Having never blogged before, it's likely to take me a while to get the hang of it, so bear with me. This blog will be about education at all levels and so I feel obliged to provide some details of my own.
I attended St. Agnes elementary school in Rockville Center (on Long Island in NY) and Bishop Laughlin High School in Brooklyn. (Yes...Catholic schools, so bear with me even further.) From the middle of my sophomore year I 'til graduation I went to Oceanside High School and worked a year before going to college. The only one that would have me was SUNY Geneseo, where I got a Bachelors degree in English, then went to Syracuse University for my Masters in English, and finally to the University of Texas in Austin where I got a Doctorate in higher education--specifically in their Community College Education program.
I taught one year of Seventh Grade in Letchworth NY and one year of Eleventh Grade in Cortland, NY. I taught for a year and then was named Department Chair of Humanities at John Tyler Community College in Chester Virginia. After I got my Ph.D. I was named Dean of Instruction at Austin Community College in Texas. I produced the first academic online program in English while I was there and went on to teach college online for a number of schools--some for profit and some not. And I still do that for Southern New Hampshire University.
But enough about me. :-)
"You can always teach," my mother said when she encouraged me to go to college, and so I have always taught. That's probably close to forty years worth. And I've seen a lot of 'movements' come and go during that time with the only result that education in the U.S has been declining. Why? I feel like I have only gotten better at it. So why is it that:
- The United States ranks fourteenth out of forty countries in the area of cognitive skills and educational attainment
- We're 23rd in science, 30th in math, and 36th overall.
George, congrats on the new blog. Your pedigree is a little scary. What if I mispel a word or make bad gramatical mistakes when I comment?
ReplyDeleteWithout going into a fifty+ year history in education at the public school and corporate levels, I have concluded that the system is broken. It isn't the teachers that are bad, or the courses that don't have the content load that they should that make us rank so low in the world. It is the system that needs a total rejuvenation. If you want an example of a school that created an effective approach to education, by changing the system over the years, take a look at St. Johnsbury Academy. Good luck on the new venture. I will follow you.