Boldly professing the obvious since 2009
Two posts ago, I talked about one big change I made to my Introduction to the New Testament class last summer, choosing to take the students through the Synoptic Gospels before teaching the Synoptic Problem itself. That change seemed immensely helpful, as it took an important (but typically uninteresting to the students) subject and forced [...] Read more »
I had the opportunity to teach a five-week course of “Introduction to New Testament Literature” at UNC-Chapel Hill this summer, and I took the opportunity to reexamine and revamp a few aspects of how I’ve taught that course (or have seen others teach it) in the past. In addition to a lot of fine-tuning and [...] Read more »
In “Parents Caught Spanking Children on Audiotape Real Time,” what should have been a straightforward report on the somewhat surprising (to the researchers) results of placing audio recorders in families’ homes to study “Real Life Mother-Child Interaction in the Home” was somehow transformed into a piece against corporal punishment chock full of misinformation. Susan Donaldson [...] Read more »
The NYTimes has published a piece focusing on 100 New York schools experimenting with different approaches towards achieving the “Common Core” standards that attempt to shore up problems with the “No Child Left Behind” standards. In general, I agree with clearer standardization of minimum standards (though it must be clear that these are minimums and [...] Read more »
LZ Granderson has put forward quite a provocative proposal: before anyone can register to vote, they should be required to take and pass a test modeled off of the citizenship test required of immigrants. He roots this in the (true) observation that the founding fathers weren’t exactly “a bunch of average Joes with gripes about [...] Read more »