Dialogue Journals: Biting Off More Than One Can Chew

Ah, the beginning of a new academic year, and a chance not to repeat the mistakes of yesteryear. This one was not a bad mistake, as it was beneficial for all of my students, but it was devastating to an already-exhausted writing teacher swamped with papers to mark and lessons to plan.

My wise idea last year was to include dialogue journals as part of my assessment for freshmen. Each student had two small notebooks that they would use to write each week. They would exchange them with me once a week, after which I would read and make comments.

Now, at first I clearly instructed my students to focus on writing about writing. (Some pedagogues call this metacognition, though my high school critical thinking teacher has convinced me that’s a silly term as that would suggest the end of cognition.). But these were freshers, with new university experiences every day that they just had to share with their new teacher. Keeping these young students focused in their writing turned out to be impossible.

To make matters worse, my students had to show off their individualism by buying notebooks of every concievable size, color, and binding. Some even chose heavy leather covers! So once a week, I got to roll 98 journals around in my airplane luggage, just to go to class.

In the end, I’m glad this batch of nearly 100 students got to have dialogues with me. But I would never, ever, implement dialogue journals again. Never, ever! Too much work is bad for teacher.

Pornstar Names for Students

This morning I convinced one of my Chinese students to drop his conservative English name of Davidl Apologies to my colleague Dave Davies, but there’s nothing wrong with his old name; he just has more marketing potential with his new name. This is a Business English class after all!

David is now Mr. Happy. Mr. Happy has two classmates named Swallow and Fannie. That was a pre-existing condition, not my doing. But I do have two other gals considering the monikers Microphone and Doublemint.

Looking forward to the role-playing scenarios later this semester!

Blackmail, Chinese University Style

So I get a text message from a clerk flunky earrly this week, saying they have enough teachers at my university so they won’t be hiring me again this fall. Reminds me of the breaking-up-by-text-phenomenae explored in the film Up in the Air (with George Clooney). Lame, lame, lame. Considering they only have three foreign teachers here, and one of my colleagues has announced he is leaving, I started smelling something rotten after this text message.

Moon’em I thought, and sent out a few letters of interest that night. My prospects are bright away from this place. Only thing is I love it here, and hoped to guide my 2nd-year students through their 3rd-year literature curricula.

Tonight I heard from a 3rd-year student, that the administration is actually asking students to comment on whether I should be retained. So if I could kindly refrain from assigning homework, hint hint, maybe I could stay here.

Now that’s just bollocks. Blackmailing a teacher to not give homework, so that he can return next year only to teach another class where he ought not to ever prescribe homework ever again. No wonder China has never won a Nobel Prize; they are discouraging students from actually learning anything in their universities.

I’m supportive of student-centered learning, but student-directed slacking is for pussy teachers. So, while I will miss guiding my hard-working younger students next year, I will not let the hardly-working older students blackmail me.

Homework is necessary for cognition. The classroom is where guidance and exposure to information take place, but the real intellectual heavy lifting is with reading, re-reading, writing, and thinking that come with homework tasks.

How real is too real?

Geez did I make a mistake today. I thought I’d teach my sophomore students about the differences in risk-taking between Chinese and US American youth. A perfect chance to show them MTV’s Jackass Lost Tape, or so I thought. There was a scene where they were making omelettes by masticating the ingredients first, then upchucking into a mixing bowl before frying to a golden brown. Another scene showed two dudes and one chick competing to see who could drink a gallon-jug of milk the fastest. At least ten girls dashed back-and-forth to the W.C. in just one hour. Half of the audience kept their faces down during the puke-free rad skateboarding scenes.

Three conclusions were derived from this failed classroom lesson: 1) U.S. Americans have nothing to fear from the ChiComs. If they can’t handle blood and puke on television, do you think they can handle armed conflict with us foreign devils?; 2) China is not ready for MTV; and 3) English teaching is sometimes itself a high-risk activity!

I’m Sleepy

So I’m going to bed now.

Death of the Salesmen

From Saul Alinsky’s Rules for radicals: A pragmatic primer for realistic radicals (1971):
“There’s another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevski said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution. To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system, among not only the middle class but the 40 per cent of American families – more than seventy million people – whose income range from $5,000 to $10,000 a year [in 1971]. They cannot be dismissed by labeling them blue collar or hard hat. They will not continue to be relatively passive and slightly challenging. If we fail to communicate with them, if we don’t encourage them to form alliances with us, they will move to the right. Maybe they will anyway, but let’s not let it happen by default.”

The Summer ’09 health care debate in the USA has the blue collar and hard hats prevailing over the liberal elites. Had the Democratic senators studied Saul Alinsky as their leader B. Hussein Obama has, they would accept that their defeat is because they failed to communicate with the middle class. The party-of-the-jackass’s tendency to talk down to, rather than seek buy-in from, the middle class ensures the movement to the right that pollsters are noticing in the States. This same rightward shift was predicted from the quote above.

In the world of salesmanship, prospects are buttered up. Their fears are validated, not necessarily agreed to, and empathy is shown. Then the salesman demonstrates how his goods or services match the needs of the potential customer. Saul Alinsky thought like a salesman. Congress didn’t. That’s why the ignorant middle class is moving to the right.

Health care reform is being killed by the condescension of liberalism, not by the ignorance of the mainstream. It is a sublime case of bad salesmanship.

When will those on the left stop letting liberals run the show?

Disrupting the Hierarchy

From Peter and Hull’s The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong (1969):
“Employees in the two extreme classes–the super-competent and the super-incompetent–are alike subject to dismissal. They are usually fired soon after being hired, for the same reason: that they tend to disrupt the hierarchy. This sloughing off of extremes is called Hierarchal Exfoliation.”

When I first started working, in my teens, my father explained the Peter Principle to me during many informal chats. Now that he’s long gone, I realize the importance of his message: Don’t ever let your boss know you’re smarter than them.

In practice, the way the best of us are exfoliated is to creatively conflate our super-competence into a super-incompetence, for the HR department’s legal files. So, if you really like your job, feign stupidity and stay under the radar.

Otherwise, you too will be exfoliated.

Hacking the MBTI Inventory

From Isabel Briggs Myers’s Introduction to Type, Sixth Edition: A Guide to Understanding Your Results on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (1998):
“Taking the MBTI inventory and receiving feedback will help you identify your unique gifts. . .understanding your MBTI type is self-affirming and encourages cooperation with others.”

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is a psychometric test used by corporate astrologers to categorize their employees. Despite its pretext of validating all personality types in an organization, in the actual workplace you will be invalidated frequently by performance reviews, scorecards, metrics, and other corporate tools of conformity.

If you must take this intrusive anal probe called the MBTI, make sure all your answers make you an IFSJ; you will stay under the radar and outlast the rest of us, including the ISTP that brought you this advice.

2×2 Matrices

From Chetan Bhagat’s One Night @ the Call Center (2005):
“‘Maybe I can explain this to you with the help of a 2×2 matrix,’ Bakshi said and bent down to write ‘High‘ and ‘Low‘ along the boxes. I had to stop him.“

The dirty little secret for all you potential intermulticultural hucksters out there is to simply articulate your scheme into a 2×2 matrix that is easily penetrable into the managerial brain. It’s that easy.

The Cultural Perversity Agenda

From M.R. Hammer’s The Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI): An Approach for Assessing and Building Intercultural Competence, in M.A. Moodian (Ed.), Contemporary Leadership and Intercultural Competence: Understanding and Utilizing Cultural Diversity to Build Successful Organizations (in press) :
“Individuals at the Acceptance level are typically curious and interested in cultural differences and committed to the cultural diversity agenda.“

An infamous charlatan on the intercultural scene, who uncannily bears a resemblance to Dr. Monroe on The Simpsons, makes much talk about aligning the global workforce to the “cultural diversity agenda”. The presence of a definite article directly implies that we should all understand what this agenda is, and indirectly implies that we should accept it as a good thing. He’s even got 2×2 matrices to hammer these implications in, no pun intended.

Now, before we take the sage’s regimen of psychometric tests and debriefing sessions, and weaken our resolve until we no longer question, let’s take time to ask:

What exactly is this cultural diversity agenda, anyway?