Coffee heat rising

Education in America

Your Taxpayer Dollars at…uhm… Work?

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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.

Moment of Fame Leads to Education Moment

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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.

Why?

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Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer. . .

William Shakespeare
Richard III, Act I, Scene 1.

Alone this afternoon I stood in the empty classroom amid the thoughtfully designed seating, sunshine flowing through the ceiling-high windows, and I wondered: Why do I hate teaching? Am I making a neurosis of this? Or is there some reason I should hate what I’m doing so passionately? And if so, do I exaggerate that reason?

It wasn’t always thus.

Although I will say I’ve disliked teaching freshman comp since the first day I set foot in a roomful of sullen nineteen-year-olds as unhappy then as their children are now at being forced to take a hoop-jump course, nevertheless after I went to work at the Great Desert University’s west campus, I enjoyed teaching.

But then, our typical student was quite a different creature. When I started at West, it was an upper-division and graduate-level campus. The average student was a 32-year-old woman.

Teaching was great for six or eight years. You could even go so far as to say I loved my  job. Working with adult students was a joy, and I never taught composition. I taught upper-division courses in workplace, technical, and scholarly writing and advanced courses in editing. Pay was comparable to that of tenure-track people with the same number of years on the job, but because the full-time job was nontenurable, I didn’t have to worry about publishing (not that it mattered: my book was already published; had they seen fit to  hire me on the tenure track, I would have achieved tenure quickly) and when it came to academic politics, I could keep my head below the line of fire. This was good. Very, very good.

But then morale on the campus began to sag. Tenured and tenure-track people felt the effect of President Michael Crow‘s hostility to the Westside campus, which he regarded as a red-headed stepchild. Things became so bad that our department fractured in two. During one memorable faculty meeting, our chair and the instigator of the palace revolt almost came to blows; the only thing that kept them from physically engaging was two rows of tables that had been pushed together to form a barricade between them.

As things political went from bad to worse, the Crow administration decided to convert West into a four-year campus, despite the fact that we didn’t have enough faculty to handle an influx of lower-division students and that the several two-year community colleges that fed our campus opposed it.

Suddenly, everyone had to teach freshmen, trained in rhet-comp or no.

Certainly the faculty who had no rhet-comp training were abhorred by the idea. And those of us who were trained in rhetoric and composition were equally disgusted: if we’d wanted to teach composition, we would have sought jobs in the junior colleges or gone after teaching certificates and taken (better paying!) jobs as high-school teachers. If most lower-division students intuit that freshman composition is a fraudulent waste of time, Research One faculty know it is.

At about this time, I started looking for another job. I applied for three openings with the community colleges, figuring if I had to teach composition, I might as well be paid decently for it (starting pay for me would have been about 15 or 20 grand more than I earned at GDU West). One job was made for me, and I had contacts there who were pushing for me; however, an internal political conflict over whether the candidate had to be a person of color led to the position being taken off the market. Another job was promising but they called and asked me to create an elaborate PowerPoint dog and pony show just as final grades for four sections were coming due; overwhelmed with work, I simply couldn’t get it done. I applied in the business world, coming close to landing a corporate training job for an outfit that later proved to be even more fraudulent than the freshman comp scheme.

As the psychological and political clouds filled the sky over the West campus, I came to dislike my job more and more. Like everyone else in the department, I went to campus to meet my classes and, if forced to it, for the occasional departmental meeting; otherwise office hours were “TBA” and I stayed away as much as possible.

Despair was setting in when an opportunity arose to build and direct an editorial office at the main campus. Here, too, I had spies, and this time they served me well.

This was one of the best jobs I’ve ever had. It was great.

Or…it was until, university-wide, steadily collapsing morale took its toll on the main campus, too. My main supporter retired early and fled the state. Her mentor and my office’s most powerful supporter fell ill with cancer and died. The administration’s ham-handed leadership and obsession with corporatizing the university devastated the faculty, shot tuition rates through the stratosphere, and set the stage for disaster.

Meanwhile, the economy was flying high. As I became increasingly dissatisfied with GDU as a place of employment, I conceived the idea that it wasn’t teaching I disliked: it was working. Period. With a phantasmagoric net worth of over a million dollars, I  considered simply quitting. When word got out that I was serious about walking, some issues that had to do with administration of my office were magically resolved from on high.

So I stayed, none too happily but nevertheless wisely, until the collapse of the Bush economy and a rabidly right-wing legislature openly hostile to education devastated the university. Funding dissolved and the administration was forced to can many hundreds of employees, among them me and all five of my staff.

As legislative madness targeted education and funding evaporated, the administration fired thousands, including me and all my staff. On the one hand, I really couldn’t afford to “retire” eight years ahead of schedule. But on the other, my joy at leaving was an ill-concealed secret. In a matter of months, I went from being financially comfortable to wondering whether I could afford to stay in my paid-off home, with no hope of ever seeing fiscal “comfort” again, as long as I live.

Do I really hate teaching? I wondered as I stared at the ten-feet-high and fifteen-feet-wide map of the world glued to the wall of the empty classroom. Maybe what I hate is working. Or, I thought, maybe I exaggerate this stuff with all the negative self-talk, which naturally is exacerbated by writing it into blog posts.

Maybe.

But maybe not. We have, for example, today, a bitch of a day crowning a string of days that made up a bitch. of. a. week.

No. I don’t think I’m aggravating myself into an irrational neurosis. It may very well be true that I hate working. But of all the kinds of work I’ve done in my life, academic and otherwise, I hate teaching freshman comp more than any of them. I hate putting up with this kind of garbage. And even though the chair was highly supportive when I described today’s Eng. 101 antic and said I figured the girl was laying groundwork to come back and beg me to let her turn in a paper two and a half weeks late; even though he urged me to refuse any such request, I hate dorking around with anything that is so stupid, so time-wasting, and so pointless.

I truly do hate teaching freshman composition on an adjunct basis, as I think anyone with a shred of self-respect and a particle of sanity would hate it.

And I’m so glad I’m not going to have to put up with it after December 13. Assuming I live that long.

Ever so much better to take up residence under the Seventh Avenue overpass.

Image: Portrait of Richard III of England, painted c. 1520, after a lost original, for the Paston family, now owned by the Society of Antiquaries, London. Public domain.

The Opportunity Cost of Adjunct Teaching

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I just sat down and figured out the opportunity cost of teaching two sections of freshman comp, based on the $60 hourly rate we now know businesses will pay me and my sidekick, a figure we believe to be somewhat below market.

Hang onto your hats, folks…

If I teach two sections of composition—just two!—instead of billing the same number of hours for editorial work, it costs me $11,059 per 16-week semester in lost income.

That’s right. The privilege of earning $4800 in pursuit of your children’s higher education actually impoverishes me by more than 11 grand. In one semester.

Here’s a conservative calculation showing that to be true. Bear in mind that it doesn’t include commute time to campus (that would be six hours a week this semester) or the unpaid time we are asked to donate to departmental meetings and faculty development workshops.

Translation: I spend 96 hours in the classroom during a typical semester with two face-to-face three-credit sessions. My graders billed me $1,311 for plowing through the spring semester’s composition papers; at $10/hour, that suggests it takes 131 hours to read and assess a semester’s worth of postadolescent writing. Course prep for those two sections took me four full days this fall. Assuming I only worked eight hours each of those days (a very modest assumption!), that comes to 32 hours of prep time and website management. Thus the total number of hours consumed by two sections over a 16-week semester is 259. I’m paid $4,800 for all that labor, which, when divided by the number of hours required, works out to $18.53 an hour.

Not great, but not so very bad (as long as you don’t figure in the required and expected freebies).

Except…if I spent that many hours working at my editorial rate of $60 per hour (which, as it develops, is a little low), I would earn $15,540 during those 16 weeks.

Subtract the amount I actually earn, $4,800, from the real value of my time, and you get the opportunity cost: $11,059.

That is more than I’d need to earn all year—in 52 weeks!—to get by without teaching any comp courses.

Reality check! Could I actually do that much editorial work in 16 weeks? Let’s see…

Sixteen hours and eleven minutes a week? Somehow I think I can struggle through it.

If you’ll recall, though, yesterday I figured The Copyeditor’s Desk would need to earn only about $6,000 for me to get by just fine in 2013. Fifteen thousand five hundred and forty bucks is 2.6 times what I absolutely have to earn to pay the bills. So let’s prorate those hours over, say, 50 weeks—give me a two-week vacation, why not? This scenario would have me billing all of five hours and 10 minutes a week to earn enough to live rather comfortably, what with Social Security and a tiny drawdown from savings. Or actually, no drawdown: because Social Security covers almost half my expenses, an income of $15,540 would mean I wouldn’t have to raid retirement savings to live.

Think of that.

 

Cost of Education: Another Country Heard From

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So I’m haranguing the 101s about the 102s’ having flubbed their first effort at framing a thesis for the extended definition essay, and in the middle of my rant I ask them if they know how much it costs to put 25 Arizonans through 13 years of K-12 schooling.

They of course don’t know, so it’s a SMARTPHONES OUT! moment: I reveal the $7,813 annual per-pupil spending our illustrious state commits these days and holler “multiply that by 13! Now multiply it by 25!” Forthwith, they come up with the $2.5 million figure that we have spent on the members of my English 102 section. And, for that matter, on their own section.

They’re shocked.

But one guy, a freshly returned Navy veteran, keeps calculating. Hand goes up.

“Just for comparison,” says he, “the cost of operating an aircraft carrier is $1,450,000 a day. Let’s see…my last deployment was for 10 months…{tap tap tap}…that’s $435,000,000 to send us to sea for ten months.”

We all look at each other. Silence descends over the assembled company.

Me: “uhhhh…. So, we’re spending, what…? About a zillion times as much to send our young men and women to war as we’re spending to educate them?”

Vet: “Looks like it.”

{sigh}

 

 

Holy Cripes!

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You have got to read this post about what devolved from my English 102 class yesterday. It defies belief. Holy cripes, indeed.

I’m back in that place where I keep asking myself, why am I doing this? Surely I could work as a greeter at Walmart and earn as much with less aggravation. And be paid for all the time I put in on the job.

Actually, things are looking up in the Department of Making Myself Miserable. So far this week the editorial business has earned $440, and I expect to rack up another few hundred bucks today. And the new client just sent another document for us to edit. We have three clients in-house just now; taken together they’re cranking steady work for us. If we could keep this pace going all the time, 50 weeks a year, enough cash would come in to allow me to chuck the teaching gig. Or, if I chose to continue making myself miserable, to allow me to live a normal middle-class life again.

In the Department of Already Miserable, the unending bellyache bizarrely ended. Bizarrely and abruptly.

A few days ago I woke up and realized I felt better. Didn’t think much of it, though, because there have been a couple of days when the thing hasn’t been too bad, but the following day it would come back with a vengeance. But then the next day I felt more or less OK. And then the next day! This morning I feel downright normal, for the first time in over two months.

So it looks looks like this thing is passing. Thank God!

And Gaviscon.

Yes. I discovered an over-the-counter nostrum that actually works on gastric reflux.

Rifling through the hypochondriac’s treasure chest that is the Internet, I came across one of those message boards for people whose illnesses have driven them neurotic, and on it several people remarked that the only thing that had helped them was an antacid called Gaviscon.

As it develops, in addition to the usual antacids that potions like Mylanta contain, this snake oil includes an industrial chemical called algin or alginic acid. Among its many properties, algin foams up on contact with liquids. Its foam floats on the top of the liquid. The geniuses who concocted the stuff thought that if they could incorporate an antacid with the foam, it would come up against the base of the flaccid and irritated esophagus, where it would create a protective barrier. And y’know what? It works!

Gaviscon itself is expensive—ten bucks for a bottle of icky-tasting lozenges. However, Walgreen’s has a generic knock-off that sells for six bucks. The queasiness began to subside the minute I chewed up a couple of the things in the car outside the store. It took about a day and a half of swallowing the stuff after every meal and before bed-time, but shortly it took effect.

I’ve stopped losing weight, because finally I can eat something other than disgusting yogurt. Matter of fact, this morning I seem to have gained a pound.

This excellent development, however, was not a free pass out of the Department of Misery. Ohhh no…not a chance!

Three days ago, my back went out. Excruciating! This is the first morning I’ve been able to sit in a chair, and it ain’t very comfortable. At the outset I thought I was going to have to farm out the dog, because I couldn’t bend down to put food and water on the floor for her. Since my son resisted and since La Maya recently adopted a dog that deeply dislikes the Corgi, it looked like I would have to board her. How to get her to a boarding kennel was unclear, since I couldn’t drive the car—take her in a cab, I guess.

SDXB, who suffers chronic sciatica because of a couple of herniated disks, suggested laying flat on my back in bed for the better part of a day. To that, I added a heating pad. After several hours, I was at least able to stand upright and limp into the kitchen. Today it still hurts mightily, but here I am in front of the computer.

The last time this happened, I knew what brought it on: picked up a writhing 40-pound German shepherd puppy to carry her away from the rush-hour traffic into which she was trying to lunge. This time, I didn’t do anything: it just started. My father had disabling muscle spasms in his back, which he kindly bequeathed to me. Like his, mine are usually in the shoulders and upper back. They rarely happen in the lower back, but when they do, they are crippling. So it may have just happened out of the blue.

Or it may be the result of the limp the plantar fascitis has induced.

Cripes. I’m falling apart like the Minister’s One-Hoss Shay.