My computer is in for repairs, so the postings will be more sporadic for a while. I will post little things when I'm in the office or at the library, but nothing too big for a while. In the meantime, anyone who would like to can tell me what they make of this article, which is not entirely dissimilar from my own experience at Mall University a few semesters ago...
You know, I hate to say this, but my life is generally much more enjoyable when I have little to no Internet access. I am more aware of the passage of time. When I'm online, I can spend four hours on You Tube without noticing it. Maybe most people don't do that. But, it's nice to not have easy access to a computer and have to find ways to fill my time. Yesterday, I read two books, cleaned up the garden, did housework, played with the cat, and watched a movie!
So, maybe it's for the best that the computer is in the shop for a while.
3 comments:
Seems to me there's an elephant in the living room... any formal educational program is already a political indoctrination regime. Inherently, and always. Even the stated agenda of creating critical thinkers who question everything is an indoctrination program. So that aspect of the conversation can be thrown out.
This leaves the question of what kind of indoctrination is desirable. If people coming out of the program are bent on analyzing and criticizing it, that means the thing is (was) probably working as designed--which makes it ironic that the director has shitcanned the two TAs. On the other hand, if the students really are now being put in that position to regurgitate...
My sense is that the TAs probably lack diplomacy, but that the people in charge of the program are defensive and resistant to criticism from that angle. Almost as though they have enough trouble creating solidarity among their own ranks, and feel that it's a gross breech of etiquette for the TAs to suggest the program has lost the plot. The recurrent invocation of the "collegial atmosphere" sounds suspiciously like someone complaining that a "real friend" would not criticize unseemly behavior.
I don't think there's any doubt that the program is on the receiving end of modifications to suit the views of the current leadership/political trends. In that sense, it's bound to seem terribly uncouth for the TAs to insist that what was before, was better. The people who were in charge Before were replaced by the New & Improved. No one ever claims they're deliberately replacing good with bad, or undermining excellence to no apparent purpose...
Yeah, I got the sense that the 'indoctrination' angle was a canard anyway. It sounded to me like the TAs had the same problem we often do with these courses, which is that they consist of a dab of this and a dollop of that with no context whatsoever being thrown at these first year students, who are totally bewildered by it all. The TAs end up having to fix those sorts of problems because they're often thought of as the help desk anyway. So they get the bulk of the complaints from students.
I got the sense that the director's attitude was more like "I don't pay you to think" than "I must maintain the intellectual purity of this program". I think he must know that, if you accuse academics of 'indoctrination', you have built-in support. So, I think they might well lack diplomacy, but something about his response to interviewers struck me as 'prick'.
Incidentally, I do think it's funny that they try to teach so much history in the composition courses, while we spend huge chunks of our intro history courses teaching people to write.
It's a checks and balances thing, math departments everywhere spend vast amounts of energy trying to teach the students the finer joys of showing up at all...
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