Cynthia Miller Coffel

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Papers by Cynthia Miller Coffel

Cynthia M. Miller CV

With departmental honors RESEARCH INTERESTS Multicultural children's and young adult literature S... more

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Review of Normalities: The First Professionally Prepared Teachers in the United States

describes a period in our country that was unusually intellectually lively. The three female teac... more describes a period in our country that was unusually intellectually lively. The three female teachers-Lydia Stow, Mary Swift, and Louisa Harris-this book follows interacted with some of the most famous people of their period, and with some of the most important educational ideas of their time. By telling us about these women-their experiences in the normal school, their early teaching careers, and later adventures in their communities-Kolodny has added interestingly to available information about the careers of the first professionally educated teachers. In 1839, Horace Mann, the Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, and one of a group of elite intellectuals living in Boston at the time, started the first normal school, designed at least in part to "promote standardized and regular teacher preparation in order to produce an assemblage of carefully trained educators to meet the needs of the growing number of common schools" (p. x). Modeled after German and French systems of teacher education, the normal school beat out other systems

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Letters to david

The Missouri Review, 2007

Letters to D avid/Cynthia Coffel A ll through my tw enties, those playful, makeshift years w hen ... more Letters to D avid/Cynthia Coffel A ll through my tw enties, those playful, makeshift years w hen nothing seemed serious or settled, my friendship w ith David w as the most important constant. I w as building w hat I thought of as my teaching career, those young days, and I moved to a new place every tw o or three years: I w orked in a daycare center in Live Oak, California first, then in a school for teenaged mothers in Ogden, Utah; next I taught English as a Second Language at a Catholic college in my home state of Indiana, then high school English in a little tow n in the Catskills. A ll through that time-through each new job, through the cardboard boxes and the packing string, the maps, the too-heavy-for-California coats and the not-right-for-Indiana halter tops, the crosscountry Greyhound trips and the flights on United, my friendship w ith David w as steady. I w rote him long letters describing each new apartment, each new group of students. In his ugly hand, in ballpoint pen, he w rote back about his yearly rafting trip w ith friends from high school, how everybody w as changing, taking grow n-up jobs, getting married, and w hy w asn't he? Long-distance on the phone w e talked late into the night about ex-lovers and sexual guilt, about the hostages in Iran or Reagan's election, about the w ays w e w ere each going to improve our ow n little corners of A merica. I read The Untold Story of the Unions because David told me to, and Chuck Colson's autobiography (" Don't you believe people can change?" he asked); he learned about the Catholic Workers and about Pippi Longstockings from me.

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