Blogs

This week, as I was starting to feel myself again after an intense bout of the flu, Ben came down with it. I had a comparatively light work week, so even when he wasn't that sick I was able to spend time with him, watching TV, talking when he felt up to it, and making tea, the closest thing to food he could tolerate for a few days.

Borrowing from Ta-Nehisi Coates, I'm looking for help understanding this phenomenon as it pertains to higher ed.

This month, students in my January course have been reading about books and culture. This week, as we’re wrapping things up, they speculated about what the world of books might look like in ten years, and came up with some intriguing scenarios and proposals. As I left the building where the class meets I chatted with some humanities faculty and mentioned what we’d been talking about. They seemed at first apprehensive, then surprised and relieved that students predicted a future for books.

When academic Twitter starts sounding too much like academia.

CourseSmart is the world’s largest platform for eTextbooks and digital course materials. CourseSmart has over 40,000 titles from more than 50 publishers and over 3.5 million student and faculty users. CourseSmart Analytics provides faculty with a platform to develop insight into how students are interacting with the digital texts that they assign. Robust analytics seems to be the logical next step of the move from print to digital in curricular materials.

One of the challenges to teaching with technology is helping students figure out the "who", "what", and "how" of internet messages. As a grad instructor of “Human Diversity, Power, and Schools”, a course that centers on issues of difference, this challenge coincides with a key concept: social construction, or the idea that dominant groups’ norms are positioned as natural, to the exclusion of non-dominant groups. I have stumbled into memes as one fruitful teaching tool for helping students to uncover the ways mass media shapes how we view ourselves, others, and the world around us.

The Boy continues to careen into tweenhood. On Wednesday morning I dropped him off early at school for jazz band. As we approached the front entrance, a girl started to cross, and I stopped to let her pass. He got oddly quiet. Later that night, he told me that she’s his crush, and that he was silently praying that she didn’t see him in the car.

When I teach Economics, I often find myself teaching about the effects of a tax on the supply and demand curves for a product. While a tax can be levied on a producer or a consumer, it is generally the case that the producer and consumer will each pay a portion of that tax in the end, once the equilibrium price changes in response to the tax. Indeed, the degree to which a consumer and producer share the cost of a tax depends on how willing those agents are to change their behavior in response to a change in price. In economic language, we say that who actually pays a tax “depends on the elasticities.”