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Education in America

Legislators propose to shoot us all in the foot

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More scary news from the Great Desert University: Our beloved president sends an announcement that our ever-astonishing legislators yesterday recommended cutting the university systems’ funding by $243 million in what remains of FY 2009 and then by another $388 million in 2010. That is huge: the largest cuts in higher education in the state’s entire history. And this is not a state known for its support of education.

Arizona has only three public universities, and you can count the private institutions of higher education on the fingers of one hand. None of these are exactly world-class institutions. A few departments are excellent: the University of Arizona, for example, has one of the world’s leading astrophysics programs, and Arizona State University has cultivated a good business school and a research emphasis in bioengineering. But by and large the universities reflect the general quality of education in this state, which as we have seen before, is not high. In an Arizona university classroom, it’s possible to guess with some accuracy which students grew up in the Midwestern states where citizens invest in education, simply by observing the students’ basic writing and logical thinking skills. Nine times out of ten, I can identify a kid who came from Ohio, Minnesota, or Iowa just by reading a paper or two.

This is the direct result of Arizona’s chronic underfunding and neglect of education.

“Budget reductions of this magnitude,” says Arizona State University President Michael Crow, “would have a serious and immediate impact on university operations.” The $39 million that had already been cut in the 18 months leading up to FY 2009 have so far resulted in the elimination of almost 500 staff positions and more 200 faculty associates, the dismantling of two schools, and a reduction in the number of nursing students.

Arizona State University serves 67,000 students. It graduates 14,000 a year, and its president claims it pumps $3.2 billion a year into the state’s economy. The planned cuts, Crow reports, will require additional layoffs, furloughs, and reduction of programs that already have enrolled students for 2009.”The fact that the legislature has known about the state budget problems for months and failed to take appropriate and effective action to minimize harm to Arizona’s families and economy is unconscionable,” he adds.

Unconscionable, yes. But surprising or anything new? No. This kind of thing is standard operating practice, historically, for the state’s legislative leadership.

With Governor Janet Napolitano leaving to head up Homeland Security, the state loses its strongest advocate for intelligence and commonsense, one whom our legislators have resisted and fought every step of the way. Her replacement will, according to the state’s constitution, be the present secretary of state, a dim light whose politics and retrograde thinking echo those of the blessedly exiting presidential administration.

Our new governor, heaven help us, is the woman who is responsible for state employees losing all choice in health-care plans: her husband, an executive of a large insurance company, was involved in submitting a bid for the contract to insure state employees that was below the break-even point, so that Blue Cross/Blue Shield, at the time the only decent insurer we had, pulled out in protest of the blatant conflict of interest. For a time, we had just one insurer, the one for which our new governor’s husband worked. This company was so roundly hated by the medical profession that many doctors (including most of mine) would not accept it. If you wanted to go to your doctor, you had to pay in cash and then try to extract the money yourself from the insurer, a process that at best required three to six months. My dermatologist would not let me set foot in his office, even after I said I would pay in cash! To get care from the doctors I knew were reasonably competent,I had to buy my own insurance on the open market. Today the state has to self-insure its employees, thanks to that fiasco.

And she’s pretty typical, this new governor. Remember, this is the state that once elected Evan Mecham, the stupidest holder of elected office in the nation’s history. After Mecham made a laughingstock of Arizona, his predecessor, an affably muddle-headed fellow, looked smart: he was the one who announced that he had never read a book from cover to cover except the Bible and had finished school with a junior college diploma—and he didn’t see why anyone else needed to do anything any different. After all, look how far he’d gone!

That one’s favorite byword was (I kid you not!) “It’s a beautiful day in Arizona. Leave us all enjoy it.”

You can see where all this is going: straight back to the Dark Ages.

So, to personalize, it appears that the danger of a layoff where I’m concerned is still very real and very immediate. The university’s administrators are already firing library staff, and I’m sure they soon will move beyond that.

Related Posts:
The Devastation of Higher Education in Arizona
The Perqs of Penny-Pinching

A modest proposal…

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Over at The Simple Dollar, Trent is kicking himself for what he calls “Seven Huge Financial Mistakes” he made while he was in college. Most of these, such as “Going into College without a Clue,” “Not Taking My Classes with Enough Seriousness,” and “Signing Up for a Credit Card—Then Using It with Reckless Abandon,” are functions of youth. No one should be surprised when a young person does exactly these things and all the other alleged missteps Trent describes.

Youth, after all, is wasted on the young.

As a veteran of 15 years of university teaching, I’d like to trot out a radical idea that has silently lurked inside my mind for a long time:

Students should not be allowed to go directly from their senior year in high school to their freshman year in college without passing “Go.” Given the staggering cost of a college or university education, its importance to a young person’s future, and the number of financial predators waiting to prey on the kids the instant they’re set loose with no real responsibilities and no parents to watch over them, America should make it an expectation that everyone will work or do paid community service for two years before enrolling in any form of higher education.

We should set up a national service program for young people, one that could send high school graduates anywhere in the U.S. and to parts of the world that are relatively safe for Americans to live and work. This program should provide jobs that pay more than minimum wage (possibly through a matching tuition savings plan) and build real-world, salable skills.

Then we should give high-school graduates three options:

a. join the military;
b. sign up for a national service program; or
c. get a job in the real world.

In addition to paying young people a salary, the national service program could provide something like a 401(k) for prospective college students, into which pre-tax dollars could be contributed—and employers would match this—to build a fund to help pay college tuition. Actually, for people under, say, 26 years of age, all private, municipal, and state employers could offer a 401(k)-style college tuition fund, with matching contributions. Since soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen risk their lives in the service of their country, the military should provide a benefit like the GI Bill with more generous provisions than the proposed tuition fund. The latter would apply only to the national service program and to real-world employment.

This scheme would have a number of advantages.

First, it would expose kids to a period of responsibility at a time when they need to build maturity…and at a time when, as Trent’s post so accurately reveals, many young people are simply not ready for college.

Second, it would allow the students themselves to earn a portion of their college tuition, even it it’s only a small portion. This would help them to appreciate what is entailed in earning the amount a university education costsbefore they rack up a lifetime of student debt, take some of the burden off parents’ shoulders, and give students time to learn responsible financial habits.

Third, it would get kids out of an environment where they can easily be exploited by credit-card mongers and others who make a business of ripping off college students. By the time the young people return to campus life, they will be two years older, more mature, and smarter. The difference between a 19-year-old and a 21-year-old is significant, particularly if that 21-year-old has been earning a living for a while.

Is a national service program socialism?

Yup. So are public universities and community colleges. So is federal support of research at private universities such as Harvard and Princeton. So are city roads, state routes, and interstate highways.

We work together to make life better.

It should be so. There’s nothing wrong with creating a program to employ young people productively and give them time to grow up before completing the final part of their education, when it ultimately will repay us all with a better-educated, wiser, and smarter workforce.

What’s your conspiracy theory?

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Over at CBS Marketwatch (my favorite portal to the Wall Street roller-coaster ride), Paul B. Farrell has an entertaining post highlighting his theory that big business has sabatoged democracy.

It’s a little oblique to my own conspiracy theory, which is that democracy in this country evaporated a long time ago, replaced by a latter-day incarnation of what Dwight Eisenhower first called the military-industrial complex. Exactly as he warned, it has taken over the functioning of this country to such an extent that our much-vaunted “freedoms” have effectively disappeared. The citizenry has been too busy sucking on the pacifier of material plenty to have noticed that little factoid.

I have even gone so far as to theorize (hang onto your black helicopter helmets) that huge pan-corporate interests (which we see manifest in the puppeteers behind the Bush administration) are responsible for the dumbing-down of public education in this country. Universal education in Western government-run schools has never existed to train brilliant minds; from its outset in 19th-century Prussia, its purpose was to develop compliance. Schools exist to teach kids to do as they’re told, so that as adults they will cooperate quietly with what the government wants them to do. It’s an effective device to create a nation of sheep.

The way to make sheep out of American citizens is to see to it that they know nothing about the history and ideas that brought their nation into being, and by design to avoid teaching them how to think logically or coherently: hence the erasure of history and literature in grade school, of civics courses in high school, and of Western civilization courses in college. Indeed, it was Eisenhower who warned,

Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Dumb down the citizenry and you get your way. There’s a reason college juniors and seniors will tell you Wisconsin is a Rocky Mountain state and World War II happened in the 19th century. This is not something that happened by accident. It happened because over the past forty years public schools have systematically been commandeered to teach compliance, not to furnish young minds with facts and thought.

Over time, functions that once were performed by the government have been taken over by private entities which, because they are nongovernmental, do not have to abide by regulations designed to protect your privacy and your civil rights. Consider:

• Federal law forbids the use of the Social Security number as an ID number. But try to get a credit card, a home loan, or medical care without forking it over for use as exactly that. Even if you refuse to reveal your Social Security number, insurance and financial companies already have it, and they use it as an ID number in national databases designed to track your behavior. How can they get away with it? Because the law applies only to government bureaucrats…not to corporate bureaucrats.

• Big Brother watches you in every store, every parking lot, almost every intersection in this country. Every purchase you make is tracked on store “club cards,” on credit cards, on debit cards. Every step you take is recorded on cameras. Who is Big Brother? He ain’t Uncle Sam. He’s corporate America.

• By law, the government is not allowed to violate your privacy and to track your every movement in this way. Government agents have to get a court’s permission to do this sort of thing. But corporate interests do not.

• You can write to your Congressman about an issue and be damned. If you don’t have enough money to purchase representation, the only way your wishes will be considered is if they happen to coincide with those of the lobbyists who do own your elected representatives. Who can afford to buy representation in this country? Only very large, allied corporate interests.

• Prisons, schools, medical care, and most social welfare programs are now the province of industry, not your elected government.

• Every time you pass through an airport, enter a public building, or go through the electronic examiner at the door of a retail store, you are searched without due cause.This is a violation of the United States Constitution, a fact ignored because the illegal searches are conducted by private entities, not by government agents. You accept it because you have been trained to comply and because you have been told that you should be scared, very scared.

• The reason we no longer have the basic access to decent medical care that Americans enjoyed thirty or forty years ago is that corporate interests took over that access, bringing us “managed medical care” that places an army of corporate bureaucrats between you and your doctor. These same interests have fought a one-payer medical system—expensively and efficiently—for decades. They have played a major role in running up the cost of medical care and have seen to it that most Americans are discouraged from seeking good, consistent care…what propagandists call “Cadillac healthcare.”

Habeas corpus? Oh, that… If we don’t like you, you’re not eligible for it.

So it goes. Or, we might say, so it went…

And you…what’s your conspiracy theory? Is the truth out there? Is George Busha robot? A stuffed puppet? Is Barack Obama a Muslim terrorist? Are black helicopters operated by aliens? Is truth beauty? Beauty truth? Is code poetry? Who made us think so?

Stop the presses…literally

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Word on the street has it that The Arizona Republic, the only daily metro newspaper serving the fifth-largest city in the nation, is laying off most of its photographers and much of its editing staff. A few unseasoned reporters will be retained. In the fall, we’re told, the Republic is slated to morph into a tabloid. Those who will staff this downsized entity, the ghost of our right-to-work state’s flagship newspaper, will have no health insurance and a pension plan that will be, shall we say, commensurately downsized. Thus saith the paper’s present owner, the Gannett Corporation.

The Republic, having abandoned journalism years ago, no longer has much of a readership. It’s losing readers even as the population of the Valley grows. There’s a reason for that: it doesn’t publish news.

This is no exaggeration. One year a mayoral campaign came and went with almost no mention of the candidates. Yesterday (we’ll give it this much), its print edition mentioned that unless Our Esteemed Legislators approve a budget within the next two weeks, the state budget will expire and state employees will not be paid on July 3. Having heard this from La Maya and having a vested interest in getting paid on July 3, I went to the Republic‘s online edition and found not…one…word about the possibility that Arizona’s largest employer may fail to pay its workers and that state government is, as we speak, preparing to shut down all nonessential services. The lead online story concerned the recent opening of a new ice cream store.

Turning this formerly major metropolitan newspaper into a throw-away tabloid will put it head-to-head with New Times, which succeeds because it has verve, sass, only the thinnest veneer of journalistic ethics, and lots of advertising. Lots and lots of advertising. New Times is entertaining but devoid of credibility. On the other hand, it does attempt to follow local politics. You can’t believe a word it publishes about local government, but at least it has some words!

Newspapers that abandon their mission to deliver the truth to the public and forget the importance of that mission have nothing to sell. For a long time the Republic has staggered along with dwindling advertising, but as readers lost interest in the paper’s content, advertisers lost interest in its ballooning space rates. Who reads the local newspaper’s classifieds when you can go to Craig’s List? What’s the point of pawing through page after page of irrelevant retail adds to clip a few coupons when you can download what you want from the Web? And why pay to advertise in a newspaper that nobody reads?

I canceled the Sunday Republic when I realized that the only things I was reading were the front page (part of it) and the funny strips; it felt ugly and irresponsible to throw away three or four pounds of advertising to read a half-dozen pages of ephemera. Just the thought of how many trees were pulped only to be tossed directly into the trash disgusted me, and I decided to stop abetting that kind of criminality. Not long after, I realized I’d rather pay to have The New York Times delivered to my house and so canceled the Republic altogether.

It’s a sad development. There’s a reason journalism is called the Fourth Estate. It’s an important part of the polity of a democratic republic. When we cannot get information about what’s going on down at City Hall or over at the State House, we as voters are in the dark. And our path through the darkness, as we have already seen over the past decade, is inexorably leading us toward tyranny.

Are college degrees overrated?

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On Monday, NPR’s Talk of the Nation chatted with career coach Marty Nemko, who recently published an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education arguing that the bachelor’s degree is one of America’s most oversold products. He stops short of calling the marketing of undergraduate degrees to those who are unqualified for university work a scam. But after twenty years in academe, I surely would go that far.

Nemko points to the vast numbers of college graduates who end up in jobs they could have had with a high-school diploma, and then goes on to cite figures showing that only 23 percent of high-school students who take the ACT are prepared to perform at the college level in English, math, reading, and science. That just about accords with my experience. As I’ve explained in earlier posts, I organize students into groups, each of which is led by a classmate who, in the absence of grade inflation, would genuinely be an A student. Any given class of thirty students will have at most six who really do perform at the A level: that’s 20 percent. The rest are folks who tell me that Wisconsin is a Rocky Mountain state and World War I occurred in the nineteenth century, and who turn in papers with their own names misspelled.

According to Nemko, of the four-year college students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their high-school classes, two thirds had not managed to finish the bachelor’s degree after eight and a half years! Meanwhile, however, universities merrily collect these kids’ tuition, running them deeper and deeper into debt as the young people continue a fruitless pursuit.

And fruitless, he suggests, is le mot juste. The claim that workers with college degrees earn more over their lifetimes is, he says, “misleading”:

You could lock the collegebound in a closet for four years, and they’d still go on to earn more than the pool of non-collegebound—they’re brighter, more motivated, and have better family connections.

While that is not 100 percent so—thank goodness, we still do have some social and economic mobility in this country—the truth is that class matters. Students who do well in school often are those whose parents were well educated and have provided their kids with a fistful of educational, social, and economic advantages. Not least of those is Dad’s old college chums now in a position to hire Junior. The uphill climb for a first-generation college student is a lot steeper than it is for a kid whose parents have graduate or professional degrees.

He adds that as increasing numbers of decently paying jobs are sent off-shore or converted to part-time, the pool of good opportunities drops. So, many college graduates are forced to take blue-collar work, driving trucks and waiting tables.

Then there’s the question of whether college students get what they pay for. It’s a big question, since many university graduates start their working lives with five- and six-figure student loan debt. Graduates surveyed in recent studies are understandably dissatisfied with the quality of instruction in environments where an average of 28 percent of their courses are taught in classes of thirty or fewer.

But did they learn anything?

Apparently not much. A 2006 study underwritten by the Pew Charitable Trust showed that 50 percent of tested college seniors could not follow the argument in a newspaper editorial or compare credit-card offers. Folks. That’s half of them! Twenty percent had such weak math skills that they could not estimate whether their car had enough fuel to get to the gas station.

Think it can’t get worse? Think again, says Nemko:

Unbelievably, according to the Spellings Report, which was released in 2006 by a federal commission that examined the future of American higher education, things are getting even worse: “Over the past decade, literacy among college graduates has actually declined. . . . According to the most recent National Assessment of Adult Literacy, for instance, the percentage of college graduates deemed proficient in prose literacy has actually declined from 40 to 31 percent in the past decade. . . . Employers report repeatedly that many new graduates they hire are not prepared to work, lacking the critical thinking, writing and problem-solving skills needed in today’s workplaces.”

What to do?

Nemko suggests that colleges should be held to the same standards as, say, tire manufacturers: at the least, they should be required to provide applicants full data on their performance in areas such as graduation rates; average costs for every year, broken out by race and gender; and employment data for graduates. He also suggests that a high-school graduate in the bottom half of his or her class consider more profitable alternatives, such as associate-degree programs at community colleges, apprenticeships, the military, and on-the-job training with a successful small-business owner.

The national campaign to enroll every body that’s still breathing in four-year bachelor’s degree programs is a rip-off. It rips off the young men and women who are unprepared to succeed in universities, and it rips off the ones who are prepared, by siphoning resources away from them. Not everyone needs a four-year degree. In fact, some people are likely to find more success by using those four years in vocational training and on-the-job learning.

3 Comments left on iWeb site

BeThisWay

I think that a degree isn’t necessary, per se, and you can certainly have success, even great success, without one.

That said, I don’t think Nemko is right if he says that many of the jobs could have been landed without the degree.Degrees are actually required for more jobs above a certain pay grade than not, especially in corporateland, and having one certainly gives you the edge when all other things are equal.That doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of other industries where great success can come without that degree.

To me the issue isn’t how many people are going for degrees, the issue is the commitment of each individual student to learning and getting what they’re there for in a university setting. Many kids go for the social aspects instead of the educational aspects, and view it as a way to delay having to take responsibility for their own lives.

That’s why I agree with Nemko’s suggestions.College isn’t for everyone, and parents IMO should look at who their child really is and what they are really capable of and committed to.Otherwise it’s just a waste of time and money, and it dilutes the quality of education for those that are really committed.

And the lackluster way these uncommitted grads approach their jobs has far-reaching effects and dilutes the quality of life for us all.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008 – 10:47 AM

Strid

I’m not an American, or going to university in America, but I’ve seen the relative worthlessness of bachelor’s degrees all around me. I’m not sure if it’s so much more of a scam than a high school education was back in the past, though. You know, when only the rich or the scholarship kids went to uni?

Nemko’s right, class does matter, and I’m pretty sure that it’s really one of the few constants in this whole education-employment system. If you’ve got parents that went to uni, you’ll get a decently paying job. If not…be prepared to struggle. And as for the upper class, it’s unthinkable that you could NOT have at least a bachelor’s degree from somewhere (the quality of the degree…well…it only really matters that you can say you went to university).

Here (in the Caribbean) if you don’t have some kind of degree, you’re simply not going to get an ‘acceptable’ middle-class job. Sure, you can be a tailor, or a carpenter, or a maid or whatever without a degree, but you’ll never be higher up than a bank teller, really. Many more people go to university now than ever before.

However…since everyone has one…bachelor’s degrees aren’t worth much any more. University graduates are jobless because lower-end degrees won’t get you the pay you want…but you’re not going to go into a trade or some such ‘menial’ labour because you went to uni, darn it!

It’s definitely true that many people are getting ripped off by the system and preconceived notions of status in relation to a certain type of education. Really, there SHOULD be some attempt to expose high school graduates to the various options open to them, and to emphasize that an excellent mechanic will be more successful than a pass-degree BA Literature grad will be. However, people in general aren’t stupid. They figure things out sooner or later. Many people drop out, work for a few years, and when they settle down, do their degrees successfully. And I know many people that only started to shine in uni…moving from simply passing in high school to really maturing and buckling down (and being really successful) in uni. There ARE positives to the huge increase in enrollment in the university/college system; more people have more opportunities, and a greater chance of realising their full potential.

Friday, May 16, 2008 – 01:35 AM

vh

It’s true that for certain kinds of jobs, a bachelor’s degree is key. It’s also true that an undergraduate degree in the liberal arts enriches your life immeasurably, in ways that far surpass the financial cost of obtaining the degree. And a bachelor’s degree in an academic subject prepares you for graduate study in professional programs such as the law, business, journalism, and education; in that sense, the bachelor’s degree does eventually pay for itself monetarily.

However, when you’re actually in the trenches, you come to appreciate Nemko’s estimate that 40 percent of students who are sucked into the university system are not prepared for university-level work.

Persuading those kids that they need a bachelor’s degree to have a decent life is probably a scam. When they finish the four-year degree, too many of them end up in low-skill, low-wage jobs that DO NOT REQUIRE A COLLEGE DEGREE. I have a nephew, for example, who got a bachelor’s degree in construction (don’t ask!) some years ago and to this day drives a delivery truck for a paint company. He could have driven the delivery truck with his high-school diploma and got a four-year leg up in experience and wage increases.

Advertise for a $28,000/year secretarial position and you’ll get a slew of applications from people with bachelor’s and even master’s degrees. You don’t need a college degree to push papers and answer the telephone. Give me a break! Why have these people wasted their time and gone into debt up to their schnozzes if jobs like this are what they have to look forward to?

I argue that for many young people, there are alternatives that may serve them better than marking time for four years in a bachelor’s degree program. For example, a two-year program at a community college could very well land you in a job that will earn lots better than the $28,000 secretarial position—or at least no less. Many trades are well paid, and you can’t off-shore a plumbing or an electrical job. A paid apprenticeship could prepare a young man or woman for a decently paying job—and possibly prepare the person to own a business—without leaving him or her in five-figure debt.

I also argue that filling up our universities with students who are academically unprepared dilutes the quality of the degree for every student. When faculty have to deal with gigantic classes, 40% of whose members cannot keep up with the work, attention that should be given to those students who belong there is diverted and wasted. We would not be sending college graduates into the workplace with subminimal skills if we were not having to grant degrees to people who come to us with subminimal skills.

Should we flunk out every freshman who arrives in our classes with subminimal skills? What? Send away 40% of our little cash cows? Not and keep our teaching jobs!

By and large, as a college instructor you are ill-advised, indeed, to fail students whose skills and performance do not come up to par. Promotion and tenure depend largely on semester-end student evaluations—if you give these students an honest assessment of their performance, they blow you out of the water. If you fail them, they and their parents show up at the dean’s office. If they are members of minority groups and you are not, you’re likely to be accused of discriminatory practices. If their politics are conservative and yours are liberal—or vice-versa—you may be accused of vindictive behavior.

The system as it is currently set up is designed to churn huge numbers of students through to the bachelor’s degree. Because some 40% those students are unprepared and stay unprepared throughout their four-year experience, a large proportion of those degrees are fraudulent. It is a system that cheats the students and cheats employers. And because it defrauds strong students as well as weak ones by diverting resources away from the truly qualified, over time it weakens our country’s economy.

Monday, May 19, 2008 – 09:59 AM

Bombs Away: Academic trench warfare revisited

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A query from one of my honored students:

I am wondering why the rough draft for the proposals are being graded on grammar content. I was always under the impression rough drafts do not worry about grammar content and areforgathering your thoughts together for the final draft.

Nowhere in the course materials does the slightest suggestion appear that any of the six writing assignments are “rough drafts.” Could there be a reason that I wrote and posted not one, not two, not three, but four reviews of basic grammar and style matters, and that I gave not one, not two, but three exams on that material? Might there be some reason that I posted rubrics explaining how papers would be graded on basic grammar and style, among several standards? Could there be a reason that I posted an example of copy graded in that way and told students to look at it so they would know what was expected? And might I have had some motive for putting this passage into the syllabus?

For writing assignments, writers start with 100 points; points are subtracted for various crimes and misdemeanors. For example, each Basics Review error, redundancy, or verbosity costs 2 points; logical lapses and organizational flaws, 4 points; citation errors, 6 points; and so forth. See the document titled “Essay Scoring List,” posted in Course Documents on our BlackBoard site, for a full description of deductible errors.

Or this, in the assignments handout?

Writing projects start at 100 points and challenge writers to maintain the highest possible score by creating papers that are well written, logically argued, and free of basic grammar, punctuation, and style errors. Points are deducted for specific kinds of errors, described in the Essay Scoring List, posted in “Course Information.”

Naaaahhhh. I must’ve done that just to hear my brains rattle.
“. . . the rough draft are being graded . . .”
“grammar content”
“. . . drafts do not worry about . . .”

What? Me, worry?

Stand by, all you entrepreneurs! This young fellow will soon graduate and show up at your door asking for a job. Awe-inspiring, isn’t it?

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Tuesday, April 29, 2008

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Mrs. Micah

Dear student: Why are you turning in rough drafts?

Micah sometimes runs into that when he assigns a paper and then an expanded version of the same paper. He does it so they will have a better chance of learning from their mistakes…but yeah.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008 – 09:15 AM