Rick Hess, the half-cynic
Rick Hess has a new book, The Same Thing Over and Over: How School Reformers Get Stuck in Yesterday's Ideas (Harvard University Press, 2010), which argues that the history of education in the U.S. is littered with earnest reformers whose efforts went for naught or created all sorts of unintended consequences. While it is not […]
Jeff Danziger is geographically illiterate
Thanks to Alexander Russo, I just saw Jeff Danziger's October cartoon about an apparent "great wave" overtaking American education: The apparent inspiration for this visual repetition of the first paragraph of A Nation at Risk appears to be Hokusai's Great Wave: Apart from repeating confectionary fairy tales written by Tom Friedman, Danziger can't tell his East Asian […]
Faculty jobs–yes, even this year
My college is not searching for a huge number of faculty, just three. But if you are interested in a tenure-track position in school psychology, educational measurement (I think the title of the position is "quantitative analysis"), and instructional technology, apply in the next several weeks.
On heterodox teaching decisions
Tim Burke's blog entry "Providing the Bricks, Not the Building" is a little obscure, but one piece of it makes me wonder about academic parochialism. Apparently a few of Burke's colleagues at Swarthmore feel it is inappropriate for a social historian to bring literature from anthropology, cultural studies, etc., into a history class at a liberal-arts […]
Facebook, teacher ethics, and history
This weekend's Tampa area news story about the Plant City High School teacher who gave a student a contraceptive is at one level a story about a (former!) teacher who had no boundaries and no common sense. She had a student on her Facebook list, gave him a morning-after contraceptive package after he was worried he had […]