Tonight's post continues with the happenings on October 6, 1988, as recorded in my Bendnotes 3. Last night's post was my 1988 report on a Faculty Forum meeting. Tonight I'm typing up a couple of discussions that occurred after the meeting.
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"C. and I talked with Don after the meeting. He gave us the story of Fred's decision to turn the school toward the PhD. He also told us that "while I respect Ward a lot" that they don't see eye to eye -- Ward is perceived as being very close to the administration. As we walked back to the office, C. and I shared with each other our concern about being the bad guys, the professional guns brought in to take the place of those who were good teachers but who didn't have the magic letters after their names, or who weren't committed to the PhD myth. Although she is a Dr., she and I agree that a belief that the PhD means something about an individual's ability to teach is a belief in magic.
{By the way. I figured out this week that little of what I learned about teaching at the U of U is useful for this job here. The major job of a teacher here, still, is to try and teach, not to sort out the wheat from the chaff for the replication of an archaic and oppressive disciplinary society.}*
When we got back to Deschutes, we ran into Mary Monaghan, and she eased our minds by telling us that we wouldn't have been chosen if we had not been seen as potentially excellent teachers as well. She was especially nice about me, remind me that she had supported and fought for me strongly.**
. . . So. That's an overview of part of the political situation here. Sometimes it's real interesting to me. Since my depression sat in, it's mostly been really dreadful.
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* To understand this comment, you need to know that at the University of Utah graduate students often taught one of the three "weed" courses. A weed course is not one in which students smoke weed. (Yeah, I know what you were thinking.) It was a course in which the teacher, usually a graduate student at the U Comm dept, was required to bring in a classwide GPA of no higher than 2.4 because these courses were designed to "weed out" those students who supposedly didn't have the smarts to do great work in the communication program. Weeding was necessary because communication was one of the most popular humanities programs so their needed to be a gateway to entering.
The required C+ class GPA meant that almost every high grade (B and up) needed to be balanced with a lower grade. If a graduate student like myself allowed a class average to slip upward toward 2.8 or, heaven forfend, a Stanford-like 3.3, then we would have been "spoken to" and threatened with the loss of the teaching assistantship. Because I was at the U. only because I had the assistantship (which covered my tuition AND gave me enough to pay for rent and food as well) I did my job as required. Of course, being who I am, I often told the students about the weeding I was required to do. When one of the major departmental faculty heard about my honesty, she was very upset and told me that, "It's not a good idea to be too truthful with them." And yes, she was someone who touted a left-wing, post-Marxist ideology.
One interesting aspect of this kind of grading requirement is that a student who might get an A in one class because they outshone the other folks, might have pulled a B or lower in another class where there were more high performers. An undergraduate's grade in these classes had as much to do with the other students in the class as with his or her own abilities. Thank all the powers that bee that I haven't been required to grade like this since I left the U. Nowadays, I have a set criteria for an A which I really believe almost every student in my classes can reach if they do the work.
** Reading once again about Mary's comment about fighting for me leads me again to think that I was the second choice of the COCC hiring committee. I wonder how I could find out for sure?
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