Teaching

Thinking In Images

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Thinking in Images 3 Comments

I was at a dinner party recently with colleagues and, per usual, the conversation at some point turned to bemoaning students’ sometimes less-than-ideal language skills. The complaints were standard fare– what ever happened to proper grammar? to sophisticated and orderly essay construction? to close and careful reading skills? to the capacity for clearly translating ideas…

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Ass[backwards]essment in Higher Ed

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 6 Comments

About a week ago, in a NYT article entitled “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” professor and provocateur Stanley Fish lambasted the Texas Public Policy Foundation and Texas Governor Rick Perry for proposing that the evaluation of faculty should move to a more “consumerist” (Fish calls it “mercenary”) model. The proposal would require college and…

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Transcribed From My Real Life, And Animated, For Your Amusement

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Women and Gender Issues 7 Comments
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The Things They Take With Them From Class

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 1 Comment

I’m inclined to just post this image without any explanation at all. It’s a snapshot of a status update I saw on Facebook yesterday in reference to my colleague Dr. Grady and myself. Grady is teaching Kant’s first Critique right now, and I just began teaching Marx in my 19th C. Philosophy course. (You can…

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Outbursts I’ve Considered, Then Thought Better Of…

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Open Source Pedagogy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 6 Comments

I don’t think I’ve said so officially on this blog yet, but the NBC sitcom “Community” is one of the funniest things on television in a long, long time. It’s about a group of ne’er-do-well’s attending community college who accidentally fall into a Spanish “study group” together. Much hilarity ensues. The group’s Spanish professor, Señor…

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More On Tenure

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 0 Comments

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a follow-up piece on the Amy Bishop story called “Reactions: Is Tenure a Matter of Life and Death?”, in which they ask several academics (at varying levels of seniority) to repond to the questions: What are the psychological effects of academic culture, particularly on rising scholars? Can or should…

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Unscrambling Marx

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 10 Comments

I’m about to begin teaching Karl Marx in my 19th C. philosophy class this week. Although students usually get some (very elementary) introduction to Marx in most of my other classes as well, this is the course in which they get the most extensive and systematic exposure to his writings. I always anticipate the Marx…

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The Deadly Serious Business of Tenure

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Politics, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Women and Gender Issues 0 Comments

Last week, University of Alabama-Huntsville Professor of Biology Amy Bishop opened fire in a faculty meeting, killing three of her colleagues and wounding three others. Despite our hopeful image of the Ivory Tower as a place far removed from the ugliness of “real world” violence, stories like these remind us that, regrettably, wishing doesn’t make…

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Philosophy, Done Another Way

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Thinking in Images 0 Comments

As I mentioned a little while ago on this blog, I gave students in my Existentialism course this semester the option of making a short film for extra credit. The motivation for this was my frustration, in previous iterations of this course, with what I viewed as a deficiency on my part of adequately capturing…

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A Parable for “Glorious” Essay-Writers Everywhere

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 3 Comments

Whenever I’m grading papers at the end of the semester, there always comes a point when I am reminded of that peculiar conversation between Alice and Humpty Dumpty (from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass). After noting that there are 364 days of the year that one can receive un-birthday presents, Humpty Dumpty says to…

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