The Academic Life at Salisbury University
The following stories were written by faculty members
as part of their work in the Writing Across the
Curriculum seminar.
Missing the Bells of High
School
Stefani Pautz
Education Specialties Department
Once upon a midnight
dreary, while I pondered, weak and…whatever.
It's actually closer to 2
a.m., and I’m staring at a pile of not one, not two, not
three, but FOUR assignments I simultaneously collected
from my classes, roughly 200 pages of text. As snoring
echoes from the next room (my husband, the dog, or
both), I sigh, arm myself with my favorite green pen,
and begin to read again.
Competing for
Our Students' Attention
Jennifer Cox
Communication Arts Department
When we instructors were
students, we were all guilty of being off-task from time
to time during a class. Maybe you thought there wasn’t
any harm in jotting a note to a friend. Perhaps, in more
recent years, you stole a quick glance at Facebook
during a lull in the lecture.
The Challenges of Active
Reading
Itir Gunes
Philosophy Department
The
question for most students is, even when they get the
rare opportunity to read the material, do they find this
experience valuable and rewarding? How often do they
feel that they truly benefitted from the activity of
reading? Not too often. [Read the Full Story]
I Play Favorites
Karen Shaup
English Department
Don’t tell my students,
but I tend to play favorites – not with the individuals
attending my classes, but with the poems, plays, and
works of fiction I have carefully selected to populate
my syllabus. In the crowd of assigned reading, there are
always the texts I love, the texts I like, and,
inevitably, the one or two texts I dread spending time
with and teaching. [Read the Full Story]
Failure
Nancy Mitchell
English Department
The author of
FAILURE
volunteered to read her poem first, and I could tell
from her shy smile that she was proud of it, although
she read the following so softly I had to lean to hear
her clearly. The rest of the class nodded in admiration or
whispered awesome. They looked at me. I looked
down at the poem, where the underlined, capitalized and
bolded title screamed accusingly. [Read the Full Story]
University and Technical
Educations: Are They the Same?
Tylor Claggett
Economics and Finance
A remarkable, largely unnoticed, transformation has
taken place in higher education. I am referring to a
blurring of the lines of distinction between the
university experience and the technical school
experience. This transformation has important
consequences for students, parents, tax payers, those
that hire recent graduates and all of society.
[Read the Full Story]
Where in the World is the
Tripoli Shore?
Alexis Aguilar
Geography
Every semester I give students in my introductory
Physical Geography class a blank map of the world and
ask them to label some of the world’s major physical
features. One time, a student drew Iraq as a big
island in the middle of the Atlantic, and another drew
the U.S. with an ocean where Mexico was supposed to be.
[Read the Full Story]
You Knew the Job Was
Dangerous When You Took It
Darrell Newton
Communications
All the coffee shop chatter in the world that takes
place between starry-eyed grad students couldn’t prepare
any of us for the ultimate challenge – our own,
self-imposed, workload as faculty members.
[Read
the Full Story]
Successful Applicant Will
Have Experience With…
Patti Erickson
Biology
“Why do I have to study this stupid cell biology?
I’ll never use this stuff. I want to be a zookeeper!” I
hear it at least once a semester, students moaning about
the required coursework for a biology degree. They don’t
realize that the skills they’re learning might genuinely
prove useful in later life—no matter what field of
biology they enter. [Read
the Full Story]
In a Flattening World, Will
Interdisciplinary Research Thrive?
Gina Bloodworth
Geography
We can now connect via telecommunications
with colleagues in from Texas to Thailand, but can we
communicate across academic disciplines? What will the
next generation of students, citizens and scholars need
to adapt to an ever-more complex and interconnected
world? [Read
the Full Story]
I Love My Office, Even
Though It Smells Like Dead Mice
Karen Rayne
English
The hallway outside my office smells like dead mice.
About three weeks ago the Registrar’s office, one floor
up, was fumigated, and the mice went into the
crawlspaces and walls to decompose. I told my students
coming for writing conferences to follow the smell of
dead mice and they’d find me, in the basement, waiting
for them. [Read
the Full Story]
Wanted – Manager of the Wind
Shawn McEntee
Sociology
I have a hair trigger on my sociological imagination:
I was listening to Ira Flatow on NPR’s Science Friday
and heard that there is no 'leakage' associated with
genetically modified (GM) crops; incidents in which GM
species ‘volunteer’ in places they were not planted is
'a management problem . . . not an ecological problem'.
[Read the Full Story]
The One Shot
Stephen Ford
Blackwell Library
Imagine this: your task is to fit all of your
accumulated professional knowledge into a single 50
minute instruction session. That’s it; you will get no
more classroom time with your students. So then, what do
you teach and how do you teach it? Will it be relevant
to your students? Will they get it and, more
importantly, will they use it? [Read the Full
Story]
Is it Cultural
Difference or Individual Difference?
Yoojin Choi
Health and Sport Sciences It
was the very first day of class in US. The first mission
I had was to locate the right place to find my
professor. I entered a building and kept looking around
to find a room for a meeting with my professor. My
entire sensory system was sending all kinds of signals,
telling me, ‘Yoojin, this is not a place in which you
used to live.' [Read the Full Story]
I Don't Read Books
Robert Bleil
English Department
As a teenager, I worked on a
bookmobile; during my college years, I clerked and
shelved books at two campus libraries; after college, I
became an academic librarian and earned a Ph.D. in
English, but I haven’t read a book in years. [Read
the Full Article]
Do They Like Me Enough to Give Me Tenure?
Brent
Fedorko
Health and Sport Sciences Department
It may not be something you immediately
think about, but it’s eventually something every new
faculty member faces – it gives you flashbacks to
elementary school when you wondered “Do they like me?” [Read
the Full Article]
“Finding” Time to be Active in Your Busy Schedule
Lisa
Mealey
Health and Sport Sciences Department
How many times have you
said, “I wish there were more than 24 hours in a day”?
Our professional lives are so busy with lectures to
prep, classes to teach, research to conduct, office
hours to hold, committee meetings to attend and students
to advise – not to mention the demands of a busy
personal life. [Read
the Full Article]
Help For A Drowning
Colleague
Brandye
Nobiling
Health and Sports Science Department
It’s Monday. I wake up, make coffee, and begin my day of planning
as usual. But half-way through creating case studies on
bacterial infections of the skin, I find myself
interrupted by a drowning colleague seeking counsel on
how to teach a new class. Under most circumstances, I
would advise for a moment or two, and quickly return to
my task at-hand. But this situation is quite different.
This drowning colleague is my husband. [Read
the Full Article]
Philosophy: Entertainment for Everyone
Joerg
Tuske
Philosophy Department
The other day I realized
that this need for entertainment might have reached a
level that interferes with my role as an educator. A
student in one of my upper-level classes asked me why I
had not scheduled a movie on the syllabus. While I do
not think that showing a relevant movie (and
subsequently discussing it!) would be out of place even
in an upper-level philosophy class, I find the
expectation of a “movie experience” troubling.
[Read the Full
Article]
I Hated History, But
Now I Teach It
Karen
Silverstrim
History Department
I hated
history classes in high school. Truth be told, most
college students love or hate a subject because of their
high school experiences. I had mostly mediocre teachers
in high school. I know because I also had a few stellar
teachers, and they taught me the difference. The truly
great teachers were not the popular teachers or the easy
graders, they were the teachers who actually taught you
something and made you want to learn. They respected
your intellect no matter how great or small, and they
found a way to reach you. I try to keep this in mind as
I enter the college classroom because I now teach
history. [Read
the Full Article] |
