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Education in America

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.


Where Education Goes, There Goes America

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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.