Friday, June 23, 2006

The quest for the holy grail, episode 35

For those of you wondering, where Harm Principle has gone for the past few days, the answer is simple. Author was pretty busy. For those keeping score with me, 35 done, 3 to go. That means I’m done for the summer and will continue on in the fall, all according to plans so far. The last one was pretty hectic, since I had to learn a lot very fast.
That’s what I’ve been doing for the past 4 years at our faculty. I’m pretty good now at learning insane amounts of data, by hearth in a very short amount of time. I forget most of that in a few days after the exam anyway. I’m resigned to that by now and I do what is required of me, learn instead of think.
And yet, there’s a nagging feeling in the back of my head, the last independent brain cell, which refuses to accept the uselessness of most of what we learn. Is it really necessary? Is there nothing that can be done? I don’t think the Bologne reform will have any practical influence whatsoever on the quality of education at our faculty. There is no will to change the substance of what we learn and therefore, therefore a change of the form won’t matter. It’s a system designed to allow professors to get through lectures with minimal amount of effort involved, and on the other hand it’s a system designed to allow students an easy way out. You learn it by heart.
There are exceptions of course. I’ve had courses by brilliant professors, courses where I had fun, courses that were actually practically oriented. Professors don’t get paid extra for that, they do it, simply because some of them actually like to do their work well. But sadly, there are also a lot of students who don’t like such exams. Those are exams where you can’t learn a single book by heart and know you’re going to be all right. The logic behind the system is quite scary, though. Despite the impressive speeches our dean gives every year, it’s a system designed to make everyone average. If someone did too well, it might become too obvious there are people out there, who would be better professors than those we have. Unfortunately, those will teach quite a few years longer as I’ve never heard of a professor loosign a job before retirement due to bad quality of his work.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Cool written :>

5:06 PM  

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