Category: Learning, Education, & Training

The Bully Business – The Atlantic

An entire industry is profiting off of tactics used to punish mean children at school.

One consistent element is that “solutions” such as this one never explicitly regard bullying as a symptom. As such, when causes are discussed, they are couched in terms of character defects.

Inconceivably, the captive environment of school is rarely, if ever, taken into account by researchers or faculty when assessing the behavior of students.

The only way to constructively deal with bullying is to give students appropriate degrees of autonomy and not compel them to be in oppressive environments where they are subjected to people they despise and deprived of any control over their lives.

Source: The Bully Business – The Atlantic

People Hate Bankers Because People Are Ignorant – Bloomberg View

Research shows most people are not financially literate enough to use a credit card or take out a mortgage. People should take a test before buying any financial product.

Source: People Hate Bankers Because People Are Ignorant – Bloomberg View

 

Is the root problem that banks sell/push products which only 30% of their customers understand?

The Teaching Class – Guernica

Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone paying tuition should care.

In the American imagination, a professor is perhaps disheveled, but as a product of brainy eccentricity, not of penury. In the American university, this is not the case.

This is a relatively new phenomenon: in 1969, 78 percent of professors held tenure-track positions. By 2009 this percentage had shrunk to 33.5. The rest of the professors holding jobs—whether part time or full time—do so without any job security. … many universities limit the number of hours that adjunct professors can work each semester, keeping them nominally “part-time” employees

The rise of adjunct labor in universities is also a student issue. Teachers’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions. Yet students are often unaware of the way their colleges contract with their teachers—after all, who would tell them? … one of the reasons that adjunct conditions remain obscured from students: for workers without job security, the line between scolded and fired is uncomfortably thin.

But while the faculty-to-student ratios have remained constant (with both groups growing at around the same rate), the administrator-to-student ratio has increased dramatically. And Ginsburg notes that though administrators often extol the virtues of using part-time contingent labor for teaching, “they fail to apply the same logic to their own ranks.” In 2005, 48 percent of college faculty were part time, compared to only 3 percent of administrators.

Adjuncts need better conditions—stable contracts, office space, access to departmental decision-making, access to the kind of work community that makes people better at their jobs and allows space for reflection and information-sharing. And they need living wages. Not because they hold advanced degrees, not because they are better than other kinds of workers, not even because teaching is a magical and consecrated profession. We need these things because they allow us to be the teachers that our students need and deserve.

Source: The Teaching Class – Guernica