I have been following Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s journey in space for some time now, and on May 13th, he stepped down from his command of the International Space Station. He has been on the artificial satellite since December 2012, when he arrived as part of Expedition 35, a six-person crew.
There’s a lot of righteous arguing on The Internets recently concerning the way religion and science are cleverly being mashed up by fanatical Christian fundamentalists to create a whole new anti-science, anti-reality, anti-educational rhetoric that is being fed to our children as something real and true and factual when it is not. The monsters behind this religious terrorism of the mind are the same evildoers who invented the “Creation Museum” where they argue that people walked the earth with the dinosaurs even though there is a 65 million year gap between the last dinosaur and the first human.
Last night, Janna and I were rushing home after teaching in New York City, and in the middle of Times Square, I had a moment I hope I never get to repeat. I tripped — over my own two feet, or the curb, or a break in the sidewalk — and instantly fell long and hard on the sidewalk. I was stunned for a moment and didn’t quite know where I was. Janna was behind me somewhere and I remember one woman bending down to ask me if I was okay.
I currently teach in an old Midtown building in the center of New York City that used to house a secretarial typing school. Legend has it that because there were lots of nefarious “students” in and around the “school” in the past, video cameras were placed in every corridor and cranny to record any crimes for the police that might take place.
The life of a teacher is a difficult one. Many people think that they have it easy — school ends at three, they have the whole summer off, and who can beat that for a job? What the people who think this way do not take into consideration is that the teacher, leaving the school at three, then has a stack of homework to grade and tests to score and lessons to plan. The lessons that a teacher plans for their classes every week has to not only cover the material that the school requires but ideally engages the children in the classroom and keeps their attention.
Teaching a course on film can be one of the major joys of the educational process as long as both instructor and student are on the same page of expectation. You cannot spend class time watching the assigned movies. You must use that precious class time together to discuss and dissect the films frame by frame — but you cannot do that unless and until the students have watched the movies on their own time beyond the classroom.
I recently had a wonderful conversation with my mentor Howard Stein — also my Columbia University MFA Playwriting Chair and head of the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies, and now lifelong friend — concerning the appropriateness of ending an English sentence with a preposition.
People who take on roles of authority — police officers, business owners, parents — are often caught in the trap of being accused of being tyrants. Tyranny is not authority and knowing the difference with a distinction is important.
Panagiotis Ipeirotis teaches computer science at NYU in the Stern School of Business. After winning tenure, he decided to use TurnItIn‘s Blackboard integration to see how many of his students were plagiarists.
Unionization in higher education is important because it helps preserve the individual in service to the corpus. Collective bargaining is all about equality and fair treatment and when the terms of agreed-to contracts are changed on a whim by the university, the stiff arm of the union must be invoked to preserve the basic rights of every instructor. One violation offends every instructor.
In the History of Bad Idea the — the worst one, in my humble estimation, is the practice of teaching students of American Sign Language with a stick. Yes, a stick made of wood. In some ASL programs, instructors use a stick during class to manipulate — and intimidate! — their students.
The great SuperGenius Howard Stein and I were recently discussing the writing process when I reminded him of his unforgettable advice to writers — found in the Secret of Good Writing — and we both shared a laugh. Then, Howard told me a story about Jerzy Kosinski and writing.
Too often, when we place the self in the context of the greater world, we point outward instead of directing the fit inward. Today, I’d like to discuss the idea how learning civilizes you — the self — and not just the greater “ourselves.”
One semester, I was teaching a Dramatic Literature course at a major public university on the East Coast, when I was approached by four women after the first session.
