What will it take for us to accept that the public speaking course is a composition course, and we should be in frequent, deep, constructive dialogue with those who teach composition and work in writing centers? The pandemic, and the quarantine, have shown that public speaking instructors who have not invested in, or looked at,…

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What has quarantine done, and what did you expect it to do? Quickly approaching the start of month two, and I have little to show for it. A lot more hours logged in video games, a lot less reading done. Writing promises and obligations have been furloughed, by me, so that I can stare at…

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I was meant to be presenting this idea at the Third International Workshop on Debating at the University of Florence this weekend, but obviously that cannot happen now. I hope you are safe and secure wherever you are as we ride out this pandemic. Here’s the video version of the presentation – I tried to…

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Yesterday I thought about, wrote out, and recorded some thoughts about my process of designing online instruction for university students. I thought I would make this video to share with you some of those ideas that have helped me ground everything I’m doing online in good principles, practices, and care in order to make sure…

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In my last post, I gave the higher elevation view of how to put a debate together for an online course. Here’s my specific rendition of it for my debate course. The course is about the significance of large debate events for the public -whether they matter or not. Each unit has a debate with…

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Here’s something I wrote up today as a basic guide for holding debates in online courses. Not sure how many people plan to do this, but it’s worth thinking about how to create and structure engaging and interesting class experiences that would be easy to do in person. We are transitioning to an online campus…

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I was having a conversation with someone who has left teaching for the moment. “I am not ready to do it again,” she tells me, “I am not ready to teach undergraduates again.” This quote might strike home with many who are preparing to return to the classroom in January. The only good response to…

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What does it mean to have a good class? I’m spending a lot of time – too much – staring at a Google document that has a bunch of dates and blank space.  Whatever I choose to put there is going to be heavily influential in how this semester’s students wind up feeling and thinking…

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Had a great time at the Book Culture 20% off sale last weekend. It’s got to be my favorite New York City bookstore, but I haven’t done a YouTube video on it yet. I really only do the bookstore videos when I’m travelling but I should do my home city as well. There are a…

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What happens when your values cease to become incompatible with your university and start to become incommensurate? I wonder if this is just my university, or all universities. But I feel more and more that the classroom – whatever that might be – is the last part of the university that resembles anything we assume…

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