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Saturday, June 4, 2011

Strokes of brilliance...

Okay, I'm up, I'm down.  Whatever.

I need to archive what I believe are the strokes of brilliance from our last meeting.

First, you must know that Liz, like me and Neal, have been thinking all along that we couldn't teaching any of the courses that we've been consider.

STROKE #1
At one point, Liz said, "We've been been thinking all along of what we can't teach.  Maybe we're approaching this all wrong. We should be thinking of what we CAN teach..."



STROKE #2
Kathryn,
"Are we still going to do the UNIV activity?  I see this as a way that Liz and be involved..."
This is perfect...Liz has advised over 200 projects in her time teaching at Cal Poly

STROKE #3
Pete,
"We don't have anyone from MATH who is willing and able to do it, but what if we get someone here who is doing a sabbatical, maybe they would be interested."
Awesome! In my department, we've done this two times with the results of deep, lasting improvements in how we teach.

STROKE #4
Ginger,
"What is to prevent us from offering one section of ENGL134 with, say 50 students, and one section of ENGL145 with 10 students?  The workload would be the same."
How I saw this as a stroke of brilliance is that Ginger was decoupling the constraints, pointing out that the rationale for the rule of 30 or fewer students per section is in part an issue of workload...to me, this represented "out of the box thinking," that we haven't really been pursuing.

STROKE #5
Pete,
"Maybe you [Linda] and I can teach physics together."  Now, Pete just broke through a big assumption barrier...this really could be "teaching together."

STROKE #6
Dan,
"Hey, we have ECON201 (macro/micro) and 222 (macro) up there.  What if we did ECON201 and 221 (micro)?" Where this was a stroke of brilliance is that Dan is more interested and comfortable with micro. By shifting to 221, this creates a lot more overlap with the courses, continues to serve any of the business students and would make it a much more enjoyable experience for him.

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