Masters of Teaching Brain Dump #34: Losing a bit of motivation
You can find previous Brain Dumps here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21. Part 22, Part 23, Part 24, Part 25, Part 26, Part 27, Part 28, Part 29, Part 30, Part 31, Part 32, Part 34.
Well, well... that is quite telling that my last Masters of Teaching Brain Dump was over a month ago! That pretty much sums up my motivation for the course at the moment... I am finding that writing of humanities essays is really quite annoying and frustrating. To me, it just seems like an exercise in blathering and nothing more than that... and it does enhance my feeling that much of "white-collar" work (that is based off completing a tertiary humanities degree) is nothing more than a smoke and mirrors game to create work for the sake of having work to keep people occupied. Honestly, who the hell reads and writes this crap...
That said, there is always a core of really quite interesting topics and things to learn... but it is hideously obscured by the need to write and "discuss" in a terribly opaque and "high-brow" manner. This should not be the way forward... and yet, I think that many people mistake writing in an "authoritative"/"formal" voice to be a good substitute for actually talking about something of actual substance. It ties in with my observation that Australia has slipped further into the idea of bureaucracy for the sake of bureaucracy and the desire to talk endlessly without taking time to observe and listen. That is sort of inherited from our United States friends... but they can get away with such inefficiency due to the sheer size of economies and superpower-ness. Australia should be smarter... (and I was under the impression that it used to be...).
Anyway... back to the topic of my education study. I've long lost serious motivation as it has become quite apparent that teaching at schools seems like a nightmare of dealing with government, parents, and just a myriad of bureaucracy. That has combined with my luck in continuing to land decent work as a musician, and my realisation that working in a regular "workplace" and dealing with people/bureaucracy/anything is the equivalent of smashing your head into a desk millions of times a day. I feel like just performing on stage is actually a really really really nice job!
Anyway, I do have this single History of Australian Education topic that I'm doing this semester, and I will finish the Masters... at a slow pace. But I think I will only ever teach as a casual, at my own leisure and pace. Doing it full time seems like a recipe for burnout and frustration!
So, I did finish my first assignment for the Australian Education topic... and this topic was described as one of the few "true" humanities topics in the degree, and not a specific education training topic. So, this would be my FIRST ever exposure to "real" humanities in the form of a history topic.... and as a musician/physics point of view... I'm pretty unimpressed. It is interesting to learn about how we arrived where we are at now... and that is also important to avoid similar mistakes..
... but writing the assignment was a sort of a "I don't give a crap" affair where I had crazily limited time to catch up on the subject material and then bash out out a 2000 word essay in less than two days in between performance projects. Honestly, I thought it was the most derivative drivel that was completely unfocused and lacking in serious direction. I've written better blog posts on 2 hours sleep, and those can be seriously rambling and all over the place (a bit like this one...).
... and depressingly enough, I scored a high High Distinction for it. Sigh, the world is all turned around and upside down.
So, I will be churning through the rest of the topic... this time, being a little bit more prepared about that. I will have to write something about an issue that affects Australian Education system in the 20th and 21st centuries. Seeing as funding models are just beyond saving (governments needing to pander to the wealthy...), I think I will turn in a rant about how education has been captured by humanities graduates who think Maths and Science was hard and not fun, and how that has led to the disemboweling and dumbing-down of those topics in order to make them more "approachable".
GRRRRRR!!!!! I plan on finishing this topic with a bang!
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I feel this a lot.
Sounds like what I remember of uni including the description of the essay 🤣 I figured both that the wankier I made something sound the higher marks I would get (because I was half decent at baffling people with bullshit if it was written) and also that that was all bullshit.
I still don’t want to start with the amount of whining I have about the education system.
Are you looking into changing profession?
No, I'm not changing... it was something that I had started just in case jumping across to the other side of the world as a freelancer and rebuilding a work base didn't go well. As it turns out, being a teacher seems like the ninth ring of hell... and oddly enough, my wife and I seem to be in demand as musicians!
It’s a sign! 😆