On Sat, 2007-10-27 at 15:11 -0700, Jim Devine wrote: > nice idea. You're not a teacher, are you?
I was, for a while. Gave it up, because I had to do grading. I hated that, for two reasons: 1) It was an exceptionally squalid business. It made me feel like a combination cop and butcher: Patrolling for plagiarism, taking attendance, surveillance against cheating, on the cop side, and issuing a little blue stamp, on the butcher side, after the abattoir had done its work: US Prime, Grade B, whatever. Revolting. 2) It got in the way of education in any meaningful sense of the word. What happened in the classroom was all about the extraction of a grade (on the kids' part) and the withholding of it, to keep it suitably valuable, on mine. The subject matter just got flattened out into an arbitrary field in which the kids could display their gifts -- or their "deficits" -- and I could put them through their paces, like some ghoulish ringmaster.
