Longest Running Thread EVER

[L. Marcus]

Teens?

[Bazza]

Best article i've read for the past couple of weeks..

Classics for the people – why we should all learn from the ancient Greeks

The dazzling thought-world of the Greeks gave us our ideas of democracy and happiness. Yet learning classics tends to be restricted to the privileged few. It’s time for ‘elitist dinosaurs’ to embrace a citizens’ classics for all

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/20/classics-for-the-people-ancient-greeks

[Cancer]

Like everyone who has ever advocated something to ram down every student's throat, the author omits an inconvenient question.

 

What are you going to drop from people's education to make room for whatever you consider your holy writ to be?

 

This sounds like me being snarky, but here in the US, for the last 30 years or so there has been an unrelenting drumbeat of This Must Be Taught! That Must Be Taught! OMG Our Students Aren't Learning XXX! OMG Our Students Can't Read/Write/Speak Something I Consider Important/Doesn't Know Who YYYY Is!

 

There isn't room in the high school or college curriculum for more of Someone Else's Sacred Cows, without casting out something else. The graduation requirements over here are drastically more complicated and restrictive now than they were when I finished in 1978. There's barely time in a four-year program to complete a bachelor's degree in one of the sciences as things. It is worse in engineering programs.

 

And never mind that people who cry out for XXXX generally lack something in their own education that others consider essential (but it's too late to force-feed it to them).

[Bazza]

Fair points.

[Pariah]

One interesting example: With the increased emphasis on having students score high on state-mandated high-stakes standardized tests, many schools in the last decade have reduced or eliminated their physical education requirements to focus more on academics. This as our fine nation's childhood obesity rates continue to climb.

[L. Marcus]

... Bunch of chubbies ...

[Cancer]

Here at the Jesuit university, there's a progression of courses which we reformed a few years back, keeping track of the total load. Those can include classics, but it is not required that they do so; there are suites of classes that can be used to fulfill several "bins" in the core structure.

 

At the enormous state university, they had (right before I arrived) put in place a "capstone" course requirement. (This had come out of some bunch of cretins somewhere in the humanities departments, and I have no idea how it managed to get passed by the collective faculty.) These were supposed to be multidisciplinary, have a significant writing component, and so on. But they gave no incentive to faculty to develop or teach those classes, and as a result there it made a terrible bottleneck for students: literally the last graduation requirement for many of them to be fulfilled was this guilty-of-incestuous-rape capstone thing. The capstone classes were a lot of work to teach, and difficult to develop, and as a result there were few of them. The only one based in the natural sciences was mine. The others tended to be anvilicious obvious political-social agenda ax-grinding where one got an A by parroting the social justice slogans the instructor was transmitting.

 

I never want to teach that situation again. I had an overfull class of graduating seniors, many of whom needed only a class with a "capstone" tag on it, to get their diploma and go on to the job they had waiting for them. They did not give a **** about my class; they hated me for making them work; they hated me for trying to teach them anything in their last term as students; they hated me for making them write a an honest-to-Baal term paper and making them do real library research for it. It was in that class that I felt obliged to stand in front of the room and make an infamous statement:

Using the lecture notes as research paper source material (when you are asked to search the library for references) is like getting a date to the Senior Prom with your brother or sister. It shouldn't count. If it *does* count, you should both go to prison.

I did go on record in the campus paper (a reporter was looking for professors to comment about capstone courses, and I gave her a bunch of really juicy sarcastic remarks) just blasting the concept and the university's execution of it. Even the responding pro-capstone professor (I think in the philosophy department, but I may be imposing my prejudices on that memory) could say nothing more in response than, "Well, yes, I can see why one might say that."

[Pariah]

"Writing Across the Curriculum" is a mandate in my district. I'm actually in favor of it, because honest to Baal, so many of them are SO bad at writing.

 

And technical writing, like a coherent lab procedure? I've never actually seen monkeys trying to do calculus, but I imagine that's very much what it would look like.

[Old Man]

"Okay, pass your lab procedure to the person on your right. Your grade depends on whether that person executes the lab correctly."

[Pariah]

"Okay, pass your lab procedure to the person on your right. Your grade depends on whether that person executes the lab correctly."

Oh, the nasty emails I'd get from parents...

[Cancer]

Just add, "You will get a passing grade if no one dies. A good grade takes more than that."

[procyon]

I graduated with degrees in Chem E and Physics.  So English is pretty much a foreign language to me.

I am about as far from a writer as you can get.

(Don't even ask about how I ended up going back to school and becoming an RN taking care of babes in a NICU...)

 

But the number of folks that we have hired who can't write conherently is deeply concerning to me.

In the medical profession, if it isn't charted - it didn't happen.

But unless it is canned text, a lot of the student nurses version of charting would get them crucified in court.

And some of the actual (newer) registered nurses aren't much better.

 

So when they have written down their hand off report for the nurse who will be assuming care for the patient, you have to get that person to translate what they have written, as it isn't in 'words'.

[L. Marcus]

Still using paper journals, eh?

[Cancer]

Heh. Just ask students to plot points on graph paper. Go ahead. I dare ya. I double-dog dare ye.

[L. Marcus]

I see no challenge. Is there a challenge?

[Old Man]

I don't think the challenge is in asking the students, I think the challenge is maintaining sanity while watching them attempt to comply with the request.

[L. Marcus]

Going laughing mad, you mean?

[Cancer]

There are cases of raw incompetence, cases where the goal is merely to get something that looks like you completed the task as quickly as possible, and others which defy explanation by anyone with a passing familiarity with quantitative data. Well, there's the universal explanation of being unable to read the written instructions (and I have had that actually happen once), but usually that's not a viable alternative.

[Cancer]

Thirty hours without sleep. Time to go home and get horizontal.

[Old Man]

Horizontal is hardly necessary for good sleep.  The chairs in the conference room are great for napping.  As is the driver's seat in my car, with the soothing noise of freeway traffic all around.

[L. Marcus]

... Tagline time.

[Pariah]

"When I die, I want to go peacefully in my sleep, like my Grandfather . . . not screaming in terror like the passengers in his car."

[L. Marcus]

A mercy, that.

[Cancer]

[L. Marcus]

I don't do Horse Jazz.