A glimpse into academic bureaucracy, Panamanian style

One of the things I wanted to learn during my visit to Panama is what it's like to teach in the universities here.  I'm not sure what exactly I wanted to know --- how prepared are the students? what are typical class sizes? how many courses does a person teach? Just, I know that I have certain unexamined assumptions about the way stuff works, and I figured being in an entirely different country might help me re-examine aspects of academia I'd taken for granted.

So, when I got to lead a week-long professional development workshop for instructors in David, Chiriquí, --- and when, doing this workshop meant that I ran headlong into busywork and pedagogical buzzwords and bureaucracy --- instead of feeling frustrated, I feel like I'd struck gold.  Here, here was the kind of cultural difference I'd been hoping to uncover, and I waded right into the middle of it up to my knees. Yay!

In retrospect, I'm somewhat impressed at how incredibly proficient the administrative leaders at that school are at creating mounds and mounds of bureaucratic paperwork when they feel like it. 

As I was getting ready to lead the one-week workshop at UNACHI, I sent the department chair a draft syllabus, outlining topics I could cover each morning and afternoon. The chair responded by setting up a Google classroom platform (I guess it's kind of like Canvas or Blackboard) to document the purpose of this workshop. 

And then he fleshed out the draft I sent him.  For every single morning and for every single afternoon – that means 10 times in all – he created a google classroom sub-page with a giant table listing three kinds of activities the instructors in the workshop would do, the academic objectives of each of these, the formative evaluation aspects, the evaluative assessments, and a couple of other things that I forget. He asked me to read it over and comment. Of course, since he was guessing as to what I had in mind, there were lots of inaccuracies.  For example, the material I do is deep enough that often just one activity can take the whole morning, so having to parse it into three different activities for the purpose of the spreadsheet (with evaluative objectives and so on) is a lot of petty reductionism. He also showed me the separate evaluation page that said there would be a pre- and post-test.  

Now, I remember a few years back attending an MAA (Math Association of America) discussion on how to retain retired members as part of the association.  One of the things Doug Ensley commented on is that we need panels that focus on things outside of the classroom. "Retired professors don't want to go to workshops on assessment; getting out of assessment is the reason they retired!"  Exactly.  I was happy to do a workshop where I could share information with people; I really didn't want to get into these buzzword weeds, though.  Nonetheless, the chair of the department valiantly led me through this all. I am so, so, so very glad this is not what the rest of my career has been like!

So, after all that paperwork of figuring out what we'd be doing hour-by-hour, from 8 to 4 each day,  (and why, and how that links to formative and evaluative assessment), and after creating a pre- and post-test . . . 

. . . after all that, we completely ignored the spreadsheets.  Completely.

The flyer advertising a workshop whose hours are
8:00-noon, 1:00-4:00, 40 hours in person 

Day 1, the Chair explained that today, it'd be best to meet just in the morning and to give people work to do on their own in the afternoon.  Oh, they have another visitor coming all of a sudden to do workshops, and so could I stop at 11 to give him time?  A bit surprised, I agree.  But I'm ready to go at 8.  And then the instructors didn't really wander in until 8:30.  So, instead of 8 to noon or 8:00 to 4:00, Day 1 is 8:30 to 11:00.

And they explain Day 2 will be the same.

Day 2 is indeed the same: we worked 8:30 until 11:00 or 11:30.  When I suggested a 10-minute break, it stretched to nearly a half hour.

Day 3, we'd talked about working both morning and afternoon, because by now the other visitor was gone.  But when I suggested to the class that we break for lunch and they come back in one hour, or maybe 90 minutes (I explained I wasn't sure of local customs and needed feedback on that), I got a lot of panicked-looking faces.  Someone explained that we should probably do the afternoon virtually, and although it's really hard to explain math-and-art over a video screen, I agreed and so we set that up.

After most people left, some explained they had other obligations, and eventually I figured out we should just cancel the afternoon sessions and meet again tomorrow at 8:00 (= 8:30).  The chair agreed: "people were really just expecting to come in in the morning; they have to use the afternoons to get ready for their classes since the semester is starting soon." Um, okay . . . 

At that point, I asked the chair about all that paperwork we'd filled out;  he said, "Oh, we only use that internally.  And don't worry, it's all approved".  So that's what the paperwork was for: to get professional development credit for the instructors who attended.

We actually set up a second Google classroom for the students (but that the internal folks couldn't see), one that had none of the spreadsheets or buzzwords, but that did have all of the handouts that I shared with them.

I'm not complaining; I really loved working with the instructors in Chiriquí. They're enthusiastic; they're bright and ask great questions, and they do a bunch of work. Also, having afternoons to work on my book was an unexpected gift.  Still, the mismatch between the paperwork and the on-the-ground expectations was enlightening.  

We continued on the same way for the last two days: meeting mornings 8:30 to 11:30 or noon, and of course we didn't do half of what I'd said we'd be doing working 8:00-4:00.  I never gave anyone a pretest or a post-test.  We did have a party and go out for lunch on Friday, when the sessions wrapped up early so that the instructors could attend a different workshop on --- as the chair explained to me -- how they should fill out those spreadsheets for the classes the were getting ready to teach in the upcoming month.  [Shudder].  

We had a lot of fun, and I was begged to come back sometime, and I would thoroughly recommend the experience to other instructors, especially now that I know the forms are read by administrators who don't know or care about mathematics, as long as something plausible-sounding seems to be in each of the cells. Sounds like a great job for generative AI.

A second experience

At the second university where I did extended workshops (in Penonomé), we didn't have to fill out the spreadsheets.  But there was a similar disconnect between the official face and the actual face.  The chair asked me to come "all week", and to arrive on Tuesday, and also said we'd be able to meet only in the afternoons.  Then he sent me this poster advertising the workshop, with the poster saying that my workshop would be "40 hours in person".  (Oh, and again he signed off, "see you Tuesday".). By this point, I knew not to argue about the poster wording.

"February 24-28" (really 25-28);
8:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. (really 1:30 to 4:30 p.m.)
40 hours (um, no).
We didn't do anything with fractals.

And again, it was lots of fun, and again, I'd recommend it to anyone interested in teaching math in Panama.  So cool!  Don't believe everything that you read on the posters, but the people are great.