If teaching doesn't work, here is Plan B: Just shoot me ;)

One of my complaints about higher education (yes, I have many!) is that the curriculum that faculty put together and the way they present their courses is mostly to achieve only one goal--to replicate themselves.  As in the higher education process seems to be designed to make graduate students and then faculty out of students.  No wonder, therefore, at teaching universities like mine, faculty love to announce how their students are going on to graduate school.

Which is also why, like I noted in this post a couple of years ago, one of the questions I was asked by the chief academic officer was this:

"How about graduate school?  How many go on to professional schools?"

To quite an extent, all we seem to do right from the time kids enter the first grade is to try to brainwash them into thinking that there is no greater glory than to keep earning the As and do as much schooling as possible.  It does not take a PhD in rocket science (no grad school needed!) to figure out that not all students will go on to grad school, even if they are fully capable.  After all, there is more to life than grad school.  This is the situation that gets tricky for most faculty.  Why so?  Let me explain.

Assume that a student who is majoring in gender studies approaches a faculty and asks a simple question: "how do I go looking for a job?  And how do you think I can use gender studies as my selling point in getting a job?"

Most faculty won't have any answer, and we will begin to bullshit about critical thinking and writing and communication as being important to any job, even when most faculty couldn't care about critical thinking and writing.  And if you listened to faculty at meetings, you will be convinced that they know nothing about communication.

Which is why most students are smart enough not to ask faculty about jobs and careers anyway!
(So, what do I tell students?  Full disclosure is what I do--I use the "P" word, which I first used to describe higher education more than four years ago)

I am thinking about these issues because I have begun my serious work on re-creating the syllabi for the classes next term.  Beginning that work is always nothing but examining, again and again and again, this existential crisis of why I do what I do.  I have this enormous pressure within--and not because my faculty or my administrative colleagues care about what I do--to convince myself every summer that I am preparing myself to help students prepare for their long lives as productive members of the state, the country, and this world.  Productive not merely in economic terms--yes, I tell them all the time that there is more to life than money.

I had an encouraging start to that today, when a student wrote to me, "I got lucky and got a full time job, that may even turn into a career."

That was not because of any of the classes in which I got to interact with that student.  As I always tell any student, my class and five dollars will help them get a decent cup of coffee at Starbuck's.  But, I like to imagine that somewhere I added a little bit, and made that coffee at least one cent cheaper and the student had to shell out only $4.99

A couple more days to ease out of such existential dilemmas, and then off to real work.  I am glad, however, that I continue to have these crises--it assures me that I still care about what I do.

Shoot me like you will an injured racehorse when I don't seem to care about teaching and students.