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 […]
Teaching
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, […]
Since When?
I recently shared a story about Halloween my freshman year of college. I like thinking about those good old days. I made lifelong friends. I am grateful for those friendships every day. Did I get a good education? Maybe. If I didn’t, I own my young-person’s choices. Because, as I have quoted elsewhere on this […]
Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist
I binged on two of Roxane Gay’s books: Bad Feminist and Hunger. Bad Feminist was wise. Hunger was shocking, in an impressively plainspoken way. The essay in Bad Feminist that moved me to post was “Typical First Year Professor.” This incident, in particular: When I was a student listening to a boring professor drone endlessly, […]
Culture of Helplessness?
Lori Isbell has a story that I would file under “you can’t make this stuff up”: Recently, I received an email from a student asking me the name of a writer — a writer whose book we’d been reading for two weeks….I knew that the student owned the book, because I had seen her with […]