Re: Door Slamming/Question

[csjhs@eiu.edu (Jeanne H. Simpson)]

Beth & Co.

An interesting circumstance, one of us pointing out the assumption that
English majors will do something else only if they can't teach and at the
same time another one of us indicating a distinct lack of interest in
teaching among English professors.  

It may be that one of the core problems afflicting our profession of
English is that we simultaneously hold and operate on conflicting values:

*teaching college is an honorable profession but
*there is no need to include training in it in our courses at the graduate
 level. Though grad. assistantships *are* included and some training
 is attached to those, systematic, extensive training in teaching at the
 Ph.D. level is pretty unusual; more common not to hear about how to teach
 Herman Melville or Isabel Allende.  
*and k-12 teacher certification programs are the butt of our humor and
 are frequently held in contempt for their emptiness
*and teaching college is somehow at a "higher" level than teaching k-12,
 as if it takes more brains to teach Melville than it does to teach
 6-year-olds how to read
*and we hate it that teaching is not honored in our society and complain
 that we don't get paid in proportion to what we know and do.

There are other influences on both circumstances, influences which I do
not underestimate. But I keep looking at these conflicting values and
think that we need to consider them first.

Jeanne Simpson
csjhs@eiu.edu