As I’m teaching four classes this semester, something I haven’t done for a while, I figured it was time to up my organizational game just a little… and give website readers a sense of how I organize my classes along with the tools I use. Tools: What Goes With Me Into the Classroom As my…
Read More Setting up classes for a new semester: My processIn other words: Did I waste a lot of time? I don’t think the project I described in a previous post was a waste of time at all — there are two ways in which I think of the project: The mere act of going through the abstracts pointed out to me the articles that…
Read More Followup: Why bother to have abstracts for all my journal articles?I’m not going to rehash here the myriad debates about what Artificial Intelligence (AI) will do to education and colleges. There’s been enough electrons and ink spilled about that, with more to come. I want to focus on one aspect that ties in well with the typical academic’s tendency toward imposter syndrome — the fear…
Read More FONK, not FOMOToday happens to be a “work from home” day, given the heat in Georgia and that my pressing matters can be dealt with by email.[1]I say this fully recognizing the blessing of having a job where I can do my work remotely. Not everyone is so fortunate. Email is the joy and curse of many…
Read More What to do on a “it’s too hot to work in the office” dayLet’s be honest: Most students don’t want to read assignments, let alone for a course such as research methods. Typically, only 20-30% of students will read their assignments [1] See Kerr, M. M., & Frese, K. M. (2017). Reading to learn or learning to read? Engaging college students in course readings. College Teaching, 65(1), 28-31.…
Read More Rethinking reading assignmentsI have to admit this is so brilliant and I wish I had thought of it. But I didn’t. Here’s the idea: hand out your syllabus and have students annotate it. Let them mark up the lessons, ideas, thoughts, assignments that went well and that didn’t go well. Or, an alternate way of doing it:…
Read More A different way of evaluation at the end of the semesterI probably subscribe to way too much stuff, but that’s a matter for another post. 🙂 One of my subscriptions is to The Teaching Professor, a publication for college professors designed to get people to reflect upon their teaching. They have a parallel site called “Faculty Focus” which is free, and does have good material…
Read More How do we make students “teachable?”Some of my former teaching assistants would laugh because my desk is relatively clean right now. In addition to the things you would expect (file drawers, tissues), there are a couple of other things I keep on my desk to remind me about various things: Yes, I’ve been known to like the Peanuts cartoon strip…
Read More What’s sitting on my desk now…I suppose one of the reasons that it’s easy to have a full inbox is because there might just be that good article that’s worth saving for a class or another reason. So what do I do when finding such articles? My new answer: save them to DevonThink and my database for that class. Just…
Read More Teaching Workflow Example: Email to DevonThinkAs I mention elsewhere on this site, I’ve been slowly trying to get electronic copies of all my articles since not all of my journals were able to make the trip from Minnesota to Georgia. And let’s just say that some of the predictions came true a little earlier than intended, and some of the…
Read More How well do old journal articles hold up?