The Assault on Merit

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9 responses to “The Assault on Merit”

1. 

   Kevin Kim

   May 30, 2023

   My best French student, back when I was a 20-something high-school French teacher in the 90s, was a Thai girl who thought the American French-language curriculum was too easy (she was probably right). Among my worst students… a good percentage were black, but it was a white student in one of my English classes who said “Fuck you” to me. My absolute worst student, though, was a black girl named Edrica. I was involved in several parent conferences because of her behavior. She was loud, obnoxious, and disrespectful. Funny thing was that my kids were required to write periodically in journals, and Edrica’s journal was filled with pious crap about God. Meanwhile, her classroom behavior was the mirror image of her sanctimonious journal. Funny how the virtue-signalers are always the worst.

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2. 

   BV

   May 31, 2023

   Hi Kevin,
   I didn’t know that you know French. By now you must be fluent in Korean. What other languages do you know? I appreciate your civil courage in speaking of that delightfully heart-warming topic that brings us all together: RACE.
   I am interested in group differences. You have provided some examples. On the basis of those examples and from what I know about you I will ascribe to you the view that in your experience the best students are Asians and the worst blacks. Is that a fair ascription?
   >>Meanwhile, her classroom behavior was the mirror image of her sanctimonious journal.<< I think what you want to say is that her classroom behavior was the opposite of her sanctimonious journal.

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3. 

   Kevin Kim

   May 31, 2023

   Dr. Vallicella,
   After twenty years in Korea, I might barely call myself functionally fluent in Korean. My French is still ten times better (some years back, I’d have called myself almost natively fluent; these days, I’m fluent but a bit rusty, especially when it comes to ever-changing slang), but with Korean, I know more than just the minimal amount to get by. Using the Korean government’s 6-level fluency ratings, I’m about a 5. A low 5. If I’m not higher on the scale, this is mostly thanks to laziness, but it’s also because, despite my half-Korean ethnicity (Korean mom), I learned little to no Korean at home, and for English speakers, learning Korean is much more difficult than learning, say, French or Spanish—both in terms of vocabulary/grammar and in terms of cultural assumptions, etc. In French, for example, you can say “J’ai plusieurs fers au feu,” which literally translates to “I have several irons in the fire,” and the French expression means the same thing as the English expression. Upshot: I’m still working on my Korean, but my aging brain will soon reach a limit, I think.
   In my time teaching at Bishop O’Connell High School in Arlington, VA, most of my students were white. It’s hard to say, in terms of groups, who was the “best.” I had sharp white students as well as sharp Asian students. My most talkative and distractible students tended to be black, but I also had white and Asian students who spent time running their mouths. All in all, I realized I hated teaching high school in the US, so I moved to South Korea, where the people supposedly value education… but that’s a rant for another time.
   re: mirror image
   I guess I was thinking that a mirror image is in a sense flipped, therefore backward, therefore the opposite. But I see what you’re saying.
   A look at the sample sentences for the phrase “mirror image” over at Dictionary.com shows that most of them relate to the idea of “faithful reproduction,” but some show the meaning of “opposite.” Maybe “faithful reproduction” is the more common meaning.

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4. 

   Dmitri

   May 31, 2023

   I’d like to share a teaching experience which is not directly relevant to the issue of the race of the students, but it is quite important in itself and relevant to the subject matter of good/bad students from a different angle.
   In my grad school days I used to teach a lot of beginners computer science and practical computing in a private college specializing in this kind of education. The students were mostly adults though.
   The worst students — by far — were the lawyers who came (or were sent by their work places) to learn things like spreadsheets and basic database management tools. The lawyers were always full of themselves, understood the subject matter very poorly and blamed the teachers, the computers and the textbooks — but never ever themselves.
   Race was not a factor because the students were white. But diligence and self-image and basic life attitudes were. I won’t pretend to any scientific merit to this experience, but I saw this effect consistently in students with legal background. For context only, my teaching grades were consistently high & I was sought after to teach the most sensitive classes because of that.

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5. 

   BV

   May 31, 2023

   Thanks for the that report, Dmitri. What do you mean by “most sensitive classes”?
   I pretty much agree with you about lawyers. They are an arrogant bunch, full of themselves, as you say, and thus not very docile in the root sense of that word, i.e., teachable.
   They are — many if not most — the sophists of the modern world. They will argue anything — for a hefty fee. But that’s their job. They are advocates, not truth-seekers. We need lawyers. Unfortunately, some will fabricate evidence, lie, cheat, and use verbal tricks to ensnare the unsophisticated — which is why a man who defends himself in a court of law has a fool for a client.
   I have long maintained that there are far too many lawyers in government. The House, the Senate, and the Presidency are top-heavy with lawyers. That’s a problem because their professional training is merely verbal. We need more medical doctors — hats off to Rand Paul! — engineers, scientists, businessmen, and military types in government. More builders, fewer talkers and scribblers.
   I could go on.

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6. 

   BV

   May 31, 2023

   Dmitri,
   Another related angle has to do the age of students. The young are more teachable, but too often unserious and unmotivated and disrespectful. The older students are serious and motivated and respectful but mental petrifaction has set in. Their minds are shot at 30. Some of them. Life has ground them down and enclosed them in boxes that they cannot jump out of. I had a computer programmer in a logic course so stuck in a rut that he couldn’t learn the standard notation of first-order predicate logic. Nice guy, though. And white, and male.

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7. 

   BV

   May 31, 2023

   Worst of all would be to try to teach in a black ghetto. This will blow your mind:https://wesleyyang.substack.com/p/taught-for-america

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8. 

   BV

   May 31, 2023

   Kevin,
   Thanks for the response. My spam corral apologizes for its anti-Korean bias. I will have to check it more often — the corral that is.

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9. 

   Dmitri

   June 5, 2023

   Bill
   I completely agree with your thoughts on lawyers and the impact of age on open-mindedness. By “sensitive” in my story above I meant that frequently I was assigned courses which meant a lot to the college in terms of revenue while having demanding and/or capricious audiences. I knew my stuff, knew how to explain it to anybody and — back then — I had the patience necessary for teaching students not exactly willing to make an effort to learn or needing more elaborate explanations in terms of metaphors, analogies or examples that they could make sense of.

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