Word: gen
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...right of the basement door of the Freshman Union. Inside, there is still the jungle of little wire baskets that hold corrected papers, and you can still hear a faint hum, from the Union kitchen. But the program that lives there has changed more than its name this year; Gen Ed A and all the perfunctory drudgery the name implied are rapidly becoming things of the past...
These transformations of the once-staid and uniform Gen Ed A program are the brainchild of Robert J. Kiely, assistant professor of English and director of the course. Last year Kiely himself taught an honors Gen Ed section as a dry-run for courses in writing for special fields. He pronounced the experiment "very very successful" and last spring the Committee on General Education approved the five new courses...
...case, middle-level classes are the Gen Ed section man's dream. He is freed from the dreary search for inept metaphors and badly constructed sentences that absorbs most of a teaching fellow's energy in what one of them called "the basic idiot's course." Instead he is able to teach his own field to students who have declared an interest in it. The old "why-bother-with-the-reading-it's-only-Gen-Ed" syndrome seems to have vanished in middle level sections...
...middle-group courses, most students find the educational experience euphoric. They generally revere their section leaders ("He's a God," sighed one Cliffie), and accept his criticism as the kind advice of a helpful expert. Most look with solicitous condescension on those stranded in the renamed version of Gen...
...turning all freshmen loose in specialized writing seminars like the middle-group course. "We just can't do that," says Rosenblatt, "with people who haven't demonstrated the ability to put sentences together." And for those, it will probably always be questionable whether spirit or renaming can make Gen Ed A more than a necessary evil of the freshman year