Cranezilla --Mark Crane's collection of rarely annotated links

Classics-L: dissertation and teaching: "But, beyond the personal issue, it seemed to me that Classics is
>misdirecting its talent. The fact that PhD programs don't teach their
>students how to teach is a scandal of long-standing. (Personally I think
>the recentish on-list suggestion that acting should be a graduate
>requirement is an excellent one. Teaching is a performance skill.) It
>would
>be bad enough if programs were also not teaching students how to write.
>But, through the genre of the dissertation, *successful* students in PhD
>programs are actually being taught how *not* to write-- how not to write
>clearly and effectively, how not to make remarks of import on issues that
>matter, how not to distinguish evidence that matters for an argument from
>evidence which does not matter, how not to avoid crafting too-lengthy
>sentences with too many parallel clauses.... (damn it!). How many of these
>bad lessons, once learned in the intense formative experience of writing a
>dissertation, will never be unlearned, affecting the writing and even the
>thinking of the future professoriate?
"