Last spring, I taught two courses that attracted a lot of STEM students. History of medicine always holds appeal for future doctors and my death in America course drew more aspiring engineers and chemists than it did aspiring historians. This was a very different experience for me, as I was used to having most of…
It is the beginning of another academic year and here I am at another new institution with a new student body, new curriculum requirements, and a new conception of the purpose of the history survey. Centre College, my new academic home, has a general education curriculum and the history surveys serve as the gen. ed.…
Last month, I began a new position as Assistant Professor of History at Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale, VA, teaching both halves of the U.S. history survey. I love the job, not only because I get to teach the survey, which, as I’ve already explained, I thoroughly enjoy, but also because of the students I…
Last semester I went back to basics. My previous offering of Postwar America (1945-present) had been an experiment with a theme of interrogating decades. After this one-time experiment, which was fun but ended up being a lot of extra work both for me and the students, I decided to go back to a traditional lecture-discussion…
I ended up in the clearly enviable situation of teaching, alongside my standard U.S. history load, two sections of Global History II this semester. Yes, that’s two sections covering the quick and unproductive time between 1500 and 2015…across the entire earth. This, my friends, to many, is the grizzle of the academic teaching world. But…
I’m now two sessions into my American History and Memory course (the re-vamp of my old syllabus I talked about here) and so far, things are going well. I’m nervous, though, and I don’t think that feeling is going to be going away anytime soon. I’ll be spending some of my posts this fall talking…
As I teach my second graduate readings course, I have realized just how little I prepared for similar courses in grad school. Yes, I “mastered” comps and arrived in daily seminar meetings equipped to discuss books. But it is another matter altogether to prepare and lead an organized, fluid three-hour weekly discussion on books and…
When I began teaching online in my graduate history department in January of 2012, I became one of only three individuals to take up the challenge. At this point, I was encouraged to try this type of teaching because my dissertation required an extensive research agenda in Washington, D.C., and nearly ten U.S. cities. The…
Over the past several months, I have seen at least a half dozen academic friends circulate a piece from the Huffington Post College blog, entitled, “A Message to My Freshman Students.” The piece touches on some important issues regarding the differences between college-level and secondary-level instruction. I appreciate the author’s attempt to meet his students…
How does blogging fit into your academic life on a daily/weekly/monthly basis? That was one of the framing questions that Joe had asked us to think about, and it was one that really got me thinking about the importance of accountability. As professors, we are of course accountable to our students every time we walk…
