I think I killed my yeast.
It has been years, nay, decades, since I last baked bread without using a bread machine. It has even been years since I used a bread machine. I once regularly made a delicious honey graham bread. It always turned
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What makes some teachers more effective than others?
Throughout my teaching career, I have asked numerous colleagues, mentors, and associates for their advice regarding excellent teaching. Here is a sampling of the advice I have gleaned during the past 40 years from outstanding professors:
Like birthdays, anniversaries are occasions for reflection, and as I approach the fifth anniversary of my teaching career, I find that my thoughts are drawn to the things that I did badly. Here’s a list of five teaching mistakes I have made. I share them
Graham Broad’s piece reminded me of a short critique John Kenneth Galbraith did of his teaching: “How I Could Have Done Much Better.” The honesty of both is courageous and refreshing. Most of us were trained as content experts. We learned to teach by doing
As I prepared to teach my first-year orientation class this fall, I realized that I am 44 years older than my youngest students. Our window of shared experiences is small. They’ve always had iPhones and been able to text and use Instagram, and most are
If you teach, you know about learning outcomes. Unless you inherited your courses from someone else, you’ve developed lists of them. You’ve probably had to submit these lists to the administration to be reviewed and possibly revised. You might have been asked to map these
Having never viewed myself as an expert and periodically believed I’m an imposter just waiting to be found out, I went a long time without worrying about the so-called curse of knowledge. I couldn’t possibly know too much math and chemistry, the content I teach.
A few months after I received my university’s undergraduate teaching award in 2009, my classroom anxiety dreams went from merely hairy to absolutely hair-raising. For years, I’d dreamed about my classes erupting in chaos: rebellious students flipping over desks, watching pornography while I lectured, or—most
A year ago I received the worst student ratings of instruction (SRIs) in my 28 years of teaching. On the Likert scale I am normally between 4 and 5 for quality of instructor and quality of the course. Last year, however, my fall term ratings
