Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Sometimes I Just Hate Teaching

Every job has its downside. Some always suck, and some often suck, and some rarely suck. No job fails ever to suck. As much as I love my job, even it sucks sometimes. This semester I have encountered an aspect of my teaching that I'd just as soon have avoided. This semester I am teaching business students. To be frank, I would rather teach freshman public speaking than teach business students. The course I'm talking about, Professional Communication, is taught in my area, but the content and approach are partly mandated by the Business department. More or less, I get to teach a bunch of business students how to write and present as professionals. So, you're probably wondering, what's so bad about that. Well, I'm glad you asked.

The first thing is this: Business students are people who mostly want to be told how to do something. They don't want to learn, they want to pass. They need me to tell them how to communicate, because, like many other students (but especially in the case of many business students) they see the learning process as a hoop of some sort. It's a necessary step in satisfying their major requirements, but that's about it. Rarely does someone come into a class saying, "Hey, you know what? I'm interested in learning about this stuff. I don't even care about what grade I receive." The funny thing is, people who take that approach often do a lot better than those whose orientation is toward success rather than toward learning. Furthermore, students have a tendency not to do things on their own that would allow them to be successful. For example, they read (maybe) if they are forced to, and write only if they have to. As a result, writing and reading are neither pleasurable nor as natural if they could be if those students did them more regularly. More importantly, they don't really do those things very much on their own. As a result, they continue to struggle, and hence to avoid. This is especially true in "instrumental" or "technical" majors like business and some of the sciences. That is, the learning is see as a means to an end. In order to know how to do something, one must be shown how to do it. And, having been shown, one assumes that one knows how to do it. As a result, I will teach students how to use email, write memos and reports, and so forth. Once they pass the class, they, for the most part, will believe that they have learned those things sufficiently that they no longer have to worry about them. They have, in effect, transcended the need for further effort toward learning. It is an orientation that treats things like reading, writing, and speaking as "skills," instead of "arts." As a result, students, and particularly students in the instrumental majors, have a tendency to think in very localized and short-term ways about what a particular learning event is "for" or why it is "useful."

Second issue: I am more or less teaching these students how to be better tools of The Man. That's my job, I realize, but it still makes me feel icky. I'd feel almost the same (though not to the same degree, certainly) if my job was to teach hookers to suck cock, and to do so in such a way as to get their johns to drop that load ASAP, rather than, for example, prolonging and enhancing pleasure, taking pride in technique, experimenting freely with one's approach, and so forth. I'm teaching them, in the words of Larry the Cable Guy, to "git 'er done." (sorry Brandon). Now, that's all and well. We need to know how to get things done. The problem arises when we only worry out how "useful" something is in achieving that end. In fact, we may get to a point where things are only "useful" if that help to achieve some immediate need, some preconceived end. Witness, for example, the decline of the arts and music in the public school system. Notice the decline of creative writing at the college level. These are the things that suffer as a result of the instrumental orientation toward learning. The problem with this is that it assumes we can know in advance every specific thing that could be useful. We assume that knowledge is unitary, linear, rational, and so forth. We learn to fetishize those things, and to diminish or even to demonize those things the value of which we cannot immediately recognize.

With this class, I fear that's the thing to which I will be contributing. Not only will I not be enhancing love of learning, creative work and expression, and so forth; I will also be called upon to actively suppress those tendencies. That's what sucks.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"sorry Brandon," You should apologize to the world for that reference!

Doc Johnson said...

Well, sue me!