Teacher or Snowflake

\ Leave a Comment \ by

I am an A student and that is an A paper, and always will be to me. I read some of the other students papers, and to me they were nonsense written to fill pages. I will apologize for this email if you can produce one paper written for this assignment that can come close to competing with the ideas in my paper. I can only dream of having someone like Bill Gates give me advice for this situation. But I will still go on to follow the path that God has paved for me regardless of your opinion, because I already had the guideness I needed to help me visualize my purpose. I want my grade changed, and I am sorry if I offend you by this email, but I put my heart and sole into my education and I believe in myself even if you don’t.

The Status of Higher Education in 2010? An Empty Bottle of Jack Daniels and the Greatest Student Email Ever Written, Chauncey DeVega

It’s funny how these things go in cycles; perhaps mid-term (for traditional teachers) is the season for discontent. Or maybe it’s the last little taste of the foul moods of a long winter. But after I wrote my complaint about “snowflakes” I found this piece, which seems to express the same sentiments. I have mixed feelings about these sorts of critiques. On the one hand, I do think that the ideals of education has been denatured. Maybe it was never as real as I imagined, but I think that education used to represent a profound existential challenge, willingly taken on by students who by necessity had to trust their professors.

I didn’t like all of my professors, by any means, and one main reason is too often they were not particularly challenging, at least in the ways that I wanted to be challenged (in my admittedly naive way). However inchoate, I was looking for transformative experiences, and when I found professors that seemed to offer it, I knew instinctively that I had to believe that my guide had, in the end, my best interests in mind, even when they seemed to be saying things that I did not like, or asking me to do things that, at least in the short run, I did not want to do. I had a kind of faith in teachers. That’s rarer now.

On the other hand, I think the erosion of that faith is our own fault as educators. I think the problem is not so much in what happens in the classroom, or in the written conversations about writing that is at the heart of my own work, but in the broader context of education. It’s the giant athletic programs with their fetishistic obsessions with youth and physical strength; it’s the endless marketing of “school brands”; the cynical exploitation of the student loan system; the ongoing attacks on teaching and teachers; the manipulation of anti-intellectualism of both political parties, but especially the right. We don’t fight back effectively.

Posted in: Writing

Against the Student Grain

\ Leave a Comment \ by

As a part of my job as an online teacher I’m required to attend a yearly conference with my fellow full-time faculty and to participate in several online workshops each year. I enjoy it; it’s a chance to feel a bit more like a member of a department (not that I miss that too much!) and to think about what I love to do. Sometimes, though, it really makes me crabby and irritable, professionally and intellectually speaking. The problem has its roots in the rejection of the so-called sage on the stage.

Once upon a time, the legend goes, professors stood up at the front of the room, or lecture hall, and talked for the entire class. (I am sure that was, and is, still true, but I also think it’s partly a fairy tale.) Students had little say in their educations, much less a chance to tell the professor what they thought or how well they were learning. About four decades or so ago these students began to become teachers themselves and resolved to correct what they saw as an injustice rooted in bad teaching methods.

This student empowerment, as it came to be known, did a world of good insofar as it made professors pay more attention to their teaching. Of course, in the most elite institutions teaching is only rarely rewarded as well as research, if at all, but that’s a story for another day. On the other hand this empowerment helped to lay the basis for a consumerist model of education, particularly in the form of student evaluations, which too often become the main yardstick for teaching. It’s a boon for administrators but a disaster for teaching.

Too often, these evaluations were designed poorly and subject to all sorts of manipulation; they distort more than they reveal. Hopefully, their luster has begun to fade. More insidious and difficult to weed out is a kind of obsessison with positive feedback and affirmation. That’s what often drives me so batty about these conferences and workshops; it’s the Oprah school of pedagogy. “I tell students to visualize success,” one teacher said, “until they have their diplomas in hand.” It sounds harmless until you lokk closely.

I have a 40-something drill seargent in one of my classes for example; he’d probably (and rightly) take that as either nonsense or profoundly patronizing. This way of thinking turns students, even if they are young adults, into helpless, dysfunctional children, always in need of reassurance. Apparently, we can’t tell them that a successful education might be very difficult to achieve, that they might have to make sacrifices, or that there might be unexpected losses along with the gains. They’d melt like sugar in the rain.

Posted in: Composition, Professional, Writing

Teeth for the C.A.W.

\ Leave a Comment \ by

Over the last forty years, there has been a dramatic shift in the instructional staff at US colleges and universities. Increasingly, institutions of higher education have hired faculty members who are not on the tenure-track and, in large part, are hired in part-time positions (see app. for more detailed data on these trends). In 1970 faculty members in part-time positions represented only 22.0% of all faculty members teaching in US colleges and universities; in 2007 they represented 48.7%. Of faculty members who are full time, well over a third do not have access to tenure. When graduate teaching assistants are included in the calculations, barely one quarter of the instructional staff are full-time and have access to tenure. The shift toward a more contingent workforce is occurring at all types of institutions in both the public and private sectors.

Coalition on the Academic Workforce, “One Faculty Serving All Students.”

This is a nice summary of what is arguably the most important set of facts about U.S.education at the university level. It’s presence in a mainstream organization’s report, sponsored by the Modern Language Association and the National Council of Teachers of English, among others, isn’t exactly new, but it does represent the fruits of a decades long struggle led by graduate students, starting just as the internet began to take off in the early 1990s. It’s their voices hidden between these lines.

It’s also a remarkably soft take on the sorts of policies that have led to this mess. Noting that the recession is likely to accelerate these trends, the reports says that universities respond in one of two ways: “Some institutions increase their hiring of contingent faculty members to cover enrollment growth. Others reduce the number, resulting in increased class size and workload for full-time faculty members.” Surprisingly, what follows isn’t a critique or a list of better money saving alternatives.

Instead, the report writers launch into a defense of part-time teachers, as if the issue wasn’t the ongoing destruction of an independent academia, but the “‘dissing of the part timers.” Never mind academic freedom of speech, or tenure, or even the quality of instruction, the problem is respect! I suppose I shouldn’t be so cynical; this is certainly a step in the right direction. But its tentativeness is only going to feed the suspicion, hinted at recently in the MLA Newsletter, that not everyone wants change.

Respect is necessary and welcome, but it’s not even a starting point for the change that needs to happen. Here’s three things they could do immediately. The CAW needs to call for the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act and for the end of university policies, such as hiring union busting firms, designed to prevent teachers from organizing. The CAW needs to call for policies that would either freeze or cut the salaries of the highest paid people, not teachers, at universities under financial duress. That’s respect with teeth.

Posted in: Professional, Union, Writing