A humble rant... (totally NFR)

I am almost done with all my classes and do my student teaching in the fall. The flip side of that is that I have to take an adolescent literature class right now. I've always liked reading, but this is giving me a new and unwelcome viewpoint.

Let's say you like cookies and you are a culinary arts student. So, to get your degree, you have to take a course in cookie evaluation. You get the chocolate chip, the 2x chocolate chip, the oatmeal raisin, the whole works.

Well, you also have to eat every other kind of cookie. The spinach and garlic one, the haggis cookie, the concrete chip and nuts cookie, and anything else you can think of. Suddenly, you don't care if you ever see a cookie again. On top of this, the evaluations you must write about each cookie are repetitive and aggravating, and have to follow a certain format with no deviations for common sense. You also have to write 4 additional papers comparing different themes and styles of these cookies to each other and how they relate to what past cookie makers did in generations past. To top it off, your textbook for Graduate Level Cookie Comparison is nothing more than a $120 dollar cookbook with material comparable to what you could find doing a google search. You would not be smiling.

Well, that is me in my young adult lit class. Right now, I don't care if I look at another book again. And I really don't want to write another review of the characters, the setting, the theme, and what exercises I would assign. I got the point of the course about a week ago. (I've completed 4 weeks of a 6 week summer session; class meets about 3 1/2 hrs two days a week). So now, it feels like I am jumping through hoops like a good little malcontented grad student. Add to this that my professor has some shortcomings. We'll just leave it at that because I don't want to start talking about issues that an intoxicated frat boy would highlight, but they are there and they are a challenge to look past.

So, here I am, bitching like a little girl and holding on til the end of the semester. Graduate education at it's finest. Gotta get those tuition dollars coming in. I gotta go finish reading my latest book aimed at 14 year olds. Auf weidersehen.

 

Well, that's why you're gonna get paid the big bucks.
Seriously, that's what a degree is supposed to reflect:
DISCIPLINE
Otherwise everyone would be doing it. Look at it like this. I got my education the alternative way: Self-taught and by way of 'problem solving'.

I ended up being paid as well as if I was an average guy with average intelligence who went through the academic route. Which was okay with me until I had to find new jobs and sell myself.
That's why you're going through that ring of hell.

And of course, your rant rings much like what your future Young Adult Lit students might think.

 

How can anyone ever get sick of cookies?? :roll:

Can feel your pain Steve, my wife is a teacher and had to endure such mundane classes. The only advice I can give is to role reverse and come up with ways that'll give your students the opposite feeling you have now. At least you are learning what kind of teacher you don't want to be[/b][/i]

 

Steve, if it makes you feel any better my sister is a painter (as in master in Fine Arts, studied in France, the whole works). One day she decided to get a teaching lisence so she could make a decent living and teach art. They made her take a course in how to decorate classroom bulletin boards.

 

Good points.

 

More wonderful carping by me, since I'm up at 0500 and am working on an assignment in this class.

I have actually found one really good book this semester, Ten Cents a Dance by Christine Fletcher. It's about a 16 year old girl in Chicago in 1941 who quits school to go to work in the meatpacking plants, only to quit when her boyfriend tells her about a nightclub needing a dancing girl. This isn't prostitution, but it's also not a respected profession and she goes to great lengths to keep it hidden from her mother. The historical details all are well researched, and the writing is excellent. The lead character, Ruby, is very compelling.

Right now I am doing three poems (don't ask) on a book I am reading now, called the Burn Journals, by Brent Runyon. When he was 14 he tried to commit suicide by putting on a bathrobe drenched with gasoline and setting himself on fire. It's the story of his hospital stay and rehab. It was written more for his benefit than anyone else's. That is all good, but it's a book I see more for showing the teens who dress in all black and have skin the color of Cool Whip who think that this is the way out. That is what I got out of it because as a story, I didn't go for it all that much.

One week to go...

 

Steve, I work at a college-prep high school (not in a teaching role, though). My teaching colleagues generally have a very low regard for the study of Education. When discussing their college experience, they invariably point out the vast difference in competence between their Education professors and the professors in their specific fields of study (e.g., science, math, literature, history, etc.).

Teachers at our school all have a bachelors degree in their field. Almost all of them also have masters degrees, but a lot of their masters degrees are in Education rather than in their field subject. The reason? The pay scale greatly rewards advanced degrees, and obtaining a masters in Education is far easier and quicker than obtaining a masters degree in your field.