Friday, February 01, 2013

Last semester. Feeling a little overwhelmed.  My particular form of disgruntled burnout has manifested itself through following letter of law, rather than spirit.  You want a summary and an opinion of the article?  I can do that.  Most recent assignment started thus:

"Oh, Skinner.  You aren’t going to make this easy, are you?

 Don’t get me wrong.  I have absolute respect for the founder of behavior analysis.  His opinions are well-supported with solid evidence.  He offers valuable insights into the process of teaching, and suggests improvements in the educational system which would be inexpensive and easily implemented.  However, his article about increasing student comprehension is peppered with sentences like, 'It is not surprising that techniques of this sort have yielded only very rough data from which the uniformities demanded by an experimental science can be extracted only by averaging many cases.'


I assume I am not this paper’s intended audience, because I had to reread that grammatically convoluted mashup of clauses about three times to wrap my head around it.  Perhaps Skinner just had a finely-tuned sense of irony."





In theory, the professor is reading these papers.  In practice, well.  We'll see.

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