Philosophy 101E

Thanks again to everyone who gave me feedback in class. I’ll try to respond here to a few of the comments brought up in the assessment. If you have any other comments or suggestions, please leave a comment in this post. Follow the break to keep reading:

I would really appreciate it if you talk a little slower

I admit I have a problem with talking too fast, and I will try to slow it down in the future. Part of it is that I am just too much of a philosophy nerd, and get pretty excited at some of the material. I try to compensate by repeating myself often, but that’s not a very good strategy. Please don’t hesitate to interrupt me in class and tell me to slow down.

… sometimes we go off in tangents that go a little too far off topic. Perhaps you could help the class focus on more important points and try to cut down on this.

… it seems like you are trying to tackle a huge amount of information in lectures, some of which isn’t important yet… “we’ll talk about that later in class”. If they were more structured, I would have an easier time pulling out the key important concepts

I try to take good notes. However, when I read over the notes later, I don’t understand what you were saying. I’m concerned about my future papers because of this.

These are all very helpful comments. A lot of the work we have been doing so far is designed to lay the foundation for the second half of the course, which I hope will be more concrete and focused. In the mean time, however, there are many different threads in the current material that will be picked up in new and interesting ways when we start talking about technology later on in the course. So I’m trying to plant a lot of seeds now that will hopefully bear fruit later on.

As a consequence, though, I think you are right to say that the lectures have been unfocused. Again, I try to compensate by writing the important topics and themes on the board at the beginning of class, and by repeating the important points many times throughout the lecture. However, sometimes this might get lost in the shuffle, and when it comes time to write your papers that may end up hurting you. I will try to be more explicit about the important points and central arguments in the future.

If you are getting lost, it may be helpful to ask in class “How does this relate to *topic*?” It probably wont be entirely helpful to ask “Why is this important?” because this is a philosophy class after all, but it might be very helpful to ask how it relates to the main thread of the lecture. Another thing to stress is that, if you are feeling lost after lecture, please come see me during office hours!

Sometimes you miss that people have their hands up

Try to be sure we understand your answers to our questions before moving on in lecture.

I’m sorry about this, and I try to call on people as much as I can. Class discussions are extremely important to me, so don’t be afraid to interrupt me during lecture to ask your question. Shouting out “Question!” is a good way of doing this. Sometimes, if I am in the middle of a thought, I’ll ask you to hold on a second while I finish, but I want to make sure that everyone is keeping up with the material, and that everyone’s questions are addressed.

Also, don’t be afraid to keep asking questions if I am not clear, or you don’t understand my response right away.

Can I post discussions on any topic outside philosophy?

I partially answered this in class, but let me clarify something. The website is here to help the students discuss the material first and foremost. However, part of the point is to get you thinking about these topics outside of the classroom environment. What is most important to me is that you are thinking about these issues, and you are putting some effort into the class and the material.

With that in mind, you should feel free to post anything you want here, and use the site as you see fit. If you read some interesting news article that is somehow related to the issues we are discussing, please share it with the rest of us. If there is some topic that was only touched on in class, or that has otherwise been bugging you and that you would like to discuss with the rest of us, please post something about it. I can’t guarantee that you’ll receive posting credit for all of this, but I am being quite liberal with extra credit, and these are all instances of effort on your part to continue and expand on the discussions in class.

As a last resort, you can email me to see if it is ok to post something. Most likely it will be. I am moderating the board, so if there is something I don’t think is appropriate I’ll remove it, no harm done.

The website is fine, but I do not check it often enough. You should do something that forces people to view it more often.

Part of the reason I require so many comments is to try and force people to use the website, but apart from that I don’t know what I can do. I also do quite a bit of work sending out email responses to posts and stuff, hopefully that will remind people to check the site. Otherwise, you should just bookmark it and try to work it into your normal internet routine.

One surefire way to make people check it more often is to have everyone using it more often! The faster the website changes, the more often you have to come back to keep track of everything.

Rather than organize it by time posted, maybe separate it by topics

Actually, the website is already separated by topics. If you scroll down a bit, you’ll see a group of links on the left sidebar titled “Categories”. Each post is tagged with a bunch of categories, so for instance if you wanted to read all the posts having to do with Descartes’ cogito , just click the ‘cogito’ link and they’ll all come up.

I’ve been trying to go through the posts to make sure they are tagged, but you can tag your own posts too. Take a look at the tutorial again to see how.

Where’s the Google hat?

Oh, I’m sure it’ll be back.