I came here to post that. I must say, though, that your description is a rather massive understatement. The reality is that after a takeover of the college administration by DeSantis-backed right-wing nutjobs, the place is in complete chaos. It’s not “several professors” that have left over the policy changes, it’s nearly half of the whole faculty.
The Yahoo article I read this morning, quoted the gov as saying he wants that college to be the publicly-funded version of some conservative private Christian school. Why is it so hard for these nutjobs to understand the constitution. Oh, wait. They’re nutjobs.
It all makes sense once one understands that the whole objective here is to regress Florida back to the Dark Ages, where things were much more the way that right-wing nutjobs like them. An important strategy to that end is to take over and subvert the public education system.
Wow. We’ve actually made progress. /s
Over Christmas vacation of 1958, my family moved about a mile down the street, changing the school I went to. One school was about 99% black; the other school was about 99% white. (Some exaggeration; I never knew hard numbers.) I was in second grade. When I resumed school in January I found I was two months behind the class.
Two months. Halfway through second grade.
That was eons ago in almost every other way. But as I grew older I realized I had a peak behind the curtain of school reality. 1958 was supposed to be a Golden Age of education. Instead, there were good schools (the one in the suburbs two miles farther down the street), poor schools (my high school left me woefully unprepared for the science career I wanted), and black schools. This in a northern, fairly wealthy, city.
These stories could have appeared at any time in the past 60 years. We keep saying there’s a problem and we will fix it. Nobody seems to understand how. It’s a national disgrace. Florida just waves the disgrace proudly.
Flor-i-DUH! Flor-i-DUH!
That’s a common jibe about the natives around here.
They’re not quite as proud of ignorance as, say, most Alabama folks. But they’re much more effective at implementing it.
Who gives a crap? It’s not the responsibility of black children to make these educators competent.
Even back in 2013-2014, when I was considering college, New College of Florida had a reputation for being that liberal arts college where you can earn a useless degree. They were so liberal they didn’t issue grades, or maybe that was a myth.
I didn’t realize it was public until the hostile takeover this year. (I didn’t want to go there because I was thinking about an engineering or computer science degree.)
~Max
Speaking to is not listening to, so no.
The one person I know who went there is also possibly the most brilliant person I ever knew. He went on from there to UNC Chapel Hill to get his PhD in mathematics, completing his thesis on a branch of chaos math.
From everything he said about New college, it was a wonderful school.
I also went to a college without grades. Instead of grades, every professor gave us a two page narrative evaluation of our work in their class. I am flabbergasted that anyone thinks a two- or three-digit number would be preferable to that.
I should have written with, not to.
There are ways to talk with kids to become a better teacher. I often ask students, “If you could change how we teach reading [or math, or whatever] to make it more interesting or useful, how would you change it?” It’s an open-ended question that prompts pretty good answers, and I try to incorporate the answers into my own pedagogy.
But this is a question to ask kids one-on-one, or at least in some sort of survey. It’s 100% not something to ask to a racially-segregated group in an atmosphere that comes across as blaming or stigmatizing.
I will also point out that “figure out what the educators are doing wrong” is assuming that the problem is within the school. There are certainly ways to be better teachers, always; but also, the problem may be that the police and/or organized crime are disrupting a neighborhood, or that parents can’t find good-paying jobs so the kids are living in poverty, or skyrocketing housing costs have increased homelessness, or medical care is inaccessible so the kid has a rotten tooth or no access to glasses, or a myriad other things that are difficult for a school to address.
I’m sure NCF is a great school. I don’t remember any of us kids taking the whole ‘liberal arts is useless’ canard seriously. Half of our teachers had liberal arts undergrad degrees.
That would be really cool! With the exception of math, where I think I’d prefer the number.
Here I am today, taking 3000 and 4000 level courses online, and I’d be lying if I said I’ve had a single line of feedback on any of my term papers. Two pages… imagine that!
~Max
Speaking as a math prof at a liberal arts college with a traditional grading system, I think it would be FAR more useful and meaningful if I could write a page or two about the details of individual students’ course performance, rather than just slapping a single number or letter on it. (There’s no reason I couldn’t include quantitative information about course exam scores in that hypothetical written assessment, either.)
Not issuing conventional grades doesn’t seem to have been a bad thing for pre-hostile-takeover NCF graduates, according to this 2020 description.
After I was done with school, every evaluation I’ve ever gotten, whether it was for work or some kind of training, was genuine personal feedback telling me where I did well and what I need to improve. That is far better than a number or letter, and they use it because it’s for something that has priority. Our education system is not a priority, it is an institution that churns out people like a factory in large quantities. I’m not sure teachers in traditional schools even have the bandwidth to give real feedback for performance.
My youngest daughter goes to a private elementary school and they don’t give letter grades or percentages. They have dozens (maybe a hundred or more) of categories ranging from specific academic skills to behaviors and habits and grade you on each of those. The teacher sits down with parents and goes over them with us a couple of times a year, and helps come up with a strategy (both in and out of school) to foster improvement. This is what it looks like when education is a priority, not a prison for kids to keep them off the streets.
In my experience, most K-12 schools have a space for a teacher comment in addition to the grade. Usually, it’s a list of standard comments, from which the teacher chooses one or two, like “Is a hard worker”, or “Needs to finish homework on time”. Sometimes, there’s an option for a custom comment, if none of the standard ones fit.
And I’ve never given back an assignment with no feedback about what mistakes the student made (well, except in the obvious case where the student didn’t make any mistakes), nor have I heard of very many other teachers doing so. I’m a math teacher, so I’m probably not writing detailed sentences, but I’ll have things like a part of the work circled with “Simplify this”, or “Apply Law of Sines”, or whatever.
From the link
The New College Board of Trustees is succeeding in its mission to eliminate indoctrination and re-focus higher education on its classical mission,” DeSantis said earlier this month in a press release.
Well its certainly succeeding in the first part. If the college shuts down itsn not indoctrinating anyone. Not so much on the second part however, but I would guess that DeSantis would also consider that a win. The worse education is the better Republican prospects.
Same. Hell, even when the student didn’t make any mistakes I’m usually giving some written feedback, if it’s only a smiley face.
Re Finland, teachers get a great deal of education and training; teachers are paid well; education isn’t chopped into “job training” or “liberal arts.”
Update to this story: The teacher who led the assembly has resigned. He’s African-American, so I have to wonder why he didn’t see why this might be viewed in a negative light.
From the article:
The intent of the August 18 assembly was misconstrued and the goal was to speak with kids in an intimate setting to generate excitement over the goal of building good grades and test scores, according to Hines.
“We had a good time in the assembly. I kid you not, but I didn’t think it through and I take full responsibility for that,” he said.
To me, if they’d picked the most underperforming kids regardless of race and chosen to have an assembly with them to inspire them to improve, and honestly try to work with them for those goals in a positive manner, I’d have applauded them. The fact that they specifically singled out African-American kids (and even explicitly did so in writing in a PowerPoint presentation) sabotaged anything else they may have tried to do, and you are forced to question anyone’s motives.
Imagine the reverse; you get the top 5 kids in the school and give them awards in an assembly. That sounds great, you should encourage and reward academic excellence. Then let’s say that you announce, “Great job, look what white kids can do!” Suddenly the entire thing is transformed into something ugly and disgusting. How can these people not realize how much this shit matters?!