Category: Pedagogy

  • Responding to the Recent U.S. Election

    The responses have been poor, to understate it. I see little action plan and a lot of reaction to something that was apparently “hard to imagine” – most of the population voting against foreigners and for America first. I’m not sure who finds that hard to imagine, but it shouldn’t be rhetoricians. But here we…

    Read More

    //

  • Bad Teacher

    I’ve become a very bad teacher recently and I’d like to figure out why. Reflecting on what a bad teacher is, I’ve come up with the following ideas All of these things are elements of bad teaching and being bad at teaching, but perhaps the bad teacher is someone who just disregards these and doesn’t…

    Read More

    //

  • Bad Teaching is Debate Coaching

    Still thinking about what makes bad teaching/good teaching. I found this atrocious lecture from “debate coaches” supposedly teaching the best and brightest young debaters at an exclusive “forum” for debate at Emory University. The Barkley Forum doesn’t seem to have any quality control standards. We get a route lecture that is thin, vapid, and incorrect…

    Read More

    //

  • I Taught a Terrible Class Today

    I thought the class would be great. Why was it so bad? First of all, what’s a bad class? Definitions abound! I would say for me a bad class means: I should have prepared differently. I should have spent more time thinking about the material, which was very familiar to me. The death of good…

    Read More

    //