Monday, December 14, 2009

Wax On...Wax Off


  • Posting a scathing comment about me to RateMyProfessor.com on the same morning that you come to my office hours to plead for a passing grade is pretty risky, especially when I subscribe to the RSS feed!
  • And people criticize string theory for being too pie-in-the-sky? Here's a concrete representation of it for just $90. That may seem cheap, but just remember than you need to buy something like 10 raised to the power of 500 of these to get something like our universe!
  • Teaching Tip #436: I've long been aware of a glaring weakness in my teaching; I'm bad at repeating things. In particular, I suck at reviewing things. I suppose it's because I'm pretty spare with my speech in the first place, and I tend to either understand something right away or I ask questions. So I've always simply expected students to ask if they don't get it. Of course, this often doesn't happen. Anyway, you might think just recognizing this defect means I could easily fix it, but not really. So here comes the tip: teaching is a bit like painting in which one needs to brush in various directions to fill in spots and establish a good covering. It may sound a bit corny, but it really helps me come into lecture each day and try saying the same things from previous lectures a bit differently.

4 comments:

Dave Bacon said...

"Posting a scathing comment about me to RateMyProfessor.com on the same morning that you come to my office hours to plead for a passing grade is pretty risky, especially when I subscribe to the RSS feed!"

You must made coffee go up my nose. :)

CarlBrannen said...

I'm going to send this link to my sister, a prof of English at Duquesne.

Her equivalent is the students who are her friends on Facebook and who come up with explanations for missing class or homework that are divergent with the party images.

cerita said...

well, I hope you always keep your confidence, keep your spirit and believe that there is nothing difficult..

maths said...

Hmm.
Nice!
I will forward this link to may teacher.