I get tired of hearing people ask how many hours I teach then say, “God. I wish I only had to work 15 hours a week.” Bill Self, who coaches KU Basketball, has 40 games a year, and each game…
Advice for students from Comp 1 Profs: part 2
Dave Davis, veteran Prof, provides this advice.
Advice for students in comp -from other profs part 1
Prof. Mathew Schmeer writes: A Few Important Notes About This Class & How I Teach It You are required to do every last iota of the reading and writing assigned, exactly in the format requested in this syllabus, and it…
Andragogy boost from Twitter
We need to write revisions to the natural narratives to see stories from other point of view. I’ve had students do this in the past, but have fallen out of the practice. I recently read on Twitter, “We write from…
Smartphones in class
“Working while receiving texts or email reduces workers’ performance IQ by 10 points“: From the conservative but reliable The Economist. “Study: Allowing smartphones in class lowers grades–even for students who don’t use them” from BigThink.com, a website whose credibility and…
Technology, social media and mental health
I have found, or perhaps my family has informed me, that heavy use of social media on my phone makes me short tempered and unhappy. This is particularly true of my use of Twitter. I had an account I rarely…
When Students Tell Me Things I Have Asked Them to Document
Like: anticipated absences they think deserve excuse, reasons, excuses, mitigating circumstances. Talk is cheap. I only have so much working memory – and documenting or remembering things constitutes mental labor. This labor, and the stress attached, is the student…
Late April, Guns and Schools
We play a game in some classes where we list historical dates and others guess what happened. We often learn that revolutions tend to happen in the summer, and that school shootings cluster around the 3rd week in April. A…
RateMyProfessor: Marketing, Assessment and Reliability.
A student journalist contacted me yesterday and asked about my feelings on the accuracy of feedback on a popular crowd sourced website. They approached me because I had the highest number of student evaluations (206 at this moment). My feelings…
Campus Wide Sustainability Contest.
Every year JCCC Sustainability holds a contest for student ideas. Each semester they fund these projects AND award cash (? – cav. card) prizes. See website here for more details. This semester I’d like one of my student groups to…