Opinion

So last year I was on a Fulbright in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Setting aside all good judgment I agreed to rent a room in an apartment with a group of “mature professionals and graduate students.” Because, conveniently, none of them were home at the time I visited—which was already the first of the month—I had no opportunity to assess for myself just how “mature” was being defined.

I have a confession to make: Until recently, I have not known how to ride a bike. Some 6 years ago when a Belgian friend of mine found out that I did not know to ride a bike, he asked me the following question in shock: “OK, so you did not ride a bike, but then what did you do as a child?”

I've been racking my brain trying to come up with a way to discuss these three books with you. The deal is that we meet in this space to discuss the intersection of education and technology. Where does fiction fit in?

I just returned from a family vacation week in the Netherlands spending time at the Floriade (which is the once every ten years flower show) as well as time in Amsterdam and th surrounding areas. I thoroughly enjoyed the trip. Certain observations and comparisons are inevitable and these observations may help us and our county in the years ahead.

Ben now has two weeks of college classes under his belt, and we are all breathing a little more easily.

For all the attention paid these days to retention and graduation, we pay so little to how teaching practices in the classroom can help nontraditional students. In the first of two essays, Mike Rose offers some guidance.

Laurence Musgrove describes the complicated and ultimately rewarding nature of teaching.

As we prepare for a new school year, many of us will write lectures either by choice or because we feel or are told we must. I confess that I don’t like to lecture; I much prefer to facilitate student discussion, which places the responsibility for learning back on the students themselves. We have all experienced mind-numbing lectures and (most of us!) have vowed not to do that to our own students, but how do we break out of the mold in which we have been shaped?