Have You Ever Noticed … ?

With a new semester starting this week, I’ve been thinking about what I hope students get from the general education side of the curriculum.

My favorite moments as a teacher haven’t been the times I’ve introduced new information or challenged existing preconceptions. They’ve been the times when I was able to connect existing dots for students and I could see the proverbial light bulb go on over their heads. Those moments are less about new information than about seeing existing information in a new way.

Sometimes those moments are more obvious than others. A few years ago, I gave a presentation on contemporary politics to a community group comprised mostly of retirees. I mentioned Elbridge Gerry—the early governor of Massachusetts whose salamander-shaped voting district ensured victory—and let them know that “Gerry’s mander” is where the word “gerrymander” comes from. It felt like the entire room said “Ohhhh …” in unison. At that point, they were hooked. They wanted more.

At DeVry, those moments were especially gratifying. The college marketed itself as vocational, so the students who signed up were self-selected as having chosen to avoid gen ed classes. It was my task to teach some of the classes they had signed up to avoid. That forced a certain level of experimentation. It became clear (through some admittedly awkward trial and error) that reaching the students required starting with “Have you ever noticed …” and working my way up.

My favorite moment was a discussion of why it’s so hard to afford a “starter home.” I put it in the context of towns wanting to maximize property tax revenue and therefore generally chasing commercial development over residential. To the extent that they allowed residential, it was either extremely high-end—generating a minimal number of kids sent to public school—or senior housing, which keeps kids out by definition. That led to a supply constraint for starter homes, and thereby to inflated prices.

I remember a woman probably in her midtwenties getting the “holy @$#” expression at that. Suddenly, she was engaged in the class at a new level. Later, a faculty colleague told me that the student told her that ever since that moment, she couldn’t stop thinking about it. It explained a pain point in her world. She wasn’t imagining things, and solutions weren’t simple. But now she could place her frustration in a context that made sense.

Students come to us now with all sorts of pain points. The younger ones have grown up in a culture in which effort and reward are largely disconnected and in which paths to a stable living are fewer and farther between than they once were. (Allied health fields stand as exceptions, which may help explain their enduring popularity.) The monoculture of my youth had all manner of shortcomings and blind spots, but at least it offered a certain legibility. That has been largely supplanted by a sort of fragmentation. Students’ intuition that the world doesn’t really make sense is substantially correct, but they often don’t know why or what it might look like if it did.

That’s where I’d love to see the general education side of college make a difference.

Yes, students need to make a living. Their majors largely address that. The gen ed classes should round out the mission, adding a kind of cultural sense making to their tool kits. That’s a harder task than it used to be, for various reasons, but all the more important. We’re educating the next generation of voters (or nonvoters), as well as the next generation of workers and consumers. The journalist Sarah Kendzior captured the current environment well when she noted that journalism is paywalled but disinformation is free. Sense making is possible, but it takes real effort. To the extent that we can both supply some tools for sense making and generate those “aha!” moments, we do a real service.

I’m not sure how to measure “aha!” moments in an outcomes-assessment grid, but to my mind, they’re the most important outcomes we can engender. Once students have that light-bulb moment, they want more. Once they want more, the rest falls into place.

It’s a simple goal, but an ambitious one. Sometimes it starts with something as basic as asking, “Have you ever noticed …?”