After looking through some of my blog posts recently, I thought I’d clarify a few things. I’ll admit, teaching college students is not all sunshine and rainbows. There are plenty of frustrating moments and students that know how to push your buttons. However, the students I meet with weekly in the classroom do inspire me…
“Have you ever stopped yourself in the middle of the day to question what you are doing? I often think about how invigorating it is to really think about why we, as social creatures, choose to live our lives the way we do. Why have you chosen to take the actions or engaged in the…
“I started my career in education as an English teacher in Japan. The experience was life changing for me. I previously had little desire to pursue a career in education, however my experience teaching – and learning from – my elementary and junior high school students has steered me toward my current profession. The thing…
I’ve been using the ‘flipped classroom’ approach to teaching since before I knew what the term meant. I’m sure I’m not the only instructor who intuitively felt that talking at students for a few hours each week, and then sending them home to do outside work wouldn’t be the best learning strategy. Instead, I had…
Because it’s Valentine’s Day, and we should all have a little more compassion and love for each other on this (slightly too commercialized) holiday, here are some moving teacher/professor quotes to make your day a little sweeter: “My teacher thought I was smarter than I was- so I was.” “Every kid is one caring teacher…
“I never planned to be a teacher. In fact, my mother (a teacher) steered me away from the profession. In college, my interest survey said I should be a catholic nun/teacher. I thought the survey was screwy – I wasn’t catholic and had no plans to be a teacher. After I finished my masters program…
In the article, Top 10 Education Technologies that Will Be Dead and Gone in the Next Decade, faculty members voiced their opinions about what classroom technology they believe will be gone within the next 10 years, which ones they hope might become obsolete, and what they believe their role as instructors will be versus the…
As I mentioned in a recent blog post, I’ve been working on some face-to-face classroom activities (that I’ve also tried out with my online classes) to help my students answer and analyze questions/concepts more thoroughly in future assignments. After experimenting a little bit, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the results. Any instructor, regardless of what…
The dean at one of my local colleges goes through the trouble of sending out department-wide emails each week with school updates and interesting articles we might be interested in reading. As an online instructor, I probably appreciate these weekly emails more than most instructors since it keeps me in the loop, so I try…
Tim Ferriss has talked about how to cut hours from our busy schedules in The Four Hour Work Week, and I took some helpful suggestions to heart after listening to the audio book. However, I’m sure many people, like me, were still left thinking “I don’t know that I could apply this to my job/life.”…