teaching

Never-Got-Around-To-Responding Linkdump

It's been a while since I've done an old-fashioned linkdump. All of these are articles or posts that I wanted to respond to but never found the time to, and yet had stuck in my bookmarks.

What The Notorious B.I.G. can teach university professors
For 'crackhead,' think 'student with a late paper.' For 'credit,' think 'extension.' The comments are split between people who think it's brilliant and those who are appalled by all the cursing. Bonus points, I say, for quoting MF Doom.
"The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher"
Schools only teach us confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, and surveillance, says John Taylor Gatto.

The Girls Cutting Up Male Qualities

Alanna Mitchell on why men are less and less likely to be teachers: “The class batted it around in a bloodless little battle of the sexes, the girls cutting up male qualities, the boys rebutting as they roared with laughter. Finally, one boy summed it up for everyone: It's because men like to be active, play games, look to the future, explore. They don't want to be stuck in a classroom with kids. Women, on the other hand, like to take care of family, home and community. They're natural teachers.”

More along the too few good men theme.

Mark Edmundson on Academic Cheating

Mark Edmundson: “professors need to stop looking exclusively for technological solutions to a problem that often stems, in consequential ways, from the way we do our jobs. Perhaps the current boom in electronic cheating can give professors — especially in the humanities, as the sciences are often bound to traditional test-giving and test-taking — a chance to pause and think and ultimately to teach in a better way.” Among the things that I need to think about if I'm ever going to get into PDP, must less become an accredited teacher, are the dilemmas involved in preventing and catching cheaters. Edmunson is talking mostly about university-level teaching, but a lot of what he has to say applies to high-school teachers as well.

The Deepest Experts Can Be The Worst Teachers

Eric Meyer talks about teaching without qualifications, though still having the skillset:

Allow a History major to teach in a computer science department at a University? [...] am I not qualified to teach students how to assemble a Web design, and about the underpinnings of today's Web, with an eye to the future? I certainly think I am, at least from a skills point of view; whether or not I'd make a good teacher of people is another question entirely, of course. The deepest experts can be the worst teachers, something all of us probably encountered at some point in our eductional experiences.

Something I've been thinking about lately, with my political science degree but interest in web design and such. This as I consider doing the social studies stream of PDP.