Lying to students

Honesty is, usually, the best policy. Could it be, however, that there are times when a good lie serves students better?

One student who thinks so recently shared his memories of his favorite liar. It's a short piece well worth the read, especially since it's written from a student's perspective many years after the fact. As an instructor, it's so rare to find out what lasting lessons students take away from your class. I sincerely hope the blog author sends a link to "Dr. K."

In any event, the basic premise is simple. Tell your students on the first day of class that you are going to tell at least one lie in every lecture. Their task is to discover what that lie is. At the beginning of the semester, you endeavor to make your lies as egregious as possible. As the semester progresses, you make the lies more subtle. My favorite anecdote was of the time the professor didn't give any inaccurate statements at all, but hinted that they had missed his fib and that they should go over their notes over the weekend to discover what it was. Only after they had given their notes a thorough review and suggested places where he might have gone wrong did he confess that his only lie was that he had told a lie. Positively fiendish! But then, they had a test coming up so it was a devilishly clever way to encourage them to study.

As remembered by this student, such an approach can be an effective way to increase student engagement. I also like the implications for teaching students valuable lessons in critical thinking. Too many students unquestioningly accept any information that comes from an authority. Although some of this could be chalked up to intellectual laziness, mostly it's because students are given far too few opportunities, especially as undergraduates, to discover that authorities don't always agree or don't always have all the right answers.

Another good discussion of this technique is Lubomir Tomaska's, "Increasing student involvement in lectures by error-prone talks," Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education (2000) 28: 242-243.

Maybe it's time for me to start lying to my students. Then again, perhaps I already do...