Steve Ersinghaus

Yipes, what a couple of weeks. But it has been good work. There’s lots to do at the course level, the program level, and the institutional level, and work with our fellow institutions in the state on transfer, articulation, and ability-based approaches.
Over the years the college system in Connecticut has been working on [...]

The new building and classroom are a breath of fresh air. The little laptop in the room that runs all the equipment is a little disproportionate, though. Nice big screen and D assures us that the macs will jack right in and auto-switch.
Very nice and we also have a little gizmo we can use to [...]

The themeing is nearly done.
Here’s the result. Cleaner presentation and less clutter.
This was fun.

Spazeboy writes in an older post:
The research paper is for American Political Economy, and the topic I’ve tentatively chosen to write about is “How do corporations/associations/industries mobilize politically to protect their business models?”
Isn’t this about researching the activities and influence of special interest groups or industry lobbies?

I think sometimes I throw a profile out here. Here’s one.
We have a lot of standout faculty at Sixnut (soon I’ll be able to link back to it once the website is redone by someone who knows what they’re doing) so it’s hard to single them out.
Recently a Ph.D in History from the University [...]

In this response Neha tells me about the quarter-life crisis, which I know only from John Meyer. I also know of Abby Wilner’s work on the issue.
We talk about liminality, spatial and temporal transition a lot (and yet never enough). But new spaces and transitions do not constitute “reality.” When we ask the question, [...]

The Course Weblog will be going through some redesign in preparation for the literature course I will be teaching in the summer and for the Fall semester. Some pages have been prepped, but they’re not really what I want them to be. Lots of cool reading there, though. How does one design a weblog to [...]

From the NYT (requires login):
The two-year colleges most committed to funneling students into four-year colleges tend to have some or all of the following: learning communities (in which students attend classes with the same small cohort of classmates), honors programs (noted for curriculum that crosses disciplines, teachers who hold advanced degrees and smaller classes taken [...]

Spazeboy writes further about his Tour de Tunxis.
I’d like to see him write more about a logical full-time faculty staffing number. I think we need five more English faculty to cover work load. That’s a lot of faculty. What forces prohibit a reasonable number of full-time teaching faculty?
Is this the correct question?
He might ask, “Why [...]

This comes from a comment on “the other weblog” from a good citizen:

I was appalled as a student to see the level of irresponsibility and “uncaringness” in my math peers. Has no one taught them, in their previous 19 years, to pull their own weight? (Then again, looking at who’s running the country, I don’t [...]

Something’s been bothering me of late. It has to do with college student responsibility. Why is it bothering me? A couple of reasons. I find more students not observing the time and date of my meetings with them. I did not determine these dates and times, though I agreed with them in consultation with my [...]

The Independent Thinker run by Dr. Rafaele Fierro is up. This will be a hub for Rafaele to engage students in history and government courses.
One of his first links cuts to Lawrence vs Texas. One of the reasoning lines in Lawrence points back to interesting determinations about the positions of married and unmarried persons [...]

I’m currently writing up and editing standards of evaluation for the Shakespeare course. As I think about symmetry in the lines and how observing and analyzing the plays at this level provides insight into performance, I’m reminded of the importance of the ability to read beyond the text, especially for readers so immersed in their [...]

Alec Couros leaves me a nice note and asserts this:
We must help students to understand what is worth reading, how to find the relevant voices in the huge raving river of information, and then be able to engage in conversations with what they have learned, and who they have learned from.
I agree that a great [...]