All weekend, I’ve been baking and making — helping my daughter cut out and assemble the sloper for the prom dress she wants to make all by herself, so we can check the fit before cutting into the good fabric. We have trays full of small cream puff shells cooling, with the idea that this will be dinner, filled with savory shrimp filling, and dessert, filled with coffee and vanilla ice creams and drizzled with chocolate sauce. And we’ve tried…
People who gravitate towards subjects broadly contained under the label “the humanities” tend to do so because we are intellectually curious–because we love to read, debate, think deeply, learn, investigate. We don’t embrace the question “what are you going to do with that degree?” because we hear its unspoken premise that “that degree” is a “useless” one. Instead, we get defensive: inquiry itself is an end. There is value in learning. One does not have to quantify a job trajectory…
There is a lot of brilliance to read right now about teaching for the coming year. So much, in fact, that it can be hard to wade through. We’re all working to figure out how to shift our modes of delivery to include far more asynchronous and online content than we normally have and, hopefully, far less panic than we had during the sudden pivot this spring. And we’re all talking about what we’re thinking. And it is a lot….
Starting in March, my college, like many across the nation, had to require faculty, staff, and students to pivot to remote teaching and learning in response to the public health risks of Covid-19. We were lucky. We had two weeks of warning and some emergency training in online teaching tools and methods. As plenty of people have articulated, what we faculty across the globe were doing was not best practices for online course development, but triage. Some things we did…
I’m in week one of remote teaching and learning, after a two-week “break” during which faculty were frenetically retooling classes, and students were trying to figure out what to pack up and where to take it. My campus has been pretty spectacular about offering all kinds of support systems — from a food pantry and emergency grants for students to tenure clock pauses and revised (extremely humane) policies for faculty course evaluations to careful plans executed so as not to…
As schools and universities all over the country are scrambling to try to figure out how to move to remote teaching and learning in a time of great uncertainty, I am trying to stay focused on how I will do this in the least complicated ways for my students. Pedagogically, that means figuring out the top priorities for what I hope they will get out of what remains of our semester and then working on a plan that allows for…
Here is one thing we need to say out loud as faculty: it is almost impossible NOT to miscalculate how long it will take to do any given task of research or thinking or writing. For this (and probably other) reason(s), academics are notoriously terrible at meeting deadlines. And we ought to allow our students to have some growing pains in this regard as well. In twenty years as a faculty member, I’ve tried every form of lateness policy I…
This past semester, an extremely bright student in my senior seminar recounted a story of how her high school debate team, which was very successful, found itself towards the end of the season facing debates against kids from swank private schools. Describing her own school as working-class, she said that the thing that stood out most for her was how extremely well-read those private-school kids were. She felt like there was no way she and her friends could ever catch…
Towards the end of this spring’s Senior Seminar, we took up this question. I had given the class a 2013 column by Michael Bérubé to read as a jumping off point, with this as perhaps its most pointed bit: After all, who needs another 50-page honors project on the poetry of Charles Baudelaire? Well, strange as it may sound, if you’re an employer who needs smart, creative workers, a 50-page honors project on a 19th century French poet might be just the…
Earlier today, I read a mini-rant by a professor I don’t know, who was fuming over students who don’t do their homework. She wrote that, having been educated to PhD level herself at the University of Hard-Assery, she didn’t tolerate slackerdom in her classrooms. As a student, she had once had a professor pitch a fit that involved throwing and kicking things in his fury over student unpreparedness, and she had taken away from that incident a healthy respect for…
