Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Teacher tells it like it is, and gets suspended for it!


Pennsylvania high school teacher Natalie Munroe now sits at home having been suspended by her school for ....get this....writing a blog on her non-performing, uninspired students and their attitudes. Really seems like the truth hurts! But getting fired for blogging! WTF!!!

Natalie merely articulated well worn truths (about today's students) that most of us who've done any teaching in the U.S.A. have seen first hand. In two recent blogs:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2011/01/are-college-students-really-wasting.html

and


http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2010/10/college-freshmen-or-wimps-inc.html

I noted my own disenchantment with the American teaching experience, though that was confined to a community college, after I'd just come back to the States from teaching nearly 20 years in Barbados. I also compared how college was in my day, when there were no "teacher evaluations" and students earned exactly what they merited, compared to today, when grade inflation is rampant.

Author Hara Estroff Marano, editor-at-large of Psychology Today and the author, most recently, of A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting, nailed this pervasive grade distortion which is ruining college, as well as High school students and converting them to grade grubbers (p. 15):

"In 1968, 17.6 percent of students received As in high school and 23.1 percent got Cs. In 2004, 47.5% of students had an A average and only 5% had a C average."

As one can see, this makes a high grade essentially meaningless. Indeed, if 'C' is average, then the bulk of students ought to be earning it - IF the teacher is doing his job properly! Excess frequency of high grades in a given class distribution then either denotes a soft marking scheme, softball curriculum or some other defect. In college, as Estroff notes (ibid.) it's even worse, with her report that Larry Summers (then President of Harvard) discovered 94% of seniors graduating with honors! No way!

If 94% of any college or university are graduating with honors, then that college isn't doing much of anything and its honors program is merely cosmetic.

Worse, as Estroff accurately observes (ibid.):

"It is a mark of the devaluation of education at every level that a C serves as the impetus not for the hard work of self-improvement but for parental intercession".


In my own case, students whined that they "needed the A" on this physics homework, or that lab, and could I just give it to them for turning it in? Again, no way! You turn it in and you escape a "duck egg" (0%) but that's all. The lab or homework actually has to disclose you've done something with the problem, assignment or experiment. No punking out!

In her own blog, Ms. Munroe recalled an incident with a pesky student e-mailing her and bothering about getting a grade changed. But this is totally typical in today's grade inflation grubbing climate where yes, the student is regarded (with his parent) as some "consumer" and education is a product like an i-pod or blackberry which must deliver to expectations (with no extra work involved like reading a manual) or it is taken back.

In her interview on MSNBC this afternoon, Munroe noted this "consumer-customer" idiom as well and complained about it, but she certainly isn't the first. Mark Edmundson, writing in Harpers, Sept., 1997, p. 39, observed even then how this sort of "evaluation" activity (especially by immature students) plays directly into the consumer mystique, or student as "consumer" of knowledge":

"They're pitched into high writing gear....stoked on a procedure they have now supremely mastered. They're playing the informed consumer, letting the provider know where he's come through and where he's not up to snuff....For someone growing up in America now, there are few available alternatives to the cool consumer worldview. My students didn't ask for that view, much less create it, but they bring a consumer weltanschauung to school, where it exerts a powerful and largely unacknowledged influence"

One might say the final epitaph for this country may well read: "Here lies the American Consumer, who's greed, selfishness and unwillingness to make any effort finally did us all in".

And what of Munroe's actual blog remarks? I give some of them here, from:

http://natalieshandbasket.blogspot.com/

--
"Kids! Who can understand anything they say?
Kids! They are disobedient, disrespectful oafs.
Noisy, crazy, sloppy, lazy LOAFERS (and while we're on the subject--)Kids! You can talk and talk till your face is blue.
Kids! But they still do just what they want to do.
Why can't they be like we were? (Perfect in every way!!!!)
What's the matter with kids today?????

My students are out of control. They are rude, disengaged, lazy whiners. They curse, discuss drugs, talk back, argue for grades, complain about everything, fancy themselves entitled to whatever they desire, and are just generally annoying.

In the past week alone, I've written up 4 separate students--one for dropping the f-bomb in class, one for repeatedly saying "shittin'," one for crafting a pencil topper made from paper clips into the shape of a man and woman having sex, and one for being disrespectful to me (Me: Stop tapping. Him: (ignores and keeps on tapping. Another student tells him to stop but he still doesn't, indicating that if he didn't stop when I told him to, he wouldn't stop for this kid either. Another student then kicked the back of the first student's chair. Me: "I DID tell you to stop that already!" Him: "Yeah, you were ignored." Me: Do you want me to write you up?" Him: "Go ahead." Me: "Done!")


I'd like to interject here one huge reason for these spoiled brats' sense of entitlement: the prevalence of social networking, Twitter and Facebook foolishness, as well as the ubiquity of ipods, cell phones and video games. We've actually turned our kids into a pack of drooling zombies with the collective attention span of a gnat. (See also the feature article in the current issue of TIME : "Wired for Distraction", noting that social media are reprogramming our children's brains)

The piece cited a Stanford University study comparing the performance of heavy media-multi-taskers vs. light users. The former were wrong more often (in geometric pattern recognition and memory) than the latter. The problem? One of continuous partial attention which translated into poor concentration or full attention! The electronic multi-taskers repeatedly fired up their brains' stratium which encodes habit, rather than the hippocampus which forms the declarative memory circuit which is the basis for connective analysis and association for deep learning.

My guess is that Ms. Munroe's kids were all suffering from a major striatum defect, much like certain fundagelicals who are so habitually wed to their KJVs they're incapable or reading or learning anything other than a bible verse. Their brains have been habituated to that form of minimal exposure.

Also enlightening is her approach and change in attitude to comments:

"When I was first teaching, I put a lot of time and effort into the comments because I felt it was a great way to communicate the students’ efforts. Then it got to be a complete pain in the ass, just one more thing standing between me and being done with the report cards, and suddenly I realized why I’d always gotten the same comments from my teachers: they didn’t want to do them any more than I do."

“Also, as the kids get worse and worse, I find that the canned comments don’t accurately express my true sentiments about them. So now I pretty much choose ‘Cooperative in Class’ for every kid (or, in some instances, will speak in other codes. For instance, if they talk a lot, I’ll put ‘is easily distracted’ or ‘talks persistently’; if it’s a kid that has no personality, I’ll put ‘ability to work independently’). For some kids, though, my scornful feelings reach such fever pitch that I have a hard time even putting ‘cooperative in class’ and have, sadly, had some kids for which none of the comments fit.”

She then goes on to give some fictional comments she'd liked to have written:

"Concerned your kid is automaton, as she just sits there emotionless for an entire 90 minutes, staring into the abyss, never volunteering to speak or do anything.”

* “Too smart for her own good and refuses to play the school ‘game’ such that she’ll never live up to her true potential here.”

* “Seems smarter than she actually is.”

* “Has no business being in Honors.”

* “A complete and utter jerk in all ways. Although academically OK, your child has no other redeeming qualities.”

* “Lazy.”

* “Shy isn’t cute in 11th grade; it’s annoying. Must learn to advocate for himself instead of having Mommy do it.”

* “Dunderhead.”

* “Nowhere near as good as her sibling. Are you sure they’re related?”
* “Rat-like.”


* “Frightfully dim.”

----

So why should all this raise a firestorm? Especially when she's made clear it was an anonymous blog, no specific names or references, and she did it to get a lot of grief off her chest. Since when have we become such damned babies and busybodies - that people pick up on a blog, then go bonkers...forgetting about that old First Amendment. Oh, but wait! The First Amendment is only meant to be a lure, and bait to merely exercise free speech before losing it! Don't believe so? Ask former Colorado University Professor Ward Churchill. The guy made the error of writing a non-descript essay on "Roosting Chickens" after 9-11 which some trolling student in New York just happened to find, and then he sent a copy of it to the university Churchill was to address, as well as to the President of CU. All hell broke loose, CU then commenced an academic witch hunt (to get around the free speech provisions) and accused him of "academic fraud and plagiarism". Churchill lost his job and hasn't been re-instated.

Never mind that around the same time, many similar sentiments were being prominently circulated especially by author Chalmers Johnson (‘Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire’). Some of the comments of Johnson, made in a September 13, 2001 interview with the magazine In These Times:


Is what happened on September 11 an example of blowback?

Of course it is. That's exactly what my book was written for: It was a warning to my fellow Americans, a year ago, that our foreign policy was going to produce something like this. It's important to stress, contrary to what people in Washington and the media are saying, that this was not an attack on the United States: This was an attack on American foreign policy. It was an example of the strategies of the weak against the overwhelmingly powerful.


Is it possible that blowback may take place internally as well as externally?


The greatest danger we have now is militarism in America. We have this huge, overpowering, unbelievably expensive military establishment. It is something from the days of Washington's farewell address to Eisenhower's invention of the phrase "military-industrial complex" that seasoned U.S. leaders have warned against—the threat of a huge military establishment to the liberty of our citizens.

I fear that from this we are going to get even more militarism. That is, more and more functions—including domestic police functions—will be transferred from civilian institutions to the military, and the military will have ever greater authority in our society. We know how that will end. We're talking here about imperial overstretch, and the weaknesses of the imperial structure that will ultimately lead to a collapse.


None of which is substantively different from Churchill's opinions, yet he was hung out to dry for them, like Munroe is now for hers. The hard fact is this country is infantile, and doesn't really believe in awarding free speech provisions without possible penalty- which makes it spurious, a joke.

Of course, just as in this blog (before I limited it to members, after having to deal with assorted Tea Party crazies, oddballs and malcontents) Munroe had her blog commentators. One who identified himself as cbeast123, wrote:

"If you're in a school district as prestigious as CB East, you should act like it and stop blubbering to people who couldn't care less about your life. Just because you hate your job, doesn't make it okay to whine about it on the internet."

But this pissant has it all wrong. It makes it perfectly okay to say whatever she wants on the net. THAT is her prerogative and FREE SPEECH RIGHT, just like it was Ward Churchill's to express his opinions on 9-11 in an essay - that some little squealing rat (with nothing better to do) had no business revealing to the world, out of pure rat-like spite.

Another opinionated commenter wrote:

"You should be spending your time helping out students instead of insulting them on here. You have cheated, screwed, and under-cut every single one of your students this year... Maybe you should learn to teach and be compassionate with your students. Respect goes a long way, and the only way people will respect you is if you respect them (too late). Have a nice life. Good luck with the inner-city shithole they call a school in philly,"

But what if students don't want help? It's all very well to lecture a teacher on "helping students" but this Einstein obviously never processed that most don't want it! My policy when teaching was always to put the onus on students to come forward with any problems, difficulties - and I always arranged office hours to ensure this. If a kid doesn't come forward, it's not my damned job to go looking for him in the video game store, put a harness on him and take him back to the office for help!

As for "being compassionate" that's a two-way street, as is respect. If students carry on as Munroe described, they merit neither respect nor compassion, but they do merit discipline. But all this whining of 'Concerned' factors back into the perception Hara Estroff Marano disclosed of today's students as a bunch of little wimps. Always whining or grafting and grubbing for grades, and now - as we learn from another report on today's students - exhibiting the weakest mental health of any group over the last four decades.

Yes, we hear the poor little cream puffs "live in a different world" what with t'errists all around and code reds, body scanners and whatnot. To which I say, 'Horse Shit!"

I had to live through the October, 1962 Cuban Missile crisis - when all of us at the time expected fully that every one of the 6,500 Soviet, H-bomb-armed missiles would be raining down hellfire on us at any time. THAT was a reason to fear! Not a few grubby terror idiots who may set off a little "smart bomb" or whatever. We had the prospect of more than 300 million killed and civilization destroyed and you didn't see us running to therps and taking meds like today's cream puff kids. We toughed it out, still showed up for classes, until the teachers on the afternoon of Oct. 24 told us to "make final preparation" - which we did.

Well, at least one commenter did have the perception and brains to render a reasonable remark:

Anyone remember the 1st right ‘The freedom of speech’ She is not mentioning any names she is just speaking the truth about kids in today’s world. I am sure the students use teachers real names in their blogs and the foul lang. even if it is written in a text form,”

And this person, 'opinion 44' hit the nail on the head. Would that more American babies could pull their heads out of their behinds and remember what this nation used to be about, before it turned into a collection of whiny wimps and wussies.

As for Ms. Munroe, I don't see that the school can win this case, since they have no formal policy on blogging, nor should they be allowed to get away with any retro-active baloney or resort to back-engineering a restrictive speech policy such as permeates corporate America. (In a 1994 decision, 'Waters vs. Churchill', the Supreme Court made clear: " that an employee's speech is not protected.")

Let's hope, for all our sakes, that Natalie Munroe prevails and doesn't emerge as a female Ward Churchill!

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