Well... (the word I have started more posts with than any other)... it seems I have a little more time on my hands so I think I'll write a post about why without sounding too much like Tommy Shaw or whoever wrote the Styx song. To all of you who don't know, REALLY? You don't know this song???:
The song is not quite accurate for my situation, but I have taken a stab at my capstone course and it went about as badly as it could have. There are many reasons for this and since I have the time on my hands, I'll tell you about them. So, unlike a regular university master's program, the one I'm taking doesn't allow you to choose some of the things that resonated while you were studying and write a thesis one of them or a combination of them. I had a thesis topic chosen but the 11th and 12th courses are, unbeknownst to the students, designed (in my opinion) to generate tangible studies and use them for the purposes of convincing whatever boards need to be convinced of granting regional accreditation to the school. I guess I thought the international and national accreditation the school advertised when I was considering committing to study there was going to be good enough. I had no idea what regional accreditation was or that it was the highest accreditation of the three.
Nevertheless, I did 10 courses and then we got into the most boring area of education in my opinion - educational research. The 11th course was going to be a study done in an actual school with actual students that you thought up and did yourself. When course 11 originally came around I was moving from Canada to the Disunited States and it was summer so I had no idea where I could find a school at which to do the study. I had to take a semester off because of this and all throughout the semester I was doing all I could to ascertain what the hell I was supposed to do to finish my master's. I was getting the runaround from everyone until finally the school made the wise decision to change the course. Now it did not require any actual school with actual students. So while in the DS I took the 11th course on the theory of educational studies and aced it. It was super easy! The whole time I was checking on what would be in store for me when I took the final course. Unfortunately the website just had the old description of writing up the data you had gathered during your real study in a real school with real students as a real educational research study. But I signed up anyway.
I have just completed the first week and received the grades for what I submitted. I'll tell you one thing: I worked at least twice as hard in this one week than any other week of any other course. I was supposed to submit a study proposal using secondary research only. That is, not a real school, no real students, and using data and information from writings and studies of OTHER people to support my study proposal. This was easy enough to understand. We were actually instructed to create a fake school. I chose "Terry Fox High School" but was told by the prof that I shouldn't use any real names. Even for a fake school? But, as it turns out, there actually IS a Terry Fox High School in Coquitlam, BC. So I changed the school name to "Larry Fox High School." Sound silly enough yet? But wait, there's more! I had to compose fake letters asking permission from Larry Fox High to study their students, and being granted permission by the fake principal of the fake school (I made up the name of Derek Sweeney for him) to do my study. Fake addresses, phone numbers and emails included :-) ha ha ha. STILL not Mickey Mouse enough for you? In this letter to a fake school asking for fake permission to conduct research on fake students at this fake school the stipulation was included that the research we were asking permission for - the fake PRIMARY research - would only be SECONDARY research. Somebody who wrote the permission letter templates just couldn't seem to keep reality and fantasy straight. THEN... (still not finished) when I included in my research proposal to the fake school and the fake principal a fake description of conducting fake interviews with the fake students, the professor told me to delete that part because it's primary research and we are supposed to only use secondary. It's FAKE primary research FFS!
Then... (can you believe I'm still not finished?) I was given a list of considerations for the proposal that included (verbatim) specific evidence of an educational need, the goals and objectives of the (fake) school, stakeholder (students, parents, admin, community) interests, cost, visibility, ethical considerations, and possible barriers to the study. This was the first description of the project I read. There were several others that were similar but different. I tried to come to a compromise but couldn't do it. So I wrote to the prof midway through the week telling her I had started and stopped the project proposal several times and just can't come to a clear understanding. I also mentioned that the templates were in pdf form and I was unable to edit them so I had changed them to Word form to make it easier. She gave me some advice about my concerns. She told me I had to use pdf so that she could sign the fake proposal to the fake school etc etc etc... SURELY she could sign the damn thing in Word! And a helluva lot easier! Why ANYBODY needs to sign fake shit was never explained but... At LEAST I didn't have to come up with a fake Principal Sweeney autograph. Cuz that woulda been silly wouldn't it???
She gave a few other bits of simplistic advice like just follow the directions (that I had told her I couldn't follow and frankly NOBODY could) and don't overthink it. This proposal is "amazing." That's the exact word she used. Then she said, "Don't worry, we'll get through this."
So I figured maybe I WAS overthinking. I put together a project that I felt very unsure of still unclear on the majority of the spaces in the templates - what they meant and exactly what I was supposed to fill them in with. But I did my best and thought the substance of my project (which she called "amazing") would be considered, as it should be, more important than the style. The style we could work on in the coming 7 weeks. NOPE! Even though the prof accepted the fake letters of permission and consent IN WORD, the other stuff I had submitted was given a total of - are you ready for this? - ZERO.
That's right, zero. My "amazing" proposal got a zero and I was told to fix it by Sunday (2.5 days) or it wouldn't be accepted. The reasons were itemized. The stakeholder interest was to be edited because it contained primary sources. (RIGHT! FAKE primary sources.) Cost was to be eliminated for the same reason. I had just said that cost would be covered by the province since they had paid for a similar program (I gave the name and reference for the real program which is secondary research) but I said it would be low due to the universal nature of the program's implementation which made it unnecessary to screen individual students for special needs and/or learning disabilities. She found this too "primary" too. Again this was fake screening of fake kids I was talking about. Visibility was never explained to me even though I asked her to clarify its meaning. I think it was just one of many words used to impress rather than instruct. Ethical considerations was to be rewritten using source A and source B which are ethical considerations for secondary research in general rather than the ethical considerations for MY specific research proposal, which, (is it me?) I would think are the ones to be considered here. And finally the research I had done and I had sourced directly from books, articles, videos and such was to be removed because it contained verbiage about interviewing real people and it was not "secondary" research as defined by the regulations on human research protections. Then she had the NERVE to tell me that when I do research to cite it specifically and put it under the heading of "references," which I HAD.
One other hilarious addition was the 7-sentence summary of my project. Seven sentences. No more, no less. What am I writing poetry here? Should I make them rhyme? How about Spenserian Stanza? What in the name of Paulo Freire could the point of THIS be I ask you?
And the cherry on top of all of this? Every time I sign into the website of my school I get an email saying a new sign-in has been detected even though I have signed in from this computer from this location before.
So the upshot of all of this is this course is by no means ready for study. The prof needs to come to grips with the difference between reality and fantasy, primary and secondary, instructing and impressing. I'll wait till the various kinks are ironed out just like I had to do for course 11. All this does is postpone my master's another semester... or more.
I've had two experiences with "teachers" who run this plan of instruction whereby the beginning of the course is designed to make students fail and feel like they will never be able to succeed. It's primarily (not to say ALWAYS) done by "teachers" who are crappy at teaching. Often they are what I call eggheads who are so fascinated with jargon, technicalities, money, and authority that they lose sight of the human side of their jobs. These "teachers" do their best to complicate, obfuscate, and make things as HARD to navigate as they can. Then as the course proceeds the change is not in the students but the "teachers." They explain things more thoroughly, they are nicer, and they accept students' work more readily. The students perceive this as learning while they may not be improving at all. All that is happening is the information that was hidden from them is now being revealed. Things that were made ambiguous are clarified. The confuser is now a teacher. And this is done in many cases by teachers who are after high evaluations, high praise, or undeserved reverence. The students are so relieved to understand that which they thought they could never understand they give the credit to the "teacher" who really was the reason they couldn't understand in the first place.
This happened to me at one job I was trained for in Korea and one certification course I took for a job I had in Canada. SPEP in Korea and PBLA certification in Canada. So maybe just look out for abbreviated company names. More specifically company names that are actually initialisms in which the teachers call the initialisms acronyms. A lot of people at both places annoyingly did that.
Burning bridges... doo doo dee dee doo. I am not saying for sure that the prof in this new course of mine was doing that but it has all of the earmarks of - hmmm... what shall we call this type of teaching? It's done mostly for unearned evaluations, respect, and self-congratulatory ego stroking. How about we call it Narcissistic Pedagogy? Does that have a ring to it? If I had the choice to write an actual thesis instead of put together some bogus fake study on fake students at a fake school overseen by a fake teacher (oops, now I've SURELY gone too far!) I just might do it on Narcissistic Pedagogy. Maybe I should write a book. I've got enough experience. It's an idear...
Anyhoo, the internet here was iffy at best. There were times while I was writing my "amazing" project proposal when my Perrla couldn't be used. In fact all the sources that Heather and I have saved over our shared Perrla paper writing studies have now been erased. I had to RE-enter the 20 or so sources I used while writing my project proposal.
Wanna know what it was for? Recently in the news in BC there have been stories on exclusion from public schools. Kids with disorders that could cause learning impairment, students with diverse needs, and students with anxiety symptoms that make them "disruptive" have been excluded, missing classes, even sent home from schools a LOT and parents are concerned. There's even a study being done on it by the BC ombudsperson Jay Chalke. There was a very successful program designed in BC for kids that has shown success internationally called FRIENDS that I had read about in my studies. There wasn't one for secondary school, however, so I thought I'd do one. It would not just be for anxiety but it would include the growing needs of diversity, multiculturalism, and learning disability knowledge. It would take an empathetic design approach combined with project-based learning, team-building exercises, and collaborative dialogic methodology to create human connection and understanding the lack of which is commonly the root cause of exclusionary behavior and the disastrous effects it can have at school and in the future lives of the students. I don't want to get too deep into the plan but suffice to say it was "amazing."
If it weren't for the style over substance approach that was chosen by the professor, I'd continue writing my fake project proposal and I'm sure I would have a master's degree by springtime. The question I can't help asking myself is, given all that I know about the source of it, how much more legit would this master's degree have been than my project? When it comes down to it, how legit is ANY school?
And so we arrive at the inescapable point of the year again. Everything is fake.
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