Caveat Emptor Praeceptores

This week Ontario elementary school teachers are staging one day rotating “labour strikes” in light of their inability to negotiate a contract with the province of Ontario.  At least, that’s what they’re calling it, “labour strikes”.  The problem is, that’s not what's really happening, is it!

For one thing, a strike usually results from the breakdown of labour negotiations between the union and management (whomever they may be).  This has clearly not happened.  In most cases negotiations haven’t occurred yet; negotiations can’t break down if school boards refuse to come to the table.  In fact, one might ask just what message are teachers sending via their so-called labour strike.  Given present circumstances, perhaps that message is, “WE ASSUME THAT NEGOTIATIONS WON’T WORK!”  But that’s putting the cart before the horse, is it not?  And we all know what happens when we go assuming things, don’t we.

The fact is, Ontario’s teachers are making of themselves exactly what anyone else would make of himself when he refuses to engage in a process based on some presumed outcome.  The reason why rational people look down upon such presumptive people is that they are, in effect, opting for the more radical and confrontational mode of discourse before exhausting generally more productive and civilized modes of discourse.  This, as all rational people recognize, is not how mature adults act.  And, quite frankly, it is unacceptable behaviour in our teachers.  Why?  Because it's counter to the responsibility teachers take upon themselves when they choose their profession and it is contrary to one of the most importants roles a teacher serves in society--namely, training our young people to engage in, and seek out, the most civilized, productive, and non-confrontational forms of discourse.  

Perhaps I’m an idealist, but I hold teachers (myself among them) to a higher standard.  Those who we trust to civilize our children cannot do so if they choose confrontation over dialogue and choose, arguably, illegal action, when legal means are at their disposal.

What is more, the actions of Ontario teachers might justifiably be construed as a protest against democracy.  That’s right, I said, “against democracy”!  Consider this, in both the 2007 and 2011 provincial elections the Liberal Party of Ontario were swept into power with no little help from the endorsement they from Ontario School Teachers and their unions.  In other words, when Ontario teachers had their legitimate say in the legislation of our province they said, in no uncertain terms, that they trusted the governance of Ontario to the Liberal Party.  And when the time came to exercise their democratic right, they willingly gave the Liberal Party the power and the right to create the legislation they see as necessary to fulfilling this responsibility.  Unfortunately for our teachers, that legislation included Bill 115 and, apparently, our teachers are suffering from buyers remorse!

Two great disconnects are at work in this teacher debacle: On the one hand, labour negotiations are not the appropriate venue for political protest (especially when the instigators of the protest refuse to engage in the negotiation process).  On the other hand, political protest is entirely ineffectual when its instigators assert their right to speech, while refusing to enter into dialogue and when they extol the virtues of democracy while at the same time denouncing the product of its legitimate exercise.

I know there are teachers out there who not only understand the arguments I’ve made here, but support them and may have even voiced them!  Lets just hope that their calmer heads will prevail, and they are able to convince the strike mongers that the capacity to strike is not a necessary condition for the capacity for effective negotiations before their capacity for effective teaching is undermined by their inability to present themselves as sincere advocates of civilized dialogue and democracy.

COMING SOON: Decadence and Dissension, by J.D. Pine-Coffin

11D Press is excited to announce the forthcoming release from Blogger, Professor, satirist, and Social Critic J.D. Pine-Coffin, Decadence & Dissension: Reflections on a Culture in Decay.  In this explosive monograph, Pine-Coffin tackles education: ...academic freedom policies are the same policies quashing the free exchange of ideas and promoting whole new highs in academic mediocrity. ("Why Some Professors have to Fail") social Media: It's about time we throw an icy cold bucket of water on our rutting love affair with social networking. ("To 'Like' or not to 'Like', how relevant is the question?") and Western culture in general: Mashable, YouTube, Twitter are all littered with countless examples of our utter disregard for common sense, not to mention our fellow citizens, all in the name of some shit that we'll wrap in cellophane and pass-off to one of our relatives as a heartfelt expression of our love for them. ("Dear Granny, Keep your stinking waffle maker!") D & D is sure to be satirical, insightful, and guaranteed to be controversial.  Stay tuned for more information, a tentative table of contents, and a sneak preview of the book...

Originally posted on 11th Dimension Press...

What Matters

I can think of few more corrupt and rancid institutions than the modern collection agency (just check out Scurlock's film, Maxed Out).  Nor can I think of a greater waste of time than talking to the insipid drones that they recruit.  But the other day I had a telephone conversation with one of these drones that really got into my head.  I was confronted, during this conversation by an awesome statement of indubitable Truth (that's right, truth of the Big T kind), the point of this little rant is to tell you about it.

Let me set the scene and make one thing clear: I'm not dealing with a real collection agency here.  After a long and painful stretch of underemployment I managed to secure a job and, eventually, catch-up on all the bills that I got so far behind on.  Nothing is paid off (yet), but nothing is behind either.  Unfortunately, I was not able to catch up fast enough to prevent Chase from sending my account to their pseudo-independent collection agency; a limbo from which there is no return.  What's interesting about this circumstance is that, despite their mandate (i.e., bleed the debtor for all they can before the leveraging or scarring the debtor into bankruptcy) it makes no economic sense for the collection agency to take any further action on my account.  If they take any action, I will stop paying (as is the rational thing to do, as I remind them whenever I get the chance).  On the other hand, this means that their threats, and therefore their function, are impotent.  If they do what they are trained to do they will fail to achieve their primary objective.

I was taking the opportunity to explain this to the simpleton on the phone, I'll call her Molly for lack of a better name, so I asked her this:  "If you do the math, you'll see that, at the rate I'm paying it will take 29 years for me to pay off the whole debt.". I wasn't done.  I then got to the point: "Do you plan to make a career out of calling me, being berated, and ending achieving nothing?"

I wasn't surprised by Molly's baffled response.  "Sir, I don't understand what you're asking."  She said.  I almost asked her where she went to school.  You know, for future reference.

“What I mean,” I said instead, “is that you call me every month and every month you manage I tell you the same thing and, ultimately, you manage to to achieve nothing.  I'm asking you, Molly, if you think calling me once a month for the next 29 years is a productive way to spend your time?  Do you think it will make for a satisfying career?”

Finally, the Molly seemed to realize that I was mocking her.  “Sir,” she said, "what I do doesn't matter."  And truer words were never spoken.

The words rang in my ears.  I couldn't believe what she was saying.  I couldn't believe the admission she was making.  Clearly, Molly didn't know what she was saying either.  If we were jousting, I'd just put Molly on her ass.  If we were sparring, I'd just won the match.  I'd be willing to bet that Molly had just broken one (if not many) of the cardinal rules of debt collection--namely, “thou shalt not concede the futility of the exercise”  I’d also bet that if our conversation was really being recorded “to ensure quality service,” Molly was going to be brought into the manager's office for a stern talking to.  I have no sympathy!

Immediately, I did what every good philosopher is obligated to do: I made sure that the Truth of what Molly had just said was not lost in any further superfluous chatter.  I spoke abruptly not allowing her to continues.  "Exactly!"  I said.  "What you do doesn't matter!"

And so the conversation ended the same way all of my monthly chats with the Chase simpletons end: I decided I'd wasted enough of my time, I frankly didn't care what else Molly had to say, so I hung-up the phone.

That said, I wasn't really done with the conversation, I wasn't done turning it over in my mind.  Without a doubt, Molly has one of the most repugnant, soul-crushing occupations one might have in this post-worldwide-credit-crisis, pre-Eurozone-disintegration economy, squeezing the last corpuscles from stones long since bereft of blood.  What Molly does really doesn't matter; not just in some existential Sisyphus-rolling-the-rock-up-the-mountain sense, I mean in all economic and practical senses.  Molly is tasked with making so-called 1% richer which means that she is part of the machine built to squeeze the last traces of wealth scattered amongst 99% of the world’s population.  If all this propaganda about the evil 1% is true, each citizen that makes up the other 99% of the world’s population controls a  0.0000000000014484354693787%  share of the world’s wealth (a very rough calculation: 0.01/(total population x 0.99)).  That makes the dollar value of any success Molly  might have  insignificant in any way you care to look at it.

“But wait a minute,” I’ve been asking myself.   My  function in my new vocation  is, effectively, to make rich people richer.  Does that mean what I do doesn’t matter either?  When I was teaching  I never use  to ask myself questions like  these, but even then I was effectively working to make rich people richer.  So what’s the difference?

Well, I’d like to think the main difference is that my new vocation does NOT involve  the same sort of vampirism that Molly’s vocation involves.  I’ll forgo with the details, but my job involves  shuffling wealth amongst the one percenters.  This, in fact, might be the only viable career options left for us ninety-nine percenters: skimming what we can from the  one percent and doing what we can to hold on to it.  Rather than satisfying work, we’ll have to settle for work that doesn’t eat our souls. 

Of course, in the end, what I do to  feed and clothe my family is not  what I look  at when I assess whether or not the things I do matter.  Not anymore, at least.  And considering I spend at least 40 (usually 50) of my roughly 84 waking hours doing  these things, it would seem that I discount better than half my waking life.  My only solace comes from my conviction, earned after lengthy contemplation, that what I do during those 40 - 50 hours does not malign the soul living the other half of my life.  Maybe my conversation with Molly gave her pause to  engage in this sort of contemplation.  She most likely dismissed me as just another asshole the moment I hung-up.  But if she didn’t, maybe something she did really does matter.

Fear & Loathing in Academia

As some of you know from my previous post, I have a new job.  It's in an entirely new field (new to me that is) performing an entirely new function.  (It's amazing how a crappy economy can change your life, but I can rant about that another time.)  While settling in to the new career I've often found myself reflecting on the challenges I encountered trying to establish an academic career and how those experiences contrast with my present experiences.  I'd like to share a few of these thoughts, observations, opinions, whatever here.

The Source of the Problem
I'm pretty sure that all those involved (that is, directly involved, not the politicians that generally understand nothing about education and academia) agree that our universities are pathetically under funded.  This situation is severely exasperated by gross mismanagement of those funds.  I regret that I can't name names here, but I have personal knowledge of high ranking university executives flouting the advice of their financial advisers and running up massive deficits for the sake of pet projects and pet students.  I've seen nepotism to rival the Bush family.  I've seen professors paid full salaries on sick leaves lasting almost a decade.  And I've seen failing departments choose to pay teaching staff to do nothing rather than admit to making mistakes in their hiring practises.  (That's one thing you'll never hear an academic say, "I was wrong.")

The Symptoms of the Problem
All that aside, it's the environment of fear that these funding crises gives rise to that is, I think, most deleterious to higher education. Good old fashioned job security fears, that is. The problem is that, for the most part, academics are not judged according to the quality of education they provide. They aren't even judged for their research, they are judged by their publications. (The research may be garbage, but if it led to a publication, that is overlooked. And don't think that a 'good' publication necessarily means good research went into it.) This means two things: (1) teaching, when done right is very time consuming, is an obstacle to academic success; and (2) it is not in the best interest of any individual academic to encourage, mentor, assist, or support in any way the efforts of her colleagues. After all, there is only a limited amount of money, and if it comes down to their project or yours, their tenure or yours, their employment or yours, you don't want your own good will to be working against you.

The Victims of the Problem
It goes without saying that this situation is absolutely detrimental to the students. When faculty show moments before (and sometimes after) the scheduled class start tine and leave the moment class ends never to be seen until next class students become alienated. When faculty refuse to participate in independent course, reading groups, and other similar off-the-books activities students never develop the passion for there discipline and their studies that faculty look for and feed off of to energise their teaching. (After all, why should they devote any more energy to their discipline than their so-called mentors?) It's a failing situation all around and it cheapens not only education but scholarship in general. It destroys student moral and it reinforces the idea that academics occupy there time with abstract trivialities that are irrelevant to everyday life even when the opposite is true.

The Solution to the Problem?
Of course, no mere blog post is going to solve this complex problem. And I hesitate to conclude here without offering any suggestion as to how w might begin to address it. That said, I can't help but anticipate the controversy that I know my suggestions will raise. I think it would be self-defeating, even stifling to a proper discourse for me to offer a sketch of my current thinking on the matter as opposed to a thorough(ish) elaboration and defence. For that reason and with my apologies I will satisfy myself with the attempt to perpetuate discussion and the promise of more posts to follow.

The Practise of Death

Phew!  Its been a long few months for me.  I started a new job, had another baby, and, well isn't that enough?  Anyhow, I've been inspired (mostly by the surprisingly consistent visitation to this blog during my hiatus) to resurrect The Pine Box.  I have a short coming soon list that I think best to keep to myself, but for now I'll leave you with the following.  I consider this to be one of the most inspiring pieces of text ever written (then translated, then translated again):

The truth rather is that the soul which is pure at departing draws after her no bodily taint, having never voluntarily had connection with the body, which she is ever avoiding, herself gathered into herself (for such abstraction has been the study of her life). And what does this mean but that she has been a true disciple of philosophy and has practised how to die easily? And is not philosophy the practise of death?

Certainly.

That soul, I say, herself invisible, departs to the invisible world to the divine and immortal and rational: thither arriving, she lives in bliss and is released from the error and folly of men, their fears and wild passions and all other human ills, and forever dwells, as they say of the initiated, in company with the gods.

Plato - Phaedo

Reflections on Typos and Failing Professors: A Response to An Honors Writing Professor

Thank you for your feedback, An Honors Writing Professor!

Typos are always the scourge of authors of all sorts and I have no doubt that there is more than one in this post.  The Pine Box is far from the Harvard Review so the peer review process is less rigorous.  I also make no pretence that the writing found in the box is based upon anything but personal experience.  The truth of the matter is that I have found The Pine Box to be an excellent vehicle for catharsis; my research proper finds other outlets.

That said, if you choose to find subtext in my modest blog, be assured that all my sour grapes are directed at my colleagues, not my professors.  Specifically, I reserve my sour grapes for the proud misogynists, the malignantly self-important, chronically intoxicated, and for any professor who is offended by the idea of an honest constructive review, as opposed to a nice and misleading one.

The simple fact of the matter is that there is no real mechanism in Canadian post secondaries education (not the seven or eight institutions I've taught in at least) for the assessment of their instructors' teaching abilities and no mechanism for the removal of the notoriously bad.  Sure, you might be fired for sleeping with a student or for keeping kiddie porn on your office computer, but failing to fulfill your primary role, i.e., teaching, has little impact on your professional advancement.  So long as there are no overt mechanisms of this sort, I'm afraid we (those with genuine concern for the quality of education [quality of scholarship is another, related, but distinct, issue]) will have to resort to covert mechanisms.

So long as we're looking for subtext, lets not ignore the text; nowhere did I ever suggest that professors are selling a product.  I'm certainly not selling anything in my classrooms and this seems to be one point on which all professors (and, again, I'm speaking from my experience, not research) agree, they should not be selling anything.  The corporate entity that is the university or college, on the other hand, is selling something.  They don't seem to be selling education in the Platonic, Ignatian, or even the Freirean sense, they're selling an ideal and a lifestyle that feeds the naive expectations of young adults and part of that ideal (embraced, apparently, by administrators but not professors) is the right to the expected outcome/product, i.e., the credit and ultimately the degree, by virtue of having payed for it.

Anyhow, this response is getting almost as long as the original post.  I have class prep to do (unlike most of my colleagues who, more often than not, wing-it).  But, before I sign-off I just thought that I would reassure my readers that I don't often incorporate references to and video clips from Californication in writing that I expect to be taken seriously...by anyone...

Dear Granny, Keep your stinking waffle maker!

These past few days have seen a deluge of Web 2.0 driven testimony baring witness to our (or, rather, the vast majority's) disgusting passion for consumption.  Mashable, YouTube, Twitter are all littered with countless examples of our utter disregard for common sense, not to mention our fellow citizens, all in the name of some shit that we'll wrap in cellophane and pass-off to one of our relatives as a heartfelt expression of our love for them.  And if you're taken in by that facade (the one that is most often wrapped in words like, "I knew it would be perfect for you," and other similar tripe), then I'd like you to give some consideration to the violence that might have gone into securing the perfect gift for you.  I'd like you to ask yourself whose to blame for that violence and, once you've figured that out, ask yourself how much love and respect that gift is worthy of.

    

Don't blame Wal-Mart folks.  They didn't make you flock into their stores by the thousands for a chance to swarm a stack of memory cards, Xboxes, waffle irons, or whatever else you could get your hands on!

And don't blame the cops either!  Any idiot with half a brain cell can see that this sort of mayhem cannot be controlled by any outside force, it can't be slowed down by any show of force or authority once it started.  In short, it's not policeable!

On the other hand, feel free to blame these cops for this (alleged) act of brutality.  Of course, don't blame them for their inability to impose order on a crowd that defies order, blame them for not exercising their own common sense and just letting the guy pass.  If Walmart is so concerned about loosing items to the five fingered discount during their Black Friday sales, perhaps they should reconsider having them.  Call it the cost of doing business because there isn't anything that guy can slip into his pocket that is worth his life!

Nor can we blame capitalism, consumerism, mercantilism, or any other -ism we can think of.  Nope, sorry folks, the blame for this sort of unruly chaos lands squarely on those who participated.  It's demand that leads to this supply and that demand originates inside the homes and hearts of the common person, inside everyone appearing in the above film clips and everyone making them.  Each and every individual we see in these clips decided as an individual to engage in this inhuman behaviour and each and every one is to blame for its outcome.  

There's just no poetic way of expressing how disturbing and vile these scenes are when we realize that what they depict are thousands upon thousands of our fellow citizens, our neighbours, our relatives, maybe even ourselves, sacrificing our human dignity in exchange for pieces of plastic and metal, some of which have been given the financial value less than that we might, on a lucky day, find on the street.

If that plea for dignity and common sense doesn't move you to, (a) avoid kicking and scratching your neighbours as you descend upon that dwindling stack of Nintendo Wiis (there is a reason why the name of the system is also slang for a bodily function), (b) backing off the the poor WalMart slave (they don't want to be their either!) whose been given the garbage bag full of merchandise (how poignant it is that the merchandise arrives in a garbage bag!) and sent to risk his or her life on the storeroom floor, (c) stepping out of the line of 500 people waiting to pick up one of 25 items (the math isn't hard, customers 26 through 500 are not getting that camera without resorting to violence), or (d) staying home, then maybe the following will:

Go back and watch the first video again.  When you do, imagine this: imagine that woman in the blue t-shirt with her butt sticking out is your granny, or mom, or aunt, or sister, or daughter (you know she's one of these things to someone!).  Now imagine that you're the one on Christmas day who unwraps the waffle maker, or, rather, one of the four people to unwrap the waffle makers she managed to get away with.  How would you feel knowing what she went through to get it?  Never mind how much the item cost, how would you feel knowing how low she sank for that stupid waffle maker?  Does it look like she put a lot of love and consideration into picking for you the perfect expression of her affection (for you and three other people)?  I would like to think that after all the chaos of Black Friday has subsided and when family and friends have finally gathered for some recreation and celebration, that most people would recognize that waffle maker for what it is, a worthless prize in a meaningless game, a token of nothing but your granny/sister/daughter's compulsion to act like an animal when she finds herself among animals.  I'd like to think that most people who stop to put two and two together--Black Friday chaos and the Christmas ideal--that shame and indignation would be the only sentiment filling their hearts.  Now imagine being reminded of that shame and indignation every time you use that waffle maker--that is, if you ever do use that waffle maker.  Wouldn't that seriously diminish your opinion of the person who gave it to you?  If it doesn't, don't you think it should!