This week, I have decided to discuss Professor Fleming's posting about "What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us". Here is a link to the article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/opinion/sunday/what-a-million-syllabuses-can-teach-us.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share&_r=0
To which I would like to name this blog post: "What an article failed to teach us". Now before you click that "Comment" button and type a post longer than my own, I will say the following: If you went ahead and read between the lines of the article as to WHY some books are as popular as they are, then good for you. I didn't.
This article was clearly a way to advertise their website. Because if there is one thing this article fails at, it's telling us what a million syllabi (emphasis on "i", because syllabuses is not an English word) can teach us.
To tell us that you have gathered a bunch of syllabi from different places and then proceed to tell us that "Frankenstein" ranks number 5 on your list doesn't tell me that "Hey, everyone teaches the same way". Instead, it tells me that "Hey, Frankenstein is probably a REALLY good book that I should read." Furthermore, I have difficulty perceiving the flaw in teaching "strikingly similar" content. Does it not demonstrate that our education is uniform and that one school or student body gets a better education than others?
Besides, they carry on to say that they don't have nearly as many syllabi as they would like, and only constitutes a small portion of the courses taught globally due to copyright and protection problems. Way to shoot down your article and your advertisement opportunity.
Rant done.
2 comments:
Interesting
Noticed the typo, too. The books we read in schools are uniformed, those are the books read by people who teach us. Rarely do you see a book that is out of the to-read-list. Keeps the traditions, I guess, but sometimes a little change is good.
One of the profs told a story that Captain Underpants was banned from reading in one of the schools she taught. Go figure!
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