There's a lie in my lecture

A great post about a professor who always includes one lie in his lectures and it is up to students to spot it. I will have to use this next semester.

Advice from elsewhere

I like to scour the web for the advice that other professors are giving their students. The Yale political scientist/economist Chris Blattman has a nice set of ten tips that he recommends to undergraduates interested in public affairs. I would second his recommendation to get a good foundation in statistics and mathematical modeling. It really is essential for working in public affairs. I noticed that he is a little less supportive of language classes than I am both because immersion is the best way to learn a language (very true) and because there are lots of opportunties for learning languages outside of college (somewhat true - more true if you decide to live abroad).

Appreciative thinking

The Berkeley psychology professor Seth Roberts has an interesting post on what he calls appreciative thinking (in contrast to critical thinking). He worries that students are too inculcated with the tendency to tear apart any academic they receive, to find its flaws. He suggests instead that students be taught to first appreciate what the work achieves because just about any published piece has some worth.

This is a good point. In my first reading of a work, I always try to give the author the benefit of the doubt and give it my most generous reading. But I do have two quibbles with his worries. The first is that I think it applies more to graduate students than undergrads who are often too appreciative, assuming that if we assign a work then it must be both correct and important. Second, I think appreciation is a good first step but needs to be followed by criticism. Almost all academic work challenges the conclusions of some previous work. If we simply appreciate, then it is difficult to know what to believe. If two scholars disagree, then at least one of them has to wrong.