I read blogs today and found many that were relevant to education and my life. While I can’t see making a post out of each of them, because I don’t really have time to comment substantially, I do think they are worth looking at.
This probably deserves its own post. Right Wing Nation has a blog post on how to be a good teacher.
Reassigned Time is talking about office hours. As an adjunct, I don’t have them at one school and do at the other. If I have them, though, students come in for help.
Critical Mass has an article on general education and college.
What colleges and universities are missing, with all their emphasis on endless student choice–with the sheer volume of trendy, cute, or aggressively trivial course offerings; the avoidance of core content-based requirements; and the sometimes-cynical, sometimes-naive focus on skills over knowledge–is that students are hungry for intellectual anchors. They want to read the great writers, study the major historical events, examine the most lasting ideas and powerful inventions. They are delighted when they happen across the opportunity to do that–but they also tend, quite understandably, to lack the wherewithal to self-style courses of study that offer that. That’s what requirements and college counselors are for, after all.
My son is a mathematics major and is taking an environmental history course which required nine (9!) books. Not little wussy ones either. Honking big texts. He wanted to take Revolutionary Russia but it was limited to majors only. I don’t know how he’s going to do in the environmental history course. I hope he does well.
Right Wing Nation has a blog post on the lowering of standards of research in academia. It is not a study, but an anecdote. Nonetheless it is interesting.
The Wall Street Journal has an opinion piece on why snobbery is the bastion of the liberal arts major. I don’t think that’s who is snooty, but maybe that’s because I am a liberal arts major.