‘Know Your Rights’: Immigration advocates, attorneys ramp up efforts ahead of planned mass ICE raids (NBC News) One of the English classes I taught back in Toledo started out on the first day with a student threatening violence against me because he couldn’t use the textbook from his previous English class in mine. (I didn’t have any control over what textbooks I could use in that class, but he was giving every sign that he didn’t want to listen to anyone, as evidenced by his…
DeVos Repeals Obama-Era Rule Cracking Down on For-Profit Colleges (The New York Times) This presidential campaign season, as execrable as it already is (and I’m under no delusions of it somehow getting better in the next sixteen months), has at least generated some discourse about American colleges and universities, especially about their cost. While the possibility of forgiving student debt has grabbed the most headlines, how future students will pay for their higher education, or even if they’ll have to pay at all (outside of…
If you’re looking for a line of work where it’s relatively easy to become well-liked, teaching probably isn’t for you. That’s not to say that it’s impossible to have students and/or colleagues like you — I’ve certainly had my fair share of both — but the heart of your work is convincing a lot of people, more and more of whom have grown up with the instant gratification of modern technology burnt into their synapses at an early age, to set aside those enjoyments and…
Indiana teachers ‘shot execution style’ with fake bullets during active shooter training (New York Daily News) One of the biggest challenges we teachers face is making sure that every moment in our classes has some kind of meaning to it. As interminable as college classes can seem when you’re a student, most of us who teach those classes only have about forty hours over a semester not only to impart knowledge to our students, but also make sure that our students understand that knowledge well enough to be…
On Fox News, Dinesh D’Souza calls on Trump to use “force” and send the National Guard to college campuses to crack down on liberal protesters (mediamatters.org) Of all the social calamities caused by the last thirty years of right-wing education “reforms,” historical detachment may be one of the worst. As an increasing number of schools have been forced to cut their curricular offerings in order to handle an ever-growing host of problems, from budget cuts to mandatory standardized tests on math and reading, fewer students…