Bottom Line

[Derek C. Maus]

On Mon, 26 Jun 2000, jbor wrote:

>> Teaching 150 students in outmoded classrooms with shoestring
>> budgets and an administrator more concerned with campus discipline
>> and football is not a sign of non-elitism, it's probably the sign of
>> sainthood.
> 
> Hyperbole seems to be your strong suit, Derek. The administrator's
> predilections for pigskin and the lash don't necessarily have to have a
> bearing on what goes on in y o u r classroom. There are books: in fact,
> those types of schools tend to have quite a good stock of Shakespeare, both
> in the bookroom and on the curriculum. I speak from experience.

Hey, rj. I also speak from experience and you don't know what you're
talking about (at least in re: to public schools in the American South and
much of the rest of the country). If you don't think school administrators
have a direct bearing on the goings-on in the classroom here then you
don't really pay much attention. As you stated, overcrowded classrooms are
illegal in Australia, which is a damn fine step in the right direction. It
is pretty common practice over here, even in states where it is
technically illegal or "strongly frowned upon".

I wish it was hyperbole, I really do, but the fact of the matter is that a
lot of schools in this state (and others like it) *don't* have Shakespeare
and a lot of other things. They probably do have a computer thanks to some
Microsoft/IBM PR program, but I'd guess they have no one to use it. I
welcome you to visit Hickory, NC or Dumas, AR or Milledgeville, GA or
Ottumwa, IA or damn near any inner-city school in this country for a
lesson in the reality of American education.

Again, sorry about the pissiness, but I'm really, really, really tired of
having my profession being poked at from people who haven't actually seen
it from the inside for as long as I have. Nobody in my experience (I can't
vouch for Duke or Berkeley, but there was a reason I chose not to go
there) is pushing "postmodernism" or "queer theory" "poststructuralism" as
an exclusive theory (I'm not claiming you said this, by the way...it's
just a common rant from the readers of Camille Paglia et al.) and very few
people are deluded enough to think that this is 1930 and a Ph.D leads
directly to an endowed chair at Cornell (or community college for that
matter).