Pedagogy Prob

Jenny, my labmate and fellow PhD student, is teaching the undergrad bioethics class for which I am a TA. Her basic teaching philosophy is a fair amount of reading, no busy work, few papers and few exams, lots of participation. However, the class is 180 people, and undergrads are happy to take advantage of a professor who simply asks that everyone do the reading and be prepared to discuss. To combat this, she gives quizzes on the class reading in every lecture. They are not hard quizzes - what was the thesis of article X, what is androcentrism and why is it important to ethics, the sort of thing you'd be able to answer easily if you 1, read the article, and 2, read it while not stoned. However, the averages on these quizzes have been terrible - we give them 0 points for a wrong answer, 1 point if they can demonstrate that they did the reading, and 2 points if they read and understood the reading i.e. got the answer correct. The averages have been 0.9, 0.6, and 0.5, etc. Awful.

So Thursday, Jenny asked me to write a quiz question. We wanted to cut them a break, so I tried to make it something that was severely easy if you had read the articles, but completely obscure if you hadn't. The first article was called "Dancing with the Porcupine" and was about the relationship between university-based research and industry (namely the pharmaceutical industry). It certainly seems like it should be obvious from the title alone, but the porcupine is a metaphor for the caution one need to exercise when working closely with people of different values and goals who could, um, prick you. The metaphor framed the short article, and, as you may have noticed, the metaphor was in the title of the paper (not to mention there was a subtitle that said something to the effect of "The Tricky Intermingling of University and Industry Research"). So, I came up with the murky but would-be-obvious-if-you read-it question:

"From the reading: what was the deal with porcupines?"

I'll fully admit that this was at least somewhat motivated by the sadistic desire to read the answers of floundering students who hadn't done the reading, as out of context, being asked about porcupines in a bioethics class conjures all kinds of images of throwing train track switches to kill one porcupine instead of five. So it was a bit of a silly question. But it should have been clear, given the reading, that we would have accepted any sort of answer that included "metaphor" and "for the relationship between universities and industry." Jenny was a little concerned that it was too casual, too obvious from the reading, and maybe not funny enough. Another article that had been assigned for that day recounted the tale of Joe Smith, who died essentially because a clinical trial researcher had a vested (financial) interest in his participation in a pharmaceutical trial, failed to disclose this fact, pushed Joe Smith through the trial when JS perhaps should not have been pushed, and killed Joe Smith via a reaction to the drug under study. The "drug" was an attenuated form of a virus that caused JS to have a overblown immunological reaction such that he died from shock. So Jenny appended our original question:

"From the reading: what was the deal with porcupines? (Extra Credit: Did Joe Smith die from a porcupine-inflicted wound?)"

Ooh. I really liked this question now, as it had some kick and depth to it. If you had read neither article, you would either be utterly confused and surrender with an "I don't know" or offer some ridiculous tale of Joe Smith and a quill puncture. If you had read the first and not the second, you could easily say what the deal was with porcupines, but only able to offer a guess as to how JS had died. Read the second and not the first, and you come out with "I don't know what porcupines are, but no, JS died from anaphylactic shock in a clinical trial." Read both, though, and you get to put two and two together (hopefully) - you could recite the porcupine metaphor, and then say yes, JS did die from a porcupine-inflicted wound, because it is at least arguable that the prickly relationship b/w the researcher and the pharmaceutical industry caused him to push JS through the study and killed him. That, natch, would require the ability to read / understand metaphors and apply them, but what the hell, that application would be in the extra credit portion of the exercise and not vital to the quiz. Right?

Right... so, tragically, it turns out, you can't do anything remotely this complicated when the vagaries of undergrad thought (or, notably, lack thereof) are involved. Note that I didn't say you can't do anything "complicated," as this is not what I would call a complicated question. You just can't even do anything "this complicated," because chaos ensues. What happened?

1. Bold ignorance of the concept "Extra Credit," not to mention parentheticals and italics. The majority of students answered the second question without even addressing the first. I don't know why. Some of them had read at least the second article and answered quite literally, "No, he died of anaphylactic shock in a clinical trial." No breath of porcupines, though. Others had clearly not read and said overtly wrong things - "he died in a car accident" - but again, no mention of the porcupines. Others still took the coin flip chance and answered simply "No," but again, no mention of porcupines. I can't begin to comprehend how one looks at a two part question, the second part of which is labeled as bonus and is in parentheses, and does not address the first art of the question at all.

2. Just hadn't read. The second largest portion of the class had no clue what was going on. These resulted in the anticipated hilarious answers, the best two of which were:

"I don't know what the deal was with porcupines. But no, he did not die from the porcupine wound, but from the infections that resulted from the wound."

"Porcupines are prickly critters not be messed with. Joe Smith did not die from the porcupine wound because they are quite small, but I ask you: when Joe stepped on the porcupine, what became of the quilled beast?"

3. Did the reading, didn't get metaphors. A portion of the class did the reading, accurately described the porcupine metaphor, but then said, no, he died from anaphylcatic shock. We shook our heads in disappointment and gave them full credit anyways.

4. Tried to game the system. More than one student rushed up immediately after the quiz and protested, "I did the reading. I knew the answer. But I thought you were trying to trick us!" They ended up giving answers that just said, "Yes, he died from a porcupine wound." And some, also citing that they had thought we were trying to trick them, said, "no." Again (see category 1), no reference to what the metaphor meant. Baffling. These were some of our better students, too. They protested adamantly, and we ultimately decided that we would give a "yes" answer the benefit of the doubt for the ones who talked to us and score it a 1. But why had they assumed that gaming was going on??!?!

5. Had a clue. Approximately five students described the metaphor and explained precisely how yes, one could describe Joe Smith as having died from a porcupine wound in the sense of X, Y, Z. I gave them full credit, but I may need to go back and give them 3's.*

* - Leading to a Mike TPB Gordon-esque quip, on a scale of 1 to 2, I'd give it a 3.

So that's where we're left - the base assumption that students 1, understand quizzes; 2, do the reading; and 3, can understand and use the simplest of metaphors, are decidedly bogus ones. The worst feeling of all was that I noted the bevy of 0's and 1's and complete misconstruals of the quiz and its purpose, so I couldn't help but feel guilty for having composed an apparently impenetrable quiz. It was so obvious that an entire range of the class never could have "gotten" the joke gave me a flash of an insight:

The quiz was biased. It was biased in favor of smart people.

I mean, even more biased than all quizzes are biased in favor of smart people. Which killed me. I mean, it's not like Jenny and I had composed a stunning poem of untold beauty. We had simply written a little bit of metaphoric play that turned out to be inaccessible to all but a fraction of the class. You had to have a level of linguistic comprehension that is, again, laughingly low, to appropriately engage the question. Which, pedagogically speaking, crushes me. I understand that for testing purposes, things should be clear, straightforward, etc. But this quiz just gives me the idea that we can't even work toward any kind of literary understanding of our everyday. Again, not that the joke was genius, just that it required an ounce of stepped back insight into word meanings. An insight that is obliterated by preoccupation with this notion that education is a game, that the teacher is a binary figure who either 1, gives it to you literally, or 2, is out to trick you. Nothing to be said for a clever turn of concepts that makes you, say, integrate the material.

Okay, end rant. I am sure I am making more of it than is there. The easy move is to say "ASU kids" derisively and move on. I'm not sure that is the case (though I did recently get the comment on a regrade request that a student's grammar was fine because "I can put a semicolon wherever I want." Um, okay). Sure, lots of university kids don't do their readings, don't get it, etc. It's the smart ones who were so distracted by grade-consciousness as to limit their interpretations to fifth grade reading levels that bothers me. How do we speak to others? I only have so many straight-forward, literal ways to convey that "I am in here." Sheesh.