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.
Continue reading → Destroying the Sacred Dyad: Cameras in the Classroom as Shadows on the Cave Wall
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.
Continue reading → When the Plagiarist Punishes the Professor
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