learning
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sharing leadership with students
I have mixed feelings about a recent attempt of mine to share more leadership with students in the classroom. This past semester, I taught a new course on personal narrative. In this course, we read the memoir Angela’s Ashes; I decided to structure our discussion of the book as a series of seminars. I divided… Continue reading
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some thoughts on student feedback
In some of my courses, I have tried to ask students for more frequent anonymous feedback – midterm assessments, for example, in addition to the usual end-of-term evaluations. I have often found, however, that the feedback doesn’t teach me much that I don’t already know through simple observation. This might say something about the kinds… Continue reading
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spare the rod: part two: primary vs. secondary relationships
To clarify the shift in my thinking, let me point out an important development that has taken place in my relationship to my profession. My first teaching job was as an assistant English teacher at a tiny French primary school outside Ottawa. I was nineteen, and had just left my home province for the first… Continue reading
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spare the rod: part one
It has become clear to me that many of my students need a firm hand. Now, why you would reach the age of 17 or 18, make the decision to come to college, and still need a punitive nanny standing over you and telling you how to behave in the classroom is beyond me. Why the… Continue reading
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small tasks
After writing my last howl of a post, I took a sick (read: mental health) day. What I learned from this is: when you are ready to smack your students, are so tired you can’t sleep, and experience more than one crying jag in the space of a few hours, it’s time to take a… Continue reading
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Formal-Operational vs. Post-Formal Thinking: Brains Grow Up
Formal-operational thinking is absolute, and involves making decisions based on personal experience and logic. Post-formal thinking is more complex, and involves making decisions based on situational constraints and circumstances, and integrating emotion with logic to form context-dependent principles. The distinction is a useful thing to understand when dealing with emerging adults. For example, adolescents have… Continue reading
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Primary and Secondary Intellectual Abilities in Adolescence
Primary intellectual abilities include number skills, word fluency, verbal understanding, inductive reasoning, and spatial orientation. These abilities improve until early middle age, and then begin to decline. There are cohort patterns where strength of primary abilities are concerned – for example, our grandparents were better at math than we are because they had less access… Continue reading
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Games in the College Classroom
This semester, there will be more games. When I taught ESL immersion, I taught the same class for five hours a day, five days a week, for five weeks. Every morning we started with a game, and we usually ended every afternoon with a game as well. In such a circumstance, the content of the… Continue reading
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Effective Reasoning and Prior Beliefs
Klaczynski and Narasimham demonstrated in a 1998 study that if children and adolescents are presented with evidence that contradicts beliefs they already hold, they will often ignore or reject the evidence, rationalize as to its real significance, or otherwise do whatever they can to hold on to their preconceived notions. As educators, we can certainly… Continue reading
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learning happens here
An inspiring post on creating and fostering an optimal learning environment. Continue reading
About Me
My job is to teach people to read and write; aside from that, I like to learn things.
Classroom as Microcosm 