Writing Instructor

We were discussing Karen Horney’s “Our Inner Conflicts.”  In the book she tries to define three basic neurotic strategies for dealing with deep, deep, deep inner conflict: the moving towards, the moving against, and the moving away.  The first seeks love, tends to avoid conflict, to be self sacrificing (all towards the unconscious goal of “safety); the second sees life as a jungle of all against all and tends to be aggressive and controlling (all towards the unconscious goal of “safety); the moving away moves away from conflict in the name of the of independence, seeking not to be dependent on any one or anything (all towards the unconscious goal of “safety”).

I asked students—understanding of course that in reality life is a lot more complex than any three types—to pick which type they tended more towards, or pretend to pick one in any case.  Describe the type using Horney’s theory and then provide examples from their own lives that illustrate or elaborate upon the type.

About half the class was present on that cold and wet day, so I made them sit in a circle and asked each student present to say what type they thought they were and then discuss their example.  I was half listening—because I sort of try also to listen around the edges of what they are saying—and one guy said he was the moving toward type (seeking to please others and win their approval) but then (maybe I missed something) he went on about how people are such jerks and so stupid.  So I said, I was lost and that he sounded more like the Moving Against type who sees himself as super strong and everybody else as weak or possible stupid.

Later another student read a quotation from her paper.  I am not sure if it was this one but something like it:

            …he (the moving towards type) persuades himself that he likes everybody, that they are all nice and trustworthy, a fallacy that not only makes for heartbreaking disappointments but also adds to his general insecurity.

Bingo, I said, and tapped the student on the arm (he was sitting right next to me) who had said people were jerks.  So this is what you meant; since as a moving towards type you want to see others as nice like yourself, you frequently find yourself pissed off at people when it turns out they are not nice. As a moving towards you project your own values on others; you idealize them and when the veil slips away and you see the warts you see them as jerks, etc, not perhaps because they really are jerks but because they were not quite the people you thought they were.

Bingo!  I said.  There’s a whole paper there.  Abstractions and examples make it possible for the teacher, who doesn’t understand much, to understand something.  It’s like a process.

Bingo!

Posted by Nick Tingle at 06:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

But recently I realized that, with the professor’s approval, a student can enroll in a given course as late as the end of the second week of the quarter.  That means a student can officially miss 1/5 of a course and still receive credit for having taken it.

 Additionally as I previously noted, if a student has classes on MW this Winter Quarter 08 he or she will miss an additional two classes.

If then a student enrolls at the end of the second week and those two additional vacation days are thrown in the student can miss 6 of 20 courses (on a twice a week schedule) and still receive credit for the course.

Also here at UCSB the second and third weeks of the winter quarter are the weeks students, who must leave the dorms, head over to IV to sign leases for their housing for NEXT YEAR with the IV slumlords.  I hear students talking to each other over their cells about housing, trying to figure out both who they will live with next year and where. 

One student said he went out with three other guys and wanted to rent a place; the slumlords said, sure, but you will need to get your parents to co-sign, not just for you, their child, but for all the other people renting the place as well.  I have never heard of such a thing.  Is this legal?

The student shrugged.  It was just their way of getting rid of us till they found a group they liked the looks of better, he said.

And students in my Monday class—was that just yesterday—when I was beginning to feel sick and all lethargic—when I asked how they were doing honestly said they were wiped out because the first weekend of each quarter is a really big getting drunk weekend. 

So to summarize I am trying to teach something to students who are allowed back into their living area less than 24 hours before the actual start of classes.  During that first week, they must locate their classes, attend them, correct problems in scheduling, move back into their dorm rooms, and stand in long lines buying books.  The following week, especially if they are freshmen, they must go out to IV and try to find a place to live for the following year.  In the meantime, at least half of the students feel obligated via peer pressure to get drunk as skunks the first weekend of the quarter.

I do no feel this environment is particularly conducive to what I think of as education.

Posted by Nick Tingle at 11:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, the beat goes on and the UC sinks further in my estimation.

According to an article in the student newspaper student fees (officially UC students don’t pay “tuition”) went up 85% over the last six years.  And Lieutenant Governor Garamedi, as well as, Lillian Taiz, President of the California Faculty Association, had the nuts to say the obvious; while students are paying more—all those undergraduates—they are getting less and less for their money.

That’s clear to me.  There are not enough teachers, back logs are building up all over campus; students can’t get the courses they need to complete their damn majors.

And at the same time they are trying to up the minimum number of units a student must take per quarter from 12 to 14.  And somewhere I read about a new rule that would penalize (probably by making them pay more) students who take less than 15 units a quarter.

So where’s all that money going.  To make up for previous budget cuts, one is told.  Oh, yea, while all over campus new buildings are going up like mushrooms, and they are proposing now to increase chancellor’s salaries by 33% over the next three years.

You’d think students would take a look at the situation and just say, NO!  Because they are getting royally screwed.

But they are just students.  They are here and then they are gone.  More and more, it seems they want to get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible.  That suits the UC since they want to increase throughput, thus the increase in the number of units per quarter, and rules about penalizing students who go over the unit level necessary for graduation.

And of course the students’ parents want it over with too ASAP because of the debt piling up….

Going to the UC these days is way too much like a forced march through Siberia; all you want to do is survive.

No wonder then students sit in my class slacked jaw, glassy eyed and looking at me like my very existence was an imposition on their lives. No wonder I can’t engage them, or get them talking, or fired up over the importance of learning to write well, and, heck, the fun one might have doing it.  I need to stop feeling like a failure and realize I didn’t make this mess.  

Posted by Nick Tingle at 04:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here’s another article disputing the claim in the New Yorker that our educational system represents a meritocracy.  So much depends on how one defines merit.  Take your SAT scorches.  One finds in this interview article:

Selectivity is virtually defined by institutional average SAT scores, and so the SAT remains the most powerful mechanism by which elite institutions create a pool of “credible” candidates. Examine the College Board’s annual data on the relationship between SAT performance and the class status of students’ parents, measured by family income and parent education levels. The data are astounding, showing that high school seniors with highly educated and affluent parents can expect to score hundreds of points higher than students from far more modest social and economic backgrounds. For example, the average SAT score of students whose families earn between $30,000 and $40,000 a year is 1436. That’s compared to the average of 1656 for students whose parents earn $100,000 or more — a 220-point difference.

This is the statement of a guy named Peter Sacks who recently published a book: Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education.  He disputes the claim that the educational system, at least at this point in our sordid history, acts as a social economic equalizer.  By the way, Sacks praises the UC system for having moved away from a dependence on SATS.

Posted by Nick Tingle at 03:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A student gave an oral report on financing of student debt. Turns out it’s an 85 billion dollar a year business.   Not exactly chump change.  She decided to look into the topic because she will be graduating in a matter of days with 45,000 dollars in debt on her back as she walks down the aisle. She had to finance her own education she said.  Her parents had managed to help her two older brothers but by the time it got to her and her younger sister, the larder was bare.  So she had to take out student loans, and she had run up credit card debt, and she had to start working.  Well, her attendance in my class has been irregular.

Mostly her report focused on hearings in New York on the collusion between college and universities across the country and the major lenders, like B of A, and Citibank.  Seems that when a student goes to get a loan at the school, he or she is given a list, created by the school, of preferred lenders.  Lenders the school prefers for whatever reason.  Turns out the reasons have to do with outright kickbacks, payoffs, as well as free vacations to some exotic spot for the whole damn financial aid office.  So for these perks, the lender gets put on the preferred list, that sometimes has only two or three lenders listed, and as it turns out 90% of the time students pick one of the lenders on the list given to them by their school.  They make the mistake in other words of trusting the people at the college of their choice.

This is fairly disgusting. 

I really don’t know where to direct my anger.  At the fact, companies and colleges have systematically set about fleecing students, or the fact that student have to take out such huge loans at all. 

Posted by Nick Tingle at 02:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)