I spoke to my classes today about The Chronicle piece that described recent evidence on best teaching practices in the college classroom. I poked fun at it — Harvard found that students don’t like to take quizzes, that teachers don’t like to write or grade them, but that neverthless students learn effectively when they know they will be quizzed. I think we knew a lot of that. But I also suggested that there was much in the article that challenged old and even current notions on good teaching. We spoke of this before a quiz in the Punctuation class (“I do this for your own good,” I told them). I joked that the on-line quizzes in Research were not of my design, and were mechanically graded, so I liked them. I went into a similar spiel with my Irish class — quizzes, blah, blah, funny, ha, ha. This was at the end of class, at the end of a very long bout of lecturing on my part. As the laughter subsided, one student raised her hand and said, “One of my other professors discussed that article today, too. She said lecturing was found to be ineffective.”
So we move forward, trying to remain open to the nuances of eighteenth-century punctuation, MLA formatting, and the dichotomies between the great Irish law tracts. I wonder whether the oes dana, oes cerdd, and boaire classes (artists, tradesmen, and cattle lords) were ever quizzed (or bored by some droning, lecturing druid)?
On a different note, I showed Potter’s Puppet Pals in the minutes before two classes (see the link in the blog roll). I’m told they’ve been around for quite some time — I just discovered them — still everyone seemed to enjoy the show.