It might be a heck of a scary time out in the real world, but here in the Ivory Tower the roller coaster ride on Wall Street and the antics of a presidential election provide valuable fodder to generate class debate and provide vivid examples of theory in practice.

While faculty are inwardly freaking out over the tumble our 401K plans have taken in the past weeks and adjusting retirement dreams to match the reality of the market, we are also capitalizing on current events to illustrate what could have been dry lectures.

As an academic adviser, I encouraged my students to take a political science course this semester. What better way to learn about American politics than to observe a tight presidential race from the vantage point of an expert in the field? Our dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Joe Marbach, is often tapped by local television stations to comment on elections. I’ve also seen articles in recent Star Ledger editions by Prof. Catherine Zizik, a speech professor who also coaches the SHU Brownson Speech and Debate Team, whose expertise was tapped to comment on the recent presidential and vice presidential debates.

The goal is to make the curriculum come alive. That’s especially important for our first-year students who could be having difficulty making the transition from the active-teaching model of K-12 schools to the active-learning model of a college campus. What do I mean by that?

Well, in K-12, students are taught by people who felt such a passion to be educators that they went to college to learn HOW to be a teacher. Part of what they learned was about how to keep the attention of children and how to entertain, for want to a better word. These teachers pull out all the bells and whistles (and power points and movies and group activities and field trips) to keep students engaged and involved in the curriculum.

Then, students graduate from high school and come to college where the only people who have been taught HOW to teach can be found in the College of Education. Everyone else gravitated to college teaching as they became experts in their field. Math professors love sines and cosines, but don’t give a hoot about pedagogy. English professors love literary criticism. Journalism professors (that’s me) love news leads and nut grafs. Although none of us has taken courses on teaching, we know more about our particular field of doctoral study than 99.9 percent of the rest of the world.

But students are sometimes confounded by the transition from the active-teaching model, where the onus falls on the teachers to teach, to the active-learning model, where the burden falls squarely on the student to become a learner. Students sometimes complain that a professor is boring, or the ultimate insult, “That professor doesn’t know how to teach.”

“You are so right,” I proclaim. The students are startled that I have validated their complaint and off-guard when I add, “But that is your problem, not his. What are you going to do about it?”

That is the challenge to our students: how do you use active-learning skills to learn as much as you can about a field of study from someone who is an acknowledged EXPERT in this field?

For professors, oftentimes the best way to meet the students where they are is to bring the world into the classroom. As a journalism professor, I used to assign my students to “cover” the debates – to take notes as if they were professional journalists. Then, I would have them write up their stories in class. It would give us the opportunity to talk about the election from a media perspective, to hash out the concept of objectivity of news reports and to also give students a real life journalistic experience.

The best synergy is achieved when a dynamic professor who doesn’t know a bit about the science of teaching but has an innate sense of theatrics draws from the tremendous world stage to illustrate theories and give students concrete examples that make dry textbooks come alive.

This can also spill over into family life and reap benefits for us parents. I have found that current events can raise the level of dinner conversation. If I ask what they are learning in their classes, they say, “Nothing.” But if I draw them out to apply the book learning they are mastering in the classroom to the havoc that is swirling around us, it usually works. It does my heart good when a family dinner centers around whether and how the stock market can right itself or whether the major candidates’ positions on Iraq should be the determining factor for casting a vote. So much more valuable than fighting over who hid the TV remote in the sofa cushions or who ate the last Ring Ding. Makes college worth all the sacrifices!

By Tracy Gottlieb, Ph.D.

Dean of Freshman Studies and Special Academic Programs

By Tracy Gottlieb, Ph.D.

Ask your sons and daughters about their journey. Not the journey from their homes to South Orange, but the journey they have embarked upon in the classroom. All incoming students are inaugurating the new University Core Curriculum, an initiative that was seven years in the making.

The Freshman courses include Journey of Transformation, a course that creates a “community of conversation” around the “big” questions – questions like “What does it mean to be human?” or “What is truth?”

We expect that our 18-year-old population will be a bit overwhelmed by the idea that we are asking them to contemplate the meaning of suffering or the meaning of freedom, so don’t be surprised if you hear some grumbling.

We are also asking these students to read some difficult texts, a smattering of Plato, St. Francis, Rumi and Dante, for starters. We know they can rise to the occasion.

The faculty here at Seton Hall is excited about the possibility of our students seeking a deeper level of understanding of the human condition. We are also excited by the fact that, beginning this year, all Seton Hall students, no matter their college or major, will have a common educational experience.

Before this year, the only common course that our students had was their one-credit University Life course. That hasn’t gone away, but instead we’ve linked the University Life course with the Journey of Transformation so that all the students in one see the same group of “travelers” in the other. This way, we’ve created mini learning communities. We’ve also tried as best we can to group these students together in the Residence Halls so that they are also living/learning communities. Experience and the academic literature tell us that when students go to class together and live together as a group they have a better chance at success. Plus, they have each other’s back. When a student in a learning community gets sick, classmates will provide the notes and a fill of what was missed in class.

We have a group of tutors in residence who can help our incoming class if they stumble. These tutors live in Boland and Aquinas halls and are equipped to help students study better or understand difficult material. A few of the tutors have already participated in the pilot of the University Core class last year and have been through the discussion process that helps bring clarity to a difficult reading.

This year’s freshman class will take their next core class as sophomores when they study “Christianity and Culture in Dialogue.” Then, as juniors, they will take a special topics course that explores “Engaging the World.” Thus, over the course of their time at Seton Hall we will ask students to think critically about their own personal journey on earth, then about how cultures interact through time before we ask them to think about their own personal place and responsibilities in the world.

Our incoming freshmen were also all required to participate in our annual Summer Reading Program. This year’s selection, Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust by Immaculee Ilibagiza, provides a vivid example of a poignant journey of transformation. It is the story of a young college student whose family is slaughtered during the tribal genocide in 1994 and who survives by hiding in a bathroom with seven other women for 91 days.

While obviously we are hoping and praying that none in our Class of 2012 is called to endure so wrenching a transformation as Immaculee, we are nonetheless convinced that our students need to be active participants in their own transformation into adulthood. We are asking our students to understand that they are one part of a bigger picture. As a teenager I stumbled upon the John Dunne meditation, No Man is an Island. The 1970s, a time when many of you, like me, came of age, were relevant times. I quoted Dunne ad nauseam: “Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind. Therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”

Fast forward thirty years. Another generation is setting goals for itself and writing its own new story. This new Core Curriculum should help them understand the context of those who have come before so that they can truly understand their own personal responsibilities to humanity.

So go ahead: ask your sons and daughters about their journey. And let’s hope they know what you are talking about!!

If you have any questions, feel free to contact Tracy Gottlieb, dean of Freshman Studies and Special Academic Programs, at gottlitr@shu.edu

Interested in becoming a successful college student? Here is some advice from Dr. Tracy Gottlieb, Dean of Freshman Studies and Special Academic Programs.

How to Succeed in College

– This article can also be seen in the 2008 edition of Off to College

Whenever I hear the song Summertime, I cringe. While Lena Horne croons that the “livin’ is easy,” I find myself making flow charts to track the work and play schedules for our family.

I know that summer is supposed to be a time when life slows down, but every year I brace myself for the complications that come with the summertime.

Some observations from the front:

• Why am I the one who ends up without the automobile? When there are four adult drivers and only three automobiles, it is I who ends up begging rides from coworkers and standing on curbs waiting for my husband or sister to swing by. Why is that?
• Why do fast-food profits spike in the summer? Some speculate that it is because of vacationers on the go. In my heart I know it is because of desperate mothers swinging by the drive-thru in an attempt to multi-task by doing a carpool and feeding the family dinner simultaneously.
• Why do college students go out for the evening at 11 p.m.? This is particularly puzzling. I am putting on my pajamas while my children are getting dressed and spraying perfume in the air.
• Why do family dynamics shift so cataclysmically when students return for the summer? We have long established roles in the family (i.e., the whiner, the helper, the helpless, etc.) but those roles shift when the kids come home in the summer. The middle child who had a particularly good year in college comes home bursting with self-confidence and energy; the extrovert who had a tough year academically is picking fights with siblings.

Armed with the reality that summertime living can be anything but easy, parents may wonder what they can do to prepare themselves and the family for the return of college students to the family fold for the long summer months.

The best advice is simply to be prepared for the changes, to communicate with all the children, to set some ground rules and to perfect the art of negotiation.

Talk to the younger children at home about having to share a room or a bathroom again. They will be resentful that what they now believe is “their” space is being taken up by a “foreigner,” a person who is quite different from the one who left home nine months ago. When my oldest, Annie, left for college, she magnanimously willed her third-floor nest to the next in line. Then, when she returned home in May, she spent the summer lamenting that she had given up this prime piece of family real estate. Her brother Daniel, heir to the space, hung strong and ignored her protestations.

Perhaps the smartest thing I did when my college-age students came home to roost was to sit them down and talk reality to them. This took the form of serious negotiation. I had to figure out first what was absolutely crucial for me and what could I give in on? In other words, was a curfew important? For the first few years, the answer was yes. Then, I found that I was losing so much sleep fretting over Daniel’s benign but persistent ignoring of his curfew that I decided to give it up and negotiate on more important items, like keeping the house clean and carrying their weight with other chores. I also liked to force attendance at a weekly family dinner, but after nine-months of eating out, they think of this as a gift not a duty.

Automobiles are always sensitive issues that can easily cause tension. When Annie left for college, Daniel didn’t have his license. By the time she came home in May, Dan had gotten his license and had begun to think of the third car as his own. If there are more licensed drivers than there are automobiles, a written schedule is the only way out. Map out all the times people need to get to work, buy groceries and attend church and then give the car to the child who volunteers to run all the carpools and do the grocery shopping (this is known as the wisdom of Solomon).

The best advice I can give, however, is to never let resentments fester. If the dirty towels on the hardwood floors are driving you crazy, invite your student for coffee and chat about your concerns. If your younger child is resentful of the prodigal child, sit them both down for a conversation (and feed them food while you talk. Food always facilitates negotiation!).

Remember, the adjustment to home is as hard for your child as it is for you. Your job as the adult in the equation is to look at the shifting family dynamics as an opportunity for family growth and a chance to break away from bad habits. And always cling to the knowledge that summertime is fleeting. It will be September again before you know it!

If you have any questions, feel free to contact Tracy Gottlieb, Dean of Freshman Studies and Special Academic Programs, at gottlitr@shu.edu

In the Gottlieb house, you’ve got to grab the opportunity for family bonding whenever you can. That’s why I always welcome the brouhaha of March Madness. We spend hours discussing our choices for the Gottlieb NCAA basketball pool (no money exchanged), hooting over the long-shots we choose, crowing when we call it accurately, watching television together, and vying for family bragging rights.

While other families assemble for intimate dinners or gather round the kitchen table for endless hours of friendly Monopoly games, just about the only thing the Gottliebs can agree on is that we all love college basketball. Annie reminisces that one of her clearest childhood memories is being awoken from a deep sleep to the hootin’ and hollerin’ by her parents, aunts and uncles that accompanied Seton Hall’s near victory (it’s the only way I can refer to it still, nearly 20 years later) in the NCAA tournament. When ESPN Classic replays the 1989 final game, my kids text messaged me to turn on the television. I sit down to watch the final minutes with the hope that maybe this time the ref’s whistle won’t blow!

I’ve always felt a little bit jealous that one of my best friends regularly has poignant family moments with her two children, a 15-year-old and a 21-year-old. They go out to dinner as a family. They take vacations together, bike ride and climb mountains together. Meanwhile, the Gottliebs are quibbling over whether anyone in their right mind would have picked Davidson over Georgetown in the NCAA second round.

We’ve tried family dinners, but they aren’ particularly successful. Someone complains about the main course; someone else picks a fight; it all unravels rather quickly.

Family vacations also are a thing of the past. I’ve been able to rally the troops only twice in the last ten years – once for a family cruise to Bermuda that cost a fortune and once for an even more expensive five days in London (but Annie had to decline at the last minute because she got a new job so even that didn’t make it as a full family bonding experience). Thus, unless the destination is really alluring (read that expensive) I can’t get all three children together as a group.

So instead I’ve learned to cherish our moments gathered together around our television during March. It’s family bonding time at its best. The boys find great amusement in my unwavering loyalty to Big East teams (I managed once again to come up with an all-Big East Final Four); Annie crafts two grids – a sentimental favorites and the real one; Tom tracks the possibility of his winning electronically; Dan smugly sticks with the favorites.

I could lament the absence of traditional forms of family bonding, or I could celebrate the fact that we have found some common ground to continue our growth as a family. I choose to focus on the latter. As our children age, we need to meet them where they are. If that means listening to their choice of music when we are in the car together or watching their favorite television program with them, so be it.

As one of nine children, I am so used to being smothered by family that I always feel so sad when some one tells me they haven’t spoken to their brother in six months or they haven’t seen their sister in a few years.

My job as mother of my own small clan is to help my children forget all of the grudges and hurt feelings of their childhoods and form bonds and alliances that can carry them through to genuine adult friendships.

When I was a kid, my parents would drag us all together, kneel us down and say the Rosary as a family saying, “The family that prays together, stays together.”

The Gottlieb family ritual doesn’t ring with the same solemnity as that one, but I’m hoping that the effect will be the same. My fantasy is that years from now, my kids will come together as a family without their dad and me and wax nostalgic over the year that Mom had the audacity to pick the Hall as her Cinderalla team and win! (…I said this was my fantasy!)

Remember the good old days when your mother wanted to get you home for dinner so she stuck her head out the screen door and screamed your name at the top of her lungs? Yesterday, I was too lazy to get up from my sofa, walk up the stairs and rouse my husband from a nap, so I pulled out my cell phone and called our home number knowing that the ringing would wake him up.

Oh, my! Who could ever have envisioned how much technology would change our lives?

Our children are from another world. When my son was whining last week over how long it took to download an episode of his favorite TV program, Lost, that he had missed the night before, I waxed nostalgic about how we watched television as children, if we missed a program, we had to wait until the summer to see it as a rerun.

When I was delivering a lecture to my older son about the genesis of music videos in the 1960s, I cited the Monkees television show and the Beatles’ clip to promote Strawberry Fields Forever. Dan nonchalantly reported that he has been watching those old clips all the time on YouTube. Who knew? Sure enough, anyone interested in walking down Memory Lane (or Penny Lane, for that matter) can relive the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, the Monkees cavorting in full costume or the 18+ minutes of Arlo Guthrie singing “Alice’s Restaurant.” Every single recorded moment that I could think of, I found on YouTube.

YouTube, which facilitates the world-wide sharing of homemade and professional video clips, brings in literally billions of viewers. If it’s been taped, you can probably find it on YouTube.

If you can’t find it on YouTube, you can probably read about it on Wikipedia, the free online, reader-written encyclopedia. If you are not aware of Wikipedia, which has 9.25 million articles, you should be. Your children are using it every day to research subjects from Shakespeare to baseball statistics. It is the bane of faculty, who rail that Wikipedia articles are unreliable and lack academic credentials, but they seem to be fighting a losing battle. Wikipedia is indeed helpful in solving difficult crossword clues and putting a finger on an elusive fact, but we’re trying to teach our students more sophisticated and reliable advanced searching techniques!

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