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Sterility or psychodrama vs. untimed engagement or intellectual drama
Margaret Soltan is not a Luddite—far from it, she has used her University Diaries blog to become one of American academic letters’ premier public intellectuals. But as an observer of college life, she has a well-reasoned hatred of what she calls technolust. She regularly links to stories about students who abuse cell phones and laptops […]
Summer syllabus finalized
In between bits and pieces of other things, I’ve finalized the syllabus for the class I start teaching in June. This is a topics course on education reform (history and social-science perspectives on), and I probably didn’t take many risks in setting up the summer course. We’ll just see how it goes. Four books in […]
College graduation
The new Ed Sector report by Kevin Carey, Graduation Rate Watch, summarizes some of the material available from the IPEDS 6-year graduation measures for four-year colleges and universities. The main point is that there are vast differences within different higher-ed sectors not only in 6-year graduation stats but also Black-White differences in graduation. He correctly […]
Sketching a course 6
Habits and experienceToday I’m trying desperately to finish a paper that is far too late. Part of the delay is the craziness that is my professional and union life, but another part is that I am delving into two subjects that I have not been diligent in keeping up with. I am keenly interested in […]
Sketching a course 5
Framing questions as stuff, habits, and experienceProbably the most powerful intellectual experience I had as an undergraduate… or rather the most powerful explicit design of a course I took in my major (history) … was a course on late medieval/early modern Europe taught by Susan Stuard. She structured the entire course around a single question: […]