This article, Silly Season for the School Scholars, by Frederick Hess at the American Enterprise Institute and an education researcher named Laura LoGerfo, is hilarious. It’s about the titles of research papers presented at the April conference of the American Educational Research Association. My favorite titles include:
—Resisting Resistance: Using Eco-Justice and Eco-Racism to Awaken Mindfulness, Compassion, and Wisdom in Preservice Teachers
[If someone has a creative guess as to what “eco-racism” is, I would like to hear it]
—English-Language Learning in a 3-D Virtual Environment: Native/Non-Native Speaker Dyads Co-Questing in Quest Atlantis
[Do you know that “dyads” means “pairs”? I heard “dyads” used all the time at grad school. What’s wrong with “pairs”? And if you don’t like it, can’t you say “two students”? Someone needs to let these people know that making up new words does not make you smart. Or, as I like to say, “making up new words does not make you comalius.”]
Maybe some of this silliness wouldn’t be so bad, but, as Hess and LoGerfo point out, we have real educational crises on our hands right now. Do articles on eco-racism and Taiwanese mail-order brides (that was another one they mentioned) really help educators search for solutions to these crises, or are they a way of keeping busy to avoid the real and difficult problems facing education in our country?
–Guest blogger Newoldschoolteacher