Primarily because we read an article on Texas Tech's unique program for freshman writing this week in my 505b class, I have administrative and infrastructural concerns on my mind. In that vein, I read the Richard Miller piece, and his video with some of the specific issues regarding what we will be teaching and what will count as "work" in the coming years. For some background Texas Tech uses an online essay dropbox and breaks TA work into two main chores: teaching and grading. For example, some TAs grade and teach, while other perform only one of these tasks. Students write a lot more papers (somewhat traditional papers, I imagine) and when they turn those essays in to through the system (it's called ICON), at least 2 TAs will assess it and provide comments. All TAs teach the same material and only meet with their class (35 or more students) once a week. Suffice to say, this program is nearly the complete opposite of our program here at Purdue.

In considering Kristine Blair's essay on what should count toward tenure, and in considering the Rutgers program that we saw a short video of in class today, I find myself completely unsure of what will happen in our profession in the future. Blair claims that "technological literacy and technology in teaching need to be common topics in the general assessment of candidates for tenure and promotion," but the opportunities to create these types of documents and to do those kinds of teaching activities change completely with regard to these programs. At Rutgers, faculty might change their mind and start valuing "digital teaching" more, but at Texas Tech there might not even be an opportunity to do that kind of work. Additionally, where digital teaching appears to be given a higher purpose and more credibility at Rutgers, at Texas Tech, it sounds as if their program "ghettoizes" comp teaching yet again.

And given these possible futures, I would certainly take Rutgers, if only because there are more opportunities within the system there to do more and more interesting work with freshman composition. That, and Texas Tech is probably in Texas and I don't fancy scorpions in my boots.