Little Gray Boxes

We consider the power and perils of interrupted readings (and did I mention I'm available to Zoom meet your class?)

Bing AI image creator has a weird idea of interrupted readings

When I started writing Practical Bioethics:Ethics for Patients and Providers (2023), I wanted to write a textbook that could be relevant and helpful to students and useful to professors.

One feature that I hope will useful are the interrupted readings. These are the gray boxes that you find in the readings and sometimes in the “What’s at Stake” section of each chapter.

These boxes help students make sense of what they just read and what is coming next in the argument. They also ask questions to make students think and provide some insider information of medical culture.

I wish I could say I came up with this myself. Truth is I stole it. Well, it can’t really be stealing if you ask permission can it? I learned the method from my professor at the University of Mississippi, William Lawhead. He uses it in his enormously popular intro to Philosophy text The Philosophical Journey (McGraw-Hill, 2023). It’s in its 8th edition.

The little gray boxes make difficult readings easier to understand without simply giving a summary at the beginning. I really, really, hate the summarize the entire reading at the beginning of the article. Students inevitably just read the summary and try to fake their way through Q&A and discussion.

With the little gray boxes, I can give a very short and vague intro and even if the student doesn’t read the whole article hopefully they will, at the very least, read the little gray boxes.

The boxes don’t always explain. Sometimes they provide leading questions. Here’s something you might not have noticed. There are less and less little gray boxes as you move toward the end of the book. The idea is that students will need the boxes less as they get better and reading bioethics articles.

In fact, you’ll notice that the articles from chapters 1-3 tend to have longer opening descriptions and more little gray boxes. While Chapter 7-9 has less of both.

Earlier chapters have more explanation and less critical questions but the later chapters have more questions and less explanation.

Here are some suggestions on how to use the interrupted readings first for students and then for professors.

For Students: Use the gray boxes to help you understand the author’s thesis. The most important thing to get clear on before you come to class is what the author wants to convince you to believe. Next, use the gray boxes as a way of zeroing in on passages you want to bring up in class.

Hopefully you’ve highlighted passages that you are confused about, but you can also flag passages that are compelling to you. Something the author says is really helpful. Just as important is flagging those passages where the author’s ideas are concerning to you—places where you might be critical.

Right before class you should refresh your memory.It’s been a day or two since you read that article. The gray boxes help. Finally, use the gray boxes to stimulate your own critique. Some of the gray boxes have questions, where I play devil’s advocate. Use those as a lauching pad for your own writing. Don’t forget to cite the text though!

For Instructors: I’ve been teaching for almost 20 years. I know there are times when you didn’t get to prepare for class near as much as you wanted. It happens to all of us.

Here’s a pro-tip: Use those little gray boxes as prompts for class discussion. If the box contains a statment. Encourage students to chime in with whether they agree or disagree.

One of the most important skills a student can learn is the middle ground between being too critical and too charitable to an author. My students seem to either simply defer to the author and agree with whatever they say, or refuse to even consider the author’s position and cancel them in their minds before class starts.

The latter is rarer but it does happen especially with chapters 7 (reproductive and genetic dilemmas) and Chapter 9 (dilemmas with Abortion).

If the interrupted reading in the gray box contains a set of questions, then confront the students with them and walk them through their reasoned critique of the text.

My first question in any class discussion of readings is “What passages were confusing?” followed by “Which passages were concerning” and then “What passages were compelling.”

After that, we concentrate on the thesis by asking “What does the author want me to buy into?” Followed by “Do you agree? Has the author made her case well?” etc. Unless you are a new instructor, you know all this.

You can treat the gray boxes as mile markers or sign posts. I anticipated students who only read the gray boxes. Yes, humans gonna human, after all.

I tried to make sure that if you only read the gray boxes, you still wouldn’t have enough info to bull-s**t your way through the discussion.

Less so in the early chapters but definitely in the later ones. (I did make exceptions for difficult articles like McMahan’s “Killing, Letting die, and Withdrawing Aid” in chapter 5.)

One Last Thing: I find myself searching about for new topics so if you have a question for me, the author, I’d love to answer it in a post. If you have a topic, you think I’ve overlooked, I’d love to dive into it. Just hit the Leave a Comment button. Oh look, there it is. Right down there. See it?

If you ever would like to have your students meet the author of your text via zoom call, I would love to talk with your students about any of the topics in the book or bioethics in general. Just hit the Leave a Message button below and I’ll get back to you ASAP.