Tag Archives: university

There’s a difference between giving information and asking for money

Business, Education, , , , , , ,
Now, if SHE emailed and asked for my phone number....
Now, if SHE emailed and asked for my phone number….

I received an email from the place where I received one of my bachelor’s degrees. Apparently, according to the email, students from that school have been trying to get a hold of me to tell me about campus activities, important events and to inform me of all the great things that other alumni are doing to support the institution. Having received numerous contacts from this university over the years, what they’re really telling me is that students from this school have been trying to get in touch with me to beg me for money for the university. Simple as that.

So, this alumni organization would really appreciate it if I would update their records with my new phone number so they can get right on that “informing me of things I’m missing out on”.

Look, I don’t mind that a university needs lots of money to pay its professors and cultural studies programs to explain why fish fall in love, but I’m not a spigot of revenue that a university can rely upon to help pay its Board of Directors, or to provide fuel to their limousines they use to drive to their private hanger at the airport.

If I was extremely interested in continuing to provide kickbacks to the executives from my university, I would have contacted them personally so that they would not have had to hunt me down with some undergraduate (or graduate) on a stipend or grant-writing scholarship.

I think what bothers me the most is the dishonesty in the email, in that they’re pretending to be doing me service that somehow gets provided by me giving them my phone number. The reality of the situation is that any emails they send me completely keeps me up to date on what’s going on with the alumni of that university, meaning that a phone call from some undergraduate isn’t going to provide me with more information than I already have. But what I have learned (from a graduate school, not from that school itself) is that foot in the door processes allow you to gain so much more if you can get someone to give up just an inch on ground. In other words, if I am willing to give my phone number, I’m more likely to donate money the next time someone calls because I already “agreed” to provide my phone number first.

So, I’ll pass on this “great” opportunity.

When you’re blind-sided by religion in class

Education, Religion, , , , , ,

The other day I was teaching a public speaking class where the students were required to interview another student and then present a two minute speech about that person. All was going well until one of the introductions of a student indicaated that he was a member of a religion that’s been around the US for a long time but is mostly unknown to most people who don’t follow religious news, or are just not very cognizant concerning theology. One student asked what that religion was, and the student tried to respond by not getting into a conversation about religion. However, the questioning student continued, trying to get more information, essentially putting the original student on the spot to have to explain his religion to a group of people who knew nothing about it.

The one thing I could see was that he was very uncomfortable talking about his religion in front of class (the student who interviewed him had only mentioned it as an aside, saying she was exposed to it for the first time when talking to the student and was more intrigued than anything else, and then she moved onto another subject). So, as this student tried to explain quickly and without any elaboration, the asking student still continued to want to know more information.

What I found interesting from the exchange was that the questioning student appeared to be more interested in talking about the religion because it didn’t fit his understanding of Christian religions (although it actually was one of the more Baptist variety). It almost felt like this was about to turn into a “explain your religion so I can see if I approve of it” converation, although there’s no way to know that was the direction it would have taken. Fortunately, the discussion ended quicky, and then we went onto another group of students. At least before it became too uncomfortable.

This reminded me of the many political science courses I’ve taught over the years where one student is an outlier from a completely different political philosophy than everyone else. It is so easy to make just one student very uncomforable, which is something that most educators are supposed to learn is never acceptable. Over the years, I’ve taught courses where I try to take the middle ground of a group presenter/moderator rather than someone with a political opinion. What usually happens is a select few students start to suspect I’m politically opposed to their personal philosophy because they always seem to notice when I’m not siding with their side and giving conversation time to a side they might not agree with (when in reality, they haven’t a clue that my philosophy is so out of the mainstream that they’d be hard pressed to actually try to guess it if they were put on the spot to do so).

Religion is one of those scary topics because no matter how hard you try to avoid it as a conversation, someone always manages to try to pull it back in and then tries to put you on the spot to engage the topic. Students generally feel more comfortable when they can back a professor into a boxed corner. Why? I haven’t a clue. But I find that happens way too much.

For that class, we managed to avoid a political/religious issue that seemed to want to take the stage, which tells me it will likely happen again. All I remember is when I was in class instead of standing up in front of the class, and so many professors took the bait and allowed their classes to become very uncomfortable for a lot of students. What’s amazing is that administrators NEVER discuss this with professors as to how the college/university stands on such issues, so you’re generally on your own until some administrative body decides you took the wrong approach (and then they fire you).

The funny thing is: Even though my class was a success that day, there’s really no way to tell if you’re maintaining the peace as well as providing the correct education. It’s almost a continuous series of trial by error moments that you hope is helping to provide the best education to all involved.

I is a teacher

Education, Social Networking, Technology, Writing, , , , , , , ,

A new semester is finally about to begin. Again, I will be teaching college political science and interpersonal communication, two separate disciplines, but two fields I am qualified to teach). Strangely enough, the two disciplines really aren’t that different from each other.

While I’m looking forward to a new semester of new young (and some older) minds to educate, I’m also feeling a bit apprehensive, and it’s mainly because our country is so negative towards teachers that I’m tempted to tell America to go screw itself and stop educating anyone on anything. The money isn’t all that great, so that’s not the only reason anyone would ever teach. But whenever I read about some critic of education going all half cocked about how teachers are lazy, how they only work a short period of time and get great pay (which they rarely do), and all sorts of other insults, I want to just say screw it. It’s not worth it. If America sees education as less important than business than let’s let the market figure it all out (which to make a long story short, the market is completely incapable of handling altruistic disciplines, like education, because there is no profit in doing the right thing to make your country benefit in the long run). Altruism, which is quite often the only reason to teach, is very difficult to maintain, especially when society goes out of its way to ridicule your field and everyone who has ever gone to school is convinced he or she is an expert on teaching, even though they have absolutely no experience at teaching, or so little that they have nothing solid to contribute.

When I first started teaching years ago, I remember being bogged down by the fact that I was overly concerned that a few of my students were struggling and no one else seemed to care. Other colleagues would tell me they were lazy, so forget about them, but I didn’t feel that way, and by getting closer to them, I discovered that there was more going on with their personal lives that was actually interfering with their learning. I realized then and there that they were going to fail because everyone else gave up on them because it was too much work to care, not because it was the right or wrong thing to do. What I discovered then and there is that educators who care are quickly discouraged from caring and working harder, quite often by the system, and sometimes by the same people they educate. Yet, I was convinced that this was important to overcome, or our very reason for teaching was gone.

Years later, I found myself in the same situation with a few students just last semester. It was so difficult to try to be more available than the system allowed, yet I tried, and in the end all you get is sometimes a belated thank you from someone who may or may not have saw you as their ally rather than the person who was making their education “more difficult” by forcing them to jump through hoops no one forced them to do so in the past. A couple of students out of the blue contacted me and thanked me, which may not have been the reward that completely paid back the efforts, but it helped, and that sort of thing is the item that keeps a teacher going. However, when attacked by so many other who really don’t care and see you as the enemy (for bizarre reasons that make no logical sense), it becomes less and less likely that you’ll continue trying.

So, I go into a new semester, thinking that maybe this will be the time when I find that one struggling student who needs that certain nudge forward, and hopefully I won’t be discouraged, rejected and forsaken at the time that one person needs a little more from an educator who is doing everything possible just to make sure the trains run on time (for the sake of an Italian historical reference of competent leadership).

When you’re standing up in front of a class of students and explaining the virtues of the governmental system, as proposed by Adams and Madison, you have to bite your lip after that young student in the back row raises her hand and asks: “Do we have to know that for the test?” I remember once responding to that exact question with a ten minute lecture on the importance of knowing information, history and relevance to all sorts of connective synapses of knowledge. How Caesar understood that Alexander’s charge into India incorporated phalanx technology with the scattering of forces or how Patton understood that Caesar’s understanding of Alexander showed him how a faster tank can be stopped by a barrage of spread ammunition. To them, nuance was more important than specific knowledge, but they came to specific knowledge through understanding of nuance. Even when explaining such things, you’ll still have one student sitting there wondering, “is this going to be on the test?”

Unfortunately, teaching can be a lot like that.

Is Innovation Dead?

Politics, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In case no one’s noticed recently, we seem to have a real innovation problem in the world today. I say this only because we live in an age where people think that innovations are happening all around us non-stop, yet no one really seems to recognize that we’re actually stagnating, doing nothing new and pretty much living in the successes of the past.

What am I talking about? Think about it. When was the last time something truly innovative appeared that has enriched humanity? I mean REALLY think about it.

What are the great innovations of today? The computer? The Internet? The microwave oven? The cell phone? Self-cleaning ovens? Google? Viagra? Honestly, I can’t think of an actual innovation that doesn’t have me thinking, um, that’s just an improvement on a previous innovation. The computer is probably one of the few that might be arguable as an innovation, although I would argue it’s really not that much more innovative than a calculator. It’s a machine that reads numbers in binary and then translates them into an operating system language that then gets used to produce computer programs. Nothing it does is really truly innovative. It’s not even all that useful if you think about it because the old arguments that the computer would make our lives easier were incorrect; the computer has arguably made our lives more difficult and as a result has increased the amount of paperwork we use, although it was supposed to cut down on it at some point.

The Internet is an improvement on the computer and email. The microwave oven is an improvement on the oven, and some people even argue that it’s made us a lot less healthy as a consequence of the types of food that can be produced from it. The cell phone is an improvement on the actual telephone, and I’d argue that it doesn’t make our lives any better as it now forces us to be “on” all of the time rather than letting an answering machine take a message for us so we can get back to people later.

Which brings me to the realization that there’s really nothing new that’s defining our current age when it comes to innovation. To make it even worse, people are no longer innovators either. Fewer people invent things, and fewer people are actually involved in the process of producing things. The rich people of our time don’t actually do anything other than move money around, or even worse, speculate about money. The people who do the most work get paid the least while the hardest workers are controlled by the people who haven’t made anything with their bare hands during most of their lives. Patent lawyers make far more money than the people who make the products that are patented and arguably wouldn’t be able to make the items they’re arguing about even if they tried.

The days of a lone scientist sitting in his laboratory trying to solve the mysteries of the universe are over. Instead, we have academics who sit in university libraries and then write papers that they discuss with other scholars who argue the merits of theories with people who generally don’t make anything themselves. Most current day scientists go into the science without producing new science but begin to theorize upon a foundation of theories that someone discovered centuries ago, and quite possibly that new scientist would never have been able to figure out the logic behind that theory himself/herself if presented with a blank state today. The line is “built upon the shoulders of giants” but we have so few people who are capable of creating the shoulders these days. Everyone stands on shoulders, profiting off the marvels of those who came before us.

Part of this problem may stem from the very nature of specialization, which makes the general theoretical scientist almost obsolete. But without those philosopher-scientists leading us forward, what exactly do we have to say for ourselves when we start to run out of new ideas? Conceptual innovation doesn’t really give us anything new but lets us figure out new ways of using what we already know. Which is why I argue that while Google is interesting and fascinating, it is by no stretch of the imagination an actual stretch of the imagination.

So, no one should be really surprised when we start looking for enlightenment from our world leaders and we keep coming up with the same, bad responses and answers. Instead of some great 21st century logic of how to move the world forward in areas of peace and understanding, we are still sending soldiers into hell holes to kill people who seem to be living in the ways of the 12th century. You see, as much as we like to think that we’ve emerged far better than we once were, we’re still the same barbarians we once were. We just have better toys than we used to have. So instead of pointing a spear at some Visigoth, we point cruise missiles at Libyan SAM missile sites. But in reality, it’s all the same thing. We never grew up; just our weapons did.

In the end, I hope we one day realize that we’ve stagnated in our technological growth because what that means is that our cultural growth is equally stunted. And until we start to realize that, we’re never going to move to the next stage of an evolution we keep thinking we’ve already achieved.