From the article:
‘Responsibility means we trust you to do your best. Accountability means we don’t trust you at all and we’ll be checking up on you every 5 minutes. The result is teachers bogged down in paperwork instead of teaching and the over-testing of students that gets in the way of the joy of learning.’
And we are burdened with new teachers with an ingrained sense that the classroom belongs to them and their needs are all that matters. They only want the best students, the least teaching hours and it’s all about them. Makes me feel proud to be old school where the student is the centre of a massive matrix that is all geared to their success, where they’re treated as individuals, where learning is all that matters and where testing is impossible because progress is so profound and sweeping that there is nothing to actually test. The council of the university I work for has determined that only two things matter: students, and higher education (which is another way of saying learning which in turn means students, all of us as learners) but by the time this sublime philosophy finds its way to the classroom it’s become something else altogether, something perverse where individuality becomes a mishmash, marshmallow of sameness and, to quote Welby Ings, ‘fear and power’ rule and the idea of ‘everyone singing from the same song sheet’ blights even the vaguest hope of evolution and turns everything we sing into the same dull monotone we achieved yesterday and the day before. It’s OK, though, because now we have something we can test and measure and turn into data, ‘data’ that can be press released and made into something else, a ‘something’ that will reflect this spinning top of mediocrity and provide governments with the illusion that everything is as it was and safe and that we all my lie easy in our beds. But learning isn’t safe, it isn’t safe, as Ings tells us in ‘Disobedient Thinking’ but no-one is listening. No one is listening because it’s not actually about learning or students or even about collegiality but it’s all about them and their careers, it’s all about them, as Bryan Bruce says. Welcome, my friends, to the modern, neoliberal New Zealand university.
dykiegirl 