shanmonster | Edumacation Rant (Reply)

In my religious studies class last night, someone asked how long their research paper should be. I was a bit surprised, because the answer should be you write until it is done. But the answer was at least five pages. And then, someone asked "Double-spaced?" My first reaction was to laugh, but then I realized the woman who asked this wasn't joking. This is just so foreign to the way I think. I mean, it's possible to have a good five-page, double-spaced article, but I don't think most of the topics chosen by students in my class are narrow enough in scope. Some of the research ideas could produce several books' worth of material. How can they expect to do a decent job in so little space? I doubt they'll be using shorthand. And it's not like this is a rare point of view. Most of the students were looking for this quantitative guidance when it's pretty much irrelevant. I mean, I can see that a forty-page paper is a bit long for the professor to read (there are too many students for her to get that much reading done), so if the paper is going to be too long, narrow the focus of the thesis. Gah!

I'm also horrified at the lack of scholarly skills my fellow students are exibiting. The writing skills of some of them shouldn't have let them pass grade five or six. Plenty of sentences are unreadable due to an ignorance of grammar, and their spelling has regressed to something like a cross between Chaucer and an ICQvert. And even the literate ones don't have a clue how to use citations or footnotes. This is stuff that should have been well in hand by the time students finished junior high school. Hell, I did it in grade six. Now, I don't think all, or even most of, these students are stupid. I've spoken with plenty who seem intelligent enough, but something has gone horribly wrong. They're uneducated, ignorant, and waiting to be spoonfed. It's as though all their years of reading, writing, and critical thinking in grade school have been excised. What the heck is going on?

A couple of years ago, I took a class with a discussion group in it. The topic was "What makes a good professor?" One of the students said, "A good professor tells you what you need to know so you don't waste your time learning other stuff." Ack!

I'm tempted to go back to university, even though I'm not a very academically-minded person. If education were a contest, I think I'd beat most of the undergrads I've met, hands down. But it shouldn't be a contest. It should be about learning, exercising critical thought, and adding to the pool of knowledge. But how can people learn and contribute in a post-secondary institution if they can only barely read and write? I don't believe my education in the school system was any better than that of my peers. I had some really lousy teachers over the years. So what on earth is going on?

Most students I've met are looking for a high GPA so they can graduate quickly and get a big-paying job. Actually learning something is secondary to getting out into the "real world." I'm not a big fan of letter grades, or, in the martial arts world, the belt system. I understand the value of these for instructors--it theoretically makes it easier to determine the expertise level of your students--but in my perfect little world, people would work not to get an A or a black belt, but because they want to increase their body of knowledge. Shouldn't learning be an end unto itself?