Once again you've made me think hard. My personal experience as an adolescent (about which I have been honest in a couple of published interviews) always coloured my attempts to understand first year student learning problems. My childhood was such a mess that my experience of schooldays was that of total confusion modified by occasional bouts of shapeless hedonism. I had no idea of what I wanted and what I needed to do to get close to achieving anything I could identify as a goal. But I am now old enough to be unembarrassed enough to say that I was a rather clever mess. I looked, I read, I felt things that I now recognise as culture but manifested themselves as formless, non-contiguous enthusiasms that didn't fit into the categoric rigours of subjects and syllabi; there was no discernible motivation and if things like getting away from the suffocation of home might have been motivations then I had no text-books or counselling to help me achieve even that. I scraped into university with the cloud of chaos constantly overhead; I never really knew what was expected of me and consequently was a poor student. But in terms of some of the smart points you raised, almost none of my teachers ever troubled themselves to find out why a bright, largely self-taught kid who learnt by osmosis, wallowing in the unrelated things he loved (and had come to know about) found learning and writing in a disciplined fashion so damned elusive. They simply assumed that being relatively clever meant that the skills demanded in higher education simply emerged like the hairs on your chin. That long preamble perhaps explains why as a first year teacher I always tried to ensure that none of them wandered around in the confused fog in which I'd tried to navigate as a youngster. And I was especially keen to discover what they really were interested in and how well the menu of university served or utterly failed to satisfy those interests. If there was no conceivable way in which combinations could mesh with those interests then I felt obliged to help them seek other paths rather than toughing it out. But in recognising interests and (I hope) validating them even when they did not interest me (a frequent experience) I think I used to try to cultivate the capacity to recognise the potential of things seemigly tengential to their hearts' desires to afford them insights into the ways in which, in some magical way, everything has the potential to be folded into more obviously personal passions. In some ways I think I saw cultivation of motivation as the whetting of boundless curiosity, the hostility towards narrowness, the perception of possibility in the least pre-possessing subjects, the grasping of the relatedness of the apparently un-related. Forgive the long ramble but I regard the onfusion of my younger years as a really dark night of the soul and always wanted to help the young out of that morass if it was possible. Most university yeachers are smart as hell and know what they wanted and had pretrty good ideas about how to achieve that from the get go. Many of thoise we teach (or taught) lacked that facility.
Thank you for the long ramble! As always, full of rich and meaningful observations. In some sense, even though I have an opposite history, I think you describe some inner experiences in ways I very much recognize. I always thought of myself as a good student, and after I got thrashed enough by other students in elementary and middle school for being rather bookish and talkative, I was more determined than ever to perform well in classes. But as a result, I started to avoid subjects I wasn't confident about (I stopped math as soon as I was allowed) and started in some sense drifting towards experiences that I knew would reliably dispense the satisfactions of good grades and compliments without really having strong internal motivations for the work itself. That's been costly in certain respects over my whole life--I once was stung by the truthful dismissal from someone I knew only in passing that I wanted to act like I was smarter than everybody else and have all of them love me for it nonetheless. A hangover of being the teacher's pet, in some respects. Reading my undergraduate essays as a part of teaching writing, I'm rather chagrined in some cases by just how brashly and inaccurately I was arguing some analyses simply because I knew that bold arguments were more rewarded on balance, not because I had a reason of my own to make the argument. If I've found better motivations over time--and that seems an 'if' still in the balance--it is only after a great deal of doing that I was rewarded for as if I was the captain of my own destiny when I was not. I think the first thing I ever did as a scholar that felt like I was actually motivated by the project itself and by my own interest in it was my dissertation, and that felt startling and surprising as a sensation, as if I'd only seen the vaguest hints of it beforehand in any academic work.
I am such an outlier, because I did not begin college in my teens. I began it in my twenties, and I knew what I wanted from it—not a credential but a portal into more systematic learning. Like Richard, I had been an osmosis learner up to that point. Like you, Tim, I gravitated to what I thought I liked. But the College at Chicago forced me to come to grips with some of those previously skated over subjects, including math, and I have been grateful always for it. When I teach First Years, I want to encourage them to be less fearful about what they can do. Hey, guess what? You just read Aristotle and asked some good questions about him! Anthropology is more complicated than you thought? Truth! It’s what every anthropologist realizes every day. Writing is a learned skill as well as a talent. So let’s practice! As what today we call a “First Gen” student, I quickly sussed out all the hidden curricula (not only class but gender and race, too). Part of what made that possible was reading something like Freud my first week in Self, Culture, and Society and realizing, I can do this. I want my First Years to feel like that, too, when we start with Gilgamesh in two weeks’ time.
I am coming around to the view that the best way to understand the hidden curriculum might be through precisely that kind of indirect reading. I got a great reaction when I used The Magicians in another class as a way to think about liberal arts education, whereas it seems to me coming straight at it through scholarly work that is about social capital and the hidden curriculum almost perversely feels to me at times as if it makes the hidden curriculum even more powerful. Knowledge may be power, but perhaps it is most powerful when it sneaks in from the sides.
Once again you've made me think hard. My personal experience as an adolescent (about which I have been honest in a couple of published interviews) always coloured my attempts to understand first year student learning problems. My childhood was such a mess that my experience of schooldays was that of total confusion modified by occasional bouts of shapeless hedonism. I had no idea of what I wanted and what I needed to do to get close to achieving anything I could identify as a goal. But I am now old enough to be unembarrassed enough to say that I was a rather clever mess. I looked, I read, I felt things that I now recognise as culture but manifested themselves as formless, non-contiguous enthusiasms that didn't fit into the categoric rigours of subjects and syllabi; there was no discernible motivation and if things like getting away from the suffocation of home might have been motivations then I had no text-books or counselling to help me achieve even that. I scraped into university with the cloud of chaos constantly overhead; I never really knew what was expected of me and consequently was a poor student. But in terms of some of the smart points you raised, almost none of my teachers ever troubled themselves to find out why a bright, largely self-taught kid who learnt by osmosis, wallowing in the unrelated things he loved (and had come to know about) found learning and writing in a disciplined fashion so damned elusive. They simply assumed that being relatively clever meant that the skills demanded in higher education simply emerged like the hairs on your chin. That long preamble perhaps explains why as a first year teacher I always tried to ensure that none of them wandered around in the confused fog in which I'd tried to navigate as a youngster. And I was especially keen to discover what they really were interested in and how well the menu of university served or utterly failed to satisfy those interests. If there was no conceivable way in which combinations could mesh with those interests then I felt obliged to help them seek other paths rather than toughing it out. But in recognising interests and (I hope) validating them even when they did not interest me (a frequent experience) I think I used to try to cultivate the capacity to recognise the potential of things seemigly tengential to their hearts' desires to afford them insights into the ways in which, in some magical way, everything has the potential to be folded into more obviously personal passions. In some ways I think I saw cultivation of motivation as the whetting of boundless curiosity, the hostility towards narrowness, the perception of possibility in the least pre-possessing subjects, the grasping of the relatedness of the apparently un-related. Forgive the long ramble but I regard the onfusion of my younger years as a really dark night of the soul and always wanted to help the young out of that morass if it was possible. Most university yeachers are smart as hell and know what they wanted and had pretrty good ideas about how to achieve that from the get go. Many of thoise we teach (or taught) lacked that facility.
Thank you for the long ramble! As always, full of rich and meaningful observations. In some sense, even though I have an opposite history, I think you describe some inner experiences in ways I very much recognize. I always thought of myself as a good student, and after I got thrashed enough by other students in elementary and middle school for being rather bookish and talkative, I was more determined than ever to perform well in classes. But as a result, I started to avoid subjects I wasn't confident about (I stopped math as soon as I was allowed) and started in some sense drifting towards experiences that I knew would reliably dispense the satisfactions of good grades and compliments without really having strong internal motivations for the work itself. That's been costly in certain respects over my whole life--I once was stung by the truthful dismissal from someone I knew only in passing that I wanted to act like I was smarter than everybody else and have all of them love me for it nonetheless. A hangover of being the teacher's pet, in some respects. Reading my undergraduate essays as a part of teaching writing, I'm rather chagrined in some cases by just how brashly and inaccurately I was arguing some analyses simply because I knew that bold arguments were more rewarded on balance, not because I had a reason of my own to make the argument. If I've found better motivations over time--and that seems an 'if' still in the balance--it is only after a great deal of doing that I was rewarded for as if I was the captain of my own destiny when I was not. I think the first thing I ever did as a scholar that felt like I was actually motivated by the project itself and by my own interest in it was my dissertation, and that felt startling and surprising as a sensation, as if I'd only seen the vaguest hints of it beforehand in any academic work.
I am such an outlier, because I did not begin college in my teens. I began it in my twenties, and I knew what I wanted from it—not a credential but a portal into more systematic learning. Like Richard, I had been an osmosis learner up to that point. Like you, Tim, I gravitated to what I thought I liked. But the College at Chicago forced me to come to grips with some of those previously skated over subjects, including math, and I have been grateful always for it. When I teach First Years, I want to encourage them to be less fearful about what they can do. Hey, guess what? You just read Aristotle and asked some good questions about him! Anthropology is more complicated than you thought? Truth! It’s what every anthropologist realizes every day. Writing is a learned skill as well as a talent. So let’s practice! As what today we call a “First Gen” student, I quickly sussed out all the hidden curricula (not only class but gender and race, too). Part of what made that possible was reading something like Freud my first week in Self, Culture, and Society and realizing, I can do this. I want my First Years to feel like that, too, when we start with Gilgamesh in two weeks’ time.
I am coming around to the view that the best way to understand the hidden curriculum might be through precisely that kind of indirect reading. I got a great reaction when I used The Magicians in another class as a way to think about liberal arts education, whereas it seems to me coming straight at it through scholarly work that is about social capital and the hidden curriculum almost perversely feels to me at times as if it makes the hidden curriculum even more powerful. Knowledge may be power, but perhaps it is most powerful when it sneaks in from the sides.