Re: Door Slamming/Question

["B. Silk" <bsilk@titan.iwu.edu>]

Jeanne outlines the paradoxes of our professional values beautifully in
the post below.  I suspect a great many of these conflicts arise from the
uncomfortable overlapping of perceptions in our national culture.  (George
Will's recent column on writing instruction in college is a good example
of misapplied values and skewed understanding.) As a society we value
competitive "survival of the fittest" and yet we also encourage an
individuality and creativity that competition stifles.  We value hard
work, but we would rather have other people work hard FOR us.   No matter 
how smart we are (or think we are),  academics are as susceptible as 
anyone else to our national schizophrenia--which, in iteself, seems to be 
one of our values. We want to have our cake and eat it too, even if the 
cake tastes terrible.

All of us say we value education, but look at the disrespect we show to 
people who specialize in it.  A university I know (and perversely love) 
is presently looking to rebuild it's education department;  it's first 
stipulation for employing new faculty, however, is that an applicant must  
have a ph.d. not an ed.d.  I can't imagine a more absurdly snooty 
requirement.  Do they want the best PEOPLE for the job or do they want 
the "best" letters after their names?  Strange priorities.

Several years ago, before I became a college instructor, I did typing for
an ed.d. named Walt Pierce (Jeanne--he was a colleague of Dent Rhodes')
who several times re-wrote and re-submitted an article on the basics of
improving teaching in higher education.  The article offered simple
instructions to improve focus and pedagogy, no matter what the discipline. 
According to Pierce, ALL college disciplines suffer with teachers who
really don't want to teach.  And he was right.  This is the reason his
article was so hard to place.  The editors of the journals he submitted it
to didn't believe their readers wanted information about how to improve
doing something they don't want to do anyway. Although Pierce finally
placed his article, he had come to believe it wouldn't do much good.  A
few years ago--when I felt my own teaching finally coming together--I
tried to contact him to tell him that his ideas had a profound effect on
me (if no one else), but he had retired and moved away, and I was unable 
to find his address.

The university I work for wouldn't hire Walt Pierce, Ed.D., but the good 
that I do in the classroom (and the ideas I share with faculty who want to 
improve writing assignments) is grounded in what I learned from him.

  Bobbie Silk
  bsilk@titan.iwu.edu


On Mon, 3 Jul 1995, Jeanne H. Simpson wrote:

> 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
>