But I was talking about the system I teach in, not the one I'd want to teach in. I didn't say we shouldn't do it because it doesn't scale. My point was that you can't make money off it because it doesn't scale. And so where the system is built to make money for people, which it is, there's a drive to make things efficient, standardized, etc. So at least what i think i'm doing is rejecting a factory model of education. Do we not think the kind of teaching we're talking about doing is time-intensive in ways that are not reducible to replaceable parts in a sort of fordian model of education, which is more or less what i think i teach in? That in fact "what students can handle" is at least pretty close to individual? But i don't get to sort the classes i have now into groups of people who can handle the same amount of the same kind of material. I teach classes with broad mixes of talent, interest, and background. But if i tried to tailor the class to every one of them, it would kill me. At least i think it would. Maybe i'm wrong, but it's the way it looks to me right now. It would be like teaching five or six or seven times as many classes as i already teach.
If it does scale (i.e., to mass levels), can you explain to me how far and how it works? I'm open to the idea. I just think teaching and learning are inherently inefficient, but maybe that's because i'm stuck in an outmoded way of thinking about everything.
I guess i think you're attributing a bunch of stuff to me that i don't think, and i don't understand why you're doing it except that i said something that sounded like some stuff other people say, and so suddenly i was one of them.
As for students not liking the work, i'm partly venting frustration, but it ought to be understood as symptomatic of the structure we're in. But the truth is that i actually get a lot of students who enjoy the class and enjoy the challenge. If not at first, then eventually, when they start to feel like they're getting somewhere. So, there's that. But when they first get to me, they generally expect me to hand them everything. They've been trained to it, afaict. It's not just laziness (although i reckon some of it is). It's a symptom of the structure. On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 2:58 PM, shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com>wrote:
>
> "oh, that sounds great. but it just won't scale. how can you teach lots of
> students that way."
>
> you're talking a "free" university, where you all do it for the love of
> doing it, where you're supposed to be fostering the joy of learning for the
> sake of learning, and then say, "eeek. but it just won't scale doing it
> like that."
>
> "and besides, students don't like the hard work."
>
> who knows what students will and will not like and how hard they will or
> won't work when taking free courses. and what would we care -- if it's free
> anyway? [1]
>
> graeber says that neoliberalism has been a systematic attack on the
> imagination. when, at one time, people started BOU and my uni with the
> ideas of "unschooling" - that we could do things totally differently - as
> outrageous as having prisoners unions or even that there would be no need
> for prisons except for the most violent few -- it's been lost under the
> systematic onslaught - all the things we talk about here.
>
> as an aside, on direct action (the other thread), the point of direct
> action isn't, as is assumed, always just to speak to power in the form of
> legitimate authority - politicians, bureaucrats, etc. sometimes, it's to
> speak to the power of social movement itself. in this case, while we can
> never immediate raise a revolution and tear it all down overnight, the
> point is that, on the way there, a long slow process, we can remind
> ourselves every so often what it *might* be like to be free. it is the
> taste of that freedom, every so often, obtained during the entire process
> of planning and staging a direct action, that keeps people in it for the
> long haul.
>
> [1] if it's for the sake of learning, what could possibly be wrong with
> learning what you are ready to handle. if it's "hard" and it is free, why
> should a student read 5 books in a term when she can only handle one. who
> is in charge of - who actually decides - what a student should learn in a
> semester, how many books to read, how to know if she understands them, what
> counts as knowledge, etc.
>
> none of us know.
>
> when i went through teacher training at my uni, one of the first things we
> discussed was that no one ever is taught to be a university teacher. i was
> in THE only university that, at the time, taught people how to become
> teachers at uni level. not very many professors are ever taught a damn
> thing about how people learn, etc.
>
> and even then, taking a series of seminars to prepare us, the whole point
> was to immediately reveal to us the socially consituted character of what
> we did in so far as most of us simply reproduced what we think our
> professors did. we use textbooks to decide what's an adequate amount of
> work to assign. but who made the textbook? is any of it based on any
> research? when was it conducted? or do we simple get our first course
> handed to us, expected to simple "know" by osmosis, what to do, and then
> spend the next week fumbling around. wash. rinse. repeat.
>
> there was this hilarious speaker at this training who had us all in
> hysterics over this, how the whole point was to mystify the process. as a
> consequence, we all pretend we are absolutely sure that we know exactly how
> much one should study and read to be proficient in, say, an introduction to
> political science course. is it one textbook with 26 chapters and 500 pages
> of additional reading. what's the algorithm? what about that one professor
> who only teach with the one textbook, no extra reading. eeeuuu. he's
> offering the 'gut' course. ugh. wouldn't want to teach that.
>
> but why? who said that the textbook is not enough material whereas the
> textbook and the two additional assigned books and the term paper is the
> right amount.
>
> etc.
>
>
>
> At 03:04 PM 2/27/2012, Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
>
>> oph, wait. it's about how i hate and mistrust students and want them to be
>> just like me?
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 1:58 PM, Jeffrey Fisher <jeff.jfisher at gmail.com
>> >wrote:
>>
>> > sorry, I've not been able to follow the Graeber thread(s). Can you recap
>> > for me in a sentence or two?
>> >
>> >
>> > On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 7:15 AM, shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com
>> >wrote:
>> >
>> >> As for students not working hard, students disliking being challenged,
>> >> BOU model not scaling, etc.: It sounds like a good example of what
>> Graeber
>> >> said about the war against imagination.
>> >
>> >
>> >
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>>
>
> --
> http://cleandraws.com
> Wear Clean Draws
> ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)
>
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