Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 22, 1991 TAG: 9103220728
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MADELYN ROSENBERG HIGHER EDUCATION WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"They just turned around and left," said Ashby, who has taught at the private liberal arts school for five years.
But the following semester, eight students asked to switch into her class.
By then, the idea of using classics to help students develop their reading, writing and speaking skills was catching on, Ashby said. Even in math.
And now, two years after the college started a pilot program that incorporated the use of classics across the curriculum, officials have decided to make courses like Ashby's a requirement.
Beginning in 1992, freshmen will be required to take at least one course a year as a part of the Lynchburg College Symposium Readings Program. They will have to complete six courses to graduate.
"We had found that we just weren't seeing the kind of writing or speaking skills with our senior students that we wanted to," Ashby said.
As part of the remedy, faculty members pulled together an idea for a program that would use the classics in subjects ranging from math to, of course, English.
The U.S. Department of Education funded the study.
"We're hoping this is a trend," Ashby said.
She laughed, thinking about the startled look on her students' faces when she asked them to write a paper on "How they would change their high school math curriculum, based on Rousseau's writings on foreign language in education, substituting math for the foreign language."
"I guess when you combine math anxiety with writing anxiety and speaking anxiety, it gets to be a bit much," she said. But it also works.
Ashby said she is finding that students who take the course using the classics do better in translation work, or working word problems.
"There's been no significant dent in improving computation skills," she said. "But they are seeing a relevance to math they've never seen before.
Other teachers are having similar success.
At the end of the two-year pilot program, faculty found that the students who took the symposium readings courses scored better on their accounting certification exams and performed better in class.
And at the end of two years, students have studied Plato and Thoreau in auditing courses and Adam Smith in business classes.
"I've talked with recruiters and asked them what they've wanted, and they've said, `Just make sure your students can write,' " said Nancy Saltz, an assistant professor in accounting. "Before, accounting students didn't get the opportunity to do that much writing."
The symposium program is changing that.
"It helps put things in historical perspective, too," said Kendall North, who has added Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" and Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" - a 1906 expose of the meat-packing industry - to the syllabus for some of his business courses.
"The students said they felt they understood things better," said North, a professor of business administration for 20 years. "It's speeding their maturation as thinkers. . . . This is one of the most satisfactory experiences of my professional teaching life."
In business, he said, reading the classics teaches the students that answers to problems are not always black and white. "One answer may be good on one day and bad on another day, depending on the circumstances."
Teachers who want to use the program in their courses go through a training period first.
So far, 35 instructors and professors have taught classes using the classics.
This summer, the training program will be opened to professors at other universities. It could be a while before faculty from other schools start attending, said Julius Sigler, who teaches physics and the senior symposium. "But I'm sure some schools will find this a useful model. We're doing something different here."
The program has been met with interest from some universities, including Harvard. Others have greeted the idea with skepticism.
"They say students just aren't interested in the classics - that the work is too difficult," said Sigler, who will include readings from Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton in his physics course next semester. "But we've found the students to be receptive and interested. And by the time they get to the senior symposium, they're more poised. . . . People are saying it can't be done, but we're doing it."
by CNB