Creating Creative Criminals

It's almost unimaginable how stupid educators can be. Almost. This story is so disgusting that no punches need to be pulled in the name of "polite criticism."

ST. JOSEPH, Mo. — A Missouri high school teacher apologized for asking students to write about who they would kill and how they would do it.

Michael Maxwell said it was a horrible mistake he regrets, according to an Associated Press report.

Maxwell said the request to describe how students would carry out a murder was merely a writing exercise. Maxwell teaches a beginning drafting class and it was not clear why he asked the class to write fiction.

School officials in St. Joseph said the teacher will likely keep his job. [Emphasis mine]

Oh yes, you read that right.

Learning the Language… or Not

In this case, I don't mean "eduspeak," that quagmire of buzzwords and stolen terminology from other disciplines and professions. No, this is a story about English. It's not much of a secret that college graduates are abysmal writers. I don't mean that they have trouble with the nuances with MLA, APA, or Chicago standards or have a difficult time writing papers in a clear and fluid manner.

I'm going all the way back to the basics: parts of a sentence. I don't understand how students have been allowed to advance into college, and more specifically, into the education courses, when they can't easily identify the function of words within simple sentences. Should a person who wants to become a third or fourth grade teacher be able to quickly identify conjunctions and know the difference between pronouns and prepositions? From what I saw in my class, the answer is apparently, "Who cares?"