Student Guide Corner

�Too often, we settle for dreams that merely scratch the surface of our abilities and then wonder why we are dissatisfied with the results.� From the book:    Don�t Just Dream about Success:    Stack the Odds in Your Favor By:    Joe Hoyle (to be published in January 2014)   Returning from Thanksgiving break, virtually all college teachers start looking forward to creating and then grading final exams.    It is a necessary part of the job but it is also an event that can impact the education of each student rather significantly.    Below is a rewritten version of a blog entry that I posted 3 � years ago.    I thought it made a good point back then.    I believe the same thing today. ** Why do you give a final exam to your students? What do you hope to accomplish?   I have talked with many professors over the years and their strategies for final examinations vary greatly from one to the next.   Here ar...

As I have mentioned before, on August 7, 2013, I will be giving a 75 minute presentation about this blog at the Annual Convention of the American Accounting Association in Anaheim, California.   If you are going to be at the convention, I hope you�ll stop by and chat.    I�d love to meet each and every one of the people who read these essays.   I�ll be there for several days so let�s get together over coffee and talk about teaching.    In preparing for this talk, I have gone back and looked at some of the 170 posts that I have written over the years.    To me, it is interesting how many of these posts push teachers (including me) to think about the last day of class and what the teachers want their students to have accomplished.    Until you visualize what you want your students to do by the end of the semester, it is hard to know how to guide them.    Over and over, you see that theme in my thoughts on teaching.    Y...

Okay, I post a blog entry like this about every six months but I think it is important enough to be redundant. If you ask your students to leap tall buildings in a single bound and they manage to do it, I think you owe it to them to acknowledge what they have accomplished. Simply putting an anonymous A on a grade report doesn't seem to properly recognize those students who have done truly outstanding work. Every semester, when I finish my grading and I sit down and write this note, I am amazed by how good it makes me feel. I had several truly outstanding students this semester and I wanted them to know that I did notice. I did recognize that they worked incredibly hard and learned an amazed amount. I noticed and I wanted them to know that I noticed. Thursday Dear Mr./Ms. XX, I just wanted to let you know that I have finished grading the final examination and computing course averages. Only six students in my two Accounting 201 classes earned the overall grade of A for ...