What is University For, Part 2

Does making it all easier make us lazier educators, or is neoliberal politics to blame?? 

The Quality of Teaching has been Strained: 

This is a back-in-MY-day story, but I think it's necessary to look at how far we've strayed. 

When I was in teacher's college, we had to make it through four practice teaching sessions spaced out over the year in which we took over an experienced teacher's classes while they took notes at the back of the room. Typically the first placement is sink or swim, and some bail at that point, but by the fourth one, at the very end of the year, student teachers have honed many necessary skills. It's tricky for people in History Departments because they also cover social science and humanities courses, and being proficient in one doesn't make you proficient in all. My very first placement was teaching social sciences, my teachable, but my associate also gave me an American History course to teach as well. I knew almost nothing about history at the time. He gave me the textbook, but I also spent hours in the public library night after night, scanning other books enough to give me answers to any potential questions. I worked my ass off for the weeks I was there to make sure I did the best job I could and to make sure I didn't look like a total idiot in front of the kids.

Once teaching, I took on my own burgeoning teachers - until I got a weak one. It was her final placement and she started by complaining about all her previous associates because they refused to give her lesson plans. I explained that we make a lesson plan to follow for a supply teacher, but it's vital for new teachers to learn how to create a lesson plan. So I gave her texts and resources and a bunch of ideas. At this point, she also had access to the internet! She was livid at the injustice of having to actually do this pretty necessary part of the job. I wrote a letter to her college about ensuring new teachers are aware that daily lesson plans aren't handed to teachers. 

A huge part of teaching is taking the curriculum and working backwards towards each lesson, gathering resources for students to use - readings, images, or objects, designing where to go with the lessons, crafting questions to ask to deepen understanding of the topics, and developing a variety of ways to test their knowledge. That's the work part of teaching. It's can be a joy because it's highly creative. I love it! I know lots of educators who continue to do this type of work, but it appears to be too much to ask of some people.  

Fast forward 32 years from my time in the library learning American History: I left halfway through my final semester of teaching, and the Long Term Occasional teacher filling in for me let me know that he was a history guy and didn't know any social science stuff. I gave him all my notes about each topic with tons of explanation and anecdotes to help get the ideas across, along with assessments, quizzes, etc to help him out, and he just GAVE my notes directly to the students and plunked himself down at his desk to chat with kids at the front. Apparently, he didn't even try to teach the class much less learn any of the material. I know all this because several parents emailed me directly. Some said it had been their teen's favourite class until that point. I apologized for this abrupt change in the course delivery, but it was out of my hands. It was no longer my class. 

There's a problem here with the expectations set for teachers who think posting information is the same as teaching it. There's also a problem with teachers outside their area of expertise who don't think they should be expected to learn the new subject: I have too many stories to list, like the phys ed teacher who got slotted into a family studies class and kids ended up throwing out all the food they made, rendered inedible from a lack of instruction. That kind of thing can't be allowed to continue happening, but the shortage of educators and increase in class sizes is adding to the problem.

They also used to interview teachers differently. In the 80s, an interview for teaching might require parsing a passage or teaching the Krebs Cycle - you know, proof that you're proficient in your field. Now they require liberal use of buzzwords of their favourite edu-guru-du-jour. Ideas from the bullshitters on high aren't explored or questioned but blindly accepted and expected of us. It's not about teaching and learning, but about being in the know. 

Unfortunately, the lack of interest in developing curriculum and actually teaching students has bubbled up into the universities as well. 

Institutions of Higher Learning

This past term in university, I believe I took another course purchased from some American company. The biweekly 70-question multiple choice "quizzes" were all open note. I'm a keener and took copious notes to better learn and to be able to command-F my way through the quizzes, but occasionally I would get stuck on a question that couldn't be found in my notes or in the online textbook. So I googled. And low and behold, all the quiz questions and answers are online, word for word. Even the names are the same:

You can only see a few answers before they ask you to sign up -- and I never signed up (even though it's free), but I don't blame others for doing so. And locking the computer screen for quizzes just disadvantages students with only one device. How many university students only have one device?? 

A first year psych class of 300-500 kids can be forgiven for churning out multiple choice quizzes as their primary assessment tool. A Master's Degree program with sometimes just seven students in the room cannot. And, despite only having to mark discussion questions in alternating weeks for a very small group of people, they were never marked before the quiz that followed. Not that the feedback was useful to the quiz, or anything, but it's good practice in general to mark one assessment before the next one comes up. 

Some of the questions from these types of quizzes - given in many of my classes - didn't make any sense and some answers were flat out wrong. It's not that onerous to make up a test or even just read through the questions to make sure they make sense, maybe adding in another letter 'u' here and there to pretend it's Canadian and maybe taking out references like 'sophomore year'. In one course on provincial legislation, over a third of the exam prep questions were about American cases.  

I get that most of my instructors were adjuncts, likely paid maybe $5,000 to teach and grade a class of 5-25 students for three months, and it might not even be a course that's in their field of interest. A friend of mine found work as an adjunct and encourages me to apply to any position - even those that aren't in my area - because apparently, 1. they'll take anyone with a masters, and 2. they give you the entire course - the lessons to post, powerpoints, questions, and answers. 

Apparently she's right. 

I commented a few times on some of the content of my course this term, and my instructor responded very clearly that it's not her course, despite her name being on the syllabus, but she'll let people know of my concerns. This course that she taught and graded (quizzes were auto graded, but she had to grade biweekly discussion) was not her course, and apparently she had no say in how it's taught or what is taught. 

This has all become just a game. 

According to one former-prof, even tenured professors lack agency in the classroom:

"Most of my professor friends can't support themselves. That includes the fancy tenured professors, even at nice schools. . . . I also think they don't want anyone to ever build up any kind of financial cushion or independence. If we did that, they wouldn't be able to push us around. We could actually quit. That plan is starting to unravel now. You can only push teachers so far before they've got nothing left to lose. . . . We know where the money goes: The money goes to hire new directors of athletics. It goes toward new athletic facilities. . . . It pays the inflated salaries of the upper administration, who make healthy six figures even when they're terrible at their jobs. . . . Nobody really wants to admit they don't care about education. . . . Politicians and CEOs have always wanted kids to be in factories, not schools. . . . The idea of a real liberal university poses a grave threat to the establishment. . . . Universities aren't institutions of knowledge anymore. They're assets. They're revenue streams." 

So, why would students put in effort to study for a 90 minute quiz when all the answer are in plain view?? Why take copious notes and study to learn material - much of it horribly outdated or not applicable to us or just plain wrong, or even potentially harmful? 

And - another thing - why spend the time memorizing the concepts - actually learning the concepts - when so much time is required to read several books on the same topics? Many of my courses had three or even six textbooks providing the same general information non-controversially, and we were required to read them all. Gone are the days where profs will choose the best chapters to read from each text instead of demanding of us to just read everything. I'm a very fast reader, and, as I've said, also a keener, doing all of the things for each class, and the required texts, online lessons, and videos were sometimes over 40 hours in a week for a single course. It feels like they wanted us too busy to think. In one class, a very expensive and lengthy text was never mentioned beyond chapters assigned in the syllabus. 

University feels like a major textbook-selling scam and sports-recruitment center.

About Those Discussion Questions: 

My daughter is in 2nd year university, and the structure of many of her courses is identical to my Master's level classes. She has to do the same mindless discussion questions then respond to two of her classmates. Somewhere some self-appointed guru on high must have done some little study showing this is somewhat useful, sending all uni admin to adopt it as the learning tool. None of the questions ask anything requiring a semblance of critical thinking. Apply this concept to this situation using as many words from the chapter as possible. Responding to others is painfully tedious and bereft of evidence of learning. "I like how you used this technique first and then the other; I did it in the opposite order. Fascinating!" It's typically a cheerleading type of response with rarely any insights or in-depth thought. At the beginning, I tried really hard to find ways to demonstrate understanding in my comments, then soon realized I just have to crap on the page (or screen) for full marks. 

Someone in a similar Psychotherapy program to mine who has their eyes on the prize of the over $100/hour rate of pay, also doesn't recommend their program or these useless assessments, which clearly aren't just the product of a single school: 

"You will find yourself doing a lot of work that has little learning value, specifically with the discussion questions. They are worth usually around 25% of your grade. . . . The issue with these questions is that they are time-consuming. They are not difficult. They do not require much critical thinking. You will, however, sit and struggle to figure out what the hell you are supposed to say. . . . The questions are not written in a way that elicits discussion. For example: "Reflect on your reading about strategies to identify and challenge problem cognitions. Which techniques do you think will be easy to implement and which do you foresee being more challenging?" This is easy to answer in 200 words. All your classmates will post similar answers. Now think about what you would say next, how would you would discuss someone else's answer? It will start like this "Hi Mary, I agree with your post and how that technique would be easy to implement. I also think this technique would also be able to implement......". And you will do that over, and over and over again, week after week, and gain little to nothing from it. You will spend the majority of your time on this. . . . You won't ever even know if your answer or the answer of another student was correct or not because you will not get any useful feedback from the professors. . . .  Just a tip if you do the course. You will be assigned readings each week as well - read only what you are interested in. For the rest, get all your discussion question answers from the assigned readings. Get PDFs or e-books and do keyword searches. In the end, that will be sufficient."

I understand the bind that some universities are in to get alternative revenue streams (international students and donors and arms manufacturers) as government funding dries up from austerity measures and promotion of privatization. It's a huge falling dominoes chain of cause and effect, like all bureaucracies, with no single entity holding enough responsibility to clearly merit punishment. The buck stops nowhere. We're all feeling the effects of the cuts to education. But this is ridiculous.

I wore a shirt with this on it back in grade 7.

I worked hard as a high school teacher to prep kids for the rigour of university, but there is no rigour in these courses. The kids who honed their skills in bullshitting answers will rise to the top. The thinkers will become frustrated and demotivated by the tasks and possibly completely lose interest in higher education, like I have. 

How to Think

There's an old complaint that kids should be taught how to think instead of what to think, and I was always baffled by it. When do we ever teach what to think beyond basic facts? Even when we teach agreed upon dates of world wars we also get into the controversy around the origins. When we teach y=mx+b, we also teach how that formula was devised. We show them where facts come from and various perspectives of the times. 

But now I get it. 

In this MA program, I've been taught to see people with autism as a burden to their families and bereft of empathy, to understand people by the categories created by Piaget and Erikson without exploring the history of those formulations, to assess EQ despite some serious issues with that concept, and to celebrate the new knowledge that ALS is caused by childhood trauma. And that's just what I've written about along the way.

I bought and read a textbook for the course on adolescents I was slated to take this spring, and it puts a ton of weight on the claim that brains aren't fully developed until 25, concluding that anyone below that age should not be punished for their actions (which would be like punishing them for not being tall), should never be made to wait for long-term rewards (which is impossible for their undeveloped brain), should be better monitored and supervised by parents, and ideally should not be allowed to drive until 21 or at least prohibited from riding in cars with other youth present. W.T.F.? It's true that the prefrontal cortex continues to develop into the 20s, but it's also true that it starts to shrink as early as age 30. If we make conclusions by looking at the physical brain, then we should only allow people aged 25-30 to make any decisions. Anecdotally, having taught many teens over the years, I believe the majority of them can understand punishment, wait for rewards, and make good decisions about as well as the adults I know. That textbook was the final push it took to leave the program. I'm fine with disagreeing with texts if we're allowed to discuss disagreement, but I object to courses with controversial content that we're just supposed to learn and regurgitate on the test. 

I wonder if this was actually how American public schools have been teaching for years, and that's why this seemingly nonsensical complaint about being taught what to think rears its head over and over. We're just now seeing it in full force north of the border. We're being told what to think without much room for question outside of occasional research papers. That's a completely new way of delivering content from what I've seen in my time as a student, a teacher, and a mom of kids in school. It's a total Americanization of our education.

Back in my day... 

I did an MA at the same university way back in the previous century. Every class was an enriching learning environment of discussion and debate and questioning of every line of the readings. In one class we had one text which we read in intense depth, spending a full class just on the title of the book. We were given time to read slowly and carefully, and we were encouraged to really think about our own reactions and explanations of the ideas presented to us. No videos or extra readings, just one book in the hands of an extraordinarily learned professor who guided us through the debate over various ideas to help us each develop our own arguments. I fell asleep at night pondering the ideas and had regular epiphanies. It opened my eyes to new ways of understanding. That's what I hoped to get from school again. And it's definitely still there in bits and pieces, but those courses are overshadowed by the many rote instruction or edu-tainment courses that offer crafts and candy in lieu of rigorous discussion. (And I'll never get over that one prof went to a 90 minute meeting DURING OUR CLASS, and we all just sat and waited for her return!!)

What's happening now in these courses, this isn't education. It's not about learning. It's about persevering - finding all the tricks to level up through unnecessarily time-consuming content bereft of thought. That used to be the tactic of the weaker kids who just wanted to finish and didn't care about learning. This type of "teaching" has lowered itself to meet the standards of the least-interested learners. Find ways to cut corners, and you can get an MA easy-peasy. Don't waste time reading all the books and sweating by actually thinking. 

Teaching has become a business, not a vocation. And once we're used to this delivery method, if we don't complain too much, it can easily be presented and evaluated by AI. The word count of my discussion posts appeared to matter more than the content, and a computer program can surely manage that. 

In my final assignment ever, the instructions offered choice, and I missed the second part of a question within a question, which took me from an A to a B despite hitting the word count exactly: a mere 300 words. The feedback was entirely about that missing question. The questions were on my personal experience, and the question I missed was specific to peer pressure. The rest of questions asked how my gender affects me, my experience with discrimination, my Big 5 traits, and my parent's attachment styles. I have no idea how this final set of questions provoking a very brief and superficial exploratory of my life possibly assessed my understanding of the course content. It appeared to be graded based on word count and a completion checklist. And I really don't understand how the assessment could possibly be used to determine my skills as a potential psychotherapist. 

I guess my real problem is that I think that should matter! 

A Bit on Mark Creep

I happened on this Reddit post full of kids unable to get into university programs with marks in the mid-90s. I noticed this shift in marks over my career where averages moved from 67 to 85. This Toronto study shows a similar trend:

One comment about Computer Science programs consoled, 

"This rejection could be a hidden advantage. The tech market is in a terrible state. Jobs and internships are scarce, making these times extremely challenging for newcomers to the tech field. This is likely a temporary situation, but the end is far from near given the actual circumstances of what is happening." 

As Michael Sandel wrote in his brilliant book, The Tyranny of Merit, 

"Turning higher education into a hyper-competitive sorting contest is unhealthy for democracy and education alike. . . . Irrational ideals of the perfect self have become desirable--even necessary--in a world where performance, status and image define a person's usefulness and value . . . jumping through hoops of high achievement wind up as 'dazed survivors of some bewildering life-long boot-camp'. . . . We should figure out how to make success in life less dependent on having a four-year college degree."

We need higher education as a public good, not as a means of sorting who's allowed to have a job. We need students to learn how to scrutinize information presented instead of being rewarded for rote explanations or finding answers online. And we need funding for teachers well-trained to craft lessons to provoke the very best from students. It's a lot of work, but it's absolutely vital to cultivate a thinking populace. Unless we fight back, courses will be taught and graded by AI within a decade, and, based on some of my recent experiences, I'm not sure we'll be able to tell the difference. 

I picture a dystopian near-future with AI instructors grading ChatGPT essays on a curve. Degrees will be just be letters purchased in a student loan scam raking in cash from kids just trying to find a way to be allowed to have a job. 

And, for God's sake, people! "Utilize" means to use something beyond its intended purpose, like in a creative or innovative way. Stop using it as a fancy way to say "use"!!