One of the things I love about an academic life is how many chances for reflection, renewal, and rebirth there are. Each term is a chance for rebirth, and we also get the rhythms of the calendar year. It is following…
Tag: pedagogy
What Wearing a Fitbit Taught Me about Teaching
I started wearing a Fitbit fitness tracker so I could log my running progress more easily, but wearing it all day, I started to notice a pattern: on days when I teach, I walk miles further than on days when I…
Should we burn our rubrics?
Steven Conn’s post on “The Rise of the Helicopter Teacher” at the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Conversation blog raises important points about students looking for a precise series of steps to follow and instructors who, due to various institutional…
Trigger Warnings in Higher Education
Over the weekend, trigger warnings hit the mainstream with a New York Times article about recent calls from university students for trigger warnings on syllabuses. Many of the responses I have seen online assume that such requests are about students wanting…
I’ll Burn My Syllabus
A pedagogy that cannot respond to change is at best a zombie pedagogy. Monday morning I came in to my office to learn that Seamus Heaney had died over the weekend. Because one of my goals in my Introduction to…
Near-Disaster Pedagogy
Sometimes the best classes happen when you start out thinking the whole thing is going to fall apart. I finished off this week—my first full week at the College of the Marshall Islands—with a lesson that began that way. I…