"Flexible" Teaching or Fraudulent Teaching?
In "The Flexible Teacher," Leila Christenbury tells us that, having "concluded that few of [her] students would pass the course as currently constructed", she "jettisoned . . . deleted . . . truncated" some of the more challenging parts of her 300-level course on Teaching Writing Skills. Though acknowledging that "these changes may appear to have weakened the rigor of the original course," Christenbury concludes it was more important to give grades of A to 14(!) of the 18 students who otherwise "would falter . . . if not fail the course."
Christenbury calls these changes "compromise"; I call them fraud. I believe Christenbury perpetrated a fraud on at least three groups:
- The college administration hired and paid her to teach an upper-level course that was cross-listed in both English and education, presumably with the understanding that an appropriate syllabus would be in place. Instead, 300-
