The
What?
By “Diogenes”
The
events of this tale happened to me many long years ago, when I, Diogenes,
taught at the College of San Hemlock. CSH had its quirks, but it was much
livelier than the College of San Generic, just a few miles down the interstate.
Take
for instance the building signage. At San Hemlock, my department’s office was
in Socrates Hall, which had a Hemlock Cup icon. Hemingway Hall had a Booze
Bottle icon, Galois Hall had a Pistol icon, Marlowe Hall had a Dagger icon and
Trotsky Hall had an Icepick icon. At CSH, every hall’s icon was what killed the
hall’s honoree. Some may question the good taste of this, but compare that to
signage at the College of San Generic. At CSG, Socrates Hall’s icon was a vase,
because Socrates was Greek, and so are vases. Edison Hall had a football icon
because Thomas Edison was American; and Curie Hall had a Polish Sausage icon
because Marie Curie was Polish.
I
preferred CSH’s signage system to CSG’s. The Hemlock Cup icon told a better
story than the Greek Vase icon. It was more offensive, and more vivid. It also
expressed the administration’s true attitude towards the faculty with
refreshing directness.
My
department was run by Dean Rubicon, a cybernetic micromanager. She was very
exacting; everything had to be electronic. Everything at CSH was very cyber,
with predictably glitchy consequences. Once I saw a whole restroom full of
urinals all stuck on eternal-flush because of computer error. Another time, in
the middle of a summer heat-wave, the heaters at the tutoring center were on full
blast. Another glitch, and the IT staff was away for the long weekend, so the
only solution was to open up all the windows. At the College of San Hemlock,
the design philosophy was not to do anything right, but to do everything, right
or wrong, by computer.
One
fine day Dean Rubicon cornered me. She ordered me to submit the SLO. I said, “The
what?” She told me that the SLO must be in every course syllabus; and that it
meant Student Learning Outcomes. I thought this just meant the course topics,
already listed on my syllabus; but no, that’s not the SLO. Perhaps the SLO
was the textbook table of contents; but no, no, no, that wasn’t the SLO either!
Then what’s an SLO? Dean Rubicon was vague yet insistent. The SLO was somehow
the Platonic ideal of education-ness; it was what we want the students to learn; the details don’t count! Besides,
how dare I not know what an SLO is? How unprofessional of me! Having an SLO is
college policy; so it didn’t matter what an SLO is, I just had to write one; or
failing that, download one from the CSH website.
Baffled
by such addled urgency, I queried the only person in the department office who
knows anything; Belladonna, the Dean’s secretary. Belladonna explained that
pressure for the SLO came from the Chancellor’s office. Chancellor Basilisk was
trying to ensure accreditation for the college. Compliance with the accreditors
was the issue.
So
I gave in. I logged onto the department’s website and looked up its SLO. It was
two paragraphs of clotted educratese. The SLO quivered with the same vague
tension that radiated from Dean Rubicon. I tried to read the thing, but no
trace of any meaning gelled within my mind. I then tried to insert the SLO into
my syllabus’s file, but it failed to embed! Some weird invisibility code was
attached to the text. Again I gave up, and copied the SLO into another file,
which I printed separately, and xeroxed onto the back of the syllabus handout.
I
gave the syllabus to every student on the first day of class. I insisted that
the syllabus had valuable information, so they should read and understand all
of it. But of course the students didn’t read everything on the syllabus. You
can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink. Or put it this way;
students are more like cats than like dogs; for Fido will do what you want Fido
to do, but Kitty will do what Kitty wants to do.
I
handed in the revised syllabus, with SLO, to Dean Rubicon’s office; but a paper
copy wasn’t what the accreditors wanted; they wanted electronic proof of compliance to their arbitrary demands.
So
I had to get the SLO to the office electronically. I tried sending the office
an email with the SLO attached; but the email failed. I looked for a
thumb-drive to load the SLO on. The only blank drive I could find right away
was from my daughter’s desk; a Speedy Gonzales thumb-drive. I loaded my SLO
onto Speedy, I sneaker-netted Speedy to Socrates Hall, and I plugged Speedy
into Belladonna’s computer’s port. Belladonna speedily loaded my SLO onto her
computer’s desk-top. Problem solved? No! Belladonna’s word-processor couldn’t
read the file!
I
sensed a spooky pattern at work. When I first heard of the SLO, my response
was; the what? The dean was vague, colleagues were puzzled and the accreditors
didn’t say. This same automatic bafflement was displayed by the machines
themselves! The SLO, a slippery beast, refused to be remembered, even by
computers!
Belladonna
fixed the glitch; she could read the file as a PDF. She saved it and sent it to
her colleague’s computer. Problem solved! A good secretary is a pearl beyond
price.
In
retrospect I had to admit that Dean Rubicon was partly right. I erred by giving
the wrong SLO to the wrong people. The accreditors didn’t want me to show a
paper SLO - whatever that is - to the students; they wanted me to show an
electronic SLO - whatever that is - to them.
The SLO was a fraud and a sham, but it was their
fraud and sham. How unprofessional of me not to harmonize with the bogosity
program.
Naturally
the students ignored the SLO; it had nothing to do with them. The student body’s
resolute apathy revealed sterling indifference to nonsense, and a visceral
rejection of babble. The students acquired these virtues by exposure to CSH
bureaucracy. The College of San Hemlock was educational despite itself.
Still
the whole caper irritated me. The SLO was an arbitrary assertion of power by
out-of-touch bureaucratic empire-builders. The political dynamics were
familiar; as usual Parkinson’s Law ruled, as did Murphy’s Law, the Peter Principle
and every other iron law of bureaucracy. The corruption was stereotypical.
The
SLO reminded me of Caesar’s incense. In the late Roman Empire, subjects had to
sacrifice a pinch of incense at Caesar’s altar. Those who refused were thrown
to the lions. The SLO was the incense, the accreditors were Caesar’s ravenous
worshippers; the faculty had to offer up their compliance. It was a test, not
of faith but of subjugation. You just had to offer the incense, or be thrown to
the lions; but you didn’t have to believe in the divinity of Caesar.
I’m
no martyr, but fake gods bother me. So I wondered; how do you slay a fake god?
By critical intelligence, to be sure, but also a sense of humor; for a
horselaugh is worth a thousand syllogisms. Aha! The weapon I needed was satire!
So
one Friday morning on the campus of the College of San Hemlock, I ran an
informal poll. I approached random students; I politely asked them for a moment
of their time for some questions. Bless their hearts, almost all of them had
time. I lost count of the sample size; more than a dozen but less than twenty;
so call this poll unscientific if you wish. Nonetheless, here are the results,
with divided and unanimous responses noted:
Q:
When the semester began, did the instructor give you a syllabus sheet?
A(all):
Yes.
Q:
Did you read it?
A(divided):
Yes / Some of it / I skimmed it.
Q:
Did you read time, place, teacher, textbook, grading method?
A(all):
Yes.
Q:
Did you read everything that matters to you?
A(all):
Yes.
Q:
Did you read the Hours by Appointment section?
A(divided):
Yes / I skimmed it / My class doesn’t have tutoring.
Q:
Did you read the SLO?
A(all):
The what?
I,
Diogenes, swear that every single student
asked about the SLO said, “The what?” Those exact words! As did I, and the
Dean, and even the computers!
Therefore
it is unanimous; the SLO is unknown, undefined, infinitely indistinct. It is a
mind-breaking Zen koan. The SLO is nothing divided by nothing!
So
here is my reply to the Riddle of the SLO:
What is the SLO?
The SLO is the What!
