Main Menu · Search · Current Issue · Contact · Archives · Centennial · Letters to the Editor · FAQs
|
When people go back to school, they go for a reason. Whether the returning students are mid-career professionals seeking to update their skills or potential entrepreneurs looking to research a brand-new field, they have a drive and a discipline that can surpass that of traditional students. Those who enroll in Harvard's Division of Continuing Education (Harvard Summer School and Extension School) or the Harvard Business School's executive-education programs may not spend as many hours in the classroom as their full-time counterparts, but they are people intent on learning. That is why many teachers say that teaching older students can be so gratifying, and can even reinvigorate them as teachers.
"The greatest strength is their maturity," says professor of management Paul W. Marshall, M.B.A. '66, D.B.A. '72, who runs the Business School's Program for Global Leadership, which this year taught 74 students from 28 countries how to work in the emerging global economy. "Business is a practiced art," Marshall explains. "And the maturity of these people is useful in that regard, because they pick up much of the practical nature of our cases. They've seen things and experienced things that many full-time students haven't."
With a median age of 35 to 40, about a decade older than most of his full-time M.B.A. students, Marshall's Global Leadership participants come to their classrooms with a different perspective. "They have some serious appreciation of practical problem solving and much less interest in abstract theory," he says. "Almost every class, they test by asking, 'How could [we] use this?'" Marshall, who has been a consultant and has run a small manufacturing firm, values this hands-on approach. "You have to come in with better staff work," he says. "They're more demanding."
"The people know why they're there," agrees professor of psychiatry J. Allan Hobson, M.D. '59. "They're motivated; they're serious." Hobson teaches at the medical school and runs the neurophysiology lab at Massachusetts Mental Health Center (see "Dream-Catchers," May-June, page 58). For the past 10 years, he has also journeyed to Cambridge to teach the very popular Psychology E-150, "The biopsychology of waking, sleeping, and dreaming,'' at Harvard Extension.
"It's so much nicer than teaching medical students," says Hobson, who calls Extension "The Other University" and says he frankly relishes his returns to the Yard. "In the medical school, if you give one or two lectures a year it's sort of excessive. You never get to develop a topic."
 The
Arboretum's Jack Alexander |
Coming to the Division of Continuing Education in 1988, he says, was perfect timing. "For me it was an intellectual adventure. There was a wonderful opportunity to be articulate and to try to make people understand things that seemed dauntingly complicated."
In addition, Hobson believes his Extension course addresses a need he would never meet through his medical-school courses. "There's this huge scientific illiteracy," he says, stressing that he is not talking only about nonscientists. "I went through college and I didn't understand what the professors were talking about. They were teaching science as if it were a set of facts. More importantly, it's a way of finding out about things."
How vital can an Extension School science course be? Hobson says his staff provides an answer. "Practically everybody who has come out of my lab has taken my course. And two of the people teaching the course with me this past year were my former students."
Henry Leitner, Ph.D. '82, agrees with Marshall's and Hobson's assessment of adult students. As senior lecturer on computer science for the Division of Applied Science and director of academic computing for the Division of Continuing Education, Leitner is responsible for putting together Extension's Certificate of Applied Sciences program. This may sound like a big job, but meeting his students' expectations, he says, is his most difficult--and rewarding--duty.
"What distinguishes these students is a level of attention and an attitude toward the course," he says. "They are on the edge of their seats, and if things don't go well, it's not unusual to be interrupted. You have to be prepared. You always have to come with backup material, and really be 'on.'"
The commitment of his students, whether they are working adults looking to master new skills or--as is increasingly common--gifted high-school students seeking new challenges, continues to impress Leitner. "They're coming, for the most part, after working a long day, and then struggling to find parking or dealing with public transportation. And computer courses demand a lot of high-level commitment--we demand 10 or 15 hours a week, just to get the problems done."
Leitner taught the first computer classes that the Extension School offered, back in the late 1970s, and he has seen interest in the field grow. He can also testify to how important such classes are in his students' lives. "Some of them are looking at their studies [as a means] to change their lives in a very serious way. I have a real responsibility to educate them. On an emotional level, it's very gratifying."
Some teachers understand their students' motivation particularly well because they have joined them in making formal learning a part of their adult lives. Jack Alexander, A.L.B. '89, has been the plant propagator of the Arnold Arboretum since 1976. He learned his propagating skills, which include caring for the Arboretum's impressive lilacs, from his family: his grandfather and great-grandfather were both nurserymen in Plymouth County. (Although his father rebelled by becoming a banker, Alexander returned to his family roots, first working in the family nursery at age 6.) But he earned his degree only nine years ago, studying botany and biology at the Extension School. "And if they had more classes in botany," he says, "I would take them."
For the Arboretum's adult-education program, he teaches his very hands-on skill of plant propagation in three sequential classes that involve one or two full Saturdays and some take-home work. The courses--the autumnal woody plant propagation session, the one-day winter grafting session, and, the most difficult of all, the springtime softwood cutting course--give the students not only skills, but also samples of Arboretum plants to help their own gardens grow.
Such teaching, Alexander explains, also involves learning. Sometimes someone who has worked with plants in a different climate may bring a new piece of knowledge to the group. At other times, he says, he learns about the continuing process of learning. "Someone asked something about watering once, and I said, 'Didn't your mother teach you about watering?' And she said, shyly, 'No, my mother didn't garden.' I was embarrassed. I come from a family of horticulturalists, and I always knew how to garden."
These days, Alexander helps encourage human growth as well. The rewards, he says, are simple. "There's a great deal of satisfaction in helping people who don't know how to do what you know how to do get to the point where they can do it by themselves," he says. If learning is a garden, teachers like Alexander would say, it blossoms in all seasons and the harvest is great.