I went on to teach there as well and the students, whether they were taking vocational kinds of coursework - like nursing or studying for a master's - were all perfectly wonderful students who, like me, read no less than 12 books a semester, wrote about 120 pages of material for each course, grappled directly with source material, not spoon fed crap from some reader with 10 page excerpts and summaries...
and... there were no grades! Which didn't present any problem getting into grad school on a full ride at several different universities in the central NY area.
I remember being stunned in grad school at the deference people gave to professors. I sat there on the first day, listening to various profs tell us who they were and why we should work with them. One explained in her spiel that Thomas Kuhn had no theory of scientific change in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. To which I immediately began to have an argument, much as I would have had with my tutors - de rigeur in courses where you had to defend and argue with them as part of the eval process.
Well! Boy, was I considered an upstart. She got over it though and eventually went on to be one of my closest, dearest mentors in grad school, someone who helped me get my head around the rituals of deference and demeanor, who would unpack the politics of faculty meetings with me, whenever I found myself unable to parse what the fuck was going on. As she later admitted, I'd pissed her off. I'd broken the rules, failed to conform to rules of deference and demeanor.
So, sometimes I have a hard time understanding Michael's antipathy toward universities. I didn't go to anything like what he describes and by the time I got to grad school I was sufficiently inoculated.
Like: I can't understand that concept of running to the mailbox to find our your grades. All my mates would do that. Me? I used to have to wait 3 months for an evaluation to come through by which time I was half way through the next course, so who cared about a lousy grade, never mind that I got, instead, 3-4 pages of single spaced engagement with my work - real attention to what I accomplished, what I'd argued and whether I was successful, where I needed to work harder, where I might want to go next,etc.
it is all part of what makes me so wonderful!
<> Schools are hierarchical, man. You know, the teacher is presumed to <> know more than the students and it's all authoritarian and stuff. <> Besides, that shit is boring! Let's smoke a bowl and go fishing. <> <> Doug <> ^^^^^^^^^^ <> Here's an early 70's " poem" on a teacher experimenting with <> non-hirearchical classes. I agree with Doug's sarcasm <> <> Politics of Prof. John ___'s Class Experience ( 1972) <> <> In a classless class, The teacher was oppressed by the class. Paradox <> underlay classroom struggle, And our minds: <> <> In le Fronde, to a louse of Levi-Strauss, John sounded like a river <> doused, R.D. Laing mouse: 'the mountains are sacred, With templed <> pyramids, treasure boxes. The conscious and other consciouses, The <> part and the whole, One with the Universe, With Jung and with Yoga, <> Why , the inside's the outside, and...' <> <> 'Hold that Cline bottle talk ! (from one culturally boxed) 'Is it <> paradise or Pandora's box Paradox locks and unlocks ? And what of <> empirical gnomes and queries ? <> <> Class of all classes, That don't contain themselves... Double Bind in <> the Mind ! Tangled rules, but exposed, So, John, you get Hempel's , <> <> Streaking * rose. <> <> * streaking - early '70's campus prank of running naked publically at <> football games and such. <> ___________________________________ <> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk <>
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