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The Truth Is in the Tape
- University Press of New England
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177 Last. The student must learn to overstudy. There is a wonderful —if frightening—line from the movie “The Untouchables,” where Sean Connery, a beat cop, is telling Kevin Costner, playing Eliot Ness, how to deal with the mob. In his best Chicago accent, Connery asserts, “They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.” Likewise , if you think, prior to a test, that you can cover your notes in one hour, study for two. If you think it will take two, put in three. Every night. Commence this process of repetition (practice !) one week before the test, but—leap of faith again—don’t study at all the night before the test. Trust me. After all that hard work, give the brain just one evening of respite to sort it all out and deposit the information into the proper slots. All of this is a lot of advice. But, taken together, it will work. Will it make an “A” student out of a failing student? Probably not (but who knows?). But one last point needs to be made: colleges and universities call their subject areas “disciplines” for a reason, because that’s what it takes to master them. o p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p thetruthisinthetape Despite all my years of college teaching, and despite knowing that I should know better, I still harbor the illusion of being able to get through to all of my students. In fact, I once had a dream in which, on the last day of class, I wandered among the desks, dispensing A’s from a basket to eager, interested souls, as rewards for their hard work, diligence, and mastery of introductory biology. And then—poof!—I awoke. Such are the things, Horatio, that I dream of in my philosophy. 178 p m e t h o d o l o g i e s On a more realistic note, I have spent many, many nights at the kitchen table, making my way through seemingly endless piles of student papers. Some of the work was fairly competent and required that I write only occasional, modest glosses in the margins. But much of it was, to be blunt, disastrous, evoking such detailed, lengthy comments from me that the margins became a dense and all but illegible scrawl of well-intentioned wisdom . Through it all, as I critiqued syntax, grammar, content, and style, I was haunted by one nagging question: Will the students read it? This fear was highlighted one day when, shortly after returning my students’ assignments, I found one in the wastepaper basket. Unread. Unheeded. Unloved. Alas, it was too easy for my students to discard corrected work. By and large, they wanted to know only one thing: their grade. In a sense, I understood where they were coming from. Who wants to get a paper back that, like some recovered palimpsest, is overlain with my underlinings, circles, exclamation points, and existential questions such as, “What are you trying to say here?” (I didn’t know, and in most cases they didn’t know, so the answer lay, more often than not, in the round file.) I continued to wrestle with this quandary for semesters on end, until one day I noticed a student headed down the hallway with a Walkman (this was quite a few years ago). He looked alert, engaged, and had a mean hitch in his giddy-up as he bopped to the tunes being piped into his brain. Hmmm . . . I thought. That kid knows the truth. I bided my time until the next semester, when I presented a new grading approach to my students (who were fresh and still unsure of who exactly I was. In other words, they were pliant , and I seized the moment). “Ladies and gentlemen,” I announced , and then went on to explain that they would need to hand in their laboratory essays along with a blank cassette tape, on which I would record my comments. At first they were alarmed, because they feared that they would have to say something on the tape. But I assured them [54.166.234.171] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 13:34 GMT) The Truth Is in the Tape p 179 that the process was strictly a one-way street. “I will do all the talking,” I said, and then I gave...