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Why would a teacher lay down her life for her students? At one level, such bravery is unfathomable. At another, it’s the most sensible thing in the world.
Archive for the ‘Teaching’ Category
November 12th, 2012
Category: Teaching
Mark Kleiman has railed appropriately at presenters of academic talks who read their slides at the audience. But you can do even worse: Read your damn slides while facing the slides and having your back to the audience. If you do that for 80 straight mind-numbing minutes, you will not only give a lousy talk, [...]
July 30th, 2012
Category: Policy Analysis, Teaching
What authority may I legitimately claim, standing at the head of a classroom with a piece of chalk in my hand, when I teach a course on the methods of policy analysis? One possible answer: the authority to say what counts as a valid argument within that specific discipline of thought.
July 25th, 2012
Nicholas Negroponte nears his objective of the $100 educational laptop. What does it mean?
May 10th, 2012
Category: Personal moment, Teaching
My “Art and Despair” seminar came up on our last unit, on resignation and acceptance, last week with Brahms’ Requiem, and we got into a discussion of immortality as a comfort in the face of death. I provoked them a little with Minsky’s question “Does the soul learn?” from The Society of Mind, and the [...]
May 2nd, 2012
Category: Education policy, Teaching
I blogged a couple weeks back about the similarity of college tuition and health care costs (up, up, up). I then linked to story about High Point University, and its highly leveraged play to recruit students. There were several interesting comments about these stories, and many others are weighing in on related issues lately (Josh [...]
December 20th, 2011
At my company (less in my unit of it), teaching is basically treated as a tax you have to pay to do your research, and faculty are hired and promoted for research and encouraged to avoid this tax where possible; indeed, one of our principal recruitment gestures is a reduced teaching load for the first [...]
August 26th, 2011
Category: Handbasket, world going to hell in, Teaching
Professor who closed the laptop of a student surfing the web during class acquitted of battery–and fired.
May 16th, 2011
Category: Teaching, Technology and Society
Last week, I gave grand rounds at a small hospital in Northern California, and they filmed it for medical staff who couldn’t attend in person. A few days later I attended a drug policy conference where every talk and every comment from the floor was filmed. My university has a deal with YouTube to post [...]