As readers of this blog know, I implemented a new pedagogical technique in all of my courses a while back that I called “blogging in the classroom” and that I described here and here. (If you scroll down on the column to your right, you can find links to the student blogs for courses I…
Read MoreLast year, in my section of our College’s great books program (which is called “The Search for Values”), I taught Michel Foucault’s Fearless Speech for the first time. The book is an edited volume comprised of six lectures that Foucault delivered at the University of California-Berkeley in the fall of 1983, all centered around the…
Read MoreTake a look at this short lecture (only about 10 minutes) that Jim Hanas delivered as a part of the “useless lecture series” that he helps curate. According to Hanas, the point of his address was to debunk what he calls “America’s Big Lie,” the one perhaps best epitomized by Andy Warhol’s famous remark about…
Read MoreIn an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom”, Jeffrey Young reports that the Dean of Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University has recently banned all “machines” from classrooms and challenged his faculty to “teach naked” … by which he means, to teach without…
Read MoreI was very glad to receive all of your various contributions to the discussion about “small groups” in the classroom last week, so I thought I might impose on you again for your pedagogical insights. In the last few days of our core-humanities curriculum seminar, we were debating which translations of the core texts to…
Read MoreA friend and colleague of mine invited me to come speak to his class about torture last week. The class was a writing seminar, organized around the theme of “citizenship,” and my colleague was feeling (understandably) frustrated because– in his words– he “just didn’t feel like [he] had the tools or the knowledge to counter…
Read MoreThis time of year, I always here the theme song to “Rawhide” in my head. Only instead of “rollin’, rollin’, rollin’…”, I hear “gradin’, gradin’, gradin’…” This verse is especially inspirational:Keep movin’, movin’, movin’ Though they’re disapprovin’ Keep them dogies movin’ Rawhide! Don’t try to understand ’em Just rope, throw, and brand ’em Soon we’ll…
Read MoreDid I mention that I don’t care about cheating? Check. Did that already. Of course, if you read the earlier post, you know it’s not so much that I don’t care about cheating as it is that I don’t care about policing cheaters. (Read linked blog-post for my amazing argument in support of said apathy.)…
Read MoreLast week and this week, I’m participating in the annual seminar that reviews and (occasionally) amends the curriculum of the core humanities course-sequence at my college. Some of the work that we do is tedious and bureaucratic, but a lot of it includes really interesting sessions on pedagogy, core text discussions, interdisciplinarity and more general…
Read MoreJust a couple of quick recommendations for those of you keeping up with the current scandal over the so-called “torture memos.” I’ve been doing a lot of reading on this stuff over the course of the past year as a part of my research, and I plan to include both of these texts in my…
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