Blogs

As regular readers know, I grew up in a city with minor league baseball. As it happened, a few of the players from the years I paid attention went on later to significant major league careers; one of them even became a first-ballot Hall of Famer. (Yes, I saw him play in the minors. Even then, you could tell he’d be special.)

We need more dialog about our teaching failures, including how we define failure in the classroom.

The techno thriller is fast becoming one of my preferred fiction genres. Zero Day is a terrific beach book (or whatever the winter February school vacation equivalent is, the time period in which I interfaced with the book).

The last couple weekends around home have been math weekends. Not by choice, not by design, not for fun. My daughter brings home a fair amount of math homework from middle school. She’s actually pretty good at it but she doesn’t realize this, because (her words) she thinks her friends are all better than she is at doing it. To be fair, the work is hard.

Bookrenter is spilling out a separate company today called Rafter, aiming to help offer universities better deliver course materials. This isn't just about finding cheaper textbooks (although that's part of it), but rather providing a technology infrastructure to help campuses better purchase, manage and distribute educational content.

The unruly process of ‘innovation’ has long stumped analysts and advocates.

A colleague here likes to tell the story of the evening student who visited her office in tears. The student had been trying to locate an academic adviser for a while, and at the time, they weren’t easily available in the evenings. (We’ve since changed that.) By my colleague’s telling, the student complained that it wasn’t fair; she had to work during the day, but she still wanted to feel “just like a real college student.” That meant advisors, and faculty, and even student clubs.

Come Fall semester I predict that Going Solo will be on the syllabi of sociology courses across the land.