Almost there

Today is my last day in Wodonga. I have just had my last week at uni. Tomorrow I make the journey to Dubbo to complete my final practicum, and thus my graduate diploma in education. I haven’t written in this my reflective journal for some time, a symptom of my increasing disillusionment with the course.

My last practicum was fun; I felt like I was finally learning important lessons, lessons that have been harshly missing over the previous nine months. Most of it has felt like irritating hoops to be jumped through as the university has concocted a course that sketchily meets all the department’s regulations for teaching registration, but little else. Tedious small group tasks upon small groups tasks devising units of work, which I doubt I will ever use. The only English discipline based unit we were force to manufacture into a cross discipline unit, which is much outside the true nature of text and theme based units eschewed by most curricula.

The one reason I was really excited about this course, the opportunity to dirty my hands in lots of educational methodology, we have been left to discover by ourselves, given only a cursory introduction to some of the discipline’s earlier protagonists such as Piaget and Vygotski; the equivalent of trying to approach the ethical philosophy of stem cell research with only Aristotle and Plato to go on. Unfortunately the multitude of tedious small tasks have detracted from my mission of reading voraciously, and in recent months, reaching for escapism, weathering under the strain of being talked at for endless hours at a time, I have found myself gorging on fiction for the first time in many years.

Today my philosophy essay is due, and I have spent the last two days re-reading, investigating, dredging through and being inspired to greater and lesser extents, by the subject matter I was so excited by so many months ago. In concert with the vagueness of the rest of the course, our excuse for an essay question is:

Develop a statement about personal philosophy to teaching.

Like, what is that? The one thing that has come home to me during the year is that precise planning and targeted questions open up students thought processes much more than a vague “what do you think about x?” But this year has been marked by huge double standards. “Don’t forget multiple intelligences” drone the lecturers week after week in the same style, with the same monotonous voices over badly constructed powerpoint presentations. “you must be engaging” we further get droned at, as most of the class have taken to doodling, reading, watching youtube videos on laptops, or filling in the cryptic crosswords in the attempt to complete the necessary 80% attendance rate for the requisite piece of paper we are all here for.
“Build meaningful relationships with students” demand lecturers who are known for ‘going off’ at innocent students who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time whilst lecturers are stressing about their own research. What happened to ‘user-pays’? You’d never guess that we are the reason they are getting paid, as yet another lecturer whinges about the marking and the paperwork they have to do.

Patrick, David, Andrew, Tom. My cultural studies lecturers. Whatever happened to the guys who inspired me to see the world in a completely different way, headfucked my brain, bent rules and encouraged rule bending. Macquarie University’s “higher earning for higher learning” I guess. and now the department no longer exists, leaving being the fuddy-duddies and their straight modernist readings of Shakespeare and Melville and Chaucer. The politics of education. And this is what I want to write my essay about, where politics meets philosophy, for both are surely interdependent upon the other.