Links
Archives
Saturday, November 12, 2005
|
I got a new disposition Got me a new routine Got a new disposition Got me a new routine UD’s efforts to understand the use of the “dispositions” standard as applied to prospective public school teachers are landing her in the same slough of despond she’s in after equally serious efforts to understand the phrase “cultural competency” as applied to university professors. (For an update on one university’s notorious cultural competency program-in-the-works, go here; and note that the head of the working group says that their new focus will be on “providing definitions.”) Every time a representative from the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, which sets the standards by which schools of education judge their students acceptable or unacceptable for the classroom, attempts to define this crucial, intimate attribute -- if you don’t have it, you’re booted out of a career in teaching -- UD becomes more confused. At times having the correct disposition means something grand and overarching. You care about all students as human beings. You want to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. All God’s creatures got a place in the choir. At other times, representatives of NCATE define the proper disposition not in macro but in micro terms. It involves the details of daily classroom management. "We're trying to get to the softer side of teaching," says an NCATE spokewoman. "Some people are brilliant in the subject matter, but scream at their students, show favoritism, it's things like that we are trying to get a hold of." At yet other times, dispositions turn out to have to do with your profoundest and most private political and moral beliefs, as in the recent effort of one school of education to throw out a high-GPA student with a conservative political philosophy. Here the dispositional deficit lay in the student’s stubborn insistence, despite mandated diversity education sessions, brutally negative dispositional evaluations from his professors, and the school’s insistence that he sign various contracts aligning himself with social views alien to his own, on remaining loyal to his conservative outlook. Like Bella Cohen, whoremistress of Ulysses, UD finds herself all in a mucksweat whenever she tries to make the disposition requirement make sense. She awaits with eagerness NCATE’s decision to dispose of it. |