I woke up with the feeling - once again - that I've thrown away another decade at a career that I ultimately don't know if I believe in.
My students are so careless with the idea of their own education, and the standards have fallen so far at my college, that I just feel like a factory worker sorting very unreliable widgets out of a long conveyor belt of widgets that might work and might not.
We keep graduating them, but I don't have confidence that what they get here is worth much. The need to get them through seems to have trumped everything else.
I would like to call my own faculty meeting, and say - first of all, let's sing Happy Birthday to Me! - "What on earth are we doing, people? Johnny can't read. Johnny can't write. Johnny can't do anything but get graded on the curve. And, whoops, Johnny just got his cap and gown. We did it. We didn't treat Johnny right. He begged us for chances and we gave in. He couldn't make the midterm because he 'had' to go to the Bahamas, and we let him take a final via email instead. He missed too much class, and slept through the rest, was more interested in porking coeds and beer ponging away the night, and we let him because he's our customer, and we didn't want to disappoint him into giving us a bad evaluation. Johnny's a moron, and we're to blame."
But instead I'm probably going to eat my birthday cupcake for breakfast, and go and face the blank horde that awaits me at my 8 am class. Johnny's in there. I mean, there's a whole mess of Johnnys waiting.
I was watching NPT yesterday and on the McLaughlin Group, they were fussing about higher education and how students aren't coming away with any better reasoning and critical thinking skills than they had to begin with, partly because of all the "silly, useless" courses they're having to take for the first two years.
ReplyDeleteThere was a lot of yelling at the screen, but my conclusion was: why is nobody blaming the students? They'll blame faculty easily enough, some of them even blamed administration, but nobody suggested that maybe the students just aren't trying or caring.
Awww, happy birthday Hiram. We love ya.
ReplyDeleteHappy birthday, Hiram.
ReplyDeleteAnd Snarky, you said it, sister. Nobody blames them for the fact that they don't read, don't care, don't engage, don't want to work.
If I pushed my students to do as much as I did as an undergrad then 75% would flunk---and I was a C student my first 2 years of college! (although I was pretty good at beer pong)
DeleteIt's in Business, Social Sciences & Education that they aren't coming away with any better critical thinking (etc) skills than they started with. If they go into STEM or Humanities their education does them fine. But nobody thinks Humanities is worth anything.
ReplyDeletere: giving in: I think the basic question is, are they learning anything? I don't care if they skip the midterm; that's not learning, that's just evaluation. I don't care if they email me the final provided there was someone I trusted at the other end to invigilate it for me. I'm sorry we have to evaluate things at all. That wasn't the point, and it doesn't affect how much they learn.
Letting a badly written paper get by, however, THAT affects how much they learn. I am happy to cut lots of slack on the circumstances in which evaluation is conducted, but I will cut none on the evaluation itself, or on how much I expect them to read and how much work I expect them to do.
That's very flattering, but if you saw the engineering students in my physics class, your heart would be filled with dread, the way mine is. They are dangerously innumerate, as well as being so unimaginative they think that if I didn't show them a specific example of how to do something, they don't have to know it. As I wrote on one's homework, "if you think that, you're going to be an engineer who can't innovate, and overseas your job will go." (Yes, I have tenure.) These people can't explain the thermodynamics of an engine, nor can they replace a spark plug in one, nor can they design a car that one fits into that is pleasing to the eye or is efficient or fun to drive. Grrr!
DeleteOh, and heaven forbid any of them think to work on an electric car.
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DeleteAnd they can't write manuals that are in any way helpful, because they're too apathetic and too dumb to understand English literature, as some biz-skool knuckle-dragger we know proudly announces to the world!
DeleteHappy Birthday Hiram. Don't let the bastards wear you down.
ReplyDeleteHappy birthday, Hiram.
ReplyDeleteOh, and Johnny is in my class, too. Damn him!
Happy Birthday, such that it is, Hiram.
ReplyDelete"...Porking coeds..." You're such a romantic, Hiram.
Johnny's a moron, and Johnny's to blame. What happens to Johnny would be quite impossible without Johnny's full complicity and enthusiastic participation. It still is quite possible for Johnny to get a fine education in college, if Johnny were even the slightest bit interested.
Whatever else happens, we need to keep providing the opportunities to learn for the few who still do. They still are out there.
Hiram, don't give up. Hold the line. If you have tenure, there's no excuse for you to give into the Johnnies of the world. Make them work. Force them. That's the only way to feel like what you're doing has any meaning. If you give in, that's when your job means nothing.
ReplyDeleteHiram, your name makes for interesting alliteration with the Happy Birthday song. Thanks for caring enough to keep coming back for another decade! And Johnny is a multiplying moron!
ReplyDeleteHappy Birthday!
ReplyDeleteMy favorite CM character joke was when you said you were going to make a new avatar. And you changed the background to blue. I almost pissed my pants the next time you posted. My husband wanted to know what was so funny. It doesn't really translate unless you were there. But to put my comment in thinking point form:
Happy Birthday.
Fuck Johnny.
Quit or don't quit, but don't quit making me laugh.
PS I don't know if those are thinking points. I started reading some trendy article on thinking points and I'm a 37 year old female grumpy old man, so it struck me as trendy and dumb and I didn't bother to finish it.