There are few things (outside of my family) that make me truly happy … a Mark Knopfler guitar lick … nailing an apex on a gravel road … and snow.
Knopfler comes with me everywhere via my iPod. The time spent on gravel roads has dwindled, so I make the most of it when I can. But living in Georgia … well, that makes snow hard to come by.
But when it comes, it’s a glorious thing.
I made a promise to make more stuff this year. I am failing. Miserably.
My goal was to make four things a week – images, videos, audio, deep pieces of philosophical slander … whatever I could come up with. Have I made four things this month?
I wrote the other day about grades and grading and how I hate them. Then I came across this post by Marilla Svinicki that talks about orientation of goals – how there are various ways of approaching learning from both the teaching side and the learning side.
No question I teach in the mastery/learning orientation and, I hope, after a few weeks in my class the students move away from the traditional performance approach. I’m a week away from the first actual “grades” going out in the intro class, the email responses will tell me who’s on my page and who’s on their own.
… this photo has nothing to do with the current economic crisis or a pawn shop …
We had one of those conversations in class yesterday, the kind I just abhor. It was about grades … the intro students don’t know how much I hate grades, or how much I hate students who ask about grades. I did not go into academia to grade people, I went in to teach them.
Granted, I have to grade as part of my job but I minimize it as much as possible. My students have a nearly limitless redo policy – so long as they make deadline, they can redo almost every assignment for a different grade. There’s no curve – if everyone masters the material, they all get an A.
… he would obviously do it in an Airstream Basecamp.