Tag: Teaching

Planting Seeds

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics, Editorial

I want to talk about teaching and how difficult it is.

When I was teaching, there was always the “wall.” That thing that prevented what I was trying to convey from getting through.

You see, my students were generally very young, eighteen to twenty-one. There were middle aged students who returned to school and a good number of veterans, and they were wonderful students. But the great mass were the young ones. And they were inexperienced

Without perspective, they could not draw a conclusions from a similar circumstance. You could lead them to the right answer but they had enormous difficulty applying the reasoning to anything else.

I used to show a clip from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” where the learned knight leads the local peasants to a completely wrong conclusion (that witches burn because they are made of wood). And while they thought it was funny, they didn’t get the hard cold fact that leading people in the wrong direction is not that hard and the tools we depend on for teaching are not always that reliable.

It soon became evident that they had never been trained to understand the implications of what they were learning. In fact, for most of them learning was just a long boring process of getting the necessary paperwork for later employment. I taught every new class the rationale for why each major subject was part of their course of study and fit my own classes in that picture of whole trained human being.

So, I began to plant seeds. It seemed to me that if I placed an idea with wide applications in front of them several times, they would realize at some point later the implications of that idea. So, I taught the great ideas. I showed legendary movies, and I would tell the great stories of Western Culture. I was talented enough to make those things interesting.

Did the seeds grow? Probably. Ideas especially ideas deeply embedded in the culture have a lot of relevance and staying power.

But do I know that for a fact? No. You never know what effect your teaching has. You just hope.

James Alan Pilant

The Lessons of this Administration

On By southwerkIn business ethics

The environment both natural and artificial shapes us.

I write about business ethics and I am deeply concerned about our current students in colleges and universities across the United States. Right now they are witnessing the highest and most powerful people in the United States government behaving in often illegal and continuously unethical ways. I am pointing specifically at the Cabinet members of the current administration although they are not the only ones.

They were selected on the basis of the most craven, servile loyalty and very often without any actual qualifications for their positions. And we see often on a daily basis, that to keep these jobs they must over and over again express their fealty to the current leadership. It is a degrading spectacle. Humans were meant to walk upright like free men and women not like some kind of whipped dog.

So, the current students here in this country witness a group of people getting ahead by sacrificing their honor, their self-respect, and abdicating their obedience and oath to the Constitution and laws of the United States. These people appear on television. They get good salaries and excellent benefits. There is an implication of after office service in think tanks and foundations at even more money. (However, the future of those from this openly corrupt administration is in some doubt.) Their lives are clear evidence that giving up your principles and abject loyalty to the most monstrous of individuals can be a successful strategy, if money and position are your only goals.

We do not live purely for money and position. I believe that is a truth. However, when I was teaching my students often told me that would seek a high paying position and do that job for twenty some years and then retire and live the life they wanted. I tried to explain to them that twenty years at a degrading and morally corrupt job would change them permanently, not to mention that a long life is not something that can be depended on. I am not sure they listened. After all, the lure of the opposite sex, nice cars, social position and economic security are very persuasive.

Explaining that a life you can look back on with pride is the only one worth living is difficult when your students are so young and want so many things so badly. And that is why we who teach are under a special and vital responsibility to point out the flaws in the “success at any personal cost” model.

We must be inspirational leaders not just teachers. We will have failed in a substantial and historically significant way if the current generation learns as a life lesson that servility and dishonor are proven paths to success. How will we be able to enjoy our retirements and our latter years when we see our students entering middle age in jobs they hate and despise because we were unable to communicate the important of moral and socially responsible conduct? And what of our nation? Can you imagine an entire generation admiring the antics of Pete Hegseth or Pam Bondi or any other of the cast of this ongoing federal reality show, a form of Wrestlemania writ large across our civic landscape?

If there was a time in your life to stand up for the values of the United States of America, this is it.

If you value your students’ futures, you must act to influence them to act in the interests of their nation, their posterity and their honor.

If not now, then when?

There is no convenient time to take a stand against evil.

Act now.

Your students and your nation are worth fighting for.

James Alan Pilant

They Drugged Their Students!

On By southwerkIn business ethics1 Comment

https://www.yahoo.com/news/two-teachers-yanked-texas-classroom-160046076.html

It seems based on the evidence of the press reports and interviewed witnesses that teachers at an elementary school put “sleeping” patches on the children in the classroom regularly in large numbers. These are small children as young as four years old. I am outraged. You just don’t give other people’s children drugs. That they didn’t actually kill anybody is just dumb luck.

Here’s a quote from the article:

Najla Abdullah asked her four-year-old son if he too had received a sticker. “He said, ‘Yes, mommy. I get a special sticker,’” Abdullah told ABC. “I said, ‘What does it look like?’ He said, ‘I get it right here on my hand, and it has the storms with the clouds and the star and the moon.’”

My son is entering his thirties so I didn’t even know these things existed (sleeping stickers). So, I went over and opened my Amazon account and there they were in large numbers and variety of colors and various capabilities. I’m sure many parents whose children have sleep problems find them to be of some benefit.

However, drugging entire classrooms of tiny tots to make your job easier is wrong! (to put it mildly) Since, I assume there will be firings and criminal charges, hopefully the idea of drugging small children will not catch on as a teaching aid.

As an expert on business ethics, my analytic abilities are wasted here. What analysis can you do? Is there a moral argument about giving other people’s children drugs? I think not. There is no way the teachers or teacher’s aides had any idea of what medications the children were already taking or the existence of an medical conditions the children might have had so administering any drug on a large scale is highly dangerous. These acts endangered children. End of moral analysis.

If I may quote from a legendary source of moral support: In the New Testament, Jesus Christ issues a stern warning against harming children. In Matthew 18:6, Jesus says, “If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”

This is a catastrophic failure of business ethics. The school is hunkered down. There is no listing of classes involved, number of students or if this was the only set of violations. We can expect this story to develop.

If I were advising the school. I would recommend an outside investigator be hired and as early as possible personnel decisions. They need to share as much information as is possible under the circumstances and new rules specifically banning these actions put in place.

James Pilant

AI Weaponized.

On By southwerkIn business ethics

As technology moves forward with often amazing speed, the law struggles to keep up. New offenses never even thought of before are happening every day. One tragic trend is the posting of fake nudes of high school students and there are many others. The internet is a massive information super highway of fraud, deception and filth. I don’t need to tell you in any detail because you see and experience yourself the horror of what the internet has become.

This case detailed in the links below alleges that Dazhon Darien used AI technology to imitate the Pikesville high school’s principal. The fake recording had the principal disparaging minority students and teachers. It was spread about on the internet. Darien was under accusation of having billed the school illegally for about $2000. It seems the motive was revenge.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/25/maryland-teacher-ai-principal

A quote from the article above:

Using cloning technology, Darien forged an audio clip in which it sounded as if the principal was frustrated with Black students and their test-taking abilities, police wrote. The recording also purported to capture the principal disparaging Jewish individuals and two teachers who “should never have been hired”.

The AI attack was very successful. The principal was temporarily replaced as complaints flooded in. This was a truly vicious unprincipled attack. There are many disturbing elements, the main one being this is a first use case. There will be others and the results are likely to be at least as tragic and probably much, much worse.

We must as a society find ways of dealing with these issues of technological criminal innovation much more quickly. AI is a revolutionary technology. To say that it could be used to kill is not an exaggeration. And I while I am seeing a great deal of concern and discussion, I’m not seeing much legislative and administrative action.

Our legislatures, our Governors, our federal system are all creatures of the past with long and storied histories. But they were developed in the age of the horse as the main instrument of travel and the written letter, the primary medium of communication. Let me just give you an example, in the great majority of states, Corporate law requires the Board of Directors to meet annually and keep records of that event. This is directly from an era in which they traveled by train and horse. Isn’t it obvious that the corporate board be regularly involved, meeting often and having some kind of regular contact with the company? Yet the law requires no more than that single meeting a year. And we’ve had the internet, automobiles and telephones for quite some time now and we have not adapted the the statutory law to mandate more contact in an ongoing business. And that is the story across the board in the United States. The laws are based on circumstances that have become obsolete.

I suggest that the Justice Department create a division devoted to technological innovation and crime. This will give the government a slim chance of getting ahead of the curve of these new kinds of crime. We really don’t want to wake up one morning and find that AI had killed, destroyed reputations, collapsed companies and crashed infrastructures without legal recourse for the victims or the government.

We need to act. We must act now. Because the wicked actors both here at home and overseas are not resting. They are actively plotting and will given any opportunity take advantage of these new technologies.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-school-principal-faced-threats-after-being-accused-of-offensive-language-on-a-recording-now-police-say-it-was-a-deepfake/ar-AA1nJhWo

From the article above.

On January 16, a Gmail user known as TJFOUST9 sent an email to three teachers, including Darien, at their school email addresses. The subject line said, “Pikesville Principal — Disturbing Recording.” A sound file was attached. A man could be heard speaking. Among other disparaging comments, including one about two teachers and another about Jewish people, the man said Black students couldn’t “test their way out of a paper bag.” The recording proliferated. A teacher who didn’t get along well with Eiswert admitted to sharing it with a student “who she knew would rapidly spread the message around various social media outlets and throughout the school,” the report said. The teacher also sent the recording to media outlets and the NAACP.

Music Business Ethics!

On By southwerkIn business ethics

033Music Business Ethics!

I was looking for songs used to illustrate business ethics themes. For instance, Billy Joel’s song, Allentown, and Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. are good business ethics songs. But my first search pulled up a course offering for “Music Business Leadership and Ethics.” I am delighted. The more specialized a field becomes the more likely its reach is increasing. And few fields need more reach like business ethics.

Below is a piece of the online syllabus. Maybe you will have an opportunity to create or participate in this kind of innovative teaching. If so, Good Luck!!

James Pilant

Music Business Leadership and Ethics Course – Berklee Online

The course begins with an examination of notable leaders, leadership approaches, and industry scenarios important to anyone in the music field. Students will explore ethics from a wide variety of industries to gain an understanding about why ethical choices are important in sustaining one’s career. The music industry is, of course, no stranger to controversy or ethical inquiry. This course work will illuminate current issues such as:

the treatment of artists

intellectual property rights

revenue sharing

digital media and distribution

Students will apply specific decision-making approaches and ethical frameworks toward group activities that mirror the real world. They will explore some controversial issues that have existed for decades and emerging issues that are reshaping the modern music business. Students will be fine-tuning their career plans as they progress through the lessons and they will learn to anticipate decision-making, and ethics challenges. Students will create a blueprint for sound decision-making, effective leadership, organizational planning, and ethical awareness that they can immediately apply toward advancing their careers.

This course gives vital insight in to the overall role of leadership and ethics in the music business, other industries, and in one’s daily life. By the end of this course, students will be able to:

gain insight in to how leadership and decision-making considerations can help create a career plan

examine their plan in the context of the history and evolution and history of the music industry

translate and extrapolate leadership and decision-making strategies from other industries and decision-making scenarios

create a career roadmap with a focus on the achievement of specific goals

identify ethics considerations and leadership opportunities in the music industry that pertain to their career paths

via Music Business Leadership and Ethics Course – Berklee Online.

From Around the Web.

From the web site, Thinking Sounds.

http://cobussen.com/research/music-and-ethics/

It seems self-evident that music plays more than just an aesthetic role in contemporary society. Its social, political, emancipatory, and economical functions have been the subject of much research. Given this, it is surprising that discussions of ethics have often been neglected in relation to music. The ways in which music engages with ethics are more relevant than ever, and require sustained attention.

The book Music and Ethics (Ashgate 2012, co-author Dr. Nanette Nielsen), being the result of my research on the relation between music and ethics, begins from the idea that music is not only a vehicle to transport ethical ideas, ideas that can also be articulated verbally or discursively; rather, the book demonstrates that music ‘in itself’ can, in a unique and purely musical way, contribute to theoretical discussions about ethics as well as concrete moral behaviour.

Music can teach us to listen carefully and without prejudice. It can also teach us to cooperate and interact with others outside preconceived goals and benefits. It can offer insights into expressions of selfhood, as a key player in the construction of subjectivity. However, on the other hand, music also plays an important role in the disciplining and controlling of human beings. In that sense, music has ‘unethical’ sides as well.

 

Testing Opt Out!

On By southwerkIn business ethics

1-05-006Testing Opt Out!

My son did high stakes testing in high school. He described it as a hideous experience often being taken from his classes and placed in the gym as one in rows of students preparing for the tests. The school would move desks into the gym so they would have a huge open area for the supervision of test preparation. They spent days preparing for tests each year.

It seems that the high school experience I had so many years ago has deteriorated into a facility where the wonderful things about school: art, science, literature, inspired teaching as well as opportunities to interact with your fellows, have diminished in favor of standardized tests. Many of my students in the college courses I teach appear as if to do well on tests was the main thing they learned in school. The broad range of skills and the confidence one gets from being educated seems to be diminished among them.

As an educator I know the limitations of testing. Some of my students do well on some kinds of tests like multiple choice. Some do badly. Switch to true-false and some students who did badly do well. It is well known that stress knocks down test scores. So does illness and other factors. One story you hear over and over from other faculty at the college level is the student who takes down everything said in class scoring lower than students who don’t take any notes at all. There are powerful differences in test taking abilities and learning styles.

Testing is a blunt instrument. It has limited accuracy. As a college instructor, there are always students in my classes who do badly on tests that I believe are capable learners who I trust will take away more from the class that those who scored well.

After using tests for years and having taken countless tests myself, I am horrified at what these clumsy assessment tools are being used for. If my son were still in high school, I would opt out. I would not put up with this nonsense. I am familiar with the corporate compulsion to collect data and to crunch numbers. As a business teacher, I believe firmly that this is a corporate fetish. Many numbers are useless and mean nothing. Sometimes it is difficult to discern which numbers are significant when compared to other measures. If you want to see number crunching taken to the level of madness, read David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest. Many things done in Vietnam were designed to produce good numbers. And they did, the numbers show that we the war easily. Is that what you remember about the war? Did that war go well for we Americans?

When cooperation with the system means pain for our children, the generation of numbers used to justify the destruction of our schools and increased influence by testing corporations and anti-public education zealots, it is time to say, “Enough.” Opt out, don’t feed the beast.

James Pilant

 

Test Season Reveals America’s Biggest Failures | Crooks and Liars

It’s testing season in America, and regardless of how the students do, it’s clear who is already flunking the exams.

Last week in New York, new standardized tests began rolling out across the state, and tens of thousands of families said “no dice.”

According to local news sources, over 33,000 students skipped the tests – a figure “that will probably rise.”

At one Brooklyn school, so many parents opted their students out of the tests the teachers were told they were no longer needed to proctor the exams. At another Brooklyn school, 80 percent of the students opted out. Elsewhere in Long Island, 41 school districts in Nassau and Suffolk reported thousands of students refusing to take the test, and an additional district reported hundreds more.

Reflecting how the testing rebellion may affect upcoming elections, the Republican opponent to New York’s Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo, Rob Astorino, announced his intention to opt his children out of state tests.

What is happening in New York is indicative of a groundswell of popular dissent – what Peter Rothberg, a journalist for The Nation and a New York City parent, called a “nationwide movement” – against the over-use and abuse of standardized testing in public schools.

via Test Season Reveals America’s Biggest Failures | Crooks and Liars.

From Around the Web.

From the web site, Change the Stakes.

http://changethestakes.wordpress.com/about-cts/what-we-believe/teachers-of-conscience/

Teachers of Conscience

A Letter to Chancellor Carmen Fariña

Dear Chancellor Carmen Fariña,

We are teachers of public education in the City of New York. We are writing to distance ourselves from a set of policies that have come to be known as market-based education reform. We recognize that there has been a persistent and troubling gulf between the vision of individuals in policymaking and the work of educators, but we see you as someone who has known both positions and might therefore be understanding of our position. We find ourselves at a point in the progress of education reform in which clear acts of conscience will be necessary to preserve the integrity of public education. We can no longer implement policies that seek to transform the broad promises of public education into a narrow obsession with the ranking and sorting of children. We will not distort curriculum in order to encourage students to comply with bubble test thinking. We can no longer, in good conscience, push aside months of instruction to compete in a city-wide ritual of meaningless and academically bankrupt test preparation. We have seen clearly how these reforms undermine teachers’ love for their profession and undermine students’ intrinsic love of learning.

As an act of conscience, we are declining the role of test administrators for the 2014 New York State Common Core Tests. We are acting in solidarity with countless public school teachers who have paved their own paths of resistance and spoken truthfully about the decay of their profession under market-based reforms. These acts of conscience have been necessary because we are accountable to the children we teach and our pedagogy, both of which are dishonored daily by current policies.

Syllabus Content Warning

On By southwerkIn Teaching

Japan-Nuclear-EmergencySyllabus Content Warning

I’d never thought about this until I saw Angus Johnston’s post on his blog, Student Activism. I use the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire as an example of the need for regulation in the business environment. It’s pretty graphic and I warn the class verbally before using it. But this might be better. I could include a warning and then list the documentaries that students could have trouble with.

Mr. Johnston says he could use some feedback on this issue. If you are a teacher, please go to his web site and give your advice.

James Pilant

Content Warnings and College Classes |

The New Republic has a story out mocking and condemning what it describes as a trend toward the use of mandatory “trigger warnings” in college classes.

I don’t have time for a full post on this subject right now, but as I said on Twitter a few moments ago, while I’ve never given a trigger warning by that name, I do make a point of mentioning to  my students at the start of the semester the fact that my courses sometimes address horrific and difficult subjects. Beyond that, I spend a lot of time thinking about how I prepare my students for traumatic material in class, and about how I present that material. Classrooms can be traumatizing environments, and it’s appropriate for professors to consider how to ameliorate that possibility.

After I logged off of Twitter, I got to thinking about whether it would be appropriate for me to address the subject of potentially traumatic subjects in the syllabus, and what an attempt to do so might look like. Here’s what I came up with:

“At times during this semester we may be discussing historical events that may be disturbing, even traumatizing. If you ever feel the need to step outside before or during one of these discussions, either for a short time or for the rest of the class session, you may always do so without academic penalty. If you ever wish to discuss your personal reactions to this material, either with the class or with me afterwards, I welcome such discussion as an appropriate part of our coursework.”

That’s just a very early first draft. I don’t know for sure that I’m going to incorporate this into syllabi going forward, but it’s a whack at the problem at least.

I’m interested to know what y’all think, and to see other examples, if you know of any.

via Content Warnings and College Classes |.

From around the web.

From the web site, Classically Inclined.

http://lizgloyn.wordpress.com/2014/01/21/the-classical-pedagogy-of-trigger-warnings/

So, I was putting together my syllabus for Roman Literature of the Empire recently, which is the half-unit course I’m currently teaching to the first year students. It is going to be awesome – we have Livy, Ovid, Lucan, Petronius and Seneca, so I get to spend some time with my favourite boys talking about my favourite things. However. I had decided that for Ovid, if I was going to get the students to read some of his love poetry, I needed to have a lecture titled Why Ovid Is Problematic.

Why? Because it’s not pedagogically responsible to set students loose on the Amores and the Ars Amatoria without explicitly talking about sexual violence and rape. There is a darker side to our witty, playful poet that does need to be talked about, and students need to be given the tools for thinking about these difficult issues. This is, in part, what my article handling teaching the Metamorphoses in the classroom addresses. I had to think quite carefully about how I structured that lecture and what I do with it – I want to talk about the romanticisation of rape in terms of the Sabine women, the abuse of power as it appears in the two Cypassis poems, the violence against the female body as it appears in the two poems about Corinna’s abortion, and the problems of consent and its absence that some of the Amores pose, which feels like a well-structured progression through the issues posed by this sort of writing with some concrete examples.

I have, of course, yet to face the issues involved in actually preparing the lecture. My problem when I was constructing the syllabus was how to make it clear that the content of this session could be disturbing for survivors of rape. What is the pedagogy of the trigger warning on the syllabus?

Not Teaching Anymore?

On By southwerkIn business ethics1 Comment

Here’s a post from an adjunct professor who quit. Her story isn’t unique. It’s becoming increasingly common.

James Pilant

From the web site, Bryn Greenwood

http://bryngreenwood.wordpress.com/2013/09/19/why-i-dont-teach-anymore/

Unfortunately, I don’t teach anymore. I made the decision to become a full-time secretary primarily because of an environment like the one described in this Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article, which details the downward spiral of Margaret Mary Vojtko, a long-time adjunct professor. Her poverty eventually led to her death, so I feel lucky that mine merely led to a secretarial job.

Universities increasingly rely on underpaid adjunct faculty to carry the burden of what are dismissed as “entry level” courses. It seems to escape university administrators and many tenured faculty members that those entry level courses matter the most. Those are the classes where freshmen get a firm footing for the courses they will take in the next three years. Underpaying the people who teach first-year college students seems equivalent to systematically paying first grade teachers less than sixth grade teachers. After all, teaching kids to read, that’s just entry level work. Easy.

Yet those same tenured faculty lament how many students arrive in their upper level courses without the most basic research skills. Why? Because the people tasked with teaching them basic skills – the underpaid adjunct faculty – do not have the time, energy, or institutional support to become truly great teachers. Some of them are teaching four courses per regular semester and two courses per summer semester (compared to the average tenured faculty load of two/two/zero for an academic year.) At the typical pay of $3,000-$3,500 per course, an adjunct is lucky to make $30,000 a year, teaching as many as ten courses per year.

Please go to her web site and read the entire post. JP

From Online Ph.D Programs
From Online Ph.D Programs

Business Ethics Through Film: Monsters Inc. (via You Tube from bdickson14)

On By southwerkIn business ethics

There is probably a little more of the movie than business ethics in this little teaching module but it’s still relevant and very, very fun.

If you are teaching business ethics and you want to lighten the atmosphere, this is a good little video.

James Pilant

Teaching difficult texts (via jay.blog)

On By southwerkIn business ethics

I talk about this a lot myself. My primary gripes are that teachers often teach unimportant things because they are easy to grade. Sometimes, I see meaningless questions asked because they lend themselves well to an easily gradable format. Here’s a disguised version of one I saw –

The Social Security Act was passed by Congress in ….
A. 1935
B. 1936
C. 1937
or D. 1928.

If your career and life depend on knowing the year that social security passed in the format of a Jeopardy question, that would be a good question. In every other way it is useless.

How should the questions be phrased? Like this –

The Social Security Act was passed by Congress in …
A. The first few years of the Roosevelt Administration.
B. The last years of the Hoover Administration.
C. As one of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs in the mid-sixties.
or D. With the founding of the Constitution.

This places the Social Security Act in historical perspective, and it allows reasoning to be used. You can use what you learned in a variety of venues to determine if the act would have been something that the founding fathers or Herbert Hoover would have done.

I believe in teaching difficult subjects. I believe my students can handle difficult material. And I believe that teaching is an art whose highest practitioners can rise to meet the challenges of complexity and ambiguity.

James Pilant

Just a short post that got me thinking about this. In our Inquiry Education class, we read Wintergirls, a novel about a young girl, Lia, who has anorexia. It takes place in the days, weeks and months after her "best friend," Cassie, who had bulimia, died. It's an intense book with a lot of touchy and sometimes controversial events. In a nutshell, it's the book you want kids to open up and read but you don't want to teach it because of the subject … Read More

via jay.blog