savageinfidel

Assume someone offered you a million dollars to become one of the great college teachers in the world.   Given that much incentive, how would you approach the challenge?    Well, my plan would be to break teaching down into all of its many basic components and study each one very carefully – looking for ways to make it better.   I think you build a better machine by taking it apart so that you can analyze the individual pieces and try to improve each one.    However, over the years, I have never actually had anyone suggest this approach as a way of becoming a better teacher.    Improvement in teaching is more often talked about in generic ways.    My thought is that you need to select one specific component of your teaching and then focus on it for a while.    How can I do this better?    In fact, there have been many semesters over my teaching career where I spent the entire time trying to improve one particular aspe...

Globalization created the opportunity to capitalize on cheap labor in developing countries. Although China remains the primary source of apparel manufacturing for many developed nations, the country’s demand for increasing wages has lead to the search for new labor markets. A new sources of cheap labor is Bangladesh—one of the poorest countries in the world, located in South Asia. Bangladesh has a population of approximately 160 million, and remains plagued by corruption, massive poverty and political instability. A Deathly Shortcoming: The cheap labor in Bangladesh has made it the second biggest apparel exporter—an industry worth $19 billion. The wages for the workers in Bangladesh are a meager $0. 18-$0.26 an hour, while China’s workers average $1.34 an hour. This motivated many manufacturers, like Wal-Mart and Sears to shift its production to the country, allowing them to squeeze out a slightly higher margin. However, the working conditions for Bangladeshi workers include an a...

As I have mentioned, I will be giving a presentation in Anaheim in August at the annual convention of the American Accounting Association.   I will be talking about this blog (and, hence, some of my ideas about teaching) for 75 minutes.   (When it comes to teaching, I can easily talk for many hours.) Over the last couple of years, I have written 166 entries on this blog.   I think some have been pretty good but others have been rather stupid.   In writing and in teaching, that is how it goes.   Perfection is never my goal.   I like to throw out a lot of ideas and hope that a reasonable number are helpful. My idea for this presentation in August is that I will talk about some of the blog entries that have been the most helpful to teachers out there in colleges around the world.   However, I can only guess at that.   So, I would like to enlist some help from YOU.   If you think that any of ...

Sunday morning, my wife informed me that there was an article in the newspaper that I was really going to find interesting.    My wife knows me well so I was immediately intrigued.    The article was by Charles F. Bryan, Jr. and was titled “What Makes Great Teachers Great?”   And, yes, I was certainly interested. I found a lot about this essay to be very insightful.     I was especially interested to note that it was not written by a faculty member or by an administrator.    It was written by one of the leaders of a consulting firm.    Often, I believe, we get too close to college education to see it clearly.    I liked the idea here of having an outsider come in and study teaching with fresh eyes in order to provide his vision of what makes a great teacher. Here, the author identifies seven common traits of great teaching.    So, I have an assignment for you.   Read about these traits and then give yourse...

I got the nicest email a few days ago from the president of the American Accounting Association:     “ I am happy to give you some great news: you have been selected as the recipient of the 2013 Innovation in Accounting Education award for your blog, Joe Hoyle: Teaching -- Getting the Most From Your Students . The award was established to foster innovation and improvement in accounting education through ‘significant programmatic changes or a significant activity, concept, or set of educational materials.’” I was really thrilled.   As a result, I will make a 90 minute presentation on August 7 at the AAA annual meeting in Anaheim.    If you are going to be at that conference, I hope you will stop by.     And, I want to thank everyone who reads this blog for helping to spread the word.    We have now had 78,000 page views over the years and my guess is that most of those hits came from you guys telling other folks about the blog...