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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Monday, May 07, 2007

The Trumpet Will Sound


Charming little dialogue between two writers at the University of Texas newspaper, in which they argue that Professor Iverson, a great lecturer, should give mandated teacher training sessions to all new UT faculty:



'R: Professor Brent Iverson is the best lecturer I've ever had.

E: The best ever?

R: Yeah, he uses special techniques to trick your brain into remembering everything.

E: What's [his] trumpet have to do with this?

R: That's one of his tricks. Whenever we learned about a new carbon-carbon bond, he would bugle a fanfare on the trumpet. It gave us a laugh but also made us remember the concept. Everyone enjoys the class, so attendance rates are much higher than average. He even rewards us for finishing a textbook chapter by showing us slideshows of his scuba-diving adventures.

E: I wish other professors were like him. I remember my freshman-year calculus teacher could barely speak English, much less communicate multivariable differentiation.

R: Yeah, that sucked. The problem is that professors don't have any incentive to be engaging lecturers.

E: I don't think that changes after you get hired, either. I for one have never heard of a professor getting fired for being a poor lecturer.

R: And PickAProf doesn't help. Even if the online service rated professors' lecturing skills, students would still use it to choose courses with generous grade ratios rather than fulfilling learning experiences.

E: Any steps professors take to improve lecturing effectiveness come out of their own good will. My economics professor remarked last week that his Ph.D. qualifies him to write academic articles about economics, not to teach it.

R: That's a big part of the problem - the University doesn't train professors how to teach.

E: Our tuition payments make up the largest single source of UT's revenue, but the school doesn't do us the courtesy of promoting good lecturers for undergraduates.

R: Hey, UT should hire Iverson to teach other professors how to lecture.

E: Good idea. I expect, though, that some of the current faculty would be too prideful to submit to teaching lessons...

R: But professors new to UT would have to take the training program with Iverson before teaching classes. UT could solidify its reputation as a premier undergraduate program by making this professor training initiative a flagship program.'




Here's a comment about Iverson from Rate My Professors:

"He sings for us on the last class day!"




UD - a singer - occasionally sings in class. When she's talking about leit motifs that recur in certain stories and novels, she sings some famous musical leit motifs... DeLillo's Underworld makes much of a famous tune from Prokofiev's Love for Three Oranges, and UD sings this for her students... She doesn't sing, though, a semester finale... Nor does she blast a trumpet when students correctly define 'Joycean epiphany' ...

As for rewarding students by showing them slides of my travel adventures (and since when would this be a reward?), UD's not at all sure this represents a terrific use of class time... I mean, you could turn around what these guys say up there, and you could say Our tuition payments make up the largest single source of UT's revenue, and our chemistry teachers show us their scuba slides...

Still, if you insist, UD has some real cute shots of her falling off Sumatran elephants in the rice fields of Bali...