Search This Blog

Friday, October 21, 2011

the "help" we are getting from our colleagues

today we learned of the "help" we are receiving from our colleagues: a student who entered college with a year's worth of college math credit, a term's worth of physics and probably some other advanced placement credit, was advised not to participate in SUSTAIN because it would "slow him down."

slow him down from what, we don't know....from going ahead in all the technical classes, perhaps.  he is perfectly eligible, but would find himself taking History, instead of the next Physics class, which would be a year ahead of what he would normally be taking at this point in his college education.

this is the kind of thing that we are suffering now...the risk aversion of the faculty being translated into advice "not to participate", without any substantive reasons.  students can progress toward their degrees without any loss of time, but somehow we find our colleagues manipulating these unsuspecting students with their own biases and fears.

UPDATE: I realized I need to ask the person who is doing the advising if we are missing something. I can see that I'm exhibiting the same kind of knee-jerk reaction that is irritating me in others. I just found out from the person who did the advising had a complete misconception of what it was that we were doing, what classes he could take and so on.  I wonder how many other times we act as experts only to really mis-inform those who have sought our opinion.  Almost always, the student is the loser in our irresponsible "expertise."  I am making a commitment to be more aware of not knowing.

No comments:

Post a Comment