Lecture #1: That Was Then, This is Now … for Now Time to get out your camera – the first day of school is here (for us, it’s next Tuesday). Here’s what I do after rolling through the syllabus and addressing any “crashers” – the name we have for students who want to add a class that…
More on Assignments 2. Exams (30%). This is where I hit my students hard about reading the textbook and attending lecture. I want my students to learn the material that they are to debate and discuss. The first half of the exam is straightforward multiple choice questions and True-False assessments. These questions often ask for…
Assignments, part 1 Grading can be the worst part of the job. Maybe for a semester or two as a TA I enjoyed it. There was that rush of power. Sitting at a café with 60 bluebooks, I got to sit with an air of superiority. It nicely hid my overwhelming feeling of inferiority as…
I’ve always wondered about the best way to find out what our students know. How do I know what I know they know they know? Over the course of this blog I hope we’ll talk a lot about assessment. But as I’m putting up my syllabus I’ve decided on a strategy to make sure they…
Selecting Texts There are three types of texts I have traditionally assigned: the textbook; the primary document or documents; and secondary sources. Let’s begin with the textbook. My experience as an undergraduate history major and as a graduate student instructor was that everyone assigned a textbook, but professors never used it and students rarely read…
–(I honestly meant to get this posted before Ed posted his second installment, and now I see I am too late. The lesson: never try to be as productive as Ed–it’s too tall a task.)– I’d like to thank Ed for setting up such a useful site, on how we teach the survey. Because I…
The Schedule It comes last on the syllabus, but I have learned the heart of my syllabus is the schedule. It’s like the great, ghastly tick-tock machine of Gregory Maguire’s magical novel Wicked – subtly controlling all other events (at least that’s what I think happens in the novel). When I first began teaching, I…
This is an invitation to discuss and debate how best to teach survey courses in United States History. This semester, we’re focusing upon the second half of the survey (so roughly the Civil War to yesterday). I started teaching United States history survey courses ten years ago. I’ve taught them in five different states, at…
