Delta Autumn and the Summer School

As I understand it, I'm supposed to blog about "Delta Autumn," right now, right?

If so, let's get to it:

I am going to be as blunt and as honest as I can with this blog, and while I don't mean to hurt anyone's feelings (though I don't think I will), that possibility always exists when someone (me) is criticizing anything (the summer school).

First, a background: We are told again and again--we being the MTC--that we are the top 7 %, the cream of the crop, the liberators of a downtrodden and backwards culture, etc. etc. etc.

All of this is nice, and we hear it often enough that before long we're inclined to believe it.  But then summer school starts, and we are treated like the greenest of all the college freshmen.  Ann's class, while it is informative, is clearly not pitched towards the understanding and comprehension levels not only of "the top 7%, etc." but also of men and women who are told they are responsible enough to teach in critical areas.

Let me rephrase:  if we are all that you say we are, the classes we are taught should expect of us more than normal classes expect of normal education-major freshmen and sophomores.

This is where Delta Autumn comes in.  It's a good book; a great book, probably.  And it has just about everything useful that a first year teacher in the Delta would need to know.  But I read this book for the first time over the summer and I couldn't help but be struck by the fact that all that was in the book we were learning from Ann, but learning at a slower and (sorry to say) more boring pace.

If we are all that you say we are, tell us to read the book over the summer, and let us discuss it in Ann's class.  Give us online reading quizzes or something (hello, wufu, or whatever it's called) if you don't believe we'll read the book on our own.  But don't patronize us.  Because just like our students--whom you tell us to  keep interested--we will tune out of a lecture as well if it is boring/uninformative/repetitive/etc.  Is it even a secret that everyone who had a charged battery was on his computer during the lectures in the summer?

Let us read Delta Autumn and cull the basics from it.  Let us review and build on the material in Ann's class (hopefully in a less-than-daily format, since we'd be assigned large reading passages as well).  It should give us more time to learn more things during the summer (like unit planning, perhaps?).

Alright.  Any questions?