What I'm Reading This Week #14

There were a couple of blog posts this week that really resonated with me. The first one stems from the recent news stories about the firing of Chemistry professor Maitland Jones, Jr. The post is written by a former student of Dr. Jones and provides some great advice for those of us who teach courses that have traditionally been viewed as "weed out" courses. 

• Leslie Berntsen. How Not to Handle Student Failure. Chronicle of Higher Education. October 13, 2022.

The second one comes from Oliver Burkeman, whose blog The Imperfectionist is one that I find really helpful to read. It reminds me that while I find it useful to let my todo list run my life, it doesn't need to rule my life. (FYI, I use Todoist to manage everything work-related, plus many things in my non-work life.) If you're feeling overwhelmed by everything you need to do, take a look at this post.

• Oliver Burkeman. How To Get Out Of a Rut. The Imperfectionist. October 6, 2022. 

Finally, a slightly older post that gave me a much needed reminder about the value of using Think-Pair-Share in class. It's a technique that I really like but often forget about in the moment. As a result of reading this post, I added Think-Pair-Share as a subtask to my repeating Prepare MATH 340 task in Todoist so that I'll be reminded to look for opportunities to use this technique in my course each week.

• Zachary Nowak. A Paean to Think-Pair-Share. Inside Higher Ed. July 14, 2021.

While  I'm talking about Todoist and todo lists, I should mention that I rediscovered the Think-Pair-Share article last week when I was cleaning out the Inbox in my Todoist app. For a while, I was using this inbox as a dumping ground for articles that sounded interesting but that I didn't have time to read right then. I've since shifted to categorizing the articles as soon as I send them to Todoist. For example, I have a Blog todo list where I send articles that might be useful for my What I'm Reading This Week posts. Anyway, as I said, Todoist runs my life!