teaching
-
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
-
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
-
49 conversations about 5 things
This week I also met with all my 101 students individually in my office, to discuss their writing samples, move some of them into other classes, and generally get a feel for where they are all at. I think I may have put out a couple of small fires. For example, one young woman, who… Continue reading
-
back on the horse
It’s been over a month since I’ve posted. I’ve been revelling in the first real vacation I feel I’ve had in years. No working on the novel, no thinking about teaching unless absolutely required, not much prep except tweaking course outlines, cutting and pasting course packages, and reading Angela’s Ashes. It’s been a necessary but… Continue reading
-
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
-
Harry K. & Rosemary T. Wong’s “The First Days of School”
I love this book. I think you should buy it. I picked it up after reading recommendations on several blogs, and it arrived at a very good time (even if it’s no longer the first days of school.) True, the strategies are mostly directed at elementary school teachers (I don’t have a classroom to set… Continue reading
-
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
-
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
-
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
About Me
My job is to teach people to read and write; aside from that, I like to learn things.
Classroom as Microcosm 