For my sins, I guess, I’m a member of the Berkeley faculty Committee on Courses of Instruction. Things are looking up for this gig, though, because there’s growing interest on campus and at the university level in online instruction, and the committee is starting to seriously deliberate this very interesting issue. Not surprisingly, I guess, [...]
Archive for the ‘Teaching’ Category
Kevin Carey says that college educators are failing to teach students much of anything and concealing the information that would prove it. He’s basically right. But he might be surprised to how supportive college professors might be of efforts to do somethign about it.
Pay cuts are better than layoffs.
In the situation faced by UC faculty, calling them “furloughs” is better than calling them pay cuts.
So I don’t see any moral imperative to act out the idea of a furlough by teaching less.
The Royal Society sacks its education adviser for talking sense about creationism in schools
Not the kind that treats all arguments, and therefore all conclusions, as equally plausible.
The Pope supports academic freedom, as long as professors are careful not to reach the wrong conclusions.
Two of your genial hosts have been having a self-referential episode that readers might enjoy, if only as a Gallagher and Shean routine. I sent out to some colleagues my approximately annual update of a longish memo for students about writing, and Mark suggested I post it. OK, here it is, with some free samples: [...]
Bob Frank exhibits the factor most highly correlated with student evaluations of teaching, which is manifest enthusiasm for his subject matter. Like many of us, especially those of us who teach and preach more technical content, he’s perplexed by the failure of so many students (and, I bet, cocktail party interlocutors) to see how great [...]
Does “paralysis by analysis” have a moral analogue?
Is it dishonest to award “honors” to 80% of a graduating class? Harvard does.