College Life
Hello everyone: Discussion board postings can be worth up to 20% of your final grade or more, so how do you ace this part of the grade? Let me tell you how! First, read the instructions carefully. Then take a moment to check what the instructor may have posted as an announcement to clarify his or her instructions on the assignment. Take those comments seriously....
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College Life
Hello everyone: My topic for today is how to use your holidays to get ahead on your schoolwork. Let’s say that you have Thanksgiving off. Oh, my, you do! What do you do with those four days of not being in school? I suggest you work ahead. Here’s how you do it: Take your syllabi for each class and figure out what is due in...
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College Life
Hello everyone: Have you ever heard of a Dead Face Diva? Well, I have met a couple. They sit in class, obviously bored to tears, not participating ….ever…, and always with the same responses whenever I ask a question: “What he (or she) said” or “I don’t know….” (Note that a whine accompanies the second response.) What do you think a professor thinks about that?...
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College Life
Hello everyone: Watching school buses pick up their children this morning, I began wondering what my students in college are planning for their first day of fall semester tomorrow. Have they visited our class webpage and read my first announcements, including the one that tells them to bring a copy of the syllabus to class with them, or do they figure that I printed it...
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College Life
Hello everyone: I received an email from a student today. Her note made it very clear that she had not read the announcements or the syllabus before posting her first assignment. While I am the first to agree that a syllabus will probably never make the Best Seller list with Amazon, there is important information in it that could dramatically affect your grade. First, she...
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College Life
Hello everyone: As an instructor, I offer undergraduates the opportunity to earn extra credit throughout the semester. However, that opportunity is dried up two weeks before the end of the term. Why? Because I am a grading machine at that point in time and I don’t have the time or desire to take a student who has goofed off all semester and add to my...
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College Life
Hello everyone: I recently had a student who had inflammatory excuseitis. She gave excuses, and I became inflamed towards her. This lady had every excuse in the book to not come to class. The key here is to remember we are talking about an eight week course. Week one to week one and a half: She had the flu (Hey, it’s an online course. It’s...
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College Life
Hello everyone: A former student of mine needed to pass her math course in order to graduate from college. She had a job all lined up, the family was preparing to move across the country so that she could start the job, but ….she was apparently failing her math class….or so it seemed. No degree would equal no job…… She wrote a very impassioned letter...
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College Life
Hello everyone: Have you ever worked on an assignment, only to discover at the last minute that you did the wrong assignment? Maybe you wrote a wonderful treatise on the role of tiddly winks in today’s culture. Perhaps you waxed eloquently on the job of belly button lint in the overall scheme of life. Perchance you discussed Shakespeare’s wife’s personality as it related to his...
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College Life / Home Life
Hello everyone: Today’s blog is on avoiding gaining the weight that you might otherwise pick up in college. They traditionally call it the “freshman fifteen” but I didn’t find it until graduate school. You know how it goes- you are busy working and studying; shopping and preparing nutritionally-sound food seems out of reach for your hectic schedule. Or perhaps you are busy studying and trying...
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