Our Mission

After one failed attempt, I got the online Web forms working to give my class quizzes. I think I will continue to do it that way, even for the final exam. I wrote a perl program that collects the student's answers to all the questions, which are multiple-choice, and saves them in a text file along with the student's name and a secret nickname they make up, and it also invisibly saves their IP address and the date and time they completed the test. Students can view their scores right after the quiz by using the nickname, and the last two items should help me detect cheaters who try to do the quiz from home, or late. I prevent students seeing the quiz early by denying permission to the directory it's in until right before class, and by requiring a password to get in which I write on the board when I start the quiz. The only remaining security issue is that students can look at other student's screens during the test because the computers are near one another, but I think I can handle that by moving the trouble-makers to isolated screens during the semester. For the final exam I may make two different tests with the same questions in a different order and alternate them on the machines, so that looking at another student's screen would tend to be more harm than help.

For online courses, there is a whole prepared package that does all this for me, but I do not know how to use it yet, or how my students can get access to it since this is not an online course, so I am using my own programs for now.

I heard an interview with Jill Ker Conway on NPR. She was a president of a girl's college, Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and she discussed the merits of women-only colleges. She described the tendency for female students to be ignored in class in favor of the male ones, and to be left out of student government, and other ways in which they were inhibited and oppressed in coeducational colleges. Her point was that women-only schools are needed to give women an education that properly empowers them.

That idea seems reasonable to me when I remember my childhood in Pennsylvania -- most of the female students there were not really intending to get an education or a job, but were in college to get their Mrs degree. And it was normal and expected that families would send the boys to college, and either not send the girls to college at all or just use the cheapest college available for them, since they were never going to really get a job anyway. So I agree that removing the male students would make a large difference in the goals, opportunities, and motivation of the students. But out here in California, it seems very different to me. Half of my students are working adults, and their religions, ethnicities, and motivations are very diverse. There are a few groups of giggling female teenagers in my classes at times, and I suppose their minds may well be on boys rather than their classes to some extent, but in general my students are quite solitary and disconnected from the other students. They have families, jobs, churches, and other things that define their life, and school is just one more activity to them. I often find that the advice I hear from other teachers is inappropriate here, because it comes from either high school or a school full of full-time teenage students living in dormitories, which creates a whole immersion student culture. In such an environment, I think students do actually mold their lives to match the expectations of the school, but not at my school. People here are molded by San Francisco, and so is the college. Perhaps that's why I like it: this school is not a cult group. The bigger schools I have been to tend to become the whole world to people inside, and I dislike that. I did my time in religious cults and other pressure-cookers, and now I want to see more of the world as it really is and live in it.

Our school is just a community service, like the library or a recreational center. I think our proper mission is to provide vocational education, basic skills, remedial education, adult career-enhancement, ESL, and worthwhile entertainment for retirees. There are some sports teams and people who want to build school spirit and puff up some self-importance, but I think they are shunned by most of the teachers. When I went to a Methodist church, there were a lot of people who sang the songs and read the prayers obediently, then gossiped about their family afterwards while drinking coffee, and just one or two fanatics that wanted to talk about miracles, Jesus, and converting people, and we shunned them like the dangerous lunatics they were.

11:42:54 AM     comment []    .