Why do the criticisms of these pieces [Stommel's] want to use the supremacy in the educational system. And why imagine all the students are in fact (from what I can read in these commentator's critiques) white, probably upper-middle class (b/c clearly no one wants to talk about students working 20+ hours a week to pay for going to school), cishetero, male, and able-bodied. Are they really imagining that academic classroom across the country (when we know the faculty and HE admin. demographics are WHITE and MALE) somehow "safe" spaces for anyone with any kind of intersectional identity in relation to race,class, gender, ability, sexuality, etc.
The Rest.
Oh Lord. Not this argument again. I'd tell Stommel and Kim to call me and give me lectures on teaching once they've had to call the cops on one of their students because said student got physical with them over a grade. Or when one of them decides to smoke a cigarette in class. Or when a student tries to use class time for hooking up while I'm lecturing. Tell me where intersectionality fits in with downright criminal behavior in class? Oh, right! The fault is mine because I'm LECTURING and not engaging them well enough! I think I deserve the right to vent.
ReplyDeleteThis person does not understand how to use Twitter, and needed to edit their polemic a little more carefully. These flaws make it difficult to assess the merits of the arguments advanced...
ReplyDeleteHey, I have an idea! Let's invite Jesse Stommel and Dorothy Kim to write for CM! It'll be fun!
ReplyDeleteWhen I started teaching as an overly idealistic and eager-to-please Accursed Visiting Assistant Professor (hi, Walter!), I had similar attitudes. I got over them. It quickly became obvious that I had too much else to do aside from run around with a pooper scooper after my students, particularly when doing that did so little discernible good.
It's close to my bedtime, and I'm not sure I followed all of that (it's a pretty good demonstration that twitter isn't good for everything -- perhaps a link to a longer piece posted somewhere more adapted to medium-form writing, e.g. a blog, would have been more effective? And no, I'm not genre-policing, just thinking like the composition professor I am). But here's my off-the-top-of-my-head reaction:
ReplyDeleteThe students Kim describes sound very much like my own students, and I worry -- a lot -- about all the barriers to education she names, and do what I can to reduce them (e.g. trying to reduce my use of expensive textbooks), and to help them catch up with skills they need, but don't have, when that's reasonable within the bounds of my course and my own teaching load. I also don't impose significant grade deductions for minor technical errors (that's bad practice, according to current comp theory), and I try to assign group work that can be substantially completed in class, and/or provide tools that allow students to complete it virtually (a useful 21st-century skill).
But I'm not going to assign a grade the student didn't earn just to help him/her stay in school, nor am I going to abandon the principle that taking a college class requires significant out-of-class work, and that a student who can't manage that work should cut down on his/her class load (and yes, I wish financial aid were more available to part-time students). Neither of those practices would be fair to the student, who risks ending up with a diploma, but an incomplete education. That would be wrong, and quite possibly exploitation of the student -- for tuition dollars, for good graduation-rate numbers, or even for a good feeling on the part of the "compassionate," "helpful" professor who helps hir students "succeed" (yes, emotional over-investment in a shallow definition of student success = a form of exploitation). The worst example of this practice, of course, is the issuing of diplomas to athletes who lack high-school or even elementary-level academic skills, but allowing anyone to graduate without the skills the diploma supposedly certifies is not fair to the graduate, who's going to run into trouble somewhere down the road, and feel baffled and quite possibly betrayed because the college education for which (s)he worked so hard isn't serving hir very well. We all know that it's bad to end up with student loans and no diploma; I'm not sure it's much better to end up with loans and a diploma, but not all of the skills the diploma supposedly certifies, and some of Kim's thinking strikes me as coming perilously close to overlooking the possibility of such outcomes.
Finally, I'm going to keep complaining about student behaviors that bother me, if only because sometimes the complaints elicit just the sort of information that Kim has provided here (and that yes, that some professors probably do need to learn more about). In fact, sometimes I wonder whether I shouldn't complain more, and more directly, to my students. It took me several years of wondering why some of today's students think that it is okay to schedule work during class hours before I learned (from NPR) about how retail and restaurant workers are scheduled these days, and put two and two together. I can't help wondering whether, if I'd pushed back a bit more against those excuses, or even snarked about them in front of other students and/or colleagues, I might have gotten more information sooner. Sometimes you have to say "this sounds wrong to me" to get a fuller explanation, and perhaps arrive at a solution (though I have yet to arrive at one -- at least one under my control -- for the work-scheduling issue, though I think some of the laws currently under consideration would help).
AMEN, CC.
DeleteYou are my commenting HEROINE! (heroin? hermione?)
What garbage. Of all the times the RGM features Twitter on this blog, it has to be this?
ReplyDeleteWhich mod was it that got a lot of shit from THIS COMMUNITY for posting blacked out and insane Twitter comments? No student names. No institutions. Just them admitting to cheating over and over and wishing their "fag" professors dead and so on.
ReplyDeleteI remember people I really LIKE on this blog writing in saying that they weren't comfortable with their blog posting these anonymous tweets that were already public. So, if the current RGM is a little shy on Tweeting, I'd say that's why.
I do read Ben's page sometimes and he does an excellent job finding them. Does he get a lot of complaints?
In case it wasn't clear, I was completely joking about the RGM posting something from Twitter. He was the RGM who tried Twitter hear and was abused for it. I don't know how much Twitter would add to the CM blog.
DeleteI don't get any complaints on Twitter because the only people who read my tweets are those who choose to sign up to receive them.
Okay, that was a waste of time.
ReplyDeleteOnly Norm McDonald does 60-tweets-in-a-row well.