This is my seventh post for the 9x9x25 Challenge.
This evening while I was waiting at the airport to board my plane to Toronto for TESS 2018, I ran into one of my former students. I taught her when she …
Seeing My Students Soar
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4 x 4 x 16 Challenge Articles
Would You Please Start Arguing Part 3 of 4
Where we left off last week is that people have trouble constructively disagreeing and prefer to shut down and dismiss instead of hearing out or seeking out debate and opposition. In fact, some so distrust these actions that they actively distrust journalistic media...
Using Reflection in the Classroom
Last Friday’s Friday Forum focused on using reflection and metacognition in the classroom. We talked about using student reflection for two purposes: 1) instructor’s information--we can use student reflection to assess learning, pacing, and/or achievement of outcomes,...
Supermassive Black Holes (like my class).
Reading a few other posts from this week and the last gets me thinking about how we "do" education. For students to be successful (and complete on time), they really need to bet taking at least 4 classes a semester. Now we know that for many students this is almost...
The Great Calculus Exam Throw-down
To a bunch of high school students railing against the system in the 70’s, Jimmy Reeves was “The Guy”. You know the type, long wavy brown hair, a trimmed but significant beard, often clothed in jeans and sandals with a wonderfully impish smile. A common enough...
The Tribe of Late-Night Wanderers
In Sherman Alexie's novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, the main character at one point lists all the tribes he belongs to including the Spokane Indian tribe, the tribe of basketball players, the tribe of small-town kids, the tribe of...
NMC Frequency: Season 1, Episode 3: Don’t Should on People
Stages of Insensitivity Turned Teaching Moments
Inclusivity practices should be involuntary, but sadly, we live in a world where that is not the case. I had a difficult moment in the classroom last week as I was trying to get students to think about what it would be like to be… (basically someone other than...
My Class is Not the Center of the Universe
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...