Sucking up and the catfish of eduspeak

You know how the conversation goes, its like ”Yep some people just insist on sucking up to ....... ...well anyone.” How smart are they?

We spend a lot of time in schools exhorting students to persevere, to seek cognitive challenge, to excel in a domain. There is a sense that faithful effort and academic achievement will be rewarded in life after school. Alas misrepresentation and dissembling is rife in the land of eduspeak – feel compelled to reveal that all is error and illusion. Our framing is flawed and is founded on a deceit.

Will be of no surprise to the catfish of edupeak; will be of no surprise to those of us weaned on Machiavellian politics that a recent University of Texas study has shown that sucking up rather than effort and ability is the best way to get ahead.

“Aching to get yourself named to a board of directors but don't know how to break into that elite crowd? Don't waste your time proving how smart you are or flaunting your listing in the social register. Instead, try another classic corporate strategy: brown-nosing.

In their new study, "The Other Pathway to the Boardroom," the product of a survey of 1,012 senior managers and CEOs at 138 major companies, James D. Westphal, professor of management at the University of Texas at Austin, and Ithai Stern, a doctoral student there, show that exhibiting "ingratiatory behavior" toward your chief executive does more to help you get a board appointment than does brandishing a passenger manifest from the Mayflower or an Ivy-covered sheepskin. Put simply, sucking up trumps a noble birth.

We do not need paradigm shifts, constructivism, authentic experience or inquiry learning in our classrooms. When we ache for something, we need courses in catfish.

The catfish represents – the high point, the apogee, the climax, oh yes the climax, the crown, the culmination, the height, the meridian, the peak, the summit, the top , the summit of what it might represent to be a “sucker upper” .

The catfish is designed for sucking and clinging, just look at those sensitive sensory fingers lining the mouth – and the high oxygen requirement, well that is a bonus feature when it comes to sucking up - requiring frequent visits to the top for a quick breath.

• Catfish 101 - Epistemological Breakdown of Ingratiatory Behaviour
• Catfish 102 - Action Research Topic: Distinguishing between sucking and sucking up
• Catfish 103 – Moodling and Sucking Up – Myth, metaphor and misrepresentation.

I know you think I made “moodling up” but I didn’t, I didn’t …. is worthy of a post of its own

The Open Source Courseware Initiative New Zealand (OSCINZ) has, after intensive testing, selected the Learning Management System Moodle as the Open Source Solution for its collaborative partners (Link: http://www.elearning.ac.nz/ ).