Answers Don T Matter, and Other Things They Won T Tell You About College

“Answers don’t matter,” and other things they won’t tell you about college

Authored by Michelle Stephens, Professor of Theatre and Communication, Richland Community College, Decatur IL.

But perhaps it might be better if they did. See, the purpose of college isn’t to cram a bunch of facts and formulas and poems and anatomy into your brains and then shove you out the door.

In fact, all of your professors are teaching the exact same thing.

Thinking.

In each of your classes you’ve spent much more time on the process leading to the answer than the answer itself, because you have a much better chance of figuring out the answer on your own if you understand the process it took to get there.

Go with me for a second.

You are taking a class on car anatomy. You know how to drive a car and over the course of the class you examine piece after piece, leam the name of each and where each fits inside the car. You take tests about these parts and you score marvelously.

But you still don’t know how it works, how it does what it does, how a small pressure of the foot creates acceleration down the street.

Stick with me.

If that teacher had taught you the other way, explaining the process by which each part was formed and its function, how the various elements of a car’s engine fit together and perform nothing less than a triumph of science and engineering, you’d know how it all works. The concept and theory behind each piece. What function it performs and why.

So as you look at a motorcycle, you begin to understand how it must work. Not because you know what it is, because you have learned about the process of it.

This is the beginning of teaching critical thinking. It’s the race where the runner doesn’t care about the finish line. It’s a path that has no destination. The answer is a forgone conclusion. I can just google it, right?

I mean, no professor wants to admit that most information is now available with the flick of a finger. But, you see, we don’t teach answers that can be googled. We teach the processes leading to the answers. And, like the choreography of dance, these twists and turns can be combined and recombined to create anything. People who work in two different subject matters can find the places in which their processes intersect and join the two subjects. Then watch as it increases the effectiveness and sets expectations high.

We expect you to think outside the box.

We expect you to challenge yourself to see the similarities as well as the differences.

We expect you to ask, “how” and “why” as often as you ask “what.”

We expect you not to be afraid to ask “how” and “why.”

We expect you to stand up and demand “how” and “why.”

Your tuition does not buy you grades, but it does buy you the right to ask for what you need to learn. To let professors know that you want more. To be more.

We expect you to fail.

We expect that there are times you won’t be happy with us.

We hope that someday you understand.

It would have been so much easier to give you the answers. How badly I wanted to, class after class, rehearsal after rehearsal. But I don’t need to learn how to figure out the answer, you do. The answer is worthless to you if you don’t know how to get to it.

So, as you go to class, remember. The answers are important, but they are worthless if you don’t know how to get them. You can google information, but critical thinking is a skill that, once learned, will give you all the answers.