Don't call it a comeback . . . .
Every teacher has this experience. Reading the final exams, I discovered that I had taught my students, unintentionally, some things that are, um, untrue. And when I say unintentionally, what I mean is . . . my students this semester learned things that I didn't teach them at all. Plus, those things weren't in the readings, either. So, the question is, where did they learn these . . . untrue things?
posted by Number Three @ 9:00 PM
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3 Comments:
OK, I'm curious. What exactly did you unexpectedly "teach" your students?
I've got two examples from my own classes. First, in my American Government class I'm always amused at how many students see a strong political party system as working for wealthy interests rather than as a way to channel majoritarian (hence middle and working class) interests. I can make that point a dozen times and it will never, ever sway them from their default view that it's all about the richies. And this was true long before the Bushies came in and started trying to prove them right. I think the students must assume a naive populist position that ANY institution that goes beyond "the individual" must serve an upper-income elite.
Secondly, I sometimes have students come out of my Senior Seminar, where I do ideologies in an American context, wowed by "libertarianism," often thinking that I myself have been sympathetic to it. Although I try never to reveal my own politics in class, presenting first the good and then the bad with every perspective, I do a particularly bad job of this with libertarianism, for which I'm fairly sure that I ooze a steady and unconcealable contempt. In the historical background, I spend some time on social Darwinism, hitting all the callous highlights, then I assign Hayek's Road to Serfdom, and ridicule his central thesis that what made the Nazis "Nazis" is that they were lefties who took your property away. Finally, I show a John Stossel ABC special, where he does his typical snake oil routine, and has Nadine Strossen of the ACLU saying patently stupid things like, "in America, you have the right to inject, inhale, imbibe, or insert anything you want into your own body," and ""Let the majority decide' sounds like a totalitarian credo!" No matter how much I stack that deck, there will be students who gravitate toward it anyway. I take it as a refreshing reminder of just how little power I, as a professor, have to mold their politics.
My students were left with a distinct impression, apparently, that McCleskey v. Kemp came out the other way, or, at least, that racial discrimination forms a major part of the Supreme Court's death penalty jurisprudence. Now, I have no trouble saying that this has been an important consideration for some justices, and that it may be a subtext of some of the decisions. But never the holding in the case . . . still, when my students want to talk about the arbitrariness of the death penalty, well, that's mostly about race. Again, factually that may be the case. But not a very good legal argument.
My theory about this is that racial discrimination makes sense to the students in a way that procedural issues don't at this point in their educations.
Ah, you know I get that too. I don't actually teach McCleskey in any classes, but I do often find that students believe the DP is biased racially against black defendents when the real bias is toward white victims, who, of course, are usually killed by whites.
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