All Posts Tagged With: "professors"

A “take” is the opposite of a mistake. Did you get that OED people?

In my last post, I urged new undergraduates to avoid some of the mistakes I made in my own undergraduate career. This post relates some of the strategies that served me well — takes, if you will –and should serve you well, too.

1. Study what you love. It sounds a bit trite, I know, but I really was one of those people who followed a dream. I had trouble settling on a major until I happened upon the English and Drama program at the University of Western Ontario where I was studying. By happy circumstance, I got to know some of the senior drama students and that year’s director-in-residence and knew I wanted to be one of them. Many people, no doubt, worried about what was going to become of me with such an artsy major, and my grandfather was recruited to gently urge me on the path towards high school teaching, but I knew that I was learning a lot and when the time came I would somehow end up in a career that let me do what I loved. And here I am. And no, being a professor is not like being a high school teacher, thankfully.

2. Find new, smart friends. In a comment on my previous post, a reader urged me to not to neglect the social aspect of university life, and I certainly agree that social interactions are a key part of the experience. But by “social interactions” I do not mean getting drunk and falling down a flight of stairs every weekend. A university undergraduate is one of the few people for whom it is not unforgivably obnoxious to question everyone about everything. Find people who want to talk about big ideas. Talk about religion, talk about politics. Talk about all the things that you won’t feel comfortable talking about when you are at an office cocktail party ten years later. Many of my ideas about ethics, government, law, and art took shape during raucous, impromptu debates with classmates, roommates, friends — even strangers. For those of you attending your small, local universities, try to find some friends that you weren’t friends with in high school — you’ll be amazed at what other people think.

3. Never underestimate the value of thirty minutes. My roommate and I had a regular TV schedule that had us watching one show from 7:00 to 8:00 and something else at 8:30 (kids, “TV” was a kind of internet that you couldn’t control). In the interval, I would go upstairs and do homework for half an hour. My roommate marveled at this, partly in admiration at my discipline, and partly in incredulity that I thought I could get anything worthwhile done in half an hour. In fact, you can get a lot done in half an hour. You can read a chapter of a textbook, proofread the draft of a short paper, organize your schedule for the coming week. And, in practice, an undergraduate often has a half an hour here and there between classes, before the bus comes, and so on. But I think a lot of people assume that if you only have half an hour, there’s no point in getting to work. Wrong. Find something you can do, and do it. An extra half an hour a day is an extra 84 hours in an academic year, not counting exam periods. That’s more time than all the classes in a full-year course.

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Passion and commitment define the winners of the 3M Teaching Awards.

Within Canadian academia, there is an exclusive club that grows by no more than 10 members annually. While a debate continues among university professors and administrators as to what is the optimum balance between conducting research and teaching students, the 3M Teaching Fellowships have unabashedly recognized the importance, and celebrated the achievement, of great university teaching. Created in 1986 through a partnership between the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education and 3M Canada, the award recognizes faculty members at universities across the country for their exceptional contribution to teaching and learning. “The 3M Fellowships were not conceived to pit research against teaching,” says program coordinator Arshad Ahmad, a Concordia University business professor and a 3M fellow himself. “Instead, the idea was to advocate ways in which student learning could be promoted.”

Since 2006, Maclean’s has proudly been the program’s media sponsor. This year, as the program marks its 25th anniversary, 10 more professors join the 3M Fellows club. We profile them here.

Spend an hour with Olenka Bilash and you won’t be surprised to hear that one Cree community has nicknamed her “Opastosew,” or whirlwind. The child of a working-class Manitoba family of Ukrainian immigrants, Bilash grew up with a front-row seat for processes of language acquisition, change, and loss.

Today, as coordinator of second languages and international education in the U of A’s department of secondary education, she is a globally recognized mentor whose B-SLIM model (Bilash’s Success-Guided Language Instructional Model) for second-language instruction is used from Japan to Cameroon. It’s no coincidence that one Facebook group created by her ex-students is cheekily called “B-SLIM for World Domination.”

Ask her about her teaching mission, and she will dart amongst anecdotes, maxims, and theories at dizzying speed, frequently pausing, if you can call it that, to break down the etymology of items of technical jargon or even of familiar words like “understand.” She’s comfortable with pedagogical theoreticians from L.S. Vygotsky to Howard Gardner; one of her strong intellectual influences is Paulo Freire, the Brazilian anti-colonialist who criticized the teacher-student distinction as authoritarian and urged teachers to view education as the “practice of freedom.” But she remains anchored to a timeless, humanistic faith in the student. “The truth of the matter is, people want to think,” she says. “As teachers, we have to ask how we can create the opportunity to make that happen.”

Bilash has taught educational psychology and theory to aspiring second-language instructors in a myriad of contexts. Over the years, she has trained everybody from English teachers working with the rising middle class in Asia to Albertans outside of the university system helping the children and grand-children of immigrants reclaim their “own” ancestral languages. She has played a particularly celebrated role in the fight to preserve Canada’s threatened Aboriginal tongues. “I’ve always been interested in languages and been privileged to travel and study abroad,” she says. “But then you come home and say, well, hold on: for these languages, this is ‘abroad.’ ”

—Colby Cosh

Clare Hasenkampf stands at the front of the classroom, arms aloft, holding a pair of purple and burgundy homemade sock puppets resembling elongated sausage links. Meant to represent chromosomes, Hasenkampf ties and unties the various links, joining them together to form new patterns, as the chromosomes become hybrids of each other. This, explains the biology professor, is meiosis. Speaking in an excited voice that reveals her fascination with the subject, she says: “When meiosis occurs in our bodies, brand-new, never-before-seen-on-the-planet DNA molecules are created. It’s really amazing.” Students can’t help but be mesmerized by her boundless energy.

As an undergrad at Loyola University in her hometown of New Orleans, however, Hasenkampf didn’t immediately click with biology. There was too much memorization and no application. It wasn’t until third year, when she connected with genetics professor Ken Shull and got to work on a project in his lab, that she found her “passion for biology,” which led to her mission “to get students jazzed earlier.”

In her Introductory Biology class, Hasenkampf does exactly that, getting students involved in the research process early, testing hypotheses, and analyzing data. Meanwhile, she has given her third-year genetics students more control over their lab work. In the past, lab technicians did much of the prep work and part of the experiments. Now students have hands-on access, getting four different stocks of drosophila flies and determining the inheritance patterns of the genes they are tracking. Observes Hasenkampf: “You’d be surprised how much more this gives them ownership of the experiment.”

Hasenkampf has also responded to the many undergrads who feel left out of the research process. She came up with the idea of a Centre for Science Engagement through which students can engage in service learning. Students apply classroom knowledge to real-life, community-based initiatives by teaching high school students, tutoring first year biology students, and more. “If you can get students to switch over, to think of themselves as a young professional in their area, there’s a night-and-day difference,” says Hasenkampf. “Then the battle is won.”

—Robert Near

It would be an understatement to suggest that Elizabeth Wells is simply another well liked professor. For example, while kicking off a concert to showcase performances by students enrolled in her popular course on the Beatles last April, she began her introduction by announcing: “I’m Dr. Elizabeth Wells.” Before she could get another word out, the room shouted back: “Best professor ever!”

Such praise for Wells, a Toronto native whose mother has been a church soloist for as long as she can remember, stems from one simple philosophy: “that learning occurs between people, not between people and course material.”

To promote the concept, Wells relentlessly engages students inside the classroom and outside by infusing personal stories and anecdotes from her life and career, including a stint in public broadcasting and another as a production stage manager for the Eastman Opera Theatre in Rochester, N.Y. She strives to interact with students one-on-one so that “they really get what I’m saying.” And they do. “Every day, every topic, Elizabeth brings insight, urgency and life into unlikely places within the study of music,” says former student Andrea Warren.

Three years ago, Wells took a unique approach to resolve an ongoing problem. While teaching a first-year foundation course for music majors, precious class time was being spent answering students’ questions about the syllabus and what was expected ofthem on certain assignments. So Wells set up a camera with a colleague and started shooting short videos. Lasting no more than five minutes, she explained each assignment while standing in relevant locations, such as outside the Sackville Tribune Post for a newsrelated project. She didn’t think anybody would really watch them—she was wrong. “People in other classes started watching them, then they wanted me to do more.” Since her acting debut she has added additional videos, including one on plagiarism and another on professionalism. All of which leaves more time in class to study a topic that is music to her ears.

—Cameron Ainsworth-Vincze

When Jean Nicolas first joined the faculty of mechanical engineering at the Université de Sherbrooke in 1978, he hadn’t received any formal training in how to teach a university-level class. It doesn’t appear to have hampered him: Nicolas is recognized as one of the best educators in Canada. But he believes it’s a mistake to underestimate the importance of strong teaching and other practical skills, even in research-driven graduate studies. Through an innovative program at Sherbrooke, he’s working to correct that.

Today, many doctoral students won’t stay in academia, he says; they’ll join the wider workforce. “We need to create a doctorate that’s relevant to that,” says Nicolas, who also holds a position at Montreal’s École Polytechnique. After a stint as vice-rector of research at Sherbrooke, when he observed a variety of disciplines, Nicolas ushered ina series of workshops on topics including scientific writing, intellectual property, and yes, teaching skills. Students from a range of disciplines—engineering, medicine, the sciences—take part.

This cross-pollination of ideas is at the base of Nicolas’s teaching philosophy; while training engineers, he’ll bring in outside experts, or deploy techniques that might be more common in a humanities class. “Instead of saying, ‘this is how you do it,’ we’ll collaborate,” he says. Students leave with new skills, and as Nicolas observes, are “inspired to look into different jobs, or directions for their research. It motivates them.” A change in direction led Hugo Douville, 35, to leave the Université de Sherbrooke’s Ph.D. program in 2007 before graduating in order to cofound his own company, Cadens Imaging, in Granby, Que. But the training he received was crucial, says Douville: “It provided a base of all the missing elements.” Other universities in the province are now looking at emulating the program.

Beyond Nicolas’s innovative approach to doctoral training, colleagues and peers praise his boundless enthusiasm and passion for teaching. “It doesn’t matter what he’s teaching,” says Douville. “He never fails to get students hooked on the material.”

—Kate Lunau

When should professors bring their own views into class?

A few years ago, a student of mine began a sentence with, “I don’t know what your religious views are, but…”. I can’t recall what the rest of the sentence was (I listened then, I just don’t remember now), but she went on and I wasn’t obligated to answer the implied question about my own religious views after all. But I thought about it for a while after that and wondered how open I, a vigorous atheist, ought to be about my religious views in class. It’s not always a pressing concern — I don’t teach religion — but religious questions often come up in literature — which is what I do teach — and, in any case, students occasionally ask.

This question came back to me during the explosive debate on these pages over the place of the religious university in Canada and all that that implies. Without going over that debate again — clearly we’ve covered that in enough detail — the larger question remains: when and how should a professor bring his own views into the classroom?

To begin, I think most scholars would agree that every intellectual must, by definition, have strong views on some subjects. And no expert worthy of that word could fail to hold strong convictions about issues in his own field. If I don’t have strong opinions on how to read Hamlet, or the extent to which intention is relevant to meaning, or the value of placing a play in its historical context — well, then I’m not really doing my job. Further, I think most professors would agree that it is perfectly responsible to make those positions known in a lecture of class discussion. If I have an interesting and well-supported argument for how to think about the language of Romeo and Juliet, I would be remiss if I did not share it with my class.

But now things start to get complicated. When does sharing a position verge over into trying to convince students of my position? In my own classroom, I try to give a variety of points of view, and make them as convincingly as possible, before letting students know what my own view is. Ideally, students shouldn’t be able to tell what my position is until I tip my hand, since I’ve made the case for each side so well. And if I’ve done it right, students should be able to make up their own mind, whether it accords with my personal view or not. I experienced an even better version of this multi-faceted approach when I had the pleasure of team teaching a course with a colleague: students were presented with, and could judge between, genuine debate from professors with competing perspectives.

So far, so good. Still, there are some positions where I do not feel that an equally convincing account of competing positions is honestly possible or even academically desirable. In my Shakespeare class, for instance, I usually spend a day on the so-called authorship debate, mainly so that students understand why it is that scholars agree that Shakespeare was Shakespeare despite the claims of enthusiastic amateurs to the contrary. I imagine that biologists might treat creationism the same way — if they touch on it at all.

Still, these are largely matters of fact. When broader questions like social justice come into play, the issues become even more vexing. A colleague of mine once complained to me that she had two men in her women’s studies classes who questioned the most basic assumptions of the course. It was hard to teach the class, she explained, if the students were not willing to accept at least a few basic premises about the oppression of women as historical and contemporary reality. But this raises troubling questions regarding where lines can and must be drawn. Certainly all disciplines have certain basic assumptions. My own discipline assumes that language is capable of generating some kinds of meaning (though what that means is up for grabs); science disciplines assume that empirical observation, rightly analyzed, can give us at least some information about the state of the real world. Philosophers assume that contradictions cannot be true, and theologians assume that there is a God, in at least some useful sense of the word. But are all these assumptions equally valid? What about a cultural studies professor who assumes that all culture is based on economic inequity, or a literary theory prof who takes for granted Foucault’s suggestion that all knowledge itself is a form of oppression?

In addition to assumptions about the nature of disciplines and sub-disciplines come assumptions about what the function of those same fields. What, precisely, are we trying to do to our students? Help them become better in some sense, to be sure. Better informed, more critical, more thoughtful. But what else? More compassionate? More skeptical? More tolerant? What happens when skepticism conflicts with tolerance?

I once had a student who, for a creative writing assignment, turned in a poem that ridiculed fat people as greedy, stupid, and, if they had kids, bad parents. Being rather on the wrong side of slim myself, I had a difficult time knowing how to respond to the assignment. Intellectually, I felt right in finding fault with the poem for the simplistic treatment of its theme. But at the same time, I wondered whether I would have reacted the same way if I were slimmer and fitter.

In reality, every professor will have to make these judgements in the particular moment depending on circumstances. But what will prevent students from getting an education limited to only certain points-of-view and presented from certain angles? I would say that this is precisely where the universality of the university comes in. Not that any university can provide every perspective, but that  all universities must strive to present a range of perspectives and require students to study a range of courses. Similarly, students seeking the best possible education should make a point of seeking out professors with differing views and approaches, or at the very least avoid deliberately taking courses from those few profs they like and agree with.

How are you to know what your professors’ deeply held convictions? Start by asking.

More on the debate over assigning one’s own book.

My pal Carson Jerema takes the Globe and Mail to task for being upset by professors assigning their own textbooks. He is right, it seems to me, that this issue is overblown, and right to say that the argument that students won’t question the book rings hollow. The point he spends less time on, and the most interesting one it seems to me, is  the Globe’s assertion that assigning one’s own book represents a conflict of interest.

The conflict of interest argument goes something like this. If a professor is going to assign a textbook to her class, she has an obligation to choose the best book she can. If she herself is in a position to earn money directly by choosing her own book, her personal financial interest is in conflict with her professional obligations. That is, how can one know whether she is assigning that book because it is the best, or just because she wants to line her own pockets? And depending on the class, this money may not be trivial: it may be thousands in royalties. Moreover, if a professor does not assign her own book in her own course, and that fact was picked up on by competing publishers, the overall sales of the book could suffer, costing the professor even more money. It’s not the same as being paid to teach the course itself.

In practice, though,  the conflict of interest does not cause much harm. In the fields where sales are substantial — Intro Psych, Organic Chem — most textbooks are fairly similar, often indistinguishable in all important ways — I know because I used to sell textbooks for a living. So unless Professor Smith has written the one American Government textbook that really sucks, her students are no worse off than they would be with her own book. In more specialized fields, Professor Smith’s book may be the only up-to-date book there is, in which case Smith would be derelict in NOT assigning it.

To be sure, there are abuses. One professor at my university was said to assign his book in every class he taught whether it was relevant or not. Maybe it was relevant; I’m not an expert in his field and I didn’t take his courses. Or maybe he convinced himself that it was relevant to every single course, but that’s where the conflict of interest comes in. We can convince ourselves of a lot if we are to gain from it. But such cases are, in my experience, the exception. In fact, I think most professors are fairly circumspect about it. When I was a doctoral student, my department decided that all English courses must recommend a standard composition handbook, one that happened to be co-authored by the department chair. In anticipation of the raised eyebrows, the chair announced that he was donating all of the royalties earned thereby to charity. It seemed like a good compromise.

In short, the textbook conflict of interest could be a big problem, but as far as I have seen, it just isn’t.

It’s that time of the year again

Although it may come as a surprise to many students, right around now is the time to start worrying about reference letters, if you intend to apply to graduate or professional programs for next academic year. Don’t worry – you aren’t out of time yet if you haven’t started. But that’s part of the point. You want to allow plenty of time for this and you absolutely don’t want to be scrambling around at the last minute.

You may enjoy doing things at the last possible moment, but the odds are strong that the people you need to write your letters do not. Yes, it’s entirely possible that your professors and other referees (if applicable) may end up writing your letters at the last minute, regardless of when you ask. Procrastination is not a character trait unique to undergrads. But they’ll still be annoyed at being asked on short notice. Even if you get your letter it’s a bad idea to annoy your referee or appear unprofessional in your request. And really, it does take time to write a decent letter. You may find if you rush people you’ll get a poor letter as a consequence or even a straight up refusal.

A poor letter, by the way, is not one that directly criticizes you. I’ve never yet seen a letter like that. But if the reference is completely formulaic and it’s obvious the referee has nothing too personal or specific to say about you – now that’s a poor letter. Please keep in mind that the point is not simply to produce a couple of reference letters to prove that you can but rather to present references that speak to whatever qualities are sought by the programs you wish to enter. Properly tailored references are far better than general ones, and references that only prove you convinced someone to write a letter are almost useless.

A referee may ask that you give them a copy of your CV and/or any personal statement from the relevant application. You should have them available in case this happens. Unless you know your referee very well indeed (which is not very common, in our modern educational system) some additional details about you may go a long way towards personalizing what might otherwise seem too cookie cutter. Even if you do know the person very well, don’t be offended if they ask for the material. People who write reference letters tend to write a lot of reference letters. They may simply have a system. So don’t take the request personally.

It goes without saying that when you need references you should get the kind you were told to get. Academic references come from professors and instructors (more on that in a moment) while non academic references may come from an administrator, an employer, or someone else you know. Read and pay attention to any guidelines, as they will vary from place to place. For some purposes it would be entirely out of line to present a letter from your religious leader, for example, but if you were applying for a theology program it might be required. Whatever the system, don’t try to substitute one reference for another. The requirements were determined intentionally and you shouldn’t circumvent them.

Academic references are a special case. Depending on your purposes, it may be important to get your letters from specific professors or it may be less so. For graduate programs in academic disciplines you should absolutely attempt to get letters from tenured (or tenure stream) professors – meaning “real” professors as opposed to lecturers. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out the difference so don’t be afraid to ask. You might even make an effort to get one or more letters from particularly prominent scholars. For academic fields this does matter. When in doubt, speak with any professor with whom you have a rapport and get some targeted advice on who to approach for references.

For professional programs the standards are entirely different. Professional schools have no way to gauge the relative standing of your professors and so it doesn’t matter. In that case what you want are strong and personal letters from those who know you best and it’s fine to approach lecturers, graduate student instructors, or conceivably even TAs. Be wary of TAs, however, and pay attention to guidelines. That should be a last resort. But a strong and personal letter from a tutorial leader may be better than an impersonal one from a professor.

Show some consideration when you make your requests. Often you’ll be communicating by e-mail and it’s very easy to give a bad impression in that medium. Don’t request a reply “asap” or enforce rigid timelines. If you need a letter within the next three weeks it’s fine to say so, but at the same time be clear you’ll take no for an answer. No one owes you a reference, after all. If you haven’t allowed sufficient time to ask someone else that implies you feel you are entitled to the reference.

As a final note, just keep this in mind. When you’re about to ask someone to offer their opinion of your character and ability as a student, the last thing you want to do is give a poor impression immediately before that happens. So be on your best behaviour.

—

Questions are welcome at jeff.rybak@utoronto.ca. Even the ones I don’t post will still receive answers, and where I do use them here I’ll remove identifying information.

Great students are great. And I am grateful for them. But they are not enough to make it all worthwhile.

In the final days of summer, my thoughts naturally turn to teaching, and maybe I’ve seen too many teaching movies (Stand and Deliver, Dead Poets Society, Mr Holland’s Opus and so on), but somewhere in the back of my mind, I think that this might be the year I get through to everyone. I imagine a class where every student is inspired to greatness. Everyone’s curiousity is awoken, and each of them is transformed and made better than they ever thought they could be – all by the transcendent power of great literature.

And then I am faced with reality.

The sad fact is, that many students cannot be inspired because I never see them – they’re just names on my class list. Some can’t be inspired because they neither do the readings, nor listen in class, so while they are there, they’re not there. Others might listen, but they do it only out of a sense of duty; they just want the credit. They refuse to be inspired. There are a few left, of course, but the story of a professor who teaches all year for the sake of a dozen or so good students isn’t coming soon to a theatre near you.

At this point, I abandon the teaching movies, and turn to stage musicals, particularly my favourite, Man of La Mancha. The show’s most famous number is, of course, “The Impossible Dream” which more or less sums up the whole thing. Don Quixote’s quest is impossible, not just practically, but necessarily. He cannot be a legendary knight, for the age of such heroics has long ended. In fact, his dream is not just impossible, it is, to paraphrase Simpsons nitwit Ralph Wiggum, un-possible. But Don Quixote is glorious anyway, not in his accomplishments, but in his vision. The quest itself is worth following even if it is doomed to fail.

Which brings me back to teaching. Professors who pay too much attention to how many students they have, compared to how many are really learning anything, are on the fast track to bitterness and depression. I know lots of them who are already there. I don’t want to be that prof. So I focus on teaching as a wondrous thing in itself. Fine and worthy of doing regardless of the outcome. And while I am encouraged by the very good students – and some of them are inspired, they tell me so – I don’t teach for them. I teach because it is a great and important thing to do. Because, as the man of La Mancha says, whatever the outcome, the world will be a better place for my having done it.

Ten tips for the common sense student

Lest we forget, going to university actually includes doing some homework. And as Todd Pettigrew pointed out, high school doesn’t always leave you prepared for what awaits when the mid-terms start popping up in October.

The work will be more difficult, generally, but first and foremost it will be different. The way classes are structured, the papers you are expected to turn in, and the marking schemes probably won’t be what you’re used to. And in order to avoid that reality-check (slash soul crushing) grade on the first assignment, there are a few basics tips I think can help you get prepared.

Now, these won’t ensure you pass your exams, nor will they even tell you how to write one. They’re just tips to cover your basics in the first couple weeks (particularly if you’re in arts), and they will seem like common sense – but it’s the kind of common sense I wish had occurred to me a bit earlier in my first year!

Step 1: Learn to use the library.

Unless your parents are librarians and you were reared on the Dewey decimal system, you will probably take a little while to get used to your school library. The trick is to do this early, not the day before your first paper is due.

You can get an upper-year student to show you how the library works, or you can ask a librarian (but be wary, the kindliness of university librarians is never a guarantee!) However, in many cases, you will just have to wander around for a while becoming steadily more impatient, frustrated and possibly sweaty, until the little numbers on the books mean something to you.

This means practice. Pick some books you actually want to read, and go find them. (Trust me, this will save you much first paper anguish.)

Step 2: Learn to use online journal databases.

This is just as important as the library these days. If your professor or the library holds an information session on how to find journals, or provides hand outs, pay attention. If you’re on your own, it’s time to ask around and do some digging on the library’s website (usually links are well marked or under FAQs.)

Unfortunately, if you go to say, Guelph, I can’t tell you where to look. I can just tell you it’s important that you find out.

Once you’re in to the journal database, try sites like JSTOR to help you find articles in multiple journals at once.

Step 3: Learn how to source your research.

This is a big one in university, and not only do you have to keep meticulous records of where ALL your research comes from you have to be able to reference them properly.

The two sourcing methods are APA and MLA. Before you ever write a paper, buy a basic book on essay writing, or print guides off the internet. For each essay, find out which one your prof prefers, and stick to it!

Here’s one to know before your prof tells you: never, ever use Wikipedia as a source!

Step 4: Go to every class. Sit near the front.

Technically, your professors are not taking a record of your attendance. That’s because you are the only one who will suffer if you don’t go. You may be tired, sick, or hung-over – but you’ll learn more just being there, even if you’re half asleep and drooling, then you will from the power point slides or some other kid’s notes. Because most of the time these won’t be legible, or will be full of unexplained graphs.

You’d think these things would be obvious, but, judging from students’ behaviour, they’re not

If you’re so excited to be going to university that you’re reading Macleans OnCampus to get advice in August, you probably don’t need it. But just in case, here are a few more tips:

1. Ditch your childhood email address. It will be (or should be) embarrassing if you email your professor from “cutielikestodrink647@hotmail.com.” If you keep that address, get another one along the lines of “myactualname@gmail.com” and use that with your profs.

2. Speaking of emails, while you may think of them as a kind of instant messaging, most professors over 35 (which is most professors) see them as a kind of letter. Begin with “Dear Professor Smart,” spell words correctly and in full, and sign off respectfully. Never say (or imply) that you expect or need an answer right away. If it really is time-sensitive, say you know she’s busy and you would appreciate a reply as soon as possible. Notice that the above applies only to schools small enough where the professors actually answer emails.

3 a.I once asked the best student I ever had what one piece of advice she would give to students. She said, “going to class should not be optional.” Exactly. Go to class. Getting the notes from the guy who sits next to you is not the same as actually having been there.

3b. Do the assigned readings before they come up in class. You’ll be surprised how many classes are actually interesting if you know what people are talking about.

4. Never ask your professors for copies of their notes.

5. Read your syllabi (sometimes called course outlines) carefully. Try not to ask a professor a question that is clearly answered in the syllabus.

6. Never ask a professor to recommend an “easy” course.

7. If you complain about a grade, do it respectfully. Never demand a higher grade based on how well you are doing in other professors’ classes.

8. There’s no such thing as an exam you can’t study for.

9. If your class is the sort where questions and comments seem to be welcome, try to ask at least one question or make one comment per class. Try not to ask more than three. If the professor doesn’t rush out of the room when classes are over, take the time to make additional comments then.

For more tips on starting school from The Hour Hand, click here.

Maybe I’m unpopular. Or maybe I’m elite.

As a departmental chair, I feel it’s my duty to keep an eye on our department’s enrollments as the new school year approaches, but inevitably I pay special attention to the enrollments in my own classes, and I am dismayed to see that my section of Introduction to Literature is lagging far behind the others. One of my colleagues’ sections has already reached its maximum of 45 students; mine languishes at just nine.

Fortunately, we professors are trained in explaining things away. After all, the low numbers may have more to do with the time slot than anything else: mine is the only section that includes a class on Friday, and students hate coming in on Fridays. Or maybe it’s my reputation for demanding excellence which is keeping the students away. They think I’m “too hard,” but I know I that I simply have admirably high standards. Besides, by the time the first day of classes rolls around, all the sections will be full, so what does it matter?

But then another number catches my eye. That nine is after four students have dropped the course. Four students have dropped the course already and it hasn’t even started. Was it something I haven’t said yet?

U.S. interactive guide shows how to avoid breaking copyright in class

When I went to university, there were two types of professors: those who loved using audio, video clips and pictures in their classroom slideshows, and those who stood at the front of a lecture hall and talked.

But according to Baruch College at the City University New York, some professors might not be using copyrighted material in their classes because they don’t want to break any copyright laws and are erring on the safe side. For those teachers, and those who might be unknowingly breaking the law, the university recently released their interactive guide to using multimedia in academic courses.

Riding the “copyright metro,” professors can click through various questions about the multimedia they want to use in the classroom or online, which leads the user though a maze of options and questions, along with some additional information about fair use and American copyright law.

Keep in mind, though, it’s a primer on American copyright law. For some Canadian copyright resources for profs, you can take a peek at the Canadian Education Ministers of Canada’s Copyright Matters!