Now that the teaching part of the semester is over, and the marking part nearly so, I can reflect on my effectiveness in getting students to think rationally, using the ever-reliable indicator of whether I’ve managed to convert any of them to godlessness. The evidence is mixed. On the one hand, I’ve received a typical [...]
Our SRC (Student’s Representative Council) elections are underway. The candidate manifestos usually make for interesting reading, if only because of their idealism in terms of what they hope to accomplish during their terms of office. Sometimes, however, you find something truly alarming, such as this manifesto from Philani Msomi. While it’s reproduced verbatim, I’m afraid [...]
My students are due to hand an essay in next week. Besides the typical whingeing relating to things like essay length (1500 words is apparently unreasonable these days), I’ve also had some students saying things like “if I had wanted to study museum subjects then I would be a Humanities student”. This, after I had [...]
The New York Times carried this article discussing student emails to their professors, which has been generating subtantial debate on academia-themed blogs (for example, 1,2 and 3). All the posts so far are from campuses in the US and Canada, where I’d imagine it rare to teach around 2000 students per year, as [...]
Whether students like it or not, one of the things I aim for in my classrooms is to break down the (usually artificial) divide between academia and everyday life. It’s made somewhat easier by the fact that the sort of things I teach are easily applicable to non-academic activities.