Term paper on Other Students Other Problems

Other Students Other Problems Essays

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Gene Greiner

Other Students, Other Problems

Gerald Gaff, teacher of literature at the University of Chicago, writes books about higher education. Other Voices, Other Rooms is an essay from Culture Wars. The battle he describes is being fought on the college campus by faculty and staff. The majority of the wounded are the students, while the remainder are those teaching. He applies the term "cognitive dissonance to the students who survive. Gaff states that few students are able to differentiate conflicting ideas and terms from one course, classroom, and professor to the next. By definition, Gaff s thesis is correct; only a minority is able to mentally process, knowing that they are hearing a harsh, disagreeable combination of sounds that suggest unrelieved tension and or discord. For those few individuals that enter a university with [ ] already developed skills at summarizing and weighing arguments and synthesizing conflicting positions on their own (152) are advantaged. They embrace clashing ideas and recognize them as rewarding experiences. However, the others are confused by the different views from class to class and conclude that course survival is contingent upon them conforming to the professor s view for the duration of the term. George Gaff does not discount the less skilled student. In fact, his essay speaks of solutions to this unspoken common ground (152) found within the academic environment. This personal, multi-dimensional point of view is certainly worth trying on to see how it feels (152).

No self respecting educator would deliberately design a system guaranteed to keep students dependent on the whim of the individual instructor. Yet this is precisely the effect of a curriculum composed of courses that are not in dialogue with one another (151). The students loose. They come to universities expecting to find a community of scholars seemingly in accord with one another, but what they find is not what they expected. They find a curriculum that is not in agreement, only showing bits and pieces of the whole, which leaves students confused and possibly indifferent. This dilemma escalates when you bring teachers into the equation. [ ] [W]hen their teachers conflicting perspectives do not enter into a common discussion, students may not even be able to infer what is wanted. Like everyone else, teachers tend to betray their crucial assumptions as much in what they do not say, what they take to go with out saying, as in what they say explicitly (152). Students may not even realize that their teachers disagree. A group of teachers may use one word to describe different concepts or they may use different words for the same application. Most students do not realize when this is happening to them in their courses, so these students are forced to agree with everything the professor says just to get by. To help people understand this dissonance within the universities, Gaff uses the game of baseball as an example. It would be difficult to understand the game of baseball if each part of the game was shown in different rooms. Presenting the student with individual aspects of the sport and never unifying all the elements to equal the game causes the student to loose.

This analogy is the curriculum presented in college. As many rooms as the student enters and the amount of subject material he learns, if those teaching are not willing to teach unification of the matter that is presented, the student will not benefit. Students that present themselves for college admission have proven to the university that they are academically ready to learn. With that foundation, the voices in the various rooms need only to teach them how they will be presented with cognitive dissonance in their courses. The result will benefit the student s overall education from its inception while the communication between the other voices and rooms will provide another dimension to the course. Each course is a bit of the whole and it would be...

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