Giving us an extra push

For me, these responses achieve two important goals. For one, it forces me to do the readings and be ready for discussion, while it also forces others to do the readings and be ready for discussion.

I consider myself a decently self-motivated person, but sometimes I need the extra push. It’s a question of long-term versus short-term happiness. In the long term, I want to be able to appreciate the philosophic foundation of Marx’s work, but in the short term, there are so many episodes of “Arrested Development” I could be re-watching. A required response before precept forces me to do what I, in the end, want to do: read and think critically about the readings.

This is necessary because, as I and a majority of the student body have found, you don’t have to do any more than a little bit of reading to participate in precept. Reading about a fifth of the required pages, skimming the rest and finding a good quote is a recipe with which most of us are familiar. But I don’t want it to be that way. I didn’t come here to skate by with minimal work, and I shouldn’t be allowed to. (This position of course assumes that learning is the main goal of being here, a tenet with which I’m sure some students will disagree, but which I believe should be at the core of every education.) And although it is of course possible to write the response without having done the work, I find that to require much more thought than flying by the seat of my pants in precept. Yes, I can be responsible for taking advantage of the wonderful resources I am given, but if for whatever reason I am not, and someone has the power to light a fire under my butt, so be it.

It also benefits the precept as a whole if everyone has this shared motivation. Requiring a Blackboard response also forces others to do their readings and come prepared for class. This problem comes from what I believe to be a flaw in the precept system wherein people are encouraged to participate even when they don’t know what they are talking about. Because a person’s grade is on the line, he will want to participate in precept. Having not done the reading, his contributions to the discussions, as I alluded to earlier, will be carefully calculated but utterly baseless drivel. The preceptor must know that the person has no background in the subject, but most preceptors, in my experience, allow these students to continue pontificating. I find these precepts to be a waste of my time, the other students’ time and the preceptor’s time. However, if students prepare for class by doing the readings and giving them some thought, an actual dialectic can occur and the kind of precept I can only imagine Woodrow Wilson envisioned can take place.

In spite of our substantial self-motivation, I believe we often need to be prodded to be reminded of the importance of our education. So preceptors, if you’re reading this, assign a weekly Blackboard assignment. It doesn’t have to be long, and it doesn’t even have to count for our grades. (If need be, it can be factored in to that nebulous piece of the pie chart: class participation.) You might make a bunch of students angry, and chances are I’ll be one of them when Lucille Bluth’s wit is oh-so-tempting and Netflix is just a click away. But you’ll also make a bunch of students read and you’ll have an actual discussion in precept, so what you’ll have given them, if not what they want, is what they came here for: an education.

Luke Massa is a sophomore from Ridley Park, Pa. He can be reached at lmassa@princeton.edu.