Are Sections Valuable?

The student will use any means he can find to avoid taking a fresh look at things, and it is the job of sections to force him to recognize his own reactions, William Alfred, associate professor of English, told aspiring college instructors at Harkness Commons last night.

Afraid to be taken at a loss, the student comes to sections armed with memorized opinions he has culled from a "paperback library." He never asks himself how he reacts to an essay or a play, and his section man never gets any idea of the student's level of learning.

"We all use these methods to bolster ourselves, sometimes," said Alfred, but the section loses its value if this pretending to knowledge is not undercut. "The section man can joke his students out of their pretensions," he suggested. Most important, he himself must never pretend to wisdom he does not have.

Since his most important objective is to encourage the student to react personally to what he is studying, the section man must stifle his own temptations to have a definite list of "points" he wants to make. "If you set up a notion," said Alfred, "you don't hear what they're saying."

To encourage students to put forth their opinions, Alfred assigned papers to his freshman seminar to be prepared before each meeting. "People who won't speak will read papers," he noted, because they can act as if they were dealing with something external. And they know they will not run out of things to say.

Armed with an "intermediate shield," before long they find themselves able to speak extemporaneously to a given point.

In the same vein, Jerome S. Bruner, professor of Psychology, drew a distinction between speaker decisions and listener decisions. In a action in which there is "a lot of noise and very little signal," Bruner said, the impulse of the instructor is to tune out the noise. Instead, "he should cultivate the patience of a Job" in order not to force the student back into listener-ship.

The most important thing a section can teach, Bruner emphasized, is the wide variety of possible interpretations and opinions on any subject.