“Industrial-era education” as rhetorical whipping boy
I am starting a local chapter of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Metaphors. Part of my motivation is the release of another Dan Brown novel. But it didn’t hurt my motivation to read the awful thumbnail history in Arthur Levine’s column this week on teachers unions. Teachers’ unions are under siege nationwide…. What’s […]
Sherman’s style note: An algorithm is not personal
Style note to education beat reporters: an algorithm is not “personalization” of education, no matter how many people make the claim. As computerized algorithms currently exist, here are the things that an algorithm cannot identify in an educational context: An algorithm does not know when to pull a student aside at a quiet moment to ask […]
The ha’penny competency
I have a bridge to sell, quite cheap. All it will cost you is the following: One halfpenny (British, before metric conversion) Three drachmas One lira Three euros One franc (French) Four thalers (the coin, not the economist) One escudo One ekwele Ten qirans Five kroons One hundred C.S.A. dollars (paper bills only) When I […]
Past practice and other arcane collective-bargaining matters
Now that the spring semester is over, it’s time for me to catch up on a bunch of reading. In the current-higher-ed-commentary genre, I just finished Matt Reed’s Confessions of a Community College Administrator, and am looking forward to Jeff Selingo’s College (Un)bound, which came out this week. I thoroughly enjoyed Reed’s book, though I […]
Semester debriefing
We’re at the end of the semester here at USF, and this is a short debriefing of the semester. My particular form of craziness this semester was teaching three courses while serving as department chair. Technically, I was teaching four sections of our undergraduate Schools and Society course, but two of them met in the […]