An adjunct lecturer at Shih Hsin University lost his cool after a student left a negative comment in a teacher’s evaluation. The interesting thing is not the legitimacy of the lecturer’s behavior and threat to give all students a “zero” grade. Rather, the case highlighted a bizarre aspect of higher education in Taiwan.
The reason the lecturer felt so wronged was because he does not understand why the higher-education system operates the way it does.
Why are universities and colleges creating trouble and disputes by requiring teacher evaluations? Because the nation’s higher-education system finds itself in an abnormal state, as schools must rely on government financial support.
To obtain subsidies, schools have to be run like a business and teaching achievements have to be quantified. This commercialization requires satisfaction surveys among customers.
As a university lecturer myself, I can fully understand the frustration of that teacher. This is a job that kills your dreams with low pay and lack of dignity. We are only paid nine months per year and the government has allowed private schools not to increase our salaries. Not to mention the instability, as contracts must be renewed on an annual basis.
Losing control probably allowed that teacher to vent his frustrations and he was in fact giving a “zero” to his role, not to his students.
To be honest, few people are able to live on the salary of a university adjunct lecturer and most lecturers have side jobs. That makes one wonder why they continue to do this lowly work?
Some of these “vagabond teachers” who continue to work part-time at university after university still have some passion and hope for education, but they are unable to concentrate completely on this role.
They are haunted by the shadow of this fuzzy ideal at all times, as if they were ignorant and laughable for pursuing their ideal of becoming an educator. Eventually they either blow up or give up teaching.
Teacher evaluations are pitting teachers against students.
During my university years, a professor once said in class that we would be given high scores if the professor scored highly in the teacher evaluation. This creates a situation where teachers and students are trying to outsmart each other.
However, teaching and learning should never be seen in opposition, they should be complementary and beneficial to each other. The learning process of students also serves as a lesson to teachers, as their enthusiasm and innovation constantly inspire teachers to do research. Educators also benefit from this process.
Instead of superficial quantification of teaching achievements, universities will hopefully be able to return to operations in accordance with their own specialties rather than based on cold, hard figures.
Because students at my university complain that different teachers use different grading standards, the university now has a joint final exam for the “Freshman English” course.
I have always been opposed to joint exams aimed at implementing the same grading policy across the board, because universities are not supposed to be a place for the pursuit of achievement quantification or grade equality.
The more the government emphasizes quantification, the more schools devote themselves to superficial work. If they adopt a grading policy based on equality across the board, students will attach greater importance to grades and take courses that are easy to pass.
This will lead to more teachers who do not care and students will lose out on both ends as “bad money drives out good.”
Universities should organize more competitive activities to encourage students to display their actual work and to participate in society to put what they have learned into practice. This would broaden their vision and cultivate their true aspirations, so that they can recognize and learn from teachers with special talents and research methodologies. This is the kind of teaching and learning that brings dignity to a university teaching post.
However, as the number of professors has increased, while the birth rate has gone down, universities are unable to make a strong push for such reform at the moment. Driven by the trend of the times, schools only care about hunting for more students and grants.
Ailing universities will hopefully close down so that higher education as a whole will find a way back and once again become a healthy system.
The government should also promote mature technical and vocational education, so that most students are able to acquire professional skills instead of wasting four years at regular universities to earn a diploma that is just a piece of waste paper after a job interview.
Four years is a long time. Hopefully, Taiwan’s universities will one day once again be filled with students who take knowledge seriously and professors full of enthusiasm, so Taiwan’s higher education will be able to recover from its current serious condition.
Avery Tsou is a lecturer in the Department of English at Tamkang University.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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