Because so much depends upon the evaluation of a student’s learning and the resulting grade, it is in everyone’s interest to try to make the evaluation system as free from irrelevant errors as possible. Borrowing from the evaluation literature, I propose the four R’s of
In this high-tech era teachers often look askance at blackboards, most of which aren’t even black any more. Blackboards are something math instructors still scribble on, and are good for leaning against, although they dust your clothing and make you sneeze. And we all cringe
In William Wordsworth’s well-known sonnet “The World Is Too Much with Us; Late and Soon,” the titular line’s meaning hinges on two words, the latter of which may initially seem insignificant: “world” and “with.” “World” refers to human affairs; and, of all the definitions for
I have long pondered a phrase I learned from a mentor: “Witness the struggle.” Frances, my mentor, used the phrase when she talked about working with students in emotional pain. She was referring to those students who sometimes lash out in frustration over missed assignments,
I’ve been teaching literature for more than 30 years, and nothing has struck me more during that time than the difficulty of finding just the right discussion question. It’s easy to give out information, which students dutifully take down in notebooks and throw away after
Most faculty schedule at least three office hours per week—that’s 2,700 minutes a semester. If you have 135 students, that’s 20 minutes for each student. Even if you have 270, that’s still 10 minutes per student. Recently I’ve been working to make the most of
Two readings triggered my thinking about contrasting images for education. In Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, Mr. Thomas Gradgrind tells us that education is stuffing facts into the minds of students. The more, the better. The quicker, the better. In current terms he favors “information bombardment.”
A question has been floating around in my head since I started teaching college students: are we supposed to act like swimming instructors or Olympic coaches? The analogy is not as odd as it might seem at first. Don’t we talk about whether students “sink
During the pandemic the support we’ve received from and been able to offer to colleagues has offered a sliver of light during a season of darkness. We’ve had the joy of being there for each other. How could those of us teaching for the first
I dread the moments when I look out into a classroom and see a collection of blank stares or thumbs clicking on tiny keypads: a pool of disengaged students, despite what I thought was a student-centered activity. Recently, I have been considering how teachers (me
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