The University Needs You

Maybe you have had an experience like the one I have had: an education professor who has never been a classroom teacher

. Or an education professor who was a classroom teacher so long ago that all that remains of the experience are some anecdotes from a lost era. Or an education professor who may have more recent teaching experience but nonetheless still seems strangely Links Of London Silver Chain disconnected from real classrooms, from the challenges teachers face all the time, from getting students to turn in homework, grading all the papers, addressing curriculum mandates, dealing with parents and vice principals, and so on. Thus my first point: Universities don't need more education professors who know teaching only in theory, who pay more attention to research and publishing than to what is happening in the schools, who aren't themselves good teachers.

My second point is that the teaching done by classroom teachers in the public schools is more important to the future of the world than the teaching done by professors at universities. Far more students are reached, and more profoundly influenced, in K12 education than at the college level.

My third and, for the moment, final point is that colleges and universities do need excellent professors of education, and, since I have a lifelong involvement in the teaching of English, I am going to say that universities especially need outstanding professors of English education.

Colleges and universities need English education professors who know what it is to teach five classes a day, accommodate lEPs, and still take on extracurricular activities. They need English education professors who not only present at NCTE Annual Conventions but who also want to be in schools talking to teachers on a regular basis. They need English education professors who have been in the National Writing Project, who have mentored interns, who read English Journal, who care passionately about the importance of teaching English language arts. In short, as the title to this article suggests, colleges and universities need you.

Let me say something about why that need is especially great at present. When I was an undergraduate English majorheck, even when I was working on a master's degree in English education at nights and during the summersI heard stories about people with PhDs who couldn't get jobs, who had spent untold years studying, say, Emily Dickinson and were now driving taxis.

I now know that those stories were misleading in at least one dimension. Yes, there are too many people getting PhDs in literary studies, but there is and has been for many years a serious shortage of professors of Links Of London Necklaces English education, a shortage amounting to a crisis. A study I conducted in 200102 and repeated in 2006-07 showed that 40-50% of the open English education positions in university English departments in the United States are going unfilled because no professors of English education can be found. And that wasn't counting professors of English education in education departments, an almost equally desperate situation.

by: Scofield

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