I’ve always been a firm believer there’s only two good times to have an election: when the outcome isn’t in doubt or when you are not concerned with the results one way or the other.
An example of the former is when periodically students will go, “Oh, Mr. Long! Mr. Long! The weather is so beautiful today. Can’t we have class outside? Oh please, oh please!” To which I always respond, “Sure, let’s have a vote to see who wants to have class outside.” I ask everyone who wants to do so to raise their hands, which is inevitably the whole class. Then I ask anyone who doesn’t want to have class outside to raise their hands. I’m always the only one who votes for this option. Then I say, “Okay, let’s tally the results . . . 1-0, I win.” Then we pick up with the rest of class . . . in the classroom.
However, an example of the latter, is the third and final critique assignment in my MCC winter minimester English 1302 class going on right now. (Four days down, seven days to go before it ends on Friday, January 3.) The critique assignment originally started out as a detailed summary and response to an outside reading I would pick. However, after doing various iterations of this assignment over the years, I’ve gotten tired of having to scout around looking for new and (hopefully) interesting things to read. One thing I tried last semester in my 1302 class was having students vote on one of four TEDtalks videos to write their final critique over. It worked out pretty well: They chose a video I probably wouldn’t have used but which turned out to be both quite interesting and provoked a lot of good discussion in class.
So, the candidates this time around—my students will have to vote at Blackboard by the end of the week—are the following:
1. Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution!
2. Liz Coleman’s call to reinvent liberal arts education
3. Salman Khan: Let’s use video to reinvent education
4. Daphne Koller: What we’re learning from online education
All four of them look interesting—to me at any rate—and because the final paper my 1302 students write will be a proposal to improve something about the school they’re attending—be it a school-wide application or narrowly specific to their particular programs of study—this ideally will offer them some different perspectives to consider while developing their own ideas.
Mark Roy Long 