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Show DR. BRIGHAM MADSEN: "All my life I've been repelled by the dullness in the teaching of history. I have a horror of a poor lecture, an uninteresting lecture, and a poor discussion. I have too many of them even though I have the horror. I wake up at nights worrying about this and so I just try to work hard to get something that I can really contribute to the class. They're going to forget the subject and me but maybe they won't forget history if it's interesting enough so that they do get some inspiration from it, and maybe later on they might sit down and read a historical novel or even some straight history. So I think my number one objective is to make history interesting-to make it live. I think it can, I think a teacher has got to have some enthusiasm for a subject if he's going to do it. I think that if a teacher isn't willing or doesn't have the desire to teach for nothing that maybe he shouldn't be in teaching. He ought to do something else. I think you have to treat students as though they're people of some in-telligence--maybe some in the class even more intelligent than you-and expect them not to regurgitate what you've given them but to really come forth with ideas of their own to give them a chance to create on their own." MRS. MARY ETTA WILLIAMS: "I suppose our point of view is really twofold. First of all we have professional preparation to be concerned with. It's one of our primary motives. We want our students to feel really confident when they leave the university so they don't have some of the insecurities that many students do. Secondly, we also are very concerned with our students being individuals that have happy but good lives--that they are well adjusted in a sense, they have interesting family lives to fulfill. We try to prepare in that way, beginning with the family and with the individuals that we can contact, so that perhaps we will have a little happier and better oriented society with perhaps a more confident outlook on life. So we have these two points of view that we try to deal with in our, with our students. Plus I think that they like to feel that their instructor is well prepared, that he has taken the time to really pull ideas together, not that you just feed it out to them, have them feed it back, but that you have your information well enough in mind that you can really respond to their questions and to their ideas so that you do have good discussions and can bring out worthwhile ideas." DR. DAVID KRANES: "A couple things that have been said strike me because I find myself very much in agreement with them, and that is, it seems to me, a focus on the learn-er--the student who is there; recognition first of all that there are individuals out in the classroom, that those people have a sense of dignity and desire. I think we are all probably battling against a system-particu-larly a numbered system-which threatens to dissolve all the qualities that we would cherish in a classroom, and that is some kind of human contact between ourselves and the students. I find myself becoming more and more interested in what I might call-drawing a phrase from Art Fields -'minimal teaching.' A critic by the name of Susan Sonntag makes a distinction between the quantity of attention and the quality of attention. I think we have a great deal of quantity of attention in the university-this university and all universities-and very little quality of attention. So I guess most of my efforts are directed toward setting up conditions whereby there can be a quality of attention, whereby those people in the room have something to focus on and that they can go into that in some kind of depth and that the way that they examine that indicates things about their minds." 311 I |
