Brent Ibata! This year, for Halloween, the faculty of the College of Science are going to sneak up behind each other and say my name instead of saying, Boo! Perhaps an exaggeration, but probably more true than even I would care to know. (I am the accused liar who spent my hard earned money to take a lie detector test to prove that I turned in a ten question homework assignment; for those of you who just tuned in.)

I have had the opportunity to observe the educational process from both sides of the teacher’s desk, and I find both teaching and learning just as exhilarating.. Unfortunately, having taught for so many years I am keenly aware of the apathy that ferments on both sides of the teacher’s desk. While I don’t believe that schools should strive to entertain students for eight hours a day, I don’t feel that teachers should feel compelled to suppress excessive movements and thoughts. Quite often during my education I have felt as I was Tigger and my teachers were trying to take the bounce out of me.

While I have managed to keep a fair amount of my bounce, some teachers in my past have been very successful in their attempt to suppress me. I can remember clearly my third grade teacher yelling daily until he turned red, and in retrospect I am aware that my education was placed on pause for most of that year. It took several passionate teachers to restore my urge to learn. Several years later I am here at SIUC, a little bigger, and a little wiser. After taking some time off between high school and college I was able to restore most of the bounce that I had when I was young and curious.

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After this whole fiasco over one silly little homework assignment I feel a little less bouncy. The momentum I had all through last year has abruptly come to a halt. I now feel like a freight train trying to get a start.

While I will bounce back, there are numerous other students who fall prey to a teacher who is a Tigger hater. Right now SIUC doesn’t have a mechanism(at least not one I have been able to find) for a student to file a grievance when they feel unjustly treated. This means that teachers can destroy the urge to learn willy-nilly without any formal grievance procedure for the students.

I feel that SIUC needs to implement a grade appeal procedure where the instructor can be overruled with just cause. Additionally, I feel that SIUC should create a student run Ombudsman office where students can turn to when they feel unjustly treated. I believe that each individual department on campus should be held accountable for the quality of their teaching. It is useless for me to sit in a science lab class listening to a teachers assistant who I can’t understand. There should be a mechanism for a student to request a hearing for any grievance. The results of those instructor evaluations we fill our each semester should be available to the students through a student organization like USG. Additionally, I support the idea of creating a course evaluation catalog that would rank the various courses and instructors by objective as well as subjective means. Teachers should be ranked by understand ability, relevance, average time spent studying and the instructor’s approachability/ availability. Most of all , I believe that most teachers here should be reminded of the passion for teaching that they once had. It is sad how often neither the teacher not the students really want to be in each other’s presence.

SIUC has probably succeeded in pushing back medical school one year for me, but I will move on, and I will become a doctor. I will continue to teach and I will continue to learn. I believe that all teachers should embrace the same principles as doctors, specifically to do no harm,. Education should be an instructive process and not a destructive process.