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Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Teaching for Lust
crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com
“Dude! Her metrics are awesome!” Teaching for love, indeed.
Youtube phenom “Hotforwords” raises the ante on the “teaching for love” canard. In the process, she schools us on how teaching really can realize the administration’s dream in the form of the ultimate “quality” process.
The 27-year-old Russian philologist is a former Ph.D. aspirant and high school literature teacher with nearly 30 million views of her videos explaining various linguistic puzzles, such as--in the featured clip--how “dope” can mean both stupid and excellent.
One might ask the same about the term “quality,” which for administrators means, well, this.
Seriously, there’s no disputing her metrics. It’s teaching as “vaudeville,” as the New York Times’ Virginia Heffernan points out, but her curriculum is customer-defined and market-oriented. She is a self-funding responsibility center. She gets great student evaluations. Her teaching methods are susceptible to straightforward assessment instruments. There isn’t a “quality” complaint to make about her.
Oh yeah, and it’s totally exploitative, which makes a nice fit with all the outsourcing and permatemping.
Marina’s teaching for love (of fame) is not entirely divorced from the phenomenon that Michelle Masse analyzes as the feminization of the humanities--the reduction of whole fields of faculty work to second-class status by way of the gender economy: part of the cheapening and degradation of the work is the tacit recognition of it as women’s work, as a service, compensated by something other than wages. In connection with her forthcoming SUNY collection Ten Million Served with Katie Hogan, she observes how the call to “service” is one of the most compelling vectors of exploitation in academic life.
Masse points out that “secretary” and “nurse” used to name well-remunerated, well-respected positions for men. Kinda like “professor of language.” Now that it’s women’s work, it’s best done as a kind of lightly-paid volunteerism--for love, or, as in Marina’s, case, something closely allied to it.
Comments
Aren’t the women of YouTube normally Bill Benzon’s territory?
Marina, by the way, replied to my post over at the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Brainstorm.”
http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/bousquet/
And Ben, given your dedication and skills, you may want to work as Marina’s TA. She has an application form on her website:
http://www.hotforwords.com/ta-app/
The principle of working for the pleasure of relating to Marina and/or linguistics is essentially identical to the principle employed by universities in getting teaching assistants and contingent faculty to work.
Ben may have accidentally given the impression that Marina has plagiarized. The link he gives was actually published _after_ the “Hotforwords” segment above, on March 1, 2008. Marina’s segment was added to Youtube on February 1 of this year.
Ben’s source exactly republishes the work of a popular linguist working for love but paying the bills working for a chipmaker here in California, Dave Wilton, at
http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/member/1/
Wilton’s “dope” entry is here:
http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/site/comments/dope/
I haven’t examined Wilton’s sources, the OED, and the Historical Dictionary of American Slang. But I can say that, while Marina presents much of the information presented in Wilton’s entry, mostly in the same order, she does not exactly reproduce it (as Ben’s source does). On the other hand, she doesn’t appear to provide citations--though failure to do so is fairly standard practice, even in network television.
Yes, I should have made that clear, actually. After posting the comment I saw the bit in the youtube video saying that Valentine’s day was coming up, so clearly (even based solely on internal evidence!) the video predates the wordorigins site.
By and large I prefer the natural linguistics teachers to the silicone kind.
What was the word she was analyzing?
John, I think you meant, “Bi and large.”
Was no one else reminded of
“And Madly Teach” by Lloyd Biggle Jr. ?