Grading Papers Is Hell (But It Doesn’t Have To Be)
by Talia Argondezzi
There’s a certain beautiful, irksome symmetry about writing assignments. Whatever carelessness, vagueness, or still-inchoate pedagogical goals creep into a teacher’s assignment tend to return to her in the form of careless, vague, and poorly executed student essays.
Instructors are skilled at finding scapegoats for our students’ awful writing — the failing public school system, our university’s shoddy or spotty composition […]
The Second Language of “Standard English”
by Alison Powell
A recent editorial in the New York Times by Stanley Fish, “What Should Colleges Teach?” generated enough controversy and enthusiasm to merit that he write two follow up pieces. In the first, Stanley Fish argues that the problem with English composition courses is they don’t teach composition at all; rather, they are poorly masked cultural […]
Teaching Writing Intensively (and Often)
by James Hoff
It happens at the beginning of every semester. Tucked into my tiny mailbox are a stack of about fifty blue and white student evaluations. The scantron sections of these evaluations, where students “rate” their professors in several categories on a scale of one to seven, never seem especially helpful to me. After all, it is inevitable that […]
Of Earth Monsters and Adjunct Lecturers
by Renee McGarry
Where other cultures have an earth mother, the Aztecs have an earth monster. Their creation myth takes all our ideas about this familiar paradigm and goes topsy-turvy. The female creature from which the earth grew doesn’t nurture her people but terrifies them and demands ritual sacrifice. Quite frankly, this image is what made me fall […]
The Pile
by TKrause
Sometimes, every few weeks during the fall and spring semesters, my home is overrun by a creature I call The Pile. The Pile is a stack of student papers, usually some 25 – 30 in number, in dry times as few as 10 or 15, at flood-tide (the unholy confluence of, say, two written assignments in a row) some 60 or so. […]
Catching More Flies with … Butter?
by TRobey
I don’t know why I thought teaching my History 101 class to make butter would be a good idea.
In April of last year I packed two glass mason jars, a pint of heavy cream, some spoons, cheesecloth, bread, and salt before making my long trek to Queens College. As I switched between local subway and express subway, then subway […]
In the Classroom of the Critical Mind
by LDesilva-Johnson
Dispatches From The Front
“Only dialogue, which requires critical thinking, is capable of generating critical thinking. Without dialogue, there is no communication, and without communication, there can be no true education.…For the truly humanist educator and the authentic revolutionary, the object of action is the reality to be transformed by them together with other men – not other men […]
Notes from Beyond: Teaching Outside the CUNYverse
by AEfthymiou
Dispatches from the Front
It is likely that each of us, at one time or another, has engaged in a scathing rant regarding the exploits that the CUNY system inflicts upon those that are so crucial to its existence: namely, its students and adjuncts. Whether or not this implies that you secretly believe those private school kids down […]
Not Another Dangerous Minds Story
Challenging the Teacher-as-Savior Myth
by NStanford
Dispatches from the Front
It was my first time teaching an evening class at a community college, and I was nervous. I’d heard about how tough these night students are: not your typical, fresh-out-of-high-school, no-extra-job, too-much-time-on-my-hands learners, but cynical, busy, non-traditional students, some returning after flunking out years prior and some just trying it out for the first time. […]
Learning Teaching Excellence (the Hard Way)
by RPorter
When I first began teaching in the sociology department at Queens College I was also new to the Graduate Center. At the end of each semester emails go out looking for adjuncts and those emails continue right up to, and sometimes well beyond, the first day of classes. I thought that teaching would be an interesting supplement to […]
