Category: Tsinghua University

Teaching Academic Writing: My Plan (Part 2 of 2)

Seth Roberts3 Comments

To review, I am teaching Academic Writing this semester. I want to motivate learning using forces other than grades. Here is my plan.

On the first day of class, I’ll say: Don’t take this class unless there is some piece of writing you want to do. This class will be all about me helping you write whatever you want. Most of the students will want help writing a personal statement for graduate school applications. I’ll tell them there needs to be something else they want to write. Without that the class will be a waste of time.

For the first class — the course meets for 1.5 hours once/week — I’ll talk about writing a personal statement.

After that, the general plan will be:

1. I meet with students after class (in the same place) for however long they want, maybe 5-20 minutes. They choose the duration. During these meetings, they show me what they’ve written. I read it and tell them how they can improve it.

2. During the next class, each student who met with me will give a talk lasting the same length of time as our meeting. For example, if we met for 5 minutes, the talk will last 5 minutes. The talk will be about what I said. After each talk I’ll give feedback.

3. In addition, students who meet with me will add my advice to a shared document (e.g., Google Docs).

4. Each week, one student will be assigned to spend a certain length of time (30 minutes) improving the shared document. For example, making it clearer or better organized. The next class they will give a brief talk saying what they did. Again, I will give feedback.

This accomplishes several things: 1. Customization. Each student can write whatever they want. 2. Doing. They actually write “real” material (in contrast to writing assignments). What they choose to write will probably be stuff like a paper for another class but at least it isn’t a writing assignment. 3. Telling. They will tell other students what they have learned.

Attractive elements of the plan for me include the fact that I never lecture and never grade. I never need to guess what the students need help with. I learn what they need help with by looking at what they’ve written. Even though there are no grades or teacher-imposed deadlines, I give lots of feedback — it really is challenging. Attractive elements of the plan for students are that there is flexibility, they can write whatever they want, they never have to take notes (yet there is a written record to refer to), and they are pushed to understand the material in a non-competitive way.

If a student doesn’t pay attention in class — the presentations when other students tell what I told them — he risks having me make the same comment on his writing I made earlier on someone else’s. Then he would have to tell other students that I made that same comment. The other students wouldn’t like that; it wastes their time. So there is pressure to pay attention. If you miss it during class, you can study the shared document.

More English is not my students’ native language, although they are quite good at it. I think that they are more likely to understand another student say X (in English) than when I say X (in English) because the student’s English will be closer to their English ability. I might use words they don’t know. This is a problem in America, too (professor knows a lot more than his or her students) but it is especially clear here. My point is that this is a good feature of having students give class presentations about what I told them, rather than me telling the class directly, which might seem better. If a presenter makes a mistake, I will fix it.

 

Teaching Academic Writing: My Plan (Part 1 of 2)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

This semester at Tsinghua — which begins this week — I am going to teach Academic Writing in English. The class is in the Psychology Department. It hasn’t met yet; I suppose all of my students will be psychology majors. In this post I am describe my plan for teaching it; future posts will describe what actually happened.

Last year I taught a class called Frontiers of Psychology. I discovered that I could teach the class without grading. I never gave grades (nor tests), yet the students did lots of work (the assignment completion rate was about 99.9%) and apparently learned a lot. Behind my removal of grading was my belief that long ago people learned everything without grading. Maybe I can use those ancient sources of motivation, rather than fear of a bad grade or desire for a good grade. The details of the course centered on three principles: 1. Customization. As much as possible, I tried to allow each student to learn what they wanted to learn. For example, they had a very wide choice of final project. 2. Doing. “The best way to learn is to do” (Paul Halmos) — so students did as much as possible. For example, they did experiments. 3. Telling. Students told the rest of the class about what they had read or done. I gave plenty of feedback but it was always spoken. For example, after each class presentation I pointed out something I liked and something that could have been better.

It was like the discovery of anesthesia. All of sudden, no pain. No difficult grading decisions. No written comments (explaining the grades), which I wondered if the recipient would understand. The class was a pure pleasure to teach. For the students, no longer did they need to worry about getting a bad (or less than perfect) grade.

Can I repeat this with a much different class? At the same time I taught Frontiers of Psychology, I also taught Academic Writing in English for the first time. It was pass/fail, so I didn’t grade there, either, but I wasn’t happy with how it went. (I didn’t want to teach it again . . . but, a month ago, I learned I am teaching it again.) This time I am going to take what I learned from my Frontiers of Psychology experience and try to create a better class.

In the next post I will describe my overall plan. Throughout the semester I will post about how well my plan is working. Supposedly “ no battle plan survives contact with the enemy” but my Frontiers of Psychology plan worked fine. I didn’t change it at all. Maybe my Academic Writing plan will work, maybe it won’t.

Movie directing and teaching.

 

 

 

Tsinghua Graduation Memento Statement

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The first class of Tsinghua psychology majors in a half-century is graduating in a few days. (The Tsinghua psychology department was closed in the 1950s — Soviet-style university reorganization — and reopened in 2008.) The seniors asked their professors for statements to be included in a memento book. My contribution:

I remember our first day of class (Frontiers of Psychology). It was my first time teaching in China. It was on a Monday, maybe it was your first class at Tsinghua. Some things surprised me. Moving from students in the front row to students in the back, English ability got worse. Each student said their name. When one student said her Chinese name, everyone laughed. I still do not understand this. This had never happened in my American classes. A student had her picture taken with me. This too never happened in America. There were two graduate students in the class. Both of them volunteered to be teaching assistants. In America, no graduate students attended my undergraduate classes, and you need to pay them a lot of money to be teaching assistants. (At Tsinghua, that was the only time graduate students came to my class.) The graduate student who became my teaching assistant told you, “Don’t say My English is poor. Say My English is on the way.” I can tell you now I disagree. It is confusing to say My English is on the way. There is nothing wrong with saying My English is poor. I say 我的汉语不很好 all the time. We were all so new that we weren’t sure when class ended! That was the first thing you made me learn: The length of a class period. I enjoyed having dinner with you. You were less afraid of me than my Berkeley students. I especially remember dinner with 徐胜眉, who told me the Chinese side of the debate about the Chinese takeover of Tibet. Most people in America, including professors like me, had no idea there is another side. I had had a big gap in my knowledge and hadn’t even realized it. The most important thing I learned from you was how to teach better. The homework you did was very good but I was puzzled how to grade it. From talking with you at dinner and listening to you in class, I could tell that all of you were excellent students. It did not seem like a good idea to make it difficult to get the highest grade, but what was the alternative? This was the puzzle that you pushed me to solve. Eventually I changed how I teach quite a bit, as you may know from talking to students from last year’s Frontiers of Psychology. Thank you for that, and may you teach your future teachers as well as you taught me.

Because my students were so good, they made me see the deficiencies in usual teaching methods especially clearly. It really did seem idiotic to take perfectly good work and carefully divide it into piles of best, good, and less good (and give each pile a different grade). Surely there were better uses of my time than making such distinctions and better uses of their time and mental energy than trying to do exactly what I wanted.

When I visited Berkeley to be considered for an assistant professor job, one of the interviews was with graduate students. One of them asked, “Which do you like better, teaching or research?” “Research,” I said. They laughed. All Berkeley professors prefer research, but you’re supposed to say you like them equally. I was unaware of this. I did like research more, and still do, which is why I am surprised that I talk about teaching so much. I told a friend at lunch recently that it was weird how much I talk about my teaching ideas.

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Thanks to Bryan Castañeda and Andy.

Why Fujoshi? Experiment by Tsinghua Freshmen

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In January I blogged about teaching a class in a new way. The obvious novelty was that I did no grading, but I was also pleased by the high quality of the student work.

The class, at Tsinghua University, is called Foundations of Psychology. It’s required of psychology majors and is taken by freshmen. Last time there were about 25 students. The biggest assignment was a final project where I allowed students to work on their own interests. They could do almost anything they wanted related to psychology and they could work alone or with others. I “graded” their work via a checklist: X points for doing this, Y points for doing that, and so on, with the possible points adding up to an A. The checklist was different for every project. They had about five weeks.

Here is a summary of one project, by Vista Zeng:

In the Frontiers of Psychology class this term, we, a group of three freshmen (Vista Zeng, Joy Wu and Michael Wu) conducted an experiment on Fujoshi. Fujoshi is a subculture that started in Japan and spread in East Asia. It has influenced many of our classmates and friends. When recruiting participants, we found 14 Fujoshis out of about 720 female students in Tsinghua University.

According to Wikipedia, fujoshi is synonymous with yaoi fandom:

Yaoi fandom refers to readers of yaoi (also called Boys’ Love, BL), a genre of male-male romance narratives aimed at a female audience, and more specifically those who participate in communal activities organized around yaoi, such as attending conventions, maintaining or posting to fansites, creating fanfiction or fanart, etc. Most fans are teenage girls or young women. . . . In Japan, female fans are called fujoshi.

It’s easy to raise questions like “why don’t those girls enjoy heterosexual romance narratives?”, “why is boys becoming fans of female-female romance narratives and creating another sub-culture (yuri) not so big an issue?”, or “why did this phenomena first occur in Eastern society?”. Vista Zeng believed that the main reason may be the traditional ethics in Eastern world (China and Japan, to be specific) on women. Traditional Chinese moral principles assume that women are not supposed to appear in these sexual scenes, so the girls turn to male homosexual products to satisfy themselves, and to avoid the condemnation from our society.

Since there are very few researches on this topic, and all of them use research methods like interviewing, Vista decided to conduct an experiment to test her explanation. Joy and Wu joined the project.

The study included 30 Fujoshis and 30 non-Fujoshis in Tsinghua University. [The students recruited about half of their Fujoshi subjects going door to door in the dormitories, the other half by making announcements in classes.] The subjects were asked to read several paragraphs including erotic scene, and the only difference between them was the gender of the two characters. The first story includes two male characters, the second one a man and a woman (“he” and “she”), the third one a man and the reader herself (“he” and “me”). (The idea was inspired by the study about judgments of intentionality by Joshua Knobe, which the class introduced.) What’s more, a neutral paragraph was put between two paragraphs. The subjects were asked to estimate her emotional feelings (we mainly focused on embarrassment and the sense of guilt) on a scale before and after reading each paragraph aloud in front of 3 strangers, and the 3 observers would also estimate the subject’s extent of embarrassment.

The answer to our assumption was yes. The most important finding was that the Fujoshis felt less guilty than non-Fujoshis when reading the male-homosexual paragraph, but far more guilty when reading the heterosexual one, showing that they agree with the idea that women are not supposed to appear in these sexual scenes. We also found that women are prone to put themselves into the sexual scene in which women are constantly involved, and they are therefore embarrassed and guilt about their own feelings.

We think our study found an example about how the traditional ethics from thousands of years ago still influence the teenagers nowadays in China, and implied a lack of sense of equality and self-esteem of Chinese women – they don’t see their natural desire and rights legitimate. However, the Fujoshis are also the ones who dare to show their demands of sexual narratives (generally, we found Fujoshis more open to sexual topics than Non-Fujoshis), which can be seen as a progress in Chinese society. We are glad that we conducted the first experiment on Fujoshi (as far as we know) and got such findings which are worth thinking about.

 

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Thanks to Bryan Castañeda and Joyce Cohen.

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How Meritocratic is Chinese Higher Education?

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A friend of mine taught at Harvard for a few years. Her husband needed a job, so he taught a writing class. He said his students were so bad it appeared to be an experiment: How stupid can you be and succeed at Harvard? They had not been admitted based on SAT scores or grades, that was clear. In a recent article called “The Myth of American Meritocracy”, Ron Unz described considerable evidence of exactly what my friend’s husband noticed: Harvard admission not based on the usual “meritocratic” measures, such as SAT scores and grades. For example, he found evidence of an Asian quota. If Asians weren’t penalized for being Asian, far more would be admitted.

In a follow-up article, Unz wrote:

Near the beginning of my article [about meritocracy] I had noted that although complaints about official corruption of every sort are a leading topic on the Chinese Internet and also in Western media coverage, I had never once heard such a claim about admissions to elite Chinese universities. This led me to conclude that the process was entirely meritocratic, and a couple of individuals with good knowledge of China confirmed this. However, during one of my recent Yale Law events, a student from China stated that he and his friends were firmly convinced that any of China’s 350 Central Committee members could easily obtain an admissions slot for his friends or relatives, so my claim was incorrect. This conflicting evidence may be reconciled if the number of such corrupt admissions each year is so tiny—perhaps a few hundred out of over eight million—that it is completely invisible to the general public. I should note that the New York Times just ran another major story on colleges in China, emphasizing every possible unfair aspect of the system, but nonetheless indicating that admissions were entirely meritocratic and objective.

Here is one reason that there is zero discussion of corruption in admission to elite Chinese universities (such as Tsinghua, where I teach): Rich Chinese universally want their children to go to college outside China, especially America. The more money you have, the easier this is. I’d guess all children of Central Committee members attend college outside China. None of them attend Tsinghua, as far as I know. At least among my students, this is utterly obvious — that education outside China is superior and anyone who can go outside China will. The brake on this is purely cost. One of my students said she didn’t want to burden her parents with the cost.

The test that Chinese high school students take to get into college is the gaokao. One of my students got the highest gaokao score in Beijing. An astonishing achievement. He didn’t get in to any American university. The Chinese public was shocked. Many newspaper articles were written about it. The rest of my students knew about it. His family is not well-off. This is why he failed where thousands of Chinese students from rich families — who didn’t bother to take the gaokao, but surely would have had a lower score – succeeded. Although he went to Tsinghua as a freshman, he too wanted to escape Chinese higher education. First he transferred to the University of Hong Kong. Then he transferred to MIT.

Why is Chinese higher education so bad that everyone who can avoids it? One of my students (a psychology major) said that as the economy quickly improved, the government quickly expanded the college education system. There weren’t enough good teachers to fill the slots. That’s one reason. Another reason is a certain ethos. I asked a friend of mine, a Tsinghua student not majoring in psychology, “In what fraction of your classes do the professors lecture by reading from the textbook?” 80%, she said. That’s at Tsinghua. Below Tsinghua it’s worse. Of course students go to college outside China for reasons that have nothing to do with quality. The most obvious is prestige: It is prestigious to go elsewhere.

Lack of higher education meritocracy in China has a more subtle aspect. It is much easier to get into elite universities, such as Tsinghua, if you live in Beijing or Shanghai than if you live elsewhere, especially poor provinces. Is this unfair? It isn’t easy to say because the gaokao is different in different places. I don’t know the official reason for this (different textbooks?), but the difference in tests makes it easier to have lower admissions cutoff scores for students from Beijing and Shanghai. A Beijing student at Tsinghua will usually have a lower gaokao score than a student at Tsinghua from a poor province. Of course it is much more expensive to live in Beijing and Shanghai than elsewhere. Moreover, a big chunk of the gaokao is about English proficiency. A student’s English proficiency depends heavily on amount and quality of English education, which depends heavily on family income. The richer you are, the better your children’s English.

All this makes political sense. Richer people — whose children have better English — have more political power than the less rich. Those who live in Beijing and Shanghai have more political power than people in poor provinces. Allowing their children get into Tsinghua with lower gaokao scores (Beijing and Shanghai residents) or writing the gaokao so that their children have an advantage (English proficiency) is one way to keep them happy.

 

 

How to Write: Lessons From My Writing Class

Seth Roberts8 Comments

I just finished teaching an undergraduate class called Academic Writing at Tsinghua. One semester, pass/fail, about 10 students. The last assignment was list six things you’ve learned. Combining the answers, I came up with this:

1. Don’t tell readers what they already know. This came up a lot when I discussed how to write a personal statement. “Your university has an excellent program in X” — no, don’t say that.

2. To make your writing moving, focus on your own thoughts and emotions. Moving = evoking emotion. Evoking emotion was enormously important, I said.

3. Use simple words and sentences (don’t show off). As one student put it, “Received the blames from one class, changed all my GRE words into understandable words.”

4. Give examples.

5. Avoid boasting (say “I like X”, don’t say “I am good at X”).

6. Do not write about things that are “too big”.

7. Have clear connections between sentences. We spent several classes on the various ways adjacent sentences can be related.

8. Say things that are honest and true. In contrast to what you think your reader wants to hear. A friend asked for advice on her personal statement for a graduate school application. She sent me a revised version. I thought the unrevised more honest version was better.

9. Begin with something interesting.

I asked which of these lessons they already knew. The consensus answer was #1 (don’t tell readers what they already know) and #4 (give examples). Their personal statements flagrantly violated #1. One student said they had learned it, yes, but needed to be reminded.

Jon Cousins of Moodscope, in town for a Quantified Self conference, gave a guest lecture. From his talk the students came away with four main things:

1. Copy someone’s writing you admire.

2. Imagine your audience. Are they busy? Curious?

3. Write as you speak.

4. Revise after a period of time. Like a month.

Another of Jon’s lessons was use punctuation sparingly. An editor told him, “Using an exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke.”

 

Online Teaching Versus What?

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Is online teaching (e.g., MOOC) a big deal? In an essay (“Why Online Education Works”), Alex Tabarrok argues for the value of online education (meaning online lectures) compared to traditional lectures. A friend told me yesterday that MOOC was “a frontier of pedagogy”. No doubt online lectures will make lecture classes cheaper and more available. Lots of things have gone from scarce/expensive to common/cheap. With things whose effects we understand (e.g., combs), the result is straightforward: more people benefit. With things whose effects we don’t understand, the results are less predictable. Did the spread of sugar help us? Hard to say. Did the spread of antibiotics help us? Hard to say. It may have helped sustain simplistic ideas about what causes disease (e.g., “acne is caused by bacteria”, “ulcers are caused by bacteria”) reducing effective innovation. Do we have a good idea of the effects of lectures (or their lack of effect), or a good theory of college education? I don’t think so. Could their spread help sustain simplistic ideas about education? Maybe.

As books spread, the teaching of reading increased. Everyone understood that books were useless if people couldn’t read. The introduction of PCs was accompanied by user interface improvements. This helped PCs become influential– not restricted to hobbyists. Will online education be accompanied by similar make-it-more-palatable changes? I have heard nothing about this. Their advocates seem to think the current system is fine and if it could only be available to more people…

Online lectures will make much difference only if the cost and quality of lectures is the weakest link in what strikes me as a process with many links. It would be a coincidence if the link that can be most easily strengthened turned out to be the weakest link. For example, is the cost of lectures the main thing driving up the cost of college? That would be wonderful if it were true, but I haven’t seen evidence that it’s true. At Berkeley, for example, there has been enormous growth in the administrator-to-faculty ratio.

Here are two arguments used to argue that online lectures are a big step forward:

It will help people in poor countries, like Zambia. There is a long history of people in rich countries misunderstanding people in poor countries. Several years ago I was in Guatemala. I heard about a school being built by a (rich country) religious group in a poor area. After two years, the American running it wanted to leave. No member of the community took it over. It disappeared. “Maybe they didn’t want a school,” said the graduate student who told me about it. Maybe few people in Zambia want online lecture classes. (I have no idea.) If so, the benefit will be small.

It will save labor. Each lecture will be viewed many more times. Saving labor is not always good. It is plausible that the growth of online lectures will mean fewer college professors. Colleges and universities are among the few places where people do research and almost the only places where they do unrestricted research. Most of the research is useless; a tiny fraction is enormously useful. At the moment, lectures subsidize research. By giving lectures, professors are allowed to do research. Fewer professors, less unrestricted research, less innovation. “Wasteful” lecturing might be labor we shouldn’t save.

One thing I like about online classes is the possibility they will connect people who want to learn the same thing, like ordinary classes do. They can help each other, encourage each other, and so on. I have no doubts about the value of this. (I find language partners — I teach them English, they teach me Chinese — way more pleasant and helpful than tutors.)

At Berkeley, I tried to find good lecturers. With two exceptions (Tim White and Steve Glickman) I failed. Almost all lectures, even those by brilliant researchers, were dreary. (A shining exception by Robin Hanson.) They suffered from a lack of stories and a lack of emotion. (At Tsinghua, things are worse. A friend who majors in bioengineering told me that 80% of her teachers lecture by reading from the textbook.) The power of professors over students in some ways resembles the power of doctors over patients. Just as there is little pressure on doctors to understand disease (if antibiotics have bad effects, it doesn’t harm the doctor who prescribed them), there is little pressure on most professors — at least at the elite research universities that produce online lectures — to understand education. At Berkeley, many professors say they teach their undergraduate students “how to think” or “how to think critically”. In fact, they were teaching their students to imitate them. The simplest form of education. This is neither good nor bad — it depends on the student — but it is the opposite of sophisticated.

A few months ago I assigned my Tsinghua students (freshmen) to read 60 pages of The Man Who Would Be Queen by Michael Bailey, a book full of stories and emotion. Any 60 pages, their choice. No test, no written assignment, no grade. One student told me it was the first book in English she’d ever finished. It was so good she couldn’t stop reading. My assignment had changed real-life behavior: what my student read in her spare time. Maybe it changed her tolerance of homosexuality and the tolerance of those around her. My assignment (not a textbook or academic paper, not a fixed reading) and evaluation (none) differed from conventional college teaching. Experiences like this make me wonder what fraction of important learning during college happens due to lecture classes. (In my case, the fraction was zero.) If the fraction is low, it suggests that online learning won’t make much difference.

How Difficult is Chinese? A Tsinghua Professor Complains

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Recently there was a competition for Tsinghua civil engineering majors. Whose structure can support the most weight? And so on. At the end of the competition, a professor handed out prizes to the winners. After the awards ceremony, the professor who had handed out the awards said to a colleague, “I don’t like this job.” His colleague was surprised: What was so bad about handing out awards? The professor explained that the students’ names sometimes included characters so obscure that he didn’t know them. Which was embarrassing.