For three semesters I have attempted to incorporate Twitter into the college classroom, even once relying on the service to arrange a win-a-free-textbook contest for my Film Noir students. But overall, these attempts have failed miserably as the majority of college students — at this point in time anyway — …

A couple of weeks ago, USA Today‘s pop culture blog featured a guest author, Denise Du Vernay, a lecturer in Humanities and Communications at Milwaukee School of Engineering and co-author of The Simpsons in the Classroom: Embiggening the Learning Experience with the Wisdom of Springfield (she also tweets). For her guest …

About five years ago, I came across a column in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “Notes from a Career in Teaching.” (If you don’t have a Chronicle account, you may read the entire piece here.) In it, the author, a recently retired college …

When I was in college, both undergraduate and graduate school, this is what I knew about the personal lives of my professors:

Many had cats; at least two had dogs.
One spent most of her summers in Italy researching the letters of a sixteenth- (or maybe seventeenth-) century Italian woman.
One smoked cigarettes, …

Students in my traditional and online Introduction to Film courses take three exams, each of which includes at least four types of questions — clip, multiple choice, short answer, and identification — all designed to target the various learning styles that my 200+ students possess (e.g., visual, aural, kinesthetic, reading-writing). …

Last week Dominique Homberger, a tenured LSU biology professor, was removed from her class mid-semester for “allegedly grading too harshly.” According to one article that covered the event, “more than 90 percent of [her] students were failing or had dropped the [introductory-level biology] class.” After considering those numbers, the dean …