This first time around teaching the survey I have, simply, been starved for evaluations. Do I lecture too much? Do I lecture too little? Are the readings interesting? Are they too long? Am I covering the right stuff? What should I be talking about? Am I asking the right questions? Really, I want to know,…
“Professor,” the student said to me, with a look of embarrassment that braced for my disappointment. “I do not understand this poem.” The student was referring to a poem I had assigned students in my U.S. History I class. It’s a poem I was very excited about. It’s an 1802 poem, published in the New…
Last spring I conducted an unscientific poll about teaching practices in the US survey. One of my goals in this survey was to get a sense of the different themes that we emphasize in our classes, across the halves of the survey. In my review of the results, I am risking preaching to the choir.…
This is my fifth year as an instructor of record for the survey course and my, gulp, ninth year involved in teaching the survey in some way. And, I’m struggling to separate my current students’ answers from all the other answers I’ve read over the years. I find myself a little frustrated that they STILL…
“So you study stuff?” A student had stopped by my office hours—rare, I know—and just wanted to chat. I was taken aback by her analysis of my research interests. “Stuff” seems so dismissive, belittling even to the material culture of African Americans that I study. But on second thought, that description was right on. “Yeh,”…
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…
Last week I showed my students the recent HBO film, All the Way. It stars Bryan Cranston of Breaking Bad fame (although he’ll always be Malcolm’s dad to me) as Lyndon Johnson and presents the struggles of LBJ’s first year in office in a gripping and accessible portrayal. In addition to teaching the regular post-1885…
So you want to integrate the uses of GIS into your research and teaching? Great! Let’s look at the ways a GIS works. Exploring the potential of GIS technologies is a first step in approaching how spatiality can intervene and create new knowledge in our work. Many scholars (and students) are often tied to interpreting…
This summer when my department asked if I would, for the first time, teach the first half of the US history survey I knew I wanted to assign William Cronon’s nearly-deified Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England for two primary reasons. First, because it is a wonderful example of…
We all have cIasses from high school and college that we remember with fondness, and others we remember with terror. Probably even more common is a subject that we associate with boring assignments on long forgotten material. When we encounter someone who has dedicated their life to an academic subject, it’s hard not to immediately think…
