That joke aside (geddit?), please let’s not have two posts in a row
at the top of the sub which explicitly admit that they’re not in our
wheelhouse; leaving this up because I guess it’s pretty interesting and
I’m in a reasonably good mood since I’m headed to Kosovo today
I can believe it. There's a prof in my schools CS department who routinely has students make cellular automata in numpy graphs, in an intro class, in the third week. I don't know for sure if anyone has dropped the major because of that practice, but I know I've seen a lot of very frustrated freshmen and sophomores at the student tutoring service.
Hey. I don't know your uni's dynamics, especially as it pertains toward department/school-wide goals, but I can say that at elite levels, this is exactly how 'star' faculty "teach".
Basically, they have no personal understanding about *what* undergraduates know, or *should* know. So, instead of trying to elevate them, they set arbitrary hurdles and then pay lots of attention to those that happen to pass those hurdles.
Are they judged by their student evaluations? No, because their research grants are the real tenure-maker.
Does this system favor the students who were best prepared in high school to continue succeeding? Yes. Favoritism is alive and well. At least at my R1 school, student/teaching achievement was never counted against you, only for you if your students were exemplary. It's all about the grant money.
Only the very richest of schools (i.e., Ivies and their peers) have faculty that only research. Some of your more prestigious R1s will have faculty who only teach grad students, though (which in practice amounts to their being pure research faculty).
Some schools are rolling out a model where you have some faculty who are teaching faculty and some who are research faculty, with the latter having a much lower teaching load and the former not having research requirements for promotion, evaluations, etc. In practice, though, this turns out to be really iniquitous: research faculty have more prestige, and teaching faculty are often non-tenure-track.
Some of the people teaching classes at my school were "lecturers", which I understood to mean "has teaching as primary/exclusive responsibility". But it's possible I misunderstood.
It turns out having people whose job is to teach, but whose performance is not assessed based on how well they teach leads to bad education outcomes. Who would have guessed?
But this is absolutely my experience. Even as someone with a relatively high level of outside knowledge, the difference between the lecturers whose primary job was teaching and the ones who were researchers that taught undergrads because they had to was fucking massive. In the latter case, you basically had to be on board with teaching yourself the material either wholly or partially.
It’s important to remember that the word “racism” - thanks to the influence of luminaries such as Stuart Hall in my own country, the UK, for example - has achieved the status (in my opinion the correct status) of denoting something other than mere “personal bias”, and is widely understood as referring to exactly the structures of power, deference, inequality, unfairness, whatever, which keep e.g. black people down.
Individual racist animus is obviously still a thing, but it’s important to remember that racism is a *social* disease, not just a disease which inhabits the minds of atomised individuals - and as such the specific animus of racial individuals should not be dissociated from the mere ignorance of people who allow racism *qua* structural imbalance promoted/permitted by nominally “not racist” atomised individuals who teach computer science badly.
There are at least two kinds of people who sit at the top of the putative racial hierarchy (in the anglophone world: white people): people who cling to this idea of atomised, personal, racism which only permits that you can be racist if you are motivated by personal racist views; then people (I hope I am one), who in spite of living in a racist society, learn how and where it is that they were taught beliefs and practices that are passively racist, in spite of holding no personal animus towards (in my case) black people.
police department A decides to brutalise a poor neighbourhood because it's full of minorities and they're outright racist, resulting in the disproportionate incarceration of black people.
police department B decides to brutalise a poor neighborhood purely because a stats robot told them it was the easiest way to make arrest quotas, resulting in the disproportionate incarceration of black people.
Both departments are doing the *exact same thing with the same effect*, but one is being intentionally racist and one is being unintentionally racist. I think they both deserve to at least be in the same category.
Theere is a problem as this two things are different enough from each other that it's problematic to use the exact same term for them.
I think second or third order effects of racism that result from treating everyone equally, 2 decades after not having equal chances and access at learning etc, are a real and widespread problem.
but they way it's often talked and written about, it gets muddled.
Racism is often taught by refering to the civil rights movement. have a look at perhaps the most well known quotation:
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!"
MLK is talking about abolishing personal bias here. of course, MLK also knew about structural forces. but that is what is taugt, what almost everyone knows.
Hey sneerclubbers! When people come here from the motte to try to debate racism, the correct move is to downvote + ignore. The wrong move is to engage them.
The judgement based on the color of their skin was almost assuredly talking about systemic forces as well. One such form of judgment that MLK Jr was quite familiar with was the "separate but equal" denial of services to non-white people. This systematic racism was arguably the entire thing that MLK Jr fought against (his famous criticism of white moderates can be interpreted as criticizing those who, while potentially free of "personal racism", are quite tolerant of systemic racism. One can make other comparisons to "tolerant" Nazis, etc).
I do agree that MLK Jr is often presented as campaigning against "personal racism", but I think this is via misrepresenting his own words, not just "zeroing in" on moments he privileged the personal over the systemic.
you would actually have to show it from the speech itself that MLK conveys a message about structures here successfully. you seem to be assuming it from your knowledge of other positions held by him.
I did a significant part of my first degree in lit crit, and I have to say: why would you call contextualising the speech of a public figure in their well documented life “assuming”?
No, I'm claiming your analysis of his speech relies on an ahistorical view of the *context* of his speech. The "judgement" he speaks of was both overt *personal* malice, and overt *systematic* malice, including segregation within schools, african americans being banned from certain bars, and being banned from riding at the front of the bus (and *many* more things of course).
This context can be found by reading other parts of MLK's life (say his participation in the Montgomery Bus boycotts), but can also be found by *reading that exact quote* in the *setting* he said it in, and not just pretending he said it today, about the circumstances african americans face today (where systematic malice is often less overt, say the "peculiarly long" times non-whites have to wait to vote).
This sucks so much as this is very close to an actually very good teaching technique, where the students and the teacher tackle a hard problem together as equals, with the teacher often going, 'i dont know either but lets figure it out together'. Aka coming from a position of equality and cutting edge, and not coming from a position of ivory tower lecturing.
And this is why we must get rid of affirmative action because the low
performing folks didn’t earn their education, unlike rich white kids
who’s parents paid for their education AND got them admitted on
legacy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdbXGi2WX0Q
That joke aside (geddit?), please let’s not have two posts in a row at the top of the sub which explicitly admit that they’re not in our wheelhouse; leaving this up because I guess it’s pretty interesting and I’m in a reasonably good mood since I’m headed to Kosovo today
[removed]
And this is why we must get rid of affirmative action because the low performing folks didn’t earn their education, unlike rich white kids who’s parents paid for their education AND got them admitted on legacy.
Checkmate libtards.