Saturday, October 26, 2019

Professor: Grading and Grammar Are Racist




By Professor Doom

     Our institutions of higher learning are massively oversized. While in general I disagree with the levels of growth which allowed this to happen there is one benefit to a large institution: resistance to change. Back when our institutions were merely huge, this benefit occurred quite often as the universities tended to not fall into fad “learning” scams like “new math” or “common core” or whatever, but somehow along the way to achieving truly immense size the institutional resistance to change vanished.

       The reason for this, of course, relates to the student loan scam, which made size, and not education, relevant to a school’s status. This led to the worst sorts of people getting control of our universities, and these kind of people, edu-fascists, concentrated power. Just as the Emperors of Rome could single-handedly achieve broad changes in society with an edict, so too can a university Poo-Bah dramatically change the character of an institution.

       The concept of “best practices” allows other Poo-Bahs to follow suit, and quickly, and so whenever some institution changes its rules to cause even further growth beyond all reason, the other “leaders” quickly follow to do the same.

      This growth has been achieved by allowing a great number of people to come on campus who have little interest in learning, and are merely there to collect their share of student loan money (after the university takes quite a bit more than lion’s share, of course). Trouble is, these students do tend to fail classes, and do tend to drop out after so many failures. In the last few decades, the rules have long since been changed so that failing doesn’t occur quite so much, and that dropouts due to failure are likewise less common than before.

      But, we still have students failing and dropping out. Whatever shall we do? Cry RACISM, of course:


     The professor referenced above, I covered before at American University. It’s the same spiel as always:

‘Grading is a great way to protect the white property of literacy in schools’

      Before going further, I must highlight how incredibly stupid the above is, and give the reader fair time to laugh. Please, gentle readers, call friends and family members over to whatever device you use to read this, and call their attention to the above quote. They deserve a good laugh as well.

      Now that this lunatic professor has infected American University with this madness, he’s travelling the country spreading it to other schools, with Ball State University next.  He gives his speech there, hosted by the Office of Inclusive Excellence (I can’t make these names up, and our schools are bloated with such goofy-named fiefdoms).

       When I was at a corrupt community college, every semester we had people coming in telling us basically the same thing as this professor, at least in terms of results: don’t fail students. The only difference is this guy’s rhetoric plays the race card more often than the Kentucky Derby:

We are all implicated in white supremacy,” Inoue said during his presentation…“This is because white supremacist systems like all systems reproduce themselves as a matter of course,” he said.
“This includes reproduction of dominant, white, middle-class, monolingual standards for literacy and communication.”


     If I was in China, taking a course in Mandarin, I would fully expect the teacher of that course to grade my use of Mandarin. It wouldn’t occur to me that this would be “supremacist,” I would expect a “monolingual” standard for a country. Yes, I know China has many native languages, but despite this reality it still mandates “one language” that all educated people there must know. Bottom line, mandating a proper use of a single language isn’t “white supremacist,” it’s a matter of nationalism, and our planet has seen endless countries arrange themselves linguistic lines far more than along physical characteristics.

     There is absolutely no winning with these people, who are never satisfied:

“Your school can be racist and produce racist outcomes,” Inoue said. “Even with expressed values and commitments to anti-racism and social justice.”


      It doesn’t matter what you do, you’re still vulnerable to the RACIST charge. This suits both sides of the edu-fascist cabals running our schools: admin is happy to add yet another fiefdom to rule over, and the ideologues are thrilled to be ever in pursuit of ever louder virtue signaling.

During his presentation at Ball State University, Inoue said that in order to succeed in even the most liberal and forward-thinking institutions of higher education today, a person of color has to act, think and sound white to some degree.


     Rubbish. Honest, there are universities in China where “sounding white” will not help you at all, and in many institutions in Africa, sounding white could easily be a detriment.

      Ultimately, it comes down to one selling point:

      …writing teachers should “calculate course grades by labor completed and dispense almost completely with judgments of quality when producing course grades.”


      The above is the primary reason this professor gets so much traction with his ideas. He’s advocating for course grades not to be about quality or knowledge, but simply a claim of effort. Much as admin continuously brought in educationists to “suggest” I allow more cheating in my classes (because that keeps more students on campus and provides admin with bigger checks), the professor’s above advice is given for different reasons to be sure, but is promoted for the same reason as other educationists.

       While the educationists pumping this crud decades ago could only have a low impact on schools with tenured faculty who weren’t going to change their ways, the classes of today are largely taught by de-professionalized faculty who have no choice but to follow the Poo-Bah’s whims or be dismissed.

        And so I assure the gentle reader that Ball State will become converged and achieve educational irrelevance in short order as this professor’s ideas are followed. The only question which remains is what school will be destroyed next?

       The comments section is filled with people who rightfully laugh with scorn at the professor’s racist ideas, but they’re not the edu-fascists running the schools, alas.

      The double-lung surgery failed, and finding that out was delayed a few weeks because they ignored my reminder to do a tumor marker test.  MDA's biopsy shows I have a met to my femur. So, next thing is surgery. They told me to wait for the call from the surgeon's office for set up the meeting to get the go-ahead for the surgery appointment.
   
       It's been a week waiting for that phone call. MDA in Houston is the #1 cancer treatment center, and one thing I can say from this ordeal: the #2 cancer treatment place must be absolutely wretched.


                                           

9 comments:

  1. My heart sank twice, professor, reading this posting.

    First, I teach a subject which absolutely demands a high standard of English. What is happening in US colleges will arrive at our shores in time — sooner rather than later, no doubt. Such a blatant contradiction of one of our main demands of the students pretty much renders the subject redundant. How long can one go on, labouring under this burden of political correctness while trying to teach, when every policy statement issued contradicts that attempt?

    Second, there is the bad news that your illness has not been stopped in its tracks. I too have had a major operation recently, and all I can say is, every morning, you should thank God you don't live in the UK.

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  2. I think about you and hope you will be better, my husband nearly died this last summer, was operated on several times, each time, I said it wasn't working and by the third time, the surgeon listened to me and let me be more involved in the process which finally led to success. You have to take charge of yourself, no one knows you better than yourself. I wish doctors listen more closely to their patients or the closest family members. Best wishes! Keep up your spirits! You are our leading light!

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    1. Sorry to hear of your husband, hope things are better now.

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  3. Not only in the UK, but in Germany as well. There however is one GIANT difference, the anglo-american world has let itself to be hopelessly corrupted whereas we Germans have been forced to live a lie, we were targeted for extinction a long time ago and the destruction of our once fabulous education system has been one of the means.

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    1. How might I learn more about what happened to the German system?

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  4. Sorry yo hear of your medical condition. Medicine, like the rest of education, is politicized educationally. Don't be afraid to look outside the temple of "Western" medicine.
    Decades ago, I had a conversation with my boss, who was bemoaning the fact that his daughter lost marks on an essay due to grammar. I asked whether he would support marks being deducted from an essay that was grammatically perfect, but had many of the facts wrong, and/or arrived at illogical conclusions. I'm still waiting for an answer.

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    1. Oh, I've looked outside the temple, bought into over a dozen miracle cures...every bit as effective as Western medicine, and far less painful.

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  5. I won a scholarship to go to school in Germany in 1968. The Gynasium for young ladies in Tübingen one entered via a very severe test. The lower level students got appropriate classes they could use as adults. The rarified students aiming to go to the various universities were totally different and very, very difficult, classes in 'high school' were sophmore and junior level classes in the US. I was able to take a graduate course in the US after leaving Germany at age 18, due to the nature of these advanced classes!

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  6. Libertarians have been warning for some time that the far-left like the far-right is just demagogy's nihilism: It's really opposed to reality and accountability of 'best practices' (a term I coined, BTW, and being misused into its opposite, like 'data-driven policy').

    So now we have a Marxian labor theory of value in grading: '...calculate course grades by labor completed and dispense almost completely with judgments of quality ...' What is really sad is the 'don't act white' trope identified some decades ago as being used by delinquents to keep smart Black kids down (who typically see through the far-left ) has become an academic dogma.

    The far-left believes time is a conspiracy of capitalist clockmakers to sell more clocks. Realities of math, logic, and grammar are therefore plots to oppress them in their quest for totalitarian power. As the totalitarian socialist far-left is being rolled back worldwide, the pretense of 'scientific socialism' is crumbling and the masks come off.

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