Renewing the effort to do fairly regular blogging now that a new semester has started. Truth be told, the last semester put me in a bit of a funk regarding my teaching. My evaluations and in-class observations were generally positive, but because of what I was teaching (and what I was taking) I had to give a lot of renewed thought to Dewey and how I envision education working. I think that in my efforts to structure my classes to give students maximum opportunity to prepare for tests and exams, I wound up encouraging memorization, and I didn’t do enough to encourage students to reflect and connect the material. I think a gut check like this is a good thing – I’ve been doing this for eight years now, and it’s easy to fall into habits. So I’ve been tweaking my class approach, and we’ll see where it takes me.
The next question is whether this election year will totally ruin whatever faith and interest I have in studying democracy, but that’s a rant for another time.