teaching

…is linked here. Tip from Joanne Jacobs. Read more

In "The Unlived Life is Not Worth Examining," Robert Pondiscio challenges the idea of personal essays for college admission applications: What if applicants were asked to write or submit a research paper instead?  Which is more predictive of college success, past academic work, or a personal essay, where students labor to make themselves seem well-rounded, fascinating and Read more

This guy has perfectly nailed or current screwed up intellectual and educational landscape: Such a partition of thinking from doing has bequeathed us the dichotomy of “white collar” versus “blue collar,” corresponding to mental versus manual. These seem to be the categories that inform the educational landscape even now, and this entails two big errors. Read more

Earlier this morning, I took a break to visit our local Taqueria on the main floor of the Business Building for a couple of their delicious (and generous) breakfast tacos.  There was a minor hubbub going on, as a half-dozen young boys, more or less in school uniforms, were milling about.  Apparently they had ducked Read more

My colleague Joleen Beltrami passes on this interesting story about the increasing presence of laptop computers in the classroom.  I’m sure she was thinking of me and my tablet PC — I use it to take notes (with the pen!), check facts, and run programs like SAS, Excel, S-Plus, or Mathematica.  For me, it’s a Read more

From a FOXnews article on the VPI shootings: Trey Perkins, who was sitting in a German class in Norris Hall, told The Washington Post that the gunman barged into the room at about 9:50 a.m. and opened fire for about a minute and a half, squeezing off 30 shots in all. The gunman, Perkins said, Read more

RightWingProf has a great post about the differing perceptions of what secondary and post-secondary* instructors think students should be learning in high school. My favorite: Look, it would be nice if I had a class of incoming students who already knew what Chi-square, ANOVA, t-test, regression, binomial distribution, and so forth were, knew how to Read more

I think I’ve just found a way to improve my teaching evaluations. Tip from the Geek Press. Read more

Apparently, learning to write cursive–which is on the wane–has cognitive benefits: The loss of handwriting also may be a cognitive opportunity missed. The neurological process that directs thought, through fingers, into written symbols is a highly sophisticated one. Several academic studies have found that good handwriting skills at a young age can help children express Read more

Frederick Mosteller, one of the great teachers of statistics, passed away on July 24th.  Although I had seen his name on numerous books and articles, I didn’t really "get" Mosteller until I read his American Statistician article "Classroom and platform performance" with its memorable advice "Strange things happen. Be ready for them." Tip from Andrew Read more