*Note: This post didn’t get uploaded on Friday because I was too lazy. I’ll explain in tonight’s post.
Spending some time away from division meetings at the collegiate level has reminded me of the disconnect between how colleges are run/assessed and how students are taught. While teaching is/should be at the heart of what we do at any school, it feels like the administration of and analysis/reporting of that teaching is a larger part of what teachers actually do.
In teaching writing I often talk about the 60/40 and 80/20 rules In critical analysis I invite the students to structure their work as 60% evidence and 40% analysis and argumentation. Science pushes that evidence vs. analysis spread to 80/20. This is merely my rule and doesn’t reflect the actual functioning of the multiverse. It does, on the other hand, create a fair comparison to the to what the functioning role of a community college professor feels like. 60-80% of these meetings have little to do with the actual teaching.
We are focused on collecting and reporting data. We are focused on assessing individuals, classes, and programs. We speak a jargon-filled language that inevitably bleeds into the classroom and into how we communicate with students who don’t really need to hear or learn our language.
A part of this meeting/working time is about building community amongst the teachers. Now a lot of that community is forged in the mutual disdain for such meetings, but beyond this we do effort to create real communication and real differences and consistency between what is taught between the levels and classes and how that is carried out. I would love to see a school where the classes offer the same basic content from top flight instructors who all approach it from a very different angle–so much so that variants of students would be super engaged in both class and community. Jargon free: I want good teaching that looks different in each class.
One can dream.