Students often carry misconceptions about coursework. They may view an instructor as an opponent standing in the way of the grade they want. And they see “getting the right answers” as the goal of education because that’s how you secure that grade.
Pedagogy aside, this is not entirely untrue in the lower division, at least on an institutional level. It’s usually the institution propping instructors up to stand in the way. They are told “you have to meet these learning outcomes, so these assignments have to do X, Y, and Z” and turns out X, Y, and Z are bullshit, but it meets accreditation standards if the class is audited. I taught rhetoric and it had to be explicitly Aristotelian. It blew chunks, nobody liked it or really understood it, but it was what the department justified to the institution for accreditation purposes.
I hated giving grades. I wanted to see continual improvement rather than final products. With a gun to my head I wouldn’t go back.
I agree 100%. My friends, peers, and I all wasted huge amounts of time during our undergrad degree,and to varying extents even in post-graduate degrees, fulfilling the university’s “one size fits all” curriculum standards.
I spent hundreds of hours sitting in lecture over nearly a decade. I DO NOT learn well from oral instruction but still was graded on attendance. I did homework far in excess of that required to learn and practice the material. I wasted so much time that I could have achieved double the number of degrees, even then with less work, if I had been given full autonomy and responsibility to learn the course material.
Pedagogy aside, this is not entirely untrue in the lower division, at least on an institutional level. It’s usually the institution propping instructors up to stand in the way. They are told “you have to meet these learning outcomes, so these assignments have to do X, Y, and Z” and turns out X, Y, and Z are bullshit, but it meets accreditation standards if the class is audited. I taught rhetoric and it had to be explicitly Aristotelian. It blew chunks, nobody liked it or really understood it, but it was what the department justified to the institution for accreditation purposes.
I hated giving grades. I wanted to see continual improvement rather than final products. With a gun to my head I wouldn’t go back.
I agree 100%. My friends, peers, and I all wasted huge amounts of time during our undergrad degree,and to varying extents even in post-graduate degrees, fulfilling the university’s “one size fits all” curriculum standards.
I spent hundreds of hours sitting in lecture over nearly a decade. I DO NOT learn well from oral instruction but still was graded on attendance. I did homework far in excess of that required to learn and practice the material. I wasted so much time that I could have achieved double the number of degrees, even then with less work, if I had been given full autonomy and responsibility to learn the course material.