This article first appeared in the December 2011 issue of The Teaching Professor.
I can’t remember when it happened; I just know that it did. I changed vocations in 2003, becoming a full-time academic after being president of a heat treating company in Ohio.
I have a brown wicker chair on my back porch. It is nestled in a little nook, shaded by the overhang of my roof and the foliage of Douglas firs and oaks. My neighbor’s water features, two little fountains and streams, gently murmur. One
Every January, millions of people around the world resolve to do things differently. Some want to eat better. Some want to keep in better touch with friends. Others want to travel more. Many want to get more physically active. A lot of these resolutions quickly
The animals went in two by two to be saved from the flood. To some students, doing poorly on the first exam is also a calamity of biblical proportions. A bad first grade is often nearly impossible to recover from if no changes to studying
I probably shouldn’t admit this, but when I was just beginning my teaching career, I had one clear goal on the first day of class: scare the living crap out of my students.
I’m exaggerating, but only a little. And while I’m tempted to say,
Like many college faculty, my first teaching experience was in graduate school. I was woefully unprepared to teach but blissfully ignorant of that fact. I had sat through three informal meetings on how to teach given by fellow graduate students who had taught a few
Books and journals on college teaching are chock full of best practices, compelling activities, and successful ideas for the classroom. These resources do help, but also helpful are experiences at the unsuccessful end of the teaching spectrum. I am referring to clinkers – those best
In the face of a long, protracted pandemic with reports of exhaustion streaming in from all quarters, many educators may feel they were not able to teach as effectively as they would have liked to. This is the perfect time to revisit (or ask anew)
Why this article is worth discussing: For most teachers, change keeps their courses fresh and invigorated. It’s an antidote to all about teaching that doesn’t change: content fundamentals, courses taught, passive students, exams, assignments, and grading—a list we can polish off with committee work. Despite
Most teaching careers last for years; for many of us, a lifetime. With noses to the grindstone, we don’t usually take stock of where we are in light of where we’ve been. We know that we aren’t teaching as we did in the beginning. The
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