Academia was interesting and pleasant when I was a student. That is how I became a professor. Since then I have wondered why academia is actually so unpleasant and I have come up with several observations and theories. I stand by these theories and by others, including the theory that professors are in a way trained to be permanently dissatisfied students or if not, pompous authoritarian boys and officious senior girls.
My principal theory, however, is that we are struggling over paradigms and priorities. It is traditional to say that we are struggling over scarce resources but I say that at a more fundamental level it is paradigms and priorities. Funding is one root of this problem but if it were the root things would be simpler.
My examples have to do with struggles over the teaching of foreign languages, where the most cost effective strategy for purposes of funding the graduate program is to hire instructors who, for fear of receiving low evaluations, are willing to produce student credit hours without teaching material. A more interesting example is discussed chez WoC PhD.
Still amid grading, though, I have a solution for my language teaching problem which I would love to implement. Students who are not interested and who resent the requirement should sign paperwork affirming they will accept a D, and then not attend. We thus continue to boost our enrollments, which is why we are so wedded to the language requirement in the first place, and the university continues to have such a requirement, which is good for its standing in some quarters. Meanwhile, students who are actually interested in the material or in a grade higher than D should attend class. If they complete all work on time and follow all rules, their minimum guaranteed grade is C.
I think this is brilliant. But it would never be accepted because people do not want to admit that it is in fact what we are already doing – in an unspoken way which is very stressful for all involved.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Ah ha. I suspected this was a required course. Do you think your students may be taking Spanish because they have heard it’s the easiest foreign language to learn?
Yes and yes. I do not even have to suspect it, they say so directly. They are very angry to discover it is not that easy. Typically, they say Mexicans speak it and Mexicans are stupid so it must be easy. I am expected to be polite and “professional” in the face of this.
This was never a problem in the German department. You would have loved us. We knew how hard it was, and we rose the task. No one ever takes German thinking it’s going to be easy.
Correct. People never take German if they aren’t serious. It is a whole other world. The same is true in Portuguese and for the most part, Latin.
I think the hard languages are the ones like Chinese, with tones and characters, or the ones with just a syllabary, or the ones with alphabets other than ours.
But it would never be accepted because people do not want to admit that it is in fact what we are already doing – in an unspoken way which is very stressful for all involved.
The unspoken aspects are always the most interesting in various organisations. In Australia, for instance, there is this abandonment of system, called OBE or Outcomes Based Education. Those on the right seem to be up in arms against it — but it was most punitive, in terms of extra marking hours, on the teachers.
What it meant was that everybody in the class could progress at their own pace. Part of the philosophy of the paradigm is that learning is not painful or difficult but a natural process that every child undergoes naturally at his or her own pace. The complexity of the children’s thinking about a particular subject is measured from grades of 1 to 8, where 1 would be preprimary thinking and 8 would virtually be first year of university level. So, instead of giving the child harsh punitive grades from A-D, or to F, the child is given a number indicating his or her progress towards sophisticated thinking.
The problem is the underlying notion that everybody wants to learn and is driven to learn, and that huge variations of progress are permissable within the same classroom. This just reproduces the characters of their children in their parents’ already existing mould, with no character-forming input from the teachers. Those who have learned to fail, because their parents have never been gifted academically, will certainly fail as they plod through the curriculum tediously “at their own pace”. Those who have been conditioned by their parents’ own socialisation to succeed will, in turn, succeed.
But the marking of a movement from basic thinking to complex thinking, and then being able to justify that mark to anyone who asks, on the basis of some very detailed formulations about the concrete evidence that must be present for a student to receive a mark — this is hard to do.
And then, the parents don’t necessarily understand what it might mean if little Johnny got a “3” in social studies. Should they be on his case, or should they let it slide? What numbers are the other students getting? They don’t know.
Although I do like to incorporate improvement as one component of a grade. It challenges people who have an easy time with the subject, rewards work at all levels, and encourages people who are coming up from behind.
I gave a B to this girl who had started at F because, when I told her why her F paper was an F and what characteristics it would have had to have to be passing, she then wrote one that made a D … then a C … then a B … then an A. The average was of course C, but the progress was so clear. I’d have liked to just give her the A, on the theory that she had now transformed herself into an A, but that would be hard to justify bureaucratically when there were people with higher averages overall. She would have been happy with the C, which is far better news than an F, and she is exuberant over the B. But objectively I think she really did deserve the A … I have rarely seen anyone learn so fast.
Yeah, there should be room to give her an A. I agree.
And because of this perception that Spanish is “easy” the department where I first taught Spanish was extra rigorous. We had take points off for every tiny mistake, and the range for grades was not 90-100 but 92-100. While I have not urged my colleagues to be as grotesquely rigid as that, I have suggested that if we were to raise our standards, we would have more capable students because only those who wanted the challenge of rigorous hard work would be majors.
The department where I did that for that girl was actually at the same university where you first taught Spanish. That was why she was so exuberant over the B, it was very unusual. [Time and space are scrambled in this blog, you know.]
I am also always suggesting that “if we were to raise our standards, we would have more capable students because only those who wanted the challenge of rigorous hard work would be majors.” I also think that more people would be interested if we were more rigorous – people who want rigor now go elsewhere. I hold a minority viewpoint, however.