One of the schools I used to adjunct for just put up two full-time positions, with four descriptions. Two of them match me perfectly. But after their bizarre changes in management, I am not sure I would want to return there. Also, though I qualify, I think this is one of those times they would probably not want someone they know.

And, really, I have a job that, while it doesn’t pay great, doesn’t leave me wondering when the ax will fall from managment, even with a one-year “we can fire you any time we have an exigency at all” contract. Unlike the other school which decides willy nilly to change their faculty and lets most of them go. They went from having eight faculty to having two and hiring the provost’s best friend. They let the other six go.

Now they are finding they can’t staff a full English department with those numbers of faculty, even when their 35% tuition hikes have run off a significant portion (1/3) of their students.

They pay well for adjuncts, though. Too bad they don’t have something they need me to teach. Tuesday-Thursday afternoon would give me something to do.

Joanne Jacobs says:

We know how to teach black kids – and other disadvantaged students — but we don’t do it, writes John McWhorter in The Root.

Starting in 1968, a huge federal study called Project Follow Through compared different methods of teaching at-risk K-3 children: Direct Instruction (DI), a scripted phonics program using repetition and student participation, worked much better than anything else for all students, but especially low-income black students. DI has continued to work where ever it’s been used, McWhorter writes.
…
But DI defies the conventional wisdom of education schools, which “keep alive the canard that teaching poor kids to read is an elusive, complex affair requiring a peculiarly intense form of superhuman dedication and an ineffable brand of personal connection with young people,” McWhorter writes. “In a better America, schools that do not use DI to teach kids from poor households should be seen as vaguely criminal. People should point them out as they drive by them, like crack houses.”

Right on the Left Coast talks of the LA Times “identifying good and bad teachers by name.”

Ouch.

RotLC says that if shaming the teachers gets them to make changes, it’s all to the good.

Yes. It is.

But maybe the reason they are looking at making changes is because this is the first time anyone has told them that their students are not doing as well in their classes as other students are doing in other classes.

I didn’t see that the teachers who were called out in a negative way were trying to shift blame. That’s good. I also saw that they were looking for ways to be better. That’s good.

Maybe they just didn’t know there was a problem.

Been there myself.

I received my averages for classes for the last three years, as compared to the full-time faculty and the other adjuncts. It is not quite accurate because I have been teaching a new version of the course that whole time and yet the advisors kept letting students who did not belong in.

Despite that caveat, it is still depressing.

I have a lower success rate by 22% than the ft faculty. I have a +.8 GPA in my classes though. How does that work?

Falsified scholarship gets scholar a pass, when it’s liberal.

He was drummed out of academe after a controversy over his book about guns in America

I am in Switzerland and at dinner we have discussed the Swiss system, which chooses in the sixth grade whether you will go to college or not. One of the teachers of my friends’ children said that he can tell in kindergarten which class they will be in. BigArmWoman says that Americans can tell in the third grade.

If you want to be enlightened and depressed, go read it.

(For those of you who didn’t go read it, 3rd grade exams are used to predict the need for prison beds.)

This is incredibly important for low socioeconomic students.

When low-income students are given books to read during the summer, they read more, a Florida study found. This summer a large-scale study in seven states will look at whether book giveaways can stem the usual “summer slide” in reading skills. USA Today’s Greg Toppo asks: “Can a $50 stack of paperback books do as much for a child’s academic fortunes as a $3,000 stint in summer school?”

Low-income students have few books at home. Walking to a public library may be dangerous. The result is a “summer slide” in academic skills that may account for 80 percent of the achievement gap by sixth grade, says Richard Allington, a reading researcher at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.

Researchers note that low-income students lose about three months of ground each summer to middle-class peers.

“You do that across nine or 10 summers, and the next thing you know, you’ve got almost three years’ reading growth lost,” Allington says.

For three summers, students in 17 high-poverty elementary schools in Florida got 12 books on the last day of school. After three years, book recipients had “significantly higher” reading scores, showed less of a summer slide and read more on their own than classmates who didn’t get free books, Allington and colleagues reported.

Found via Joanne Jacobs

The USA Today story.

Here are two views on the same situation by respected academic writers. (Well, I respect them. They’re on my personal blogroll.)

Threatened with the mass lay-off — and knowing 800 applications have come in for the school’s 93 jobs – the union agreed to “Gallo’s initial requests, including two weeks (rather than one) of summer professional development at her preferred rate,” Hess writes.

from Joanne Jacobs

What’s lacking here is any indication or evidence that the proposed changes will elicit the desired results. Let’s look at the proposals.

from Right on the Left Coast

Dweck and her collaborators have demonstrated that praising children for their intelligence can backfire. When young people’s sense of self-worth is bound up in the idea that they are smart—a quality they come to understand as a genetic blessing from the sky—at least three bad things can happen. Some students become lazy, figuring that their smarts will bail them out in a pinch. Others conclude that the people who praise their intelligence are simply wrong, and decide that it isn’t worth investing effort in homework. Still others might care intensely about school but withdraw from difficult tasks or tie themselves in knots of perfectionism. (To understand this third group, think of the Puritans: They did not believe they had any control over whether they were among God’s elect, but they nonetheless searched endlessly for ways to display that they had been chosen, and they were terrified of any evidence that they were not.)

It is much wiser, Dweck says, to praise children for work and persistence. People nearly always perform better if they focus on things they can control, such as their effort, rather than things they cannot.

from The Chronicle

I resigned from English, because I don’t think I can do six classes a semester anymore.

Originally they offered me a VAP with adjunct pay and benefits. They told me I would only have one prep, so I could teach for business, too. That would have given me more money.

Now, though, I have at least two preps and probably three for English. That means I would not be able to teach for business.

So, finally, after hemming and hawing for three days and wondering how and what to say, I turned them down. I feel relieved, so I know it was the right thing to do.