Another semester ends

Another semester has ended and the perennial woes circulate among professors and instructors. "Why can't students follow (simple) directions?" "Why are they asking for extra credit on the last day of class?" "Who was that student (re: student who managed to miss all classes since the first week until the last but still showed up on the last day to turn in work or take the final)?"

I keep a few ideas in mind to keep things in perspective and to avoid unnecessary angst:

1. Students earn grades; professors do not "give" grades.

2. Students have what they need to do as well as they can from the first day because the syllabus and assignment instructions were complete and thorough.

3. Not all students can do as well as they think they can, at least, perhaps, not at this point in their lives.

4. I cannot control what administrators may do, but I am a conscientious grader. A pravda vítězí (And truth prevails).

Here's an amusing slideshow as movie that gets my World History started. Yes, I update it every year. It's "13.67 Billion Years in approximately 13.67 Minutes." (Disclaimer: the timing works better in PowerPoint; as a movie it seems to go much too long.) . . . Drat, it didn't upload the entire "movie." Sorry.

Looking ahead to the fall semester

Collaboration in the classroom experiment, Fall 2011

This fall semester in my History 103 class I am going to try out group work again, but this time I would like to initiate better collaboration. History 103 is ambitiously titled "World History, from the Beginning to 1500" and trying to cover millennia of history in one semester is daunting. The first step in this experiment I'm going to take is to show the following 10-minute clip in class on the first day.

What should step #2 be?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU