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…
As an American studying in Toronto during the Clinton administration, I encountered some non-negligible anti-American bias. I learned to pronounce the last letter of the alphabet “zed” when I was spelling my name. When I sang “ahh-men” in a church choir, the music director stopped the rehearsal to express his surprise that I hadn’t sung…
Am I wise now? At an event for encouraging graduate student research, a 26yo grad student said she had just heard the term “impostor syndrome,” and she asked how long she’d have to be in the profession before she got over her fears that she was just faking it and didn’t belong. I looked her…
I love STEM. My SAT score for math was exactly the same as verbal. When I was in grad school, struggling with Sausserian semiotics and Beowulf in the original Old English, I taught myself C++, Turbo Pascal, and Java for fun. For some project I was coding I learned how to do 3D matrix transformations…
Today one of my students gave a final presentation in the form of a branching hypertext (akin to the “Choose Your Own Adventure” novels). On the opening screen, the voice of the professor welcomes the students to the course, announces a the major term project, and then immediately dismisses the class. During the Q&A afterwards,…
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Today’s students have also lived most of their lives in the shadow of a systemic financial collapse. Some of us can still remember the extent to which the worldview of our parents or grandparents was shaped by having grown up during the Great Depression. While the Great Recession was objectively not as severe, it has…
I used to print a lot. I have enough tote bags. I found more stuff for my box of once-loved tools. It felt so good throwing away all the papers having to do with that one thing. If spiders had to crawl into one box and die, I can forgive them for choosing that other…
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