Hell Cycles

Comp Tales 98 and 100 offer an interesting look into confidentialty within the classroom. We have discussed--briefly--in 601 how to spot troubling writing and ways to handle the situation, but I felt for the professor in Tale 98. She technically did the right thing, but never getting to know what happened to that student caused her so much grief. I think she handled it well on her end, but the administration could've done a much better job handling the psychology aftereffects for her. While 98 does not offer a common experience necessarily, protocols for responding to troubling writing and efforts to debrief teachers are important issues.

Comp Tale 100 gives us a much more common scenario with a parent criticizing a professor for his daughter's failing grade. My mentor and I just talked about this issue when I interviewed her. I saw this cartoon by Daryl Cagle in a newspaper once, and it has stayed with me. It captures the changes ideologies and pressures put on educators to appease parents and students, not evaluate effectively.

I believe there are these cycles of pressure inside and outside the school. Internally, the government pressures the school for standards. The school pressure the teacher to perform. The teacher pressures the student to learn. And student scores influence the very government standards that started this whole messy cycle.

Externally, you have the economy pressuring the parents. The parents pressure the child to ensure he/she makes it to a good school. The cost of the good school pressures students. And the number of students in debt after college influences, again, the very system that created the problems.

I don't have an answer. I don't have the end-all-be-all solution to these multi-faceted hell cycles. What I do have is experience. Like many of you, I have experience at many different spots in the cycles. And I think that my advantage in dealing with the cycles is from understanding the point of view of the people at the other stages. That's my best advice: Consider the people to your right and to your left, where they came from and where they plan to go. Maybe then we can stop yelling at each other long enough to hear.