It seems like it was just yesterday Newton was climbing in the backseat of the car that hot August morning, unaware that it would be months before he would return to Arkansas. He was happy that morning just to ride in the car, but soon his happiness turned to nerves. The first time we took him to Hickory Hill Park, he pulled loose from his collar and ran hard as he could into a native prairie planting. There, he scared up a deer and chased it into the park. We thought he would never come back to us! But soon enough he came back, and soon enough, we learned to trust him more. All the things we’ve done together: Chasing deer! Flopping in the snow! Chasing eagles! Playing with squeaky toys! Developing elaborate plans for world domination! Chasing possums! Sexing up all the neighborhood women! Chasing raccoons! Undermining the international banking system! Chasing geese!
But Newton is nearly eight years old. All the other dogs are well ahead of him in smarts, if not in looks. But today, all that changed: today was his first day of dog school.
By all reports, he did well, even managing to get one of the teachers to flirt with him. To which I say: That’s my boy!
Because it comes very close to what I do IRL, I can’t say very much about Elizabeth Green’s New York Times Magazine article about training teachers, which has been making the rounds through the Intarwebs. But I want to highlight a concept springing from the work of Deborah Loewenberg Ball, dean of the college of education at Michigan. Studying mathematics pedagogy, Ball (with coauthor Hyman Bass) recognized that, to be able to teach mathematics well, teachers need a sort of empathetic knowledge that is different from being able to find the derivative of a curve. Green describes it:
It’s one thing to know that 307 minus 168 equals 139; it is another thing to be able understand why a third grader might think that 261 is the right answer. Mathematicians need to understand a problem only for themselves; math teachers need both to know the math and to know how 30 different minds might understand (or misunderstand) it. Then they need to take each mind from not getting it to mastery.
Ball called this knowledge Mathematics Knowledge for Teaching (MKT) and, as education researchers are prone to do, devised a test to measure it. MKT, she discovered, has a strong correlation to learning. That correlation has led other researchers to begin studying the idea of knowledge for teaching in other disciplines, including Pam Grossman in English.
Since I read that last part about Grossman’s research (which, going by her CV, doesn’t seem to be that far along), I have been thinking about what English Language Arts Knowledge for Teaching (ELAKT) might be. Surely it includes sympathy for the traps of argument and the problem of process when writing. It also includes a keen awareness of the ambiguities of language and a willingness to to exploit those ambiguities at all points of learning. But what of teaching narrative, or teaching poetry? To teach fractions well, math teachers must understand why slices of pie are really poor metaphors to use; is there something comparable for teaching voice, for teaching meter? I’m curious what you language teachers think.
A report released last month by Public Agenda and the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education revealed that, despite its importance, a majority of Americans are increasingly skeptical of higher education. While people perceive college as essential, they also see it as increasingly exclusive and out of reach; the public believes that significantly more could be done to increase enrollment without sacrificing educational quality, despite colleges’ and universities’ claims to the contrary.
There are good reasons to believe that the public doesn’t know what it’s talking about. One of those reasons I wrote about last year when I observed that, nationally, institutions of higher learning are already increasing enrollment and cutting costs, but they are doing so by phasing out tenure-track faculty. Of course, replacing tenure-track faculty with non-tenure-track faculty does not necessarily mean a drop-off in quality—I know many visiting professors who are excellent teachers and researchers—but the gate is wider, the way quicker, and the toll higher: those who are on the instructor-track struggle as much or more than the family working three jobs to pay for a daughter’s tuition.
The survey may also reflect general discontent with the direction of the country. The more dissatisfied people are with the way things are, the more valuable education becomes as a goal, but the harder it seems to get. This chart correlates well with public “direction-of-the-country” polls such as Newsweek’s:
Nevertheless, the report warns:
This does not mean that the public is actively hostile to higher education, but it does suggest that the public may not be especially sympathetic to the internal problems of the higher education system either. Our findings suggest, in other words, that the public may be poised in a period of ambivalence and perhaps unpredictability toward the financial difficulties of higher education. (My emphasis)
In fact, A 2009 Des Moines Register Iowa Poll found 64% of Iowans happy to cut university budgets. Iowa, it would appear, is already skeptical.
It has taken me years to learn the value of planning ahead when writing. Even into graduate school I told myself that the structure of an argument was best when it developed organically from the source material. I wrote slowly, painstakingly, and, more often than not, futilely trying to prove my point. My essays were often clunky and, worst of all, rarely came to a conclusion at all, much less a satisfying one. Not until my last semester did a professor ask, “Do you outline before you write?” No, I didn’t, and even at the time she asked I wasn’t entirely convinced it was necessary.
Not to confuse being organized with actually having an argument; indeed, in retrospect I more often than not wrote in order to to find something to say. One must respect the creative process if one wants to be creative, and sometimes that is the way things go no matter how much structure you try to impose. My bigger problem was that I didn’t respect that process: I treated first drafts as final and vice versa, too often ending work precisely where it should have begun.
But Greg, I hear you ask, whatever did you learn in college if not how to outline? Dear, dear Reader, do not be so naïve! There is a difference between learning how to do something and learning the necessity of it! Do not forget it!
