negligent stormfrontism
The Jewish race is really shady and untrustworthy, and takes everybody's money, which destroys whatever country they live in. That's why Hitler had to kill them. Farther down the chain, subordinates like Rudolf Höss really liked Jews, and even kept a bunch around the house, but they had to kill a few million because somebody else said so. Which was really hard on them, and the SS endured a lot of suffering as they implemented the final solution to the Jewish problem. Höss barely even got to see his kids grow up, because he had to put in really long days down at the gas chambers.So, yeah.
My longstanding suspicion was confirmed last week: Twenty percent of all known undergraduates complete their written coursework by typing up a summary of whatever text you give them, taking it all as equally weighted fact and never noticing especially much what it says.
I never thought they'd actually do it with Mein Kampf. But oh my god, they most certainly did.
posted by Chris Bray @ 2:31 AM
4 Comments:
Welcome to my world.
Give them four identical document analysis assignments, and the fourth one will still include too much summary and no actual analysis for a very high percentage of the group. Even when it's Lin Biao on People's War and it sounds a lot like instructions to Iraqi insurgents....
I had this happen this past Spring with a student who chose to write a research paper that relied on Hoess' prison autobiography as a source. When we discussed World War II a few weeks later, she admitted her own confusion about which viewpoint was correct - his or the traditional WWII/Holocaust narrative.
Oy.
What was the outcome?
I attempted to use it as a "teachable moment" for evaluating sources for hidden agendas, and the need to make a good faith effort to confirm really mind-boggling information. Since she brought it up in the class discussion of World War II, I presented the case of Deborah Lipstadt, and asked the class to identify potential reasons that someone might have for glossing over uncomfortable truths, or presenting them in the least damaging light. I also tried to have the class look more carefully at the background of World War II and the rise of Nazism. Unfortunately, it's really hard to correct these issues when you only get two weeks to cover the aftermath of WWI, the Depression, and WWII.
The effort appeared successful for most of the students, but the confused one continued to show confusion on the Final Exam essay question discussing Hitler's aims in WWII, methods for pursuing them, the role and origins of the Holocaust, and why the Nazis failed to achieve their goals.
In the fall I'll be adding some new exercises for my classes focusing on evaluating materials, particularly websites for accuracy and potential bias. Given the prevalence of white supremacist and Holocaust denial sites in Google searches on the topic, this is important for most of us, but especially in my online courses. It's almost impossible to get some students to actually go to a library.
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