Last week I tried out another student-centered activity in my Roots class. All semester I have been attempting to transform many of my mini-lectures into activities where the students present the information to each other instead of me simply giving it to them. We have recently begun a unit on Greek and Roman government and political vocabulary and so I devised an activity called “propaganda pitches” in order to combine the
On Friday, I presented some of my current research at the CUNY GC’s English Student Association annual conference. I’m developing a writing process activity called textless writing, which is writing about a text without initially referring to that text. I see it as a way to have people tune more in with memory and with their own affective (and maybe somatic) responses by setting aside the text’s authority and trying to establish
My students and I are embarking on an exciting adventure. We are making room in our already crowded semester for a project that I thought would only be a thirty minute lesson. A large part of the reason that it’s become more than that is their own input and interest. I generally teach from a place of collaboration between/among the folks in my classroom, but this project is opening that dynamic
Have you ever tried to explain the concept of musical timbre? How about describing the exact differences between an “important” versus a “secondary” melody? In dry, textbook terms, sure, my Intro to Music class can do this. But once our attention shifts from abstract concepts to real musical examples, the definitions provided in the textbook no longer seem so helpful. This is one of the difficulties I’ve struggled with in
