Yet another prediction that my discipline is obsolete (apparently this time from a lame teacher): "When all the world is abuzz with digital twitterings, it may be that the humanities requirement is a dead and rotting carcass that we tiptoe around, neglecting to bury at our peril."
1. Maybe if English professors keep talking about how what we do is no longer relevant, we're actually ensuring our own demise, actually killing our own discipline. Maybe the problem isn't in fact texting and twittering and iPods and the like: maybe the problem is professors who don't think every student should take a humanities course - like really don't believe that they should, and feel like they're too good to teach those chemistry and construction management and accounting majors - and so they actively resist making such a course appealing.
2. Shame on the Chronicle for just about everything it publishes related to the humanities.
(If you really want to revel in some righteous indignation, also check out this thread over in the forums about the reading vs. readings debate. There is exactly one commenter who seems to have half of a clue, from my perspective.)
12 years ago
3 comments:
Wow! He certainly chose the right adjective to describe himself, didn't he? It seems clear to me that the problem is his carefully crafted distance from his students - hey, I know I'm boring, so I don't get involved - rather than what he teaches. If he really believes he has so little influence on his students, then why is he teaching? I've taught at several schools of all different levels, and all of them had students that got excited about what they were learning. Don't blame the students if semester after semester, they're bored. Anyway, I agree that the Chronicle should stop giving space to this kind of crap.
As far as I'm concerned, anyone who hasn't been educated in the humanities has been educated at all.
I teach sciences, but I can assure you that the humanities are sorely needed. I wish that my students could read and write. I also wish that they had some connection to their culture (knowing literature). These things are just as important as math and science.
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