Those in academe have no doubt heard that in the face of a tight budget, SUNY-Albany has cut several departments and the tenured professors in them. French, Italian, classics, Russian and theater will no longer be programs at the flagship state college in New York. Stanley Fish has an interesting column describing this development, noting…
> In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, Susan Engel, the director of the teaching program at Williams College decries the awful state of the reliance of our educational system on standardized tests. I am very sympathetic to this view, but for different reasons than Engel. She sees the rote memorization that current…
>I am now reading Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft (original essay with same points, NYT review) and am finding it very interesting, if a little simplistic and categorical, and the evidence too anecdotal (I guess that’s what you get from a philosopher: “Here, take this situation, let me reason about it, and make generalizations about all…
>I have a response to an article on learning styles from Teacher MagazineHere is the original article, and here is the link for my response, which you need a username and password to the site for, so the gracious editors have allowed me to post it here as well. By the way, you can sign…
> Given that I am both an early adopter, and a college teacher, I have been thinking lately about integrating the latest social networking sites into my classes. First, I am going to describe the best known (to me of course) social networking sites, how they function (very very briefly, for other better intros, check…
>I think this is a great little piece on storytelling, the value of failure, and how to get good at something. I am going to find some excuse to make my students watch it.
> Fool’s Paradise: The Unreal World of Pop Psychology, by Stewart Justman. Ivan R. Dee, September, 2005. $27.50 You have heard of Dr. Phil, you probably have friends who have adopted the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, you may have even nodded blandly upon hearing that Men are from Mars and Women are from…
> My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student, by Rebekah Nathan. Cornell, September 2005, $24 While the “Ivory Tower” of higher education in American is often faulted for being out of touch with the country around it, it is an open secret among academics that many are similarly out of touch…
