Author Archives: Phil

Prior to our presentation, I was a bit nervous as I thought I had not contributed much in the way of this group.  I had two ideas that I thought were good, but was not enough work to make me feel as an equal contributor.  My area was assessment for the course. Grades had to […] Continue reading →

Is teaching science or art? Read through the first part here: http://blogs.lt.vt.edu/plh5012/2013/04/17/the-art-of-teaching/ There is a science to teaching. This is known by many IN the sciences, as we study numbers, statistics and subjects all the time. Why would students and their test scores be any different?  To start, let’s think about how students learn in […] Continue reading →

The classroom is a stage.  The students, the audience. The material, the screenplay. The teacher, the entire cast. Using these parallels, we can adapt many ideas of teacher into our teaching techniques.  If this is sounding familiar, maybe you have seen one of Greg Justice’s lectures or workshops here at VT, we spoke briefly on […] Continue reading →

I spoke in my last post about how it is inevitable for our brains to sort and organize people.  We discussed in class many other categories that we sort other into.  To reiterate, those included: Age, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, ethnicity, social status, and a few others.  I feel that many people think they avoid […] Continue reading →

When I hear diversity, I tend to immediately jump to racial or cultural diversity. But when I truly give it some thought, there is so much more, i.e. religions, gender, political, regional, etc. The fact of the matter is that there is an enormous number of ways we can separate and categorize each other. Our […] Continue reading →

(For some reason the embedding isn’t working…) I’m sure many of you have seen this video, especially after the readings from last week. If you haven’t seen it, it was mentioned in Wesch article and should contain very familiar material.  The other videos included in the resources led me to more videos about education and […] Continue reading →

I blogged a lot when I was in high school.  Nothing really noteworthy, but they were my own thoughts and I could organize them in writing.  Since then, I stopped blogging, thinking that it was merely a waste of my time.  But later on, I noticed it was more difficult to write out things, assignments, […] Continue reading →