Daily Archives: 2020-06-16

Article note: I don't put "Rigor and Grit" in the same category as the rest (An awful lot of my lab instructing is teaching students how to persevere and systematically solve a problem until it is actually solved, instead of going through proscribed motions and throwing it over the wall whether or not the result makes any sense), but I'm generally in agreement. Making schools adversarial, surveiled, conformity-enforcing environments is only rarely helpful. The part TFA, and most such proclamations, doesn't adequately address is how avoiding that requires having more avenues to get students who don't want to be doing traditional schooling into some mutually acceptable alternatives. At the college level, we have to do a lot of our performative rigor things because too many of our students have been taught to think of college in terms of "Obtaining this otherwise meaningless credential is a necessary and sufficient condition to obtain a job that will comfortably support you" and, as a result, will cheat to the greatest degree possible.

Article note: This is gonna be dumb and exhausting. It's going to be exhausting for me because we're effectively going to have to double our lab hours or dramatically pare down our lab offerings. Not-in-person finals with limited support are going to make it hard to make things trustworthy (and tempt people to do stupid intrusive things). At least it's plan-shaped and contains contingencies.