It is interesting how the author is so cautious about saying "College is not for everyone". Maybe we hear "It should be hard to get a college education - especially if you are poor". I'm a big believer in getting all the education you can. That is not the same thing as believing you should get as many college degrees as possible. There comes a point when it is time to get out and do something with your life. For some people that means a PhD. For others a B.S. For some an apprenticeship with a skilled craftsman. Don't confuse a degree with an education.
In the Basement of the Ivory Tower
21–30 of 132 posts
Re: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower
#22Very insightful view into the mind of an essay marker. I've always loathed the subjectiveness of English courses, that's why I took computer science :) I agree with the author, not everyone is cut out for English classes, but I think an alternative to these "trying help you an write essay" classes should be some kind of "just read a book and enjoy it" class. It would be a start anyway. In school, any hope of loving E…
The problem with dissecting a book is that -- just like dissecting an animal -- at the end of the exercise, the subject of the dissection is dead. While mulling over a good book and discussing it can be enjoyable, the attempt to squeeze deep meaning out of something that the author put in by chance simply kills the joy of a good book. Besides, I find that often the books that tend to be chosen for literature classes…
My favorite 'English' class in high school was a journalism class, which was centered around learning to write well and communicate something effectively, with none of the BS about "hidden symbolism".
I proudly got a D on an English paper once, when the topic was "how does the symbolism help us understand what the author is telling us", where I answered that it didn't help in the slightest, and that, truth be told, if the author wanted to tell me something, he ought to have come out and said it directly instead of beating around the bush with "symbolism" that to me was as clear as mud, and that in the process he would have saved us all a great deal of time because his message wasn't really all that difficult to summarize in a paragraph or two.
Re: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower
#23Excellent submission. That was an extremely well-written and particularly trenchant piece of writing. It is interesting to compare the experiences of Ms. L to various people in their 40s returning to school when I was in undergrad. They too had difficulty with very basic (to us youngsters, anyway) methods of computer use. Many viewed computers with either outright terror or blatant suspicion. I have often thought of…
It would be such a simple thing for me and judging by Ms. L's plight, it could make all the difference in the world to some people.
SIMPLE!!!??? You clearly didn't teach your parents to use computers. Teaching people how to use computers is one of the more challenging and frustrating things I have yet to do. Besides perhaps math, computers baffle more adults than anything I can imagine. I used to have 2 hours phone calls with my mom trying to "get her document back". She had just clicked another window and her word doc was behind it. 2 hours later she accidently clicked the word doc again and it came forward. Teaching the computer illiterate is a can of worms I wouldn't open without some serious friends and some serious beer.
Re: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower
#24Very insightful view into the mind of an essay marker. I've always loathed the subjectiveness of English courses, that's why I took computer science :) I agree with the author, not everyone is cut out for English classes, but I think an alternative to these "trying help you an write essay" classes should be some kind of "just read a book and enjoy it" class. It would be a start anyway. In school, any hope of loving E…
I'd argue that the subjectiveness of a paper isn't as totally devoid of a good method. If you, once you were out of the woods from writing you paper, read it you could probably tell the teacher what grade it should receive. If you couldn't, if she gave you a great paper, (say an A paper) and you could easily compare the relative merits of each paper. You'd know immediately if your paper was worthy of an A or not.
Its probably all the more difficult for the teacher to grade the lower end of the scale. Giving a B grade is probably pretty easy. The paper was pretty good, but not an A. From there on down it gets difficult to wade through the errors and bad constructions to figure out if perhaps the ideas were of B quality but everything else was a C or D. I'll bet that the lower end of the scale is the most difficult and gives the most grief.
Its like judging climbing routes. They have this whole rating system (5.8, 5.9, 5.10a, 5.10b, 5.10c, 5.10d...) that is wholly subjective, much like an english paper. However, if you were told that something was a 5.10a, and you could climb it, you could surely judge climbs around it. "oh, well that climb was pretty hard, I just barely made it after several tries at the crux (the hardest move). It must be a 5.10b or c."
On a side note, grading "quantitative" tests isn't easy or grief free either. Math tests with lots of mistakes are frustrating. You want to give as much credit as possible for correctness, but for a multi-step problem, how does one assign points for correct ideas but incorrect implementation. What if they screw up the first step, that didn't allow them to do any of the other steps, but they had the right idea for those? Its quite challenging.
Re: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower
#25I can bet that woman must be good at something she has never been tested on and probably does not know about. Maybe if we start from the premise that most individuals have something they are really good at, we might be able to move beyond the educational system of As and Fs and take advantage of people's abilities to the fullest.
But what if that premise isn't true? What if some people just suck at everything?
I can't see any reason why everybody must be good at something. There's nothing about genetics which says that random genes will combine in such a way as to give them at least one useful skill.
How would we go about testing your hypothesis?
Re: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower
#26I can bet that woman must be good at something she has never been tested on and probably does not know about. Maybe if we start from the premise that most individuals have something they are really good at, we might be able to move beyond the educational system of As and Fs and take advantage of people's abilities to the fullest.
as an economics guy, I can tell you the fundamental flaw is with the signal models higher education systems currently use. It follows even on through to the wall street ibanks. "Ivyleague type with above 3.7 GPA." look at the mess they are in now.
The mess they are in now isn't because of Ivyleague type dudes with good grades who are actually dumb. Its just ridiculous decisions all along the way. Who came up with the ridiculous idea that Fannie-Mae could buy its own securities? That still amazes me.
Re: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower
#27At my old school they tested incoming freshmen and sent many of them to a pass / fail English 050 class. It seems odd that most schools don't have such programs.
Agree. I, too, taught "literature" to people that could barely read. It sucked. If you can't read, you should learn the mechanics of how to read before dealing with things like "foreshadowing" "theme" "denouement." Just, basic stuff.Otherwise, it's just ridiculous. That's what these colleges should be doing, if they're taking student's money. Not raping them in their vulnerability, naivete, and ability to get a loan.
That's what these colleges should be doing, if they're taking student's money.
Oh, and also... if you're going to be claiming to be an English lecturer and complaining about illiteracy, you should probably master the rules of apostrophe placement first.
Re: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower
#28Excellent submission. That was an extremely well-written and particularly trenchant piece of writing. It is interesting to compare the experiences of Ms. L to various people in their 40s returning to school when I was in undergrad. They too had difficulty with very basic (to us youngsters, anyway) methods of computer use. Many viewed computers with either outright terror or blatant suspicion. I have often thought of…
It would be such a simple thing for me and judging by Ms. L's plight, it could make all the difference in the world to some people. SIMPLE!!!??? You clearly didn't teach your parents to use computers. Teaching people how to use computers is one of the more challenging and frustrating things I have yet to do. Besides perhaps math, computers baffle more adults than anything I can imagine. I used to have 2 hours phone c…
My Mom always wants the screen to "return to the way it was".
Me: You mean the desktop?
Mom: I don't know. The way it was.
Me: Is it this? (shows her the desktop)
Mom: No. It was all black.
Me: You mean off? (shuts computer down)
Mom: Yes. Thank you.
My Mom's a preschool teacher, and I will rely heavily on her wisdom when I have kids, seeing as I don't know jack about 3 year olds.
Me in 7 years: Mom, my kid won't eat his dinner. I think I got a broken one.
We all have our own useful areas of knowledge.
Re: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower
#29Excellent submission. That was an extremely well-written and particularly trenchant piece of writing. It is interesting to compare the experiences of Ms. L to various people in their 40s returning to school when I was in undergrad. They too had difficulty with very basic (to us youngsters, anyway) methods of computer use. Many viewed computers with either outright terror or blatant suspicion. I have often thought of…
It would be such a simple thing for me and judging by Ms. L's plight, it could make all the difference in the world to some people. SIMPLE!!!??? You clearly didn't teach your parents to use computers. Teaching people how to use computers is one of the more challenging and frustrating things I have yet to do. Besides perhaps math, computers baffle more adults than anything I can imagine. I used to have 2 hours phone c…
I meant simple in the sense that it would be a pretty straightforward way for me to help people like Ms. L. I doubt it would be in any way easy.
And I taught my mother from basic computer illiteracy into practically a power user (well, a relative power user: email and surfing and transferring images from her digital camera. she's the envy of all her friends, at least...).
The biggest hurdle was getting her to believe me that no matter what she did, she couldn't possibly harm the computer beyond my ability to repair it. I think a lot of people unfamiliar with computers think that it is very easy to irreparably damage them. It kind of discourages taking risks and trying to solve problems on your own. Once I made it clear that she could (and should) do whatever she wanted without fear, she picked it up extremely rapidly.
Re: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower
#30Perspicacious and lyrical. Nicely done.
Having said that, I found the author a bit whiny.
I can almost hear his supervisor at his "night job"
"Old Professor X seems like a nice enough sort," they'd say, whispering among themselves, "but he'll never be ready for a job a at a major university. Sure -- he might get published in some rag like The Atlantic, but serious work? Not likely. He's just not cut out for it."
It's all in your perspective. You could take a guy with the same students and the same success ratio and he could write a story about how rewarding it was to help people at night school!
I think that's why I liked it so much: it was so artfully done that I couldn't help but think that the same experiences could be written to drive home a completely opposite conclusion.