it makes the heart grow fonder September 20, 2007
Posted by KC in teaching.2 comments
Absence, that is.
I was revising my attendance policy the other day, partly to line up with what other people do around here, and I got to wondering why I even had one in the first place. In the past, I’ve used attendance as a factor in students’ participation grades, essentially lowering that grade, which usually counts for 15% of the course grade, after a certain number of absences. But I also had a mechanism for lowering a student’s final course grade if they were excessively absent, as in missing more than two full week’s worth of class. This policy was similar to what many other instructors had at my last university.
But was it necessary? Or, looking at it from the other direction, was it even effective? The truth is that I’m not sure. Every semester, I’d have one or two students who skipped enough classes to have their final grades suffer. These students often didn’t have great grades in the first place, having missed so much class. So their absences hurt them in terms of their actual performance in the course, and it hurt them in terms of the attendance policy. I’m not sure I’m comfortable any more with that kind of double-whammy. (more…)
revision tips September 13, 2007
Posted by KC in writing process, writing tips.3 comments
Productivity blog, Lifehack.org, has a post on Nine Tips to Productive Revision. The tips themselves are useful, I suppose, but only if you think of revision mostly in terms of editing or proofreading. Take the first tip, for instance:
Try to get what you’ve written on paper. Scanning a piece on a computer makes revision extremely difficult, even though it may seem like the more sensible process. By printing out your computer work, you’re able to get more hands-on with your writing process. For most people, it’s also much easier to look at what you’ve written on paper rather than on a screen. Things you might not be able to see on your computer can show up when you’re marking your piece up with paper and pencil.
What, exactly, are these “things you might not be able to see”? Since the author doesn’t really say, I’m guessing he has in mind grammatical and spelling errors, or stylistic infelicities. I (sort of) agree that printing things out makes it easier to catch mechanical problems along those lines, although I find that reading drafts aloud is even more effective. (more…)
spoiled rotten September 12, 2007
Posted by KC in uncategorized.2 comments
I finally got up to the library here, to set up my account, and discovered that the library doesn’t have any service for paging books or delivering books through campus mail. A snotty librarian lurking behind the circulation desk cast a derisive smirk at the very idea that a university library would send books to patrons.
I’m not sure I deserved that smirk. I think that, from her point of view, I’m just too lazy to get my own books out of the stacks. But I’ve been at two universities now (one of them belonging to the same larger state univ. system) that delivered books–free of charge–to both faculty and graduate students. I always figured that those schools saw such a service as a way to support research and scholarship–not to mention all the possible work-study funding for undergrads.
Maybe those other places spoiled me. The thing is, I don’t particularly mind getting my own books, even though time in the stacks is not especially productive. It just seems, well, not as supportive as I’m used to.
I’m curious what other folks’ libraries do. Is it unusual for libraries to deliver books to faculty and/or grad students?
