Vague expectations yield shoddy scholasticism

The 2012 Mayan apocalypse never visited us, and on December 22, office workers across the nation peeled the date off their Dilbert day-by-day desk calendars, uttering defeated sighs.  We are still here, and society hasn’t crumbled.

Maybe you too are seeing what I’ve noticed all semester; that disappointed sentiment that’s still rippling through our community.  It’s a post-ejaculatory refractory period, where all we feel is solitary shame.

We placed all of our hope in the world ending, but 2013 is still here, and it’s looking like a bad year.  I try to keep my ignorance in check, but bravado begs the question from the dark recesses of my mind: Have the professors given up?

This isn’t an accusatory statement; it is an inquiry, but not the first-year variety, mind you.  I’ve been elbow deep in some of the politics on campus, and I’ve come to know and respect almost the entire faculty here, (with due exception to the business department.)

There’s an underlying sensation that I think is unitarily binding, from undergraduates to faculty; our collective “give-a-damn” seems to have busted. This is the season when wanderlust becomes too feverish for us to avoid.  We’re chomping at the bit, daydreaming of those paltry three months of reprieve before the cycle of stress and anxiety begins anew.

But this loathsome reality didn’t spawn overnight; it’s been like this since the start of the semester.  I’m not so cynical as to believe you are all unchaining your politesse; the aim of this piece isn’t to place blame.  I understand you are under constant bureaucratic pressures from board members and committee chairs, and I know that the faceless figures who sign your paychecks seem to be pushing us all in weird directions.

It appears to me that the standards have been written in polar extremities.  On one end of the spectrum, you are enforcing staunch adherence to the curriculum, ensuring the accreditation of our endeavors.  The cost of this practice stifles free thought, minting a fresh generation of binary robots.

Gaining a specific skill set for a particular job is an admirable goal, but that’s about it.  I don’t know how masochistic you have to be to find that reality enjoyable, but there is no chance such a path could ever provide me satisfying, gainful employment.

At the other end of the dilemma is an ailing situation where the criteria are deliberately penned to be vague and capricious, leaving students with too much slack. The metric is constantly changing while we develop weak and useless philosophies, embracing unfounded biases about what we “ought” to do.  We will be the underemployed that participate in the next round of Occupy movements, clinging to our pretentious belief that art can save the world.

I can’t be the only one that feels this frustration with post-modern thought.  Some place on this campus, there is a professor grinding his or her teeth, knowing that the bachelor’s degree most of us will walk out the door with will be absolute rubbish.  We will be saddled with an unbearable debt, with no hopes of employment to repay such bondage.

And bondage is something you are all too familiar with.  As educators, your hands are tied with standards.  Let me reassure you that your efforts aren’t in vain.

I speak only from my personal experience, but my time here has molded my sense of duty, just not in that touchy-feely “making me a liberal” way. I’ve seen quite a few professors hold their tongues, because if they unfetter, they will be looking for another job.  To make an anti-establishment utterance is out of turn for you, because when you boil it down: you are the establishment.

I can empathize with your plight.  You have to constantly deal with the nonchalant and entitled attitudes present in all segments of the student body.  That is a battle in and of itself, and I’d bet many a closeted alcoholic sits in their office late at night, nursing a bottle and staring at a computer screen; retinas burning.

You are rubbing your forehead and furrowing your brow after reading a paper, and you are losing sleep because nothing seems to make it through to your students.

How is it that some of these “kids” are juniors, yet they still can’t write coherent sentences?  You can’t even try to tell them the blunt and honest truth; that this is all garbage.

They will instantly be upset and complain because they still expect their half-plagiarized, half-assed work to be validated.  For every minute you spend trying to teach us the right way to do something, we will spend 59 seconds bored out of our skulls. Eventually we sink back into our mobile devices, fingering stream of consciousness tweets and uploading pictures of what we ate for lunch.

There’s no value in pointing fingers, but why maintain status-quo when we are all disillusioned with why we are here?  Why is it now that this unbridled and immutable apathy manifests itself? Perhaps it’s time for a paradigm shift.

Pedagogy works with children, and while many students are fresh off mother’s tit, we are adults by law.  It’s easy practice to write syllabi, preach stentorian, and swear by that model until you die.  An even easier route is to view your students as “customers,” a business model that uses psychological gimmicks to generate a “need” for education.

I reject the above assertions, however, because they illustrate a lack of virtue in higher education. The value of these observations would seem to serve only the institution, not the student.  When such a plan is followed to the letter, the only thing it teaches us is to embrace legacy, which is irrelevant once we are all food for worms.

Maybe we should try and work on infusing andragogy into the course work; teach students as peers and speak to them as colleagues.

I know that there is no profit to be had in this method of instruction, but if you became a teacher to get rich, you’ve lost the plot already. It’s not an “easy” task to teach this way, and any standards you set are almost impossible to objectively measure.

But for as much as we harp on the rhetoric of “when you get out in the real world,” you might want to let on to your students that nothing is really “easy”.

Maybe if students were treated like adults, they would actually start to act the part.  It’s a novel idea, but I think most would finally start to see the pragmatic aspect of what they are paying you to teach them.

This whole piece is a wordy, self-serving rant, but I’m brave enough to display my ignorance.  I’m not afraid to ask questions and admit that I don’t know the answers.  I will entertain anyone willing to explain the inner workings of this magical and complex world to me, be it the lowest person on the totem pole, or the highest official on the boardroom table.

I’ll be waiting.