changing the university experience

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Contemplative Pedagogy: Going Deeper

Tweet This post is part of an ongoing series on contemplative practices in the writing classroom. It is about the absence of language as much as language itself. Following a challenging autumn, during which we had a terrible hurricane, a contentious election, and the shootings at Newtown in which little children were mowed down with […]

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 […]