This post is the second in a series of reflections on Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, a collection of vignettes by the Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. In the previous post, I had my dander up about Professor Feynman’s ogling of the co-eds. I can see that his creepiness was a distraction—for him and for me—from […]
Teaching
Chair Evaluation of Teaching (vs. SET)
It’s my third annual evaluation season as chair. I’ve progressed, or at least improved my attitude, since the first year. Our school has a reasonable system in place for the annual evaluation of research, one that addresses a big pain point—consistency across disciplines. But that system is not the focus of this post. (If you […]
Apologies to David Brooks: Students Learn From People Who Love Them
My social feeds are circulating a David Brooks column: “Students Learn From People They Love.” The piece cites research from cognitive scientists about how integrated emotions are with learning. The many comments on the NYTimes site wonder whether Brooks would have more accurately said “respect” rather than “love.” Probably, yes, but my read is that […]
Life Among the Savages
In her memoir of young family life, Life Among the Savages, Shirley Jackson tells the story of the outsize influence of a child’s first grade teacher. We get a delicious profile of her daughter Jannie’s Mrs. Skinner: We had been exposed to Mrs. Skinner from about the third day of school, when Jannie came home […]
Mommy, Is Manny a Boy or a Girl?
My sister’s family went to a Red Sox game. This was many years ago when my niece was in the single digits, maybe 8 years old. The players were announced. Manny Ramirez. For some reason, he caught my niece’s attention, and she wanted to know: “Mommy, is Manny a boy or a girl?” This isn’t […]
Roles and Purposes of Higher Education
This year my school worked with the Policy Center on the First Year of College, now known as the Gardner Institute. Campus leadership used Gardner’s guidance to scrutinize our first year students’ experience. Gardner recommends organizing the work around nine committees, one committee for each of the “dimensions” they have identified. One of the dimensions […]
Student Evaluations of Teaching (SET)
One of the instructors in my department came by to see me. She was concerned about her spring semester teaching evaluations from her students (SET, which we call FCQs, for faculty course questionnaires). Now that she had seen the reports, she renewed a concern she had expressed about the chaos of the transition to online […]
How Do You Get Students to Read the Syllabus?
I sent some resources to the new instructors in my division. One of them wrote back with a question, “how do you get students to read the syllabus?” I tried googling it: how do you get students to read the syllabus? Apparently, I am not up the latest “Easter Egg” techniques: hide a request for […]
The Only Way to Learn Something! (or ?)
I saw this advice from James Altucher: The only way to learn something is to have a passionate interest in it, then learn it, then repeat it, then try to teach it to someone else. Altucher is a writer, podcaster, entrepreneur, Internet personality. He’s written self-help books. His Medium tag line is “For some reason, […]