Teaching Tuesday

First off, Ms. Lauren of Feministe is doing some practice teaching with one of my favorite poems, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." It brings back memories, as I did that poem during my own student teaching days.

Second, let me argue early and loudly for some better Geography teaching in our nation's middle schools. Well, at least my district's middle schools. My 9th graders are doing a research project, a simple comparison-contrast thing involving two cities, Milwaukee (kids ought to know a little something about where they live, no?) and some international city, i.e., a city outside of the United States.

"Can I do Denver?" a student asks. No, I tell him, since Denver is not outside of the United States.

"Oh, you mean like Kansas City?" (I wish I were making these up.) Again, I explain, Kansas City is in the U.S. We want something in a foreign country.

"Can I do France?" That's better, I say, but France is a whole country; pick a city in France.

"How about Hawaii?" (By now I'm feeling frustrated.) Hawaii, I explain, is neither a city nor outside of the U.S.

(And it goes on like that.)

Add to it the argument when a student insisted that it wasn't plagiarism if he changed a word or two, and--I'd better stop. We did the research yesterday and today; we start outlining tomorrow. Don't even ask how it went when we found percentages from their opinion surveys . . .