In the late 1850s students at Haverford College had to pass exams in three departments: English, Classics, and Mathematics.[1] They demonstrated their mastery in these divisions through a grueling set of exams at the end of the senior year.[2] First they had to pass a battery of private exams that covered all the subjects and […]
Tag: Teaching
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Eratosthenes and Second Graders
One recent sunny afternoon, I took a bunch of exercise balls with little sticks taped to them to the local grammar school where I met a class of second graders. As part of my war on the flat earth myth, I had encouraged their teacher to read Kathryn Lasky’s The Librarian Who Measured the Earth […]
Each time I teach Collecting Nature & Displaying Authority we take three field trips to local museums. Our first outing took us to the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Megan, one of the Visitor Services Assistants, led us around on an informative tour and engaging tour of the permanent exhibition, Making Modernity. The students were pensive and […]
K–12 science education in the U.S. has a new set of standards, the Next Generation Science Standards. The new standards are supposed to set uniform benchmarks for teaching science and encourage depth of investigation rather than broad coverage. Four organizations spearheaded the process and various states signed on to help generate the standards. Unfortunately, despite […]
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The MORU as Precursor to the MOOC
MOOCs are all the rage right now—academics generally upset or unimpressed and disruptors generally optimistic. What intrigues me is how familiar the kook-aid (sorry, typo) Kool-aid tastes. The latest technology becomes the mechanism to democratize learning, to bring the best college and university lectures to the underprivileged, and to expand learning to hundreds of thousands […]
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The Importance of Style
Without further comment: The American university teacher who gives honor grades to students who have not yet learned to write English, for industrious compilations of facts or feats of memory, is wanting in professional pride or competence. Samuel E. Morison, History as a Literary Art (1946), 3.
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More on David Levy’s Delusions
My post yesterday joined a chorus of voices pointing out David Levy’s many delusions and errors. Here are a few of the interesting ones: Attacking Community Colleges by Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber The Last Enclosures> at Timothy Burke’s Easily Distracted More Accusations of Professor Laziness at NeuroDOJO In Which the Professor Expresses Her Frustration […]
In his recent Op-Ed in the Washington Post, “Do College Professors Work Hard Enough?” David Levy parrots banal misconceptions about what is required of college faculty and how those faculty spend their time. He reduces a faculty career to teaching and assumes that teaching is nothing more than the hours spent in the classroom and […]