Serendib Teaching

UIC faculty, we now have a Slack. Woot! I know, most of you probably aren’t interested, but I spend a lot of time on Slack these days, and I find it works pretty well for staying in touch with community. Better than all the things that get lost in my e-mail… I’d personally love to […]

Heh. One more example video for today’s class — I did 6 minutes on the opening to “Oceans Bright and Wide,” which was a little odd, because I’m the author, so I was talking about what I was hoping to do with the language in that paragraph, which may or may not have succeeded. Maybe

I’m trying to be a little more casual about my teaching in various ways, including little bits of video to demonstrate things. Maybe helpful, maybe not? But thought this might amuse y’all — me talking about Amal El-Mohtar’s poem, “Biting Tongues” (which always has really high engagement from my students — they love it). From

Taught my first Zoom class. (Last semester was completely asynchronous; this semester, I’m taking a hybrid approach.) I told them they didn’t need to have video on, but I admit, I am grateful to the one student who did keep video on, so I didn’t feel like I was talking to a bunch of names

I’ve been thinking a lot right now about prepared versus nimble, about what makes a good teacher and a good experience for the students. When I was first learning how to teach, I took a pedagogy course in grad school, and my professor told us to prepare 30% more lesson plan material than we’d think

I have lots of e-mail and teaching prep to get through, some of it pretty mechanical (copying over dates to a calendar, etc.), and in case you’re in the same boat, I’ll note that The Lord of the Rings makes excellent background TV — pause to watch Frodo offering to take the ring, the fires

I gathered my courage in both hands and opened my course evaluation files to find that my students… …were just fine with my teaching last semester. Whew. Some of them even took the time to write nice things about me, which is really going above and beyond, considering that last semester was probably my worst-ever

Trying something new with teaching this semester. Last semester was asynchronous; assignments were due weekly, by Sunday midnight, which ran into difficulty, because by halfway through the semester, almost all the students were posting their assignments between 10 p.m. & midnight on Sunday. Not ideal, esp. for commenting on each others’ posts, which they were

Here we go again, ready or not. I decided that the asynchronous we did last fall mostly worked, but that the students would benefit from a little more synchronous time. It’s a trade-off; it means that those who have complex work, etc. schedules may not be able to take my course. Hopefully it’ll work for

Fall semester grades are in (except for two students who didn’t hand in final papers, whom I’m still hoping to get something from if they ever answer my e-mail…). Did I grade somewhat more generously that I would in a normal semester? YES. Am I going to regret that? NOT EVEN A TINY BIT. Is