Skip to main content

How does government touch your life?

If you were asked to list all the ways that government (any level) touches your life, how hard would it be for you to come up with at least a few examples? Not hard, right? You probably drove on public roads today, maybe while listening to NPR on the radio; you probably ate something that was approved at some level by the FDA or ate in a restaurant inspected by a county health inspector; maybe you dropped your kids off at a public school or bought something that required paying sales tax or pulled over to get out of the way of a speeding police car. Not hard, right? Certainly, a bunch of students sitting in a classroom at a state university should be able to come up with a long (or even short!) list of things the government does, right?

I'm sure you can guess where I'm going with this... That's right: apparently, the answer is no, 300 students sitting in a state-subsidized classroom have no idea what the government does or how it might affect their lives. After mentioning taxes (which we talked about last week) and minimum wage (which we talked about earlier in the semester), they really seemed at a loss. I realize that they may not know about things like the FDA or other regulatory agencies, and maybe they just didn't understand the question (my students seem to think that anytime I ask them something easy, I must be trying to trick them), but I had to lead them into even the obvious answers like education! I honestly didn't know whether to laugh or cry...

Comments

Post a Comment

Comments that contribute to the discussion are always welcome! Please note that spammy comments whose only purpose seems to be to direct traffic to a commercial site will be deleted.

Popular posts from this blog

THE podcast on Implicit Bias

I keep telling myself I need to get back to blogging but, well, it's been a long pandemic... But I guess this is as good an excuse as any to post something: I am Bonni Stachowiak's guest on the latest episode of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, talking about implicit bias and how it can impact our teaching.  Doing the interview with Bonni (which was actually recorded a couple months ago) was a lot of fun. Listening to it now, I also realize how far I have come from the instructor I was when I started this blog over a decade ago. I've been away from the blog so long that I should probably spell this out: my current title is Associate Vice President for Faculty and Staff Diversity and I have responsibility for all professional learning and development related to diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as inclusive faculty and staff recruitment, and unit-level diversity planning. But I often say that in a lot of ways, I have no business being in this position - I've ne...
Post a Comment
Read more

When is an exam "too hard"?

By now, you may have heard about the biology professor at Louisiana State (Baton Rouge) who was removed from teaching an intro course where "more than 90 percent of the students... were failing or had dropped the class." The majority of the comments on the Inside Higher Ed story about it are supportive of the professor, particularly given that it seems like the administration did not even talk to her about the situation before acting. I tend to fall in the "there's got to be more to the story so I'll reserve judgment" camp but the story definitely struck a nerve with me, partly because I recently spent 30 minutes "debating" with a student about whether the last midterm was "too hard" and the whole conversation was super-frustrating. To give some background: I give three midterms and a cumulative final, plus have clicker points and Aplia assignments that make up about 20% of the final grade. I do not curve individual exams but will cu...
3 comments
Read more

This is about getting through, not re-inventing your course

As someone who has worked hard to build a lot of interactivity into my courses, I have never been interested in teaching fully online courses, in part because I have felt that the level of engaged interaction could never match that of a face-to-face class (not that there aren't some exceptional online courses out there; I just have a strong preference for the in-person connection). But the current situation is not really about building online courses that are 'just as good' as our face-to-face courses; it is about getting through this particular moment without compromising our students' learning too much. So if you are used to a lot of interaction in your F2F class, here are some options for adapting that interaction for a virtual environment: [NOTE: SDSU is a Zoom/mostly Blackboard campus so that's how I've written this but I am pretty sure that other systems have similar functionality] If you use clickers in class to break up what is otherwise mostly lect...
2 comments
Read more