Teaching Goals...

by Tom Vilberg

He had struggled with three students the entire semester and now, during the last week of a 5 week summer session, they continued to believe that the class was about exams and solving problems. He had repeatedly explained that the course was about understanding the world through quantative eyes. He even let each student take a 3"x 5" card of notes into each exam Ð how could the class be about computation. Ordinarily, so close to the end of the semester he would have just given in to their perceptions, but this time to do so would have demeaned the previous 40 minutes as well as his primary goal for the semester.

The question infuriated him primarily because it demeaned his role as a teacher. He had just spent forty minutes developing Student's "t" test for independent groups. He started with a simple concept the class understood and slowly explained how that statistic had to be modified to test differences between two independent groups. As he had many previous semesters, he had explained each step with what, for most students, was meticulous detail. Just as he was concluding, a student in the front of the class said "so, for the test all we have to know is the last formula?"

He went nuts. He tried to explain the importance of general education. Of understanding the world. The importance of numbers. But as he did so he could feel his face redden. He restated his goals for the semester as the back of his neck began to burn. He begged them not to reduce the class, or life for that matter, to the "final event" and he heard his voice filled with anger. He almost shreaked that to do so was to trivialize all antecedents - the hours they has spent, the other students, his efforts, too.

But the three students would have no part of it. The three knew that the course was required, that the course was difficult by any standards, and that their singular goal was to survive the comprehensive final examination. The three used each other throughout the semester to confirm their worst fears about the course, about his teaching, about why a course in statistics was required in their curriculum. Indeed, one responded to his encouragement to understand the material by retorting "but that won't be on the final" and nodding knowingly to the other two.

He knew that he was on the edge of losing it, and for the first time in his career as a teacher, he was afraid he had stepped over the boundary of propriety. But he was enraged that these students couldn't or wouldn't understand what the course was about. What statistics was about. What he was about.

Written for the Clarion University Faculty Brown Bag Series on Teaching and Learning, 1993.