This entry is part 1 of 35 in the series Teaching TransparentlyThe purpose of education, in particular higher education, is to teach creative, intelligent, thoughtful, capable people the skills needed to go into the world and do amazing things. The purpose of a college level Spanish Conversation class, it follows, is to give students the(…)
This entry is part 2 of 35 in the series Teaching TransparentlyOne of the reasons I love to teach is that I get to learn. Be it from my students or the people who come to our class… every semester I acquire new knowledge, ideas, and perspectives thanks to what happens in the classroom. As(…)
This entry is part 3 of 35 in the series Teaching TransparentlyLast summer I had the extraordinary good fortune to travel back in time. Okay not really, but in many ways it felt as if I had. For the first time in 30 years, I returned to Colombia. It dawned on me, as I mentioned(…)
This entry is part 4 of 35 in the series Teaching Transparently Readers of LLU might remember a series of blog posts I did entitled “Teaching What You Thought You Knew,” in which I chronicled my struggles with the realization that I was teaching my students what I knew about Colombia, a place that I(…)
This entry is part 5 of 35 in the series Teaching Transparently This semester I am teaching the second semester, second year language class for Spanish. You know the class… the one that has all of the gnarly bits of grammar that were left over from the first semester of the second year sequence. The(…)
This entry is part 6 of 35 in the series Teaching Transparently For the past 5 years, I have had the extraordinary good fortune to work with creative and talented people who value not only the need to create tools that facilitate learning, but tools that also are open, available for sharing, and heck, are(…)
This entry is part 7 of 35 in the series Teaching TransparentlyBefore the semester comes to a crashing halt, and we all go off to hibernate for a while, I wanted to get out at least one more post here on LLU to thank the people whose incredible work with technology has made my job(…)
This entry is part 8 of 35 in the series Teaching Transparently We are at the 1/2 way spot in our semester. It’s midterm grading time (here the grades at midterm are pretty simple: Satisfactory, Unsatisfactory, Really Unsatisfactory and Never Seen This Person). It is also a perfect time to ask the students to evaluate(…)
This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series Teaching what you thought you knewOne of my not-so-secret guilty pleasures is baseball. Growing up in a family of baseball enthusiasts and long-suffering Red Sox fans, listening to baseball games was something that put me to sleep, and going to games was something to pass(…)
This entry is part 2 of 4 in the series Teaching what you thought you knew Foto of a sign in a buseta in Bogotá used with permission from Andreuchis I have to admit it. Prior to this past semester, when I thought of Colombian Music the only things that sprang to mind was the(…)
This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Teaching what you thought you knewHISP 205 is a conversation class. As the teacher, my goal for the inclass portion was that whatever I brought for my students to see, hear, witness… that those things needed to be catalysts, springboards, starting points for comments, conversation,(…)
This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series Teaching what you thought you knewA thousand years ago, I studied at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. I went during college and then back again for a year after I graduated. Those were important years in my life and in my growth(…)