I'm an adjunct English professor at a state college.
1.) None of the students really read, not even the best students. If someone reads four or five books cover-to-cover in six months, he's reading more than almost any of his peers.
2.) None of the students understand what they read, to the extent that they do read it. Once they get to the next chapter, they've already forgotten the plot in the previous, and they often complain that there are too many characters to remember.
3.) Most students are using cribs online and then rewriting them in their own words. I can tell, because these papers are (relatively) good. The students who try to write on their own produce absolute garbage.
4.) Students have been trained to suss out any sort of unfairness or political incorrectness in the author's view, and this is what counts for criticism. So if we're reading a Jane Austen, 90% of the essays will be about how the class system/gender norms are unfair. (Kind of ironic given that most of these students have benefited immensely from our own class system).
These people aren't truly dumb, they're the all-A or mostly-A students coming out of public schools. They represent the upper end of the bell-curve, and yet they're virtually illiterate.
So yeah, it's bad. I'm only ten years older than them, and while these trends had begun in my time, it was nowhere near the way it is now. Most of my friends read good literature for fun, for example, and would have been too ashamed to cheat on an essay.
I know the standard response - "teachers always think their students are morons." Bullshit, I'm not even that much older than them. People definitely read less, read worse, and write worse than they did when I was an undergrad. I don't doubt that there are better schools than mine, but I'm pretty sure the same trends are at work everywhere.
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How much is your current salary? Please provide a ballpark figure.
Last year I made 37,654.21
F. Better luck next life
40,000 dollars is a lot of money. Are u a IQfy gay?
Lol what the frick, I'm a ph.d. on a stipend in Europe and I get 52.300 USD a year.
What institution? I know people who have been at Columbia, Stanford, Princeton, and a few others for the last 5-10 years either still doing their PhD or recently finishing it and the average was $30k, going up a bit over the last several years from an avg of $25k. The average "good" postdoc adjunct position is $45-55k at this point, more to the lower end of that scale. Low tier professorships are sometimes as low as $60k starting, mid tier in the $70s to $80s, and obviously the big fancy ones are $90k or $100k starting, with up to $200k for major and established scholars. I've never heard of a stipend as high as yours.
He lives in Europe dude. They still have the superego injunction that Americans lack to respect academics
European academics don't make much money though, that's why they all move to America.
Average salaries for professors at the Ivy League schools are just under $200K according to Glassdoor
>professors
Distinguished Professor?
Full Professor?
Associate Professor?
Assistant Professor?
Lecturer, Instructor, Teaching Professor/Clinical Professor, Professor of Practice?
Research Associate, Research Professor?
Adjunct Professor, Adjunct Instructor, Adjunct Lecturer?
Visiting Professor? Professor-in-Residence?
and isn't it true that medical-specialist profs (oncologists, surgeons, et al) are going to tip the salary scales?
if you university doesn't have a medical school, professors' salaries will have to average lower.
>if you university doesn't have a medical school, professors' salaries will have to average lower
Fair point, but it's not just medical school either, but business and law school. You hear about Econ professors at these places making half a million dollars or more. But you would think the humanities department would revolt over the inequity in salaries. Even the university presidents now routinely make more than a million dollars.
Scandinavian university, which are admittedly the ones that most handsomely pay junior positions in the world, as far as I know. The 52k is actually too low as well, because I forgot to include that they add some 12% or so which is paid into a pension scheme, so it's actually closer to 58k annually - though I wont see any of that 12% until I retire in 40-50 years, of course.
A Ph.D. is considered a real full-time job based on highly specialized skills here in Scandinavia (as it should be), rather than slave work for suckers addicted to academia. It is salaried accordingly, and for that reason, the stipends are also extremely competitive.
Of course scandinavian tax rates are much higher as well, so you have to factor that in, but I can say with certainty that the Ph.D. salary here puts you very comfortably in the middle class of the country. I can realistically save up to a down payment for a house/condo from my Ph.D. salary.
I have friends who went to Scotland, Australia and Canada to do theirs, and the pay and conditions range from poorer in Scotland to atrocious in Canada in comparison. In those countries, I don't think you'll really enter a middle-class salary range until later in your career.
Well, that and a long and serious history of labor organization in pretty much every sector of work, at least here in Scandinavia.
The floor is much higher and the ceiling is quite lower in Scandinavia - that holds generally, and also for academia. In my country you max out at around 115k USD for a full-tenured senior professorship with world-class results, and those positions are very rare, especially so in the humanities. Hence, senior researchers who do consistently good work and want more money would probably find it in America.
how did being a literature professor go from being a well-paid and very prestigious profession, to an anonymous job in line with a barista? (sorry)
Probably the same reason as anything: mass production. Everything conforms to an indistrial factory model these days, so everything is plastic and cheap.
Its slightly more detailed. Literature professors used to be necessary to reproduce a large kleine- and hautes- bourgeois to institute governmentality over capitalism. Your local Banker needed to make judgements about loans with propriety (such as redlining), and to do so he needed to be part of a culture which transmitted its revolutionary liberal statements about What Man Was. Literature professors reproduced the ruling classes before 1980.
With the Team B experiments governmentality became utterly routinised.
Watch this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_of_Loving_Grace_(TV_series)
Then read Braverman on deskilling.
Then read the CCRU output. You'll need Kant Hegel and Marx for this.
That's $19/hr, for those keeping score. Might as well learn to code and do wordpress vomit for $80/hr and work half time. Make more and have more free time.
Wrong. In terms of actual work its closer to 100 $ an hr. Have fun being a code Black person loser
I make more than that as a PhD student in a post-communist hellhole my man
that's an unfair wage. it's really a travesty when college sportsball coaches are making probably triple that if not far more, depending on the team. if you're an adjunct then you probably don't even have a TA, who're paid even less.
I feel you. I was a deputy city manage and then I was part of a start up consultant firm. I cleared $200,000 one year. I decided I wanted to study philosophy. Now I teach. At community college. No one reads. I make about $33,000 a year.
Holy shit is it really that bad?
That's sad if true, although the vast majority of """English""" professors deserve far less than even that low salary.
Yeah, I never took a regular English class in college. But everyone in my AP classes were basically illiterate anyway, too.
True, but what can you do about it?
Wtf, I fill out Excel spreadsheets for $18.7 an hour. You should probably quit, you could get a less stressful job for more money.
Im 24 and just got a promotion to 40/hour today, aka 80k/year in communications. Will likely get another in 1.5 years to 120k+. It’s fricking over for you
gratz on the lower middle class life
what do you do for work anon, im a fricking 24yo cashier
>what do you do for work anon
Communications. That's why you're a cashier.
>
Professor, I am sorry that that college underpay you. May one day justice be served.
I just got hired as an adjunct at a very prestigious university, my first teaching job after a lifetime of education and pursuing my goal of becoming an academic. Classes start Monday. I'm rather nervous honestly.
Both about teaching, and realizing I've signed up to be a glorified babysitter for rich kids. I want to make them care about the subject as much as I do. I also want to get rehired next year or find a tenure track job, so I feel like I need to do my very best, despite the absurdity of academia in current year.
Any advice to a new adjunct?
If you're able, play the office politics game.
I hope you at least bang some of the students lol
>tfw didnt go to college and still got a bs "operations" office job that makes more than double this
By no stretch do I make a lot but frick anon that sucks
I make $20K a year for simply waking up and being alive.
Sounds like IQfy.
Some dyke from my English course recommended everyone use the audiobook for The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. She listened to it while gaming. I can’t comprehend the stupidity.
Of course they're stupid they're studying English in college. If they're good at it they can almost make $40k in a decade.
So they are only as good as their teacher?
Basic English courses are required in college, you'll learn that when you're old enough to go to to one yourself.
Lol you can test out of those in high school with AP credits.
At my university you explicitly cannot
And not just for the reasons you imply. I swear everyone needs to get a reality check about the intelligence-required differential between English and e.g.math or CS. It’s 25 IQ. You can pass an English course with 95; you will not pass a math course or CS (unless your fake uni allows you to strategically skip the math for pure IT) with 115. An eye-watering difference.
It’s truly interesting to ponder why that is. It is because English texts allow exponentially more “succeeding states”, whereas math/logical expressions allow by definition just one. Thus more entropic (=random-ass bullshit) content can still pass, and if you are stupider the less entropic output is more unachievable.
For example, the two sentences “the curtains were red” and “the curtains were blue” are both equally valid, but the sentences “the natural numbers are a dense total order” and “the real numbers are a dense total order” are very much not equally semantically sound.
tldr: I loudly ponder why stupids can still pass an English degree.
>ENGL-writing undergraduate here. The reason I don't read most of the material expected of me is really due to two compounding issues.
>The first is the fact that when one takes a full load of classes the books start to pile up and it becomes unfeasible to read all of them thoroughly. This is worsened by the absolutely unrealistic expectations many professors have for students. No exaggeration, I have had professor assign over a hundred pages to be read between a tuesday and a thursday lecture, and mind you, this is for in depth close reading. While normally this is something that someone of an average reading speed can accomplish, when you factor in the other readings from other classes (which is just as intensive), along with homework and what not, it becomes impossible to fulfill what your professors requests.
>The second is because we're reading absolute garbage that no normal person wants to read. (Toni Morrison's Beloved or Moshfegh's Eileen for ex.)
yeah most of my peers are morons who gobble these shit books up AND also don't read them.
When I was an undergrad English major I did one term where I took 4 upper division English courses in the same term. Never again. The amount of reading assigned meant I spent 12 hours a day on campus, either in class or in the library, reading in all my spare moments.
I understand the desire to take as many courses as possible each term to get through college faster, but you really need to space out the English courses if you want to stay sane and not utterly ruin reading for yourself. By the time I graduated (with honors) I was burnt out on novels. I didn't read for pleasure for years afterward.
Time to remind everyone of what W.H. Auden's single-semester syllabus looked like back in 1941
Too many white men, not enough coloured voices
>what W.H. Auden's single-semester syllabus looked like back in 1941
that is fricking awesome
wow. that's truly insane.
Is there a database or something for things like this?
not that I know of, but if you find something like that it would be quite valuable to anyone trying to craft a serious curriculum
Is this actually possible? I don't think I could do this.
difficult question to answer. depends on lots of other factors, like other course load, expected depth of reading and individual unmediated analysis, expected volume of writing, etc.
in any case this was clearly intended for cream of the crop students who could handle an immense amount of reading, and who had perhaps already read some fair fraction of the required works
I was just about to say that this sort of reading seems difficult to us because we live in an age where we didn't learn Latin since we were like 8 years old. An upper-middle class student probably already read quite a bit of Shakespeare and probably all of Dante before starting higher education, was somewhat familiar with most authors from classical antiquity due to mandatory Latin and Greek classes and also read some Baudelaire, Goethe, Dostoevsky, and Melville on the side.
I strongly recommend The Education of Henry Adams, which is incidentally on that list, as an illustration of that very thing. From the book:
>As the boy grew up to be ten or twelve years old, his father gave him a writing-table in one of the alcoves of his Boston library, and there, winter after winter, Henry worked over his Latin Grammar...In any and all its forms, the boy detested school, and the prejudice became deeper with years. He always reckoned his school-days, from ten to sixteen years old, as time thrown away. Perhaps his needs turned out to be exceptional, but his existence was exceptional. Between 1850 and 1900 nearly everyone’s existence was exceptional. For success in the life imposed on him he needed, as afterwards appeared, the facile use of only four tools: Mathematics, French, German, and Spanish. With these, he could master in very short time any special branch of inquiry, and feel at home in any society. Latin and Greek, he could, with the help of the modern languages, learn more completely by the intelligent work of six weeks than in the six years he spent on them at school.
>By way of educating and amusing the children, Mr. Adams read much aloud, and was sure to read political literature, especially when it was satirical, like the speeches of Horace Mann and the “Epistles” of “Hosea Biglow,” with great delight to the youth. So he read Longfellow and Tennyson as their poems appeared, but the children took possession of Dickens and Thackeray for themselves. Both were too modern for tastes founded on Pope and Dr. Johnson. The boy Henry soon became a tbhltory reader of every book he found readable, but these were commonly eighteenth-century historians because his father’s library was full of them. In the want of positive instincts, he drifted into the mental indolence of history. So, too, he read shelves of eighteenth-century poetry, but when his father offered his own set of Wordsworth as a gift on condition of reading it through, he declined. Pope and Gray called for no mental effort; they were easy reading; but the boy was thirty years old before his education reached Wordsworth...Sumner, Dana, Palfrey, had values of their own, like Hume, Pope, and Wordsworth, which anyone may study in their works; here all appear only as influences on the mind of a boy very nearly the average of most boys in physical and mental stature...Books remained as in the eighteenth century, the source of life, and as they came out—Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer, Tennyson, Macaulay, Carlyle, and the rest—they were devoured...
I also suggest this letter from John Adams to Benjamin Waterhouse (one of the founding faculty of Harvard), wherein he details his *apology* for the academic achievements of John Quincy Adams, who was Henry Adams' paternal grandfather:
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-17-02-0020
Note that John Quincy Adams was not quite 18 years old at the time!
Not that this workload isn't impressive, but at the time people rarely had many different classes. When I was in college (for a STEM major) I had 5-6 per semester. By contrast, in 1940 most British and American colleges would only assign you 3 courses max. Your grade would then be entirely dependent upon writing a term paper at the end, so you could (theoretically) never read any of the coursework and just wow your professor at the end and still pass (This is obviously unlikely).
At Cambridge as an English undergrad, the first years would have one term in which to read all of Shakespeare --- it was expected of all, and achieved by perhaps half the class, within the last decade. American undergraduate degrees in which you take multiple subjects at once actively encourage dilettantism, but that Auden course load, outside of Melville, Dosto and Dante, is mostly made up of texts you could push through in two days, in time for a seminar.
This. Just assign more than they can read and then fail them. It's the right thing to do.
I doubt the complete works are read. Usually there are just sections read for these types of courses. See the St John’s(I think?) syllabus and it puts this to shame as far as material goes, but then you realize they don’t read full works often
it was ~6000 pages of reading according to secondhand account from a guy who was an undergrad in the early 1960s. He also mentioned that he himself took a course called 'The Age of Johnson' in which he had to read not quite that much, and which was similarly restricted to juniors and seniors who could handle that kind of serious reading volume.
>6000 pages
For Auden or St John’s? An unrelated point I’d like to bring up is for the decline in liberal arts; the money just ain’t there anymore, nor the career for that matter. Many here glamorize the past and lament on the decline but they have to realize it was a different time. If you are unfamiliar with Ancient Greek and Latin it will seem impressive, but those kids were learning it from a young age. There isn’t inherently anything super intellectual about writing lines of Horace when that’s what everyone did. There is no need for it now. It is tangible and specialized skills that will move your career forward. Those kids in the lines of Horace days would look upon hard science coursework with awe while we look upon reading and writing the ancients in their original language. Ultimately the decline of the English department is directly proportional to the career prospects. So I guess you’d have to blame capitalism and specializationism (my neologism), and overpopulation. Everything is becoming more niche as the economy is flooded with jobs. Entertainment has moved past literature. Would be great writers today are in other fields. We have to remember that those of us who love “high brow” literature are dinosaurs. Nothing wrong with that, it is what it is, and what it is is a hobby, not a career, or at least a viable one
~6000 pages for Auden's course.
Personally, reading impressive curricula like these only reminds me that our hellworld of 8 billion was crafted by people educated like this
Self-awareness is in short supply even amongst the most consummately educated
Educators and specialists are very, very susceptible to the lure of the echo chamber, to post hoc rationalizations, to social desirability biases
Auden himself was no exception to this
really gay use of greentext
fake
real
Lmao at the average IQfy posting loser thinking they are some superior specimen by dunking on the average joes they share space with. Wouldn’t you be far away from those people if you were so much more intelligent?
nta but that doesnt make sense. why does sharing space mean you are the same as someone else? is someone with an iq of 150 not allowed to talk about books with other people even those of a lesser iq?
Not that those posts are any good, but I'm not sure where exactly you believe there's an escape from normies on this hive planet nu-earth
>the average IQfy posting loser thinking they are some superior specimen by dunking on the average joes they share space with.
To be honest, it's healthy to let things out anonymously than to hurt people when you lose that 2 second longer bit of self-control that you feel superior about.
>Wouldn’t you be far away from those people if you were so much more intelligent?
I'm around the 99.99+ percentile, so it's very difficult to talk to people who are on the same level as I am. While I'm not a lit major, I am a graduate mathematics major. Also, keep in mind, I am only referring to the potential, I'm still an idiot that will probably feel like I don't know enough when I'm 80, if I make it to 80. You will find in life, especially as you get older, you are often forced to interact with all walks of life. In some cases, it can be avoidable, but usually at great costs. Like I can't go around tell black people to not bother talking to me, I'll get fired. But I can require punctuality while letting a few in to see me about 10 minutes before and after my required time.
I make $60k a year and not in a burgerstan, but in a country with average income of $150 per month.
Where? Simple, honest question. Which country?
Vietnam.
Are you actually living in a gated community mansion teaching frickin English, fren?
Rent a house in HCMC suburb. Work in the city itself. Not a teacher though.
It's a safe country with very low cringe rate. There's no such thing as gated community.
Keep in mind I'm a speech pathologist here. Regular esl teachers get $20 per hour on average.
Like a phonoaudiologist therapist (or some shit)?
correct
Then all your years of study into some exotic, ridiculous field have paid off. What are your main patients, children? The elderly? Congrats BTW. God bless
3-5 of a hundred are soon be out guys after a stroke. The vast majority are children.
if students don't then what exactly is your job? What do you do as an English professor in an institution where no one cares about English?
Nothing, it's a pointless job. I mostly try to get published by writing about very obscure critical problems in Anthony Trollope. These do nothing to advance the state of knowledge in any way, and are not at all worth the trouble it takes to produce them. I fantasize about quitting to go mow lawns at the cemetery across the street - I'd make about the same amount of money, have better (union) benefits, and be making a meaningful contribution to society. And I'd be able to read whatever I wanted for any or no reason at all, without trying to squeeze a publishable paper out of it. I'd also never have to read another academic journal again.
Not to sound too much like an butthole but just about any job that is a step up from basic retail clerk is going to pay as much or more than you make now. How long is the tenure track where you work?
congrats on being the most self-aware academic at least. you could start trying to radicalize the students for fun. they're probably pretty impressionable and easily misled
This. Tell them that they don’t have to be ashamed about being white
This. Actually that's the only reason to be a professor anyway. Make them hate capitalism. Maybe one of them will have the courage to stab some bureaucrat or businessman.
Or you could move to asia and make $10-15k a month and have lots of pussy.
You can find a job at an independent classical school, produce good readers from a young age. Parents are often good about keeping their kids off screens, so they actually have the attention span to read Virgil and Shakespeare.
> I mostly try to get published by writing about very obscure critical problems in Anthony Trollope. These do nothing to advance the state of knowledge in any way, and are not at all worth the trouble it takes to produce them.
>fantasize about quitting to go mow lawns at the cemetery across the street - I'd make about the same amount of money, have better (union) benefits, and be making a meaningful contribution to society.
Shitty job and relatively meaningless contribution. Why don’t you just bee yourself?
One drawback with the cemetery lawn: no climate control.
I get where you're coming from. College nowadays is about the credential, nothing more. Unless someone's planning to go into the liberal arts, literature isn't much use.
>no climate control
Not a drawback.
You can learn a trade to become a well read tradie. I often fantasize about that, though I’m too lazy to do so.
I managed to realize this before I went through with my masters program in English lit. Some real eye-opening conversations with the adjunct professors teaching my upper division courses helped steer me away from academia. I work at a costco now. My novel is forthcoming.
>Nothing, it's a pointless job. I mostly try to get published by writing about very obscure critical problems in Anthony Trollope. These do nothing to advance the state of knowledge in any way, and are not at all worth the trouble it takes to produce them. I fantasize about quitting to go mow lawns at the cemetery across the street - I'd make about the same amount of money, have better (union) benefits, and be making a meaningful contribution to society. And I'd be able to read whatever I wanted for any or no reason at all, without trying to squeeze a publishable paper out of it. I'd also never have to read another academic journal again.
Become a postman. Much better job than being a historian.
How are your academic peers? Are people working in your department just as bad as the students?
Not him, but worse. The last great professors are now 90-100+ or dead. The last uniformly competent professors are now well over 70 on average, usually pushing 80. The last generation of moderately competent and occasionally very competent professors are 50-60, and tend to be embittered and closed off in my experience, waiting for retirement as their innately optimistic liberal went to grad school in the '80s brains can't comprehend why everything is so boring and weird, and why it feels like teaching high school now. They're very "checked out." Anyone <50 is, as a rule, a hep cat cool professor who is part of the problem, and the younger generation of rising star professors just now being hired in their early and late 30s straight out of grad school by committees of hep cats are basically just Twitter in human form.
This I think will finally trigger the collapse of all respect for academia. Something like that "replication crisis" a few years back will happen in the humanities soon, and the hep cats and new hires will rally to defend themselves and of course make themselves look a thousand times worse in the process, cluing the general public in to the fact that these people can't teach anything.
Even at the level of general competence, specialized studied have been the norm for decades now. Standards have collapsed. Nobody knows what they're teaching anymore. Everything has been farmed out to adjuncts, excitable diversity hires who actually know very little about what they are supposedly experts in.
If you are in college you owe it to yourself to hunt down the last professors representing the old system before they leave.
>This I think will finally trigger the collapse of all respect for academia.
Optimistic. Academia is its own arbiter...it's like a snake biting its own tail, a part of the essential "purpose" of academia from the perspective of the elites behind academia is to monopolize authority, so you end up with reasonings that unironically go like "thing good because academia approves it, and academia good because it approves the right things and disapproves of the wrong things".
Academia does not need the approval of, or care for the opinions of the plebs. The only approval it needs to care about is the state and the NGOs who finance academic institutes to function as their think-tanks.
>Something like that "replication crisis" a few years back will happen in the humanities soon
Too many citation circles with personal, financial, and political interests to not keep things going. It's not going anywhere, there's no deliverance from the current situation awaiting.
>last uniformly competent professors pushing 60s-70s
>complaining about the current state of the humanities in a zoom calls
?si=gqEKJMrN4wiWPJIb
Humanities bros.....
I run free courses for adults 18-25 as part of non-sectarian working class self-education. The only people who bother to read are from the tools. And they read voraciously and with violent intent.
>are from the tools
what does this mean
Well we can tell what class you are.
That's fine, but I still don't get it. laborers? working class? never heard that phrase before
I think he's referring to dupes and idiots. That's generally what it means to refer to someone as a "tool".
yes as in 'they are tools' but not 'they are from the tools'. look at what he said
>The only people who bother to read are from the tools
Even if that is the intention it doesn't make sense, so dupes and idiots bother to read voraciously?
>yes as in 'they are tools' but not 'they are from the tools'. look at what he said
Maybe he just sucks at English.
>Even if that is the intention it doesn't make sense, so dupes and idiots bother to read voraciously?
Sure, why not. I know a lot of really stupid people who read and write radical literature.
>This I think will finally trigger the collapse of all respect for academia. Something like that "replication crisis" a few years back will happen in the humanities soon
As someone who went to college from 2016-2020 this basically happened to me after going into History with the last year being derailed by corona.
The amount of shit just made up from "Historians" circlejerking the same post 1990s sources was disgusting, and I treat oral storytellers more seriously these days.
>and I treat oral storytellers more seriously these days.
You should publish. It'd be decolonial.
Maybe if I live past the next decade I'd consider it.
The few highlights that come to mind are:
>The Classic Department head realizing he destroyed his own job after sucessfully deconstructing the idea of there being a Classic's Department in front of his economic sponsors
>The same Classic Department head without a shred of self-awareness complaining how when he first joined the department back in the 1980s the old guard were elitist to him and were convinced new money like him would ruin everything
>The only good history professor was a 60 year old medievalist professor who enjoyed drinking and refused to talk history past the 1700s
>The professor who bragged how she took advantage of the Catholic Church, by lying that she was a research student, then used their records to push for abortion in Ireland 10 years earlier
>The professor who dug into the history of medicine, talked about atroitices done as it developed in the US, and said people needed to become more aware of how centralized medicine can go out of control
>The same professor losing all self-awareness when Covid happened
>The self-hating israeli Professor who said Hadrien was her favorite Roman Emperor who constantly had neurotic breakdowns.
Literally theory is predicated on a knowledge of history, philosophy, linguistics, etc. You can’t expect young adults to write meaningful essays for things they know nothing about. How can any student know that Animal Farm is an allegory for communist Russia without an idea of what communism broadly is and the history of Russia in the 20th century?
>You can’t expect young adults to write meaningful essays for things they know nothing about. How can any student know that Animal Farm is an allegory for communist Russia without an idea of what communism broadly is and the history of Russia in the 20th century?
I recommend studying.
The point is that classic literary novels, which are studied in university, are firmly entrenched in attitudes and beliefs that are highly contextual. You’re not going to get as much value out of reading Crime and Punishment, for example, if you aren’t aware of what Russian society was like at the time that novel was written. Only by being acquainted (moderately, at least) with the circumstances under which something was written can people comprehend and appreciate fully, but the way education today is ministered seems to take the opposite approach.
>Only by being acquainted (moderately, at least) with the circumstances under which something was written can people comprehend and appreciate fully, but the way education today is ministered seems to take the opposite approach.
I agree. University students should be required to go beyond the mere basics. I know this is hard intellectual work, but that is what they do.
They are called students because they study. Not readers. I could read Animal farm, as a reader, for pleasure and there is nothing wrong with that but as a student if I study Animal farm I must gather supplementary material, take notes, research, etc... This is what is means to be a student.
The problem, I believe, is that this meaning of student is lost and students became readers and now they're not even that.
>Literally theory
Obvious bait
How so?
Why? It used to be the norm that people who managed to reach tertiary education actually knew a thing about history, literature, logic/math, and latin/greek. Now they don't have to know shit, and it shows. The average college student today is an actual moronic sack of shit compared to the even dumb college students from before 1950.
It's an allegory for England, moron.
Good job just copy/pasting from r/professors
proof?
I have a degree in English and attained the highest GPA my department had seen in 20 years. I barely read anything that was on the syllabus. I would read the synopsis and anything else I deemed necessary in order to construct essays and interpretations that went into fine detail on specific topics.
Can confirm that a vast swathe of English students are morons who have never had an independent thought in their lives - one of my professors (RIP) would always bemoan the amount of essays regarding feminism in the works of Austen, Shakespeare, Dickens etc.
The sad thing is, this is all academia is. As an undergrad I felt guilty for Frankensteining papers together at the last second, even though I was good at it. I thought things would get better over time.
They don't, it's the same thing but worse. You're under tremendous pressure to churn out papers since your whole career is at stake, not just a B vs an A, and it's such that you don't necessarily have time to think of anything truly worthwhile to write, you just have to cobble together some arguments. If you can make another academic look stupid, so much the better.
Probably the best description of academia is in one of Plato's dialogues, some of you may remember it:
"A philosopher is a gentleman, but a lawyer is a servant. The one can have his talk out, and wander at will from one subject to another, as the fancy takes him; like ourselves, he may be long or short, as he pleases. But the lawyer is always in a hurry; there is the clepsydra limiting his time, and the brief limiting his topics, and his adversary is standing over him and exacting his rights. He is a servant disputing about a fellow-servant before his master, who holds the cause in his hands; the path never diverges, and often the race is for his life. Such experiences render him keen and shrewd; he learns the arts of flattery, and is perfect in the practice of crooked ways; dangers have come upon him too soon, when the tenderness of youth was unable to meet them with truth and honesty, and he has resorted to counter-acts of dishonesty and falsehood, and become warped and distorted; without any health or freedom or sincerity in him he has grown up to manhood, and is or esteems himself to be a master of cunning. Such are the lawyers."
The tragedy is that people get into academia to avoid the lawyerly life, but it's just about as bad a lawyer's life as there is in our society.
It's actually worse. Lawyers are at least well-paid.
Honestly thing I’m just going to major switch one last time to a hard science. That or dropout and just grind until I can start a business.
Hard sciences are literally no different from that, but at least many of them have prospects beyond academia
I'm in a particular branch of biology which doesn't. Kms
There were lawyers in Plato's time?
Law is probably the third most ancient profession after prostitution and espionage.
Yes. Why do you think they executed socrates?
>I have a degree in English and ....I barely read anything that was on the syllabus.
Why would you cheat yourself out of this opportunity?
What was more important than learning in your chosen field?
Really curious.
Thanks dfw
Oldgay here, I've several friends and aquitances in education, from primary all the way to college level, and I've heard similar accounts of this very issue.
Friend of mine teaches engineering in college, has been done so for 15-odd years. He says in recent years his students are failing the exams because they do not understand the questions. There has been a sharp decline in reading comprehension in the last 4-5 years.
This is partly a result of the general decline of our culture, but partly also owed simply to the death of literature. STEM is not like this. Not all the students are passionate, but there's a good amount of passionate people who work really hard. It's just that the appeal and power of literature today cannot motivate people to engage with it.
One of my family members is a teacher at a high school - apparently, kids in their late teens can't read an analogue clock. It's not like reading an analogue clock is an IQ test, but I mean, come on!
This is a problem that's developing earlier and earlier. My Mom's a pre-school teacher and says most of the kids already have phones and tablets that they bring to school. And it's not like this is a particularly wealthy school. Imagine having unlimited access to a tablet and everything on it from age 3-5. Is it any wonder books don't interest them?
>I'm a teacher now but I never read in class.
As if we needed further proof that zoomers and Gen Alpha are fricked beyond belief.
You can read things outside the syllabus anon
NOOOO ONLY STATE APPROVED READING
Harry Potter was the swan song of literature
He said while stretching his legs.
Hey, here's some legitimate advice from someone who was in a similar situation.
Find a middle school to work at. The pay in some parts of the country is more than twice the number you cited. Moreover, this is the age at which kids really are malleable and either learn to love reading or love TikTok. If you are the type of person who can be trusted to work with middle schoolers, this is probably about the most good you will ever be able to accomplish, anywhere.
This. I went from permanent contract at a university in the English department to teaching at an international high school in Europe. Better relationships with students, different influence, more satisfaction, colleagues that care about what they're doing, easy access to university libraries (with paid subscription). It's working out. Both my family and I are happier.
The level of direct influence is much higher in middle school, which is why I specified that. OP sounds like he could be legitimately interested in instilling a love of reading, which is more or less only possible at that age. But otherwise, high school.
>permanent contract at a university in the English department to teaching at an international high school in Europe
That just sounds like kicking the Kalergist can down the road tbqh
I reject the idea that pivoting to teach in a middle school is a step up for anyone. Even if some of the bright students are at their most malleable, young adolescence is also when kids are at their most interminable. Obviously the racial makeup of the student body is a major determinant, but even white kids are relatively awful at this age. But if it works for you, good for you I suppose.
I'm not even convinced that "instilling a love of reading" can happen optimally at that age. It seems to me that this is likelier to occur at the elementary level, even if the material is literally childish. But then I was reading Dr. Seuss to mom at age 3 and was told that I was reading "at a college level" when I was in 4th/5th grade, so my opinion may be warped.
>If you are the type of person who can be trusted to work with middle schoolers,
The fact that this even need be said is so depressing
>These people aren't truly dumb, they're the all-A or mostly-A students coming out of public schools.
What makes you think public schools produce intelligent people who know how to think critically? It produces educated people who know how to be told what to think.
>critical thinking
Buzzword.
>It produces educated people who know how to be told what to think.
Pop idea that doesn't address OP's point whatsoever.
You are probably the average IQfyner who cut class to play video games and now resents your education because you weren't automatically recognized for being smarter than everyone else.
OP is talking about a crisis of bare functional literacy that you would care about if you knew how to care about anything.
thinking
>Buzzword.
You're clearly one such person who can't think critically.
>>It produces educated people who know how to be told what to think.
>Pop idea that doesn't address OP's point whatsoever.
Who said I was addressing OP's main point? I clearly quoted to what I was replying.
>You are probably the average IQfyner who cut class to play video games and now resents your education because you weren't automatically recognized for being smarter than everyone else.
>OP is talking about a crisis of bare functional literacy that you would care about if you knew how to care about anything.
You're the average whiner who comes to IQfy to whine about the IQfy userbase but somehow think you're exempt from your own accusations despite your ignorant sweeping statements, assumptions, strawmen, and ad hominem. You couldn't even address my point, all you did was deflect from it then whine like a baby and post that anti-intellectual, thought-terminating drivel. Are you even 18 or older? Because you are acting like a child.
brainlet cope
Have you any idea what the average IQ of the students might be? I've heard the research on transference (IE applying concepts in a novel way outside of rote teaching) is shockingly bad for everyone
>I've heard the research on transference (IE applying concepts in a novel way outside of rote teaching) is shockingly bad for everyone
because they're kids who don't do anything
applying learned knowledge is a skill that has to be learned
sounds like they've learned how to game the system to a straight A pretty well
all kids are like that
none of them do anything
they look at social media, play video games, do drugs, and have sex
the first two are so time consuming that it leaves little time for anything else
Yeah, what did you expect as an adjunct at a state school? They're all young, and over half are there to party and then land into some easy office job after graduation.
Just spend your class time trying to frick the cute ones, and spend your free time on worthwhile pursuits like learning for learning's sake. You aren't going to be having some Dead Poet's Society experience in a lower div required lit course, my friend.
Say it to their faces. Tell them how ignorant they are. Tell them how brainwashed they are. Tell them "muh equality" is the lowest form of criticism.
They'd probably try to get him fired for that. That's what kids are programmed to do by K-12 schools these days.
I find that hard to believe, anon.
When I got to college I was devouring books left and right, and so were my friends. We would go to a park near our university building and spend the rest of sunlight reading and debating. 2013-2017
A lot have changed since 2013 old man
Fun fact: some colleges and some student bodies are much better than others. Lucky for you, it sounds like you went to a relatively good one (I did too, but there were stoodiers and partiers alike).
Now that I think of it, there was this one shitty political philosophy summer class that I had the misfortune of taking, fortunately it was an outlier and not the norm in my undergrad, most classes were reasonably engaging. In this particular class there were a bunch of ignorant scrubs looking for an easy B/C and they just straight up didn't read anything, and they couldn't even fake a conversation about Locke or Tocqueville or whoever it happens to be today. So I and one or two others would awkwardly try to carry the discussion, but there weren't enough of us. About two weeks in this old man who was taking the class for pleasure said he was dropping it, it was a waste of his time. He did what the teacher wouldn't do: he told off the scrubs who weren't even doing anything, I was glad he did it, they had it coming. Fortunately most of undergrad wasn't like that.
At my uni literally no one did the reading, except for me, and I only read the synopses in order to freestyle some bullshit position without abandoning the parameters of the material.
Same goes for my brother. He studied English lit and actually read all 1000 books assigned on his course. Generally, there were only two other guys that he could even have any conversations with. The others just either didn't read or didn't think.
College is just a stepping stone to a career. Nobody gives a shit about putting hours into reading a book on top of all the other bullshit, yet alone something they didn't choose. I'm a teacher now but I never read in class.
They had bad teachers…and lecturers.
Literally nobody in the united states has a lecturer anymore the last one retired in like 2012.
Their teachers are just moderators for group projects and guides for interactive learning experiences.
I've also adjuncted at both the state level and highest levels of undergrad education and I can mostly confirm OP.
>Students around 2010-2015
Generally bad but not uniformly bad, you could find people who cared at least, there were still idiosyncratic souls
>Students 2015-2018
Worse, the beginning of the end. The beginning of what I can only describe as "contently aimless mere cleverness." Mostly stupid, but now even the potentially idiosyncratic types are more diluted and don't tend to achieve critical mass or escape velocity and differentiate themselves. Likewise, the very smart ones apply all their smarts to acing a bunch of ritualized "growth experience" type classes without ever growing. Even grungy student counterculture and drug use is ritualized to the point of being lame and yuppie-ish. I think due to colonization by rich people with too many resources, making idiosyncrasy and ingenuity unnecessary.
Also deadly to this generation was the influx of nouveau riche white-washed diaspora types from LA, the Pacific Northwest, and New England. These really set new standards for not having any mental priorities or connection to any culture (aside from the typical "I am theoretically [ethnic identity], i.e. my grandfather robbed my native land during its brief liberal experiment, and then my father robbed it as a corrupt apparatchik during its commie phase, and then when it was finally dying its final death and becoming a satellite of foreign capital, my family used its ill-gotten money to emigrate to the States and start over as anonymous brown people, therefore, I will write about my 'experiences' as [ethnic identity]"). These people only know TV and internet culture because they aren't really from [ethnic identity], and they certainly aren't "from" the dystopian neo-Babylon their family moved to, which itself has no connection to the country it parasitically lives off of. So they just gum up the works by being free-floating airheads bobbling around campus checking their phones and "getting boba" with six-figure dad's credit card.
I think there were a lot of IQfy types adrift in this sea of LA-ized bobblehead brownoids and merely clever fluoride starers but they couldn't manifest their idiosyncrasy and form little networks with one another, so they mostly drifted through college during this period, wondering why they never had the "college experience." This was before COVID too.
>College during COVID generation
Totally fricked. Everything bad about the 2015-2018 now became standard even for the people who weren't innately like that or had some potential not to be. The potential IQfy types channeled their "am I missing something here? Why am I not having a 'college experience'?" feeling and vague but undeveloped disdain for the airheads and assorted richdad browns into "frick this farce lol" quiet quitting during the Zoom era. I think anyone with a soul and residual human dignity instinctively realized that Zoom was kindergarten-esque, it brought them face to face with their Adderall-Fluoride happy-go-lucky rich doofus peers and the whole house of cards finally collapsed in some deep region of their unconscious. I saw less and less of the even potentially idiosyncratic types throughout and especially after COVID.
>Post-COVID
All the 2010s parodies of "diversity! lived experience!" rich airhead student bodies are now the baseline, making further parody impossible. Even people I knew from this period who used to contradict my pessimism about the students are now saying "I fricking hate these kids" type shit regularly. It seems to have reached So Bad Even the Normies Notice It levels, which is always a sign that actual change or collapse is on the horizon. Slight uptick in idiosyncratic types in the opinion of some people I knew, but I think the problem now is that their idiosyncrasy is being artificially boosted by internet culture, so you run into a lot of edgy 18 year olds but they're also only "allowed" to be edgy in the ways prescribed by the internet subcultures they've integrated into and the internet streamers they watch. It's a new kind of homogeneity, it feels like a totally captured and maybe even controlled pseudo-idiosyncrasy. There's no wonder or excitement at encountering something new, it's more like they're unlocking new based skills on the pre-ordained skill tree. I still can't find any of the old-school self-motivated weirdos capable of becoming actual unique people.
I can't even imagine how bad it's going to get from here on out. I imagine teaching university in 2025 will just be like teaching a private high school in 2015.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by “idiosyncratic”. Is it idiosyncratic merely in what beliefs they hold or also how they think? I guess these feed off each other. To add my two cents, I was a lawgay at uni and in my jurisprudence classes, about 85% of the students hadn’t read Plato. We were looking at Crito and the lecturer did a straw poll of who would have taken Crito’s offer to escape. I’d say the same amount if not more said they would have escaped with many expressing confusion as to why Socrates might even consider staying in prison. It was revelatory to say the least
>realized that Zoom was kindergarten-esque, it brought them face to face with their Adderall-Fluoride happy-go-lucky rich doofus peers
I graduated from high school and entered college in 2020, right as the pandemic was beginning. I had this exact experience, and I believe it was the beginning of the end for my higher education. In every one of my classes, I was made to interact with people that were either not paying attention or were incapable of it. Coming into contact with these people made me realize why the standards for understanding material in high school were so low, and it sapped all of my enthusiasm when I realized that was how it would continue to be. I would often stay after class to discuss the material with my professors, and in three years, I only ever saw two or three people who did the same. Most tuned into the class for attendance and left the instant they could get away with it, and that carried over into physical classes when those opened back up.
>house of cards finally collapsed in some deep region of their unconscious
This is absolutely where it leads. It finally broke me at the end of the Spring semester. I would be placed into groups in my classes, assigned something that requires multiple people's efforts, and be seemingly the only one in the group even conscious. Nobody cared about or understood a thing, and trying to work through shared assignments or help them was like talking to zombies. I always had a romanticized view of academia and thought I would be surrounded by genuine scholars. My whole experience was so demoralizing that I decided to study on my own, and left.
The professors must already feel like babysitters rather than teachers. I wouldn't be able to do it.
>The potential IQfy types channeled their "am I missing something here? Why am I not having a 'college experience'?" feeling and vague but undeveloped disdain for the airheads and assorted richdad browns into "frick this farce lol" quiet quitting during the Zoom era.
Graduated in 2021 and can confirm. College during COVID was a joke and I had a feeling education would be entirely upended by it.
Also you're spot-on with the nouveau riche immigrant thing. Always the most annoying and wokest people in any class despite their obvious ~privilege~
>this sea of LA-ized bobblehead brownoids and merely clever fluoride starers
Haha, holy frick this is the type of person who uses IQfy? Some petty racist adjunct professor who hates his students? What the frick are you doing in the education system my guy. Get the frick out and let someone teach who isn't a loathsome prick to their pupils.
You are not a big man, you will never get tenure, the kids you are teaching will go on to make 6 figs at FinTech while you moan about degeneracy on IQfy. Humble yourself
> NOOOOOOOOO, THIS OPINION IS VERBOTEN!
> YOU MUST ACCEPT GLOBOhomosexual AND LIKE IT OR KISS YOUR $37,000 SALARY GOODBYE YOU RACIST!
where did it all go so wrong?
There's "opinion" and then there's "I'm an butthole."
Guess which one you fall into!
i'm not the anon you replied to. i can't speak for them but as a TA i always treated my students fairly. everyone is entitled to an opinion.
>There's "opinion" and then there's "I'm an butthole."
you must be the latter. it is not your prerogative to tell people what they can and cannot think.
More than a little bit pathetic to try and shift focus to moral character after your first outlash was based on cash rewards for corporate compliance.
ask me how I know you're from r*ddit! (?(!(?(!*~~)
oh, that's hilarious. I'm from twitter.
same culture
The exclamation point says a lot about you.
Lmao. A troon cant even sort his own life out and then violates the rights of actual educators. have a nice day rapist weirdo.
>he didn't notice the past tense
>he doesn't know how many more like me there really are
>he doesn't know the ones like me are the ones who do try to provide a good education, because we have actual reverence for the tradition
>he prefers his kids be taught by bubbly braindead genderqueers who have four degrees and 12 conference presentations on a topic yet know less about it than one autistic kid with $1.50 in late fees at the public library
>he thinks his potemkin university and fake finance empire will hold up for another decade, when his "FinTech" kids don't know what a file directory is and cry constantly without knowing why
even if everything else you said was true, anyone who perceives others as "bubbly braindead genderqueers" is closeminded enough to make me say that even if you were remotely intellectual, you've proven you aren't by any interest in learning. you sound like a dying moron whose ideas are in the past.
although the past is full of good stuff to be fair
you are proof that his description is accurate
>
x
lmao are you really forwarding
>the future is now grandpa
unironically?
they're choosing to blame gay people instead of whatever systemic issue is at the root of academic and literary decay. but sure, some braindead mongoloid larping as a college professor on IQfy said it's cause the trans people are destroying the west
historically, unhinged homosexualry has reliably been a symptom of civilizational collapse. Not to mention homosexuality does violate the Categorical Imperative.
so that's why the presumably majority straight kids that homosexual professor is teaching are also falling behind in their educations?
that anon is a dipshit because handwaving away problems to a minority group is an excuse to not think critically about why society, in this case, academia is actually collapsing. good thing that moron is writing out of his mom's basement and will be nowhere near education ever in his life.
>good thing that moron is writing out of his mom's basement
you must be eight kinds of delusional to complain about the vague bullshit that anon forwards when you say shit like this. calm your breasts.
the greeks seemed to handle it pretty well throughout the majority of their extremely gayged out civ
>throughout the majority of their extremely gayged out civ
common misconception—pederasty was mostly an upper class thing, same as today, really. It was contentious then. Salt of the earth comedians like Aristophanes made endless queer jokes.
Great book that will make anyone into a fascist: The Other Greeks
Actually, to be fair, unhinged homosexualry on this scale is unprecedented
It's not a big stretch to blame a minority demographic when they're directly favored by policy and recruitment and overrepresented in HR
While it's important to make a distinction between causes and symptoms, when it comes to modern social malaise, trans people happen to be both simultaneously
These are people whose souls depend on synthetic hormones manufactured from petrochemicals.
Anyways, "bubbly braindead genderqueers" is the perfect description. The euphemistic self-description would be "neurodivergent and nonbinary"
I heard Misc Pot is hiring.
>close-minded
>your ideas are in the past so they are le bad
Yup you've got the script down very well. Good boy! You'll do great in college.
>a mirror is held up to the zoomoid's face
>xe blames the person holding it for xem's own repulsive reflection
Damn. You've had the exact same teaching experience as me, anon. Nicely put.
Very grim but well-written and very funny. You should write a book. Your writing very much aligns with my experience in college, it was honestly a very sterile place. Felt like all the harsh-edges to everything had in some way been rounded off. I honestly can't once remember hearing a truly radical or provocative thought during my time in college.
Other students are wealthier than prior generations of students, but they all have a similar outlook. It's hard to even explain concretely that outlook beyond this vague commitment to identity politics and inclusion.
They've this herd sense, an instinctive ability to suss out and shut down incorrect lines of thought.
>If you are in college you owe it to yourself to hunt down the last professors representing the old system before they leave.
One of the best English professors I had was like 70. He was a pretentious old-fart, and in some ways super obnoxious, but he was actually at least interesting and had novel opinions.
He was in a perma-war with the rest of the literary studies department who hated him.
Young English professors were copy and pasted critical theory types.
Took a class on Shakespeare and the young professor taught everything through the lens of feminist theory. He was excruciatingly awkward, a poor public speaker, and had zero capability to maintain an authoritative distinction between teacher and student. He was utterly spineless and would never contradict a student. No matter how unbelievably stupid a student's opinion, he'd bend over backwards rather than just say he or she was wrong.
He'd also contort 15th century writings to try and make it fit with contemporary feminist theory. It was insufferable.
I took a range of classes and English professors were the worst. Poli sci professors were decent from what I remember.
When I was in university studying a hard science none of my peers took English class seriously because it's full of BS and unrigorous, so we just considered it an easy break from real courses.
I think has a point. I apologize if this is mean but no really one cares about English classes. Most kids are just doing it as a requirement for stem or medical or whatever else they’re doing. Of course most of the stuff written for it are half assed and shit. It’s very easy to say a book is sexist or whatever because when your writing essays your just trying to get the word count. You find something that vaguely fits the question and you turn it into an answer.
If you said most kids in real important classes are failing or doing stupid things I would be worried then.
I think part of the problem is the attitude of "if it's not profitable its worthless." A huge part of how the culture war got going and can continue is that the right pretty much abandoned the entire arena of the arts and humanities in North America. At best you get hucksters like Ben Shapiro, but mostly you just get people who look at Michaelangelo's David and go, "eww a penis." The dialectic has been abandoned and left wing academics have been left entirely to talk to themselves at the same time as culture has shifted to only care about what can immediately make money, and the institutions themselves have become nightmares that cant offer academics a real secure future. No wonder they've all gone schizo.
>it's your fault for getting gatekept and auto-da-fé'd out of the scene by clannish buttholes and their citation circles
Very original, very insightful.
They obviously bear the brunt of the responsibility, but do you really think the appropriate response to the gatekeeping was "whatever, books are for gays anyways."
is there any way to objectively measure the decline these academics teach about or am I to assume it's simply job fatigue
I have some old (1960s) mathematics textbooks with so much material and complexity in them I swear most modern day college kids wouldn't be able to crack them.
So my bet for an objetive measure of academic decline is this: old archives of exams, tests, outlines, textbooks, etc...
For a clear cut example: coders. In the old days they had huge manuals and spent hours learning everything about their languages, now it's a few power points, a compilator and some simple basic course that just barely touches the surface of the subject.
I've often thought about this too. Someone should start an institute with the job of formulating objective standards for various fields by collating past materials like exams and things that can act as "you should be able to solve/translate/read/understand this" tests.
Imagine simply having at your fingertips the knowledge that, in 1965, it was plausible to throw this or that book down in front of a student and say "You have 2 years to memorize every word of this." And year after year thousands upon thousands of people did just that. You would at least know, you can test yourself against this book.
There was an actual published study about this examining the maths exams in the UK from the 60s, 90s, 2000s and 2010s. The questions were scored by maths post-grads not from the UK so that they would not have any predilections.
They found that there was a statistically significant decrease in the difficulty of questions and the marks required to achieve each level from the 60s onwards.
However, this could be partially explained by more people taking the exams, and it being more important to distinguish this larger pool of people compared to the smaller, more elite pool in the 60s who would all get top marks today.
Unfortunately I don't have this paper at hand, but it was quite rigorous from what I recall.
Honestly reading old letters shows the decay of language skills. I read a biography of an old football player once in high school that was set around letters he sent to his family. Unbelievable language skills from a normal ass 18-21 year old in the 30s/40s. He was like an academic all American so he was obviously above average but still.
I read a letter from a confederate soldier to his wife and I noticed the same thing. And all this time I was being told they were uneducated country bumpkins!
Look at exams from ten, twenty years ago for the same course and compare their difficulty. Then compare the raw scores that people are getting even on completely neutered, toothless, purely regurgitating-the-lecture of today. Even as a recent student this was painfully apparent when the old practice exams would routinely have about half their problems "crossed out" because their concepts were no longer taught (and not replaced with different or newer material).
I think that, at least in America, the economic view of college has finally triumphed over the liberal have-fun-and-find-yourself mindset in most circles. Of course, everyone knows that college is expensive in both time and money but even for the poorer kids like me there was always the fantasy of high-academia and being around likeminded young people who share your general thirst for knowledge, like that one Goerte story. Sadly, that much can’t be said anymore for 90% of colleges in America. The ones that are on the lower end of the scale struggle to keep garbage off the sidewalks and crime off of campus and the higher scale ones are filled with basedbrained yass queens there to follow in their parents footsteps as a proud middle-manager. Part of the problem is that our culture has disintegrated into saccarine commodification at $8.99 on sale in every DVD bin across every walmart in America. And part of it is that the K-12 education system in America is a joke these days. For instance, we didn’t even start learning about algebra until I was in 9th grade. (year 1 secondary school for you eurogays) College has become what it always was in essence: an idle pastime for the rich and a rite of bondage for the poor. You should force your students to watch ISIS beheading videos in lecture for an hour and fifteen minutes so you can watch the shock and horror fade off of their faces as the second video starts. They’re already hip to the scam. For the ones that aren’t there for drug fueled hedonism it’s like serving a prison sentence. There’s nothing you can say or do that would reach them.
It's actually worse than that. I don't know about humanities, but stem is structured like it was 100 years ago i.e. like a pastime for obsessed autists living off somebody else's money with a wife keeping the house in order. Within this hyperfocused structure, you are expected to be highly productive with a massive professional network. The people who find success are therefore turbonormies with incredibly regimented lives. It's only a job for them, in the worst way. People are doing PhDs so they can graduate into an industry job where they spend half the day literally watching Netflix and the other half ordering around a swarm of early career peons on projects nobody actually cares about
I was where you were from 2011-2015, anon. I left because adjuncting freaking sucks, and I couldn't get full time (and didn't want to play either the publish or perish game or the conference game - I wanted to teach). And now, nearly a decade later, I have no desire to get back in the job as it stands now.
However, if I could find a school that didn't demand I teach Race And Queerness in every class, I would do the following:
1) In class essays. Period. Regular writing in class, with conferences at least twice a semester to workshop the writing and analysis.
2) Source requirements: make students argue both positions in their papers, which gets away from the reliance on the Higher Theory and all its variants - well, not completely, as pretty much all sources in JStor and Ebscohost will be from Higher Theory, but if you make them at least find opposite positions on the same argument, you'll at least start from a position of pushing for more critical thought.
3) I'm curious if you're teaching Comp 1 and 2, or if you get to teach the lit courses. I never got to teach past Comp 1 and 2, and for the last two years I was teaching, only Comp 1 (another reason I left, because I was tired of not getting to teach my students the next steps).
Thank god you're not "teaching" anymore. You sound like a fricking idiot.
>In class essays
They allowed you to teach English despite not knowing how hyphens work? God have mercy.
Extremely based thread , I like the part of generations of professors the most , as a harvard grad from recently (2019, the last class) I can say for certain that the classification is true. Unfortunately Mansfield et al are retiring and then literally the twitter users are storming the gates looking for tenure. Even if they are smart , they do not have the time to actually be academics due to paper pushing . Sad!
If you are a Harvard grad, then why di you write like a moron? Do you have a mental disability?
Zoomers are also technologically illiterate.
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
>Catherine Garland, an astrophysicist, started seeing the problem in 2017. She was teaching an engineering course, and her students were using simulation software to model turbines for jet engines. She’d laid out the assignment clearly, but student after student was calling her over for help. They were all getting the same error message: The program couldn’t find their files.
>Garland thought it would be an easy fix. She asked each student where they’d saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. “What are you talking about?” multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved — they didn’t understand the question.
>Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.
wonder what percentage of that class is hispanic or black
>Implying white zoomers are not also moronic
It’s a worldwide problem with zoomers, /misc/tard.
The blackening is also a worldwide problem with zoomers
zoomers do kot understand the concept of file storage. Also:
>astrophysicist teaching an engineering course
>hispanics and blacks
How is that even possible? They must be using files and directories when they take pictures or videos on their phones for social media.
Zoomers think all computers are phones, they don't see phones as simplified frontends for little computers, they see computers as big phones. They do stuff like cite their harddrive in a paper they're submitting to a job committee.
>They do stuff like cite their harddrive in a paper they're submitting to a job committee.
PLEASE tell me this didn't actually happen.
not the same I know, but I saw this
Haha classic luttwak. We'll never know if he's being ironic
huh? i just go to my camera app to find my pictures (t. zoomer)
It's funny because I am a zoomer and I am the opposite. I only use desktops, I don't use smartphones at all. I have zero idea how mobile system file storage works, but I am very comfortable with (Windows) PCs.
I can see why a mobile phone person would struggle, though.
This is bullshit. Who cares what an "astrophysicist" c**t woman went through? Astrophysics is the soft option all "women in STEM" take.
All my friends born after 2000 know how fricking file systems and folders work.
This apparently happens with people who have Master's degree and start working in a real job. People who have already graduated with good grades have be taught how to use Word or folders which is just fricking baffling.
I love these kinds of threads. They affirm my decision not to go to college and make me feel intellectually superior to younger generations.
Professor anons, I despair.
I skipped university to get a job here in Bongland. I am not going to make out I am smarter than them or whatever (I got shitty grades but I did very well in the class) but I despaired at who I studied with.
The smartest dumb people ever. Some of my old high school class mates are editors at literary journals now. Their work is incomprehensible bullshit. "Publishing for the proles: a gendered analysis of black and brown writers struggling against a cis white printing process". Shit like this appears as their featured monthly piece. And I have argued with them and they don't know a single thing about life they are opinion regurgitators. They are not even smart, they just have memories for sound bites and screeds.
And what is worse, they are so smug, they are above criticism. I spoke to one of these people and claimed something rather taboo about a minority religion. They stormed out of the room, stormed back in, screamed at me "I am a scholar!" As if to tell me they knew this place and people and faith intimately so they KNEW it better than us all, and therefore we HAD to listen.
How the frick do we breakthrough this attitude? "I have a prestige qualification from a prestige place with prestige and accepted opinions". It makes me despair.
>How the frick do we breakthrough this attitude?
You don't. Firstly you've misunderstood academia to be merit based, it's not. They can publish what you consider garbage because people like them are the editors as you've stated. So agreements with themselves that their pieces are publishable. Doesn't matter if it's woke, they could be writing about Thomas the tank engine or a boot (quoting Andy Warhol here). Uni is for a structured learning environment to learn basics but more importantly to make connections. If you don't make connections, simply going to a got school is a signifier that you're more publishable than a smart ass plumber who has an unknown self education. As a writer i's your job to try to understand what editors think should be published (I.e. by reading what they've already published). Shitting on minorities was publishable 50 years ago, now it's not. If you don't like this system, then IP capitalism is not for you and you should stick to plumbing or whatever.
Not that anon but I have been wondering whether our disappointment with the ways of academia is not a result of unrealistic and misplaced expectations than anything else. To be more precise, the kind of environment most people think of when they think of the platonic ideal of the university resembles that of the republic of letters far more closely than it does that of the university as it truly existed at any point in history...universities have always been about codifying, policing, and transmitting the orthodoxy of the milieu they existed in, not debate or free thought. I feel like it's telling that after Aquinas but before Kant practically no famous philosopher operated in the environment of academia, but rather as the part of the pan-european republic of letters. This association of academia with critique and philosophy becomes even looser the further away from german idealism we get.
Just to be clear I meant they were editors of magazines, not academic papers or publications. They are independent but brainwashed by their education.
> Shitting on minorities was publishable 50 years ago, now it's not. If you don't like this system, then IP capitalism is not for you and you should stick to plumbing or whatever.
ayo hol' up, were we not capiliss fif'y yea's ago?
college is about sexually roleplaying as a member of british intelligence
>The smartest dumb people ever.
I know exactly what you mean. I run the service engineering department for a large tech company and was recently told that I had to hire more women as over 90% of my team consisted of men. I hired this woman who had a double master (mechanical engineering and electronics engineering) from one of my country's top universities, and am frequently stunned by her complete lack of common sense and ability to think critically about a problem to find a solution. She can only regurgitate thinks she memorized in school and what she finds in the service manuals for the devices we repair and even after 6 months of working still constantly needs help from colleagues to solve simple issues. I imagine that if it's this bad in STEM it must be even worse in other fields.
I observed much the same.
Its so odd because as you say, they are smart. You can tell some of them are quite clever.
But its like their brain has this cliff notes filter turned on where they have learned to just scan text for keywords and key ideas that will show up on the test. And they are very good at picking up on these things.
I think this is the result of years of reinforcement in the lower levels of education. The best students are the best at adapting to the situation at hand, and they've literally been trained to be text scanners, not readers.
>they have learned to just scan text for keywords and key ideas that will show up on the test.
Have you ever read The Shallows? It theorizes that this phenomenon is caused by internet use.
At the lowest point in my PhD I outright asked my professor why I was expected to know so many things offhand when a citation manager could serve that purpose. He facepalmed and sent me out of our weekly meeting in disgust, at which point I went home and compulsively jacked off until the adderall wore off
Infant mortality sounds horrible, but it's a great filter for high-mutational load morons.
It feels weird, how the public perception of and performance of the humanities are perpetually stuck in the 1920s or so. People still think that being bohemian while being a trust fund kid is edgy, people are still shadowboxing with this idea of "tradition" and thinking that being dada is being unique and subversive, people still think you go into the humanities to learn to appreciate classic texts and acquire some semblance of erudition. It's like a groundhog day where time never stopped, only people's understanding of the times did, like a pan-societal curse of senility struck the west. I'm not sure if this makes sense to anyone but me but it's really eerie in a way.
It's not that eerie. The simple truth is that people have limited memories and perception. People assume that you go to university to study the classics because in people's minds, universities are for smart people and the smart people things are the classics. Given a free flow of information and sufficient public interest, this will change. Even your insight isn't "unique". "Conservatism is the real counterculture." is itself a fairly trite observation by now.
Bizarrely reductive
Tangential at best
Verdict: likely botpost
How does an average younger guy go about actually reading and comprehending literary works, as well as becoming a well-rounded educated man?
just read homie
it helps of course if you learn a foreign language or three in high school
but there is no secret trick to suddenly increase your comprehension, just read anything challenging and you will get more allusions and connections over time and the gains will compound
ok maybe a trick is to summarize stuff you've read while talking to yourself but some people already do that automatically
and learn some poems by heart
- Make big goals and test yourself against them. Can you read one classic novel a week? You will fail at many things but you will learn things through your failure. When I look back and remember being 20 and thinking I was going to read Bloom's entire Western Canon list front to back I laugh, on multiple levels since I have multiple reasons of my own for rejecting Bloom's list too, but it was also important in my development that I had such thoughts.
- Read historically and in parallel, read about and around the things you read. Demystify the authors you read. Read about their historical settings, read biographies, read Wikipedia articles.
- Read the great critics. Get Kaplan's Criticism: Major Statements and start learning the names and contours of the critical tradition.
- "Seize on" random moments of unusual commitment or interest that you have, and propose projects to yourself. When you're reading X and you have a thought as simple but as genuine in its curiosity as "Did X read / know Y?," make a project out of that. Ideally you want to build up to projects that lead you to the library and to pulling a dozen books off the shelves and spending all days skimming through them. That's when you learn the really fun things that stick with you.
>Can you read one classic novel a week?
>mostly made up of texts you could push through in two days
Isn’t literature meant to be read slowly and deliberately?
>weren't books supposed to be read slowly and methodically
Why slow? Read more and your reading comprehension goes up. It's not magic. Books often have refrains or will use wordplay to emphasize things you should remember.
I could describe it really specifically, but instead I'll give you the video game analogy. Everyone thinks they know what makes a good game. They think it's the plot or the genre or the type of main character or the message, but that's all bs. It either feels good moment to moment while building to something that's greater than the sum of its parts, or it isn't doing that.
Sentence to sentence the best books succeed. They were entertainment and a vehicle of expressing ideas and critique in their times. If you can't sit down for a few hours and read a book your comprehension skills are not there yet. If that sounds like something you can't possibly do, that's why those of us here who can read at an adult level are so freaked out about a generation that cannot read.
Read the books homosexual. And then have a nice day.
i cant take fat people seriously
>None of the students really read
Get used to it. Zoomers are actually moronic.
It's both that white zoomers are the most moronic generation in history and that elites are trying to create a quadroon/mestizo class of moronic 80IQ tortilla sellers in America like every South American country is burdened by, because it makes them easier to manipulate. All they had to do was stir the existing multicultural pot of Black folk and add more latinoids. At this rate it wouldn't matter if the remaining white zoomers were geniuses, because they're a shrinking and increasingly gay minority anyway. But in practice, the under 30 demographic in the USA is made up of 50% full blown mystery meat with no sense of anything outside of being a 24 year old smartphone user with a moronic side hustle, 25% off-white semi-mixed people who align with the mystery meat in everything but may have residual connections to their white dads' money and culture, and 25% whites who mostly align with the mystery meat too (talk like them, think like them, look up to them). There's nothing left.
The best hope for whites at this point is 1) purge and re-build Europe into a cognitive superpower using what is left of its decent genetic stock to create a new Hitler Youth type generation, 2) let America collapse into South American / South African style social chaos which will cause a lot of migrations and die-offs probably, 3) somehow try to survive ensuing global chaos by aligning with any other nation that isn't moronic, probably in an alliance against the Chinese, and 4) reconquer and recolonize collapsed America with whites and be nicer to her this time.
To be fair Americans can not understand geography. This isn't new necessarily
>I know the standard response - "teachers always think their students are morons." Bullshit, I'm not even that much older than them. People definitely read less, read worse, and write worse than they did when I was an undergrad.
raised on a steady diet of uncritical and subversive mass media. and when it is critical, it's usually nonsense. just as you've observed. you condone this, you know.
>37k seems pretty reasonable to me.
it might be "competitive" for the job but it's certainly not a fair salary compared to other professions that are less important and require less education and skill. i'd like to teach at a university nonetheless.
>As a righty, it was really frustrating to constantly run into morons who said "isn't it scary that we live in the Handmaid's Tale" - in 2013! And in 2017-18, my alma mater didn't offer a single course that wasn't race or sexuality focused
You're right to be frustrated about that, but the abdication of the dialectic was happening in the 60s and the total domination of profit above all, even in academia solidified in the 80s. You never even got a chance to properly fight against it, it started before we were born. Again, blame the professors for being moronic, blame left wing thought, but the right didn't fight for these institutions when they had the chance. Even now the rhetoric isn't how can we reclaim them or reestablish actual value to the arts, there's just a doubling down and telling people to go into the trades, while a few angry weirdos like us seethe on the sidelines.
I don't wholly disagree. Righties like to be more self reliant, and find the ever spiralling death obsession of lefty academics not worth putting up with. And the righties who did see the problems and try to speak about them - people like C. S. Lewis and Tolkien - were ostracized and treated like dirt by their colleagues with power.
I wasn't even thinking about Britain. They actually sort of have a right that ostensibly cares about high culture. There's no North American equivalent though, the right here prioritizes GDP growth over the preservation of the cultural past.
Where are you keeping the good knowledge? I know the slop your feeding us is fake stuff.
It's in the books. Usually from 50-3000 years ago.
bullshit. Idk any successful people who got that way from reading.
Well, you may need to clarify what you mean by "good knowledge". "Self help" is a different field from "live the good life." (Good meaning moral, not affluent)
Thats a long winded way of saying 'if you listen to me youll end up a loser'
If you define loser as "someone who isn't a baller like Andrew Tate", sure.
I'll be happy to lose out on being that kind of person.
Andrew Tate can never buy white genes.
You'll never be woke enough for SJWs, and you'll never be white enough for IQfy.
>white enough
>IQfy
i wish
>I read about 100 pages an hour
Ask me how I know you don't retain anything.
It's not my fault your retention at speed is crap.
separate from the complexity of the text, retention is also going to be largely determined by pre-existing familiarity with the content therewith. Everyone has to learn something slowly at least once.
Besides that, there is the integral matter of the density of the text. Sure, you can read The Waste Land in minutes, but are you going to understand it? If going into it naively, would you even detect that there is this much more to understand?
https://eliotswasteland.tripod.com/
You have an excellent point about Waste Land (though I prefer Four Quartets by a lot). But poetry reads quite differently than prose - it's about each and every word chosen, and their sequence, and their aural capacity.
There are some prose writers who similarly choose their words with that kind of quality - Tolkien comes to mind in his more heroic passages or most of the Silmarillion - but most prose writers are about the meaning rather than the word by word parsing.
Additionally, when I say 100 pages an hour, I'm speaking of fiction. Non-fiction does tend to take a bit to parse the ideas. Though a lot of non-fiction books, especially those published in the last 20-50 years, are basically an essay expanded, and can usually be skimmed.
I've edited over a thousand papers for high school students. Their English is laughable. I've had to numb myself to the reality of their almost inestimable moronation. They, unfortunately, constitute the next generation of would-be academics. It's well and truly over, lads.
>Why is nobody taking college seriously anymore.
Gee, its a real mystery.. Honestly if ur not doing STEM its a huge waste of time become a tradie plumber or some shit. One of the key issues in schooling in general is that teacher are allowed to shill politics or marxists garbage in general school which should be prohibited and im talking about all politics. It should be punishable with prison time and ban from educating anyone. Keep the school neutral.
STEM is for soulless bots willing to serve the system for momentary comforts.
Yeah whatever i will have large black coffe little starbucks baristacuck. im sure ur little gender studies degree will serve you well.
Better to serve coffee than to make the bugsoy machinery
>Le buogigi heckin
According to ur philosophy the family structure would be considered bougigig, fricking subhuman. You deserve to be broke, minimum wagcucking and have no property.
Incoherent.
I literally got a BSEE and had to quit after a decade to work security because it was murdering my soul.
But considering you‘ll invent redditisms and bring trannies up out of nowhere I shouldn‘t be surprised you need to tilt at windmills inside your own head.
I've found a decent amount of work to be pretty gratifying and interesting.
I'm running some errands by the unemployment office later, so I can drop off a coffee for you while you're waiting in line. It can get pretty chilly out there!
Funny enough I went to business school and they said don't bother applying to consulting firms. They prefer engineering students since they can do regressions correctly. Most students thought they'd get comfy well paying jobs because of muh MBA. In the end everyone went into crypto, marketing, entry level banking, data analysis jobs, accounting, or studied for CFA and realized what a waste of time the degree was after that.
>offering paid college classes on how a cartoon frog is racist
exterminatus is too good for this world
Can't believe /misc/ used to have actual people on it once. Now it doesn't even resemble the rest of the site.
shills all the way down
/misc/ used to have intelligent discussions on occasion. Now it's filled with bots, shills and all sorts of other degenerates
What? You don't think Blood Tribe and the GDL being shitheads isn't breaking news?
I remember the days when anons would write long effortposts about the conspiracies of the day or historical events. There used to be some genuinely smart anons on there. The problem is that there is nowhere on the internet that resembles old /misc/
>The problem is that there is nowhere on the internet that resembles old /misc/
Hate to say it, but there is. It's IQfy
Adjunct philo here, you think you have it bad?
I am a philosophy undergrad because I thought the sexuality studies and other departments would catch the superficial readers. Now I've gotten to the graduate level and it hasn't ended; many of my classmates aspire to be professors. They know very little outside of a few authors and their derivatives. It's so fricked.
I'm not sure why you'd want to pursue a humanities PhD and not become totally immersed in your field.
There are clearly demonstrated racial differences in IQ, and we have been on a disgenic spiral since the industrial revolution. So it not so much the level of education but rather the sort of people who go into education professions and the students themselves.
So you're an English teacher aye? Name me ONE book. Or two, whatever.
I believe it.
t. English major
Goated IQfy thread fsho
>>half assed read 30 mid books per year
>>be in the top 0.01% of English language readers worldwide
>>???
kids aint shit these days and now theyre being raised by folks born in the 90s, early 2000s who never read anything themselves
critical thinking is frowned upon
sitting quietly by yourself (prerequisite for serious reading) is frowned upon
Michael Silverblatt said it best (10 minute video probably too much for people to bother with):
>10 minute video
Surely you jest.
As others have said, I think the big issue with academia is that has long been circling the drain because of its self contained and self nourishing model. For academia, by academia mindset. Things become too niche and specialized. Combine that with the fact that a degree is now the norm, and every student from the middle class on up feels they need to get one or they are strongly pushed by parents. And they are right to some extent, a degree is now needed to get your foot in the door for most jobs with a liveable wage or salary. Capitalism and academia are in bed together and that has led to academia being a cash cow. The self contained academia in league with capitalism and many kids who shouldn’t be going to university has created an awkward environment. Also another factor is that kids aren’t as mature as they used to be. An 18-22 year old 100 years ago was more mature than those today. Anyone under the age of 25 is still a kid at this point. Kids aren’t going to take things seriously and most aren’t exceptional
My experience teaching various classes in a relatively high rated PPE program is basically the same. Nobody has any intellectual curiosity in class. Basically every class would boil down to the same 5 or so A student brown nosers engaging for the 5% participation points. There were a few actually deeply thoughtful papers but usually from people who stayed shut up in class to avoid being mobbed.
Actually there was a lot of complaining about texts in general. We had people actually contesting a statement in one textbook that made the verifiable, factual statement that "The Affordable Care Act made some people worse off." which was stated as a basic, fundamental rule of policy, ie, that any re-distributive government policy will make someone worse off. These counterarguments weren't even like in the vein of "Yes but the downstream benefits will result in net benefit for the folks who are paying more", it was more like "You need to select a less biased textbook for this class in the future." There's just zero will to engage with anything even remotely challenging to their preconceptions.
I was convinced to not remain in academia by a similar conversation that got me "in trouble" in a different class. Teaching Street Level Bureaucracy which is a cornerstone text of policy analysis and governance in general we had a 25 minute long struggle session about the use of the term Gypsy in the book and Lipsky using them as an example of some behaviors like selective ignorance (ie, people pretending to not speak a language, or speak it at a lower level than they do, to gain advantage in some social interactions). I eventually snapped and asked if we were going to spend another hour being upset over peripheral details or if we wanted to try engaging the key points of the text and what it means for policy making at some point.
Of course I got reported for it and the professors I reported to basically said they knew exactly how I felt, but if I wanted to maintain good standing I had to grin and bear it. So once I finished my degree I got the frick out. If you want to teach community college is actually probably the best level anymore if you want to actually have an influence. Teaching at a 4 year school is an exercise in pure masochism, it's no wonder that most of my professors were completely disengaged from the teaching side of things.
NUS?
>Basically every class would boil down to the same 5 or so A student brown nosers engaging for the 5% participation points.
Great to know that this is how profs think of me when I actually try to participate and get the class going. Maybe I shouldn't anymore. Maybe a completely silent classroom is what you deserve.
man, intent is usually pretty transparent. If you're trying to genuinely engage with the content, they'll know.
I wouldn't bet on it. I am an autistic dork. I look weird no matter what I am doing.
I would never be honest about my political opinions in college. I parroted the party line and cruised through.
I just asked questions of classmates and lecturers rather than reveal power level. Though it would have been pretty funny if I vocally advocated in class for a Byzantine-style monarchy with all of its social mores
I was studying English literature as an undergraduate for a year before I switched majors. Nobody aside from one or two others seemed to actually care about the material. I remember once a lesbian in one of my classes complained that all the poets we had so far read were just "old white men complaining about how sad their lives were," concluding with the statement (verbatim), "Anyways, I hate men." The professor (a man) just stood there and affirmed everything she was saying.
If you tell animals (minorities or women) the truth that they’re fricking dumb for their dumb animal opinions they will cry and rage and report you to the dean.
We were reading some 70s or 80s feminist schlock (I forget who) and one of the female students gave one of the lightest and most milquetoast critiques of their writing saying "what if some women want to be housewives but also want to have careers, they're not mutually exclusive etc". For the rest of the class I kept hearing murmurs around me of people calling that girl a TERF and whatever the equivalent pejorative is for an "Uncle Tom"
I used to go into presentations and intentionally antagonize the other students by insulting the dogshit YA and contemporary lit books we were forced to read. People would routinely get up and leave in the middle, or stay around to yell at me.
This thread makes me glad I never went into academia as a career, but it makes me quite said I come here for literary discourse.
>This thread makes me glad I never went into academia as a career
I, as well, fren.
You're too stupid for a professor. Remembering is not understanding.
I'm a part time history teacher in a third world country (Argentina)
I have a job in the private sector from 9 am to 15 pm (I'm the boss), and teach in the afternoon to poor shanty town kids, by poor I mean Brazilian favela level.
The kids don´t study, and the majority of them don't understand what they read. I'm told it didn't use to be so bad, but covid lockdowns were an atomic bomb on the intellectual development of poor children.
What I do now (for exams) is give them 4 texts and make them search for what I want in those texts. At least that way they practice reading, and practice searching for something in particular in a text. Which are skills they will need for any job in the future, like reading a manual.
I've become an accidental language teacher, because when you have kids who don't understand what they read and have very poor vocabularies, that issue becomes the priority, whatever history they happen to learn is just a bonus.
They never write something like "Napoleon imposed/established", they don't know those words, they will only write the Spanish equivalent of Napoleon made/did.
The way they speak and write reminds me of the Simple English wikipedia.
A weird thing is you can't really predict who the "smart" kids are (there are like 5 smart kids out of 30 in general). I thought the smart ones would be the ones sitting close to the professor, but sometimes it's the noisy chad at the back of the room with an entourage of bawds who displays iq over 100
>the ones sitting close to the professor, but sometimes it's the noisy chad at the back of the room with an entourage of bawds who displays iq over 100
Why don't you quit this shit and let it all burn? Are you one of those "independent" types? Are you one of those that refuse to kiss ass and don't even know the names of the higher-ups? Are you one of those?
Nobody would be so utterly stupid nowadays, anon
That's interesting. I feel like teaching younger and poorer students would be more challenging, but rewarding as you're teaching very fundamental skills.
At that level at least you don't have to deal with the kind of ideological brain root described itt. They're not educated enough to be truly stupid.
Whereas at a higher level you get people who are good at regurgitating lines they've picked up from professors or what little they've read.
Sometimes misfortunes really are a blessing in disguise. I was fired after sleeping with a couple students and I dread to think how life would have turned out if I kept teaching.
you're correct 100%, it's the same with math, was tutoring a "cream of the crop" kid a year ago on college entrance exams, he bombed the reading section because "he couldn't stay awake to read the passages"
St. John's College is the antidote to everything OP mentions.
The book the shallows by carr kind of goes into this and it was written in early 10s so the trends it speaks of have only gotten worse surely.
So, since most western education institution is a malaise, what are some of you Anons advice on how to be self-educated and be well rounded person?
Never been to Academy, have a part-time job that pays me 22usd per hour.
Plenty of time to read and read for pleasure, im following "Great Books of the Western World" list and almost finish with the Gayreeks. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World)
What am I missing
>im 21
I might catch hell for this (though frankly I'm perfectly willing to defend myself), but many of the works in that series can be dispensed with as being only of historic or antiquarian interest and not particularly useful for one's education (self-directed or otherwise), still more are better excerpted than read as a whole, and most of those that remain are best read alongside critical companions or secondary works.
Most of the scientific primary works can be safely ignored. 90% of Hippocrates, for example, is really just pointless to read. Same with Euclid, Archimedes, Apollonius, etc., you get the idea—better to read modern textbooks for such material.
The second edition's inclusion of so much mediocre Moliere is fricking baffling.
The inclusion of Machiavelli's The Prince but not Discourses on Livy is fricking weird, and so is the non-inclusion of Livy's (fragmentary) History of Rome. Speaking of Rome, they don't include Sallust's Conspiracy of Catiline or The Jugurthine War either, or Caesar's Commentaries.
Man, I wish I had more energy, more time, more of everything in order to put together a curriculum and complete my other projects