A professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, Scott Galloway, recently sent an email that has gone viral, due largely to its unique approach in response to a student’s particularly obnoxious behavior. The student, who remains anonymous, had arrived an hour late to...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
