Painful to Read
Over the last few months, I've been reading personal statements of the kind supposedly designed to get students into prestigious institutions of higher learning. I've noticed a disturbing and painful trend.
In the statements emanating from the College of Wyverns (especially the products of the Ghastly Eloquence Process), I've found rambling, disjointed, badly-focussed, slightly-concussed, irrelevant, self-indulgent, and ill-chosen helpings of thrown-together verbiage. If this were a salad, it would be light on content and poor in presentation. Even if not a salad, it would be that as well.
Why are these students, supposedly more eloquent and compelling and creative than those from the other great high schools of Atlantis, producing such dung-heaps of subliteracy? I suspect it is to do with lack of corrective rigour. If they were my students, I'd whack them up the head with a large blunt object (metaphorically) or slice them to pieces with the red pen that is mightier than any sword.
But it looks like NOBODY has ever attempted to teach them how to write a personal statement, NOBODY has sat down with them to discuss their aims and hopes and ambitions in later life. That is just plain sad, and very painful. The founder of the College, Ankh-Morpork himself, once said that the mission of the College was to prepare its students for 'all their after life' — that is, their life after leaving the school, and not their eternal trajectory.
It looks as if this isn't being done. Perhaps people need reminding about what Career Guidance means. 'Career' means a headlong progression over a constrained course, much as a racing or dressage circuit. 'To guide' means 'to show the way (from the perspective of knowledge)'. If the way is not being shown, how is it guidance?
In the statements emanating from the College of Wyverns (especially the products of the Ghastly Eloquence Process), I've found rambling, disjointed, badly-focussed, slightly-concussed, irrelevant, self-indulgent, and ill-chosen helpings of thrown-together verbiage. If this were a salad, it would be light on content and poor in presentation. Even if not a salad, it would be that as well.
Why are these students, supposedly more eloquent and compelling and creative than those from the other great high schools of Atlantis, producing such dung-heaps of subliteracy? I suspect it is to do with lack of corrective rigour. If they were my students, I'd whack them up the head with a large blunt object (metaphorically) or slice them to pieces with the red pen that is mightier than any sword.
But it looks like NOBODY has ever attempted to teach them how to write a personal statement, NOBODY has sat down with them to discuss their aims and hopes and ambitions in later life. That is just plain sad, and very painful. The founder of the College, Ankh-Morpork himself, once said that the mission of the College was to prepare its students for 'all their after life' — that is, their life after leaving the school, and not their eternal trajectory.
It looks as if this isn't being done. Perhaps people need reminding about what Career Guidance means. 'Career' means a headlong progression over a constrained course, much as a racing or dressage circuit. 'To guide' means 'to show the way (from the perspective of knowledge)'. If the way is not being shown, how is it guidance?
Labels: Career Guidance, Education, Pain
etched with acid at 11:04:00 am
1 Comments:
I think they expect that the students already know how to Write a personal statement - after all, most of them would have had to submit one of those thingummies to the College at one point or another.
As for the rest, well, tough.
They do, in some sense, 'show the way' to career fairs though.
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