Alan Shusterman

"When fast and slow time meet, fast time wins. This is why one never gets the important things done because there is always something else one has to do first. Naturally, we will always tend to do the most urgent tasks first. In this way, the slow and long-term activities lose out. In an age when the distinctions between work and leisure are being erased, and efficiency seems to be the only value in economics, politics and research, this is really bad news for thorough, far-sighted work, play and long-term love relationships." (Eriksen, Tyranny of the Moment, 2001)

I invite your (patiently cultivated, well-turned over) comments.

This is a test. Please write down your answer and keep in mind that all Reed exams are governed by the Honor Principle.

• Transforming STEM Education: A Scientific Approach to Teaching and Learning, Prof. Carl Wieman (White House OSTP) OSA Leadership Conference Address, Feb. 10, 2012, Washington, DC. At 7:29, Weiman starts to describe his own teaching history and how he became enlightened about his own deficiencies as a teacher. As he describes it, "I would think really hard about the subject I wanted to cover. Then I would go and tell the students so that they could understand it the same way I did. Then I would give them some problem to solve and if they could do that problem, great, they had mastered this. They thought about it like I did. If they couldn't do this problem, well, that must be a problem with the students because I clearly understood it. And so if you're mean, you decide, 'OK, we should get rid of them. There's obviously something wrong with them.' Now, I wasn't mean. I was a caring thoughtful teacher so what I would do is tell them again LOUDER."
• Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative at University of British Columbia. This is an excellent site for finding out where science education (and maybe other types of education too) should be headed.
• It's the Teachers, Dr. John E. Burris (President, Burroughs Wellcome Fund) Science (13 Jan 2012, editorial, p. 146). Burris cites Finland's success in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA): "Finland has scored near the top of the PISA examinations for the past decade, and the lessons of its success are simple: Recruit the best and the brightest to be teachers, and train them extensively and well." [P. Sahlberg, Finnish Lessons, Teachers College Press, NY, 2011]. Burris also points out that "there is little recognition of the importance of time spent with peers or participating in professional development." I would add that Reed College faculty fall into this latter trap. The moment we get away from the work we must do to keep our courses running, we are expected to pursue scholarly activities that may have very little positive effect on our abilities as teachers.
• Teaching Creative Science Thinking, Dr. Robert L. DeHaan (Emory University) Science (16 Dec 2011, Education Forum, p. 1499). DeHaan states, "... in the classroom, we often teach as if creativity is not important, as if science deals only with well-structured problems with known answers and a single way to find the 'correct' solution." DeHaan believes that "students' creative insights can be nurtured by promoting peer-peer learning and increasing associative thinking". Associative, or divergent, thinking is described as "thinking, in which thoughts are defocused, intuitive, and receptive to a broad range of associations to a given stimulus." This seems like a fair indictment of our classrooms, particularly of introductory science courses, wherein the mastery of problem-solving skills is a significant challenge and there isn't much time for other types of learning.
• Groupthink: The Brainstorming Myth, Jonah Lehrer, The New Yorker (30 Jan 2012, audio interview on how to stimulate group creativity) points out that group thinking is not a panacea.