I miss "The Ear," and my attempts to resurrect it through alternative means have resulted in a stalled Tumblog and Music Video Meltdowns (which Molly Smith and Sara Rasmussen tell me are great, but then...
The cliché that liberal arts schools teach their students how to think has never made sense to me in the context of Whitman. Although official rhetoric about the school promotes “diversity," diversity of thought among students seems strongly discouraged.
The process of grading is an integral component of this agenda.
Since the boom in the assessment movement, public schools across the country have become obsessed with presenting students with a certain kind of knowledge that they can apply to the SAT and other standardized tests.
Despite the heroic and thankless work of a small number of primary and secondary school educators who attempt to teach their students to think critically, the vast majority of the curricula across the country is concerned with imparting a certain “standardized" form of knowledge.
The way that the geniuses that came before us decided to track understanding was through a numeric scale running 0.0-4.0. Certainly, there are some institutions that use a 0-10 scale, but this doesn't address my fundamental concern, which is that grades are a reductive way to measure progress and evaluate knowledge.
Several weeks ago, The Pioneer listed "town-gown tension" as the seventh-worst thing about attending Whitman.
"Townies," as citizens of Walla Walla are called, are viewed with amusement, fear and ignorance...
Pigs will kill you and your family!
Or, at least, that's what the mainstream media seems to be portraying. After a slew of infections and deaths in Mexico, it seemed as if this novel virus was prepared...
Summer time is fast approaching and soon we will all burst forth from the Whitman bubble. With papers to write and final exams to take, it's easy for us to complain about how hard our lives at Whitman...
