Teaching Tip Number 19

I often hear "80% of life is showing up." I say 90% of success is organization.

If I have learned anything in 33 years of teaching, it's that students like structure. It even trumps a groovy personality. They like to know the teacher has a plan, works the plan, gets the papers graded, gets the grades up, doesn't lose papers, and doesn't forget what the assignments are or how they are set up. Students today have a very low tolerance for confusion. Since their own mental schema are so faulty, we can't afford to confuse them anymore.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Spirituality and Being an Academic

Addendum:  I revisited this post on July 28, 2016, edited it, appalled by the number of typos. Sometimes I wonder if having an academic career is detrimental to being a Spirit-led disciple of Jesus Christ.   I present, as an academic would (especially one who was a debate coach for several years), the arguments. 1.      In a career in academia, we must be merit mongers.   In order to achieve tenure and promotion, the only two big monetary awards outside of the move to administration, or to be eligible for grants and awards, one’s accomplishments in all things teaching, service, research, and professional development must be documented, recorded, and broadcast.   Volunteerism for the institution is not valuable for it own sake, but for expanding the CV, or at least, one starts to feel that way.   One begins to question one’s motives.   Of course, one could leave things off the CV, but . . . their absence may mean the difference in ...
Read more

Morning News, July 14: The Day After

 Many of us are glued to, or at least checking frequently, media accounts of the shooting last night.  Donald Trump is very fortunate, and I hope he sees the spiritual reality of this incident--his life was spared--and lives in gratitude.  He is not "lucky," he was saved from death or significant brain injury. It's hard not to predict this propels him to the White House, but just as no one expected the back lash toward Biden about his debate performance or this shooting, we cannot assume the future.  And of course, the incident will be investigated for a long time to come; the fact a sniper was even there is pretty disturbing. On the "Twitters" there were some funny memes about how the media's coverage. One large outlet I was checking last night, even with the very clear Fox News footage of gunshots and blood, wrote as a headline, "Secret Service interrupts Trump Rally." You can't make this stuff up.  I'll let the chattering classes interpr...
Read more

Open Educational Resources and Artificial Intelligence-Generated Material

 https://affordablelearninggeorgia.org/resources/opengenai I share this link because it leads to information about The University System of Georgia's policy statement on AI use in Open Educational Resources (OERs).  For those who don't know, OERs are not just homemade textbooks. They are designed for wide distribution digitally and should b e well researched and designed to be at parity with publishers' text. If done correctly, they use no material that is under copyright or that needs permission (and therefore perhaps payment), including images or text. They can utilize links to open access material on the Internet. The goal is to not breach copyright law and to keep them zero cost. Actually, the goal is to provide a better to or equal than option to traditional textbooks, which can extremely expensive.  OERs use Creative Commons licensing to protect the integrity of their use and to keep the author's work from being "stolen" and sold. I am not sure how viabl...
Read more