Note: This is a paper I presented at a conference in February 2006
When offering my critique of the higher educational system, I believe it is wise to keep in mind the words of Allan Bloom “Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being.” (Bloom 26).
I argue that the market language has been so fully integrated into the higher educational system that it has begun to shape the formative process of education into a mechanistic framework. First I shall analyze the use of this language and its effects on the administrator-faculty level. Second I shall analyze the student-faculty relationship, and how it has manifested concepts inherent in the market language
The Bay-Dole Act was a large step into the era of commercialization. It allowed universities to patent intellectual property created through government funded research. This quickly led to universities opening their own patent offices. A quick change in priorities was noticed in Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing. Stanford, who was ranked one of the nations top producers of licenses (fifty million in 2002) noticed a decrease in teaching pedagogy, as this opportunity presented itself:
“You have to understand—initially the department chairmen and school
deans weren’t thrilled by having this new activity that was diverting the attention of their faculty away from teaching and research,” he said. “So how do you offset that? You make them stakeholders—you make them beneficiaries.” (Washburn 138).
As we can see, the weight of money has begun to corrupt the quality of education. In the three tiered goals of faculty, teaching-research-community outreach, commercialism has shifted the focus into the most pertinent investment—almost completely neglecting teaching pedagogy. Private industry, in an effort to keep an edge on the market, will often delay the publication of research, and forbid their researches to share their information with the pool of their fellow researchers. In 1994, Massachusetts General Hospital conducted a survey of 210 life science companies, finding that 58% of them delayed publication of material for six months (Blumenthal 1224-1228). Worse is the number of researchers that would allow data to be deleted from their research. A survey conducted in the main centers for the university-industry research centers found that 35% were willing to allow companies to delete data from their research (Washburn 76).
A new trend in university “management” is the concept of responsibility center management. The concept is to get a university to run like a firm. Each department is responsible for its own funds. If they make a surplus, they get to keep it. If they end in deficit, they have to pay it back. The results can be fearsome:
At the beginning of each semester, as students signed up for courses,
campus units paraded their wares with the fervor of discount merchandisers. Full-page ads in the Daily Trojan touted courses such as the drama class that required no reading (“Tired of reading Shakespeare? Kill off your [general education] requirement, sit back and eat popcorn, and watch it being performed.”). The behind the scenes rivalries were even fiercer. Schools that had never expressed an interest in the liberal arts were suddenly claiming that their offerings---introduction to real estate, for example---should satisfy the university’s general education requirement. (Kirp 116).
Such was the flurried response of faculty to RCM at USC. Competitions between departments became fierce. Academic cooperation reduced to nil. In one particular case, faculty and staff were allowed to enroll in courses in order to boost their enrollment numbers. Deans were coercing their underlings to enroll in their class, in order to give the appearance that the enrollment numbers of their department was greater. Since the humanities are often unable to produce the same amount of fiscal weight as other departments, their programs often suffer the consequences:
What’s striking about the changes today, however, is the degree to which they are being driven not by intellectual concerns but by financial considerations and pure market demand…Defying traditional academic notions, departments now openly vie for resources. English professors must demonstrate, in essence, that Chaucer pays the bills as effectively as engineering or business classes….Professors worry that creative writing and other courses requiring very small classes will cost their department funding under a system that strictly measure productivity.” (Curry 18). When I see actions such as this, I question that “proponents forget that they are talking in metaphors and start to believe they are really running a business.” (Lazerson et. al. A72).
Is it really still a metaphor? Language is how we choose to express ourselves and our perceptions, and as Donald Stein, a professor at Emory University notes:
Now when you go and look at university business plans, as they are called, students are seen as clients; parents are seen as customers…The question has now become ‘What is going to sell?’ as opposed to ‘What is the right thing to teach?’ Once things take on a commercial, monetary value, the whole academic decision-making structure becomes impacted.” (Washburn 209).
An increasing trend is to hire administrators “who come directly from industry or are recruited for their corporate know-how, not their educational experience.” (Washburn 205). With their increasing corporate backgrounds, is it surprising that administrators rely heavily on categories that can be quantified, such as enrollment and student retention? As Amy Graham and Nick Thompson note, “Teaching…is a net drain on the bottom line—and it is not measured in any of the major national ranking surveys.” (Amy Graham, Nick Thompson). As a matter of fact, very little emphasis is placed on teaching pedagogy because, as Rand economists Dominic Brewer,
Susan Gates, and Charles Goldmain explains:
Prestige seeking promotes excellence on the one hand but can lead to excessive expenditures and unresponsive schools that neglect the needs of some undergraduate students and other customers who don’t contribute to institutional prestige….Further, competition for prestige in the student market does not encourage institutions to improve the quality of educational delivery.” (147-148).
This trend in higher education is apparent when we look at who teaches the majority of undergraduates: Meanwhile, the professoriate has been remarkably silent about the outsourcing of higher education’s most basic function: teaching. The practice of hiring part-time instructors is not usually understood in these terms…adjuncts recruited on a fee-for-service basis are the academic equivalent of temp. agency fill-ins or day laborers. Barry Munitz, the former chancellor of California’s state universities, estimates that in that system more than half of all classes are taught by these disposable workers. (Kirp 114).
With the increase of part-time professors, there also has been a significant decrease in quality of education. Many times, these adjuncts must move between several different universities to make a living. One study performed by the American Association of University professors notes that “liberal arts adjuncts are 50 percent less likely to require an essay exam than full-time faculty, presumably because of the extra time required to read and grade them.” (Washburn 211). Even worse is what the adjuncts learn from the invasion of the corporate model. An adjunct at Columbia notes:
Submitting students to the rigors of learning seemed only to incur the wrath of many of them, which entered the record as my teacherly shortcoming….The business model has taught me that the customer is always right.” (Washburn 209).
The adjuncts are purely evaluated by student response. There is no peer evaluation. As a result, many adjuncts take the easy way out: offering grade inflation to appease his/her students. The way many upper classes are structured, one would not be surprised to find that the university truly is a business. Classes are cancelled if the student demand for them is not high enough. If the course a student wishes to take is not popular enough, the only manner in which he can acquire that knowledge is if the professor is willing to do an independent study, but often the three tiered duty of a professor (teaching, research, and community outreach) does not allow the time for many independent studies. A notable exception is the University of Chicago, which regularly offers one student courses.
I do indeed fear that the administrations of the institutions of higher educations increasingly believe they are running a business. The idea that education is a formative process in which minds are molded has become quaint. “The objective of the enrollment management” William Elliot, vice president for enrollment management at Carnegie Mellon remarks [good bye admissions director, hello corporate speak], “is to improve your market position.” (Kirp 12). In developing the “university product” Michael Benke uses the following marketing concept to “sell” the “learning experience”:
Because consumption is a learning experience, follow-on brands may be
compared with the pioneer brand to their disadvantage if the latter is perceived as ‘ideal’. As a result, the pioneer brand may be viewed as competitively distinct, and making competitive inroads would become difficult for later entrants (Roger Kerin et. al. 35).
In marketing the “learning experience” universities can come to some ethically challenging situations: Bob Massa learned that applicants who come to John Hopkins for an interview—something that all colleges encourage, in the belief that students should see for themselves whether the school is a good fit—are more likely to enroll if they’re admitted. That meant the university could, with relatively little risk, offer them smaller aid packages than their counterparts who had never visited campus. (Kirp 22)
Somewhere between the abstract metaphor of the University that is run as a business, and the concrete reality of the university education, we have lost the idea that education is a formative process, instead of a marketing ploy. Often the faculty are entirely cut from the loop of administrative practice, DeVry University states that: “Decisions are made by the management, by the central office, not by faculty deliberations,” says Meyers, the vice president of Academic Affairs. “The expectation is that [the faculty] will do it like it or not.” (Kirp 248).
We quickly see that the relationship between faculty and administration is often not of dialogue, but a passive command and obey structure. So what is the impact on the internalized lessons of the student who, so often in the eyes of the administrator, is a valued commodity whose education is often formed by the demand of his/her fellow students?
The university student is submerged in a world in which numbers are of the utmost importance. The student wishes to get into the most prestigious school that is ranked as high as possible on the near deified U.S. News & World Report “Rankings of Undergraduate Colleges and Universities” as he/she can afford. The student strives for the perfect GPA in order to attain his pass into that desired school. Classes at these universities are taught on the basis of marketability. With the exception of a few universities (Like the University of Chicago, who taught 173 single student courses in 2003) if the demand is not high enough for the course then it is cancelled (Kirp 49). In this world, the student internalizes the idea that in order to prevail in this academic survival of the fittest, he/she must internalize two concepts: the importance of being able to produce practical proof of their activities (for the student a good grade, for the professor research and grants) and the importance of creating of those numbers that create the demand needed for their education. All too often, the student, instead of embarking upon a quest for knowledge, instead embarks upon a quest for strategies: strategies to “make it through” the curriculum. Students become objectified through the curriculum. In each department, they adapt themselves accordingly. In English, the student adapts to the writing style of the professor. In science and history, the student learns the layout of the course, and adapts his strategy accordingly. In music degrees, often the emphasis is learning to play what is on the page, not true expression. The aspiring high school band director quickly learns that for one’s band to succeed, one must play a direct transcript of what is on the page; forget shaping the phrase according to form. All of this underlies one internalized concept: that the student is an object of reality, not a subject. The entire educational process is shaped in such a way as to expose the student to the academic cynicism to the “inevitability” it is impossible to make an impact on the institutional system. Chomsky notes this process:
One is the breakdown of independent social organization and independent thought, the atomization of people. As we move towards a society which is optimal from the point of view of the business classes-namely, that each individual is an atom, lacking means to communicate with others so that he or she can’t develop independent thought or action and is just a consumer, not a producer-people become deeply alienated, and they may hate what’s going on but have no way to express that hatred (Chomsky 1-4).
Students especially feel the effects of atomization when confronted with a curriculum that is run upon the concept that a course is not worthwhile unless the demand is high enough. Again, there is that perception that if a concept does not show its practical worth, then it is not worthwhile. The student is taught to internalize the sheer importance of numbers. In the educational process, the student becomes alienated from the humanistic side of his existence:
The dimensions with which we deal are figures and abstractions; they are far beyond the boundaries which would permit of any kind of concrete experience. There is no frame of reference left which is manageable, observable, which is adapted to human dimensions. While our eyes and ears receive impressions only in humanly manageable proportions, our concept of the world has lost just that quality; it does not any longer correspond to our human dimensions. (Fromm 119). Through the medium of Fromm’s observation, I argue that the student becomes alienated from reality with his/her higher educational experience. His/her educational experience is lead by quantification: practical learning, grades, and the marketable development of the curriculum. When released from the isolated environment of higher education, the student finds himself embroiled in abstractions: the government transmits its messages increasingly in the use of euphemisms (where prisoners-of-war are called “unlawful combatants, and concentrations camps were called “relocations centers”), government documents often use the flowery language of abstraction, and the way we experience events through abstract terminology (disasters cost the nation millions of dollars, the government via nuclear weapons, has the capability to destroy millions of lives with a single button press, and billions of dollars in the national debt). Is it a surprise that the American Institutes of Research found that 50% of graduates of four-year colleges and 75% of graduates of 2 year colleges lacked complex literacy skills (Feller A3). The survey analyzed three categories of literacy: analyzing news stories and prose, understanding documents, and having math skills needed for checkbooks and restaurant tips. I believe this survey shows that students increasingly find that aforementioned “strategy” to make it through their courses. The students internalize the image of the professors they see: in order to maintain the status of their department, the professors take a shift of perspectives from “scholarship to salesmanship.” (Williams 16), and the students internalize the need to adapt to the world, instead of shaping it (and thus dulling the capacity to think critically).
So, what manner of citizens are our institutions of higher education molding, referring back to Allan Bloom? Higher education, through the advent of the corporate language, has experienced a paradigm shift that has subjugated the role of teaching pedagogy for market principles: the marketability of the curriculum, the objectification of the student body, and the metamorphosis from “scholarship to salesmanship”. In the search for funding the institutions of higher education have allowed some of their academic freedom to be compromised. With half of the four year university graduates failing complex literacy tasks and student-pleasing adjuncts teaching over half the undergraduate body, the American higher educational system is in dire straits. The tense balance between academic objectivity and industrial cooperation has been upset. Students, instead of being challenged to think critically of their social surroundings, are instead being lead to passively accept what is, and give in to the fatalism of the status quo. Do we truly want students trained for the market? Or would be rather have educated citizens who believe in their ability to transform the world around them?
Works Cited
Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1987.
Blumenthal, David. “Withholding Research Results in Academic Life Science:
Evidence from a National Survey of Faculty,” Journal of the American Medical Association, 277, 16 April: 1224-1228.
Dominic J. Brewer, Susan M. Gates, Stephen J. Rose. Strategy and Competition in U.S.
Higher Education. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2002.
Buck, Jane. “The President’s Report: Successes, Setbacks, and Contingent Labor.”
Academe 87.5 September-October 2001.
Chomsky, N. “Language Politics, and Composition: Noam Chomsky Interviewed by
Gary Olsen and Lester Faigly.” Journal of Advanced Composition 11.1, 1-4.
Curry, John. Responsibility Center Management: Lessons from Twenty-five Years of
Decentralized Management. Washington, D.C.: NABUCO, 2002.
Feller, Ben. “Study: Most College Students not Literate Enough for Complex Tasks.”
Amarillo Globe News 20 January 2006: A3.
Fromm, Erich. The Sane Society. New York: Henry, Holt, and Company, LLC., 119.
Geiger, Roger. To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Universities, 1900-
1940. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Amy Graham, Nick Thompson. “Broken Ranks,” Washington Monthly September 2001,
20 January 2006.
<http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0109.grahamthomson.html.>
Roger Kerin, P. Rajan Varadarajan, and Robert Peterson, “First-Mover Advantage: A
Synthesis, Conceptual Framework, and Research Propositions.” Journal of Marketing 56 October 1992, 35.
Kirp, David L. Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher
Education. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: Harvard University Press.
Marvin Lazerson, Larry Moneta, and Ursula Wagener. “Like the Cities They
Increasingly Resemble, Colleges Must Train and Retain Competent Managers.” Chronicles of Higher Education 28 (July 2000): A72.
Moser, Richard. “The New Academic Labor System: Corporatization and the Renewal
of Academic Citizenship,” American Association of University Professors. 12
June 2001. <www.aaup.org/Issues/part-time/cewmose.htm>.
Washburn, Jennifer. University Inc.: the Corporate Corruption of Higher Education.
New York: Perseus Books Group, 2005.
Williams, Jeffrey J. “Franchising the University”. Beyond the Corporate University:
Culture and Pedagogy in the New Millennium. Eds. Henry A. Giroux, and Kostas Myrsiades. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 16.
Saturday, December 1, 2007
Website Evaluations
1) Name of Web Site: NCTE (national council of teachers of English)
2) Web Site Address: www.ncte.org\
3) Copyright date and/or last update: Copyright © 1998-2007 National Council of Teachers of English.
4) Author/organization credentials: This website is for a national professional organization for English teachers. It offers a wide variety of credible information from a variety of professionals in the field.
5) Web site design and ease of navigation: This website offers a cornucopia of information, but it can be difficult to find something specific. Also, there is a such a wide variety of information that there is a wide discrepancy between reading levels. Many of the articles are written at a professional level, but there also many that rank much lower. To their credit, they DO have a search engine, but it runs on very bland algorithms that make it hard to locate something specifically. The layout of the website makes it available to all levels of this profession: elementary, middle school, secondary, and even college. While there is much information offered on the website, there is also much that you need to be a member for (which is not necessarily a bad thing if you are an English teacher). This website can be very overwhelming if you are just entering the field. Much of the literature is at a professional level and could scare someone away who was not familiar with much of the terminology. Again, to the website’s credit they have an FAQ, but, unfortunately, it is very hard to find. You can only track it down on a dropdown list, and even then, it looks rather conspicuous.
6) Your response and recommendation for use: I would recommend this to all English content are majors – not only for its content utility, but also because I think it is important for teachers (especially first year teachers) to get involved in professional organizations. If there’s anything a first year teacher needs, its some impetus to get serisously engaged with professional pedagogy. I think this website offers a great community so that one can do just that. I would also highly recommend this website’s sister site: www.readwritethink.org. They offer many in-depth lesson plans that will help flowering students. One thing I have noticed in my brief tenure in the education department (I was a straight English major going through post-bach) is that although many classes had me prepare lesson plans and even critique lesson plans, not once did a teacher show me what they thought to be an excellent, top-line lesson plan. I suppose it further shows our society’s tendency to focus on the negative ;)
1) Name of Web Site: Guide to Grammar and Writing
2) Web Site Address: http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/index.htm
3) Copyright date and/or last update: copyright 2004.
4) Author/organization credentials: This website has been sponsored by a college organization – the Capital Commnity College Foundation. The website was originally created by Dr. Charles Darling who is now retired. On the author’s webpage he remarks that “to me it was always essential that this website remains a free service.”
5) Web site design and ease of navigation: As a future English teacher, this is one of my favorite all-time websites – not only because of its content, but also in the way in which it is set up. When the internet first boomed into the public populace words like “new levels of interactivity” and “active learning” where buzzed around the education field. Many websites fall short of this, but I believe that this website completely lives up to that heritage. Not only does each section (found through a variety of drop down menus) have information on the subject an a variety of examples (usually at least ten, which is important in grammar), but also there are quizzes on each subject. A teacher could use this site as an excellent tool to assess his/her class.
This website further impressed me with its inter-relatedness: in every single article on the webpage each key word is linked to the key articles about those key words, and if that is not enough for you, at the end of each article is a suggestion of which articles you could look at to further your knowledge and clarification of the subject. The website has been awarded nearly 20 different awards on the merit of its content and set up. Despite all this information, if you are still struggling with your grammar issues, there is a section where you can email a question to the author (or even look at the archives of questions that has already been asked).
6) Your response and recommendation for use: If you could not tell, by my tone of my discussion of navigation through the site, I think this is an excellent resource. In fact, when I was taking advanced grammar, this website helped clarify some things I could not understand through pure diagramming (that is what my advanced grammar class consisted mostly of). I think this website is an excellent resource from middle school all the way through college. It even helped me when I was studying latin because it clarified some questions I had on grammar which is very important when you are learning a foreign language.
1) Name of Web Site: Web English Teacher
2) Web Site Address: www.webenglishteacher.com
3) Copyright date and/or last update: The webpage was last updated October 6, 2007.
4) Author/organization credentials: The author, Carla Beard, has been an English teacher since 1975. She created the website so that English teachers could share their ideas and take advantage of “cutting-edge technology”.
5) Web site design and ease of navigation: The website has a wide variety of information, but it is in disarray. There a many resources organized by category, but often the description are very bland and ambiguous giving little credence to the credibility of the website. One thing I think it really lacks is some sort of forum or message board. The author’s premise for the website is “sharing ideas among fellow English educators” but is not the most efficient method to do that somewhere where you can post messages? Also, the website is not dated as often as I would like. I tend to be a little hesitant about websites that are only updated once a month.
This website is also riddled with ads, ads, and more ads. I understand that the author is trying to pay for the bandwidth that the website is producing (since this is a personal website and not one done by an organization), but it draws away from the quality and presentation of the website.
Although I’ve been fairly negative on many of the features, the website does have many things that are positive. Much of the information is very personalized so that it achieves a level of concreteness (which is often lacking in my education classes) that is frequently hard to find on the web. There are many websites that are those smaller websites that are difficult to track down ever since “Google” has made the functional shift into a verb. For that reason alone, I would mark this website as a treasure in and of itself.
6) Your response and recommendation for use: While I wouldn’t recommend this website as a constant source of information, I would recommend people to browse through it and see if there is anything of interest to you personally because much of the information could be of use – depending upon where you are in your professional pedagogy. Overall, I think the author did an excellent job achieving this level of quality and organization for a personal web site. Even though I did complain about the ads placed throughout the website, I am concurrently impressed that the author was able to craft such a large website under what resources she had at her disposal.
1) Name of Web Site: The English Teacher
2) Web Site Address: http://teacher2b.com/intro.htm
3) Copyright date and/or last update: Copyright 2007.
4) Author/organization credentials: The author (Lief Danielson) of this website has been an English teacher for the last 32 years. Once again, this is a personal website that the teacher created after he has retired. He attempted to include things that he thought would be hard to find in textbooks.
5) Web site design and ease of navigation: The set up of this website reminds me of the time I created a game of bingo using the powerpoint software. There are nine different categories and the content of the website is arranged accordingly. The layout of the actual articles is slightly flawed, though. The website is not very print friendly. Much of the material on the website is worksheets and tests that serve as a guide to use in the classroom, but all of the information is set up in table that make the information difficult to print neatly. This is especially true if you are trying to use the website for its prescribed purpose – to copy worksheets and tests.
The scope of the website is somewhat limited because there is not a whole bunch of information on the website. The material that is there is decent (not pristine by any means), but I would like it if there was a deeper experience as I dig through the website. Much of the material is didactic and requires little critical thinking about teaching or what a truly effective method is.
6) Your response and recommendation for use: Overall, if I had to give this website a grade, it would probably be a C. It does a decent job at what it is supposed to do, but like a C paper, it lacks depth and true logical progression. There are two particular parts of the website that struck me as odd. There is a section donated to a tirade against casinos. In the view of the overall website, I thought that this did not fit at all. The second thing I noticed was that on his “teaching philosophy” page there is no teaching philosophy. He recommends you join his email list. The list, in and of itself, sounds intriguing, but I believe it falls short of its goals. If the author truly wished for interactivity, then he should have founded a message board or a chat room. The website has merits, but it also has its flaws. Overall, the websites flaws outweighs its potential merits, but the intention was well placed.
1) Name of Web Site: A definitive English Teacher and Middle Schooler’s Website
2) Web Site Address: http://www.pittsford.monroe.edu/pittsfordmiddle/Staff/rzogby/Zogby/
3) Copyright date and/or last update: Last revised on October 28, 2007. Copyright 1999-2007.
4) Author/organization credentials: The author is Robert Zogby and has been an English teacher for nigh on 20 years. The website is hosted by a university (which adds to its level of credibility) and the author is very upfront about contacting him.
5) Web site design and ease of navigation: This website has a smorgasbord of information. I believe this website is as much for the teachers students as it is for fellow educators. There is a ton of information and much of that information is presented in such a way as to be interactive. From what I know from my advertising classes, this makes me think that the website is geared more to students than teachers. It also gives me the impression that the whole layout is like an interactive edublog turned into a website. I was disappointed when I started investigating into the individual links under the English teacher sections. At first, I thought “Wow, there’s a ton of information here.” But as I started checking them out, I realized that each of the books only linked to the homepage of the publisher. As a website for students, it is tremendous: it has interactive graphic novels, interesting articles, and even flash-based games. But as a Teacher resource, it falls desperately short. The author proudly remarks that this website “is not your stereotypical website” and, indeed, it is not, but it also lacks depth and true organization.
6) Your response and recommendation for use: As an effort by an English teacher created to communicate with his students and the parents of those students, this is a tremendous effort and an innovative way to communicate. But as a teacher resource, I would not recommend it to any fellow English teacher. I would, however, should I be teacher a class to future English majors use this as a tool for reflection for my class on parent involvement.
2) Web Site Address: www.ncte.org\
3) Copyright date and/or last update: Copyright © 1998-2007 National Council of Teachers of English.
4) Author/organization credentials: This website is for a national professional organization for English teachers. It offers a wide variety of credible information from a variety of professionals in the field.
5) Web site design and ease of navigation: This website offers a cornucopia of information, but it can be difficult to find something specific. Also, there is a such a wide variety of information that there is a wide discrepancy between reading levels. Many of the articles are written at a professional level, but there also many that rank much lower. To their credit, they DO have a search engine, but it runs on very bland algorithms that make it hard to locate something specifically. The layout of the website makes it available to all levels of this profession: elementary, middle school, secondary, and even college. While there is much information offered on the website, there is also much that you need to be a member for (which is not necessarily a bad thing if you are an English teacher). This website can be very overwhelming if you are just entering the field. Much of the literature is at a professional level and could scare someone away who was not familiar with much of the terminology. Again, to the website’s credit they have an FAQ, but, unfortunately, it is very hard to find. You can only track it down on a dropdown list, and even then, it looks rather conspicuous.
6) Your response and recommendation for use: I would recommend this to all English content are majors – not only for its content utility, but also because I think it is important for teachers (especially first year teachers) to get involved in professional organizations. If there’s anything a first year teacher needs, its some impetus to get serisously engaged with professional pedagogy. I think this website offers a great community so that one can do just that. I would also highly recommend this website’s sister site: www.readwritethink.org. They offer many in-depth lesson plans that will help flowering students. One thing I have noticed in my brief tenure in the education department (I was a straight English major going through post-bach) is that although many classes had me prepare lesson plans and even critique lesson plans, not once did a teacher show me what they thought to be an excellent, top-line lesson plan. I suppose it further shows our society’s tendency to focus on the negative ;)
1) Name of Web Site: Guide to Grammar and Writing
2) Web Site Address: http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/index.htm
3) Copyright date and/or last update: copyright 2004.
4) Author/organization credentials: This website has been sponsored by a college organization – the Capital Commnity College Foundation. The website was originally created by Dr. Charles Darling who is now retired. On the author’s webpage he remarks that “to me it was always essential that this website remains a free service.”
5) Web site design and ease of navigation: As a future English teacher, this is one of my favorite all-time websites – not only because of its content, but also in the way in which it is set up. When the internet first boomed into the public populace words like “new levels of interactivity” and “active learning” where buzzed around the education field. Many websites fall short of this, but I believe that this website completely lives up to that heritage. Not only does each section (found through a variety of drop down menus) have information on the subject an a variety of examples (usually at least ten, which is important in grammar), but also there are quizzes on each subject. A teacher could use this site as an excellent tool to assess his/her class.
This website further impressed me with its inter-relatedness: in every single article on the webpage each key word is linked to the key articles about those key words, and if that is not enough for you, at the end of each article is a suggestion of which articles you could look at to further your knowledge and clarification of the subject. The website has been awarded nearly 20 different awards on the merit of its content and set up. Despite all this information, if you are still struggling with your grammar issues, there is a section where you can email a question to the author (or even look at the archives of questions that has already been asked).
6) Your response and recommendation for use: If you could not tell, by my tone of my discussion of navigation through the site, I think this is an excellent resource. In fact, when I was taking advanced grammar, this website helped clarify some things I could not understand through pure diagramming (that is what my advanced grammar class consisted mostly of). I think this website is an excellent resource from middle school all the way through college. It even helped me when I was studying latin because it clarified some questions I had on grammar which is very important when you are learning a foreign language.
1) Name of Web Site: Web English Teacher
2) Web Site Address: www.webenglishteacher.com
3) Copyright date and/or last update: The webpage was last updated October 6, 2007.
4) Author/organization credentials: The author, Carla Beard, has been an English teacher since 1975. She created the website so that English teachers could share their ideas and take advantage of “cutting-edge technology”.
5) Web site design and ease of navigation: The website has a wide variety of information, but it is in disarray. There a many resources organized by category, but often the description are very bland and ambiguous giving little credence to the credibility of the website. One thing I think it really lacks is some sort of forum or message board. The author’s premise for the website is “sharing ideas among fellow English educators” but is not the most efficient method to do that somewhere where you can post messages? Also, the website is not dated as often as I would like. I tend to be a little hesitant about websites that are only updated once a month.
This website is also riddled with ads, ads, and more ads. I understand that the author is trying to pay for the bandwidth that the website is producing (since this is a personal website and not one done by an organization), but it draws away from the quality and presentation of the website.
Although I’ve been fairly negative on many of the features, the website does have many things that are positive. Much of the information is very personalized so that it achieves a level of concreteness (which is often lacking in my education classes) that is frequently hard to find on the web. There are many websites that are those smaller websites that are difficult to track down ever since “Google” has made the functional shift into a verb. For that reason alone, I would mark this website as a treasure in and of itself.
6) Your response and recommendation for use: While I wouldn’t recommend this website as a constant source of information, I would recommend people to browse through it and see if there is anything of interest to you personally because much of the information could be of use – depending upon where you are in your professional pedagogy. Overall, I think the author did an excellent job achieving this level of quality and organization for a personal web site. Even though I did complain about the ads placed throughout the website, I am concurrently impressed that the author was able to craft such a large website under what resources she had at her disposal.
1) Name of Web Site: The English Teacher
2) Web Site Address: http://teacher2b.com/intro.htm
3) Copyright date and/or last update: Copyright 2007.
4) Author/organization credentials: The author (Lief Danielson) of this website has been an English teacher for the last 32 years. Once again, this is a personal website that the teacher created after he has retired. He attempted to include things that he thought would be hard to find in textbooks.
5) Web site design and ease of navigation: The set up of this website reminds me of the time I created a game of bingo using the powerpoint software. There are nine different categories and the content of the website is arranged accordingly. The layout of the actual articles is slightly flawed, though. The website is not very print friendly. Much of the material on the website is worksheets and tests that serve as a guide to use in the classroom, but all of the information is set up in table that make the information difficult to print neatly. This is especially true if you are trying to use the website for its prescribed purpose – to copy worksheets and tests.
The scope of the website is somewhat limited because there is not a whole bunch of information on the website. The material that is there is decent (not pristine by any means), but I would like it if there was a deeper experience as I dig through the website. Much of the material is didactic and requires little critical thinking about teaching or what a truly effective method is.
6) Your response and recommendation for use: Overall, if I had to give this website a grade, it would probably be a C. It does a decent job at what it is supposed to do, but like a C paper, it lacks depth and true logical progression. There are two particular parts of the website that struck me as odd. There is a section donated to a tirade against casinos. In the view of the overall website, I thought that this did not fit at all. The second thing I noticed was that on his “teaching philosophy” page there is no teaching philosophy. He recommends you join his email list. The list, in and of itself, sounds intriguing, but I believe it falls short of its goals. If the author truly wished for interactivity, then he should have founded a message board or a chat room. The website has merits, but it also has its flaws. Overall, the websites flaws outweighs its potential merits, but the intention was well placed.
1) Name of Web Site: A definitive English Teacher and Middle Schooler’s Website
2) Web Site Address: http://www.pittsford.monroe.edu/pittsfordmiddle/Staff/rzogby/Zogby/
3) Copyright date and/or last update: Last revised on October 28, 2007. Copyright 1999-2007.
4) Author/organization credentials: The author is Robert Zogby and has been an English teacher for nigh on 20 years. The website is hosted by a university (which adds to its level of credibility) and the author is very upfront about contacting him.
5) Web site design and ease of navigation: This website has a smorgasbord of information. I believe this website is as much for the teachers students as it is for fellow educators. There is a ton of information and much of that information is presented in such a way as to be interactive. From what I know from my advertising classes, this makes me think that the website is geared more to students than teachers. It also gives me the impression that the whole layout is like an interactive edublog turned into a website. I was disappointed when I started investigating into the individual links under the English teacher sections. At first, I thought “Wow, there’s a ton of information here.” But as I started checking them out, I realized that each of the books only linked to the homepage of the publisher. As a website for students, it is tremendous: it has interactive graphic novels, interesting articles, and even flash-based games. But as a Teacher resource, it falls desperately short. The author proudly remarks that this website “is not your stereotypical website” and, indeed, it is not, but it also lacks depth and true organization.
6) Your response and recommendation for use: As an effort by an English teacher created to communicate with his students and the parents of those students, this is a tremendous effort and an innovative way to communicate. But as a teacher resource, I would not recommend it to any fellow English teacher. I would, however, should I be teacher a class to future English majors use this as a tool for reflection for my class on parent involvement.
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