Being a Professor: Fire Emblem vs. IRL
Hello, everyone. I’m Professor Byleth, but you can call me Byleth. This course has no syllabus because apparently those don’t exist at Garreg Mach monastery, so I’m NOT going to spend the first 30 minutes of today going over some important course policies…
… is what I would say if I worked as a professor in the Nintendo Switch game Fire Emblem: Three Houses and not in real life at an accredited Canadian university. Because, as far as I can tell, there is no Senate at Garreg Mach that enforces rules to ensure fairness for students and teachers, and not a single Blue Lion, Black Eagle, or Golden Deer ever appealed a single grade.
In fact, there are plenty of ways being a professor in Fire Emblem differs from being a professor in real life. Some are great, some are… not so great. For example:
+ At Garreg Mach, you get a generous monthly budget…
Like, 5000 moneys each month to be spent entirely on equipment, food, gifts, and other supplies, all for your students.
… well, okay, you can also buy fishing bait and tea arguably for your personal use. But what do you do with the fish you catch? Cook stat-boosting meals for your students. Do you ever drink tea by yourself? No, only when you have tea parties with students or faculty.
As you probably know, most teachers for many age groups buy supplies for their classes out of pocket. 5000 moneys to cover a month’s worth of supplies? Imagine all the cool things everyone could do with their students without worrying about costing them more money on top of tuition.
– … but you also regularly send students to battle to kill or be killed
Yeah, none of the assignments I give my students have the potential to injure them beyond, say, spraining a finger while typing. I also explicitly require them not to do anything that could accidentally hurt themselves or someone else (you’d be surprised how many people think throwing things to audience members during presentations is a good idea).
Classrooms should be safe–no one should be worried about their physical safety while trying to learn. Granted, Garreg Mach is a fictional officer’s academy, so I guess some level of physical risk makes sense, but, c’mon, they aren’t even trained yet.
+ At Garreg Mach, there are only about 8 students per instructor, and only one instructor per semester…
Do you know how much 1:1 time that is?
If I spend 2 hours each week with my class and there are 12 people in the class, let’s say that I “officially” have 10 minutes per student per week, not including office hours, and of course understanding that we don’t give exactly equal amounts of attention to everyone all the time.
At Garreg Mach, assuming Byleth teaches students for, oh, let’s say, a single hour at the start of each week, she still has more time per student per week than I do. It seems clear from the game that she actually lectures for six days out of seven, and that the lectures and tutoring probably last more than an hour per day.
Those levels of individual attention? Would be amazing for just about every student, from those struggling to those excelling. If I could teach that way, I could help my students learn so much more.
– … but you also spend an unhealthy amount of time with your students.
OK, let’s get the biggest problem out of the way: because Fire Emblem is a role-playing game catering to the player, Byleth can court and flirt with students. Obviously, in real life, that is highly unethical, no matter how close in age they are. There’s a power dynamic between students and instructors that makes romantic relationships inappropriate, period. (Not to mention the power dynamics of the military, church, and divine hierarchies the game throws into the mix.)
True, you aren’t allowed to actually start a relationship until the end of the game, when your students are all adult graduates. But the courtship process starts earlier, and, more importantly, you don’t set any kinds of personal boundaries.
You live in the same dorms as your students. You eat your meals with them. You celebrate their birthdays with them. You hang out with them outside class.
My real-life students are generally great people, but, frankly, having the power of an authority figure and the responsibilities of a friend is not a good mix. Friends can screw up, even when they’re trying their best, because you don’t have to be an expert on personal problems to be someone’s friend. When authority figures screw up, the mistake is amplified because of the power they/we exert.
Besides, I already have friends and family who are my peers. I’m happy keeping my social life separate from my work life, and, ethically and personally, I can’t imagine doing anything different.
+ Your students are all there because they want to be.
All right, fine, Bernadetta and Hilda aren’t thrilled to be at Garreg Mach, but they do want to succeed. Just like all the rest of your students. They’re motivated to do the best they can in the courses you teach and to work hard outside class to make that happen.
Real talk: some of the courses I teach are service courses, which means students from a separate discipline have to take them in order to receive their degrees. Many of those students don’t want to practice, say, writing and presenting when they signed up for a STEM-heavy subject. And I don’t deny that sometimes, everyone needs to learn stuff they don’t care about in order to succeed later at stuff they do.
But I also meet so many students who seem to be in post-secondary education because someone has told them that they have to be. I’ve noticed plenty of students who just want to work and feel that a degree is the best path to get a good job. Or who don’t know what they want to do with their lives yet and have been told university will help them find out.
School doesn’t serve those students the way it should. Don’t mistake my meaning: if they want to be there, for whatever reason, then of course they should get to be there, and I will do my darnedest to teach them with the same effort I’d put towards a student who considered my subject to be the meaning of their life. I just wish society wasn’t set up in a way where those students end up paying considerable sums to a university to get a piece of paper they don’t really want in the first place and hardly any of the knowledge meant to go with it.
– … but most students are nobles and the ones that aren’t had to work really, really hard.
Unfortunately, the reason Garreg Mach is able to be so selective about its students is the fact that it accepts only elite, wealthy candidates. There are exceptions–some characters are commoners who’ve been able, through extraordinary luck and hard work, to amass the requisite funds and social support. And there’s a bunch of non-named NPC students running around too, though only about a couple dozen.
But, overall, most of the students at Garreg Mach are the children of wealthy, powerful families.
This isn’t a cool way to run a system of education. It perpetuates unearned privilege and excludes those who could succeed but for the circumstances of their births. Just because Dorothea and Leonie were able to join the officer’s class after putting in tremendous effort doesn’t mean Garreg Mach’s admissions system is fair or just.
Sadly, this isn’t as different from real-life post-secondary schooling as it should be.
+ There are no lasting consequences for failing…
In the classroom, I mean. Of course there are consequences for students who fail in battle (if you pick classic mode and run out of magic time-rewinds, anyway).
If a student has a bad training day, they look sad, but you can go right on training them in that subject. If they don’t pass a class certification exam, they can try again later, no matter how many times they’ve failed before.
As an instructor, I’m often torn between the pedagogical importance of allowing students to try, fail, get feedback, and try again and… well, just about every other practical need.
Every grade matters to my students–it determines what courses they can take and even, if they do poorly enough, whether they need to spend more money and time taking another semester. It might mean the difference between keeping and losing a scholarship. For some international students, bad marks might mean not getting to stay in Canada to continue studying.
Boy, do I ever wish that students could take my courses as many times as they needed to without having to worry about finances or time management or feeling ashamed.
– … but there are also no consequences for giving up on some students.
At Garreg Mach, if I don’t want to waste time buffing a particular student whom I don’t intend to use in battle, I can simply stop teaching them. I can leave them behind when I take the rest of the class to fight. I can let them lag dozens of levels below their classmates, with skills no better than a novice, and nobody bothers me about it.
We can’t ignore when students don’t learn, and failure grades in real life can act as an alarm. Maybe this student isn’t taking courses of the right difficulty or in the right subject for them. Maybe they need to work on their study skills before they can succeed. Maybe the professor or the course is terrible.
That doesn’t mean that having severe consequences for failure is justified. It just means there has to be someone who is paying attention when students do fail and asking why. After all, our job as educators is to help our students succeed. How can we do that without understanding why some of them don’t, and how can we claim to do that if we don’t try to help those who need to try again?
+ You don’t have to grade assignments in all your free hours.
Like, not a single thing.
– …
There is no downside to this. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be off fishing for the evening until I find and return a half-empty tube of lipstick somebody dropped in the quad.