When postgradding I probably was paid for less time grading 6 homeworks [1] than 1 student spent doing the damn thing. And these weren’t just grading, they were giving written feedback and preparing for the next small class where I’d be covering common mistakes with these 6.
Exams were fast, but we split the pile up by question - doing a pile of only Q1 muddies “how long was the postgrad paid to mark an exam”.
I likely still have some homework questions to hand if anyone wants to attempt to feed undergraduate maths to GPT.
short exercises to help them work out where they hadn’t understood the material. Something like all 8 homeworks would be 15% of the grade for this module. ↩︎
It sounds like this district’s administrators have some major issues. How do they allow students to transition to their senior year without letting them know exactly what they need to graduate? Granted, my school did this to me way back when. But my school’s administration had issues, too.
And the state leaders only have to tell these people it’s the fault of city liberals to keep fleecing them indefinitely while renigging on every social contract they once signed. Schools have been under attack literally and figuratively for some time here.
Who needs educators, let’s just destroy an entire profession and let computers do it all!!! /s
Here’s the thing… whenever you talk about things like single payer, you get people clutching their pearls about the people employed by insurance companies who are going to lose their jobs… I’ve yet to hear a single person say word one about educators losing their jobs. Not a single fucking one. It really fucking shows you how little those pearl clutchers care about ensuring people have good, steady employment… especially when it’s in something that’s funded with public monies.
Just had a really difficult conversation with two young men. One was in Toronto, and the other was in Paris. Both were talking about how competitive education has become in India, and how depressed / stressed the students have become. The “haves” can afford tutors, while the “have-nots” struggle (especially if they are affected by the digital divide). This is the model that we’re seeing increasingly here, where people are not only attacking public education, they are also removing money from what was supposed to benefit the public and putting it into private institutions/private hands.
… In blaming parents, Farris absolves himself. The truth is that parents like those of the Bealls are making the most out of a world he helped build. The Homeschool Legal Defense Association steadfastly opposes any attempt to regulate homeschooling, which means that families have broad leeway to do what they like to their children. Child abuse is illegal, but in isolated families, it often goes undetected. “It’s specifically a system that is set up to hide the abuse, to make them invisible, to strip them of any capability of getting help. And not just in a physical way,” Christina Beall explained to the Post . “At some point, you become so mentally imprisoned you don’t even realize you need help.”…
Not only are these attacks on certain books and ideas aimed at educators and minorities of class and color, this far-right attack on education is also part of a larger war on the very ability to think, question, and engage in politics from the vantage point of being critical, informed, and willing to engage in a culture of questioning. More generally, it is part of a concerted effort to destroy public and higher education and the very foundations of civic literacy and political agency. Under the rule of this emerging authoritarianism, political extremists are attempting to turn education into a space for killing the imagination, a place where provocative ideas are banished, and where faculty and students are punished through the threat of force or harsh disciplinary measures for speaking out, engaging in dissent, and holding power accountable.
In this case, the attempt to undermine public schooling and higher education as public goods and democratic public spheres is accompanied by a systemic attempt to destroy the notion that they are vital democratic public goods. Schools that view themselves as democratic public spheres are now disparaged by far-right Republican politicians and their allies as socialism factories, government schools, and citadels of left-wing thought.
In fact, as Jonathan Chait observes, what is being said by a right-wing Republican Party about American schools echoes a period in history in which fascist regimes used a similar language rooted in the cold war rhetoric of McCarthyism. For instance, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida has called schools “a cesspool of Marxist indoctrination.” Former secretary of State Mike Pompeo claims that “teachers’ unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids,” will “take this republic down.”
