Links for 6/14/10

Carolyn Foster Segal

What other profession demands seven to 10 years of preparation for a position that may never materialize?...

The answer to those questions lies in the fact that applicants rarely consider college teaching a job; for them, it is a calling. This is especially problematic for humanities faculty members in general and English instructors in particular (both full- and part-time), whose numbers have been falling. Again, why do otherwise obviously intelligent individuals persist in battering against what is so blatantly obvious?...

Sixteen years at a small liberal-arts college have done much to bring me to my senses. I like what I do—and I believe that I do it well. But I can't encourage others to spend years in graduate school wishing and hoping for a position that may never materialize…

Douglas Crets

Right now, teaching is a carpenter with a hacksaw, wearing a hood, cutting away at a huge block of wood, while imagining the Venus de Milo.

What it could be: a laser-like robot-enhanced craftsmen’s hand tracing a 3-D image of each and every student’s internal thought processes…

TRIP GABRIEL

Of all the forms of academic cheating, none may be as startling as educators tampering with children’s standardized tests. But investigations in Georgia, Indiana, Massachusetts, Nevada, Virginia and elsewhere this year have pointed to cheating by educators. Experts say the phenomenon is increasing as the stakes over standardized testing ratchet higher — including, most recently, taking student progress on tests into consideration in teachers’ performance reviews.

Paul Basken

Sparked by job-tracking requirements in the $787-billion economic-stimulus bill approved last year by Congress, the government's major science-financing agencies have been working with universities to devise a way to bring scientific precision to the explanation of how their expenditures help the national economy.

The organizers of the effort, known as Star Metrics, reached a milestone this month by declaring the success of what they consider a critical element—their ability to create a low-cost system for universities to easily compile and assemble their records of federal grants, including the faculty members and students employed by them, in a way that the information can be automatically fed into the overall nationwide database…

The organizers of Star Metrics are emphasizing to universities the voluntary and cooperative nature of the project, particularly its reliance on low-cost sources of existing data…