New Emphases in Teacher Preparation

Language, Culture, Teaching

Testing, Blaming, and the Corporate Model of Education

A Wonderfully Unproductive Day
On Halloween we had friends come over for dinner before trick-or-treating. Kim and Tom have three little girls around the same age as our kids. We had a nice night that ended with the five kids sitting on the floor of our living room in their disarrayed costumes, eating their candy, and watching It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. I should point out that my six-year-old son shares with his mother a certain Scandinavian, existentialist perspective on life. They like rainy days and Mumintroll books; they loved the new Where the Wild Things Are movie with all its emphasis on the search for a shield to keep away life’s sadness and loneliness. S

Those Who Can Do More, Teach
When I was in graduate school at Humboldt State University, I used to read a comic strip in the San Francisco Examiner called Luann. It takes place in a junior/senior high school, and one recurring device in the strip involves funny banter that takes place in the faculty room. In one strip, a bespectacled male history teacher named Mr. Fogarty is talking with a guidance counselor named Miss Phelps, and he says, “I wish I could quit teaching and go write a novel.” Miss Phelps replies, “Ah, yes, the ‘frustrated teacher syndrome.’ The art teacher wants to be a great painter, the science teacher wants to do research ….” Mr. Fogarty interrupts Miss Ph

"I teach students how to be human!"
We had a department meeting today, and one of the topics of discussion was the new rules put in place regarding travel. The details of these new rules aren’t important, but in discussing them our conversation touched upon how much more corporate the university has become. I suppose this is true everywhere. There’s so much paperwork to complete on every discrete aspect of our profession that we run the risk of losing sight of our obligations to teach students and produce research, scholarship, and art. Or maybe we keep those obligations in sight but we find our ability to meet them compromised by layers of bureaucracy and oversight.The evening before, I was at Bulkeley Hi

Write Your Own Papers; Take Your Own Tests
Last week Ed White came to campus and met with writing faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates. Ed is semi-retired now but still works as a visiting scholar at the University of Arizona. His most well known and critically acclaimed work deals with writing assessment, including Teaching and Assessing Writing: Understanding, Evaluating and Improving Student Performance, Assigning, Responding, Evaluating: A Writing Teacher's Guide, and Writing Assessment: Politics, Policies, Practices. Teachers from the CWP-Storrs might be most familiar with him from work he has co-edited with Lynn Bloom, including Composition in the 21st Century

How Meritorious Are You?
The other day I was exchanging emails with my friend Jon, who like me was a high school English teacher for more than a decade before making a move to higher education. Both of us have school-age children and spouses in education. We were cynically commenting on President Obama’s and Secretary of Education Duncan’s Race to the Top program, which was announced this past July. According to its website (http://www.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/index.html), Race to the Top “provides competitive grants to encourage and reward States that are creating the conditions for education innovation and reform; implementing ambitious