Category Archives: teaching

Keeping Up Appearances

personal, teaching 2021.12.27 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

Multiple College Bowl Games Cancelled, Others Impacted as COVID-19 Cases Rise (People via yahoo.com)List of colleges going virtual to start spring semester due to COVID spike (The Bergen Record via yahoo.com) I know that my bosses are currently monitoring the state of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wisconsin, and it bears repeating that you couldn’t pay me enough money to make the decisions they’re having to make right now about what next semester will look like. If the past couple of years have taught us anything,…

Disconnected

internet, personal, teaching 2021.12.20 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

Finals week started this past Wednesday and runs through tomorrow. (I’m not a fan of having it staggered over a weekend like this, but at least it’s better than other arrangements I’ve had to deal with, including one where I was forced to run a final on a Saturday.) As I’m fond of telling my students in the leadup to finals week, we instructors kind of deal with pressure this time of year in an inverse relationship with how students feel; right now things are…

Spectacle

politics, teaching 2021.12.13 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

Why South Dakota teachers’ “Dash for Cash” felt so gross (msnbc.com) For all the “television will rot your brain” rhetoric I heard when I was younger, the opposite seemed to be the case for me. I watched a lot of educational shows back then — Sesame Street, Mister Rogers’ Neighbourhood, 3-2-1 Contact, Mr. Wizard’s World, and others — but even the shows that weren’t explicitly educational still triggered a desire in me to learn more. Back when all the major television networks had game show…

Crisis Point

personal, teaching 2021.10.11 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

[The following blog contains mentions of suicide.] UNC-Chapel Hill cancels classes after police investigate reported suicides (Charlotte News-Observer via Yahoo! News) Throughout my teaching career, I’ve dealt with students from a very wide range of upbringings and socioeconomic statuses. Trying to pinpoint any single factor as being primarily determinative of students’ success in college, regardless of how “success” is defined (a whole separate argument) is foolhardy, but if you forced me to pick one thing to focus on when it comes to helping incoming college…

Beginning Again

personal, teaching 2021.09.13 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

This past weekend, as I was decompressing from the work week, it felt strange to recognize that even though I’d taught for six full days of the nascent fall semester, I had yet to teach a full week. Colleges set their schedules differently — I’m still getting used to the much longer winter breaks here in Wisconsin, presumably to keep us all inside for most of January, when the cold weather and roads can be incredibly dangerous — and state law requires that we start…