a highly motivated, academically talented, intrinsically motivated, advanced, and curious student who has broad interests, a passion for learning, and excitement about ideas. The student should also be sufficiently different or unique from the institutional norm to need, indeed require, a different, more challenging curriculum and other learning opportunities to satisfy his or her drive to learn, know, and do.Obviously the definition is not necessarily descriptive, and certainly not universally so. Still, as the Platonic form of an honors student, it seems pretty good.
For Collo purposes, it's the second part of the definition I really like. I think the way to think about the curriculum in general and Collo in particular is to think about what needs the ideal honors student has and how we can best satisfy those needs. We need to identify needs that aren't being met through other courses and figure out if and how we can satisfy them through Collo. That's what it's there for.
This is really just another way of stating and maybe partially answering the Stockdale questions. Collo is here to help meet the needs of a unique population of students. That's the criteria by which we should measure assignments, requirements, classes, etc. We need to be clear about what needs we are addressing and how the requirements are attempting to do that.
June was for rumination, July is for action. It's time to start making the syllabus and thinking about the concrete particulars of the course. That means now is an excellent time to break the impressive streak of not commenting at all. Knowing is better than guessing and it would be great to know what needs you think Collo could satisfy. What's happened in the past that has met the criteria above? What's happened that clearly hasn't? Keep in mind that we're dealing with the ideal version of you. So pretend you are instantiating the Form of an honors student and think about what you want or need in this course that you are not or cannot get elsewhere.
Since I began in the honors college, I felt like this class should meet as a 160-member group maybe once or twice during the semester. As a freshman, I felt like the upperclassmen had already been well-versed in their assignments, but I had no idea what to do. Further, there wasn't a lot of time spent on "How to make a program of study" in the past, but in a room where ~120 of the students know what's going on, there's not going to be many questions presented.
ReplyDeleteThe Bigs/Littles situation helps with this a little, but I didn't want to feel like a pest. I think it would be beneficial to have separate classes for the under/upperclassmen since both groups clearly have very different needs in their present academic careers.
I agree. I don't think whole class meetings are particularly useful and dividing things up by year could be beneficial. The program of study is a good example of when that would make a lot of sense. In general, there are a number of orientation type things that I think are useful for freshmen/1st year midways, but not useful for everyone else.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely. In addition to that, I'm sure there are some things that the seniors would like to know about graduating, finishing up theses, etc.
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