These folks are amazing! It’s such an honor to teach them. Similar:AP wins reinstatement to White House events after judge rules government can’t bar its jou…This morning I awoke to YouTube’s live footage of crowds circling a mosque in Mecca. For m…My crowd simulation handles 2000 capsule NPCs at 130fps. I’m really pushing my coding…
My job includes teaching students to read long, complex texts (novels, play scripts, and academic texts.) My job also includes asking students to write researched essays that are longer documents than many of them at first seem comfortable reading. Years after they graduate, students often thank me for what I’ve taught them, and say the…
I still use blogs.setonhill.edu, which I started in 2003. Not for every class, but for most of my discussion-heavy in-person classes. Weblogs@Harvard, as it was then known, was considered pioneering. Facebook didn’t yet exist. Social media was in its infancy. And starting a blog usually required some knowledge of code. Harvard’s blogging platform, now known…
My own students haven’t described encounters like this, but I have encountered students who enter the classroom with the idea that there is a fairly consistent, uniform, organized entity called “the media” that it’s fashionable to distrust. It’s fair to point to specific news stories that got specific facts wrong or that showed bias, but…
According to the NACE 2018 Job Outlook, college seniors are very confident about their professionalism, work ethic, and writing skills. Employers are not so happy with those skills among the applicants they see. The biggest divide was around students’ professionalism and work ethic. Almost 90 percent of seniors thought they were competent in that area, but only…
I spent about 30 seconds eyeballing the hexcode colors for Starfleet uniforms so that, from now on, when I’m marking papers, my Canvas interface will remind me just a little bit of Star Trek. Where do you create joy? Captain’s log… supplemental entry. It’s not a perfect match, but the blue and gold are hard…
Sometimes my students get nervous because I ask them to learn writing by, you know, writing. For some other subjects, it makes sense to ease students into the work, having them memorize facts to recall for points on multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank quizzes. But writers gotta write. That means taking risks, and occasionally stumbling. In a…
After I read Mark Sample’s blog post “What about Blogging Keeps Me from Blogging,” I tried to post a comment lamenting that I miss blog comments. I ran into these fun problems. Similar:AP wins reinstatement to White House events after judge rules government can’t bar its jou…By Inferno's Light #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5,…
Helping my students understand how my role as a college literature teacher differs from the role of a high school English teacher is a sometimes daunting task. Preparing students for a standardized reading test is completely unlike teaching them about a work of classic literature. In an English class addressing The Great Gatsby, depending on student ability…
In my freshman writing class, my job is to teach students how to write a researched essay. I encourage students to pick topics that interest them, but I warn them that if they go into their project already convinced that one answer is correct (that euthanasia should/should not be legal, that abortion is murder/healthcare, that…
Above is my response to a meme that makes some shaky assumptions about the purpose of an English classroom. Exploring the intent of the author is a huge part of the English discipline, but it’s far from the only way to study (or teach) literature. Author intent, new historicism, reader-response, structuralism… the list goes on.…
When a Facebook friend asked for tips on teaching a large class, I inventoried what I’ve learned about the flipped classroom. For the classes I teach on a regular basis, sometimes online and sometimes in-person, I’ve had many opportunities to develop stand-alone resources that I reuse. For example, I’ve recorded some stand-alone audio lectures on…
In my lit and writing classes, I regularly encounter STEM students who are frustrated because I won’t deliver a lecture that tells them “what the poem means” and then give them points for spitting back the “correct answer.” Likewise, when I teach a math unit in my journalism class, I regularly encounter word-oriented students who…
Democrats wildly over-estimate the percentage of Republicans who make over 250k a year (estimated: 44%; actual: 2%). Republicans are almost as bad when it comes to predicting the percentage of Democrats who are LBG (estimated: 38%; actual: 6%) and atheist/agnostic (estimated: 36%; actual: 9%). Both groups were a little closer to the mark when asked…
We learned that though a degree made a big difference in the success of an entrepreneur, the field it was in and the school that it was from were not significant factors. YouTube chief executive Susan Wojcicki, for instance, majored in history and literature; Slack founder Stewart Butterfield in English; Airbnb founder Brian Chesky in the…
One of the benefits of working at Seton Hill is they provide me with a MacBook Air and an iPad. I turn them in every few years for an upgrade. The computer the kids use for gaming is a Mac Mini that I bought in 2011, with a virtual machine that runs Windows. It has served…
John Stubbs reviews Stephen Grenblatt’s Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power The psychology and spectacle of villainy and the intoxicating nature of power clearly preoccupied Shakespeare. The grandeur, amoral freedom of action and sheer theatrical potential of tyrants must have moved and excited him. The case of a confirmed murderous dictator, after all, especially one with the…
“Parents normally set these rules to promote their children’s scholastic development and to make sure that they invest enough time in schoolwork. But that evidently can also backfire,” commented Hargittai. But why exactly? The study can’t say definitively, but I emailed Hargattai to see what hypotheses she might have. “One possibility would be that such…
A few years ago, I told myself I would start making a bigger deal about such things. It’s too easy to obsess over the students who don’t care, don’t like how I teach X, stopped submitting the assignments, didn’t apply my feedback, etc. I do wish I could get more students to feel grateful before…
This story offers evidence to challenge the stereotype that under employed humanities majors are stuck working in service jobs years after graduation. STEM jobs are indeed the most marketable, but a recent study found that after five years, business, health professions, education and psychology make up far more of the underemployed graduates than English or…