15 Kasým 2016, Salý
saat: 17:39
I'm the world's most insecure grader when it comes to long writing assignments, and it makes the process so long and arduous. I second-guess myself and worry that I'm not grading with fidelity and consistency, and then double and triple check and compare and contrast the assignments and UGH.
It's stressing me out.
And there's also this:
If the rhetoric of Trump’s campaign is translated into some kind of reality, there may be many victims ahead: respect for women, the rights of racial and religious minorities, an entire world facing environmental degradation. The population of several nations – the Baltic states, for example – may find themselves trying to decode the implications of Trump’s opaque foreign policy utterances.
Yet, as I sit with a stack of essays in front of me, the victim whose pain I feel for most immediately is the practice of logical, reasoned argument itself.
As educators have we been getting things hopelessly wrong? Maybe, if one of my students writes “social cohesion means social cohesion” in this latest essay, I should put a hearty tick in the margin.
Should footnotes and bibliographies be dismissed as elitist pedantry? Perhaps we should be training our students in the art of constructing compelling internet memes founded on fantasies? Or forceful slogans that combine emotive power with a strategic absence of content?
If we aspire to educate policymakers of the future, are these not the skills demanded by our age? For £9k a year, might the subtle art of articulating effectual nonsense be preferable to the ineffectual tools of argumentation?
For any academic this should be, of course, no less than a vision of hell. But with 2016 and its strangest of political events, such visions might drift across our consciousness.
The alternative vision is a world in which a renewed sense of cause-and-effect asserts itself. That is, a situation in which it is realised that ignoring peer-reviewed expertise, evidence, and critical arguments does have consequences.
Getting just anyone to fix your plumbing leads to leaks. Ignoring experts in international relations leads to wars. DIY dentistry leads to painful tooth-loss. Dismissing the predictions of climate scientists increases the potential for disaster. Saying simply “X means X” means nothing at all.
This vision must be clung to with determination. Even if, in the short term, holding on to these principles is actually a bit annoying – because if they didn’t need critical argument these essays would be a lot quicker to grade.
