A talented blogger writes about a new fad in education methodology:
The “flipped class” is too traditional. It had its moment, but the buzzword has been around for a few years now. Years! And think about what the term evokes. We flip burgers. We flip pancakes. Red meat and carbs. Things that are bad for you. Is that what we want for our students?
Anyone who is serious about better teaching has abandoned the outdated “flipped” class and is embracing the scrambled class. What are the virtues? First, it’s new. That’s important. Second, we will pretend that it is radically different. Third, everybody will have to buy new books and software to do this, and pay fees for the workshop presenters and consultants who will help institutions to implement this model, so that’s important. The scrambled class is in the most rapid revenue-generating stage of the obsolescence cycle.
So true. All of these flipped, scrambled and hard-boiled classrooms are nothing but an excuse for lazy, useless administrators to justify their stupid existences and for textbook publishers to sell more air.
Just look at these idiots who are coming up with all the flipped and scrambled teaching methods. The most recent one is introduced at IHE as follows:
Pamela E. Barnett is associate vice provost and director of the Teaching & Learning Center at Temple University.
Associate vice provost, got it? A provost is a pro-vice-chancellor. So an “associate vice provost” is a vice-vice-vice chancellor.”
I wonder how many adjuncts have to be exploited to give this stupid parasite her enormous salary.
Any school that hires crowds of administrators and gives them these ridiculous titled to make them feel important should be ashamed of themselves. This is a disgrace, and what is more disgraceful is that IHE is publishing the rantings of these losers as if they could ever contribute anything of value to the learning process.
And the saddest part of all this is that I’m sure that crowds of facile idiots will be in a rush to demonstrate their servility to Ms. Vice-vice vice and start reporting on how they are trying this ridiculous method she invented and how it changed their lives.
Clarissa's Blog 
“Parasites?” To what percentage of administrators do you think this term properly applies? I have no current familiarity with academia, but just hazarding a guess based on administrators’ peers in Government, fifty to eighty percent seems about right. But even there, I am looking in from the outside.
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Yes, that would be about the right number. And the problem is that they are an ever-expanding army of parasites.
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Along those lines, have you read this article? I absolutely agree with you. In my opinion, administrative bloat is the number one crisis facing the modern American university. I really believe that EVERY problem (rising tuition, adjunctifacation etc) can be traced to the issue of administrative bloat. http://chronicle.com/article/Administrator-Hiring-Drove-28-/144519/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
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” I really believe that EVERY problem (rising tuition, adjunctifacation etc) can be traced to the issue of administrative bloat.”
– YES. I didn’t believe that at first, but the more I’m seeing, the more I’m realizing that this is precisely at the root of all problems.
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Thank you for the article.
“Across the board, the ratio of full-time-equivalent faculty members to administrators has declined sharply since 1990.”
What an absolute disgrace.
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Did you happen to read any of the comments to the article? I usually avoid them but the first comment caught my attention. It was from someone who attached her own name to it. So she is apparently proud of the sentiment she expresses. ANyway, it comes from a Tracy Mitrano–an Inside Higher Ed columnist and the “Director of IT Policy” at Cornell. Anyway, here is her comment:
“[G]iven the rise of administration in its broadest sense, it may be time to rethink a number of assumptions about and for faculty. We are in an era of collaboration. The stereotype of the lone scientist or scholar is effectively over. For the benefit of younger faculty coming up in the academy, for the benefit of the staff that support them, and for the university and its missions overall, it is time to rethink tenure, promotion, its criteria and processes.”
In other words, in order to “benefit” faculty, we need to realize that scholarship and tenure are “over” and start hiring “Director[s] of IT Policy” in droves. And she reflects an ever growing majority attitude. Disgusting and absurd.
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God, this naked cynicism is extremely disturbing.
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No, no, no, Clarissa! You’ve got to keep up here! We’re not flipping or scrambling anything any more–it’s all about the rhizomatic learning! (I’m not kidding; it’s a thing. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but like any potentially useful pedagogical innovation, it can become a new path to idiocy in the hands of administrators looking for cheap one-size-fits-all ways to deliver instruction.)
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I haven’t heard of this one yet but Im afraid I won’t be able to avoid it.
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That’s the same kind of clutter, noise and power relationships I was talking about in relation to political correctness. Once you get away from it all, things start to make more sense.
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