“I decided we would do an oral exam* because it’s a great way to see if people have actually learned anything from my course and aren’t just parroting notes. Because I can ask them to elaborate on their answers.”
Yeah and it’s also a great way to get otherwise good students to go blank because it isn’t possible to absorb every bit of complex information you spent 12 weeks rushing through, Barbara.
This “gotcha” style teaching fucking pisses me off. There is no time in the real world people are not going to be able to look up their notes. Fuck, half the time I’ll ask a professor something and they’ll be like “I’ll have to look that up later and get back to you.” Why? BECAUSE THEY’RE HUMAN AND THATS HOW BRAINS ARE.
This type of teaching only favours students that already had experience with the subject beforehand and freaks with amazing memories. This kind of understanding of the material only comes from experience and repetition, something that the traditional 12 weeks of rushed lectures/labs that discard each topic quickly to fit all of them in don’t do.
I fucking hate how much I am going into debt to be taught only the vaguest concepts but doing most of the teaching myself in my own time. Education under capitalism is a joke.
*An oral exam is an exam where instead of answering questions in a quiet room on paper, you have to answer questions on a live video call with your instructor.
I can tell you as a teacher that there is no method of assessment that does not disadvantage someone. Answering questions in writing in a quiet room is a nightmare scenario for somebody. For instance, I teach in a very poor area and have a lot of students with lagging writing skills who would be thrilled to have a chance to just talk through material they understand but struggle to express in writing. This is not to say that the education system under capitalism doesn’t do a shit job generally with the neurodivergent, but that’s mainly because there is no one-size-fits-all approach to education that works for everyone, but differentiating for everyone’s needs is hard and, ultimately, expensive. The bigger the class size, the smaller the staff, the less possible differentiation becomes, but of course, capital does not want to fund a robust education system.
New York State passed a law to reduce class sizes a few years ago, and the New York DOE just hasn’t done anything to comply with the law. They’re not hiring more teachers, they’re not building more schools. They don’t even have a plan to get to the required sizes. They’re just
Capital is interested in educating it’s workforce. It’s the whole reason we have a public education system in the first place.
I like everything else under capitalism though, there is a point of “diminishing returns” - Costco does not want to have to train its employees how to do basic arithmetic, but outside of ensuring that there are people it can hire, it has no incentive to ensure every member of society receives a good education.
In fact, capitalism requires “losers” in addition to “winners”. It requires people to fall out of the system, to be homeless and poverty-stricken, in order to force compliance on the rest of us. When a child with a profound learning disability fails out of high school, and spends their life precariously hopping from low wage job to low wage job, our education system is working as intended.
“The purpose of a system is what it does”
I see. Geez, I knew teachers were overworked and understaffed, but that sounds dire
If you’re experienced, you learn ways to deal with it, and the school system can vary wildly from place to place in the US. But generally the the need for as few staff as possible to teach as many students as possible is in direct tension with every student getting their needs met.
This is why the bourgeoisie are increasingly turning to things like charter schools (essentially publicly-funded private schools), computerized instruction and, increasingly, AI, to try and solve this contradiction.