1 like, 1 opinion about college teaching and learning, until I get bored
1. Professors can be more rigorous in teaching review and evaluation
2. Student evals are more like comment cards than teaching evaluation
3. The link between good teacher and good researcher exists, but it’s curvilinear
4. Colleges could do much better at communicating how much work students should do
5. Colleges could do much better at auditing classes to see how much work is assigned
6. Fear of failure has gotten way way worse since I was a student
7. Educational technology is worthless without universal access
8. Too few people understand that tuition isn’t the cost of instruction—at good schools, tuition is a loss leader
9. Pandemic has both mainstreamed and stigmatized online learning
10. Teaching is really hard and lecturing is the easy part
11. I don’t blame a single adjunct ever for using provided course slides
12. More profs should read up on ethnographies of student life; we need more ethnographies of student life
13. An hour lecture is four times easier than a 15-minute recorded class
14. Mostly students mostly want to do good work and mostly grades are unhelpful
15. There’s an immense paradox of choice for having too much freedom in charting ones way through a curriculum
16. Employers mostly want highly technical skills or general skills, and college isn’t well set up to do the latter
17. Students should rarely take overloads and should focus on getting more out of them
18. The ratio of faculty to course designers should be about 20:1
19. Portfolio-based assessment is the best and it’s hugely difficult to deliver with economical course sizes
20. Unsurprising but: student loans were a mistake past a certain point and we are way past that
21. Corny jokes are good because anything risky may be harmful to students or faculty
22. Many open resources aren’t as good as textbooks or other closed ones and that’s a structural condition
23. Making learning difficult requires risks and sometimes classes don’t pan out, and that’s okay
24. The first couple of years of a major should be very basic skills building and then you move harder to content
25. Weak foundations in reading are the causes of many problems we blame on writing instruction
26. We actually need “reading across the curriculum” instruction
27. Completion rates are an absolute scandal and administrators should have the power to force faculty to teach courses to keep students on a 4-year course
28. Yes I’ve heard about places where degree requirements couldn’t be fulfilled in 4 years because of faculty unavailability
29. The cultural divide between largely ex nerd faculties and largely non nerd students is more important than any partisan divide
30. IR specific: the paradigm debates are uninteresting and only make sense after students get to know the world—teach real theory before meta theory
31. For students anything that has a publication date of more than two years ago is impossibly old—consider just churning these
32. There’s a huge unmet need for 5-page literature reviews written at an undergrad level for American politics—we don’t need more “Monkey Cage” pieces but more Foreign Affairs-length pieces
33. It’s actually bad that political science undergrads are not consistently trained to read research in their field
34. But whaddaya going to do when the first few years of a degree have to cover the very basics?
35. Cheating is bad, but really it is
36. We could design courses that would be all but impossible to cheat in and actually there’s some blame on institutions there
37. If I were paying $60,000 a year in tuition, I’d also expect professors to respond to weekend emails
38. Students have very weird ideas about how much faculty earn
39. It’s okay to assign your own work
40. It’s not okay to assign your own $400 self published textbook
41. Hogwarts had crap teaching
42. No seriously though, just the worst
43. Departments need to actually explain how major requirements are supposed to work and why
44. Administrators seem to have next to no sense that their data points are grossly misleading about on the ground realities
45. Tests should count less than papers
46. Multiple choice tests are okay actually but just use them for low stakes assignments
47. Shocker: it’s easier to have a VP for diversity than to have diversity in a syllabus
48. Some critics of university hiring practices need to familiarize themselves with employment law
49. Yeah actually the faculty are the core employees of the institution but also their function is special not themselves as people—be nice
50. Colleges should be talking openly with faculty about the shrinking enrollments of the 2020s in many parts of the US
51. Community colleges are heroes
52. Foundations could counter disinformation by funding open textbooks and videos
53. The George Mason Econ videos are great for non-Econ major expositions of core Econ topics
54. Students confuse partisan slant with ideological stance
55. Faculty are crap at time management
56. Faculty are crap at thinking through trade offs
56. Dangerous opinion I guess but: I dislike having all social activities moved to the working day, since that’s when I work
57. We faculty leave a lot of data about student confusion on the table—we should revise lectures with more precise understanding and testing
58. F me if I know how to do that with very little time and resources
59. Students don’t use the Web anymore—they use apps
60. F whoever told people that Wikipedia isn’t reliable, now students get info from HH1488SS on YouTube
61. It’s okay to talk about the fun parts of your discipline in early classes
62. Classroom architecture belies the idea that universities want anything besides lecture-test
63. Students have no idea how little guidance we are given on accessibility issues
64. The .5% of students who are dishonest spoil instructors for the other 99.5% of students
65. My syllabus is so long because you won’t believe how much time I wasted when it was short
66. The entire academic apparatus at times seems to be geared toward making students hate learning
67. Gen-eds should be special classes—politics for poets, poetry for physicists, etc—and they should be as exciting as possible
68. All gen eds should be pass fail
69. Profs: put a recent headshot on your web site so I can use it in my slides
70. I don’t do that, either
71. Right wing groups have done real harm to classrooms with all their snitch sites
72. But also come on there were definitely some way biased lectures out there
73. 71 and 72 will get loud response but most faculty agree with them
74. The division isn’t teaching university vs research university but faculty who have biggest impact on the world through teaching vs those through research (and public engagement)
75. All your monocausal explanations for why college is so much more expensive now are wrong
76. Most senior university administrators make reasonable salaries
77. But not the coaches, I’m sorry
78. Constantly bizarre to me that people think that state universities wanted to chase international and out of state enrollment rather than being hugely incentivized to do so
79. If colleges are businesses, lazy rivers are rational investments
80. The allocation of federal work-study dollars is a disgrace and favors rich schools
81. Commencement ceremonies are weird and fraught even without having some big political figure come by
82. Capital budgets can’t be used for operating expenses
83. Most universities spend too little (yes) on capital
84. I’m pretty sure at least half of faculty use 🇷🇺 🏴‍☠️ web sites for books and PDFs
85. Letters of recommendation are confidential and should be meaningful
86. A letter of rec is uncompensated labor that’s a service to the employer
87. It’s okay in some (rare) circumstances to give a bad recommendation, but these are very rare
88. Fundamentally the decline in student study hours is real and has affected academic achievement
89. The causes of that decline have to do with rising inequality, access, and tuition costs and so it’s a mixed bag of good and bad reasons
90. HBCUs are heroes
91. We need more Native (AI/AN) content throughout
92. It’s okay to buy your way in with large donations, even at Harvard—depending on how large
93. We should vaporize effective higher Ed altruism—more gifts to CCs
94. But actually gifts to research centers may score very well on returns to society over a long term
95. Dorms should be less nice and way cheaper
96. Universities can be cheap or they can redistribute income
97. If stakeholders want universities to redistribute income, then graciously accept rich parents buying their kids’ way in
98. I sincerely believe every student in my classes has the potential to succeed. My responsibility is to make that possible. And sometimes that doesn’t work out, on one or both sides
99. I can’t remember my college GPA anymore. I remember a lot of what I learned. That’s all I hope for the courses that I teach.
Four more theses than the heretic, my work is done
You can follow @profmusgrave.
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