Jul

1

Not Seeing the War For the Battles

July 1, 2009 | by Glenn Petersen | 3 Comments

The following is a portion of a letter to the editor that appeared in the June 15, 2009 NY Times. It addresses purported changes in the ways history is taught, but it is rooted in a larger perspective I have encountered many times and I bring it to our blog as a springboard to raise [...]

Feb

4

We Were Nerds Once…and Young

February 4, 2009 | by Glenn Petersen | 2 Comments

(with apologies to Hal Moore and Joe Galloway, authors of We Were Soldiers Once…and Young)
Many of us (I suspect most of us) were nerds when we were young students, or we at least shaded well into the fringes of nerdiness. We studied, we memorized, we solved quadratic equations in our heads while waiting for [...]

Dec

12

Pondering Teaching Evaluations

December 12, 2008 | by Glenn Petersen | 21 Comments

Elisabeth Gareis recently raised a question regarding student evaluations of our courses, which prompted me to write this. But her post doesn’t have “evaluations” in its title, and so I’m making a new post of this, rather than simply commenting on Elisabeth’s, in order to draw attention to the matter of evaluations.
I take [...]

Nov

12

Let Them in on What You’re Doing

November 12, 2008 | by Glenn Petersen | 4 Comments

Most of you are probably familiar with the old saw: Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. I once heard a coda: Those who can’t teach, teach pedagogy. I used to find the notion funny, but as I’ve observed new faculty beginning their careers over the years I’ve come [...]

Oct

23

Grafting onto What Students Already Know

October 23, 2008 | by Glenn Petersen | 4 Comments

When I was a boy I was extremely proud of one of my dad’s apple trees, the one onto which he had grafted three varieties of apples and a pear. By carefully attaching cuttings from these different fruits onto the stem of a single tree he had been able to make it bear a [...]