There are ways to raise a child’s test scores that have nothing to with helping that child learn. In the past 10 years I have seen far more students — even the most capable, most brilliant students — paralyzed with fear about grades. In high school, you got good grades if you followed instructions and…
Transcript: Me: (Starts writing a routine email for textbook adoption committee.) Me: (Accidentally paraphrases part of Roy Batty’s “Tears in rain” monologue.) Me: (Checks IMDB to refresh my memory of the full quote.) Me: (Checks Blade Runner Wiki to confirm umlaut in Tannhäuser Gate.) Me: (Looks up Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser.) Me: What, what was…
It’s a myth that humanities majors don’t care about post-graduation employment. What changed was the safety valve of subsequent law school enrollment.
Law school was long the default post-graduation plan for majors in qualitative fields. As long as you had the prospect of a lucrative legal career after college, you could safely major in English or poli sci. Those students didn’t ignore the vocational imperative; they just postponed it. And for a long time, that worked pretty well.
But the Great Recession, combined with AI and offshoring, did a number on law as a career option.
This is an important time to teach people what journalists do and why it matters. “The media” is much larger than “journalists devoted to the objective coverage of the news.” If you don’t like the slant, or the shallowness, or the opportunism of the media you run across, then check out several different sources, including…
These folks are amazing! It’s such an honor to teach them. Similar:Voiceover artist Gayanne Potter urging ScotRail to remove her voice from new AI announceme…Why Even Try if You Have A.I.? Now that machines can think for us, we have to choose wheth…Spring 2025 Final Grades Submitted!The Missing Will, by Agatha Christie (WAOB Audio Theatre)'Most…
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:Voiceover artist Gayanne Potter urging ScotRail to remove her voice from new AI announceme…Why Even Try if You Have A.I.? Now that…
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…