Jorge Hankamer–Teaching Statement 2000-01
Professor, Linguistics

My pedagogical philosophy is very simple: you never learn anything that you don't figure out for yourself. So I try to construct my courses so as to maximize the opportunities for students to figure things out for themselves. This can be quite strenuous for everybody involved. I have to pose problems at just the right level, which is strenuous for me, and my students have to try to solve them, which (if the problems are pitched at the right level) will be very strenuous for the students.

To illustrate how this works, let me describe just one course. I choose this course to talk about not only because it's my favorite course to teach, but also because just about everything I know about teaching I learned from this course and others very much like it. The course is Linguistics 52, Syntax I, and it's the first course in the syntax sequence for Linguistics majors. Like most of our courses in the Linguistics program, and all the ones in the syntax sequence, this course has no textbook. In fact it has no readings at all, and no lectures to speak of either. The course is driven by problems. A problem is assigned at the end of every class (the course meets three times a week) and is due at the next class. The written responses to the problems are read, commented on, and returned the following class. This is the pattern throughout the quarter, except for a week in the middle and a week at the end which are given over to take-home exams.

The students are actually given almost nothing in this course. At the beginning they are introduced to two essential concepts: the notion of grammaticality (that some strings of words count as grammatical sentences in English and others do not) and the concept of a generative grammar—a system of rules and principles that explicitly describes a language. The first and second class sessions are devoted to developing a rudimentary grammar for a restricted subset of English. After that the common task is to build and modify the grammar, adding rules and proposing principles to bring the class grammar closer and closer to an adequate grammar of English. The problems are designed to lead the students toward interesting discoveries, which they of course have to make for themselves. After the first day I tell them almost nothing, though I do ask a lot of questions.

A feature of this course, which has been adopted throughout the Linguistics curriculum, is that students are not only permitted but expected to work together on written assignments, including the take-home exams. They are told from the first day that they should collaborate with others in working on the problems, though every student is to write up the work independently. This leads to an immense amount of peer-to-peer interaction, and I suspect (though I cannot know) that my students learn more from each other than they do from me. Another little benefit from this policy is that I can assign much harder problems than I would be able to assign if every student had to figure them out alone. It seems to me that the students get more satisfaction from solving hard problems than easy ones.

An interesting side effect of this pedagogical method is the amount of writing it elicits. No specifications are given for the length of the written responses to the homework assignments, but an adequate response is usually two or three pages, and good students who see the extra challenges often write ten or fifteen. The take-home exams can run from 20 to 50 or more pages. So an average student writes between 100 and 150 pages during the quarter. Some of this, of course, is diagrams, but at least two thirds of it is text. I believe that people learn to write by writing, and that courses like this one, where writing is integral to the course and incessant throughout the quarter, are the best ways to make writers of our students.

When I think about this course and others like it I have taught, it seems to me that the main element that makes the course alive (as opposed to dead) is the element of discovery. The students discover things for themselves (because they have to, because I don't give them anything, or not much), and they love their discoveries, they present, argue for, and defend them passionately. And I never fail to learn something new myself