edwired: Don’t get me wrong–I’m a firm believer in the value of the liberal arts over the long term and have no interest in teaching history as a purely job preparation program. But those who want to draw a line in the sand in the defense of the liberal arts (Job preparation has no, NO place in our curriculum!) make that case with zero data to support their arguments.
Leave a CommentTag: teaching
HASTAC: Nobel Prize Winner vs TA With a Clicker? Who Wins the Teaching Award? If you guessed the Nobel Prize winning physicist, you guessed wrong. In a fantastic new study, it turned out the way students in a 250-person lecture class really learned the nitty gritty of the physics was not when the famous scientist lectured at them but when the TA engaged them with a clicker. This is music to my student-designed, peer-assigned, peer-assessed, interactive ears! Here’s the url to the article that describes the study: http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2011/05/12/study_its_not_tea… All the research shows that the best way to learn is to…
Leave a CommentTenured Radical: Needless to say, one powerful message In The Basement of the Ivory Tower delivers is how profoundly different the lives of academics are, not just because our students are sorted and tracked at an early age by testing, poverty and race, but because many of the students in most need of close attention and the time to reflect, read and learn to express themselves are the least likely to have that opportunity. Furthermore, a community college campus may be running two entirely different schools in the same space. By day, tenured faculty and long-term adjuncts teach students who…
Leave a CommentTenured Radical: Word out of Florida today is that a bill that would prohibit the granting of tenure at state and community colleges went through a legislative committee yesterday and is headed to the state senate. Faculty would work on annual contracts but administrators would not; only new and untenured faculty would be affected by the law. So it is no accident that community college presidents, who are protected under the proposed legislation, understand what a disaster this policy is. It worth emphasizing that the right has produced a new strategy that is remarkably consistent: going after “workers” in the…
Leave a CommentSalon.com: We need our universities, public and private, to be places where academics feel free to pursue whatever line of thought they want. If that pursuit spills over to action, we should be careful about what restrictions we try to enforce. Better, by far, to err on the side of freedom, because that, theoretically, is what this country is all about.
Leave a CommentLast week’s guest post on the digital humanities and the classics really got me thinking about academic outreach (both from inside academia to those outside and spreading information about digital tools and projects within academia). Dan Cohen furthered my thinking with a good post about blogging as a medium and the resistance of blogging academics to take on the blogger moniker. While these posts encourage academics to venture into the “public sphere,” one recent news item (William Cronon and the Wisconsin GOP’s inquiry into his emails) highlights the dangers of academics moving outside the ivory tower and the importance of…
Leave a Comment[Editor’s Note: This week’s post comes from my good friend Bill Briggs. Bill majored in Latin at the University of Michigan before moving onto law school, also at the University of Michigan. As someone not completely isolated within the ivory tower of graduate school and with experiences outside of history, I thought Bill could bring a new perspective, which I think he does quite nicely. To the chagrin of some, I will return to writing next week.] Could Better Utilization of the Digital Humanities save the Classics? Full disclosure: I know very little about the Digital Humanities. In fact, my…
Leave a CommentWith some fudging on how many items can be in a “top five”, here are my top six “top five” lists (in no particular order): 1. Top Five History Books (Listed in the order in which I read them) 1. Rats, Lice & History: The book that really made historical thinking click for me in my first history class freshman year. 2. A Midwife’s Tale: The book professors have assigned to me in three different courses, a great microhistory. 3. Nature’s Metropolis: The book that has stuck with me for years–I just really like Cronon’s approach. 4. Nation among Nations:…
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