What do you call a room of them? A Dullartorium?
That's where I teach.
What happens in high school? Is it such a mind-numbing process that the students come out as if they'd been whacked by wet salmon for a year? My students look dazed, confused, and not even in a good way.
I teach media, TV, internet, stuff that they normally like. They can't be bothered. Some assignments involve watching a current TV show and writing a review. "I couldn't find FX channel. I don't think the school has it." "I was going to watch Hoarders, but then I realized I didn't have a laptop to write my report."
How tough are times if modern students can't even be expected to watch TV for homework.
And when I'm really rolling in class, doing my little dance, bringing the information, they all just sit there like wet bags of shit.
What has happened in the past 10 years? It has not always been like this.
I also teach these popular media fields, and I have a theory that these subjects attract a certain percentage of passive students. They like these mediums for all the wrong reasons. They have no concept of their meaning or history. They are so immersed in passively watching that they are attracted to these classes like a moth to light.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that they have not yet realised that these are classes, academic subjects, and they are supposed to think.
(Yes, mass comm and film and television are worth of academic study. )
It hasn't been the past ten years; it's been the past forty. Ever since proffies started handing out C-minuses like candy so their flakes wouldn't get drafted and sent to 'Nam.
ReplyDeletePretty soon, the C-minus wasn't good enough any more; if C-minus is the new F, then students will "flunk out" with a C-minus average. So now it was B-minuses.
And now, when the typical grade is "A," students -- who are perfectly smart, just not necessarily interested -- understand that they don't have to do anything. They disconnect because connecting is more work, and it's not in their short-term interest to connect.
By the way, I have sources:
DeleteStuart Rojstaczer & Christopher Healy, Teachers College Record, Volume 114 Number 7, 2012
"It is likely that at many selective and highly selective schools, undergraduate GPAs are now so saturated at the high end that they have little use as a motivator of students and as an evaluation tool for graduate and professional schools and employers."
Wow! An A as a typical grade given seems quite inflated. At all 3 institutions that I've worked at (here in Canuckistan), there has always been an unwritten C+ average "rule." I've taught and continue to teach in the humanities and social sciences.
DeleteAnd even if such a rule didn't exist, my class averages would tend to fall in line with this logic. I've only had two or three classes that had better results - a B- average. I still enforce the belief that only stellar work is rewarded with an A. Ever.
Likewise, ChrryBlstr.
DeleteOfficially, the average class grade in my department is B+.
DeleteAt least your students have laptops; I'm marking a whole raft of exams where students refer to their "labtops." (It's not a science class.)
ReplyDelete"The problem is that they have not yet realised that these are classes, academic subjects, and they are supposed to think." This. So many of these students enroll in these classes (I've also taught them) and then protest that we're asking them to analyze the materials, raising the fear that we're "killing the beauty" or something. (As an old friend used to say, "Does anyone go into a Biology course and insist they should be allowed to just appreciate the 'beauty' of the frog?")
And don't you DARE criticize their precious Disney movies!
DeleteOh holy mother of crime! The whining and moaning. Some of them just shut down like emotional cripples. And I am not even talking about deep criticism here!
They had a conniption when I played a clip from Pocahontas in my Native Americans in Lit/Film course. "It's just entertainment!" Yes, and "What Makes the Red Man Red" in Peter Pan isn't racist at all. Nope.
DeleteJeez.
A few years ago, I was a TA for a Hamsters class called Hamsters in Film. It was the token easy/fun course for the otherwise rigorous Hamsters Department, and it was one-credit pass/fail.
ReplyDeleteWe showed 13 films, one a week for 13 weeks. We showed them in the evening. About 300 students enrolled in the class. To pass, you just needed to ATTEND 10 films. That's all. No quizzes, no assessment. Just attend. And these were mostly popular, mainstream films, too.
And yet: In addition to the numerous students who failed or dropped, we had DOUBLE-DIGIT numbers of cheaters who sent in a friend to watch that tenth film that they just didn't feel like seeing. And I'm not even sure we caught them all.
Dullard. Dolt. Dim bulb. Dumb-dumb. Dumbass. Dickhead. Dickface. Dipshit. Dildobrain. The list goes on and on.
ReplyDeleteWhat happened in the last ten years? That was No Child Left Behind. The curriculum was narrowed to taking standardized tests, at the exclusion of all else. These tests were on reading, writing, and math. They failed horribly to engender understanding in even in those subjects.
This is why even one of my best physics grad students never heard of the War of 1812. This is also why most students have to have explained to them why Earth has day and night. The only thing they know about science is the fear of it they get very effectively instilled in them by their K-12 teachers; they know no history at all. Few of them have ever been taught to write in cursive, so now you know one reason why so few of them take notes: they can't.
As with many large social changes, this wasn't all of it. There was also demographics: in the mid-to-late '80s, the end of the Baby Boom and the beginning of Gen X caused a downturn in the number of students attending college. This gave rise to the idea among university administrators of "students-as-customers," the evils of which college teachers have grappled with ever since. The ground was made fallow for this by three other developments, all from the '60s: (1) the advent of anonymous evaluations of teachers by students and their enthusiastic adoption by university administration, particularly of the numerical scores they generate; (2) the rise of grade inflation, a by-product of deferments from the draft for college attendance during the Vietnam conflict; (3) the abandonment of in loco parentis by nearly all American universities, which meant that students could run amok and faculty have no right to say anything about it. A parallel development in American society, which started around 1970 but became really noticeable in the '80s when "Baby on Board" stickers became common on cars, was the rise of "self esteem" in education, a symptom of which are rewards for participation: every kid gets a trophy, not just the winners.
At the same time, American society itself has become crass, rude, and extremely dumbed down. During Project Apollo, kids admired astronauts who were smart, but that was a wee while ago. TV used to cater to middlebrow tastes, since TV sets used to be expensive, but with low-cost electronics, there is no limit to how low it can go. Ever see the Jerry Springer show?
A parallel development, starting in the '80s and continuing, especially since the financial crisis of the past few years, has been the growth of contingent university teaching positions as replacements of what were once tenured positions. This makes teachers vulnerable to "students-as-customers," particularly when armed with anonymous evaluations of teaching. You can see them arguing about this on the other thread.
My heart is filled with dread. Remember the scene in Monty Python, where a criminal admits to a crime but says, "...but society is to blame," and the reply from the police is "Right, we'll be charging them too"? If trends in American education follow trends in American society, good luck fixing them.