Neither fame nor money

Credit, fame, recognition, money. In most of academia these come from one thing: scholarship. Even at my University where "teaching excellence is job #1" the rewards for scholarly productivity outnumber those for excellence in the classroom (although it's getting slightly more balanced). I was aware of this preference for scholarship from my first days as a grad student, so I've played this game well enough to get a job, tenured, and promoted. But it's never sit well with me. The reason I got into this profession was teaching. The mission of my institution is teaching. What my students want is quality teaching. So if I put all my attention, time, effort and expertise into teaching, what does that get me? Satisfaction, pride, gratitude from my students -- all significant and energizing. But not fame or money.

I have no illusions of this blog resulting in any more fame, and certainly not any more money. But maybe I'll feel better by taking the actions I describe below. Maybe not. 

I should admit that teaching excellence can and has garnered accolades, for me and others. In fact I've been involved in creating and administering teaching awards on campus that actually come with a monetary award. And SoTL is a clever and effective way to focus on teaching while enjoying (a lesser degree of) the plaudits of scholarship. 

My real complaint is that I spend hours of hard labor on my teaching, really most of my time and productivity in any given week or semester, and that results in nearly no recognition outside of my students. I understand that teaching is my job, and it sounds like I want a cookie for doing it. But there are plenty of cookies for scholarship, and that is less of my job than teaching.

So here's what I plan to do: I will use this blog to push out some of my favorite teaching materials. My idea at this point is to share some of the jigsaw prompts I have written for my Introduction to Psychology course. Just a brief description of the jigsaw: it's a cooperative learning activity where students develop expertise on one area and share that with their classmates while learning from them about their areas of expertise. I do this in Intro by giving students questions to answer by accessing the text, the web, YouTube, Wikipedia, any source they think appropriate. I have written 4 - 7 jigsaw prompts for each day of class in Intro (a ton of work that I really enjoy). I will share my favorite prompts. Feel free to steal them, use them, critique them, ignore them. I claim a Creative Commons license to this material. (CC)

The point, I suppose, is that I am very proud of this intellectual labor. I am not saying I think it is excellent or exceptional -- just the opposite, really. This is what instructors do every day: scholarship of application, based on scholarship of discovery (if done right). I can tell you one difference between my jigsaw prompts and my disciplinary publications: I know more than just a few people will read and benefit from the jigsaw prompts.



 

Topic: Critical thinking
Consider the psychological claim, put forth by President Trump, that he’s a “very stable genius”. That factual claim may be true or false, like any factual claim. In order to evaluate that claim we should apply critical thinking to it, as described in the text. What are the 4 mental activities and how would you use them to evaluate this claim? Keep in mind the role of your own biases in evaluating Pres. Trump’s psychological claim!