We’re back from “spring” break this week, and my students have all gotten their midterms handed back to them. My inbox and office hours were both accordingly more full than usual. Some of the students are taking the time to check in, talk about their performance, and think about what they can do to improve…
It’s a classic question of job interviews, isn’t it? How do you combine your teaching and your research? Next week brings my Religion and American Politics course up to the foreign mission movement, and I will find myself talking to my students about a subject that has been the focus of most of my scholarly…
The pile of blue books and final papers that were decorating my office desk have been filed away. I submitted my grades earlier in the week, and now it comes time to join Ben in thinking about what lies ahead for next semester and reflecting on the one that has just past. It was my second…
I tried something new in my women’s history class this term, and I’m really happy with how it went. I tend to get students from all over the university in this course, but noticed that there are a good number of education majors who show up. One of the papers I assigned last year was…
This semester, I am teaching a course titled “Social Science Approaches to the American Past.” It’s in one of the interdisciplinary programs on campus, with the stated goal of teaching students how social scientists think. This has been an interesting challenge for me as a teacher and a historian (particularly a historian who leans more…
Hello there! Like Katie, I am teaching the first half of US Women’s History this fall, and I couldn’t be happier to be doing so. This is by far my favorite course to teach, and not least because it was in a women’s history college classroom that I myself figured out that I wanted to…
