Student Guide Corner

This is my 125th blog entry in the last 25 months. When I started this site, I promised myself that I�d try to do at least 15 entries. My guess is that I would have quit long ago were it not for the many kind emails that I have received. Thanks � I love hearing from people who tell me about their own love of teaching and the challenges they face each day. Today�s entry is broken into several individual parts. PART ONE � I travel around the country 3-5 times per year to give teaching programs and presentations. Invariably, at each stop, some teacher will ask in complete exasperation �why should I even try to do better? The students do not appreciate what I do. They certainly don�t appreciate when I try to make them work and think.� It is very tough to spend the time necessary to move toward excellence if you believe that no one appreciates you. It is hard to put out so much energy if no one cares. I often think deans and department chairs ought to be required to pat as ...

I gave my first test in Intermediate Accounting II last week. As probably most of you know, this is a really difficult course. Every topic, every day, is complex. For this first test, I gave nine problems. I referred to these problems as puzzles because they were quite verbal. I find that the more numbers a problem has, the more likely it is to be a purely mechanical exercise. The students had 75 minutes to see how many of these accounting �puzzles� they could solve. It was a challenging test but, heck, it is a challenging course. And, maybe more importantly, it is hard to convince students that they can leap tall buildings in a single bound if you don�t make every test both challenging and fair. Here�s the good news: 19 percent of the students made an A. For my classes, that�s a pretty good rate. I had 19 percent of the students who did what I judged to be �excellent� work. I was pleased with that. Here�s the bad news: 48 percent of the students made a C and 12...

To me, the following is a marvelous statement about what a college education really should be. But my favorite part is the last sentence. I could yack for days about virtually every word in the entire paragraph but I am not sure I could really add one iota to what is said. �The justification for a university is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning. The university imparts information, but it imparts it imaginatively. At least, this is the function which it should perform for society. A university which fails in this respect has no reason for existence. This atmosphere of excitement, arising from imaginative consideration, transforms knowledge. A fact is no longer a bare fact: it is invested with all its possibilities. It is no longer a burden on the memory: it is energising as the poet of our dreams, and as the architect of our purposes. Imagination is not to be divorced...