158 ❯ STEP 4. Review the Knowledge You Need to Score High
— Support for facts is tested, reliable, and authoritative.
— The speaker does not confuse appeals to logic and emotion.
— Opposing views are represented in a fair and undistorted way.
— The argument reflects a sense of audience.
— The argument reflects an identifiable voice and point of view.
— The piece reflects the image of a speaker with identifiable qualities (honesty, sincerity,
authority, intelligence, etc.).
As practice, read the following editorial, which appeared in a recent teachers’
newsletter.
Misters King and Prince could not have picked a more ironic day to have their anti-
teacher tirade printed in Today’s News than on Tuesday, January 13. Here were Matt
King, executive director of the conservative magazine The Right Position, and Ray
Prince, the chief economist for the conservative Small Business Conference, showing
their poisonous fangs in their hissy-fit against the state’s teachers’ union and the state’s
education department.
Here were two cobras from the antiteacher snake pit posturing about the need to
end tenure and to create charter schools. These, said the two vipers, are among the steps
“needed to revitalize education in our area and across the state.” Later in their column,
they continued with “declining student performance in recent years” is indicative of
poor teaching quality.
May I direct King and Prince to pages A5 and A28 of this very same Today’s
News edition. In this article were the names of 74 (4 of them from New High School)
Intel competition semifinalists out of a total of 144 in our state. With about 50% of
the state’s semifinalists, this and our neighboring county had MORE winning contes-
tants and MORE participants than any other region in the country. This is MORE
than half the national total of 300... [and] “more than six times as many as the
second-ranked state, which had 21 semifinalists and the third-ranked state, which
had 19.”
Hmmm... now, let me think. Which speaks more loudly about teacher quality
and student motivation: the negative nagging of King and Prince or the positive profes-
sionalism and performance represented by the Intel story? I daresay—no contest. And,
this type of professional proficiency and dedication is part and parcel of the standards
and goals of ALL our state teachers.
They would have to count the extraordinary number of national, state, and
local awards our professionals and their pupils have earned. They would have to
count the number of scholarships, volunteer hours, and AP courses our students
have amassed. They would have to listen to a litany of academic awards,
associations, and degrees with which our teachers are connected. They would have
to read the hundreds of thank-you letters former students have written to their
teachers.
They would have to acknowledge that their scaly agenda needs to be shed.
Rather than casting a “shadow over education” in this state, our teachers shine a
bright light on the snake pits created by ignorance and negativity.