May 2007

The Value of Not Accepting Late Work

I had an amazing thing happen this semester: every student turned in every assignment on time. I don’t think that happened due to the caliber of students or the time I was teaching the course, for those things didn’t make that big of a change in other dimensions of the course. The reason why it [...]

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Morning Person Tester: Are You Working At the Wrong Time?

Glen has recently posted an article on LifeDev that resounds quite true. My original peak-time was in the morning from about 7:30 to 11:30, but I stopped getting up earlier and have actually managed to collapse onto the time of 8:30 to 12:30. Sometimes I catch another sprint from 1:30 to 5pm, but that’s highly [...]

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Teaching Students to Write: Dealing with the Perennial Problem of the Pile of Crap

I’m currently designing my next course and I am faced with a problem that gets me every semester: what’s the best way to teach students how to write well while balancing that objective with many others? Many people in my department subscribe to the “look-Ma-no-hands” pedagogical principle, which asserts that the best way to learn [...]

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To Work or Not To Work…That is the Question

Some days you wake up knowing that you’re not going to get much done (today was one of those days for me). Popular wisdom would tell you to drink your joe, open up your work, and get to it. In this case, I think popular wisdom is wrong. Let’s suppose that you’ve got a 20-page [...]

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Yet another blog on time management?!

Okay, so there’s a plethora of blogs out there about personal productivity (I personally enjoy 43folders and LifeDev). However, their appeal is either based on programmers, as Merlin’s is, or is too general. I’ve often found myself asking, “How the !@#@! do I translate this good stuff into my academic world?” Generally, by the time [...]

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