Comments for Casting Out Nines

Comment on Which domain name are you using? by Robert

Robert — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 02:18:07 +0000

I’m probably going to hang on to the domain name itself, just in case one of these days I decide to go back to self-hosting. With WordPress.com you get the whatever.wordpress.com domain for free, but if you want to map a second domain name to your blog it costs extra. That’s the fee I’m talking about. Just FYI. Thanks for subscribing!

Comment on Which domain name are you using? by Thom

Thom — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 01:54:48 +0000

I just re-found your web site a couple of weeks ago by resurrecting my use of NewsGator. I was subsribed to the old RSS feed. I deleted that subscription, and re-subscribed through the wordpress feed. It was VERY easy.

I think as long as you give a reasonable heads-up you can go ahead and let the old domain name lapse.

Comment on Updated Teaching Statement by teachthemasses

teachthemasses — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:48:54 +0000

You put a lot of work into that.

Comment on Skeletal form of my new Teaching Statement by Updated Teaching Statement « Casting Out Nines

Updated Teaching Statement « Casting Out Nines — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:12:36 +0000

[...] July 2008 · No Comments Some time ago, I posted a very skeletal outline of a new Statement of Teaching Philosophy and got some good feedback. After struggling to write something that doesn’t sound like it [...]

Comment on Skipping class by rwp

rwp — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:42:01 +0000

I never ask students why they weren’t in class, unless they come to office hours and have Fs on projects or the exam and I knew they weren’t in class. It’s not feasible to take attendance in a lecture hall with 250 students. However, I do give pop quizzes, always at the end of class, and on those days, TAs hand the scantrons out at the door for the first five minutes. When the five minutes are up, the TAs take the scantrons back to my office and return. Come late, or don’t come, and you get a zero on the quiz.

Comment on Ideas about a course on blogging? by Teaching College English » How to assess blog posts.

Teaching College English » How to assess blog posts. — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 22:00:23 +0000

[...] were my comments on a Casting Out Nines post on teaching blogging back in [...]

Comment on Skipping class by Robert

Robert — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 19:25:32 +0000

@student: I’ve actually written one of those letters before, although not quite so, um, bluntly. A company was considering hiring one of my students and asked for a reference, and I told the company that the student was a competent worker — so long as she feels like working, and so long as the work is, in HER opinion, interesting enough to merit her attention. But if the company had some pressing business and wanted her to take care of it, it was a crap shoot — maybe she’ll take a shine to the assignment and get it done, or maybe she’ll just figure she was getting a raise anyway and perhaps her time was better spent doing something else. You pay your money and you take your chances.

And I tell that story to every student who gives me the “I had a thing” treatment. College students are adults, and so I let them make their choices and take the consequences. If they want to establish a reputation for themselves as underachievers, and possibly screw themselves over grade-wise, then I will make the consequences and policies clear to them, and I will tell them why it’s better to be responsible, but otherwise leave them alone. I have no problem with letting students develop good judgment through the exercise of bad judgment.

Comment on Skipping class by Student

Student — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:56:21 +0000

Usually, if a prof asks why I didn’t show up to a class, I say “I had a thing.” Upon being pressed, I follow that with a hand wave and a “don’t worry about it.” That’s when the usually-miffed prof gives up.

Check this out:
http://chasingtenureinsociology.blogspot.com/2007/01/honest-letter-that-i-wish-i-could-write.html

When you’re the person the Chasing Tenure author is writing about, you know it. You know you’re getting an A anyway, and you know your time’s better spent reading a good book on an interesting subject. So why bother showing up?

If you can get past my incendiary tone, I’d really be interested in reading an answer.

Comment on Skipping class by rwp

rwp — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:18:01 +0000

Oh, and Mitch Daniels’s daughter asked if she could miss class at the beginning of the semester to attend the inauguration. I was really busy getting ready for the semester and I hadn’t read it carefully, so I didn’t realize it was his daughter, but I told her sure, since she was missing only the first day, and asked her to drop by the office to pick up her materials. It was about a month after the semester started that the chairman was down in my office and we were chatting, and he asked me how the Governor’s daughter was doing. That’s how I found out she was my student.

Comment on Skipping class by rwp

rwp — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:15:02 +0000

I’ve had a few memorable legitimate excuses. I had a student *ask me* if it would be okay if he missed class so he could attend his naturalization ceremony! I said absolutely, and congratulations!

I’ve had a number of students who had to drop to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan. I thanked them for their service.

I’ve also had a couple of oopses. I had one student keel over and die of a heart attack in the hall as I was getting ready to let students in for the final — he’d been up all week, eating speed.

I once had the students on a cohort complain that one of the cohort had disappeared, and I hadn’t seen him in class, so I sent him an email message that while not rude, wasn’t the most patient message I’ve sent. About a week later, I got an email message from an account I’d never seen, AOL, I believe. It was the student’s father. He had been killed in a car accident. I felt really bad about that message I’d sent.