Comments by "" (@davidbockoven161) on "I would never go back to academia. Here's why." video.

  1. Thank you to Jared for the work he's doing. I agree with a lot of what he says here. I'm an adjunct instructor (primarily writing) at three different schools. I have been teaching at them for over 15 years now, so it's not exactly as transitory as Jared described in the video. It's just that none of the three wants to invest in me in a more permanent, supported capacity (which I have to say kind of hurts because it reminds me just of how little value the institutions find in the work that I do). At one of the schools, I get to teach a 300-level class in literature, which on the one hand I love because it's the area of work that I trained in, love, and really care about the most, but at that particular school I have no control over the course content or syllabus. The course I teach most often there is a course on British Poetry, and I find the difficulty level laughably and woefully inadequate. I think it's less challenging than the 100-level Introduction to Poetry class I teach at a different school (where I did create the syllabus). I'm all for enhancing accessibility for people with different abilities, but in an English class being able to read extended works is the primary interface that remains in trying to learn this type of material. I don't mean to be an elitist snob about it, but it actually sort of angers me that these students' academic credit that they're earning in these 300-level courses counts the same as the coursework I took when I know for a fact that it's not even on the same level as my high school English classes. I'd like to see more "freedom to fail" than "guided pathways" in education. Reduce the numbers of classes students are forced to take and allow them to take the classes that they think will be more beneficial to them. (Yes, I realize I'm arguing myself out of a job in not mandating something like freshman composition courses.) What upsets me about the educational system in the U.S. the most is that it's just SO lousy at providing better "pipelines" to move people into professional careers. I don't think schools should just be a very expensive technical/vocational training program, but it really does end up feeling like a glorified Ponzi scheme at some point. (This discussion is reminding me a little of Spinoza, who was offered an academic job at one point, and he's like nah, I'm just going to write the Ethics instead and completely reimagine what God might be like.) The assignment that I think is most important in a freshman composition course is a Rhetorical Analysis because they have not been trained to think of texts AS rhetorical artifacts. Like Jared says, this is not the fault of the students themselves. They have been trained for the purposes of taking standardized test to "identify the main idea" of a reading, so they usually have at least a basic understanding of the content (the "what"), but they have almost no understanding of the "how" of a reading--why it's written in the way that it is. So, I try to focus my energies on rhetorical analysis and critical thinking.
    1