Pedagogy
Bullying – Rutgers
Tweet Rutgers just fired its basketball coach for some pretty offensive bullying, including sexual slurs. Rutgers buried one of its freshmen last year because his roommate was spying on him during an encounter with another man. These were examples of disregard for the welfare of the students. I am not surprised. I interviewed twice at […]
Contemplative pedagogy: Names
Tweet Naming things is an important concept in linguistics. People have cute, or crazy, or insulting names for people and things in their lives, and that is an area for productive study. Grandmother names are my present fixation — I am called Granna. I remember the struggle after 9/11 to find a name for the […]
Contemplative Pedagogy: “Eat it immediately.”
Tweet This post is part of an ongoing series on Contemplative Pedagogy which often focuses as much on the absence of language as on its form. In his book Meditation in Action, Chögyam Trungpa writes: “…one usually finds that books, teachings, lectures, and so on are more concerned with proving that they are right than […]
Concentration, not Meditation
Tweet My class has asked (by vote of 19-1) for regular meditation exercises. We do them once a week. I will document those in subsequent posts, but yesterday we did a variation — a concentration exercise. A case could be made that because of multi-tasking and the constant electronic intrusion into their lives, students rarely […]
Slowing down the class
Tweet Research has shown (as if we needed much research to know this!) that some students process questions slower than others. This may be for a variety of reasons, among them that the student may be an introvert or shy, or may be a detailed thinker who wants to pause over certain parts of a […]
Contemplative pedagogy.
Tweet Several major universities and other centers are developing curricula which include contemplative and meditation practices. My own university, Montclair State University, is developing a center of its own, and I have been invited to be a Fellow in the group that will investigate including contemplative practices into our own courses. I have written several […]
Online education
Tweet California is pushing many entry-level college courses online. I have so much to say about this that I don’t know where to begin. I teach writing. The parts of the class which always, always engage the students most vividly are group work, critiquing other students’ papers, individual conferences, and class discussions. Taking those away would […]
Linguistics helps me teach Chinese speakers
Tweet My linguistics background is particularly useful when teaching my Stevens Institute of Technology class of 14 Chinese, 1 Saudi, and 1 Iranian graduate students. The class is called English Communication because the arriving students have studied English for years and could not be called Second Language Learners. They arrive in the U.S. for a […]
Teaching pronunciation
Tweet I am teaching a class of Chinese students (plus one Saudi Arabian and one Iranian). They are graduate students who have all studied English for many years, and perhaps were under the impression that they spoke English when they arrived on our shores. They were rudely greeted by professors who gave incomprehensible lectures, and […]
Sports writing
Tweet A few years ago I was having coffee with a friend who worked at the time at The New York Times. We agreed that some of the best writing on the newspaper could be found on the sports page. Nothing earthshaking happens in sports –the player hits the baseball “out of the park” or […]