I mentioned in the previous post that, before I started teaching for the first time, I asked some colleagues for advice about how to establish myself as an authority in the classroom. At that point, before I’d ever walked into a classroom as an instructor, I phrased the problem in terms of “controlling” the room. [...]
Tags: history, students, teaching
Posted in academic | 1 Comment »>Yesterday, in my lecture class (Science in the United States), we ended up having a bit of a class discussion about the borders and boundaries of science. I love this type of question, and I think that we learn a lot about our own assumptions and categories when we try and work through possible answers. [...]
Tags: boundaries, history, science, teaching
Posted in academic | 5 Comments »>The semester has started well, if busily. More posting in the next few days, maybe, but in the meantime, some links I want to get out there before my computer loses all of these lovely open browser windows I’ve mentally tagged “of possible use in weblog”. Mostly academic-related, although not entirely. New Kid on the [...]
Tags: academic job market, academics, feminism, history, miscellany
Posted in academic | 1 Comment »>As promised, my reaction to the most recent Digital Campus episode Some background: Digital Campus is a biweekly podcast from the Center for History and New Media, dealing with issues of technology and the college classroom. If you’re teaching college students, you should be listening to this podcast–it’s the most consistently intelligent and useful discussion [...]
Tags: academic blogging, digital campus, history, teaching
Posted in academic | 3 Comments »>For all that it sounds like I’ve been whining about these trips, I want to be very clear about this: I love doing this kind of research. The boxes and the folders and the reading rooms. Doing it with a digital camera is new to me, but the principle is still the same. I mentioned [...]
Tags: archives, history, missouri
Posted in academic, personal | 1 Comment »>Archives work is tiring. I suppose it doesn’t have to be, but the type of work I’ve been doing for the last week certainly was. The first step is easy–go through the finding aid (a compiled index and description of the collections) and identify which material you want to look at, and then fill out [...]
Posted in academic | 2 Comments »>One of the books I’m working through at the moment is Mystics and Messiahs by Philip Jenkins. Five or six years ago, I read an article Jenkins wrote for The Atlantic Monthly about global Christianity; specifically, the article looked at the different types of Christianity proliferating (and thriving) in the Global South, pointing out that [...]
Tags: history, objectivity, wikipedia
Posted in academic | 5 Comments »>As previously noted, I had a great time at the AHA meeting this weekend–it was both enjoyable and productive, and I’ve returned home exhausted, but full of ideas and energy. I’d imagine that part of my general positive feeling about the whole thing comes from the fact that I didn’t get arrested for jaywalking. (The [...]
Posted in academic | 2 Comments »>My lecture course this semester, the one on the history of premodern science, is divided into six major units. Each unit deals with a major geographical region, and the first lecture of each unit is a walkthrough of the geography, political history, and agricultural development of that region. There are a number of reasons for [...]
Posted in academic | 3 Comments »>Today in class, the history of math and engineering in West Africa and in Egypt. It’s a great topic that I hope I did justice to, because looking at the development of mathematical concepts in very different cultural contexts can possibly help us not take math too much for granted–it’s not just a fixed thing [...]
Tags: history, science, teaching
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