savageinfidel

  If you have followed my blog postings over the years, you know that I have several obsessions about teaching.    (1) – I believe in having a lot of communications with my students.   Whether it is love, marriage, or a college class, things go better with communication.    To the teacher, everything makes sense.    Too often, to the students, everything is a mystery.    I want to cut out as much of that mystery as possible.   I think students respond well when they understand what is expected of them. (2) – I believe in honest and frank communication.    College students are adults.   I never see any reason to feed them a bunch of nonsense.    If you aren’t going to tell them the truth, you would be better off not to have the communication.    I think you should stress the good as well as the bad.   No one wants to get praise all the time and no one wants to hear how bad they are all t...

At this moment, I am half-way through my 42 nd year as a college professor.    Tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. I walk back into class to see if I can do it all again.    This semester, I have 28 students in one Intermediate Accounting II class and 26 students in another Intermediate class.     I also have 15 students taking my Governmental Accounting course.    I have an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of these 69 young people.    Hopefully, that will be a positive difference.    That is not a responsibility that I take lightly.    Whether each of these students is better off on the last day of the semester depends in large part on how well I do my job.     After all this time, I am still thrilled when I think about going into class and leading the conversation.    I never fail to get a stomach full of butterflies before the first class.    You could describe my feel...

I am always a bit amazed by how many readers we have on this blog. I never expected to get to 1,000 and we have now had (as of 8 minutes ago) 54,309 page views. Many readers are accounting profs but a lot teach all kinds of other things. I am busy so I rarely pay attention to which blog entries get a lot of readership and which get less. However, because of an unrelated project, I had to go back a few days ago and look at all the entries to date and noted the number of hits for each. Most got hundreds, some got thousands. However, the following entry (from May 30, 2010) only had 14 hits. 14??? Heck, some of these entries get 14 hits in the first two minutes. I’m not sure why no one read this entry because (even rereading it today) I think it raises a valid question as to what you actually want to be as a college prof. I especially liked the comment about the baseball team needing different types of players. Are you in an environment where different talents and roles are recognized? So,...

To me, the following is a marvelous statement about what a college education really should be. But my favorite part is the last sentence. I could yack for days about virtually every word in the entire paragraph but I am not sure I could really add one iota to what is said. “The justification for a university is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning. The university imparts information, but it imparts it imaginatively. At least, this is the function which it should perform for society. A university which fails in this respect has no reason for existence. This atmosphere of excitement, arising from imaginative consideration, transforms knowledge. A fact is no longer a bare fact: it is invested with all its possibilities. It is no longer a burden on the memory: it is energising as the poet of our dreams, and as the architect of our purposes. Imagination is not to be divorced...

Football coaches across the country work constantly on getting their players to play especially hard at the end of each game. Often, the difference between winning and losing is based on who can put on the strongest push in the final moments. One last valiant effort can lead to a victory that will be remembered with fondness for years to come. When my students return from Thanksgiving break, they will have one more week of classes and then final exams. In less than 2 weeks, it will be all over. They can be lethargic or they can be energized. I know what I want. I don’t want them to coast out. I want them to finish strong. Why do all this work throughout the semester only to fade out at the very end? If the material is worth learning, now is the time to put on that push to add even more knowledge and understanding. Here at the end of the semester, I like to challenge my students to keep pushing forward. I think it is human nature; people need motivation. For studen...

Interesting article in The Chronicle of Higher Education on what a professor can learn from student evaluations. The article is insightful as are a lot of the numerous comments that were left by readers. http://chronicle.com/article/How-to-Read-a-Student/129553/

Garry Trudeau, who writes the comic strip “Doonesbury,” must have some interesting opinions about college education. In this blog, I have written previously about the picture of college education that he paints occasionally (see “Dealing With The Truth” posted on January 23, 2011). Well, once again, Trudeau has written a strip that I felt went right to the heart of some of the problems we face as educators. In his cartoon for Sunday, June 26, 2011, two students are sitting at what looks like a coffee shop. One student asks: “When is Guy Fawkes Day?” and the other looks at a computer screen and responds with the correct answer in 0.08 seconds. The next question is what is “the seventh most abundant element in the earth’s crust”? This time the correct answer is provided in 0.14 seconds. The final question is what are “the three main branches of moral philosophy”? Discovery of the correct answer takes a mere 0.09 seconds. The instant availability of an infinite amount of inf...

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...

By now, everyone who reads this blog has probably heard of the book “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses” by Arum and Roksa that basically makes the claim that the emperor has no clothing by giving evidence that students do not learn much in their four years in college. If you have missed the release of the book, you can learn more at the following URL where the authors are quoted as stating "How much are students actually learning in contemporary higher education? The answer for many undergraduates, we have concluded, is not much.” http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/18/study_finds_large_numbers_of_college_students_don_t_learn_much What I find most interesting is that the blame game has started. Something is obviously wrong so what is to blame? Here are some culprits that I’ve heard mentioned: grade inflation, lack of education classes for college professors, the stress put on faculty to do research so they can’t focus on their teaching, lack...

In my previous post, I indicated that I believed teachers should do a lot less than 100 percent of the talking in class—especially on the opening day. Several people wrote to ask me how I do that. I view every class as a conversation. So, how do you start a conversation? Most conversations begin with a question. “Do you come here often?” “Have you ever had better barbecue?” “What did you think about that baseball game last night?” “Do you remember the weather ever being this hot?” Questions are a natural conversation starter. You then reply based on the answer you get. A good question can lead to hours of non-scripted conversation. The same is true in class. Therefore, I really think about my opening question. Where do I hope it will lead our conversation? I think it often sets the tone for the entire day. In fact, on the first day, you may well be setting the tone for the entire semester. Okay, I teach accounting classes so my opening question probably c...

I am at the annual meeting of the American Accounting Association in San Francisco. I thought, if I saw something interesting while I am here, that I would write about it. Yesterday, I was lucky enough to have a long conversation with Presha Neidermeyer, Associate Professor of Accounting at West Virginia University. She was telling me about all of her many trips to Africa to take her students to places like Uganda and South Africa to work with the not-for-profit organizations there. We typically think about accounting professors sitting in a classroom teaching sleepy students about debits and credits. Dr. Neidermeyer is going way, way beyond that. She takes small groups (“I like to be able to load them all up in a van, if I have to”) and goes to the country and helps out some of the NFPs there. She talked specifically about one organization that did micro-lending and how her students helped them organize their forms so they could become more efficient. Can you imagine how h...

In his book Outliers , Malcolm Gladwell talks about how much knowledge students lose over the summer time. Although he is looking at younger students, the amount is incredible. For some reason, we seem to hold the philosophy that summer time is a “no brain” time where students should do as little as possible that might stimulate their thinking. I’m not sure that is a very good idea. Consequently, last week, I sent an email message to the 37 students who will be in my Financial Accounting courses next fall. (I will also be teaching one section of Intermediate Accounting II.) I wanted to get the students’ attention. I wanted to start convincing them that Financial Accounting was going to be challenging but very much worth that challenge. Most importantly, I wanted them to have the opportunity to make use of their summer vacation to get ready for next fall. Why not? What is wrong with wanting to learn more? I don’t accept the premise that my students want to learn as littl...

Last Wednesday, I gave a one-hour presentation for PricewaterhouseCoopers. The partner and I had talked about a topic and finally decided on “College Education Over the Next Ten Years” since I do a lot of thinking about how education as we know it will evolve. I decided to end this program by making a few predictions. I thought that seemed appropriate. And, it would be fun. To generate discussion (or debate), I made a few of them rather far out. But, on the whole, I really did believe that most would come to pass in one form or another. So, I figured I could throw out my predictions to you today and let you ponder them a bit. Because the first one is central to my overall view of the future, I decided to include just it today. In the next day or so, I’ll give you all of the rest of my predictions. Remember, though, that these are for the next ten years. And, as we all know, over 10 years a lot can happen given the fast pace of change in the world today. Here is my f...

Students today commonly use Twitter and Facebook and, therefore, they receive lots of information on a regular basis. Information comes to them in small bits many times each day. Therefore, the 48 to 72 hours between class meetings can seem like an eternity. It is little wonder that students often seem incapable of remembering what took place in the previous class meeting. The amount of correspondence they have received in the interim is probably massive. I don’t use Twitter because I can’t write anything in 140 characters but I use email A LOT. I want to keep the students engaged in the period between my classes. I want them to think about Financial Accounting every day not just when they are walking into class. The emails that I send to my students vary enormously from motivational to practice questions to simply informational. I often ask the students about these emails in class so they know they need to read them. Yesterday was our first class where we discussed ow...

My first Financial Accounting class of the new semester is tomorrow. I am prepared. I am excited. After 40 years, it is nice to feel such anticipation. My goal for the first class is to convince the student that financial accounting is really important to them (regardless of their major), help them understand the topic in terms of the conveyance of financial information to decision-makers, and start helping them to understand that it is actually all quite interesting. In my classes, normally about 11 percent to 24 percent of the students earn the grade of A. I like for the percentage to be small enough to feel really special, a genuine challenge. However, I also want the grade to seem attainable with a reasonably strong effort. I am a big believer that students believe other students (“the grapevine”) much more than they will ever believe any teacher. So, at the end of each semester, I send an email to the students who make the grade of A in my class. First, I want to...

I am a big believer that you need to set the tone that you want for a class right at the beginning. That first impression forms a foundation that you can build on throughout the semester. I am lucky at the University of Richmond for two reasons. One – I have been here for 30 years so I already have a reputation. I imagine that most of the students that I will have starting on Monday would say this about me: “I hear that he is a good teacher but I hear that he is very challenging and really wants you to learn; I imagine that I am going to have to work hard this semester.” I believe teachers should think about the reputations they are building because students will live up (or down) to what they have heard about you and your class. Two – The University of Richmond provides us with email addresses for our students and I have already sent them three emails getting them ready. I want my students to understand what I expect right from the first day. I want to set the tone righ...