The crazy thing is that we’re writing a report for our “new” curriculum that’s been in place only two semesters. Our number of students going through has been so small and so recent that I can’t figure out how I’m supposed to write an assessment that means anything about an “n” of 15 first-years. Regrettably, three people plagiarized and failed the course the second semester, which is not to mention the few that did poorly on their own merits. There’s no place on the NCATE forms to discuss the specific ways in which people fail to meet the standards, which to me would be an important piece of understanding a program’s efficacy.

Not to mention that if all your required courses are taken by first-year students, they might not be as plugged in to college-level performance and dealing with maturity/transitional issues. If you don’t follow a cadre through their coursework as they mature, how do you understand their development and how they prepare themselves to use their knowledge over time?

Gotta say, too, that there are some students who enter our program that don’t have the prep or the willingness to do what it takes to learn “content.” They might not be cut out to be teachers, lacking either the ethics or the temprament to succeed in the field. Is it a deficiency of our program if we identify those students in these early classes and get them out of the teaching stream and into some field in which they’ll have better chances? Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?

AIE. There I go again. I’m wasting time and energy thinking about this ridiculous stuff rather than just cranking it out.

That sucks that you’re still program chair.

It’s funny/sad how jaded I’ve become in 2 short years. We have 2 new faculty and I’ve had to hold my tongue several time so that they won’t be biased about the way things work.