Please don’t fail me

Guest post by Melanie Trecek-King from Thinking Is Power

Imagine it’s the end of the semester. Students are finishing their exams and you’re entering grades. You open your email to find the following:

Dear Professor,

I understand that the course is ending soon but I would like to have a quick discussion about my final grade for the class. Now I understand that from your point of view it looks like that I did not do much of the work that you assigned for the course, but I assure you that there is a very good explanation for it. Just hear me out, failing this class would ruin my chances of transferring to a four year school. If that happens, who knows what might happen to me. For all I know my life will spiral out of control and next thing I know I will be on some street corner asking people for spare change. Now that you understand the stakes let me explain what happened. Professor in my opinion the reason I am failing is mostly because of you. The lectures I did watch were extremely boring and did not help me at all with the pile of work and essays you assigned. Maybe if you had made the course more interesting I would have done better. The way I see it we only have two options. You either give me a passing grade or you will have to live with the fact that you are the reason I become homeless and live in a tent.

Have a nice day.

While I’ve received countless emails over the years from students explaining the many reasons they shouldn’t fail, this particular email was part of an assignment. Let me explain.

For over a decade I taught non-majors biology at a community college, eagerly trying to convince my students that science is awesome and that science literacy is essential in today’s world. Unfortunately, few of my students agreed with me. They didn’t necessarily hate science, but they were afraid of it.  

I tried everything. Each semester I reinvented the course (as much as possible) to reflect how relevant biology was to their lives. I brought in case studies. Used issues-based approaches. Changed textbooks….

And then I remembered Carl Sagan’s wise words:

If we teach only the findings and products of science – no matter how useful and even inspiring they may be – without communicating its critical method, how can the average person possibly distinguish science from pseudoscience?

He was right. Science is more than a bunch of facts to memorize. It’s a process. A way of thinking. Good thinking.

So I completely reinvented my course to focus less on the findings of science and more on science literacy and critical thinking. Now my goal is to give students the tools they need to make better decisions for their own lives. Students learn to evaluate the evidence for claims to determine how we know something. And they learn to recognize the characteristics of good science by evaluating bad science, pseudoscience, and science denial. 

Scientific claims must be logical, so I teach students how to break down the structure of an argument into its conclusion and premises, find hidden premises, and recognize fallacies that weaken or invalidate an argument. In the “real world”, we make and hear arguments all the time, and while they may sound convincing, they’re not necessarily good ones. Learning to recognize fallacies is challenging, but it’s essential to avoid being fooled. And importantly, logic and critical thinking are transferable to different topics, helping students identify many different types of misinformation.  

Recently I found myself reading emails similar to the one above, from students illogically arguing why they should pass a course on critical thinking. It was too ironic. So I had an idea.

Since one of the best ways to learn to identify misinformation is to create it, I gave my students the following assignment as part of a class discussion on Canvas. 

The instructions were as following:

1– Imagine that it’s the end of the semester and you’re failing this course because you didn’t do the vast majority of the work, such as watching lectures or completing assignments.

Write the professor an email arguing why you should pass the course, using at least four of the following fallacies:  Hasty generalization, cherry picking, single cause, false choice, appeal to (false) authority, appeal to emotion, ad hominem, red herring, slippery slope, appeal to the masses, false analogy, false choice.

2 — After you make your initial post, please read your classmates’ posts carefully and reply to at least 2 of your fellow classmates. Identify and name the fallacies the other student used in their argument, and explain why it’s fallacious.

Have fun!

 The resulting discussion was hysterical. Consider the following “email”:

Hey Prof Trecek-King,

So, I couldn’t help but notice you gave me a 34% for the year, and see, I’m gonna need you to bring that grade up a little bit. The reason my grades have been slipping lately is actually because my uncle’s friend’s kid’s dog just had babies, and one of them got hit by a car. My car. I accidentally killed my uncle’s friend’s kid’s dog’s kid and now my uncle’s friend’s kid’s dog is depressed, which honestly has been weighing on my heart lately. Also, other than that, if you fail me in this class then I’m not gonna get into the graduate school I wanted to get into, and I’ll never be able to get my doctorate and then even more people will die. If you fail me in this class people WILL die and it will be your fault.

The way I look at it is like this, why would you give me a failing grade? Yeah, I didn’t do any of my homework but there are homeless people. Literally homeless people. Everywhere. You should put more of your focus and energy on that if you really care so much. I even asked my mom and dad if they think my final grade is fair, and they agree with me. It’s not fair. So, anyways PLEASE update my grade and I would appreciate it sooooo much. Thank You.

In their responses, students correctly identified the fallacies committed, in this case slippery slope, red herring, appeal to emotions, and appeal to (false) authority. (Other popular fallacies included ad hominem, with some pretty hysterical attacks on my character, and appeal to the masses.)

In my estimation, what made this assignment so successful was that it was a topic students could relate to and they actively created the misinformation using humor. An unexpected but welcome side benefit was that it addressed a common misconception. Students often learn to associate a fallacy with the example/issue used to explain it. But through this assignment students learned they could argue for one thing, in this case a better grade, with many different types of fallacies.

In my debrief, I lauded their efforts at creating fallacious arguments and thanked them for making me laugh. I also reminded them to use their new “powers” for good, and not for persuading other professors to raise their grades.

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To learn more about my work on teaching critical thinking, visit Thinking Is Power.