Finished another set of student papers, highly entertaining. This bunch seems to have split sharply between those who got it right on and those who stumbled into a haze of mystification. It’s a function, I’m afraid, of online teaching. If a human being isn’t there, in person, nagging and repeating the nag day in and day out, some folks have a rough time keeping up—especially when the pace is pretty fast, as it is in these eight-week courses.
If I weren’t already in “pause” mode about online pedagogy, this would put me in it. I spent the whole damn summer trying to make this course work for anyone who might sign up. Even after I made them take a quiz on the syllabus, they still apparently haven’t read it, still don’t do the assigned readings, still don’t seem to know due dates.
Another serious issue is that some of them either can’t or won’t buy the book. Their student aid gets to them long after the semester begins, and as a result, they simply don’t have the money for textbooks. Our text is pretty cheap—available today at Amazon.com for around $10 new, less than $5 used. But I still had someone write to ask if they really had to buy the book.
Why do they think I’d require a textbook if I didn’t expect them to read it? And why are they in school if they don’t want to read?
There’s something creepy about how wedded they are to the Internet. They just don’t want to turn it off. Given an assignment that requires some research, they’ll do everything in their power to find enough to suffice online. If a resource doesn’t exist in digital form, they just won’t go to it. They’ll ignore it. Sometimes they’ll ignore it because they don’t know where to find it…and it doesn’t occur to them to look in a library. Or even a bookstore. But sometimes they appear to be convinced that something equivalent or better is to be found on the Web.
It’s kinda sad. As rivers of knowledge go, the Internet is wide and shallow. If it’s true we’re watching the death of the printed word, what’s coming to replace it doesn’t quite seem to be up to the job of preserving a culture and passing it to the next generations.
Well. Despite its barren moments, at least teaching is a living. This morning I figured out that if we can permanently keep the present “modified” terms of the mortgage on the downtown house, I can cover my share by teaching two and two, especially if a miracle happens and I get a tax refund this spring. Three and two will cover it generously, and three and three would give me plenty of money to live more or less comfortably. And to put some cash in savings toward such frolics as buying a new(er) car and being prepared to replaster the pool, when the time comes.
Image:
Partial map of the Internet based on the January 15, 2005 data found on opte.org. Each line is drawn between two nodes, representing two IP addresses. The length of the lines are indicative of the delay between those two nodes. This graph represents less than 30% of the Class C networks reachable by the data collection program in early 2005. Creative CommonsAttribution 2.5 Generic license.
The other day I took the opportunity to enter a comment, at a business blog, that alluded in passing to my favorite conspiracy theory; to wit: over the past two or three decades, we have been watching the deliberate erosion of the American middle class.
Don’t believe it? Well, skepticism is healthy.
But consider…
• If you can’t get access to affordable medical care (exorbitant insurance premiums do not qualify as “affordable”), you’re not in the middle class, certainly not by the standards of any other developed country.
• If your access to health-care services and to a health care provider of your choice is limited, you’re not in the middle class.
• If the quality of education in your local public schools is so poor that you have seriously entertained the possibility of homeschooling—not for religious reasons but because you’re concerned for your kids’ literacy, their safety, or both and you can’t afford private school—you’re not in the middle class.
• If you counsel your children to get a vocational diploma in college instead of a full education that will inform them of the history and significance of their culture because you’re afraid their bachelor’s degree will qualify them to stock the shelves at Borders, you and they are not in the middle class.
• If you’re not on track or ahead of schedule to accumulate enough savings to live on through your old age without benefit of Social Security, you are not in the middle class.
• If you’re driving a clunk because you can’t afford to buy a newer car now, you’re not in the middle class.
• If you buy your clothes at Goodwill less for the entertainment value than because you feel you shouldn’t spend the money on new clothing, you’re not in the middle class.
• If you were to lose your job tomorrow and you know the likelihood of replacing it with a job that pays about the same is low to nil, you’re barely clinging to the middle class.
• If jobs in your industry are increasingly being outsourced to Indonesia and waypoints, you won’t be in the middle class much longer.
• If you would rather use department-store cosmetics but you get your makeup at the drugstore because you cringe at paying department-store prices (though you happen to know there’s no real difference), you’re not in the middle class.
• If what you do for a living is a dying vocation (and there’s more!), you’re not long for the middle class.
• If you live in a big coastal city and you don’t earn a six-figure income, you’re not in the middle class.
• If you live anywhere else and earn less than $40,000 or $50,000 (depending on the region), you’re not in the middle class.
• If you are the breadwinner in your house and you earn what a typical teacher earns, you’re not in the middle class.
• If you and your spouse or partner depend on both your incomes to maintain a middle-class standard of living for your household, you as individuals are not in the middle class (check out the book from which this article was spun).
• If your spouse or partner earns enough to maintain your household in middle-class splendor while you earn pocket money, your companion is in the middle class and you’re not.
Still think you’re living in the middle class? Or even in Kansas, Toto?
It’s hard to deny that our country is polarizing economically as radically as it has polarized politically. I personally don’t think it’s an accident. We could argue over conspiracy theory and over the reasons and the fixes until we’re all carted off from the poorhouse and delivered to the nursing home. But there it is. IMHO it has little to do with technology and nothing to do with the recession. There’s been more to this than has met the eye…for quite a long time.
I see the volcanic Stanley Fish is rumbling over the dim fate of the humanities. He sees SUNY Albany’s dismantling of its French, Italian, classics, Russian, and theater programs as the beginning of the end.
It’s not news, of course. Foreign language departments across the land have been eviscerated or killed: at Drake and Louisiana State (which also terminated all of its English instructors), with a death warrant in the works at the University of Maine. Arizona State, my beloved former employer, eliminated the foreign language requirement for the bachelor’s degree years ago, and bumbling semiliteracy in a second language is no longer required for many graduate programs. In any event, ASU will accept American Sign Language to fill what few requirements remain.
And what do we expect? When everything but business and engineering is devalued and we convert education to an assembly line, what are the humanities other than a pothole in the road to voc-ed?
So it goes. Elite schools no doubt will continue to educate the elite, an exercise that involves furnishing the mind, not just inculcating skills. But as for true public education? Expect your tax dollars to support institutions modeled on proprietary schools, whose mission is to churn out lots and lots of worker bees, future technicians and paper-shufflers with bachelor’s degrees that give them no clue to what the world is about or how it got to be that way.
And if a kid in the middle or working classes has a hunger for insight, a mind for deep thinking, or a taste for art?
Having closed academic programs and laid off several thousand employees, shucked off almost all graduate student support, and inflicted six months’ of furloughing on faculty and staff, the powers that be in Arizona higher education have decided it’s time to “improve” the universities.
Their idea of improvement? Privatize entire colleges. Bloat enrollments still further. Eliminate small and politically unpopular programs. Expand online course offerings by a factor of nine. Graduate still more students who can barely spell their own names.
No joke.
Noting that, at 25.3 percent, Arizona’s ratio of college graduates among adults 25 and older compares dismally with the nationwide figure of 27.5 percent, the Board of Regents proposes to tie university funding to each institution’s number of bachelor’s degree graduates. The more ignoramuses you turn out, the greater your share of state funding!
Remember, we’re already graduating seniors who don’t know what a preposition is, who think Wisconsin is a Rocky Mountain state, and who believe that World War I happened in the 19th century. Not that these minor shortcomings should affect your ability to flip burgers and stock the shelves at Walmart…
Arizona State University, with almost 70,500 students, is a hectic, overcrowded zoo. Some young Arizonans choose to attend the community colleges as long as they can specifically because they perceive such an environment is counterproductive to real learning. ASU proposes to increase its brick-and-mortar enrollment by 15,000, create a three-year “college lite” program with a limited choice of majors and lower tuition, and to add 27,000 students to its online programs.
Think of that. We’re talking about 112,000 students plus an unknown number in the college lite program, all riding the conveyer belt through a single learning factory’s assembly line.
You know, there’s a reason Arizona’s graduation rate is so low. Actually, one can readily find two reasons.
First, the poverty rate in this state is sky-high. Overall, 24.2 percent of Arizona children lack access to enough safe and nutritious food to ensure an active, healthy life. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 21.2 percent of Arizonans live in poverty, compared to 14.3 percent nationwide. Poverty levels are even more extreme on the reservations: in Apache County, 29.8 percent of the population lives in “critical” poverty; in Graham County, the rate is 22.3 percent; in Navajo County, 23.7 percent. When you’re wondering where your next meal is coming from, matters like literacy and education don’t rate very high among your concerns.
And second, thanks to a long history of neglect, legislative short-sightedness, and underfunding, Arizona’s educational system ranks at the bottom in terms of quality, nationwide. Depending on how you look at it, our K-12 system is either 46th in the nation or 50th.
Now the Board of Regents proposes that our colleges and universities be funded according the number of ill-prepared kids they can push through four years of education lite: i.e., by the number of bogus bachelor’s degrees they can hand out.
They propose to privatize the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, one of the very few facets of our higher education system that has managed to achieve a decent reputation, 38th among the nation’s law schools. Its tuition is already $19,225 a year for in-state students and $32,619 a year for out-of state students, exclusive of an estimated $10,660 for room and board. This will cut off professional training in the law to even more of our impoverished citizens, as tuition will rise into the stratosphere. Phoenix already has a proprietary law school, proudly ensconced in its artificially gentrified downtown, and so the new owners will have to compete with an outfit that provides night-school and online law degrees. We’ve already seen the quality of education in proprietary schools; this strategy will bring that level of excellence to the Sandra Day O’Connor school.
Thirty thousand students will float through online programs (the university already has 3,000 people in online programs). I’ve been teaching courses online for a long time; after several years of online teaching at ASU, last summer the community college district certified me as an instructor of its online courses. Lemme tell you something: a good online course can’t hold a candle to a good face-to-face course.
Good learning requires good mentoring. It is based in discourse. That would mean conversation, observation, discussion, understanding. These things exist only in altered form in the online environment.
An online course is to learning as Facebook is to friendship.
Online courses are correspondence courses, barely adequate to the task of reading a textbook and taking a test on it. They do not suffice for studies that require lab experiences or field research, for learning that requires people to develop the ability to reason and argue on their feet, for thoughtful give-and-take.
Certain academic disciplines are, not surprisingly given the atavistic climate, politically toxic. Ethnic studies and women’s studies rank high among these. State Superintendent of Education Tom Horne, a crass pol of the demagogic kind, wrote a legislative bill that his fellow fruitcakes passed, banning ethnic studies classes in Arizona high schools because, said he, they promote the overthrow of the U.S. government.
I just know you think I’m kidding. Who would believe such a story if they were sober?
At any rate, the result of this performance—designed to pander to the widespread bigotry in the mob mentality here—ethnic and women’s studies faculty in the universities watched their programs run right down the drain. The sociology department at ASU, which had already been all but shut down (full of socialists, you understand…you can tell by the “socio” part, and because it’s housed in the school of “liberal” arts), has no place for these idled tenure-track and tenured faculty. So…quite a few junior and even senior faculty are wondering how much longer they’ll have jobs in the New American University.
You think I’m kidding about that socialist business, don’t you?
This morning a student sent over his latest paper, a response to an assignment in which I asked classmates to write a narrative describing their response to a tour of the campus library. This library, in addition to functioning as a busy learning center full of constant activity, houses a Southwestern art collection donated by an emeritus professor, and so there’s lots to see in there.
As he was charming me with his usual well-tuned authorial voice, he remarked in passing that although he had been attending the college off and on for the past three years, this was the first time he’d sent foot in the library.
Boink! Even dinosaurs have startle reflexes!
After an internal holy mackerel dialogue, I realized that even though the library is still the heart and brains of a college campus, there’s a reason my students seem to have set as their goal moving through two to four years of higher education without ever visiting a campus library: they can.
So much learning is available on-line, including full-text scholarly articles and books, that a good student quite reasonably can expect to get through most courses, writing creditable term papers and studying for challenging exams, without ever visiting a museum of books.
Frugalscholar, is that your hat in orbit overhead?
As I continued to read his essay and thought about his passing observation, I realized he was commenting, unconsciously, on something that has occurred to me, to at least one of my academic coconspirators, and probably to Frugalscholar: Why the heck are we keeping all these books in our houses?
Frugalscholar has shown the way to peddling scores of books online. Are we sitting on a small gold mine here, one whose financial proceeds would do us a lot more good than the decorator quality of a wallful of books?
Like many other academics, I have ceiling-to-floor bookcases in the living room and the family room, and of course the de rigueur six-foot shelf of reference works in the office (make that 18 feet). As a writer and then later as a younger editor, I used to have recourse to this library all the time. Even the most unlikely occupants of those shelves would occasionally be picked up, looked over, borrowed from. My library was an integral part of my work as a teacher, a thinker, and a writer. And I used one part of it or another every single day.
Recently, however, I’ve come to realize that I hardly ever open a book anymore. The only works I use at all are a few cookbooks…and half the time I get my recipes off the Internet—like everything else. When I write, when I grade papers, when I edit a client’s copy, when I check facts, I invariably use the Internet. The encyclopedias, the various dictionaries, the OED, the history and political science texts, the novels, the chronicles, the tomes of literary criticism and social history and science and mathematics: they just sit there gathering dust. Two walls filled with dust-catchers!
Truly, today I could get by with a computer and the following:
The Oxford Dictionary of French
La Petite Larousse
The Oxford Dictionary of Spanish
The Harper-Collins Dictionary of Italian
Collier’s Latin Dictionary
Cassel’s German Dictionary
The Compact OED Random House Webster’s Dictionary
The Chicago Manual of Style
The MLA Style Manual
The APA Style Manual
The CSE Scientific Style and Format Manual
Roget’s Thesaurus
A couple of field guides to birds
A field guide to Southwestern flora
A few favorite cookbooks
And that’s it. None of these (except the recipe books, maybe) has an acceptable online equivalent. All the fiction? It could go. The classics are online at Project Gutenberg. Most of the contemporary fiction is eminently disposable stuff, occupying shelf space by default. The nonfiction tomes are largely out of date—maybe one in thirty is worth keeping.
Because Poisoned Pen Press keeps me supplied with light fiction (at the price, o’course, of having to edit the stuff), I hardly ever buy “airplane books” anymore—their detective novels supply all my bedtime and idle moment reading. Partly because I’m paid to read and don’t feel inclined to devote leisure time to reading and partly because I don’t have a helluva lot of leisure time, I almost never buy new books.
So…why is my house filled with books?
I asked La Maya the same question, and she responded with approximately my own sentiment: Books define our identity as academics. We keep them because they say something to others (and to ourselves) about us. Also, she remarked, a bookcase full of hefty tomes makes a nice decorator item.
Yes.
I wonder what on earth I would do with those big walls in the absence of running foot after vertical and horizontal running foot of books.
Fine art? The sum total of every book I could sell wouldn’t buy one Ed Mell painting. Maybe some Navajo rugs? They’d cut the echo, though not as well as all those books. I haven’t been up to the rez to price any of those lately, but one thing’s for sure: if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.
So, what we have here is a lifetime of learning—or the metaphor thereof—reduced to interior decoration. The truth is, everything I once used books for has been transferred to a computer monitor.
For individuals, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Our students, at least the ambitious among them, can access as much information in an hour as once took us half a semester to dig out. I can check a fact in 30 seconds, a chore that once could have taken me anywhere from 15 minutes (if a source was at hand) to a day or more (if I had to traipse to a library or archive to track it down).
But what about our culture, our society? Now, there I’m not at all convinced that the demise of the book and the rise of the Library of the Internet are happy developments. For one thing, paranoia tells us that censorship of online resources is even easier than censorship of print material. But the big repercussions, the scary ones, are economic.
• Who will continue to produce “content” if all creative and scholarly work is available for free on the Web? • How many jobs will be lost when a print book is a rarity? • How many graphic artists, editors, circulation drones and managers, librarians, printers, paper manufacturers, ink makers, and booksellers will be stocking shelves at the Walmart? • How much more power will monied interests have over the intellectual and scientific direction of our country? • And when an entire generation has never known the pleasure of reading for the sheer joy of reading, what will that mean for the entire economy of the developed world?
I don’t know the answers to these questions. But the fact that we have to ask them makes me itch.
from which this article was spun).
