The Gift of Gieus

Thomas Banchoff
August 2000

Professor Gieus was unhappy about his Tuesday class. As he walked back to his office, he reviewed what had happened--a new insight had come in the middle of his otherwise standard lecture and he had strayed from his prepared notes. The bright students had perked up awhile, then settled back since it was clear that the new idea had been lost in his fumbling attempts to express it. The slow students were clearly irritated by the distraction. At the end of the hour and twenty minutes, he had rushed through the last half of his intended topics, just sketching the last one as students began gathering their books and papers to leave for their next classes. "Did anyone understand anything at all?" he asked himself, wondering how he would be able to salvage the lecture on Thursday.

As he came to his office, he saw a young woman waiting whom he did not recognize. "Probably a prospective freshman", he thought as he asked her to come in. "I come bearing a gift," she said, "a gift that will let you know by tomorrow night exactly what your students understood from your lecture today, after they have a had a chance to think about it. The only catch is that you will have to live with that knowledge". "What kind of gift could that possibly be?", he asked. "Welcome to the Internet," she explained.

By Wednesday evening, Professor Gieus had received electronic messages from nearly all of his students. Most of them started by commenting on the reading he had half-heartedly assigned when it was clear he was not going to be able to finish his prepared presentation on Tuesday. Almost everyone said they understood the additional examples in the book that paralleled the ones he had given in class, but several were unsure of some of the steps in the argument in the second section even after they went back and studied the illustrations. Could there be a brief discussion on this point on Thursday?

Then came several new messages. "When the files were opened Wednesday at midnight and we could see what the other students had written," one of them reported, "I saw how to put together a couple of comments and to come up with a new example that helped me see the problem I had described earlier. Does anybody else have an idea about this?" Professor Gieus was astounded. In his mind, the student who submitted that message was a B student. She did reasonable work on homeworks and tests, but nothing special. She never raised her hand in class or answered any of his semi-rhetorical questions. When he had tried a small group exercise in class one time, she sat there not participating as others traded fast comments. And here she had figured out by reading other students' difficulties exactly the right thing to consider to clear everything up. She had seen how to formulate his class insight better than he had himself.

A couple of the A students jumped in to add something to the discussion. On one message there was a new question Professor Gieus had never seen before. At first he started to compose a response on the Internet, and then he decided to transmit it to the entire class. He went on to summarize the lecture he had attempted to give and to repeat a few of the paragraphs at the end that he had rushed through. He couldn't wait for Thursday's class, to take up right where they had left off two days earlier, knowing exactly where the students were, and knowing that the students had shared that knowledge, with him and with each other.

He looked at his watch and realized it was 2 a.m. He had been at his computer for over three hours.
--------

Author's Note:

"Oh, wad some power the giftie gie us to see oursels as ithers see us." (from "To a Louse") is the correct Robert Burns quotation. When my father used to quote it on any number of occasions, I though he was saying "the gift of Gieus", hence the title character and the little parable, a kind of Midas tale about wishing for something and then having to face the consequences. Are we really ready to bring the Internet truly into our teaching and learning?


Thomas Banchoff
Last modified: Fri Feb 9 20:51:26 EST 2001