savageinfidel

If you have read this blog for long, you must know that I put considerable stress on communicating with my students, often by email. I believe open and honest communication is a key for all successful relationships. These communications give you a chance to guide your students toward the outcomes that you want. They allow you to motivate the students, to keep pushing them forward (“I know this seems hard but you are smart enough to do these problems with a bit of work”). They provide a chance for positive feedback – “the class was especially good today” is never a bad acknowledgement – one that students often never hear. They enable you to correct actions that you don’t like (“not very many of you had worked problem 5 for today; I’ll expect a better effort at the next class”). Communications help the teacher to prepare the students for upcoming material – “we are really going to stress the computation of interest expense at our next class so make absolutely sure you’ve studied pages 45...

My wife often watches “Morning Joe” on cable television as she gets ready for the new day. It is a group of people who discuss and debate politics and the world in general each morning. Last week, I wandered through and the people on the show that morning were discussing education. Just as I passed by, one person asserted: “We all know how to get great education: Demand Excellence and Expect Excellence.” Demand Excellence and Expect Excellence. Hmm, sounds good. I wonder how many of us really do that? Do we really demand excellence from our students? Really? In fact, do we really demand excellence from ourselves? Or, maybe, they are just two sides to the same coin. RESPONSE ONE TO MORNING JOE: After hearing the commentator, I immediately walked to my study and sent an email to one of my students. “You made a D on your first test in my class. Since then, I have not noticed one iota of improvement. None. You are not one bit better prepared for my class. ...

My first class of the 2011-2012 academic year will be next Monday at 9 a.m. If you have followed this blog for long, you know that I only teach by using a Socratic Method approach. I distribute questions in advance and then discuss those or related questions for the entire class time. I want a thoughtful conversation. This allows me to stick with my 50-50 goal (I do 50 percent of the talking and they do 50 percent of the talking). I am a big believer that it is important to get each new class off to the proper start. You set a tone at the beginning that carries through for the entire semester. If you are funny, they’ll expect you to be funny from now on. If you do 100 percent of the talking, they’ll assume that this is the way you teach every single day. Consequently, I spend a lot of time thinking about the tone I am creating during that first class. By now, I have already sent my students 4-5 emails so I fully expect them to be prepared on Monday morning and ready to...

I have mentioned several times on this blog that I would strongly urge anyone who wants to become a better teacher to keep a blog. There are always two reasons for that piece of advice. First, I just feel that working out your thoughts on paper is very helpful in establishing what you really think and believe. Until I see it on paper, I’m never sure how I feel. Thus, I was delighted to read the following in Time magazine last week from the renowned historian David McCullough. “The loss of people writing—writing a composition, a letter or a report—is not just the loss for the record. It’s the loss of the process of working your thoughts out on paper, of having an idea that you would never had had if you weren’t (writing). And that’s a handicap People (I research) were writing letters every day. That was calisthenics for the brain.” Second, keeping a blog gives you a chance to share your ideas with folks around the world. The Internet is a marvel in that way. I can s...

A few years ago a dear friend of mine died at the age of 95. When he was a young man, he worked in the Massachusetts area in construction. He once told me that on many days they would finish their work and step back and someone would speak out in pride “Look at what we accomplished today.” That has to be a great feeling. You put in a hard and full day of work and at the end of the day you see that you have created something tangible from your labors, something you can be proud of right then. The world is different because of what you did. I have always thought that was one of the most difficult parts of being a teacher. At the end of the day, it is hard to see what (if anything) we have accomplished. Oh, sure, we all know that we are changing lives. We all know that we are making a difference. Is that enough to keep us moving forward? At the end of the day, whether we did a great job or a lousy one, things look about the same. If you are a baker, at the end of the ...

In every job, problems arise and, unfortunately, there are not always great solutions. I ran into a problem on Saturday and I wasn’t sure what to do with it. When you are dealing with a group of college students and the decisions you make are important to those people, inconsistencies can drive you crazy. I have two Intermediate Accounting II classes this semester. At many schools, Intermediate II is considered one of the most challenging courses in the entire university. Consequently, the grade in that class is often viewed as extremely important to the students. The difference of one letter grade can have major implications in the direction of a career. Our final exam schedule this semester ran from Monday morning at 9 a.m. until Saturday evening. As luck would have it, one of my Intermediate II classes had its final exam in the very first slot from 9 until noon on Monday. The other class had its exam on Friday evening from 7 until 10 p.m. Because my classes were small ...

In writing this blog, I have occasionally shared one of my favorite quotes about teaching: "Teaching does not come from years of doing it. It actually comes from thinking about it.“ I bring up this quote whenever I lead any discussion of teaching. Almost inevitably, someone in the audience asks how a teacher goes about thinking about teaching. It is easy to make a joke about sitting in a dark room in focused contemplation but most of us would just fall asleep. I believe one of the best ways to think about teaching occurs when you write an examination for your students. Since I have spent most of my current weekend writing a test, the process certainly has been on my mind. Writing a test brings up so many questions having to do with your class. --What level of understanding is a student supposed to have developed based on how you structured the coverage? --What are you trying to test? What are your priorities? --How do you write questions that differentiate between...

I did a little experiment over the last two weeks and, to tell you the truth, I was a bit surprised by what I discovered. I asked my students in Intermediate Accounting II (virtually all are second semester juniors) to identify the very best teacher they have had since they entered college. For most students, their teachers provide them with the best examples of leadership. I really wanted my students to consider the attributes that it takes for a person to be a successful leader. Most of them will graduate from college and, within a year or two, they will be in a position where other workers must report to them. Often, the upward trajectory of their careers is not based on their knowledge of accounting but rather on their ability to guide and lead the people who form the members of their team. A teacher is not exactly a team leader but the characteristics for success would seem to be somewhat similar. My students were asked to identify their very best (“best” not “favori...

One of my very favorite words in the English language is “Great.” I just think everyone should decide on a few things in life where they honestly want to shoot to be great. Okay, we may never achieve that greatness but it is hard to get better without a little ambition. And, I believe life just lives better if (a) we know in what ways we would like to become great and (b) we have the satisfaction of going for that greatness. The effort alone will make us better people. (In that regard, I am a big proponent of the Zen expression: “the journey is everything.”) I simply refuse to believe that settling for mediocrity can prove to be meaningful. For one thing, I believe our students deserve better than that since this is their one shot at a college education. When I give teaching presentations, I urge the members of the audience to work gradually to become better teachers. That seems like a reasonable goal. And, if we improve year by year, eventually we will get to grea...

It seems to me that there are a few moments that are terribly critical in connection with how a student does in your class. Most days are like most other days. However, I think the period of time immediately after the first test is really critical and can make a big difference in how well a student eventually does. As you would imagine, my concern is always with the students who do not do terribly well on that first test. I worry that they will see that low first grade and simply assume that is proof positive that they are dumb so they might as well stop trying. Instead of working to get better, they begin to crawl into a hole and their grade spirals downwards after that. Or, they will start trying to make random attempts at pushing their grade up without any logical plan and become frustrated by the lack of improvement. Or, maybe worse still, they will think that I have given up on them and seek less help from me rather than more. Consequently, I try to provide some re...