Forswearing Research

And here is another ridiculous debate where academics contort themselves into weird poses to prove how little research means to them:

“We” got into academe not because we wanted to be lauded by a few intellectual

snobs with obscure tastes. . . but because we loved our undergraduate professors and wanted to be just like them.

I actually did get into academe to be lauded by the few snobs. So what? I’m still a phenomenal teacher and my students still worship me. It’s nobody’s damn business what motivates me to stay in the profession.

A couple of brain-dead Scott Walkers and Rick Perrys squeaked something to the effect that research steals time professors could dedicate to teaching. And instead of either ridiculing these pieces of inanimate matter or explaining why they are making asses of themselves, academics have started servicing this idiotic assertion with extreme eagerness.

Let’s now prepare to see one screed after another telling the world how academics are so busy with WHAT REALLY MATTERS to spend even a second of their time on snobby, privileged research.

The goal of the screeds is to convince the critics of academia that the state of perfection has already been achieved: academics already spend 80 hours a week teaching and don’t have as much as a minute for that evil, nasty research that oppresses the underprivileged and robs students.

The very point of view that research is incompatible with teaching and overall an evil thing to be destroyed, in the meantime, remains not only uncontested but confirmed.

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57 responses to “Forswearing Research”

J. Otto Pohl

March 3, 2015

There is a clear disjuncture between teaching and research on the university level for me. Most of what I am required to teach has nothing what so ever to do with my research.

http://jpohl.blogspot.com/2012/03/why-do-they-train-specialists-for.html

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Clarissa

March 3, 2015

I also don’t teach courses on what I’m working on in my research because students don’t have anything like the level needed to understand it.

But it’s is obviously enormously better for the students to have somebody who reads vastly and daily in the field, who exercises her brain by generating new knowledge, who is an intellectual in her own right than somebody who’s reciting some ancient crap she memorized in grad school 30 years ago and whose brain has ossified because it never gets used.

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1. David P. Bellamy
  
  March 3, 2015
  
  My best known, and probably most important research paper used a technique that I would most likely never have thought of if I had not repeatedly taught trigonometry to freshmen. Of course, the work itself would be too difficult for most undergraduate mathematics students, but teaching this material over and over enabled me to understand a connection that I would never have seen at all otherwise.
  
  Therefore, I am disinclined to believe that there is no connection between teaching and research.
  
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  1. Clarissa
    
    March 3, 2015
    
    Everybody’s situation is different but my own teaching in no way helps my research. The students, however, massively benefit from being taught by somebody who constantly grows intellectually. In short, they feed off me but I don’t get opportunities to feed off them. It would be interesting to experience the opposite but it just never happened to me.
    
    I once taught a graduate course on the subject of my research in Cornell and even that did absolutely nothing to help me in any way.
    
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leahladygrey

March 3, 2015

I’m getting into academia because the idea of spending hours in a library/office with stacks of books that all will become part of a bigger picture of something, whether that’s the poetic influences of Japanese anarcha-feminists, or the discourse around eugenics in Alberta history, or parallels between Siberian and Canadian residential schools, is pure bliss and probably the best autistic employment option imaginable. Why make me perform and pretend otherwise?

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Clarissa

March 3, 2015

Wow, that’s really well-said. I love this statement of intent. 🙂 And in my experience, students dig it when you just tell them that you dig your research and that it’s one of the most central things in your life. One thing I never heard from students is a complaint that I do too much research.

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JaneB

March 3, 2015

If the overriding purpose of a university education is to create ‘lifelong learners’ and help students ‘make the transition from recipients of prescribed knowledge to independent critical thinkers’ who can ‘communicate effectively in writing and orally’ (all clearly stated programme level goals – ah don’t you love bureaucratic paperwork? It’s a whole different language) then I believe it is very, very important that the students are taught by active practitioners of those skills, as in any trade. Our trade is thinking, students should learn from people who actively practice those skills. I practice those skills through my research.

Like others, I teach very little that has any bearing on my research in terms of the specific content, problems, materials etc. But by continually modelling and articulating what it takes to be good at mastering new ideas, at acquiring and using a body of knowledge, constructing arguments, designing research projects etc., I continually refresh my practice.

The other key area of benefit to me is that teaching is an activity with short term rewards: I see a problem with a topic, have an idea, design an exercise, run the class, see how things went, get positive rewards from seeing the students benefit from my work, all in the course of a few days, a week, a semester – whereas my research takes years to come to fruition, and really, will probably take decades if it ever gets there at all. And being human I like my short term rewards as well as my long term ones!

I think the prestige balance between research and teaching is off in most anglo-saxon universities at the moment, for example, why can’t I apply to have a semester of just teaching, no research, when I take on a big new module or similar, and this be seen as valuable and meritious just as a semester of no teaching to write a big paper or three is seen? But correcting that balance is a totally different thing from severing the links…

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Clarissa

March 3, 2015

This post is bringing out brilliant manifestos. 🙂

I don’t know how this works in the UK, but here in the US the percentage of academics who actually work on research at least twice a week is not even in the double digits. The majority of people has been on that semester of just teaching since the start of their careers.

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1. JaneB
  
  March 3, 2015
  
  It varies very much depending on where you work; at an elite place you might only teach ten weeks of the year for a few hours each week, at a ‘teaching-focused’ place you could teach 15-18 hours a week in the classroom then all the paperwork. Most of my experience/anec-data is from people working in generalist not specialist institutions, as a proviso, and none from the very small but growing for profit sector. However, thanks to the Research Excellence Framework and its predecessors, nearly every academic is on a T&R contract (Teaching and Research) and is expected to be research active to some degree – this can be through applied/consultancy type work or the most abstract of research. We are expected to try to generate income and to produce a minimum of 4 peer-reviewed publications over a 5-6 year period to stay as T&R staff. There are beginning to be T&S (Teaching and Scholarship) positions which have higher teaching and admin loads and supposedly no research expectations, but for example in my institution it is expected that to be eligible for promotion beyond the first lecturer step such a person will be publishing pedagogical papers or doing very extensive national level ‘public engagement’ or otherwise going well beyond their classroom and institutional duties.
  
  Yes, in PRACTICE most research gets done in the vacations, on weekends or during office hours when students choose not to attend and the grading is done. We do tend to grade less than US people seem to, as “over-assessment” is a big baddy in edu-theory circles and my impression is that we have a lot fewer weekly tests/essays etc. (no comp or maths sequences, mostly single-subject degrees) to grade and usually there are 2-3 pieces of coursework and an exam (which is quite enough grading!).
  
  My point about wanting a teaching semester is kind of tongue in cheek – what I want is a semester when no-one demands reports and expects quantified progress towards the next REF-able paper, so that I can genuinely focus on teaching rather than research becoming another villainous monkey of obligation, then return to it refreshed after that pause… that’s the point of research leave, so why shouldn’t it work the other way around?
  
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  1. Clarissa
    
    March 3, 2015
    
    “My point about wanting a teaching semester is kind of tongue in cheek – what I want is a semester when no-one demands reports and expects quantified progress towards the next REF-able paper”
    
    We don’t have this. We just have a single yearly merit review.
    
    What I find very funny here in the US is how many (total idiots) are convinced that all college professors do mountains of “useless” research when, in reality, almost nobody does any research at all, either useless or useful. This is such a strawman in this country where the main goal right now should be making sure that somebody does at least some research so that the country doesn’t fall behind intellectually and academically.
    
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  2. m
    
    March 4, 2015
    
    I work in an elite UK university, and I only teach about 5 hours per week, 18 weeks per year. I work on my research every day, have a minimum of two research-only days per week, and a ton of financial and institutional support for research trips, workshop and conference organising, etc. Also, my university, like most elite UK universities, prides itself on its ‘research-led teaching’ ethos, which is actually written into our education strategy. As a result, 100% of what I teach directly corresponds to my research expertise. In some cases, I propose a course on a topic in which I am not currently an expert, but hope to expand my work into, and I am also quite flexible about the research students that I take on, on the logic that it’s a great way to make sure I keep learning and broadening my knowledge base. It works great for everyone. Students get the benefit of my expertise, and I get the benefit of their thoughts and readings of my area. All of us get to stay up to date on the most cutting-edge work in the field. I cannot imagine any idiot trying to suggest that our research gets in the way of our teaching, when it is exactly the opposite.
    
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    1. JaneB
      
      March 4, 2015
      
      m, I am PEA-GREEN with envy (I’m at a poorly-funded ‘squeezed middle’ university, where the amount of paperwork we do to prove we are research active seems to be inversely proportionate to the amount of actual support we might have available), but yes, that sounds like a university education system working properly… and is certainly what I aspire to.
      
      When I read these anti-research screeds, two thoughts come to mind: 1) how embarrassed these people’s former professors must be, if they had any, that they messed up so badly in opening these people’s minds and 2) there’s a Dilbert cartoon where the boss edits Dilbert’s time-plan on the assumption that if he doesn’t know what something is it must be irrelevant or Dilbert is exaggerating how long it will take, so cuts tasks like “write computer programme” or “design rocket engine” to 5 minutes and leaves “progress reports” at 3 months…
      
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      1. Clarissa
        
        March 4, 2015
        
        “When I read these anti-research screeds, two thoughts come to mind: 1)how embarrassed these people’s former professors must be, if they had any, that they messed up so badly in opening these people’s minds”
        
        The probability that people like matt were actually taught by professors with active research agendas is statistically insignificant. They were told by right-wing radio stations and TV channels that the reason why their tuition was high is that evil, lazy professors waste all of the money on useless research and it never even occurs to the facile fools to wonder whether this has any basis in reality. What really happens, however, is that they are taught by adjuncts and instructors who run from one college to another all day long just to make a living wage and who are in no way engaged in anything even remotely resembling research. These poor idiots like matt believe they were ripped off by scholars doing research when, in reality, they were ripped off by the exact opposite: a system that doesn’t allow educators to engage in research.
        
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2. Z
  
  March 3, 2015
  
  They really have? Everywhere I have worked, the research faculty do do research.
  
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  1. Clarissa
    
    March 3, 2015
    
    “Everywhere I have worked, the research faculty do do research.”
    
    The most egregious case of all I have encountered (and I have encountered many) was back at Cornell. People barely even read anything in their disciplines and confess that freely. Just last week a colleague in my field told me she hasn’t read anything for at least 3 years. YEARS.
    
    In most places, besides, just a tiny minority is research faculty. The rest of people are not even expected to do anything research-wise.
    
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    1. Z
      
      March 3, 2015
      
      …that would mean they get thrown off the graduate faculty then, right? Everywhere I have worked, it would.
      
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      1. Clarissa
        
        March 3, 2015
        
        “that would mean they get thrown off the graduate faculty then, right?”
        
        Well, there are many inventive tricks to pretend like you do research and drag it out for decades. I can share the tricks with you one day but it’s not like you’d need them. 🙂 But yeah, I’ve seen things that almost made me lose faith in humanity.
        
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        Z
        
        March 3, 2015
        
        There are people who keep republishing versions of the same article or book, yes.
        
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matt

March 3, 2015

We obviously have fundamental disagreement on this, and whether it comes across I do respect your clarissa (and find majority of your blog intellectally stimulating. hopefully many of my comments are as well)

I think the one divide is that when students and taxpayers have to pay for what THEY perceive as not being financialy valuable it does make your potential income / job vulnerable. Personally it is merely a matter of time until college is reshaped (I would argue for the better), but how it will be depends. I think the best model ties into kids being more job ready at age 18 (by changing 6-12 grade education) and then having companies have young adults work 25-30 hours a week and take perhaps 2 classes at a time instead of five.. will make the learing practical, and allowing intellectual stimulation as desired. The big losers will be administrative staff at university and construction / design firms who build dorms and bigger university buildings. These economic actors will be utterly destroyed.

I think teachers / professors can carve out a niche, just need to understand the underlying economics more (or maybe a better term is accept them, as you and the other academics on here re highly educated, so would be unfair to say you don’t understand them in many cases).

Mainly just expressing my thoughts, but also doing a little psa here… I do think academics can and SHOULD be an important part of education futures… but that doesn’t really mean colleges (all the building s and administators which add probably 80% of th cost and less than 10% of the value) can exist. Will come to fruition over the next 5-20 years. Just putting a perspective out thee because this is your livelihood and figured would offer an opinion which might help! (and remember how much it cost for this opinion before being mad at me!)

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Clarissa

March 3, 2015

Matt: you are not entitled to an opinion on this subject because you know nothing about it. Everything you wrote here is completely uninformed. I keep asking you questions but you refuse to answer a single one and this is getting boring.

My students do perceive what I do as being enormously valuable. My livelihood is perfectly fine, unlike yours. Stop these bizarre fantasies and please answer one simple question: why are you so obsessed with having an opinion on a subject with which you are not even remotely familiar?

Until I get a clear and specific answer from you that starts with the words, “I feel an overpowering need to opine about a subject I know nothing because. ..” I don’t want to get any further comments from you in any other thread.

I’m trying to help you because you are behaving in an irrational way that I find preoccupying.

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1. cliff arroyo
  
  March 3, 2015
  
  Matt, you have not yet come to terms with the idea that many of the sources you get opinions from are lying to you. I’ve been there, I know how hard it can be to face that fact. Look and question the premises of people outside education versus those who actually try to broaden peoples’ horizons.
  
  You seem to have accepted the widely promulgated (and wildly mistaken) idea that the value of education is to help worker bees fit into slots created by the current economy. It’s not.
  
  Figure out what the real value of education is and the rest will fall into place.
  
  hint: creating worker bees for the slots needed at this moment is useless because the slots needed when they actually graduate might be completely different.
  
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  1. matt
    
    March 3, 2015
    
    Hint, my solution is having them going to school WHILE working in those jobs.. basically guaranteeing that the company views what they are working on and learning as relevant. Its a quasi-apprenticeship model. That IS the role of education.
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      March 3, 2015
      
      “Hint, my solution is having them going to school WHILE working in those jobs.. basically guaranteeing that the company views what they are working on and learning as relevant.”
      
      Your solution to what? Who is asking you for any solutions in a field you are so ignorant of?
      
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      1. matt
        
        March 3, 2015
        
        Solution to all the debt, inefficiency, and waste in the current system. To say I am ignorant is very childish.
        
        Certainly fair to say that you disagree for reasons 1., 2. 3.. etc. But to say I don’t understand higher education economics is simply false.
        
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        Clarissa
        
        March 3, 2015
        
        “Certainly fair to say that you disagree for reasons 1., 2. 3.. etc.”
        
        Disagree with what? 🙂 🙂 Can you try to advance a simple, meaningful statement for people to agree or disagree with? Because you are not doing that.
        
        “But to say I don’t understand higher education economics is simply false.”
        
        Nobody is discussing “economics” here. But if you are not capable of noticing this, I doubt that you’ll have anything meaningful to say on that subject either.
        
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  2. Clarissa
    
    March 3, 2015
    
    “hint: creating worker bees for the slots needed at this moment is useless because the slots needed when they actually graduate might be completely different.”
    
    Exactly. And when that happens, our graduates will at least understand what is happening and will already have a plan B in place to address the change. While people who didn’t get a chance to broaden their horizons will be stuck. Has nobody seen those news reports and documentaries about the ghost towns of the Rust Belt? These are the people who were not prepared for the death of manufacturing and look at what happened to them. What is the point of perpetuating this model if it already failed so obviously and tragically?
    
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2. matt
  
  March 3, 2015
  
  Haha. Ok, you attacked me in a way I did not you. Not fair, but whatever.
  
  With that being said, I know the economics of higher education better than you (and better than anyone on here for nearly sure). So, while you can debate the pedagogical methodologies, don’t attack my financial conditions. Do you contend you understand the higher education economics better than I? Or just that economics are irrelevant. Please answer.
  
  I can talk about the 5000 higher education institutions, the roughly 5oo – 600 billion spent on higher education each year, the pell grant system, the student loan system( shall I continue?)
  
  These economic constraints WILL affect you some day (take the burying your head approach if you like)
  
  The heart of the disagreement it I believe education is primarily to make people have the financial freedom and resources to live the life they desire… you seem to bearguing economics don’t matter. Good luck with that.
  
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  1. Clarissa
    
    March 3, 2015
    
    “Please answer.”
    
    Why? You are ignoring my simple question. I can repeat it: what possesses you to discuss something you know absolutely nothing about? This is a simple question. Why do you find it so hard to answer?
    
    Do you also go to the blogs of dentists and inform them on how better to administer a root canal? Do you go to the blogs of heart surgeons to express your “opinions” on how to perform a triple bypass? I just want a simple yes or no here, that’s all.
    
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    1. matt
      
      March 3, 2015
      
      Yes I would go to a dentist’s blog and talk bout the FINANCES and ECONOMICS of what they charge. Absolutely. Would I tell them how to diagnose a tooth no, but how much to charge absolutely. And I would include financial details.. as I have done here. They could then either respond to underlying economics presented.. or call names.. but that is on them (or on you in thi case!!!!)
      
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      1. Clarissa
        
        March 3, 2015
        
        “Yes I would go to a dentist’s blog and talk bout the FINANCES and ECONOMICS of what they charge.”
        
        If you make the enormous effort to read the post you are responding to, you will see that nobody here discussed “what they charge.” Nobody discussed any “financial details” of anything either. What I am discussing is precisely the equivalent of discussing a root canal on a dentist’s blog. Are you seeing this? Have you tried looking at the post again? Or if that is too onerous, have you looked at the post’s title?
        
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        matt
        
        March 3, 2015
        
        Economics is the reason the teachers you talk about (who sort of implicitly agree with the financial pressures and hence are downplaying the role of research) about are making you so mad. They are saying.. lets only focus on teaching. Clearly that is cheaper, than also doing research.. no? So while you say you aren’t talking about economics my whole point is economics is what is causing these issues to arise.
        
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        Clarissa
        
        March 3, 2015
        
        “Economics is the reason the teachers you talk about (who sort of implicitly agree with the financial pressures and hence are downplaying the role of research) about are making you so mad. ”
        
        Once again, this is not a grammatically correct sentence. Are you not aware of how poor your writing is?
        
        “They are saying.. lets only focus on teaching. Clearly that is cheaper, than also doing research.. no?”
        
        No, of course not. And you would know this if you were at least reasonably literate. And there are 2 mistakes in such a short statement. What is it that makes you think you are qualified to talk about education, again?
        
        Repeating the simple information already provided in the thread:
        
        In the past 30 years, the number of teaching positions in US academia that require any involvement in research has plummeted (for matt: this means gone down) to less than 30%. At the same time, college tuition has soared (for matt: that means grew.) Question: on the basis of these easily verifiable facts, should we conclude that eliminating research positions brings tuition down?
        
        Again, it would be great if matt could strain himself to the utmost and provide a simple yes or no answer.
        
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  2. Clarissa
    
    March 3, 2015
    
    “you seem to bearguing economics don’t matter.”
    
    Another simple question: can you provide a quote from me where I say “economics don’t matter”? Yes or no will suffice.
    
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    1. matt
      
      March 3, 2015
      
      http://www.businessinsider.com/sweet-briar-college-closing-2015-3 Telling article about the economic challenges I mention.
      
      Obviously small women-only liberal arts are not the same as a large state institution like you are at, but maybe the proverbial “canary in a coal mine”. Feel free to apologize whenever your desire for saying I know “nothing” about higher education…
      
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      1. Clarissa
        
        March 3, 2015
        
        “Obviously small women-only liberal arts are not the same as a large state institution like you are at, but maybe the proverbial “canary in a coal mine”. Feel free to apologize whenever your desire for saying I know “nothing” about higher education…”
        
        Matt, stop ranting, concentrate. I didn’t ask for links. I asked for simple answers to simple questions. As for women’s-only colleges, I agree that they should go and do that as soon as possible. But this is not even remotely related to the topic discussed in this post.
        
        “Feel free to apologize whenever your desire for saying”
        
        This is not a grammatically correct sentence. You are not qualified to speak about primary education, let alone higher ed, if this is the intellectual preparation you have.
        
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  3. Anon
    
    March 3, 2015
    
    “I know the economics of higher education better than you (and better than anyone on here for nearly sure). So, while you can debate the pedagogical methodologies, don’t attack my financial conditions”
    
    Man, are you drunk or on drugs? What does this even mean? What financial conditions? You can’t even express yourself so that it would make sense.
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      March 3, 2015
      
      “What does this even mean? What financial conditions?”
      
      He seems to think he’s the Koch brothers. 🙂
      
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    2. matt
      
      March 3, 2015
      
      ad hominen attacks. cute.
      
      Like I said, higher education is roughly a $500 billion enterprise in America. Debt is around 1.2 Trillion from student loans. I am suggesting this is a bad deal for about 50-80% of those who go to college (and before you ask I landed a 75k a year job out of school.. still does not change less than 5 out of my 40 undergrad classes were useful).
      
      So what I am arguing is that the underlying financial economics of college are not sound currently.
      
      To argue that means I am on drugs or are drunk when you likely due not know these financial statistics as well as I have is simply childish.
      
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      1. Clarissa
        
        March 3, 2015
        
        “ad hominen attacks. cute.”
        
        What are you, 5 years old?
        
        “Like I said, higher education is roughly a $500 billion enterprise in America. Debt is around 1.2 Trillion from student loans. I am suggesting this is a bad deal for about 50-80% of those who go to college (and before you ask I landed a 75k a year job out of school.. still does not change less than 5 out of my 40 undergrad classes were useful).”
        
        And now try to concentrate really really hard and tell me: how is any of this even remotely related to the subject of my post? How are your salary or your classes or student loans even remotely relevant to what I am discussing?
        
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        Clarissa
        
        March 3, 2015
        
        Now, for those who are into “economics”, here is small second-grade-level exercise.
        
        In the past 30 years, the number of teaching positions in US academia that require any involvement in research has plummeted (for matt: this means gone down) to less than 30%. At the same time, college tuition has soared (for matt: that means grew.) Question: on the basis of these easily verifiable facts, should we conclude that eliminating research positions brings tuition down?
        
        Again, it would be great if matt could strain himself to the utmost and provide a simple yes or no answer.
        
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March 3, 2015

The purpose of the university is not research or good teaching but familiar teaching that can be exchanged for affordable credentials. From this point of view research and teaching are in fact antithetical: the less research you do, the less your teaching will change, the more you will accept just adminstering a commercial educational program, and the more high-volume labor-intensive remedial teaching you have time for in the day. It is as simple as that.

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Clarissa

March 3, 2015

I believe that even remedial teaching at the most basic level will fail if administered by people who do not have a rich and vibrant intellectual life. Right now I’m teaching such a remedial freshman course and there is no doubt that I’m doing it enormously better than anybody who hasn’t read a book since grad school. I’ve been teaching this course for six years and every single time it transforms because I change and grow as an intellectual. If I were just to recite the notes I took back in grad school, the course would be a massive failure.

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1. Z
  
  March 3, 2015
  
  People here teach up to seven or eight sections of that course per semester and do not have authority to change it. They make about $40K per annum for doing that (or less — there is someone at $23K if I am not mistaken). Whether or not it is well done is irrelevant: the point is to pass students so they can get degrees and have credentials, and thus work white collar.
  
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  1. Clarissa
    
    March 3, 2015
    
    “People here teach up to seven or eight sections of that course per semester and do not have authority to change it. They make about $40K per annum for doing that (or less — there is someone at $23K if I am not mistaken).”
    
    We are unionized, so our instructors teach 4/4 on a yearly contract and have benefits. Now the administration wants to change it to 5/5 which I find egregious. That will be really bad teaching, I insist.
    
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    1. Z
      
      March 3, 2015
      
      Here it is considered good teaching. If you do not change, and are very rote and mechanical, that is good. It is my own teaching which is bad. Just today I had to defend something bad: reading comprehension questions with dictionary access, rather than memorizing a vocabulary list and doing a matching exercise. I say that what I did was actually better than the other, but I am wrong, it is bad.
      
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      1. Clarissa
        
        March 3, 2015
        
        I don’t even remotely begin to understand a system where people have to render accounts of such very basic activities they do in their classroom. It sounds absolutely ridiculous. Aren’t you qualified to pass a judgment on which of these exercises works better?
        
        Actually, forget my question. In this very thread, there is a semi-literate reader matt who, I’m sure, believes he has vastly important input on how you should teach your class because he “knows the economics.”
        
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        Clarissa
        
        March 3, 2015
        
        And I don’t like to bash places where people work but the program you are describing is beyond nuts.
        
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      2. Shakti
        
        March 3, 2015
        
        Just today I had to defend something bad: reading comprehension questions with dictionary access, rather than memorizing a vocabulary list and doing a matching exercise. I say that what I did was actually better than the other, but I am wrong, it is bad.
        How elementary is that class if a vocabulary list and a matching exercise is good? I haven’t done anything like that since elementary school.
        
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        Z
        
        March 3, 2015
        
        It is for sophomores, Shakti. Clarissa, yes, the said program is beyond nuts but only I think so. In the class for juniors, they wrote a 500 word essay and I said look, it is clear you have not had a great deal of experience writing in college and they said yes, that is right, that is why these essays have the problems they do, it is practically our first time. I don’t like to bash where I work but as I say, the non research faculty teach as many as 8 sections sometimes, so what can they do … and then people like me also have many duties and can be known to throw up hands and realize we cannot teach several semesters worth of skills in one, and don’t push as much as we would have … as I used to do when I was a TA and would be teaching writing to just one section of 17 freshmen and putting serious time into each individual.
        
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        Clarissa
        
        March 4, 2015
        
        “Clarissa, yes, the said program is beyond nuts but only I think so.”
        
        I worked in two of such programs where we were all coordinated to the points of insanity and had to offer a specified number of exactly the same exercises in every section or there would be hell to play. It was entirely ridiculous. Eventually, one of these departments was disbanded altogether while the other one has 1 major. Which is quite bizarre for Spanish. I still have nightmares about teaching that way, so I feel your pain, colleague!
        
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March 4, 2015

\ reading comprehension questions with dictionary access, rather than memorizing a vocabulary list and doing a matching exercise.

At this point, I am already unsure whether you are talking about the English language or some foreign language. If the first, which English words those English-speakers don’t know? Sounds downright frightening.

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Clarissa

March 4, 2015
“At this point, I am already unsure whether you are talking about the English language or some foreign language. If the first, which English words those English-speakers don’t know? Sounds downright frightening.”
- Z and I are colleagues. We teach Spanish, obviously. So it’s not as scary as it sounds. 🙂 .
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1. cliff arroyo
  
  March 4, 2015
  
  But mass quantities of Spanish vocabulary are (or should be) very, very easy for a literate native speaker of English.
  
  As a fellow student said to me years ago while discussing Spanish: “Most Spanish vocabulary is so easy that it’s almost degrading that you have to learn it”
  
  He had spent a bunch of time on German where vocabulary requires a lot more effort from anglophone students in the lower levels.
  
  One of the ways we seem to be recreating medieval conditions in the modern world is language education where at the some levels I often have the idea that teachers are actively trying to prevent learning.
  
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  1. Clarissa
    
    March 4, 2015
    
    English vocabulary that students have is also quite deficient. Nobody knows the word “feud”, for instance. I have no idea how this is possible when there is a game show that has existed forever and that is called “Family Feud”, but that’s how it is. Words that are borrowed from other languages, such as junta, guerrilla or coup, are also completely unknown, even though they are on the news a lot.
    
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    1. Shakti
      
      March 4, 2015
      
      English vocabulary that students have is also quite deficient. Nobody knows the word “feud”, for instance. I have no idea how this is possible when there is a game show that has existed forever and that is called “Family Feud”, but that’s how it is. Words that are borrowed from other languages, such as junta, guerrilla or coup, are also completely unknown, even though they are on the news a lot.
      
      You obtain a vocabulary by reading widely and well. Of course I’ve been able to figure out a word’s meaning by context 90% of the time. But that paragraph betrays your age. I doubt many of your young undergraduates know about Family Feud, and they certainly don’t watch it. 🙂 The average news watcher is not young. Do your older students display this gap?
      
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      1. Clarissa
        
        March 4, 2015
        
        “You obtain a vocabulary by reading widely and well.”
        
        Of course, if people read more, so many problems would be solved. Which is why I always say that the primary responsibility here is parental. If a child doesn’t grow up seeing parents with books, there is nothing even a million of brilliant teachers will be able to do.
        
        “But that paragraph betrays your age. I doubt many of your young undergraduates know about Family Feud, and they certainly don’t watch it.”
        
        Yes, I’m old but not old enough to watch the program. 🙂 It’s just that it’s always on TV whenever I turn it on. And if I, an immigrant, who very rarely watches TV am aware of the program, how can Americans not know of it?
        
        “Do your older students display this gap?”
        
        If all of my students were like my 60+ year-olds, I would be a very, very happy person. The younger folks don’t even recognize the expression “the evil empire” when I use it. Hell, they often don’t recognize the word “empire.” And the word “Protestants”, which is very curious, given that we are in the Bible Belt.
        
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Vic Crain

March 9, 2015

Long thread. I read two questions in the original post, and the discussion adds a third.
(1) What is the proper relationship between university and society? (That was actually an admission essay topic choice for UChicago in 1971.)
(2) Why are some politicians fundamentally anti-education? (That’s easy; politicians don’t like others pointing out how stupid they are.)
(3) What’s the best way to integrate education and life experience?

On the last point, we have five-year internship programs at Cincinnati, Drexel and Northeastern. The three middle years involve two months working and two months of school. My son’s experience and everything I have read suggests that these are excellent programs and models that could/should be replicated at other schools.

However, there is a gap in maturity among recent high school grads. I think it’s a mistake for a lot of kids to go directly from high school to college. I’d rather see them work, either in a real job (not daddy’s office) or in the Peace Corp or military, and then head into college.

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