Different Modes Of Knowing
Everyone’s busy with finals and whatnot, so you may have missed this little gem. Some people, this Ailee Slater being one, apparently consider the problem to be that the undergraduate degree has not yet been sufficiently devalued:
Personally, I have come to the conclusion that the University system makes absolutely no sense. Students pay teachers to educate us, yet they are then allowed to tell us how much we’re learning. The whole situation seems akin to a boss paying her employee to clean toilets and the employee turning around and telling the employer how much she is or isn’t happy with the cleaning job. If I’m paying someone to do my housekeeping, I’ll be the one to tell the receiver of my hard-earned money exactly how well they did. Shouldn’t it be the same with education?
Ms. Slater has paid good money to be told that she understands things, and she expects to be told that she understands them, chop-chop. The question of whether or not this is actually the case seems to be unworthy of consideration. It all makes one wonder: why doesn’t she just go ahead and ask her housekeeper to issue her with a BA? It could scarcely be less meaningful, and the domestic help wouldn’t dare get uppity.
There’s more, much more. This plaintive theme recurs:
I pay the teacher to teach me, and then I get slapped with the label of failure if the teacher deems that I haven’t learned the correct information?
That is absolutely correct. Well done! I see this “college” thing hasn’t been a complete waste of time after all.
(See also: this editorial. Summary: You can’t expect us to work this week! We just had a four-day weekend! We have to ease back into this stuff!)
age 12
Hi,….I’m David’s cousin…..
I love the ‘cleaning a toilet’/’teaching’ comparison. Taking the scrubbing brush of learning and rubbing it against the toilet bowl of my mind.. We have a phrase here “you cannot polish a turd”.
Olly: My personal taste goes against Jagernauth. He induces eyerolling on my part. But if you like his ways, go for it. Takes all kinds.
The letter: I was going to italics and post the whole thing, but it would have been without need. On the one hand (said Tevya) I side with her against Jagernauth. On the other…oy, what a pointless feminist rant. What do I think? One of my select favorite lines:
“As one who remembers the feelings of loneliness and fearfulness that accompany someone who is just beginning their college years, it makes me ever more certain that these are not the memories which will get me through my later years; but rather, they will be the experiences which I most regret.”
The whole exchange was funny because they were both completely off it, Jagernauth and the response. Jagernauth because he has women, albeit jokingly, pegged as prudes dressed as sluts(ha) and the letter confuses love and sex.
For the record: though they have little to do with college, memories of my brief trysts make me laugh at inappropriate times. Furthermore, I will be thinking of those memories when I’m chillin’ in the old folks home, and they will buoy my mood. People who regret those “experiences” have complexes to begin with. In above letter, it’s a whole chicken and the egg deal: is promiscuity due to depression, confusion, and sexual abuse, or are confusion/depression/sexual abuse due to promiscuity? Spew it, yo. Spew it into oblivion.
Oooh…my favorite piece of bullshit statistics is back for Round 2.
I didn’t think Jagernauth’s EW piece was objectionable. The message was one I think we can all get behind, for once. It was a little too much in love with its own libertinism (he said, inventing a noun) but them’s the breaks. I recommend the rest (it’s about three-quarters of the way down) of that outraged letter to the Weekly, which by an amazing coincidence I had already flagged for future Spew: One in four women are now sexually abused in some way, and that statistic is only fueled by people like you who insist that women are sending some sort of unspoken message with clothing or gestures…Sending an unspoken message with gestures? Ha! As if. The Eugene Weekly letters page is far too sophisticated for such a notion.
Mel: BUT BUT BUT, then what do you have left?
Oh, my excuse for my laughable GPA is definitely, “damn, I sure was hung over those four years.”
Yeah, ODE Commentary columnists aren’t the brightest crayons in the box. Read: David Jagernauth.
This caught my attention the other day, not in the ODE but in the Weekly
When Booty Calls: Sex in your new city
How cute! David Jagernauth, the King of Senseless Commentary, inserting foot in mouth not only at the ODE, but in Eugene at large. Who let him out? Why is he trying to be as funny as Tyler? Who did his hair the day they took his ODE staff picture? The world may never know.
Fast forward a few weeks to the Letters:
“I sincerely hope that you never attempt to give advice to today’s youth again, because you are without a doubt clueless in your expectations regarding love and relationships.”
My opinion: The guy is just clueless in general. You should read the rest of his drivel. The reason the ad was unacceptable for broadcast was because it’s intended as a flame ad between religious groups. Not becuase of David’s conspiracy theories that it condoned letting the disabled go to church or went against the Bush Administration; you can encourage people to go to your church/business all you want, but you can’t do it by calling your competitors homophobes, misogynists and racists.
This is the sort of whining that really chaps my ass. For example:
Does it make it better that a professor gives notice of a Dead Week due date within the first two weeks? Of course, but there is still something wrong with assuming that students should work through the holiday weekend when it is almost assured that few professors will spend the same time preparing for their next week of school.
I’m sure it really doesn’t make a difference what assignments are specified on the syllabi in the first two weeks of class: no one reads syllabi anyway. It’s certainly wrong to expect anyone to, say, start preparing their end-of-term projects before the end of the term!
I’m also tempted to mention that the most laughable aspect of a university without a grading system might be the students who emerge from it believing they understand things they don’t understand. Unfortunately, students already emerge from universities with such delusions, offering up as their excuse for less than stellar GPAs excuses like “That b*tch just hates me, dude.”
If Ailee is unhappy about suffering the indignities of the grading system, she could always GO TO A DIFFERENT SCHOOL (Evergreen comes to mind). Or if she values learning above all else, she can GO TO THE LIBRARY. Or if she values a degree above all else, GO BUY ONE ONLINE.