Introductory essay for the three subsequent manuscripts that providing historical analysis since 1865 of In Loco Parentis as a legal, institutional, and social feature of the American college and university campus. I characterize my Introduction as that of a senior scholar who endorses and supports the original and related essays of three younger, new historians of higher education.
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My Greek mythology-obsessed 3-year-old remarked as he splashed in his bath: “It’s as fierce as Poseidon’s waves!”
Here he is reading from Mary Pope Osborne’s version of The Odyssey a few months ago:
Some Facebook friends were asking how we got him so interested in and able to follow Greek myths. Well, first of all, we just give him more of what he asks for, and he kept asking for Greek myths. That is certainly not going to be the case with every kid. H. (now age 8) at age 3 wasn’t as interested, for example.
Anyway, if you did want to introduce a child to Greek mythology (which I’ve done with both of my boys, in approximately the same order but not at the same ages), I can recommend the following. I’ve divided the books into stages, and within a given stage, it might not matter what order you go in. Note that not even stage 1 consists of “baby books.” We didn’t start these until E. was 2, I think, and he didn’t really get into it until he was 3.
STAGE 1
Usborne, Illustrated Stories from the Greek Myths
Never read this one, except maybe particular stories in single volumes, but given Usborne’s track record I’m sure it’s awesome.
Others in the single-volume “Usborne Early Reading” series such as this one but there are several others (Hercules, Jason; these might or might not be included in the above collection).
My five presentations. If you start with these and they like them, great. E. didn’t like them when I tried them out on him before reading any myths. Later, after we read quite a few myth books, he absolutely adored them. So for E. these would have gone in Stage 2.
STAGE 2
The combination of the next two worked very well as a good general intro for H.:
Usborne, Greek Myths (not a baby book, but not as hard as it might look)
E., who didn’t like this one right away, made it through this one later than H. did; still pretty good:
The Gods and Goddesses of Olympus
The various (at least a half a dozen) Graphic Myths & Legends series comix like this one about Hercules.
Whole series by Graphics Universe is highly recommended
This “Step Into Reading” version of the Trojan Horse story.
This is a rather nice one, pretty well-illustrated and well-written:
McElderry Book of Greek Myths
We also read this one but I barely remember it; it was OK; there are doubtless much better options we didn’t read:
Greek Myths and Legends
STAGE 3
D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths
Osborne, Tales from the Odyssey (in two volumes; E. loved this to death, we not only read it but listened to it in the car; H. loved it too, we listened to it two times in the car when he was smaller)
We only listened to this one in the car, but the narrator was awesome and the versions were second to none. Arguably superior to both D’Aulaire and Osborne.
Evslin, Heroes, Gods and Monsters of the Greek Myths
Here’s the book version, which we might pick up.
There are many, many others. These are just the ones we used.
We own several “reference” type introductions to Greek myth, and we find them boring, so I don’t list them. It’s much better to learn about Greek myths by actually reading the stories, rather than lists of facts about gods, etc.
After that…
STEP 4
Percy Jackson books, Black Ships before Troy, Edith Hamilton’s Mythology
STEP 5
The originals in translation; Homer, Hesiod, Apollodorus, Ovid
STEP 6
The originals 
My Greek mythology-obsessed 3-year-old remarked as he splashed in his bath: “It’s as fierce as Poseidon’s waves!”
Here he is reading from Mary Pope Osborne’s version of The Odyssey a few months ago:
Some Facebook friends were asking how we got him so interested in and able to follow Greek myths. Well, first of all, we just give him more of what he asks for, and he kept asking for Greek myths. That is certainly not going to be the case with every kid. H. (now age 8) at age 3 wasn’t as interested, for example.
Anyway, if you did want to introduce a child to Greek mythology (which I’ve done with both of my boys, in approximately the same order but not at the same ages), I can recommend the following. I’ve divided the books into stages, and within a given stage, it might not matter what order you go in. Note that not even stage 1 consists of “baby books.” We didn’t start these until E. was 2, I think, and he didn’t really get into it until he was 3.
STAGE 1
Usborne, Illustrated Stories from the Greek Myths
Never read this one, except maybe particular stories in single volumes, but given Usborne’s track record I’m sure it’s awesome.
Others in the single-volume “Usborne Early Reading” series such as this one but there are several others (Hercules, Jason; these might or might not be included in the above collection).
My five presentations. If you start with these and they like them, great. E. didn’t like them when I tried them out on him before reading any myths. Later, after we read quite a few myth books, he absolutely adored them. So for E. these would have gone in Stage 2.
STAGE 2
The combination of the next two worked very well as a good general intro for H.:
Usborne, Greek Myths (not a baby book, but not as hard as it might look)
E., who didn’t like this one right away, made it through this one later than H. did; still pretty good:
The Gods and Goddesses of Olympus
The various (at least a half a dozen) Graphic Myths & Legends series comix like this one about Hercules.
Whole series by Graphics Universe is highly recommended
This “Step Into Reading” version of the Trojan Horse story.
This is a rather nice one, pretty well-illustrated and well-written:
McElderry Book of Greek Myths
We also read this one but I barely remember it; it was OK; there are doubtless much better options we didn’t read:
Greek Myths and Legends
STAGE 3
D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths
Osborne, Tales from the Odyssey (in two volumes; E. loved this to death, we not only read it but listened to it in the car; H. loved it too, we listened to it two times in the car when he was smaller)
We only listened to this one in the car, but the narrator was awesome and the versions were second to none. Arguably superior to both D’Aulaire and Osborne.
Evslin, Heroes, Gods and Monsters of the Greek Myths
Here’s the book version, which we might pick up.
There are many, many others. These are just the ones we used.
We own several “reference” type introductions to Greek myth, and we find them boring, so I don’t list them. It’s much better to learn about Greek myths by actually reading the stories, rather than lists of facts about gods, etc.
After that…
STEP 4
Percy Jackson books, Black Ships before Troy, Edith Hamilton’s Mythology
STEP 5
The originals in translation; Homer, Hesiod, Apollodorus, Ovid
STEP 6
The originals 
Recently Nicole Kersting wrote a commentary suggesting that teacher evaluation design could benefit from being modeled after engineering design principles. She indicated that a systematic approach to design, coupled with continuous improvements, could make systems stronger and less political. This response addresses several of her assumptions and argues that an engineering approach to improving teacher evaluation systems may not produce desired or expected results.
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This article summarizes major points about the transformation of educational assessment that emerged from the work of Gordon Commission and it presents recommendations to different stakeholders as to needed changes in policy, practice, and research and development.
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This article is a piece of analytic and descriptive commentary based on the work of the Gordon Commission on the Future of Assessment of Education, in which the authors advocate for greater attention to be given to the correlates of human performance in educational measurement.
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The ability to capture data from a wide variety of digital activity should fundamentally change how assessment is approached. Moving from an item to an activity paradigm and from individual to social considerations, along with the integration of learning and assessment, have the potential to transform how we make inferences about students.
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This article discusses various levels of interaction data available in digital environments and the potential to derive systematic measures of students’ learning processes from such interaction data.
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This article presents a working model of the formative assessment process that we believe will be essential for effective implementation of the Common Core State Standards. Assessment for learning rather than testing of achievement is presented as a way of guiding teachers and students through the progressions needed to achieve college and career readiness.
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This article provides a framework for functions and purposes of assessment in K–12 education and advances the notion of purpose drift: the tendency of assessment purposes to evolve and multiply over time. The author argues that validation activities should be more proactive and less reactive to purpose drift, to the extent that this drift is easy to predict.
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This essay presents a dialogue between a new teacher and a former professor, generated when the teacher decided to leave the classroom after two years. Contextualized within the literature of teacher attrition and offering implications for teacher education, the essay explores what it means to be (a) a novice educator in the era of accountability and (b) a teacher educator tasked with preparing new teachers for this challenging climate. The authors share their perspectives in the hopes of starting a discussion about an important issue that remains relatively unexplored in the research literature: the stories of teachers who leave and their former professors who watch them go.
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This commentary questions whether the implementation of the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy in American schools is a way of bridging or deepening the digital divide amongst students of differing socioeconomic backgrounds. It argues that that digital equity with mobile devices cannot be achieved without individual ownership of mobile technologies and concludes by posing a series of potential means of working toward the goal of ownership in schools.
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