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The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
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NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."





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Friday, August 6, 2021

NIGHTMARES

Just before I got up this morning, I had a curious dream.  I was in a nondescript classroom meeting a course for the first time. There were students scattered about the room, which was perhaps one third full, and they were looking rather ordinary. I was standing before a large old-fashioned blackboard (not one of these whiteboards that seem all the rage now) and at one point I picked up a piece of chalk and slowly drew a long rectangle oriented left to right. I explained to the students that I had no particular purpose in doing this, I just wanted them to see the rectangle. The students exhibited no interest whatsoever in what I was saying – they were not disruptive or impolite, simply unresponsive. I did not have much of anything I wanted to say to them. Although nothing in the dream was at all dramatic, the feeling tone of the dream was nightmarish.

 

When I woke up, I found myself brooding about the possibility that when I introduced my students next spring to the course I am scheduled to teach at UNC, they would not be fascinated or shocked  – they would simply be bored. I recalled that more than 50 years ago, when undergraduate students occupied the administration building and other buildings at Columbia in a protest that closed the University down for several weeks, I told faculty who were outraged by the student actions that they should in fact be flattered that the students thought University buildings worth occupying. The real danger was that they would decide we were irrelevant and would choose to walk away. That would leave us not challenged, not opposed, not condemned, not attacked, but simply ignored.

 

Perhaps the real latent function of grades, as Robert Merton would have said, is to compel the students to at least give the impression that they care about what we say in class.

11 comments:

Tom Weir said...

Well, as a former student of yours 50 years ago, I don't recall you drawing any rectangles on the blackboard. And yes we sat there unresponsive sometimes like dopey college kids.
But you brought your energy, wit, and high expectations to us. Your classes were never boring. I was just always trying to catch up to what were teaching.
I don't find you at all boring on this blog either.
So go in with all guns firing and remember being bored is on them, not on you.

Tom Weir said...

It would also be great to get into some of the particulars of your course on this blog as you are teaching it.

james wilson said...

As I read what you wrote I thought you might be going somewhere else with this: your nightmare was going to wind up with sorrowful/frustrated remarks on how when you blog your ‘students’ end up talking amongst themselves without any regard for what you’d tried to initiate, some of them even presuming—as sometimes happens in college classrooms—to talk too much about their own ‘insights.’ (I hope this comment isn’t an example of such behavior!)

Perhaps your post was about your classromm apprehensions, your concealed blog apprehensions, and even more? Nightmares like other dreams probably require interpretation.

Michael said...

A favorite prof. described a scene from one of his Philosophy 101 courses -

PROF.: "...thus concludes the argument for atheism."
STUDENTS: (indifferent silence)
P: "So, *ahem*, there you have it: There is no God!"
S: (indifferent silence)
P: "Um...you don't have to go to church?"

Another favorite prof. confessed to me mid-semester that he felt his seminar was bombing due to student apathy, for which he was inclined to blame himself. I don't remember what I said, but it must've been essentially the same as Tom Weir's comment above: It's not on you. And one student of mine was kind enough to say to me, when I was despairing over a course of my own (my very first one at that), "It's just hard." So, again echoing Tom, sometimes (though obviously not always), what looks like indifferent silence is just a person taking time to process while trying to stay caught up.

Robert Paul Wolff said...

Thank you all for the supportive comments. Tom, I will certainly talk about the courses I teach it if in fact I get to teach it at all. The way things are going with the virus, one never knows. By next January we may be back to normal or all in lockdown. Lord, how I hate teaching on zoom!

LFC said...

I've only taught on two occasions, in two different places (once as a grad student, and once after I finished my PhD). On both occasions I was teaching the intro course in my field (int'l relations); I don't like teaching the intro course, but that's how things worked out. My feeling is that the professor does bear at least some responsibility if students are bored.

However, I think it unlikely that the students choosing to take Prof Wolff's course in the UNC Phil Dept will be bored, esp if they have some idea beforehand of what the content of 'Advanced Topics in Philosophy' is going to be. If they have some notion of the syllabus beforehand and know that it's going to focus on social contract theory in various iterations (as RPW said in a previous post), then presumably the students will be a self-selected group of those who want to read what's on the syllabus. Plus, this will not be a bland "neutral" presentation of the stuff, so if there are students inclined to challenge the professor's views -- as one would hope there might be -- it could lead to some lively discussion. (I cd definitely see that happening in the sessions on Rawls and RPW's take on Rawls, even if these are mostly undergraduates.)

Danny said...

Perhaps the real latent function of grades is to compel the students to cheat. Or at least, it's not the real overt function -- which is what, exactly? I find that grades bespeak the extreme economy of attention that students can expect to get. If you have a one-on-one mentor, you would be more likely to actually learn, but instead, school is structured so that you pay tuition with of course no refunds, and all you get is a grade. It shouts to me of the extreme economy of attention you can expect to receive from the teacher -- you get, basically, nothing. I have had occasion to wonder if it's worth it. The whole thing is to be treated like cattle. This is good trainning for real life? ooops, yeah.

Andrew Lionel Blais said...

What wish do you think was fulfilled?

Nick Pappas said...

Could this be an image of writing nothing? — which would go with your saying you had no purpose in drawing the rectangle. Then it might be one of those pre-semester anxiety dreams about not knowing what to teach the students. It comes down to what you think the rectangle is about: essentially empty, essentially “rect” (I’m wrecked as a teacher), etc.

LFC said...

@ A. L. Blais

Freud's theory that all dreams are about wish fulfillment seems to me one of the weakest parts of his thought. Although I am not a particular fan of E.O. Wilson's overall views (I'm not questioning his expertise on ants), he has, as I recall, an effective critique of Freud on dreams in his bk _Consilience_, where he says, in slighter politer terms, that it's nonsense. I'm inclined to agree.

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