The Dean made a little speech yesterday about something appalling he had seen.
“I walked down the hallway yesterday,” he said in a voice that trembled with outrage. “I looked into several classrooms, and I saw faculty members doing ______ . I’m not saying that everybody does it and I don’t want to name any names because I don’t want to embarrass people. But I can’t believe that after everything, everything we’ve discussed, everything we know, all the research on the topic, there are still people who do this.”
Immediately, professors started explaining that no, they were not doing __________. It might have looked that they were doing it but was only because of the logistics of the classroom. But no, they would never. They know how bad _____________ is and they’d never engage in such behavior.
I said nothing because I do ___________ all the time and I love it.
So who can guess what ___________ is?
Clarissa's Blog 
Talking to students?
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Lecturing.
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Oh, that’s no fun. You must be in academia, so it’s easy for you.
Yes, lecturing. We are not supposed to be lecturing. Students are supposed to learn the material by themselves (yes, I know) and in the classroom we should have small-group discussions that professors “facilitate”.
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Wait, so… your job is what? Bring coffee and snacks?
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No, that’s not allowed either. All eating on campus should happen through university catering and all drinking through Pepsi because we have an exclusive contract with them.
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I’m not in the academia but it was easy to guess for me as well. Lecturing embodies a power differential. This is anathema to left-liberal thinking. Thus, the teacher must take on a more egalitarian role, such as “facilitator”, lest the student feel bad about the teacher knowing more than them. The students must be made to believe that the knowledge is somewhere already latent within them, just waiting to spring forth if they go through the motions of being in college.
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To be fair… some teachers can pull off not lecturing. I had this one absolutely spectacular teacher whose classes were structured like a group discussion. And it worked! But I can’t imagine that every subject could be taught that way or that every teacher would want to do that.
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That’s exactly how it’s explained. In these very words. A professor should not present herself as a figure of authority in the classroom. Her approach should be that “we are all learning together”. There is no stable knowledge. Everything is up for question all the time. Everybody has their own truth and education is about helping everybody express that privatized truth.
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I have nothing to do with academia, but for an outsider this sounds insane. What is the point of having professors if “we are all learning together”? Shouldn’t the professors (or any teachers) supposed to have learned the subject already? I can’t get my head wrapped around this. Is this the standard way of “learning” in all universities or just the liberal ones?
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It is absolutely insane. But this is a natural outgrowth of American egalitarianism, so nobody should be surprised. If everybody is equal, if nobody is better to anybody else, everybody lives their own truth, everybody calls each other by their first name, hierarchies are bad, nobody is intellectually superior to anybody else — then what do we expect?
A mother of Klara’s classmate texted me yesterday to inform me that her daughter “decided that she wants to come to a sleepover at your place this weekend.” I’d eat my own toenails before I tell somebody that my daughter “decided” how a family of other people should spend their weekend. Or even our family. These are small children. They don’t have decision power.
We can blame academia but we are all participating in this mentality.
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“There is no stable knowledge…Everybody has their own truth…”
LOL, yeah that is going to end well 😀
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Honestly, I sit at a faculty meeting with people who have every possible degree, and I realize that the babushkas at my church have more insight and knowledge that these academics.
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I think I might sprain an eyeball if I rolled it any harder!
The stinky fads of “flipped classrooms” and “online learning” almost always emanated from Humanities departments, at least in the US universities I studies and taught at (from private Ivies to large public state schools). It is absolutely imperative in teaching of sciences and mathematics to have in-person didactic exposition of conceptual and technical issues, else the rigor is lost. The group learning happens in tutorial sessions or study groups typically run by TAs and junior instructors, which are organized separately from the lecture — and even if these are effective only AFTER the students have themselves taken a serious shot at all the assigned problems.
I am quite bitter about this issue because the bean counters (isn’t it apt how “bean” rhymes with “dean”?) regularly complained that sciences and especially graduate instructors are punching below their weight since they teach small classes. They would even cancel some of these courses at the last moment harming the students who needed or wanted that course. I am sympathetic towards undergraduate teaching with classrooms in all sorts of orientations — flipped, rotated, tumbling etc. etc. — in other disciplines and even sciences, but it pains me when ignorant administrators who have not stepped in a classroom in decades propound “one size fits all” teaching methodologies and discount the effort that goes into preparing a Ph.D.-level course. It can easily take me 8-9 hours of preparation to deliver a 75 minute lecture in advanced courses. Just because I have less than 10 students enrolled in a classroom does not mean “I am taking it easy”. It also does not help that number of As in these courses are few and far between — but grade is not the focus for PhD courses and students anyway.
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I share your bitterness, my friend. Flipped classrooms are stupid. If people could learn on their own, education wouldn’t be necessary at all. There has never been an era where information were as easily available as right now. But almost nobody can learn by themselves. That’s not how human beings work. Solitary learning in front of a screen is as much of a waste of time as AI therapy.
Intro language courses, yes, of course, it’s all about guided speaking practice in small groups. But content courses (which is almost exclusively what I teach) require lecturing. Students love my lectures. I introduce complex, heavy material in an accessible, engaging, curated way. I trained for many years to do that. I still train daily by reading and learning. As an educator, that’s my whole thing. If I can’t do that, I become completely redundant, which, of course, is the whole point.
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Human resource is hardest one to nurture and cultivate — so, almost by construction, there is no assembly-line approach to its mass production, much to the chagrin and short-sighted bottom lines of university administration. This is the reason they gerrymander courses and sections to give the illusion “personalized attention” and “low student-to-faculty ratio” for enhancing their ranking while simultaneously making it impossible for the faculty to implement this in classroom.
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lecture?
Amanda
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On a related note…teachers and professors who say they learn a lot more from their students than their students learn from them are idiots.
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I opted out of a famous university network aimed at increasing enrollment in sciences out of sheer embarrassment**, when my 72-year old department chair groveled in front of a disabled non-binary student about how they have “significantly widened his thinking and horizons” by claiming that exams are ableist. (The said student was failing in all subjects and had to eventually drop out of the PhD Physics program).
**The fact that convenor kept insisting on me adding she/her to my zoom name may have played a small part too.
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God, this is vomit-inducing behavior. I see it often and I writhe in vicarious shame. I changed my entire political allegiance mostly to avoid being on the same side with these people.
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It depends on the context. One does not necessarily learn from students, but one learns a lot from teaching them…
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“who can guess what _ is?”
My guess was going to be ‘teaching’ because I assumed your dean follows some goofball ideology about formal instruction getting in the way of “true learning” or some such bullshit.
Haven’t written because I was visiting the fascinating city of Łódź (pronounced wootch) for a couple of days. Will catch up on a couple of things soon…
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I guessed you were traveling!
Oh, I’m good. I could practically be a spy.
Missed you in our discussions!
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