I can't think of many things within the profession that don't cripple me with fear. So your query is not some fresh-as-a-baby concept upon which I'm stumbling for the first time.Instead, it's driven and pummeled me throughout my career, grad school to 10 years in.
But the thing that scares me the most, the thing that keeps me up at night in my cups rather than snoring beside Lady Len, is that I've wasted my entire life on a profession, a calling, and a career that isn't worth a drop of my energy or blood.
Is it too strong to say that I simply don't think college works?
The rest of the goon old days misery...
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For me, this was the ultimate RYS post. In my 3+ years running the page, it was the one that sort of brought the whole experience into focus.
How different (or the same) do you think CM is?
Incredible. I feel exactly the same way (about the UG teaching part of my career.) Pointless waste of time, for myself and 80% of the students in a typical class.
ReplyDeleteOops, I didn't answer the question. Over the year I've been here on CM, my recollection is that posts like this one have been rare. We see many posts decrying the usual kinds of snowflake or adminiflake misbehavior (or working conditions/employment outlook for non-TT or younger faculty), but rarely the sort of metaphysical despair ("the whole enterprise has come to be a sham, and we know it") behind this RYS post. I wonder why, since in my experience the situation is pretty much as described here. Honest collective outrage from us (gradually propagating outwards) might lead to meaningful change.
DeleteSuch a sad read. But you know what, those 2 students who "got it?", focus on your success with them. To hell with everyone else.
ReplyDeleteSadness is a state of mind. Len could be happy if he decided to be. He doesn't have to take it to heart. It's not as if his life depends on those 18 stupid students. Buck up, Len.
ReplyDeleteAbout the question:
ReplyDeleteWhen is the answer due? How many pages does it need to be? May we use Chicago style? How many points does this count toward our final grade? I'm expecting to turn it in late because I'll be on a cruise with my family, so is there going to be a late penalty? May I triple-space and use wide margins? Thanks in advance for your quick reply to these questions.
Why haven't you replied yet?
DeleteHello?
DeleteIf a proffie falls in the hallway, does anyone hear?
DeleteIf a proffie falls in the hallway, it's not clear whether anyone hears (because everyone is wearing earbuds), but it is, unfortunately, likely that a picture of the proffie in a humiliating position will show up on reddit.
DeleteI think Len gets at one of the most frustrating parts of teaching: we don't always see the results of our efforts. I'm always amazed by how much better I feel when, especially in the middle of a semester, but also more generally, I do something that has concrete, lasting results. That can be finishing a publication, but it can also be a household repair, or a gardening task, or even a service-type project for work or church. It just feels good to produce a finished product with which I'm reasonably satisfied.
ReplyDeleteOf course we see at least intermediate results from teaching, but we don't always recognize them as intermediate. It may well be that the student that we've told a dozen times that paragraphs really shouldn't go on for three pages is still handing in 3-page paragraphs by the end of the term, but that the next time (s)he hears it, from an other professor (or hir boss), it will click, and that our dozen repetitions played a role in that "click" moment.
One of the best teachers in my grad department (who of course didn't get tenure, but fortunately landed on his feet in a semi-administrative post that seems to suit him reasonably well, and still allows him to teach) used to talk about teaching as planting time bombs: you didn't always know when they would go off, and you wouldn't necessarily be around to see the results, but they would, in fact, go off. I've since realized that the metaphor is a bit unfortunate (this was before the present wars, and increased awareness of the devastating effects of landmines and cluster bombs on civilian populations), but the moral still holds: a student's education is an ongoing process, not easily bounded by individual semesters and courses, and the results will not always show up in time for us to see them firsthand.
Of course, even if we all comfort ourselves with this thought, we still have to try to explain the idea to assessment-obsessed administrators and politicians. Oh, well; at least it makes me feel a bit better.
As far as the question goes, I have to admit that I only discovered RYS at the very end, and have mostly caught up with it posthumously, so I don't have a real sense of how the experiences compare in real time. I do like the real-time interaction on CM.
DeleteI hope that Len either got a better gig in Proffieland or found a Zenjob, because misery for nothing is Hell on earth.
ReplyDeleteMay you all have a nice German Christmas; Our Christmas is in January.
I think CM is a lot more hopeful and optimistic. The comments help because we're able to work through the angst. The old RYS stuff I read is sort of in a vacuum. We usually don't see any followup. The angst. The ennui. And then more the next day.
ReplyDeleteDon't get me wrong. I thought the writing on RYS was unreal...very powerful. But we're getting more done here.
That's a good way to put it, I think. In between the venting, beating up on students/parents/deans/colleagues, wrangling with each other, insulting the RGM, etc., etc., useful advice is sometimes given, support is offered, tentative consensus among faculty in different positions, with different perspectives, etc., etc. is sometimes reached. It's useful. RYS was also useful, but in a more limited way.
DeleteI think CM is no different. But then, I think the college teaching experience has changed hardly at all since I got into it 15 years ago. This was right around the time "Generation X Goes to College" by Peter Sacks was published, and the stories it tells could have happened in my classroom last week.
ReplyDeleteThere is one difference, though. "Generation X Goes to College" and Henry Bauer's 1997 online essay, "The New Generations: Students Who Don't Study" (at http://www.bus.lsu.edu/accounting/faculty/lcrumbley/study.htm) both lament, "With the rarest exceptions, educational administrators and leading spokespeople have not acknowledged these circumstances." That's no longer true: educational administrators have been clucking about "student disengagement" in education for 5-10 years now, at least at my university. Naturally, and of course, they want US, the faculty, to do ever more about it. It's annoying to be increasingly held responsible for people who refuse utterly to take any responsibility whatsoever for themselves.
What keeps me going is that I get to be an astronomer, and also, those 2 of 20 students who do want to learn. "Generation X Goes to College" has a touching final chapter about a plea from one of them to "give those of us who want to learn a chance." And of course, I never forget that I was one of those students.