Archives for 2013

I have always been gifted at getting people’s hackles up. Maybe it comes from being the self-righteous firstborn of two firstborns. Maybe it comes from being socially awkward, always better at pleasing teachers than pleasing peers. Maybe it comes from my tendency to say exactly what I think at ...

Recently I spoke with a seminary dean in her fourth year in office. After four years she is stepping down, but takes some pride in having hit the top end of the average tenure for faculty in that office. While she had taken some undergraduate education courses she spoke of ...

It was the middle of the semester, a time when exhaustion so often overtakes pedagogical finesse, a time when the energy of new courses is abating and the promise of a reprieve from grading and lecturing is too distant to relish. It was during one of these mornings when I ...

To paraphrase Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter, “I have a confession: I don’t much like my students.” It’s not that I don’t like them as people or that I wish them ill. It’s not that I don’t like discussing ideas, engaging texts, ...

Deans work in complex systems and, often, need to communicate complex ideas when leading Faculty to interpret problems and determine solutions. I've found that using graphic interpretation of data helps facilitate communication and interpretation of complex ideas. I've benefited greatly from the works of Edward Tufte (http://www.edwardtufte.com/...