Higher Education Observer

As I wrote on my other blog, I am now pretty much a full-time caregiver for my mother.  Other than teaching my classes and trying to finish my doctorate, right now I don't have the time or opportunity to do much else.  Perhaps I will come back to this in a few months; college teaching and learning and faculty development are my life's work.  Please look at the archives for many helps on these subjects.  Until then, enjoy.

I think about fear a lot.  I think fear explains our lives a lot more than we let it. I teach public speaking; tomorrow night my class is giving their first speeches and I have gotten the anxious emails about it.  One thing I am good at is making a comfortable atmosphere; however, I think there is also something to be said for just throwing them into the water and letting them sink or swim.  They almost always swim; it might not be a pretty breaststroke that will get them the gold medal, but they make it. Some learning theorists encourage that viewpoint.  Even Vygotsky's zone of proximal development is somewhat along that line.  I am now reading Parker Palmer's and Arthur Zajonc's book The Heart of Higher Education , which is partially a defense of integrative education.  What is that?  It's trying to get away from classroom-based, textbook-based, banking model (I call it tea pitcher model) type of education.  One argument against these methods is that it is messy