Between age 17 and 20, I got a job stocking shelves at a grocery store, earning $.45 more per hour if I joined the overnight stock crew (bringing my hourly rate to $3.80). I put things on a shelf so people could take it off again. The people I worked with on the overnight stock crew were usually much older, between ages 35 and 55. I only had the chance to interact with them during two 15 min. breaks and a 30 min. lunch break at 3 a.m. in which most of them chain smoked and hot-boxed Winstons and Marlboros. Otherwise, verbal communication on the sales floor was strictly prohibited, but smoking was okay as long is didn't interfere with one's stocking.
Before and after breaks, I spent the nights at Winn Dixie with my trusty box cutter in hand, slicing off the tops of cereal cases or the boxes of canned foods, thrusting the products onto their shelves, 2-3-4 packages or more at a time, and then breaking down the emptied box and stacking the cardboard like dead carcasses on the center of a grocery store aisle. The work was pointless and I was in college to land a career some day, anyway.
After college, I worked in print journalism and then graduated to public relations and advertising-related work. In the late 1990s, I decided to give up my six-figure salary to do something other than lying for a living: I went to grad school to study poetry, earned a doctorate, and since 2003, I've been employed as a high school English teacher.
The push for online LMS-directed education has been steady since I earned my doctorate. Today, the LMS is the bane of my existence and it's not too different from stocking shelves all night long at Winn Dixie.
In Feb. schooling went all online and since then I work roughly 12-14 hours per day, six days' per week, doing nothing but copying and pasting content from one LMS shell to another, changing dates by clicking on these calendar boxes, and uploading files that were once delivered to students in a bound, physical "course packet" when I was in college in the 1980s. I click on buttons to make modules, folders, LMS pages, rubrics, assignments, quizzes, exams, and then I move on to set the parameters in the LMS gradebook. With each click, I have to toggle switches, click buttons, set dates, and check boxes.
Teaching 4 classes in 8 sections, and having to have the entire course ready to go by the start of the academic year means that all I do all day long is sit at a computer "stocking" each LMS course shell. Add Zoom meeting requirements to the mix, and that means I have to learn what buttons to toggle and what and when to copy and paste to make sure that all my Zoom meetings are properly loaded into each LMS course I'm operating.
All the while doing this, I constantly have to think about how the student will interact with the LMS and will they be able to follow simple instructions such as click on this link to access this module and click this button to go to a scheduled Zoom meeting where I'll spend 45 minutes explaining to students how to use the LMS, where to find Microsoft Word on the campus e-mail system, how to upload homework, find the due dates and reading assignments and when to log-in to a Zoom meeting.
It's somewhat similar to putting jars of peanut butter on the shelf so somebody can eventually take it off. But with teaching high school in the twenty-first century, the biggest difference is that I know from experience that few students will "reach" up to the virtual shelf to click on the link to the lesson's reading assignments. English class doesn't really matter given that nobody has ever become wealthy by reading stories (and that's the sum total of education, to learn how to become wealthy).
Since I'm working at home in the twenty-first century, all communication with co-workers and colleagues is done by LMS direct message, e-mail, and smartphone text messaging. Since most of my colleagues are doing the exact same thing I'm doing all day long, it's rather distracting to have to answer a text or DM while you're working, so you tend to ignore them until you get to a stopping point. But similar to the grocery store work, verbal communication doesn't happen during the workday -- there are no exchange of ideas and sure as hell no water cooler banter. All communication, instead, has been reduced to e-mail/text troubleshooting the idiosyncratic nature in which computer applications function (sometimes the app does this, sometimes it doesn't and for no apparent reason).
For a long time now, I've explained to students that the difference between a job and a career (for the most part) is that a job means you do the same rote function, day-in and day-out. But with a career, one will be doing different, creative things each workday in response to varying situations and contexts. I'm wondering at what point my career turned into a job.
Suddenly, this online virtual world we've created has sucked out all the creativity and diversity of a career I once loved. As for discussions about what Jonathan Swift really meant in his classic satirical piece about England's impoverished population, those are now done through an online format, where most students wait until the final minute before the due date to post their comment that Swift "was sick in the head if he really wanted to eat people."
In the online setting, it is not possible to point out immediately that Swift was writing satire. I can make the comment on the discussion forum, but the LMS analytics reveals that more than a week goes by before the student reads it, and by that time I'd bet the student probably doesn't even remember making their initial comment about Swift's writing.
So that's what American education has come to -- students are like grocery store shoppers, picking and choosing which lessons they prefer to consume and probably rushing through the LMS the way a shopper rushes through their weekly grocery run. And as an "educator," these days I'm more like a stocker of virtual lessons that some students will consume and others will prefer not to as if they were a latter day Bartelby.
I'm just kind of wondering that if this is the best we can do in an online format, what kind of future thinkers and problem-solvers will our society produce.
Submitted July 29, 2020 at 11:49AM by NotTheKevinSmith https://ift.tt/3gejaOz
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