Student Guide Corner

Periodically, I list the entries on this blog that have gained the most readership over the years.    I am not always sure why these postings have become so popular but you might find a few of these thoughts to be especially interesting as you start a new school year. (1) � What Do We Add? � July 22, 2010 (2) � Introduction � Teaching (Financial Accounting) � January 7, 2010 (3) � What Is the Purpose of a Final Exam � May 12, 2010 (4) � What the Catcher Tells the Pitcher � August 21, 2011 (5) � A Good Suggestion � June 1, 2013 (6) � What Is the Best Book You Ever Read � June 23, 2012 (7) � The Future Is Now? � August 13, 2012 (8) � How You Test Is How They Will Learn � January 31, 2010 (9) � A Note to My Students � January 15, 2012 (10) � We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us � May 22, 2012 ** I was hunting through some old materials this morning and found the following paragraphs that I had written a number of years ago.    It is a list of what I th...

Before I get started today, I want to send out a big Thank You to all the readers of this blog.    Several days ago, we went over 90,000 total pageviews.    When I first started writing these essays, I would have bet a gazillion dollars that I�d never get 5,000 pageviews.    And, I would not have gotten to even that lower mark without folks like you passing along good words about this site.    Thanks � I would have probably stopped writing years ago except that the traffic remains strong and actually seems to grow over time.    You provide the energy.   I continue to be convinced that people really do like to think and talk about teaching because it is both extremely important to our lives and our future and a whole lot of fun. ** A new school year is starting.    For me, it will be my 43 rd year in the classroom.    I have written before that I believe every teacher should consider the �teaching perso...

I try to write all of these blog essays myself.   However, a good friend of mine, James Lang at Assumption College, has just published a new book ( Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty ) that I think is excellent and innovative and I wanted to recommend that you consider reading it.    (Here, in the name of full disclosure, I will admit that he includes a couple of pages on my approach to teaching but that is only a very small part of the book.) On his own blog, Jim posted the following description of the book.    I thought he did a great job of explaining what he had done.    So, I am simply including his words directly.    If you are looking for a thoughtful book on teaching and education, I think this is a great choice. ** By James Lang: Just around two years ago, the editor of my last book with Harvard University Press  told me that she had been to a conference about teaching in higher education and heard a lot of...

As some of you might know, besides being a college professor, I am a cofounder and president of CPAreviewforFREE.com.    In that role, I send out email lessons to about 20,000 past and future CPA candidates two or three times each month.    These lessons talk about how to pass the CPA Exam and, hopefully, encourage and assist those candidates in achieving their goal.    I�ve actually written these motivational email lessons now (off and on) for nearly 20 years.    The following blog entry is adapted from a recent one of those lessons.    Obviously, I�ve changed the goal from �pass the CPA Exam� to �become a better teacher� but I believe that this basic message applies to teachers just as much as it does to CPA Exam candidates.    Success is success whenever you face a genuine challenge. ** Two to four times each year, over the past 10-12 years, I have given presentations around the country on teaching.    I am always ...

  As I have mentioned several times in the last few months, this blog is receiving an innovation award at the American Accounting Association annual meeting that will be held next month in Anaheim.   As part of that program, on Wednesday, August 7, I will make a 90 minute presentation (2:00 until 3:30 p.m.).     Because this blog is about improving teaching, I assume the presentation should be about improving teaching.    There will be hundreds of research presentations in Anaheim; however, at least this one will be a teaching presentation. I realize that 99 percent of the people (maybe 100 percent) who read this blog will not be able to attend my session in Anaheim.    So, today, I want to talk with you about how I plan to start that program and why.    You can pretend you are in Anaheim in August (at a hotel next to Disneyland).    If I want to have any real impact during my 90 minutes, I need to get the attendees mental...

From Joe Hoyle:   On January 1, 2013, and again on June 1, 2013, I wrote entries on this blog about my experience at linking a Government Accounting course with a Victorian Literature class.   I found it to be an interesting experiment with some excellent outcomes.    If you want to read more about what we did, the following link will take you to an article in the online version of the Chronicle of Higher Education.     If you have followed this blog for long, you know that I am a strong proponent of experimentation in education.    This one did not require a committee or a mandate or a strategic plan.    We thought the idea might work and (with the support of my dean) we just tried it to see.   I believe college education would certainly improve with more such interesting experiments. http://chronicle.com/article/Victorian-Literature-for/139971/ ** Since I have already referred to Victorian Literature above, I will make a...

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...