Zooze the Horse roams around the pasture near Lamar State College. Zooze thinks about problems in academia. Zhe wants proffies to submit posts (blog posts, not fence posts).
Sunday, December 16, 2018
Does your school have a meaningful mission? Do you?
We have large populations of first-generation and immigrant students, so mission, meaning, and vision are not problems here. Here, the American Dream is still very much alive. This is especially so in my physics department, in which all our students I know of go on to prosperous, interesting futures that use what they learned from us.
Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—I had a student from high up in the Andes. She like to wear those plaid miniskirts that were in fashion at the time. She just wanted to be an American girl, just like her friends, and who was I to say she couldn’t, or shouldn’t?
Nevertheless, I wish the signal-to-noise ratio were higher. We still get no shortage of sullen dunderheads, seemingly so deliberately stupid, who just don’t want to be here, and serve no apparent purpose other than making things difficult for everyone. But enough about the ed school, and the administration…
Our school has meaningless and, in part, intentionally-archaic language that either means nothing or is in fact the antithesis of what I feel our mission should be.
Our department has an unwritten mission which I like very much: "Teach them freaking SOMETHING."
We should have, and with current demographic changes just surviving as an institution might be deemed a reasonable mission.
But this is confounded by a large number of soon-to-retire adminicritters, who all want to push their pet (and highly expensive) projects through before they go.
I like Three Sigma's department's idea.
Mine is to help our students find out if they'd really want to weave baskets out of phlogiston, support the ones who do, and suggest viable alternatives for the ones who don't.
We used to, had a very clear vision of what an educated undergraduate should look like. Now ...
ReplyDeleteWe have large populations of first-generation and immigrant students, so mission, meaning, and vision are not problems here. Here, the American Dream is still very much alive. This is especially so in my physics department, in which all our students I know of go on to prosperous, interesting futures that use what they learned from us.
ReplyDeleteSome years ago—never mind how long precisely—I had a student from high up in the Andes. She like to wear those plaid miniskirts that were in fashion at the time. She just wanted to be an American girl, just like her friends, and who was I to say she couldn’t, or shouldn’t?
Nevertheless, I wish the signal-to-noise ratio were higher. We still get no shortage of sullen dunderheads, seemingly so deliberately stupid, who just don’t want to be here, and serve no apparent purpose other than making things difficult for everyone. But enough about the ed school, and the administration…
Our school has meaningless and, in part, intentionally-archaic language that either means nothing or is in fact the antithesis of what I feel our mission should be.
ReplyDeleteOur department has an unwritten mission which I like very much: "Teach them freaking SOMETHING."
We should have, and with current demographic changes just surviving as an institution might be deemed a reasonable mission.
ReplyDeleteBut this is confounded by a large number of soon-to-retire adminicritters, who all want to push their pet (and highly expensive) projects through before they go.
I like Three Sigma's department's idea.
Mine is to help our students find out if they'd really want to weave baskets out of phlogiston, support the ones who do, and suggest viable alternatives for the ones who don't.