New Emphases in Teacher Preparation

Language, Culture, Teaching

Testing, Blaming, and the Corporate Model of Education

Great Students
Many people ask me if I love working at UConn more than working as a high school English teacher, and I tell them truthfully that there are things I like a lot better, like a flexible work schedule not determined by a bell system, but that there are things I really miss about teaching high school students. Namely, I miss the students. At UConn, I am primarily an administrator with a teaching assignment. I only teach one class a semester and then the summer institute courses, so I typically only have about twenty students a semester. I know many of you are thinking that you’d love to only have twenty papers to grade at any given time. And I agree. I would have felt the sa

Veterans Day and War Literature
As Veterans Day approached, I found myself thinking about the many books we read in my American Literature course that deal with war and its consequences. Though Huck Finn does not deal directly with war, it’s difficult to study the work of Mark Twain and not discuss the Civil War or Twain’s anti-war and anti-imperialist writings. William Faulkner notoriously lied about his World War I service record but later became a goodwill ambassador for the State Department and won the first of his two Pulitzer Prizes in 1955 for A Fable, which chronicles a soldier’s unsuccessful attempt to end fighting in World War I. Hemingway is perhaps the only American author to

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