Leslie Madsen Brooks's blog

Over the past few years, I have noticed in my undergraduates -— and even in a few of my younger graduate students -— a shift away from critical and creative thought and a greater desire for black-and-white answers, for lectures instead of discussion and for assignments that feature short answers rather than sustained argument. There are undoubtedly many reasons for this shift, but one of them is likely the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) educational reforms implemented during the Bush administration.

Most U.S. school officials and teachers warn students about the dangers of sharing too much information online and teach young people ways to maintain relative privacy while connected to the Internet.  In Pennsylvania's Lower Merion School District, however, school officials allegedly took another approach: they surveilled students and their families by using the webcams built into laptops issued to students by their high schools.

Teach For America, an organization that puts its recruits through fast-track training to teach in U.S. regions where students have fallen behind in academic achievement, is now recruiting for its 20th cohort of new teachers.  It's not surprising, then, that TFA recently has received extra scrutiny in the U.S. press. The verdict is still out on the effectiveness of the program—it depends, really, on how you measure effectiveness—yet it's still sending thousands of teachers into U.S. schools each year.

Today, I began my Seminar on College Teaching by having the grad students and postdocs enrolled in it draw a picture that served as a metaphor for higher education today. Images of violence figured prominently in a few doodles. My students depicted the research university as a guillotine, a hunting lodge filled with trophy heads, and--perhaps most graphically--as a meat grinder into which students are fed like cheap steak destined to be hamburger.

Trash strewn throughout neighborhoods, young men uprooting stop signs, people peeing in front yards, drunken brawls, people breaking into strangers' homes and falling asleep there, men punching pizza delivery drivers, and women vandalizing police cars.  No, it's not Skid Row, a gang-infested community, or a post-apocalyptic landscape.  Rather, it's 1 a.m. in a relatively upscale professorial neighborhood of State College, Pennsylvania.  The National Public Radio show This American Life recently profiled the city and Pennsylvania State University, which was recently ranked the #1 "party school" by the Princeton Review.