Friday, April 22, 2011

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.

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