Nov 12, 2018
You’re probably curious about WHY I would bother to do such a crazy, stressful, unnecessary thing, but I’ll going to start with the HOW instead. I’m pretty good at faces, but terrible at names. So to compensate, I use all the usual tricks everyone already knows, like...
Nov 5, 2018
Although I quickly go through all my policies on the first day of class, I don’t expect my students to remember, say, what my absence policy is, or what my late work policy is—let alone minutiae like how much each unit is weighed, grade-wise. Why should they remember...
Oct 29, 2018
Once upon a time, when I was a bright and shiny new graduate student teacher at the University of Tennessee, I was assigned an office with two veteran instructors. Both women had been there for decades; both were best described as “old school” in their outlooks about...
Oct 22, 2018
If you teach a class where you have lots of group activities, as I do, you inevitably face the issue of how to divide the class up. If your class already clumps into prickly social pods, then letting them group themselves risks replicating the same social order. But...