When Southpark kills off a character, they don’ t mess around.
This thread was a real eye opener. Scientology has found a whole new demographic to exploit in your school. I had a similar situation when I was in college. I went to the Dean and complained about a teacher along with some of the other students in his class. They fired him.
Based on what you’ve said, the Dean shined you on. The person you’re paying (I can’t use the word teacher) is a protected species and you’re a peon to be dismissed. If the Dean can’t immediately distinguish the difference between science and bullshit then you’re in a tax funded employment institution fronting as a school.
why would you want equal time for fairytale bullshit? This is supposed to be an accredited school so the accrediting institution needs to be made aware of what is going on. Just because a school has a stamp of approval on it doesn’t mean every teacher’s curriculum has been vetted.
Seriously. I had a really bad teacher at a CC last fall. This was a UC transferable class, and it was utter bullshit. I graduated from a UC and was taking the class because it made the Peace Corps feel better about my background. We didn’t cover anything I didn’t learn in high school bio, and I was pissed. The teacher spent most of the time on his little tangents about life, Cuba, the Olympics, whatever, we didn’t have any labs or homework all semester. I made an appointment to speak with the department chair about the academic rigor of the course. He took me VERY seriously and took immediate action to have the course stricken from the transfer list before the accreditation agency found out that it was sub-par. He also involved the course instructor and the dean to find a way to get the class taught as it should be.
Your dean is jerking you around, and that’s not right. He should be there to help you, not cover his teachers’ asses.
The teacher absolutely does not have the right to teach inaccurate information. Opinion is one thing. Facts are another. Her information on addiction is absolutely incorrect. You might want to start there.
When there are problems to be solved with authority figures, it is generally always best to “follow channels.” Start with the source of the problem: the teacher. Try talking with the teacher in a private conference about some of your concerns. I would begin with factual inaccuracy.
Remember that in college, teachers are given a lot of discretion in giving their opinions.
Try not to be discouraged in your attempt to get something done. If not you, who’s going to do it? But don’t get yourself too stressed out. Your first duty is to yourself in your particular situation.
You write beautifully!
Zoe the Troublemaker
(Proud of being labelled a “troublemaker” by a high school principal even after I had retired from teaching. It made the newspaper.)
The individual teachers set the curriculum? Not likely.
I’m uncertain about the accreditation of colleges, but high schools are reevaluated only every ten years. Pitiful, isn’t it?
No, the school is accredited, that’s my point. But in any accreditation process, the whole school is looked at. The teacher in question would not have passed an audit.
My community college instructors all did.
We very well may have or currently do. The thing is if they made it known in anyway more then “Hey I’m a Scientologist” or “Ask the Scientologist” they’d probably be written off as a troll and either ignored or banned pretty quickly. Especially if they appeared to have any type of agenda.
a) The fact that the material shown happens to have been produced by a Scientology front organization does not make the material itself wrong. That is, in fact, a well-known informal logical fallacy called the “genetic fallacy”. Heck, in my Intro to Sociology course I presented an analysis from the John Birch Society that I happen to agree with, but I’m sure as hell no John Bircher.
b) Your instructor nevertheless sounds like a sloppy & ill-prepared unprofessional person who makes shit up on the fly and/or holds some notions she is teaching as fact which are neither widely held nor supported by fact. I’d document a batch of those and complain about that instead.
c) The Psychiatry: Industry of Death short that you saw sounds pretty damn accurate and I could have probably produced it myself. And I’m no more a Scientologist than I am a John Bircher. You should perhaps question your own notions about psychpharmacology, at least long enough to consider the claims being made here.
Modern psychology and modern pharma-psychology suffer from not having enough people in them who are critical and willing to re-examine other’s findings with an eye to scientific rigor, and many who try find the going hard because there are many powerful organizations who have vested interests in the status quo and the latest drugs and psychology fads*. Unfortunately, the most vocal critic is Scientology, which has vested interests in opposing modern psychology and modern pharma-psychology. Other critics get depicted as loonies and thus discredited which is far too easy to do with modern psychology and one of the reasons there are not more vocal opponents to some of its practices which really could use some examination.
*This sounds contradictory but isn’t. The status quo, the APA and other networks of those in psychology serve as distributors of the latests drug and diagnostic fads.
An instructor for a state-issued chemical dependency certificate may choose her materials but does not set her curriculum in that there are state-mandated objectives to be met. You should be able to look up the objectives on the certifying body’s website or materilas.
Thanks for all replies. There is no way I am going to call the instructor out in the class. That would only make me look like a jerk to the rest of the class and turn the instructor against me on top of everything else.
I may go to CAADAC with this if the instructor shows the rest of the film on Tuesday. The dean talked to her between classes on Thursday; she mentioned this as the reason she was late to class. Thanks dean. I may be paranoid, but I’m imagining that that would make it easier to identify me, as the couple other folks I can imagine doing what I did were not in Thursday’s classes. That is if she hasn’t already put two and two together because I mentioned Scientology to her after the movie.
Honestly, his coursework matters little in the scheme of things. Anyone who goes on to do this work will get 95% of their education in the field, myself included. For me, it is a hoop to jump through more than anything else. I would prefer to be getting a better quality of education seeing as I have to put time into this, but it will not make or break me as a competent care provider. My life experience, in particular my seven-plus years of sobriety in AA and the vast amount of therapy I have done, will provide an adequate foundation to build my career upon.
Once again, it’s not my job to call out the teacher or rescue my fellow students. That much I know. That doesn’t prevent me from wanting to do it…
Thanks again for all support and advice.
To lee and ahunter, there is a significant difference between presenting an rational, reasonable alternative viewpoint and invoking the Nazis and calling the proprietors of Bedlam “psychiatrists.” I hope you can see that difference.
No, not really, since you ask. I consider Lenny Lapon to be rational and reasonble, if a bit shrill & strident at times.
ETA: … and Lenny Lapon is sure as hell not a Scientologist.
You consider that jackass to be rational and reasonable? Are you shitting me? He conflates the mainstream Western psychiatric community with Nazis, and that’s just for starters. I read the first third of the thing before his crazy blatherings got to me, but his modus operandi seems to be finding the random crackpot assholes and trumping them up as if they’re important.
I’m gonna grab one example, the first one where I figured out what he was doing:
So freakin’ what? We’re talking about an association with such historical significance that there are nine references to them total on the web. Note that we don’t even see an official position taken that the feeble-minded be sterilized, just that the president of this tiny group wanted it to happen.
The article is rife with such historical curiosities. Sure, if you want to convince me that there have been occasional crooks and kooks in the field, you’re preaching to the choir. But when you’re comparing a group to the Nazis, you’ve gotta do a helluva lot better than that.
Sheesh. What a load of crap.
Also a treat from the end of that screed is the suggestion that the following terms are equivalent, but that we should use the former:
Uh, yeah. I’d say this guy is unpopular beliefal, then.
Daniel
Not to mention if you go to the main site Richard Boyden Web-it’s pretty scary. It’s the kind of site that ends up on Crank Dot Net.
No offense, Ahunter, but if you were trying to make a point about psychiatry and mental illness, your choice of a cite had the opposite effect.
Now, Guin, I think we are entitled to a presentation of a range of views on the question of whether Free Masons praise Lucifer who is also “Satan”!, and it’s a shame how people who oppose the “received view” on this question are marginalized and labeled as cranks.
Aaaaah shit. She showed the rest of the film last night. (I skipped last week, trying to miss it. Fuck.)
And then, all serious-like, after saying “See, that’s why you have to know your HISTORY” forty times or so, she got up and asked penetrating teacher questions, such as:
“What did you learn from this film?”
“How did this film make you feel?”
“Did this film scare you?”
Well, teach, among other things, I learned that Osama wasn’t really the mastermind behind 9-11, it was his psychiatrist pals. And that psychiatrists are in cahoots with the feds. And that psychiatrists have a SOCIAL AGENDA, which is to CONTROL the ENTIRE WORLD with their MEDICATION.
I dunno. My will to live is crushed flat right now. I’m thinking I just have to let it go and find a new school for next semester.
The weird part is that every single professional person I spoke to, on and off the boards, was horrified by this, except for the dean. I don’t get it.
Wow. I only just read this thread now, but it horrifies me. I didn’t read too closely, so forgive me if I’m wrong, but did you say that she teaches every course in the program? As in, she’s singlehandedly in charge of it? No matter how good a teacher is, that’s not ideal in a college program, and in this case it sounds terrible.
To be honest, I think you’d be best off changing schools because she might be known in the field you’re planning to work in, and you’ll be written off when job hunting because employers know what graduates of your school have learned. Is the program accredited? Is there any body of professionals checking up on them?
That just makes me so angry. I’m horrified at the thought of someone seeking help for addiction and getting this kind of nonsense from a well-meaning but dreadfully misinformed counselor.