Maybe you should see about getting it fixed ... it does relates to your job.
)
Mary Lou, last night, was speaking to Gary about a kid that she considers a potential 'health hazard' to the school and/or the community in general. She reported him to the vice principal and to his case worker ... and nothing was done. Part of Mary Lou's responsibilities is internships and she got the kid an internship. The kid was hired after the internship and later fired. He sent malevolent emails to his former employer alluding to violent acts. His case worker requested him to stop ... but other than that, nothing was done. The kid is still in adult school and we taxpayers are footing his bill. Gary argued with Mary Lou that you can't apprehend a person for what you think might happened ... but that wasn't her point. There was no intervention of any type. None of us desire to live in a police state, but I think schools, all schools, should have a handful of psychologists on board whose job is to monitor students for potential violence. They can roam around and sit in classrooms to observe, chat with kids at lunch, even monitor the classes via video cameras. Of course the videos and such are all confidential. But in a public school the right to privacy should be significantly reduced in the wake of all this gun violence. Without action, things will not get better.
Well said.
Well, I do believe the actual writing and critical thinking skills I had also taught them at that point were just as useful
It is true that for a long time, enrollment has been more important to a lot of schools. If you ever want to read how this has been manipulated for the past 20-30 years (and, incidentally, why student debt has blown up as a problem so quickly), read this: The Invisible Force Behind College Admissions
However, there have been important distinctions between kinds of schools and the conflict over what the 'real' purpose of higher education is or should be. For much of our history, higher education was effectively restricted to a very limited population (yes, I'm going to say it, but relax and don't get your panties in a bunch - I'm talking about rich white men.) Then, slowly, more people gained access.
The push for enrollments came along with the push for increased access to higher education for many more segments of the population. When the market started demanding training beyond high school, more people wanted to go to college, and colleges, of course, wanted people to choose their school.
More people gaining access to education is never a bad thing. The way they gain access is the question, of course, and the strategies used over the years have sometimes been controversial.
Thing about creating more access is you then have to figure out what to do with the students once they're in.
The good thing is that schools - at least community colleges, anyway - are starting the push to gain not just enrollments, but to put major effort into keeping and graduating students. The buzzwords in community colleges these days are 'strategic enrollment management' and 'guided pathways.'
Students need clear pathways and methods to get in, learn what they need to learn, and then move on, either to the workforce or to a 4-year institution. As a matter of fact, I'm in the thick of one of the initiatives at our school that will help do this.
I don't believe that college is nothing more than job training. There are important skills and experiences that students gain in college that are difficult to gain elsewhere. It's true that not everyone is cut out for the traditional 4-year liberal arts education, but that also doesn't mean it's useless to get an English degree just because there aren't as many job options as there are for someone with a Marketing degree. There may not be as many clear direct pathways - for example, a Marketing degree leads to a marketing job, but that person can have a choice of any number of companies, types of industries, etc. An English degree seemingly only leads to an English teaching position or maybe a writer. However, if we look at the skills learned in a liberal arts major, we'd see that many of them - thinking, writing, communicating, analyzing, researching - are skills that are transferrable to many kinds of job.
Of course, many employers see "English major" and believe the person is some kind of disorganized flakey poet who doesn't know how to be professional. So some of the issues with finding jobs isn't necessarily the English degree, but rather the wider society's view of what English majors are like. (I was not even an English major, but I have experienced this attitude quite explicitly on more than one occasion when people see on my resume that I teach in the English dept.)
My BA is in Linguistics. I may not have become a traditional academic, which would seem to be the obvious career path for such a major, but I have used that degree every day of my professional life, both the content and the skills I learned.
(And for the record, a linguist isn't someone who just speaks other languages or knows a bunch of grammar. A linguist is very much like an anthropologist or sociologist. We embark on scientific studies of how language works. We learn research methods and analysis. Some of us do field work to study other languages and cultures. Some go into neurolinguistics and conduct very rigorous experiments to see how the brain physically processes language. Others focus on more applied disciplines, like studying second language acquisition and implications for education or cognition. It's much more scientific field than many people think it is.)
Gary evolved from journalism to environmental and construction consulting ... which in turn required significant writing. Gary, with his communications major, was humored by writing circles around the engineers who were unable to make their point(s).
Create an account or login to comment
You must be a member in order to leave a comment
Create account
Create an account on our community. It's easy!
Log in
Already have an account? Log in here.
