I have a slightly difficult time picturing you typing this with a straight face. But then, perhaps in some far off land this is a good description of grad school.

2) If you’re sufficiently cynical, you must turn the full capacity of your prodigious mind (you’re a damn sight smarter than I am, Tozier, and I intimidate most people) to figuring out how to massage the faculty. Read books on how to manipulate people if necessary. Do not worry about saying true things, worry about saying convincing things.

3) Just thought of this — if there is even ONE professor there who has glimmers of understanding you, try to take his/her courses if at all possible.

I washed out of graduate school, due in part to Aspie klutziness at dealing with people, and in large part because I was torn between saying what was politically necessary and wanting to figure out what was TRUE. I didn’t have the courage to go down in flames as a martyr to the truth and I sucked at sycophancy. I fell between two stools.

If you can’t stomach the “say what is safe” alternative, and you’re in school for the knowledge rather than the certificate, then figure out how to stay long enough to learn what you need to learn, do it, cock a snook at the idiots, and leave.

They’re obviously set up for dealing with the unformed rather than the intelligent practitioner of another discipline. They don’t have the time, the energy, or the flexibility to grapple with what YOU have to offer them. Too bad for them.

No, wait — I can sympathize with them too. Learning new things is hard. I’ve got a house full of books about things I mean to learn someday, and I keep doing the easy things. It’s even harder when you think of yourself as someone who teaches rather than learns.

Best teachers are learners. My Zen master says that “good students make a good teacher”.

Does any of this help?

–
Zora on DP (shamefully absent the last few months)

Anyway, yes, I see. But you know, a number of faculty (not the younger ones, Cf. Dean Dad’s recent discussion of Gen X faculty) do indeed take the position of “testing” as of the sea and a sailor, explicitly. They’re not liked for it, but you know I can’t help but think such examples don’t sink in and get preserved in the cultural baggage of later faculty. Not as direct descendants, but in a sort of alternation-of-generations thing, as is seen with tattoos or Republicanism.

That said, what I know happens here is this dynamic: Faculty have no time. No Time! They’re expected to put out for pedagogy all over the place, yet paid for maybe a 2% commitment, taking their real work hours and other commitments into account. No way in hell they can enter into a deep engaging analytical conversation with a class of 50 students with sufficient due diligence to give them the right grades. Whatever those right grades are—we may not believe in them, but somebody has to turn them in within 48 hours of the scheduled final exam, or they’re dead meat.

Whatever dead meat is, in such a context.

So a clear case not only of everybody complaining about the weather and not doing anything about it, but with “testing” and “grades” they make the weather themselves. Since we’re analogizing.

I’m all for alternative assessment modes, and disruptive social reconfiguration. All for it. Don’t see much of it, in practice, though. It’s wayyy too much work.

Which, if you think about it, is pleasantly ironic. Given my starting inspiration.

But I stand by my earlier implication — you (we!) take things called ‘classes’, we get those alphabetty dealies at the end, we’re in something called “school,” and yet I claim the paradigm of testing is an … imprecise one. We’re not really still in “school.”

Unless you say the ocean is testing the overboard sailor. I suppose then you could say we’re being “tested,” right?

“Testing” is happening in meetings, in homework, in reviews. It’s the way, around here at least, that classwork is conducted and discussed.