Teaching

When Students Will Not Read

Out of the three Comp II courses I taught this semester, I found a shocking statistic: no one read. No one. Okay, well maybe that’s an exaggeration, but not by much. Across these approximately 60 students, I found that when I assigned H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu,” only five people actually admitted to reading [...]

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Say No to the Burrito, College Kids!

I teach a course at my college called First Year Experience 101. It’s an introduction to college life for–you guessed it–first year students. Whether they are traditional straight-out-of-high-school 18 year olds or worked-my-life-away babyboomers, new students at my school go through FYE to learn college-appropriate study skills, life lessons, and time management. Why Me? I [...]

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Joss Whedon Inadvertently Became my Academic Specialty

I never really knew what my academic specialty would be. I originally thought about being a medievalist, but talking a single class on Chaucer where our entire text was in Middle English turned me off of that idea. I then had no idea really where my specialization would come from. Half of my indecision came [...]

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Dot Dot Dot?

I ran into a slight snag in class Friday. I’ve been afraid of this kind of snafu since I started teaching, and it has only now surfaced. When I was in graduate school, I had a professor who loved him some MLA format. He loved it. He knew it backward and forward and inside and [...]

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Pop Culture in the Classroom – Buffy: The Vampire Slayer and Stephen King

Back when this blog was new and I had no idea if people would even bother reading it, I wrote about my use of Joss Whedon’s Firefly in my Basic Writing II classes. With the new semester finally under way, I figure a similar post is in order to explain my newest attempt at emboldening [...]

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Naming the Ivory Tower

Last year at faculty conferences, the idea of student respect was brought up by an established professor. He urged us, his colleagues, to stop allowing students to use our first names because it established a precedent of disrespect that superseded our authority as instructors. He said that the use of titles—Dr. So-and-So, Professor LastNameHere, Mr./Ms. [...]

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Celebrity Professors

I woke up to an email earlier this week, and it held this link to a list of celebrity professors. It really got me thinking about why it is that we do what we do, and what it really means to be “known.” I highly doubt that I will ever be included on such a [...]

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Does College Stifle Academic Creativity?

I love school. I always have. College and grad school, however, seemed to stifle my creativity in regard to writing. To steal a term from Stephen King’s Duma Key, I think that this month has been an “unbottling” phase for me. I have been writing every time I get the urge and sometimes when I [...]

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