on education

WILL HOCHMAN (hochman@uscolo.edu)
Sun, 29 Nov 1998 13:05:42 -0700 (MST) 

from another list with love and squalor, will

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 28 Nov 1998 18:14:14 -0600
From: Fred Kemp <f.kemp@TTACS.TTU.EDU>
Reply-To: acw-l@ttacs6.ttu.edu
To: acw-l@ttacs6.ttu.edu
Subject: Re: "Just in Time Delivery"

Craig says, brilliantly, I think,

>    I don't think the problem is with "the Quest" for knowledge. If
>there is a problem with "the Quest," it is that is is not being
>presented as a quest. The problem with "just in time delivery" is not
>when, where, or how instruction is being delivered, it is _that_
>instruction is still being _delivered_, and not being sought by
>learners. Instead of teaching students what we think they want, or
>what we think they need, we should be teaching them to figure it out
>for themselves and do something valuable with what they learn.


What we all want, it seems to me, is to have students gather at our feet
seeking our wisdom.  We want that both emotionally and, as far as we've
thought the matter through, societally.  We don't want to be classroom
manipulators or puppet masters behind the two-way mirror tricking students
into learning what they don't want to learn and yet what we KNOW they should
be wanting to learn.

We don't want that, but that is what we are.  We are not gurus of Truth or
spiritual leaders gently pointing to The Way.  We are instructional hacks,
chopping semester by semester through a new growth that arises not our of
conviction or ethereal seeking, but because the catalog tells them they have
to take the frigging course.

So, does that knowledge make us toss our cookies at the beakness of it all?
Well, it sometimes does, as I can testify, having supervised several
hundreds of graduate teaching assistants over the last decade.  I get very
intelligent people sitting before me, sometimes more intelligent than even I
think I am, who go grey in the face and start gulping for air when I
convince them that they are not in the total salvation business.  But they
don't want to be English majors.  They want to be priests of art.  They want
to escape the crassness of what everybody else in life has to go through and
slip into a different ballgame altogether.  Illo Tempere.

Well, check out the clientele, you priests of art.  As I keep saying, maybe
Harvard is working with a totally different elite (I suspect it isn't), but
at the state university level we're all operating in basically the same
league.  And the students in this league are completely differently from
what we imagined they would be when we started forming our little
professional fantasies at the beginnings of our careers.  They aren't the
sort who sit at your feet and glom onto each and every of your words.
They're aggressively their own people.  The cliches of movie teaching are
beneath contempt when real people enter the picture.

The Dead Poet's Society is too easy, like that new dimwit movie of Robin
Williams where heaven and hell are reduced to childish visuals that most
children would reject as silly.  Nobody ever has a "quest for knowlege," or
would admit to it.  But we all want to know things.  Somehow our formal
education has hacked away at that basic desire to know things until most of
our students and most of our teachers can't even recognize the concept
anymore.  Both groups are simply going through the motions, living out the
terms of an implicit contract that says that "I won't bug you in your
efforts if you won't bug me in my efforts," and what results is the horrible
stagnation of mass education in America.

Should "formal learning" be more than mass marketing of professional skills
to the bidder who can pay?

You bet.

Is it a spiritual encounter with some kind of fuzzy wuzzy enrichment that
will somehow zing the students with a jazzier encounter with life?

You bet.

Can we manage, systemically, such an encounter?

Fat chance.

So do we teachers retreat to burning incense and chanting mantras, hoping
for enlightened intervention from something outside the state retirement
system, or do we operate from what we know our students, fools that they
are, stupidly think they know that they want?  The ability to use the months
and years of their education in getting a better job, a better niche, and
maybe the chance to clear a bit of the daily deck in order to think about
the higher order of things that fuzzy wuzzy humanists keep proclaiming as
the only real endeavor in life?

Well, you know my answer.

Fred Kemp
f.kemp@ttu.edu
http://english.ttu.edu/acw