[lit-ideas] Re: "education"
- From: "carol kirschenbaum" <cskir@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2004 10:47:56 -0800
Diane Ravitch... and her book ("The
> Language Police")... explains the process of selecting textbooks and
examination
> questions for American public schools.
Dear Mo,
As long as you're confessing to having attended a Cato function, I'll come
clean with my part of this textbookery: I once worked for one of the bigger
textbook companies, in the 1990s, in Language Arts, yet. Not only did I edit
rubbish, I wrote some of it--and a slew of "tests" for both the student and
teacher editions, grades 6-12. Although I don't recall having written
anything about performing fleas, doing so would have brightened my days
considerably. Btw, nobody really supervised my work. Ever. I doubt if anyone
even read the stuff--except to check that it didn't contain the no-nos you
list--until it was in the students' hands. In short, I could have redefined
a noun as a verb and gotten away with it.
That was before I encountered a 10th grade "honors" English class, as a
guest speaker. The students asked whether I was actually the author of the
short story I had assigned. Their textbook contained a biographical note
about the author--some obscure person named Virginia Woolf--but not one
student had read it (or the story). I broke the news that Virginia Woolf is
dead, but I guess they never read that flea circus causality lesson, for
they repeated the question. Maybe I wasn't looking my best that day...
Carol,
sweating in the 80s
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
