You can lead a man to college…

Back when I was a high school senior, one of the things you had to do was generate a yearbook quote (I assume this is still the case) .  I worked in a local public library after school, and so I checked out a couple of books of quotations to try to find a good [...]

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Engagement works

As I have said elsewhere, I teach biology at a small state college.  Our school uses “Blackboard,” the online system for courses, and we are encouraged to use it even in our classes that meet regularly in class (that is, ones that are not just web-based). I am running all my quizzes and having students submit [...]

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Education in the Internet Age

Lots of universities have gone somewhat “online” in recent years, bringing some portion of their classes that was formerly only available in person, to the online world. At the institution where I have just started teaching, the faculty are encouraged to get students to start using “Blackboard,” which is an online instructional system. Using Blackboard [...]

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One semester down…

This week our semester draws to an end, and the curtain is about to fall on my first semester as a faculty member. I’ve come out of it pretty well, though sightly bruised. I taught many classes before this, as an adjunct or as a TA, but this was the first semester as a full [...]

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Bleh… plagiarism

A little over a week ago, students in my embryology class handed in their term papers. The first one I read was by a student who had a history of doing “whatever it took” to get a better grade, including being caught trying to cheat on a make-up exam in a different class. However, despite [...]

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