Education in America

One of the full-time faculty at Heavenly Gardens having fallen ill, the chair called to ask if I would substitute in her course on world mythology. There’s some possibility that she may have to sit out the semester, in which I case I would end up teaching the rest of the course.

Well, sure…long as it’s not freshman comp! This will pay for the Thos. Moser chair I bought in hopes of easing the excruciating back pain.

So yesterday morning I showed up out there. Some 25 people are registered. This is the fourth week. The students have missed a week and a half of class, during which several papers were due, none of which have been collected. A 1,000-word paper is due in the next two weeks, and it has yet to be explained to the students — nor is there any clue in the syllabus as to what it should address. The students turned in a pile of papers, which I need to read by tomorrow morning! And of course I have choir tonight and a meeting at the crack of dawn tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I have to read the textbook, catch up with what the stoonts have been reading, and then try to get ahead of them.

And as I’m reading the damn thing’s introduction, what do I find but a lengthy passage positing, with a straight face, that ancient Greek societies were matriarchies until 2400 B.C., when their way of life was supposedly extirpated by invading tribes. The entire two-page section, wholly undocumented with not so much as an allusion in the narrative to some proof of this assertion, suggests that Greek mythology reflects a traditional pre-Bronze Age matriarchal arrangement.

Holy sh!t.

I go to look this up and discover that by 2007, the idea had been discredited. So I’ll have to spend half a class period referring them to Cynthia Eller’s Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory and explaining how this particular crackpot hypothesis came about.

Wow. A textbook whose introduction promulgates a defunct and patently false second-wave feminist theory is not exactly designed to promote confidence among the students.

This could be a challenge…

The ailing faculty member’s syllabus is quite good, by the way: elaborately structured to train students in good study skills, which sadly lack among our constituency. It led me to think about how different mine would be, if I had been asked in advance to teach the course: a difference engendered by the difference between full-time and adjunct hiring practices.

Welp, I’ve now been sitting here for almost two hours. I’ve written a lecture and this post, with the result that my back and hip hurt so much I can barely walk. Given the amount of work pounding down at me, it’s unlikely I’ll be back here for the next couple of days.

So…enjoy life! 😉

Wow! The entire maga-writing course is updated and online in Canvas, and it only took about five hours! Started a little before lunchtime and was done by 4:30.

By about 3:00 my teeth were grinding, but then I reminded myself that most of the hang-ups were user error, not software issues (as they tended to be with Blackboard).

The most egregious error, which surprisingly was not caught by the department’s hawk-eyed Syllabus Nazi, sprouted from a moment of true stupidity: I failed to change the dates in the calendar that we’re required to install near the end of the 18-page production. So, in the middle of uploading stuff and juggling data around online, I had to drop everything and rewrite that section of the syllabus, matching the due dates against a hard-copy calendar. That was annoyingly time-consuming, and all my fault.

Otherwise the actual conversion from spring to fall semester went pretty smoothly. Canvas imported the assignments and announcements smoothly from the spring semester into the fall course shell. The online course calendar, which the program automatically compiles from the assignments’ due dates, got a little dorked up — but that may have been my doing, because I shifted a few entries that were not assignments around and in doing so probably confused things. That took some time to undo…after the time required to figure out how to undo it.

A lot of stuff from the spring syllabus had to be deleted or rewritten, now that it’s clear there’s no need to have students send their assignments to my e-mail address. Canvas seems to be pretty reliable, unlike Blackboard, so I’m hoping that it does as well this fall, when the whole district goes cold turkey, as it did in beta last spring with just a few of us using it.

But just in case, I’m keeping my DIY course management system up in WordPress. That necessitated a bunch of up-dating and out-throwing there, too. Pretty easy, but still…somethin’ else to have to do.

In the past, it’s taken almost two weeks to update courses in Blackboard, and that’s two weeks of eight- to twelve-hour days. So I sure can’t complain about four or five hours to update content and design for not one but two websites.

Things might have gone even faster if I’d had more than five hours of sleep last night. Up at 3:30. Then off at 6:45 to the weekly Thursday morning shindig. Crawled back in the sack after I got home but couldn’t close the eyes, so after an hour or two just gave up. Have you ever noticed how when you’re really tired you miss stuff…and it seems to take forever to fix the things you discover you screwed up? Argh!

So anyway, that was four or five hours of unpaid time.

Then as I’m about to check out of Canvas, what should I notice but lo! They have me “enrolled” as a student in not one, not two, but THREE of those stupid hoop-jump tutorials they require all their employees to stumble through: one on FERPA (the federal privacy act), one on something called “Consumer Information,” and another on “Employee Access.”

What an ineffable waste of time. You can’t just go and click on the obvious answers to the brainless questions. To get to the questions, you have to plod through each stupid little pitch and then read a long-winded “case” about which the brainless question is asked.

It’s now quarter to seven — it’s taken me at least an hour, maybe more, to get through these three chunks of bureaucratic bullshit. Another unpaid hour of labor.

Did you know that if you have a 14-year-old who’s bright enough to be in college (as many are represented to be — around here, some high-school AP programs simply foist the kid onto a community college to take a course, thereby earning both college and AP credit), and you think the kid is going off the track and, to confirm or deconfirm his progress, you’d like to see his grades, you can’t. Nevermind that he’s a minor. The fact that he’s in an institution of higher education nullifies your rights as a parent.

Jesus Aitch Keerist.

 

Oh, for heaven’s sake. Did you see PBS Newshour’s report on this astonishing proposal?

Okay, admittedly I read it very fast and maybe I’m missing something. But it looks like we’re talking about a gigantic welfare system that will give pretend jobs to the vast number of Americans who find themselves in an underclass that exists because jobs for the illiterate, the disadvantaged, and those who suffer from less innocent shortcomings have gone away and are not coming back. We imagine that the experience gained in this vocational welfare scheme will magically make participants more attractive to real-world employers.

The junior-college students who come shuffling into my classrooms — about 80 percent of whom are not there because they’re smart enough to have figured out how to keep their university loan burden down by taking core courses at low-rent institutions — those folks are on the high end of the body of Americans who can’t get jobs. This country has a huge underclass of people who simply are not qualified, for a variety of reasons, to get hired. Meet the best of this group, the ones who show up in my JC classes, and you’ll have an idea why.

Look. One in four Army applicants fails the entrance exams! And, my friends, that ain’t the half of it. Three in four are rejected because of physical unfitness, a criminal record, failure to graduate from high school, and the widespread chronic use of drugs like Ritalin for diagnosed ADHD.

Do you understand what that means? Typical word questions on the Army aptitude test look like this:

Function most nearly means:

(A) calculate
(B) exist
(C) operate

 It was a sturdy table.

(A) well-built
(B) ugly
(C) thick

That’s pretty hard. How about arithmetic, an even scarier subect?

If 1/3 of a 12-foot board is sawed off, how much is left?

(A) 4 feet
(B) 3 feet
(C) 8 feet
(D) 6 feet

At a cost of $1.25 per gallon, 15 gallons of gas will cost:

(A) $20.00
(B) $18.75
(C) $12.50
(D) $19.25

Hm. Pretty tough. Maybe we’ll do better on the science section, ’cause we read a lot of sci-fi comics… Okay, we don’t exactly read them, but we love to look at the pictures!

The earth completes one trip around the sun approximately every:

(A) 7 days
(B) 365 days
(C) 30 days
(D) 30 weeks

The ovaries produce:

(A) androgen
(B) estrogen
(C) adrenaline
(D) growth hormone

Would you trust your kids to a day-care center staffed by people who couldn’t answer questions like these? How about hiring a guy who can’t answer one of those math questions to run a table saw at your shop or heavy equipment at your construction site?

I have students — a lot of them — who could not pass a general science exam that contained ten questions like those you see here. And they’re the ones who probably could qualify for Army recruitment: most of them have finished high school, and, although they’re not good at readin’, writin’, and ’rithmetic, most of them can parse out the instructions on a bottle of aspirin. More or less.

That 75 percent of military applicants who are rejected are folks on the lower end, academically and socioeconomically, of student bodies in schools that ranked 14th out of 34 in reading among Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, 17th in science, and 25th in mathematics.

 Indulge me while I repeat what I posted at the Newshour site:

When you neglect education for everyone and you also cultivate a large and growing underclass, what you can expect is what we have right now. Providing fake jobs for people who are unqualified for real paying work of any kind is not going to solve the problem.

{Pardon me for yelling, but I don’t think anyone is listening.}

What’s needed is a national education corps, with a competent leadership and a staff of teachers, master craftsmen, and trainers who know how (to the extent it’s possible) to meet the needs of this unemployed and unemployable group; and then to engage that corps a massive education campaign for low-SES youth and adults to build literacy, job skills, physical fitness, and social values among those who presently don’t qualify for employment.

An education system that could do those things would look like…what?

• It would de-emphasize social work and re-emphasize the teaching of reading and fundamental math in the lower grades.

• It would de-emphasize political correctness and re-emphasize social and moral values, possibly even hiring clergy in an effort to engage children, youth, and lost adults in concepts of basic decency (you remember: the Ten Commandments and all that?)

• It would engage master craftsmen in the training of future workers for the trades, beginning at the middle-school level (anyone remember shop class?).

• It would provide at least an hour a day of physical activity of the sort that appeals to and runs energy off of boys and young men; and, in addition to that hour, it would provide several 15- to 20-minute recess periods throughout the school day; and it would include an hour-long lunch break. Students at all grade levels would attend school no less than seven hours a day, five days a week. Adults undergoing vocational training would attend eight to ten hours a day.

• It would include apprenticeships and internships in a wide variety of occupations.

• It would include frequent, random drug testing and intensive therapy for those found to be using.

• It would provide birth control for girls; education explaining how and why to use birth control; and frank indoctrination in a value system that discourages early pregnancy, trains girls to recognize desirable and undesirable characteristics in boys and men, and urges girls to build job skills and spend some time using them before spawning babies.

• It would provide day care for parents in vocational training programs, and transportation for school-age children to and from their grade schools to the day care.

• It would include a system to redeem and expunge a record of lesser criminal offenses in exchange for demonstrated mastery of specific literacy standards and job skills.

• It would provide safe housing to shelter families living in violence-prone slums, with the requirement that residents abide by specific, strict guidelines of maintenance and behavior — sort of like an HOA. 😉

• It would require university students to complete two years of vocational training before launching into their major course of undergraduate study.

Once we had a nominally educated potential workforce, we’d have to provide decently paying jobs for these workers. And yeah: those could be government and military jobs, if the private market couldn’t absorb that many low-end workers.

But let’s not put the cart before the horse.

So yesterday morning I went down to the studios of KFNX-Radio to record a 12-minute blurb about The Copyeditor’s Desk, a freebie perq for members of the North Scottsdale Chamber of Commerce. It was kinda fun…and interesting. The host of this program is none other than the Chamber’s executive director, Joe Galli, who, it develops, is a veteran broadcaster.

Don’t know if it’ll bring us more work—Joe seemed to think it will, but then, that’s his business and it pays to be optimistic about one’s business. If you’re interested, it airs at 11:00 a.m. Mountain Standard Time (which is the same as 11:00 Pacific Daylight Time) on Saturday, November 10. It looks like you can pick up a live stream on the “Daily Lineup” page. The logic of KFNX’s web site is a little hard to follow, but from what I can tell, it looks like the Chamber Business Hour is accessible online only as a live stream, not as asynchronous downloads.

Anyway, after our conversation was recorded, Joe pulled off his earphones and said, “You know, this touches on a big concern in my business. Every time I hire new employees, they can’t write! Their grammar, their spelling…they can’t even put together a whole sentence that makes sense. I need people to help me, but what I’m finding is I can’t trust anybody to do the job and do it right. I end up having to go back and rewrite everything they do—and if I had time for that, I’d do the job myself in the first place.”

Unfortunately, there wasn’t time to discuss this much before he had to record the next session; about all I could say was “I can’t teach in 16 weeks what people haven’t learned in 13 years of K-12 education.”

The problem is, in the absence of any formal training in grammar and style during the lower grades and with virtually no consistent, across-the-disciplines practice at writing, they come into my classes ignorant as posts and they go out almost as ignorant. When you have nothing to build on, you can’t add much to the edifice.

Instead of learning their subject matter and spending class time teaching their subjects, educators get swept up in amazingly stupid stuff, faddish psycho-social theories that distract from teaching content in favor of the teacher-as-social-worker model. In America, we’ve subscribed to theory after theory after theory, and the result is that kids arrive in college thinking that Wisconsin is a Rocky Mountain state, World War I happened in the 19th century and was the only event of note during that century, and that all essays must contain either three paragraphs or five paragraphs. Many of my students cannot work with fractions. When asked how to figure out how much a tax of 9.13% would cost them if they bought $12 worth of laundry detergent, they have no clue. Social work may keep students in the lower grades from tearing each other apart, but it sure isn’t helping them to learn anything even remotely academic.

While this may look like an educator’s problem, Joe’s anguish over the state of his employees demonstrates the real issue:

The state of K-12 and higher education in this country is a problem for business and it’s a problem for our national security. Businesses cannot function when their white-collar workers arrive on the job unprepared to do white-collar work. The nation cannot function if its businesses cannot function. It’s as simple as that.

If the U.S. is falling behind as the hegemonic leader of the world—and that hegemony, IMHO, is not uniformly a bad thing—it is because over the past two generations our educational system has been sinking into the slough of despond. We try to educate everyone so they’ll fit into the same round holes, but not every child is suited to absorb that education, and not every child’s time should be spent in that effort. We need to provide reliable employment for kids who are better fitted for jobs that require skill at working with one’s hands and one’s common sense—here, in America, not in Indonesia or India!—and honor those jobs, both with respect and with decent pay. At the same time we need to make space and provide high-quality content for the kids whose cast of mind suits them for sitting in front of a computer screen all day. Then we need to get rid of all the psycho-socio-babble theories and teach the real stuff.

Elitist? Sure…unless we bring back manual jobs and bring back good pay for those jobs. It may cost business more to pay American workers a living wage. But the cost of offshoring the work that two-thirds of our population is best suited to do is far higher: one day the cost is likely to be the loss of America as a First-World economy.

Image: 1942 photograph of carpenter at work on Douglas Dam, Tennessee (TVA). Alfred T. Palmer. This image is available from the United States Library of Congress‘s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID fsac.1a35241.  Public domain.