Next semester, I’ll be offering an online version of my Civil War and Reconstruction course. This is the third time I’ll be teaching this upper-level, reading- and writing-intensive course in a fully online environment. Thanks to being a part of the initial cohort of the Council of Independent Colleges’ Consortium for Online Humanities Instruction, I’ve…
This week in my U.S. survey, we’re discussing Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of an American Slave. It’s a venerable text, and used so often in the survey that it almost feels like a cliche’ when I assign it. But Douglass is, you might have heard, doing a terrific job that’s being recognized by…
A few weeks ago, at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Denver, I had the opportunity to chair a session centered around rethinking History Ph.D. education. It was a great conversation, and the two panelists–both Ph.D. students doing some really remarkable work–powerfully articulated the ways in which we can expand some of…
I wish it hadn’t taken a crisis of propaganda and misinformation to demonstrate the worth of our vocation to society at large, but here we are nonetheless.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but it feels like an out-of-body experience trying to write a post that engages with teaching and learning US History in this particular historical moment. My students are finding it difficult to remove themselves from their urgent and fraught present; my colleagues perhaps even more so.…
Next week on my campus, we will hit midterms. And with midterm week comes an even larger pile of grading that annexes even more of my desk. A colleague of mine used to joke about going to “grading jail”–“Hard time with no parole.” Yet it really starts to feel that way when we’re slogging through…
The start of a new semester may not be the best time for deep existential questions, but I like to ask them anyway. Why are we here? I’m not asking metaphysically, however, but rather in the more immediate sense. I return to the question every time I start a new set of classes, largely because…
Throughout my teaching career, I have learned–mostly the hard way–that classroom challenges often stem from problems in course design. Students not seeing an activity as important as I think it is? Maybe I haven’t tied it to very many points in their grade, and it thus looks low-priority to them. Everyone bombs the first essay?…
I ceaselessly tinker with my courses from semester to semester, and lately I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my practice with the survey course. In the spirit of full disclosure, I should note that my stance on the survey has always been ambivalent, and there are days where my attitude towards it has…
