Earlier this past week I wrote a little bit about my final preparations towards my exams and how they got me thinking about studying in general. I’ve written about the types of questions I prefer to give to my students (from the perspective of an instructor) before but I most recently wrote about studying from the perspective of the student. This is a continuation of that prior post (read it here). Today I will examin both of these methods in greater depth for their positives and negatives. The first basic option identified was a sort of power-skimming of the texts. … Continue reading →

At the end of the school year many students come out of the shadows (or wherever they were hiding during the entire semester) asking for extra credit, hope, or whatever else might allow them to pass a class that they largely ignored. Often if they’d paid attention just few weeks earlier they could have done some extra credit, completed that paper, or finished that group project that would have allowed them to receive a passing grade. I feel for these students a little bit. While I don’t take joy in giving a failing grade for anything, I also don’t believe … Continue reading →

Currently I’m hard at work on my dissertation. Dissertations are weird entities that force their writers into very clear decisions. The single point you intend to discuss, research, analyze and explore can be approached from a variety of different angles. The difficulty, of course, is that you must pick one angle (or, absent just one, a couple very specific angles). Don’t bite off more than you can chew comes to mind as an apt corollary. This type of work is massive in depth but not massive in breadth. You explore a limited thing in a specific way. While working on … Continue reading →

There is simply no way to underestimate the amount of pressure that has been slowly seeping out of my previously over-stuffed cranial region. I passed my qualifying exams for my PhD. Months of preparation, re-reading, reviewing, note-taking, synopsizing, and general anxiety and distress has finally come to an end after the final examinations I took the previous week. I had many thoughts and preconceptions about the exams themselves as well as how I would feel if I passed or failed them. I was prepared for anything but nothing was as expected. The exams themselves were what they were. Quesions from … Continue reading →