Wednesday, September 7, 2011

First day of class

There are many more students than planned for my course. How can I teach interactively in a large crowd? My idea for today: provide the questions and answers myself. That enables me to be rude more than I would dare to be in real life.

I've always felt stupid reminding students that cheating was forbidden, as if they didn't know it already. Last year I took the moral high ground - "one should not teachcheat, not because of the threat of penalties, but because it's intrinsically wrong; and it's wrong for the following various reasons... " but that felt rather silly.

So this year, instead, I have planned the following dialogue between the fake student and the fake teacher who appear on my slides:
Student-"What's Brown's policy regarding teaching?"
Teacher-"It is not allowed."
Student-[disappointed]"Oh."
Teacher-"Duh"

How satisfactory to be able to show my true thoughts about the need to remind students of the non-cheating rules.

4 comments:

  1. You made a cute lapsus: "One should not teach..."
    ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. There is another one...

    Student-"What's Brown's policy regarding teaching?"
    Teacher-"It is not allowed."

    Really? ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Good idea. I changed my slide. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete

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