A (moderately) Easy Way to Alleviate some of the Peculiar Dynamics of College Teaching

One of the first things that bother new college faculty is that, for the first few weeks of class, things are going swimmingly; the students are eager to learn, and they believe, for the most part, that the teacher is on their side; then, one awful day, it is time to administer a test.  This is where, in many cases, things begin to go downhill.  The teacher --in the view of the students, of course, not in actual fact-- becomes the Enemy, the Giver of Grades, the Dispenser of Red Ink.

It is difficult, but not impossible, to recover from this setback.  But it is a setback that returns intermittently, especially in the sciences, because there is a greater proportion of what might be called mechanics in the sciences: standard skills that must be mastered by the student, and verified by the instructor, which are crucial to progress, even within each course, and certainly for subsequent courses.

People familiar only with US education have lived with this contradiction all their lives --or at least, the portion of their lives that they remember.  The teacher is both the Coach, and the Examiner.  But in grade school, the Examiner aspect is downplayed, and most kids remember their grade school teachers with some degree of fondness.  In recent times, teachers have been confronted with external examinations, which are outside the ability of the teachers to control, so the teachers (who have been able to set their own tests thus far) are completely discombobulated with the fact that the students are no longer able to rely on the benevolence of the teacher to adjust their grades.  But look on the bright side: the teacher is now firmly in the position of the Coach, and not the Examiner.

In College, however, the tension between the teacher's role as Coach and Examiner persists, and results in students regarding the friendly advances of their instructors as being two-faced.  Here is old professor C- trying to schmooze me again.  And it is no surprise.  (The negative stereotype of the slime-ball professor is probably reinforced at home, especially by parents who struggled in college, and are still paying their student loans!)

There are two, entirely different, solutions.  I will describe the easier, more innovative solution first, and the more traditional solution later.

Solution One.  Make it easier for the student to raise his or her grade, by repeating the course.  At present, my school like most schools, charges the full tuition rate for a student who repeats a course, despite the fact that they've already made their money from the poor kid the first time around.  This certainly has the desirable effect of forcing the kid to take the first pass through a course more seriously.  But having to pay anything for a repeated course is deterrent enough, in my humble opinion.  Why not allow any student to repeat a course for a fraction of the cost, or even for free?  Why not allow better students to carry a repeated course as an overload (that is, as extra credits, beyond the usual full credit load)?  And why not completely erase the unsuccessful earlier attempt from the transcript? The only reason for keeping the bad grades on the transcript is to bolster the impression that the school has high academic standards: Look, we give bad grades.  We're awesome.

It seems unnecessary to emphasize the dollars and cents aspect of this idea, but for the sake of the cash-hungry administrators: it is probably more likely that a student will stay in school and complete a degree if repeating courses was made easier, than if a student was thrown out of school for getting below the required course point average to stay in school.  Classes will be larger, if more students repeat courses.  But if students are encouraged to lose weight, more of them can be squeezed into the classrooms.  Lots of things to think about.

Remember, also, that if students are encouraged financially to repeat courses and raise their GPA, the average GPA of the student body will rise, which is always a good thing.  And it is done honestly.  And don't forget the advantage to this system in recruiting.  We need not advertise this program to stronger students, but for students with parents fearful about the success of their offspring, an honest way to improve their chances of success will be very encouraging indeed.  In any case, this simply codifies a discretionary course of action that deans and other administrators could have followed in any case, but codifying it makes it possible to administer the policy more uniformly.

Solution Two.  Have every course final set by an external examiner.  This is an idea used extensively in Europe and many other foreign countries, at least in the past.  This puts the instructor firmly in the role of Coach, which makes it much easier to develop a rapport with the students, and establish a friendly relationship with them.

There's no need to get sentimental about student-faculty relationships, but every teacher knows that some of the most enduring relationships are between faculty and their best students.  The question is: are the relationships strong because the students were strong, or were the students strong because the relationships were?  Why not try to extend your relationship to all your students?  Many's the time I thought a student and I were friends, only to find that the relationship was completely soured by a bad grade.  The easiest thing in the world is not to give any bad grades, and that path of least resistance is the slippery slope that leads to intrusive Assessment, and ultimately government interference in academic standards.  All a student needs, sometimes, is a second chance to ace a course, without it costing an arm and a leg.

Finally, one of the advantages of distance learning is that a student can, in most cases, take a dry run of the course first, and then take the course "for real."  This is a parallel plan to the one I suggest in Solution One: some students just take longer to pick up certain sorts of material.  Unfortunately, administrators are more happy to go whole hog into distance learning than to try more innovative approaches to raising academic achievement, simply because administrators are more focused on marketing than on the services they have been hired to deliver.  But this is America; everything is at the service of the marketers.

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A Totally Scattered Post

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This is a scattered post; it has no theme whatever, and I’m simply shooting off my mouth about the stuff that has been in the news lately.

The Supremes, the Hobby Lobby, and Birth Control
My stance on health care is that in the form it currently takes in the US today—July 2014—health care is only a little less broken than it used to be before 2012.  It is unconscionable that the Supreme Court (by a very narrow majority) has decided that businesses smaller than a certain size have the right not to provide (via the insurance plans that they offer) birth control for women (or any medical services at all) that are contrary to their religious views.  It is even more unconscionable, in my opinion, that businesses have to provide health insurance at all.  Why?  Because [1] businesses should not have to negotiate deals with health insurance companies at all.  Doing so puts them at a huge disadvantage, because they have to take administrative and planning expertise away from what they should be doing —running an efficient company— towards comparing health plans, and gambling on what sort of health plans will appeal to new hires.  Let’s face it: the existing employees will have to eat any sort of heath plan garbage that is imposed on them.  American citizens have lived with this twisted situation for a century.  As long as health services are paid for by insurance companies, there will be inequity, discrimination, and logical inconsistencies in the delivery of health care.

[2] Health care should be social obligation, paid for by taxes, not an employment benefit.  It is fashionable today to blame unemployment on the actual individuals who happen to be unemployed, rather than economic conditions, or the US tradition of not allowing government to create employment through public works, or developing the infrastructure, which is the most crying need we have at present.  It is even worse, next to being unemployed, that the health of unemployed persons and their families should suffer, so that if an opportunity for new employment does offer itself, the person concerned is too sick to take it.  Health care should be paid for by the government, and ideally the Federal Government.  If there are objections to it from the point of cost, compromises can be made.  Objections made on religious grounds must be ignored.  This “Life begins at conception” principle is sheer hogwash, and cannot be allowed to influence government policy.  The principle that all life is equally sacred makes better sense than human life begins at conception, but all other life is negotiable, which is what lots of orthodox Christians claim to believe.  Basic Health Care should be paid for with taxes, and I’m willing to discuss what sorts of health care should be considered elective, and so not covered.  If there should be a death panel, so be it.  Even a death panel cannot prevent a patient from paying for treatment that the death panel has denied.  (Denial is only denial of insurance coverage.  All these millionaires who pretend to be deathly afraid of death panels can easily afford any care that an Insurance "Death Panel" denies coverage for.  Anyone would think that a (so-called) Death Panel has the right to send someone to the Guillotine!  No.  In case you were wondering; a so-called death panel can only say that such-and-such a procedure is sufficiently exotic, or unnecessary, and expensive that the patient must pay for it him- or herself.)

I think the decision the Supreme Court (initially) handed down is the only good one it could have (except for some last-minute —evidently post-decision— finagling by the conservative justices, which expanded the rights of fanatically religious employers beyond the extent to which the Court had managed to compromise to arrive at the initial Hobby Lobby decision).

Intervention in the Middle East
I haven’t kept up with what is happening with these ISIS people; it appears that what they want most of all is attention, after which they want to make sure that Islamic women are not permitted the same rights as Islamic men.  The Christian religion, in my humble opinion, is a rational reformation of Judaism, in addition, of course, to some claims that Jesus was the Messiah, and so forth.  In all that has been reported in the first century writings about what Jesus said that we have been permitted to see, by the censoring arm of the Early Church and the Emperor Constantine, Jesus keeps up an unremitting assault on the inconsistencies of the Jewish observation of their religion.  In later centuries, successive reformations kept making the rules of the church more rational in small increments, until the inequities between the sexes were eroded systematically, in keeping with the social philosophies of each succeeding age.  In more conservative branches of Judaism and Islam, of course, the rights and privileges of the two sexes are quite asymmetric.

Until we take the logs out of our own eyes, of course, we cannot keep exclaiming about the motes in the eyes of the Islamic peoples of the world.  We can support Islamic women, we can provide sanctuary for them, we can give them a platform.  But if we were to make a raid on an Islamic country simply to liberate their women, it would be viewed as a mere excuse for aggression.  We must simply wait, until Islam comes of age.  It didn’t work for the US to liberate Iraq.  It didn’t work for the US to liberate Algeria.  It will never work.

Let us by all means take each call for “liberation” on its own merits.  But I for one am convinced that the liabilities of a move to liberate any foreign nation vastly outweighs the benefits.

Leaving the CIA to extend covert US support to foreign countries is just as idiotic an idea.  The CIA is managed by fools, and when, with the current US popular distaste for secrecy, the operation is brought to light, the US looks more foolish than ever.  We simply have to stop pretending to be the conscience of the world.

Lawsuits, and Obama Executive Actions
Recently we learned that the Speaker of the House, Mr. John Behner, has announced his intention of bringing a lawsuit against President Obama because of the number of Executive Action he has taken.  (For the information of those who are not aware of this fact: because Congress has failed to act on an enormous variety of issues, the President has gone ahead and given orders.)

Supporters of the President across the nation are incensed, because the Behner lawsuit will be expensive.  But this is a common thing: Congressional games involve appointing Special Investigators and Grand Juries and lawsuits to discredit various branches of the Government, be it Watergate, Oliver North, the Whitewater Scandal, the Monica Lewinski Scandal, or now the Too Many Executive Orders Scandal.  It is all part of the Hollywoodization of Congress.  Sarah Palin, a one-time GOP glamorous character, has come out in favor of impeaching the President.  The tragedy of the GOP is that its true leaders are a few cynical intellectuals, and a few oligarchs, such as the pair of brothers of the name Koch.  In contrast, the idols of the rank-and-file GOP are loose cannons and lightweights who are a general embarrassment to the party, such as George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, and this Senator from the south, whose name I forget [Ted Cruz. See here for more idiocy from this numskull].  It is a crazy circus, watching the cynical intellectual leadership trying to keep the goofballs under control.

All we can do is to keep careful track of how much money is spent on this lawsuit, and use it in the 2014 campaign, and the 2016 campaign, and keep using it as long as John Behner is in the running for absolutely anything.  One of the most fearsome prospects is that of having a total idiot running for President, such as, for instance, John Behner.  But there are worse idiots in the GOP stable, and the GOP knows it.  It also knows that the GOP rank and file likes these idiots.

Chaotic Weather, Global non-warming, rising sea levels, and Carbon Emissions
It seems clear that Human-Induced-Global-Warming is resulting in increasingly chaotic weather.  Even if you believed that the global warming is entirely natural, you have to believe that cutting down on energy use can help slow down the rate of warming.  But the neigh-sayers are in firm control, despite Neil deGrasse Tyson’s valiant efforts on the Fox channel.  At least one of President Obama’s executive orders, so troublesome to the Coal Industry, has had to do with limiting emissions from Coal Plants.

You probably realize that, at least in certain parts of the country, consumers have taken to buying Hybrid cars in droves, and sales of heavy SUV's are slowing down.  One of these days, Coal Plant owners will find themselves out on a limb, despite the agonizingly long-drawn out employment crunch.

The employment crunch
This is something that is not so much in the news, as affecting our family directly.  The rhetoric coming out of the Right is that it is Health Reform that is causing it.  That may be so, but it is more that the Right is aggravating the effects of health reform on the impact on the hiring practices of small businesses.

If only the US was friendlier to cooperative enterprises!  It would not be too difficult to organize unemployed young people together to create communal farms, cooperative stores, and to help themselves enjoy a moderately comfortable lifestyle.  But it is not easy.  If ever the time was ripe for a network of cooperative enterprises to be organized, it is now.  The culture is wonderful at proclaiming the value of the worker, while at the same time denying any real opportunities for workers, and working all the time to make things easier for the largest businesses.  The sheer power of the media is deployed to make it appear as though Big Business is the underdog, and anyone helping the worker is the oppressor.  It defies reason.

Well, keep calm, dear readers, and try not to get too many ulcers reading the news, or worse, watching the news, or even going on Facebook.  Political frustration is spreading among both liberals and conservatives, because nothing good ever happens in Congress, or anywhere in the world, except for an occasional tennis or football game.

Our Animals / Terry Pratchett

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My wife and I belong to a couple of animals: a Dog, whom we shall call Fuzzy (not her real name), and a Cat, Buzzy (not her real name either).

Fuzz came to live with us two years ago, when the Reelect Obama campaign was getting underway in the Fall of 2012.  I noticed, when she first arrived, that she was a mixed breed of great dignity and intelligence.  She was about 12 years old then, or at least my wife’s family had had her for that long.  She had walked into their store in a town some sixty miles away from here, and taken over the place with her wit and charm.  Or at any rate, her seductive puppy ways.

When my wife and I were still dating (we’re sort of newlyweds; we’ve only been married a few years), Fuzz would regard me with a certain reserve, more a sort of tolerance than real warmth.  After we got married, Fuzz went to live with my wife’s son, who acquired another puppy, Hank, who soon grew huge.  Fuzzy had great trouble coping, and so she moved in with us.

Once she got to my home, she became a lot more friendly, and was very unhappy with having to live downstairs, because my wife and I were convinced that her constant shedding was giving us problems, especially in our bedroom (though we all know lots of other folks who often slept with their animals, sometimes even in their beds).

We quickly settled into a sort of routine, where Kate (ouch; there, I’ve gone and mentioned her name.  I wonder whether it is common to place a semicolon right after an ‘ouch’?  Wait; should I put the question mark inside the quotes?  This is getting crazy...) would zip downstairs early morning to get the coffee started, and stare balefully at the weather reports on her little tablet, and then come upstairs with the Fuzz and the coffee.  (Fuzz was allowed upstairs briefly, but not overnight.)

Pretty soon, Kate would announced that I had a visitor, and Fuzz would march up to me and demand a scratch while I was still in bed, and I would give her a pretty thorough scratch, after which she would walk round to Kate, and demand some sort of acknowledgement, and get a little chitchat, but not very much of a scratch, but she seemed happy with the little she got.

Then we would all head downstairs for breakfast, and feed the Fuzz, and let her out, and then Kate would head off into the wilds of where she worked, in the County office, and Fuzz would mope until she got back.

Over the next year, I learned that Fuzz’s intelligence was the usual one of being able to tell to an almost uncanny degree what Kate (and often I, myself,) were thinking.  We would exchange a few coded remarks about the mere possibility of going out for a brief excursion, and Fuzz would caper about like a maniac.  But to the question, “Well, where’s your leash?”, she would just grin and wag her tail.  She would never fetch anything, not even a toy with which to play.  I cannot figure out, to this day, whether it is because she doesn’t know what the words mean, or whether she regards all that as our department, and not hers.  It is as if she were saying, “You guys get all the equipment, and I’ll help with the walking.”

Fuzzy, giving the camera the Evil Eye

She is a very pretty dog.  I can never get a good photo of her, mostly because she keeps fooling around, or showing the camera her hindquarters.  I have a photo or two that Kate took, which are the best ones we have.  She is at least half Beagle, but opinion is divided as to what the other half is: Pit Bull (Staffordshire Terrier) or Labrador.  I lean toward the latter.

Lately, she has trouble with her hindquarters; she finds it almost impossible to climb our rather narrow stairs, and Kate comes behind her, to help in case Fuzzy slips off a step, which she has done often.  We have a lot of smooth floor in our house—not my idea; I got the house that way—which sometimes results in Fuzzy doing an unintended split, which simply has to be very uncomfortable or even painful.

Buzzy, smiling for the camera

KT has, over the years, lived with numerous cats and dogs, and one day she declared that she was going to look up on the Internet to see whether there was a cat of a specific description available in any animal shelters within a radius of about 50 miles, and presently we were bringing home a little lady, whom KT named something fancy, but I called Buzz, because of her purring.  I, too, had grown up with cats, but except for a sort of absent-minded benevolence towards them, can remember little of the specific individuals our family had adopted over the years.  They were often fond of me, and would climb up onto my lap, and generally mess up my homework during my high school years, or when I was home from college.  But this one seemed smaller than the majority of cats I could remember, and certainly half the size of KT’s own cat, who is enormous, and lives with her daughter, and is a sort of feline version of the character Wimpy in the Popeye cartoon series.  Well, no; he is quite adorable, but not a very active cat.  The young lady also has a Chihuahua, and a young python.

Going through the fotos, I discovered a variety of critters whom we encountered over the last several years.  From left to right:
* we have Hank, still in his puppyhood; he is now a couple of inches larger, and a few tons heavier;
* Channing, a little foal born earlier this year, to a former neighbor of Katie’s;
* A nameless possum, who turned up on the roof of our shed last winter;
* Katie’s enormous cat, who now lives with Pam;
* Another daughter’s puppy, Bibsey, taken a few years ago.

We’re still missing photos of the python, and Pam’s doggie Jack, of whom I don’t have suitably flattering photos yet.

Some names have not been mentioned for various reasons!

Anyway, Fuzz is slowing down.  She still manages a great deal of enthusiasm when the prospect of a perambulation arises, but otherwise drags herself around the house with her head hanging.  She could last a couple more years, but they will not be happy ones.  I adore that dog, and I’m awaiting her passing almost with fear.  She still raids the garbage, when it contains something suitably odoriferous which we have forgotten to take out.  When we return home after such an event has taken place in our absence, Fuzz is walking around with a broad grin on her face.  Remorse, she says, is for the birds (though none of us has ever seen a remorseful bird).

Buzzy, meanwhile, is just the most charming, elegant, graceful cat.  She was very cautious with the dog when she first got here, but now she walks right up to her and licks her, and plays with her tail, and generally considers Fuzz her property.  She even lies down on Fuzz’s bed, and Fuzz simply lies down on the rug somewhere.  This seems a constant of cat/dog interaction all over the world.  Unlike Fuzz, who is game to eat absolutely anything (except strawberries), Buzzy doesn’t eat anything except dry cat kibble, and occasionally a few grams of the canned cat food Katie so lovingly puts in her bowl.  The cat also walks on tables and shelves and furniture, only coming down to floor level occasionally; you get a really good idea of why they call those things catwalks.  These are things I had never noticed in all my years of not noticing things!  Junior (my daughter) owned a ferret one time, called Jefferey, who also liked to walk about on the tops of shelves, and of course, push things over, onto the floor, something Buzzy likes to do.  She plays furiously for a while, then sits and stares out the window for a while, then goes to sleep, and then wakes up and does a poop, and then starts all over again, watched with apparent disapproval by the dog Fuzz.

I have been tempted to put yet more cat videos on the Web, but it seems a superfluous thing to do.  So I will be content to just blog on the little andamuls, as I call them, and leave it there.

Terry Pratchett
We have gotten news that Terry Pratchett, the well-known British author whose humorous novels of mythical Discworld have earned him a Knighthood, and worldwide recognition, has just cancelled appearing at an annual gathering in Britain to celebrate Discworld.  It appears that he has never skipped this event in the past, but the depredations of Alzheimer's Disease, which began several years ago, has left Pratchett unable to travel.  The implications are difficult to assess, because patients can survive for years.  But it is almost certain that Terry Pratchett will be contributing very much less to the intellectual discourse of various topics that he was interested in.  He was an environmentalist, and a rationalist (which meant that he was an atheist).  Though religious folks are fond of regarding atheists as devoid of any moral or ethical values, Terry Pratchett is clearly a man of what I would call great spirituality, because his books simply radiate values that go far beyond those that one would attribute to a mere rationalist.

I urge my readers to read his book Small Gods.  It is not only screamingly funny, but it also brings out how forgiving a man he is.  His criticism is relentless, but his chides are gentle, and to that extent I hope that I have been influenced by him.

This is by no means intended to be an obituary, but the news of Pratchett’s being indisposed has reminded me that I have been remiss in blogging about what a great author and all-round neat person he is.

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