<p>Does anybody besides me think that this approach to teaching humanities just sounds downright awful and alleviates the need for Case to hire permanent scholars. </p>
<p>Look under faculty. You can see they don't even list any by name. EVERYONE is a temp! $5000 per course, sorry per seminar, is the pay.</p>
<p>In order to keep this in the parents forum, I don't want to discuss Case specifically, but more to discuss the pros and cons of this approach to general education in general.</p>
<p>Not a vendetta. It’s a genuine question. I only received answers in my other thread from people who check out the Case board. Id prefer to discuss with the CC community at large. Sages is the one thing keeping me from recommending that my D look at Case. I was wondering if others have the same gut reaction as me and if not, why not. It’s also possible that I’m misunderstanding the whole thing. </p>
<p>1) SAGES is required. Students don’t have the option of taking the real courses with the real scholars unless they first endure SAGES. It looks horrible to me.
2) D likes social science and humanities even though she is likely to be a STEM major.
3) This seems like a ripoff for both the starving instructor and the interested student who is forced to endure it.
4) It seems presumptuous that someone interested in math and science doesn’t need their humanities courses taught by a professional scholar.
5) I don’t like to see adjuncts get exploited or students cheated when they charge the full tuition of a private school.
6) There seems to be no quality control. Fellows typically stay just one term.</p>
<p>When you posted your rant on the Case board, you got one enthusiastic endorsement (below) and two lukewarm negatives. I really don’t see why this consumes you so.</p>
<p>It says that “CWRU faculty members teach virtually all First Seminars.” I know that my son’s first year seminar didn’t have faculty members listed when he selected his topic. I think part of it is that is gives faculty the opportunity to teach outside their specialty. In my son’s case, he’s taking a Civil War class from a physics professor who will be his adviser for the first two years. Unless you know that the seminars are being taught strictly by adjunct faculty, this sounds like one of the many freshman initiatives that have expanded as part of the student’s total undergraduate experience.</p>
<p>I think I would raise an eyebrow at the prospect of any class -even as an elective -that did not count towards either a major or a prerequisite for a major (even outside of a student’s major areas of interest), unless a course were to be added to a full-time schedule of 12 credits or more.</p>
<p>When we saw some of the topics offered for required “freshman seminars” at some of the colleges Frazzled D was considering, we thought they were downright silly and the prospect of having to pay for these classes (which, as required classes, would displace others), that would not count towards any prospective major, or even prepare a student to take further academic courses, was a real turn-off.</p>
<p>I would rather see tuition money spent to improve teaching and reduce sizes of “weeder” courses and other intro courses so that students could get better mentoring from professors or advanced graduate students and receive early, frequent, and constructive feed-back on performance, rather than depend upon the level of preparation they got in high school (and this is all relative to peers - the student with preparation to soar at most state schools might flail about at a private school) or the luck of the draw in the assigned T.A. or peer tutor.</p>
<p>On the surface it doesn’t look that different from many freshman seminar programs except that no one gets shut out. Of the visiting faculty most either have PhDs or are pretty well known in their field. (i.e. I’ve heard them on NPR) The idea of pairing people from the “real world” with English grad students to do the writing piece is actually kind of interesting I think. The topics seem more interesting than 1st year writing courses my kids had to take. </p>
<p>That said, I think there’s also a case to be made for courses taught by scholars teaching strict scholarship. And I’m even kind of a fan of big broad survey lecture courses where you get an overview of all of art history, or all of ancient Greek lit, or all of Russian History.</p>
<p>I think it looks like a great program. Similar programs are gaining traction at all types of universities from the University of Iowa to Truman State.</p>
<p>Truman State requires a writing enhanced Junior Interdisciplinary Seminar for all students.
Classes include:</p>
<p>Death and Dying… This course examines the historical perspectives and current issues related to death and dying from a multidisciplinary point of view. The primary emphasis is to understand death in relation to ourselves and the social organization in which we have our identity.</p>
<p>Geometry of the Universe… In this course, we will discuss the evolution of cosmological ideas in Western society, using the development of measurement as one focus. While studying this subject matter, we’ll also discuss the interrelatedness of the scientific, mathematical and philosophical disciplines. For example, we’ll discuss how philosophy has helped us understand the nature of science and how prevailing philosophical beliefs have directly influenced the direction of cosmological theories at various points in history. </p>
<p>Extraterrestrial Life…Does life or intelligence exist outside the earth? This course will consist of readings and discussion of approaches to this question from historical, scientific, philosophical, and theological perspectives. Topics will include the emergence of the “Copernican Principle,” the search for life on Mars, the study of the origin of life, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) program.</p>
<p>This was my thought. Seems like my D’s freshman seminar program had some off the wall subjects. But one can learn how to research, analyze, and discuss when learning almost any subject…the skills learned are transferable.</p>
<p>Hum110 at Reed is taught in a lecture/conference format. Lectures are from profs in the sociology/psychology/art/music/history/philosophy/theatre/language/lit depts. Students are assigned to smaller groups ( 15?) led by the same prof all year. Required book list for one semester is about 17 original works. A full time semester course @ Reed is one credit. Hum110 is three credits ( for the whole year)
Lots of reading & writing, and since all freshmen are taking the same course, lots of discussion outside of class.
[Reed</a> College | Humanities 110](<a href=“http://academic.reed.edu/humanities/hum110/]Reed”>Humanities 110 - Reed College)</p>
<p>I like cross discipline courses, more applicable to real life problems.</p>
<p>Really, it looks fine to me. I sort of like the idea of connecting students’ capstone projects to some gen ed through-line from freshman year. The first seminars don’t come across like mickey-mouse humanities. First, they aren’t all humanities-related. Second, the ones I recognize are all legitimately hip current academic areas of inquiry.</p>
<p>I didn’t see the part about how the non-first-year seminars are not taught by “real scholars”, but I know that around here you can get some pretty real scholars for $5,000/seminar (if that’s really true). I took some seminars from grad students when I was in college, and so did my wife and my kids. They can be excellent; being around good grad students is one of the benefits of being an undergraduate at a research university.</p>
<p>That said, a couple of questions:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Is it really that big a deal for students to take a seminar in their major during their junior year? I have never heard of a college/department where by that point in his/her education a student was still taking only large lecture classes. That gives me a little pause.</p></li>
<li><p>Is the capstone project in addition to something like a thesis in your major? Or does it replace the major project? If the former, wow, that’s a lot of work. If the latter, I’m surprised that all the majors weren’t doing this already, and I wonder whether putting it under the SAGES auspices is the right way to go.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>This depends on a given university and the students themselves. </p>
<p>Several former colleagues who attended large universities recounted how they were either able to get away with taking nothing but lecture courses with mostly multiple choice exams for all 4+ years or their upper-level courses continued in the same format. . </p>
<p>There are plenty of cases where courses labeled seminars are effectively lecture classes because the school/Prof allows far too many students into the course for it to function as a seminar course. To compensate for the greater numbers, some Profs/instructors tend to offer more multiple choice exams and less long research paper type assignments/exams to grade them within a reasonable amount of time. Saw this happen not only at the larger state/private universities at the undergrad levels, but even some graduate level courses at an Ivy. </p>
<p>One seminar I was invited to sit in on by the Prof and a friend who was a student at SIPA was supposed to have been a graduate seminar for masters students. However, because 50+ people ended up registering for that course…it ended up being nothing but a lecture course…complete with TAs for grading.* </p>
<p>IME, once a seminar class goes beyond 15-20 students…it can no longer function effectively as such and becomes a glorified lecture course with more specialized assigned readings and greater reading loads.</p>
<ul>
<li>Granted, this is an extreme case…but it was labeled as a “seminar course” for grad students.</li>
</ul>
<p>Interesting discussion. There have been some good points in this thread illustrating the upside of a program like SAGES, which was what I was hoping for. Thanks. </p>
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<p>I read the section on their website for faculty. Basically, they expect people to come to Case for one semester, teach a few seminars, and then go on their merry way. I fear these seminars are being taught by low paid migrant academics. </p>
<p>I agree that these are better than classes with large lectures, and I think grad students from top research universities could also be better, but they need to do well in the teaching to pad their resumes in hope of landing a permanent academic job. </p>
<p>However, here I have this vision of the downtrodden humanities PhD trying who has bounced around from “visit” to “visit” trying to hang on in academia for another semester teaching 4 classes per term for $40K with no insurance, no benefits, and no future, coming to Cleveland for a semester or two and looking for the next job. </p>
<p>Maybe it’s not as bad as it seemed initially.</p>
<p>I don’t think it would be the end of the world if humanities profs spent a few years being a “post-doc” as is standard in science. (Though post-docs don’t generally teach.) But if it’s a no insurance, no benefits position that’s pretty rotten. I know U of Chicago has some sort of interim position like this.</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, I visited Case and came to the same conclusion as the Rocker (at least his initial opinion). SAGES might be a nice extra, but they’re using it as a substitute for humanities. It seems pretty weak to me.</p>