two things my students remembered

Father Guido Sarducci's Five Minute University come up in Dave Berger's talk at the Sociologists of Minnesota meeting yesterday. The premise is that in five minutes you can learn what the average college graduate remembers five years after he or she is out of school. While the good father may be right about the facts we ask students to memorize, Dave was making the point that there is powerful truth in the liberal arts dictum that we are actually in the business of teaching people to think.



Occasionally, we get direct evidence on this point. I'll often ask former students what they remember from my classes when I bump into them off-campus. Few can recall the fine-grained distinctions among the theories that I taught and tested, but sometimes I'll get a heartening response about how they developed a habit of mind in my classes that made a lasting, trajectory-altering impact.

My favorite came from a woman who said that I taught her "how to look at the data." When I pushed her about this, she said that she had always had a knee-jerk reaction to evidence about things she cared about, but she liked how I dealt with information that she knew challenged my own beliefs. She claimed I would try to understand the new evidence, evaluate it, and then -- if it passed the basic methods bar -- incorporate it into my beliefs and teaching, or at least recognize it as a puzzle that I needed to figure out. All this made data less scary to her and much more interesting. And today, she said, this gives her power and a career advantage in social services, where her colleagues mostly embrace data that supports them and dismiss anything that might be perceived as critical. I doubt my classes were responsible for all that, but it was still cool to hear.

My least favorite came from a student who took a course from me a decade ago and is now a Ph.D. He claimed to remember a few things from my classes but the lesson that stood out came on the first day, when somebody asked whether it would hurt to skip the occasional class. I was caught off-guard, so I said something like, "Well, skipping class is sort of like having unprotected sex. You might get away with it for some time with no consequences but, then again, the consequences might be quite serious and disruptive for you going forward. Wouldn't you rather be safe?" I doubt that particular message really helped his career or his personal life, but, then again, he's now a happily married father with a great job.