Reflecting on Fred's Reflections

Where has the time gone? Just a couple of days ago I was thinking to myself, "Fred, you have never read a blog, let alone written your own. Will I like it? Will anyone read it? Will it feel like a diary? Will it hurt?

I am happy to say the fear of the unknown was mostly unwarranted in this situation, as now I feel reasonably competent in this type of informal writing. To critique my blogging, I would say that my strengths were grammar, using coherent English, and getting a point across with structured and logical writing. My big weakness was the lack of originality and blandness of what I wrote for the most part. I chalk a lot of this up to my engineering-type personality of wanting to be precise, concise, and straightforward as possible when communicating. Unfortunately, this turns out to be not a very creative way of writing, which fails to hold most people's attention outside of discussing technical subjects of math, science, and engineering. There were a few pieces that I was more pleased with than the rest, mentioned below.

In The Motivation of Numbers, I took the counterpoint to what most of our class discussion implied. Instead of lauding the implementation of grading systems, such as the Apgar score, I focused on the corrupting influences of numbers to our motivations. I thought by going against the grain of most of our discussion and not following the writing prompt I could reveal a fresh look at the subject. Although it did this somewhat, the best I could come up with for examples was the overly-typical and mundane "No Child Left Behind" initiative.

As the semester progressed, I tried to make the subjects from our readings apply to my personal experience, as shown in Alignment of the Saltshaker. Here I tried to explain how the house I live in functions as a unit, and analyze whether we are aligned as a group and how we can improve alignment. I felt it was successful, but could have been expanded to putting our house in perspective of our whole lives, including the volunteer work and group activities we do together with our church, and the involvement we have with Saltshaker alumni after individuals graduate as a consequence of alignment.

Writing as a Sinking Ship made good use of metaphor. Writing in this way taught me that for someone as logical and boring as a chemical engineer, a striking metaphor that has multiple dimensions of interpretation can greatly improve my essay. Going down with the ship is like holding onto close-minded writing, and jumping off the ship into the icy water is the painful but freeing decision to open up my writing. I think it was a good analogy that helped me stop and reflect about how to pull myself away from the narrow methodology of writing that I have been indoctrinated with for the past umpteen years.

Shared Vision at Illinois and Elsewhere seemed to flow more than any other posts this semester, maybe because it felt like I was preaching against the evils of bureaucracy, large class sizes, and alcohol. I felt like the product of class discussion and learning over the pasts semester made this piece quite a bit more than it would have been at the beginning of class. I was able to see more clearly the types of things that promote and inhibit change, and point out what these might be at U of I.

Fortunately, I do have high hopes for my future blogging, because I have pretty much overcome my fear of blogging (long and hard as it was). And I vow to blog on topics of interest to me, eliminating the forced feeling of a class blog- perhaps a combination of poetry composition and energy technolgy practice and politics in the United States? However, it does not pain me one bit to say that the blogging for this class was a valuable experience and I am happy to have worked through it.

Shared Vision at Illinois and Elsewhere

I would agree that engagement/disengagement with students is very similar to Senge’s issue of commitment, compliance, and apathy in shared vision. I liked the way Senge defined the difference between a person with compliance and a person with commitment. He stated that the compliant person with will follow the rules of the “game”, but a person with commitment will be willing to change any rules that stand between them and winning the “game”. The engaged students with a commitment to their own education will seek out experiences beyond those required. They are the ones that attend special lectures, become involved in a professional organization, and stop by to talk and ask professors about their research. The disengaged students with a compliant attitude toward their education follow every rule and recommendation to achieve their goal of graduating and looking good to employers. Some of them strive to achieve 4.0s and do research to enhance their resume, but ultimately see in all of their tasks merely a means to an end.

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Not very many students have a vision of their own learning. True to the compliance nature of many students, their “vision” is to “win the game” by “following the rules”, and thus do well in school and get a good job. A few students have a personal vision of their own education, and although their peers may sometimes see them as “dreamers”, they are willing to break all the rules, to climb mountains, and cross seas to accomplish their ideals. These are the ones that end up doing great things, much greater than just building great resumes.

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How can U of I create a shared vision for students’ education? Well, I believe the difficulty of achieving a shared vision increases exponentially with the size of the university. First of all, larger schools have more bureaucracy and rules toward educational procedure, which gives students an obstacle to being commited if in their own mind a rule of the university is preventing their personal vision of education from being realized. This happened to me recently as I went to see if a class I want to take (ECON 302) could be applied toward general education for me, an engineer. But despite the appearance of a class that could help me become more well-rounded, it did not fulfill the criteria that university put forth as a firm basis for what classes can be gen eds, such as having a writing requirement. Anyway, it would help to bring each student’s vision of their education into a university shared vision if the rules were more flexible to the vision and intent of learning for the individual.

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Another reason that larger institutions like Illinois have a harder time creating a shared vision is student feelings of insignificance. When students seem insignificant and can’t see their impact on education around them-such as asking a question in a lecture class of 700- they fall into compliance or apathy. It was interesting to read about the rule of 150 in The Tipping Point because it explains the issue of large groups very well. In small groups (~150 or less) students are able to know enough of the rest of the individuals for a subconscious accountability to become innate to the group, where members know who does what. In this case organization and coordination of goals and vision is easier than large groups. In larger groups the students feel more “on their own” in such a sea of young people, and it becomes very hard to perceive the status of others and one’s own status in the group, whether they are doing right, wrong, or nothing. According to Gladwell, these larger groups need much more elaborate organizational structures to keep a singular focus or vision for the group. Thus, U of I can facilitate creating shared vision of undergraduate education by breaking learning units (i.e. classes) into more manageable sizes. The question is whether this can be done cost effectively with peer mentors, or the stronger leadership of teaching assistants is needed.

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A third reason that comes to mind on how Illinois struggles to create shared vision in such a huge student body is the prevalence of “distractions”. It is no surprise to anyone in the class that many students find it very easy to get into the party/drinking scene at U of I, perhaps as a combination of the wide number of fraternities/sororities and the already alienating character of an enormous student body. There are even a large number of professional societies that promote such things (i.e. engineering barcrawls). In addition, I observe a multiplying effect of each student that takes to the distractions and provokes interest and acceptance by each of his or her peers. Although many would argue that students that are heavy into partying are making their own choices, students make there own choices on every college campus in the United States, and yet here we are, with certain large “party school” campuses sticking out of the crowd. Point being that a suggestion for promoting shared vision at U of I, more initiative could be taken to lessen negative distractions on and around the campus community.

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While the individual vision of a professor or administrator to create within the University a shared vision of undergraduate education is a very worthy pursuit, it is a formidable task that will require committed faculty and students, willing to break rules, climb mountains, and cross seas in order to "win" the realization of our ideal.