teaching: the secondary primary

The following paragraph, from right around the middle of today’s First Person column over at the Chronicle of Higher Ed, strikes me as almost Palin-like in its illogic. (Though it is, admittedly, thankfully, handled far better syntactically than the erstwhile governor can generally manage.) Typically, research earns promotion and tenure. Teaching is secondary, and often …

on mean means, and what a mean might mean

Since reading this unsurprising-but-still-upsetting article at chronicle.com, I’ve been thinking about the whole business of C as an “average” grade. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Even granted that the average – construed as the arithmetic mean – isn’t *technically* the middle grade of a set (that’s the median), it’s still …

Gee Whiz

Maybe it’s that I play a lot of video games, but on nearly every page of James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, I found myself underlining happily, writing “Yes!” in the margins, or – often – simply smiling at the fact that someone in the Establishment was … Read more

queery

What do we make of Lessig’s use of the verbal “queering”? cf. Free Culture 167, in a critique of the war on drugs: “When you add together the burdens on the criminaljustice system, the desperation of generations of kids whose only real economic opportunities are as drug warriors, the queering of constitutional protections because of … Read more