Team Based Learning

Well, it's been a while. It's a bit tough to get excited about teaching when the department chair is telling me he'd like to hire me but he's afraid they're going to have to eliminate all the 1-year contracts in favor of the much cheaper adjunct model. This in the face of a massive budget cut from the governor following on from the Governor's inspiring speech about the importance of education. So much for Obama's new America -- and that's even before watching the Dow plummet to the soundtrack of the new Treasury Secretary mincing his words and talking out of both sides of his mouth.

Still, we're all about Team Based Learning this semester, putting the students in teams and making them do the learning for themselves, and that's been fun. They've now had a chance to look at why everyone else thinks they should be taking World History and come up with their own explanations as to why they should be taking World History (or alternatively why they should not). It's taken us this long to get to the point where Friday the teams will present their ideas, but that's the nature of learning here. They're actually learning something useful, but I have to do it in such a small way that any pretense of "coverage" is out the window.

Meanwhile, Transportation History is going smoothly, alternating between a lecture and a discussion a week. Today it was about how the RR in America were about liquidating nature (Cronon) and how they were different than the British model. Mostly they wanted to hear abou the bogie, that set of 4 wheels that sits at either end of the rail car and is an innovation peculiar to American RR because the Americans had lower capitalized lines and therefore needed to make tighter curves. Still, they seem to be all aboard. We'll find out Friday.