It's early Wednesday morning and I'm drunk now, so what do I know? But a friend of mine at a nearby college asked me to informally observe one of his classes a few days ago and "grill" him about how he does things. He wanted candid feedback from a trusted friend, not the official, useless bureaucratic shit from his supervisor. So I sat in on one of his classes and then also picked his brain about how he runs the class and interacts with the students. He's my friend and he was flexible and so I found it to be kind of fun. He bought me lunch. Fuck it, you know?There were a number of issues. Infinite stuff, both good and bad. But this one thing sticks in my craw: the fucking commercialism.
Every goddamn powerpoint slide had some stylized trademark on it from a company (imagine that it was Pearson or Cengage or B&N Education or whatever). Every slide. I asked him later if the students were seeing these logos the entire semester, and he said they were.
The cherry on top is this question from a quiz the students took:
WTF.
The commercialism was oppressive. I could not have answered this quiz question correctly. It was a stupid question. It might as well have been, "When is it a good idea to drink Coca-Cola or rent a car from Hertz?"
Why is a college forcing its students to answer questions like this? And then grading them based on whether or not they got the answer "right" or "wrong"?
When is it a good idea to use Google when writing a paper? How about "NEVER"? I prefer other search engines that prioritize privacy and use different algorithms.
And what about the fucking pursuit of truth? Do we really need stockholders looking over our shoulders in the classroom, making sure that we push their products on our students the same way the football team pushes Nike or Adidas?
Is it all just about money?
Can higher education not be a public good at all?
Fuck it.
--Southern Bubba, Ph.D.
Well, I never use canned slides from publishers or canned quizzes. I've rarely found them at all useful. To use the language of commerce, my class materials are "bespoke," so I am not in that fast food loop to begin with.
ReplyDeleteWhen I first started teaching in 1998, I was horrified by the 35mm slide sets that did this. I therefore gradually phased in my own photos, graphics, drawings, and writing. By about 2007, it was mostly complete.
ReplyDeleteLife loves its ironies. Now that I have published my own textbook and am in the process of marketing it, I have to grapple with my publisher about seemingly EVERYTHING in this ostensibly completed work. It's reminiscent of that scene from Beowulf. Someone is going to get an arm torn off, any minute now...
Because SO many of my students clearly get SUCH a bad education from seemingly EVERYONE, I regard my general-ed astronomy course for non-majors as a desperate, first-and-last-chance, long-overdue make-up attempt at an education in one semester. I cover history (ancient and modern), Latin (as in "nebulae" is the plural of "nebula"), modern languages (as in "nube" is Spanish for "cloud," German has umlauts as in "Schroedinger," and Mandarin uses pictograms that except for the one for television, don't look to my untutored Western eyes much like what they're supposed to look like, much as with constellations), mythology (Babylonian, Greek, Hawai'ian, and Pawnee), philosophy (of science and of logical fallacies), art (that's right, we do the upside-down drawing exercise as training for sketching the Moon through a telescope eyepiece), sci-fi literature and film (some of it worthwhile, such as "The War of the Worlds" and "The Martian Chronicles," but of course that's not sci-fi, that's space fantasy), English comp, and of course mathematics. I also push hard other skills so valuable for business: careful and critical reading of dense material, English comp, and of course mathematics. Sometimes I think it does some good.
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