Posts Tagged ‘education’

Student power and the end of reason

Posted: February 8, 2022 by chrisharper in Uncomfortable Truths
Tags: ,

By Christopher Harper

Although I know that colleges have been bending over backward to kowtow to students, I didn’t realize how far until recently.

In 27 years of teaching, I’ve never had a student officially challenge a grade. Until now.

A student, who was described as a “star” of the Department of Journalism at Temple, took my course in media law. She was a dreadful pain, consistently filing late assignments or asking for extensions.

By the end of the course, others followed suit, apparently driven by the less-than-stringent rules offered during the pandemic. In fact, I allowed for up to a grade of “C-” for assignments turned in within a week of the deadline.

By the end of the semester, I’d had my fill. Two days before the final assignment was due, I announced that no late submissions would be accepted.

The “star” was the only one who sent the material in late. I gave her a zero, earning her a “C” in the class.

In an email, I explained to her, “Over the course of the semester, you have asked for exemptions, extensions, and preferred treatment. On Saturday, I informed the class that no extensions would be granted. Deadlines in journalism are critical to its endeavor. It’s a truism you should learn. I will not accept your submission because it is past the deadline. It may be the most important lesson you learn from this class.”

Instead, the student learned how to work the system. She appealed the grade because I had changed the “contract” of the syllabus by eliminating late submissions.

Even more amazing is that my department chair ruled in the student’s favor.

“[T]he last-minute deadline change, in this case, goes against what is spelled out in the syllabus, which is a contract between a professor and students,” the chair wrote.

I didn’t change the deadline. I simply refused to accept late submissions.

What’s more important here is that a syllabus has somehow become a formal contract, which is unlikely to hold up in any court. Moreover, students have become consumers and teachers are products.

College is no longer a learning experience but akin to buying a car.

Thankfully, my time as a journalism professor comes to an end in June. If colleges are aiding and abetting such students and hiring administrators as consumer advocates, journalism and other professions will get even worse. Now that’s downright scary!

Report from Louisiana: Canned Curriculum Fatigue

Posted: September 13, 2021 by Pat Austin in Uncategorized
Tags: , , , ,

By:  Pat Austin  

SHREVEPORT – I highly recommend retirement.

I retired from the classroom after twenty-five years this past spring and could not be happier about it. Not everyone is cut out for retirement, or so I hear, but so far, I am loving it.

Part of the equation is that it was definitely time for me to leave the classroom; Common Core scripted lesson plans were not for me. My very nature rebelled against the canned slides, the prewritten questions, and the dull activities, the endless annotation of a “text.” I railed against all of this for the last five years of my career. You don’t realize what a burden this sort of thing places on you until you get away from it, until you strip away those bindings.

As younger, newer teachers come into the profession, this method will be the only one they know. They won’t know any other way to design lessons because they’ll never have to actually create a lesson. And the rebels, the old guard, like me, we are leaving in droves.

The result will be students that all learn the same material the same exact way.

That makes me sad, but blissfully happy that I am no longer a part of it.

When school began this fall, I thought I would miss it.  I do not. As much as I loved my students, it was time for me to go. The boring, canned lessons create more classroom disruptions. A bored kid is going to either go to sleep, pull out his phone, or act out. I no longer had the energy to battle this.

I worry a little about what is happening in education today but not so much anymore that I think I can do anything about it. I used to believe I could make a difference, that I could change things. Truth is, I could make a difference in my little room with my own students, but that was it. The future of education is in the hands of the big guys like Pearson, like Bill Gates…people with agendas and companies that write tests and publish books.

It isn’t about what is good for the kid anymore, I don’t believe.

To those teachers still in there fighting the good fight, you have my support and my best wishes.

Meanwhile, I’ll be enjoying retired life. I get up when I want to, I don’t have to wait until a bell rings to go to the restroom or to each lunch. Lunch can be whatever time and last for however long I wish. I can spend my days in a hammock reading a book, at my computer writing a masterpiece, planning delicious meals for my family. I can travel on a whim. I can spend the entire day sitting on the edge of the Atchafalaya Basin drinking a beer and watching the boats.

And for me, that’s much better than standing before a classroom of bored students reading a canned slide and having them annotate a dull passage for the third time because some suit in some office thinks that’s how kids learn.

Pat Austin blogs at And So it Goes in Shreveport and at Medium; she is the author of Cane River Bohemia: Cammie Henry and her Circle at Melrose Plantation. Follow her on Instagram @patbecker25 and Twitter @paustin110.

Hostile environment + politized classes = Bye Bye College

Posted: September 7, 2021 by datechguy in culture, education
Tags: , ,

Apparently men have figured out that it’s not worth going into a lot of debt to be told that you’re what’s wrong with the world:

Men are abandoning higher education in such numbers that they now trail female college students by record levels.

At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.

Now that the STEM stuff like math, physics, engineering and medicine are going woke with realty has taken a bad seat to ideology the cost benefit analysis will make even more men think twice.

But have no fear. Trade schools are still there and haven’t reached the point of wokeness and men who go into heating, plumbing, welding carpentry and electrical work, none of which need a degree will discover that they will be able to name their own price when highly educated woke folk with degrees on their wall need anything

An American Father

Posted: August 22, 2021 by datechguy in culture, education
Tags: , ,

All Politics is local

Tip O’Neill

The last 10 months from the steal of the election to the dishonorable debacle in Afghanistan I’ve really been in despair concerning the state of my country that my sons will be inheriting.

And then I saw this:

a lot of people make a lot of money on the race racket. This man isn’t one of them and the best part of his speech at the local school board is that it made a difference:

The good news is this shows that the Race racket in general and Critical race theory can be beaten at the local level ie people stand up to fight and refused to be played. He understand that the most dangerous thing to a person’s success is an excuse to fail.

The bad news is that even after this speech Critical Race Theory was beaten by one vote.

As long as there are financial incentives for the race racket there will be people playing the race card but local action can trump it but only if people are willing to fight.

Older Entries
Newer Entries