This past week has been been a challenging one. At times I didn’t know if I was up or down. These two words FLEXIBLE and ORGANIZED are ringing true for my work as an educator, and for my students in…
9x9x25 #5: Flexible and Organized
read more
4 x 4 x 16 Challenge Articles
Blending the Blended – 9x9x25 Challenge #6
This past week I had a student come to me within issue. Let’s call her “Jane”. Jane was not going to be able to make class today and wanted to find out what she was going to miss. Jane’s …
Trickster Teachers
Last week my mythology class was reading about trickster figures. Tricksters are playful, amoral, charismatic, and, well, tricky. After reviewing typical actions and attitudes of trickster figures, I asked students to form groups, choose a contemporary character (not...
Reflections from a Recovering English Teacher
Since 2004, I have had the same fall responsibilities: lesson planning, classroom prep, staff orientation, lesson planning, student open house, lesson planning, first day jitters, introductions, lesson planning, grading, and exhaustion. Then more lesson planning. At...
Do I have enough content in my course?
Now there is a question I would guess many people have either asked or been asked. For blended and online developments in particular I have this conversation time and time again. Of course there is a particular pedagogical paradigm and …
Can We Treat Our Students Like Adults?
For many of us, our students are first-time college students which means they are first time adults. For many of these students this means this is the first time they are given the chance to choose for themselves. Their whole lives someone has been making all of the...
Resilience
Martin Seligman, in graduate school, worked with dogs who surprised researchers and prompted the term “learned helplessness”. These dogs, upon receiving shocks, simply stopped attempting to get away from the shocks. What stood out to Seligman, however, (as an...
Never Give Them Zeros for a Grade
You may have seen the headline, “Teacher Fired for Giving Students Zeros for not Turning in Assignments”. Certainly great click-bait from a publisher’s standpoint, but what is this really about. At a conference roundtable I attended many years ago, we discussed this...
Would You Please Start Arguing Part 2 of 4
Welcome back to my serial piece--I’ll pick up where I left off last week, on the idea that it is difficult to abandon old techniques and move toward new ones, argumentatively. Something that exacerbates the comment-section mentality is that we’re experiencing...