Cortez writes “54 percent of American students admitted to internet plagiarism according to this spiked online piece.
“Most American students do not attend university to embrace knowledge; university is just a gateway to a successful career.” We work to provide more complete access to resources and they use actually them – Oh, the shame, the shame.”
- Next Whitman once advised, ‘Don’t write poetry’
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I guess if students don’t want to think….
……that’s not our problem. We can lead them to water and we tried. We should just accept that thinking is too painful for most Americans, it is easier to be given facts and opinions and instructions. Compliance can easily be defined.
Thinking critically
We should just accept that thinking is too painful for most Americans, it is easier to be given facts and opinions and instructions.
You couldn’t be more correct but I don’t think the fault lies only with the students. I remember well my days in school from elementary on up to high school. Kids have no choice but to be fed facts and opinions because, at least in 95% of the cases I remember, you absolutely did not question your teacher. Such things brought the ire of the teacher and labeled you as a “trouble maker” or someone who “speaks out of turn.”
As an example, a tenth grade English teacher of mine rattled on for a good fifteen minutes about Pearl Harbor and I fell into a stupor. The thing that brought me out of that stupor was the phrase “blah blah blah blah and all the aircraft carriers we lost at Pearl Harbor.” Well, history being my thing as far back as grade school, I called her on it and told her we didn’t lose carriers at Pearl. She challenged my notion. I mean she actually stood before people and said I was wrong, and that we had indeed lost aircraft carriers at Pearl Harbor. When I proved her wrong I may as well have proved her stupid. I barely got out of that class with a B-.
As much as schools like to preach critical thinking and assure all of us that they are teaching children and teens to think critically, they’re not. They can’t. Because the first rule of critical thinking is “question everything.” That “everything” includes authority figures- like teachers for instance. And if students started questioning teachers, who know what kind of intellectual foundations might be torn asunder, he asked sarcastically.
I remember, somewhere back in second grade, when I asked a question about why something worked a certain way I got a response similar to “because that’s just the way it works.” Those words, and words to that effect, are the hallmark of lazy ass teachers who should be forced to hand in their credentials as they leave the school. I understand that a teacher might not be able to explain all the nuances of, say, the circulatory system. Yet “because that’s just the way it works” explains nothing. I knew something was wrong with our educational system then, and I was only six.
I think we also reach a new level of maturity the day it dawns on us that our teachers aren’t infallible and that they can be wrong, and in some cases, they often are wrong. It doesn’t help that textbook manufacturers and writers are forced to edit for content, politically correct language, and things that may offend.
Dammit, during the middle of the 20th Century it wasn’t at all uncommon to see signs saying “Niggers Need Not Apply.” During the 1940s the United States suspended Constitutional rights for Japanese-Americans and locked them up simply because they were Japanese. The US killed innocents in Vietnam and then we treated our Vietnam veterans like garbage. That’s not pretty, and it’s not right, but it is history and it belongs in history books, student history books- the kind you find in classrooms. But no, that might offend some and it just doesn’t show our country in the proper light. So such things, along with thousands of others, are censored and toned down.
So I say, it’s not the student’s fault. They are conditioned to do as they’re told and believe what they’re told. Why go looking for facts when every teacher you’ve ever had said the same thing and that thing came from X book?
Re:Thinking critically
“because that’s just the way it works.” Those words, and words to that effect, are the hallmark of lazy ass teachers who should be forced to hand in their credentials as they leave the school.
—
Indeed. It would be more honest if teachers would admit when they don’t know something or are not sure. If it is one of those things that you DO understand and DOESN’T make sense (like a lot of things at your library I’m sure) you could have a boiled down “these aren’t good reasons why, but they are reasons” answer.
So I guess creative thinking is just for the rulers, leaders or courtiers. The rest must do as told.
Re:Thinking critically
Well you can blame the various Colleges of Education and the NEA for producing substandard teachers and providing them the protections of union membership.
Daily I thank God that I went to private schools where a free excahge of ideas was not only tolerated but encouraged. I wasn’t fed facts, I learned.
Gaming culture & cheating
This whole “gaming” thing is really popular in academic circles these days, but one thing that is also pretty common in gaming is cheating. Every game has an elaborate series of ‘cheat codes’ that let you turn yourself invlunerable, give you special powers; in short, make the game easier.
Personally, I don’t understand this because if I can just cheat then I wonder why I’m bothering to play the game. But if you don’t want to play the game, and you are being forced to so you can get a good job then cheating sure makes it easier. Game developers willingly enable most cheating by designing it into the system – people won’t buy games without cheats enabled I guess. So I blame the university – they’ve designed their system to enable cheating. Its probably not trivial, but worth the effort for universities to change their practices to eliminate cheating. Like game developers, they probably won’t because they would lose paying customers.
Here’s hoping that they choose to do the right thing and enforce academic integrity.
Re:Thinking critically
Daily I thank God that I went to private schools where a free excahge of ideas was not only tolerated but encouraged. I wasn’t fed facts, I learned.
And daily I thank God that I attended a good school system that taught me how to think, and that encouraged students to bring in their knowledge from outside the classroom–and that taught polite and usually-effective strategies for saying, “that’s wrong, the correct answer is this.” Sometimes (especially with the best teachers), the flow of discussion in the classroom would let a student easily do it during the discussion. Other times, not so much–because, strangely, teachers react almost as if they were real, normal, human beings, which is to say they react badly to being publicly corrected in a way that makes them look or feel stupid. In those situations, I found that going to the teacher after class with good information almost always resulted in a (credited) correction the next day in class.
But, sadly, you can only feel pity for me, because that excellent school system I attended was a public school system, with teachers who were members of the NEA, and therefore, obviously substandard, no matter what I experienced in the classroom, and later when I attended college and found that my classmates from the snootier schools had not learned by high school graduation things that I’d learned by eighth grade graduation.
A flaw in your logic
I did not say that all teachers that were members of the NEA were substandard, only that substandard teachers were offered the usual union protections of the NEA’s member unions.
Nor did I say I attened snooty schools. I had nuns. Nuns and snooty are as far as I can tell mutually exclusive. Exeter it was not, but it was a good education with teachers who knew that their work spoke for them an not their union rep.
Why I would have pity on someone who received a good education is beyond me. I am pleased you received a good education although you seem a bit bitter about it. I do wish however you wouldn’t parse my words so that you can draw your own illogical conclusions.
Re:A flaw in your logic
In what way do I seem “bitter” about having received a good education? What torques me off is people who blather on about the NEA being Bad, Bad, Bad, and therefore NEA-member teachers being Bad, Bad, Bad.
In case you’ve forgotten, what you said was:
Well you can blame the various Colleges of Education and the NEA for producing substandard teachers and providing them the protections of union membership.
What you’ve maybe also forgotten, or perhaps never knew, is that the teacher colleges were a response to the determination to provide at least basic literacy and numeracy to the entire population, and that the current protections in teachers’ union contracts are a response to the abuses that preceeded the union contracts.
Quite a few of those very good teachers my sister and I had wouldn’t have survived in teaching, absent strong union protections. One was a professional gambler, who also refused to use the official textbook. (He wrote his own, not for publication but for use in class.) One quietly but apparently sincerely believed he was Superman, although he never put this to the test in any of the critical ways. Another was more openly crazy, given to occasional strange outbursts in class. Two of them were, hey, let’s be polite and say “politically radical.” My chemistry teacher did a number of things that were highly educational, but which I recognize in retrospect to have been rather dangerous. He also from time to time railed against the idiocy of the oil company he had worked for before they closed down their local facility.
Characters like that wouldn’t have survived without a union. Sadly, today, even with the union, they probably wouldn’t survive. With today’s prudery and censoriousness, all their strangeness would be considered solid, unassailable grounds for dismissal for cause.
It’s not the union contracts that are responsible for substandard teachers. It’s the intersection of women having more options, an unwillingness to pay enough to attract what’s no longer effectively a captive supply of teachers, and a public culture so strait-laced it would give the Victorians breathing problems.
Re:A flaw in your logic
Yep, I’m wrong unions are wonderful they let nutjobs keep their teaching positions. Just ask superman.
Teachers are bad because women are no longer constrained to nursing, teaching, or housewifery. (Sorry for you non-public schoolers there is no sarcasm tag.)
Holy geez, too bad I only had mentally balanced teachers, I missed all the entertainment of a public school education.
Sure unions had a purpose (for those that did not go to public school had is past tense.) Now they serve no legitimate purpose, it is not the ’40s anymore.
What torques me off is people who think the NEA is not the worst thing that happened to public education.
Re:A flaw in your logic
Sneer at my crazy teachers all you want; I got a good education, from the crazy ones as well as the professional gambler, the political radicals, the guy who also owned the city’s biggest jewelry shop. They knew their subjects and they wanted to teach, and as long as they did turn out students who learned, no one bugged them about extraneous trivia.
When I got to college, I found that quite a few of my more “privileged” classmates, who attended either private schools or else public schools in wealthier communities, with far more decorous teachers, were stymied by simple tasks like identifying the countries on a blank map of Europe–or even North America; never mind asking them how geography contributed to the differences in development between Europe and China. And it wasn’t that they were stupid; they learned quickly, once somebody started asking them to learn and think about things like the political effects of geography. (Or any number of other things; there seemed to have been an awful lot of rote learning and relatively little thinking going on in some of those spiffy suburban schools, whether public or private.)
It’s not the ’40s, or the ’30s, or the ’20s, in terms of working conditions, because of the unions you despise. And if you think those days would stay gone if unions were totally banished from our lives, there’s a chicken factory in North Carolina you ought to check out. Incidents like that are relatively rare these days, because of all the “intrusive” regulations pushed for by labor unions, as well as the dreaded Union Work Rules. Even with the laws, the regulations, and the rules in place, companies still cut corners and take chances when they think they can get away with it, and if we kill both the bargaining power and the political power of the workers, those rules and regulations will be swept away until the next time the death count mounts high enough to galvanize people into action.
By the way, did you notice the latest report of “finger food”–the one that’s real, not the previous fraud attempt? Worker had his finger tip sliced off by the soft-serve machine’s rotars, but nobody thought to shut down the machine or warn the workers at the front of the shop. And it was the second lost-finger incident at this store. Just the kind of guys we want serving food to the public without the occasional outside inspection! (Wendy’s, OTOH, did shut down production facilities and start an immediate and thorough investigation, after the first, fake, “finger food” report. Do we really want responsible companies like Wendy’s operating at a cost disadvantage compared to corner-cutters like Kohl’s?)