004classenemy

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THE CLASS ENEMY
is not the Student or Your Professor


At the end of the semester, all sorts of stresses arise between students and faculty...anger and distress of students is muted since faculty control the certification of students to administration relative to competencies and knowledges.

It is at this time that faculty and students tend to see each other as class enemy...

Most faculty have to track 30, 50 or more differing processes while students have to play catch up with a fast moving academic programs...some of which are new and strange to lower division students.

Students have much at risk given the university as the major pathway to whatever American Dream they pursue. Faculty have less to lose in such terms yet there are faculty evaluations and students complaints to Deans and such with which to cope.

It is at this time the sociological imagination is most helpful to the equanimity of faculty if not students. Students are not the class enemy. Massified, depersonalized, routinized and standardized educational procedures are enemy to both the learning and the teaching. Large classes, poor scheduling and frequent idiotic interruptions of the knowledge process hurts both students teachers and the knowledge process. Spring break is an especial problem here in the Northeast; Christmas, Thanksgiving and Easter also rend the frames of meaning and method teachers nourish and in which students perish.

Double and triple loads of work, school, children as well as problems of health, finances or intimacy tear at the student and subvert the best intentions to learn and to do well.

Solutions to these problems in academia are, for the most part, structural. Better scheduling, smaller, interactively rich classes, longer periods of time in which to know each other, closer contact and wider understandings between student and professor are most helpful to the task.

The educational system of the US remains among the best in the world; the Morrill Land Grant Act, the Kalamazoo public school policy, the GI Bill and various federal and state programs all nourish the knowledge process...yet there remains much to do to change and to serve the student. The making small of students or the mocking fun with their work is less than helpful.

The next days and weeks will require we step back and treat our own ailments with, as CWMills might put it, a bit of our own medicine.

'tis a healthy thing to do, TR Young