Chemical Education Today
Editorial: They Didn’t Teach Me Anything, But I Learned a Lot One of the few regrets associated with my time as a graduate student at Northwestern University was that I never took mentor Ralph Pearson’s advice to attend lectures by English Professor Bergen Evans. I did, however, purchase Evans’ book of well known quotations, which I used the other day to refresh my memory on one of Yogi Berra’s many bons mots, “You can observe a lot just by watchin’.” In an editor’s note Evans pronounces this a profound statement, and it is indeed true that watching can reward us with a great many observations. But watching alone is not enough. Observing and learning are two different things. I was reminded of this by an interesting conversation during a recent trip to the University of Idaho. I observed a painting in Dan Edwards’ office and, to get the …we often are conversation rolling, remarked far too about it. He replied that it was his, concerned with done as an assignment in an art class he had taken recently. “They teaching and didn’t teach me anything, but I learned a lot,” he said, and not in a not nearly pejorative sense. We spent the next concerned half hour contrasting the instructional style of the art class with enough with that of a chemistry class, and wonlearning. dering whether we chemists didn’t have something to learn by watching how artists teach. Students in the art class were given very general directions—essentially no directions at all by a chemist’s standards. If I were to do the same thing, my students would almost certainly complain that I wasn’t doing my job. Nevertheless, the art students, after some floundering, produced very interesting works, some of which revealed a great deal about their inner thoughts and ideas. Would that some of my students could do the same. But both they and I are pretty constrained by what we think is proper and right in teaching and learning. “They didn’t teach me anything, but I learned a lot.” They did, however, provide an environment in which learning could take place, and provide some motivation for working with the tools of the artist’s trade. And the students responded. I think we often are far too concerned with teaching and not nearly concerned enough with learning. This is not an unreasonable thing, because we have control over teaching, while learning is something students must do. Shouldn’t we be more concerned with what we can control and attribute less importance to what we cannot? I think not, unless we don’t really want to be successful. It may make me feel good to do a great job of teaching, but what benefits my students is for them to do a great job of learning.
How can I get them to do it? I wish there were a simple answer, but so far have found none. But maybe something more along the lines of the artists’ approach would help. Indeed I have some anecdotal evidence that this may be true. Last spring Lab Director Joe March gave students in my class of 300 freshmen a lab experiment with no explicit directions for how to carry out the measurements. Instead they were told what kind of data they were expected to obtain and referred to the textbook for information that might help them to devise a procedure. The students, working in groups of four, at first thought this an impossible task, but many of them discovered that when their group began to discuss the problem, the group was able to come up with a workable procedure. Having done so, they had not only learned something about experimental design, but they also felt proud of their achievement in doing something they at first had thought impossible. Note that they had also made the same measurements that I would have asked them to make in a more cookbook style experiment. Not only our teaching styles, but also our textbooks, reflect too much concern with teaching and not enough with learning. We seem to think that students will be unable to learn unless we spoon … [students] also feed them with examples of every possible type of numerical felt proud of their problem. Books are apparently achievement in judged less rigorous if they presume to ask students to de- doing something velop their own knowledge by they at first had working on problems without the benefit of an example that thought impossible. allows them to follow a rote algorithm. There is a body of research that indicates that students are often able to answer questions by rote even though they have little or no understanding of the underlying principles. Bombarding them with examples—like the ones that we used to relegate to problem books for poorer students—just reinforces their dependence on teaching and does not prepare them well for solving real problems in the future. I have some difficulty with turning students loose in a chemistry laboratory with as little didactic instruction as they might get in an art class. In many cases health and safety dictate that students must have a common background of information. Similarly I would not recommend releasing students into the realm of problem solving with no guidance or help. Nevertheless, there are many instances where we might teach less and students might learn more—and become more proficient learners as well. Spend some time watchin’ them. You might make some profound observations!
Vol. 73 No. 12 December 1996 • Journal of Chemical Education
A291
