My teaching career began in the fall of 1997 when a faculty member experienced a heartache about a week before the semester began. During the intervening years between then and today, my peers, colleagues, and even those in business & industry, have noticed a tremendous decline in people’s ability to write. Recently, I spent many…
My teaching career began in the fall of 1997 when a faculty member experienced a heart attack about a week before the semester began. During the intervening years between then and today, my peers, colleagues, and even those in business & industry, have noticed a tremendous decline in people’s ability to write. Recently, I spent…
Students are fickle. They want an online course experience, the ability to work at their own pace, in their own environment, wherever that environment is, home, work, school, beach house, neighbor’s house, or Starbuck’s. In all course evaluations, online students report how they want more contact with faculty, how they don’t get email replies back…
One of the best ways to teach, I have discovered, is to be wrong. Say something wrong, show something wrong, do something wrong – such as have some errors in a hand-out, and savvy students will call you out. “Hey, I’m confused. This map is wrong, I think.” Years ago I made some maps with…
My teaching career spans only twenty-years. I have not “heard it all” nor have I “seen it all.” Judging by writing samples which continue to cross my desk I will never achieve either. Interestingly enough, my mentors, with perhaps a decade or so more teaching experience than I, have also not exhausted anecdotes on the…
At times, I think my Announcements for my classes take on the tone of a blog post. My online students do not have the luxury of the 5-10 minutes I spend each class period harping on attitude, perseverance, discipline, and poor defense and shot-blocking in mid-major NCAA basketball conferences. I have to make up for…
I’ve taken flack for proselytizing too much on my syllabi. Over the decade-and-a-half or so of being in the classroom, I have taken to being more vocal about the problems I see in students attitudes toward their commitment towards their education. I want things to be congruent. If someone says “my grade is very important…
The notion “reading is studying” needs to be removed from everyone’s brain. Reading alone is not “studying.” Reading is part of the Process of Learning and Study. When a student tells me “I read the chapter” I say, “that’s a good start. Now go back and re-read it 2 more times, and this time, pay…
Warning: my diatribe below consists of mostly rant, with excerpts of real-world writing samples from previous students. I will also indict most of Kindergarten through High School Education. I say most as the factors with the least blame, in my opinion, are the teachers themselves. However, my attitude towards K-12 teachers is changing, too. I…
If you haven’t read Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning,” you should. Even if you are a woman, thoughts shared by Frankl in “Man’s Search for Meaning” will still apply. If you have never heard of Viktor Frankl, it’s OK. I hadn’t heard of him, either. Viktor Frankl was an Austrian Jew, a Ph.D neuroscientist,…
Constant Geography 
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