Coffee heat rising

Education in America

The Problem with Working in the Cloud…

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…is that you need a functioning Stratoliner.

The plane, not the bike. Though a bike would be fun…

Last night I was determined to get through the most difficult of the magazine-writing students’ papers. By this time in a semester, you know who is going to turn in a tangle that will take you a good hour to crawl through. Two of those were sitting on the server, plus two others that will probably be OK. And yea verily, the first one I downloaded filled a half-hour of some mindless drivel on CBS that I turned on to provide background noise to keep me awake, and then it filled all of History Detectives. At 10:00 p.m. when I went to enter the grade, Google Docs would not respond.

Neither would anything else. I was offline. Couldn’t download the second difficult paper, and that left me unable to finish the work I’d laid out to do last night.

{sigh} So, this morning, with whatever was ailing Cox resolved, I still have three more papers to read, one of them something that will take forever to critique.

Honest to god, this is not the way I want to start the day. It’s six o’clock in the morning and I just can’t bring myself to read the thing closely. I have until 7:45, when Charley shows up, to get through this stuff in anything like a more or less uninterrupted way—after that, life is a kaleidoscope.

In that hour and 45 minutes, though, Cassie has to be fed and I need to get something to eat, since I hate being rushed and buffeted around during breakfast even more than I hate having to read student copy before dawn cracks. And the pool needs to be tended to. Again. That’s about 45 minutes or an hour of work.

Today is Wednesday from Hell, so these papers have to be read before 10:30 a.m. Either that, or I pick up the stuff around 9:30 and read until 11:00 p.m. Again. Assuming Cox stays up that late.

We finally landed a contract (well, in theory: I’ll believe it when I see it) from our would-be client in D.C. Pay is not great: to earn our target of $60 an hour, we’ll have to read 20 pages an hour. Speaking of needing a Stratoliner…

Anyway, we’re told this will happen in December. That’s good. Though I desperately need a break (is there a way of expressing how tired I am???), I’ve been sitting here wondering how on earth I’m going to get through December with no income. Eight months of pay is now no longer enough for me to live on.

If I don’t get a job soon or we don’t get credible, steady work through the editorial service, I don’t know what I’m going to do.

Well, it’s not getting any earlier. So I’d better start reading this damn thing.

 

What if we didn’t have to pay school taxes?

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We live, as it seems, in a country that’s seen its best days. The number of Americans dwelling in poverty has hit its highest rate in the 52 years since we began keeping track of it, employment continues to drop, and with incompetent leadership on both sides of the aisle there’s no end in sight to the economic slide into which we’ve fallen. Intellectually as well as economically, we’re being outstripped by what in our lifetimes were Third-World nations.

Voices among our present and would-be leadership want to respond to this state of affairs by cutting government and further cutting taxes (as we continue to wage expensive warfare in the Middle East on the pretext of fighting terror and spreading democracy, but really to keep a grip on the world’s supply of fossil fuels). Among the most obvious victims of this plan are our children, whose teachers are being canned left and right and whose schoolrooms are overcrowded and undersupplied. In my state a Proposition 13 will go on the ballot next year; given this year’s startling jump in property taxes, it’s a foregone conclusion voters will usher it right in, further gutting schools, libraries, and other public services.

This, of course, will shift the burden for educating future generations to parents. Those who are affluent will put their kids in increasingly pricey private schools. Those who can’t will be asked to buy supplies and books and eventually to pay for the maintenance and operation of the public schools out of their own pockets. Those who can’t afford it will take their kids out of school altogether. And those who think it can’t happen here delude themselves.

Consider what it costs for the individual users of a school system to support it. In China, whose children easily outstrip ours in math and science and where all schoolchildren are taught a foreign language, the cost of education consumes nearly a third of a family’s income. That’s if your kids are in kindergarten and you make a relatively decent living in a city. Rural residents, whose income is significantly lower than their citified cousins’, pay an even larger proportion of family income to keep the kids in the lower grades.

College there is simply out of reach for most people, especially for rural folks. Tuition is 5,000 yuan a year, well past the realm of reason on an income of 3,200 yuan.

America has managed to maintain its global position largely as the result of its universal free education. In our past we were lucky enough to have leaders who recognized that our children are our future. The way we’ve supported that engine of prosperity, once capable of graduating seniors who knew where Wisconsin is located and who understood what the word “urbanization” means, has been through taxation: everyone who benefits from the system, however indirectly, chips into it.

Imagine how many Americans at the poverty line—$22,350 a year for a family of four; $14,700 for a single mom with one child—would keep their kids in school if they had to pay the per-capita cost. In 1992 that was $7,764 a year. You can be sure it’s more than that today.

Could you afford to spend $8,000 a year to send your kids through grade school and high school? How much would you have left for the average public university tuition, books, and room and board: $16,153 a year?

Image: Matthew Trump, One-room Schoolhouse in Jefferson, Colorado. GNU Free Documentation License.

How’s about we do some actual teaching in the schools?

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{sigh} I see New Jersey has mandated another social work program in its schools. We’re told that, in a law containing eighteen pages of detailed orders, the state’s legislators have instructed its public schools that they must put children through classes on how to “tell” rather than “tattle” (uh huh…), have instituted a system through which any child can call the police and claim any other child has been bullying someone, and required that special antibullying staff be put in place.

And therein lies our problem. Teachers are not teachers anymore. They’re social workers.

Last week a young woman, evidently middle-class or even affluent, clearly neither disadvantaged nor stupid, came up to me after class. Diffidently, she begged to ask a question. Then she opened the syllabus, pointed to a word in it, and said, “I’ve looked this up in several places and tried the best I can to figure it out. But I still don’t understand what this word means.”

The word was urbanization.

Think of that.

A graduate of fourteen years of schooling, preschool through twelfth grade, does not know what urban means and cannot extrapolate from that word what might be meant by urbanization.

That’s right: another victim of Arizona’s bottom-ranking school system. But, I would suggest, not just of my state’s ridiculously underfunded and underqualitied schools, but of a nationwide conversion of our public schools from institutions of learning to institutions of social work. Teachers are being asked to do everything but teach their subjects, and then when the kids don’t learn subject matter, it must be all the teachers’ fault.

Now, I’m not trying to say that schools shouldn’t be trying to get a grip on bullying and violence. They certainly should. I was the victim of constant harassment and bullying between the second grade and the sixth grade, when my  parents finally left Arabia and came home to the States. It caused me to hate school so intensely that to this day I cannot bear to walk into a grade-school classroom—the characteristic odor of a lower-grade classroom makes my skin crawl.

That notwithstanding, pressure to conform is part of the socialization of young primates, including humans. To survive, social creatures have to learn the pecking order and obey it. Those who are “different” get beat up until they either die or give up and go with the flow. Obviously, that’s a cruel way to teach the lesson that you have to go along to get along; but for some of us it’s the only way.

This is why we have adults: to temper the cruelty. Instead of micromanaging school programs and classrooms, the legislators would have done better to give school administrators, teachers, and the larger society the tools to handle the prevailing brutality. These tools once were part of their repertoire but are no longer options:

• Allow school administrators to expel disruptive students, without having to jump through hoops to do so and without having to bend over backwards to make exceptions for students’ socioeconomic status or any other status.
• Fail students who are not performing.
• Reinstate strict dress codes.
• Teach academics in school, not social skills.
• Require, in all states, that teachers have degrees in their subject matter, not in education.
• Allow teachers to teach their subject matter, rather than forcing them to teach, lockstep, to standardized tests.
• Provide vocational training programs for students whose skills lie in nonacademic areas.
• Create jobs for people who do not have high school diplomas—bring back the gas station attendant, if need be, and revive our  manufacturing industries so people who aren’t suited for higher education can get decently paying jobs.

But of course, this would require the leadership of our country to create jobs. Real jobs. Blue-collar jobs. And pay something more than Third-World wages.

Oh well.

Another Shafting for Adjuncts, Comin’ Our Way

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We’re told, through a listserv published for community college district adjuncts, that the policy for adjunct faculty is to be rabidly enforced. We are NOT TO BE TEACHING more than three sections a semester.

Interestingly, that appears to include summer sessions. That is, your summer session time is counted in to your academic-year teaching hours, somehow, through the magic of accounting sleight-of-hand. You get a few extra hours beyond 20 per week per semester, but that would allow you to take on only one course in the summer. If you teach any more than that (this summer, I have two), you will be forced into the state pension plan, in which there is no chance you will ever become vested (you have to work for the State of Arizona or Maricopa County for 10 years to become vested!).

Your “contribution” to the state pension plan is 11.13%. In other words, if you dare to take on one course too many, if you perform any substitute teaching, or if you serve on any committees, you get an 11.3% pay cut. Thus your unpenalizable salary is kept rigidly low, and you are smartly punished if you make a mistake.

Now… Each time a contract ends—which happens at the end of each term—you are considered “terminated” from state service. Therefore, you can fill out forms and jump through hoops and demand that the “contribution” be refunded to you.

Thus it’s not exactly a pay cut.

It’s less of a pay cut if you’re over 57½, because once you’ve reached the age at which you’re permitted to take drawdowns from tax-deferred savings, you may take out the money without a penalty from the feds.

If you’re too young to take out money from a tax-deferred plan, then the only way to hang on to what you’ve earned is to roll it over into an IRA.

Well, of course…you wouldn’t be working for $2,400 a semester if you didn’t need the cash flow, and need it in a big way. So what this amounts to is a nice little shafting and another tool to keep adjuncts down.

Since I can get the money back at the end of each semester, it won’t much matter to me. As long as my chair can get away with it, I’ll take on two summer courses and just let the SOBs confiscate 11.13% of my pay; then take it back when I’m “terminated” at the end of each semester. For me, it will just mean another helping of bureaucratic hassle.

It still will provide enough to pay my share of the mortgage on the downtown house, plus a few extra dollars to help make ends meet. I sure could do without having to fill out more forms and argue with more bureaucrats, though. Gawd, how I hate that!

The Wages of Weak Education

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Lordie! Have you seen Free Money Finance’s gasp of astonishment at the latest revelation of Americans’ stunning ignorance of things financial?

Really, it’s just a hint: three surprisingly simple questions that require one to think logically, in a very vague way, about interest, inflation, and investing. Only 30 percent of 1,488 adults could answer all three “duh!” questions correctly, and less than half could answer the two that addressed interest and inflation. Amazingly, only half could say whether ’tis better to have all your financial eggs in one basket or to diversify a bit.

FMF concludes, as do a large number of his commenters, that the nation needs “a big dose of financial education.”

Probably so.

Some of FMF’s readers think the 70 percent of survey respondents were “stupid,” no “smarter than a fifth-grader,” and “the ‘greater fools’ that allow bubbles to happen.”

Now that, I doubt. The community college students I teach are exactly the sorts who would get these answers wrong: people whose K-12 training left something to be desired, or folks for whom academics weren’t a top priority until they realized they need a degree to get a decently paying job. They may not be well educated, but neither are they stupid. Many are very smart, indeed.

This very morning I spoke with a young man and one just verging on middle age, as we stood in the hall waiting for our classroom to clear out. The subject of debt, savings, and the cost of living came up. As they spoke, it became clear that neither man could even conceive of ever earning enough to have something to put aside for the future. The reason that’s so is not that they’re stupid or “greater fools,” but that they’re undereducated.

When almost half of some 1,500 adults can’t tell that $100 invested at 2 percent a year would amount to more than $102 after five years, the problem is that they can’t do the most basic arithmetic. It means something like half of Americans don’t understand decimal fractions or simple multiplication.

There’s stupidity at work, all right. But it’s not among the current generations. The stupidity is on the part of leadership that hasn’t been competent to build and maintain a decent public school system. This is a direct cause of the naïveté that led American consumers to be gulled into buying suspect and downright bogus financial instruments, the very instruments that led to the late crash and the present endless recession. And frankly, if what’s going on in my state is any indication, I don’t see an end of stupidity in sight.

I Hate Blackboard

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Lenten thanks, Day 3

I think God for the glorious experience of the All Saints choir and the generosity of its director in allowing me to join and sing along with it. The spectacular voices of the chamber choir, the privilege of being near its extraordinarily talented  members, the fellowship of good friends, and the wonder of learning about music and voice are beyond description.

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If anyone ever asks you to teach an online course using Blackboard’s course management software, RUN! Run away as fast as you can!!! If your chair or dean informs you that your courses will be converted via Blackboard to online or hybrid format, willy-nilly, by way of getting with the current money-grasping trend in higher education, fill out the application for that job at Walmart.

Do not do, my friends, what I have done
In the House of the Sinking Sun…

Whatever you try to do in Blackboard, Blackboard will scotch you, block you, screw you, deconstruct you, make you look like a raving fool. Whom the Blackboard gods would destroy, they first make mad.

Last night I worked yet again to midnight, undoing the latest devastation Blackboard’s peculiarities have inflicted on my online course. Yesterday morning it was up and back to work at 4:00 a.m.; this morning I slept to 6:00 because I doped myself with not one but two Benadryl after I stumbled away from the computer along about 12:15 a.m.

Running up to this course, I spent hours and hours and…nay, not hours: days, yea, days and days and days morphing into weeks preparing illustrated online lectures in a function Blackboard calls “Voice Presentation.” At the end of all that work, what I ended up with was not optimal—far from it!—but at least it was sort of OK. It wasn’t the digitally recorded PowerPoint presentations I’d made—Blackboard won’t hold even a small PowerPoint, much less one with fifteen or twenty slides and a few spoken words explaining them, even though the user manual indicates it will. It apparently doesn’t have enough memory. WhatEVER.

After I’d made these elegant PowerPoint shows, at great expenditure of time and effort, and then learned they could not be uploaded, I had to extract each and every accursed JPEG; save every one of them separately to disk; upload them, one by interminable one, into Blackboard’s faux blog function; and then link the faux blog posts to Blackboard’s Voice Presentation. This took unimaginable numbers of hours, and it entailed my having to record, re-record, re-re-record, and re-re-re-record my 15-minute spiels ad nauseum.

I am so flicking sick of repeating those damn lecturoids I could throw up. But now I get to do them ALL. OVER. AGAIN.

Duplicating the fall course caused Blackboard to kill all the faux blog-to-Voice Presentation links, every bloody one of them. Actually, instead of bringing the links over to the copied faux blogs, it kept the links to the faux blogs from the fall semester’s Blackboard shell. Naturally, the spring students don’t have access to last fall’s course. So when they try to enter the Voice Presentation, they’re informed that they can’t access the course material.

This quirk, of course, was not visible to me at the time I copied over the new course; because I have admin access to all my old courses, the VP’s worked just fine for me. Not until the eve of the first project’s due date did I start getting frantic e-mails…I can’t get in! Blackboard’s Help Desk can’t figure out the problem. Blackboard’s Help Desk can’t help me. Blackboard’s Help Desk says you have to change all the links.

After some thrashing around, I finally figure out—almost by accident—what is causing the problem. I go into the Voice Presentation to try to move the links (about a dozen of them…) to the faux blogs that were copied into the current semester’s BB course. But…oh yes, BUT…in the transition, Blackboard has disappeared that function! Nowhere can I find an option to set the URL. It is GONE.

For Christ’s sake.

Undaunted, I dream up a workaround: Record the lecturoid on a Voice Board, which will give me 20 minutes of recording time. This requires me to pull up the blog with its images on my laptop and then explain the images into the desktop’s microphone while scrolling through them on the laptop.

Better yet (hang onto your hats, fellow eddycators), accessing the resulting pushmi-pullyu requires the students to open two browser tabs, sign into Blackboard in both tabs, run the Voice Board lecturoid in one tab, and, in the other tab, follow along in the blogoid, manually scrolling down the page.

Gaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!

Go ahead. YOU try to explain this process to members of a student body whose constituents believe France is our  mortal enemy, Wisconsin is a Rocky Mountain state, Catholics are not Christians, and the word episcopal is pronounced ep-is-COP-al.

Blackboard has two fundamental problems.

First, it’s bloatware. It’s chuckablock full of features that no one uses and that, after a little experience with Blackboard, no one in their right mind would even think of trying to use. This bloatware costs your school money while it occupies server space.

Second, it is hideously difficult to use because its functions are unlike those in any other program and because it is utterly unintuitive. In some cases, to do the same action in more than one part of the program requires you to engage a different set of commands. So, not only are these commands unlike anything you run into in, say, Microsoft or Apple programs, they’re unlike what you run into within the program itself. To learn to use the program takes a long time, a lot of effort and study. Schools that subscribe to it have to provide endless hours of seminars and workshops to train faculty in it, and then….

Yes. And THEN. When you finally have it almost mastered, Blackboard “upgrades” and changes the whole god da^^ned thing around!

Now you get to start all over again. Even experienced users have to start almost from zero and relearn it from the ground up. And what did you get with the so-called upgrade? More bells and whistles that you would never use even if you thought they wouldn’t screw you up. Which is to say more bloatware!

If I’d had any clue I would be wasting so many unpaid hours and subjected to such outrageous levels of frustration, I would never have agreed to put this course online. Yes, teaching online obviates your having to drive out to campus and stand in front of a section for three hours each week. But a full semester’s 48 hours of face time is as nothing compared to the uncountable number of hours I’ve wasted, and continue to waste, on Blackboard.