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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Pedagogy?
Classic Gin
Friday, 2006-02-17 | Classic Gin
It's been gnawing at me for several days now and I've got to share the following anecdote or I may explode into a million quivering pieces.
A good friend of mine who happens to be nearing the end of his student teaching career and is having a very tough time of it. In addition to coping with the fickle whims and quarrelsome pedagogy of a pusillanimous bitch, he's recently been subjected to one of the greatest indignities I can imagine.
Apparently his students, adolescents and teenagers, are permitted to fill out "exit forms" in which they critique their student teacher's performance. I can't even begin to conjecture at the depths of the stupidity from which a bone-head move like this must have emerged, but my friend has been receiving unfavorable reviews from the petulant adolescents whose edification he has decided to take as his personal responsibility. To anyone who is not fully convicted of the fact that soliciting student's critiques of their instructors, I would like to remind you that 1.) students, by definition, do not know as much as their instructor about what is being taught or how: if they knew as much or more, they would be teaching a similar class elsewhere or they would be supervising their instructor and that 2.) student reviews, generally capricious and by definition completely uninformed, are often taken seriously by administrators who just don't know any better than to take them at face value and in such situations can contribute directly to the professional failure of a well-meaning instructor who simply needs to log a few more hours in the classroom before he hits his stride.
As if it weren't bad enough that a professional education should require that one be subjected to criticisms of those who quite literally don't know anything about the mores or methods of the profession, my friend was actually held accountable for the half-baked responses of one such commentator. One of his students said something like "I wish you would have actually taught something."
Man.
My friend about that a few days ago and I'm still bristling about it. I swear before thundering Jupiter and his brother, that ancient shaker of the Earth, Neptune, that if one of those bratty little mouth-breathers had written that about me, and then handed it to the person who was acting as my superior in order that his comments might reflect on me, I would have grabbed the little fucker by his popped collar, thrown him up against a locker like a bully in an 8
0's movie and proceeded to explain to him that the powder-puff secondary education system about which he thinks he knows something and is therefore entitled to comment upon exists only to keep him off the streets until he reaches his majority and can then assume his destiny folding t-shirts at the outlet mall. I would also take the opportunity to advise him at least to try to wag a civil tongue, even though doing so might offend his morbid/pathological sense of entitlement and carefully cultivated adolescent angst, because it will help us to get along with one another and contribute directly to his physical health and well-being.
