That word is pronounced PEE-tard, right?
1: I recently read a trashy book about time travel where one recurring theme was the traveler's hope she'd get to meet Shakespeare. Then someone else said that line just as part of normal conversation and she never even blinked. That bothered me a lot.
Let me interrupt this thread with a stupid bleg:
I'm filling out a recommendation form for a former (very good) student. One of the questions is "major weakness". I'm assuming it looks bad if I leave it blank. What's a harmless major weakness to list ("Her former PI is impatient with stupid-ass questions on recommendation forms" is probably a suboptimal response).
4: "I'm not aware of any major weaknesses" sounds good to me.
I highly resented those speakers who implemented high-impact practices into their talks
The part of my teaching orientation where we had to feel each other's ribs weirded me out.
I'd bet 6 is a reasonably common response.
I have to say, 5 is avery tempting response.
I've been reading lots of letters that describe "shyness" as people's major weakness. They all claim the person is getting over it.
My major weakness is laziness. I wonder if my letter-writers said that.
My major weakness is laziness.
That's just jet lag.
"Her marksmanship could use some improvement, especially at ranges exceeding 500 yards."
11: What a coincidence! Mine too.
My other major weakness is writing lots of inane comments in short spurts and then disappearing for a few days. I really feel vaguely guilty about no longer interacting with this place in a way that makes me feel like I contribute somehow.
My most pressing weakness is not bothering to realize that a bunch of recommendations are all due tomorrow. I hate recommendation season.
15: I feel like that too! But then I remember that inanity is the grease that allows the great engine of Unfogged to continue to chug along.
"Applicant can't climb trees for shit."
"Made no attempt to procure a better recommendation by putting out."
Following up on 20, I thought it was weird that a bunch of recs were due Dec 1st, and so I looked them all up and none of them are due Dec 1st. Now I'm irritated at this student for either being uniformly mistaken or for trying to game me into sending them on time by bullshitting the dates. I'll do them over break, goddamnit, like I do every year.
15. Likewise. Except not even so much with the spurts.
As to the OP, I am the same way. Just lecture to me and let me zone out and then mingle and talk to people afterwards. Please don't put me in a group and give me an index card and a topic to discuss and make me "report out" and aheasdfdasf;hsfd;f
That's odd. One of the things I really like about the American Association of Philosophy Teachers is that everyone uses the same techniques at the conference that they advocate using in the classroom. It does, in fact, make the ideas stick with you more. Also, you generally wind up finishing one half to two thirds of the work of incorporating the new ideas into your classes right there in the workshop.
The one that irritated me was similar to what emdash said - they passed out decks of cards with stock photography images and we were supposed to think of a time that reminded us of an image and then share with our group and then blah blah blah.
I'm perfectly happy to listen to audience expertise, though.
23: what kind of techniques did they model?
I have liked it at math ed conferences when someone puts you through the high impact practice on a math concept, where you have to pretend you don't already know the math and just see how the practice works in practice. But that's not quite the same - they're not genuinely trying to teach me the math, the way at this last conference they were genuinely trying to get us to digest the material being presented.
24: A striking example this summer was a talk on evaluating learning outcomes. The speaker began with the simple assertion that one pedagogical technique is only better than another relative to certain learning outcomes. The general kinds of outcome include knowledge of content, mastery of skills, and some kind of values shift or enlightenment. He then had us break into groups and develop a list of desired outcomes for three typical philosophy courses. We then got back together and put our agreed upon outcomes on the board. And it turned out that for everyone, the most important goals all related to values and enlightenment.
Then came the punch line: are you evaluating these outcomes? No, of course not. But if your evaluations don't match your desired outcomes, isn't the course out of alignment?
The whole thing was very Socratic, because he got us to agree to some premises in a very engaged and visceral way and then sprang a radical conclusion on us.
But if your evaluations don't match your desired outcomes, isn't the course out of alignment?
Not necessarily?
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When I was in grad school, a professor gave a talk about how he had put various interactive techniques into his lecture, and afterwards a friend of mine talked about how inspiring it was and I said that it looks like a great course, but I'd have dropped it.
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Rarely has a spam email or comment piqued my interest to this degree. (Actually, Jeuvederm not so much.) But I think if I search the terms it means the terrorists win a round.
29: Wait, where'd it go? More censorship apparently.
At least the interesting part of the spam lives on in italics.
31: Yes, the sacred archives. My own fantasy is that they get unearthed in the far distant future in some Motel of the Mysteries kind of way.
I wonder if Dr. Klein knows she is being marketed in this way.
In the UK, Ice Road Truckers is called Ice Lorries.
Yet everyone thought the poor Domino's workers placing orders with each other for all eternity was so mean!
Dr Slurrie Waves would have been a better name.
A lot of people totally hate it but I think a low key form of the Socratic method works pretty well. Mix of lecture, asking for volunteers, and calling on people (but either telling them they're on call that week, or allowing them to say "I don't know" without fear of ritual humiliation). Prefer that to either pure lecture or pure seminar.
The trouble with really participatory approaches to classes is that the results seem to very so wildly from one group to the next. One semester is filled with vibrant discussions and you think "Yes! This active learning thing is awesome!" and the next semester is like pulling teeth.
We need methods that are less sensitive to the caprices of group dynamics.
The one that irritated me was similar to what emdash said - they passed out decks of cards with stock photography images and we were supposed to think of a time that reminded us of an image and then share with our group and then blah blah blah.
OK, so academic conferences must be a lot different than my mental image of them. Which is doubly consfusing, given that my mental image of academic conferences is largely based on the descriptions of a (non-heebie-geebie) maths teacher.
It wasn't exactly an academic conference, it was an administrative conference.
Nice "high-impact practices" session, what do you call yourselves?
The Administrators!
Oh good, this is a perfect thread for my question! So, here's what I want to do: Have a way to send a brief follow-up exercise to my students after they finish a data analysis workshop.
I know how to do this the low-tech way -- I e-mail them a question, they e-mail me their proposed answer. Or I could make a little set of PowerPoint slides and e-mail to them to review on their own.
But I'd like to do something a bit more interactive. I just can't think how to do it. I thought of inputting a little game into Survey Monkey, choose-your-own-adventure style, and using the skip patterns to funnel them to a different next question depending on their answer. But that really won't work for this purpose, since I can't possibly imagine all of the wrong answers they might come up with.
I'm sure there's some kind of little gizmo that will let me do this, right?
49: Hypercard seems well-suited to that purpose, if it still exists.