Purpose Statement
Again, the spoon
trying to shovel back the tide.
How do you reshape nearly four hundred years of thought? Not in a single
semester. But a semester can be a terrific start.
Description of Activity
The activity is helping
students to intellectually embrace and, more important,
emotionally-intuitatively realize that working is meaningless without living
and living is meaningless without "learnings."
Application
1. If we teach well it
will create in some students its own motivation and pleasure, whether already
present or as a new perceptive.
2. Constant integration of the teacher's personal experience in learning (don't
forget some humor) is extremely valuable.
3. Extra Credit opens lots of new doors. First, extra credit must be highly
motivtional. For example, by doing well on all the extra credit assignments,
the student may be justified to receive a higher final grade, if they are
borderline.
Second, extra credit allows creative assignments that may only touch the
subject matter taught. For example, this semester I have asked all my classes
to examine the recent case of a UCSB student who was denied his Masters degree
because he inserted an uncomplementary "disacknowledgement" section
in the document after it was approved and prior to it being sent to the
library. My students must read the newspaper article on this case, determine
what forms of speech are unprotected under the U.S. Constitution, and, based
upon these types of speech and the cases that created them (fact patterns)
determine whether they believe the university is correct or that, in fact, the
student's rights of free speech under the 1st Amendment have been violated.
Doing this assignment receives more credit than doing the three normal
assignments given in the semester.
This assignment has been received well and opens doors that, hopefully, have
been a pleasure to open. It may even stimulte career ideas,and not just in law.
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and modified on 11/6/99 at 10:48:42 AM