When news broke of the Margory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting on Valentine’s Day 2008, students and faculty at the small liberal arts college where I taught at the time were catapulted out of the pastoral slumber and relative safety of our tiny rural
The first day of class is a big deal. Just as there is only one chance at love at first sight, teachers like us only have one chance to demonstrate of each class. As Sarah Rose Cavanagh (2016) writes, “On the first few days
Whenever a restaurant asks him for a credit card to schedule a reservation, New York Times food critic Pete Wells writes, “I hear several messages, none of them warm and fuzzy. [The practice] says that I’m not trustworthy. . . . It says that a reservation isn’t
“I’d do things a lot differently if I just had fewer students.”
Have you ever thought or said this? This sentiment has been voiced to me over and over again by attendees in faculty development workshops and by graduate student instructors I have supervised. Truth
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We all do it. The semester is drawing to a close, the students are tired, we’re tired. There’s one more assignment to hand out, that major project that’s supposed to somehow capture from the entirety of students’ learning from the past semester. Back in week
Imagine signing up to take a really exciting trip. It could be roaming the African savanna, strolling the Himalayan foothills, or diving on the Great Barrier Reef. You are anticipating all you will see and do, learn, and discover. But when you arrive to start
This fall, faculty will face an increased range of preparation in their students. If you’ve been teaching awhile, you have a sense of the degree to which your students are differently prepared: some know the conventions of citation better than others; some have greater spatial
Psychologists and educators have studied learning for well over 100 years, and we still don’t know the specific conditions that result in learning. If we did, then teaching would be easy. A teacher would simply recreate the specific conditions, and students would always learn. We
I probably shouldn’t admit this, but when I was just beginning my teaching career, I had one clear goal on the first day of class: scare the living crap out of my students.
I’m exaggerating, but only a little. And while I’m tempted to say,
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