Category Archives: teaching

A Nation of Prevarication

politics, rhetoric, teaching 2023.10.02 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

Gaslighting Americans about public schools: The truth about ‘A Nation at Risk’ (Washington Post) If it wasn’t the most important book I read over my summer, Maia Szalavitz’s Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids was unquestionably the most emotionally difficult to get through. Not only is the book full of the horror stories of the “tough love” sadism of the eighties and nineties, including innocent children being swept up by them and some easily-preventable deaths, but it reminded…

The Night Before

personal, teaching 2023.09.04 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

One year ago at this moment, I was spending my last night in Richland Center, wondering how I’d managed to piece together the plan that would unfold the following day. I’d agreed to begin teaching at the Platteville campus months earlier, in the middle of my summer classes, but my initial efforts to find help with locating a new apartment, and moving all my stuff downstate, failed spectacularly. With a week to go before the planned move, I still wasn’t sure what would happen —…

Oh, Hell!

personal, teaching 2023.08.14 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

That was Hedder’s first reaction a little over five years ago, when I told her that I’d gotten the full-time teaching position in Richland Center, Wisconsin that I’d interviewed for about two weeks earlier. I’d woken up a few moments earlier, checked my email on my phone, then checked it again, then checked it a third time, just because I was in utter disbelief about the job offer. I’d applied for over two hundred positions since moving in with Hedder the previous December, literally from…

Oh Hell N-O

personal, politics, teaching, toledo 2023.04.10 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

Unwieldy bill would destroy higher education in Ohio | American Historical Association (news.yahoo.com)“‘Don’t just publish another paper. Let’s do something,’ says scholar-advocate Cindy Blackstock (universityaffairs.ca) As spring passes, a handful of elementary schools across America will still devote their last day to outdoor activities for their students, to help them blow off the stress of the past academic year. (Far fewer schools are doing this than was the case when I was younger, with the push to pass all those standardized tests and all that…

Losing Placement

politics, teaching 2023.02.13 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

The controversy over AP African-American Studies, explained (vox.com)NCAA eliminates ACT and SAT scores (The Bulletin) Throughout my high school years, there was a lot of pressure put on us students at the abattoir to enroll in as many AP classes as we could. We were constantly told that not only would taking these classes be expected at the top-tier colleges that most of us were expected to apply to, but that high scores on the AP tests would allow us to skip a lot of…