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No. 2262260
>>2262213Tbh, when you even dare to tell the kids to read a whole 80 pages book they get mad and the coordination tells you to resume the book as much as possible.
I don't get why they're trying to frame this like she's some poor
victim that wasn't allowed to read a book on her own volition, plenty of kids do that.
No. 2262274
File: 1731710216615.png (45.32 KB, 901x358, 1731404067365.png)
repost from the covid thread, this woman is a university professor
No. 2262337
>>2262213>>2262243Most "elite" schools don't really rely on grading criteria or tests, it's mostly political and nepotistic factors that determine whether a potential student is admitted or denied. The top universities, at least in the USA,
aren't focused on education. It's really just a social club with very limited membership, and that membership is often procured through family connections and business partnerships.
No. 2262838
File: 1731752210744.jpeg (15.96 KB, 237x275, IMG_3532.jpeg)
Interesting thread! Academia is full of cringe. This week our news told that this non-binary disabled university lecturer showed his self-made and self-starred porn to students on a class about power and and performance in a Finnish art university.
No. 2262927
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No. 2263015
>>2262927Link to the article:
https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/23/shakespeare-made-theatre-too-white-male-cisgender/Let's not be daft, this article is just run-of-the-mill conservative clickbait meant to convince British readers that 'wokism' is going to destroy their culture. From what I've been able to find, the study simply claims that Shakespeare's plays are over-represented in British theater and advocates for the staging of a play by Lyly. The whole "too white, male and cisgender" thing is weird because the field of Shakespearean studies is known for its feminist, queer and postcolonial interpretations, so I suspect the quotes in the article are taken out of context. Maybe I'm wrong, but since the article doesn't link to the study there is no way to verify this (I've tried to look for the study but I couldn't find anything).
The article then features interviews of various conservative personalities, including a Tory MP and an American author (???). Based on the general tone and the insistence on public funding, it's clear that the article was written just to create yet another moral panic and to justify slashing higher education funding.
No. 2263510
>>2262213Reminds me of when I was in undergrad and an acquaintance complained to me about having to write a five page paper. She had never had to write anything longer than two pages in school and was incapable of finding and quoting sources. Just had no idea how to even do that.
She ended up passing the course because the professor died unexpectedly after the semester ended and the school just gave everyone in the class a passing grade.
No. 2264080
File: 1731816665211.png (192.82 KB, 636x882, uhhhhhh.png)
>>2263015NTAYRT but. It's not hard at all to figure out what funding this refers to, as it's stated at the bottom of the article. The project is called 'Diverse Alarums' and nothing has been published from it yet but the project is quite clearly delineated on the website of the university and it indeed looks very 'woke' and like a huge waste of money, especially since like you said Shakespeare plays themselves contain lots of plays on gender roles etc. It's just grifting off the government purse like there aren't much better things to spend that much research grant money on. Picrel.
Highly doubt that as they claim on the website this play from the 1500s
>a cast of characters that includes very few cisgender adult males and a plot that builds towards the celebration of a queer and trans marriagebut what do I know? It sounds like a pretty similar plot to a lot of Shakespeare, girls being disguised as boys because they need to for their safety and bla bla, there is a gay plotline though but of course these retards make everything about being 'trans.'
If you read the article you would have seen that the lead on the research project does not seem to agree with your (and my) perception of shakespeare:
>Writing for the website Before Shakespeare, Andy Kesson, the project’s principal investigator, said that “masculinity and nationalism were crucial motivating factors in the rise of Shakespeare as the arbiter of literary greatness” and that “[w]e need to be much, much more suspicious of Shakespeare’s place in contemporary theatre”.Yeah that's clearly not taken out of context, that is very clear and it's in line with what the website for the project says as well which you easily could have looked up. God I'm so tired of people always blaming conservative fearmongering for everything instead of just checking if it is true or not, it takes like 5 minutes max. And of course more 'conservative' people will be interviewed to take issue with this waste of taxpayer money, because leftists would never dare criticize a project that is all about trans and queer and critical race studies! FWIW I have no issue with a group getting funding to stage the play, it's the research aspect and retconning a 16th century play as 'trans queer lit' that I take issue with. They could have just given money for someone who isn't a retarded critical theory academic to stage the play instead and they would be more likely to do it justice in its capacity as a play from the 1500s which apparently was one of Shakespeare's biggest influences instead of using it as an opportunity to shit on Shakespeare and promote a TRA agenda. I think this article is extremely relevant to the thread topic tbh.
No. 2264121
File: 1731818954783.png (3.06 MB, 1728x2304, violent gays.png)
This has potential to be a fun thread
No. 2264146
File: 1731821414796.jpg (652.02 KB, 1080x2137, Picsart_24-11-17_00-28-21-509.…)
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/allyn-walker-professor-paedophile-virginia-b1960427.htmlThe professor tried to claim transphobia when he got backlash for trying to "destigmatize minor attracted people"
No. 2277066
>>2262213I've had the opposite experience. I'm a junior at an "elite institution" and this semester marks the first time I've ended up reading an entire book for a class. (Plato's Republic)
Have taken plenty of classes up until now with essays and readings but they have all been excerpts, or short texts <30 pages. Maybe profs are obsessed with increasing scope of the class but afraid of backlash for overwhelming workload?
Meanwhile high school english (public) assigned me so many books in full. Stuff I really loved. Maybe senior year they'll pile it on but so far college has been so undemanding and I wouldn't be surprised if it continued. If they're not Harvard they don't expect anything of you ig
No. 2291595
File: 1733439138272.png (109.71 KB, 660x677, gWUuU9H.png)
does this count?
No. 2291621
>>2291605Wow okay, that makes sense now. By the way the headline was written I thought it was saying
he was so attractive he had to see a prostitute, I was like why does he have to pay for sex if he's so attractive. What a pest
No. 2293066
>>2292303>one bullet point on second wave feminism: "they did some good stuff but they were terfs"God nona I'm in uni right now (not specifically gendershit but humanities has devolved into that anyway). My female professor did the exact same thing kek. except she said that what they were writing was so horrible and disgusting and mean to the troons, she (a grown woman who is a professor) had to physically rip the book, and could not finish it. Allegedly, this was Dworkin, who has written practically nothing specifically about troons, so she clearly hadn't even begun to read second wave feminists but was so upset at the idea she had to imagine having a temper tantrum and destroying it kek.
Also kinda blogging but our only Feminist Philosophy course is similarly taken by a fucking he/they septum piercing moid.
Another philosophy course is taken by a brony redditor who draws philosophical links on his reddit about doki doki literature club, a high school girl dating simulator (he is in his 30s-40s), and rambles about how le evil feminists bad!
No. 2293465
File: 1733524400849.mp4 (5.05 MB, 854x480, A9kY6fM.mp4)
>>2292389then this should also count
No. 2293492
I'm doing my bachelors, am in my 30s and I am continuously amazed and horrified by the fact that these 20-somethings cannot read books. This one 23yo dude actually said out loud in all seriousness that he cannot read books, I instantly think he must have some eye condition, but no he just never reads. He whined to our school councelor to get access to the audio book library meant for people with doctor's notes for it. He doesn't have dyslexia, we did screening in our first year for free, he just never reads books, so he never reads for our exams? He is not the only one either, there's at least 3 other men who are loud about not being able to read books, they use A.I for everything or audio books sped up. One day I told someone to look up a term from our 500 page source book and he seriously asked me how was he supposed to just know where that is, he can't read through it all. This school had entrance exams but some people got in with their grades from high school only, so maybe it's that but what the absolute shit is going on.
No. 2293512
File: 1733526686776.webp (8.4 KB, 320x240, IMG_4712.webp)
>Shoutout to my college profs who told us all that there was about to be a huge wave of job openings as the boomers start to retire, but then as the boomers retired their positions were just eliminated.
>Shoutout to my old coworker who got a PhD so she could stay in academia but then could never get anything but term assistant professor positions, and was now too “overqualified” for other jobs.
>Shoutout to my other coworkers who each relied on their personal combinations of pharmaceuticals, alcohol, and weed to get through the day.
>Shoutout to my last employer who began hiring 10-year term positions so they could minimize the number of researchers qualified for permanent-position benefits.
>Shoutout to the stories of academic fraud across the field, told only after NDAs were signed and cell phones were removed from the room.
>Shoutout to the endless rat race of continually having to prove that you’re worthy to speak, and continually fighting fragile-egoed men who can’t bear the idea of a woman telling him he’s wrong.
As hard as it was to make the decision, I knew it was a good thing to have left academia when watching the beginning of Lessons in Chemistry made my heart race and adrenaline start rushing through my legs. Why didn’t I have enough self-respect to leave sooner?
No. 2293519
File: 1733526986401.jpg (425.59 KB, 2560x1978, 1000009175.jpg)
>>2293503It's an "educational tool" to help give people brain damage
No. 2293577
I had a class this semester that was infuriating because the professor was so bad. The head of the department told us that minority professors are subject to more bias in their reviews, but they genuinely fucking sucked. I've been in school for a few years but now I just feel so embittered by the low quality of instruction.
>any instructional project was just free tutorials by a youtuber >professor never shared any of our grades during the entire semester >would just walk around silently or sit at their desk during classes >slides or online posts made by them were ALWAYS filled with grammar errors and typos (it's a fucking design class, how is this acceptable in higher ed) >at the end of the semester they uploaded all of our class designs to their own online portfolio, which IMO is like they're trying to get the credit for everything they had almost no influence in making>>2292303>not to be a drama queen but i feel like some of the shit my professors "taught" me in college was borderline groomingIt is. I know someone whose adult child is an adjunct professor and they posted online about how excited they are whenever they have autistic students on the cusp of trooning out.
No. 2293610
>>2293566fucking KEK
>>2293465I forgot about how hilarious this is, holy kek. How do these people walk to the mailbox without dying?
No. 2293847
File: 1733542432516.jpg (51.84 KB, 800x518, genderbread.jpg)
>>2293519topkek they made us do the genderbread persyn at my residential college
>>2293577in my foundational bio classes i had a lot of the same issues. the classes were taken by multiple professors because no one wants to take foundatioinal stem classes (because the professors are there to do research not manage an auditorium of retarded 18 year olds on their phones). but this meant there was zero consistency in teaching from one "module" to the next. the biggest joke of those classes was that they couldn't even be bothered to give us proper lectures/tutorials, we had one "seminar" per week to go over the "online mini lectures" they posted on our lms which universally had godawful sound quality and slides riddled with errors and typos IF an actual professor made one at all, plenty of them just outsourced the whole thing to fucking jove videos they'd embed. they could not have made it more glaringly clear that they had zero interest in teaching the classes.
the worst part is, despite the fact that it was super insulting, i genuinely sympathise with many of them (some were irredeemably shit). the course is so overinflated, and my country is a major exporter of education so id estimate 50% of students in my stem degree were international and the vast majority of them had limited to no english skills. and i hate to say it because it feeds into my country's racial issues but working alongside them proved that they are almost universally HUGE cheats and plagarists. i know of seven international student expulsions on these grounds at my university last year alone.
also when i requested to work with someone else for a group project once because my assigned partner had extremely limited english and kept copypasting from journal articles into our shared document as her contribution (she didnt even delete hyperlink footnotes), i got reprimanded for being racist and lectured on how in industry ill have to work with people "of different backgrounds".
No. 2294264
>>2293980NTA but I would like to see the answers too. From where I attend school one professor said that the recession in the 2000s (and you could probably add the pandemic now) has currently resulted in a drop in enrollment that will continue. Less students = less money, cut programs, and less full-time positions. I've noticed a lot of people getting hired as adjunct professors, so they are paid per semester credits with no job security.
I'm also wondering if there is just a glut of people getting masters/doctorates for niche studies who just expect to be able to be professors or researchers for careers. I don't really
get academic employment and from listening to my coworkers who have pursued masters and doctorates it's like they were just throwing huge amounts of money at higher academia and hoping to get something out of it
No. 2294412
>>2293847I had a professor for a writing/literature class break down to me about the number of international students plagiarizing/cheating on essays. they would pay grad students to write, and it would be so obvious (they have limited English but the paper is written perfectly and also use grad level analysis and concepts). but the schools love international students' wallets.
at another university we would walk into the lecture hall and it would be littered in flyers written in foreign language advertising cheating help basically, it was wild. and yeah that was an entry level stem course
No. 2306522
>>2294204read the name of the rose anon kek. praying for us. god help us.
>>2294412an english professor friend of mine has had the same breakdown to me. hes completely despondent because hes literally not allowed to fail them either, and the university makes it near impossible to investigate plagiarism SPECIFICALLY for these rich international students, if youre a domestic student with the government comping your loans youre held to a much stricter standard.
No. 2310357
File: 1734388695117.png (315.94 KB, 1307x869, 7RdxexS.png)
anything related to judith butler
No. 2319230
File: 1735023300165.png (781.26 KB, 590x879, ph.png)
What are anons' thoughts on the Cambridge smell PhD? I have mixed feelings
No. 2322302
>>2292303It's not borderline grooming, it's indoctrination.
Grooming conditions you to perform a specific role. Indoctrination/propaganda conditions you to accept an idea, usually at an institutional/cult level, and is a precursor to grooming.
If you look at NCMEC or RAINN red flag lists they still operate under the assumption that a single perpetrator does both. But everyone recognizes that approach– the creepy guy who flatters you, gets you horny, shows you porn to normalize objectification before asking for nudes, etc.
Now schools, social and traditional media, and edgelords telling you to "educate yourself" do the part of putting unfamiliar sexual ideas in your head all day so you're confused, aroused, and receptive to assistance when helpful strangers offering to help you explore "your" desires come along. It shortcuts and obfuscates the grooming process by outsourcing the first half of it.
It works beyond all expectation. People like you don't recognize it for what it is, and those who try to call it out get denounced as crazy or homophobic. It's just the cult recruitment playbook rebranded.
No. 2339446
>>2339225I'm in a Niche stem field and went to school with a friend who is also in a different Niche stem field. This is the drama that was in my friends Niche stem field.
There were 6 graduating seniors, 2 were girls, 4 guys. One of the men in that group had a fiance, and was sleeping with one of the girls. They got caught because the guy accidentally texted in the class group chat something along the lines of "hey wanna get together and do our homework for senior stem class 202? (flirty emojis)" and everyone was confused and started making fun of him because they didn't have homework for that class and also the emojis made it weird because the dude had a fiance.
My friend knew the fiance and brought it up to her and showed her the text in the group chat and it turns out she was the one who sent it to try to figure out why her husband was acting so weird with the other girl. as far as i know they separated and nobody from their class talks to the two of them now.
No. 2339545
>>2339256it's still a waste now, unless you're an industry plant. the courses don't recommend any specific books on the subject, the professors read off of ppt slides that were made 3 years ago and are already outdated. the website on which you may access these pages is broken down into 6 different websites, all of them requiring you to learn how to use them and which often include unusable, outdated boxes, and misspelled words. it's very low effort and extremely unprofessional. the clerk's desk is unavailable, the timetable logs you out, teachers don't reply to emails, they never have time to tutor you and they are rude. even in a western country, the shit they call college has become a scam. it's a fucking money laundering scheme. maybe it always was.
>>2339462in our university, girls were getting groomed into becoming prostitutes by pop culture and honeypot boyfriends, and guys were getting groomed into drug abuse through fraternity culture. some died.
No. 2341419
File: 1736534740199.png (140.37 KB, 942x840, ReedUniversity.png)
>>2277158NTAYRT but to this anon or anyone else is similarly applying, I personally advise against judging universities in this way. Of course you want to attend a university with standards, but the reality is that plenty of academically renowned universities like Berkeley, UChicago, etc, participate heavily in grade deflation and the culture can be quite competitive. Even if you select a more rigorous/academically oriented school, it does not necessarily mean that their expectations of students are higher in terms of quality. imo the standard is quantity now, having students taking full course loads while also doing research/interning, and working to pay for it all on top of it. Broadly speaking, quality expectations are lower at most universities now, schools want to keep their stats up. They're not going to let a class of 4.5 GPA stemcels and barely english speaking multimillionaire international students flunk their required English/History courses.
Standards are lower almost everywhere, and schools that boast of higher standards and intellectualism have cultures of grade deflation and difficulty for the sake of difficulty. No matter where you attend, you'll get out of it what you put in. If you hold yourself to high quality expectations and put in effort, it'll be easy to get into your professors' good graces and get all the benefits/opportunities that come with being a great student. If a school is considered rigorous nowadays, I feel like it's artificially so.
The job market is rough right now for many majors, being able to graduate on time and with little debt (and a high GPA if it matters for your field) should be the goal. There's nothing wrong with going to a solid school that seemingly has pretty average standards. When I hear people talk about high-standard schools, I think of Reed and other liberal arts universities that have their heads stuck up their intellectual asses and that are absolutely academically cringe. I personally like reading university/major subreddits and looking at how whiny the users are to get an idea of school/degree quality and culture.
No. 2366280
File: 1737855939159.png (188.53 KB, 194x500, N2ACfMe.png)
I went to the International Medieval Congress a few years back, and a lecturer gave this bizarre class on "Byzantine transgenderism" The first examples were related FtM and it was pointed out that breast reduction surgery was possible (the byzantine medical texts of the time mention it, initially as a way to deal with breast cancer).
the examples of TIFs given were all women who presented themselves as men to becomes monks (the eastern orthodox church did not have nuns during this time period)
>After nine years, they saw that the young girl was beardless and they called her ‘Hilarion the Eunuch’ since there were many such [eunuchs] wearing the habit. For her breasts, too, they were not as those of all women. Above all, she was shrunken with ascetic practices and even her menstrual period had stopped because of the deprivation.”
Anonymous, 'The Life of Hilarion', trans. James Drescher, “Hilaria,” Three Coptic Legends (Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1947), pp. 69-82.
>In the case of Hilarion, the author emphasizes that he had stop menstruating and that his breasts were “not as those of all women.” This latter detail is repeated in the story of another trans monk, Anastasius, which explicitly tells us that as a brother was dressing him after his death, the brother “saw that on his chest he had women’s breasts, looking like two shriveled up leaves,” a detail preserved verbatim in both the Syriac and Greek versions of the text.
'Life of Anastasius', 7, trans. Susan Ashbrook Harvey and Sebastian P. Brock, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 147.
Picrel Mary of Egypt, one of these women monks
they also mentioned the important role of eunuchs in byzantine courts(and brothels) often these were castrated orphan boys who would serve the various noble houses in the Byzantine Empire, as their doctors, teachers and record keepers, the Byzantines had learned this "enlightened practice" from the Persians, and this horrific and unnecessary shit was presented as progressive and used as evidence for "historical trans identity" that was erased by regressive unenlightened western people
No. 2366283
File: 1737855961729.png (257.98 KB, 500x598, KAoK93N.png)
>>2366280this was the lecturer btw
No. 2366452
File: 1737862575153.png (75.85 KB, 542x910, dda.png)
>>2319230A bunch of people tried to cancel her for some racism/Tiktok related thing. If only libfems could learn that it's a mistake to ever dance to the beat of woke drums cause those people will turn on them at the very first opportunity
No. 2366810
File: 1737883535489.jpg (34.5 KB, 564x541, 1000058574.jpg)
>>2366280It's baffling how incredibly obtuse these fuckers can be. How can someone in a position to give a lecture at an international congress have such little brain power to understand why a woman would want to take up a different role in society? How is it that such simple reasoning seems impossible for these pretentious retards? They have to be doing it on purpose
No. 2496863
File: 1745366382010.png (195.54 KB, 752x773, j5ctZ4w.png)
No. 2497212
>>2340886Late but severely underrated comment
nonnie I cackled
No. 2498198
File: 1745459474413.png (250.11 KB, 1254x919, BY8Ovy1.png)
>hundreds of young girls groomed, raped and and abused
liberal academic:here's how this effects islamophobia and further bigotry
No. 2498310
File: 1745465320339.png (52.88 KB, 626x366, does anyone actually read this…)
Revisiting the Professor Parody article by Martha Nussbaum (recommend to all anons btw) reminded me that Butler won first prize in a bad writing contest way back in the 90s
No. 2498312
File: 1745465611573.png (114.2 KB, 720x1040, 1000069020.png)
>>2498310Reminds me of the Friends episode where joey used a thesaurus kekkk
No. 2526237
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No. 2526671
>>2526237Why are academics so obsessed with the concept of fat black disabled people in sexual contexts? I have read dozens of guides and shit in the past decade and you would be amazed how many of these dull corporatecore illustrations are generic white woman × fat roll disabled
poc fanart. It has to be the same person doing all the art
No. 2526916
>>2526671I think it's really simple, they just think they're being really woke and intersectional by dumping every possible marginalized identity on a character at once. They don't want to get criticized for leaving out any possible identity group so it has to be like a fat
POC trans homosexual amputee or something.
No. 2527648
File: 1747552864642.mp4 (1.4 MB, 778x360, 1j5jhlbz.mp4)
>"Victoria" Bucholtz, aka Karla Marx, Professor of History at Mount Royal University and Queer Marxist explaining anti-trans legislature is state oppression on par with what native americans face
No. 2531302
>>2528682Kek well I do hope you're not German nonna otherwise they might make you serve jail time for a comment like that
>>2527896Academia aside, I feel like I see way more AGPs irl in my city than HSTS
No. 2533589
File: 1747983181247.png (1.24 MB, 1024x1024, PzhYt1RK.png)
No. 2533601
>>2531302Thankfully no although I have been there many times. And a lot of other universities aren't far behind but it's unreal that this was made with a grant.
>>2533589This poster is like an actual tumblrite mad libs kek. Upholding the… uh… pro-trans… democracy! Only 15 more buzzwords to go! Let's get some fat bald bearded males with soyfaces in there who claim to be nonbinary! Perfect.
No. 2535568
File: 1748157423583.png (240.67 KB, 600x776, IMG_3536.png)
No. 2536525
>>2535631she's saying gametes don't exist "at the moment of conception" which is true for male and female embryos. oocytes (egg precursors) develop in the the female fetus around weeks 18-22 post-conception.
the real argument against this line of thinking lies in the fact that it seems that these retards can't or refuse to understand causality. when they frame arguments like this, the whole thing hinges on their assumption that organisms are just collections of coincidentally related or just plain unrellated features. they can't seem to understand that all physiological features are directly downstream of genetic features, every time. it is a causal relationship. therefore, when you meet someone who has normal female secondary sex characteristics, you can assume with extreme confidence that she carries XX chromosomes in every cell of her body and that her mullerian duct developed into ovaries. the standard error on this assumption is so low its laughable.
it's just not an "imperceptable dimension" in humans. there are very well known patterns of physiological features that directly relate to what kind of gametes someone produces, or would produce if not for some kind of endogenous or exogenous disorder. if x, then y and therefore z. how the fuck does she think disorders of sexual development are diagnosed if not generally in the first place being noticed and flagged from gross physiological inconsistencies?
she's a decent hegel scholar, but she really doesn't know shit about normal human society or the biological world. in fact you could probably establish a causal relationship there too, kek.
No. 2538770
File: 1748365025665.jpg (393.97 KB, 1080x930, 1000021002.jpg)
No. 2538809
>>2535909Interesting blog. That passage actually makes me want to read Dickins for the first time. “if this day ever broke” made me chuckle. I’m not at all surprised that your average American college student would do that poorly, but I would’ve expected students who voluntarily joined an English program to be above-average American readers, even if they aren’t exceptional. But I never took a class that English majors would take so that was completely outside my cultural milieu in college. Though I could see English being a fallback major for people who want to declare
something but don’t feel good enough at anything else to do that.
No. 2539282
>>2538809the really scary truth is that the readers who were tested ARE statistically above-average readers in the USA.
>>2538997MA is pay for play kek
No. 2541941
>>2535909Kek I was coming into the thread to post this but it was posted already. This article was a wild ride, I had never read Bleak House but I read the first chapter when I started reading the article (out loud to the person I live with) and we both instantly grasped it all. I read Great Expectations for school when I was TWELVE and liked it. The comments on that substack blog too are full of 'omg well of course you can't expect non-British people to understand all of this archaic middle English and terms that aren't familiar to them but are super obvious from context oh and they had access to google and dictionaries but that would be too much to expect!' Like wtf how have academic standards for 3rd-4th year college students gotten so low that we're calling 1850s writing similar to Chaucer and saying Americans can't be expected to imagine London from writing? Jesus christ.
>>2536525Thank you anon. This should be incredibly obvious to anyone with even a high school bio background yet somehow it apparently isn't to professors in critical theory, because their whole schtick is being stubbornly ignorant of reality. Then people read Butler and come to insane conclusions like 'you can't even know if you have XX chromosomes until you get genetically tested, cissie!' when like, well, yeah, I can since I got a period and everything.
>>2538809Lol I felt similarly after reading the first chapter, I was never interested in Bleak House but I thought the first chapter of the book was so riotously funny I almost considered reading the whole book, then I realized it's 900 pages and went 'nah.' But I'm also a STEMfag who rarely reads novels. The fact that this is challenging to the average American college student actually was shocking to me (I'm not American) but then I heard that over 60% of high school graduates go to college and it seems less surprising. I honestly think we need to go back to only 5-15% of people going to university, I know this is a hot take that will upset a lot of people, but I just don't think there's any point in sending a majority of high school graduates who already can barely handle reading and math in high school into higher ed when they don't want to do the readings or homework, can't understand them, etc. We need to renormalize people getting normal, moderate-intellect jobs just with (ideally) higher-quality high school education and on-the-job training, and reserve the immense time and money investment of college for people who actually want to do it and are intellectually inclined. The fact that
>a fallback major for people who want to declare something but don’t feel good enough at anything else to do that.exists is in and of itself extremely troubling. These young adults are spending in many cases 100k plus of SOMEONE's money (maybe not their own but in many cases of taxpayer money, endowment money, their parents' money, etc) just to go to college where they don't read and don't want to do the homework and declare a 'fallback' major because they aren't interested in anything. It's really disturbing.
>>2539344Sadly a lot of 'avid readers' these days just read YA-level books so they aren't getting better at reading in the process. It's fine to read for entertainment imo just like it's fine to watch TV but thinking you're gaining some huge cognitive benefit just from reading any fiction at all is probably misguided. I've read books before where the authors themselves misused English and had horrible grammar so I'm honestly not surprised that people who read bad books don't end up benefiting all that much.
No. 2542669
>>2542554Having been on the 'prof' side of this (not an actual prof but I taught a course section at a 4-year university) I know exactly what you mean. Retards complained to the department chair that I didn't give them 100% on their completely incorrect or plagiarized assignments because 'I tried so hard I should get 100% for putting in effort' kek and I overheard them gossiping that I'm a hardass because I'm not much older than them and trying to assert authority when I was just following the grading rubric the course coordinator decided on and always gave detailed comments. I would get like 1-2 students per semester who actually tried and I wanted to jump for joy when I'd get their assignments because the rest of them were so bad I always felt like I needed several drinks after grading just to recover from the horrors I had seen. This was before ChatGPT got popular but I had a class where 35% of the assignments were 100% plagiarized, like word-for-word, from the same 2-3 websites. I swear they spent more time and energy trying to figure out how to cheat (and then complaining to the dean/department chair about getting bad grades after they cheated) than actually trying to do the very simple, intro-level homework in the first place. I fucking begged them to come to office hours but pretty much nobody ever did except the best students to ask for random career and grad school advice unrelated to the course, except a few students who were failing who would come to the last office hours of the semester before exams to beg me to 'somehow' give them free marks so they wouldn't fail after never coming to class or completing their work and then start crying and shit when I said to just retake the class since they hadn't attended or done anything all term and needed to understand the class to move forward with their degree (again it was a fundamental course needed to understand all their future courses, not a gen-ed). They had to do some very basic late-elementary to middle school level math for the course but most of them struggled with it, and the writing was out of this world bad, like people who had English as their first language and spoke fluently but based on their papers I would have assumed they were an ESL person who had just taken 1-2 introductory English classes and hadn't heard of spell check, total word salad, no punctuation (for essays/papers).
I've been looking at applying to teach at community college now since I'm job hunting but idk if I can do it. The pay is good and I have good qualifications/references for it so I've been recommended to do it by my former boss but idk nonnas, I think it would mentally break me to deal with the same thing but now with more ChatGPT and no way out if I hated it. It sucks because the 1-2 students I used to get per class were totally wonderful but I felt so bad for them having absolutely no one to challenge them or help them get better since everyone else in their classes was doing middle school level work at best.
No. 2542746
File: 1748620866095.png (234.05 KB, 1276x928, IMG_1581.png)
>In order to support the theory of a 'transgender child,' gender identity sexologists and psychiatrists "measured the level of physical attractiveness in children."
>The average age of the boys who were rated on their attractiveness, by adults, was 8 years old.
>This research cites Robert Stoller extensively. Stoller was behind one of the first gender clinics to experiment with transitioning children in the US, at UCLA.
>"We have noticed that they often have pretty faces, with fine hair, lovely complexions, graceful movements, and - especially - big, piercing, liquid eyes," Stoller said of the young boys.
>In 1994, Zucker said "We recommend that one goal be to help the child feel more secure about his or her actual gender, another to deal with the child's emotional difficulties, and a third to help with problems in the family. It's helpful to have parents set limits on things like cross-dressing, which many parents have not done before coming to us."[20]
>2018, Diane Kuhl and Wayne Martino reviewed Zucker and Bradley's 1995 work, Gender Identity Disorder and Psychosexual Problems in Children and Adolescents, and stated that the work endorses the treatment of boys deemed "pre-homosexual" as "both therapeutic and ethical."[29
No. 2542769
File: 1748622514731.mp4 (4.55 MB, 540x540, 1748622113352.mp4)
>>2542763>>2542746worth remembering john money, another sexologist and early trans-researcher who ended up defending paedophilia later on
>Money coined the term chronophilia and nepiophilia (sexual attraction to toddlers and infants) in 1986. In two 1983 case study publications, Money stated that pedophilia, among other chronophilias, could be characterized as combining "devotion, affection, and limerence", "comradeship with a touch of hero-worship" and ultimately as "harmless… in most instances".[52]>He stated[where?] that both sexual researchers and the public do not make distinctions between affectional pedophilia and sadistic pedophilia. According to Colapinto, Money told ''Paidika'', a now defunct Dutch journal of pedophilia, that:>"If I were to see the case of a boy aged 10 or 12 who's intensely attracted toward a man in his 20s or 30s, if the relationship is totally mutual, and the bonding is genuinely totally mutual, then I would not call it pathological in any way."[53][54]>Also in 1986, Money postulated the existence of multiple chronophilic forms of erotic age-roleplaying, or age impersonation, which he named "infantilism", "juvenilism", "adolescentilism", "gerontilism".[52] No. 2543812
>>2542669>a few students who were failing who would come to the last office hours of the semester before exams to beg me to 'somehow' give them free marks so they wouldn't failJust a tip, I had the same thing happening. I make them take an online "syllabus quiz" and one of the true/false parts states that they understand that begging for "extra credit" is inherently unfair to other students in the course. The next question makes them agree that they will not do this. That doesn't mean students don't complain or try to ask for EC, but I can remind them of the agreement they made with me. They also had other ways to recover points lost from exams (aside from the final).
For many of my classes, I honestly wanted them to do well and was flexible about some aspects of grading, but I had really strict rules about stuff like begging for EC and plagiarism/cheating. I'm taking time for research now and not so eager to teach again, but I'm sure I'll manage whatever new challenges have popped up. I'm not in this field to teach (though I'm not a jerk). It's just something that goes along with the research.
No. 2543866
>>2543812Kek nonna that actually sounds like a great idea, but I wasn't the course coordinator for the course, just one of the instructors, so I was pretty boxed in as far as giving them homework assignments since all the course sections of the course had to have the exact same assignments to be fair. In the future if I ever end up teaching again I will use your idea though. I was strict on plagiarism too but I'm hearing more and more stories from people who are doing college instruction now that their schools are not letting them penalize plagiarism anymore or fail students for not showing up, it's dire.
>I'm not in this field to teach (though I'm not a jerk). It's just something that goes along with the research.I left research academia on purpose because of all the fraud, dishonesty, censorship, exploitation etc. but that's why I was considering going back to teaching at the CC level - I never wanted to teach but it seems a bit more 'moral' than industry positions I guess. Working for pharma has its own issues. But whenever I think about the total lack of interest by students and the fact it's probably gotten worse since my time teaching I'm like… maybe not. I'm not so confident I could get around the chatGPT effectively whenever I read or hear university profs talking about it. It just feels like the university is collapsing.
No. 2543916
File: 1748700726022.png (68.63 KB, 698x254, James_Cantor.png)
>>2542759So basically it's weird pedoshit. Why would boys at an age where they don't really know if they're attractive or not associate themselves with femininity just because they look 'prettier' to adults? None of this makes any sense except as some adult scrote fantasy. Also you're right, boys that are attractive as teens tend to be way more well-adjusted and turn into normal adult men not troons.
>>2542763This is so disturbing. I hadn't heard of Kentler but it's true that there is so much pedophilia and pedophilia apologism in academia even to this day. See Cantor at UofT who was the architect of twitter's (pre-Musk) policy to allow pedophiles on the platform to talk openly about pedophilia as long as they weren't sharing CP. He also thinks pedophilia and porn addiction are just like being gay (picrel).
https://kinseyinstitute.org/news-events/news/2017-09-28-james-cantor.php No. 2543930
File: 1748701610625.jpg (96.04 KB, 612x576, istockphoto-618512924-612x612.…)
>>2543916that's what i don't understand either, 8 year olds are not attractive or petty, they are 8 year olds, only a pedophile would think one these kids is "prettier" than the other.
No. 2544300
File: 1748716680468.png (345.36 KB, 822x2714, pedophilia_in_intelligentsia_1…)
>>2542763The rabbit hole goes much deeper than that. There was/is a huge movement within the intelligentsia that defends and promotes pedophilia, and that has never been addressed in any significant way. Even feminist academics (including some radfems like Kate Millett) have participated in this.
No. 2544413
>>2542554I get what you mean, I had a similar experience back in college, it was kinda worse because everyone paid for private tutors who would gather "test banks" i.e. leaked pictures of previous years exams collected by students and then solve them with an explanation and sell them to the students subscribed to them. And when the exam is nothing like the test banks, they cry about how unfair it is lol. They also ignore when a prof says what we studied on the midterm would be on the final and only study everything after it then get upset at questions from the midterm exam. You solved them back then anways, why can’t you solve them now? They want to memorize everything with 0 understanding. And for projects, they pay someone to do it for them, only to embarrass themselves when asked to explain how they made such a project. They even did this on senior projects. Si retarded. This is the future workforce BTW. The sad part is companies don't care and would hire them for seemingly having more achievements and higher grades despite being actually retarded and not understanding or knowing anything at all. Now I won't lie and pretend to be a genius either, because I did get private tutors on my first 2 years, specifically for physics and calculus because I'm awful at math and formulas and the professors could never get the point across to me no matter how hard they tried, but the private tutors' videos with slow explanations of every single point and how the physics and math were invented actually helped me understand it better. I got Bs in physics I and II but C and D in calculus I and calculus II despite everything because I'm retarded no matter what lmao. There was this course called digital logic design and the professor had a THICK French accent so it was slightly hard to understand her but I managed and I always asked questions and tried my best to solve things whenever she gave us class exercises so I was basically the teacher's pet, so when I made mistakes on the exam, she'd ignore them and give me a full score because she knows I had potential but I struggle with some stuff. Kinda sad because we were allowed to use calculators and everything but I still couldn't figure it out because, well, I'm retarded. During the final exam, I didn't have time to study the last chapter of the course which was the longest and hardest, everyone else said they're gonna skip it, too, so I joined them saying maybe it won't be on the exam anyways. It was the last question with 9 points for this 40 point exam lmao. The prof could tell I was struggling with this last question and panicking so she whispered the answer into my ears lmao. I will never forget her help. I used to greet her whenever I see her even after not studying any of her courses anymore. I got a C+ in the course I think. Another incident that happened to me was during my very last university year, my mom passed away like 10 days before final exams week, and I was mentally and physically exhausted I got hospitalized a few times, but I tried my best to study everything as hard as possible because I only had 4 courses and the senior project to work on, so I didn't want to slack off so I can make my mom's dream come true when I succeed. I stayed up all night studying for my last final exam ever in cyber security, and I decided to take a one hour nap a few hours before the bus arrives, I set an alarm and everything but apparently, I woke up and turned it off subconsciously and went back to sleep…younger sister came back from school and asked didn't you say you have a final exam by now? Why are you sleeping? I panicked and looked at the time, I was 1 hour late to this 2 hours exam, so I called a taxi because the bus is long gone, and I arrive there panicking and crying but the supervisor said no. I went and cried in my cyber security prof's office explaining my situation and she said "I thought you overslept and was gonna let you have the exam anyways", I lied to her and said dad had a heart attack and he's all alone at home with me only and everyone else is at school and mom is dead, she believed me and let me have the exam and I thankfully got a B or B+ on the course and got 30~ out of 40 on the exam despite skipping 2 chapters, while everyone else who studied and got to have the exam in time got like 7 out of 40. I'll never forget her kindness to me and I still feel awful for lying but I just freaked out and didn't know what to say. Thankfully I graduated and it's all in the past now. Sorry for wall of text blogpost though.
No. 2544703
>>2544196AYRT and I think there's a couple things going on, 1. a lot of YA slop is ff.net/ao3 tier level writing with very little creativity in terms of writing style, heavy use of simile over complex/extended metaphor, etc. so basically even if you read a lot of YA-slop you still won't get to a much higher reading level since it's basically written for like an 8th grade reading level and 2. the Dickens has some unfamiliar words or cultural references that most modern YA books don't, so it's harder for them to process and they just give up due to shorter attention spans and getting discouraged by anything difficult or unfamiliar. I actually read the full study that blog post is based on and the researchers explained that a lot of the 'competent' readers (the middle group that didn't understand the whole passage but understood some of the sentences) started off looking up unfamiliar words and trying to parse the earlier sentences, but eventually gave up, or if they didn't look up a word they assumed what it meant and continued to assume that even after the context made it obvious that wasn't the meaning. A vast majority of the English Majors in the study didn't even realize after 7 paragraphs that the passage involved a court of law/legal proceedings, including most of the 'competent' reading group - even though the 7th paragraph includes over a dozen obvious legal terms like 'court,' 'counsel,' 'the judge,' 'the bench,' etc. This partly has to do not only with bad reading comprehension but with short attention span - basically the students were getting burnt out by the difficulty of the passage and stopped actively trying to understand it after the first couple paragraphs. That wouldn't happen with YA books because they're written simply enough that they can be understood easily without too much mental effort.
>>2544300NTA but I've been aware of this for a long time and it surprises me how many people don't know this. Even many famous critical theorist/Frankfurt School philosophers (who are pretty much the only philosophers anyone cares about or teaches past the 101 level in modern academia) like Foucault and the others mentioned in your screenshot were open pedos or at least pro-pedo. Almost every famous 'queer theorist' from like the 60s-90s had at least some books or articles supporting pedophilia. I think whoever wrote that passage in your pic was correct that part of the reason no one really looks into it is because Academia is heavily leftist-skewed (well, almost entirely leftist) and most recent humanities academia still idolizes these Frankfurt School philosophers or sexologists like Kinsey/Freud/etc. So it would look 'unflattering' for them to figure with the pedophilia in the philosophy but that also means the pro-pedophilia lean continues in modern academia, albeit often less explicitly. Critical theory/Frankfurt School philosophy basically all hinges on deconstruction and the idea there is no objective morality or truth, so it makes sense that any field/philosophy heavily based in these ideas would be hostile to 'moral outrage' including outrage about child exploitation. You can see this in the modern troon movement and how they treat parent groups who think children shouldn't be able to medically transition or shouldn't be reading pornographic comic books about fisting and anal sex in elementary/middle school.
No. 2544868
>>2544302This screenshot also touches on an issue that drives me absolutely insane about modern humanities academia which is the insane overreliance on the Noble Savage trope. Like it's totally batshit crazy how far leftist academics have gone to trying to justify absolutely EVERYTHING that is bad in modern civilization (including troonism, pedophilia, massive relationship age gaps, tankie communism, woo-woo antiscienceism/premodern medicine - which to be clear wasn't all bad but some of it was - and mistreatment of women as well as tons of other shit I can't name off the top of my head) with appeals to the Noble Savage and 'tribal societies.' You'd think the humanities academe would be full of careful thought about how to improve our already advanced and sophisticated civilization(s) but instead whenever some crazy, regressive thing gets flagged by normies as immoral/wrong/stupid, these academic types always have to refer to some mythical perfect tribal society of probably like 500 people in a remote steppe or jungle and insist that THEY had the thing and it worked for THEM so we should have it too. As this excerpt implies, they're usually glossing over some pretty serious immoral practices those societies had, and they don't consider that something which worked for a small hunter-gatherer tribe likely won't work for a large society of millions/billions. It's actually disturbing to me how the modern academic left considers everything pre-post-modernism but post-civilization bad and evil, but everything pre-civilization is supposed to be magically good and worked really well but was just destroyed by evil pre-modernity. I've seen the Noble Savage shit invoked by academics probably two dozen times just in the last month alone to justify (usually modern) shit like xenogenders, polygamy, pedophilia, surrogacy, etc. and when pressed these people can never identify exactly what it is they're talking about, they just intuitively know that those early stone-age societies were more happy, peaceful and moral. It's like they think no one killed, raped, or took advantage of anyone else before the Western Hegemony introduced the idea of objective morality and biological sex to them or something. Anyway the quotes in your reddit screencaps were really interesting to read, nonna, thanks, even though I am somewhat familiar with the pedophilia shilling in that particular intellectual lineage.
>>2544413It really concerns me that this is the future workforce. I got my bachelors in the early 2010s and I already thought a lot of students were retarded back then, and there was definitely some of what you're describing (dishonesty, plagiarism, memorizing only for the latest test or begging profs to curve up their grades 'because I have to apply to med school' kek) happening back then, but when I went back to school and what I hear from current college students is like 20x worse than what I experienced doing my bachelor's and it makes me actually worried because a lot of millennials in the white-collar workforce are already so incompetent so it can only get worse. Like I had a friend in 4th year who plagiarized her lab partner for 2 paragraphs of her paper, and had to go through an entire plagiarism courtroom type procedure (with the guy she plagiarized from as a witness) to basically let her stay in university, but she got zero on all her courses that semester and had to re-do a year for copying 2 paragraphs of a 10-page paper because she ran out of time before the deadline. When I was more recently in university teaching I'd have students who plagiarized their entire assignments repeatedly and I'd be told by higher-ups to just 'give them zero or, if you're comfortable, 30-40% so they don't fail the class' on the assignment and otherwise not penalize them in any way, even if it wasn't their first instance of plagiarism. I ended up passing dozens of students who had plagiarized on multiple assignments over the 5 years I taught the course even though I was against it.
That was a few years ago but now it's even worse. Where I live passed a law that students can't be failed or penalized with their grades if they don't attend any classes, so some of the profs/instructors I know have been forced to pass students who never showed up or did any work for the whole semester as long as they somehow managed to pass the final exam. They could have been in another country for all anyone knows (I had a student who was in South Africa for the whole time she was supposed to be taking my course except for the first day, and my course had a mandatory attendance policy. She only failed because she kept sending me doctor's notes to excuse her absences but I noticed it was a clinic in South Africa and she eventually fessed up to being out of the country and having a doctor relative who was writing her doctor's notes lmao - for a lab course). A prof I know who teaches a jazz arrangement class at a music conservatory was forced by the dean to pass a student who submitted an entire, extremely famous Count Basie arrangement of a very famous song for multiple arranging projects. Even after he warned her she would fail the class if she didn't do her own work she just submitted it again a month later kek, and he was like 'well there's actually nothing I can do about it because the college doesn't want us penalizing people heavily for plagiarism.'
Also as an aside you're not retarded for struggling with Calc II, I know people with math and physics PhDs who failed that class more than once - my BFF in college who ended up doing a physics PhD at MIT said she got a D in Calc II and it was the only math class she ever found hard. I'm a 'stats expert' relative to other people in my STEM field and failed Calc II the first time I took it. Calc and physics are normal classes to be shit at in college.
Anyway sorry for the long rant but things are getting dire now and the people I know who teach college classes are more and more 'whatever' about the whole thing, treating their students like actual children. A lot of them are into the 'no grades' ethos and just give everyone an A no matter what because they think assessments are useless/evil, while the people who still believe in having standards are outvoted by the dean/department chair/other admins. When I was teaching I called a meeting with higher-ups to talk about the tanking academic standards and cheating issues and they basically told me 'there's nothing we can do, the kids are coming out of high school/community college so retarded but with such high grades that the best we can do is try to teach them how to write legibly and do basic elementary school math and hope for the best, otherwise we wouldn't have enough students left to run the department. Just try to help them.' So yeah idk if anything will be fixed without primary/secondary schools becoming better or colleges deciding they don't care about money/butts in seats. Shit's getting scary.
No. 2545056
>>2544994To be exact, 60% couldn't understand him AT ALL, and 46% mostly couldn't understand it (to the point many of them didn't get it was about lawyers/a courtroom). Only 4% of the readers mostly understood the passage.
>>2545045You're probably right, but a lot of the academics in question have never even written a book, just academic journal articles that on average like 2 people ever read (no I'm not exaggerating). So that can't be the only reason.
No. 2545549
File: 1748792651372.png (30 KB, 1155x181, Screenshot 2025-06-01 163654.p…)
>>2535909this comment made me kek, i think i was 12/13 when i read bleak house and rereading that paragraph made sense to me. media literacy is dead.
No. 2545794
>>25450951st AYRT nonna and yeah I've seen it not just in white people either (although I understand what the other nonna is saying about wealthy white western profs being some of the most insufferable about this) but in pretty much every humanities academic. Kek the India being a trans-inclusive paradise shit always cracks me up considering what actually goes on with Hijras.
>>2545549I read not bleak house but Great Expectations when I was 13 and I thought his writing was accessible, if annoyingly long-winded, too. Seems like a lot of college students currently just don't read/have never read books though.
No. 2545984
>>2544302Theodore Kaczynski actually did a lot of writing and study on primitive cultures from prison, he wrote a lot of commentary on what he had read. I remember on one he touched about an aboriginal woman crying and having a meltdown after she was forced to marry an old man, so it wasn't really happy for the women at all. They also didn't share all food like people think, powerful people hoarded the best and nutritious meat. Inuit women would hide seal meat in their vaginas.
I also read some books on Melanesian islanders and wow, it's schizophrenic. They had no concept of natural death, so if someone died, they spent a week playing cluedo trying to work out who cast the black magic. They would pray and chant for hours on end to ward off other evil spells. They are also really envious societies, if you gather too many yams or catch too many fish, everyone would assume you cast black magic to whisk the fish from their basket and turn on you.
Primitive societies mostly function like religious cults, they're patriarchal with elders hoarding wives, and you just have no freedom because everyone is gossiping and backstabbing one another. At least in modern society you can go to work, punch in, punch out, and it doesn't matter too much if your co-workers hate you. Back then it was death, and gossiping and mean rumors really did destroy your life.
No. 2545991
>>2545984Different primitive cultures (and even extant tribes) had/have a variety of different cultural norms, so some were better about sharing food than others, and some normalized big age gap marriages/partnerships (or even monogamy/marriage at all) more than others, but you'd be hard-pressed to find any evidence of any tribe that did not include rape and violence against women/girls because moids are just more violent and rapey by nature. Some tribes would try to kill/abandon the violent and rapey moids if they were discovered, but again, it wasn't always possible for the rest of the tribe to know if they managed to scare their
victims into silence. There have been quite a lot of good articles about this, the noble savage trope is really just wishful thinking retardation because most of them had some very messed up cultural practices even if they didn't have overtly patrilineal or 'patriarchal' structure.
No. 2546185
>>2545095>>2545794I've personally only had experience with white American academics.
>>2545984>>2545991Most early human groups were just extended family units so it makes sense that they were just cults of personality centered around one slightly more charismatic or strong moid who put a lot of rules into place to serve his personal interests/ego. His successors (assuming that the group wasn't broken up or integrated into a larger or more successful one) would often keep those rules in place to preserve the transition of power which led to them being codified as something more than just 'a dumbass fifty years ago made it so that meal sharing works like this'.
No. 2546190
>>2545991>the noble savage tropeI am so sick of this being how history is rewritten. Every culture throughout time,
every single one of them, has been massively rapey. It makes me ill whenever I see ahit like "the tribe was so peaceful until they had outside intervention" as if it wasn't standard practice since the dawn of fucking time for men to capture & violate women from other tribes as the spoils of war. There's an old ass documentary on YouTube about a tribe in the Amazon and it had a fully uncensored scene of a feral woman tied into a rack of sticks bent over and we are explicitly told what the purpose of this is, it's
documented No. 2546226
A few times online I've come across people that will make a big deal asking about my job, education level and income. And afterwards they'll go into bragging detail about how I'll be destroying my body working menial jobs while they'll be earning six figures sitting comfortably in an office. This mentality is what causes so many of these people to cry like hysterical piggies about "elite overproduction" the second they don't get the lifestyle they think they deserve.
I've read zoomers are absolutely delusional about the money they'll make upon graduation, where every one expects six figures minimum for their first job offer, regardless of their degree. Even people studying things like social work or english literature have this mentality. There was a controversy surrounding a film school, where the people with post grad degrees were found to have an average income of $30,000 per year for their first job upon graduation (this was 7 or so years ago). In the article one of the graduating students literally said "This was supposed to be a way to climb the social classes", so they're basically coming out and saying "I'm supposed to be better than you".
I don't think there's such a thing as "elite overproduction", these people like the film students just got scammed and there's nothing special about them. They were hustled and ripped off, their teachers filled their heads with "give me all this money and you'll be an elite film maker higher than the rest" and they all ended up poor and straddled with debt. By all criteria this is a scam on the level of Trump University, if you get angry at stuff like Trump University and give a pass for established universities being just as scummy, you are doing it wrong.
Even the ones doing somewhat normal degrees are assuming they're the "elite". And based on personal experience at high school, I know exactly why they think this way. Our teachers crowded us into the assembly hall, got out a white board and drew up how much we'd earn being university educated, and how much we'd earn without it. The teacher explicitly said we'd be wasting our potential if we didn't go to university.
Turns out high schools get graded by the government based on how many graduates go into higher education. Gee, I wonder what the perverse incentive is for that. So that pushes the teachers to start cultivating a narrative of how higher education means you're elite and not having it means you're a peon. They would literally say things like "it doesn't matter what degree you get, as long as you get a degree", they made no mention of the income disparities between degrees, which is the most important factor when it comes to investing tens of thousands into higher education IF you are using it climb the social classes.
No. 2546485
>>2546190It always seems like an insidious way to shit on all the progress made by feminists and other civil rights progress in more modern/civilized cultures too, like obviously everything isn't perfect in modern China or Europe or North America but we've had hundreds of years of women incrementally making gains over time and some random genderist troon academic will come in and give a speech about how there was no need for codified women's rights in Tribal Culture because they all were perfect women respecters before the evil colonizers came with their codified laws and concepts of binary sex which is why we need to let troons into women's bathrooms (a thing feminists fought for) or women's sports (a thing feminists fought for) or any number of other actually hard-won progressive institutions/rights.
>>2546443I agree it's really interesting to learn how different the various extant tribal cultures are and to look at anthropological records from first contact of earlier tribal societies because yeah, the whole evopsych 'caveman did X' bs gets annoyingly reductive, but the academics who point to these tribes to prove some social justice point usually just pick and choose details about these cultures and ignore everything else about them that doesn't fit their thesis which is where I start to have a problem.
>>2546226Kek I have a PhD and I agree with you. I knew going into my PhD that it likely wouldn't dramatically increase my earning potential over a Master's but I did it anyway because the job market was shit either way and I liked research so it was a way to get paid for research for a few more years. But this has been true at least for the last 10-20 years so idk where people are getting the idea that university guarantees good pay or 'better' jobs. It depends what kind of job you want of course, but a lot of tradie jobs or starting a small business can also involve a lot of intelligence, complex thinking, etc. and actually be more rewarding in many ways (I've worked manual labor jobs in the past which were some of the most rewarding jobs I've ever had since you got to see how you were directly helping people day after day and the work was rarely boring).
>Our teachers crowded us into the assembly hall, got out a white board and drew up how much we'd earn being university educated, and how much we'd earn without it. The teacher explicitly said we'd be wasting our potential if we didn't go to university. This happened to me too but I already knew it was bullshit by the time I'd finished my bachelors in the early 2010s. There's a lot of fearmongering now about conservatives telling people to stay out of college and get into a trade or apprenticeship because 'they're trying to dumb everyone down so they can have fascism' but honestly college students are mostly dumb and not learning much that's useful in college anyway, only a minority of college students really want to be there and are taking full advantage of the learning opportunity. I think the emphasis on college is partly reactionary to what conservatives are saying but in this instance they're not entirely wrong, you can't run a successful society with office jobs alone, you need people to do all sorts of work and a lot of it is more essential than sitting in an office making powerpoints or filling out paperwork. University is a good option for people who either 1. actually love learning and are going to put the work in because they love the learning process so much (and have the money for it), 2. are physically disabled in some way and need a sit-down job, or 3. have a very specific career in mind like healthcare worker, lawyer, engineer, etc. It's not even necessary anymore (and tbh for most of history it never was) to be a journalist, banker, secretary, small business owner/middle manager or most of the other nonspecific white collar jobs aside from hiring committees preferring to employ people with degrees. But if fewer people get random nonspecific degrees, it will stop being considered a job requirement. You can learn so much from the internet or the public library that if you just want to read some books you don't need to pay for university to do so, and a lot of the 'just get whatever degree' degrees like business, communications, english, etc. weren't traditionally degrees in 4-year colleges anyway until they started trying to scam everyone into going. I see the quality of writing produced by people with journalism and comms degrees for example and weep, you could learn to write better by just sitting down and reading some books and old newspapers.
No. 2547000
>>2545984> I also read some books on Melanesian islanders and wow, it's schizophrenic. They had no concept of natural death, so if someone died, they spent a week playing cluedo trying to work out who cast the black magic. They would pray and chant for hours on end to ward off other evil spells. They are also really envious societies, if you gather too many yams or catch too many fish, everyone would assume you cast black magic to whisk the fish from their basket and turn on you. This is one of the craziest things about the noble savage thing, they never want to say that they have false or harmful beliefs. I've also seen a lot of people try to say that Indigenous societies have knowledge that should be called 'scientific' and it's racist to say it's not science. Obviously they have a lot of practical knowledge to survive but none of it is produced in a scientific way. And a lot of it comes from religious beliefs which they then try to argue is proof their religion is real and should be respected as a 'way of knowing.' I read the book 'plants have so much to give us' and the author talks about how anishinaabe people receive signs from nature about what to do and not do. How is that different from some crystal girl reading angel numbers. But if you point it out, you're racist and colonialist. It's not their fault they didn't invent science and they're not inferior for not inventing the scientific method from scratch. But it is insane to act like this is in any way compatible with science or equally
valid.
No. 2547164
>>2547137Yep this is true, and it really feels like an intentional dumbing down of the populace. A lot of these schools now pay a lot more for administrators than they pay for profs, and are slowly phasing out tenure in order to bring in a bunch of underpaid adjuncts while trying to convince students they're still getting their money's worth. One example is I used to work for a professor who taught East Asian history courses that were heavy on sources, context, anthropological and historical texts, etc. The courses were really interesting, I took multiple courses with him as electives even though I did a STEM degree because he was such a good teacher. But he got fired and replaced with a lady who taught 'media' courses on kpop and kdrama and anime, because apparently students were 'more willing to pay money for media-centric courses than history courses' and no one batted an eye at the total uselessness of kdrama class replacing history and anthropology classes. One of the worst parts of this cycle is the glamorization of university has led to students genuinely believing they're well-educated if they pass college, and thinking they know more than other people around them, no matter how little they actually learned or how much bullshit they were taught. Then that's the pool of students that also goes on to grad school, does research, and becomes profs, continuing and worsening the cycle until there will be no one left to properly teach any of the subjects except for a few actually intellectual people who probably get nabbed by the top schools. Already when I was in college last time, I noticed that the older profs were much better and had much higher standards than the younger profs, but a lot of the best profs I had are near retirement age now and will be completely replaced by the younger ones who have lower expectations, don't grade fairly, and have less genuine knowledge of their field.
Deleted to add that one of the biggest issues with hiring adjuncts is that they are totally beholden to their students in a way tenured profs are not. Tenured profs can get put on academic probation or pulled from teaching courses if they fail too many students too many semesters in a row, but if an adjunct gets too many student complaints because they're grading harshly or failing too many students, or if their classes are 'boring' or 'too hard' they will get instantly fired and replaced with someone willing to have a customer-first mindset about the students. So it's not just about teaching quality (adjuncts can be just as good or better at teaching than tenured professors) but it's about the inherent disposability of those job roles. As an adjunct you are fucked if the average for your course is a C or D, even if the students all deserve to fail, which turns into a vicious cycle of classes getting easier and less rigorous so enrolment stays high.
No. 2547178
>>2547164I find it embarrassing that so many colleges now have courses on things like analyzing Taylor Swift or Beyonce lyrics. That's something you should do in your spare time for fun, not something you should charge hundreds of dollars for. Anything you can learn by analyzing pop lyrics, you can learn better by analyzing something more complex and challenging with more pre-existing research on it. English Lit majors have a massive inferiority complex about the value of their degree and yet a lot of them seem to resist anything that would make it more rigorous and selective.
College really shouldn't be about the customer getting what they want. The whole point is you don't know enough and someone wiser and more experienced will teach you. Good teachers don't have to be hardasses but they do have to be passionate, well educated, and have strong convictions. I've had amazing professors in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and STEM, and what they had in common was they were confident in their ownership of the material without being petty little fascists either. Rare balance to walk between the people pleasers, the mini-tyrants, and the ones who don't give a fuck.
No. 2547196
>>2547178>I find it embarrassing that so many colleges now have courses on things like analyzing Taylor Swift or Beyonce lyrics. Wait is this actually real? Tswift has some of the worst lyrics in the world kek I can't even imagine what a class on analysing her lyrics would be like 'my baby flies high like a jet stream up above the whole scene' or 'sometimes it feels like everyone around me is an adult baby' please write a 3-paragraph essay on the deep meaning of the words, kids! I agree about already devalued majors like English Lit though, I have a friend who tried to do a PhD in English Lit after already having a masters (her masters thesis was on like Don Quixote or something long and complicated like that) and she showed me the classes she had to pick between and they were just… bizarre. I don't think there was a single class that was on any kind of novel or any writing prior to 1950. There were classes about stuff like 'how walking around relates to creativity' that had hands-on assignments where you had to walk around town and then write about your feelings about walking places, classes about extremely niche DEI-related topics like 'Australian Aboriginal Poetry between 1970-1995 (no the university is not in Australia)' and multiple animal rights and environmentalism courses that didn't even seem to relate to English Lit at all. I think there was also a course about how to effectively politically protest. She was like 'I just want literally one class that's about reading and analysing actual books but there are none.' She wasn't kidding, I went through the whole course calendar and there really wasn't anything. At that point what is even the purpose of having an English Lit degree at all? She dropped out (not just because she hated the classes but partially because of that) and just became a published writer with multiple books while working in like a restaurant instead. Also there were like 3 consecutive sexual harassment scandals by profs in the department around the time she quit despite all of the courses being related to feminism, activism, and other social justice causes kek.
>The whole point is you don't know enough and someone wiser and more experienced will teach you.Yeah that SHOULD be the point but it seems like it's not really emphasized much anymore because the customer is king so any prof who challenges students is seen as bad unless they happen to be exceptionally fun (which sorry, a lot of researchers aren't, they can't help it). I think a lot of profs are also just getting frustrated because their hands are tied when it comes to plagiarism, AI, cheating, lack of attendance, accommodations they can't ask about and other modern student issues so they're making their classes more and more convoluted to try to work around the fact they can't hold students to any consistent standard. I agree a good instructor doesn't have to be a total hardass, but if students are coming to class and refusing to do readings, constantly turning in AI-written homework, etc. they should not all be passing the class, period. Unfortunately holding students to basic standards is penalized. You can't run a class effectively if half the students are being disruptive, don't show up, scroll social media on their phones all class or haven't done any of the work/readings. Then when students don't do the readings, profs remove readings and make classes easier. Many English or History/Classics profs now don't even assign full books/articles as readings, just short excerpts, and the students still won't do them. You can't get as much from a short excerpt from a novel as you get from reading the whole novel, the same way reading a science paper abstract is far more useless than reading the entire paper.
It's one of my pet peeves too but I see more and more comments from students online (and even hear from people I know) that they 'have to' use AI for all their homework because 'otherwise it's impossible to get the work done.' But then when you ask them what all the work is, it's less than millennials had to do in school. Like there's some cognitive damage happening or something where students actually believe it's impossible to be asked to do a normal courseload worth of work so they excuse making AI do all of it and think they're still somehow getting an education even though they're barely participating. Why even get a degree at that point?
No. 2547312
>>2547002the alternative math is what's really concerning. because it's not teaching "alternative ways of knowing" math but rather depriving
poc of actual math
No. 2547340
>>2542605kek I cared so much I think the professor ended up getting a small crush on me.
That confuses me because why are people taking these advanced courses then lmao. I see it too. You deliberately chose this field of study, deliberately signed up for advanced courses, then get mad when you have to do advanced coursework?
>>2542669Very interesting, thank you nonna. I offer to help tutor my classmates and tell them about a professor's office hours and they still don't use any resources. They truly don't give a fuck. I was interested in teaching too, but given my experiences now, I don't know if its a smart idea. I love teaching and tutoring, but the students are insufferable.
Emphasis on their inability to understand basic English and math. I was often calculating their grades for them because I guess addition, subtraction, and percentages are too much??
>>2542888a discord server sounds so nice but most of us would probably be too paranoid to interact much
>>2544413It sounds like you're not retarded, you just had a lot going on and I'm sure your courses were more rigorous. That's real silly that they put so much effort into cheating; I'm sure your professors appreciated all the effort you put into your classes. Weird but you remind me of a baby bird, nonna. in a loving way
No. 2547350
>>2547340The putting more effort into cheating than actually doing the work bit is the bit that really gets me. Why? What's the point? It's not like college is literally mandatory so why go if you just are going to say 'oh no I can't do this but I can cheat my way through it instead'?
>You deliberately chose this field of study, deliberately signed up for advanced courses, then get mad when you have to do advanced coursework?Exactly. It's not like you even get extra grades for taking advanced-level classes in university, so why?
>I was often calculating their grades for them because I guess addition, subtraction, and percentages are too much??Kek same, it's really something.
No. 2547405
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>>2547385I hope you're not an english major anon kek… it was already kind of explained in the article.
>As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.>The subject cannot make the leap to figurative language. She first guesses that the dinosaur is just “bones” and then is stuck stating that the bones are “waddling, um, all up the hill” because she can see that Dickens has the dinosaur moving. Because she cannot logically tie the ideas together, she just leaves her interpretation as is and goes on to the next sentence. Obviously this is not referring to a fossil, since the dinosaur is referred to as moving. 'It would not be wonderful' means 'it would not cause wonder' in this context, i.e., it would not be shocking or it would not be surprising. So rewrite the passage in your head as
>(there was) as much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be surprising to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.For additional context/fun facts Megalosaurus is the first dinosaur fossil discovered in Great Britain (Oxfordshire iirc) a few years before Dickens wrote Bleak House (sorry for deleting, I shared a wrong fact kek - here's actual Megalosaurus).
No. 2547835
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>>2547377I'm pretty sure you're confused about the relation between "there is lots of mud" and "dinosaurs could be (figuratively) walking about." I see what you're talking about with the fossil-hutning (and honestly that would be a fun reading if it were about bones), but the more common interpretation would be that the mud-covered street felt nasty and primitive, hence why it "would not be wonderful (weird)" to see a Megalosaurus. The emphasis is that the dinosaur and the muddy scene are not at odds with each other, not that the dinosaur emerged from the mud.
>>2547312To be fair, these 'alternative math' courses are actually pretty rare and usually restricted to upper level courses, often with some cultural material included. Google 'ethnomathematics' for an example. There have been attempts to sneak them into grade school, although even that is pretty limited so far. See picrel, a teacher who wrote to evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne from whyevolutionistrue.
>>2547196Yep, google Taylor Swift or Beyonce college courses and you get stuff like this:
> Like Swift’s Eras tour, the topics explored in the course progress album by album. The syllabus pairs a specific interpretive focus with each album to encourage students to apply their textual analysis skills to Swift’s lyrics. For example, one week students will consider symbolism and foreshadowing on the album 1989. In another week, they will consider Swift’s use of fictional characters to drive narratives in her album Evermore. The course will also lay out the common pop song structures to show how formal manipulation can create meaning.This would be acceptable for a middle school teacher trying to teach students about basic concepts in songwriting, but I don't see how this merits a semester.
> It's one of my pet peeves too but I see more and more comments from students online (and even hear from people I know) that they 'have to' use AI for all their homework because 'otherwise it's impossible to get the work done.'These people probably don't actually have the skills, intellectual or otherwise, to pull it off. I talked to a friend of mine who did the same high-intensity advanced high school program I did. She claimed that there was a cheating ring and everyone "had to cheat" to survive it. I felt completely blindsided because I definitely did the homework myself and I certainly wasn't in any cheating ring. It was grueling, but I did it and ended up one of the top students. She wasn't even taking the advanced math classes. I suspect she didn't have the discipline to get through all the material because she's always struggled with follow-through.
I did a social science and computer science at college and the difference between them was bleak. The social science students were pretty self-motivated and I definitely don't recall any cheating. The computer science students cheated blatantly, sharing all the answers they found, posting their homework online, bragging about using ChatGPT for everything, and I got the impression they didn't care at all about actually learning the material.
No. 2547836
>>2547819
>The emphasis is that the dinosaur and the muddy scene are not at odds with each other, not that the dinosaur emerged from the mud.
Well, sort of. It's a three-part metaphor: there was as much mud in the streets (1) as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth (2) and it would not be surprising to meet a megalosaurus… In this case the second part is most likely referring to either Genesis or Noah's flood, or in a modern interpretation you could say to a continent that just rose up out of the seas at some point in Earth's history. So the ground is SO extremely muddy and waterlogged it's like flood waters covering the earth had just receded, and therefore (going back to the beginning of time when the continent first emerged from the flood waters) it would seem appropriate/unsurprising to see a dinosaur crawling up onto the land.
>>2547819
The more concerning thing with elementary math is that they introduced widespread non-algorithmic math teaching, which isn't exactly 'ethnomathematics' but it could be considered an 'alternative way of knowing/doing' math, and it's making a lot of kids confused and innumerate. All the weird division strategies that are 100x more convoluted than simple long division for example, just to feel like kids are 'exploring' how to figure out math on their own instead of learning the fundamentals that smart people already figured out first. Lots of problems that are teaching kids to add in weird ways, etc. I wish I could remember the name of the mathematician I saw making videos about this, but if I remember I will post it in the thread even though it's less academia-related and more primary-education related, of course it was the retarded invention of academics though.
> Like Swift’s Eras tour, the topics explored in the course progress album by album. The syllabus pairs a specific interpretive focus with each album to encourage students to apply their textual analysis skills to Swift’s lyrics. For example, one week students will consider symbolism and foreshadowing on the album 1989. In another week, they will consider Swift’s use of fictional characters to drive narratives in her album Evermore. The course will also lay out the common pop song structures to show how formal manipulation can create meaning.
This is insane because her lyrics and songforms are incredibly simplistic, sophomoric even, and the topics of her songs are either attention-seeking puzzles for her fans about her various PR romances or even more attention-seeking whining about how 'mean' everyone in the entertainment industry has been to her and how persecuted she is despite being one of the richest musicians of all time. Like thematically there is nothing worthy of exploring in Tswift's music for a college student, when they could be learning about actually interesting and meaningful topics instead, and in terms of writing quality I was writing better and more complex lyrics when I was twelve years old. Why would anyone waste hundreds to thousands of dollars to take a course about this?
>These people probably don't actually have the skills, intellectual or otherwise, to pull it off.
This is probably true, but how did it get this way? 10-15 years ago a similar number of students were taking those same courseloads (or heavier ones - a lot of profs and high school teachers have made their coursework progressively lighter over the past decade or two) and were managing to pass without chatGPT or stealing from github or whatever, for the most part. So either they can't pull it off because they've gotten used to being lazy/unfocused/distracted, or it's because students are getting such a low level education at all levels that by the time they reach high school/college they're hopelessly behind where they should be. Both of those things should be concerning to everyone, unless they believe the average IQ of a 16-20 year old just dropped 20 points in the last decade.
>I suspect she didn't have the discipline to get through all the material because she's always struggled with follow-through.
The lack of discipline may be due to the lax attitudes about cheating in the first place, or at least it seems like a chicken/egg scenario. If students get used to getting straight A's in 'advanced' classes without actually putting the work in, I'm sure that trains them over time to lack follow-through and discipline. But one of the main purposes of school, especially advanced classes and college, is to teach people discipline and focus so they can be more successful in their future lives. If people constantly get away with cheating, and 'everyone' does it, then they start to believe that's the highest standard they can expect from themselves.
>The computer science students cheated blatantly, sharing all the answers they found, posting their homework online, bragging about using ChatGPT for everything, and I got the impression they didn't care at all about actually learning the material.
That's so weird and interesting to hear especially considering that STEM people, in tech/engineering particularly, always brag that they're doing one of the 'hardest' and 'most rigorous' and 'most useful' degrees that actually has real world applications. But what even is the point of the real world applications of a compsci degree if you don't actually know how to code at all yourself and are just getting your answers from online? What do they expect to do once they have to work at a job?
I've seen absolutely bizarre examples of people bragging about this, like people bragging that they used AI to write a master's thesis or even to 'do research' for them for their master's thesis, or students in medical fields saying they 'had to' use ChatGPT to do entire assignments about how they would do some medical procedure or other because 'it's unreasonable to expect me to learn this in 6 weeks.' So will they be going to work in hospitals and just… not doing the work?
No. 2547845
>>2547836> The more concerning thing with elementary math is that they introduced widespread non-algorithmic math teaching, which isn't exactly 'ethnomathematics' but it could be considered an 'alternative way of knowing/doing' math, and it's making a lot of kids confused and innumerate. All the weird division strategies that are 100x more convoluted than simple long division for example, just to feel like kids are 'exploring' how to figure out math on their own instead of learning the fundamentals that smart people already figured out first. Lots of problems that are teaching kids to add in weird ways, etc. I wish I could remember the name of the mathematician I saw making videos about this, but if I remember I will post it in the thread even though it's less academia-related and more primary-education related, of course it was the retarded invention of academics though.I have mixed feelings about this. The way math is taught to students throughout much of grade school is basically based on memorizing algorithms and solve obtuse word problems. I really hated math classes for this reason despite doing well at them and always thought of myself as "not a math person." When I took a calculus course, I found myself thinking that math could be fun for the first time, but by that time I had already developed an entire identity and interest in other topics, so I didn't explore it further. I enjoyed doing proofs and coming up with applications of math (especially after taking discrete math), but I had no idea youc ould act. It makes me sad because I definitely could have not just "done better" at math but genuinely enjoyed it as a topic if I hadn't associated it with mindless arithmetic. At the same time, you really cannot do well in math if you don't actually learn the basics and that does require mindless drilling. Trying to show more clever tricks when you don't know the normal ways to add is confusing.
> Both of those things should be concerning to everyone, unless they believe the average IQ of a 16-20 year old just dropped 20 points in the last decade. It would be extremely worrying if this also happened. But I suspect that standards have loosened. I don't know how or why; there are many theories and they're all light on empirical support. My own high school experience was more than ten years ago when it was harder to cheat. It's easier to cheat now than ever.
> That's so weird and interesting to hear especially considering that STEM people, in tech/engineering particularly, always brag that they're doing one of the 'hardest' and 'most rigorous' and 'most useful' degrees that actually has real world applications. But what even is the point of the real world applications of a compsci degree if you don't actually know how to code at all yourself and are just getting your answers from online? What do they expect to do once they have to work at a job?I have no idea why they think anyone should hire them if you can just pay ChatGPT $20 a month to do what they do better. But computer science as a major isn't what it used to be. It's completely flooded by people who seem to think it's easy money. Most of my cohort aren't old-fashioned computer nerds. They're wannabe tech bros who want to make a startup to make a gorillion dollars, or they're normies who think programming is the new accounting. They don't seem to enjoy programming as a hobby, for example.
No. 2547886
>>2547315I'm currently in uni and had to take a unit on that just recently. Half of it is academic writing, the other half is Indigenous science, then part of that is just talking about colonial history and oppression of Indigenous people. I actually researched ethnomathematics for one of my assignments kek. It wasn't even "alternative" mathematics really but just how Indigenous people learn mathematic concepts. Everyone complains about the unit because it's compulsory for everyone doing a STEM degree (minus engineering). At least I understand the relevance in degrees like geology, for most it just isn't relevant at all.
>>2542554I'm very much the same anon. When I first went to uni, I didn't cope well (fuck covid) but now I have my passion back and approaching uni with more maturity is great actually. I've watched so many of the teenagers in my units pull up chatgpt to code for them. I love the content I'm learning, and I love learning additional things outside of my classes too. It's funny because the person I've met at uni so far who's most passionate about learning is someone who has a similar background to me (failed classes, got diagnosed with a neurodevelopmental condition, doing well in uni now). It's really great being around people with similar values so I wish I could find more people like that and I hope you do too. Teens these days rely too heavily on chatgpt and I'm glad I wasn't in a teaching environment when it hit it big so I don't have the normalised dependency on it all these younger zoomers do (not that I think I would even if I was anyway).
>>2547845>I really hated math classes for this reason despite doing well at them and always thought of myself as "not a math person." When I took a calculus course, I found myself thinking that math could be fun for the first time, but by that time I had already developed an entire identity and interest in other topics, so I didn't explore it further. I enjoyed doing proofs and coming up with applications of math (especially after taking discrete math), but I had no idea youc ould act.Pretty interesting anon because when I was younger I didn't really know the point of being good at maths but I still found it fine because I found it easy. When I got to calculus though that's when I started to dislike it and my ability decreased somewhat kek. However learning more about applied mathematics and discrete mathematics is incredibly interesting to me and it made me realise how interesting maths can be. I'm quite excited to do my linear algebra unit but what I really want to do is learn some discrete maths in my spare time. I hope I'll get over my aversion to calculus when I self-teach myself some more, especially when I get to multi-variate calculus (the person I mentioned above started explaining lambda calculus to me randomly one time which made me want to dive into that now also so there's hope kek). Maybe it's just the trig in calculus that was offputting to me when I learnt it years ago because I fucking hate trig and that will not change.
No. 2548055
>>2547886I'm also excited to get to linear algebra. I've been trying to teach myself but I have little time and energy to be doing the actual exercises. You will probably enjoy discrete math. If you look up "Discrete Mathematics: An Open Introduction," you can use that and it's a free online textbook. I'm planning on going further into graph theory when I have the time, it's a really powerful tool for modeling. Once they actually show you how you can use math to model things it opens up a whole new world.
>>2547920If it's online courses, the only way to prevent it is through something like HonorLock or Proctor. Which students really hate and complain about. To be fair they are very strict about things that shouldn't matter. I did my exam on my bed once during COVID and they pinged me for 'suspicious activity' when I didn't have access to the office because everyone was at home. I didn't get in trouble but that's the kind of thing they do. Other than that, if you're in-person and you can ban laptops, it's a lot easier. Some classes can do oral exams or pen and paper. I think the classes suffering the hardest are the ones that depend on a big project that you do throughout the semester at home because now there's no way to tell if you used ChatGPT or not. So big essays, big programming projects, etc. are a lot easier to cheat on than they used to be. And it's a problem because we do want students to know how to put together an essay or work on a big project outside a timed environment.
No. 2548164
>>2547845>I have mixed feelings about this. The way math is taught to students throughout much of grade school is basically based on memorizing algorithms and solve obtuse word problems.The type of nu-math I'm talking about is like this, but even worse though. It's even more word problems, and even more memorization of weird, counterintuitive algorithms, plus trying to make kids 'feel out' math that they don't understand yet leading to them memorizing and internalizing an error-ridden, nonsensical, illogical process at the earliest stage of math education. Learning the simplest, most intuitive and logical algorithms for arithmetic at that crucial age is the bedrock of having a good sense for math in later life as it gets more advanced. There is lots of good research and evidence about this type of math (since it's been used in schools since common core iirc) and it has made students much worse at math, with much worse mastery of concepts. I think it's interesting that you found calculus interesting though as it's the most memorization-heavy type of math I've ever taken kek, every math nerd I know hated calc 2 the most of all the math courses they'd ever taken since it's so purely memorization-based. I enjoyed proofs a lot too, probably my fav part of high school math, but proofs are like 100% based on that fundamental algorithm-learning that kids used to be taught in elementary schools which they largely aren't anymore (at least in the US). Countries with better math performance all use the 'traditional' way of teaching math and the outcomes and concept mastery (judged by application to novel problems, for instance) are always better with 'traditional' elementary school math. The overreliance on weird word problems and 'various ways of solving the same problem' are a scourge, it's like causing math-dyslexia in people who wouldn't have it normally and following them through their entire education.
>I don't know how or why; there are many theories and they're all light on empirical support. Yeah, I'd be really interested to know why or how exactly this happened - I think some of the obvious factors are checked-out parents who get mad at teachers asking them to help make sure their kids complete their work, teaching-to-test, anti-assessment/anti-grading/no-zero initiatives or what they call 'social promotion' where kids are passed on to the next grade without mastering the current grade (likely due to educator overwork and pressure from parents/admins), high school funding depending on graduation rates as well as college admissions rates (which incentivizes grade inflation and putting more kids than normal in AP/IB/honors classes), etc. But it being easy to cheat is doubtless a huge factor, and zoom school during COVID lockdowns was probably a huge factor in both the ease of cheating, and kids getting distracted. Ipads and iphones in classes also likely cause increasing distraction and shortened attention spans. It would be hard to do empirical research on this since there's just so many different potential factors at play and it would be really hard to isolate any of them, so the best we could probably do is compare different school systems/school districts that are doing slightly different things and seeing what changes between them and how it affects outcomes. But a lot of this would essentially have to be qualitative.
The good news I think is even if we don't exactly know what caused it, we do have a pretty good idea of how to (at least partially) reverse it - which is to go back to the way things used to be not that long ago. Some things will have to change because of AI and cheating becoming easier, but there are ways to hedge against that like making kids write homework/papers/tests by hand in class (although this takes away from lecture time, but it's probably too important not to do this) or making kids submit multiple rounds of drafts/edits (hard work for the teacher though). Getting electronics out of classrooms and emphasizing concept mastery over 'pass rates' and college admissions would also help, although colleges eat up so much money now they'll be loath to let go of willing/paying customers. Nonetheless it has to be done if they don't want to devalue degrees to the point nobody bothers going at all anymore.
>It's completely flooded by people who seem to think it's easy money. Most of my cohort aren't old-fashioned computer nerds. They're wannabe tech bros who want to make a startup to make a gorillion dollars, or they're normies who think programming is the new accounting. That's sad but honestly I'm not at all surprised. That seems like the obvious fallout of the constant hammering of 'learn to code' as the solution to every young person's money problems. It's too bad, because I started to learn a bit of programming in grad school and found that I really enjoyed it, way more than I thought I would, and it really helps train logical thinking and even, in a way, language skills. When the job market sucks as much as it sucks for young people now, though, obviously a lot of them are going to choose to get a degree in something 'useful' they don't care about that looks good on their resume instead of something they actually like.
No. 2548181
>>2548164> The type of nu-math I'm talking about is like this, but even worse though. It's even more word problems, and even more memorization of weird, counterintuitive algorithms, plus trying to make kids 'feel out' math that they don't understand yet leading to them memorizing and internalizing an error-ridden, nonsensical, illogical process at the earliest stage of math education. Learning the simplest, most intuitive and logical algorithms for arithmetic at that crucial age is the bedrock of having a good sense for math in later life as it gets more advanced.Yeah there's really no way around the fact you need to drill addition, multiplication, division, etc. I am pretty sure I was taught the old fashioned way and I just hated doing it because it was so much of my homework. The only reason I didn't give up on math as an interesting subject is because my dad insisted one day math got really cool and I just needed to wait for that moment. As for calc, it might be that the teacher was just really interesting because I don't remember much of calc itself but I do remember his lectures on number theory. The class itself also combined multiple types of advanced math together that weren't just calc. There was less of a reliance on word problems and more on just "how well do you understand the axioms and can apply them."
> Yeah, I'd be really interested to know why or how exactly this happened - I think some of the obvious factors are checked-out parents who get mad at teachers asking them to help make sure their kids complete their work, teaching-to-test, anti-assessment/anti-grading/no-zero initiatives or what they call 'social promotion' where kids are passed on to the next grade without mastering the current grade (likely due to educator overwork and pressure from parents/admins), high school funding depending on graduation rates as well as college admissions rates (which incentivizes grade inflation and putting more kids than normal in AP/IB/honors classes), etc.Everything you listed is definitely a factor. I also think that a lot of educators are convinced there's a secret pedagogy to make all students equally good at math and reading instead of accepting that there's always going to be a bell curve. There is nothing wrong with trying new pedagogical methods out. But they really want to believe that One Weird Trick is going to fix all the issues that come from the brute fact some children are smarter than others. And when fucking around with the New Math or the Whole Words approach to reading, what you end up with is really confused kids with poor foundations. The top 10% of them will learn math and reading anyway but it will really hurt the middle percent the most.
I don't know if you were in one, but I was in an advanced program throughout my whole grade school. At least in elementary school you had to get in on the basis of an IQ test and keeping your grades. I suspect the real benefit was that they weeded out the students who were the worst behaved. Whenever I took a gen ed elective, I noticed that the classes were way more disruptive than the honors classes and the teachers seemed to have given up on life. The AP/honors/IB courses didn't necessarily have smarter students in the median (although the smartest, best performing students were almost always in them) but they were far more disciplined. Could just be my school.
No. 2548191
>>2547886AYRT and thanks for the reply nonna. Can you expand on 'indigenous science'? What course was it a part of? What was the rest of the course about? I'll look up ethnomathematics when I get the chance but it seems counterintuitive to me that indigenous people would learn math differently, I would think that most people regardless of background would more or less benefit from the same ways of learning math.
>approaching uni with more maturity is great actually.I found this too as I took a 3 year break to work before going to grad school. The people who went straight from undergrad to their masters/PhD seemed to handle it a lot worse, both academically and mentally, and it really made me think that people should be encouraged more to take 'nontraditional' paths to college like taking some gap years first or even gap years in the middle if necessary rather than pushing every 18 year old to go straight into 4 (or more) years of uninterrupted college. It's a lot to throw at people all at once - becoming adults, (in many cases) moving away, a whole new learning structure, whole new friend group, lifestyle, money worries, etc. When I was teaching, a lot of my best students were returning students in their 30s or 40s (although I had one 60-something year old boomer scrote student who already had a bachelor's degree in something else who was straight up retarded and one of the most obnoxious, lazy people I have ever dealt with, so anyone who tells you boomers were so much smarter and had to work so much harder in school than genX/millennials is obviously lying - he threatened to report me to the ombudsman for giving him a well-deserved bad grade and kept trying to finagle points by arguing for really weird non-standard definitions of words that he obviously meant in the standard way kek).
>I'm glad I wasn't in a teaching environment when it hit it big so I don't have the normalised dependency on it all these younger zoomers doI was still in school when chatGPT became big but I honestly didn't even know about it beyond 'oh, it's a chatbot I guess?' and have never used it. I don't know how I managed to completely skip the chatGPT craze, I never heard about it from any other students either but I was in grad school so maybe they were more like me, although now I hear grad students saying they use it as well. It's brainrot inducing, I don't think anyone should use it for anything at all other than maybe as an actual chatbot. Not research, not as an alternative to google, not for homework, not for brainstorming ideas, not for writing your emails, not for translation. I will continue to be a luddite and keep my brain functional while other people use it for everything though, I know. I would just feel so awful and stupid if I had a chatbot do my homework, idk how people can psychologically handle it knowing that they're falling behind on everything they're supposed to actually learn.
Also I hated Calc 2 and felt like I was 'bad at math' when I did it too, but I loooved linear algebra, it was one of my fav courses in undergrad. I hope you like it too, I think it is so much more intuitive and interesting than calc 2.
>>2547920Omg claimed to have heart attacks? Nuts. I think it's hard to avoid chatGPT when everyone is using different devices on different wifi with different operating systems and working from home and emailing/e-submitting most of their assignments (or just printing them out after doing them at home), it's really hard (and invasive) to oversee homework assignments to that degree without either making them do all their homework in class or making students use/download a bunch of additional software (spyware). I'm 100% sure some of the students in my classes were typing essays on their phones and probably didn't even have a computer - of course we had computer labs but if they commuted they couldn't use the school computers late at night or whenever they were probably doing their homework. You can't penalize them for that because different financial backgrounds, etc.
>>2548055A lot of my classes - the majority from 3rd year undergrad to the end of my PhD - were project and big-assignment based with either no exams or exams worth less than 30% of the total grade, so pen and paper exams just simply wouldn't have worked. They can work for some 101-201 level classes for sure, but once you're getting into stuff that's more applied it's basically impossible for the students to do all the work in class. You can increase the emphasis on in-class discussions and such, but it's hard to make grading for those fair, so they usually aren't a big component of the grades for most classes. Honestly the only reliable way to get away from all of the cheating is either to make it incredibly inconvenient (like forcing students to hand in all their essays and assignments in pen-and-paper format - sure they could copy from ChatGPT but it would take so much time they might just give up and do it themselves) or to just ensure you're only accepting students smart and motivated enough to not want to cheat, which would require a total overhaul of the system. There might be other workarounds that are possible but I haven't really heard of any yet. I've heard some profs suggest nutty ideas like making the students do all their homework in class, but then that would leave no time for lectures kek, it would be like kindergarten. That's not to mention that students are now using ChatGPT to do their readings for them too, basically using it as sparknotes, which is basically impossible to prevent entirely.
No. 2548225
>>2548181>Yeah there's really no way around the fact you need to drill addition, multiplication, division, etc. I agree, and not just drill it but learn the most logical and intuitive algorithms first. Unfortunately a lot of the alt-math is getting rid of the 'standard' algorithms for arithmetic entirely, which starts to mess students up horribly once they get to topics like algebra, since they aren't able to manipulate equations using non-standard addition, subtraction, multiplication and division techniques. God I wish I could remember the name of that mathematician with the video, she showed what they're actually teaching and it was beyond convoluted.
>I just hated doing it because it was so much of my homework.Kek when I was a kid math was my fav subject, I always found it the fastest/easiest. But then it became my most hated subject by the end of high school/beginning of college, I only started liking it again once I did linear algebra and started getting into advanced statistics. I actually wish they prioritized teaching more stats instead of calc at the high school level, I think it's way more useful to the average person than calculus and for the people wanting to go into engineering or whatever they could just offer calc as an elective instead. My first calc 2 prof in my freshman year of college had a thick accent I couldn't hear, and wrote in illegible tiny font on a blackboard in front of a 200-person lecture hall, so I was screwed from the beginning. I only passed it by taking it at a different university that had smaller class sizes and a postdoc teaching it instead of a researcher, kek. It was a lot easier to learn in a class of 40 where I could see the blackboard and the prof spoke actual English, the first time I took it I felt like wolframalpha was my only teacher and I hated having to memorize 120 different equations from the textbook for the exam. For math and physics especially I feel like the teacher and class size can make or break your experience completely.
>I also think that a lot of educators are convinced there's a secret pedagogy to make all students equally good at math and reading instead of accepting that there's always going to be a bell curve.I agree, another stupid idea that came out of academia and trickled down. I actually think many teachers are aware this is not the case, but school admins seem to be completely in denial so they force the teachers to teach as though everyone was going to be equally good at grasping the topics. Another huge factor is the anti-streaming movement all over North America, which is making the burden on teachers incredibly daunting. I think a lot of teachers are stupid but I really do sympathize with them when they're stuck teaching the same material to a 40-person class where 25 of them are ESL and functionally illiterate in English while the other 15 are fluent English speakers, classes where special ed students are integrated into the same class with high-achieving students, or classes where people who shouldn't have passed 3rd grade are learning the same material with 5th graders. They either have to teach to the 'actual' grade level, leaving the 3rd graders/ESL students in the dust, or they have to teach to the lowest common denominator student, preventing the more advanced students from getting a grade-level education. The anti-streaming concept also seems to come from this same idea that all students can be equally good at something if they're just mixed in with students of different skill levels and taught 'properly,' whatever that means, but it's just wishful thinking that ends up harming every student in the class. I know people with PhDs from ivy league schools who are anti-streaming, even though they themselves spent their whole life in GATE and IB… I wish people who had been insulated from the 'average' students and below-average students their whole lives would stop having these lofty ideas about how putting the speds in with the AP students will make everyone come up to the AP student level.
>I don't know if you were in one, but I was in an advanced program throughout my whole grade school. I was in GATE from late elementary until 9th grade, and then 10th grade onwards I was in full AP (here it doesn't work like in America, there's an AP 'stream' and two separate non-AP streams so the AP students don't mix with the other students at all throughout high school. I'm really grateful I got that opportunity because when I saw the homework my friends in the 'normal' educational streams were getting I was horrified, one of my friends' English teacher gave them fill-in-the-blank essays that were like mad libs with a lot of the sentences and connector words pre-written. And I went to a 'good' academic school too. Although my experience was the AP students in my high school (and the GATE kids in middle school) were way worse behaved than the normal students, we had all the weirdos and autists and ADHD kids and assholes like me who swore at the teachers kek. I was the bad kid (only in certain classes). The best part about my AP stream classes since you had to test into them was the class sizes, one of my AP classes had only 13 students and we had a ton of free time and spares. Personally in my city AP was much more intellectually rigorous than GATE at the high school level, and IB was somewhere in the middle (more homework but way lower standards). Most of the heavily autistic and weird kids stayed in the GATE program in high school while most of the normies switched to AP or IB. I actually noticed that the 'upper normal' stream students in my high school were the most disciplined and hardworking, but their coursework was much too easy and they didn't end up learning nearly as much and they didn't get the best teachers - they had the benefit of much higher grades though since the AP grades weren't curved. My two BFFs from high school both did mostly the 'normal' stream and they got early admissions into med school though, so apparently it was good enough to get them into and through college. I think the advantage of both GATE and AP for me was that we got the best teachers the school had to offer, while the normal kids got shittier teachers. Most of our teachers had Masters degrees (and in a couple cases PhDs) in the topics they taught (not education, like physics, english lit, etc). I guess I can see how people would consider that unfair but everyone I knew who went through my schooling system loved it - they had technical programs like hairdressing and carpentry/car mechanic programs that the lower-stream kids were allowed to take that hooked them up to apprenticeships, the mid-stream kids had the advantage of the best most peaceful school environment and higher grades, and the AP kids got to do the more challenging coursework that we were interested in and got to skip some college. Win/win, I didn't speak to a single person who disliked the system.
No. 2548246
>>2547845>The way math is taught to students throughout much of grade school is basically based on memorizing algorithms and solve obtuse word problems.But obtuse word problems are the context in which how most working adults have to exercise math skills. I’d argue those are the most important to be teaching kids. And the algorithm memorization is just the application of the word problem.
>Sally wants to buy a house. Happy Roof Lenders is offering a 15-year mortgage at 3% interest, whereas Big Castle Lenders is offering a 30-year mortgage at 6%. If Sally’s offer is for a $630,000 house and her down payment is $120,000, how much will she pay monthly with each of these loans? Which is the better deal?Or more commonly…
>Bob is at the grocery store to buy oats for cookies. His recipe calls for 5 cups, so he needs at least that much. The Quaker oats cost $3.24 for an 18 ounce container. The Bob’s Red Mill oats cost $2.40 for a 12 oz container. Which is the better deal if Bob buys one bag? If rolled oats weigh 2.5 oz per cup, how many bags of which brand should he buy to get the best deal? No. 2548269
>>2548246A lot of the word problems they use to teach little kids math are not very ecologically
valid, many are badly/confusingly worded or deliberately tricky, and 7 year olds don't need to be calculating sales tax or adding up prices with decimal points in their heads yet, they need to get the basic logical fundamentals of math down. Obtuse word problems should be for later grades, after they've learned how to do the math itself and mastered the basic concepts. Neither of your examples are 1st-4th grade math, which is where most of the damage is happening.
No. 2548301
>>2548246AYRT, those are fine and pretty standard. I don't have any examples because this was more than a decade ago and I definitely don't remember any homework from elementary school, but I recall math homework around middle school coming up with increasingly weird and contrived examples where half the challenge was trying to parse the English. I get what they were going for but not all math concepts map neatly to "John has 5 apples, Sally has 3" type situations. In any case, my concern was a lot of people grow up thinking math is just about applying a formula or calculating by hand, when math as a subject is a lot more about understanding how to apply axioms, what mathematical tools are appropriate for modeling, even creativity, etc. Math is also adding and subtracting, but most people's understanding of math is very narrow and it's a shame because advanced math is very rewarding and can be applied to a lot of different subjects. I've started doing minor recreational math recently and it's been so much fun, I wish I knew math could be enjoyable back when I had more time and resources to do it.
>>2548225> I actually think many teachers are aware this is not the case, but school admins seem to be completely in denial so they force the teachers to teach as though everyone was going to be equally good at grasping the topics. Another huge factor is the anti-streaming movement all over North America, which is making the burden on teachers incredibly dauntingYeah, they call it 'tracking' in the US. I don't think you can be a teacher working with kids daily and just not notice that some kids are smarter than others. Not just good at a subject, just generally intelligent and good at most subjects. A lot of teachers and activists are really empathetic and they want to believe that there's some way for a kid who's terrible at math to become good. Students who aren't as smart deserve a good education too but they're not going to get it by being forced in a class with other students who are way ahead of them on the material. It's very demoralizing when a handful of students clearly dominate the class and it makes the other students stop trying to participate. But then it's demoralizing if you're really passionate about the class to be ignored for being too good. The two groups have different needs and nobody can convince me that teachers are somehow going to be able to meet these needs better with mixed classes and the same amount of time.
Some people are also trying to get rid of gifted programs for being 'unfair'. I have no idea what benefits they think will come from having a 130 IQ kid in the same class as a 110 IQ kid as a 90 IQ kid. Gifted kids are already weird in general and likely to get bullied (in theory they're supposed to get support for their challenges, but in practice I don't think I ever saw that).
No. 2548562
File: 1749012363406.jpg (6.55 KB, 223x226, foucault.jpg)
Asking as a STEM brained clueless nonnna: why do kweers love picrel so much when he was a pedo?
No. 2548778
>>2548567Foucault wrote about the way society constructs the limits of what’s acceptable. For example he wrote about how what is considered “madness” or “insanity” is heavily influenced by the dominant cultures conception of what the ideal human should be like. This means you can weaponized the concept of madness against groups you want to control, like women, gay people, black people, minority ideological positions, etc. The idea that psychiatry is not a neutral pure discipline but ideologically driven was novel at the time. You can see how his arguments would be useful to feminists, who wanted a theory to discuss hysteria and lobotomies, and gay people, who were literally considered mentally ill by most mental health professionals. These people were basically like “if it’s actually okay to be gay, what else is society telling us is wrong that is actually okay?” A fine question, and there was definitely a restricted notion of what was sexually acceptable back then that was often backed up by psychology. Think of the damage Freud did to female sexuality by saying only immature women orgasm clitorally and mature healthy women orgasm vaginally. But they took it too far, probably from wanting to seem edgy, probably from ignorance (there was a huge taboo on discussing anything having to do with incest and some psychologists even said it was healthy and fine), probably because some were pedos.
The good ideas from the post structuralists about questioning power and the ambiguity of language have all basically been absorbed into the intellectual mainstream, so the bad and weird ideas are the ones that stand out as different. It sounds like a meme but you really cannot understand why post structuralism and modernism caught on without understanding the context of intellectual life in the early 20th century. Among other things, the development of Freudianism, the carnage of World War I, the industrial method of World War II, the transition to a modern consumer society where reality felt increasingly unreal, the Soviet Union, the Vietnam War, segregation and the civil rights movement… Add to that a modernist obsession for the belief that human life could and should be engineered according to ideology. There was a lot of fear that authoritarianism was not just gonna win, but win brutally. This during a highly conformist culture that openly thought homosexuals were perverts that couldn’t be trusted. It’s not surprising they became obsessed with reading and finding power structures everywhere and rooting for the underdog even if it was someone who should have been condemned, like pedos. There’s honestly more that has to do with the specific intellectual frameworks that were popular in the academy but that’s getting into the weeds.
No. 2550292
>>2548562They love him
because he's a pedo. Hope that clarifies things.
No. 2556749
>>2542554I was a TA for many years. Throughout my years as a TA, I saw the quality of students decline steadily. I will say that the decline began to become much more noticeable in the 2021/2022 year. I think that the pandemic really messed with a lot of people that were in high school at the time, specifically their social and academic development. When you pair underdeveloped students with declining educational and entrance standards, it makes for a really bad situation.
When I first started to TA, students would be asked to write a 6 page report, and that would be fine. Nobody would really complain. Maybe 20% would turn it in late by a few days, which is expected. In my last year of being a TA, students would be asked to write a 3 page report, they'd complain and ask for other ways to do it, they'd spam me with emails about how it was an unfair assignment, around 50-60% would turn it in late, and even then, the majority of reports wouldn't even be
2 pages long. And these students would STILL get passed. When I first started as a TA, it was very rare for students to misunderstand things like citations, or formatting - the basic kinda things that one needs to know when writing academically, and if they did err, then they would usually learn from their mistakes and it wouldn't be an issue for them again. Near the end of my tenure, students in 3rd or 4th year would regularly email me and ask how to cite things, or ask me why they had to use certain formats or styles. It seemed like they couldn't learn how to correct their mistakes - if someone got docked a mark for an improper citation in the first week of class, they'd still be improperly citing things for the final.
It was so bizarre seeing the quality and standards of education decline in such a short period of time, it was a very 'blackpilling' experience for sure. It had been declining for a very long time, but I think the pandemic was sort of the "tipping point" where the decline turned into a free-fall. It made me question my own qualifications and how the standing of my own degree would be influenced in the coming years. A university degree used to mean something because it was so exclusive; now that they let anyone with $$ get one, what does it really mean?
No. 2557053
>>2556760What's stopping a private company from basically having an unaccredited education system that de-facto functions like an IQ test, is 3-6 months long, and serves as a brutal filter based on cognitive ability?
Surely, surely, surely, businesses wouldn't care about the unaccredited part, as long as it's basically guaranteed to be passing only people on the right side of the bell curve and far along it. Accreditation shouldn't mean much when it's not legally required -if- the non-accredited standard is the higher standard.
I racebait on here a lot, and get banned for it, but in my race-obsessed reading I found out that the explosion of businesses requiring college education was specifically because the supreme court ruled it was racial discrimination to use IQ tests for employment. Why is it considered racial discrimination? Because too many black people were scoring low on them. So they then got around this by asking for college degrees, which, in an age when colleges had high standards, de-facto functioned like an IQ test.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.
>On July 2, 1965, the day the Civil Rights Act of 1964 took effect, Duke Power added two employment tests, which would allow employees without high-school diplomas to transfer to higher-paying departments. These two tests were the Bennett Mechanical Comprehension Test, a test of mechanical aptitude, and the Wonderlic Cognitive Ability Test, an IQ test created in 1939.
>Whites were almost ten times more likely than blacks to meet these new employment and transfer requirements. According to the 1960 United States census, while 34% of white males in North Carolina had high-school diplomas, only 18% of blacks did. The disparities of aptitude tests were far greater; with the cutoffs set at the median for high-school graduates, 58% of whites passed, compared to 6% of blacks.I think a large part of the problem with cognitive sorting with employment is that it's just too unbearable on people's ego, if there really was an objective criteria that cut through the hassle, people that fail will find it psychologically intolerable. Dostovesky in "Notes from the Underground" wrote about this a bit, he said if we solve the science of society and work everything out, we'll find the truth to be so unbearable that'd we'd tear society apart and start from scratch.
I feel like every time we as a society have a cognitive sorting mechanism for employment, the stupid people will feel left out, agitate to lower the standards, and then that cognitive sorting mechanism stops functioning as it should. The shift from BAs to MAs/PHDs being required is just that, and very soon MA degrees will become just as devalued.
No. 2557488
>>2556749Very similar experience to yours nonna. I taught the same course section for 4-5 years, my last year being 2021 during zoom school. Every year from the first year I started teaching the course, the quality of students and their work was declining, but in 2020-2021 it dramatically dropped off compared to previous years. I stopped TAing at that point but I can imagine 2022 would have been even worse because you'd be getting students who had missed over a year of high school. Everything else you're saying tracks with my experience pretty closely.
>It made me question my own qualifications and how the standing of my own degree would be influenced in the coming years. Same here. When I first started university I thought getting a PhD would be a big achievement, but now I have one it feels like a Master's is worth less than a Bachelor's was when I completed my Bachelor's. It's only a matter of time until Masters and PhDs get devalued to a large degree as well, considering the quality of students that are passing and getting good grades in their Bachelors degrees could not possibly handle the level of work that was traditionally expected in graduate school.
>>2556760>Good in that it'll hopefully cause colleges to either be more selective (and thereby raise the worth of their degrees) or slash their over bloated budgetsThe problem is that there is no sign they will do this unless they are somehow forced. No matter how bad this problem gets, colleges just hire more administrators and admit more students. They don't care at all that degrees are worth less than toilet paper as long as the gravy train keeps chugging along.
>>2557053>What's stopping a private company from basically having an unaccredited education system that de-facto functions like an IQ test, is 3-6 months long, and serves as a brutal filter based on cognitive ability?Racebait aside, I think you already explained the main issue people would have with it, which is that it's too unbearable for the ego of most people to essentially 'officially' take an intelligence test that would sort them for employment. Most people who have real IQ tests done are people who suspect they have extremely high IQ (like top 2%) or, more often, children whose parents/teachers suspect they have extremely high IQ, for the purpose of going into special school programs. Those are kids that are already functioning way above the normal academic level, typically. Most people who aren't confident they have top-2% IQ don't even bother with IQ tests, and comfort themselves that they 'probably' are smarter than average and they have lots of specific skills and aptitudes which are more important than raw cognitive ability - which in many cases is actually true. People can be very good at certain jobs that require high skill without having unusually high IQ. So this sort of brute force cognitive sorting would cause ego injury for, well, pretty much basically everyone except the very upper group, possibly unnecessarily because people who previously were confident in their specific skills and aptitudes would now be demoralized and feel inadequate.
>The shift from BAs to MAs/PHDs being required is just thatYes but not only. MAs/PhDs are not only required as a 'cognitive test' but also as a test of tenacity and a 'jobs training program on the job' since most MAs and PhDs are, functionally, jobs. They require a lot of effort, energy, tenacity, gumption, whatever you want to call it and that's part of what employers are looking for in addition to hard and soft job skills you learn while working on your thesis. Unfortunately this aspect will also become devalued if standards drop and continue dropping, which has to happen if the people graduating from Bachelor's programs are graduating with such low skills, functional literacy/numeracy, and cheating constantly.