Mark at CU/Boulder sent this:
Hi Ben,
Praise to Robert Patrick for what he has started at Georgia.
Last night, in speaking with my colleague from one of our language departments, I learned from him that he had students who didn’t do homework in class and still got better results than students who did. What they did to replace their homework was seek out on their own input that they found interesting.
Now, no surprise for CI people, nothing novel about any of that. But what was interesting was the way he framed the story. First, he said that the students received worse grades simply because they did not complete the homework (because in that department, as in many on our campus, homework represents a major part of the grade). Then he said that he would never tell that story to his colleagues, “of course.” What he meant by “of course,” is that questioning why students might be doing better without doing their homework was just too politically sensitive.
So what this means is that if he belonged to a team of oncologists and he had a group of patients who were refusing to do the radiation treatments in their chemo/radiation regime – and that group had a higher survival rate – he would hide that information from his colleagues because of the political repercussions.
That is how things get done where I am. That is the culture I am tasked to change, and I am no Atlas. I have the feeling that Georgia, a place some unenlightened people might think is behind the times, is miles ahead of us on that score.
Mark