{"id":2583,"date":"2012-02-19T12:18:35","date_gmt":"2012-02-19T19:18:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.ups.edu\/studentlife\/?p=2583"},"modified":"2012-02-19T12:18:35","modified_gmt":"2012-02-19T19:18:35","slug":"the-rise-and-fall-of-the-lecture-the-value-of-a-liberal-arts-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studentlife\/2012\/02\/19\/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-lecture-the-value-of-a-liberal-arts-education\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rise and Fall of the Lecture: The Value of a Liberal Arts Education"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\"\"<\/a>Now that the semester is well underway, I thought it would be a good time to talk about the classes that I\u2019m taking this semester. I\u2019ll start by discussing the seminar-style classes at the University of Puget Sound, because they use a great system of teaching that is is unique to liberal arts schools.<\/p>\n

I took my first seminar-style class last semester with my Honors Writing and Rhetoric class studying New World Rhetoric. The class looked at the rhetoric surrounding the discovery of new peoples and travel from the middle ages through the Early Modern Period.<\/p>\n

Seminar classes are about fifteen students total. Our class was around a long table and classes were almost entirely centered around discussion (when we weren\u2019t involved in discussion, we were pre-writing or crafting ideas for discussion!). I love the guided discussion approach to learning because it is entirely interactive. At the same time, because it is a guided discussion, classes end up covering the texts we\u2019re reading and their associated history in detail. Class feels like a collaborative meeting instead of a one-way lecture, and I find that I personally retain more information and develop stronger paper ideas in discussion than in lecture alone. Discussion-based classes also act as constant preparation for developing and presenting ideas, two key elements of writing (a major part of college classes) that are rarely addressed in lecture-based classes.<\/p>\n

But you don\u2019t have to take my word for it: here\u2019s a great NPR article about a study by physicists on why lectures don\u2019t work, and what to do instead:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.npr.org\/2012\/01\/01\/144550920\/physicists-seek-to-lose-the-lecture-as-teaching-tool<\/a><\/p>\n

It essentially advocates for collaborative learning, small-group discussion, and student-professor feedback, three qualities that major parts of seminar classes and that are ubiquitous in classes at Puget Sound. In fact, Puget Sound and other liberal arts schools have long used the teaching style for which this article advocates, so it\u2019s fascinating that the liberal arts approach to education is finally receiving official verification!<\/p>\n

Even though not all of my classes are officially seminar-based classes, they all incorporate the seminar teaching style thoroughly. My Early British Literature class this semester is almost entirely discussion. We spend most classes discussing specific passages in detail, closely reading texts such as Beowulf, Paradise Lost, Beowulf, The Duchess of Malfi, <\/em>and Shakespeare\u2019s Sonnets. <\/em>Prior to the University of Puget Sound, my exposure to British Literature mostly consisted of reading Charles Dickens and Shakespeare, but my professors have really brought Early British Literature to life and it\u2019s now one of my favorite periods of English literature.<\/p>\n

I am also taking a seminar class with the honors program called History and the Construction of the Other, which looks at seminal historical texts from Herodotus\u2019s Histories<\/em> of Ancient Greece to World War II texts. Although the scope of the class is fairly large and the class is fast-paced, we read a substantial amount of each text and devote most classes to discussion and short writing assignments to prepare for discussion. My professor spends a lot of time connecting past historical events to current ideas an issues. For example, we discussed how the Founding Fathers were inspired by Livy\u2019s Early History of Rome<\/em>, just last class when we discussed the Republic\u2019s political system and Code of Laws.<\/p>\n

I am also taking a class in Chemical Analysis and Equilibrium, essentially a hybrid second-semester chemistry class with some statistics and chemical analysis. My class is small for an introductory science class \u2013 about 30 people total – which is less than the size of my high school Chemistry class. Lab is even smaller and allows for a lot of small-group work.<\/p>\n

The other class I\u2019m taking is Intro to Computer Science. I had some experience programming a long time ago, but the class uses a different language than the one I used and emphasizes a different type of programming style than I used, which has made the class really useful and interesting. Although the class is a lecture, my professor essentially uses the Socratic Method, asking students how they would program certain methods or write certain lines of code. This makes the class extremely interactive, and classes rarely feel like a lecture.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s all the classes I\u2019m taking this semester! I\u2019ll post soon about performances for Fight Call<\/em> and the other things I\u2019m working on this semester.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now that the semester is well underway, I thought it would be a good time to talk about the classes that I\u2019m taking this semester. I\u2019ll start by discussing the seminar-style classes at the University of Puget Sound, because they … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,11],"tags":[76,91,94,102,123,164,213,370],"class_list":["post-2583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2011-12","category-billy-rathje-15","tag-billy-rathje","tag-chemistry","tag-classes","tag-computer-science","tag-english","tag-history","tag-literature","tag-university-of-puget-sound"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studentlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studentlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studentlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studentlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studentlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studentlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2583\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studentlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studentlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studentlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}