Search For New Editor Of Language Arts And From The Editor

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NCTE is seeking a new editor of Language Arts. In July 2011, the term of the present editors (Patricia Enciso, Laurie Katz, Barbara Z. Kiefer, Detra Price-Dennis, and Melissa Wilson) will end. Interested persons should send a letter of application to be received no later than August 7, 2009. Letters should include the applicant's vision for the journal and be accompanied by the applicant's vita, one sample of published writing, and two letters of general support from appropriate administrators at the applicant's institution. Do not send books, monographs, or other materials that cannot be easily copied for the Search Committee. Classroom teachers are both eligible and encouraged to apply. The applicant Replica Breitling appointed by the NCTE Executive Committee will effect a transition, preparing for his or her first issue in September 2011. The appointment is for five years. Applications should be addressed to Kurt Austin, Language Arts Search Committee, NCTE, 1111 W Kenyon Road, Urbana, IL 61801-1096. Questions regarding any aspect of the editorship should be directed ...
... to Kurt Austin, Publications Division Director: kaustin@ncte.org; (800) 369-6283, extension 3619.

From the Editor(1)

There's a lot of talk about "the real world" in this issue. Sometimes the idea of a real world is used as a club to beat teachers over the head. I'll bet most of us have heard "Yeah, but you don't work in the real world" more than once in our careers. (In my case, it tends to come from relatives.) I won't respond to the charge here; please see the excellent responses in this issue's "Teacher to Teacher."
There are aspects of the "real world" that teachers should take more seriously than we are required to. For example, if students lament that our teaching doesn't seem relative to their lives and goals, we should listen. Effective teachers make sure students understand why they should take the trouble to learn what they're teaching, and when the students don't understand, these teachers make efforts to change that. For some students and for some English language arts material, this is a challenge, to put it mildly. But when students value what they are learning in class, they learn better.

One of the prime obstacles to teaching for the real world, as everyone reading this editorial knows, is the standardized exam. Such exams focus on basic skills of reading comprehension, recall and restatement of facts and formulas, and the ability to identify the assumptions of test-makers. If the relationship between standardized exams and real reading is distant, standardized exams and real writing don't even speak to each other!

In a typical standardized exam situation, students write on topics that are rarely and only serendipitously of any interest to them, and they write to an audience that, by definition, knows more about the topic than they do. Worse, exam readers read primarily for mistakes (could there possibly be a more hostile reader than one who is looking for problems?), and they read the essays as quickly as possible be-cause (1) they are probably as bored by the topic as the students, especially after reading dozens of essays; and (2) they may be paid in a manner that encourages speed reading. Further still, the student writers have no choice about when they do their writing, and they are forced to write in a testing Breitling Replica Watches environment, which appears designed to make writers uncomfortable and denies them access to research and feedback to which any effective writer in the real world has almost unfettered access. Finally, the real-world purpose of a standardized exam is to determine a number (a test score) that will have real-world ramifications for the student. The relation of the score to the content of the exam can vary widely, and the increasing numbers of test-taking courses--in which students learn tips and tricks for succeeding on tests--prove that relation can be distant indeed.