Category Archives: teaching

Frankenstein for Engineers

good reads, philosophy, storytelling, teaching

In the Mastering Academic Conversations class we offer for incoming college freshmen, we typically read a book together. Or perhaps I should say, we assign a book to read together, I’m not sure how much of it actually is read.

There is always a “common-read” book that is selected for use throughout K-State each year and it always has interesting programming associated with it such as bringing in the book’s author to speak and so forth, however, those books vary widely in subject matter and interest area from year to year. Sometimes they are works of fiction and other times they are non-fiction works.

Nex year we are planning to do the book Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus, by Mary Shelly and there is a nifty, annotated version for scientists and engineers we are planning to use. I’m pretty excited about this. I think our students will benefit from reading classic literature and I think the work is still very relevant to our times as we seem to think that science and technology is our salvation. It is not.

Subversive Teaching Suggestions

teaching

These suggestions on subversive teaching techniques are from the 1969 book Teaching as a Subversive Activity by Postman & Weingartner:

  • Declare a five-year moratorium on the use of all textbooks
  • Have “English” teachers “teach” Math, Math teachers English, Social Studies teachers Science, Science teachers Art, and so on.
  • Transfer all of the elementary-school teachers to high school and vice versa.
  • Require every teacher who thinks he knows his “subject” well to write a book on it
  • Dissolve all “subjects,” “courses,” and especially “course requirements.”
  • Limit each teacher to three declarative sentences per class, and 15 interrogatives.
  • Prohibit teachers from asking any questions they already know the answers to
  • Declare a moratorium on all tests and grades
  • Require all teachers to undergo some form of psycho-therapy as part of their in-service training
  • Classify teachers according to their ability and make the lists public (LA School District has recently made a lame attempt at something like this)
  • Require all teachers to take a test prepared by students on what the students know.
  • Make every class an elective and withhold a teacher’s monthly check if his students do not show any interest in going to next month’s classes. (this would sort the wheat from the chaff in a hurry, wouldn’t it? Everyone would be forced to step up their game, or go hungry!)
  • Require every teacher to take a one-year leave of absence every fourth year to work in some “field” other than education (my biggest gripe about education is that educators often have little connection with the world outside of education. It’s why I do faculty internships and help with my wife’s home-based business to help me remain connected.)
  • Require each teacher to provide some sort of evidence that he or she has had a loving relationship with at least one other human being. (what a fascinating job requirement!)
  • Require that all the graffiti accumulated in the school toilets be reproduced on large paper and be hung in the school halls.
  • There should be a general prohibition against the use of the following words and phrases: teach, syllabus, covering ground, I.Q., makeup, test, disadvantaged, gifted, accelerated, enhancement, course, grade, score, human nature, dumb, college material, and administrative necessity.

Don’t Let Powerpoint Take Over Your Screen

online teaching, teaching, Uncategorized

When you are making a Powerpoint presentation over a Zoom session, you are working with two applications that think they are the center of your computing universe. That makes it very difficult to know what is going on in your Zoom room if you are showing a Powerpoint that has taken over your screen.

Don’t do that! You don’t have to operate Powerpoint in “Full Screen” mode, make it into a window so you can see other things too!

To display PowerPoint presentations in a window and not full screen just do the following:

  • Select “Set up Slide Show” on the “Slide Show” tab
  • Select the radio button for “Browsed by an individual (window)”
  • Start your PowerPoint show

That’s it! Now you can see what’s going on in Zoom while you are presenting a PowerPoint.