Pedagogy
Educators are Exhausted
Tweet The educators I know are exhausted. I spoke yesterday with a woman who facilitates the transition of disabled children into and out of classrooms, trains teachers to deal with problems students, provides class plans and individual reports on students, running from classroom to classroom, in more than one school, every day. When a student […]
Trust your students
Tweet As a professor of freshman writing, I teach students who are just out of high school. Some students are satisfied with their former high schools, but most complain bitterly. The most frequent complaint is about sitting around doing nothing, not that the subject matter is too difficult. Why are teachers so afraid to challenge […]
How to Write Descriptions (continued)
Tweet A previous post shared the first part of a class on writing descriptions. The first exercise was writing a description of a classmate. This is the second part of that class. Exercise: The class was asked to close their eyes, and I turned off the lights. They then were asked to pull up their very […]
How to Write Descriptions
Tweet For the next essay “A Visit to Another Culture,” my students must physically place themselves in a new culture — it can be a new type of restaurant, a church service of another religion, dinner in the home of an immigrant friend, a visit to a Japanese supermarket, and so on. In the several […]
German and English
Tweet German-speaking friends are visiting us. Their vocabularies, cultural knowledge, and structural command of English are impressive, and we speak together fluently. This afternoon we worked on the little bit of accent that remains in my friend’s English speech. It involves voicing the “g” of “German” or of “joy,” and getting used to pronouncing “th.” […]
Problems with multilingualism
Tweet Karina is from Prague and spoke Czech in her family growing up. She attended high school in Frankfurt and speaks accent-free German. She now lives in Vienna and she and her husband are raising their children bilingual – Czech and German. She spent her junior high school year in Maine and speaks almost perfect […]
Contemplative Pedagogy: Standing Meditations
Tweet The class has insisted all semester on keeping to our Thursday meditation schedule. It has been a challenge to think up new meditations. My role is to conduct a writing class, not a meditation class. The goal is to introduce them to the concept of meditation, and to allow them to experience the feelings […]
Contemplative Pedagogy: Evaluating contemplative practices
Tweet I can’t report that I meditate daily or even weekly, but there were times in my life, difficult times, when meditation was a daily aid. I learned skills and habits that still help me today. I am, in other words, well aware of both the power and the long-lasting nature of discoveries and habits […]
Contemplative pedagogy: A creative meditation
Tweet This meditation took place between the clarification in class of the goal for the next essay, and each student’s attempt to narrow his or her focus. The lights went out, the door was closed, the students set themselves up by adjusting their posture and taking a few breaths. I asked them to turn their […]
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 […]