“The MLA Focuses on Teaching—And Job-Hunting Skills—at Its Annual Meeting” is Jennfier Howard’s report from the recent December 2008 Modern Langauage Association meeting; in her report, Howard refreshingly remarks “it is not intellectually unserious to talk about teaching” and “Pedagogy is not a dirty word.” 

Please access the link above to enjoy Howard’s piece. Her article was published in the January 9, 2009 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education.

by our new yet anonymous “Points of View” professor

It takes a couple of years for new faculty to feel as though we’ve established a routine and have truly become part of the university. Tenure-track junior faculty have to find ways to balance life and work; and somewhere in the midst of publishing, teaching, and service, we have to acclimate ourselves to a new town and a new university, establish new routines, and build new friendships. 

 I’m lucky to have a host of colleagues to help guide me along these ways, and I’m even luckier that some of these same colleagues have become wonderful friends.  Last fall, my newfound friends convinced me to go to the gym with them. They argued strongly with the familiar refrain that exercise positively benefits all aspects of life.  So I relented, and three times a week since October, I’ve been regularly working out with the same group of people. As many of you know, when you first return to serious exercise after a long absence, the road back is hard—it takes work, commitment, and dedication—and the road was made much easier because I had others helping me.

by Kevin Oberlin, PhD

The gap in expectations between teachers and students in the classroom appears to be widening.  As a first-year composition teacher, I most frequently perceive this gap as an unearned sense of entitlement on the students’ part.  On the whole, this perception is not incorrect.  Generation Me, one of the common text selections for beginning composition courses, provides mounting evidence to support the argument that today’s teens to twenty-somethings have been reared to expect that the world owes them success because they are each special and unique, a logical impossibility.

Indeed, first-year composition students on the whole seem to approach the classroom with the sense that course content will be presented to them at best, and inflicted upon them at worst.  In either case, they will walk away from the course having learned something they didn’t particularly care to learn, and something they don’t particularly need to know.  Even teachers attuned to this attitude, who often rightly emphasize to their students that they must earn their education rather than expect it to be given to them, often continue to use language that unwittingly reinforces students’ sense of entitlement.  While such teachers might never say that they are forcing their students to learn, they will often still explain what a particular assignment “forces” students to do so that students will develop a certain skill set.

by our experienced yet anonymous “Points of View” professor

I like to try new experiences in my classroom. Sometimes I ask students to work in groups to research questions and summarize their findings in oral presentations. Sometimes I use a canned talk with PowerPoint slides. Sometimes I come to class ill-prepared, and other times I’ve spent hours working on a lecture that maps everything to Bloom’s taxonomy and clearly identifies my learning objectives and rubrics for student assessment. But at the end of all of this experimentation, I’m still left wondering whether it’s pedagogy or charisma that results in my accolades as a teacher.