Eric Hayot said:
No one ever said you would get to do the job in the same way for all 40 years of your career. No one ever said that large-scale social changes wouldn’t change your working conditions. And now they have.
via https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Humanities-as-We-Know-Them/243769
Yep. Time to get to work. And in much bigger ways than you’re probably thinking…
I was giving a lecture on the history of sociology of education this morning, and what struck me–and my students–was that absolutely everything that I had been taught in the sociology of ed class when I took the same course back in the early seventies, is now known to be laughably, horribly wrong. My students could not believe that anyone believed those explanations–N’Ach or “cultural deprivation” and so–let alone that it was canon. How do we know our theories today aren’t just as racist, classist, ableist, gendered as the ones that went before? The answer, of course, is that we don’t know, and that all we can do is keep seeking new answers, moving forward, changing what we believe as we hear new facts, listen to new perspectives. So…just as we can teach 40-year-old sociology or ten-year-old physics, we can’t partying, can’t keep running our schools, like it’s 1999…
That is so true. Why do people think anyone could do anything at the same job for 40 years and still say they are proficient? I often reflect on the way I was taught in high school, back in the mid 90s, and how different it is to today. It would be naive to think that I’ll be teaching the same way in twenty years as I am now. Yet, some teachers believe – if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it. Well, news flash, things break down over time, and you need to modernize!