Author’s note: I started this essay when my son graduated from high school. He is now a college senior. (Procrastination is a problem I need to deal with one of these days.) I publish it now so that readers may share it with the college
“The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius.”
—Aristotle, Poetics
“Gen Ed is crap.”
—Student, senior exit survey
What if a student was having trouble understanding an assignment, and they asked a smart friend to help them? This person had not taken the class but was able to get the student started on the assignment or at least unpack the instructions a
There are more than 2,000 islands along the coast of Maine, 200 of which are in the Penobscot Bay. My island, one of the few that is publicly connected to the mainland, is a 20-minute ferry ride shore to shore. We also have a
Experiential learning is “the process whereby knowledge is created through transformation of experience” (Kolb, 1984, p. 38). The benefits of experiential learning include increasing student engagement, supporting various learning styles, and fostering the link between theory and practice.
Shifting from traditional educational approaches can
My upper-level course on writing in the natural sciences was filled with technical writing or communication majors developing and honing their skills in writing, presentation, visual communication, and user experience strategies. Most had limited, if any, college-level natural sciences coursework. Students are taught to
The best final exam question I’ve ever given is this: “I want you to write about one thing that you figured out in this class that matters.”
This sounds simple, I know. Perhaps even a little flaky. After all, we’re the instructors. We’re the
You’re teaching an intro class; it’s three weeks into the semester, and you’ve just returned a high-stakes assessment to the students. The next time you look at your inbox, there’s an abundance of email from students wanting to make appointments because “they worked really
Learning requires effort and is often difficult, but the exact relationship between learning, effort, and difficulty is complex and often misunderstood by both teachers and students. The misunderstanding can lead both groups to behave in ineffective and even counterproductive ways. In this essay, I
To begin with a statement that will surprise absolutely no one: one of the major challenges of general education reform is turf anxiety—the concern among various departments and disciplines that a new curriculum will not adequately represent their fields to ensure class enrollments that
