teaching toolbox

I'm heading home tomorrow, and I've finally got a little time to blog. Here's quick summary of the sessions I went to on Sunday (the first day of the meeting).Detachment Dynamics: heat, deformation, and fluids in extensional systems: Where continental crust stretches apart, steep normal faults join at depth into detachment systems: shear zones that separate hot, ductilely deforming rocks from shallower, brittly deforming rocks. These systems have been discussed since the 1980s, but the focus in this session was a little different than in past discussions I've witnessed. Detachments bring hot…

I've spent 15 hours in the classroom teaching in the past three days, and several more meeting with students to sort out schedules and brainstorm ideas for senior thesis projects. My brain is fried, but I'm going to try to share some interesting stuff I've run into: - Early this afternoon, I posted a frantic plea for good Google Earth locations to use to demonstrate tilted rock layers in my first Structural Geology lab. I should have just checked SERC first. They now have a collection of images and latitude/longitude coordinates that are both beautiful and beautifully deformed. I started my…

While I was teaching my reworked upper division gen ed class earlier this summer, I decided to use a discussion technique that I hadn't used before: the "http://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/gallerywalk/index.html">gallery walk. It worked so well that I'm trying to figure out where else it might be useful. The idea behind the gallery walk is pretty simple: students are divided into several groups, and work their way around a series of stations at which they add to a list of answers to a question (or whatever the task at each station involves). I had used the technique as a participant in a…

When I was designing my summer session class, I ran into a problem. If I really wanted my students to achieve the course goals, they would need to spend a lot of time on a computer. In a 3-times-a-week lecture course, I might expect them to do that work outside of class, but we were going to be meeting for two hours a day, four days a week - they wouldn't have much time between classes (especially if they were taking other classes and working). And I didn't want to lecture for two hours a day. So, if I wanted them to get in-class practice doing things that related to their goals, I needed to…

I spent last Friday grading for my five-week summer class. It took about nine hours*, which wasn't that bad, considering that the main graded work consisted of papers. I like making students write. It lets me see their thought processes, and helps me differentiate between the students who can repeat what they've heard and the students who think for themselves - something that I especially want to see from an upper-level gen ed class like this one. So I assign papers. But I usually end up regretting that later, and wish I could convince myself that multiple-choice exams were adequate for a…