https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2020/09/18/professors-poem-invokes-learning-and-safety-time-covid-opinion
University of Wisconsin-Superior Professor of Writing Julie Gard recently had a poem featured in the Career Advice section of Inside Higher Ed, an online publication focused on college and university topics. More information on the poem is available in the academics news section of the UWS website.
— a loose companion to a previous essay about teaching —
“The truth knocks on the door and you say, ‘Go away, I’m looking for the truth,’ and so it goes away. Puzzling.”
— Robert M. Pirsig, from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
I understand why a lot of teachers lust after “best practices.” I get why so many of us grasp at supposedly foolproof methods for making students do exactly what we want them to do. A lot of us have been taught that assigning work then rewarding or punishing students according to how they do it is the gist of teaching. (A lot of students, understandably and heartbreakingly, believe those rewards and punishments are the gist and evidence of learning.) From a certain perspective it makes sense for us to seek information about how to reward and punish as effectively as possible. It also, in some ways, makes sense for administrators to dictate practices they believe will create consistent punishments and rewards throughout a particular course, major, college unit, school, district, or state. The actual of process helping fellow human beings learn — as opposed to the process of meaningless, faux-rigorous punishing and rewarding — is a task of privilege that’s incredibly difficult to do well. I know my own version of feeling desperate for some method or approach that just works. …
In a letter to the University of Minnesota Board of Regents, leaders of two faculty organizations on the Duluth campus call the compensation package of the outgoing system president “excessive” and a “golden parachute.”
University of Minnesota President Eric Kaler announced in July his intention to step down from his position in 2019, saying in a statement that his seven years as president exceeds the national average and the university will benefit from a fresh perspective.
“Quite simply, it is time,” he said, noting he intends to work as president emeritus for one year to continue momentum on the university’s $4 billion “Driven” campaign. The fundraising effort is seeking to raise $1 billion for students, $2 billion for faculty and research, and $1 billion for university initiatives and outreach. …
UMD faculty union and senate denounce outgoing U of M president’s compensation packageRead more
‘Cause I survived the ’80s one time already
And I don’t recall it all that fondly
— Craig Finn
The bemulleted boy in that senior portrait over there came very close to not graduating with his Rochester John Marshall high school class of 1989 mates. One semester more and the rage that had fueled his self-destructive approach to school since 1983 would have elicited an anticlimactic letter explaining why he couldn’t walk in the ceremony and what he’d have to do if he wanted a diploma.
His K-6 career had suggested potential. Then a few months into seventh grade his interest in caring or trying seemed to evaporate. He embodied adolescent apathy. He also transcended it in ways that made very little sense to himself or anyone else. One example: he so bitterly resented being placed into advanced science and English classes (for reasons he could articulate no further than, “I just want to be in the normal classes”), that he intentionally got crummy grades on assignments until people who made such decisions had no choice but to bust him down to non-advanced sections.
At least that’s how I think I remember it. I know he was pissed — furious — about school in general, and still pretty far away from having vocabulary or perspective required to process what he was feeling or why. I know he self-sabotaged, sometimes so willingly it seemed wanton, and sometimes while watching it happen and wishing he knew how to stop it. In those situations, the latter often presented as the former. I also know it’s possible he got kicked out of those advanced sections because he just wasn’t equipped to stay in them. It’s not taking shots at him to say he might just not have been smart enough in ways the classes required students to be. …
