English Two-Year Colleage Assocation (TYCA) position statements on academic preparation, research, and scholarship

The main thrust of the academic preparation position statement is that graduate programs in English do not adequately prepare graduate students for the reality of teaching in two-year colleges. Admittedly, the position statement was written in 2004, but I do not believe graduate English programs have changed much in the interim. 

Position Statements

21 years of teaching so far

I realized last night that I have been teaching English for 21 years now, in Africa and Russia, and at Kent State University, Saint Mary's University, and Rochester Community and Technical College. The epiphany was quite a shock. I've been teaching a long time! What has changed in the classroom since1990?

• Students are more tired now. 
• No more chalk boards, most of the time. 
• Textbooks used to be dense black holes of print. Now they look like web pages.
• Class sizes have gone up. 
• Even with web sites that do automatic bibliographies, students still can't write decent research papers.
• Capitalization problems have overtaken the ubiquitous comma splice as the number one grammatical problem.