Yesterday was like new comics release day except instead of being on the receiving end of one of the cooler parts of popular culture I was the recipient of documents which bear only the merest of traces of what students may be getting out of any of my courses. There is also a remarkable paucity…
I’m probably wrong, but bear with me as out outline all of my errors for you. Over the last two decades I’ve seen student performance noticeably decline. Students fear math. Not calculus, but merely simple multiplication and division. Ask any student to calculate a percentage, i.e. “The population of the United States is 310,000,000 people.…
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…
This has been a week from Stupidville. Let’s see if I can describe the situation. I’ll need to describe events and motivations leading up to the recent controversy, and the immediate results and subsequent modifications I have had to make in order to make one of the institutions I am employed by happy. As always,…
I can’t stand cheating, academic dishonesty, and plagiarism. People who spend more time trying to figure out how to subvert an exam, cheat, plagiarize, or pay someone else to do their homework. Fail. Simply fail on your own merit. Contemplate what led to your failing grade and change your behavior. Not everyone can, should, or…
Cheating bothers me. As a child, I did not cheat. I was too afraid. Afraid of what teachers would think, afraid of upsetting my parents. Even more so, I knew cheating was wrong. Simple as that. Succeed or fail on my own effort. My grandparents were solid, ethical and moral people, my grandparents as the…
Update: The following essay was written October 2011. On March 30th, 2013, the Atlanta Public Schools Superintendent and 34 other school officials were charged with running a “corrupt organization” (yes, just like the Mafia). The 35 individuals have been indicted for falsifying standardized test scores. (WashingtonPost) Let me begin by stating I am not going…
Constant Geography 