/ot/ - off-topic

If anyone wants to read the article: https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/?gift=UoS1tIc6TXiFq9icdNennfq49wPwe8tkAtwAwaD_gqg

>at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
What is the grading criteria that makes these students look so good to "elite schools"?

>>2262213
literally how

>>2262213
Tbh, 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.

repost from the covid thread, this woman is a university professor

>>2262213
>>2262243
Most "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.

>>2262205
the title alone is grim as hell

awesome thread idea anon

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.

That phase on Tumblr where people refused to say college or university and instead used academia obsessively was so cringe. Not as bad as people who try to unironically drop the word pedagogy, those people are the worst.

>>2262838
believe me, I know

>>2262205
The fact that this article has an audio version at the very top… lol

>>2262213
My public high school in one of the worst ranked states in the US made us read books cover to cover, that’s insane. I’ve only been out of high school ten years too.

>>2262927
Link 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.

>>2262838
Btw the video featured him jerking off and shoving stuff up his ass.

>>2263249
gross

>>2263015
and why did it cost £8,000,000?

>>2262213
Reminds 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.

>>2262876
A lot can change in just 10 years in education and a lot has. I taught the same lab course in a major (mid-level) university for about 6 years and just in those 6 years the quality of writing, critical thinking, ability to read etc. in the student pool took a huge nosedive, there were emergency meetings called by faculty members to deal with the lowered skill level of the students and needing to change rubrics/expectations so we wouldn't fail too many of them. One of the biggest issues brought up was that the standards in high school/community college were getting worse year over year, so even though our department was very competitive and all the students we admitted had 4.0 GPAs in high school or community college beforehand, many of them were incapable of reading passages longer than a page or 2 and could not write in full sentences or paragraphs either. It's really hard to remedy that at the college level too even if you have dedicated writing classes (which the faculty I taught the course in didn't).

>>2263015
NTAYRT 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 marriage
but 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.

This has potential to be a fun thread

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/allyn-walker-professor-paedophile-virginia-b1960427.html
The professor tried to claim transphobia when he got backlash for trying to "destigmatize minor attracted people"

>>2264146
troons never beating the pedo accusation

>>2264121
Good lord, who would attend this talk after reading that text wall? Ironically there is a grain of truth to that, I wish people would stop lumping 'LGBT' together as a 'community' too, but he could have stopped after the first half-sentence.

>>2264121
It’s so embarrassing having to be lumped in with this shit. Let me be a lesbian in peace away from these insane idiots.

>>2262841
What's wrong with "pedagogy"? I've only heard people using it in an appropriate context and never perceived as just some fancy word. I'd say it's quite normal in my language at least.