Thursday, September 03, 2009

Nerd News: Stanley Fish on "What Should Colleges Teach?"

Love him or loathe him, Stanley Fish is (pardon the wordplay) a big fish in the pond of academia.

Check out what he has to say about what colleges should teach: Part 1 and Part 2. Thoughts? Comments?

I am happy, though, to see that Fish recognizes a problem that I see constantly. He observes:
A few years ago, when I was grading papers for a graduate literature course, I became alarmed at the inability of my students to write a clean English sentence. They could manage for about six words and then, almost invariably, the syntax (and everything else) fell apart. I became even more alarmed when I remembered that these same students were instructors in the college’s composition program.
Boy howdy, it's TRUE. Then just think about the writing often produced by undergraduates if Fish's grad students are so awful.

No comments: