Alternative education school
The Daily Mail picked up the University of Southern Maine story.
A group of students at the University of Southern Maine in Portland, Maine are calling for their professor to be fired after she said in class only two sexes exist.
Christy Hammer, a professor of education, allegedly made the statement during a heated debate about gender identity in her ‘Creating a Positive Learning Environment’ class, causing an uproar among the graduate students.
Only one student agreed with the educator. The rest maintained both biological sexes and social genders are on a spectrum.
…
The class is a requirement to complete the graduate-level Extended Teacher Education Program and become a certified teacher in Maine.
So, as we know, the university is offering an alternative section for the class while declining to fire Hammer.
Ok so wait a second here. These are graduate students in education, and they’re being enabled to say and maintain and insist a fatuous untruth about basic biology. How is that ok? How is that going to work out in the future? Are education schools just going to nod placidly and allow students to go out into the world of school maintaining a fundamental lie about human biology? Might there possibly be any drawbacks to such a move?
Are grad students in education going to start having their own astronomy next? Their own climate studies? Their own special unique chemistry?
And now that the Daily Mail has covered this (and next Fox?), more lefties are going to reflexively take up the stance opposite to that of the Mail. Not allowed to think something through and perhaps agree with a source commonly considered The Opposition, must adhere to the battle lines and oppose out of loyalty.
Tribalism is strong on both sides. Most of my positions on political matters place me solidly on the side of the modern left – strongly in favour of unions, abortion availability, euthanasia legality, same sex marriage equality, tight gun control (though not an outright ban), decriminalisation of personal use quantities of drugs, curtailing rampant land development, rewilding and noxious weed control, social safety net spending… so on and so forth, with all positions being the product of long thought rather than reflexive loyalty to the best of my ability. Yet by opposing the left this one matter, in the eyes of the genderists I may as well be a Trump-supporting evangelical southern baptist.
That has been the instant assumption others make about me whenever I take up the gender rejecting position without saying the words ‘gender critical’ (BTW I think gender rejection is a better label than gender critical for reasons of clarity. Oh well, can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.). It just doesn’t enter the head of the genderist that opposition could come from within the left. Either I am an evangelical moving against laws that
protect the rights of trans peoplepander to and coddle trans people with special exemptions from existing law, or I am the unwitting dupe of such people. And of course, in the process I am murdering / genociding / forcibly suiciding the transes and enbies, the delicate flowers.It is a characteristic of many who call themselves ‘conservatives’: the truth of any proposition lies not in how well or otherwise it stands up to rational critique and analysis, but rather whether or not it is good for business-as-usual. Both covid denialists and climate-change denialists fall into this camp.
Arguably, the most successful of all was Trofim Lysenko, whose brand of quackery was seen as something that could possibly get Soviet agriculture out of a short-term crisis in the 1930s, and was endorsed by the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin on that basis.
Keeping an open mind is more difficult for some than it is for others. It has been a long slow haul away from tribal groupthink towards genuine freedom of individual thought. Some people and regions have been more successful than have others; islanders like the Ionian Greeks more so than Russians and Americans.
But at no time to my knowledge has the official Kremlin line been that there are more than two sexes. Orthodoxy has its limits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism#:~:text=Lysenko%20was%20admitted%20into%20the,and%20cause%20it%20to%20fail.
Alternatively, they could prove the existence of a third sex, graduate with honours, and pick up a Nobel Prize.
For a long time, I have not been impressed with degrees in education. A lot of the teaching there is sloppy, and a lot of it is “modern pedagogy”, which means bullshit about things without evidence, often leading to really out of the world of reality suggestions; I believe I have mentioned the idea that we need to allow students to be examined on Mitosis using interpretative dance.
In one school I attended, the students who were not able to get into the Biology graduate program because they didn’t have good records from their undergrad (and the school was not draconian or punitive; they allowed leeway in admissions scores) enrolled in the education program to become Biology educators. In another school I attended, one of the EdD students was given data another student collected, so that student was no longer able to use that data. The data were sent to the Ed department, where one of the department faculty wrote the dissertation for her.
Sorry, but the whole concept of the Ed department is so outrageously ludicrous, this doesn’t surprise me at all. It is fertile grounds for woo.
2#4:
There is no academic discipline of ‘Education’ comparable say, to Physics, Chemistry, Biology or any of the other sciences, where the parameters of each are well agreed and understood. ‘Education’ is whatever the individual teachers of it want it to be, and they in turn have commonly failed to make the grade in the more seriously defined and understood other disciplines; including languages and literature.
The aim of education is cultivation of literacy and numeracy at appropriate levels. But most importantly, to develop the student’s capacity for critical thought. This is dangerous, as it can be easily turned against the vendors of all 57 varieties of bullshit, none of which are in short supply in the Education departments and faculties.
Perhaps, however, allowances can be made: as long as we remember that those practitioners are in an early period in their field’s history, and are arguably back in something similar to the good old Aristotelian days of chemistry, when everything consisted of earth, fire, air and water in different combinations and proportions. (And I reckon that that was not bad for a first try; not forgetting the pre-Socratics of course, like Thales of Miletus, who reckoned that everything was just made of water; as ‘Education’ presently is.)
I have had some aspirations, at different points in my life, to be a teacher. I have despaired of any personal ability to teach, even back in grade school, when classmates would ask me to show them how to work a particular math problem, but then they would be utterly unable to solve the next similar problem. I also doubt my ability to lead or control a group. I know a very good teacher when I see one; there must be teachable things from these examples that could be conveyed to others, like me, who are not natural born leaders or teachers. That is the kind of thing I’d be looking for in a teaching curriculum, as well as things about different styles of learning, what counts as measurable success in helping students achieve literacy, numeracy, critical thinking, reasoning and logic, writing expression, and so on. Surely,there are things that good teachers know that can be taught to others.
maddog1129:
Don’t get me wrong. I criticise the discipline of ‘Education;’ not the profession of teaching.
I would seriously recommend that you could acquire a lot of useful classroom and teaching skills by joining an amateur theatrical society and spending some time learning-by-doing in that environment. iknklast (of the commentariat here at B&W) does this, and I’m sure to the benefit of both those domains of her life.
At this point, what I can tell you from my years in teaching. There isn’t much science behind learning styles; while I believe that people do learn differently, I doubt we can quantify that into “learning styles”. Since different methods developed to test a person’s “learning style” often come out with wildly different answers, it is not considered scientific. Education departments, however, regard it as such. I wish the whole damn concept would go away. I am tired of getting it on my student reviews, with “I learn to a visual style, and she teaches to auditory”, while another student in the same class will say “I learn to an auditory style, and she teaches to visual”. In short, the only real role I see in learning styles right now is a tool to bash the teacher over the head if you don’t get the grade you want. Recognizing that each student comes in with a different set of skills and experiences, different vocabulary, and different knowledge base is so much more relevant, and I don’t know if this can be taught or not. No one tried to teach it to me; I learned through trial and error.
As for what counts for a measure of success, we have been debating this for the entire time I have been teaching. Do high stakes exams have any value? Should students do group projects? If so, how should they be graded? Are grades even legitimate at all, or should we just assign them a diploma if they stick around for the required number of years/classes? (This last is fast becoming a standard belief for many, especially those who believe in the market place of education rather than the education role of education). What counts as critical thinking? In that last context, many people teach woo as high examples of critical thinking, because you are rejecting the “establishment” thought everyone else is trying to feed you. So my attempts to teach critical thinking may be at odds with those of other instructors, leaving my poor students with their heads swimming. Should they really look for experts and robust research? Or should they accept that expert knowledge is colonialist, imperialist, racist, homophobic bullshit?
And one of the latest fads is particularly problematic – the use of student evaluations as a measure of teacher performance. Not only is there doubt about the reliability and accuracy of these assessments, they have been demonstrated to be racist and sexist. In fact, my friend who was a math teacher (from Thailand) has been told on several occasions to go back to China.