I didn’t appreciate humanities in college until my last year when I finally took two really incredible courses in early modern European history and environmental politics & policy of all things. I’ve wondered about how to fit more of this into packed schedules and (I hope the English teachers don’t hate this too much, but) I think it would be good to cut out some of the “gen eds” in which skills can be addressed in other courses. If students didn’t have to take two classes specifically on writing on contrived essay topics, they would have space to, early in their university career, experience an engaging humanities class in which they could write about something interesting to them. There is certainly enough writing in humanities courses without having to have a whole class only on writing.

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The basis of this comment has been made above by and others replying, but I think I have something to add.
The mental health of a worker (Doctor, therapist, crisis responder) and their sensitivity to trauma are likely negatively correlated. People who can keep themselves healthy working regularly in critical moments usually have to be able to desensitize when needed. If you’re fully emotionally engaged with every crisis, you won’t be able to maintain your own health. This is why so many people only last a few months as a crisis responder or therapist despite going through long training; they can either sacrifice feeling in the moment or their own long-term mental health. Being able to desensitize is the preferable option because it’s the only way to maintain balance and keep a qualified person available to help more individuals.

I think that part of the reason online lectures are more difficult to concentrate on is that you can’t communicate with your lecturer. They (1) assume that lectures are how to teach and (2) disconnect the person from teaching and learning. These are both things we’ve examined and are often seen as negative.

To Savannah and as a response to Jackson’s comment, I think we can start students thinking of work and all of our eventual professions this by presenting ourselves as whole people with interests and skills outside of the scientist/historian/teacher they see us as. Essentially, being a role-model of a well-rounded person living a healthy life and also doing good work.

I’m glad you guys felt free to actually make a blog post. Your examples from your fields are excellent. With the insistence that we do something “creative” I felt that we couldn’t make a nice clear substantive post with a definition and discussion, but instead had to create some abstract representation that couldn’t actually define anything. This is much better than that. Thanks for the post!

I appreciate that you were willing to write more of a “for me” than “for others” post here. I had a lot of similar thoughts while trying to figure out what to write and ended up with a short and insignificant post because I didn’t want this sort of thing to be part of my online presence as a researcher. It’s nice that there are people willing to put out “talking yourself through it” style content in a way that I can’t.

Hi Blayne. Reading the Fowler piece was a reminder to me that, being in the sciences, my students are likely never going to have high expectations of my style when presenting. If I’m awkward or tell stupid jokes no one thinks are funny, it’s sort-of what is expected in the “science professor” bag. In a more positive light, if I don’t put on a show it doesn’t reflect poorly on me as an “expert” on the subject I’m teaching
I imagine being the expert on public speaking would be absolutely terrifying and would make you feel even more like you had to put on a performance and be TED-talk slick every time you lead a class since your students would expect an excellent public speaker every time. Is this not the case?

To my reading, the case against grades is that they actually decrease what I would consider “measurable goals” – learning and interest. However, the fight against measurable goals struck me as pretty much just semantic. I also think that what the ideas put forth as alternatives are lacking is a predictor of future success.
My biggest problem with grades is that I don’t think they are a reliable predictor of future success. But I don’t think that individual assessments check all the boxes, either, since they lack utility (and I don’t think utility is a bad thing).
What Dan Pink brings up when he discusses why the 20% thing is good are measurable outcomes – they are new innovations and products. Additionally, just because we don’t know how to measure learning in a positive way doesn’t mean it’s immeasurable, it just means we don’t know how to effectively and harmlessly do it yet. What do you think?

One thing I kept thinking of with this reading was the difference between graduate and undergraduate classes. I can relate to the student experience/actions you bring up (not reading feedback on good grades, etc) in terms of my past experiences from back when I was an undergraduate, but all of my graduate courses have been essentially pass-fail, even if there are letter grades assigned in the end. They’re based on creating a product that actually gives insight into how research is done and gives perspective on where current research in an area is heading.
I don’t think that implementing these types of expectations would be unreasonable for undergraduates. It may even address some of the issues we’ve discussed in previous weeks of this class related to teaching a swiftly changing subject.

Hey Savannah, I really liked your post. I have only taught as a GTA one semester so far, but I had the freedom to make my class my own in the past when I was teaching high-school level biology, and the restrictions of teaching to the primary instructor’s goals was the main thing the other TA and I discussed when we were working on the class last year. It can be so frustrating to realize how different your teaching philosophy and what you value in a subject is from what the instructor thinks and values, but I do think there is a positive there. I think that facing the frustration helps us to develop and articulate our own philosophy of teaching, which will help us be better when we’re the professors in the future.