By Robert Talbert. I am emerging from a self-imposed blog exile that happened because of the usual end-of-semester chaos, plus the fact that I am currently teaching my very first online course — a fully online version of our standard Calculus 1 class. More...
By James L. Doti. In a recent Wall Street Journal interview, President Mitch Daniels of Purdue University said, “For decades college tuition has outpaced inflation, forcing students to increase their borrowing.” While this sort of hyperbole is rampant in the media, it’s disconcerting, to say the least, coming from a college president. Daniels claims “tuition has outpaced inflation” for decades. More...
By David J. McCowin. I am an adjunct (part-time) instructor. As such, I receive drastically less pay than full-time faculty members, and I receive zero benefits. Assumption College pays me $3,500 per course, which is more than many other institutions pay. But “more,” in this case, is still not even close to “good.” According to my own conservative calculations, I devote roughly 220 hours to every course I teach – including construction, delivery, administration, and evaluation – which means that my compensation equates to $15.91 per hour (less at other colleges). At Assumption, the department for which I teach typically has very few courses available for adjuncts (at other institutions, the number of adjunct-taught courses is often far higher), so I have never taught more than two courses per semester there. More...
By Patricia Emison. As one of the last cohort of flesh-and-bone tenured teachers of non-STEM courses at the postsecondary level, allow me to express what always ought to have been better understood, in this last light before the machines take over teaching as they have already begun to take over grading. Administrators, we all recognize, have long since been replaced by robots, whose reading is limited to grant applications and teaching evaluations. More...
By Amy Cavender. With finals and commencement just around the corner — or already finished — our thoughts turn toward summer. Some of us will be teaching summer classes; others may be planning travel. By Ryan Cordell. My wife loses her keys often. I don’t mean to cast aspersions; I have plenty of my own quirks and foibles, to be sure. It makes sense, too. We have busy lives, and it’s easy for keys to be thrown in bags or tossed on counters and forgotten—until they’re needed. As a result, though, we spend far too much time, particularly in the mornings, turning the house over in search of the keys that will help us get out the door to work. Read more...By Lee Skallerup Bessette. I’m teaching Introduction to Literature (with a Digital Humanities slant) in the fall, and I’m deciding on tools and approaches to use. One of my favorite activities is annotation, moving towards thinking about critical editions. But I’m at a loss now for what tool or tools to use in my classroom for this activity. Read more...By Ryan Cordell. As we move into summer, so do we move into time (I hope) for more diverse reading. Which is my excuse for having no coherency in my selections this week. The following are just articles that I’ve found of interest over the past few weeks, and I hope some of them will also spark your interest. Read more...
By Allan Metcalf. “The world’s elderly need fed, bathed, their dentures or teeth cleaned, catheters changed, etc.,” a student of mine wrote in a recent paper. And so they do. But does that grammar need changed?
Not if you’re from Pittsfield in the southern part of Illinois, as this student is. Or Pittsburgh, Pa., for that matter. More...
By William Germano. You will recognize the first name as that of one of our greatest novelists, known privately as Mary Ann Evans, author of the immensely satisfying Middlemarch as well as things you were forced to read in high school, like Silas Marner. More...
/https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
