Newmark's Door

How to survive the first year of teaching high school English

As recounted by the MeFites. The main advice seems to be: pace yourself, be patient, and stay optimistic.

Pretty good advice for most jobs, I expect.

"Harvard Releases Infomercial to Boost Adminissions"

You'll laugh at least once or your money back.

"High expectations for everyone, constant assessment and family involvement . . ."

. . . that's how you fix the K-12 schools. It's no mystery. If you don't believe me, read about Leroy Anderson Elementary School in San Jose and listen to Charles Weis, superintendent of schools in Santa Clara, CA: “We know what needs to be done; we know how to do it.” 

Also, demand action via The [James] Heckman Equation.

"The Autodidact Course Catalog"

Johns Hopkins faculty outline mini-courses on various topics.

Includes "How These Things Work: Business Management Writ Large". I'd skip Berle and Means, but the Mokyr, Hayek, and Chandler volumes are good for autodidacts or anybody else.

Link via Metafilter.

Dave Barry on college

This is no doubt quite old, but I just recently ran across it. Very funny and has this absolutely beautiful evisceration of sociology:

For sheer lack of intelligibility, sociology is far and away the number one subject. I sat through hundreds of hours of sociology courses, and read gobs of sociology writing, and I never once heard or read a coherent statement. This is because sociologists want to be considered scientists, so they spend most of their time translating simple, obvious observations into scientific-sounding code. If you plan to major in sociology, you'll have to learn to do the same thing. For example, suppose you have observed that children cry when they fall down. You should write: "Methodological observation of the sociometrical behavior tendencies of prematurated isolates indicates that a causal relationship exists between groundward tropism and lachrimatory, or 'crying,' behavior forms." If you can keep this up for fifty or sixty pages, you will get a large government grant.

"Education reform is in for a big test"

"We’ll learn what’s truly important to the Massachusetts Legislature: offering families more choices, catalyzing educational innovation, and tackling underperforming schools - or placating the teachers unions."

I'd hope for the choices but I'd be unwilling to be against the teachers' union.

"Top 10 College Admissions Tips"

Ya gotta love #8:

8. Make Sure the Teachers Show Up for Class
“The most important question to ask when considering an application or making an enrollment decision is this: What is the degree of attention paid by this school to the undergraduate educational experience? If superstar faculty members never cross the threshold of an undergraduate classroom, what will be the value to you? If research is valued more highly than quality teaching, and some faculty only do research or work with graduate students, what will be the value to you? You want to find a place where faculty are enthusiastic about teaching undergraduates, where they are accessible to students, and where they include them in their research. It takes some work to learn about the undergraduate teaching culture of a college, but it's important to find out. . . ."  -- John Mahoney, director of undergraduate admissions, Boston College

(Lotsa luck finding that out, kids.)

Two on MBAs

"The Shorter, Faster, Cheaper MBA".

"MBAs Confront a Savage Job Market".

The MBA Class of 2009 was hit harder than expected by the recession. At some top schools, 1 in 5 are jobless 3 months after graduation

More blistering criticism of U.S. higher education

Honest, I'm not going out of my way to look for it. It just seems as though there's more of it these days.

Louis Menand, Bass Professor of English at Harvard:

Weirdly, the less social authority a profession enjoys, the more restrictive the barriers to entry and the more rigid the process of producing new producers tend to become. You can become a lawyer in three years, an M.D. in four years, and an M.D.-Ph.D. in six years, but the median time to a doctoral degree in the humanities disciplines is nine years. . . .

There is a sense in which the system is now designed to produce ABDs. . . .

In the sixties, the time-to-degree as a registered student was about 4.5 years in the natural sciences and about six years in the humanities. The current median time to degree in the humanities is nine years. That does not include what is called stop-time, which is when students take a leave or drop out for a semester or longer. And it obviously does not take into account students who never finish. It is not nine years from the receipt of the bachelor’s degree, either; it is nine years as a registered student in a graduate program. The median total time it takes to achieve a degree in the humanities including stop-time is 11.3 years. In the social sciences, it is 10 years, or 7.8 as a registered student. In the natural sciences, time-to-degree as a registered student is just under seven years. If we put all these numbers together, we get the following composite: only about half of the people who enter doctoral programs in English finish them, and only about half of those who finish end up as tenured faculty, the majority of them at institutions that are not research universities. An estimate of the total elapsed time from college graduation to tenure would be somewhere between 15 and 20 years. It is a lengthy apprenticeship. . . .

The effort to reinvent the Ph.D. as a degree qualifying people for non-academic as well as academic employment, to make the degree more practical, was an initiative of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation when it was headed by Robert Weisbuch. These efforts are a worthy form of humanitarianism; but there is no obvious efficiency in requiring people to devote 10 or more years to the mastery of a specialized area of scholarship on the theory that they are developing skills in research, or critical thinking, or communication. Professors are not themselves, for the most part, terribly practical people, and practical skills are not what they are trained to teach. They are trained to teach people to do what they do and to know what they know. Those skills and that knowledge are not self-evidently transferable. The ability to analyze Finnegans Wake does not translate into an ability to analyze a stock offering. If a person wanted to analyze stock offerings, he should not waste his time with Joyce. He should go to business school. Or get a job analyzing stock offerings. . . .

Put in less personal terms, there is a huge social inefficiency in taking people of high intelligence and devoting resources to training them in programs that half will never complete and for jobs that most will not get. Unfortunately, there is an institutional efficiency, which is that graduate students constitute a cheap labor force. There are not even search costs involved in appointing a graduate student to teach. The system works well from the institutional point of view not when it is producing Ph.D.s, but when it is producing ABDs. It is mainly ABDs who run sections for lecture courses and often offer courses of their own.

Tufts University--boldly addressing the difficult issues of modern higher education . . .

I'll let the student newspaper tell it:

The Office of Residential Life and Learning (ResLife) has added a new stipulation to its guest policy that prohibits any sex act in a dorm room while one's roommate is present. The stipulation further states that any sexual activity in the room should not interfere with a roommate's privacy, study habits or sleep. . . .

ResLife received a significant number of complaints last year from residents bothered by their roommates' sexual behavior. Ales-Rich said that this was one of the most commonly cited sources of conflict between roommates.

(Link via, of course, Fark.)

The Washington Post reports that Tufts's policy ". . . has reaped heavy publicity on college campuses, providing fodder for Conan and Leno and reducing the school to something of a national punch line." Awwwwww.