Sharing my own thoughts and philosophy on teaching
With the advent of ubiquitous AI tools, I’ve renewed my emphasis on connections to real-world experiences as a way to both learn and to communicate the attainment of knowledge, and demonstrating achievement of learning objectives.
It is interesting to see how people use Large Language Model generative AI. They may enter a prompt from the discussion board into AI to see what it delivers. It usually delivers information in the form of short lists, which are either bulleted or are bold-face in the topic or subject. When entire papers are constructed, they are very clearly structured. The thesis statement is often very clear, but the introduction is unengaging. The body paragraphs have good topic sentences (as though from an outline), but any reference to relevant information is not cited properly (no in-text citations, no reference section at the end). If the topic is a common one (Write a paper about Hamlet’s conflicts in Shakespeare’s Hamlet), the information is likely to be pretty reliable, given that there are so many easily accessible papers on the topic. However, it could be unreliable if the Large Language Model is using student papers, websites, and places like Course Hero for the data used to train the model.
My philosophy of teaching has to do with making emotional and cognitive connections to the topic and igniting a fire of curiosity and personal connection so that they feel real curiosity and a need to know about the topic because it could inform them of what could be a future path to a fulfilled and meaningful life.
I think back to my own experiences in life – when I was an undergraduate, I had dreams and there were aspects of life that really fascinated me. I kept changing majors because the world around me kept changing, and I constantly wrestled with perfectionism, which made me feel either euphoric or in a pit of despair. It took me many years to learn how to self-regulate, and now I think I may do it too much – if something negative happens, I immediately reframe it as something else, and my mind starts churning out affirmations as I seek “win-win” situations within my sphere of influence.
It's a lot of work, and it requires a steely resolve to maintain a positive outlook. When I was a graduate student and had a part-time job, I was fascinated by emotional and cognitive “limit experiences” that would push me to the edge and inform me about the nature of reality. I guess that proclivity was what inspired me to write my dissertation on mad messiahs and the apocalyptic narrative. It was the gift that keeps on giving, and I automatically process the day’s headlines through a debunking narrative mechanism that identifies key apocalyptic words and then classifies the narratives into apocalyptic genres and sub-genres. I’ve been doing it so long it’s automatic. These are good days for apocalypse, I must say.
That said, my world view has changed over the years to help me feel a sense of self-determination and well, joy & happiness, even in the face of clear chaos and uncertainty in the world. It helps that the world is always chaotic and so the panic-dread I felt the first five or six times economic meltdown and social discord were proffered up has dissipated into a “well, fortunately, no one has to live forever” mode. What is that about? I think it is, ultimately, a recognition that there are things I can do to make life better. But, I can’t control the world. Good grief – I can’t even get the information needed to be able to control the world. If I did have that key information, would I be able to interpret it? Who knows….
And so, the world I view is one of the joy of discovery and the deep satisfaction of new connections to people, cultures, ways of thinking and living.
We can live. We can live together. The more we know about the past, the magical intersections of history, art, and culture, the more joyous and open our futures can be.
We train our minds to see.
