The dog days of discontent

It was a difficult week at the career college. Difficult for my Access and Excel students, who on Tuesday soldiered through their first test. Difficult for me, struggling to grade their tests Tuesday night and Wednesday afternoon, in time to return the tests the next day. A few things had to get cut from my schedule. This blog on Tuesday. My mid-day siesta on Wednesday. Oh, the sacrifices we must make to provide good customer service for our students.

Somewhere in the neighborhood of the Love Shack, not too far away, not far away enough, is a sad and lonely dog. I've never seen this dog. I don't know where it lives. But I can hear this dog weeping and moaning for long hours on end, its howls echoing above the houses on the gravel road, endless, piteous weeping and moaning. On Tuesday, the dog was speaking for me. I wanted to weep and moan, raise my voice to the sky, just let loose with a howl. Life sucks, owwwwwwwwwwooooooooooo.

Sometimes the dog's howling sounds wrenchingly heartfelt, full of genuine angst, like a coyote crying to the moon, and other times the howling resembles the fake screaming of an angry child: woe is me, everyone is so mean to me, boo hoo hoo. Either way, I frequently vow I am going to find that dog, record its howling, and play it back for its owner at top volume in the middle of the night.

It's hot. Maybe the dog is howling because it can't get to its blistering hot metal bowl of water. Maybe it can see its owners through the patio door, kicked back in their Lazy-boys in air-conditioned luxury. I have no idea, I'm just making this all up. But god's truth, I'd like to throttle those owners for creating the conditions that motivate that dog to continuously weep and moan. Sort of like I'd like to throttle the owners of the career college for creating the conditions for students to fail at Access and Excel.

Well, I guess that isn't really fair. There's really not much the two owners do these days except play golf, as far as I have heard. They sneak up to the third floor via the elevator on Board meeting days, to avoid mixing with us riff-raff, I presume. We rarely see our college president, who seems perennially on trips to east coast Ivy League colleges with his 12-year-old son. Is it fair of me to blame them, the invisible Board, for staying stuck in 20th century technology, when the means to help students succeed at learning computer programs exist? I'm talking about using computer simulation software to teach computer applications courses. Nothing radical, nothing new. Other schools do it, even employment agencies use simulation software to teach the basics of Microsoft Office.

My Excel class is not large, only fifteen students, but the capabilities of the students run the gamut from how do I select a range of cells again? Press the what button on the what? to I am a power user and I could teach this class, stupid. Lecturing seems like a Jurassic approach in a computer class where everyone is moving at different speeds. But unfortunately, they are all stuck working through the lessons and exercises in the error-ridden, out-dated textbooks. If they are careful readers, they can successfully complete the lessons, but even the most careful of students can navigate an exercise with 20 complicated steps and reach the end with no conception of what they were supposed to learn. I see it happen time and again. They perform the steps, but fail to learn. How is that helping them prepare for the workplace? And don't get me started on what happens to ESL and learning-disabled students.

We use a software tool called Lanschool, which allows teachers to commandeer computers in the classroom to demonstrate skills students need to know and to review for tests, on the premise that showing them how to perform a task is just slightly more effective than simply telling them how to do it. The best I can manage is to have them work along with me on their computer while watching me demonstrate the skill on the computer monitor next to them. Ideally, though, the best way for them to learn the material would be for them to teach it, but it's a rare student in the computer classes who is willing to bravely demonstrate for his or her peers the steps to, say, create an input mask in an Access table, or insert a function in Excel that returns the current date. Muttering ensues. Teaching, you call this teaching? Why are we doing the teacher's job? Muttering, followed by mutiny, followed by unemployment.

My unvoiced suggestion is for the college to purchase software that lets students learn in a simulated computer environment, where they move through the lessons at their own paces, receiving instant feedback from the software, moving on when the system thinks they are ready. Without having to read the out-dated, step-by-step workbooks. But then, who needs a teacher? Indeed.

I think my problem is I just want to shake things up. I'm dissatisfied with the pace at which my own studies are progressing, and I'm feeling trapped in what I perceive to be an ineffective work environment. The chronic malcontent resorts to pot-stirring, just for the hell of it, just to avoid really having to feel the uncomfortable feelings that arise when one realizes there are no easy solutions. That people learn in all kinds of ways, and I have no control over them or their learning process. That the owners of businesses can do whatever they want, and that includes doing nothing. That dogs will continue to howl, because that is what dogs do.