Date: Mon, 28 Apr 1997 04:20:48 -0600 (MDT)
Message-Id: <1.5.4.16.19970428062102.0d979152@pop.uvm.edu>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
To: TEACHSOC@maple.lemoyne.edu
From: TR Young <TR.Young@uvm.edu>
Subject: Class enemy
Cc: socgrad@csf.colorado.edu
At the end of the semester, all sorts of stresses arise
between students and faculty...anger and distress of students
is muted since faculty control the certification of students
to administration relative to competancies and knowledges.

It is at this time that faculty and students tend to see each
other as class enemy...

Most faculty have to track 30, 50 or more differing processes
while students have to play catch up with a fast moving academic
programs...some of which are new and strange to lower division
students.

Students have much at risk given the university as the major
pathway to whatever American Dream they pursue.  Faculty have
less to lose in such terms yet there are faculty evaluations
and students complaints to Deans and such with which to cope.

It is at this time the sociological imagination is most helpful
to the equanamity of faculty if not students.  Students are not
the class enemy.  Massified, depersonalized, routinized and
standardized educational procedurs are enemy to both the learning
and the teaching.  Large classes, poor scheduling and frequent
idiotic interuptions of the knowledge process hurts both students
teachers and the knowledge process.  Spring break is an especial
problem here in the NorthEast; Christmas, Thanksgiving and Easter
also rend the frames of meaning and method teachers nourish and
in which students perish.

Double and triple loads of work, school, children as well as
problems of health, finances or intimacy tear at the student
and subvert the best intentions to learn and to do well.

Solutions to these problems in academia are, for the most part,
structural.  Better scheduling, smaller, interactively rich
classes, longer periods of time in which to know each other,
closer contact and wider understandings between student and
professor are most helpful to the task.

The educational system of the US remains among the best in the
world; the Morrill Land Grant Act, the Kalamazoo public school
policy, the GI Bill and various federal and state programs all
nourish the knowledge process...yet there remains much to do
to change and to serve the student.  The making small of students
or the mocking fun with their work is less than helpful.

The next days and weeks will require we step back and trat our
own ailments with, as CWMills might put it, a bit of our own 
medicine.
                            'tis a healthy thing to do,  TR Young
TR Young
Sociology
U/Vermont
TR.Young@uvm.edu