All Posts Tagged With: "anthropology"

Remember when choice and flexibility were good things?

With Nova Scotia’s O’Neill report in the books, and a similar report just released in Ontario, specialization is the new watchword for Canadian universities. Thus Bonnie Patterson, President of the Council of Ontario Universities: “the funding realities mean we’re going to have to build on the differences that already exist.”

Setting aside the question that the so-called funding realities are really funding decisions, the emphasis on specialization is troubling from the point of view of quality higher education.

Of course, some specialization is inevitable, or at least practical. Not every university can have a medical school, and a law school, and a major in South American Urban Geography. Fine. But I worry when I hear people like Harvey Weingarten, President of the  Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario say things like this: “If Ryerson were to say its priority is undergraduate programs that graduate the next wave of entrepreneurs, for example, it might be that the U of T wouldn’t have a program exactly like that.”

Related: B.C. PSE split sets dangerous precedent

Setting aside the fact that if Ontario really wanted to save money it could eliminate a few of these education councils, Weingarten’s comments hint that specialization is all about output. If Ontario needs graduates in various areas, the implication runs, it doesn’t need every school to fulfill that need. Put another way, if a student wants program x, she only needs one school to offer it and she can go there.

But the underlying assumption is that a university education is designed only, or mainly, as an economic investment. Universities are understood like factories, turning out useful products and thus should be specialized so as to be more efficient.

Setting aside the fact that it is inherently repugnant to think of people as products (the report calls for graduates who, like iPods should be “highly valued and competitive” [p.15]), the specialization perspective assumes that students know what they want to study when they go to university and will stick to that field of study all the way through. Anyone who teaches at a university  knows that these assumptions are actually false, and idealists like me see them as deeply troubling.

For one thing, circumstances mean that students are not infinitely mobile.  A student in Sudbury may not feasibly be able to move to Windsor to study. Consequently, specialization means limiting choices. The report claims that “differentiation” will mean more variety of programs overall (p. 6) but later reveals that claim to be false by insisting that universities must work with their existing programs (p.10). In other words, the Kingston girl who might have been a world-class artist may end up toiling as an accountant because Fine Arts was only available at Western, not Queen’s. Such things may happen even now, but they become more likely the more specialized institutions become.

Just because it’s easy doesn’t mean that it’s the one for you

Are you looking through all the course listings and feeling completely lost? Korean 101, Ethics 105, Anthropology 201. With all of the options available, it’s easy to find yourself with a serious case of D.E.S.S. — Dysfunctional Elective Selection Syndrome.

Knowing your priorities is the most important aspect of picking electives. An elective has to make it through my personal screening system in order to make the cut. Grades. Interest. Time.

Or: G.I.T.

Last week I enrolled for my next semester at Waterloo. I had to choose three electives. Thanks to G.I.T., I have a filter to help me make selections that are a perfect fit.

My first stage of screening: Grades. Will this course help me get a good mark? For me, this is one of the most important criterion for an elective to have. Yes, I admit it. I choose electives for their GPA-boosting abilities. Something to offset organic chem when it inevitably suffocates me.

So if I find History and Film while trolling for an elective, and find out from birdcourses.com or ratemyprofessors.com that a 90 percent is easily achievable, it goes straight to the top of my list. But it still has two more stages to get through.

Stage two: Interest. Will I find the course interesting and engaging? When I started first year, I underestimated how critical this could be. Four months of lectures about Socrates, Plato and early political movements left me knowing I did not want to take any more political science courses. Ever.

I finally get why it’s important to find the subject matter interesting. My anthropology elective last year was unexpectedly fabulous. I discovered, thanks to a professor who was also an engaging lecturer, that mitochondrial DNA and 10,000 year old neanderthal skeletons are really interesting. In a cool but kinda icky way.

I now know that taking an anthropology course with this professor guarantees me a course that I’ll enjoy. And that really helps you to do better in a course. You can’t help but absorb and retain everything the textbook and professor says.

Pros of History and Film: All I have to do is watch boring old history films.
Cons of History and Film: All I have to do is watch boring old history films.

It won’t matter if a course is being touted as an easy grade if it becomes your post-cram nap hour.

Stage three: Time. The time you have to put into a course. If an elective, for all it’s GPA boosting power, is going to require more time that your core courses, then something is seriously wrong. I’ll get my fill of 24-hours-a-day-studying from my core courses. You don’t want to end up swamped under a course that just doesn’t mesh in the work input/grade output machine. I’m more than willing to put in the work. If I’ll get the mark to show for it.

If I take History and Film, I watch old history movies once a week for three hours.

What’s great about electives is that you have the complete freedom to pick what you study. But you’re also responsible if you end up in a course that you absolutely hate. Knowing what you want from an elective makes choosing one a lot easier. And helps to cut down on course drops later due to complete course loathing. Don’t enroll in Creative Writing if you don’t like writing essays. Period.

So if I take History and Film, I’ll probably get a good mark. If I can stand watching old war movies once a week for three very long hours.

Then again, maybe some things just aren’t worth it.

I was sitting in the middle of a chemistry lecture the first time it happened. One moment I was copying notes from the projector, the next I was suddenly staring at my sleeve. It took me a couple of seconds to realize that 15 minutes of class had vanished, and instead of writing notes about [...]

I was sitting in the middle of a chemistry lecture the first time it happened. One moment I was copying notes from the projector, the next I was suddenly staring at my sleeve. It took me a couple of seconds to realize that 15 minutes of class had vanished, and instead of writing notes about electron orbitals, I had been drooling into my armrest.

In university I’m in a constant state of tiredness.

By the time I was sitting in anthropology, my final class on Friday, I was thinking in slow motion. I registered the fact that the professor’s lips were moving. And that, judging by the way everyone else was scribbling into their notebooks, what he was saying was probably important. But lifting my pen required too much coordination. In fact, keeping my eyelids open took too much concentration. When reading over my biology notes on the bus ride home, I blinked- and suddenly my notebook was on the floor.

I’m looking forward to my weekend coma.

My anthropology class recently watched a documentary about Neanderthals. One of the discoveries that was highlighted in the documentary was a site called Shanidar, in Iraq, which showed evidence of a Neanderthal burial- complete with funeral flowers. This led anthropologists to conclude that Neanderthals, contrary to the ‘brute’ stereotype, were capable of showing compassion. Or [...]

My anthropology class recently watched a documentary about Neanderthals. One of the discoveries that was highlighted in the documentary was a site called Shanidar, in Iraq, which showed evidence of a Neanderthal burial- complete with funeral flowers. This led anthropologists to conclude that Neanderthals, contrary to the ‘brute’ stereotype, were capable of showing compassion.

Or maybe, as a classmate sitting next to me said, “They stuck the dead guy in a hole because he stunk.”

Then there’s the site called Grotte XVI, a cave in southwestern France, where archaeologists found a bunch of fish bones and some residue of smoke. From those two bits of ‘evidence,’ anthropologists assumed that Neanderthals must have had the mental capacity to plan ahead, or even the ability to imagine the future. Apparently, some ash on the side of a cave and a couple of fish skulls imply that Neanderthals deliberately preserved the fish that they caught for future consumption.

Or maybe someone forgot to put out their cigarette.  And clean up the dregs of their fish sticks.

Since anthropologists try to reconstruct cultures from thousands of years ago, it seems that everything they deduce about a given population is through reverse engineering. I’m waiting for one of them to say, “All we have is a well-preserved eye socket and some flint- how the hell could we really know if this culture valued compassion, could conceptualize the future, or had gender equality?”

Unless all the anthropologists in the documentary were the slobs of the archaeological world, I was shocked to see that when a fossil is processed- starting with its excavation, all the way up to its reconstruction- people handle it with their bare hands, without gloves. Clearly, anthropologists don’t watch CSI. Otherwise they’d know all about “DNA contamination” and the threat of “cross-contamination of evidence.” Anthropologists could learn a thing or two from Gil Grissom.

That’s the thing about anthropology: it’s the McGuiver of the science world. All an anthropologist needs is a fragment of a finger bone and a sharp rock, and they can recreate an entire culture. For example, one of the Shanidar fossils was a withered upper arm bone, a stump that the Neanderthal apparently lived with for 20 or 30 years. Some anthropologists claim this is further evidence of Neanderthals’ compassion- that they clearly cared for their injured brethren, helping them to overcome their handicaps and continue to be welcomed and functional members of the social group.

There could be a second, much more simple option: they didn’t leave the injured guy behind because he made a good water boy. Or maybe they kept him around because he was fun to arm wrestle.

That, or an archaeologist sat on the bone and broke it. Then created an elaborate “withered arm” story to cover himself.