspectives because the willingness to volunteer to talk is not equally spread across all demographics.
But how to avoid seeming like John Houseman? I want to draw them in, not catch them out. After I had started cold-calling routinely a student observer admonished me: “I know that you don’t mind if a student has nothing to say. But they don’t know that. You have to tell them that, and show them that you mean it”.
Today cold calling is an essential strategy in my smaller classes. I use it to ensure that nearly everybody speaks in every class session, and few students go more than two classes without speaking.
Some students would talk all the time if you let them, and professors sometimes feel that seeking out other voices deprives the eager of some valuable opportunity. Maybe it does. But it replaces it with something else that is also valuable: the opportunity to listen, and think, about what someone else has thought. A student afflicted with over-enthusiasm about his own talk once told me that he resented my classes at first because I would constantly overlook him, but that after a few sessions “I realized that I was thinking about what other people were saying rather than what I was going to say, and it was interesting”.
Maybe cold-calling is a misnomer. A new instructor who observed one of my classes recently baulked when a student observer told her I always cold call. “It’s not cold at all”, she said, “it’s more like warm calling”. Let’s go with that: I’ll propose a few rules of thumb for warm-calling:
i) First, what makes it warm calling rather than cold-calling is making it clear that you know sometimes people space out, and sometimes they have nothing to say. So it is ok to pass. Tell them that explicitly. But then, make sure they really believe you, by reinforcing it whenever someone does pass.
ii) Second, what makes it warm calling rather than cold-calling is making it clear that you know sometimes people space out, and sometimes they have nothing to say. So it is ok to pass. Tell them that explicitly. But then, make sure they really believe you, by reinforcing it whenever someone does pass. (I made that point twice to reinforce it, in case you spaced out).
iii) Ask good questions so that students don’t think you are searching for a specific answer and get paralysed searching for it.
iv) Forewarn the students that you will engage in the practice.
v) Use the students’ names (have them introduce themselves at the start of every class, and get them to use name tents)
vi) Before you call on anyone you should often, though not always, give students time to get their thoughts in order, with think-pair-share or by asking them to spend a minute writing their thoughts on paper.
vii) If you don’t give them time before you call on them, give them time after you call on them. Smart people can’t always answer good questions immediately, and part of the point of the practice is to elicit the voices of those who don’t answer immediately.
viii) Many students are habituated to the idea that they need to get everything right: talking risks getting things wrong. Make it clear—not just by saying it, but by the way you interact with the students – that you expect them to make mistakes because that’s an essential part of learning.
Warm calling is a self-effacing practice. If you do it quite a bit in the first few weeks, you’ll pretty quickly stop doing it. The students, including the shy ones, will start to talk of their own accord.
And let them talk. Structure it, make it purposeful, but make it happen. As one student observed: In my classes where the professor does all the talking I think my classmates are all stupid. In classes where they do the talking, I think my classmates are really smart. And they’re the same students!”
I’m comfortable with cold calling now. Students aren’t, to start with. A student called Rachel, whom I subsequently got to know well, told me at her graduation that after the first class session (on her first day of college) in which I told the students I’d feel free to cold-call, she called her mum and said “I hate Brighouse. He says he’s going to cold call us, and I’m going to hate that”. Three years later another Rachel called her mother on the first day of college to say she hated me because I had told her I would cold call. She graduated early and kindly described the classes she took from me as ‘transformative’. Several other students have thanked me using exactly the same word recently. The phrase is overused, and in this case flattering, but I do know what they mean. The second Rachel was as shy and reserved as the first during her first semester. But she approached me in her junior year for advice on how to get a department on the campus to add a new American Sign Language class; she enthusiastically approached her classmates to organize them. She told me that being forced to talk in class had made her learn more, including that she had agency in the world. I’ve met the mothers of both Rachels [2], and each thanked me for the care and support I gave to their daughter.
[1] I wrote the letter. She didn’t go to Law School, and became a Philosophy professor instead. Does she cold call? Ask her if you can figure out who she is.
[2] One of them brought her mother to my office at 5 pm on the day after the 2016 General Election, having texted me at short notice. Neither was in a good mood, and possibly just needed cheering up, which Rachel knows I’m good at. I met the mother of the other Rachel at graduation, which was a much happier occasion.
{ 63 comments }
Paul Segal 12.02.22 at 4:18 pm
Lovely post. What size classes do you typically teach? My last class had 60 students, which is certainly (for me) too many to learn all their names, and also too many to make sure everyone talks at least once per two classes. Any thoughts on how to approach that size of class?
Kevin M 12.02.22 at 4:21 pm
Lovely reflections and advice, as usual. (iii) – asking good questions – is the hardest and takes the most practice. As a teacher, it’s good to develop a habit of acknowledging when you’ve asked a stupid or overly leading question. It happens, and it can turn warm calling into cold calling (as in casting a chill over the conversation) if it goes unacknowledged.
CJColucci 12.02.22 at 5:08 pm
When I was in law school — back when Hammurabi’s code was the main focus of our study — students had to sign up on a seating chart for the large lecture classes.
Much juvenile hilarity involved in the project. Dick Hertz, Heywood Jablome, and others appeared on the chart often. In one of my classes, we had a classmate named Patty Ness. She, perhaps unthinkingly, wrote in “P. Ness.” When the professor called on her, he was probably shocked to get an answer.
M Caswell 12.02.22 at 6:14 pm
Haven’t called on a student, cold or otherwise, in 17 years.
Stacy 12.02.22 at 7:37 pm
RE: Allowing students ample opportunity to have their thoughts together, your point (vi).
One of my law professors used a strategy I liked a lot, which was to rotate through the class in clusters, so that you knew ahead of time if you would be on the “hot seat” during a particular session or not. This naturally improved the quality of class discussion, because we all tended to come very well prepared to sessions where we knew we would be called on.
Obviously, this approach lowered the baseline level of anxiety felt during class sessions where you knew you were “safe,” but it also did that even for sessions where you knew you would be called on. For a lot of people, removing the uncertainty basically defines the difference between a call being cold versus warm. I think there was also a psychological benefit to knowing that you would have allies on the day, so that you would not be expected to carry more than a share of the questioning.
For me, there was so much truth to the old law school joke that you lose 20+ IQ points in the moment you are cold called, but this warm-call alternative seemed to entirely solve that.
LFC 12.02.22 at 8:41 pm
M Caswell @4
Any particular reason why not?
Alan White 12.02.22 at 8:47 pm
Stacy beat me to the punch, but I was thinking along those same lines–using some kind of ordering in the class for called-upon answers. As for me, I relied entirely too much on raised hands and the like for discussion and answers, and think I should have used something like this ordered method.
Joe 12.02.22 at 9:03 pm
Re: Houseman’s accent
John Houseman was born Jacques Hausmann, with a French father and British mother. He was educated in England and didn’t move to the US until his twenties.
Although he had been involved with countless productions as director, writer, or producer, the law professor in The Paper Chase was his first big acting role.
engels 12.02.22 at 9:15 pm
I can remember hating this as a fresher and I don’t think it helped me overcome anything. Different strokes, different folks…
M Caswell 12.02.22 at 9:42 pm
LFC: With small enough discussion classes, I need only ask an opening question, and then participate in the ensuing conversation as I see fit.
Matt 12.02.22 at 10:30 pm
When I taught large law classes in the US, I usually made of of seating charts. These days the schools would provide a scheme shaped like the class, each student would write their name in the spot they were sitting, and then the university would provide me with a chart with the student’s pictures and names at the spot. That helped a lot for learning people’sl names and with calling on them.
Here is Australia, even pre-covid, law schools had most decided that attendence was optional, and unsurprisingly, students have decided to not attend very often. This is bad for everyone. (Imagine how Harry’s students who found the experience “transformative” would have likely reacted if going was optional.) So, calling on people in lectures isn’t very easy. Where I teach now attendence is required in tutorials, and I do something like cold calling in most of them, though they are also small enough that I don’t have to do much.
When I had larger classes in the US I often used “on-call” panels – groups of people who were assigned to be especially prepared to speak for the particular class, known beforehand. I did still reseve the right to cold call, but this reduced some of the stress people had. It was more work for me in some ways, and lacks some of the benefits Harry mentions, but has some advantages, too.
Harry 12.03.22 at 4:24 am
“With small enough discussion classes, I need only ask an opening question, and then participate in the ensuing conversation as I see fit.”
I sometimes tell my students (and basically believe) that if I were really good at teaching I’d never speak at all, but I’m just not that good.
“My last class had 60 students”
AARGH. So, I can make what I describe above work really well with 20 students, and can just about keep it up with 25, but anything above that I find very hard. My department has been raising the cap on upper-level classes lately, and we’re now at 30 — next semester I will have 40 because we have a crisis (someone who was going to teach another class that meets the requirement is leaving). I’ve dealt with the higher cap by getting students to volunteer for an extra session. So I meet the whole class for 75 minutes once a week, then on another day of the week meet half of them for 75 minutes, and the other half for another 75 minutes.
I do teach classes of 80 plus. At that point I can’t even try to do what I have described. So I lecture, but with a great number of built-in, though mostly short, small group discussions. In spring 2020 I managed to get really high quality whole class discussions of 15-20 minutes at a time in a class of 160 (in an amazing room, I should add). And then on March 11th we got closed down. I managed to do the same thing pretty well when I taught my large lecture class last spring, and hope to do the same this coming spring. 60 is much closer to 180 than it is to 30, if you see what i mean.
My recently retired colleague Dan Hausman could, in fact, learn all 80-100 names of the students, and quickly. I don’t understand how, especially because, as he (rightly and regularly) points out in all other respect I have a quite remarkable memory and he… doesn’t.
John Q 12.03.22 at 10:14 am
50 is pretty much an absolute minimum in Australia, and I have huge trouble with the students’ names. Name tents is an interesting idea.
Phil 12.03.22 at 11:38 am
I used to have terrible trouble framing questions in ways that – not just could but – would elicit thoughtful answers and prompt discussion; I remember an awful lot of “yes”, “no”, “well, to some extent”, “it’s a bit of both”… Getting students to want to kick ideas around and explore possibilities, rather than reach some sort of agreement and shut things down as quickly as possible, was what I never really cracked. (That and the whole name-learning thing, but that really was on me.)
I had good results one year with a Rogerian approach, which in some ways is the opposite of cold-calling – the instructor sits down with the students and says, “anything that’s related in any way to the subject of this course is on topic for discussion; what do people want to talk about?”. Rogers himself admitted that students find this tremendously difficult at first and need two or three sessions before it clicks; my trouble was that by the third session I’d lost 2/3 of the class. The other third turned into a really good, high-performing group (although I never did manage to rein in a couple of the more talkative blokes).
Just to round things off I’m currently taking a law conversion course, and it’s cold-caling pretty much all the way – but then, I’m in a group of 6-8 grad students, 12 at most. Also, everyone’s expected to prepare for every workshop sessions, so everyone does prepare (apart from a few students who get round it by skipping the workshop).
engels 12.03.22 at 11:50 am
I’ve heard that in Law School they cold-call, so that all the students have done the reading, and everyone is engaged. I want to be in classes like that.”
Not sure how I managed to get through university without meeting anyone like this (probably my age).
Some of this reminds me a bit of Annette Lareau’s stylised distinction between American middle class and working class parenting styles: “concerted cultivation” (roughly: enforced participation in activities organised by adults) and “accomplished natural growth” (unsupervised interaction with peers). To quote the Wikipedia entry on the former:
Harry 12.03.22 at 5:09 pm
I’m just guessing that you went to college with lots of people who felt entitled enough to talk in class, whereas she went to college with lots of people who, like her, didn’t, so was in classes where the few people who felt entitled did all the talking.
She was excited to think and talk about ideas. I have lots of students like that, but who don’t get much opportunity because of the way their lives and their classrooms are structured. What she didn’t understand was the lots of the students have done the reading, and are engaged, but in many classes the professors do all the talking and in many others they just lack the skills to elicit valuable participation from students who aren’t full of themselves, as many of them were when many of them were students. I think they deserve teachers who can make that happen, and I’m glad she prompted me to try and become one.
M Caswell 12.03.22 at 5:23 pm
“natural growth”
That’s the ticket. Such a discussion may require the faculty member and the students to all become dialogical “peers”– no claims of authority, reciprocal respect around the table.
engels 12.03.22 at 6:55 pm
I’m probably too far removed from it to have useful opinions; I just have strong memories as an inhibited first year of it being counterproductive when it was done to me (albeit in a less sensitive way than you are proposing). Generally I’m against paternalism I think.
Anyway I recently learned that one of my fellow wallflowers from those days is a partner at one of those firms making £500K+ a year, largely by facilitating corporate tax avoidance as I understand (another is a powerful “left” neoliberal politician). So there’s hope for all of us.
StevenAttewell 12.03.22 at 7:01 pm
This is obviously dependent on small class size, but one way that I’ve found to merge “cold calling” with priming the pump on discussion is to set out an expectation from the beginning of class that A. everyone has to talk at least once, no matter how minorly, and B. that I’ll start the discussion portion of each class with a “first reactions” to the reading where I’ll go around the room and ask everyone one-by-one.
I’ve found this helps the people who really don’t want to talk beyond the bare minimum get their required obligation in, while priming the rest of the class to start talking (and flags up issues in the reading that people found interesting or confusing that I’ll need to make sure to cover in more detail).
Harry 12.03.22 at 8:04 pm
I don’t really see it as paternalism. They didn’t have to go to college, and having gone they don’t have to take my class. There’s plenty of classes where they can just listen to a professor tell them things they would have gotten if they’d done the reading and do lots of rote memorization, if that’s the bag they’re into. Lots of options! Taking a class in which they’ll learn how to think with their peers and how to thoughtfully articulate ideas is just one of among many possibilities. For what it’ worth the kinds of people who have those career trajectories don’t take my classes, for reasons best known to themselves (and are more likely to attend posher universities than mine, though mine is entirely posh enough I’d have thought!).
LFC 12.03.22 at 8:06 pm
engels
Didn’t you go to Oxbridge (I’m using the portmanteau term bc in your case I’m not sure whether it was Oxford or Cambridge) and aren’t there such significant differences between (much of) British and (much of) American undergraduate education as to make this a case of apples and oranges?
Or maybe I’m missing something here. (It wouldn’t be the first time.)
Poirot 12.03.22 at 9:08 pm
This is great, Harry. I always enjoy reading your posts on teaching, but this one put a big smile on my face–on an otherwise unpleasant day.
Like you, I’ve had plenty of success at productive discussions in large classes via groups, etc.
Emma 12.03.22 at 10:19 pm
Harry, great post!
By the way, Dan memorized students’ names by taking their photos on the first day of class, getting them printed at Walgreens, then using them as flashcards.
engels 12.04.22 at 1:24 am
I think the equity worries about non-participation look a little different in Oxford, where PPE means the most venal careerists are taking philosophy classes, sometimes with visible boredom and impatience. But idk maybe if — had been coerced into speaking up in a discussion of Rawls they’d be less enthusiastic about dismembering the remains of the British welfare state today (I doubt it).
Alan White 12.04.22 at 3:59 am
Harry, I will point out that you teach students at an R1 who are for the most part much more motivated in the realm of higher ed. I on the other hand taught at the lowest echelon of that same UW System, and the quality of k-12 preparation I saw was on average much below what you see every day. (The average ACT for Madison is 27 or better; at my campus it strayed around 20-21.) Getting students motivated to learn in the first place is a much greater challenge in those circumstances. It requires a great deal of performance on the part of the instructor to instill that motivation. So the starting-place for where students can even begin to try and participate in class is very different. That’s why cold-calling in your circumstances and mine were from the start very, very different. I tried to instill a passion that just wasn’t there for many students; it required a combination of scholarship, theatrics, and just keeping up with popular culture to try and continually shock them into interest. That is a combination of skills that is stressful to maintain, but essential to connect with that audience.
Blissex 12.04.22 at 11:33 am
«“My last class had 60 students” AARGH. So, I can make what I describe above work really well with 20 students, and can just about keep it up with 25, but anything above that I find very hard.»
«Didn’t you go to Oxbridge (I’m using the portmanteau term bc in your case I’m not sure whether it was Oxford or Cambridge) and aren’t there such significant differences between (much of) British and (much of) American undergraduate education»
The question here is cost of education and consequently student participation.
In some universities the customers are willing to pay a lot to have not-so-large classes, where students are talked at, and smaller tutorials where students are talked with.
In some other universities the customers care only skills acquisition and a credential for getting a job, and don’t care about class size or tutorials.
One question then is which universities are finishing schools for the future leaders and investors from the upper class and which are job training for future trusties and professionals from the middle class.
Another question is how many middle class parents would risk giving a finishing school education (“talked with”) to their offspring giving them attitudes above their station that would make them a bad fit for the trustie and professional jobs that would be open to them.
Ben Vernia 12.04.22 at 1:58 pm
There are a lot of variations on compelled student dialogue. Law school is famous for the Socratic method, and it’s obviously a component of that. Students who don’t participate voluntarily are missing out on the full experience. Another twist is the “stand and deliver” method, in which the student must stand, deliver a case’s facts and holding, and then answer the professor’s questions. It ought not be much different than doing so from one’s seat, but it significantly raises one’s blood pressure. When I was in law school at Vanderbilt, its chief proponent was my 1L Property professor, C. Dent Bostick (the “C” was short for “Charlemagne”). Since many law students go on to specialties that require some public speaking, standing and delivering helped build some muscle memory for those who would practice in court– and probably helped steer into other disciplines those who remained fearful of public speaking.
LFC 12.04.22 at 2:30 pm
engels @24
But when _ gets to their tutorial session (I don’t know btw what the frequency of those is) they have no choice but to speak bc it’s just them and the tutor (and maybe one other student) alone in a room, right?
Even if _ comes in with a prepared paper, I imagine there’s still some back-and-forth?
Michael Cain 12.04.22 at 6:05 pm
Not just law or philosophy or traditional “discussion” classes. I took honors calculus as a freshman. The prof was from Louisiana and ran the class on a rather formal basis. From time to time he would stop in the middle of a proof, look out over the class, and pick a victim. Often it was me: “Mr. Cain, what comes next?” It happened often enough that on the walk back to the dorm one afternoon one of the women asked me, “Mike, why does Prof. Lewis hate you?”
Years later I had a chance to ask the prof about it. He smiled and said, “I thought there was a mathematician in there, but they needed to be goaded into coming out.” In hindsight he was right — at least there was an applied mathematician in there. I didn’t ask why he thought I was stubborn enough to stay in the class and put up with it long enough. But damn, I had “Mr. Cain, what comes next?” nightmares for years.
engels 12.04.22 at 8:27 pm
LFC, that’s true but they did have classes too, even in the dim and distant aughts.
More importantly, I disagree with the populist-y notion there’s an ethical difference in kind between their careers and aspirations and those of ambitious grads of “not posh but posh enough” unis, and that lawyers/accountants/corporate executives on less than half a million a year are likely to upstanding, socially useful members of the community. To quote an (in)famous statesman:
LFC 12.04.22 at 10:43 pm
Blissex @26
With respect, your comment is not sociologically accurate. Class position certainly matters, but plenty of middle-class kids go to universities (in both US and UK) where they take some small classes.
It’s the one-to-one tutorial system (one student, one tutor) that is, while not unknown in the US, more distinctively, I think, British; and I associate it, perhaps wrongly, esp w the most elite British univs. I stand open to correction on the facts…
Harry 12.05.22 at 3:06 pm
“More importantly, I disagree with the populist-y notion there’s an ethical difference in kind between their careers and aspirations and those of ambitious grads of “not posh but posh enough” unis, and that lawyers/accountants/corporate executives on less than half a million a year are likely to upstanding, socially useful members of the community”
Teachers, nurses, counseling psychologists, social workers, pre-school teachers, Mayors of poverty and violence-ridden cities, park rangers… I’m just thinking about the careers of recently and not so recently graduated students I know really well. A lot of teachers and nurses. An American-Indian/native American student of mine just graduated from the Police Academy in Madison last month. Cops are, for the most part, social workers round here.
One of the Rachels just finished training as a school psychologist (so she’ll be on teacher pay) and the other is in nursing.
Some become doctors (GPs usually, though one is currently training to specialize in geriatric medicine). And a few become lawyers, but, honestly, they don’t end up earning that sort of money (the ones I teach don’t go to Harvard and Yale Law schools, they go to Madison, Marquette, or Minnesota). I teach future actuaries, for sure, and a working class kid who took a lot of my classes is now an analyst and I predict she’ll make a lot of money; and another working class kid will probably will go to some fancy law school and make a lot of money). But a different recent student who became an analyst quit after two years to train as a teacher instead.
There isn’t really an equivalent in the UK of the State flagship. We teach students who would sail into Oxbridge, and students who would attend the nearest former poly, in the same classes. The median family income for students from Wisconsin is about 10% higher than the median income for families with college age children in the State (obviously, we have disproportionately few WI students from the lowest and highest parts of the income distribution; poor kids go to college at very low rates, and rich kids from Wisconsin (we do have plenty of affluent kids, but they’re mostly not from Wisconsin) go to private schools) .
But maybe engels disparages nurses, social workers and primary teachers as the class enemy too. I don’t know what engels does, but I certainly lack the standing to criticize them. Or, if he wants to exclude them from the category of “ambitious students”, well, I disagree. These are people with very a lot of ambition, smart and hard working, who want to do something that is difficult and valuable (at least, I think those professions are valuable, and I’m not going to be drawn into an argument about that). As their teacher I want them to be able to learn and lead, and have rewarding enjoyable, as well as valuable, work lives.
tenacitus 12.05.22 at 3:20 pm
I used to do a lot of warm calling in the class. Asking students what they thought, reminding them we’re all friends here and if they’re not sure they could ask their colleagues for help. Also they were free to say they don’t know. Being a student soon I realize there can be a lot of anxiety about being called. Hopefully it helped them prepare for interviews and see all ideas and paths are worthy when you’re trying to figure things out. Like most things I didn’t use just one approach. The biggest thing I tried doing was reminding students they could figure out things from their prior knowledge, talking with me and others and gain confidence in their abilities. Maybe some of them didn’t like it but I would discuss that and other things with the students to figure out what was helpful. If they told me some practice want I would drop it. I’ve always found your posts about pedagogy insightful .
J, not that one 12.05.22 at 3:31 pm
Re. The discussion between LFC and Blissex, I’m inclined to agree with the former. While there are presumably criticisms to be made of the idea that everyone should attend the kind of college that prepares them to see the world as elites do, an education system that prepared a large professional class that expected to follow orders and join a strict bureaucracy would also produce people who are wholly unsuited for adult life in existing society.
Trader Joe 12.05.22 at 4:50 pm
With respect to using a Socratic or cold/warm calling method in larger classes where its hard to know everyone’s name.
I had a business school professor for a class of around 60 who basically said on the first day: 1) I’d like to get to know all your names but I probably won’t get to know all of you 2) I’m going to cold call, so be prepared every day and;
3) Every day I’m coming to class with a randomized list of the names in this class and that’s how I’m going to do the cold calls. If you otherwise answer questions in the class name yourself and I’ll strike you off the cold call list for that day.
What he told me later (I had him as an advisor and a couple of small group classes later) was that yes, he did in fact have such a randomized list, but after a few weeks he pretty well knew the people who were speaking regularl so he skipped those names even if they came up in favor of those he didn’t hear from.
Despite what he told people, by the end he did in fact know most all of the names.
He found the approach constructive both for generating good class discussion as well as to helping to inform how he read and interpreted various long answer exam questions and reports since he could tell the people who understood the concepts verbally vs. written and vis versa.
engels 12.05.22 at 10:59 pm
I want to say I wasn’t attacking University of Wisconsin-Madison and I’ve always had a very high opinion of it since I listened to Erik Wright’s recordings of his graduate class (though I sadly couldn’t participate). However, I did just try to google graduate destinations and got a list of famous alumni topped by Dick Cheney and Charles Lindbergh, so they can’t all be nurses and park rangers I think.
As their teacher I want them to be able to learn and lead, and have rewarding enjoyable, as well as valuable, work lives.
And I just think that within a capitalist system this is impossible.
Eugene Zapst 12.05.22 at 11:14 pm
I’ve tried rotating through groups of 10 students selected alphabetically from a class of 30 or so and who were given notice they would be called upon in the next class session. When called upon, students who had previously talked did so, but most of the students who didn’t talk previously simply responded that they had nothing to say. If you let students know they can just pass on participating, many will do just that.
Harry 12.06.22 at 10:57 am
I did specify my students, the ones I teach: so, for example, not political science graduate students, and not Law students (some of whom are wonderful though). This is part of it: state flagships produce Lindberghs and teachers and nurses and… they’re not like Oxbridge. Of the several hundred thousand alumni alive at any one time we are bound to have a few bad eggs. But for what it’s worth, Dick Cheney isn’t one of them. I think that’s a case of a massaged cv. He dropped out of grad school in political science here after no time at all.
On the other side of town there’s a Charles Lindbergh Elementary school. We passed it the other day and were all shocked. Your comment explains why its there. But why there hasn’t yet been a huge ruckus over renaming it? Ignorance explains that and I am so so tempted to give the politically correct “defund the police” “teachers are the cause of the achievement gap” “kids learn more at home anyway” crowd on our school board yet another excuse not to to the job they took on.
But I won’t.
I don’t think I’ve ever genuinely been angry at any politicians before but these people have earned my undying enmity. They got a black security guard fired for telling kids not to call him the N word, and a teacher for suggesting to a kid that he read a book by James Baldwin and another for telling a kid the N word is one of the most disrespectful words you can use. The security guard got reinstated, but the teachers are gone.
“this is impossible”. It’s all relative isn’t it. I don’t mean morally relative. Just we do our best, or something like it, in the circumstances we find ourselves in. To echo the old man.
engels 12.06.22 at 7:02 pm
Happy to acknowledge there are differences between Madison and Oxbridge and I stand corrected re Cheney.
we do our best, or something like it, in the circumstances we find ourselves in. To echo the old man
I have to say that (on any but the most trivial reading) I think that is descriptively inaccurate, normatively questionable, and as a paraphrase of Marx leaves something to be desired.
engels 12.06.22 at 8:22 pm
Oh, if you’re describing Madison students’ ethos specifically than I’ll take your word for it.
engels 12.06.22 at 8:34 pm
Oh if you mean that’s the ethos of Madison students then I’ll take your word for it but it sounds more like Middlemarch than Marx to me.
engels 12.06.22 at 9:58 pm
Anyway, leaving aside the exceptionally ethical Philosophy students at the exceptionally ethical institution of U-MW, a good example of what I had in mind when I said the lines were blurry might be the “Big Four” accounting firms, which employ over a million people worldwide centered on US/UK and recruit fairly indiscriminately from “good” universities (although I’m sure Oxbridge are over-represented at the top, you see lots of kids walking (or running) around Exeter or Bristol in sweatshirts bearing their names).
An overview of their activities:
http://repository.essex.ac.uk/8128/
Obviously not all graduates have to follow vocations like these but I’m talking about tendencies and expectations, which marketing degrees to teenagers as an investment in their future earning power (and rationalising fees on that basis) might seem to me to reinforce. But whaddoIknow.
engels 12.06.22 at 11:10 pm
How many graduates have to become school psychologists to cancel out the one who becomes a tax accountant? Maybe universities need the equivalent of an emissions trading scheme…
Blissex 12.07.22 at 12:03 am
#31: «plenty of middle-class kids go to universities (in both US and UK) where they take some small classes.»
And plenty in Oxbridge too take 300-student classes. The big issue in the choice between “finishing school” and “job training” (credential mill) universities and direct interaction and stimulation of discussion by teachers or tutors of students is something that in philosopher-king debates like this is not easily mentioned: cost and profit:
It is quite expensive to run tutorials or tutorial style classes that elicit engagement from the students, and someone has to pay for it, often parents.
For student who don’t have a trust fund, and whose parents are trying to minimize the cost of education and maximize its rewards in terms of employability in “good middle class jobs”, credential mills that inculcate conformism are the best value.
In the latter kind of institution, the vast majority, cold/warm calling and tutorials are usually not a requirement.
#34: «an education system that prepared a large professional class that expected to follow orders and join a strict bureaucracy would also produce people who are wholly unsuited for adult life in existing society.»
That “wholly unsuited” seems to me a bit handwaving. Why would conformist, reliable followers be unable to function as adults in society? What a weird claim.
Anyhow middle class people are paid well as long as they do what their employer tells them and don’t answer back; no employer is going to give them a good salary just for them to be suited for adult life in existing society. Thus there are entire books, old and new, about “organization man” and the conformism inculcated by the education system.
https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780742577107/Disciplined-Minds-A-Critical-Look-at-Salaried-Professionals-and-the-Soul-Battering-System-that-Shapes-Their-Lives
Unfortunately the debate about cold/warm calling, tutorials etc. is relevant only in expensive universities that are meant to “finish” leaders and people who can afford to be independent thinkers, and in some lucky corners of the rest of the university system.
engels 12.07.22 at 1:46 am
Not sure why I’m doing this but comparing average graduate salaries for Madison (2019) and Oxford (2017) after 1 year and 5 years shows Madison graduates earning about 50% more:
Oxford £31,584 £39,612
Madison $51 843 $75 973
https://federalrelations.wisc.edu/announcements/salary-outcomes-2020/
https://www.cityam.com/average-graduate-salary-university-after-five-years-10/
Average Madison grad makes $117 000 after 15 years, which would be pretty good for a social worker, in UK at least…
Harry 12.07.22 at 2:39 am
Interesting. Our biggest majors are CS, and Biology (well, combined biology). Plus there’s other STEM and the more lucrative business majors. OTOH we produce a much higher percentage of social workers, teachers, and nurses than Oxford. Basically state flagships do enact something like the offsetting system you propose.
“I have to say that (on any but the most trivial reading) I think that is descriptively inaccurate, normatively questionable, and as a paraphrase of Marx leaves something to be desired.”
That’s exactly the reaction I anticipated.
Alan White 12.07.22 at 6:41 am
“Not sure why I’m doing this” speaks volumes about motivation. For crissakes this was an OP about cold-calling. And then it is trolled into somethi9ng else. Harry, you have infinite patience.
engels 12.07.22 at 12:31 pm
Sorry Alan (slow day at work)
Harry 12.07.22 at 2:25 pm
Thanks Alan. I try to have patience. But really I should completely ignore it. I’ll filet the comments (and include your important one above!) for distribution to graduate students learning to teach.
TM 12.07.22 at 3:30 pm
Having read with some amusement the turn the discussion has taken:
engels: “How many graduates have to become school psychologists to cancel out the one who becomes a tax accountant?”
This kind of moralizing may or may not be justified but one thing it certainly isn’t: inspired by Marxist materialism. Marx would have had only derision for such bourgeois moralizing of economic necessities.
“And I just think that within a capitalist system this is impossible.” It was Adorno who pointed out that “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen” , “Wrong Life Cannot Be Lived Rightly”. But that applies to everybody including the proletarians. Not sure what your point is in this particular context.
A bit OT but this link is very fitting in the context of our recent “Working class academics” thread:
“The UC strikers are part of a whole strata of college-educated workers, including Starbucks baristas, museum curators, journalists, and retail workers at REI and Apple, who are revolting against a wage standard and dead-end work regime that promise to keep them in near-poverty for decades. In academia, an impoverished apprenticeship was once considered a brief prelude to a more secure and prosperous career. But that promise has been utterly discounted by the university itself, which has constructed an enterprise model that requires a huge class of precarious adjuncts to toil alongside a shrinking number of tenured professors who receive high prestige and pay.”
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2022/12/the-uc-strike
J-D 12.08.22 at 12:50 am
I don’t know what the intended point was in this particular context, but ‘Improvement is impossible within a capitalist system’ can function as a justification for making no effort to improve things and feeling superior about it at the same time.
engels 12.08.22 at 12:21 pm
Not sure what your point is in this particular context.
That an education governed by the values of optimistic technocratic careerism, whether directed towards functions like law that are directly useful to capital or those like HE that merely help to reproduce the system, in a society that’s falling apart, risks missing out on a lot of learning.
Harry 12.08.22 at 1:05 pm
Engels’s point is, presumably, that we should defund the universities.
engels 12.08.22 at 2:14 pm
I have certainly said repeatedly over many years that I think they should be deprived of fees (another issue that placed me outside Crooked Timber‘s socialist consensus iirc: I wonder if anyone ever had second thoughts about that?)
Blissex 12.08.22 at 9:06 pm
«That an education governed by the values of optimistic technocratic careerism»
Good other way to describe “job training” (credential mill) style teaching. I would not call it an “education” though, in the classical sense of the term.
«risks missing out on a lot of learning»
Indeed, but who is willing to pay for that learning? Not many parents are, when they do a cynical cost/benefit analysis of getting training vs. education.
And even if the cost of getting an education were paid by someone else (benefactors, taxpayers, …) many parents would reject the education alternative because an education may make it harder (by giving them too much independent thinking) for their offspring to fit into and achieve success in that “technocratic careerism” that they think is the most they can aspire to.
https://iniitian.com/ess/press/impstories/McProgrammers.pdf
https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2004/08/01/377380/
“McProgrammers
Rajendra Pawar created a global chain of computer schools that churns out low-cost
techies for call centers and software farms. That has made him a fortune — and a
folk hero.”
Harry 12.09.22 at 4:42 am
So you think the government should be bearing the entire cost of creating this process that you think is utterly corrupt and corrupting. That seems, well, peculiar, but to each their own I suppose.
MisterMr 12.09.22 at 10:35 am
It is possible, I think, to organize a system where all universities are completely sustained by taxes,.
To do this the government has to make the “degree” diploma something that can be churned out just by government approved institutions.
private universities can exist (to guarantee diversity, like religious institutions) but they also have to be sustained by taxes and/or have a cap on the fee they can ask if they want to give out legally accepted degrees.
I don’t think this would work, though, because the “credentialism” is caused by competition between workers, which is caused by cronical unemployment even in boom periods.
So a policy of free tertiary education for whomever wants to at state sponsored universities seems a good idea, but the school system can only do so much to combat inequality/ stratification.
engels 12.09.22 at 11:11 am
I’m not sure if you mean universities or accountancy firms (not so easy to tell them apart these days) but in either case: yes.
https://leftfootforward.org/2021/08/prof-prem-sikka-why-audits-of-major-corporations-need-to-be-performed-by-a-state-body-and-not-chummy-auditors/
engels 12.09.22 at 12:25 pm
credentialism” is caused by competition between workers, which is caused by cronical unemployment
I don’t think that can be the whole story because unemployment has been around for a long time and credentialism (in today’s pervasive form) hasn’t.
engels 12.09.22 at 1:26 pm
But to be clear I don’t think free education would solve all the problems with universities or capitalism but scrapping it in Britain was an important waypoint on the road from post-war social democracy to… whatever the hell we’re entering now.
LFC 12.09.22 at 8:22 pm
The well-known sociologist Randall Collins wrote an in-depth study of credentialism some decades ago. (Haven’t read it.)
engels 12.10.22 at 11:44 am
Interesting alternative response to #56/#57 from Dr Randall Collins:
https://www.drrandallcollins.com/sociological-eye/2018/7/21/vxpcvc9o05qgcj4u4xasxe4covnl6b
Harry 12.10.22 at 9:32 pm
Since we’re totally off=topic: I’ve no objection to Keynesian spending, and think that the government should spend much more than it currently does on education. Obviously. Just seems odd to prioritize transfers to already affluent families and children whom a badly funded system has already served well over spending on universal educational programs that are underfunded. Especially if you think higher education is as pernicious as you do.
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