Time Change

I hadn’t really planned on any sort of hiatus. It’s a little weird to watch this blog turn into a brown lozenge when the spammers finally locate the few open entries and force it into remission. There are a lot of things I’d like to write about, but I keep getting caught up in busywork.

I had hoped that moving up into higher levels of education might mean that there would be less pure tedium—in the form of assignments targeted at a regurgitation of the “party line” espoused by a particular discipline. So far, that is only partially true. Two of my classes are intense theory seminars. These are great. It’s amazing sitting around with a group of motivated (well, mostly) people who read and respond to texts. It’s not so great for my third class, which is run using a “constructionist” pedagogical approach. That class has been nothing but an endless stream of busywork targeted at keeping the “learning community” engaged with fitting poor theoretical models into hypothetical practices. The teacher seems mostly absent, other than just to send yet another useless assignment into the ether. There is no discussion of the theory, really, just endless application to dubious situations which we are forced to create. It ties up at least two days of my week with forced group work.

Then there’s the matter of teaching a class I’ve never taught before, and having to develop material for that. The theory seminars are both so excellent that I don’t really question my decision to go this route, but that third class�

Enough of a vent. I’m just tired of staring at that brown lozenge.