Comments on Fooling the College Board

• The Essay Isn't The Only Sad Part Of The SAT...
• Posted by Mystery Tutor , Test Prep Vigilante on November 7, 2008 at 11:10am EST

• It's true that the essay can be easily gamed, and is no real measure of a student's writing ability. But the essay is not the only part of the test with that shortcoming: the reading section punishes intelligent reading skills and the math section is little more than a collection of brain-teasers.

  Unfortunately, it's also true that the SAT's intended purpose is not to gauge anything meaningful about a student's intelligence, but to provide a reliable and consistent measurement that schools can use to predict an applicant's likely performance as a freshman in college. As long as the SAT does this well, it's not going anywhere.

  So here's my solution to this problem: I've decided to teach everybody on Earth how to raise their SAT scores significantly for free. That way the results from the test will become meaningless over time, and colleges will have to come up with something else. My main web site, www.mysterytutor.com, has the details. If you know anybody taking the SAT any time soon, please spread the word...

• Good writing and holistic scoring
• Posted by Linda Adler-Kassner , Director of First-Year Writing at Eastern Michigan University on March 26, 2007 at 9:01am EDT

• Professor Perelman's study reinforces what we know about the SAT writing exam. With its emphasis on formula, the exam discourages not only good writing, but the development of good writers. Good writers are those who take time to think and develop their ideas through writing and revision.

  The College Board defends scorers' readings of the SAT writing exam by saying that they are not "judged by just one part, but in a 'holistic' way."

  But holistic reading - attending to the whole of a piece of writing, rather than to the components which comprise that whole - does not mean that readers ignore errors of fact or misuse of conventions like those included in the sample exam discussed in this story/Perelman's study. Rather, holistic scoring is the conclusion to a process of writing instruction where students learn to understand both the activity of writing and the written product as a process. Through this process, writers hone their abilities to analyze audiences' expectations (of content, form, style, syntax, mechanics, and so on) and develop strategies to meet those expectations.

  Good writing is reflected in the writer's abilities with the conventions of writing (content, form, style, syntax, and mechanics, etc.), not her/his mastery individual components of a piece of writing (say, a writer's ability to use commas). The College Board's readers may be looking at the entirety of an SAT writing exam, but their ideas of "holistic" reading aren't contextualized in a course of teaching and learning. Holistic teaching and reading foster students' growth as good writers, not writers who ignore one 'part' of a piece of writing in favor of another.

• Fooling the College Board
• Posted by rpmelia on March 26, 2007 at 9:01am EDT

• First, teach students to use plethora and myriad. Second, encourage graduates to work for the Federal government. Then strictly supervise and edit publications to ensure words such as plethora and myriad do not confuse the public. See http://www.plainlanguage.gov/index.cfm

• Identity theft?
• Posted by J. Mueller on March 26, 2007 at 9:46am EDT

• " ... Franklin Delenor Roosevelt ..." Is he any relation to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had a wife named Eleanor?

• Standardized Tests
• Posted by Scott on March 26, 2007 at 10:06am EDT

• I have never believed that standardized tests represent and effective way to measure a student's knowledge or ability. I have seen bright people do poorly--even though they shine in classrooms and other settings--because they lack an ability with these tests, while mediocre or worse students sometimes perform remarkably well. We need to get back to an emphasis on teaching and the evaluations of individual teachers who grow to know students well over the course of years, rather than the current assembly line attitude that drives testing and admissions.

• Posted by math prof on March 26, 2007 at 10:06am EDT

• As bad as this excerpt is, the entire essay
  is worse.

  I'd describe this as a new low for the College
  Board, except that they're so low already.

• Unrealistic testing of writing
• Posted by Rich Haswell , Haas Professor Emeritus at Texas A&M University Corpus Christi on March 26, 2007 at 10:16am EDT

• In large-scale testing of student writing abilities, such as the SAT performs, students have to write in a way that no one would recommend anywhere else (less than an hour to produce an "essay" on a surprise topic that the student has no special knowledge about) and the raters have to read in a way that no one would recommend anywhere else (as fast as possible, applying a contextless and tissue-thin set of criteria). To no one's surprise, the result is a score that is unusable in predicting individual performance in college writing courses. So why are there college admission offices still requiring applicants to send them the scores? That may be the most unrealistic and suprising aspect of this farce.

• What's the goal of the test?
• Posted by Duncan on March 26, 2007 at 10:21am EDT

• I think the question at the core here is what's the goal of that test?

  If we simply talk about the skill of manipulating the words, I have no trouble given that paragraph a high grade since the piece can simply be part of a fiction. Fact checking can be measured as a separate skill.

  It's not impossible to measure all things at once, but the grading scheme will have to be much more sophisticate.

  College board simply need to make limitations clear so people know how to interpret the score.

• Posted by Marvin McConoughey on March 26, 2007 at 10:46am EDT

• Accurate evaluation of essays takes time, sometimes a bit of research by the evaluator, and some common sense. I think that the College Board will never achieve a quality assessment program for student essays.

• Posted by Anne Herrington , Professor of English at University of Massachusetts Amherst on March 26, 2007 at 11:42am EDT

• Professor Perelman is on target. We need more of such critical examination of the standardized tests being marketed to higher education and of the rush to add even more standardized testing to higher education in the name of comparability.

  Presently, the federal government and some higher education associations are also advocating use of standardized tests of learning outcomes (e.g., ETS’s Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress; Rand’s Collegiate Learning Assessment, and ACT’s Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency). These tests evaluate writing by either multiple choice questions or a timed writing sample evaluated by a computer program—both of which turn writing into a formulaic, unnatural activity. Consider the potential wash-back effect on curriculum of these tests: more multiple choice teaching or having students write to computer programs, also marketed by testing companies.

  It’s not clear how to stop this train of comparability and bench-marking that requires standardized assessment and seems to allow no time for considered evaluation of the tests themselves, including by experts in the subjects and skills being tested. The American Association of Colleges and Universities report College Learning for the New Global Century appropriately calls standardized tests a “low yield strategy” and calls for “curriculum-embedded assessment.” If we want our students to be adept critical and creative thinkers and adept at writing persuasively to others in business and civic situations, let’s focus on developing assessment practices that support those goals and support sound teaching.

• Posted by Test Prep Tutor on March 26, 2007 at 12:26pm EDT

• This essay was the direct result of requests (and threats) from Admissions Officers. When colleges quit using the Essay, the College Board will be happy to remove it from the test.

• no surprise here
• Posted by Melissa at UCI on March 26, 2007 at 12:51pm EDT

• Sadly, this doesn't surprise me. The 5-paragraph essay and 'thesaurus finger' are a plague in the freshman writing courses. They have learned form, not content, and it shocks them when I say that the number of paragraphs should be dictated by the number of ideas, not the other way around.

• What's even more scary is the GRE
• Posted by Linda Grochowalski , Adjunct Professor on March 26, 2007 at 1:16pm EDT

• The part of this article I found most interesting was the SAT's focus on the 5 paragraph essay--while most college writing professors focus on getting students away from it. I took the GRE a few years ago and--guess what--it required a 5 paragraph essay in answer to a prompt! How can we expect incoming freshmen to abandon the 5 paragraph essay (way too formulaic and constricting for any student past 7th grade) when college graduates are expected to focus on it for the GRE? Scrap the test or make it more compatible with what good writing really is.

• Apples and myriad oranges
• Posted by Kevin Drumm , College President on March 26, 2007 at 1:42pm EDT

• A standardized assessment is just that and in the SAT’s case it has a very specific purpose. Whether or not we agree with that purpose is another issue, but purpose seems to be more the focus of criticisms aired here.

  It is not the purpose of the SAT to create good writers, yet it appears Prof. Perelman and others would like it to be. It seems to me that the critics are comparing a one-time, laser-focused assessment with learning outcomes that otherwise take years to develop on the part of students. If faculty in high school and college aren't having more influence on students' writing ability than the SAT, then shame on us.

  If the SAT is having the kind of broad influence on student writing that Prof. Perelman suggests, then the SAT is a very powerful phenomenon indeed, well beyond what test-takers and their coaches should allow.

• Graders?
• Posted by schencka , Grad Student at University of Arizona on March 26, 2007 at 1:46pm EDT

• The College Board and etc.: for-profit.

  They hire people with BAs and BSs to grade too many essays for low pay. It's easy to get hired for this part-time job.

  Complain all you want: the only "solution" I see is for folks with upper-level degrees currently teaching to bite the bullet and provide the service of grading the essays.

  I'm sure you all are excited to do that.

• essays are automated on the web
• Posted by steve laudig on March 26, 2007 at 1:56pm EDT

• http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo

• Telling Writing
• Posted by Bradley Andrews on March 26, 2007 at 3:00pm EDT

• Plethora and myriad are fine words, but I also like my old college prof's favorite hackneyed word: "nebulous."

  If I could cite one book that should be mandatory reading for EVERY english teacher/student, it would be Telling Writing by Ken Macrorie. (My copy sits right above my monitor.) Its truths are the same ones exposed by Perelman.

  Chapter 1, "The Poison Fish" succinctly describes the problem; you can read it here:
  http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0867091533/ref=sib_dp_pt/104-0886221-2951151#reader-link

• Apples and Oranges?
• Posted by John S on March 26, 2007 at 3:01pm EDT

• President Drumm stated that the purpose of the essay portion of the SAT is not to produce great writers. Perhaps not. However, the purpose ought to be for students to demonstrate decent, effective writing skills that reflect a degree of critical thinking and analysis. Afterall, isn't that what Admissions folks are hoping to assume based on the score provided by the College Board?

  Assuming that Professor Perlman's example is representative of how the College Board assesses essays, it is both possible and likely for students who receive test prep services based on shallow forumlas to receive higher scores than students with stronger writing, thinking, and analytical skills but without the formulaic approach.

• Posted by Bill M. on March 26, 2007 at 4:00pm EDT

• There is some merit, I think even opponents of the SAT writing test would agree, in seeing how a student writes when he or she has no opportunity to have the essay edited by third parties.

  However, the SAT's attempt to reduce the essay to a numerical score by a nameless functionary in some sort of sweatshop-type grading factory is what is silly.

  The approach used by the LSAT is far better. The examinee is given a prompt similar to those the SAT uses, and writes a similar short essay. But the LSAT makes no attempt to grade it. The essay is photocopied and passed on to the law schools the examinee is applying to, for the school to do whatever it wishes with the sample.

  If the law school's admission committee wishes to see how the student writes under pressure with no one else to assist, there is a sample they can examine. If they want to throw it in the trash, they can.

• SAT essays
• Posted by Cindy on March 26, 2007 at 4:25pm EDT

• I hope the SAT one day includes mandatory use of Microsoft Word's SpellCheck and GrammarCheck, with the only rule being that the essay must abide by what Word says. I worked as a college newspaper adviser for a year, and I can honestly say I saw my share of mistakes that students defended because "spell- or grammarcheck said that's how it was supposed to be."

  As far as the testing goes, chalk this up to another idiocy added to a plethora and myriad of idiocies plaguing the SATs.

• Yes, but...
• Posted by junglegymn , Prof at CUNY on March 26, 2007 at 4:25pm EDT

• We've all probably got our own stable of horror stories about the unreliability of SAT and TOEFL scoring of essays. My favorate was our stellar student in Yangon whose TOEFL essay was graded 3.5 until we got them to rescore it (for a $50 fee)and it came back a 5. Meanwhile, in order not to miss out on competitive college admissions the student took the TOEFL again and received a 6 on what he considered an inferior essay.
  Yet there is value to the essay part of the SAT. It provides the college admissions office a true sample of the candidate's own writing, not something that may have been constructed by a counselor, a consultant or a cleverer sibling.

• Posted by Kevin Drumm , College President on March 26, 2007 at 4:25pm EDT

• John S makes quite valid points. However, there are very few high school seniors out there (even bachelor grads in my experience both teaching and hiring them) who have acquired the level of analytical and critical thinking skills being supposed in this dialogue which might lead to a quickly well written serious essay under most any circumstances, let alone under the stress of taking the SAT. Maybe if the student is headed for Prof. Perelman's class at MIT, but that is a rare and tiny minority of college-going seniors.

  In the given amount of time, a formulaic approach may weell be the best one. Prof. Perelman simultaneously implies that it is while lamenting that it shouldn’t be. In the end, good writers should know how to write appropriately for the context and context varies. The SAT essay is but one important context for writing. If this is the only context for which any teacher or coach is preparing college seniors in writing, then, once again, shame on us for giving the SAT that much sway.

• Fooling the College Board
• Posted by Dale Flier , Instructor of English and psychology at Roanoke-Benson High School on March 26, 2007 at 4:27pm EDT

• Earlier advice on abandoning the five-paragraph, write-to-a-formula approach to compostion was dead on target. In fact, the formulaic approach to writing should not only be abandoned from all grade schools, junior highs, high schools, and colleges--it should be outright jettisoned.

  I pose a rhetorical question: Why hasn't that approach been declared dead and buried?

  Here are some possible answers: First, formulaic essays are contrived and boring, but they're very "gradeable." Composition teachers simply don't have enough time to give each student piece the time it deserves.

  Second, the five-paragraph essay is deeply ingrained in grade school. Why? Grade school teachers are not adequately prepared to teach writing without gimmicks like "the hamburger method."

  Third, the cut-throat political climate of the times demands mass assessment so the federal government can go about declaring public education institutions inept so that they can be shut down. Don't kid yourself; that's the real goal here.

  Fourth, kids like to write such essays because then they don't have to think.

• Posted by Larry on March 26, 2007 at 5:45pm EDT

• Mr. Flier, It works both ways. Kids might “like” to write other things, but as you concede, they won’t be rewarded for it by high school teachers or standardized tests.

  Anyway, I congratulate Professor Perelman on “hacking” such a system (in the good, legal, and political way – not the evil way with stolen passwords).

• There are better ways to assess
• Posted by Elizabeth Wardle , Director of Writing Programs at University of Dayton on March 26, 2007 at 9:35pm EDT

• A formulaic test cannot be defended on the basis that it is the best we've got, as Kevin Drumm suggests, because it isn't. There are many better ways to assess writing for college admissions. Portfolio assessment is an excellent way. Students turn in portfolios of work they have written over time and in a variety of contexts. These can be rated, also holistically, but with an eye for things like accuracy of facts and use of appropriate genre for the message. There is no reason why a timed writing exam should be the measure of how well a person can and will write in college. I cannot think of a single writing assignment in my class or any other I know of that asks students to write a paper in 30 minutes on a topic they know nothing about. Thus the SAT is no predictor at all of how well students will do on these college writing tasks. The assessment must be suited for the purpose; if you want to know how well an 18 year old can write in 30 minutes about something they know nothing about under great pressure, the SAT test will tell you that. If you want to know how well students will write history papers and English essays and final exams, then you need a different measure.

• SAT Tests
• Posted by Theodore Bones on March 26, 2007 at 9:41pm EDT

• "If you won't tell on me, I won't tell on you. If you give me some money, I will give you some money. I am the Morning star, the Evening Star. Why God calls me God." Etc. That's the challenge on the SAT tests. Defend against any thinkers who might come to college and dispute things. Curve fitting is an art.

• President Drumm
• Posted by Greg Giberson on March 26, 2007 at 9:41pm EDT

• My guess is that Prof. Perelmen was not suggesting that the SAT is used to teach students. More likely the suggestion was (or at least it is my opinion) that given that the SAT is a high stakes test that can make or break a student's future plans to attend college, conscientous high school teachers and administrators inevitably end up teaching to the test. "If the SAT requires x, Y, and Z, then we are going to teach our students to X, Y, and Z (lest we lose our jobs because our students are not getting into college)."

  The environment fostered by such high stakes testing leaves little room for doing what is "right" or "best" as we might see it for our students, especially as student performance on those tests are more and more being used to evaluate teacher performance.

• My Two Cents
• Posted by Karl Schellscheidt on March 27, 2007 at 4:25am EDT

• While I am an advocate of doing away with the SAT essay for many reasons, I do not think it is destructive to require a high school junior or senior to draft an essay within certain stated parameters. Attorneys, for example, are asked to write legal briefs that conform to well-established models every day. The trick is to find ways to be creative and persuasive within the form -- not such a destructive exercise in my opinion.

  Let's face the facts, most of what we ask kids to do in school is contrived and circumscribed (then graded, averaged in, and added to the high school transcript, by the way):

  A train leaves City A at ten o'clock traveling due east at 55 miles per hour . . .

  Graph the trajectory of the ball. (You man neglect air resistance.) . . .

  In the space provided below, describe Huck's reaction to . . .

  Write a ten page, double spaced, paper on . . .

  For better or for worse, the College Board's practice seems to be in line with how America has educated (and evaluated) its youth for centuries.

  Again, I am not a big fan of the SAT essay (or the College Board for that matter), but I would not label it destructive.

  Karl
  www.eprep.com

• One data point
• Posted by Quo Vadis on March 27, 2007 at 10:15am EDT

• I took the GMAT several years ago and my score on the essay was in the bottom 25%. I recently graduated with High Honors with a MS in Marketing and was elected “Graduate of the Year” by my professors. Almost every assignment I submitted involved an extensive written component. It is a remarkable achievement considering that I am apparently among least able writers to take the GMAT.

  It would have been a loss for all had my application been rejected due to my low score on the essay.

• Portfolios, et al
• Posted by kevin Drumm , College President on March 27, 2007 at 12:56pm EDT

• I am all for portfolio assessment but that is for admissions offices to administer, not the College Board. However, portfolios would present a real challenge for high-volume admissions offices where a simple score brings the staff time demands to merely unreasonable levels rather than impossible.

  It is ultimately admissions offices that give such sway to the SAT (or ACT). When admissions office stop requiring it or ignore the essay in afvor of their own approach, the SAT will have less influence. But for the large university, especially public universities where the highest percentage of stduents attend, I see no other way in light of shrinking state support and already escalating tuition. Asking the College Board to do a better job of assessment, however, is a reasonable approach.

• an appropriate index?
• Posted by Greg Tropea at CSU Chico on March 27, 2007 at 7:05pm EDT

• The big question is whether all or part of the present SAT provides the best index available when it comes to predicting future academic success.

  If it turned out, for example, that we got the most accurate predictions from a verbal component that consisted only of writing jokes that used five out of ten words in a list and from a mathematical component that simply asked students to describe a train's journey from Point A to Point B using as many appropriately and correctly applied mathematical concepts as they could, then that would be the best instrument available at the time.

  As a comprehensive test, the SAT would be comically pretentious. But whatever its other sins, that has never been how ETS represented it, only how some people perceived it. As a predictor, which is its advertised place in the academic universe, it has to be about reliability and nothing else.

  If something more reliable than the SAT comes along, ethics must overcome inertia and that new instrument should supplant it. Even then, we can be sure that outliers would occur with some regularity.

• Fooling the College Board
• Posted by Cathy , Adjunct Instructor at St. Xavier University on March 28, 2007 at 10:56am EDT

• College professors and instructors, including Dr.Perelman, must realize that US universities have failed to prepare K-12 teachers to teach writing. What the US has now is a generation of teachers who take their instructional writing assignments directly from the internet. There is no crafting of sentences, extending vocabulary, and teaching various genres in the classroom. There is no zeroing in on the turn of the phrase or the use of metaphor from current and classic literature. There is none of the aforementioned going on because teachers do not read and write themselves! They are too busy making sure their students meet district, state, and national benchmarks and goals in the core subjects and beyond.
  Quiz the teachers in your Masters programs and ask them how many books they read for leisure in a year. Ask how many belong to a professional organization geared to their grade/content area. It will open your eyes! Best writing practices and the latest research are what they are spoon fed in teacher workshops and inservices.
  Understanding all this, asking perspective college students to write an essay on a specific topic within a short time frame is formulaic and artificial, but it still reveals a student's reasoning, design, coherence, and conventions - the elements of writing.

• required writing sample (not the SAT essay)
• Posted by Ann Stubrud , Assistant Director of Admissions at Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University on March 29, 2007 at 2:17pm EDT

• As an admissions officer at an admittedly small, selective public honors college I have had the pleasure (and sometimes pain) of reading writing samples self-selected by students as part of our admissions application for the past four years. It is quite telling to see not only the content of the paper itself, but also teacher comments and grades for many of the submitted papers. For some students, the SAT essay is fairly reflective of their writing ability as compared to the generally longer assignment requested as part of our application; for others, the SAT essay is something they seem to view as "something I have to do" and the piece from school is much more thoughtful, well-planned, and articulate (not to mention factually accurate!)as one would hope from a college bound high school student. Would that all college admissions offices had the time to require an assignment/portfolio as part of the admissions application! But please keep in mind that many colleges DO require students to submit graded essays/papers from their high school courses, sometimes in addition to the "personal" or "Why I want to attend XYZ College" essays. And a growing number of colleges also are placing more "weight" on the strength of the high school curriculum and performance in challenging courses, or even tossing standardized tests out the window when it comes to student evaluation and readiness for their particular institution. What a novel idea! See fairtest.org for more information on this topic. I also would like to send out warm wishes to my colleagues who are up to their eyeballs in application files for students eagerly waiting to hear if they are in or out. Keep up the hard work!

• Reality
• Posted by Ted Silar on March 29, 2007 at 4:26pm EDT

• I have worked scoring essays ETS. Get real. The above essay gets a high score because you should see the rest of them.

• Fooling the college board
• Posted by John McKelvy on March 30, 2007 at 12:15pm EDT

• I too grade for the ETS in HIstory AP courses. My experience is that the essay portions of these AP exams reward students for jumping though hoops, but not for good writing or critical thinking. The students who do well memorize rubrics. The students who do poorly never had a teacher who gave them the rubric. The best essays rarely received the highest scores.

  I *hope* others' experience has been different.

• Scoring the SAT Writing Sample
• Posted by Daniel J. Daly , Teacher at Duchesn Academy on March 30, 2007 at 12:30pm EDT

• I have been teaching English for forty-five years in both public and private schools. For five years in a row back in the 1980's, I graded the SAT's ECT in December and the AP exam in June. Never did the rubric or benchmark essays suggest a five paragraph paradigm. Hey, there's another word that keeps popping up along with persona and ubiquitous.

  In those days, we used a four-point scale for the SAT and a nine-point scale for the AP. I remember well that they hoped to discourage readers from choosing a safe middle score thereby. I also remember that table leaders would take readers aside and counsel them if their scores were off the mark. This usually meant that it was quite a bit different from the other reader's score.

  They used to put a black bandaid over the score of the previous reader to prevent halo (or pitchfork) effects. I remember watching one reader looking under the bandaids and getting caught and sent home.

  One day, reading AP tests, I came in from one of our many tea and fruit breaks and read an essay that looked awfully familiar. I thought I'd read the same one earlier. I alerted my table leader, who alerted the question leader. It turned out that a whole school's essays on the open-ended topic were about the same.

  Overall, I thought the experience reading the essays helped me quite a bit with my AP classes. Oh, by the way, I'm still trying to get my students to abandon the three-pronged thesis, which is the spiritual handmaiden of the five paragraph essay. I liken these devices to training wheels and leg weights. Please excuse this rambling excuse for discourse. I just felt like doing some free writing.

• Cathy hit the nail squarely on the head
• Posted by La Maestra on April 1, 2007 at 1:45pm EDT

• I'm a high school English teacher. I teach six periods of English a day. I have 150 students. From about the age of 4 until my final year in college, I read 3-7 books per week, sometimes more. I've been teaching for six years, and I'm ashamed to say that if I thought hard about it, I could probably make a list of all of the books I've read this school year. I don't have time to read, and frankly, I've lost some of my enthusiasm for reading.

  That's something that I, a lifelong bookworm, never thought I'd say, but it's true. I don't enjoy reading and I don't enjoy writing--it's somehow been totally wrung out of me. I'm currently looking for a way out of teaching English, because I want my old enjoyments back. I'm tired of the pressure of trying to reform years of bad writing habits, facing pressure to get my students to perform well on the state tests, exit exam, SAT, AP, and be prepared for college-level writing. I'm tired of people looking at us and questioning why we are failing as English teachers, when students come to me in the 9th grade as college-prep students and still have trouble with basic homonyms and sentence structure, and what's worse, have no motivation to improve.

  For the last essay my students turned in, I gave them five days in class to write it. I gave them the outline I wanted them to use. We discussed the topic extensively in class. I gave them a rubric. 50% of my students bothered to turn the essay in, and of that 50%, the average score was a 50%. I gave them the option to rewrite and resubmit it for a higher score (I also made extensive comments on their essay and gave them two class days to work on the rewrite.) Of that 50% that turned in the original essay, only one in three chose to rewrite and resubmit their essay--the rest chose to stick with their original score.

  Something else Mary needs to keep in mind is that often, K-8 teachers have had NO formal teaching in writing outside of random workshops. In California, K-8 teachers only need a general degree in elementary education in order to teach--it isn't until the 9th grade that English teachers must have an English degree and/or subject competency in order to teach English.

  Ideally, English teachers would all have small class sizes (20-25 students), an extra prep period for grading, and extra time for collaboration and professional development. However, since English teachers are a dime a dozen, when one burns out there's another young, eager one waiting to take his or her place, and the cycle of inexperience begins anew.

• Exploited
• Posted by Ted Silar at Albright College on April 8, 2007 at 6:21pm EDT

• You can tell how horribly oppressed and exploited we are by noting how La Maestra thinks 20-25 students is a "small" class size! Hegemony at its finest.

• Posted by Steve on April 14, 2007 at 10:56am EDT

• La Maestra's words are thoroughly depressing. Teachers cannot convince students that writing is important. I just finished a college course and the instructor scolded us - graduate level students - for bad writing. It is television. It is video-games. It is American society and impossible task of sitting still in order to do some real writing. Students cannot organize their thoughts because their brains are scrambled.