Cate Denial

I read a wonderful interview with Natalie Mendoza this morning, in which she offered a wonderful articulation of alignment – making sure that your course goals, assessments, and instruction are all synced with one another: “Let me explain what alignment is. Alignment includes three steps. The first step would be identifying learning objectives. What is it that you want students to learn? We talked about skills, we talked about concepts, or content – any of those things could be learning…

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Today was “Fun with Scissors!” day in my methods class, otherwise known as our end-of-term paper workshop. I’m sure I am not the first or only person who believes in cutting up papers to emphasize organization, strong thesis statements, and good topic sentences, but in case you’ve never heard of the tactic, here’s how it goes: Everyone brings in a complete first version of their paper to class, printed single sided. They scribble out the in-text footnote numbers, and then…

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The other day, Jesse Stommel tweeted a thread about how we train our graduate students to teach. It got me thinking about my own experience, and how much work graduate programs need to put in to make sure we do better. I was 22 years old when I first began teaching. I was an English, first-generation, immigrant graduate student, brand new to the American system of education, and just six weeks past my own graduation with a BA in American…

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