What’s Left?

~ Clarissa

I can’t assign essays or compositions because of AI.

I can’t assign oral presentations and exams because there are students who suffer from anxiety.

I can’t assign readings, use PowerPoints, or even gesticulate because one student is blind.

I can’t give lectures because one student is deaf and we don’t have an interpreter from Spanish into sign language.

Can anybody explain to me how I’m supposed to teach?

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Published by Clarissa

32 thoughts on “What’s Left?”

  1. Are all of these statements literally true or is this an emotional reaction to the unreasonableness of society at this moment in time? Asking, seriously. Because anymore what you have written doesn’t seem entirely implausible at this point… But I think that you might be exaggerating, hopefully?

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    1. I wish I were inventing this but, alas, it’s all true. I had a conversation with our disability services today, and they gave me the list of these accommodations. They actually told me not to gesticulate. I teach in Spanish!! How can I not gesticulate? And I’m not allowed to turn towards the blackboard. I have to face the class at all times.

      Maybe they need to get rid of humans altogether and have robots teach.

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      1. Replacing people with robots and AI seems to be the goal. But people are irreplaceable. I don’t want a bot. I don’t want our children to be taught by a bot. We need each other as human beings. I am sorry about this list you’ve been given. Pray. Pray for your students and know I am praying too. Pray even for the person who has given you this list. I believe things will change and you will see results- and take courage if you don’t for a time because even simply praying will guard your heart.

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  2. As far as I can see you really only have two options at this point. Bow to the nonsense and simply do make work for the students before handing them an automatic A at the end of the semester.

    Or you could teach your students using the skills you have learned over your career, doing you best to help them learn. Then when accused by the admin of doing your job. You can tell them to pound sand. That they were too spineless to stand up to the nonsense when it came into the college. So they can damn well sit there in silence and shame as it is pushed back out of the college.

    That’s my two cent. Which considering how badly things have been inflated since 1913 means that my two cent is now worth $0.65. Something to think about.

    • – W

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    1. It’s the Americans with Disabilities Act. We have to provide equal education opportunities. Why do students with disabilities have no responsibility for their education? It’s a rhetorical question. We all know why.

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      1. This is one good thing about Canadian universities (and it is surprising): we are more moderate with those cases than in the USA. The general consensus here is that we professors try our best to accommodate students. I systematically ignore requests from accessible learning for note takers, for instance. But I modified my syllabus, making them very bland and boring, for some accommodation reasons.

        Keep gesticulating, my friend.

        Ol.

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        1. I’ve done everything to accommodate and gladly. But today I was told about the blind student, and I sincerely don’t know what to do. This is a literature course. The student should be figuring out how to fit in, not me.

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  4. Before the start of class instructors get a notification from the university disability services center giving us a list of students that need extra time on exams. Ok fine, standard procedure. The day after I gave my midterm, I received a request from them asking me to add 4 more students to the disabled list lmao. This shit is meaningless and an insult to people who actually have disabilities.

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    1. Absolutely anybody could get accommodations. They are granted on the spot and no medical evidence is required. It’s getting so, I’ll soon have more people with accommodations than not.

      Also, I don’t know what possesses people with fear of public speaking take courses on public speaking and then request accommodations because they are incapable of doing any public speaking. My colleague who teaches it says it’s a full 1/4 of all students.

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  5. Did you hear about the mexican teen who’s suing her school district because she can’t read or write? lol she even made honor roll her high school class.

    The real story:

    Ortiz got special education because she asserted disabilities. As part of that, every year, she and her mother negotiated an individualized education program tailored to her disability under the federal IDE Act. Ortiz negotiated for special recording and talk-to-text privileges to help her grades (which she apparently needed because she couldn’t read or write), but never demanded to actually learn anything. If the school had tried to flunk her for being an ignoramus, they would’ve been sued, so the school district went along with the negotiated IEP of waving her through as a pretend honor student. Now that she’s in college (!), she’s complaining that she got exactly the education she demanded. And none of the press coverage holds her accountable.

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    1. The school offered an intensive remedial reading program and a delayed graduation and Ortiz demanded to graduate on time. Ortiz repeatedly chose the illusion of success over actual learning. If you delve several dozen paragraphs into the story, one learns that Ortiz was monstrously disruptive her first several years in class, regularly screaming in and expelled from classrooms. This surely hurt the education of her classmates in addition to making it impossible to teach her.

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    2. Even in the USSR it was accepted that many people weren’t going to succeed in high school. They were instead diverted to the workplace or trade school. High school wasn’t a given for everybody.

      Even in the stupid USSR!!

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  6. It’s a disease called democracy.

    Or, if you like, democracy in the American sense, which has now seeped into every corner of the Western world where this peculiar type of American nonsense has become established.

    A democratic society that is particularly open to ALL and ANY cultures is a society that makes itself especially vulnerable to grifters, and the first victim is the very foundation on which all truly democratic societies are built: high trust.

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    2. The backstory.

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  7. Your disability resources office should have a written set of rules somewhere. Read them carefully. At our University, we do not need to comply with all requested accommodations if they “alter the essential requirements or educational outcomes of the course.” You should be able to successfully argue that some of these requested accommodations prevent you from teaching effectively.

    Can you get a transcriptionist instead of an interpreter for the deaf student? It should be easier to find someone who can do it for both languages and they can do it online ( via zoom, for example). University should have resources to pay for this. I have used a transcriptionist with a deaf student in my class and it worked reasonably well.

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  8. I find it is very helpful to speak to the students directly and ask them what other professors have done. It often turns out that what the student actually needs/wants is not nearly as obnoxious as what the disability office has written into the paperwork. The folks in the disability office tend to write out the accommodations in the most extreme way possible.

    For the deaf student, a transcriptionist as Random Reader recommends is probably the best solution. We’ve done that with a deaf student once and it was not a problem once it was set up.

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    1. A transcriptionist is a great idea. I’m very grateful for the recommendation.

      The blind student is more of a challenge. The Disability services are used to working with textbooks but I don’t have textbooks. I have plays, poetry, novels, short stories – all in Spanish. These are works of literature where the form is as important as the content.

      I also do a lot of small-group discussions using sheets with questions that I generate for that purpose. Also, all in Spanish. I have no idea how this is supposed to work.

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      1. Have you talked with the blind student? There must be some AI- based text to speech tools available that will work with Spanish and English. The student may already be using some of them. The solution may end up being as simple as providing pdf files of the text. I am not very familiar with tools for blind people, but I know that my deaf student was able to use some AI-based speech to text tools (they were not as good as a real person doing transcription but they worked). There must be some tools available for blind.

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        1. Also, people in your disability office are not that great. Instead of just imposing a burden on you to figure this out, they should be up to date on the various tools that can help students with disabilities to integrate into normal courses as much as possible. What will happen to these people after they graduate? Regular workplaces will not be able to do all these accommodations – it will be up to these students to adapt so they can do the work.

          I am not against accommodations and I am happy to help students as much as I can, but there are limits. Unfortunately we live in a society that is prone to deny reality.

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          1. I agree. This whole thing with giving students extra time on tests, for example, is nuts. If they can’t do the work in the allotted time period, that’s something that should be reflected in the grade. There are many jobs for which they are simply unqualified if they can’t do them at a reasonable pace. No workplace will accommodate nervous nellies who are such very special cookies that the world needs to stop for them. We keep hearing that our #1 task is to prepare students for the workplace but we are prevented from doing that by this consumerist model of education.

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  9. “I can’t assign oral presentations and exams because there are students who suffer from anxiety.”

    Someone who is so anxious that he/she can’t make an oral presentation or pass an oral exam should learn how to overcome his/her pathological anxiety (with medication if necessary) or, if the anxiety can’t be dealt with, how can that student deal with everyday life?

    Maybe I’m a bit harsh (I’m writing this from France , with a French point of view) but at the moment I’m a bit angry at the people I see around me, who cheated in order not to do military service (which we had until the mid-nineties) and who now want to send the young ones to war in Ukraine. Your students who pretend to be unfit to attend standard college classes and at the same time want a college education remind me of them.

    This being said, I understand that American universities are private entities that must cater to their customers, aka the students, unlike France where they are public and the students’ education is paid for by the taxpayer.

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    1. “want to send the young ones to war in Ukraine … a college education”

      Well there are parallels… Ukrainians don’t want French soldiers (who would? they don’t have a great track record) and there’s no job market for those that get phony ‘accommodated’ degrees.

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      1. Yes, we definitely don’t, erm… You’ve got a president who gets publicly beat up by his hag of a wife. I mean no disrespect but I can’t find a similar example in history.

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        1. “president who gets publicly beat up by his hag of a wife… I can’t find a similar example in history”

          In public…. there were lots of stories about Hillary getting violent in private (and that she was the only person Bill was actually afraid of).

          I wouldn’t even care about the slap if Macron could actually keep the same posture in public for 15 minutes straight…

          Meanwhile, the next russian delegation is getting ready to head to Istanbul headed by the person Washington explicitly asked be excluded (medinsky)…

          Will Trump finally find his missing balls or will it be Taco Tuesday again?

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    2. I work at a public university. But it doesn’t matter. All universities have to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. It’s federal legislation. I have absolutely no choice in the matter.

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