"All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past."
In the Spring of 2022, I took a mandatory writing class for university. It was a class on digital media and influencers. I had gone into this class with high hopes thinking that the trendy nature of the topic in today's society would promise some diversion to the standard English class, that there would be more freedom to what you could pursue or what you could write about. The first few weeks of unfortunately made it clear that my delusional optimism was just that. Delusion. We started off reading some theories made by some authors that are completely irrelevant to any progress toward understanding influencers or social media. We read a theory about what constitutes a ‘Third Place' which is just any social environment outside of work and home, we then proceeded to discuss if social media, or sms, or emails were so-called 'Third Places' for an entire two weeks. I'm sorry but who the fuck cares if social media or emails or sms falls into an arbitrary definition made up by some author. Everything you know intuitively about digital media is just fed back to you in the form of 20-page scholarly articles written by some dropkick with a degree 20 years ago... But I digress.
A couple of weeks go by and we get our first assignment we hand it rough drafts and have each other peer review the assignment. Our instructions were this and I quote "It'll take too long to read each other's entire piece, so just read the introduction and conclusion for the peer review." I disagreed. How could you get a good understanding of someone's paper if you just read the introduction and conclusion? I thought we should all read each other's paper in its entirety because I thought I owed it to my classmates to give them honest, decent feedback after I... you know actually read the paper. Before I could digest what had just been said, my train of thought was cut off abruptly when I heard: "You also get extra credit if you do more peer reviews." I was lost for words. This system rewards people to half-ass their peer reviews and pump out as many as possible for that sweet, sweet A. I couldn't in good conscience give someone a half-ass peer review so for the rest of the class I sat and read papers diligently. When class was over I get told "This isn't 2 hours' worth of work", I stayed back as everyone else got their bags and left. On the surface, I stayed calm but I felt helpless and upset and it was at that moment that I snapped.
During the midterm break, instead of writing a piece about what we've learnt so far, I sent my teacher a sharply worded response that demonstrated my concerns with her teaching style. In hindsight I could have been more gentle, it's not like the message was filled with swear words but I still could have dealt with this better. The semester resumes and I don't hear from my Professor for 2 weeks, I go to class as normal I see my Professor and all seems and then I suddenly get an email from the head of the department. Instead of talking to me and having a discussion about my issues with some aspects of the course, she goes straight to her boss who doesn't know exactly what's going on. I set up a meeting with her boss she, unsurprisingly, didn't want to hear me out at all. I was berated for 45 minutes. I was told that challenging teaching methods were "unacceptable" because I don't have a degree in sociology or pedagogy... This the cancer that plagues education and academia. Pride. Ironically, the assignment that we were supposed to write over the break asked us what we were most proud about this semester.
Most students engage in classes as pure spectators, it's what the system has designed students to be, slaves to their teachers and their grades. They put their teachers up on a pedestal because without even knowing it they see teachers as infallible gods. Everything a teacher says is absolute, their methods are flawless and not up for discussion. People who have been in such a closed system, such as education, for so long have their identities formed by the metrics the system dictates. Academics see grades and degrees as reflections of great knowledge and are proud of their mastery over their field but outside academia they have nothing, so they choose to hide behind their degrees and accolades thinking they mean something when in reality they haven't contributed anything truly meaningful to society. So when someone challenges the only thing that they have, they feel threatened; their ego that has been artificially propped up by arbitrary metrics has been damaged. Instead of accepting critique, they cower, they get someone else to fight their battles. What's insane is that during the meeting with her boss she mentioned I was disruptive in class, she brought my body language, that I yawned, that I stared at her and how it was affecting the entire class. I certainly did not go out of my way to be disruptive, I didn't do anything that regular tired university student wouldn't.
