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scrottieI dropped PHIL C131 not because I was picking hard-right cues but because I could not pin the professor down on a consistent logic. When pressed for consistency so I could find the pattern so I could replicate it and do the work, the exceptions kept growing exceptions. After wading in to ENGL C101 and remembering the context, I'm going ooooh.
I didn't save the exact passage, but it was basically "scientific studies show that children who are beaten tend to grow up to beat their children". We were asked to if the conclusion follows from the premise necessarily/unavoidably, probably, or they're unrelated. (The UMN Predicate/Prepositional Logic class that Cerro Coso refused to transfer was a much more formalized version of the same thing, so this is not new territory to me.) I picked "probably" and was told that that was wrong, and it does not necessarily follow... with shifting reasoning as I continued to question this. First it was because there's no casual effect (studies generally aim for showing causal effect), then because time has passed and effects don't happen over time (this reverses the outcomes of a bunch of the other sample questions and no explanation could be provided for when time did and did not nullify cause and effect). At the time, I basically ignoring that this was happening over a question about beating children; I was just focused on trying to get a consistent explanation on the logic, eventually spent too much time and mental energy on it, and decided that I would not be able to peer in to the instructor's head and trying to emulate completely arbitrary exceptions would be a liability to my other obligations and recreation.
To be absolutely clear to anyone wandering in here, my position is that the US politically is far to the right, dangerously so, and has been and continues to move in that direction. We do not need even more hard-line right-wing narrative like this.
Something started to smell when the syllabus quiz asked students to repeat back what reads to me like a threat:
Next up was summarizing this absolute gem:
https://esl501crenshawfa2012.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/give-more-fs.pdf
Among fallacies in there, completely disregarding the imo easy refuted premises, is question begging, circular logic, and victim blaming. To wit: "As long as it is the practice of teachers to pass students
who should not be passed, the responsibility will not go home to the parents, where, I hope, it belongs. (I
am tempted to make an analogy to then Gov. Lester Maddox's statement some years ago about prison
conditions in Georgia-"We'll get abetter grade of prisons when we get abetter grade of prisoners"-but I shall
refrain.)"
If we were reading one annoying, misconceived paper as part of an attempt to expose us to different things and give us practise with odious writing, that's fine, great, but when every single piece is argument for the same purpose, that's more something else.
The theme of "we need to toughen kids up" is unmistakable, because it is recurrent in every reading assignment and lecture. Here's a mix of the next essay we're to summarize along with lecture notes for it:
A lot of things set me on the idealogical path that I'm on, but one of the first was seeing the intersection between church authoritarians during the day and people who go home to beat their kids, and hearing the reationalizations of "toughening them up", "teaching them about the real world", "they need to learn how the world works". I learned at an early age that abusers rationalize their abuse to themselves and others and in the case of the far right, glorifying perpetuating trauma is a cornerstone of the idealogy. In there lies circular logic. They're creating the horrible word they claim they want to prepare kids for. Often their kids wind up broken (many of my cousins did) and when they "succeed" by being numb, they don't enjoy it. Other things at other points helped cement that, but another experience making me like this is watching two friends spread out in time deploy this kind of rhetoric -- the same I saw with some of my uncles -- before eventually coming out as a neonazi. So maybe I'm more aware or maybe I'm just more on edge.
I'd rather drop this than play along. U*P has major issues but this has not been one of them. The Global Policy class was actually excellent, and a lot of technical classes despite being a bit on the fluffy side, not adequate hands on, and plagued with sloppily written quiz questions, and not transferable to regionally accredited schools, at least has never had this problem. The petty tyrants who infrequently wind up teaching there are at a less developed stage of the far right ideology, not past an entitled stage. Far right ideologies prey on these feelings of entitlement. I still couldn't help laughing the ineffectualness of a petty tyrant with a Ph.D in Human Resource Management who didn't actually know what copyright is and was mispelling it "copywrite" and knew even less about actual tech.
But I kind of don't want to leave this completely unchallenged, and adding footnotes referencing citations for some of the rhetorical devices seems to maybe already provoking ire or something similar. My canvass inbox is blowing up with messages from old white dude who is carefully watching my every move now. Like the beating kids article in PHIL, the giving F's article is being kind of indirectly, low key defended, but this time through overbearing presence instead of weak arguments. So my brain is spinning on how best to point out this pattern, or pieces of it, without adding too much conclusion to it. Footnotes as I started with may be best. But doing that, it seems extremely likely I'm provoking a poor grade.
This is at the top of the syllabus:
"COURSE GOALS
The aim of English 101 is to help students reason logically, read critically, and write
effectively when using university-level, academic sources."
The interpretation of what constitutes "logically" and "critically" is of course very up to interpretation.
Or am I overreacting and completely misreading the intentions of an innocent old man?
I'm done taking classes from old white dudes. Complete boycott here.
I didn't save the exact passage, but it was basically "scientific studies show that children who are beaten tend to grow up to beat their children". We were asked to if the conclusion follows from the premise necessarily/unavoidably, probably, or they're unrelated. (The UMN Predicate/Prepositional Logic class that Cerro Coso refused to transfer was a much more formalized version of the same thing, so this is not new territory to me.) I picked "probably" and was told that that was wrong, and it does not necessarily follow... with shifting reasoning as I continued to question this. First it was because there's no casual effect (studies generally aim for showing causal effect), then because time has passed and effects don't happen over time (this reverses the outcomes of a bunch of the other sample questions and no explanation could be provided for when time did and did not nullify cause and effect). At the time, I basically ignoring that this was happening over a question about beating children; I was just focused on trying to get a consistent explanation on the logic, eventually spent too much time and mental energy on it, and decided that I would not be able to peer in to the instructor's head and trying to emulate completely arbitrary exceptions would be a liability to my other obligations and recreation.
To be absolutely clear to anyone wandering in here, my position is that the US politically is far to the right, dangerously so, and has been and continues to move in that direction. We do not need even more hard-line right-wing narrative like this.
Something started to smell when the syllabus quiz asked students to repeat back what reads to me like a threat:
Next up was summarizing this absolute gem:
https://esl501crenshawfa2012.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/give-more-fs.pdf
Among fallacies in there, completely disregarding the imo easy refuted premises, is question begging, circular logic, and victim blaming. To wit: "As long as it is the practice of teachers to pass students
who should not be passed, the responsibility will not go home to the parents, where, I hope, it belongs. (I
am tempted to make an analogy to then Gov. Lester Maddox's statement some years ago about prison
conditions in Georgia-"We'll get abetter grade of prisons when we get abetter grade of prisoners"-but I shall
refrain.)"
If we were reading one annoying, misconceived paper as part of an attempt to expose us to different things and give us practise with odious writing, that's fine, great, but when every single piece is argument for the same purpose, that's more something else.
The theme of "we need to toughen kids up" is unmistakable, because it is recurrent in every reading assignment and lecture. Here's a mix of the next essay we're to summarize along with lecture notes for it:
A lot of things set me on the idealogical path that I'm on, but one of the first was seeing the intersection between church authoritarians during the day and people who go home to beat their kids, and hearing the reationalizations of "toughening them up", "teaching them about the real world", "they need to learn how the world works". I learned at an early age that abusers rationalize their abuse to themselves and others and in the case of the far right, glorifying perpetuating trauma is a cornerstone of the idealogy. In there lies circular logic. They're creating the horrible word they claim they want to prepare kids for. Often their kids wind up broken (many of my cousins did) and when they "succeed" by being numb, they don't enjoy it. Other things at other points helped cement that, but another experience making me like this is watching two friends spread out in time deploy this kind of rhetoric -- the same I saw with some of my uncles -- before eventually coming out as a neonazi. So maybe I'm more aware or maybe I'm just more on edge.
I'd rather drop this than play along. U*P has major issues but this has not been one of them. The Global Policy class was actually excellent, and a lot of technical classes despite being a bit on the fluffy side, not adequate hands on, and plagued with sloppily written quiz questions, and not transferable to regionally accredited schools, at least has never had this problem. The petty tyrants who infrequently wind up teaching there are at a less developed stage of the far right ideology, not past an entitled stage. Far right ideologies prey on these feelings of entitlement. I still couldn't help laughing the ineffectualness of a petty tyrant with a Ph.D in Human Resource Management who didn't actually know what copyright is and was mispelling it "copywrite" and knew even less about actual tech.
But I kind of don't want to leave this completely unchallenged, and adding footnotes referencing citations for some of the rhetorical devices seems to maybe already provoking ire or something similar. My canvass inbox is blowing up with messages from old white dude who is carefully watching my every move now. Like the beating kids article in PHIL, the giving F's article is being kind of indirectly, low key defended, but this time through overbearing presence instead of weak arguments. So my brain is spinning on how best to point out this pattern, or pieces of it, without adding too much conclusion to it. Footnotes as I started with may be best. But doing that, it seems extremely likely I'm provoking a poor grade.
This is at the top of the syllabus:
"COURSE GOALS
The aim of English 101 is to help students reason logically, read critically, and write
effectively when using university-level, academic sources."
The interpretation of what constitutes "logically" and "critically" is of course very up to interpretation.
Or am I overreacting and completely misreading the intentions of an innocent old man?
I'm done taking classes from old white dudes. Complete boycott here.
