Guest post: Until the next idiotic thing comes along
Originally a comment by iknklast on Ask the consultants.
From my experience, most of what they teach us in teacher training is just someone getting a bee in their bonnet and producing idiotic materials that schools eat up…for awhile, until the next idiotic thing comes along and they move to that. I have been “trained” in what color I am (not in the terms of white/black, but in terms of what color of personality – they said I am a green), what sort of shoe I am, what my Myers-Briggs is, and something I can’t remember the name of that was peddled as being “actually scientific”…and it wasn’t.
Then there is the yearly training on Title IX, most of which is now taken up by LGBTQ – with an emphasis on the T. Antiracism training that perpetuates stereotypes. Anti-sexism training which focuses not on sexism at all, but sexual assault. Important, yes, but it misses the underlying problem that causes it! Now, of course, we have to recognize that men are assaulted, too, so they manage to alternate stories about young women being assaulted with stories about young men who are being propositioned by their instructors Yes, it happens. But it isn’t the more common situation, and they have minimized the real problem for the problem the MRAs want then to focus on. Now we also have training on diversity, which can be anything, but seems to again be focused on the T.
It’s all a grand scam; companies have found ways to make money “training” teachers, and schools have thrown the money at them, money that could be used much more effectively by actually promoting real professional development instead of noisy quackery.
“It’s not easy bein’ green.” — Kermit
Ray Charles’ outstanding rendition >> https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KHR6HkHySWY
Trouble is, there is no field of knowledge called ‘education’ analogous to those fields labelled ‘history,’ ‘mathematics,’ ‘chemistry,’ and such. And at university level in my experience, academics are mainly concerned with their own research, and in getting ahead in the publish-or-perish scramble. Teaching is down low in their lists of priorities.
Omar, I think part of the problem is that there is a field called “education” that turns out Doc Eds at a rapid pace, but the field lacks any of the rigor of the other fields. And those Doc Eds are in charge of many of the colleges and universities because they’ve fooled people into thinking their degree means something.
As for the university level? I definitely agree. I was fortunate to attend a university that wasn’t publish or perish, and the professors were hired at least in part for their ability to teach. I went all the way through my Master’s program there, and I benefited a lot from having professors who saw teaching as an important part of their life’s work. Most of them did research, of course, but without the push to publish, they were able to teach. Which is probably why this small regional college I attended had a larger percentage of its graduates accepted to medical school than the University of Oklahoma, where the “teachers” do research and the “students” play football.
iknklast:
That reminds me of the situation in the English Department of my old alma mater Sydney University many moons ago now, where the only creative writer on its staff was the janitor (whom I knew personally.) The rest of them were into Eng. Lit. Crit: ie picking through the works of established writers looking for literary allusions, symbolism; that sort of stuff.
But what goes around comes around. It was not long before our modern novelists and poets, eager to get their works set on University reading lists, started accommodating this market by sprinkling or shovelling literary references and allusions into their works; by the ton.
Or so I was told. I could not myself be bothered reading any of it, except for occasional amusement.
Omar, a lot of my books have literary references in them, but I didn’t even know this was happening. In my current series, I use Greek mythology quite heavily. Maybe that means I’ll get on a university reading list someday. That would be nice, because at least someone would be reading my books.
I don’t mind literary references in stories. It’s interesting to see how authors use them and elements of them, weave them in, modify them, put their own twist on them, use them as a starting point. Of course, it can be done well or poorly. Some times I don’t catch the references, but that’s OK. It’s not unusual to see it in the science fiction and fantasy genres. It makes for interesting discussions.