Blackmail, Chinese University Style

So I get a text message from a clerk flunky early 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.