pixel skylines
RMH
#extradirty
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
PR's Tumblrdome
𓃗
official daine visual archive
sheepfilms
Cosimo Galluzzi
🩵 avery cochrane 🩵
wallacepolsom
todays bird
Not today Justin
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Discoholic 🪩
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
taylor price
untitled
Xuebing Du
seen from Germany
seen from Oman
seen from T1
seen from Jordan
seen from Bangladesh
seen from Australia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from South Africa
seen from South Africa
seen from Russia
seen from Germany
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United Kingdom
@40houradjunct
I Love Library Day
The incorporation of Information Literacy Requirements into all of my classrooms has many consequences, most of them positive, but sometimes, my favorite is simply that I must schedule a day in the library. Nothing is better than watching a librarian do her/his thing in front of students forced to be enthralled. Libraries are so great.
"Missing Links: UO Has a Hard Time Keeping the WiFi Generation Connected" I get this on both sides. I rely on technology in my classes. It's not always visible -- I don't have a PowerPoint for every lecture or a video to demonstrate every idea -- but it's there, in every class, at least as a supporting player. I rely on the computers in the podium to work, for the WiFi in the building to be running, and, under all of that, for the Course Management Software we use to be, well, usable. That last is getting me into serious trouble this week. Though both campuses where I teach highly encourage us to use Moodle, neither seems to ever anticipate correctly that so many teachers and classes will be using it. Thus the start of every term sees a dramatic slow down in access times that has the result of making the site nearly unusable at a time when ease of use is most critical. If a student gives up on Moodle during Week 1, by Week 3, when the assignments there are really rolling and/or when they've lost their schedule, they're in difficult place. Then they have two options: turn to me or give up. Assuming they do the first (and not all do), they'll often receive a "check moodle!" message from me, and that's just doubling their frustration. To combat that, I often end up retyping in e-mail what I've already typed on Moodle. Moodle, of course, is at minimum supposed to fix that problem by acting as a consistent repository for resources. Right now, Moodle is partially broken at one of my schools, and it's driving me and my students nuts. I promised them grades there by today, and I haven't been able to do it yet because I've already seen three pages of written work "eaten" by a slow system that can't connect. So now we're all behind, we're all frustrated, and… there's little to do about it beyond telling, it seems, the Internet. Capacity issues hit every campus. The promise of online incorporation into classes is that it will keep us connected and make some jobs simpler. The reality is that scaled back support for the systems often results in slower processes.
This tumblr has tumbled off...
I'm over at Wordpress now. Find me there!
I'm pretty certain a fair number of my students are in danger from this menace:
Text neck results from frequent texting or looking down at your mobile device for extended periods of time and chiropractors say it is on the rise and is quickly becoming a global epidemic.
The repetitive stress injury caused by flexing of the neck for prolonged periods can result in tightness across the shoulder, cause headaches and neck soreness and can even result in permanent arthritic damage if left untreated.
Some of them also suffer from a related disease, I Believe You Can't See Me Texting If I Hide The Phone Under My Desk-itis, which is easily preventable by pointing out none of the desks have front panels on the first day of class.
Syllabus Writing Brings Out the Worst
I think I've finally figured out that the worst part of syllabus construction isn't even figuring out what to assign when, what to cut, what to keep -- it's that I turn into a weird design junky when I'm writing the final document. Do all the indents match? Is everything appropriately spaced? Would this be better in a table? With shaded rows? Is a hollow bullet point more appropriate? The finishing touches take me forever and inevitably just lead to heartache the next day when I notice a new, awkward space on page 3. It cuts me more than the missing comma on page 2.
A Web site has students contribute answers of their own in order to earn points toward getting the answers submitted by others for many popular textbooks. Mind/Shift says this is "not as straightforward a transaction as it looks." I say yeah, it is, in the same way that trading test answers with a friend is still cheating. Making students do some kind of work in order to be given the right answer is an interesting idea, but it's still a transaction which leads to students not doing their own work and taking credit for the work of others.
I dislike the term ‘politically correct’ because I so often hear it used with a sneer, and because the word ‘politically’ is so unnecessary. What’s wrong with just ‘correct’? As in, it is correct not to be sexist, it is correct not to be racist, it is correct to treat everyone with common decency. See? Works perfectly well.
The inimitable Sarah Rees Brennan (word!)
A bad habit: Using other teachers for feedback
I've realized a bad habit of mine. I often turn to my partner, also a college instructor, and say the following: "Does this make sense to you?" Inevitably, I then show him an assignment or a set of instructions, and usually, he says, "Yeah, that's totally clear." The problem, of course, is that my classes are populated not by English-major professors but by just-starting college students. Things that click for me, or for C, do not automatically come across very clearly for my students. One of the ways one of my departments has proposed to combat this trouble is to allow/encourage teachers to send their syllabi and assignments to another faculty member with some experience in "grade leveling." The idea is that she'll read your papers and tell you what "level" they're written at. I like this idea, in a way, and I did send my papers off (though did not receive a response), but I also think it may, again, be a circular, insular process. Far better, probably, would be to hand out syllabi and let students edit and reword them (without changing the content) until they make sense to them. Oh. Hey. First day activity?
Late Work Rules
I'm reviewing and revising my syllabi for the next term (which begins Monday). This shouldn't take much work, but it always does because I always end up tinkering with things. The policy I have in mind to change this term is my late work policy. For several years, my late work policy has been one of the most forgiving policies around. Basically, I accept late work -- any late work -- with no penalty if a student contacts me before the deadline (even the morning of) to request an extension. I take late work otherwise with a 10 percent penalty within a week of the deadline. I do this because I see three main reasons to penalize late work:
Late work inconveniences, mostly, the instructor. Since I'm always grading something, it's not usually much of an inconvenience for me to receive a new paper at a later date. I also don't really want to punish students for making me work harder, since there are sometimes stretches where they're working very hard and I'm twiddling my thumbs.
Late work offers a student an unfair advantage (of time) over students who submit their work on time. Yes, it does -- but this seems to even out in the fact that it puts students who turn in late work at a disadvantage on the next assignment they turn in, for which they'll have less time. Also, because the late option is available to everyone, I don't think it's inherently unfair.
Late work demonstrates a student's unwillingness or inability to prioritize or meet deadlines. Perhaps this is true, in some cases, but I have two problems with this. First, if a student can contact me in advance and admit that he/she can't finish his/her assignment on time, that is a form of recognizing limits, and I want to reward that honesty. Second, I bristle at the idea that my job should include explicit instruction in time management, in part because it is so often expressed as a "desirable job trait," and I do not work as a teacher to better prepare students for jobs. That is what on-the-job training is for.
I do, however, work as a teacher to help students succeed further in their academic career, and time management is a necessary skill for academic success. To this end, I'm not sure my policy is very effective, and I sometimes worry that students come out of my class feeling they've gotten away with something by turning in late work. This is usually not true. My one best reason for accepting work past the deadline is that my actual goal in every class is to encourage students to learn certain skills and make their best effort at every assignment. Often, for some students, an extension of a week can mean the difference between turning in a D paper that's dashed off the night before and that neither of us really understands and a B paper that's taken enough work that the student actually manages to imbibe some of what I'm trying to pass along.
Sometimes, of course, that week-long extension just leads to a student writing a paper in one night one week later than they would have. Are they getting away with something then? No: that paper still gets graded as it would have. (It is those papers, though, that make my quick dismissal of the inconvenience feel very thin).
Anyway, this term, I'm probably moving to a one-late-paper pass system instead of the old way. This is mostly because I've seen too many students now sink too far behind once they've turned in a first late paper. I'm not terribly pleased with this policy, though. I'd welcome any other good ideas on how to deal with delays.
Sigh. I feel a little shaky because I can imagine the pressures that might lead to this kind of conference.
Michael Bloomberg is kind of a tool.
via Siobhan Curious.
This almost brought tears to my eyes. It’s so painful to listen to the public hate on teachers when I work my ass off every day at a job that most people I meet raise their eyebrows at and say, “I could never handle that job.”
Amen
Whoa, yeah. Very cool. Go teachers go!!
Via: positivelypersistentteach:
Spot on. She definitely put into words the steam that sometimes comes out of my ears.
Over at Time, Annie Murphy Paul writes about the “Protégé Effect”, or why first-born children are given tools to learn that their younger siblings don’t have, or why teaching someone else is the best way to deeply learn a subject.
Students enlisted to tutor others, these researchers have found, work harder to understand the material, recall it more accurately and apply it more effectively. In what scientists have dubbed “the protégé effect,” student teachers score higher on tests than pupils who are learning only for their own sake. But how can children, still learning themselves, teach others? One answer: They can tutor younger kids. The benefits of this practice were indicated by a pair of articles published in 2007 in the journals Science and Intelligence. The studies concluded that first-born children are more intelligent than their later-born brothers and sisters and suggested that their higher IQs result from the time they spend showing their younger siblings the ropes. Educators are experimenting with ways to apply this model to academic subjects. In an ingenious program at the University of Pennsylvania, a “cascading mentoring program” engages college undergraduates to teach computer science to high school students, who in turn instruct middle school students on the topic.
via jtotheizzoe
I experimented broadly with having students lead discussions, work in small and mid-sized groups on quizzes, and take charge of certain lessons in class this term. The results were very positive. I'll be doing more of it next term.
Posted because this is making someone in my household incredibly jealous. Via Atlantic Wire.
Question for Teachers: When do you grant incompletes?
I have granted a few incompletes over the years, and always for about the same reasons: student who's doing pretty well in the class runs into a huge problem at the end of the term and can't continue. Like most teachers I've talked to, I've had very mixed results with this. Maybe 20 percent of students who have an incomplete actually finish the work in the next term. My two schools have different policies on Incompletes: one requires that 80 percent of the work be completed by Week 8 in order for the student to receive an Incomplete; the other says 75% by the end of the class. These are extremely high bars, and also kind of vague bars -- 80% of total class work, or 80% of what's been assigned by Week 8? I was advised when I went through teacher training to grant an Incomplete rarely and only in the face of overwhelming proof of medical or personal emergency, which is a policy I've tried to stick to. It has an unfortunate, difficult side, though; it can lead to me spending time reading through submitted medical documents, trying to figure out whether what's written down is actually a reason that a student couldn't do his or her work, weeks after the fact. I am not a doctor and I don't play one on TV and I hate, hate, hate having anything to do with figuring out a student's medical state. Yet, in cases where at the time, the student didn't get a flat-out excuse note from the doctor and later realized he would need to document his illness, that's what I end up doing. So -- anyone have a good answer for this? What's a good bar for students to be over or under in order to get an Incomplete in a class?
Professor must hold class even if there are no snacks. This is a sad day for munchies. Probably OK for students, though.
