You Must Read / Watch the Assigned Material BEFORE I Lecture on it, NOT AFTER!!

Here's why.  Once upon a time, there was a long period after World War II when the U.S. economy needed armies of employees to do routine white-collar jobs.  These were mostly "middle-skill" jobs.  They paid mid-level salaries that paid for for middle class lives.

Public universities expanded quickly to crank out large numbers of white-collar workers.  UCSB went from being a teacher's college to a research university in about 10 years.  Enrollments multipled by 5.  Passive learning was fine for most of the situations these graduates would face in their office jobs: take in information, process it accurately, reproduce it correctly.  The job would often be following instructions that other people write for you, like your bosses.  To simplify, higher-skill people would write the scripts for the mid-skill jobs.  High-skill people decided things, and mid-skill employees operationalized them.  Large lectures were pretty good formats for people learning to follow semi-complicated instruction sets in those large middle levels of big companies.   Other things being equal (they weren't but bear with me), learning to do this meant a decent salary, a pension, health benefits, two cars in the garage, a chicken in every pot, etc.

That world is gone.  Parts of it should and could come back--I don't at all condone precarious working conditions and uncertain job pathways. Nor do I think precarity helps make people smarter, more creative, and more competitive. (We're talking about the background economic issues in Chinatown.)   But whatever I think, it's my job to help prepare you for what comes after college.  The main thing I need to do is help you all be high cognitive skill people who have a chance to avoid the shrinking pool of (often boring) routine jobs and get into high-skill jobs that are more interesting and challenging.

Passive learning won't help you with this.  Active learning will.  (It's a necessary but not a sufficient condition for acquiring high-level cognitive skills.) 

Here's the slide I showed in lecture on November 7th.

Active learning requires bringing pre-existing knowledge to bear on the material being presented in lecture (or while you are reading or watching something) .  Active learning means making connections between things you already know (and are re-learning by recalling them) and things you are seeing for the first time.

In the case of a novel or film for this course, you can bring things you've learned in other courses (attachment theory from a psych course for example) to bear on what's happening in lecture.   Most importantly, you need to bring what you personally know about the work I'm discussing into contact with what you are hearing me saying.  If you're not making connections, you're not learning. You're just transcribing stuff on the theory that you'll learn it later by remembering it when you actually do watch the film or read the book.  Here's the problem: This destroys active learning in lecture.  It lowers your learning overall (you will learn less later on your own).  It reduces what you get out of the class, including ideas that you can use in other courses and later in life.

So that is why Requirement 1 for this course is "Read Texts On Time." Now more than ever.