Word: sectioning
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This is also how refer to our peers: “Do you know that girl?” we’ll ask each other, or, “Do you see that girl over there?” Anecdotes about section or about extra-sectional cattiness almost always begin, “So there’s this girl—.” We are about as likely to call ourselves “women” as we are to call ourselves “crones...
...encourage people to speak up in section and in their tutorials and elsewhere, but we don’t teach or evaluate public speaking in quite the same way we do writing,” he says. “I don’t know that this happens freshman or sophomore year, but it might be more ideally situated there in the same way that writing is now situated there, and might be integrated into the writing requirement...
...reason I am crestfallen, then, is Freinberg’s painfully mistaken belief that “we confuse true intellectual enlightenment with Harvard-style academics at our peril.” For him, apparently Harvard means “facile response papers, mandatory section participation and finals where students spew professors’ own words back at them (or, more likely, at teaching fellows),” which “squelches independent thought.” In sum, Freinberg complains that watching “Jeopardy!” is more educational and more fun than his section...
Granted, most teaching fellows do lack the quick wit and dashing good looks of Alex Trebek. And, I must admit, Harvard has yet to fulfill my requests to hold my sections in a television studio, or distribute cash prizes to my students who write “A” papers (you see, the endowment would run out too quickly, since 47 percent of all students expect to receive A grades). But I simply cannot sit in silence when Freinberg claims that section participation is superfluous or that final exams are designed to prompt wholesale regurgitation of professors?...
...Freinberg: if reading great books, participating in section debates and composing original and thoughtful essays summing up a semester of contemplation stifles his thought, then what on earth would set him free? I find it strange and unsettling that he believes that his independent thought is better stimulated by staring passively at a television screen than by spending an hour with his classmates discussing his own insights into his reading. My, my—I realize now that Freinberg has actually proven the very point he intended to argue against: clearly David Brooks is correct in underestimating Harvard students?...