In addition to the philosophy department’s required course “Guide to Academic Research,” the main thing I had to deal with this semester was this university-wide elective, “General History of Science.”
Grading
It must be said that Beishida’s elective-course system is not all that great either. Although course offerings are very free, the credit requirement for electives seems to be extremely low, so many classmates take a take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward them. Not only did several classmates never come to class at all, but in the end they simply did not submit the final paper either, adopting the attitude that if they fail, they fail. As a result, out of the 15 students who enrolled, I gave 3 failing grades and 3 zeroes. Two of the failing grades were because the students submitted papers that had absolutely nothing to do with the course and also had poor attendance in class; the other failing grade was given to a student who sent me an email full of all sorts of inexplicable stuff and ended with the line, “Please fail me, thank you very much, Master.” My diagnosis is that this is a severe case of zhong’er illness, but I still do not quite understand his behavior.
The assignments I set for this course were a midterm reading report and a final paper. Later I said that if one was confident about the final paper, then the midterm reading report could be omitted. Afterwards I arranged a discussion class, which could also count toward the midterm grade. In the end, only 4 people submitted the midterm assignment, and only 7 people attended the discussion class (6 spoke). In the end, there were only 3 people who both attended the discussion class and submitted the reading report, and I gave all three of them very high scores above 95. But in fact, even if one judged grades by the final paper alone, the highest scores were basically still theirs, which shows that using one paper to measure students’ classroom performance is already sufficient. Two students who never came to class submitted papers that had basically no connection at all with the history of science. They were probably written for some other course, but even if I did not care whether the topic was related to the course, these two papers themselves were also extremely bad. This shows that poor students are poor students after all; their poor performance is comprehensive, and it is not because I taught badly that they did not come to listen~
Although one paper is basically enough to distinguish good students from bad ones, I will still insist in the future on an assessment format of “reading report + classroom discussion + final paper.” And if it were not for the need to get the course off the ground and thus compromise with some students who are only there for the credits, then when I offer courses in the future I probably will not be this easygoing; none of these three assignments can be easily waived. Because the point of assignments obviously is not only to distinguish good students from bad ones and then give a final grade. Assignments are also part of the course design, embodying my basic requirement for this course, namely, that one should read and think independently. The three stages of reading—discussion—writing are originally linked as one whole: first read, then think, then exchange ideas, then return to reading… These are precisely the stages that a final paper must go through. If there is no independent reading and thinking, and one simply goes looking for a few ready-made articles at the end and patches them together, then of course one cannot write a good paper.
One of my other courses is about how to write papers, whereas this course sets a much lower bar for papers; I merely emphasize that a paper should reflect one’s own reading and thinking. In fact, the papers students submitted were all rather immature, but whether there had been reading and thinking could still be seen. I also caught one case of plagiarism. Actually, most of the plagiarism cases I caught were not ones I deliberately checked for; rather, as I read the article, I would suddenly feel that the prose was not flowing properly, that these few sentences sitting there felt discordant, that the appearance of certain concepts was abrupt, and so I would guess that these sentences were probably copied. In such cases, I was basically right every time. In fact, even if I had not caught the plagiarism, such papers themselves would not have been good. Articles cobbled together from here and there may mobilize a great many seemingly impressive concepts and formulations and appear quite formidable, but people who genuinely care about the thought in a paper will not buy that. On the contrary, these pieced-together bits will damage the coherence of the argument and make the article feel awkward and out of place. A piece written with care by oneself may indeed seem immature, but as long as the prose flows smoothly and the reasoning is coherent, it is certainly much better than a grotesque hybrid. Of course, it is not impossible for someone to make painstaking adjustments so that the patched-together and plagiarized parts seem smooth and coherent—but if one is willing to go to such trouble, why not honestly add citations instead?
Lecturing
This was my first time offering a complete course, so I certainly did not control it very well. As for content, let that go for now; in terms of lecturing technique, I definitely had almost none, especially when it comes to how to enliven the classroom atmosphere, where my ability is almost 0.
Every week I prepared a full lecture script in advance and basically read from it in class. But I was not reading it word for word either; during class I would make improvised adjustments and additions to the script, and then on the weekend I would revise it again and upload it to the blog.
Of course, this approach has its advantages: first, it allows me to control lecture time fairly precisely, and I do not have to worry about forgetting my lines on the spot; second, once the class is over, a manuscript of book length can be produced. But the drawbacks are also obvious: first, because one is reading from a script, the lecture’s momentum inevitably suffers to some degree; second, once the entire lecture content is posted in full, it seems as though students no longer need to come listen.
However, these two drawbacks are not absolute. First of all, an energetic classroom atmosphere does not necessarily require the teacher to improvise without notes. I have heard that New Oriental teachers prepare word-for-word scripts, with even emotion and pauses written into them, and in the end precisely guarantee the classroom effect. So if my lectures seem dull and uninteresting, that is because my scripts were not prepared well enough, not because I prepared scripts at all. Secondly, experience has shown that students who do not come to class basically will not read the script either. Posting the script after class makes it convenient for students who attended to review and verify things, and it is also convenient for students who missed class once or twice to catch up, but it basically does not make students who originally wanted to attend stop attending.
Posting the full script also has another meaning, namely self-compulsion. That is to say, when I teach this course again next time, I can no longer just go through the same script a second time. With the old script sitting right there, everyone can see at a glance how much I have changed the next time I lecture. Beyond carrying out the necessary tasks, I think teaching is a part of academic life. If I merely mechanically repeat what I said before, then it would be difficult for me to gain much from it. I cannot say that every time I offer the course I will teach completely new content, but I do hope that every lecture will involve major changes. This is not to say that I want to pursue perfection and teach better and better; in some cases, it is not impossible that one would teach worse and worse. The key is that each new offering of a course should bring me new challenges and new gains. Therefore, even parts that are very well taught and very well prepared may be abandoned by me.
My way of lecturing is basically still all-output-no-input, with a little time left for free questions. Senior brother Donglin came to listen once and suggested that each time I begin by raising some questions for thought to guide the class, and that I add impromptu questions during the lecture to enliven the atmosphere. These methods are not hard to imagine, but they are not easy to put into practice. Since there were too few students in this course, I was too lazy to improve it. Let’s talk about it next time.
Content
This semester’s General History of Science had a total of 16 weeks of classes, one of which was a discussion class, and the remaining 15 sessions were themed as follows:
6 Special Topics in the History of Chinese Science
7 The Middle Ages and Christian Science
8 Printing and the Scientific Revolution
11 Alchemy and the Scientific Revolution
13 Science in the Age of Enlightenment
14 Science and the Industrial Revolution
16 The Physics Revolution of the 20th Century
Summary of Recommended Reading
From the syllabus alone, my course already differs quite a bit from Mr. Wu’s. Of course, there has not been much substantive improvement either; overall, it still has not broken out of the established pattern of lecturing on the history of science. I also did not use some of the new historiographical strategies we plan to promote, such as phenomenological or technics-oriented perspectives. My idea was to first ensure a basic standard and then improve slowly. Although I did not apply any particularly novel historiographical methods, my course did draw on some new literature introduced domestically in recent years, especially the series translated by senior brother Bu Tian, which I basically all read. Besides, although I did not cite historiographical strategies that we consider relatively novel, compared with the history-of-science teaching in China that still mostly remains stuck in Whiggish historiography, my historiographical perspective is already very novel~ In short, I believe that my course can at least reach an advanced domestic level.
My course downplayed the history of technology and the history of Chinese science; I even cut out crucial content such as the history of medicine and the history of optics. My consideration was to emphasize “general” rather than content accumulation: adding more material does not make a “general history” more “comprehensive”; on the contrary, the more content you add, the less “comprehensive” it becomes. Once you bring in the history of technology, the question becomes: why discuss these technologies and not those? Once you add the history of Chinese science, there is sure to be a large amount of content that cannot be covered, and you then have to ask: do we talk about Indian science? The “general” in general history has the sense of “overall,” but the totality of history does not mean “comprehensiveness,” because the details of history are infinite. No history book or history course of any length can exhaust all the aspects of history. Therefore, to grasp the “overall,” one must precisely rely on “broad strokes.” Only by finding some specific threads and bundling them together can one tell a “general history.” My general history this semester did not have a single throughline, but there were indeed some threads, though not emphasized, that connected it together.
In the introductory lecture and in later classes, I often emphasized the subjectivity of historiographical perspective: there is no absolutely standard historiographical criterion that decides what is important and what is not. But this does not mean that one does not need to distinguish important matters; rather, it means that in each historical retrospective, one needs to rethink and revise one’s historiographical strategy anew. Different historical narratives have different characteristics, and there is no absolute superiority or inferiority among them. Perhaps next time I teach, I will highlight content such as the history of medicine and the history of optics, but that does not mean that the next lecture will be better or worse than this one; it is simply a change of perspective. History is like a woman of a thousand faces; each historical narrative is like drawing her portrait. A portrait is always limited: it can only reflect one of her aspects from one angle. If the compositor or artist aspires to include all the lady’s beauties in a single image, then that picture may well turn out badly. Only after one angle is kept relatively stable, and then one further considers details of presentation such as setting, lighting, and color coordination, will the portrait be truly the most splendid.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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