Third class of the summer session this morning, first one where students were supposed to have finished readings. This is an undergraduate social-foundations class, and the readings for this week include Gary Becker on human capital, Sam Bowles on social reproduction, and either the start of Paul Tough’s Whatever It Takes<\/i> or Joe Williams’s Cheating Our Kids<\/i> (which is apparently out of stock now).The summer session is only ten weeks, so they need to hit the ground running. I tossed the schedule around a bit to put the suck-the-reader-in books at the top of the term. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
We start with an ungraded quiz. The incentive to do well here is
\nbecause the questions might show up on the (absolutely graded) final
\nexam. The last item is to propose scoring criteria (jargon: rubric<\/i>)
\nfor one question on the back of the sheet. The substantive questions
\nare of the compare\/contrast sort with an implied 3-4 sentence answer,
\nand I provide the broad hint that the authors “cannot all agree.”
\nStudent groups talk about their answers, propose them on the dry-erase
\nboard, then we talk about the sketchy phrases, and they turn in the
\nsheets, which I’ve now read. \n<\/p>\n
Next is a quick exercise suggested by the latest edition of Wilbert
\nMcKeachie’s college-teaching classic: they read drafts of their weekly
\npapers to a peer, give reality-check feedback (i.e., after the reading,
\nthe listener summarizes what she or he thinks the main point is), and
\nthen hear me remind them to use formal citation mechanics, even if the
\nformat for the paper may be informal. <\/p>\n
We then started to talk about the books — they first had to find
\nsomeone at a different table who read a different book and represent
\ntheir book to their classmate. Then as a whole, we compared the
\nsettings, the (inferred) motivations for each author, the (implied)
\nmajor questions in each book, and the assumptions behind those
\nquestions. Students decided they wanted to discuss Bowles and Becker
\nrather than have me lecture, so we spent the rest of the two-hour class
\ntalking about those ideas, discussing how Bowles and Becker would interpret Geoffrey Canada’s personal history and education, and figuring out where Barack Obama’s stated views on college would fit. \n<\/p>\n
Somewhere in there we had questions on the logistics of the class, I
\nmet the three students who registered after the second class last week,
\nI discovered that a PDF I thought I had locked for editing had been
\nlocked so students couldn’t open the file (ouch), and we left loads of
\npotential issues on the table. That’s life. Thursday they upload a
\ndraft section of the major paper for the course (the section where they
\ndon’t need a critical mass of readings under their belt yet), and
\nFriday they upload the final version of the weekly paper. And somehow I
\nwill return feedback and grades Tuesday morning.<\/p>\n
In some ways I am “working without a net” this semester, with a
\nlittle more turnover on readings than usual. In particular, I dropped
\nKozol’s The Shame of the Nation<\/i> and paired Williams with Tough this semester. Maybe
\nI should have dropped Williams because of the limited supply of books,
\nbut while Kozol and Williams were great contrasts the last time I
\ntaught this course (they both express outrage over unequal education in
\nmany of the same cities, but their explanations are worlds apart), I
\nwanted to get Tough in there, and I may stick with Tough as a universal
\nreading because of Chapter 2. But switching books always creates a
\nlittle more demand in thinking-on-my-feet skills because I don’t have
\nexperience in how students will respond.\n<\/p>\n
Also, because of the compressed schedule, I made a commitment to
\nlearn student names in the first week. I’m awful with names and used
\nevery mental trick I could. I think I’m about 80-90% of the way there,
\nand for a class of approximately 40, that’s good for me. Right now, students are trying to keep up with the readings. My challenge is to keep the class rolling, to identify students who are behind from the get-go, and to manage the reading\/feedback in a compressed semester. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Third class of the summer session this morning, first one where students were supposed to have finished readings. This is an undergraduate social-foundations class, and the readings for this week include Gary Becker on human capital, Sam Bowles on social reproduction, and either the start of Paul Tough’s Whatever It Takes or Joe Williams’s Cheating […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy","category-teaching"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-qm","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1634"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1634\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}