Thank you, Mr. Stewart!
Education in America
Where Education Goes, There Goes America
Down the tubes, that’s where it’s going. Education, I mean. Especially higher education. And by extension, all that we know as America the Beautiful is in the toilet, too.
Mercifully I don’t have to teach in the lower grades, where administrators and taxpayers feel teachers should work for poor pay in worse working conditions and are reviled for daring to organize. Instead, along with legions of my colleagues, I get to teach the products of those conditions.
Here’s what’s on the wind at the Great Desert University: At a recent college meeting, faculty were informed that the university plans to eliminate as many faculty associates as possible.
“Faculty associates” are grossly underpaid part-timers, desperate enough to take contract work with no benefits and, given the de facto workload, at less than minimum wages. When I was teaching at GDU in a full-time adjunct position with a modest salary and benefits, I taught eight sections a year. For what my salary and benefits cost the university, GDU could have hired FAs to teach eighteen sections, and still had $945 left over. Most adjuncts teach the required lower-division scutwork courses, especially freshman composition, a hugely work-intensive writing course.
So, a large portion of the FAs are to go, but some will remain. Those who do remain will be required to teach a hundred and fifty students. That’s 75 students per writing course, since GDU limits part-timers to two sections per semester. A full-time adjunct, who teaches four-and-four, would be teaching three hundred students each semester in writing-intensive L-1 courses.
By way of pretending to accomplish this impossible task, the university will recruit undergraduate students to work as “peer reviewers.” These kids, whose job will be to “review” but not to grade papers, will be trained by the director of composition. In other words, they will not be true teaching assistants, but just one more responsibility for the adjunct to have to deal with.
One full-time adjunct on the West campus has already announced she’s walking, unemployment being a far more attractive option than slave labor of this magnitude. She told friends the work was crushing her…and that was before this announcement came down.
Such a short-sighted and merciless scheme came about because the state’s extreme right-wing legislature, while it’s busily engaged in passing laws that engender one costly lawsuit after another, in suing the federal government over health-care reform, and in fulminating that President Obama should prove (to their satisfaction) that he was born in the U.S., is killing the beast by cutting education funds to virtually nil. State funding for the community colleges was cut 85 percent this year, and you can be sure they’ll do something similar next year.
Students come into my classes from the public high schools better prepared (maybe) than they were a dozen years ago, but only by dint of ridiculous standardized tests that put them into ticky-tacky boxes so they all come out looking just the same. They can recite a few facts and they can organize a standardized three-paragraph or five-paragraph essay. But they still can’t formulate a logical sequence of thoughts on their own, they still can’t discern a reliable fact from raw baloney, and they have become artists at gaming the system.
This semester I decided that instead of knocking myself out riding herd on two or three dozen learning exercises and quizzes, I would take a leaf out of the University of Phoenix’s book: don’t grade the things. The UofP, according to a friend who teaches there, inflicts the same kinds of quizzoids and exercises on its lower-division comp/communication students that I do, with the same purpose: to focus attention on the high points of reading and lecture material. But instead of motivating students to do these exercises by paying them in the currency of the classroom (grades), the UofP tells them that the exercises are there for the students’ benefit. If you want a decent grade in the course, students are advised, you’ll do the exercises. If you don’t do them, you run the risk of getting lower scores on the assignments that are graded. And then: the only graded assignments are the actual, required writings.
For the English 102 sections, this cuts my workload from 23 graded assignments to nine. I’m still scoring drafts and peer reviews, since we’re required to teach writing as a “recursive process.” Drafting and peer reviewing is part and parcel of this theory of composition pedagogy. If that were not the case, making the students responsible for their own learning process would cut my workload to three graded assignments.
Okay, so this semester we’re seeing exactly how the new strategy works. Over the weekend I reviewed their responses to an exercise asking them to apply some new knowledge (i.e., stuff they should’ve learned in the fourth grade but didn’t) to some specific examples.
The exercise went online in one of Blackboard’s pseudo-blogs, which allow students to post material in a format that appears on the instructor’s end as long toilet-paper pages containing everyone’s work. The program eliminates the endlessly time-consuming task of downloading, opening, and re-uploading file after file after file. They can see each other’s work in the “blogs”; BB just changed providers for this program, and I can’t find any way to block students from viewing other students’ posts (as the previous program would do). I’m told it would do this, but apparently it won’t do it retroactively in “blogs” that were created before the program was {snark!} “updated.”
Of 50 students, 27 posted responses. And get this: a bunch of them cheated!
No joke. They copied each others’ work and posted it, for an assignment that bore NO CREDIT.
How do I know?
They copied and pasted the same typos. As in “the car cab goes from zero to 60….” They meant can, not cab. Or at least, the person who first wrote it meant that.
And how did they do on the fourth-grade work with which they were presented? Well, they had 20 questions. One of these snared 17 wrong answers from students (out of 27 respondents!). One had 13 wrong answers, and two had 12. These figures aren’t surprising, considering that they’re copying and pasting each others’ errors. What is surprising is that as they’re copying and pasting, they don’t spot typos and obvious bêtises. The only thing you can conclude is that a significant number of them aren’t even looking at what they’re pasting.
Cheating at solitaire…
Well, my friends. Those of you who work in HR, who run businesses, or who expect to do so in the future will soon have these fine young job applicants at your doorstep.
And that is why the future of America looks dimmer and dimmer.
Did you know that only 37 percent of white Americans have bachelor’s degrees? Those who do are getting them on the strength of this kind of work. By short-changing our schools, colleges, and universities, we’re short-changing ourselves and short-changing our country.
We are, in a word, screwed.
Life in Academe, 2011
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LOL! Mammas, don’t let your babies grow up to be academics.
How to Procrastinate, Dawdle, and Waste Time While Reading Student Papers
Now, don’t get me wrong. I love students. And I’m thrilled to meet the 52 new and returning freshpersons in this semester’s composition courses. But let’s be frank: reading student papers is something that causes one’s attention to wander. Easily.
It’s the brain’s self-preservation strategy: focus on this stuff nonstop and your synapses clog. You fall on the floor beneath your desk, unconscious. Inexorably, the attention wanders, the Internet beckons, the fingers wish to occupy themselves with, ohhh…knitting or paper-doll construction.
Blackboard, that all-but-ubiquitous collegiate course management system, is one of the great time-wasters of all creation. Feeling bored with reading student writing? Turn to Blackboard. There’s nothing like watching a page load for five minutes to instruct you on what boredom really means.
BB’s endlessly meddling administrators took it upon themselves to install new “blog” software (the function doesn’t really mount blogs, but it apes them in an oblique way). Was anything wrong with the old “blog” function? No. They just wanted to add a little bloatware, complicate our lives, waste a bit more of our time. Mission, we might add, accomplished.
After having strained every gut to get my spring courses built and online by the end of fall semester, what do I find when I reopen my BB courses by way of revving up for the first day of class? Yes. They’ve disabled all my blogs, which form a central part of each of my three courses. To get them back online, I have to sit through an endless “synchronizing” process…for each and every separate single individual goddamn redundant blog! Over and over!
Okay. Did that a week ago.
Get online today and find…what? Every blog I open goes through the same endless (“This may take a few minutes”) process…AND once the execrable things finally do load, there’s no way for users to create the entries they need to build for their assignments. So, send an inquiry to the admin who has been assigned to struggle with this program for us.
Go back to reading student papers.
Brain boggles. Cruise the local Play-Nooz sites, killing time by clicking thumbs-up or thumbs-down on the commentary. Gratified to see that Gabrielle Giffords is improving beyond what anyone could imagine.
Re-engage Blackboard on the blogging battlefield. Finally force it to bring up a “New Entry” button. Write new instructions for how to use the blog function; post these on all three course sites. Over and over and over again…
Read e-mail. Review the 46 college & district messages MacMail has already relegated to the trash; find that MacMail is right about all of them.
Learn from BB admin that now you have to instruct students to “save” and THEN “save and submit” to post a BB blog entry. Rewrite and repost instructions. Over and over and over again.
Begin reviewing intro papers and entering attendance and participation scores. By way of speeding the interminable grading process, I’ve learned to make a hard-copy notecard for each student, listing all the assignments with places to enter their scores. This is much easier and faster when you’re plowing through a random set of papers than trying to plod up and down BB’s endlessly reloading pages (which take you back up to the top of the grade sheet, over and over and over again…never stop saying you’re bored…). Once you’ve finished reading all the papers, all you’ve got to do is alphabetize the cards (easy to do when you’ve also numbered them) and then enter the scores quickly from top to bottom.
Problem: This entails handwriting 12 assignment titles 52 times; that would mean writing the same 23 mind-numbing words 624 brain-deadening times.
But wait! I recall I have a ream of heavy card stock, liberated from the Great Desert University when I abandoned ship. If I can recreate a set of 3 x 5 cards with a table, I can enter the semester’s assignments once and then just copy them to create a page of identical cells, which can then be printed out 26 times. It means I’ll have to cut these things apart with scissors, but somehow that seems less onerous than writing 23 mind-numbing words 624 brain-deadening times.
A lot like cutting out paper dolls.
Persuading Word to build a table with cells that measure exactly 3 inches by 5 inches without dorking things up is not as easy as it seems. Mind-numbing.
Enter in Google the following search string:
I hate Blackboard.
Dozens and dozens of sites come up. I quit scanning them after five pages of hits.
Enter in Google the following search string:
I love Blackboard.
Three sites come up, one of them titled “I love Blackboard—NOT.” One reports the results of a poll asking people whether they love or hate Blackboard; 7 percent report they love it, implying that 93 percent hate it. The third emanates from a site called blackboard.com.
Take scissors and cut out 52 notecards word-processed onto heavy stock. Fill in names and scores. Alphabetize and number cards. Enter students’ scores in Blackboard. Discover that in each spreadsheet, the endlessly redundant, space-and-time-consuming unwanted columns I marked as “hidden” have all come “UNhidden.” Click “hide” again. Over and over and over again (never stop saying you’re bored…). Hit “enter” to submit a grade and what happens? All the hidden columns get UNhidden. Again.
Other first-rate procrastination strategies: Google “evil Blackboard,” “useless Blackboard,” “frustrating Blackboard,” “annoying Blackboard,” “fu¢king Blackboard” (fill in the obvious character there), “farking Blackboard,” “godawful Blackboard,” “demonic Blackboard,” “accursed Blackboard,” and so on.
At last, you finish your work. A two-hour job has only taken you about five hours.
You have now killed a substantial part of the day. It is unclear whether you have wasted more time trying to do your job with an impossibly clumsy tool or whether you have wasted more time trying to distract yourself from the tedium of trying to do your job with an impossibly clumsy tool. Whatever. It’s time to get up, feed the dog, fix dinner, and go to choir practice.
One dares not reproduce this fine graphic, for fear of lawsuits from its creator or, more likely, from the megacorporation that promulgates Blackboard. But it expresses one’s sentiments nicely, after a day of educational time-wasting:
Admirable. If you teach college courses, if you go to college, don’t miss it.
School’s Out!
Hurrah! Finally finished grading papers last night! The papers are read and semester grades are online, and after about two more days needed to wrestle three new sections into Blackboard, I won’t have to think about school for a whole month! Mirabilis!
Like most things that are any fun, teaching is poorly paid. But it sure is a hoot! I love students, even when they’re up to no good. This semester the 101s were full of mischief. We had not one but two hilarious ringleaders, one a young woman whose mouth absolutely refused to stay shut no matter how hard she tried to keep it under control, and the other a boisterous young man whose lifelong job title, clearly, will be “Life of the Party.” In these circumstances, I don’t bother trying to suppress them; instead I play along with them and use their energy to drive one teaching moment after another. Though this requires more work, it’s entertaining. Makes for a very noisy classroom, but my theory is that when they’re too quiet they’re asleep.
The online magazine-writing course went reasonably well. A great deal more boring to teach, alas—but at least it doesn’t require any driving. Or any shushing of bouncing blondes! Quite a few students dropped, but those who survived did pretty well. Some of them were actually writing at a publishable or near-publishable level by the end of the term. My co-conspirator taught a hybrid version of the same course in first eight weeks of the semester, and she reports that a lot of her students dropped, too. She made them write five articles, which is quite a few for such a short course. I inflicted only two on mine, but made them do market research, write queries, and jump through one prewriting hoop after another. If we’d had sixteen weeks, I probably would have made them write four feature-length articles and a brite. But eight weeks is, IMHO, too little time for a nonprofessional writer to get a running head start on more than two or three 800- to 1,500-word pieces with queries, interviews, and other research, plus exams on the reading material.
Now it’s time to go sing. Hallelujah, brothers and sisters!
😀
Image: Interior of the Francis M. Drexel School, from John Trevor Custis, The Public Schools of Philadelphia. Public Domain. Says the contributor who posted this
on Wikipedia:
The interior of the Francis M. Drexel School in Philadelphia from the Custis book, published in 1897, p. 435 (original numbering) – out of copyright. Available at Google Books. I’ve downloaded a jpg format (rather than pdf format) taken from http://www.thedrexelschool.com/ sub page “History from 1888” (clearly the same photo from the same source). Notice the gaslights in the classrooms and the moveable classroom walls that have been folded up and stored.
Back to the Future…
{sigh} We have seen the future, and it is…the Dark Ages. The Party of No has wrested control of the U.S. House of Representatives from the Party of the Half-Baked. No hope for relief from the metastasizing mean-mindedness and outright viciousness that have invaded our body politic is to be found, anywhere.
Here in Arizona, voters have approved a measure that exempts citizens and businesses from the national healthcare plan. The comically moronic Governor Jan Brewer (she of “uhhhhhh………..tee hee!……..uhhhhhmmmmmm”) was re-elected, of course, and the craven pol who presided as superintendent of public instruction while Arizona’s school system sank to the bottom of the national rankings is now, God help us, the state attorney general.
Now I’ll have to say, I wasn’t pleased with Obama’s healthcare plan. Without a national option, it’s just another iteration of what we already had: it threw us into the lion’s den with a pride of hungry insurance companies. We needed an option to make something like Medicare available to everyone who wished to accept it. Medicare is expensive — even after the state’s insurers raised their rates, my employee plan cost an eighth of what I’m paying to be fully covered under Medicare. However, for what I’m paying, coverage is better. If I fall ill and have to go doctors frequently, my overall costs will be much lower. Requiring everyone to sign up for full coverage with private insurers while blocking insurers from shafting people who really need care simply guaranteed that everybody’s costs would go up, coverage would be no better than what we have, and the well-heeled insurance industry would be joined by every other well-heeled industry in mounting a no-holds-barred campaign against the Obama administration.
Accepting compromise on healthcare was stupid. If the Democrats couldn’t swing a national healthcare option, then they should have dropped their plan until they could.
As for the Afghanistan mess: We were in Afghanistan long before Obama came along. Matter of fact, it seems to me we entered the war in the Middle East because a certain pack of lies emanated from a previous administration. Afghanistan was where the perp was hiding, but instead of going after him, we took it upon ourselves to depose a dictator who was formerly our ally, not because he was much of a threat but because, said our then-President, “This is the guy who tried to kill my dad.”
So…now we have in office some folks who think it’s acceptable to stomp on the head of a woman who disagrees with their doctrine.
Time to get out our brown shirts and iron them. And if you still believe you’re in the middle class, say good-bye to all that.