Your production line's doing WHAT? Song prosody? Where will the standardized test examine that? Or by those who know nothing of teaching, like the US Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, who only taught for two years-gym. Well, if that was the way it was fifteen years ago, think how that will be reinforced by the scrutiny of the classroom by those who think of it as a factory. You'd think frosh comp would be generally staffed by the younger and more flexible teachers, but perhaps when you include all the adjunct and experienced teachers who missed tenure, you have a group of fairly careful people unwilling to take risks. Evidently, all the freshman lit-comp teachers in the country were pretty used to doing what they did, could not use the wonderful innovations. It included Tom Thumb, had an entire section of songs and the prosody of songs, and many other things, which because they were unique, I tended to teach. My riveting memory of such an event was in a freshman literature anthology, ground-breaking in its day. I am more familiar with earlier editions, and while Margy Ferguson* is an excellent and perceptive scholar-editor, she cannot repell the publisher's usual bowing to sell books.
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