ReadMetro, you're shitting me, right?
This comes from the drunken, malingering fuck-ups over at Rate Your Students:
Yeah, kids. If you're my boss go ahead and try and fire me. Hold on. I'm going to go get the hand lotion and Kleenex....There. Ready.
So, I'm like a burger-person, am I? The things I teach are too hard for a 5-year old, and if someone only has the capacity to understand what a 5-year old can understand...What the fuck are they doing in my classroom? Siew Cheng Hoe, you're an idiot.
HJ
Seed Newsvine
5 comments:
Wait, what? What's wrong with the ReadMetro article? Obviously you should ask questions, the teacher must be accountable for the clarity of the lesson. Education is a business as much as anything else, and a lousy teacher is bad for both students and the school. The headline does state this a bit too strongly, and the "5-year-old" remark is perhaps overstating the point, but in general I don't see the problem with it. What's with this animosity toward students?
I have no animosity toward students, only the ones who might actually try and pull this argument. Without exception, the ones who would make this argument are in the vanishingly small minority of students who do not pass my class. When they fail, this I know, it is _never_ my fault.
Nobody said anything about a lousy teacher in the article. The teacher can be really fucking fantastic and a student can still crap out and fail. "If it's hard," the argument goes, "it's the teacher's responsibility to dumb it down to the lowest common denominator." I just don't buy that. Some shit is supposed to be hard. We often teach about things that we have a hard time understanding.
I'm not there to powder babies' butts, and I am not there to make them happy (though we generally seem to have a good time). The business model is simply not accurate. If it is accurate as a model, then they are paying for the opportunity to win my approval that they have mastered the course material. The student is always right? My ass. The student who disappears for a month and then tells me that they _have_ to pass my class can lick me.
HJ
Remember, too, that your tax dollars pay firefighters' salaries. If you don't think a fireman is extinguishing a house fire in the right way, feel free to wrest the hose from him and show him how it's done.
The problem with the article is that it implies that, because you paid for an education, an education should be given to you. the last few paragraphs, though, encourage students to become involved.
I think it's really just a case of choosing a bad metaphor. College isn't like a fast food restaurant. It's more like, oh, Weight Watchers, or bariatric surgery, or riding a bike.
The business model (students as customers) is so flawed in so many ways that I don't know where to start. But a good place to begin would be the reductio ad absurdem - if students are customers, they are buying a grade or a degree, and we should just take their money and give them the grade or degree. Standard tuition for a C, 150% for a B, 200% for an A, etc. Saves all that vexing teaching and learning hassle...
I think I'll ask my students for a raise.
HJ
Post a Comment