Author: Steve
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The Fallacy of the Banned Public Speaking Class Topic
Just finished assessing the first round of student speeches for the term and the average grades were around an 88 to 90, high B to low A. This is atypical for me; most first speeches are closer to a C and slowly move up to this point over a course of four to five speeches.…
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Bad Teaching, Bad Graduate Student Mentoring, Bad Pedagogy
There really isn’t such a thing as “graduate student pedagogy,” but I thought I would write about it anyway. I’m always hopeful about it, but I know why it doesn’t exist: People who want to teach graduate students don’t understand how teaching works, they aren’t interested in thinking or talking about teaching, and they also…
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The First Oral Assignments are Turned In and It Seems Like a Lot of Grading
The biggest hazard from teaching online I think is that you get huge waves of grading that have very firm time requirements. If I assign students to prepare a speech 6 minutes long, I have to listen to 40 or so 6 minute speeches. There’s nothing I can do to reduce that amount of time…
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The Maelstrom, Online Pedagogy, and Rhetoric
Following in the footsteps of Marshall McLuhan, I have used Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Maelstrom” as a way to describe rhetorical strategy, kairos, and how argument really works away from all the too-firm theories that are floating around out there. Now I’m thinking that the Maelstrom is a useful metaphor for universities and…
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Doing What Works in Online University Teaching
My last post was about losing the thread, and losing the focus of what the course is about in the sea of technology available to us. I pretty much lost my way 2 days ago working on these very nice powerpoints for my courses. I realized I was spending hours on one reading. How was…
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The Trap of SlideWare in Preparing Online Instruction
Yesterday I started making Google Slides presentations for various reading assignments for my courses. I planned to video some lectures with these, but also providing them as documents on the learning management system (we use Canvas in my shop). As I started making the slides, the amount of work I needed to do kept increasing.…
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Grades are the Finger, Look at the Moon!
“Finger pointing at the Moon” is a famous koan that has been rewritten and offered so many times that the search for the origin of this early teaching lesson might as well be lost. As a koan we can accept it as a case that is worth our investigation, a case that everyone must investigate…
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A Case of Tarmac Rhetoric
This post was originally from my previous blog, progymnasmata, and was published there on Friday, August 28, 2020 at 10:49PM. I will sometimes be reposting older blog posts here as I work through my collection of years of posts, sharing the ones I think are the most interesting. Your comments are of course welcome on…
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A Case of Tarmac Rhetoric
It’s Friday night and normally I’m pretty energetic and excited. Tonight I’m worn out, and I think it’s because I spent most of the week working on an essay that I should have done last month. With all the changes and the almost-taking-a-buyout business I can forgive myself the slip this time. After all it’s…
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Required Reading is Draconian and Stupid
Professors, stop requiring reading. Instead, require engagement. Require response. Require conversation. Require a challenge. It seems incredibly sad that I have to say this, but requiring someone to do something because you are an expert or an authority is not how you teach. This is more along the lines of how to be a bad…
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