Transparent Teaching

Do you talk about why you do what you do in class? Do your students tell you why they're there, or what their expectations are? That's what I blogged about this week at Inside Higher Ed.

Tiger Mothers, Drifting College Students...

Was it possible that the whole Tiger Mother thing would blow over before I mentioned it? No, it was not...

back again

Again I missed one of my posts over at IHE. Last week I blogged about my phone ringing while I was in a workshop (among other things); this week I have a little more to say about that workshop.

Posted using ShareThis

Blog U.: Mothering at Mid-Career: Talking about Teaching - Mama PhD - Inside Higher Ed

It's an odd thing, writing a blog. Folks I know — or colleagues I don't know, for that matter — can stumble across it in ways they're unlikely to come across my academic work, but they don't often let me know they read it.

today I talk about one time when someone did let me know, and why I'm glad about it...

Blog U.: Mothering at Mid-Career: Talking about Teaching - Mama PhD - Inside Higher Ed

Posted using ShareThis

ps: this piece should really have a link to Becca's recent column on social reading...

In Memoriam

I learned today that one of my high school teachers, Otis Benson Davis, died earlier this week. O.B., as we all called him (only behind his back--to his face he was, of course, Mr. Davis), graduated from Kent School in 1942 and returned to teach there full time in 1949. He retired from active teaching only a few years ago, in 2006.

I graduated from Kent 36 years after O.B. did. He was my AP English teacher, my senior year; he was also the English department chair, and his influence was pervasive in the department. He was the co-author of the textbook we used for AP English, The Idea of Man (now out of print), and he was the teacher who introduced me to Hamlet, King Lear, and Oedipus as well as Out of the Silent Planet and Point of No Return. O.B. didn't think that, as 17 and 18-year-olds, we were too young to "get" dramas of middle and old age such as Point of No Return and King Lear; he didn't think we needed to be pandered to or coddled. I might choose different books than he did to teach seniors in high school--I imagine he chose different books, too, over the years--but I still remember what we read and, especially, his presence in the classroom, pushing, probing, questioning so that we read better, read deeper.

Part of AP English then--and, I imagine, now--involved drafting the college essay. My first draft, as I recall it, was unimpressive. O.B. wrote in the margin that it was a "cursory adumbration" of a much better essay. I had to look up "adumbration." I didn't ask him to define it; I knew it was my job to figure out what he meant and then to act on it. We sat around a seminar table in his class and discussed our essays, and the books we were reading, and started to feel like scholars.

We weren't, of course, but his confidence in us was, at least for me, infectious. When I started teaching I thought of O.B. all the time. I couldn't emulate him as a teacher--I didn't have his gravitas, his beard, his pipe. But I could and did remember the care he took with my essays, the love he had for literature. His was the approval I sought, the criticism I learned from, the example that inspired me. I can't say for sure that I'm an English professor because O.B. was my teacher, but I know he was a part of what made me choose the path I did. I did have the chance to say "thank you," years later, and I'm glad I did, but I'll say it again.

Thank you, O.B. Rest in peace.

Thinking about teaching

As my sabbatical draws to a close I think about what I've learned about teaching in the year I've been away from it, over at Inside Higher Ed's Mama, PhD blog. See you there...

teaching and tae kwon do

At first I didn’t mention it at work. I think I felt a little silly about it: a middle-aged woman — an English professor! — taking tae kwon do. But then one day a colleague asked about a small bruise on my arm and, unthinking, I told him I’d blocked a kick with my forearm. It hadn’t been a smart move in tae kwon do, but as I told him about it, I could see the respect in his eyes. I began to think I should bring in my broken boards, leave them in the office, maybe mention how easily my palm had just gone through the wood. It couldn’t hurt.

Read the rest here..

(cross posted at Lessons from the Tortoise)