Category Archives: Teaching Notes

One of the video vignettes from the Rock Ethics Institute Principles Curriculum is about group ettiquette for student group projects. Although it’s “ettiquette” this clip neither shows a loud argument or an initial session to establish operating parameters. Instead it… More On: A Team Learning Conundrum

This January the ETS team successfully completed a pilot of an online course on symbolic logic and turned it over to Liberal Arts for future maintenance. Now it’s time to assess what happened and see if we (or I) learned… More On: Assessing a Logic Course

A Harrisburg colleague, Carol McQuiggan pointed out an interesting article on teaching from the New York Times “Geek Lessons” (Sep 21, 2008). One of the interesting points is that the author, Mark Edmundson argues that the role of the instructor… More On: Learning and Surprise

One of the most challenging questions I ever got in a class wasn’t an advanced question, but rather a very elementary one on sentence structure. Almost all linguists assume that in a sentence The queen saw the corgi that you… More On: Remebering Your Assumptions

I’ve recently returned to the world of course development and am now working on some more mathematically oriented courses…which is nice because I can contemplate the minor teaching sins I and others commit in teaching “formalisms” (sometimes math, sometimes phonetics).… More On: Beware Scrambled Notation Syndrome

One of my Listservs passed along a great resource on online poetry for many languages at http://lyrikline.org/. This is similar to the Penn State Scola service which allows instructors to access foreign language video. For each language, you get to… More On: Foreign Language Poetry on Lyrikline

I’m prepping for a course (along with many other of my ITS collegues) and I’m noticing with a certain amount of chagrin how hard it is for me to break free of the old lecture model. If I’m an instructional… More On: Instructor: Teach Thyself

Here’s a page full of quotes from one semester in a physics course. http://complex.gmu.edu/people/ernie/witty/mohapatra.html As you can see, few of them deal directly with physics… except maybe for “It’s like unshooting your anti-grandmother… well, I don’t want to get sued… More On: A Really Memorable Physics Class