The Adjunct

Two of the headlines on CNN today demonstrated the great economic dissonance that is more and more prevalent in our country.

The first headline:

Top Republican unloads his mansions

Then, directly below it:

“Make every penny count, and count every penny.”

Compare the two articles, each dealing with the same economy. From the first article:

(CNN) — He has been estimated to be worth in excess of $250 million, but former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney may just be belt-tightening along with the majority of Americans.

Romney, the former business whiz and governor of Massachusetts, is looking to unload two of his four mansions, collectively valued in the currently-sour real estate market at close to $10 million.

Compare to this excerpt from the second:

(CNN) —Orman: If you don’t have a good savings rate and something happens, where are you going to go?

That’s when you all of a sudden start putting things on your credit cards — that you can’t do anymore.

That’s when you then start to become an aid, you know, where you’re asking the state to aid you — food stamps and everything.

What should strike you about this is the great disconnect between the two. This is not meant as any form of attack on Romney, nor Republicans. Democrats in Washington are millionaires as well, and even if President Obama only owns one home, his bank account is quite full, just like nearly all our leaders.

No, this isn’t about politics, but it is about a tension or clash resulting from the combination of two disharmonious or unsuitable elements: the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

As Orman tells people to pinch every penny, Romney unloaded a few of his spare mansions. As one talks about people going on food stamps, the other pulls in 20 million in spare change.

How can one world possibly understand the other?

Yet it is those penny-people who decide which multi-millionaire shall lead them, in both business and politics. And those chosen multi-millionaires shall try and see what they can do to make things right for the penny-people. It reminds me of one of those conversations where both people are talking to each other about completely different things, yet neither notices.

Fellow adjunct instructor and all around woman of letters Stephanie Han has written about her reaction after reading Naomi Wolf‘s book, Misconceptions:

While she made a few good points, overall, she sounded so out of touch with the average working woman I wanted to throw the book out the window when I read it. The woe-is-me-and-my-group-of-friends-we-all-own-expensive-homes-and-are-lonely was insulting. Hers was not a perfect world but she didn’t seem to get that she had a much better situation than the burger slinging working person.

At the end of Orman’s interview, Larry King helped demonstrate the point I am trying to make by chipping in with his own ideas on what these penny people can do to stay afloat in these tough times.

King: Go cheap. Tip 15 percent, that’s it. Shop — bargain everything. … If tomatoes are 20 cents over there and 15 cents across the street, buy for 15 cents.

That’s right, the problem the penny people are having is that they must be tipping too high! Please, cut off those tips at 15% for your own good. Buy 15 cent tomatoes, because you’re gonna need every nickel.

PART 2
(Click here to read PART 1)

This seminar was not just a failure, but also a major failure. The idea behind this seminar was to show how collaborative learning can be more effective than traditional lecturing, but it ended up proving the exact opposite. We were unable to complete small tasks in a timely fashion (in fact, no task was fully completed). Most people complained of the tedium and irrelevance of the exercises in our groups, and keep in mind we were all teachers. Imagine a student’s reaction.

In addition to this, no information was successfully gained from the group work. Most of the time was spent with us sharing ideas that we already had, and new information was only gained when we left our groups and the professor leading the seminar proceeded to lecture further about the subject.

The theory is that a group exploring a topic collaboratively will be more successful than the traditional lecture, retain, and repeat (via test) method. There is some truth to this, and I use a combination of lecture, group work, and independent study in all my classes. However, it has become too trendy (and too easy) to reject traditional teaching methods in favor of a more “free-learning” experience. The professor leading the seminar told us that her classes are 100% collaborative learning environments. She hands out worksheets, organizes groups, and then lets the students figure it out in their groups. She said that she has a rule in which she will not answer any student’s questions about anything until that student has asked at least three other students if they know the answer. This includes everything from questions regarding the syllabus, to questions about the final exam. I couldn’t help but feel that one reason she prefers this purely collaborative method is that she simply has to hand out worksheets, and then sit back and let the students do the rest. I imagine the students who already posses the information and skills that the class requires will succeed in this environment (“Okay! We’re outlining a speech about our family today. I know how to do that, its easy!”), while those who are unclear and have questions will be unable to learn much (especially if they can’t ask their teacher until asking three classmates), and will ultimately fail the class (or, pass the class with a C, and move on having learned nothing).

Remember when I said that there was another voice of dissent during the Peanuts cartoon farce? After our groups had aborted, and we returned to the class as a whole, the professor leading the seminar commented on how allowing Rerun to explore his art more freely would likely make him a better artist. An instructor raised his hand, and told us that he was, in fact, an art teacher himself. He politely explained that if his students did not follow his specific instructions, it would not make them better artists.

“But don’t you think they should learn creativity?” she asked him.

“Yes,” he replied. “I think creativity is good, but if I have asked them to sketch still life, then I need them to follow my instructions and sketch still life. If they do something different, then they will not learn techniques such as cross hatching, or drawing perspective, or shadowing. If they all just did what they wanted and disregarded my instructions, then they would never learn these techniques on their own. One lesson leads to the next lesson, first you draw still life then you learn figure drawing, and you must learn one before the other. So perhaps in this cartoon the teacher was trying to teach the student a skill, and he refused to learn it because he just wanted to do his own thing. You can do your own thing all you want outside of class. You come to class to learn a skill that you cannot learn on your own. So you need to follow instructions and listen to your teacher in order to do this.”

I applauded him, as did a few others, but the professor leading the seminar suddenly got a look on her face as if she smelled a really ripe fart, and quickly moved on to the next group activity.

There was another moment where I looked proudly up at one of my fellow attending adjuncts. After the scavenger hunt, just before we were let out, the professor leading the seminar was again discussing the importance of group work, stressing the need to learn social skills and interaction. A chemistry teacher raised her hand and admitted that, even after our four-hour seminar, she still didn’t see how she could incorporate social interaction skills into her chemistry class. Again, the seminar leader responded by stressing ideas which only promoted the students interacting with one another, sharing their names and interests, working together to complete a puzzle, etc. She boasted that these social skills happened to be what her most prized class, Speech 10, was all about. A different instructor raised his hand and said, “Yes, I think these are some really good exercises for a Speech 10 class, but I think they may not have direct applications for a lot of other classes, even in Speech, that don’t set out to teach inter-personal skills as a goal. In fact, I teach Speech 1A and I mostly lecture. They independently give their speeches, and group work is kept at a minimum.”

“I don’t teach Speech 1A,” she told him in a hoity manner. “I teach Speech 10.”

“Well,” said the adjunct, “I do teach Speech 1A, and I couldn’t see using a lot of these activities in that class. They wouldn’t accomplish the goals of the class. It sounds great for Speech 10, but not Speech 1A. If I can’t even translate these exercises to meet my goals for a Speech 1A class, then I doubt other instructors here, who teach vastly different subjects, can use them as heavily as you’re saying we should.”

Frustrated, the professor leading the seminar blurted out, “It is important that these kids learn how to interact with one another!”

And there you have it. The fatal flaw in this seminar was that the professor leading it viewed her college students as children, and felt that shaping their ability to play well with others trumped any course objectives, skills or outcomes. If a fellow speech professor felt that this level of collaborative learning wouldn’t even apply to other speech classes, then as a teaching method intended to replace the traditional lecture it is fatally flawed.

At the end of the seminar I told her my classes utilized lecture, class discussion, independent study, and even a little group work. Of the four, my classes were primarily lecture and class discussion. I asked her if she considered class discussion, where all students are encouraged and required to voice their ideas, their analysis, their questions and concerns, to be a form of collaborative learning. “Aren’t we then functioning as one big group?” I asked her. “With me their as their teacher to guide the direction of the discussion, and make sure that all the learning outcomes are accomplished?”

“No,” she told me. “That isn’t collaborative learning. If all you do is lecture, and then just call on students who raise their hand, then they’ll never learn how to interact with each other.”

Oh well. At least they’d still learn class objectives such as cross hatching, or the periodic table of elements, or how to give a speech.