Calvin College professors call for discussion about memo warning against homosexual advocacy |
by Dave Murray | The Grand Rapids Press
Friday August 28, 2009, 7:44 AM |
College employees received a memo last week saying the Board of Trustees has revisited issues surrounding the college’s position on homosexuality, concluding it is “unacceptable” for faculty and staff to teach, write or advocate on behalf of the issue. |
The college in 2008 affirmed its commitment to the Christian Reformed Church’s position on homosexuality: that the practice is sinful, but a person’s orientation is not. The board formed the Homosexuality and Community Life Working Group to discuss the implications of the college and church position and how it relates to the day-to-day life in the college. |
| Karin Maag, vice chairwoman of the Faculty Senate, said there are concerns about both the content of the letter and the process by which the policy was determined.Read more at www.mlive.com |
I think this is actually a pretty good summary of some important traits for teachers to cultivate. It’s based on observations of a small group of award-winning primary teachers, but it has broad applicability, I think. Sure, it’s a little vague, and it’s kind of predictable, but sometimes bullet-pointed lists can be handy things anyhow. The source has more quotations and more detail. The seven secrets behind great teaching |
2. They’re not afraid to make difficult decisions |
4. They’re good communicators |
5. They’re non-conformists |
Teachers may get frustrated with pupils who insist on asserting their individuality at every opportunity, but it turns out that they are just as averse to conforming: 87 per cent have a low or extremely low preference for conformity as a personality trait. |
6. They thrive in the company of others |
In Thrilling Find, Scholar Unearths Long-Lost Letters of Benjamin Franklin |
He asked to see a volume of papers that had belonged to Thomas Birch, secretary of the Royal Society from 1752 to 1765. The volume was described simply as “Copies of Letters Relating to the March of General Braddock,” referring to the ill-starred venture of a British general dispatched in 1755 to capture Fort Duquesne, in present-day Pittsburgh, from the French. |
“The first thing in it was a letter from Benjamin Franklin to the secretary of the governor of Maryland,” Mr. Houston said this week. “I looked at the first sentence and said, ‘This doesn’t sound familiar.’ Then I got kind of nervous and bouncy in my chair.” |
He then did what any researcher worth his library card would do: He went outside and called his wife back home in California. Read more at chronicle.com |
A new psychology experiment uses techniques from popular magic to demonstrate that people misunderstand and misrepresent the reasons behind their own choices. Participants were asked to choose which of two alternatives they preferred, and subsequently to justify their choice. However, experimenters surreptitiously swapped the alternatives immediately after the participant had announced a choice, and most never noticed, in most cases even giving “reasons” for why they had “chosen” the option they were presented with (even though they had, in fact, picked the other option).
Choice blindness: You don’t know what you want
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Rather than playing tricks with alternatives presented to participants, we surreptitiously altered the outcomes of their choices, and recorded how they react. For example, in an early study we showed our volunteers pairs of pictures of faces and asked them to choose the most attractive. In some trials, immediately after they made their choice, we asked people to explain the reasons behind their choices.
Unknown to them, we sometimes used a double-card magic trick to covertly exchange one face for the other so they ended up with the face they did not choose. Common sense dictates that all of us would notice such a big change in the outcome of a choice. But the result showed that in 75 per cent of the trials our participants were blind to the mismatch, even offering “reasons” for their “choice”. |
| In everyday decision-making we do see ourselves as connoisseurs of our selves, but like the wine buff or art critic, we often overstate what we know.Read more at www.newscientist.com |
- rené
girard
- a presentation from Philippe Cottet (available in English and
French
|
Faculty Success Story: Christopher Long |
 Christopher Long in the College of the Liberal Arts teaches “Tragedy, Comedy, Politics” and “20th Century Philosophy” courses. To help students develop their critical thinking and writing skills, he asks each student to create a blog on which they post assignments. The blogs allow students to write for a broader audience than their instructor alone and encourage them to develop a unique voice. Long’s ability to provide regular, dynamic feedback helps students grow as writers and thinkers.
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Long said, “I intentionally chose a decentralized model, where each student would have his or her own blog, because I wanted them to have a sense of owning their work. My main goal for using blogs is to get students actively involved in their own education.” The student blogs, as well as blogs Long set up for each course, were created using the Blogs at Penn State. |
| A Newsletter of the Center for Teaching Effectiveness
January 1995 |
“CREATING PROBLEMS” FOR PBL |
| Invariably students do not understand an article when they first read
it. Initially they must define learning issues — words, concepts,
procedures, etc., that they will need to learn about before they can
understand the article. Defining one’s ignorance is a most important first
step in problem-based learning. During the first day of group discussion,
students share their learning issues and attempt to resolve them. Those that
remain at the end of class become group learning issues that are ranked in
order of their perceived importance and assigned to group members to look up
before the next class. After several iterations of this process, students
demonstrate their understanding by completing a specific assignment such as:
Write a 200-word abstract of the article. |
|
April 11, 2008
/ Volume
CXXXV, Number
7
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| University of Chicago Press, $35, 416 pp. |
When I was a student at Williams College in the 1990s, Professor Mark C. Taylor was the big man on campus, the intellectual figure to reckon with. If a book had been written with the title God and Man at Williams, the man would have been Taylor, according to whom God was dead. Taylor loomed especially large for students like me who came to Williams with faith in God as well as aspirations, or pretensions, to be intellectually sophisticated. For faith in God, at least according to Taylor and his protégées, was intellectually disreputable. Haven’t you read Nietzsche, and Freud, and the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and above all the French “deconstructionist” Jacques Derrida? See more at www.commonwealmagazine.org |
Religion a figment of human imagination |
Humans alone practice religion because they’re the only creatures to have evolved imagination. |
That’s the argument of anthropologist Maurice Bloch of the London School of Economics. Bloch challenges the popular notion that religion evolved and spread because it promoted social bonding, as has been argued by some anthropologists. |
Instead, he argues that first, we had to evolve the necessary brain architecture to imagine things and beings that don’t physically exist, and the possibility that people somehow live on after they’ve died. |
Once we’d done that, we had access to a form of social interaction unavailable to any other creatures on the planet. Uniquely, humans could use what Bloch calls the “transcendental social” to unify with groups, such as nations and clans, or even with imaginary groups such as the dead. The transcendental social also allows humans to follow the idealised codes of conduct associated with religion. See more at www.newscientist.com |
Babies, Bottles, and Bisphenol A: The Story of a Scientist-Mother |
Aimee Quitmeyer and Rebecca Roberts* |
| My 11-month-old daughter loves her baby bottles and sippy cups (first-person narrative is from the viewpoint of Rebecca Roberts). But as I sit and watch her drink from them, I cringe, because I happen to be a scientist who studies a chemical found in those bottles and cups. I also know that some scientific research suggests that exposure to that compound, called bisphenol A (BPA), is detrimental to good health”something I can’t help but think about as I watch my daughter use her sippy cup as a teething ring. |
| I make daily decisions about what my baby does and does not do, in order to limit her exposure to danger. In both of my roles, I depend on information: nonbiased, factual, evidence-based information. The mother in me relies on my training as a scientist to objectively look at scientific data in order to determine personal choices for my daughter.See more at www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov |
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