ANOTHER REASON FOR MY CAREER DESPAIR

Amongst the plethora of nearly content-free requirements for public school teachers is a little exam called the "Reading Instruction Competence Assessment (R)." It's known as RICA (but oughta be RICO) in the field, where folks seem to think acronyms are adequate disguises for bullshit.

An exerpt:
Domain II: Developing phonological and other linguistic processes
Content Area 3: Phonemic Awareness
"...teacher promotes students' understanding that words are made up of sound and achieves this goal by delivering appropriate, motivating instruction, both implicitly and explicity, in auditory awareness and sound discrimination, phoneme awareness (rhyme, blend, substitute, segment, and delete using phonemes, onsets, rimes, letters, letter combinations, syllables and morphemes), and word awareness (recognition of word boundaries)."

How is this done? According to the sample exam question regarding Domain II, Content Area 3, students should cut letters out of sandpaper.

It costs $360 to take this exam.

As the CCPC aptly put it, "Some fields just shouldn't allow people to get a Ph.D."