Week 6 Reading and Class Reflection

I enjoyed all of the readings this week, but they were easier for me to digest individually than all in one big bite.

Metzger

Two things in this passage really stood out to me. First, when she mentioned that before the Socratic Seminars, students who discussed a piece of writing would then understand it—but wouldn’t be able to apply those strategies to a later piece of writing. I immediately thought, “Aha! They’re not able to transfer the knowledge!” And then I thought, “The way that I am transferring my knowledge about transfer!” And then it got a little too meta, and felt kind of like when you face two mirrors toward each other and they reflect back and forth into infinity. So I dropped that train of thought.

Second, I appreciated the point she made about how sometimes the teacher’s presence in a discussion derails it. I was noticing the same thing in another class last week; we were ostensibly having a discussion, but in reality, it was just a series of comments directed at the teacher. Few people were responding to one another, and when they did, they didn’t seem very self-assured about it. It felt like no one knew how to build on other students’ comments, and instead could only respond to them with a contrary statement, if they acknowledged them at all. I think that good group discussion is a skill that’s not much more developed in many grad students than it is in freshmen; I could use some work on it myself.

Hoffert

Some of the suggestions in here were great; I definitely liked the idea of having a book club based on a theme, instead of on a single book. I think there’s more potential for a variety of viewpoints that way. However, one part of this piece has NOT aged well: the discussion of bringing authors in to speak via videoconferencing. Even five years ago, when this was written, videoconferencing was apparently a big hassle that required cumbersome equipment. Basically, Skype has rendered that entire section of the article pointless. Also, the talk of conference calls seemed dated, since there’s rarely any reason to use conferencing technology that doesn’t include video anymore.

Tredway

I had a friend visiting last week; she was considering SI, and she wanted to tag along to my classes. Like me, she has a JD, but she graduated more recently than I did. Her immediate reaction to hearing that I had a 3-hour class was horror. She asked, “How can you stand three hours of lecture and questions?” I responded by reminding her that, “We don’t use the Socratic Method here.” That was basically the equivalent of me telling someone who thought she was about to witness an execution that, “We don’t use capital punishment here.”

To a law student, the Socratic Method is generally seen as a weapon used to force compliance with reading assignments and terrorize the unwary. There are a few professors who approach it the way that this article describes—at least, pretty close—but the Socratic Seminar described in this article would work best in a small class, not in a massive lecture. In the legal world, the Socratic Method usually means picking people (either at random or according to an unarticulated system) to answer specific questions about a case. It’s more of a spot-check to be sure people have done the reading than an actual give-and-take. Have you ever seen The Paper Chase? It’s pretty close to that. Seriously. I had a Torts professor during my first year of law school who seemed to think that it was actually supposed to be called “Socratic Hazing.” It didn’t really feel like a Thursday morning unless someone left the lecture hall in tears.

All of which is to say: the Socratic Seminar sounds like a lovely idea, but based just on the name, I was terrified of it. Now I’m looking forward to seeing how some of my classmates choose to put it into action.

Last week’s class

I wasn’t sure how useful it would really be to discuss the evaluations of McGonagal, but that ended up being my favorite part. In the process, I reached some conclusions that I just hadn’t seen before about the role of various questions for different evaluators; questions that tested comprehension would probably be of little use to the event organizer, but they would be a goldmine to McGonagal. Likewise, McGonagal is unlikely to care about the crowd’s feelings on temperature and sound quality, but to someone at the library who is tasked with maintaining the infrastructure of the presentation, that information would be valuable. I know these aren’t ground-breaking ideas, but I hadn’t considered them before.

Also, I just wanted to mention that I’m super-excited to be learning more about book clubs this week, because in another class, I’m part of a group that’s evaluating book clubs at a public library. It’s time for some CROSS-POLLINATION IN MY HEAD-GARDEN. (…um. Yeah. Midterms have got me a little loopy.)

Darnton

Since this is for the Socratic Seminar demo, I don’t know if I should say much about this article or not. But I do have three thoughts to share:

1. 1. Finally a piece that really delves into an issue facing academic libraries! Exciting!

2. 2. Any day on which I learn a new word (jeremiad) is per se a good day.

3. 3. Having that many books easily available in digital format, for FREE, would be unbelievably cool. Copyright issues be damned.