Crusty Faculty...

Today I presented our work on our 'Local Choices Global Effects' course at the NRC Conference on Students in Transition. The attendance was small, but those present gave good comments and feedback. They were quite impressed by the work of some of our students. It was also quite heartening to note that other schools have similar programs; it was also disconcerting to note that a few schools are quite ahead of us.

I attended a session on memory and how to help students perform better based on what know about memory. The session was quite interesting, and I learnt quite a bit. At the end, in the context of math, I remarked that faculty often dumb down things and could be the culprits. I cited, as an example, the practice of allocating points when describing grading on a syllabus. Instead of saying 20% of the grade depends on homeworks, faculty write that 100 points are for the homework, and so on, and the total grade is out of 500 points. Students now don't have to do even the basic math to convert their % to points. The speaker remarked that she also does this, and in jest, said she is a fake. Perhaps, but she did not seem to understand the gravity of the situation.