First Sight and Second Thoughts

Sometimes, I feel like college does a better job of honing the skill of crap detecting than it does imparting other kinds of skills and knowledge. Don't get me wrong, I am and have learned many things here, but at the end of the day when gather with my friends on the 7th floor or head to other friend's apartments, unless we learned something earth shatteringly cool, we're going to be complaining about the things we perceived as crap. That could be something a professor said that we thought or know was incorrect factually, or an attitude that rubbed wrong. One of my best friends still complains about a day last semester when his wellness professor (to his and others' perceptions- I wasn't there, I don't judge) insulted several majors including my friend's own (he was not happy at all...) . Another example comes from my sister, who failed one of her vet tech classes and barely passed some others last semester. When my sister says she studied a lot for all of them I believe her, and I also believe her when she complains about having the class with a brand new professor and a vet who's never taught. I've seen this at Millersville too- good people who know their stuff but haven't the faintest idea of how to teach people. Expecting these techs in training to know what fully qualified ones do is crap, telling them to look it up every time they have a question and then complaining that they are slow is double crap. That sort of thing gets my blood going of late- I may not know all there is about good teaching, but I know when those who are paid to teach aren't actually teaching, are engaging in practices that hamper and discourage learning and it frustrates me. I don't think that the Vet for Alexa's class has to know a great deal about pedagogy, he's a Vet and that's what he's there for, but I don't think it would be too much for him to listen to what his students are saying or recognize that if you send them to the book every time they have a question they are going to be slower. They're college kids and diligent, they can make up for mediocre teaching practice to a point, but they can't be as good as their graduated and experienced counterparts. What I think I'm getting at is that it's not very hard to find  crap in various parts of the educational system (and not just higher ed but those examples are pretty close to me just now) what seems harder though is what to do about it.

It's all well and good for me to see the crap, but doing something about it is harder. For the most part it seems like my ability to fight the crap is going to be limited to my own classroom, and the greatest challenge to that is if the school I'm in doesn't recognize crap itself. I'm not unwilling to make some waves, but for the first couple of years that has to be carefully balanced by the sad but inevitable fact that money is necessary to survival. I don't expect that to an issue, mainly cause I'm not sure that an overly conservative school would hire me in the first place- I don't fit in molds well, but then that's not always immediately evident. Sometimes I'm sneakier than I think I am. I'm concerned by the persistence of the same sort of crap at higher levels, (can politics please stay out of deciding what's good for kids? pretty please? I mean come on guys, I bet most of you have children, can't you make it about them and not money and testing companies?) but I'm not sure I can do much about that yet besides being aware and talking. And voting.

Did anyone else notice that Francesca and Kozol detected some significant crap in our reading with the Meta-Lady and Efficacy Man? (they sound like really really bad superheros) We do run into a great deal of meaning-less jargon. I mean it's one thing to talk about meta-cognition which is readily definable (thinking about one's own thinking) but what is a meta-moment? a moment about a moment? a moment beyond the moment? Neither of those make much sense. And if she's trying to say meta-cognitive moment (a moment in which one is thinking about their thinking) well I guess that might be something you could talk about, but taking the thinking out of the phase is just lazy word-smithing. Meta-concept is the other one, (presumably a concept about a concept) which seems to at least have a meaning, but it's kind of redundant anyway, especially when Francesca's phrase "a shrewd perception" says more (a clever or astute intuitive cognition). Yep, I'm a word nerd and could probably keep going, but considering meta-cognition, I'd like to share how one of my favorite authors portrays meta-cognition and crap detecting neatly, elegantly and humorously in language a third grader could read.

In The Wee Free Men and the other books in the Tiffany Aching series, Sir Terry Pratchett describes the most important abilities of a witch as the first sight and second thoughts. They see what's really there, and there's a part of them that watches the rest, watches how they think. One character describes it in this way(in a scottish accent no less- seriously you should read the book) "Ye've got that little bitty bit inside o' you that holds on, right? The bitty bit that watches the rest o' ye. 'Tis a wee gift an' a big curse to ye. You see and hear what others canna', the world opens up its secrets to ye, but ye're always like the person at the party with the wee drink in the corner who cannae join in. There's a little bitty bit inside ye that willnae melt and flow." There's good stuff to think about there, and throughout the book. The first sight is the crap detecting- see things as they are, not as you want them to be or how people tell you they are, and second thoughts is being mindful of how you think and how you act, because teachers, like Pratchett's witches, are responsible for more than themselves. There's more in those books that I can tie to teaching, but I'll stop here for now.