Changing the university experience
Peer review redux
Tweet My students hate peer review, at least the way it is traditionally presented. I don’t like it either. Students are not skilled enough to analyze each other’s papers well, even when the peer review is tightly targeted. My students love individual conferences. I combined them into one activity which would be suitable for a […]
Bullying – Rutgers
Tweet Rutgers just fired its basketball coach for some pretty offensive bullying, including sexual slurs. Rutgers buried one of its freshmen last year because his roommate was spying on him during an encounter with another man. These were examples of disregard for the welfare of the students. I am not surprised. I interviewed twice at […]
Contemplative Pedagogy: “Eat it immediately.”
Tweet This post is part of an ongoing series on Contemplative Pedagogy which often focuses as much on the absence of language as on its form. In his book Meditation in Action, Chögyam Trungpa writes: “…one usually finds that books, teachings, lectures, and so on are more concerned with proving that they are right than […]
Concentration, not Meditation
Tweet My class has asked (by vote of 19-1) for regular meditation exercises. We do them once a week. I will document those in subsequent posts, but yesterday we did a variation — a concentration exercise. A case could be made that because of multi-tasking and the constant electronic intrusion into their lives, students rarely […]
The ideal writing class
Tweet I asked my class today what the ideal writing class would be like. I haven’t analyzed all that they said, but was surprised by a couple of comments in our class discussion. 1. They hate peer review, find it useless. I agree, as presently structured (though I don’t follow the recommended structures). They do […]