Page and Spine Story

My flash "fiction" (*cough cough*) piece, "The Novice Instructor" is available at Page and Spine in their "Reading Lamp" section.

Social Issues in Education

I've signed up to teach a course at the UofL this summer: Ed 4321, Social Issues in Education. I've posted my course outline already, so that students taking the class in July can make suggestions now if they like. I've been teaching the course since 1991 but because it's an issues course, the specific content is different every year, and I've changed up the assignments to make them more manageable for a compressed summer course. Looking forward to a bit of teaching to break up my steady diet of editing and writing . . . I love working with authors and graduate students, but it's mostly solitary deskwork, so it will be good to away from the computer keyboard and actually interact with other people for a bit. My idea of a July holiday. . .

Excellence for What?

Very pleased to have a chapter in the just-released Routledge collection, Global Perspectives on Teaching Excellence entitled "Excellence for what? Policy Development and the Discourse of the Purpose of Higher Education." The collection is basically a reaction to recent legislation in the UK that attempted to measure and mandate teaching excellence in higher education. My wife and I wrote a critique using my discourse analysis model of the purpose of higher education applied to the new legislation to suggest that the government's definition of 'excellence' might be somewhat problematic from the perspective of students and learning.

On Canadian History

Kasia (my almost-10 yr old): "I finished my report for Canadian history."

Me: "That was fast. What did you write on?"

Kasia: "How I feel about Canadian history. " Hands me an 8.5X11 sheet of paper covered on both sides with a continuous row of "Z"s.

Point taken.

But the thing is, Canadian history is actually really interesting. Fascinating piece on Albertan Two-gun Cohen this morning on CBC morning a case in point. After listening to his story, interviewer asked, "How come we never heard of this guy before? It's a fantastic story!" And the journalist essentially shrugged on air and said, "it's how Canadians teach history: they leave out all the interesting characters".

Drives me crazy.

My students never found Canadian history boring, but then the story of confederation is one of bribery, booze, and backstabbing when I tell it. And McKenzie King! Who could find King boring? How cool is it to find out that Canadian foreign policy was dictated by his dead mother (via a psychic)? "Conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription" is one of the great bafflegab statements of all time. And compare King's handling of the Bing scandal with say, Watergate. And what other world leader stole stones out of Buckingham palace for their private estates as King did with Kingsmere?

I'm telling you, Canadian history is engrossing if you actually know any of it.

Mary Wins Teaching Award

Just two weeks after receiving her Distinguished Woman Award from the YWCA, Mary has won the Management Student's Society's annual Teaching Award. The Award (complete with rather nice plaque) was presented at the annual Management Student Scholarship Banquet.

Mary hadn't wanted to go to the Banquet Thursday because she had had emergency wisdom tooth extraction Wednesday and still felt like someone was driving needles into her head--major painkillers notwithstanding--but one of the organizers insisted, so she dragged herself to it because, well, Mary is the type of prof who pushes herself to go out to support her students. So when her name was announced as this year's recipient of the Teaching Award, we understood why he had been so insistent!

I'm pretty proud of Mary. Nice to see her recognized for all the work she puts into her teaching...