Preface for Instructors

Like its predecessor, Our Times~3 is a collection of contemporary non-

fiction and short fiction intended for use in composition courses. This wealth

of very recent writing -- most of it published since 1991 and drawn from

virtually every important American periodical -- provides an intriguing and

distinctive view of life in America today.

This third edition contains sixty-seven selections, fifty-seven of which

are new. The readings are grouped into twenty-two units that treat many of

the dominant themes, issues, and ideas of our time. A number of these topics

pertain directly to the everyday lives of today s students: the difficulties of

parent-teenager communication, the problems of conflicting identities, the

obsession with physical appearance, and the significance of personal names.

Represented, too, are a variety of perspectives on some of our country s most

compelling social and political issues- AIDS, the homeless, gun control,

animal rights, immigration.

Articles on new and important issues have been added to this edition,

many of them revolving around gender and education. Though gender issues

surface throughout the book, several units are devoted exclusively to such

issues. New units cover the significance of gender differences, the debate

over sexual harassment, concern over a feminist backlash, and the fledgling.

men s movement. On education, Our Times~3 expands its previous coverage,

of three topics that have continued to command enormous media attention:

the canon controversy, free speech in the classroom, and multiculturalism.

This edition also features new thematic units on virtual reality, New Age

religion, and paranormal experiences.

A word about the length of these chapters. In contrast to most themat-

ically arranged readers, which contain a small number of broad categories,

Our Times/3 features a large number of tightly focused units, most with

only two or three selections that directly address each other. For example,

instead of one large chapter on education, Our Times~3 presents smaller

units on the canon, free speech, and multiculturalism. The advantages of

using these smaller bite-size units in a composition course should be imme-

diately apparent to "instructors: they permit a wider range and variety of

topics to be covered in a syllabus; they allow for more focused discussion

and writing; and they can be adequately handled in one or two class periods.

New to this edition are two expanded chapters designed to be used for