savageinfidel

A few days ago, this blog moved over 65,500 page views since its inception.    It is amazing how often I receive emails from teachers (around the world) who start out by saying “A friend of mine who teaches at my school told me about your blog.”    Consequently, I like to stop now and then and say Thanks!!! to everyone who passes along a good word about this blog.    If not for you, I would be writing all this stuff to myself.    Whether you agree or disagree, I really appreciate your passing along the blog entries. ** One of the things that I try to do in my classes is talk with my students about my teaching philosophy.   I want them to understand that I do not do things randomly.    I try to have a reason for what I do and I want that reason to be logical.    I think students appreciate being brought into the conversation about their own education.    I think they are more likely to do what the teacher asks i...

We completed our first week of school yesterday. I always believe that this is an important juncture. Is the class going to fall into a lethargic mediocrity or begin to take off? We only have about 14 weeks. If we are going to have something great, we need to start building on that almost immediately. If you begin to lose student enthusiasm, you may never get it back. So, this morning, I wrote my students a note to make sure they each understand what it takes to be good in my class. The goal is not to cram the night before the test. The goal is to understand the material today so that you can answer more questions tomorrow. I’m hoping they’ll buy into that as a goal worth taking seriously. Here’s the note that I wrote to my students in Intermediate Accounting II. “I thought we had an excellent first week. That’s what I want and that’s what I want every day and every week. Success is never earned by an occasional good day of work. I want you to be consistently excellent. “I have three p...

Let’s assume that you are a true baseball or soccer or basketball fan and you’ve just been appointed manager/coach of your favorite team. You are absolutely thrilled. Your goal is to win the world championship with your team. How exciting is that? How would you go about achieving this goal? My guess is that you would willingly spend hours analyzing every aspect of your team. You would try to think of how you could help each player reach their potential within the team to bring on the victories. You’d study everything about the game to help everyone do better. Heck, this might be so thrilling that you’d do all the work for free just for the opportunity. Is winning a few sporting events in basketball or baseball more important than helping your students to learn? Of course not – we may occasionally forget how important our jobs are but we should never lose sight of what we are accomplishing. I would argue that you already have a much more important job than any big l...

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...

A student that I had in one of my classes last spring wrote me recently for a book suggestion. He said that he wanted to learn more about the nature of business success and wondered what books I might suggest for him to read over the summer. I gave him a few titles that I like and then finished off with one of my very favorite books from many decades ago: Up the Organization . I made the point to the student that I liked this last book especially because it made so much of business just seem like common sense. The book didn’t try to overwhelm me with weird ideas and theories or complex calculations and assumptions. It just said, in very simple terms, “if you treat people this way, you should get good results.” After I wrote the student, I started to wonder if I could use the same logic in my teaching. Is there a common sense approach to teaching? The education system in the U.S. gets criticized quite frequently and experts put forth a lot of new suggestions all the ti...