assignments
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Civics 101 in History 130 & 131
My friend Virginia introduced me to the New Hampshire Public Radio-produced podcast Civics 101 earlier this year. She was on the board of NHPR and rightly-proud of their new venture. I’ve enjoyed listening to host Virginia Prescott (a different Virginia) interview a different guest each week – including many professors – on topics like “Party Whips,” […]
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can’t leave well enough alone
Last summer I wrote that I was going to try to come up with new projects for my US I and US II survey courses. I did, and they were…fine. But they weren’t spectacular. So I’m trying something new again, while trying to rejigger one of the things I did last semester for use this […]
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Women’s history commonplace blog drafts
As I mentioned last week, my women’s history students are creating blogs inspired by commonplace books. This project not only requires them to produce public writing, but to make the draft stage public. To that end, they have had to put up draft versions of all the contextualized quotes they want to examine, and they are […]
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Commonplacing women’s history
I wrote earlier this summer about my use of commonplace books in my women’s history class, and about how I hoped to turn that practice into a project for the class. Well… My students have each chosen a theme to explore, and are busy selecting and contextualizing passages from primary and secondary sources. By the end […]
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When did America stop being great? Another darn good question.
“We have been overlooked, with all these special-interest groups getting their way.” Source: We asked Trump voters, “When did America stop being great?” Their answers were amazing. A fascinating counterpoint to this earlier video produced by The Atlantic that I mentioned last week. I think these things matter to us as historians because, as John Fea and […]
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How Much Should We Assign? Estimating Out of Class Workload — Rice University Center for Teaching Excellence
“How much should I assign?” is one of the most basic questions teachers ask when designing and revising their courses. Yet it is also one of the most difficult to answer. To help instructors better calibrate their expectations, we’ve created a course workload estimator that incorporates the most important insights from the literature on how […]
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Teaching Students to Be Public Intellectuals – The Chronicle of Higher Education
On the one hand, it can make scholarly work seem inconsequential. To our students, an op-ed essay has “real world” value; a college essay doesn’t appear to. On the other hand, these public-oriented assignments sometimes oversimplify public discourse, aiming for a “general reader” who is less sophisticated than a scholar. It’s not unusual to have […]
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Thinking about teaching 5b: new project for Women’s History
In addition to coming up with a new term project for my survey classes, I wanted to find something new to do in U.S. Women’s history as well. In that class last fall, I had students write two short papers, neither of which required outside research. Broadly speaking, they asked students to take the material we’d worked […]
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Thinking about teaching 5a: new project for the surveys
As I mentioned yesterday, I want to revise the projects my students do in both of my U.S. survey classes and my U.S. women’s history class, all of which I’ll be teaching in the fall. For my U.S. surveys, I’ve done two major projects over time. I’ve most often taught U.S. I, and in it, I often […]
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Thinking about teaching 5: priorities, people
So, it’s almost the end of June, the point where academics (at least those on a semester system) go “OMG school starts two months from now what have I been doing with my life?!” I had big dreams about fixing/changing my courses for the fall, and now’s the point where we get real about what’s […]
