The ruse of Intelligent Design has been discussed here before and yesterday, an important ruling came down in the Dover, Pennsylvania case that puts a bright end to the dim Intelligent Design view of the science of evolution.
Here’s how the New York Times reported the story:
I am pleased to announce a new web service I have designed and will run and operate called:
Script Professor is an expansion and a joining of my Script Doctor service and the David Boles Private Writing Program.
All my teaching and consulting is now under the Script Professor banner of services where you can learn online how to effectively create all kinds of writing, not just scripts!
In our discussion the other day about my leg telling the weather, I want to make it clear the brusque, perfect-looking and cruel doctor who made declarations instead of admonitions to help heal my leg is like all the other young MDs I’ve met in New York City.
These young doctors are angry and tired and terrified of going bankrupt in an industry that doesn’t begin to pay their high scale-rents and mountainous student loan debt. Many want to make a killing on the backs of their patients as quickly as possible before the insurance companies cut their payments even more.
Annette Lareau discusses in her fine book, Unequal Childhoods, how parents with money use “Concerted Cultivation” as a weapon to make their kids well-rounded and aggressive in society and to challenge adults and teachers and doctors by “speaking up” when they feel they have been wronged.
The rise of credentialism is an onerous and angry philosophy of separation forced upon the “have nots” by the “already haves.” That phony-on-the-surface and irresistible-in-the-depths separation of people by paper is an ominous cloud along the horizon of our educated humanity because this is a separation not by talent or ability or deeds but by theory and strategy and if you doubt it there is a growing diploma trail to prove my point. I have an MFA degree from Columbia University.
An MFA means “Master of Fine Arts.” An MFA differs from an MA degree in two ways. The first is the degree moves beyond theory and into the technical aspects of the art: I can not only describe how colors affect a dramatic presentation I can design and implement them as well. Second, an MFA degree, because of the technical aspect, is considered a “terminal” degree in that, like a PhD, you have reached the end of the road in your trip for knowledge and because you have touched that terminal end you are certified by the system of academe that you are worthy of being hired on a full line tenure track.
At least that’s the way it is supposed to work in theory. In the last five years there has been a sea change in academe as the basic requirements for applying for a tenure track position at a major research university have shifted. Most job announcements used to say “MFA or PhD preferred.”
When I first started teaching at a small liberal arts college on the East Coast I knew I was unprepared for student interaction. I didn’t know how to create a syllabus. I didn’t know how to grade students. I had no clue how to speak to them. I was a last-minute emergency appointment for a freshman English composition course and when I talked to my boss about going into the classroom feeling so totally unprepared, he said, “Just teach them what you know,” and with those words of encouragement he kicked me out of his office and down the hall into my classroom.
Continue reading → Passionate Mind and Intellectual Heart
The unfortunate universal history of American university education is — on the undergraduate level at least — students remain a bit dumber than their instructors from generation to generation. I include my early undergraduate experience in that wash.
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