Word: rinker
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...RINKER...
...Rinker well knows that English teaching can be impossibly hard. The "normal" high school teaching load is 125 to 150 pupils a day. If a teacher assigns 125 pupils one 500-word essay a week, allowing 15 minutes apiece to correct them, he faces more than 30 hours of extra work. (One result is that some teachers assign no essays, and high schools are graduating students who never wrote a single composition in four years.) Nonetheless, Rinker thinks that the deeper problem is simply incompetence; few teachers, for example, read enough, and many cannot write with style and clarity...
...Germ Carriers." Teacher Rinker is now executive director of a coast-to-coast rescue squad called the Commission on English, which the College Entrance Examination Board launched in 1959 with $1,000,000. A top priority: re-educating teachers. Says Harvard Professor Harold Martin, chairman of the commission...
This summer Rinker & Co. set up "institutes" at 20 universities from Cornell to California, gave 900 teachers a stiff dose of everything from satire to syntax. Supposedly the nation's best English teachers, they are expected to go home as "germ carriers" after a graduate-level summer tour of literature, linguistics and composition. Rinker is pleased-but not nearly as pleased as he hoped...
...Reformer Rinker's problem was clear last week at Harvard, which wound up an institute for 45 New England teachers. Their ages ranged from 25 to 62, and 85% of them had master's degrees. As the course ended, a few were plain flunking; many others had barely grasped it. Only about a dozen emerged with honor...