Sunday, October 24, 2010

Dumdum Delivery!

It’s a rough economy out there, no doubt, and I sometimes feel lucky that I teach in a community college, a branch of the education sector that’s thriving as people enroll for retraining or to facilitate a job change.

Tri-annually, my college gets a huge (and growing) infusion of new students—and their tuition. We have all types at my school, from the young and clueless to the mature and motivated; from ex-felons who want to repair cars to drug-addled strippers who want to enter the field of Early Childhood Education. Go for it, Amber/Angel/Crystal/Brandi/Candi/Bambi!

But it’s not just the poor, the out-of-work, or the vocationally-minded who go to community colleges like mine. No, due to the “open door” policy of my school, any random mouth breather can give education a shot. So along with the qualified, the motivated, those who just want to save money, and those who enter admirable vocational programs, we have lunkheaded clods entering our college doors in teeming droves.

What can we thank for this loser largesse? It’s simple—our pathetic K-12 system ensures that we have jobs teaching remedial subjects in college, whether we teach at a CC with its wide-open door and bottom-trolling recruiters, or in a more selective 4-year school. The dearth of discipline and the pantywaisted, self-esteem-based swill that passes for a “curriculum” in our pre-collegiate institutions has slowly constructed a veritable Idiot Express with a direct rail line from our high schools to our colleges.

Toot toot! All aboard!

Here’s a hearty Thank You to the pussified policies of the progressive educrats who have systematically destroyed our youths’ educations so badly that colleges around the country have a steady stream of floundering fuck-ups to fill the remedial rosters and create a nice, steady demand that keeps us employed.

And not only do these low-wattage losers take remedial courses, but they also retake many other courses as they careen and bumble fecklessly through their college careers like lobotomized mice in a cryptic maze. Apparently, even the fundamentally stupid often have sizeable (though misguided) ambitions, and they just keep taking single courses over and over until they pass, tossing their grants, their dear grampy’s pension funds, or the money they earned at the car wash into the pot. Cha-Ching! “Thank you, idiots! Please come again! Next in line!?”

And should we feel guilty relieving them of their wasted tuition? No way. As an incendiary-but-brilliant CM poster noted, sometimes when faced with academic half-wittery, we should just take the money and run.

I used to get so frustrated with the loser load in my classes that I could barely stand it, but a friend’s reminder set me on an even keel: “Thanks to the shitty public school system, you’re gainfully employed!” Simply put, the perpetual idiot factories of our K-12 system pay our mortgages.

And to those who get all sweaty and pissy when faced with these uncomfortable truths, just imagine how few higher-ed teaching positions there would be if the unqualified students were suddenly purged from your college. You’d probably end up getting carpal tunnel syndrome while doing data entry for 10 bucks an hour, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week with no benefits and virtually no vacation time, sitting in a drab cubicle next to a fat lady named Cyndi who has photos of her 12 cats on her desk and chronic halitosis so searing that it could melt the chrome off a trailer hitch.

Teach to those who actually do learn, and leave the rest of the children behind, I say. Thanks to entrenched American educational philosophies, there will always be a cornucopia of dopey dunces to fill the rosters, so keep on failing them because they’ll keep on coming—and bringing their tuition with them.

21 comments:

  1. The k-12 system does not prepare many students for the rigors of college work, but some students are just not smart enough to get a degree. I read somwhere that on average, a person needs to have about a 110-115 IQ in order to get a B.A. That's above average.

    Many students simply do not have above average IQs, and they are incapable of "thinking hard" enough to get a 4-year degree. Some have the capabilities for a 2-year degree. But in general most people aren't smart enough to finish college. Some make up for it with an enormous amount of dedication, just like some with superior IQs flunk out due to laziness.

    I think it says wonderful things about the US that everyone can try, but the aura from most middle and lower-level colleges is that everyone can finish. They can't and the administration knows this, which is why graduation rates at my middling university hover at around 50%. The average over the US isn't that much better, I'd wager.

    Graduation rates are doubtless "better" at better universities because the students are better to begin with. Higher admission standards guarantee a student body more capable of completing the degree.

    The "everyone can succeed" message spread by feel-good administrators everywhere is a boondoggle, cynically set in motion to keep many students coming back to try to "finish" a degree that they can never complete, and pay for the privilege (sometimes many times) of doing so.

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  2. I can top this. The lease for our nice, new observatory in the mountains is paid for by student lab fees. I can justify it easily, since I use pictures from it in every class.

    Also, I test everything in my intro-astronomy-for-non-majors textbook on my own students. This requires that everything be clear and easy to understand.

    I therefore don't get as upset as I used to get about students needing to have the cause of day and night explained, or students who are badly behaved. My students are still serving useful purposes, even the worst of them.

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  3. @Stella -- very good points. (Do you have a source for the minimum IQ figures? I'd love to be able to cite those in these sorts of discussions at my institution.)

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  4. Instead of crying over illogical illiteracy and helplessness of my students this week, I'll be celebrating that I can pay my rent. Unethical, perhaps, to foster the dreams of feckless losers, but I, too, need to eat.

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  5. If you'll refrain from being cynical for a few moments, consider: this is a very American concept. We let in just about anyone. We take their money: that's important. And then we give them a chance.

    Some do well. Others don't, but we tend to forget about them. Teach to the ones who are willing to do what it takes to do well.

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  6. While I agree with Froderick that the only sanity-preserving way to cope, even at the somewhat-selective state university where I teach core classes, is to "teach to the ones who are willing to do what it takes to do well" and not to worry too much about the rest, I do worry about this.

    On the one hand, I value the fact that, in the U.S., the opportunity for higher education is generally available to all, including those who have, for a variety of reasons, flunked out of college at an earlier point in their lives. On the other hand, I don't like the idea that intro college classes might become a far more expensive version of lottery tickets: a tax on a subsection of the low-income population that doesn't really understand the odds of "winning."

    With not-for-profit community colleges, I'm inclined to think that our current bias in favor of making the opportunity available to virtually anyone who is willing to try, and keep trying, is more or less the right approach. On the other hand, open-admission for-profit universities that prey on students eligible for loans -- and leave them with no degree and debts that can't be canceled by bankruptcy -- are a scandal and a shame. To the extent that the community-college open-admissions philosophy is feeding for-profit open-admissions profiteering, we need to rethink the whole picture.

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  7. By any chance, No Cookies, is your real name Charles Murray? Between the hatred for ball caps, rap culture, and now this Fox News-surplus "educrats" ranting, I'm feeling you're something of a crank. There is an alternative to K-12 public ed.; it's called parochial school. The trick with them is they can throw out any student, AT ANY TIME, who seems to be "more trouble then they are worth." As a Christian school escapee, let me tell you that every year somebody vanished, and yet they kept the church secretary's son, a raging psychopath who came back to taunt students after he graduated (!), no questions asked. You would also get weird grading issues when the child of an instructor was in that instructor's class; I remember overhearing one female teacher bellowing at her daughter for the grades she had assigned to her. That incident occured about an hour after school (yes, I was in day care on top of attending Crazy Xtian Grade School.) None of the preceeding would be allowed in a public school, but things like that happen in the Protestant private schools because of the small size of the places and the incestuous relationship between the churches which founded schools on their properties and the staffs of those schools (many of whom were parishoners in those houses of worship.)

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  8. "It’s simple—our pathetic K-12 system ensures that we have jobs teaching remedial subjects in college..."

    Are you implying that once students complete these remedial college classes, they are able perform the skills that a k-12 education system has failed to teach them? I bet many of them come out of these remedial classes showing little improvement.

    I agree with many of the posters. Many students,through no fault of their own, are simply intellectually incapable of doing well in college. And in the k-12 education system, teachers must teach to the abilities of their students...I can tell you that everytime a student fails to grasp a concept, it's the teacher who feels like a failure. But oftentimes, the student just does not have the ability to perform how we would like to see them perform. Teachers cannot create something out of nothing; if the ability or the intelligence just isn't there in the first place, then some skills are nearly impossible to teach.

    Also, why do so many people insist on blaming teachers for dumb kids?? There are so many other things at play here...genetics, parents, and the students themselves. I once heard someone say that a child will either be succesful in school, or they will not...regardless of their teacher. I'm not trying to absolve teachers of all responsibily here, and the education system is certainly far from perfect...but it's ridiculous to think that people learn everything they need to know from sitting in a classroom all day.

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  9. I have 4 words for you: No Child Left Behind.

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  10. @Strelnikov I've taught in public and private schools, and public schools are not inherently more fair. People are people, and human frailities abound in all teachers and administrators no matter where they work. I sympathize with your personal experience, but I've seen plenty of crappy behavior across the board!

    Our public High School had to eliminate Valedictorian because a Counselor went in and changed her son's grades so he could be Valedictorian. She's still employed. I've seen teacher's children accomodated unfairly in both public and private schools. I've seen cheating and lying in both private and public schools. I saw no more laziness or motivation in either.

    Of bigger concern is the point brought up by several about k-12 not preparing students for college or life for that matter. Two public High Schools in a neighboring town have a 50% drop-out rate. In order not to be taken over by the State, the schools have to improve their numbers. How do you make sure more students graduate? You lower standards. When half the graduating class is on the A-B honor roll, something is pervasively wrong with the system. The "No Child Left Behind" is a wonderful THEORY. But you still have to deal with the differences in people such as IQ, economic situation, internal motivation, etc. If you set the bar so low that anyone can pass, then you create a mass of people that EXPECT to pass; and that includes EVERYTHING. You start seeing really stupid stuff like having to teach a physics class wihtout math (4real).

    I don't see this same type of thing for athletics. Only a small percentage of athletes get to go to the Olympics or play in professional sports and get the big bucks. Why is this a phenomena for academics?

    Yes, I'm glad to be employed. But I don't want to do a job that is pointless. A computer program can create brainless curriculum that any warm body can pass. Hopefully, we can help each other to continue to do a job that is meaningful.

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  11. Again, I have to wonder how you function at a community college with the level of vitriol you direct toward your students. To do this type of work and keep any modicum of sanity, you pretty much have to buy in to the idea that almost anyone who wants to be educated can be in some form. Not everyone is "college material," but the definition of success in CC Universe varies widely by the type of program the student undertakes.

    With very few exceptions (namely the special ed students who fall into what formerly would be called mentally retarded, now with some other label and in possession of their shiny high school diploma since No Child Is Left Behind, so we have to admit them), most students are capable of learning something at a community college. It may not be transfer-level work, but it could be basic literacy skills or a career certificate.

    In most of my developmental ed classes, my students tend to have the ability to do the work. What they don't have is the background. Sometimes that means they got a crappy high school education. Sometimes it means they had a great opportunity but chose not to take advantage of it because they didn't have to in order to graduate. Sometimes it means they've been out of school so long and worked such menial jobs that they're out of practice and screwed up on the placement test.

    When crappy education is the culprit, it's hard as hell to make up for 12-13 years of bad schooling in just a few short weeks. And now, since the taxpayers are tired of paying for the same instruction twice, the new trend is accelerated instruction. Our legislators believe that our students already know the stuff we're teaching and just need a quick refresher. In some cases, we're being asked to teach a developmental course in as little as three weeks. That works great for the factory worker who hasn't written an essay since 1975 but will catch on. It's a disaster for the student who was never taught what goes into a complete sentence to begin with or why we break essays into paragraphs.

    In some ways, teaching at a community college is like going into a high-risk medical specialty in a poor area of town. You have to know going in that it's going to be hard as hell, that ultimately you're going to have more failures than successes (if we count graduation with an associate's degree as success, which is a debatable proposition), and that the people you work with aren't always going to have the same values, means, and compliance rates as the ones whom your colleagues doing the same thing in the richer/more selective parts of town are teaching will have. But ultimately you keep doing it anyway because you have to believe in the ones who can make it.

    I know that probably sounds sappy on a site where we all regularly bitch about all the crap we take, but it's what keeps me going. I teach because I believe I really do help people to change their lives. The flakes who give me crap still don't have the power on a regular basis to outweigh the students who get it and gain something from the experience (even the ones who fail and learn from that). The day the flakes take over, this becomes just a job, and I lose all hope is the day I stop teaching.

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  12. @Englishdoc, I want to second what you're saying here. I've actually been pleasantly surprised at the capabilities of some of my students in the online military program I work with. They have no reason to know how to do college-level things, but I have found them to be teachable. And not all of them finished high school.

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  13. Well said EnglishDoc. Just want to note that I didn't mean to imply by the Olympic/Athletes comment in my previous post that I believe only a small percentage of people should be able to go to college or profit from the experience. Just that folks don't seem to be bothered by standards set in Athletics as they do in Academics.

    I haven't lost hope. Flakes haven't taken over. Just frustrated sometimes....
    (sp. corr. on myself "without" instead of "wihtout")

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  14. I alternate between weeping and laughing; in the next room over sits "Cyndi" clothes and breath reeking from God knows what...

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  15. "Simply put, the perpetual idiot factories of our K-12 system pay our mortgages."

    The broken window fallacy comes to CM!

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  16. ....sitting in a drab cubicle next to a fat lady named Cyndi who has photos of her 12 cats on her desk....

    Why is everyone so hard on fat chicks with cats? I have one cat, and I'm struggling to lose these last 25 pounds, but I still think of myself as a 'fat lady' and I am definitely a 'cat lady' (shelter volunteer, social activist for animal rights, etc.). I wonder if the guy who sits in the cubicle next door is offended by the photo of my cat on my desk, or by my being fat? Not sure about the haliotosis; I try to avoid getting that close to my coworkers.

    A guy can have half a dozen dogs and be as fat as a whale, and everyone just thinks he's a kind-hearted man, or if he's not fat, then he's a sexy kind-hearted man like Cesar the dog whisperer. But a gal with more than one cat better be as sexy as a supermodel to compensate, otherwise, she's a crazy cat lady who will die alone and unnoticed and be eaten by her cats.

    A word of advice to single men: if you can be nice about your female date having a cat, it goes a long way. Plenty of women like cats; it's not a sign of batty spinsterhood. Granted 12 cats is a bit much but my brother and his girlfriend are animal rescuers and have around 10 cats in their very large house and fenced-in yard, and they aren't crazy or fat and only one of them is is a lady.

    Don't misjudge cat people, we are not as crazy or evil as the 15th century popes believed. Most of us are just kind-hearted folks who like cats and the ones who are crazy would be just as crazy if they collected Hummel figurines or model trains or whatever.

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  17. @ Prof and Circumstance
    What the "Counselor" did was Grade-A HORSESHIT and should have been grounds for dismissal. I was not arguing that public schools would be more fair but that they SHOULD be more rational than the goofball religious schools.

    I never thought "No Child Left Behind" was a good idea because it has forced instuctors to teach for a test....if they want to nationalize something in K-12 education, why not textbook production?

    And now (because Halloween is approching) some more Xtian School Horror Stories....

    The school I've been talking about was next door to a pretty crazy apartment complex, and more than once people jumped the back wall and had a party in the dirt playground, leaving behind broken bottles, graffiti, and cigarette butts. They also broke into the bellowing woman's classroom and shot the fire extinguisher off; Sweet Jesus was she mad when she had to come in early and clean it up!

    We were not only graded for performance, but also for presentation and I was constantly getting graded down for my handwriting...I had to learn how to type in the 6th grade because my mother was no longer willing to take dictation for book reports and papers...between their fixations on Bible memorization and handwriting, I had a "D" average.

    I can never get school papers from the high school I graduated from because the school suddenly closed. What happened was that the church changed pastors (the original holy man wanted to do missionary work, and the new man was a missionary who wanted to hang around Southern California) and because the school was exceptionally tiny, the n00b was both pastor and school principal. However, the n00b had a wandering eye and he began having affairs with women in the church! The scandal played out Jimmy Swaggart-style with the n00b first reliquishing his pastoral duties, then demanding them back a fortnight later. The brazen ballsiness of this, coupled with his "West Point on steroids" style of running the school, broke the congregation and both church and school collapsed. BTW, his real name was Preston Bunnel; Google that and you will find an eyeful.

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  18. Actually it's "Bunnell"; there's a long, rambling thread about him at the Fighting Fundamental Forums, which is where I learned about how my alma matter vanished.

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  19. I am a fat lady with one (black) dog...but I brush my teeth and stuff.

    Atom Smasher is firmly of the opinion that we let too many people go to college because, as Froderick says, that's what we do in America -- everybody gets a chance (if they pony up the cash). The problem comes when their cash trumps their ability to fail -- "If I paid for a college degree, I should get one."

    Given the chance, I'd kick Thomas Friedman (The World Is Flat) in the teeth. BUT, he raises the excellent point that our educational institutions are not really preparing students to do the kinds of jobs that we 'want" them to have...ie, we're exporting that carpal-tunnel-inducing data-entry work and we don't educate our young-uns to do anything else.

    So we're stuck. What do we do?

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  20. Become Communists; only the academically gifted went to college in the USSR.

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  21. "I have 4 words for you: No Child Left Behind."

    A high school teacher of my acquaintance refeers to it as "No Teacher Left Standing".

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