Teaching can be an oddly solitary endeavor. Although we are constantly interacting with our students, most of us are alone in doing all of the real work of teaching. Some may team-teach occasionally, but the majority of the time, teaching a class is not a collaborative effort. And in certain environments (i.e., institutions where research is valued a lot more than teaching), those of us who care about teaching may not even have many colleagues to talk with about teaching in general, let alone specific classes.
That's one reason I was so excited about attending the pre-ASSA conference workshop last Friday. Aside from the topic of the meeting itself (which I will write about in an upcoming post), it was great simply to be able to put faces with names that I've seen on the tch-econ listserv emails, Journal of Economic Education articles and assorted teaching-econ-related books and papers. I wasn't able to attend the rest of the conference but I do hope to get at least a few of the folks who presented on teaching to do some guest posts here over the next few months.
That's one reason I was so excited about attending the pre-ASSA conference workshop last Friday. Aside from the topic of the meeting itself (which I will write about in an upcoming post), it was great simply to be able to put faces with names that I've seen on the tch-econ listserv emails, Journal of Economic Education articles and assorted teaching-econ-related books and papers. I wasn't able to attend the rest of the conference but I do hope to get at least a few of the folks who presented on teaching to do some guest posts here over the next few months.
Responding to your first paragraph: Yes, and one of the greatest benefits of participating in the blogosphere whether writing posts, reading them or leaving comments is the sense of community which develops among partipants. Keep up the good work, Jennifer!
ReplyDeleteThanks Steve! Looking forward to meeting YOU f2f one of these days!
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