Oh the woes of team teaching. I was one of the idealistic young grad students who believed that team teaching could work wonders. Of course this was all theoretical because I had never actually taught this way. Now, six weeks into the semester I would like to give my pre-semester self a smack down. Who in the world thought that four people of varying interests, specializations and disciplines would be able to team teach a humanities class that every student in the University is forced to take. I guess the theory of the damn thing was much more excited then the reality. To wit:
1. None of us, and I will excuse myself here because I am the newbie, can succinctly state, or for that matter do we discuss, what the goals of this class are nor how we hope to achieve them.
2. It is now frankly obvious that not every discipline is concerned in the least bit with pedagogy. I would like to sit my brilliant but clueless collogues down for a two hour discussion and workshop on the pedagogical impetus of small groups, class discussion and all things not lecture based. There are, in fact, other ways in which information can be taught.
3. If you demand that students engage with the material, teach them the language and the tools with which they can do this. Lecture and reading do not guarantee that students “get” the material. We too often assume our students minds have been taken over with dry rot from too much TV and empathetic social integration. But I think that students are a lot smarter then we give them credit for, and are in fact quite capable of critical thought if one would give them the tools to do this.
4. When team teaching one instructor should not ambush another to try to play out their own political agendas. Not that I do not welcome and love intellectual discussion, but over a pint like civilized people, for the love of god we are not philistines!
So team teaching has pretty much been a bust. I had high hopes, but the reality, like so much else in the real world, is a far cry from theory. I think that team teaching and that this class could work, if only we could get through the administrator crap, get some teachers together who want to teach, teach them to teach and them gives them goals to teach to.

This is my new blog, a place to give me an outlet for all things academic be they as teacher or scholar. I have chosen to write this anoymously mostly because I do not want my mother sending me links to yet another professor who has been fired because they blog. Some may say that this is a cop-out, and they may be right, but frankly they don't have my mother so they can not definitively make that decision. I recently moved and found that the informal built in support system of my grad school days has disappear. Gone are the nights of one, or more often multiple, cocktails and rants about students, departments and professors. And that absence has left in its place repression that causes too many headaches and not enough laughs. So in lieu of my pub and peeps I have decided to expend this need to express outside into the cyber world, and hopefully find a virtual place where I can release some of this pent up anger and frustration. I am ok with suppling my own cocktails.

I will rant about the university, the ineffective cousel of the state and sometimes students. I will not describe them, I will avoid descriptions of the University that I currently work at as well as the one in which I hope to graduate as soon as the diss is done. I will not relate private student information or cut and paste students emails for my, or anyone else's amusement, specifically if they contain personal and private information. I will however break this rule if the email or discussion is not personal and shows a sense of unwarrented entitlement, dangerous immuturity and lack of common sense. This would not be to rip on this student, but to showcase the woeful lack of these things in the current climate of higher education.

I think that is enough of a disclaimer. I hope that you enjoy and please comment all you like, but no stupid spam because I hate that!