So, let me get this straight: you assign students some homework and then have them discuss the material in class? Holy cow, these folks really are standing education on its head!

Typing fast before I go teach, I made some mistakes; the worst was this omission: "As long as that student is NOT planning on pursuing graduate work...." One more item: there's tons of research out there on this already, a lot of it at the MLA and AAUP websites, as well as the New Faculty Majority website.

I've been both a non-tenure-track (NTT); I am now on a tenure-track (TT) professor; and I will soon be a tenured professor. I've been in the position of evaluating non-tenure-track instructors. (First off, a correct on the terms of art: very seldom is a NTT faculty member titled "professor.") In my experience, yes, NTT faculty are much better teachers. From working as an NTT faculty member, working with NTT faculty, and having them as close friends, I can say that there are three reasons that NTT faculty are better teachers. 1) They are younger and consequently fresher and have fewer family obligations. They are typically single. When coupled, they don't yet have or don't plan to have kids. 2) They are under constant threat of losing their jobs, so they work very, very hard--much harder than should be expected of people working for, often, about $35k/year, sometimes more, but generally not over $40k/yr. 3) NTT faculty are teachers only. They are not distracted by research obligations nor by substantial obligations to develop/run the program. ALL THAT SAID, I don't think hiring lots of NTT faculty is a good thing, at least as it is done now. Such faculty are treated as disposable, paid just enough to keep them around a few years, and worked hard enough that they will burn out pretty soon anyway. That may be good for the students (as long as that student is planning on pursuing graduate work that will lead to one of these dead-end jobs), but it's not ethical. Granted, to some, those salaries I listed sound pretty good, but keep in mind that level of pay is not enough to support a family and it is often further reduced by the need to repay the costs of graduate education. The answer may well be to admit fewer graduate students, produce fewer doctorates. But, a lot of the quality I saw in the instruction of NTT faculty was the result of very strong educations; many of those faculty were electing to pursue significant and demanding research projects on their own dime/time. So the undergraduates (and the employing institutions) are often effectively getting the benefits of a young professor without actually paying for a young professor. That may sound good, until you're the person in a similar situation.

I wish I could provide a citation of the account I'm about to provide, but years have passed. Cornell West was speaking somewhere on racism, and this white person during the comment period said "I'm sick of these racists; I'm not a racist"--something like that. And West said something like "Good for you because I'm a racist. We're all taught to be racists here. I walk down the street, I'M afraid of young black men." I'm summarizing the hell out of it, and my memory is old, but his point seemed to be that no one of us is free of this BS because it's so pervasive, that black people even internalize it. And that he was calling this holier-than-though person on lack of self-awareness and sanctimony. Racism and prejudice is human nature, but it's really bad in the US because we lie to ourselves so much about it and don't face up to our problems and past. Could be worse, sure. But it's bad enough.

That's a pretty dopy comment. People will bust in just to see what's in the car. These are not generally your more polished, professional, or intelligent criminals. When I lived in Memphis, my car was broken into so that they could take three audiocassettes. My car was broken into, and they just got a few quarters from the ashtray. My car was broken into, and they not jackshit, because that was all that was in it. At that point I'd learned to install my own windows. But I just started leaving the car unlocked, and that solved the problem. Periodically, I'd get in and notice stuff was moved around, but no harm done, as there wasn't anything in there to steal because I'd never replaced the radio when it was broken into the first time. Same deal years later in Knoxville TN, which in many neighborhoods has roving addicts just looking for an opportunity, or scam artists going to door to door begging "gas money." The po-po don't care; the charitable rich NIMBYs erect shelters in poor neighborhoods, and it just goes on year after year.

I'll have to go read the research paper when I have time, but I suspect it's more than getting distracted. Excessive, slavish note-taking is bad for retention. And, I've noticed that a lot of people who take notes on laptops, myself included, get swept up into just taking dictation instead of writing notes that capture key information. Research I've read on learning backs this up (though a lot of that "research" really earns scare quotes). It might also be that note-taking in a word processor or even something like an outliner discourages two-column or similar note-taking methods in which part of study is commenting on, synthesizing, and prioritizing the material recorded from the lecture.

I have to disagree the VW, since the 80s in the US, has been a yuppy car. The marketing pushed it that way. This is very much not the case in Germany and Austria. There's it's just transportation and the Audi is the solid family brand. But that's not the case in the US. Don't know about outside those other nations in Western Europe, where they have the imitations offered by Skoda and Seat and such. Of course VW's not as upscale as the BMW or a Mercedes. But, yeah, the VW still has for many the image of its driver wearing the Izod with a sweater around his neck.

I worked as a book store manager in the early to mid 90s. I handled ordering, read heavily in industry and business news, and had friends all over our large city in the book trade, as well as friends and relatives in publishing, From that experience I can tell you this: most everyone back then saw the writing on the wall when Barnes & Noble and such came into being. They were Amazon before Amazon. These companies were getting better prices for books than small chains and independent sellers. We simply couldn't match the prices. And most of the customer bases of the "little guys" have not shit one about anything but price. And since most people who read were reading stuff like Tom Clancy, John Grisham, and the latest bodice-rippers, they didn't need the specialized services the little guys provided. (Special orders, curation of sections, readings, knowledgeable staff etc.) In fact many people dislike those things, considering them snobby, undemocratic, effete, etc. So a lot of people were relieved to get out of the "snobby" local bookshops. So those shops turned to coffee and pastry concession, more frequently children's events, and so on. But we all saw it coming then. AT THE SAME TIME, Bertelsman and others were already starting the consolidation that is still going on now, though slower because it's pretty complete. That had pretty negative impact on what the biggest publishers, like Random House would do in terms of variety of titles and support for new authors. I could go on, but in the interest of avoiding "tl;dr" I'll just say that I think "Amazon" and the e-publishing it's showing to be viable may actually be a positive, returning some of the variety to the book trade. But, yeah, I think you can stick a fork in the "mom and pop" book stores, at least outside of specialist niches.

It's mostly a threat because Pearson is the best at marketing, and because they're doing the most vertical integration at the moment. They're also damn big compared to the competition. As to the outperforming idea, well, I think they only have to outsell to establish and maintain a monopoly. And they only have to sell to the administrators. I've had some pretty bad experiences with this, with Pearson and others: the admins make a choice, and then the teachers have to suffer with the bad choice. Also, Pearson is the one giving the biggest kickbacks right now, so it is a current favorite with admins. I'm admittedly biased because my school just got out from under a long contract with Pearson. Their software products that integrate with textbooks lived up to very few of the promises made and were generally pretty much useless. Out of a just under three dozen faculty, we had one person who talked about using them, and he admitted to me in private that he only used because he felt obliged to, having been one of the people who signed off on the buy-in. I suppose folks will ding me as just an anecdote, but I've sat and talked with Pearson reps, one a friend of my wife who used to have beers with me, and Pearson is definitely striving for control over districts' long-term textbook buying, as well as curriculum and evaluation. Big money in that. But a bit worrisome to me.

I'm not seeing posts here addressing the more serious issue, which is the lock-in to Pearson. I know people who work at Pearson, and they do have an intentional policy of moving into schools, taking over curricula, evaluation, and eventually eliminating teacher jobs. I think that it's good to have plenty of teachers, fewer students per teacher, and I'm skeptical about the value of the new shiny, whether it's a gadget or some theory of fixing everything cheaply, but--by far--the more worrying concern is allowing a single corporation have such a large sway over public education. Especially as, in my opinion, Pearson provides some of the shittier textbooks out there. And that's saying something, given the general shittiness of textbooks.

That's a very silly claim. Yes, there are too many administrators. But attrition in teacher ranks is not being caused by teachers moving into administration. If there is a reduction in teacher numbers in a district, it's due to budget cuts. More typically teacher numbers are staying the same or increasing, but not at a rate that keeps up with increasing enrollments. I say this someone who teaches and who therefore really hates the increases in administrative overhead.

I've taught at four US universities--two R1s (University of StateName) and two teaching schools (StateName State University). At all of them all students were required to take core curriculum courses, which meant a minimum dose of humanities and science for everyone. So why are so many people saying "humanities students should take sciences?" Aren't they where you went to school? (Side note: Horgan says humanities is the source of skepticism? WTF? That's equally or more true of science. Granted, the "scientific method" is derived from ideas by people like Epicurus, who would be a "humanist" today, but back then there was no one to enforce this contemporary trades-based artificial divide between the arts and sciences.)

This question can't be given a flat yes or no answer. Faculty in the sciences are paid much more by grants, and faculty in some sciences and the humanities a lot less. And generally the "pay" from a grant is given back to the university to pay your way out of teaching. So I get a half-year's salary grant, and then I give it back to my school to pay them to "replace" me for a half-year. Then I go work on my painting, my medical research, or what-have-you. (Scare quotes on "replace" because the school will sometimes just take the money and not cover all or even some of the classes that the on-leave faculty member would teach.) I can say with great certainty that a very tiny fraction of a faculty member's salary at a US public university is paid by taxpayer monies. Instead it will be mostly from tuition and pay-outs from endowments or grants. The public contribution to public universities is very small these days.

"Middle America" or "Mesoamerica" is a common term for that region, especially in academic circles.

This stupid complaint about profs assigning their own texts, again.... Do you think Henry Ford the 15th (or whatever) should drive a Camry? A prof who has written a textbook no doubt thinks the textbook is the best in the field. And, yep, he or she gets a cut. But it's damn small. More important would be the vote of confidence (or lack of) in his/her book. However, yes, schools do get kickbacks from publishers. Not individual profs, but some companies, Prentice Hall especially, like to offer departments kickbacks to use that publisher's products, perhaps exclusively. My current school used to do that. We used the money for pay for our photocopier budget and some our work-study students. We eventually ditched the publisher because, well, their books suck sweaty crack. Now we run out of copy paper around mid-term, and we don't have any work-study students to answer the phones. Guess it's time to raise tuition again!