Writing or faux writing?
Recent events have brought home the fact that the Florida Department of Education expanded the performance writing exam for students in 4th, 8th, and 10th grades so that they have to answer compartmentalized grammar questions that I thought were obsolete: identify the correctly-puncuated sentence, fill in the blank with the right word, etc. As my […]
When have you had online "aha" moments reacting to others?
For the first time in five years, my distance-learning course is asynchronous, without a live chat, and this poses an interesting challenge. Oh, heck, let me be honest: at some level I’m terrified at the prospect of an asynchronous-only class, because my teaching style relies heavily on the timed revelation of material and ideas, commonly in […]
The penultimate-policy fallacy (the reverse of "fighting the last war")
Florida’s universities are facing an interesting mix of budget pressures in the short term, with some possibility for substantial improvement in about 2-3 years but also a serious Sword of Damocles in a property-tax referendum in January and short-term misery if a state-level budget-reduction exercise is handled poorly (or illegally: by law, higher ed shouldn’t […]
Appearing in Chicago on education policy…
On August 3 and 4, I’m talking in the Hyatt McCormick Place Convention Center at YearlyKos, the convention sprout of partisan DailyKos, on the panels Education Uprising: Education for Democracy (Friday afternoon, 1-2:15) and Rethinking Educational Accountability (Saturday morning, 10:30-11:30). Both are substantially the logistical work of teacherken, a fellow Haverford College graduate, an active […]
Academic joke
By Sherman Dorn on July 10, 2007
In lieu of content today, a joke: A political science professor, a mass comm professor, and a math professor were watching the news together. “To know the president and just get off like that, scot-free?” asked the political scientist. “I want to be Scooter Libby.” “You got it wrong, Jane,” said the mass comm professor. […]
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