Newmark's Door

"The Admiring Ignorant"

Short essay on the joys of teaching English comp to today's youth:

In terms of an academic lifetime, I'm still a relative newborn, yet I feel like I know a bit more about the frustration and exhaustion that might cause a college professor to wonder if he had wasted his life. I once received a paper wherein the student claimed that "John Lenin" had used his career in the Beatles as a stepping stone to seize control of Russia; last year, I read a paper that advanced the idea that "back in the day" — by which the writer meant the 1990s — people didn’t commit adultery, and homosexuality didn't exist.\

"The Costs of Higher Education"

This is such a close match to my experience it's as if the author attended my college. The bit about students making their own decisions is perfect.

I fondly remember my days as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison some three decades ago. During my time at Madison, I never saw an advisor. The course catalog would be delivered in bulk to Memorial Union (and other locations) and the university assumed that their adult students could make their own decisions about courses, the coherence of their schedules, and the number of courses they wanted to take in any given semester (if it took you longer to graduate than the standard four years, it was your problem). The one year I lived in university housing (a cooperative), I slept in a bunk bed in a cement block room with one window.  The food was rather bland—lots of starch, little in the way of protein—and you had your choice of milk or water (things were a little better in the dorms, but not much). Since no one owned televisions, if you wanted to watch TV you went to a commons area or hit a bar. If you wanted to exercise, you went to a gym that was equipped with an assortment of old steel benches, iron weights, punching bags, and stationary bikes.

UCLA has a course that matches my youth

"America in the Sixties: Politics, Society, and Culture, 1954-1974."

Why I claim it's not so much better pay that's needed for better teachers . . .

. . . it's better working conditions. An L.A.-area high school teacher writes:

My school has two full-time police officers, a full-time probation officer and several full-time security personnel to handle about 3,800 students. Yet we still have a hard time keeping kids from smoking pot on a regular basis in our restrooms.

Today's teacher must be highly skilled in her subject matter just to make it into the classroom, more so than at any other time in the history of education. She also must play the role of parent, custodian, psychologist, drug and alcohol interventionist and parole officer, to name a few.

On a recent Wednesday, my second-period class was interrupted by a student who overdosed on alcohol and Ecstasy and nearly died. Earlier in the year, one of our students was shot in the face and hospitalized. Last year, a student was shot in the neck and paralyzed for life; one of my students was standing next to him when it happened. The year before that, one of my students was inside her house when her sister, sitting in a car outside, was shot and blinded in one eye in a gang drive-by. The baby she was holding was struck by a bullet and killed.

Worst of all? The teacher doesn't work in downtown L.A. or South Central. She teaches in Reseda. Dude, that's the Valley!

"The Education Revolution"

Arnold Kling is optimistic:

I see the potential for a dramatic reduction in the labor intensity of teaching. I think we are at a point in education that reminds of what the Web felt like in 1994. A lot of excitement is coming, and change will sweep through faster than most people expect. Traditional colleges seem poised to be the Borders Books of the next round of technological change.

I'm unsure. I spent a bunch of time in school learning how to spell and learning grammar rules and times tables. Spell- and grammar-checkers and ubiquitous calculators have, seemingly, reduced the time today's kids spend on those topics. I think that's a loss, but I'm an old fogey. More important:  what has been done with the time saved? Technology can reduce the time and labor spent on memorization and drill, but we will still have to teach kids--labor and time intensively--how to think.

Bryan Caplan is less optimistic for a completely different reason.

"Teach For America Worker: 'This Is The Toughest Job I've Ever Had'"

But they are doing very important work.

"The Gotcha Test for Aspiring Deans"

Funny. And yes, being a university administrator largely stinks. That's one good reason why there should be fewer of them.

Link via John Whitehead at Environmental Economics. 

"School kids catch a break"

Kinda. According to a new study by the nonprofit research group MDRC: "When the city [New York City] shutters large, bad schools and puts kids in smaller, specialized ones, graduation and college-readiness rates climb, and much of the racial-achievement gap vanishes."

The catch? 

With this success so evident, you’d expect to see the teachers unions lining up to support the model. Not exactly.

Instead, the unions file suit every time the Department of Education tries to close or restructure a failing school.

What unions? You know, the "we're all about the kids" unions.

More evidence for Newmark's Second-Best Solution for Improving K-12 Schools: smaller classes, smaller schools, smaller school districts.

(Wait: isn't this MDRC a rabid, right-wing nut organization? No, not even close. It is affiliated with the Ford Foundation. The Board of Directors is chaired by Robert Solow. Among the other members of the board are John Reed, former chair of Citigroup, and noted scholars Lawrence Katz, Richard Murnane, and Cecilia Rouse. The study is here.)

Two smackdowns of higher education

"12 Inconvenient Truths About American Higher Education".

Inconvenient Truth #5 Undergraduate Students Are Often Neglected

At schools with lots of graduate students and/or research grants, often the faculty emphasis is not on undergraduate instruction. Big classes taught by inexperienced or marginally qualified individuals are often common, and faculty reward systems strongly favor research over teaching, as often do state appropriations in some settings.

"A Good Fit".

To help you determine if you’re a good faculty fit for a small, formerly-known-as-liberal-arts college, consider the following:

. . . 

Do you understand that you will spend more time on service commitments than on prepping for your classes?

Are you willing to serve on multiple committees whose meeting times will add up to as many as eight hours per work -- the equivalent of a full business day?

Are you willing to serve on multiple committees after repeated evidence that there is no such thing as faculty governance?

"Top 5 problem-solving mistakes by MBA's"

By Vanderbilt's Luke Froeb.

Luckily, I teach at NCSU, where such problems are all but unknown.

:-)