Great news, Montana! I'm so happy that you all have finally gotten some help from your school.
Sorry things are not quite so rosy for you, Val. That "this is what the book says" just makes me cringe!
I taught in a university department that had lots of interdisciplinary offerings, so we had students with many different majors in some of our classes. Over the years, several colleagues and I noticed, to our collective dismay, that the largest single source of attitudes like "but the book says..." or "just tell me what I need to know for the test, I'm not interested in anything else" came from the education students. (There were lots of good ed. students, too, of course, and of course this was only one school in one province at one particular point in time, but still...) The phenomenon was marked enough that we really did wonder what kinds of things were going to be going on in classrooms around the province as the years went by. My personal favourite horror story was the young woman who proudly told me that she had managed her programme over the five years of her degree such that she was going to be able to graduate without ever having written a research paper! She is now teaching middle-school English. Sigh.
