Answer for question 4594.

[sabotabby]

[Error: unknown template qotd]Well, I can't talk publicly about my work troubles; safe to say that there are a number of sad and horrific things happening.

If I could change one thing about my job—and any job—it would be the idea of education as commodity and the increasing corporatization of schools. On a personal level, bureaucracy and hypercompetitiveness brought about by the idea that I must always, always fight to stay employed means that I have less time to plan innovative lessons, take risks, and so on. This doesn't benefit me, because I am an anxious wreck, and it doesn't benefit the students.

On a broader social level, academia—both K-12 and post-secondary—is about certification, not learning. I read a great cranky essay about this but nearly every educator I know admits that grades have become inflated, students are less engaged, there's a push to rely on bells and whistles rather than inquiry, and students just seem stupider than they used to. This is not because Millennials are self-absorbed and shallow; it's pure economics. Training was once the responsibility of the employer; now it's the young person (or their parents) entering the workforce who must fund the training at an inflated rate and pray that they've made the right gamble in choosing a program. Meanwhile, the idea of tenure has gone out the window, and you get contract faculty that's stressed, overworked, and underpaid. It's all a brilliant Ponzi scheme and that's why I encourage my students to become plumbers and electricians.

Comments

[oncenefarious.livejournal.com]

I totally agree with you about the education system being a huge, commercialized economic mess (hoorah for No Child Left Behind, and thanks Bush).

But, really, thank you on behalf of everyone for being an educator even though it's difficult. Good luck!

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

Heartily seconded!

[sabotabby]

Thanks. :)

[sabotabby]

Thanks.

I'm in Canada, so no NCLB. What we do get, though, is failed ideas from the US and other countries. Our bureaucrats seem to be invested in taking things that don't work elsewhere and seeing if they will work here (spoiler: they don't).

[oncenefarious.livejournal.com]

Oh no. It's sad to hear that Canada is making the same mistakes. A lot of people in the US see Canada as a place where the powers that be don't make the same mistakes; I knew that was idealistic thinking, but it's still unfortunate to see the same issues in the education system.

[sabotabby]

It's often framed slightly differently and brings in a lot of social justice vocabulary, but yeah. We've started standardized testing and privatization and all of that crap.

[oncenefarious.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's really sad.

[kryss-labryn.livejournal.com]

It doesn't help that we don't have the population to order our own, Canadian textbooks from publishers; we somehow can't afford the print runs. So for some stupid reason we get Texas's text books, because our education system isn't saddening enough. :(

Can't even go with, like, California's text books. Nope, we buy Texas's.

Oh, and hey, for a taste of the American education system for my fellow non-Americans, a while ago I stumbled upon this quiz using questions by some American university Medieval history professor. Now, I've been a history geek for decades but my area of expertise is Viking Age Scandinavia, although I have more knowledge than the general public about the rest of the Medieval Age. So I thought I'd try it.

I got fed up about five questions in and quit. It's not a quiz on Medieval history; it's a quiz about America, as loosely tied to Medieval history.

The first one is inauspicious but indicative:
In which city did the cartographer Bartholomew Columbus work on a top-secret global mapping project during the 1480s that provided vital knowledge for his brother Christopher’s expedition to the Americas in 1492?
Toledo
Lisbon
London
Barcelona

#2:
Which US location shares its name with a canonised 13th-century monarch?
St Louis
St Paul
San Francisco
St Thomas

Oh well that is obviously Medieval history right there. Why are we even asking about the States? It wasn't a country until well outside of the Medieval period.

Also obviously St. Louis, duh.

(Oh hey, the answer to this question also focuses on Medieval history and not on, like, American geography or something stupid like that. See? It is St Louis, named after King Louis IX of France (ruled 1226–70, canonised 1297) by 18th-century French merchants. St Francis of Assisi and St Thomas Aquinas (who shares his name with one of the US Virgin Islands) are also 13th-century saints.)

#3:
Where can you see the 12th-century Fuentidueña chapel and the ‘Hunt of the Unicorn’ tapestries (1495–1505)?
Segovia
Santa Barbara
Washington, DC
New York

You know this tapestry. Everyone knows it. It's one of the single most famous pieces of Medieval art in the Western world. Heck, they used it in the opening of "The Last Unicorn".

What the hell does what American museum it's in now have to do with the Middle bloody Ages?!

#4:
This barely even counts as Medieval history, as that usually focuses on Western history, but sure, I guess you can tie it in via the Crusades. But what's a university-level course on Medieval history without something that ties back to the modern US in there?

The use of black flags by the movement known as Islamic State harks back to a symbol used by a medieval Islamic dynasty. Which one?
Umayyads
Seljuks
Fatimids
Abbasids
The answer is the Abbasids, of course, and yes, I knew that, but not because of Isil.

Question 5 is where I lost patience last time and quit the bloody "Medieval history" (ha!) quiz.

The Black Death of 1347–51 was the first outbreak of bubonic plague in the west. In which US port was there a plague epidemic in 1900–04?
New Orleans
Corpus Christi
Valdez
San Francisco

Oh, you're right; the US city that had an outbreak of plague in the early TWENTIETH CENTURY is totally Medieval history.

No wonder Yanks are so stereotypically self-centred and think everything revolves around them, if this is an example of a bloody "Medieval history" course.

And we get their bloody textbooks from them. >

[sabotabby]

Well, we do have our own textbooks—I know 'cause I've worked on them. Though sometimes we get the shitty Texas ones.

But they must be approved by multiple school boards, including the Catholic board, which is great for sex ed. And Alberta. Alberta must approve everything.

[oncenefarious.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think most of our textbooks come from Texas (McGraw-Hill). It's terrible. Horror stories include this one (http://thinkprogress.org/education/2015/10/08/3710438/texas-board-of-education-member-says-people-choose-to-be-offended-over-textbook-controversy/) that you might have seen in the news.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

And what about the Plague of Justinian then?

[kryss-labryn.livejournal.com]

What US city did that happen in, then?

[40alatariel.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the post. My father recently celebrated his 90th birthday, and it was then that I discovered that this successful engineer never finished college! He had an argument with one of his professors and neglected to pass a certain class necessary for graduation. He simply went from job to better job based on his reputation and work ethic without the framed paperwork to prove his worth.

Perhaps after we have glutted the market with degrees in Art, Drama, and Literature, we shall go back to employing people based on practical knowledge. There is nothing wrong with knowing something about Art, Journalism, and Literature. In fact, I encourage these in my children, but all their lives I've told them to consider that their "day jobs" will support the fun stuff. Therefore, one child has become a Massage Therapist, while the other has yet to decide between Auto Mechanics and Computer Repair.

[sabotabby]

The problem is that there's now a glut of massage therapists on the market. And nurses, and engineers, and certain other "practical" majors. And it's quite hard to get a job the way your father did these days, unless nepotism comes into play—the problem is with employers requiring a university degree for things that don't need a university degree.

I think art, journalism, literature, drama are all critically unappreciated these days. I can count on my fingers the number of my students who have gone into these fields. (They all want to be engineers or nurses—these are kids who can barely do math and faint at the sight of blood.) This is a tragedy. Universities should be teaching the liberal arts—that's what universities are for—and students should be enrolling in these programs if they're genuinely interested.

What shouldn't be happening is an entry-level minimum wage job requiring a university degree in something, which means the student spends four years dicking around with majors they don't really care about, plus an unpaid internship, just to enter the workforce. Not to mention the university directing all of its funding towards the upper bureaucracy rather than permanent jobs.

[joysilence.livejournal.com]

If I showed this comment of yours to my chap Duffy he would almost explode with agreeingness. His family pushed him all his life to get a Good Solid Degree in a Practical Subject, in his case computers. He got a degree in computers. He got four years of being absolutely shat on by the saturated job market, going from one crappy job with an average salary of about £12k to the next. He got a nervous breakdown and his physical health collapsed. Now I support him, largely by translating vast quantities of very un-solid and silly French jewellery and make-up catalogues. I won't lie - I do quite a bit of technical translation where my own Good Solid Degree has been helpful, but it's never been essential.

I also totally agree about the liberal arts. The UK seems to be just kissing all its humanities courses goodbye at the moment (like the Leeds University classics department closing a few years ago) and everyone seems to think this is some sort of solution, rather than part of the problem.

[sabotabby]

I took what was, at the time, a Good Solid Degree in a Practical Subject, and then the dot com bubble exploded. It turned out okay because I was willing to work shit jobs (we were all sold on the program with promises of a six-figure income, hence additional professional fees) and eventually went into teaching, but basically my degree is not worth the paper it's printed on, and I could have just gone to art school or something.

[joysilence.livejournal.com]

Urgh that must have been awful. But at least your technical background will allow you to detect when there's an electrical smell in the corner. And do all that computer and audiovisual stuff, though that's less important obviously.

I don't like the way people just assume art can be left to hobbyists. That stuff very often needs investment if you want to get past the Patrick Kincaid stage, sometimes financial investment, sometimes just time and energy. Very few people are able to just chuck out great art in their spare time. My art teacher tried to poke me into going to art school but I was all "no, I want to do an engineering thing and get Real Money", and look at me now. Doing a bit of drawing at the weekend is not a replacement for a career as an artist and it's repulsive to suggest that it is.

[sabotabby]

Yes, this.

Why is there not as much great art and music anymore? Because it's not supported. Someone pointed out that David Bowie and Alan Rickman were both working class kids who went to art school, and that's pretty much impossible these days. And of course the great artists of the past had patrons. If you let the free market decide, only the idle rich or the mindlessly marketable will be able to create art, and that's probably the most boring stuff.

The computer and AV stuff is what got me my job and kept me from being laid off a bunch of times, so I'm not complaining. Of course, I didn't learn that in school; my program was straight-up graphic design and not very useful.

[mle292.livejournal.com]

Being a plumber or electrician is no guarantee of steady or reliable employment, especially for minorities and women. It is largely seasonal unless a person is liked well enough to be a service driver.

I had a job once where there were five people who stood around and talked about fishing for about five hours each day. I had trained every apprentice that showed up on that job because I was good at it. The best apprentice and me both got laid off when the job started to finish up, and all five of the fishing buddies stayed.

[sabotabby]

I'm not sure that's the case here; people fight tooth-and-nail for apprenticeships and you pretty much can't get one unless you already know someone. And of course, you can't get work or training without an apprenticeship. The plumbers I know make a killing. (Though, none of them are women or minorities—see the aforementioned nepotism.)

The sweetest gig, of course, is to be a contractor for the TDSB.

[mle292.livejournal.com]

Okay. This sort of thing drives me nuts.

Maintenance work is ridiculous amounts of paperwork, and also quite a bit of traveling between buildings, and time to communicate what the actual task is AND, administrators often stuff their wise leadership into our budgets. All of that needs to get billed somewhere.

It probably took ten minutes to install the pencil sharpener. It took an hour to order the damn thing through the approved vendor which changed six times last year, and another half hour to get a reasonable description of where it was supposed to go because the original work order forgot to include the room number, and another half hour to finish all the paperwork once the task was completed.

Speaking as someone who has responded to work orders with descriptions as helpful as "an electrical smell in the corner," I assure you, maintenance work is under the same ridiculous constraints and expectations as all of the rest of education.

[mle292.livejournal.com]

The complaint in the article about teachers not being allowed to do their own installation is also misleading.

We've had problems with staff installing really inferior equipment and then asking us to maintain or replace it as a repair, or even installing their own locks on doors. Until there's a system in place to prevent that, then it's going to be better and cheaper in the long run to have qualified professionals doing the work with approved equipment.

[sabotabby]

If the school buildings weren't falling apart and the $147 pencil sharpeners actually worked, I might be inclined to agree.

But we have all the same approved vendors (which all charge too much) that we've had for years, and the whole idea of approved vendors is supposed to save on paperwork, but instead we end up with two layers of bureaucracy and a bunch of guys who basically just sit around and bill extra hours for each person. It becomes easier to buy, out of my own pocket, a $20 electric pencil sharpener that actually works. Which is what I, and every other teacher, end up doing, just like we tend to buy our own books, and Kleenex, and hand sanitizer, and educational toys for the little kids, and so on.

It might be different elsewhere, but here we have two big problems: shoddy 70s construction, and a maintenance staff with an exclusive contract and ties to the mafia. The buildings are deeply unsanitary—we have holes in the roof and black mold and all kinds of health things that aren't getting addressed because it's too expensive—and it's yet another reason for parents to take their kids out of the system and contributing to the downward spiral that we're in.

[mad-bertha.livejournal.com]

Totally with you. Looks like it's the same across the world, permeating teaching staff, management, and students.

[sabotabby]

Yep. It's primarily economic, hence global.

[joysilence.livejournal.com]

I get very annoyed when people try to blame the fact that things are all fucked up on millennials being stupid and shallow. Just to exist in the modern world, kids today need to have a level of computer skills requiring pretty heavy-duty brain activity, and yet baby boomers still see fit to mock them for not knowing enough grammar and stuff. I don't make fun of old people for dissolving into a pool of incompetence when faced with. say, a numberplate recognition-based payment terminal in a carpark, or a touch-screen in a Mucky D's, so I would very much appreciate it if they didn't make fun of Gen Y for not knowing what a gerund is. If I could change one thing about your job, it would be to put you, or at the very least someone like you, in charge of it at national level, but sadly that may not happen so the least our privileged elders can do is keep their trap shut about how stupid young people are for playing all day long on their Facegram and their Instabook.

[sabotabby]

Haha I would totally abuse my privilege. There's a reason I don't want to rise to any position above department head.

But I wish the higher-ups would listen to those actually in the classroom. And also that other teachers would make more of an effort to understand social and technological change.