Back before The Pip was born, our previous departmental administrative assistant used to bug me– in a friendly way– about how Kate and I ought to have another kid. (She had two kids of her own, about two years apart in age.) “When are you guys going to have another baby?” she would ask, and […]
Month: September 2016
Teaching Evaluations and the Problem of Unstated Assumptions
There’s a piece in Inside Higher Ed today on yet another study showing that student course evaluations don’t correlate with student learning. For a lot of academics, the basic reaction to this is summed up in the Chuck Pearson tweet that sent me to the story: “Haven’t we settled this already?” The use of student […]
Advice for New Faculty, 2016
A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to speak on a panel about teaching during Union’s new-faculty orientation. We had one person from each of the academic divisions (arts and literature, social science, natural science, and engineering), and there was a ton of overlap in the things we said, but here’s a rough reconstruction […]
362-366/366: Sillyhead-Centric Closing
And now, the photo-a-day project straggles in to the finish line, with a final five photos dominated by the kids: 362/366: Kid Art I 363/366: Kid Art II One of the official end of summer activities is cleaning off the “art shelf” in the bookcase in the dining room, where we pile the various projects […]
353-361/366: Penultimate Photo Dump
Another day, another batch of photos from August. 353/366: Trail Blaze This is actually a slight reversal of chronology, as the hike through Vischer’s Ferry was the day after I went for a hike in the H. G. Reist Wildlife Sanctuary. The pictures from Vischer’s Ferry were better though, as despite the name I didn’t […]
344-352/366: Wetland Walk
Another in the sadly delayed wrapping-up of my photo-a-day project. These are all pictures from a hike in the Vischer Ferry Nature Preserve over in Clifton Park. We took the kids over there one time, but a thunderstorm started coming in before we got very far. While the kids were at my parents’, I decided […]
336-343/366: Panoramas and Sillyheads
I’ve got a big backlog of photo-a-day pictures, but finding time to edit and post them is a major challenge. I’ve got nearly all the editing done, now, so I’ll start putting blocks of stuff up when I have time (generally very early in the morning, as I’m awake before everyone else in Chateau Steelypips). […]