Writing Teachers: Still Crazy After All These Years
After spending four depressing days this month at a meeting of 3,000 writing teachers in Atlanta, I can tell you that their parent group, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, is not really interested in teaching students to write and communicate clearly. The group’s agenda, clear to me after sampling as many of the meeting’s 500 panels as I could, is devoted to disparaging grammar, logic, reason, evidence and fairness as ... Full Story »
Posted by Jon Mitchell
Don Bertschman – Apr. 22, 2011 - 06:50 PM
I don’t disagree that the essay is interesting, and it’s important for thinking Americans to think about what and how we teach at all levels. My problem with this piece specifically is that it is highly misleading. The author cherry-picked the most sensational program sessions that would prove the point she (and the website where this is published) want to make: that all college English profs are depraved anti-white charlatans who don’t care about communication skills. If you go to the CCCC website (http://www.ncte.org/cccc/review/2011program) you can download the program for yourself and see that the sessions cover a much broader spectrum than the author implies. Possibly the most common topic is the use and impact of technology in teaching composition — an important topic that merits debate, but will likely remain underreported since it doesn’t serve any group’s ideological motivations.