reflections

[worldandtime]

These thoughts were written down at the end of the last school year, but I sent them to a number of people here and got a cool response from one person, so I thought I'd publish them and see if anyone else had any comments. They're more notes to myself than anything else, so some aren'tas clear as they perhaps should be and I noticed at least one

Comments

[zbohannan]

These rules mostly seem like they can be generalized to apply to all social situations. When that's not possible, they clearly maximize the efficiency of a superior-inferior (I mean no implications with these terms) social relationship (student-teacher, parent-child, boss-employee, etc.)

I also notice that the vast majority of "successful" students (according to most faculty) who are outspoken in class have monstrous potential for regurgitation, but little for reasoning.

For instance, today in genetics, one of my peers (the "intelligent" one who usually asks questions based upon the script, "I learned this in undergrad. The next topic is ______. I should ask a question about that so I seem insightful.") asked how the unpaired bases in the crossover were favorable when we were going over the Holiday model for recombination/gene conversion. He couldn't grasp that the chromosomes were, in fact, within a single phosphodiester bond of each other. This is despite the fact that last week's discussion paper was entirely about the mechanism of cohesins and chromosome pairing.

Luckily, our professor isn't afraid to lay the smackdown and ask him to expand upon his statement whenever he regurgitates an answer to a class question.

Anyway, I personally tend to be a very intuitive learner and thinker, which made Calculus a nightmare course for me. I never feel like I truly "know" something until I can apply it to solve a nontrivial problem. I view my entire brain as almost working with a "muscle memory" type system. With most things I know, I tend to leap from point A to point D without an intermediate. A->B->C->D actually confuses me more, hence the problem with math.

Also, in my limited teaching/learning experience (in comparison), I find that I tend to use analogies and metaphors heavily to explain concepts. It seems that, especially in science where many people just glaze over, when a foreign topic is linked to a common one, it's no less complicated, but people are far more willing to be active listeners.

Sorry for the dissertation, but I really love educational and social theory.