Yesterday, I saw someone go by in the hallway with some plants on a cart. Then she backed up and asked if I wanted to buy one. Every year at the this time, she sells Easter Lillies to benefit a local fire department. I decided to go ahead and get one. This morning, the first of the flowers opened and there was a delightful fragrance throughout the office. It's amazing the little things that can make a big difference.
This morning Randy and I talked about our experience trying to get students to work on open-ended projects. My experience has generally been getting better. It's different each semester, depending on the particular personalities in the group. Having one or two extremely oppositional people can poison the whole atmosphere, but I believe my students are, on the whole, more interested and capable of pursuing open-ended projects than they were four or five years ago. I think part of this is the result of increased opportunities to explore problems in an open-ended way beginning in Intro Biology. Still, you get students like the one Randy spoke with who are unhappy doing anything that requires judgement and exploration. "Look," he said. "I can study physics for two hours and I 'get it'. I can solve all the problems and get an 'A'. When I work on projects like this, I can spend a whole week and I'm not sure I'm any closer than when I started." I had a student once who came to my office after the first class meeting to tell me he was dropping my class -- he put it this way "I can see this class is going to require me to 'think outside the box'. I don't like to think outside the box."
It's a complex problem that, I think, is largely driven by how students are assessed. They believe that if they can plug-and-chug and solve all the equations, that they're really "learning something". They may be learning "something", but I don't think that whatever it is they're learning is very important. Any question that has a single "right" answer simply isn't a very important question. You can train anyone who isn't seriously mentally deficient to solve these kinds of problems. If we want to educate people, we need people to learn how to come up with good answers to questions that don't have a single right answer. We need people to work with the hard questions, like "Where should we site the hotel to minimize ecological disturbance?" or "Which metabolic pathways might be affected by this potential drug candidate?" or even "Which of these job candidates is the best fit for the position?" Being able to remember "right" answers or use the "right" formula isn't going to help you solve real problems. The only way to get good at solving real problems is to work on them.
StevenBrewer