Volume XXXIV, No. 29 | December 7, 2012 Grammar Without the Teacher Unlike baseball players, such as Hunter Pence, whose special day was celebrated by Philadelphia even after he was traded to San Francisco, they do not make bobblehead dolls out of professors. And yet, I have often felt like a bobblehead in [...]

Volume XXXIV, No. 28 | November 30, 2012 Global Horizons: The Promise of a Global Education In July 2012, Montgomery College, a three-campus institution in Maryland, was awarded the highest grant amount of six community colleges nationally, to carry out the mission of the National Endowment for the Humanities “Bridging Cultures” grant initiative [...]

Volume XXXIV, No. 27 | November 16, 2012 Filling Empty Chairs Student absenteeism seems to be the main topic of corridor conversation these days among colleagues at our college. Many share the feeling that it is getting worse every semester. For me, who still gets a good number of students even when several [...]

Volume XXXIV, No. 26 | November 9, 2012 Year Up: A Pioneering Program As part of my doctoral studies at The University of Texas at Austin, I recently read A Year Up: How a Pioneering Program Teaches Young Adults Real Skills for Real Jobs with Real Success. This text illustrates the workforce problem [...]

Volume XXXIV, No. 25 | November 2, 2012 ACADEMIC INTEGRITY: A LETTER TO MY STUDENTS For the past few years, I have been giving my students a letter on the subject of academic integrity. At its heart is the idea that the principles of academic integrity apply as much to me as teacher [...]

Volume XXXIV, No. 24 | October 26, 2012 Students, Economic "Fiaster" and.... The current economy has spawned a “fiaster” (fiasco and disaster) in many students' lives. Some students barely subsist. Others struggle to make ends meet. Though newsworthy, this is not news. Rather, it appears to be a long-term and punishing reality. One [...]

Volume XXXIV, No. 23 | October 19, 2012 I Hate to Read Research confirms that a central component of breaking through the remedial wall is to get students to read. Without the ability to read, students have no pathway to progress and success. Language is at the core of academic study, and it [...]

Volume XXXIV, No. 22 | October 12, 2012 The Peer Review Course While in the process of flipping my English composition classroom from a writing class to a lecture class, I hit upon an activity that altered the way the class would run for the rest of the semester. I had set up [...]

Volume XXXIV, No. 21 | October 5, 2012 Improving Teaching Effectiveness Through Self-Observation Teachers are accustomed to being observed by their students, by their supervisors, and occasionally by their peers. However, feedback from these observations is limited. Student reactions usually are not documented until the term has nearly ended. Supervisory observation, for the [...]

Volume XXXIV, No. 20 | September 29, 2012 Going Officeless Vision During a period of increasing community demand for service and declining external support, community colleges around the country are “doing more with less.” In times like these, it becomes tremendously important to be entrepreneurial, rather than retreat to compromised services at the [...]