||why would God want to create people with free will or choice at
all, or anyone that was imperfect for that matter, if everyone was going to be rehabiliated [sic!] to a point of perfection, or to a so called state of "good enough"?||
Every semester I teach 150 students or so in writing, strategy, dispute resolution and law, mostly at the junior-senior level. I take them as they are assigned to me, and they have a choice of sections so they don't have to study with me. Most semesters, my students all earn A's except that one or two get too sick or depressed. In each class I give them a detailed menu of tasks to perform, essays to write, cases to look up, and the like, each with its assigned points. I also give them early in the semester, a list of hundreds of questions -- from which the 100 multiple choice and TF questions of the final will be chosen. I grade their essays and try to return them early enough for them to rewrite. I only count grades on the final version. I have been pleased for years that the students appeared to do enough of the work assigned so that I will give approximately 140/150 A's.
My department chairman, a long-time adversary, and the former dean, now a professor, have long waged war on me (and a few others) who, they say, "grade too easily." I always ask the students if they think they are being cheated out of the harsh standards that they should expect in our excellent university. They say that local employers are very enthusiastic about the high grades, and my letters of recommendation in which I say that the student was the equal of the best in her class. Everyone except my boss seems satisfied. Its business, not quantum electrodynamics for God's sake. Screw him! God bless tenure! Of course, many students have more important things to do their mornings than come to my classes. The rooms are quite unheated and the chairs are hard. As a result, there is an atmosphere intime. Some students may be buying research papers off the net, but most of the good sites are free. I get to read papers by students from Harvard, Cal Tech, and other top schools attended exclusively by an intellectual elite. It is challenging for me to recommend improvements in papers written by an elect with average SAT's of 1550. It is even more challenging for my SAT 1200 students to accept these recommendations and act on them. I do get marvelous papers -- much better than by boss was able to write, even before his recent cerebral accident. I understand that, to become CEO's of major tech corporations (my optional goal for most of them), they will have to try harder than those MBA's and Ph.D.'s at Stanford and Berkeley. Lacking superintelligence, they will need help from highly placed friends and mentors (like me). They will need emotional IQ. They will need charm. They will need charisma. But success should be possible. They are already far more charming than Ellison or Gates, if not so rich. they are not as charysmatic as Michael Dell. They also write better, given a head start. Those guys, I suppose, have flacks and writers to help them, so it doesn't seem unfair to let my students, who are in competition with them, to lean on the Princeton and Swarthmore students who are so willing to share their lucubrations.
I really enjoy having my former students, now successful, jet into town. Sometimes they invite me visit with them in their simple and sparely-furnished estates. On occasion, one will shyly and circuitously) suggest that his education has somehow contributed to his success. Who can forgive me if I say (to myself) that I had some small share in helping them get where they are? Sometimes there is even beer! |
