Philosophy Referee Hand Signals

I was recently forwarded these Philosophy Referee Hand Signals; they might be useful for teaching!

The Quotable Teacher, installment 6

Returning to a recent theme here at ISW:

At the center of understanding students is learning how to be intellectually and morally attentive as a teacher. ... I found that the language of calling, or vocation, helped capture the underlying motivations and conceptions of teaching better than the contemporary languages of profession, occupation, or job. The language of calling illuminates the sustained and deep regard the teachers have for their students, a quality perhaps shared by dedicated practitioners everywhere. (David T. Hansen, "Understanding students")

Using partial notes to improve student performance

My own faculty center highlights a technique that I've used periodically: provide students with partial notes whose blanks they fill in. It's a good compromise between providing students notes and making them do all the work in taking notes.

Here's a description of a study about this technique:

The Quotable Teacher, installment 5

"I believe, indeed, that overemphasis on the purely intellectual attitude, often directed solely to the practical and factual, in our education, has led directly to the impairment of ethical values. I am not thinking so much of the dangers with which technical progress has directly confronted mankind, as of the stifling of mutual human considerations by a 'matter-of-fact' habit of thought which has come to lie like a killing frost upon human relations. Without 'ethical culture' there is no salvation for humanity."

— Albert Einstein

In favor of prospective exams

I'd like to share a positive experience I had with final exams.

Last quarter I gave what I'll call a prospective final exam in my introductory ethics sections. The idea here is that though the exam was intended to test the skills, etc., that the students were expected to acquire in the course, they had to display these skills with totally unfamiliar material. (I've been kicking around this idea for a while — see this post from 2008 — though the format differs from what I described there.)

Here's how this worked:

'A guide to living with your philosopher'

Doubtless a number of you have already discovered the fine blog philosiology. It offers outstanding advice to those struggling to live with a philosopher:

Being related in some way to a philosopher can be scary. They enter a world of dialectic and really hard, boring stuff that you do not understand and/or have no desire to understand. This is a guide to help you learn how to relate to your philosopher and, in the end, to learn how to love and live with them peacefully.

Some recent entries:

• Thought Experiments
• Buying Gifts for Philosophers: Dos and Don'ts
• Colloquia and Philosophy Talks
• Living with your Philosopher: Incessant Questioning

Anyway, it's wonderful funny stuff!

Nussbaum review in n+1: "restated, rather than resolved, the contemporary quandary of humanists"

Just keeping up with the reviews of Not for Profit: Here's a very lucid review in the excellent literary magazine n+1, along with discussions of recent books by Menand and Terry Castle.

The most interesting tidbit from the review below the fold: