This hurts my feelings?

This hurts my feelings?

This is a woman (an English professor at Barnard College, whose class is notorious for massive cheating) whose children have ballsy Daniel Ellsberg’s DNA coursing through their veins (she’s married to Ellsberg’s son). And she’s pathetically announcing to her large audience that it has hurt her feelings??

I’m not saying she should handle the problem this way, and produce a viral YouTube revealing to the world that she is an ass (the professor in the YouTube got his exam questions out of a book – too lazy to write his own – and thereby made it supersimple for students to get the questions in advance). I’m saying that having shown yourself a sap by your grading method (Ellsberg asked students to grade themselves), you don’t double down on the sap by making it clear that your emotional frailty will guarantee that you’ll just move from one way of being manipulated by your class to another.

In the Barnard case as in the ranting biz school professor’s case, the instructors were too lazy or too fragile or whatever to run cheating-aversive courses (I don’t say cheating-free, since it’s always possible that even in the best-run course some students will cheat). Instead of doing obvious things – writing questions students won’t be able with little effort to find in a book; not asking students to grade themselves; not allowing smartphones in class – these professors virtually welcomed their students into the world of naughty.

Even worse is the way such people tend to respond to the revelation of cheating. Of course both must have known it had been going on for years; neither one is stupid. They just let it continue until it got so bad they got pissed off (the guy) or until some poor honest soul in the class told them about it and forced some form of response (Ellsberg).

What they tend to do is get all police state about it. Ellsberg went from hippie to Kim Jong-un in no seconds flat, installing her students in device-free isolation chambers overseen by high-ranking administrators and administering there a big ol’ scary exam on which most of her students’ grade depended.

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Here’s UD‘s take: If you are a cheating-enabler sort of professor — if you give take-home exams and shit like that, shit that guarantees cheating — own it. Be that thing. Get defensive when people call you on it and say it’s no one’s fucking business how you run your classes. Don’t get all schizodemento and hurl yourself from one extreme to another and hypocritically protest to the class how shocked and hurt you are. That’s what Sartre called being in bad faith. Not a good place to be.

… comes out in favor of a university-wide laptop in the classroom ban. If you’ve been reading this blog for any time at all, you know that UD has confidently awaited such a day, and that she trusts something similar will happen at other self-respecting campuses (Def. of self-respecting campuses: Places whose football stadium isn’t named after a prison). That is, UD has anticipated that the real energy in favor of serious bans will come not from professors, many of whom do ban them, but from students.

This is for obvious I’m all right, Jack, pull up the ladder reasons: What careth I, Professor X, if Professor Y’s students have a shitty classroom experience? I’ve worked out something good for my group.

But – as UD has told you repeatedly – this is a treacherously short-sighted POV. As the Duke editorial writers ask:

Why convene class if students are half-present, constantly disturbed by text messages, games and Facebook? … What is the point of holding class if people are not paying attention? This is not just about respect; it is also about the necessity of a physical college campus. The more time we spend on computers, the less important the on-campus college experience — which universities tout as a major benefit of an elite education — becomes.

If it helps you to think about this in terms of sports: Note current plummeting attendance at many university and professional stadiums. Why, why, why? Well, lots of traditional reasons (obscene drunks, long runs of losing games, outrageous ticket prices, passels of bad boys on the teams) PLUS a new one: The addition to many stadiums of vast Adzillatrons — screens that show you the game as it’s happening, and add constant massive shrieking advertisements. Fun! You’ve spent hundreds of dollars to be treated to a computer-generated as-it’s-happening rendition of the game while being held captive to wall to wall commercials. Where do I sign up for my $2,000 season tickets?… But it’s so much less fun with every game, ’cause I notice all the other people who used to sit with me and make it exciting to cheer are gone. They’re watching on their big screen in the respectable privacy of their own home…

And see it’s the same thing at universities. Why go there? It’s nicer to lie in bed and stare at your very own screen. And you get to that place, mentally, as a result of staring at screens in classrooms, just the way people get themselves home from the football game by staring at screens in the stadium.

Really dum-dum states, like Nevada, our very dumbest state, are planning more and bigger Adzillatrons at stadiums. A proposed $800 million new facility for UNLV features an Adzillatron that spans the entire stadium. Imagine sitting in your seat and being forced to watch the world’s biggest moving image of a three-tier McDonald’s burger oozing white sauce! Slurp!

You probably don’t have the stomach for it.

It’s way, way late in the game for this to be happening. But at least it’s happening. At least Phoenix and the other tax siphons might be put out of their scummy business.

… a scummy industry to have Obama in the White House again.

To be sure, a few cynical Democratic lawmakers still support the government-funded for-profit college scam (put for-profit in my search engine for background). But as the industry’s greed, and criminal neglect of students’ educations, becomes common knowledge, it’s mainly Republicans – famously contemptuous of financial dependency on the government – who continue to whomp themselves up for an industry almost wholly bankrolled by federal dollars.

As David Halperin notes, a Republican victory in November is probably the industry’s last chance to salvage its basic model (enroll everyone; use their federal education money for your executives’ salaries; watch everyone drop out and spend the rest of their lives trying to pay back loans; find new suckers). Even with Republicans running the country, the for-profits may be unable to reverse the collapse of their sickening sector, one of the few surviving instances of pure exploitation of the weak by the strong, the masses by the elites.

You have to go to Lucky’s speech in Samuel Beckett’s absurdist Waiting for Godot (start at 44:30) even to begin to understand the for-profit college situation in the United States. David Halperin does a nice tidy job of reviewing the mad greed and cynicism and indifference that puts our taxes in the pockets of people who exploit innocents. It won’t change until lobbying changes. And lobbying won’t change.

For-profit universities – a class act.

… a spectacular target.

… says a high school student in one of our most depressed states – a state that, like some others, has cynically decided to deal with its education budget by buying a bunch of computers and shoving them in front of students.

Hey, they can shove computers in front of themselves at home and fuck the whole get up in the morning / be with other people / deal with a teacher thing! Remember Irving Berlin:

I’ve Got the On Button in the Morning and the Off Button at Night
And With the On Button in the Morning and the Off Button in Evening
I’m All Right!

Sure, you’ve got a little grousing – from a few teachers, a few students – but gradually everyone’s going to get on board. The teachers will still be paid — only they’ll be paid not to show up. They’ll stay home, just like their students, and be what this blog has long called distance teachers: air traffic controllers. The students will watch films and play games on their laptops and cheat their way through the courses. A win/win situation, and it costs the state vanishingly little.

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UD thanks Taylor for the link.

Lo-o-o-ong article about the cynical online for-profits in the New York Times. The writer can’t say enough bad about them.

The beauty of this money-maker is that you can “use education as a source of government-financed business, much as military contractors have capitalized on Pentagon spending.” You can be pious as hell about education, about how you’re educating young people, even as you’re taking all the money for yourself and leaving your heavily recruited marks ignorant and in debt. You pay your underqualified cyberteachers shit and give them virtual classrooms of two hundred students. You keep students enrolled even if they never even log in, because each of those students comes trailing federal funds for you and your partners. Nobody learns anything, but your investors make millions.

… for a job well done.

It’s a simple, homespun truth, but seldom has it been brought home so powerfully as in the history of the online for-profit education sector of the United States. Rich people have enormous amounts of money invested in these schools … and why not? The schools take the wretched of the earth and make them more wretched, which after all is the destiny of the wretched. The poor we will always have with us. But along the way the hedge funds behind these schools collect billions in federal education dollars for their investors. When students default, which because a lot of them are losers they often do, investors are untouched. Only the wretched are responsible for repayment.

Expenditures at these schools are insanely low, since teaching is for shit and it’s all online so you save all that infrastructure money. Your main costs are advertising and getting the students to take the bait which, though many of them are ill-educated and gullible, is hard to do, since even if you’re real ignorant you might could see what shit the online for-profits are.

Anyway. The main point is to protect the rich people who’ve invested in this can’t-lose model, and their lobbyists have done a beautiful job of that. Check out how they did it here.

Gail Collins does a little sniffing around the online education trash heap. She notices that better-off kids get physical schools with human teachers and other students in them, while poor kids get for-profit onlines with grading done God knows how and by whom. One program outsourced its grading to India.

Does full-time online learning really work for disadvantaged kids who may be alone at home all day?

Dig: Full-time online doesn’t work for anyone, least of all, obviously, poor kids home alone. But let’s dump online on poor kids whose parents don’t know any better and let’s make a mint by trashing their education.

K12 Inc. is a big private online education business. It was founded by a former Goldman Sachs banker and by William Bennett, the Republican writer and talk-show host, with an infusion of cash from the former disgraced junk-bond king Mike Milken. Its teachers generally work from their homes, communicating with their students by e-mail or phone.

What teachers? Who are they? Are you sure they’re the people teaching the course? Are you sure the student is the person signed up to take the course? No. You have no idea, and there’s no way you can know. But you don’t care, do you? Here’s the deal: “[C]ompany profits have been soaring.”

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Here’s the skinny on for-profit online education for American kids:

As long as customers don’t care about learning anything, the model will work well. Profits will soar, and students will appreciate not having to go to school. As word gets around that you can get a high school diploma while doing jackshit in the comfort of your own home, the thing will grow like wildfire.

The model’s risk lies only in the possibility that more than a few online customers will at some point after they graduate sense a connection between their failure in life and their lack of an education. It’s not just that they can’t think. They don’t know how to be in a work setting, having spent the last ten years in their pajamas.

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A good summary of the scandal. With links. If you have any predisposition toward depression, do not go there.

… is written by a high school student.

She’s not very happy.

Wait until she gets to a university.

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This year, most teachers here at Joplin High are having a hard time motivating their students to complete and turn in assignments. Hour by hour, I sit down, open my computer, turn into a zombie, shut the lid, and head to the next class. Some periods there is hardly a need to even look at the teacher. To many students, beating a high score in Tetris sounds a lot more productive than wasting time doing an assignment that can easily be downloaded at home. If someone were to ask me a year ago if I would prefer a paperless campus, I would say that our current situation sounds like a dream come true. Who wouldn’t want to ditch heavy textbooks for sleek laptops? In reality, I question the value of technology in the classroom on a daily basis.

The absence of all human interaction all day long enters you into a Michael Fassbender-intensity trance. Get ready to learn!

Don’t we already spend too much time staring at screens instead of physically interacting with our families and friends? According to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, it’s estimated that, on average, young people spend up to 7.5 daily hours in front of a TV, computer, or video game. These hours are outside the school day.

Au contraire: Education should be as much as possible an extension of whatever daily shit you’re doing outside the classroom.

Simply dumping more information on students through technology by advising them to visit numerous websites and watch tutorial videos, as many of my teachers do now, will not make for a smarter, more creative student body.

But it will make for a much happier teacher!

Unlocking the ingenuity, drive, and enthusiasm within a student tends to become virtually impossible when they all become Internet-absorbed zombies. If this is what 21st-century learning looks like, then maybe there’s no reason for students to attend school. After all, there’s not much to learn from Tetris.

Oh puleeze. Do it yourself! It’s all about self-directed now, baby! Just do what you want. Follow your bliss.

And on the not attend school bit — Where have you been? All your friends are home onlining their high school years.